Making a case for 2018 as best year in human history

The world is, as everyone knows, going to hell, but there’s still the nervous thrill of waiting to see precisely which dark force will take us down. Will the economy collapse first, the ice sheets melt first, or chaos and war envelop us first?

Let me try to make the case that 2018 was actually the best year in human history.

Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time. Every day, another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time.

Never before has such a large portion of humanity been literate, enjoyed a middle-class cushion, lived such long lives, had access to family planning or been confident that their children would survive. Let’s hit pause on our fears and frustrations and share a nanosecond of celebration at this backdrop of progress.

Only about 4 percent of children worldwide now die by the age of 5. That’s still horrifying, but it’s down from 19 percent in 1960 and 7 percent in 2003.

Indeed, children today in Mexico or Brazil are less likely to die by 5 than American children were as recently as 1970.

The big news that won’t make a headline and won’t appear on television is 15,000 children died around the world in the past 24 hours. But in the 1990s, it was 30,000 kids dying each day.

Perhaps it seems Pollyannish or tasteless to trumpet progress at a time when there is so much butchery, misrule and threat hanging over us. But I cover the butchery and misrule every other day of the year, and I do this annual column about progress to try to place those tragedies in perspective.

One reason for this column is journalism is supposed to inform people about the world, and it turns out most Americans (and citizens of other countries, too) are spectacularly misinformed.

For example, nine out of 10 Americans say in polls global poverty is worsening or staying the same, when in fact the most important trend in the world is arguably a huge reduction in poverty. Now, fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, as adjusted for inflation.

Likewise, Americans estimate 35 percent of the world’s children have been vaccinated. In fact, 86 percent of all one-yearolds have been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

“Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong,” Dr. Hans Rosling, a brilliant scholar of international health, wrote in “Factfulness,” published in 2018, after his death. “Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent and more hopeless — in short, more dramatic — than it really is.”

I suspect this misperception reflects in part how we in journalism cover news. We cover wars, massacres and famines but are less focused on progress.

It is of course true there are huge challenges ahead. The gains against global poverty and disease seem to be slowing, and climate change is an enormous threat to poor nations in particular. And the United States is an outlier, where life expectancy is falling, not rising as in most of the world.

So there’s plenty to fret about. But a failure to acknowledge global progress can leave people feeling hopeless and ready to give up. In fact, the gains should show us what is possible and spur greater efforts to improve opportunity worldwide.