THE WORLD IS BETTER OFF THAN YOU THINK
Enough with the doom and gloom! Our planet may be in better shape than you think.
Human beings have a cognitive bias toward bad news (keeping us alert and alive), and we journalists reflect that: We report on planes that crash, not planes that land. We highlight disasters, setbacks, threats and deaths, so 2022 has kept us busy.
But a constant gush of despairing news can be paralyzing. So here’s my effort to remedy our cognitive biases. Until the pandemic, I wrote an annual column arguing that the previous year was the best in human history. I can’t do that this year. But I can suggest that broadly speaking, much is going right and this may still be the best time ever to be alive.
Where 2022 excelled particularly was in technological strides.
Solar power capacity around the world is on track to roughly triple over the next five years and overtake coal as the leading source of power globally. Technical improvements are constant.
There are parallel breakthroughs in batteries. Batteries, boring? No! They’re one of the most exciting frontiers of technology, making remarkable advances crucial to storing green power. Likewise, nuclear fusion as an energy source marked a milestone in 2022.
The upshot is that we are in the midst of a revolution of renewables that may soon leave us far better off. Truly cheap energy, whether from solar or fusion, could be transformational.
To be clear: Climate change remains an existential challenge. What’s new is that if you squint a little, it is now possible to see a path ahead in which we manage — barely — to avoid calamity.
Health tech has likewise made immense gains. Scientists are making significant progress on vaccines for malaria, reflecting what may be a new golden age for vaccine development. Immunotherapy is making progress against cancer.
It’s true that what may be the most important trend in my lifetime — historic progress against global poverty — has stalled because of COVID-19, climate change and the impact of the war in Ukraine on global food prices. But it has not collapsed.
Indeed, World Bank researchers estimate that the number of people living in extreme poverty actually declined a hair in 2022, although the figure remains higher than on the eve of the pandemic. The number is about the same as it was in 2018 — and much better than in 2017 and previous years.
Max Roser of the indispensable website Our World in Data puts the situation exactly right: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.”
So all the bad news is real, and I cover it the other 364 days of the year. But it’s also important to acknowledge the gains that our brains (and we journalists) are often oblivious to — if only to remind ourselves that progress is possible when we put our shoulder to it. Onward!
› More uplift: Readers have donated more than $4 million so far to the nonprofits in my annual holiday giving guide. Thanks so much to all for bringing us closer to a better world. To join in and create some good news of your own, visit KristofImpact.org.