“WHY 2018 WAS THE BEST YEAR IN HUMAN HISTORY.” Nicholas Kristof had an op ed with that headline in the New York Times (January 5, 2019). Kristof has lots of support for his thesis.
For one example, Kristof writes: “Until about the 1950s, a majority of humans had always lived in “extreme poverty,” defined as less than about $2 a person per day. When I was a university student in the early 1980s, 44 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty.
Now, fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, as adjusted for inflation.”
Apparently Kristof writes a similar op ed annually.
It is terribly important.
While I do not scoff at the gains cited, I think it is fair to respond and ask whether or not these gains and others are at the levels where they should be. If you say, for instance, “Deaths from preventable diseases dropped by X% in 2018, that’s great,” it may elide the fact that deaths from said diseases could have been lowered by substantially more with better policy.
Moreover, if I’m not mistaken, maternal mortality rate has been *increasing* in the United States in recent years and is the highest in the industrialized world. That’s a choice we are making as a society.