"As long as each proceeding generation can say to the prior, "You kids have it easy!", we'll know that humanity is improving."
–PixelCortex, Reddit /r/ShowerThoughts
You live in an age radically different from any other in history.
For just a moment, let's ignore the recent series of political disasters including Brexit and the irrational Presidential election of Donald Trump by a terrible voting system. Let's zoom out on the timeline of human events, so we can take a look at the bigger picture.
You are reading this article on a device which, to about 90 percent of humans who ever lived, would look like actual sorcery. The march of technological progress feels normal to us, but imagine trying to tell someone from two or more centuries ago that you can talk with someone on the other side of the planet, watch a video of a man walking on the Moon, travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours by flying in a giant metal tube, look at nearly any location on a map of the entire planet and refrigerate your food all in the same day.
Technology aside, the easiest way to tell how radically different the modern world is from any time in the past is with a simple population graph. In the last 200 years, our species has grown more than the past ten thousand years combined, times seven!
If you think about it, this a mind-blowing achievement for humanity:
What you're seeing on the graph is humanity winning. Winning so hard that we're not even sure how to handle it. That up there is what every single species only wishes it could do. That kind of success requires utter mastery of the environment, food, health, and predators -- humanity just absolutely dunking over all we survey.
People have worried all the way back to the 1700s that the exponential growth of the human population is unsustainable. If population growth keeps increasing, then how will the resources of the Earth sustain humanity? Won't poverty grow exponentially as well, making people starve by the billions?
Fortunately, the "population bomb" of the last two centuries was only temporary. The global population growth rate has fallen by 50 percent since 1960, from 2.2 percent per year to 1.1 percent. It is projected to keep dropping and hit 0.1 percent in 2100, when we are unlikely to reach a population over 11 billion. The population will probably stabilize at 11 to 12 billion after that.
While the doomsayers claimed that the human death rate would rise with the population, they were wrong: it has fallen by half since 1960. While you might expect resources to be strained and life expectancy to fall through this population growth, you would be wrong. The average income per person has risen over the last 200 years alongside the global life expectancy, as Hans Rosling displayed in this visually stunning four-minute presentation:
One could argue that improvements in wealth don't matter if they only apply to the rich. Fortunately, poverty has been vanishing at an unprecedented rate in the past century compared to the rest of human history. Only a century ago, 82 percent of people on Earth lived in extreme poverty. That number has dropped to less than 10 percent in 2015, an improvement of shocking proportions:
Most of the improvement has happened very recently, considering that we reduced extreme poverty by half in the 30 years between 1981 and 2011.
While socioeconomic inequality is a serious problem, many of those at the top are trying to help. Bill and Melinda Gates pledged to donate 95 percent of their personal fortune to their charity foundation, and Warren Buffet promised to donate 99 percent of his wealth. Together, the three of them have inspired almost 140 of their rich friends to donate over 50 percent of their money to charity.
The rise in human wealth has come primarily because of improved productivity, without making everyone work themselves to death. Working hours have declined in most industrialized countries, especially among children:
Since the beginning of civilization, most humans have had to work for almost their entire lives just to survive. But in the near future, automation will increasingly displace large numbers of human jobs. It will not reduce our value as human beings, because a person's value has nothing to do with how much money they make. As long as we implement a policy like a minimum or basic income, we will be free for the first time in history to pursue our dreams without being forced to worry about how to obtain our next meal. Instead of thinking about how to survive, we can think about how to live.
About fifty years ago, for the first time in probably thousands of years, humans created a brand new form of art: the video game. Not only is it the highest form of art because it combines art forms of the past and adds the unique new element of interactivity, but it can also be good for our health in several ways. One recent video game, Pokemon Go, has led to more people exercising, finding friends, and engaging with their communities. While its popularity petered out quickly, the game has paved the way for augmented reality – a technology that literally brings imagination to life.
Humans themselves have also participated in the great march of progress over the last couple centuries. Our intelligence has risen steadily "in every age range, at every ability level, and in every modern industrialized country" over the past century. This trend helps to explain why more Americans have graduated high school and college than at any time in history, and why twice as many Americans are reading books now than sixty years ago. The accomplishments made for the rights of minority groups in the past two centuries have been amazing – although I would probably have to write another few articles, or multiple books, to do that subject justice.
I think the Discovery Channel said it best in their TV ads from 2008 and 2009...
The World Is Just Awesome.
For more information on this subject, check out some of the following resources:
Cracked: "19 Statistics that Prove Life on Earth is Better Than Ever,"
"5 Extremely Wrong Things ‘Smart’ People Love To Say," and
"5 Helpful Answers to Society's Most Uncomfortable Questions."
The Motley Fool:"Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy"
Think Progress: "The Whole World Is Getting Much, Much Better"
