Good News
Malthus’s doom-predicting “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” was published in 1798, when the Earth was home to some 980 million human beings. The global population today is about 6.5 billion, a sevenfold increase. By and large, human beings today are healthier, wealthier, safer, cleaner, better fed, and more productive.
Since 1950, the world’s population has grown by more than 150%. Yet food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75%. Over the past generation, chronic undernourishment in poor countries has been fallen from 37% to 17%, while in the US, staples such as potatoes and flour have dropped in price (relative to income) by more than 80%.
Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than 1 in 5. “In the United States as late as 1900 infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6.” In China, infant mortality has fallen from 195 to below 30 in the past 50 years.
From 31 years in 1900, life expectancy rose to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.
We are more likely to be disease-free today than our forebears were a century ago. And the onset of chronic illness has been delayed — by 8 years for cancer, 9 years for heart diseases, and 11 years for respiratory diseases.
“A world full of good news,” Jeff Jacoby’s review of Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World