The most compelling reason to be cheerful: now is the best time in history to be alive
“Now is the best time in history to be alive. Angry voices will loudly deny this but that doesn’t make it any less true. Despite the many miseries that plague our world, humanity as a whole has never climbed so high, so fast. If you could choose to be reborn at any moment in history, you should choose right now.
Why? Take life expectancy. It has risen by more in the past 50 years than in the previous 1,000. Or take incomes. For the first time in history, poverty is declining amid rapid population growth. When the Berlin Wall fell, two-fifths of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Now it’s one-eighth.
Or take education. In just over a generation, 3 billion more literate brains have joined the human race. And thanks largely to the rapid expansion of higher learning in China and India, the number of people alive now with an advanced degree exceeds the total number of degrees ever awarded prior to 1980.
With a few tragic exceptions, a child born almost anywhere today can expect to grow up healthier, wealthier and smarter than at any other time in history. And more connected, thanks principally to a quartet of big events: the end of the cold war; waves of democratisation across Latin America, much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; China’s emergence from autarky; and, of central significance, the advent of the internet.
These conditions create an ideal habitat for ideas and genius to flourish, and that flourishing is well under way. The final reason why, if you could choose to be reborn at any moment in history, you should choose now, is that science and technology – jolted by humanity’s sharp jump in cognitive resources – has never been closer to flipping our basic condition from scarcity to abundance.”
These are the opening paragraphs of an article by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna summarising the arguments in their new book “Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance”. The book will be published in a few days and I’ve ordered a copy.