{"id":20037,"date":"2016-07-13T08:10:03","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T07:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20037"},"modified":"2016-07-14T20:38:15","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T19:38:15","slug":"reasons-to-be-cheerful-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20037","title":{"rendered":"Reasons to be cheerful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of my personal and professional acquaintances voted &#8211; like me &#8211; for Britain to remain a member of the European Union and are &#8211; like me &#8211; deeply troubled by the narrow decision to leave the EU. But there are still many reasons to be cheerful that we live at this special time in history.<\/p>\n<p>I am currently reading a fascinating book called<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Age-Discovery-Navigating-Rewards-Renaissance\/dp\/147293637X\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1468393644&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=%22Age+Of+Discovery%22\"> &#8220;Age Of Discovery&#8221;<\/a> written by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna. The theme of the book is that we are living in a time which is in effect a New Renaissance and we should learn some of the lessons from the original Renaissance some 500 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>In the introductory chapter, the authors write:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;For the first time ever, the number of poor people in the world has plummeted (by over one billion people since 1990) <em>and<\/em> the overall population has swelled (by some two billion) at the same time. Scientists alive today outnumber all scientists who ever lived up to 1980, and &#8211; in part thanks to them &#8211; average life expectancy has risen more in the past fifty years than in the previous 1,000.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of my personal and professional acquaintances voted &#8211; like me &#8211; for Britain to remain a member of the European Union and are &#8211; like me &#8211; deeply troubled by the narrow decision to leave the EU. But there are still many reasons to be cheerful that we live at this special time in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20037"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20051,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20037\/revisions\/20051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}