Is the World Getting Better or Worse

Biblical Reasons Why We Should
And Practical Suggestions on How We Can
Create Heaven on Earth

Is the World Getting Better or Worse?

When students of "Eschatology" (the Biblical doctrine of "last things") weigh the competing claims of the "futurists" and the "preterists," they are struck by the preterist claim that Christ has already established His Kingdom. "Is this all there is?" they ask. Or phrased another way, "The world is going to hell in a handbasket; it can't last much longer."

A "Berean" way of answering this question goes to the pages of the Bible. It is there that we must find the characteristics of Christ's Kingdom. Did Christ promise a Kingdom without responsibility, without challenges, without growth? The student must be prepared to show "chapter and verse" to support their claim that in our day or in this life we do not see something that Jesus promised would be present in His Kingdom, or that we see things that Christ promises would not be present in His Kingdom.

Circular Reasoning

One of the most distressing features of this debate is the self-fulfilling nature of the futurist claims. They claim that things are getting worse and worse, that the Bible prophesies that things will get worse and worse before Christ comes, and that attempting to make the world better and better actually works at cross-purposes with prophecies that things are going to get worse and worse. With Christians turning off the engines of progress right in the middle of the freeway, it's no wonder there are a few traffic jams.

We might ask the question this way: which features of the modern world which are in opposition to the promises and duties of Christ's Kingdom are we prohibited in Scripture from rectifying?

Or similarly, which features of the modern world which are in opposition to the promises and duties of Christ's Kingdom are metaphysically impossible to cure? (By "metaphysically" I don't mean something paranormal, I mean something in the very nature of reality itself. It is metaphysically impossible to train human beings to fly by flapping their arms. If Christ promised that in His Kingdom men would be able to flap their arms and fly, then we're definitely not in the Kingdom. What did Christ promise that cannot possibly exist in our day, in the nature of the case?)

Material Improvement

There are two areas of human life I would like to cover in an attempt to prove that things are getting "better and better." First are material blessings. Then we'll discuss spiritual aspects of life.

It is Biblically valid to discuss material conditions. The Bible promises that if we obey God's commandments our material condition will improve. Conversely, if we disobey His commandments, our material condition will deteriorate. See Deuteronomy 28. Our goal should be to be able to accept (without striving for) and be effective stewards of unlimited wealth.

Our material conditions have improved dramatically since the coming of Christ. We are altogether too ungrateful for these blessings, and this lack of gratitude blinds us to numerous other ways that Christ's Kingdom is manifested.

Stephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute. Julian L. Simon (1932–98) was a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Most of the research findings come from Simon’s lifetime of work showing how life on earth is getting better, not worse. The research assistance of Stephen A. Slivinski and Philip Kerpen is gratefully acknowledged.

There has been more material progress in the United States in the 20th century than there was in the entire world in all the previous centuries combined. Almost every indicator of health, wealth, safety, nutrition, affordability and availability of consumer goods and services, environmental quality, and social conditions indicates rapid improvement over the past century. The gains have been most pronounced for women and minorities.

Among the most heartening trends discussed in this study are the following: life expectancy has increased by 30 years; infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold; the number of cases of (and the death rate from) the major killer diseases— such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, and pneumonia—has fallen to fewer than 50 per 100,000; air quality has improved by about 30 percent in major cities since 1977; agricultural productivity has risen 5- to 10-fold; real per capita gross domestic product has risen from $4,800 to $31,500; and real wages have nearly quadrupled from $3.45 an hour to $12.50.

During the course of this century, the affordability and availability of consumer goods have greatly increased. Even most poor Americans have a cornucopia of choices that a century ago the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts could not have purchased. Today more than 98 percent of American homes have a telephone, electricity, and a flush toilet. More than 70 percent of Americans own a car, a VCR, a microwave, air conditioning, cable TV, and a washer and dryer. At the turn of the century, almost no homes had those modern conveniences. And although Americans feel that they are more squeezed for time than ever, most adults have twice as much leisure time as their counterparts did 100 years ago.

By any conceivable measure, the 20th century has truly been the greatest century of human progress in history.

The central premise of this study is that there has been more improvement in the human condition for people living in the United States in this century than for all people in all previous centuries of human history combined. Gigantic strides have been made in living standards in most other parts of the world as well, but not all. The European Jews, the Russians, and the Chinese experienced dreadful episodes of tyranny under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

When one considers the age of the planet, the 20th century has been a momentary flash in time. Yet the documentable improvement in the quality of human life in this brief period has been nothing short of miraculous. Although the leap forward in human progress began in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, the greatest strides have taken place in the 20th century. Virtually every statistic presented in the pages that follow confirms that we are about to complete what the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago aptly called "the Century of Progress."

The roughly fourfold rise in the living standards of Americans in this century is particularly impressive when we consider that for thousands of years human progress occurred at a glacial pace. For the thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, incomes were virtually flat, growing by about 0.5 percent per year. Life expectancy was not much greater in 1700 than it was at the time of the Greek and Roman Empires (Figure 1). Throughout most of human history, life was, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it, "nasty, brutish and short."

One way to appreciate the improvements in quality of life over the course of this century is to mentally travel back 100 years. What was life really like? The latter part of the 19th century was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, child death, horses, horse manure, candles, 12-hour work days, Jim Crow laws, tenements, slaughterhouses, and outhouses. Lynchings—not just of blacks—were common. (In the South 11 Italians were lynched in one month.) To live to 50 was to count one’s blessings. For a mother to have all four of her children live to adulthood was to beat the odds of nature. One in 10 children died before his or her first birthday. One hundred years ago parents lived in eternal fear of a child’s dying; nowadays, many parents live in eternal fear of their child’s not making the county select soccer team.

Industrial cities were typically enveloped in clouds of black soot and smoke. At that stage of the Industrial Revolution, factories belching poisons into the air were regarded as a sign of prosperity and progress. Streets were smelly and filled with garbage before modern sewerage systems and plumbing were put in place. Leading killers of the day included pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and violence. In 1918 pneumonia killed 675,000 Americans. In the first two decades of the 20th century, before the era of acid rain and global warming, pollution killed people—lots and lots of people. Deadly diseases were carried by milk and what then qualified as "drinking water." Cancer was not one of the primary causes of death as it is today, because most Americans succumbed to infectious diseases and occasional epidemics before their bodies had time to contract cancer.

Medical care was astonishingly primitive by today’s standards. Abraham Flexner, writing in the famous Flexner report on medical education in 1910, commented that until then, a random patient consulting a random physician had only a 50-50 chance of benefiting from the encounter. Health historian Theodore Dalrymple notes that until the late 19th century it was often considered "beneath a physician’s dignity to actually examine a patient." Most of the drugs used throughout the ages, including arsenic, which was still used through the early 1900s, were useless and in many cases poisonous. Oliver Wendell Holmes was reported to have declared that if all of the drugs in his time were tossed into the ocean it would be better for mankind and worse for the fish.

So why did mankind experience such a burst of progress all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century? And why did so much of that progress originate in the United States? The shorthand answer to the second question is this: Freedom works. The unique American formula of individual liberty and free enterprise has encouraged risk taking, experimentation, innovation, and scientific exploration of a magnitude that is unprecedented in human history.

Economic freedom and freedom from government repression, in particular, are necessary ingredients for human progress. In the United States the government has, for the most part, set down a reasonable rule of law and then gotten out of the way. The tragedy of this century is that mankind has had to relearn the lesson of history again and again—most recently in the former Soviet Union, where life expectancies have tragically fallen, and in China, where tens of millions of Chinese starved to death under collectivist agricultural policies—that repression by government short-circuits the human spirit and produces sustained periods of stagnation and even anti-progress. Figure 2 shows that there is a strong positive relationship between economic freedom and life expectancy across countries.

America also enjoys a unique advantage over other nations because we are a nation that remakes itself through the new blood of immigrants. The tens of millions of new Americans who came through Ellis Island or the Golden Gate or across the Rio Grande have been some of the brightest and most ambitious people of the rest of the world. Americans are a people who have been self-selected as problem solvers and progress seekers. Historian Paul Johnson states this point in the first sentence of his book A History of the American People, when he describes Americans as "the first, best hope for the human race."

The answer to the first question, why all this progress has been compressed into the historical nanosecond of the 20th century, is not so straightforward. We believe, however, that three relatively modern developments have revolutionized human life. The first was modern medicine and vaccines. Scientists generally attribute up to half the increase in life expectancy in this century to improved drugs, vaccines, and other medical treatment breakthroughs.

The second development was the harnessing of electrical power. Although generation of electrical power was possible by the late 19th century, electricity started to become widely available in homes and factories only in the early decades of this century. The magic of electrical power not only brought us literally out of the darkness but also launched thousands of inventions, all of which have allowed mankind to begin to harness the forces of nature, thus improving nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

The third transforming development was the invention of the microchip. As the brains of the computer, the semiconductor has been mankind’s passport to a whole new universe of knowledge. The average American worker with a $799 Pentium-chip laptop computer has more computing power at his fingertips than was contained in all the computers in the entire world during World War II. One hundred years ago, all of the greatest mathematicians in the world together did not have the problem-solving resources of today’s fourth grader with a $19.95 Texas Instruments pocket calculator.

Americans have a tendency to believe that things used to be better than they are now. This inclination typically impels us to look to government to make things better. The nostalgia that many Americans express for the 1950s is a notable example. However, as the comedian Jackie Gleason once noted, "The past remembers better than it lived." For the vast majority of Americans—particularly minorities and women—life was not better in the 1950s than today. We are healthier; we live longer; we are richer; we can afford to purchase far more things; we have more time and money for recreation; we have bigger and better homes; we are at much less risk of catastrophic accidents; and we breathe cleaner air and drink safer water. The list could go on and on. It is impossible, of course, to measure Americans’ spiritual well-being, but there can be little argument that our material well-being has never been better.

The doubters will wonder whether our present glorious age in America is just another blip in history, like the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman Empires and the Golden Age of Greece. Skeptics moan that either the progress we have experienced in the 20th century will be reversed or, as some environmentalists fear, we will be done in by growth mania itself. We may simply be living through another episode of dynastic glory that will soon falter.

We doubt it. The advance of civilization that we are now living through is different from previous advances. Ours is the first age in which affluence has been enjoyed by more than just a tiny fraction of the population. In previous times, even in the great empires, at least 90 percent of the populace remained at a Malthusian level of subsistence. Never before have improvements in quality of life been spread to virtually every segment of the population, as has happened in the United States and the developed world in this century.

Perhaps the best way to dramatize this point is to compare the living conditions of the poor today with those of well-to-do citizens 100 years ago. As we prepare to close the books on the 20th century, most Americans who are considered "poor" today have routine access to a quality of food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and 19th-century European royalty, with all their combined wealth, could not have afforded. No mountain of gold 100 years ago could have purchased the basics of everyday life that we take for granted in 1999: a television set, a stereo with the first music ever recorded, a cellular telephone, a car, a vaccination against polio, a Häagen Dazs ice cream bar, a sinus tablet, contact lenses (to say nothing of laser surgery), or the thrill of seeing Michael Jordan majestically soar through the air as if defying gravity while dunking a basketball. Today, almost all Americans can afford these things.

We are also optimistic because, unlike in previous eras of progress, the gains that have been made in the 20th century are truly irreversible because they are primarily the result of the wondrous advances of human knowledge that have accumulated in this century. That knowledge can never be erased, even if barbarians or Luddites were to burn every library to the ground. Encyclopedias can now be stored on a six-inch, $10 computer disk. If, God forbid, a bomb were to destroy all the physical capital and infrastructure of the United States, those structures could be rebuilt in a generation, provided there were still people around to do the rebuilding. (Consider how quickly Germany was resurrected after World War II.) Moreover, the information age makes it almost futile for repressive governments, like that of the Soviet Union, to try to restrain freedom through military might, as they did in previous eras.

Finally, we are convinced that the progress of the 20th century is not a mere historical blip but rather the start of a long-term trend of improved life on earth, because almost every measure of human material welfare has shown gains. This is the first time in human history that has happened.

Indeed, we are hard-pressed to find more than a small handful of trends that have gotten worse in this century. Taxes are higher and government is a lot bigger and more intrusive than 100 years ago in the United States. (We believe that big government may be a consequence, but surely not the cause, of prosperity.) The good news is that, at this moment in history, for most inhabitants of the planet, freedom is marching forward and is not in retreat. Even in the United States, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has now dipped to its lowest level in 25 years—suggesting that perhaps Bill Clinton was right that "the era of big government is over."

Table 1
25 Wonderful Trends of the 20th Century
Trend	1900–1920	1995–98
Life expectancy (years)	47	77
Infant mortality (deaths per 1,000 live births)	100	7
Deaths from infectious diseases (per 100,000 population)	700	50
Heart disease (age-adjusted deaths per 100,000 population)	307 (1950)	126
Per capita GDP (1998 dollars)	$4,800	$31,500
Manufacturing wage (1998 dollars)	$3.40	$12.50
Household assets (trillions of 1998 dollars)	$6 (1945)	$41
Poverty rate (percent of U.S. households)	40	13
Length of workweek (hours)	50	35
Agricultural workers (percent of workforce)	35	2.5
TV ownership (percent of U.S. households)	0	98
Homeownership (percent of U.S. households)	46	66
Electrification (percent of U.S. households)	8	99
Telephone calls (annual per capita calls)	40	2,300
Cars for transportation (percent of U.S. households)	1	91
Patents granted	25,000	150,000
High school completion (percent of adults)	22	88
Accidental deaths (per 100,000 population)	88	34
Wheat price (per bushel in hours of work)	4.1	0.2
Bachelor’s degrees awarded to women (percent of degrees)	34	55
Black income (annual per capita, 1997 dollars)	$1,200	$12,400
Resident U.S. population (millions)	76	265
Air pollution (lead, micrograms per 100 cubic meters of air)	135 (1977)	4
Computer speed (millions of instructions per second)	0.02 (1976)	700
Computer ownership (percent of U.S. households)	1 (1980)	44

Some social trends, of course, indicate deterioration not improvement over the past 30 to 40 years, as William Bennett and Robert Bork have emphasized. There have been worrisome increases in family breakup, abortions, illegitimate births, and teen suicide, for example. Violent crime rates have drifted upward—in the 1920s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, for example —and downward—in the 1930s and 1990s, for example—with no immediate sign of long-term improvement. However, there are glimmers of good news. In recent years, most of these troubling trends of social decay have been improving, and for almost all the other social problems, the arrow points to improvement on a grand scale.

Winston Churchill once said that "the further back you look, the further ahead in the future you can see." The declinists are wrong when they say that mankind is on a collision course with doomsday. For Americans, the 20th century was not mostly an era of world war, environmental degradation, catastrophic global warming, capitalist exploitation, overpopulation, and a deep divide between the haves and the have-nots. (As John Tierney of the New York Times lamented not long ago: "No matter how much healthier and wealthier everyone becomes, we always read about a gap between one group or another. . . . As more babies survive, we focus on endangered species of beetles.") It is imperative that we understand and appreciate the advances of our recent history so we can use our resources wisely for solving real societal problems, not make-believe ones.

So the purpose of this study is in part to set the historical record straight; it is a plea that the history books and the media try to get the story right. We hope that the 25 great trends presented in the pages that follow and given in Table 1 will convince people that the 20th century has been the greatest century that ever was. It should also convince even the zealous skeptics that the past 100 years truly have been the American century. The great American comedian-philosopher Will Rogers had the story exactly right when he said many years ago:

The most amazing demographic fact of the past century, and the greatest human achievement in history in our view, is that humanity has almost won the battle against early death. We are not alone in this assessment. Several years ago the New York Times described the doubling of life expectancy since the start of the Industrial Revolution as "the greatest miracle in the history of our species." Throughout most of human history, death came at an early age—often 25–35 years was a typical life span. In the United States over the past 100 years, life expectancy has increased to 77 years (Figure 3)—triple the life span of our ancient ancestors and three decades longer than our great-grandparents could expect to live at the turn of the century. Incredibly, the life expectancy of black Americans has almost doubled in this century.

The safety of their children is dear to the hearts of all parents. Any parent who has experienced the joy of bringing a healthy baby into the world can imagine the agony that parents suffer when they lose a child at birth. In the early part of this century, more than 1 child in 10 died before his or her first birthday. In some areas of the country, infant mortality was as high as 1 in 4. Today, only 1 in about 150 babies dies within the first year. The probability of a child’s dying before the age of five is now 50 times lower than it was at the beginning of the century (Figure 4). Most impressive of all has been the decline in the maternal death rate. One hundred years ago a mother was 100 times more likely to die giving birth than she is today—when there are fewer than eight maternal deaths per 100,000 births.

One of the greatest success stories of the 20th century is that we have extinguished almost all of the major diseases that have killed billions of people throughout human history. Thanks to vaccines and better public health measures, we no longer even worry about the scourges of typhoid fever, cholera, typhus, plague, polio, smallpox, and the other terrifying killers of humankind. Throughout most of history plagues and epidemics could wipe out a fourth to a half of a country’s population in the course of a decade. Even as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, the death toll from infectious diseases was about 700 per 100,000 Americans per year. Today infectious diseases kill only about 50 per 100,000—a stunning 14-fold reduction in deaths from disease in this century. The number of cases of those diseases has fallen even more rapidly. Although sudden infant death syndrome and AIDS are not diseases per se, the number of cases of those ailments has also decreased (Figure 5).

The eradication of the most horrible and deadly infectious diseases, which often afflicted children, has meant that more Americans die from chronic and degenerative diseases associated with growing old—most notably, cancer and heart disease. Although we have not yet found complete cures for those two diseases, modern medicine and treatments have made spectacular strides in both cases. The age-adjusted death rate from heart attacks has fallen between two- and threefold in just the last 50 years (Figure 6), and the survival rate of cancer victims has nearly doubled in the past 40 years (Figure 7). For whites, the rate of cancer survival went from 38 percent in 1960–63 to 62 percent in 1994. For blacks the probability of survival has risen from roughly 1 in 4 in the early 1960s to 1 in 2 today.

The broadest measure of a nation’s overall economic performance is the rise in its national output, or what is now commonly called gross domestic product. The real GDP of the United States mushroomed from roughly $0.5 trillion in 1900 to about $8.5 trillion in 1998 (in constant dollars). The average annual per person output in the United States has grown from $5,000 to $30,000 (Figure 8). This rapid growth contrasts with the economic performance of the world over the last 1,000 years when, according to the late Harvard economic historian Simon Kuznets, economic growth was "virtually nonexistent." "We Americans are so used to sustained economic growth in per-capita product that we tend to take it for granted— not realizing how exceptional growth of this magnitude is on the scale of human history," Kuznets concluded.

We often hear nostalgic talk of the good old days of the 1950s when it took only one parent’s income to raise a family. Dad went to the office or factory. There was enough income for mom to stay home and take care of the kids. Good jobs were available at good wages. Nowadays, we are told, families struggle on two incomes just to make ends meet. The century-long wage data tell a different story. The hourly manufacturing wage in the United States at the start of the century (in today’s dollars) was $3.43, or less than the minimum wage today. By 1950 that wage rate had risen to $9.70. Today, the average manufacturing wage is $12.47 an hour (Figure 9). It appears from the data that wages have stagnated in recent decades, but that is a statistical illusion. When the value of fringe benefits—such as employer-provided medical insurance, retirement packages, stock options, increased vacation time, and unemployment insurance—is taken into account, average real hourly worker compensation has risen by 50 percent since 1950.

It is amazing but true that more financial wealth has been generated in the United States over the past 50 years than was created in all the rest of the world in all the centuries before 1950. Fifty years ago, real financial wealth was about $5 trillion in 1998 dollars. By 1970 that financial wealth had doubled to roughly $10 trillion. Since then the value of Americans’ financial wealth has tripled to $30 trillion. When we combine this burst in financial assets with the sevenfold real increase in housing equity owned by Americans, we discover that the nation’s assets have risen from about $6 trillion to more than $40 trillion in real terms in the past half century (Figure 10). Not all of this wealth is captured by the richest Americans. Median household wealth more than doubled from 1965 to 1995. Although we hear complaints about Americans’ indebtedness, asset values have risen at a much faster rate than has debt.

In the United States today, a smaller percentage of the population suffers from material deprivation than at any previous time in history. And people classified as "poor" in the United States have incomes that exceed the average income of most nations. Our success in reducing poverty is not a result of government welfare programs. Rather, it appears that the continuing rising tide of America’s free-market economy is lifting almost all boats. Some 30 million Americans, or between 10 and 15 percent of the population, are still officially classified as poor. At the turn of the century, between 40 and 50 percent of American households had income levels that would have classified them as poor if judged by today’s standards. The number of "poor" senior citizens, children, and blacks is half of what it was in 1950 (Figure 11).

The typical American works substantially less nowadays and has substantially more leisure time than his counterpart did 100 years ago. Because workers are so much more productive on the job today than in earlier times, we can afford to work fewer hours and still receive higher pay and maintain a high-quality lifestyle. The average workweek has shrunk from about 66 hours in 1850, to 50 hours in 1909, to 35 hours today (Figure 12). And, because Americans have more holidays, vacation time, sick leave, and so on, the average number of hours worked in a year is now half of what it was in the latter part of the 19th century. We Americans now complain that we don’t have enough time to get everything done—work, family responsibilities, household chores, exercise, and other must-do activities—in just 24 hours a day. The fact is that our ancestors were more overworked than we are.

A defining characteristic of a modern, wealth-generating economy is the production of ever more output with ever fewer inputs. This is the essence of what we mean when we talk about productivity: getting more of what we want for less human toil. Nowhere has productivity been more impressive than on the farm (Figure 13). Throughout most of human history, at least half of the workers in most societies were employed in agriculture. Today only 2 to 3 percent of Americans work on farms. But those farmers produce enough food for the entire nation and then enough more to make America the world’s breadbasket. Productivity and innovation on the farm have translated into a 5- to 10-fold increase in farm output per man-hour worked in this century—one of the greatest success stories in human history. Modern technologies—for farm equipment, pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation techniques, and bioengineering—account for this surge in agricultural output. The result: American farmers now feed at least three times as many people with one-half as many total man-hours on one-third less farmland than they did in 1900.

Motion pictures were perhaps the first form of modern entertainment. The motion picture industry was launched at the turn of the century and was so instantly popular that by 1930 Hollywood sold three tickets per week per household—an all-time high. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, movie ticket sales dropped dramatically. Why? Television. Just before the midpoint of this century, 1946, there were about 17,000 TV sets in the country. By 1960 there were more than 40 million TV sets in use. Those Zenith and Motorola TV sets were black and white and full of static. Today 98 percent of American households own a color TV, 67 percent own two color TVs, 40 percent own three TVs, 74 percent have cable TV, 40 percent get pay cable stations, 84 percent have a VCR, 32 percent have at least two VCRs, and 93 percent have a remote control with their TV (Figure 14). The diffusion of stereos and CD players into American homes has also been remarkably rapid.

In 1890 Jacob Riis published his famous book How the Other Half Lives, which describes the horrid and unsanitary conditions of tenement slums. Families with three or four children were crowded into single rooms. The dilapidated housing units typically lacked hot water and toilet facilities and were often infested with rats. Today’s homes are far superior to those squalid and cramped living quarters. The average home today has two to three times as many rooms per resident as was the case at the turn of the century. In 1900 only about 1 in 100 homes had a toilet or central heating. Even in 1950 air conditioning was rare. Today, at least 97 percent of homes have electricity, central heating, and modern plumbing (Figure 15). The rate of homeownership in America has risen from less than 50 percent in 1945 to an all-time high of 67 percent today.

Electricity has modernized almost every aspect of American industry and home life in the 20th century. Electricity replaced water and steam as a much more powerful and efficient source of energy for industrial production. And, of course, the electrification of American homes first brought light and then made possible the massive revolution in household appliances: radios, TVs, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. In 1900, 2 percent of homes had electricity. In 1950 about 80 percent did. By 1955 about 99 percent of American homes had electricity. Electric bills are much lower today than in the past. In 1900 the wage-indexed price of electricity was six times above its current level. Residential electricity costs were nearly 10 times higher than today (Figure 16).

A little more than 100 years ago, Americans sent more telegrams than they made telephone calls (Figure 17). In this century we have gone from 5 percent to 99 percent telephone ownership. Today, Americans don’t have phones just in their homes. We increasingly have phones in our briefcases, purses, and cars. The corded phone is fast becoming obsolete because it doesn’t travel well and is inconvenient. Sales of corded phones have been relatively flat in the 1990s. But sales of cordless and cellular phones have risen sharply (Figure 18). In 1997, for the first time ever, Americans bought more cordless than corded phones. Phone calls are not just more convenient, they are substantially cheaper than they used to be. A 10-minute coast-to-coast phone call in 1915 cost about $65.00 in today’s dollars.

Henry Ford’s assembly line brought the price of an automobile—ideal for the wide-open frontiers of a spacious country—within the financial reach of many Americans. Next to the computer, the automobile is arguably the most liberating invention of the past 100 years—a rapid form of transportation that allows Americans to go wherever they want whenever they want. In 1900 there were 20–25 horses for every 100 American households and virtually no cars. At the end of the century about 91 of every 100 American households has a car (Figure 19), and horses are used primarily for pleasure. Ground transportation speeds have increased about threefold in this century. Nonetheless, air travel is now replacing ground transportation for intercity trips. Miles traveled by plane have increased from fewer than 100 per person per year in 1950 to almost 1,000 per person in 1978 to more than 1,500 today (Figure 20).

From the automobile to the refrigerator, to the transistor, to the laser, to fiber optics, to modern medicines, the inventiveness and genius of Americans have been a principal driving force behind the rise in the U.S. standard of living over the past 100 years. Probably the greatest inventor in history was Thomas A. Edison (1850–1931), whose light bulb, motion picture projector, phonograph, tape recorder, and roughly 1,000 other patents propelled America into the electronic age. But Edison’s giant footsteps have been followed by thousands of less well-known American scientists and inventors whose brilliance and creativity are improving the quality of life on earth with every passing year. In 1900 there were roughly 25,000 patents issued. By 1950 that number had risen modestly to 43,000. But after 1950 the number of patents tripled to nearly 150,000 in 1997 (Figure 21). In this century the number of patents issued has grown at twice the pace of the U.S. population.

Texas Instruments introduced the first computer chip to the world in 1958. Since then the semiconductor has been doubling in capacity and speed (Figure 22) almost every 18 months (Moore’s law)—a geometric growth rate that makes all notions of "limits to growth" obsolete. Today the microchip contained in a single laptop computer has more computing power than all the computers used in all the universities across the country in 1950. The cost of processing information and data that once might have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars is rapidly falling to zero. The IBM- 370-168 mainframe (circa 1975) sold for $3.4 million; today a personal computer with an Intel Pentium chip retails for about $1,500 and is nearly 1,000 times faster. According to an analysis by Microsoft, "If the automobile and aerospace technology had exploded at the same pace as computer and information technology, a new car would cost about $2 and go 600 miles on a thimble of gas. And you could buy a Boeing 747 for the cost of a pizza."

In 1943 Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, declared: "I think there is a world market for about five computers." In 1949 Popular Mechanics prophesied that "where a calculator on the ENIAC computer is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons." Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, was asked by Xerox executives in the mid-1970s: "Why would anyone ever need a computer in their home?" Thanks to the rapid decline in price of the personal computer, today almost half of all U.S. homes have personal computers. Home computers are rapidly connecting every American to an information source far greater than the Library of Congress: the Internet (Figure 23). Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Novell, predicts: "At the current rate of growth of the internet, every man, woman, and child in the United States will be connected to the internet by 2007."

America today has the most highly schooled workforce in the history of the world. The quantity (though perhaps not the quality) of schooling received by Americans has risen in almost every decade of this century. Today the percentage of Americans graduating from college (28 percent) is higher than the percentage of Americans graduating from high school in 1920 (22 percent). Average years of schooling have increased from 8 to 12 for whites and from 6 to 12 for blacks. The percentage of American adults with a high school diploma has risen from about 4 in 10 in 1940 to more than 8 in 10 today. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans receiving advanced degrees is higher today than was the percentage receiving a college degree at the start of the 20th century (Figure 24). The increased years of schooling very closely track the rise in lifetime earnings of our workforce.

Anyone who reads the newspaper headlines or watches the evening news on TV must believe that we live in mighty dangerous times. It sometimes seems that the numbers of murders, shootings, thefts, airplane crashes, hurricanes, highway fatalities, and acts of terrorism have soared to unprecedented levels. Here’s the surprising good news: as Figure 25 shows, the accidental death rate has fallen by half since 1903–12. The biggest improvements have been in the rate of accidental deaths of infants (down 88 percent since 1900) and of seniors (down 67 percent). The accidental death rate on the job has also plummeted. In 1930 about 38 of every 100,000 workers died at the workplace, versus about 4 per 100,000 today. This sevenfold reduction in job-related deaths is due to several factors: first, fewer Americans work in risky places, such as unsafe factories and coal mines; second, safety measures are vastly improved for those who do work in risky occupations; and finally, improved medical care saves the lives of more people who are injured.

There is almost certainly no other issue about which Americans’ general preconceptions are so contrary to objective reality as they are about the environment. Most Americans believe that, because of industrialization, population growth, and our mass-consumption society, the quality of our air and water is deteriorating and that our natural resources will soon run dry. The scientific evidence tells us precisely the opposite: Between 1977 and 1997, levels of six major air pollutants decreased significantly: sulfur dioxide levels decreased 58 percent, nitrogen oxides decreased 27 percent, ozone decreased 30 percent, carbon monoxide decreased 61 percent, and lead decreased an overwhelming 97 percent (Figure 26). The quality of our water has also improved: The percentage of American households served by modern wastewater treatment plants, which improve environmental water quality, has doubled in the past 40 years. Our drinking water is safer; the number of Americans who contract waterborne diseases has fallen between 5- and 10-fold since the end of the 19th century.

Anxiety about running out of natural resources dates at least to the time of ancient Greece. The truth is that the price of virtually every commodity—agricultural, mineral, and energy—has fallen steadily throughout the 20th century relative to wages. A declining price is an indication of greater abundance, not greater scarcity. Food is so abundant today (Figure 27) that the government pays farmers not to grow so much. Of 13 major metals, the only one that has risen in price relative to wages in this century is platinum. The prices of most of the rest have fallen an average of fivefold since 1900. The price of fuel has fallen so sharply since the last OPEC oil embargo that "oil is now cheaper than water," according to a 1999 Associated Press bulletin. Fifty years ago the world had about 20 years’ worth of known reserves of oil. Thanks to technological innovation, which is outstripping the pace of depletion of reserves, the world now has at least 50 years of reserves.

Nearly every positive trend presented in this study—particularly trends of earnings, education, and health—shows greater improvement for women than for men. According to a study by former Congressional Budget Office director June O’Neill, when men and women are similar in all work-relevant characteristics, women now earn 98 cents for every dollar men do, which is close to wage parity. In 1950 only half of American female workers had a high school diploma. Now 90 percent do. More than half of bachelor’s and master’s degrees today are awarded to women (Figure 28). Women are more likely than ever to earn advanced degrees in areas once virtually closed to them: law, business management, and medicine, to name a few. One final thought: the proud moment for Americans earlier this year when Mia Hamm and the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup against China would not have been possible 50 years ago, when very few women were able to play organized sports.

Slavery and racism have been two of the greatest stains on American society since our independence—mocking the American claim that "all men are created equal." As recently as 1968 the Kerner Commission on race, appointed after the riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other cities, concluded glumly: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." The commission was wrong. The racial divide in America has been narrowing, not widening, over the course of this century. African Americans have made strong gains in income levels (Figure 29), educational attainment, health status, poverty rates, homeownership rates, and life expectancy in both absolute and relative terms compared with whites. According to economic historian Robert Higgs, "Real black per capita income increased between 1900 and 1940 by 61 percent and between 1940 and 1985 by 342 percent." In 1900 black incomes were less than 40 percent of those of whites; in 1979 they were about 58 percent of those of whites; and today they are more than 75 percent of those of whites. The income gap is still too wide, but it has been cut in half in this century.

A central message of this study is that the fruits of a free society are prosperity, wealth, and better health. All of the evidence in this analysis documents that, in every material way, life in the United States, with a population of 270 million, is much better today than it was in 1900 when the population was 75 million people. Moreover, the American people are net resource creators, not resource depleters—protectors of the environment, not destroyers. Each generation has left the planet and our continent in better ecological condition for future generations. We have produced more than we have consumed, leaving the savings and wealth to our children and grandchildren. So we consider the happiest social indicator of all in this century to be the rise in the number of Americans (Figure 30) who now live in greater affluence than ever before. We hope and predict that millions more people will live long, healthy, happy lives in America in the 21st century.

Conclusion

The Cato Analysis above is pretty convincing evidence that materially the world is getting better and better. Take a poll (if you can imagine it) of Christians living in Christ's day. I predict they would rather live in our day than in poverty and tyranny under the Roman Empire.

GPTS Online

A Monthly Electronic News Report from Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Is the World Getting Better?

The international director of the World Revival Network has reported statistical research that he says demonstrates that the "world is getting better" in large part due to the massive growth of Christianity around the globe, a fact he says is contrary to popular belief.

In a recent blog post entitled "Why You've Been Duped into Believing the Myth that the World is Getting Worse and Worse," J.D. King contends, "The earth is constantly improving because the gospel of Jesus Christ is taking root in every corner of the globe. The Kingdom of God is advancing and things are truly reflecting the Lord’s great kindness and love."

Citing statistics purportedly showing diminished violence and poverty in the world along with increased health and life expectancy, King anchors his claims of world betterment in research showing the spread of Christianity globally in the last century, with evangelical Christianity leading the way.

"Many aren't ready to accept this, but the number of those who claim to be Christians around the world has nearly quadrupled in the last century, from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2.3 billion as of 2011. Christians represent roughly 33% of the world population," he writes.

"There is little doubt that the Church is rapidly advancing around the globe. With the unfortunate exceptions of the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and a few other isolated places, Christianity is actually outpacing population growth everywhere. "

Quoting several studies, King notes that Christianity is making massive inroads even among Muslims.

"In fact, it appears that more Muslims became Christians over the last 20 years than in the previous 1,500 years combined," he writes. "Based on the observations of missiologists, journalist Audrey Lee suggests that 'more Muslims have committed to follow Christ in the last 10 years than in the last 15 centuries of Islam.'"

King says that in spite of the intense persecution, assassinations, and widespread church bombings, revival is exploding throughout North Africa and other parts of the Middle East.

"It has been conservatively estimated that at least ‘2 to 7 million people from a Muslim background worldwide now follow Christ.’ Other reliable reports suggest that there may be as many as 10 to 15 million undocumented Christians in Muslim countries. Perhaps there's even more,” he says.

"I'm aware that many don't believe it, but unbiased analysis and a multitude of relevant statistics confirm that the world is actually getting better. There is greater prosperity, peace, and health than ever before in recorded history. The Kingdom of God is boldly advancing and it's transforming everything in its wake," King concludes.

"I wish that many of my fellow Christians would gain a better grasp of what is going on in the nations. We need to let go of our pessimistic "doom and gloom" worldview and truly embrace the good news of the gospel. Jesus is on the move, and He is bringing His blessing and life to a world that has been ravaged by darkness."

King says that what is now transpiring in the nations really shouldn't surprise any Bible-believing Christian. "It's something that the Prophet Isaiah assured us centuries ago:

“The government will be upon his shoulder, and his name is called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the growth of his government and peace there will be no end. He will rule over his kingdom, sitting on the throne of David, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:6b-7a).

Read about Greenville Seminary's increasing role internationally in the latest edition of our Foundations Update newsletter, page 2.

Preach It Teach It

Shocking Statistics: Is Our World Getting Better or Worse?

Is our modern world a wonderful place that’s getting better – or a terrible place that’s getting worse?

It’s popular among Christians to believe the world is going to hell in a hand basket. We imagine an idyllic past when everyone shared our morals; when indecency was confined to the shadows; when violence was rare and kindness was common.

We look at the moral decay in our modern world and wonder if things have ever been this bad.

We may be losing the battle for personal morality. But we are winning when it comes to solving some of the globe’s most intractable problems. For example:

War. Thanks to 24-hour cable news, images of war invade our homes by the thousands. Therefore, we assume the world has never been more war-torn.

In reality, the world has never been more peaceful. Planet earth has always been a violent place. The tranquil, eco-paradise of the Avatar movies is a myth. We are living in the golden age of peace.

Violent crime. The average American child witnesses 200,000 acts of violence and 16,000 murders on TV by the time he or she reaches adulthood. TV news lives by the mantra, “If it bleeds – it leads.” Violence and gore sell. So naturally we tend to think that crime has never been worse.

Disease. We all know someone who’s contracted a deadly disease. The news media reports the maladies that befall celebrities in great detail. Therefore, we assume that people are sicker than ever.

But the truth is, we’ve never been healthier. The most dreaded infectious diseases of old have largely been conquered: plague, polio, tuberculosis, whooping cough, smallpox, leprosy, and many others are virtually unknown in the West today. As a result, life expectancy has nearly doubled in America over the past two centuries.

Poverty. In church we see a lot of pictures of very poor people – as we’re admonished to give. This is a good thing – Christians should constantly be reminded to help the less fortunate. But is poverty getting better or worse?

Better – by a mile. In 1981, over half the world’s population lived in poverty. Today the number stands at 22%. That’s an astonishing improvement that occurred in the blink of an eye. More people possess more wealth than at any other time in human history.

Hunger. A recent report from the World Health Organization says obesity – not hunger – is the world’s greatest public health challenge. Hunger is still a big problem in our world, but nothing like it once was. Starvation was once commonplace in our world; today it’s relatively rare. And it’s virtually unknown in the developed world. When is the last time you heard of an American dying of hunger?

I don’t mean to minimize the impact of suffering, but we can get so caught up in what’s wrong with the world we forget to give thanks to God for what’s right. That’s one of my New Year’s resolutions: to be more thankful for the blessings we’ve all been given.

And it’s important to realize that Christians have been at the center of many of these global victories. Christians have done more to heal the sick, feed the poor and teach the illiterate than any other faith group. The Bible’s call to live set apart is not just about your personal holiness – it’s about advancing the Kingdom of God on earth. When you walk with Jesus you elevate the world around you.

Happy New Year from Church for Men. I’d welcome your comments below, or join the discussion on our Facebook page.

OK, Haters, It's Time To Admit It: The World Is Becoming A Better Place

And there are certainly plenty of horrible things to complain about. People are mean, for example. And people get sick. And there are horrible accidents and injustices and tragedies and unfairness everywhere. And there is Ebola.

People who love to complain about how horrible everything is also love to point out that the world is always changing — and change is of course always horrible, because it destroys the way things used to be.

So it's nice to sometimes remind ourselves that some things — many things, in fact — are getting better all the time.

Over at the Oxford Martin School, Max Roser has put together a provocative article and presentation titled "It's a cold hard fact: Our world is becoming a better place."

Our world is becoming a better place. For humans, at least. (No one's saying it's getting better for plants and animals).

But, happily, on average, the number of violent war deaths worldwide is declining:

And poverty. Poverty is improving. There are still billions of depressingly poor people, of course. But the percent of the world's population living in extreme poverty continues to decline:

So complain all you want about how horrible everything is. There's certainly a lot left to fix. But as you complain, remember:

23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better

Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.

For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. We have a massively unpopular, scandal-plagued president whose aides are being convicted of serious federal felonies. Overt, old-fashioned racism is publicly visible and powerful in a way it wasn’t only five years ago. More than 200 admired, powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct or assault.

This is all real, and truly alarming. But it would be a mistake to view that as the sum total of the world in 2018. Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn.

But many of us aren’t aware of ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias. Bad economic news gets more coverage than good news. Negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones. Survey evidence consistently indicates that few people in rich countries have any clue that the world has taken a happier turn in recent decades — one poll in 2016 found that only 8 percent of US residents knew that global poverty had fallen since 1996.

It’s worth paying some attention to this huge progress. The people benefiting aren’t missing it — 50 percent of Chinese respondents in the 2016 poll said they knew poverty had fallen — and you shouldn’t either. Nothing’s permanent, and big challenges like climate change and the potential collapse of liberal democracy remain, but the world is getting much, much better on a variety of important, underappreciated dimensions.

Economic progress

1) Extreme poverty has fallen

This is probably the most important chart on this list. The extraordinary rate of economic growth in India and China — as well as slower but still significant growth in other developing countries — has led to a huge decline in the share of the world population living on less than $1.90 a day, from nearly 35 percent in 1987 to under 11 percent in 2013.

That’s a low bar for what counts as poverty, and some development experts argue we should be using a global poverty line of $10-15 a day instead. But that very debate is a sign of the tremendous progress made in recent decades.

2) Hunger is falling

This map shows changes to the Global Hunger Index — a measure of undernutrition calculated by the International Food Policy Research Institute — between 2000 and 2017. In countries marked red, hunger has increased. In countries marked orange or tan, it’s decreased, and in countries marked green it’s decreased by one half or more. So it’s encouraging to see how much of the globe is orange, tan, or green, and especially encouraging that a few extremely populous countries like China and Brazil fall into the green category.

3) Child labor is on the decline

Any amount of child labor is too much child labor, and the world didn’t meet the International Labor Organization’s goal of eliminating the “worst forms” of child labor by 2016. But the rate of decline — approximately a 40 percent reduction from 2000 to 2016 — is nontrivial and worth celebrating.

4) People in developed countries have more leisure time

5) The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US

One reason the huge amount of economic progress made globally in recent decades gets ignored is that living standards for the median American have been fairly stagnant. One exception to that pattern, however, is the fact that cheaper food has freed up Americans to spend more on other expenses. “Between 1960 and 2007, the share of disposable personal income spent on total food by Americans, on average, fell from 17.5 to 9.6 percent,” the USDA notes, and the ratio has stayed at that low level since.

Health

6) Life expectancy is rising

The increase in human life expectancy is a pretty recent phenomenon; lifespans fell in Europe from 1850 to 1870, and a slower pace of public health improvements (driven by imperial neglect among other factors) meant that Africa’s takeoff started later. But lifespans have doubled or more the world over since.

7) Child mortality is down

Child mortality has fallen by more than half since 1990. If you look at developing regions, the gains are even more impressive. In Africa, 17 percent of children died before reaching age 5 in 1990. By 2015, that was down to 8 percent.

In the world’s second-largest country, India, child mortality fell by 69 percent in that timespan, or over two-thirds. In China, the most populous, it fell by 83 percent. These are truly massive numbers that have helped drive the broader improvements in life expectancy.

8) Death in childbirth is rarer

Maternal mortality declined by 43 percent between 1990 and 2015, according to the World Health Organization. You can see the drop has been especially dramatic in African countries.

9) People have been getting taller for centuries

This chart, taken from economist Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, tracks the height of male skeletons found in Europe across nearly 2000 years, and compares those data points to recent, more complete height data in the US and Sweden. For nearly two millennia, male heights were stable, but upon the advent of the Industrial Revolution, they began to shoot up. There are many determinants of human height, but nutrition and overall living standards are crucial ones. We happen to be living in the first couple centuries of human existence to see huge advances in living standards, which shows up in height data, among many other places.

10) More people have access to malaria bednets

Malaria is still one of the world’s biggest killers, particularly in tropical regions. It’s treatable, but far more effective than treatment is prevention through insecticide-treated bednets. Access to those has grown substantially in recent years, as this chart from the World Health Organization shows. Charities like the Against Malaria Foundation have been very effective at bednet distribution.

11) Guinea worm is almost eradicated

Guinea worm is a nonfatal but debilitating parasitic infection, and as recently as 1986, millions of people got it annually. There is no vaccine or cure. Guinea worms grow in your body cavity, then work their way out of your body, often through your leg or foot. Once the worm’s exposed, it needs to be gradually coaxed out of your body in a sterile environment. If, to relieve the pain, you place your foot in water with a worm exposed, the worm will burst and send millions of larvae into the water supply. If people drink the water later, then they’re at risk of getting the worm.

But despite the lack of a modern medical treatment for the condition, it’s almost gone, due to a coordinated international eradication campaign spearheaded by former President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center.

12) Teen births in the US are down

We don’t know exactly why the teen birth rate has fallen so fast — by more than half between 2007 and 2016 — though as Vox’s Sarah Kliff has explained, there are a number of plausible factors. Everything from increased access to IUDs and Plan B to the show 16 and Pregnant could have played some role. But the trendline is dramatic and hugely encouraging.

13) Smoking is down, too

We’ve come a long way from 1955, when 45 percent of Americans reported smoking in a given week to Gallup, to 2018, when a mere 16 percent do (which is itself a big drop from 21 percent in 2014). And with the FDA poised to ban cigarettes with addictive levels of nicotine, traditional cigarettes could soon be a thing of the past in the US.

The next frontier in the battle against smoking, then, is in the developing world, where progress has been harder.

Peace and security

14) In the long term, homicide rates have fallen dramatically

The past was a quite violent place. As research from criminologist Manuel Eisner shows, homicide in European countries has been on the decline for centuries. Eisner estimates that in the 1200s and 1300s, Europe had an average homicide rate of about 32 per 100,000. By the 1900s, that rate had fallen to about 1.4 per 100,000.

15) In the short term, they’re down in the US, too

The US has historically been an outlier among rich countries, with an unusually high homicide rate. We still have a much higher rate than Western European countries do, but it has declined sharply in recent decades, as sociologist Kieran Healy’s chart above shows. There were some spikes in the homicide rate in 2015 and 2016, but it’s falling again, and even in 2016 it was lower than any year from 1965 to 2007.

16) Violent crime in the US is going down

Of course, other violent crimes are also serious, but they have been decreasing steadily in the US since the early 1990s, as part of the overall dramatic decline in crime rates.

17) We’ve rapidly reduced the supply of nuclear weapons

World nuclear weapons stockpiles peaked in 1986 at an astonishing level of 70,300 warheads, and the period since then has seen a sharp decline in US and Russian stockpiles, and, thus, the overall global total. There have been some lapses in the international nonproliferation regime, with Pakistan and North Korea developing weapons, but South Africa and post-USSR Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine all voluntarily gave up their arms.

Government and social services

18) More people in the world live in a democracy now

As recently as 1993, most people lived in autocratic states; in the 1970s and 1980s, autocracies outnumbered democracies by a considerable margin, and only about a third of the world’s population enjoyed democratic government. Soviet bloc countries were uniformly dictatorial, but the US didn’t make democracy promotion a particular priority in the Cold War either, allying with brutal dictatorships, from South Korea to Chile to Greece.

But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Communist dictatorships almost all vanished, and most of the Eastern European ones were replaced with democratic systems. US-backed military governments in Latin America lost power, and a number of African dictators fell.

19) More people are going to school for longer

We still have a lot to do to improve access to education, but even in developing countries like China and India, average years of schooling have been growing swiftly.

20) And literacy is, predictably, up as well

Increased access to education has, unsurprisingly, coincided with increased literacy. A lot of progress has also been made by reducing racial gaps in literacy. In 1870, 79.9 percent of African-Americans aged 14 or older were illiterate, and by 1952 that number had only fallen to 10.2 percent. But by 1979, according to National Center for Education Statistics data, the illiteracy rate was down to 1.6 percent.

Technology

21) Moore’s law isn’t quite over yet

Moore’s law — the empirical observation, first made by Intel’s Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every two years — has fueled the extraordinary growth in computing power over the past half-century. And while some analysts argue that that the pattern identified by Moore has broken down because of physical limitations on how many transistors can fit on a chip, decades of exponential progress is extraordinary, even if the trend doesn’t continue — and optimists in the industry argue that computing power can continue to grow exponentially.

22) Access to the internet is increasing

At this point, internet use is fairly universal in developed countries — which occurred very, very rapidly, as this chart emphasizes — and while it’s less prevalent in developing countries and the world at large, the trendlines are going in the right direction.

23) Solar energy is getting cheaper

Climate change is one big area where we’re not making progress, and things are getting considerably worse. There’s no sugar-coating that. One bright spot is the declining price of solar power, which is fueling a rapid increase in adoption. Solar and wind are now cheaper per megawatt hour than gas or oil, though better batteries are needed if the two are to become primary sources of energy.

The world is getting better all the time, in 11 maps and charts

Reading the news, it sometimes feels like the world is falling apart: that everything is going to hell in a handbasket and we're on the verge of a total collapse. In fact, we're living through what is, by objective metrics, the best time in human history. People have never lived longer, better, safer, or richer lives than they do now. And these 11 charts and maps — which draw on centuries of data, as well as a brand new UN report that focuses on the past 25 years — prove it.

Humanity's greatest accomplishment: We're living longer than ever

For most of human history, our lives were nasty, brutish, and pretty damn short. Only in the past 200 years or so, as this chart shows, have people started living lives that even come close to what we see as normal today. In 1770, the world's average life expectancy was just 29 years old (a lot of people died really young). Today, it's 70. That staggering jump represents the greatest accomplishment in human history: our victory over historical killers like disease, poverty, and war. Everything else in the post is, to a certain extent, an explanation of this one extraordinary fact.

Global GDP has surged

For most of human existence, our species was dirt poor. But that has changed rapidly since the 19th century: The world's gross domestic product has spiked in a way that's simply unprecedented in human history. The key factors here are the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism. These four transformations created and spread new ideas and technologies — modern medicine and electricity, for example — that allowed humanity to grow rich and healthy in a way that our distant ancestors simply couldn't dream of.

And extreme poverty is in free fall

Economic growth hasn't just benefited wealthy countries. Between 1990 and 2015, about 1.1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty (defined as living on $1.25 a day). That means that in just the past 25 years, a full seventh of humanity has been saved from terrible want. A lot of that came from India and especially China, huge countries that experienced rapid growth in the past several decades. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is still mired in serious poverty. But the fact that the worldwide gains are concentrated in a few places doesn't make them any less worthy of celebration. If what we care about is minimizing suffering in the world, then it shouldn't matter what country the billion-plus people saved from poverty come from.

Deaths from war are at historical lows

The modern world also birthed horrors — specifically, industrialized killing in the two world wars. But a wonderful thing has happened since then: Deaths from war have been in free fall. The percentage of the global population killed in wars has declined tremendously, owing in large part to the fact that major nuclear armed powers (like the US and Russia) have refrained from going to war. War isn't over, obviously, but we've managed to contain it — safeguarding humanity's gains from economic growth and scientific innovation.

VIDEO: Three reasons war is going away

As are deaths from HIV/AIDS

In the past 15 years, we've made serious progress in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Between 2000 and 2013, documented new cases of HIV infection fell by 40 percent, and deaths from AIDS-related causes fell by 35 percent (from a peak in 2005). That's in large part because there's been a concerted global effort to spread the medication necessary to combat the plague. Programs like the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) have done an extraordinary job of getting impoverished people the treatment and assistance they need.

And many other major diseases

HIV/AIDS isn't the only disease being beaten back. As the above chart shows, the global measles immunization campaign has been extraordinarily effective — saving the lives of an estimated 15.6 million people between 2000 and 2015. Deaths from malaria declined by 58 percent globally during the same period. Tuberculosis mortality has fallen by 43 percent since 1990. These diseases, all major killers in the developing world, are on the retreat — due to both local and international efforts to combat them.

The spread of democracy has made the world freer and safer

The spread of democracy is a critical part of this whole story. The American and French Revolutions marked the beginning of its global rise, but it wasn't until the Cold War ended that democracy became the most popular form of government on Earth. The ramifications of democracy's spread have been enormous: Democratic governments have never (or almost never) gone to war with each other, and are significantly less likely to slaughter their own people. Democracy has also put pressure on political leaders to keep their citizens happy, helping spread the gains from economic growth and technology from the wealthy to most of the world's population. And that's to say nothing of democracy's inherent benefits (like giving people the right to choose their own governments).

More people than ever before have enough to eat

One of the benefits of the world's growing wealth is that more people can afford food. From 1990 to 1992, 991 million people in the developing world were undernourished — meaning food-deprived — by the UN's numbers. Today, that figure is 780 million. That's a decline of more than 20 percent in the parts of the world where, in the past centuries, people have suffered the most from want of adequate food.

Fewer mothers are dying in childbirth

Until the advent of modern medicine, shocking percentages of women died in pregnancy and childbirth. The spread of techniques to address leading maternal killers, like hemorrhage and infection, has done wonders: Since 1990, the global rate of maternal mortality (death of a mother during pregnancy or within 42 days of its end) has gone down by a staggering 45 percent.

More children than ever are seeing their fifth birthday

If you were born 400 years ago, the odds of you living past age 5 were terrifyingly low. Nowadays, the incidence of child mortality has plummeted, owing largely to improved access to health care and food. This is one of the key reasons life expectancy is so much higher than it used to be: The fewer deaths there are at a young age, the higher the average length of a human life from birth will be.

And more kids than ever are going to school

At the same time that more children are living to be old enough to get an education, opportunities for schooling have never been greater. Ninety-one percent of primary school-age kids worldwide are enrolled. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with by far the worst primary school enrollment numbers, recent improvements have been nothing short of astonishing. In 1990, 52 percent of school-age kids in the region were enrolled. By 2012, that number had jumped to 80 percent.

But what about spiritual conditions? Isn't the world becoming more evil every day? Next