[chapter 4]

THE WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE THAN YOU THINK

Turn off the television. Forget the news. The facts are
different than you are made to believe.

IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME

When you read the paper, surf the Web, or watch the news, you may conclude that our world is in dire straits. All indicators appear to point in the wrong direction. But that’s not the case. It’s the outcome of biased views based on the prevailing pessimism of our age. Compared to the recent and distant past we’re doing much better on almost every front than our ancestors. And, yet, we keep hearing that the future will be nothing but disastrous. If 10,000 years and more is our guide, that’s simply not true.

Here’s an overview of the news you don’t hear. It’s our well-documented summary of the key indicators of the status of our lives and our societies. While in absolute terms there’s still much progress to be desired, the overall trends are upward and positive. “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better,” the Beatles sang. Now it’s your turn. Get ready for a true and happy experience: ten stories and statistics that show that the world is truly a better place than you think!

WE LIVE IN THE MOST PEACEFUL ERA EVER

Let me begin with perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions. Despite what you hear on the news or read in the papers, and despite the stern and threatening announcements you hear at airports, the chances that you will be a victim of terrorism or violence are very, very small.

Just a few centuries ago, violence was pervasive. Beheadings were public entertainment. Heretics and witches were burned at the stake. Men beat their wives. Fathers beat their children. Slavery was common. There was continual war. For Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard professor who has devoted more than ten years to studying the decline in violence, the conclusion is evident: We live in the most peaceful era ever.

That seems like a bold statement. After all, the twentieth century has a bad reputation. Millions died in two world wars, the Holocaust, the purges of Stalin and Mao. All this is true. It’s very human to remember these terrible periods and forget that millions also died from violence in previous centuries. Pinker calls the decline in violence the most underappreciated trend in the history of the human species.

What drives that trend? Nation building curbed the drive to steal neighbors’ land and the continual threat of hostile invasion. That allowed geopolitical stability to develop. The rise of democracy squelched the evils of tyrannical government. International trade turned countries into business partners, making peace economically attractive. Universal education provided an introduction to other cultures and views, opening old customs and practices to discussion.

And so began a genuine civilizing process in which the tempestuous rise of civilized behavior could be seen in everything from table manners to our approach to managing emotions. Where once a difference of opinion or an insult could easily lead to a knife fight with fatal consequences, with self-control people first counted to ten and swallowed their pride.

That trend continues unabated. In 1991, the FBI reported 758 cases of violent crime per 100,000 American residents; in 2010, the number was 404. The rate of murder and voluntary manslaughter halved in that same period. Worldwide data are fairly unreliable, of course, but here, too, the same development is visible. In 2002, ninety-four countries reported some 332,000 murders to the United Nations; in 2008, the number was 289,000. During that time, the number of reports declined in sixty-eight countries.

Today, you’re more likely to drown in a swimming pool than die a violent death. That’s a luxury no one outside this generation has ever known.¹

OVERPOPULATION IS A MYTH

We keep hearing it again and again: There’s no way our world can become a healthier and better place because there are just too many of us. Overpopulation is seen as a major threat to the future of humanity.

Let’s run the numbers for the 7 billion we are today. Let’s assume that we all live in an average four-person family and we all have our own house with a small private garden on, say, a one-tenth of an acre lot. How much space do we need for that?

7,000,000,000 / 4 = 1,750,000,000 homes
× 1/10 acre = 175,000,000 acres
= 273,438 square miles

To put that in perspective: The state of Texas measures 268,820 square miles. So we can basically fit the whole current world population in just the second-largest state of the United States. Granted these people need food, water, freeways, and work, not just homes. But we can set up another state with offices. And we still have the rest of the United States for food farms. You get the idea … contrary to what you keep hearing, space is really not an issue on our planet.

And population growth?

That’s not a problem either. Advanced countries like Italy and Japan face negative population growth. Their populations decline. That would also be the case in Germany were it not for net migration from other countries (which means that there are fewer people in these countries). The trend is the same around the globe: Where there’s more wealth there are fewer births. Take India, the country that is predicted to overtake China as the country with the largest population. In 1950 Indian women had on average six children. Today that average is now 2.6—still a high number, but the trend is clearly downward and will continue in that direction with increasing wealth.

According to the most recent UN report on population, the world’s population will stabilize during this century, or, at the latest, early next century, after which it will begin to decline. On average women across the globe give birth to 2.5 babies today—it was almost five in 1950. So the trend is downward. But even if the average woman has 0.5 more babies than the current rate in the next ninety years, the world population will peak at almost 16 billion in 2100. However, if the birth rate declines, with an average of 0.5 baby per woman, than we get to a world population of just over 6 billion in 2100. That’s fewer people on the planet than we have today! With the current trend in world population growth leader India, that last outcome is not unimaginable at all.

So, worst case, we may need another Texas. But that’s not the likeliest outcome. To put the numbers in yet another perspective: In 2011 the world celebrated the arrival of the 7 billionth person. If all of us would have come to the baby shower the state of Maryland would have offered plenty of space for everyone to dance.²

… AND WE CAN FEED ALL THESE PEOPLE

Doomsayers keep referring to Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who wrote in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over [that is, lost]. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions will starve to death.”

That is true. We have seen very severe famines. And we keep witnessing these from time to time. That’s very painful. But that doesn’t mean that we are not able to grow enough food for the world population. Famine is more than anything a distribution problem. In India an estimated 40 percent of the harvest never reaches the market. In the United States about 40 percent of food is wasted, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Distribution is a challenge, but by no means an insurmountable one.

At the same time, the good news is that agricultural yields around the world have been steadily increasing. Consider a few figures. The area of the Earth’s surface devoted to growing grain has hardly changed since 1965. Yields in tons, by contrast, have more than doubled. The production of a given quantity of crop requires 65 percent less land than it did in 1961, according to Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick of Rockefeller University, and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, in their 2013 paper “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing.” The researchers find that over the next fifty years people are likely to release from farming a land area “1.5 times the size of Egypt, 2.5 times the size of France, or 10 Iowas, and possibly multiples of this amount.” In other words: We are going to need less land to feed more people and we’ll be able to preserve more wilderness.

A lot of this progress has to do with technology, but that doesn’t mean we can only survive with genetically manipulated organisms (GMOs). To the contrary: ever more clever organic agriculture techniques—led by the University of California, Davis in the United States and Wageningen University in the Netherlands—and technology that allows for much more efficient use of water will make it possible to continue to harvest more food from the same amount of land in a healthy way for people and planet. Experiments around the world show that modern organic agriculture can deliver higher yields on farmland where topsoil has been damaged after years of heavy use of chemicals. More and more research confirms that organic agriculture can indeed feed the world.

And water? One more calculation. The Columbia River begins in the Canadian Rockies and ultimately dumps some 200 trillion liters of sweet water into the Pacific Ocean every year. That comes to almost 80 liters (about 20 gallons) per person—all 7 billion of us—per day. I’m not suggesting that getting enough drinking water to the world population is an easy job. But for a species that can send people in rockets to the moon surely this is not a challenge we cannot meet.³

WE ARE LIVING LONGER

We’re living longer—and for those who savor life, with all its ups and downs, that’s good news. A hundred years ago, our ancestors could expect fewer than fifty birthdays—and even that was nearly twenty more than the global average. In 2010, the worldwide average had risen to 67.2 years, and even 78.2 years in the United States. That increase is largely due to the progress of medical science. For example, better health care has dramatically reduced infant and maternal death rates. In poor countries, life expectancy is still rising sharply. In the past five decades, it has risen by ten years in Africa, despite wars and disease.

Not only has the immense grief of burying our children become a rarity; our grandparents are also living longer. The continuing increase in life expectancy in the West is largely the result of the over-eighty crowd living longer. In 1950, an eighty-year-old woman had only a 16 percent chance of making it to ninety; in 2002, that number was 37 percent.

The challenge now is to live our extra years in good health. The statistics on that haven’t been around long enough to present a clear trend. But the available data from France, Germany, Belgium, and other countries suggest that we not only live longer but also spend those extra years with milder complaints and fewer limitations on our daily lives.

Experts consider it unlikely that the upward trend in life expectancy will end any time soon. If the trend continues—and it has shown no sign of slowing since 1840—we can expect most babies born in rich countries after 2000 to live to be a hundred. A 2009 study in the Lancet concluded: “Continued progress in the longest-living populations suggests we are not close to a limit, and further rise in life expectancy is likely.”⁴

DEMOCRACY IS SPREADING

For essentially all of human history, non-elected leaders—feudal lords—have governed groups of people almost everywhere in the world. Some leaders worked their way up through the ranks to become military or religious commanders; others enjoyed the happy accident of being the firstborn sons in royal families. The idea that all men and women may vote for a politician to represent them in their country’s government is relatively new.

Forty years ago, American think tank Freedom House published its first annual report ranking the world based on democratic freedoms. A mere forty countries had free elections. Back then, Spain and Portugal were military dictatorships. Much has changed in the intervening decades. In the 1980s, many military regimes fell in Latin American countries, including Argentina and Brazil. In East and South Asia, too, modern civil freedoms arose. After communism fell apart, the 1990s brought democracy to Eastern Europe. Today, Freedom House counts eighty-seven nations as “free countries,” a doubling in less than four decades. An additional sixty countries are “partly free,” leaving forty-eight countries still labeled “not free.”

The African continent and the Middle East are in a turbulent period of political change. In 1990, Freedom House counted just three African countries with multiparty systems, universal suffrage, regular fraud-free elections, and ballot secrecy. Today, with the exception of Mali, democracy is taking West Africa by storm. In violent hotbeds such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, political innovations have brought about great progress. Guinea and the Ivory Coast have ended periods of internal unrest and are once again democracies. US President Barack Obama has even praised Ghana’s democracy. And the recent protests in countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Iran demonstrate people’s willingness to fight to escape authoritarian regimes.

It’s still unclear what kind of change the Arab Spring will bring. Democracy progresses in waves, not in a straight line. That’s why a country like South Africa has plunged in every international ranking after the rise of democracy following the release of Nelson Mandela in the 1990s gave way again to a culture of nepotism and corruption. But the overall conclusion is clear. Despotic rulers are retreating and democracy is on the rise giving a voice to more and more people in more and more countries.⁵

WE HAVE MORE FREE TIME

Capitalism is a rat race, forcing us to work all the time, pushed by profit seeking and ruthless competition. We are busy, busy, busy. Right?

It looks quite different from an historical perspective. The amount of working hours per year for full-time employees has been on a steady decline for more than a century. In the late nineteenth century people worked an estimated ten hours per day for six days per week. Vacation didn’t exist, nor retirement. People worked more than 3,000 hours per year.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average number for working hours for 2012 was 1,765 (US 1,790). That’s 11 percent less than the average of 1,981 hours that OECD workers spent on the job in 1970.

The welfare state has gradually reduced the number of working hours. In the 1970s the five-day/forty-hour workweek became the norm. Today many European countries have a thirty-six-hour workweek.

Retirement has made a big difference as well. That was an “invention” by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In 1889, when the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam, he decided that Germany would begin paying state pensions to people over the age of sixty-five. After a life of unremitting labor, people were often frail and sick, unfit for the back-breaking jobs that dominated that era and nearly ready for the casket. Indeed, Bismarck’s creation of the first welfare state was mainly inspired by the fact that the elderly of the time were slowing productivity in the factories. Because few people lived beyond the age of seventy, it was not a great financial burden for the German state. If Bismarck were to make the same decision today, he would probably set the retirement age at eighty or even higher. In that sense the politicians who are trying to raise the retirement age at the moment have a point.

The biggest change in work experience, however, is just starting to get momentum. Since the days of Bismarck we have worked in big factories and big companies and institutions where we needed to report on time and where our productivity was monitored. That’s why we have these nice statistics about the number of working hours. The Internet is radically changing that. The boundaries between “life” and “work” are getting blurred. On the negative side, that means responding to work emails during your private evening. But on the positive side, it means you can go surfing in the morning and then start your work in Starbucks whenever it suits you. At the same time fewer and fewer people will work in big organizations, and more and more will use the Web to be entrepreneurs with cheap access to a global market. We’ll be creating our own jobs again, like we did before the Industrial Revolution. But we’ll be able to do that in a much more efficient way than the carpenter or grocer of the past.

I know that many of us feel the burden of their work today. Stress is abundant. We need to learn to manage that. Yet, beyond the statistics, we have opportunities to make our own lives and work in ways no generation before us ever could. More and more we can make time, our time. That’s even better than free time.⁶

WE ARE GETTING RICHER

These days, most poor families in the West have cell phones, televisions, washing machines, and cars. Their tap water is clean and their food safe to eat. Though I’m not trying to play down the problem of poverty, these conditions are a vast improvement over those in, say, the 1950s.

Until 1800, the value of the global economy hardly changed, though there were periods when things got somewhat better or worse. “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC,” Gregory Clark, professor of economics at University of California, Davis concludes in Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Journalist Matt Ridley has sought to show that people today are richer than Louis XIV was circa 1700, when he was the wealthiest man in the world’s wealthiest country. He ate off gold plates, true, but his array of choices was startlingly paltry compared with the overwhelming selection in today’s grocery stores. Louis might have had a tailor, a chauffeur, and 500 other servants, but today, all of us do, in the form of clothing stores and budget airlines.

Important things cost less today than ever before. That includes all the critical stuff: food, clothes, fuel, and shelter. Ridley calculates: In 1800, a candle providing one hour’s light cost six hours’ work. In the 1880s, the same light from a kerosene lamp took fifteen minutes’ work to pay for. In 1950, it was eight seconds. Today, it’s half a second. In these terms, we are 43,200 times better off than we were in 1800.

The Industrial Revolution changed everything. People left for the cities, general health improved, schools were built. For the past two centuries, the economy has grown spectacularly, and everyone has profited.

Yes, but inequality … ?

Three billion people still live on less than $2.50 per day. And the eighty-five wealthiest people together own as much as all these 3 billion together.

Yes, that’s true.

It’s also true that the proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 per day has dropped from 90 percent to 30 percent in the past two decades.

Another example: Ghana’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita today stands at the same level as that of Spain in 1950 (in the same 1990 dollars). We would not argue that Spain in 1950 was a poor and hopeless place.

The gap is closing. According to the most pessimistic long-term UN estimates, the economies of rich countries will continue to grow at an average of 1 percent per year and the developing world at an average rate of 2.3 percent. That means that by the end of this century, our great-grandchildren in rich nations will be two and a half times wealthier than we are, and people in poor countries will be at least nine times wealthier than their ancestors living today.

The gap is also closing because many of the poorest are also the youngest people in low-paid jobs at the beginning of their careers, whereas many of the wealthiest are older people whose income is not going to rise much more. Statistics show that 80 percent of the people born in households below the poverty line will escape poverty when they reach adulthood. We’re definitely not there yet, but we are certainly on a good track.⁷

NATURAL RESOURCES ABOUND

Another favorite part of the pessimists’ mantra is that there will be too many people and not enough food, water, and natural resources (energy).

Let me begin with oil.

In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in the world. In the following twenty years the world consumed 600 billion barrels. So we should have been at minus 50 billion barrels in 1990. However, proven reserves totaled 900 billion barrels that year. Today that total stands at more than 1,400 billion barrels. Yes, there’s an end to oil, but we are not going to reach that any time soon, and new technologies and discoveries are emerging every day. More important, there are much better and cleaner alternatives that are rapidly becoming competitive.

At the time of the 1973 oil crisis, the then-Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani spoke wise words: “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

It’s the same with other raw materials. Figures from industry show that reserves are growing. Limestone, aluminum, iron, copper, gold, nitrogen, and zinc—the nonfuels—account for more than 75 percent of the worldwide expenditure on hard commodities, and despite a spectacular increase in our consumption of all these substances—by a factor of 2 to 10—the available reserves of every one of them grew in the second half of the past century. That’s because we recycle intelligently, and we’ve consistently searched for more.

Increasing consumption also means that prices fall over the long term. They’ve long been falling, fluctuations notwithstanding: Since 1845, the price index for industrial commodities—neatly tracked and corrected for inflation by the Economist—has fallen by an average of 70 percent. Ever more and ever cheaper: What commodities crisis?

Finally, please note that we aren’t interested in these resources as such. We need them for the services they can provide. Two thousand years ago nobody could imagine uranium as a source for energy. We are going to find new ways to combine, use, and reuse all those atoms to enable us to do the things we want. At some point in the future people will look back at us like we look back at the ancient Romans—clever people, leaders in their times, but, boy, what a primitive society.⁸

OUR FOOD IS SAFER

For centuries, people prayed before meals—but, especially, they prayed for them. For practically all of human history, life has consisted of a struggle for food—and in too many parts of the world, it still is. Today, those of us in rich countries appear to have forgotten that not so long ago, gathering, cleaning, and preparing food took up a substantial part of every day. Not only was it time-consuming work, there was always a chance bacteria would make you sick.

Today, every news report on horsemeat or dioxin in chickens causes a shock wave. We easily forget that our food is safer than it’s ever been. Only rarely does what we eat make us sick. It’s pretty hard these days to contract old-fashioned food poisoning. We owe this development to scientific progress, ingenious quality controls at every stage of production, and improved storage methods. In the early twentieth century a simple glass of milk was a primary source of tuberculosis. With pasteurization, the danger of milk was suddenly gone.

In recent decades, great strides have been made against microbial and chemical contamination. You can go into a restaurant knowing that the chances that you’ll get sick are miniscule. In the United States, one person in 100,000 dies of a foodborne illness every year. These cases often result from negligence in the system—something we can reduce by sharpening legislation, standards, and inspection.

Nowadays the bigger risks in food are of a completely different kind. The danger is not in the potential presence of bacteria; it lies with the ingredients that are used by profit-driven food multinationals. They use, for instance, a suspicious sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup, that’s linked to type 2 diabetes. In other words: Food may still not be completely safe. Yet the fact that you can eat almost anywhere without getting sick is a huge achievement that the modern citizen hardly appreciates.⁹

RACISM IS ON THE DECLINE

We tend to look at absolute facts. And that’s good. It keeps motivating us to change things for the better. Many of the trends mentioned in this chapter require more effort, much more effort. That certainly applies to racism. The United States may have its first black president, but racism still exists. He knows that. We all do. Offensive ethnic chants are routinely banned from sports stadiums, and children are still punished for skin-color taunts.

At the same time, a lot of progress has been made and is being made. The time when racism in America was a destabilizing social problem that led to structural violence and injustice really does seem to be over.

The success of the civil rights movement doesn’t mean there are no problems today. In America, nearly 40 percent of the prison population is black, such a high percentage that socioeconomic differences hardly provide an adequate explanation. Unemployment among Native Americans is higher than for any other ethnic group—up to 69 percent in reservation populations. Moreover, racial strife still sometimes causes death and destruction in plenty of places—consider Sudan and Rwanda. But even in Europe, periodic waves of violence break against the Romani or immigrants from the Middle East.

Yet a lot of progress is being made too. One of the most inspiring experiences is walking in busy city centers of Brazilian cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and watching teenagers of all colors and races leave their high schools hand in hand. That new Brazilian generation has left the issue behind and stands as an example for the rest of the world, where travel and trade keep mixing people more and more together.

The best evidence for the decline in racism is the rise of interracial marriages. Every day people of different races interact, fall in love, and have children together. Each new generation is more ethnically and culturally diverse than ever before.

In 1970, interracial marriages constituted just 2 percent of all American marriages; 2010 US Census reports 10 percent and a 28 percent increase compared to 2000. California, which so often shows the way to the future, already has almost 13 percent interracial marriages. The European Union lags behind, with interracial marriages at just about 5 percent. However, in Europe as well the numbers are rising year after year. That shows that racism is slowly but surely retreating.¹⁰