“Literacy has risen to 83%”
Sometimes life goes three steps forward and two steps back, and keeps repeating that pattern. Typically, the media (and we) focus on the two steps back, because we are wired to worry more than we are to relax and smile and zoom out for the bigger picture. But over time, that three-steps-forward pattern means steady progress. That is what we need to remind ourselves as we head into this new year.
“Since the 18th-century Enlightenment, life expectancy across the world has increased from 30 to 71 years, extreme poverty has fallen from 90% to 10%, literacy has risen from 12% to 83%, and the share of people living in democracies has leapt from 1% to two-thirds. Since 1945, wars between states have become rare, battle deaths have declined more than tenfold, and billions of lives have been enhanced by revolutions…
“The forces that have propelled progress–knowledge, prosperity, connectivity–will probably not go into reverse, and they build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety-nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated world cares more about the environment and human rights.”
–Steven Pinker, Harvard University professor, The Economist, The World in 2019, p. 77
