Worst of Times, Best of Times?

Quite a few people bid adieu to 2018 with relish, rejecting it as a really bad year because of all of the bad news it produced. But, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof points out, there were a lot of reasons to think of 2018 as the best year in human history.

Kristof notes that rates of extreme poverty and things like child death were the lowest they have ever been -- and not just in developed countries: Around the whole world! As recently as the early 1980s, more than 40 percent of the people of the world lived in extreme poverty, making less than $2 per person per day. Adjusted for inflation, the figure in 2018: Ten percent.

This post at Threedonia shows some other statistics in the illustration and also references the Kristof article. The author notes that several of the things that combined to make 2018 a great year are parts of trends rather than one-off events, meaning that 2019 has a good shot at being even better. We might figure we've got reasons to gripe, considering that the majority of our elected leadership labors mightily to prove that brains, decent character and common sense are not job requirements. But when we think of the children who live to be 5 today who wouldn't have as few as 20 years ago, we might offer at least a grudging admission that for some folks, being born now is not the worst thing in the world.