Over the weekend, The New York Times ran an opinion piece by two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof whose title must have freaked out leftists bent on remaking the world into their Utopia: “This Has Been the Best Year Ever.”
Kristof began by positing, “If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever … since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.
The list of reasons for Kristof’s supposition included these tidbits: “Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.”
Kristof noted that in 1950, 27% of all children died by age 15; that has plunged to 4%. In 1981, 42% of the global population subsisted on less than $2 per day; that figure has dropped to less than 10%. The last famine that the World Food Program acknowledged came in 2017 in Sudan and only lasted several months.
Kristof wrote, “Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. A half century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90 percent adult literacy.”
In 2018, the leftist site Vox also acknowledged the spectacular progress made around the world, noting, “Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries.” Vox pointed out that between 2000 and 2016, there was a 40% reduction in child labor around the globe.
Vox wrote, “Female and male life expectancy both increased by more than six years between 1990 and 2016.” The U.S. homicide rate in 2016 was lower than any year between 1965 to 2007.
The Washington Examiner noted in August: “The nation’s unemployment rate has been at or below 4% for 16 consecutive months, the lowest in half a century. Wages have been rising steadily for seven years. Inflation remains below 2%. Inflation in health-related prices is below even the core inflation rate. The stock market is reaching record highs each month. The poverty rate is at or near historic lows, as are rates of violent crime … The grand total of fewer than 17,000 troops in even semi-hot, bullets-flying war zones is quite low, and combat fatalities are averaging fewer per year than they averaged per day for most years in Vietnam.”
Oxford University economist Max Roser told the New York Times, “If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past. Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common. We are some of the first people in history who have found ways to make progress against these problems. We have changed the world. How awesome is it to be alive at a time like this?”