Ronald Bailey - Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know

PRAISE FORTEN GLOBAL TRENDS EVERY SMART PERSON SHOULD KNOW

Read this book and find out why, if you are not an optimist, you should be.

Vernon L. Smith, Nobel Prizewinning economist and George L. Argyros Endowed Chair in Finance and Economics, Chapman University

If you learn about the world through daily news and social media, you have probably missed the greatest stories of our time. But dont worry, youll quickly catch up with this tour de force. It will make you smarterand happier. I am a card-carrying optimist, but Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy manage to make even me more hopeful about humanity.

Johan Norberg, author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, named by The Economist as one of the best books of 2016

This is an astonishing collection of positive trends. I want every young person to see it and begin to escape the indoctrination in pessimism they have been subjected to by the media and the education system. Making the world a much better place is clearly possible.

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves and How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

In these dark times, it is good to remember just how far mankind has come, and how many seemingly impossible problems have been overcome. Keep this book at hand, open it at random, and it will fill you with hope for the future.

Angus S. Deaton, Nobel Prizewinning economist and Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus, Princeton University

There are two ways to understand the world: a constant drip of anecdotes about the worst things that have happened anywhere on the planet in the previous hour, or a birds-eye view of the grand developments that are transforming the human condition. The first is called the news, and for your wisdom and mental health I recommend balancing it with the second. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know is a pleasure: gorgeous, self-contained vignettes on human progress, which you can sample at your leisure or devour in a sitting.

Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

TEN GLOBAL TRENDS

EVERY SMART PERSON SHOULD KNOW

AND MANY OTHERS YOU WILL FIND INTERESTING

RONALD BAILEY AND MARIAN L. TUPY

CATO

INSTITUTE

Copyright 2020 by the Cato Institute.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-948647-73-1

eISBN: 978-1-948647-74-8

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bailey, Ronald, author. | Tupy, Marian L., author.

Title: Ten global trends every smart person should know , and many others you will find interesting / Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy.

Description: Includes bibliographical references. | Washington, D.C. : Cato Institute, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020939606 | ISBN 978-1-948647-73-1 (Hardcover) | 978-1-948647-74-8 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH Globalization. | World health. | Environmental policy--International cooperation. | Environmental management. | Climatic changes--21st century. | International relations. | International economic relations. | Economic development. | Natural resources. | World politics--21st century.

Classification: LCC JZ1318 .B35 2020 | DDC 303.48/2--dc23

Jacket design: FaceOut Studio, Molly Von Borstel.

Cover imagery: Shutterstock.

Book and graphics design: Luis Ahumada and Guillermina Sutter Schneider.

Printed in Canada.

Cato Institute

1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20001

www.cato.org

To Steve and Leslie Frantz, and Stuart and Brock Lending, the travel buddies who have journeyed so far with me, both in body and intellect. And to my dearest Pamela.

Ronald Bailey

In memory of my loving grandmother Maria Lapinova, who survived Nazism and communism and was always grateful for the little things in life. She taught me proper perspective.

Marian L. Tupy

CONTENTS

I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.

Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons Were Wrong about the Worldand Why Things Are Better Than You Think

INTRODUCTION

WHY THIS BOOK?

You cant fix what is wrong in the world if you dont know whats actually happening. In this book, straightforward charts and graphs, combined with succinct explanations, will provide you with easily understandable access to the facts that busy people need to know about how the world is really faring.

Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse rather than better. Consider a 2016 survey by the global public opinion company YouGov that asked folks in 17 countries, All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse? Fifty-eight percent of respondents thought that the world is getting worse, and 30 percent said that it is doing neither. Only 11 percent thought that things are getting better. In the United States, 65 percent of Americans thought that the world is getting worse, and 23 percent said neither. Only 6 percent of Americans responded that the world is getting better.

This dark view of the prospects for humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken. We demonstrate it in these pages using uncontroversial data taken from official and scientific sources.

Of course, some global trends are negative. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says: Its essential to realize that progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, that wouldnt be progress. For example, manmade climate change arising largely from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels could become a significant problem for humanity during this century. The spread of plastic marine debris is a big and growing concern. Many wildlife populations are declining, and tropical forest area continues shrinking. In addition, far too many people are still malnourished and dying in civil and sectarian conflicts around the globe. And, of course, the world is afflicted by the current coronavirus pandemic.

However, many of the global trends we describe are already helping redress such problems. For example, the falling price of renewable energy sources incentivizes the switch away from fossil fuels. Moreover, increasingly abundant agriculture is globally reducing the percentage of people who are hungry while simultaneously freeing up land so that forests are now expanding in much of the world. And unprecedentedly rapid research has significantly advanced testing, tracking, and treatment technologies to ameliorate the coronavirus contagion.

PSYCHOLOGICAL GLITCHES MISLEAD YOU

So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that, all things considered, the world is getting worse?

Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less timecompare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on. News is bad news; steady progress is not news.