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Showing posts from January, 2017

2016 Was a Good Year and a Bad Year for Humanity, Depending on How You Count It

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Though the end of 2016 was greeted by most people I know with a sigh of relief and by pundits as being the end of a very bad year, people who look carefully at the evidence on social trends have been pushing back.  Economist Max Roser  and representatives of  Innovations for Poverty Action  (where I work part-time) both recently wrote columns in the Washington Post about why 2016 was, in fact, a great year for humanity. Worldwide poverty continued its massive decline, and there was no great increase in violence despite what people seem to think, leaving us still far ahead of humanity and pretty much any time in the past when it comes to the likelihood of dying a violent death, as psychologist Steven Pinker chronicles in the  Better Angels of Our Nature  and a more recent  interview . All in all, humanity is likely doing better now than we were a year ago, in a continuation of an ongoing trend. Odd, though, that so many people think things are so bad. At the end of 2015 there