Dr Charles Kenny, an expert in international development at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, says 2025 is shaping as “at least one of the best years to be alive” for the average human.
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“There’s a good possibility of it being the year with the lowest chance of dying in history, the best chance of surviving childhood, the best chance of getting educated, the best chance of avoiding extreme poverty and the best chance of having access to electricity,” he told me. “But likely not the lowest chance of dying in war, or [the chance of] living in a liberal democracy.”
The improvement in so many global wellbeing indicators has happened despite the growing prevalence of violent conflict and the hundreds of millions of people requiring humanitarian assistance.
Oxford University professor Max Roser, who founded the Our World in Data project, sums up the complexity this way: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.”
The flow of negative world news tends to overshadow stories of gradual progress.
Opinion polls show most people in countries like Australia believe the world is much more poverty-stricken, sickly and desperate than it actually is. Take extreme poverty for example. The rapid decline in poverty rates during the past three decades has improved the lives of hundreds of millions and transformed the global economy. But research shows many people are oblivious to that momentous, world-changing trend.
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A large global survey by the Swedish foundation, Gapminder, asked what proportion of the world’s population live in extreme poverty with three possible answers: around 10 per cent; around 30 per cent; and around 50 per cent. The correct answer is around 10 per cent but only one in 10 respondents got it right. Around a third believed extreme poverty had increased in recent decades when the opposite is true.
People are more negative about places that are far away – places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media. But that level of public misperception is dangerous. The failure to recognise historic improvements, such as the decline in global poverty, feeds into a general pessimism about the possibility of change. Why bother if the world is doomed?
“If we only see the problems and only hear what is going wrong, we have no hope that the future can be better,” writes Roser.
The unfounded pessimism about global progress may encourage more isolationist policies and limit cooperation and investment in global public goods like public health, emissions reduction and climate change mitigation that will improve everyone’s wellbeing and life chances.
“Global cooperation is more important to continued progress than ever,” says Kenny.
More tragedy and turmoil is inevitable in 2025 but even so, for millions and millions of people around the globe, things are getting measurably better.
Matt Wade is a senior economics writer at The Sydney Morning Herald.
