It’s politics season in America. This one is particularly bad. I’ll leave off lamenting our lack of endearing candidates and endeavor to destabilize a bit of the unbridled pessimism that springs forth when two opposing political parties turn a nation into their battleground of divisive plays for power.
The 50 states of America unite not just to advance America, but to continuously improve our world at large. As one of the most powerful nations in this world, our responsibility and duty rests first and foremost in the livelihood, intelligence, and worldliness of our populace. This requires more than just an understanding of the present. We must have the wisdom to look beyond our borders and deeper into history. A broader perspective on time reveals that things may not be as they initially seem.
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While the percentage of US citizens holding a passport is growing, it’s still only about 125 million Americans. Considering nearly two-thirds of Americans are unable to legally travel outside North America, it’s no wonder that our news is overly nationalistic and tends to lack a cohesive worldview. Let’s take a crack at breaking that trend whilst instilling a healthy dose of rational optimism toward humanity’s shared global future.
The world is much better than it has ever been, as evidenced by the following economic data visualized by Max Roser at University of Oxford.
First, let’s all rejoice that pretty much everyone is living longer. Life expectancy doubled from 1800 to 2011.
Play around with this graph to explore changes in life expectancy of countries:
Longer life expectancy may not mean much if quality of life is not also improved. Luckily, nearly every metric is ascending.
The UN’s overall Human Development Index has been on the rise for decades.
Fewer than 10 percent of people on the planet now live in absolute poverty. We’re not talking about losing a car to a debt collector. We’re talking about raw destitution.
Absolute poverty is defined by the United Nations as “a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services.” In 1900, 80 percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty.
Just look at these changes in GDP per capita over the past few hundred years! Here it’s shown in purchasing power of the 1990 USD.
Hit play below to watch the world grow wealthier. Hover to see exact GDP per capita and click any country to see a time series of the same change over the past several decades.
Global income distribution is also on the rise. In the late 1990s, the world was clearly divided between rich and poor. Despite the growing wealth inequality problem in America, the global distinction is much less pronounced as wealth creeps ever higher and more evenly distributed.
And what are we doing with this newfound wealth?
We’re educating everyone.
And distributing nutrition.
We’ve innovated tremendously in commodity production, such that most people can afford food,
and electricity,
which if you live in a developed nation and want to turn on a lightbulb, is trending toward free.
Electricity even packs exponentially more punch per kWh.
Sure, you may say, we have more. But we’re working more for it. Actually…
100 years is not so long ago that we should accept forgetting it. The web is full of posts lamenting the hours in an average workweek and sure, I’m among those who often work passionately for well over 40 hours a week. Yet if we consult historical data, people—including Americans—work on average nearly 20 hours less per week now than the did in the year 1900.
The path to prosperity for many people living during the turn of the twentieth century was a production job in one of numerous new industrial facilities. From farm field to factory meant a steady stream of income. It also meant workers were at the liberty of corporations operating without present day workers’ rights laws. Today’s legal protection is influenced largely by violent labor strikes involving militias that took place in the 1800s and 1900s. This war for the modern workweek claimed thousands of lives. For example, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 left 100 dead in a fight against pay cuts. The Bay View Massacre, a strike turned bloody, left seven dead in the quest for an eight hour work day. The list goes on and on.
But thanks in part to the sacrifices made by those workers, democracy began to spread across the globe:
About half of citizens around the world live in democratic conditions, compared to a mere 10 percent in 1901. The percentage of anocracies, or unstable, ineffective governments, has somewhat ironically remained steady. There are still far too many people living in autocracies; however, it is invigorating to see that the relative percentage is on the decline.
Globally, death by war is on the decline. And where it’s not, we’re drawing on clever algorithms to predict and hopefully prevent many of the would-be future deaths.
We have access to more resources by working fewer hours. Those resources are getting cheaper year by year. Ultimately, a better world means both better quality of life and deeper connections to one another.
These graphs by no means cover everything. Numerous foes of progress thrive; however, we stand to benefit by bearing in mind how far humanity has come since the Industrial Revolution.
As we ponder the future of America, it is important to consider her not in isolation but relative to the world at large and in the broader context of history. May these data catalyze productive conversations. In times of political dissonance, perhaps that’s what we need most.
This post was originally published on Amy Robinson Sterling’s site, for which she gave special thanks to Dave Ewalt for helping to edit it.
