{"id":100046,"date":"2019-12-22T19:02:40","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T03:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously"},"modified":"2019-12-22T19:02:40","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T03:02:40","slug":"weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world\u2019s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.<\/p>\n<p>Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I\u2019ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote <em>The Rational Optimist<\/em> in 2010, I\u2019ve been faced with \u2018what about\u2026\u2019 questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that \u2018the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking\u2019 and \u2018we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet\u2019. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we\u2019d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called <em>More from Less<\/em>, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world\u2019s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,39,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-economics","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}