It is easy to be a pessimist when we look at this country and the world as we begin a new year: fear of nuclear war, a decline in environmental safeguards, a president who's unstable, incompetent, and worse.
But, as Nicholas Kristof reminds us in today's NYTimes, the year that just ended may have been the best year in the history of humanity. What??
He takes the big picture and, using the new book by Steven Pinker, cites facts, e.g., a smaller share of the world's people were hungry or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. There are more detailed facts about how the number of people living in extreme poverty goes down by 217,000 a day, according to an Oxford economist.
The point is that we need to take a step back from the madness in Washington and the daily news, which focuses on the world's problems, and examine how the quality of life, by and large, seems to be improving, irrespective of politics, nationalism, wars, and refugees in crisis.
So maybe the world is not going to hell after all in 2018--not a bad way to begin the year.
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