Is The World Getting Better Or Worse?

And how do we even measure that?

Obviously we know the ways in which the world seems to be getting worse: the COVID-19 pandemic and death + job loss, even in small contextual percentages, is very bad. Income inequality is getting worse overall. Climate change.

But it’s easy, and not always productive, to consistently reside in the negative. What if the world is getting better? At the end of 2019, Bill Gates was arguing that. In early 2019, he tweeted this too:

Gates has spoken on this topic before, too. He points to connectivity as one factor: in 2018, for the first time, half the world was able to access the Internet. (That was largely driven by an uptick in usage in Africa.) The World Economic Forum has jumped on the Bill and Melinda Gates bandwagon too, citing a bunch of charts for why the world is improving, not declining.

Steven Pinker is on the “improvement” train too

Pinker, dubbed a “superstar intellectual,” has also argued the world is getting broadly better. You can find more at 52-Insights, or in this long-form New Yorker article. In that article…