Is the world really worse now than ever before

Open your favorite internet news page. Turn on the or radio. Look at the newspaper. The avalanche of bad news is overwhelming: dozens die in bombings in Syria. An entire family is shot in Mexico. Islamic State beheads everywhere in its territories. The evidence before our own eyes seems to tell us that the world. Increasingly violent, that everything is getting worse. But that’s how it is? No! many researchers respond confidently. In fact, it constitutes an entire current, to which more and more thinkers and politicians are joining. Their arguments are based on the fact that there has never before been so much wealth, life expectancy and democracy.

Health and wealth

One of the scientists who has help the. most to disseminate and debate this. idea is the Canadian Steven Pinker. He has been doing it Jamaica Phone Number List since when he publish his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature. where he states that in the past the world was much worse. “Violence has decreas for thousands of years. and we may now be living in the most peaceful era of our. existence as a species,” he later summariz in an article for The Wall Street Journal. But violence is not the only thing that. has decreas in recent centuries. city Health and wealth According to different sources, at the beginning of the 20th century, the global life expectancy was 38 years. Currently it is estimat at 70 years. Something similar happens with infant mortality. In it was . penicillin.

The power of bad news

And the pattern continues: it was recently announc that. Latin America had become the first region on the planet. to suppress measles, which caus New-Zealand Phone Number List two million deaths in the 1970s. A little over a month ago, Guatemala became the fourth country in our region (after Colombia, Ecuador and to definitively. eradicate onchocerciasis, known as river blindness .which especially affects poor people. To continue in macroeconomic terms, also at the beginning of the last century it was estimat that the world’s population liv in poverty (those living on day. That figure – depending on who is cit – now ranges between and . In October the current president of the World. Bank, Jim Yong Kim, assur that, with the right measures, it was possible to eradicate extreme poverty by .