Do you think the world is getting worse?

Many people recently thought the world was going to hell, and that was before the coronavirus. Now all they see is ever greater numbers of people infected and dying. They see the damage to the economy with so many people laid off, so many businesses shut down and maybe never reopening. If you're of a particular mindset you're more concerned about future generations paying back the money the government is shelling out and the possibility of fraud along the way. I guess you figure people won't be starving to death on your street.

But when you step back a bit, things have never been better. Really. Coronavirus and all. By stepping back a bit, I mean taking both a more global view and a longer term view. Only then will you see really how good here and now is.

A few years ago I stumbled onto one of Hans Rosling's TED talks. I was blown away how he made the bubbles on the graph move. Something that looks that good and that easy almost certainly has huge charts of data behind the scenes, and even more effort to get the data cleaned and assembled.

He's done any number of talks on various topics related to the state of the world, and it's a joy to see the data dance. Then there was this book.

Pop quiz, from the book.
How many people in the world have some access to electricity?
A: 20 percent
B: 50 percent
C: 80 percent

No Googling! What do you think? In Canada only 19 percent of the people he tested answered correctly. In all his questions as a control asks chimpanzees the same question. One third of them got this question correct.

It's C, 80 percent. Are you surprised? Yes, in some places the supply is unstable and there are power outages. Maybe the wiring isn't as safe as it could be. None the less, they have some, maybe just enough for a few lightbulbs and keep a cell phone charged.

Rosling makes the prosaic point that many of these people want a world where they can buy a clothes washing machine, and are on the verge of being able to afford it. We take such a thing for granted, but in poorer parts of the world women spend a lot of time washing clothes and other fabrics. Why wouldn't they want to put clothes in the machine, and then go do something else, like work to earn money for their family, or read books to their children. These are the first steps to rising out of the economic mire.

There are other questions in the book. One of the fundamental ones relates to the us and them view of the world. Does your world view think there are a few places in the world where people have long lives and small families, and lots of places where they have short lives and large families? A developed and developing world? If so, your thinking is 60 years out of date. This is just one of the talks with some of this data, one of the older ones from 2007. It's still worth a watch if you haven't seen him.

The book is about some fundamental misconceptions that even highly educated experts have, even within their own fields. If you're a pension fund manager, how can you invest money profitably if you think that only the rich Western countries have money? The fact is the Asian countries are where most of the people are, and their economies are growing far quicker than Western countries. Rosling predicts than the per capita income of Asia will surpass that of the USA in 2048.

That isn't very far away. Many of the people reading this blog have a good chance of seeing that date, and I'm certainly planning to. Some might even still be working then. At least a couple of my readers are in the financial industry. I wonder if they know about that income growth, and how that will drive the investment world.

Make no mistake, those people see how we live here, and they want the same things. Reliable electricity to run the many conveniences of the modern world, access to family planning, better health care, and much more. They want it, they'll be able to pay for it, so we all need to figure out how to deliver it without breaking the climate worse than we already have. That's a better problem to have, much better than coping with periodic mass famines, or missing an Ebola-like outbreak.

One of the points Rosling makes is that it took a long time for the USA, UK, and Europe to increase the per capita income and increase the health (measured in life expectancy and child mortality) to the levels they are today. Now that we know how it's done, it's much easier for other countries to do it.

How? Educate girls, provide basic health which includes vaccines and family planning. Supplying clean water and treating sewage. Every country that has done this has seen their child mortality drop, their life expectancy increase, and their per capita income increase. Rosling shows data that says a country can go from what used to be called third world status, to near first world status in 50 years.

As a side note, the USA is currently proving the converse of that, that restricting health care and education will drive down per capita income and health indicators.

If you look at current data from around the world you can see things are getting better. Life expectancy is increasing, child mortality is dropping, many fewer people are living in abject poverty. There are fewer wars, fewer famines, fewer plagues. These are all good things.

There are some exceptions, of course, but don't fixate on them, thinking they are the norm. Note they are exceptions, and try to figure out if it's a temporary thing or a more structural problem. Issues arising from an earthquake or a tidal wave are temporary. Issues that come from the failures of colonialism or corporatism, or a kleptocracy in charge are more structural, and take longer to overcome.

When you think about why things are happening in the world, keep in mind that some of your assumptions might not be correct. In fact, Rosling's data suggests that most of your assumptions are incorrect. In many cases when you ask why lots of people are doing something you don't understand, the most likely answer is that everything else is worse. Why live in a half built house? Because you can't afford to build it all at once and the money supply and its value are unstable. Buy a few bricks when you can afford them, and you'll always have them.

The book has a number of graphs made based on real actual data over decades, and the trend lines are all good. But that's what you have to do, is look at the trends. There are blips and exceptions. Stay alert to avoid being caught up in them. That might mean not being in a country as there's an anti-government riots, or keeping a low profile during a virus outbreak. That's easy for my blog readers and most other Canadians.

So if you're going nuts, wondering when the COVID restrictions are going to be loosened, keep in mind that most of the world would like to be in your shoes. Access to soap and clean water and a toilet and fast internet would be a dream come true for all too many people. Just think, the effort to supply you with marginally faster internet, could provide basic internet to a significant part of the world.

As a last thought, if you're feeling depressed about the world, go talk to the oldest member of your family about what the world was like when they were a child, and the stories they can tell from their parents. My maternal grandmother was born near the end of WWI, and was a young woman going through the depression. I think that's the experience that marked her for life. Ask about polio and tuberculosis and what happened before penicillin was introduced. Ask about what happened when you lost your job. It's much better now, and getting better for everybody. Let's keep at it.

Some recent photos.
Curtis and Celina doing their thing.

Some spring garden shots.

 The bush across the road had some interesting light on the new growth.

The dread Alberta rose beside the garage.

Driftwood of the Day