Be happy! The world is better than you think

Enough of the pessimism.

Our planet may be better than you think.

Humans have a cognitive bias towards bad news (it keeps us alert and alive), and we journalists reflect that: we report on crashing planes, not landing planes.

We highlight disasters, setbacks, threats and deaths, so 2022 has kept us busy.

But there can be a constant stream of hopeless news paralyzing.

So here is my effort to remedy our cognitive biases. Until the pandemic, he wrote an annual column claiming that the previous year had been the best in human history.

I can’t do it this year.

But I can suggest that, in general, many things are going well and that this may still be the best time to be alive.

Where 2022 stood out above all was in technological advances.

The ability to solar power worldwide is on track to triple in the next five years and surpass coal as the world’s leading energy source.

Technical improvements are constant, as is the development by researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of a way to produce thin, flexible solar panels that can transform almost any outdoor surface into a source of power.

In parallel there are advances in batteries.

Boring batteries?

No.

They are one of the most exciting frontiers of technology, with remarkable breakthroughs crucial for green energy storage.

Similarly, the nuclear fusion as an energy source marked a milestone in 2022.

The green hydrogen it is also gaining traction and could be useful for energy shipping and storage.

As a result, we are in the midst of a renewable energy revolution that could soon leave us much better off.

If things work out, we can enjoy cheaper, more reliable and more portable energy than ever before.

Really cheap energy, both solar and fusion, could be transformative:

For example, you could run desalination plants to supply the fresh water we are running out of.

To be clear: the climate change remains an existential challenge.

The novelty is that if you squint a little, you can now see a path ahead of which we managed – just for a while – to avoid the calamity.

Healthcare technology has also advanced tremendously.

Scientists are making significant progress in the vaccines versus malariareflecting what could be a new golden age for vaccine development.

The immunotherapy progress in the fight against cancer.

(A new gene-editing technique could cure sickle cell disease; Bill Gates says in his annual letter that the same method could also cure HIV-AIDS.

We haven’t even mentioned the advances in artificial intelligence, including the Chat GPT. (No, he didn’t write this column.)

And of course, technology isn’t just making leaps and bounds in research labs, it’s penetrating to improve people’s lives.

I’m writing this on my family farm in Oregon with the help of our new service Internet connection, which is starting to strengthen rural America (and which has been a game changer for Ukrainians humiliating their Russian invaders).

It is true that what may be the most important trend of my life – historic progress against global poverty – has been stalled by COVID-19, climate change and the impact of the war in Ukraine on world food commodity prices.

But it didn’t sink.

“The fallout from the pandemic hasn’t been so bad in many outcomes,” said Esther Duflo, an MIT professor and the youngest person to ever win a Nobel Prize in economics.

“It was a very minor cataclysm for Africa than for us”.

Indeed, World Bank researchers estimate that the number of people living in extreme poverty actually fell by a hair in 2022, although the figure is still higher than it was on the eve of the pandemic.

The figure is about the same as in 2018, and much better than in 2017 and previous years.

Surprisingly, preliminary estimates suggest that global infant mortality has continued to decline during the pandemic.

A child today is about half as likely to die at age 5 as they were in 2000, and a quarter as likely to die as they were in 1970.

I am not minimizing the global humanitarian crisis and we need to do better.

Children all over the world suffer malnutrition which permanently impairs their faculties.

Marry the girls.

Displaced boys and girls do not go to school.

But David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, notes that as the world is facing “a perfect storm” of disasters, the world has responded with large amounts of aid and an international push to allow exports of Ukrainian wheat through the Black Sea.

These measures averted widespread famine, at least for the time being.

“Frankly,” he said, “it could have been a lot worse.”

You may have cringe when I wrote above that “this may still be the best time to be alive”.

This is deeply contrary to public pessimism.

But would we rather live in another era when children were more likely to die?

Max Roser of the essential website Our World in Data explains exactly the situation:

“The world is awful. The world is so much better. The world can be so much better. All three statements are true at the same time.”

So all the bad news is real and I cover it for the other 364 days of the year.

But it’s also important to acknowledge the findings that our brains (and we journalists) often ignore, if only to remind us that progress is possible when we stick to it.

To move on!