It’s not just hype, the Data backs it up!
News like this is almost enough to make you wonder who profits from the mass hysterical outrage, eh?
If you got all your news from the gloom-and-doomers, the Lets-Not-Have-Families-because-the-world-is-ending types, you’d think the world is a pretty miserable place.
A teenage girl from Sweden was hailed as a secular Joan of Arc figure, scolding us for ‘stealing her childhood’ while she gets herself a hero’s welcome globetrotting in an eco-yacht and a borrowed Tesla. Not much is ever said about who is funding her, or who her entourage might really be.
Freshman elected officials make outrageous claims about detention centers upholding the law being ‘Concentration camps’ while falling strangely silent about any hardships occurring under far-left dictatorships whose values mirror their own.
The world — as they describe it — is one of fear, tyranny, and outrage. Their answer is to ramp up their own outrage. To be perpetually hostile, to silence voices that do not subscribe to their worldview by whatever means they can… on social media, on campuses, in public speeches.
They even justify unprovoked violence against strangers with the justification that they are ‘punching nazis’ — with ‘nazi’ being a conveniently VERY elastic term that will grow or shrink to fit whoever it is they NEED it to fit.
What is the world REALLY like?
Actually, it’s pretty good, and getting even better.
Here are just a few of the highlights laid out by the Spectator.
Here’s how Matt Ridley starts it off:
Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.
Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.
Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.
Those of you who remember the serious famines that led to the music world launching charitable aid to help parts of Africa in the 80s — when’s the last time you heard news about a nation wracked by famine?
While Democrats rage on about the ‘evils’ of Capitalism and the modern market economy do they have an answer for why less of the world is in abject poverty than it was only a few years ago?
He turns his attention to the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ alarmism:
This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir David Attenborough say: ‘Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist’, ask him this: ‘But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?’ For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminum, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink.
Advances in technology is making us more efficient in all sorts of different ways. For example:
the productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking amount of land. In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 percent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago.
That, in turn, makes for wealthy countries freeing up more land to become wild again, which leads to a rebound in the population levels of large animals — deer, lynx, wolves, eagles, seals.
As we enter the third decade of this century, I’ll make a prediction: by the end of it, we will see less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world. There will be more tigers, whales, forests and nature reserves. Britons will be richer, and each of us will use fewer resources. The global political future may be uncertain, but the environmental and technological trends are pretty clear — and pointing in the right direction.
You can read the article in its entirety here.
