The Good Old Days

Ah, the good old days. The Victorian era where people had manners and spoke eloquently if literature’s anything to go by! Of course, the era was distinctive by the astounding rate of child prostitution. Life expectancy was under 50 for all countries. The roaring 20s with their jazz, fashion and arts! Of course the vast majority of the world still lived on under $2 per day. The stable 50s with their social ease, family values and post WWII optimism! Of course it was also the scene of China’s great famine: a contender for the worst non-war disaster of all time, wiping out anything between 20M and 70M people. The hippie 60′s: a decade of free love and expanded horizons! Of course, the number of people who died from violence in the 60s is by most estimates significantly higher than recently.

I think most people aren’t fully sold on the good old days. But as I realised from reading Chris Anderson’s Edge.org answer about how the world is improving, we probably vastly underestimate our privileged position. Take a look at this great video by Hans Rosling:

[Video link]

We are now living longer, healthier lives than ever before. Even the countries that are worst-off today (eg. DR Congo) are still faring significantly better than say in the 60s. Let’s say you have to live life all over again and a supernatural creature gives you the choice of year to be born in. After you pick the year, it will allocate you to any family living in that year at random. Despite the great inequality in lifespan and health, if you want to live a long life, if you want the best chance of surviving past childhood, you’d be crazy to pick any year but 2011.

We are better fed than ever before. Even if you look at a site like Stop the Hunger which tends to take the higher end of hunger stats, you still see hunger falling every second. You can see the world’s population counter increasing much faster than the population of hungry people. Other estimates have world hunger declining. Bottom line is if again you get to pick again the year to be born in, if you want your belly filled you’d be crazy to pick any year but 2011. Perhaps some times during our hunter-gatherer era matched this but it’s hard to estimate.

Finally and counterintuitively, there’s every indication that we’re living in the most peaceful time in a long time. The number of formal conflicts has been steadily reducing as have been the casualties. What has happened since the 60s is a rise in informal conflicts, but it appears that this is on the decline today. Of course it wouldnt’s seem so based on world reporting, but this is not balanced out in our heads by the truly staggering casualties of post-WWII conflicts that many haven’t even heard of. For instance how many people born after 1975 are aware of the Biafran war, which had about 1.2M casualties, a huge proportion of them starving to death during Nigeria’s blocade of Biafra?

Of course the idea that we are living in the best time in history will probably be met with hostility. At one end, you might think that it’s callous of me to say so when things are so terrible for some. Believe me, I’m aware of the extent of the situation. In solace, you can consider this post to be a negative — world history and human life has been so bad that even TODAY’s world is actually the BEST we’ve ever had it!

The other side are Malthusean predictions that this must all collapse — and sooner rather than later. If there’s one thing I find interesting its the degree of gloating I perceive (is it just me?) in such talk. It’s either something like “we’ll finally get our comeuppance for disturbing Mother Earth” or on the other side “the ‘third world’ will get its comeuppance, through mass starvation, for not developing fast enough economically etc”. Whichever end someone might be on, I see this spectrum as nothing but genocidal snuff porn, and don’t think it deserves to be treated as anything more than that.

There is of course the factual question of what will happen in the future. But I don’t see a difference between the arguments proposed today and the classical Malthusean ones so I don’t see why they should currently be accepted. However, the glee and eagerness many have in predicting doom does hint to me that there are sociological factors at play more than anything.

The world either will or won’t collapse. I don’t care to make predictions any more — and given how badly forecasting is doing (both historically and methodologically), I don’t think you should either. But either way, 2011 is — for better or for worse — possibly the best year on record to be born in. The good old days are now apparently.