[LINK] Happy New Year

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Sure, maybe a fool's paradise, but ..

"Why 2012 was the best year ever"

Never in the history of the world has there been less hunger, less disease 
and more prosperity

 http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/8789981/glad-tidings

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history 
of the world. 

That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. 

Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West 
remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are 
charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest 
rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters 
is also mercifully low. 

We are living in a golden age. To listen to politicians is to be given the 
opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and 
getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight 
problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances 
of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. 
Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind describes as 
an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside 
government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development 
Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme 
poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet 
the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because 
it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global 
capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to 
make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than 
any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting 
richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic 
growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s 
economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel 
consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, 
again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind 
farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And what about the concerns that the oil would run out? Ministers have 
spent years thinking of improbable new power sources. As it turns out, 
engineers in America have found new ways of mining fossil fuel. The amazing 
breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of the world’s 
escalating population — from one billion to seven billion over the last two 
centuries — we live in an age of energy abundance.

Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world are 
living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 this year. 
Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in 
decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a 
fifth in half a decade.

Nature can still wreak havoc. The storms which lashed America’s East Coast 
in October proved that. But the speed of New York City’s recovery shows a 
no-less-spectacular resilience. Man cannot control the weather, but as 
countries grow richer, they can better guard against devastation. The 
average windstorm kills about 2,000 in Bangladesh but fewer than 20 in 
America. It’s not that America’s storms are mild; but that it has the money 
to cope. As developing countries become richer, we can expect the death 
toll from natural disasters to diminish — and the same UN extrapolations 
that predict such threatening sea-level rises for Bangladesh also say that, 
in two or three generations’ time, it will be as rich as Britain.

War has historically been humanity’s biggest killer. But in most of the 
world today, a generation is growing up that knows little of it. The Peace 
Research Institute in Oslo says there have been fewer war deaths in the 
last decade than any time in the last century. Whether we are living 
through an anomalous period of peace, or whether the risk of nuclear 
apocalypse has proved an effective deterrent, mankind seems no longer to be 
its own worst enemy. We must bear in mind that things can fall apart, and 
quickly. Germany was perhaps the most civilised nation in the world in the 
1920s. For now, though, it is worth remembering that, in relative terms, we 
have peace in our time.

Christmas in Britain will not be without its challenges: costs are rising 
(although many children will give quiet thanks for the 70 per cent increase 
in the price of Brussels sprouts). The country may be midway through a lost 
decade economically, but our cultural and social capital has seldom been 
higher — it is hard to think of a time when national morale was as strong 
as it was during the Jubilee and the Olympics. And even in recession, we 
too benefit from medical advances. Death rates for both lung and breast 
cancers have fallen by more than a third over the last 40 years. Our cold 
winters still kill people, but the number dying each year halved over the 
past half-century. The winter death toll now stands at 24,000 — still 
unacceptable in a first-world country, but an improvement nonetheless. 
Britain’s national life expectancy, 78 a decade ago, will hit 81 next year.

Fifty years ago, the world was breathing a sigh of relief after the Cuban 
missile crisis. Young couples would discuss whether it was responsible to 
have children when the future seemed so dark. But now, as we celebrate the 
arrival of Light into the world, it’s worth remembering that, in spite of 
all our problems, the forces of peace, progress and prosperity are 
prevailing.

--

Happy New Year,
Stephen