It has been ten years since I wrote The Great Escape, which tells the story of how human life improved over the past 250 years, particularly in terms of longevity and material living standards. But the past decade has been unkind to my overwhelmingly positive account. My observation that “life is better now than at any time in history” may have been true in 2013, but it probably is not today, even for the typical person. The question is whether this reversal will be temporary, or whether it is only the beginning of worse to come. Do recent events demand that the basic story be retold?
While the long-term trends of progress are clear, history offers no support for blind optimism. Improvements in human well-being have repeatedly confronted reversals, many of them lengthy, and some characterized by unimaginable devastation. In the 20th century alone, disastrous national and international politics caused tens of millions of deaths in two world wars, the Holocaust, and from the murderous policies of Stalin and Mao.
The global influenza pandemic of 1918-20 killed perhaps 50 million people out of a world population of less than two billion. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has killed around 40 million people to date, and more than half a million continue to die each year from it, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Most recently, the World Health Organization estimates that COVID-19 has killed close to seven million people – and possibly multiples of that number – many of them in rich countries, including nearly 1.2 million Americans. The pandemic arrested economic growth in many countries and almost certainly halted the ongoing reduction in global poverty. (But since it also disrupted data collection in many places, the uncertainty around such numbers is even higher than usual.)
Depressing catalog
Typically, after such catastrophes, progress eventually resumes, with the subsequent recoveries delivering health and wealth outcomes that exceed their previous highs. True, this historical fact offers no comfort to those who died or lost relatives and friends. Progress does not expunge previous horrors. But it does hold out the hope of better lives for the survivors and for subsequent generations.
But none of this progress is guaranteed to continue.
A thousand years from now, or perhaps much sooner, the last 250 years may be seen as a bygone golden age, a flash in history’s panorama, an exception to the normal state of misery and early death. Recent events present a depressing catalog: slow or negative growth; rising global temperatures; resurgent infectious diseases; anti-democratic and right-wing populist politics; stalling globalization; stagnant life expectancy; and increased geopolitical tensions, particularly between the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China.
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