We live in a golden age

stickywicket

Today,I came across an article by the Swedish author and historian Johan Norberg and I immediately thought that New Year's Day seemed like a very suitable time to share the good news. Good news does not make the headlines. But it should if we want the truth of things.

The truth is that “Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labour and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history. The risk of being caught up in a war, subjected to a dictatorship or of dying in a natural disaster is smaller than ever. The golden age is now.”

Conflicts always make the headlines, so we assume that our age is plagued by violence. The media obsesses over wars but we soon forget those that have ended eg in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Angola and Chad. We remember Afghanistan and Iraq, which have killed around 650,000. But who remembers that two million died in those countries in the 1980s? Even today, with the jihadi terrorist threat, Europeans run a 30 times bigger risk of being killed by a ‘normal’ murderer — and the European murder rate has halved in just two decades.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/08/why-cant-we-see-that-were-living-in-a-golden-age/

Life on earth is good and getting better. Let's enjoy it and celebrate it. I wish you all a very happy 2017.

dreamdaisy

We do indeed (and in many ways) but human memory is short when it comes to matters that we have not experienced, we rarely learn from our mistakes and, with the saturation of news that abounds today, it is very easy to not recognise that there is far more right in the world than wrong.

I have not great expectations for the remaining 364 days of this year but I hope it will be no worse than last year - yup, I'm the New Year Grinch! DD