more people now enjoy a higher standard of living, and do so for more years and in better health, than at any time in history. Yet these beneficiaries are still a minority (only about a fifth) of the world’s population, whose total count is approaching 8 billion people.

#1. The good ole days

Don’t pine for the good ole days. Get busy creating the future.

Twenty years from now these will be the good ole days.

It feels like the world is getting worse, but it’s getting better.

Average global life expectancy in 1950 was 52.57 years. In 2018 it was 72.56 years.

Average global infant mortality rate per 1,000 births in 1950 w

Considerable development took place in the decades after World War II and, more recently, following the end of the Cold War. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty (defined as those living on less than $1.90 per day) is down from 40–50 percent of the world’s population fifty years ago and more than one-third of the population as recentl

The graph shows that over this twenty-year period real incomes improved substantially, often by more than 50 percent, for almost everyone around the world (keep in mind that, as we saw in chapter 1, it took eight centuries for real incomes to grow by 50 percent across the world prior to the start of the Industrial Era).

During the 180 years from 1820 to 2000, world output per person increased roughly eleven times, leading to an equally dramatic fall in the global rate of extreme poverty—from around 90 percent in 1820 to roughly 10 percent as of 2015.

This impressive achievement is even more noteworthy if expressed in a way that accounts for the intervening large-scale increase of the global population, from about 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 7.7 billion in 2019.