RECOMMENDED READINGS

1. Why 2018 Was the Best Year in Human History!

Nicholas Kristoff in The New York Times (5 min)

Summary

Kristoff makes his annual appeal that the world is gettering better.

Some highlights:

Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time, according to Max Roser of Oxford University and his Our World in Data website. Every day, another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time. And each day an additional 620,000 people were able to get online for the first time.

Never before has such a large portion of humanity been literate, enjoyed a middle-class cushion, lived such long lives, had access to family planning or been confident that their children would survive. Let’s hit pause on our fears and frustrations and share a nanosecond of celebration at this backdrop of progress.

2. 99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2018

Future Crunch  (16 min)

Summary

A remarkable compilation of facts with links to articles about things that are going well in the environment, human health, world peace, etc. Not everyone would agree that each thing on his list is good news, but there is a lot everyone can celebrate.

Selection

5. The United Nations said that the ozone hole would be fully healed over the Arctic and the northern hemisphere by the 2030s, and in the rest of the world by 2060. Gizmodo

14. In the forests of central Africa, the population of mountain gorillas, one of the world’s most endangered species, was reported to have increased by 25% since 2010, to over 1,000 individuals. Reuters

22. India registered a 22% decline in maternal deaths since 2013. That means on average, 30 more new mothers are now being saved every day compared to five years ago. The Wire

25. Since 2010, global HIV/AIDS infection rates have fallen by 16% in adults and by 35% for children. Most countries are now on track to eliminate infections by 2030. Undark

48. A little perspective. The Economist revealed that global suicide rates have dropped by 38% since 1994, saving four million lives, four times the number killed in combat during the same time.

54. Remember how the global media worked itself into a frenzy over Cape Town’s water shortages and Day Zero in 2017? Strangely, nobody reported this year how the Mother City successfully averted the crisis. apolitical

72. The Journal of Peace Research said that global deaths from state based conflicts have declined for the third year in a row, and are now 32% lower than their peak in 2014.

78. Crime and murder rates declined in the United States’ 30 largest cities, with the murder rate for 2018 projected to be 7.6 percent lower than 2017. Vox

3. Accentuate the Positive

Brainpickings (6 min)

Summary

Review of two books on how the world is better than you think, Hal Rosing’s Factfulness (one of Bill Gates’ favorites of the year) and Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

Selection

For several decades, [Rosling] gave simple questionnaires to various audiences around the world, and in 2017 a version of his quiz was administered by two polling firms to 12,000 people in fourteen countries. Here are a few of its multiple-choice questions:

How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years?

(A) more than doubled; (B) remained about the same; (C) decreased to less than half.

How many of the world’s one-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?

(A) 20 percent; (B) 50 percent; (C) 80 percent.

In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…

(A) almost doubled; (B) remained more or less the same; (C) almost halved.

Given twelve such questions one person out of 12,000 got eleven right, nobody got them all right, 15 percent got them all wrong, and the average number of correct answers was 2.2.

Rosling’s quiz is shaped so that the correct answer to each question is also the one that corresponds to the way any well-meaning person would want the world to be. (Thus in all three examples above, the correct answer is C.) It therefore seems that people are biased against good news on such topics.

4. Is the world really better than ever?

The Guardian  (24 min)

Summary

A portrait of the “New Optimists,” the group of social scientists who argue that the world is becoming a better place.

Selection

As recently as 1882, only 2% of homes in New York had running water; in 1900, worldwide life expectancy was a paltry 31, thanks both to early adult death and rampant child mortality. Today, by contrast, it’s 71 – and those extra decades involve far less suffering, too. “If it takes you 20 minutes to read this chapter,” Norberg writes at one point, in his own variation on the New Optimists’ favourite refrain, “almost another 2,000 people will have risen out of [extreme] poverty” – currently defined as living on less than $1.90 per day.

5. Miracle at Tham Luang

GQ (47 min)

Summary

The story of the Thai cave rescue. How could a team of young soccer players and their coach survive for 18 days before being extracted by divers? Not all good news is told with statistics. Some of the best news is only told through stories. You may have read this story or you may only have read about it, but the details of the rescue are remarkable and heartening.

Selection

The team was known as the Moo Pa, a name that translates literally as “Forest Pigs” but also, more reasonably, as “Wild Boars,” and they practiced on a rough field across the road from a little church and a small sundries shop. There were at least 13 players at practice that night, the youngest 11 years old, the oldest nearly 17, one turning 16 that very day, which was Saturday, June 23. Practice was run by their assistant coach, Ekapol Chanthawong. Coach Ek is an orphan who trained to be a Buddhist monk and even then, as a grown man of 25, lived as a caretaker of sorts at Wat Phra That Doi Wao, a temple at the top of a steep mountain that, if you tottered over the side of the road, would dump you into Myanmar.

The summer sky was still thick with golden light when practice ended. It was early and the boys had a little time before they had to be home. Twelve of them and Coach Ek decided to ride their bicycles to Tham Luang. Though some of the boys, maybe most of them, knew their parents might not approve, this was not a reckless adventure. The cave was neither far nor isolated—coming south from the scrappy border town of Mae Sai, you turn right just before the Toyota dealership and follow the road through a cornfield and a grove of fruit trees—and part of it had been properly tamed for tourists. It is, in fact, an official state park that includes several other caves worn into the Doi Nang Non. There is a sizable parking lot a hundred meters past the entrance and proper toilets and a ranger station from which park personnel during the dry season give tours of the first kilometer or so of the cave.

The Wild Boars had no difficulty getting fairly far in, crawling through a couple of choke points to the open spaces. And they expected no difficulty getting back out. The heavy monsoon rains weren’t expected for another week, and the year before, the cave hadn’t begun to flood until the middle of July. The team brought no food or serious spelunking gear because they were there on a lark, a brief field trip. They planned to stay for perhaps an hour, then retreat, and pedal home to their parents…

Postscript

My old boss used to say that things at our company were always great and terrible at the same time. You might only see the good things, but there were always problems lurking. Or you might only see the problems and miss the things that were going well. I’d venture that the same could be said about the world at large.

Most news we read is bad news. I guess we expect things to go well. When they don’t, we’re surprised and want to know what went wrong. Fires, murders and other disasters are the bread and butter of local news. If it bleeds, it leads. National news tends to be no better – because our eyeballs are drawn to the stories of failures, fiascos and fanatics. But when that’s all you read about, you can be lulled into thinking that’s all there is.

I’m not saying we don’t have trouble. We do. More than most of us would like. I’m just saying it helps to step back and get some perspective. With a broader perspective,  we can see beyond the latest Washington scandal of the week. We can see there are bright stars in the dark. There are plenty of things happening in the world that are worth celebrating.

– Max