Michael Barone:
“…The best of times, the worst of times. Your instinct of which one we’re living through is affected by your basic temperament, but it also depends on how well you’re observing, and quantifying, things in the world around you.
Temperamentally, in the United States, or at least in that loud if not large part of it dominated by political tweets, the overwhelming weight of opinion, crossing party lines that are unusually rigid in this period of American history, is that we live in the worst of times.
President Trump, enjoying all-but-unanimous support from Republicans in polls, tells us that we are living at the brink of disaster, at risk of being sucked under the sludge by vicious creatures of the swamp.
Trump opponents, including almost the whole of the Democratic Party and a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party, assure us that we are entering the dark night of Nazism, racism, and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion.
To which I say: nonsense. And so does, in more elegant terms, the science writer and British House of Lords voting member Matt Ridley in the British Spectator. “We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history,” he writes of the decade just ending.
Olden times may look better in warm memories — think of multiepisode dramas about Edwardian noblemen or carefully curated statistics showing narrower pay gaps between 1950s CEOs and assembly-line workers. But the cold, hard numbers tell another story.
“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.
Of course, you may say, the economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there; but over here, in advanced countries, we’re not growing. We are just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world’s limited resources, aren’t we?
Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals, or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production out of it. Thank technological advancement and, yes, in some cases, government regulations…”