Does it feel like the world is improving or getting worse? Today, I wanted to share something that has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with optimism. It is easy to get caught up in the news cycles that give the impression our country and world is so much worse than it used to be. However, if you look at the facts, that is completely wrong!
I am a big fan of Peter Diamandis who wrote Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think (along with Steven Kotler). He makes it clear that the world is improving in most ways. Here are just a few statistics he shares:
Economy - Over the last 200 years, the world’s GDP has increased 100-fold. Humankind has never been more prosperous and productive. In just the last 50 years in the U.S., the per capita GDP has grown from $3,000 to $59,000.
Life Expectancy - 100 years ago, a child born in India or South Korea was only expected to live to 23. Today, India’s life expectancy has tripled. South Korea’s life expectancy has quadrupled, and now is higher than in the U.K. In the U.S., we have added 26 years to the average life expectancy in the past 100 years.
Violent Deaths - Your chance of dying a violent death is 1/500th of what it would have been during medieval times. In the last 40 years in the U.S., violent crimes have dropped from 51 to 15 per 1,000 people.
The news is overwhelmingly negative, because that is what gets people’s attention. (That is why I try to limit the amount of news I read and watch.) Let’s focus more on what is going right in the world. A lot is going right and the world is becoming, overall, a better place to live. I would not want to live in any other time in history.