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Networked Blogs
Jan
25
The world isn’t falling apart, despite all of the dire predictions of imminent doom and gloom for the coming year.
The Economist reports that impartial data shows that the world is better off than most people think.
This sense of impending doom is not confined to politicians. Public attitudes generally seem to have become more pessimistic and inward-looking. The proportion of Americans who think their country should be active in the world (42%) is the lowest it has been since the early 1990s. Support for international trade and multinational companies is falling. Opposition to immigration is growing. Large minorities in most countries say globalisation is bad for them personally. Although the main perceived threat varies by time and place—from climate change to economic recession—the general mood is a bit despondent. And the outside world tends to be viewed as a source of trouble.
Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.
To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.
