Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT, one of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell.
“ Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT, one of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell.” Doug Sheridan
Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT, one of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell.
Perhaps that’s because humanity’s great triumph over the last half-century—huge reductions in poverty, disease and early death—goes largely unacknowledged.
By Doug Sheridan
Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT, one of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell. Perhaps that’s because humanity’s great triumph over the last half-century—huge reductions in poverty, disease and early death—goes largely unacknowledged.
Just about the worst thing that can happen to anyone is to lose a child, and historically, almost half of children died before reaching adulthood. We happen to live in a transformational era in which 96% of the world’s children now survive until adulthood.
That arc is visible in Sierra Leone, a country that remains heartbreakingly poor—yet where the risk of a child dying is less than half what it was 20 years ago. The country was not long ago the most dangerous place in the world to give birth. That's no longer true—deaths in pregnancy and childbirth have plunged 74% since 2000.
In a remote health center, there was Yeabu Kargbo, 19, who had just given birth with the help of a trained midwife, after a full set of prenatal visits. Medical care for pregnant women and babies is mostly free now in Sierra Leone, as is contraception. Kargbo has a sixth-grade education and wants to stop at three children. She has big plans for her baby. “I want this child to go to university,” she said.
More than 90% of pregnant women in Sierra Leone now get prenatal care, and the great majority are assisted during delivery by a trained midwife, nurse or doctor. After delivery, nurses put babies to the breast right away and counsel moms on exclusive breastfeeding practices, reducing infant mortality.
At the maternity ward in the city of Makeni, a nurse observes that women in labor now often arrive on the backs of motorcycles, which doesn’t sound great—until she explains that they used to arrive in wheelbarrows.
One reason the world doesn’t do more to help poor countries is exhaustion, a sense that nothing works. That misperception seems driven partly by journalists, and by aid workers, advocates and other bleeding hearts. They pounce upon crises, so what the public hears about in Africa is carnage in Sudan, hunger in Somalia and massacres in Ethiopia. Those are real problems that deserve attention but we don’t do enough to illuminate the backdrop of gains in health, education and well-being.
To Sum It Up 1: Many people believe global poverty is hopeless—87% said in a 2016 survey that poverty had stayed the same or gotten worse over the previous two decades, while in fact the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has plunged from 38% in 1990 to about 8%. Historians may eventually look back and conclude that leaps in human well-being, health and child survival were the most important things happening in the world in the early 21st century.
To Sum It Up 2: Let’s take a second to acknowledge the growing number of children who are not hungry, the increasing share of moms who are not dying in childbirth, the proven ways we have to make a better world.
Much of the reason the good goes unnoticed is because the press and environmental catastrophists refuse to admit the good hydrocarbons and the associated industrialization have done for the world.