Progress

Progress Plot Summary

Introduction

Imagine a London winter evening in 1852, where a deadly fog blankets the city, carrying the stench of coal smoke and raw sewage. People huddle in overcrowded tenements, surrounded by disease and early death. Children as young as five work in factories, wars rage across continents, and slavery is still legal in much of the world. This was reality for most of human history - a stark contrast to our world today. We often focus on current problems and crises, believing things are getting worse. Yet the evidence tells a different story. Over the past two centuries, humanity has experienced an unprecedented transformation in living conditions. Life expectancy has more than doubled, extreme poverty has plummeted from 94% to below 10% of the global population, and literacy has grown from 12% to 86%. The journey from darkness to progress wasn't inevitable or straightforward. It required scientific breakthroughs, social movements, economic innovations, and sometimes painful lessons. This historical journey offers invaluable perspective for anyone seeking to understand how far we've come and how we might continue moving forward in solving humanity's greatest challenges.

Chapter 1: From Scarcity to Abundance: The Transformation of Basic Survival (1800-1950)

In early 19th century Europe, famine was a recurring nightmare. The winter of 1868 saw Eric Norberg, a Swedish farmer, returning to his northern village with bags of wheat flour during a devastating famine year. In nearby parishes, people mixed tree bark into their bread to survive. One heartbreaking account describes how starving children went from farm to farm begging for food scraps. Three such children, turned away from one home because the family had barely enough for themselves, were found dead on the road the next day. This was not exceptional - it was everyday life for most of human history. Until around 1800, global food production had remained relatively stagnant for millennia. The average person consumed around 1,700-2,200 calories daily - less than current averages in sub-Saharan Africa. In France, ordinary families spent half their income on grains alone, often just gruel. Malnutrition was so severe that historians estimate about 20% of England's population in the early 19th century lacked the energy to work more than a few hours of slow walking per day. Famine was accepted as inevitable. As Thomas Malthus famously argued in 1779, population would always outrun food supply, making premature death from starvation an unavoidable feature of human existence. However, the Industrial Revolution brought radical change. Agricultural technology improved dramatically with mechanical innovations like combine harvesters increasing productivity 2,500-fold. The invention of artificial fertilizer, particularly through the Haber-Bosch Process of synthesizing ammonia, may have been the most important technical development of the 20th century. Historian Vaclav Smil estimates that without this breakthrough, two-fifths of today's world population wouldn't exist. Improved transportation and refrigeration allowed food to move efficiently from surplus to deficit areas. Between 1700-1900, famines became increasingly rare in Western Europe, and global food production began to outpace population growth. Perhaps the most dramatic transformation came after World War II with the Green Revolution. Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist, developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that could grow in various climates. When introduced in Mexico, wheat production increased sixfold between 1944 and 1963. As famine threatened India and Pakistan in the 1960s, Borlaug's team worked tirelessly, sometimes within sight of artillery flashes during wartime, to plant these new varieties. The results were astonishing - within a few years, both countries became self-sufficient in cereal production. Today, they produce seven times more wheat than in 1965. Similar agricultural innovations spread throughout Asia, transforming former hunger hotspots into food-secure regions. The consequences of this transformation extended far beyond mere survival. Better nutrition improved cognitive development, enabled longer working hours, and allowed societies to invest in education rather than subsistence. As food security improved, fertility rates declined naturally - contrary to Malthusian predictions. Parents who could be confident their children would survive chose to have fewer offspring and invest more in each child's development. The Food and Agricultural Organization reports that the proportion of chronically undernourished people in developing regions has fallen from 37% in 1969-71 to around 13% today. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, hunger decreased from 33% to 23% between 1990 and 2014. The journey from scarcity to abundance demonstrates how scientific innovation, when paired with improved distribution systems and economic development, can overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. While problems remain - including environmental impacts of intensive farming and continued malnutrition in conflict zones - the transformation of human food security represents one of history's most profound yet underappreciated revolutions. It laid the foundation for nearly every other form of progress by freeing humanity from the constant specter of starvation that had defined existence for millennia.

Chapter 2: Health Revolution: Defeating Humanity's Ancient Enemies

Life in pre-modern Europe was defined by the omnipresence of disease and early death. In the mid-14th century, the Black Death swept through Europe, killing approximately one-third of the population. An Irish monk documenting the plague wrote: "I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future." After his final words, a copyist added: "Here it seems the author died." Even after this catastrophic pandemic subsided, plague returned repeatedly to European towns over the following centuries. Tuberculosis claimed nearly a quarter of all deaths in the 19th century, while smallpox killed 400,000 Europeans annually, with one-third of survivors left blind. Medical knowledge before the modern era offered little protection. Prayer was the most common medicine, while physicians practiced harmful treatments like bloodletting. Surgery was performed without anesthetics, and infections frequently proved fatal in the absence of antibiotics. Life expectancy reflected these harsh realities - in prehistoric times, the average hunter-gatherer lived 20-30 years. By the early 19th century, life expectancy in Western Europe had increased only marginally to about 33 years. Parents routinely buried their children, with 30-40% of Swedish children dying before their fifth birthday in the early 1800s. The Enlightenment's emphasis on evidence-based science triggered the first major breakthroughs. Edward Jenner's development of vaccination against smallpox in the late 18th century represented a crucial turning point. By 1800, vaccination had reached most European countries. Later, the discovery of the germ theory of disease by scientists like Louis Pasteur revolutionized medicine. When Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed physicians were spreading puerperal fever by moving from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands, he instituted chlorine handwashing, reducing maternal deaths by nearly 90%. Such discoveries, coupled with improved sanitation and clean water, launched what epidemiologist Abdel Omran termed "The Age of Receding Pandemics." The most dramatic health improvements came in the 20th century. Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of penicillin transformed formerly deadly infections into treatable conditions. After World War II, antibiotics, vaccines, and public health campaigns spread globally. Organizations like UNICEF and WHO launched vaccination campaigns against tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, and polio. The percentage of infants vaccinated against major diseases increased from 20% to 80% between 1970 and 2006. The eradication of smallpox, officially declared in 1980, marked humanity's first complete victory over a deadly disease that had plagued civilization for millennia. The results have been extraordinary. Average life expectancy worldwide has more than doubled from 31 years in 1900 to 71 years today. Between 1990 and 2015 alone, child mortality in developing countries dropped from 232 to 47 deaths per 1,000 live births. Maternal mortality declined globally from 435 to 242 deaths per 100,000 births. Simple innovations like Oral Rehydration Therapy, costing mere pennies per dose, now save approximately one million children annually from death by dehydration caused by diarrhea. Even deadly new threats like HIV/AIDS, which has killed nearly 40 million people, have been transformed from certain death sentences to manageable chronic conditions, with new infections falling 35% since 2000. Perhaps most remarkable is how this health revolution has reached the poorest regions. A country with a GDP per capita of $3,000 today has the same life expectancy as would have been predicted for a country with $30,000 GDP in 1870. This "democratization" of health occurred because knowledge and basic technologies spread more easily than wealth itself. Even in countries with minimal economic growth, health improvements have been dramatic - Haiti, despite being poorer today than in the 1950s, has reduced infant mortality by nearly two-thirds. This unprecedented extension of life expectancy represents what the UN Development Programme calls humanity's "Great Ascent" from the constant threat of early death that defined existence for countless generations.

Chapter 3: Economic Liberation: Breaking the Chains of Poverty and Inequality

For most of human history, abject poverty was not the exception but the universal condition. Estate inventories from pre-industrial Europe reveal ordinary lives of staggering deprivation - a lifetime's accumulated possessions typically amounted to little more than "a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw." In 1820, global GDP per capita was equivalent to about $1,500-2,000 in today's terms - less than present-day Mozambique or Pakistan. Even in the richest countries, 40-50% of the population lived in what we now call extreme poverty, with homelessness affecting 10-20% of Europeans and Americans. The transformation began with the Industrial Revolution in England during the early 19th century. New production methods, mechanization, and the stationary steam engine revolutionized manufacturing. Between 1820 and 1850, as England's population grew by one-third, workers' real earnings nearly doubled. This contradicted Karl Marx's prediction that capitalism would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. By 1900, extreme poverty in England had been reduced by three-quarters. The Western world's per capita GDP has increased more than fifteen-fold since 1820, accompanied by reduced working hours, later retirement, and longer post-retirement life. A second economic miracle emerged in the post-WWII era when East Asian economies like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore demonstrated that development was possible for "developing countries." Their integration into global markets created a model that others would follow. China's economic opening began in 1979 when farmers in Xiaogang village secretly agreed to divide communal land among themselves, allowing each family to keep surplus production. Agricultural output immediately surged, and the experiment spread "like a chicken pest." Though officially illegal, the communist party eventually endorsed these reforms when they saw the results. China subsequently established special economic zones in Guangdong province, welcoming international investment and technologies. The results were transformational. In 1981, almost nine in ten Chinese lived in extreme poverty. Today, only one in ten do. A similar story unfolded in India after its 1991 economic reforms dismantled protectionism and central planning. Since then, average incomes have increased by 7.5% annually, doubling each decade. Even traditionally marginalized groups have benefited - the poverty ratio among India's lowest-caste dalits declined faster than the national average, falling by more than 31% between 1993-2012. As Chandra Bhan Prasad, a former Maoist turned business adviser observed: "capitalism is changing caste much faster" than political movements alone could achieve. This convergence accelerated after 2000, when 90% of developing countries began growing faster than the United States, reversing the "divergence" that had characterized earlier eras. On March 28, 2012, developing countries accounted for more than half of global GDP for the first time in modern history. Extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1.90 per day) fell from 54% of the developing world in 1981 to 12% by 2015. Most remarkably, the absolute number of people in extreme poverty declined by more than 1.25 billion between 1990-2015, despite population growth of over two billion. This means poverty decreased by approximately 138,000 people every day for 25 years. Global inequality has also begun to decline for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, as poorer countries grow faster than rich ones. The Gini coefficient (where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 means one person has all wealth) measuring global inequality fell from 0.69 in 2003 to 0.65 in 2013. While still extremely unequal, this represents a historic reversal of the widening gap between nations that characterized the previous two centuries. The economic liberation of billions from poverty demonstrates that development is possible when countries combine market incentives, global integration, and appropriate institutions. As Indian economist Parth Shah noted, seeing successful models elsewhere - from Taiwan and South Korea to China - convinced countries that "it was time to learn the lesson." The result has been what the economist William Easterly calls the greatest reduction in material misery in human history.

Chapter 4: The Decline of Violence: From Brutality to Coexistence

Violence was once woven into the fabric of daily life. Medieval European towns displayed decapitated heads on city walls and quartered bodies on stakes as routine public spectacles. Popular entertainment included villagers head-butting cats to death or beating pigs with clubs. The crucifixion depicted in Christian symbols reflects how criminals were normally executed. As historian Barbara Tuchman writes of 14th century Europe, brutal violence was "part of everyday life," with villagers passing criminals being flogged or chained in iron collars on their way to church. Archaeological evidence suggests that in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, approximately 15% of people met violent deaths. The homicide rate in medieval London and Oxford ranged from 45 to 110 per 100,000 people annually - 30 to 40 times higher than today's rates. Even aristocrats lived dangerously, with more than a quarter of English nobles dying violently in the 14th and 15th centuries. Knights killed for the slightest insult to their honor, and warfare between feudal lords often targeted peasants and crops to ruin enemies economically. The pacification process began gradually with the rise of centralized states that monopolized violence. Kings turned medieval warlords into Renaissance courtiers, replacing the culture of honor with one of dignity and self-restraint. Legal systems allowed people to maintain social position without resorting to violence. By the 16th century, European homicide rates had dropped to 19 per 100,000, falling further to 11 in the 17th century and 3.2 in the 18th. This decline began in England and the Netherlands - centers of modernization with stronger market economies and literacy - then spread to other regions. Enlightenment thinking accelerated this trend by promoting humanitarian values and reasoned discourse. Philosophers like Cesare Beccaria argued that criminals deserved proportional punishment rather than torture. The English Bill of Rights and American Constitution banned "cruel and unusual punishments." Between the 17th and 18th centuries, executions per 100,000 people decreased sixfold in the United States. European countries progressively abolished judicial torture in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and capital punishment declined dramatically throughout the developed world. Interstate warfare followed a similar trajectory, though with dramatic setbacks. Between 900 CE and the present, Europe averaged two new conflicts between countries annually. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European Great Powers were at war 75-100% of the time. However, after the Napoleonic Wars, international conflict steadily declined. The devastation of the World Wars, while representing tragic reversals of this trend, ultimately strengthened peace movements and international institutions. Since 1945, major powers have fought each other only once (US and China in Korea), and since 1975, not at all. As political scientist John Mueller noted in 1984, "Never before in history have so many well-armed, important countries spent so much time not using their arms against each other." Several factors drove this "long peace." Economic development and smaller families increased the perceived value of each human life. Market exchange transformed potential enemies into valuable trading partners, as Montesquieu and Adam Smith had predicted. Democracy spread, and democratic nations rarely fight each other. Communications technology increased empathy by exposing people to others' suffering. The average interstate war killed 86,000 people in the 1950s but only 3,000 today. Even terrorism, despite its psychological impact, kills relatively few people compared to past forms of violence - approximately 400 annually in OECD countries since 2000, fewer than those who drown in bathtubs. The psychologist Steven Pinker describes this decline of violence as "perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened in human history." It demonstrates that peace is not just an idealistic aspiration but a practical achievement that emerges from specific social, economic, and political conditions. While challenges remain - from civil conflicts to terrorist threats - the overall trajectory shows that humans are increasingly choosing cooperation over violence as the means to resolve differences and pursue shared prosperity.

Chapter 5: Environmental Challenges and Technological Solutions

On December 5, 1952, London vanished beneath what undertaker Stan Cribb described as a "swirling" darkness "like somebody had set a load of car tires on fire." The Great Smog, a toxic mixture of coal smoke, industrial pollutants, and atmospheric conditions, settled over the city for four horrific days. Cribb recalled, "It's like you were blind," as visibility dropped to mere inches. The deadly episode killed an estimated 12,000 Londoners through poisonous soot particles and sulfur dioxide. This environmental disaster was not unusual - London's infamous "pea soupers" had been a regular feature of city life for generations, forming the atmospheric backdrop for Sherlock Holmes stories and Dickens novels. The industrial age that saved humanity from poverty and early death exacted a brutal environmental price. Increased production and transportation resulted in dangerous air pollution, water contamination, and habitat destruction. By the 1970s, environmental degradation seemed unstoppable. The influential Club of Rome warned in 1972 that "virtually every pollutant measured appears to be increasing exponentially." Many predicted a future of depleted resources, acid rain, destroyed forests, mass extinctions, and cancer epidemics. Yet the environmental apocalypse did not materialize in developed nations. Instead, pollution began a dramatic decline. Between 1980 and 2014, the United States reduced emissions of six major air pollutants by more than two-thirds. Britain cut volatile organic compounds by 60%, nitrogen oxides by 62%, and sulfur dioxide by 94% between 1970 and 2013. London air today is cleaner than at any time since the Middle Ages. Rivers and lakes have recovered - the Thames, declared "biologically dead" in 1957, now supports 125 fish species including sensitive indicators like seahorses. Oil spills in oceans decreased from twenty-four annually in the 1970s to fewer than three today, with the quantity spilled reduced by 99%. This environmental turnaround resulted from changing preferences and technological progress. As wealth grew and basic survival needs were met, people increasingly valued clean air and water over marginal economic gains. The Great Smog of 1952 prompted Britain's Clean Air Act, while public awareness drove similar legislation elsewhere. Simultaneously, technological innovations created cleaner production methods - modern cars in motion emit less pollution than 1970s vehicles did when parked. Contrary to early environmentalist fears, technology and affluence proved not obstacles to sustainability but prerequisites for it. Despite this progress, developing countries face severe environmental challenges. Many cities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh suffer pollution levels ten times above safety thresholds. Approximately 1.8 billion people breathe unsafe air globally. However, the worst environmental problems in poor countries stem not from industrialization but from its absence. Without access to electricity and modern fuels, billions cook by burning wood, dung, and coal indoors, causing 3.5 million deaths annually from household air pollution - one person every ten seconds. This illustrates why developing nations prioritize economic growth, even with its environmental costs. Climate change presents a unique global challenge. Unlike conventional pollutants, carbon dioxide emissions don't decline automatically with rising wealth until very high income levels. Since CO2 makes the climate warmer and potentially more unstable, this creates complex tradeoffs between environmental protection and development. Forcing severe emission restrictions might harm the world's poor by denying them access to affordable energy. As one study calculated, $10 billion invested in renewable energy might lift 20-27 million people from poverty, while the same amount spent on natural gas could help 90 million. Fortunately, innovation offers pathways beyond this dilemma. The carbon intensity of economic activity has declined approximately 1% annually for 150 years, and this pace is accelerating. The United States, Britain, and the European Union have reduced total CO2 emissions since 2000 while maintaining economic growth. Next-generation nuclear power, advanced biofuels from algae, graphene-based solar materials, and even technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere could potentially decarbonize energy systems without sacrificing prosperity. As scientist Jesse Ausubel notes, humanity appears to have reached "peak farmland," with agricultural land use projected to decline 0.2% annually through 2060, potentially releasing "hundreds of millions of hectares" for nature. The environmental trajectory demonstrates that prosperity creates both problems and solutions. As Indira Gandhi observed at the 1972 Stockholm Conference: "Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?... The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty." By creating wealth that funds research, education, and infrastructure improvements, economic development provides resources needed to address environmental challenges. The coming decades will test whether humanity can maintain this virtuous cycle of innovation while addressing climate change - perhaps our most complex environmental challenge yet.

Chapter 6: Freedom's Expansion: Democracy and Human Rights

When Frederick Douglass was about ten years old, his slave-owner died without a will, forcing an inventory and division of property. Douglass recalled how slaves "were all lumped together, men and women, old and young, married and single... horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being." Their fates were decided by "a single word from the white men" with no regard for human relationships, exemplifying how throughout history, vast segments of humanity were denied basic rights and liberties. For most of recorded history, oppression was the norm. Slavery existed in virtually every civilization, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Africa and Asia. The Bible treated it as natural, and in Sparta, slaves outnumbered free individuals seven to one. Women were considered property of fathers until becoming property of husbands, lacking rights to vote, own property, control their bodies, or receive education. Ethnic and religious minorities faced brutal persecution - Europe experienced deadly riots against Catholics, Jews, and Protestant sects for centuries. Homosexual acts were punishable by death in many societies, with the English Buggery Act of 1533 mandating hanging. The first significant breaks from this pattern emerged during the Enlightenment. Philosophers like John Locke argued that rulers' right to govern was conditional on protecting individuals' rights to life, liberty and property. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and American Revolution of 1776 established governments limited by individual rights and parliamentary control. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison in America and William Wilberforce in Britain fought tirelessly against slavery, while writers like Mary Wollstonecraft demanded women's education and equal treatment. These voices were initially marginal but grew increasingly influential as literacy, commerce, and humanitarian values spread. The nineteenth century saw gradual expansion of freedoms, though often limited to privileged groups. Slavery was progressively abolished - in Britain's colonies by 1834, in the United States by 1865, in Brazil by 1888. Women gained property rights in some countries, and religious minorities received greater legal protections. However, universal suffrage, equal rights, and personal freedoms remained distant aspirations for most populations worldwide. In 1900, not a single country allowed all citizens to vote, and even the most democratic nations excluded women, the poor, or racial minorities. The twentieth century brought dramatic acceleration, though with severe setbacks. By 1950, the share of the world population living in democracies had increased from zero to thirty-one percent. The collapse of European colonialism after World War II ended formal imperial control over vast territories. Civil rights movements in the United States and elsewhere challenged racial segregation and discrimination. Women gained voting rights - first in New Zealand, then gradually across other nations, with Switzerland finally granting female suffrage in 1971. The most remarkable breakthrough came in 1989-91 with communism's peaceful collapse. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signaled that satellite states might choose their own paths, long-suppressed democratic movements seized the opportunity. In Poland, nationwide strikes forced the government to accept free elections. Hungary dismantled its section of the Iron Curtain. East Germans protested in growing numbers until the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution" brought dissident playwright Václav Havel to the presidency. By December 1991, the Soviet Union itself had dissolved. The democratic wave continued across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Taiwan and South Korea transformed from dictatorships to vibrant democracies. South Africa dismantled apartheid peacefully, electing Nelson Mandela as president in 1994. Since 1990, more than thirty African governments have been voted out of office. By 2015, sixty-three percent of all countries were electoral democracies, compared to forty-six percent in 1990, while the proportion of countries classified as "free" by Freedom House nearly doubled from twenty-nine to forty-six percent since 1973. Equally significant has been the expansion of personal freedoms. Homosexuality, once criminalized worldwide, is now legal in at least 113 countries, with same-sex marriage recognized in twenty-one nations. Women's legal status has dramatically improved - marital rape, perfectly legal in most countries until recently, was criminalized in France and Germany only in the 1990s. Ethnic minorities have gained protection against discrimination in most developed nations. This freedom expansion demonstrates how economic development, education, and global communication create conditions where liberty becomes both possible and necessary. As economist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, development consolidates democracy by reducing poverty and building a middle class that demands certain freedoms. While challenges remain - from authoritarian resurgence in Russia to religious persecution in many regions - the overall trajectory shows freedom's remarkable resilience. As Milton Friedman noted in 1991, the ratio of people living under arbitrary government versus reasonably free countries has fallen from twenty-three to one in the early 1800s to about three to one by 1990, and has since declined further - "amazing progress" on the scale of historical time.

Chapter 7: The Next Generation: Knowledge, Education and Future Prospects

Thi-Chi stands outside her home near Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam, gazing at the surrounding rice fields where she toiled as a child. From an early age, she worked endlessly under the burning sun and in intense rain - just as her parents and grandparents had before her. Child labor wasn't considered problematic but was simply the natural order of things. Throughout history, children worked as soon as they could walk, planting seeds, clearing weeds, collecting firewood, and herding livestock. Those who didn't work in family agriculture were often hired out as domestic servants or laborers in small workshops. This pattern persisted well into the Industrial Revolution. In 1851, twenty-eight percent of children between ten and fourteen in England and Wales were recorded as working. While this seems shocking today, it was significantly lower than child labor rates in non-industrialized countries a century later - forty-eight percent in China, thirty-five percent in India, and thirty-eight percent in Africa in 1950. Traditional legal restrictions on child labor had limited impact; what truly changed the situation was rising wages, universal education, and technological advancement that reduced demand for unskilled child workers while increasing the value of educated adults. Today, Thi-Chi no longer works in agriculture. When Vietnam opened to global trade in the early 1990s, she secured a factory job producing sports shoes for Western markets, earning five times her previous income. This economic transformation allowed her to keep her son in school rather than sending him to work. "Smiling, she tells me that she wants him to become a doctor," the author notes. Between 1993 and 2006, child labor among ten to fourteen-year-olds in Vietnam dropped from over forty-five percent to under ten percent. Similar patterns have emerged globally - child labor rates fell from approximately twenty-five percent of all children between ten and fourteen in 1950 to less than ten percent today. This liberation of childhood represents just one aspect of a broader transformation in human potential. Consider a ten-year-old girl born 200 years ago. Wherever she lived, her life expectancy wouldn't exceed thirty years. She would have had five to seven siblings, likely seeing one or two die in childhood. Her family would lack clean water or sanitation, living amid waste and disease. Undernourishment would stunt her physical and cognitive development. Without education, she would never learn to read or write. Put to work early, her options would be severely limited by gender restrictions that considered her property, first of her father, then of her husband. The contrast with today is extraordinary. Even in the world's poorest countries, a ten-year-old girl now has better nutrition than her counterpart in the richest countries two centuries ago. She's more likely to reach retirement age than her forebears were to see their fifth birthday. She attends school like almost everyone in her generation, with global youth literacy exceeding ninety percent. Her risk of experiencing war is lower than any previous generation's, and she'll never witness a major famine. Most remarkably, she lives in a world where knowledge and connection are becoming universally accessible. Perhaps the most profound change is psychological and intellectual. With three billion people soon owning smartphones, each possessing more computing power than 1960s supercomputers, humanity has unprecedented access to information and collaboration. A single Google search today uses more computing power than the entire Apollo Program that put humans on the moon. This democratization of knowledge means billions can now participate in solving humanity's problems, rather than just a privileged few. The transformation can be seen in the hands of different generations. When author Lasse Berg photographed twelve-year-old Sattos working in Indian fields in the 1970s, her hands were already furrowed and worn from years of labor. Returning decades later, he photographed her thirteen-year-old daughter Seema's hands - young, soft, and unmarked by hard labor. These images represent the change that hundreds of millions of children have experienced - from premature toil to protected childhood and education. This progress doesn't mean all problems are solved. Economic disparities, environmental threats, political instability, and new technological risks require vigilance and innovation. But our capacity to address these challenges has never been greater. As physicist Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Today, billions of people can access and contribute to humanity's collective knowledge, creating unprecedented potential for continued advancement. The next generation enters a world transformed from that of their great-grandparents - healthier, wealthier, more peaceful, and more connected than ever before. They are the most educated generation in history, with the longest life expectancy and greatest freedom. While challenges remain, their hands will shape a future with possibilities their ancestors could scarcely imagine. As one observer noted, looking at the difference between generations in once-impoverished villages: "Mostly this is about villagers raising their focus from the furrow they ploughed for generations, to start to gaze with curiosity at the world a little further away. They have started to dream."

Summary

Throughout this journey across two centuries of human development, we've witnessed an extraordinary transformation in the human condition. From a world where famine, disease, violence and oppression were the norm, we've created societies where abundance, health, peace and freedom increasingly prevail. This progress wasn't inevitable - it resulted from specific innovations, movements, and systemic changes that reinforced each other in virtuous cycles. Agricultural breakthroughs reduced hunger, allowing more children to survive. Better health and smaller families made education more valuable. Literacy and knowledge spread innovations faster. Economic development created resources for environmental protection. Freedom and equality expanded the pool of human talent contributing to further progress. The evidence of this advancement is undeniable yet often overlooked. We focus on immediate crises rather than long-term trends, on sensational disasters rather than gradual improvements. This psychological bias toward negativity distorts our understanding and threatens further progress. History shows that advancement depends on specific conditions: scientific inquiry, economic freedom, technological innovation, and social inclusiveness. When these are constrained by superstition, authoritarianism, or blind opposition to change, progress stalls. The central lesson is that human ingenuity, when paired with appropriate institutions and values, can overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. As we face climate change, inequality, and technological disruption, we should approach these problems with neither complacency nor despair, but with the confidence that comes from understanding humanity's remarkable capacity for positive transformation when people are empowered with knowledge, freedom, and collaborative tools.

About Author

Loading...

Johan Norberg

Read more

Related Books by Johan Norberg

Loading...

Open

Johan Norberg

The Story of Human Progress

★★★★☆4.1