The world is getting better and here's why we should be optimistic

Every morning, when I step into a hot shower, I'm reminded how fortunate I am. Most of human history didn't include hot water on demand. The widespread adoption of hot showers in homes really only happened in the early-to-mid twentieth century, as indoor plumbing and water heaters became affordable. Even today, more than half of the world's population still doesn't have access to hot water at home. It's a small daily luxury that most of us take entirely for granted, and it's a quiet reminder of how much has changed in a relatively short period of human history.

In an age of doom-scrolling and relentlessly negative news cycles, it's easy to feel that the world is falling apart. The headlines suggest decline. Social media reinforces it. Politicians and pundits compete to describe the problems. Almost no one is making the opposite case.

Which is strange, because the data tells a remarkably different story. By almost any meaningful measure, humanity is making more progress than at any point in our species' history.

Were things better in the good old days?

The honest answer is no. Not even close. In the past two centuries, humanity has made more material, scientific, and humanitarian progress than in the previous two millennia combined.

A few of the most striking long-term shifts.

• Extreme poverty has collapsed. In 1820, around 80% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today, depending on the methodology used, the figure is roughly 9–10%. The World Bank revised the international poverty line in mid-2025 from $2.15 to $3 a day, which produced two valid figures. Either way, the long-term trend is one of the most extraordinary reductions in human suffering in recorded history.
• Life expectancy has more than doubled. Around 30 years in 1800. Roughly 73 years globally by 2023, despite the dip caused by COVID-19. The increase is even greater in many developing countries.
• Literacy has spread astonishingly. In 1820, only around 12% of adults could read and write. Today the global literacy rate is approximately 87%, and more than five billion people can now read and write.
• Child mortality has fallen dramatically. In 1800, around 40% of children died before age five. By 2024, the global under-five mortality rate had fallen to 37.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, or roughly 3.7%. Even more striking, since 1990, one in eleven children was dying before age five. By 2024, it was one in twenty-seven.

These aren't just statistics. They represent billions of people who now have access to nutrition, healthcare, education, and opportunities that earlier generations could barely have imagined.

The picture isn't uniformly rosy. Progress on several of these measures has slowed since 2015. The UN reports that the rate of reduction in child mortality halved between the 2000–2015 period and the 2015–2024 period, partly because of conflict, climate shocks, and economic instability. Roughly 4.9 million children still died before their fifth birthday in 2024, mostly from preventable causes. Honest optimism doesn't require ignoring that. It just means seeing the long-term direction clearly while still working to keep it moving.

Are we running out of resources?

Perhaps the most persistent doomsday theme of the last fifty years is that we are running out of the things we need. Oil. Metals. Food. Water. The predictions have been confidently made, decade after decade, that scarcity would catch up with us.

Almost all of them have been wrong.

Most key resources have actually become more abundant and more affordable over time, primarily because human ingenuity has improved how we extract them, replace them, or do without them.

• Metals. Copper reserves are larger than ever despite over two centuries of mining. Aluminium prices have fallen by close to 99% since the 1850s as extraction methods have improved. Iron ore production has risen while real prices have generally declined.
• Energy. Proven oil reserves rose from about 150 billion barrels in 1950 to roughly 1.7 trillion barrels by 2021. New extraction technologies, including hydraulic fracturing, have transformed the picture. Solar panel costs have fallen by approximately 99% since the 1970s, making renewable energy increasingly competitive with fossil fuels.
• Food. Wheat yields are up around 300% since 1960. Rice yields have doubled. We now produce far more food on much less land, with significantly fewer inputs per unit of output.
• Water. Desalination costs have fallen from around $5–10 per cubic metre in the 1960s to closer to $0.50 today. Water recycling technology continues to become more efficient and affordable.

This isn't an argument that resources are infinite. Some genuinely aren't. It is an argument that scarcity has been consistently overstated, and abundance consistently underestimated, by the people making confident long-term predictions.

But what about the wars?

This is where the data gets really counterintuitive, because it cuts directly against the way most of us experience the news.

Despite the genuine horror of the conflicts currently underway in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, we are still living through one of the most peaceful periods in human history when measured properly.

• Battle-related deaths. In 1946, the global rate was around 300 deaths per 100,000 people. In recent years, it has typically sat at one to two per 100,000, even with the recent rise from the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts.
• Interstate wars. Between 1816 and 1913, there was an average of about 1.5 wars between countries per year. Between 1989 and 2022, the average has been less than 0.3 per year.
• Democracy. In 1800, there were only three democracies in the world. By 1950, there were 22. Today, depending on definitions, there are around 100 democratic countries. Democracy is by no means perfectly secure, and several countries have seen democratic backsliding in recent years, but the long-term trend is unmistakable.

The increase in conflict over the last few years is real and worth paying attention to. The longer-term picture, though, is still far less violent than at any point in the twentieth century, and dramatically less violent than for most of human history.

Why this matters

If the world is genuinely getting better in so many measurable ways, why does it feel so much worse?

A few reasons. The news media is structured around novelty, conflict, and emergency, which means slow improvements rarely make headlines. Algorithms reward outrage and fear because those emotions drive engagement. Social media accelerates negative content faster than positive content. And our brains are wired to weigh threats more heavily than gains, an evolutionary feature that worked well on the savanna but works less well in the modern information environment.

The result is that most of us walk around with a mental picture of the world that is significantly more pessimistic than the data supports. That matters because pessimism is a poor foundation for action. If you genuinely believe everything is getting worse, the rational response is to retreat, hoard, and disengage. If you understand that real progress is possible, and is in fact happening, you tend to engage rather than retreat. You contribute. You build.

Where to learn more

For anyone who wants to dig deeper into the data, two sources stand out. HumanProgress.org is a free resource packed with rigorous information on global advancement across hundreds of measures. Our World in Data offers superb visualisations and analysis of long-term trends across health, economics, education, and the environment. Both are well-sourced, accessible, and worth bookmarking.

Looking forward

Acknowledging current challenges matters. Climate change is real. Inequality is real. Recent conflicts are real. Slowing progress on child mortality and poverty reduction is real. None of this should be brushed aside.

But the evidence is clear that humanity, taken as a whole, has made extraordinary progress over the long arc of history, and continues to make progress on most of the measures that matter. Being informed about positive developments doesn't mean ignoring problems. It means having a more complete and accurate picture, which is the only honest foundation for action.

Optimism, properly grounded, isn't naive. It's earned by looking at the actual data rather than the daily mood music.

So as you scroll through tomorrow's headlines, what would change in how you spend your time, treat your neighbours, and approach your work, if you genuinely believed that the long arc of history is bending in a hopeful direction, and that you have a small but real part to play in keeping it that way?