Happy New Year – and Don’t Forget the Good News

Despite the negative news from our left-leaning media, we are awash in good news. John Fund reports on what he calls the best article that you probably haven’t read this year. It is from Science writer Matt Ridley in the British Spectator.

“We’ve Just Had The Best Decade In Human History. Seriously.”

(Ridley’s) thesis is clear:

• We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history.
• Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when (Ridley) was born.
• Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Another scientist, MIT’s Andrew McAfee, argues that many nations “are using less water, fewer minerals and less land even as they make more of everything. For example, thanks to better irrigation and technology, we use 65 percent less land to produce the same amount of food we did 50 years ago.”

Most of us have grown up with the warning that we are running out of renewable energy, continues Ridley. But how many people grasp that “the shale oil revolution and the explosion of renewable energy has brought the U.S. to the edge of being a net energy exporter?”

In “The Rational Optimist,” Ridley predicts that at the end of the 2020s “we will see less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world. There will be more tigers, whales, forests and nature reserves. (We) will be richer, and each of us will use fewer resources.”

Happy New Year

One review of “The Rational Optimist” describes Ridley’s book as delightful and fascinating,” filled with insight and wit, which will make you think twice and cheer up.”