There is much to be happy about, including a century-long trend toward increased freedom and democracy, amazing advancements in health care and longevity, and far higher standards of living for most of the world's people.
Freedom and Democracy
The last century saw a significant expansion of democratically elected governments and a dramatic expansion in the number of sovereign states. In 1900, there were no states that could be judged as electoral democracies by the standard of universal suffrage for competitive multiparty elections. The U.S., Britain, and a handful of other countries possessed the most democratic systems, but their denial of voting rights to women, and in the case of the U.S. to black Americans, meant that they were countries with restricted democratic practices. The states with restricted democratic practices were 25 in number and accounted for just 12.4 percent of the world population. In 1900 monarchies and empires predominated.
By 1950, the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism, the post-war momentum toward de-colonization, and the post-war reconstruction of Europe and Japan resulted in an increase in the number of democratic states. At mid-century, there were 22 democracies accounting for 31 percent of the world population and a further 21 states with restricted democratic practices, accounting for 11.9 percent of the globe’s population.
At the dawn of the 21st century, liberal and electoral democracies clearly predominate and have expanded significantly in the Third Wave, which has brought democracy to much of the post-Communist world and to Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa. Electoral democracies now represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 62.5 percent of the world’s population.
Health and Longevity
Life expectancy has increased steadily through history. During the Roman Empire, average life expectancy at birth was a brief 22 years. By the Middle Ages it had risen to about 33 years in England, and increased to 43 years by the middle of the 19th century. In the early 1900s, life expectancies in more developed countries ranged from 35 to 55.
During the second half of the 20th century, health conditions around the world improved more than in all previous human history. Average life expectancy at birth in low- and middle-income countries increased from 40 years in 1950 to 65 years in 1996. Over the same period the average under-5 mortality rate for this group of countries fell from 280 to 80 per 1,000. But these achievements are still considerably below those in high-income countries, where average life expectancy at birth is 77 years and the average under-5 mortality rate is 7 per 1,000.
The two factors most responsible for increasing national and regional life expectancies are improvements in medical technology and development of and better access to public health services (particularly clean water, sanitation, and food regulation). Education, especially of girls and women, has made a big difference too, because wives and mothers who are knowledgeable about healthier lifestyles play a crucial role in reducing risks to their families’ health.
Living Standards
The transformation of the world economy in the course of the 20th century would have been impossible for even the most acute observer living in 1900 to forecast or perhaps even to imagine. Output per capita, the structure of production, and the domestic and international financial systems that sustained the growth of economic activity over this period have been altered almost beyond recognition.
Technological change has driven an enormous increase in the production of goods and services, sufficient to support both vastly higher living standards and vastly larger populations than ever before in history. The increase in productivity has been accompanied by greatly increased specialization in production, leading to the rising importance of markets that have facilitated the exchange of goods and the diffusion of technology, both within and between national economies. By greatly reducing transportation costs, technical progress has contributed to the geographical expansion of markets.
The fruits of economic growth have been distributed unevenly among countries, but the extent to which this is true depends on the indicators chosen. Inequality between the world’s rich and poor regions, measured by output per capita, has increased dramatically over time. Alternative measures of development de-emphasizing output per capita beyond a certain threshold but including non-pecuniary aspects, such as life expectancy and levels of education actually show some convergence in the course of the twentieth century, although large differences between nations remain for these measures as well.
It should also be recognized that in the past century even the poorest quartile of the world population has experienced a greater than 100% per capita income increase in real dollars. The next quartile (low to middle income) has seen per capita income rise more than 400% in real dollars over the same period. Overall living standards everywhere have risen so much in the past 100 years that there is practically no comparison with what came before. Step back 300 or 400 years and it would be nearly impossible for even the wealthiest segment of society to conceive of how easily and comfortably the large majority of humanity lives today.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that these positive trends will not continue. In fact, it can easily be shown that the rate of increase in our overall goodness and caring for each other has been steadily accelerating.
Not only are we headed toward a technological singularity, but also toward a healthy lifespan singularity, a free democratic singularity, and an economic and cultural singularity!
