Better off Today or in the Future?
I WAS RECENTLY MOTIVATED, DUE TO RUSSIA’S INVASION OF UKRAINE, to explore the following two questions: “Is the world better off today than it was in the past?” and “Will our future be better than it is today?”
To answer the first question, I read the book Factfullness by Hans Rosling. He is a Professor of International Health and a global TED phenomenon who revealed the ten instincts that distort our perspective to think that the world is not better off. He notes that we have tendencies to “divide the world into two camps, “us” versus “them” and we also consume media where events of “fear” predominate and we perceive progress in a way most things are getting worse.
Rosling asked some simple questions about global trends in 2015 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Over 1,000 of the most influential people in the world there were asked 13 simple questions about world trends, such as — “what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty?; why the world’s population is increasing?; how many girls finish school?”—they got the answers wrong 66 percent of the time.
Test yourself on a few of these questions:
In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
A) 20 percent
B) 40 percent
C) 60 percent
How many of the world’s 1-year old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?
A) 20 percent
B) 50 percent
C) 80 percent
How did the numbers of death per year from natural disasters change over the last 100 years?
A) More than doubled
B) Remained about the same
C) Decreased to less than half
(Find the answers below.)
Our Dramatic Instincts make for an Overdramatic World view. As, he states, “Think about the world. War, violence, natural man-made disasters, corruption.” Additionally, “the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, and we will soon run out of resources. It makes for stress and is misleading.” But if you look at the facts you find the world lives closer to middle income of the income scale, and poverty by definition, has been reduced by 80 percent since the beginning of the 20th century. Rosling adds, “Step by step, year by year, the world is improving. Though the world faces significant challenges, we have made tremendous progress.”
As we look to the forward, demographic futurist Bradley Schurman in his book the Super Age explains the coming of a Super Age, writing, “Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children.” He notes that in the near future the most developed world will have at least 20 percent of their population being 65years or older. “The seismic shift in the world population can portend a period of tremendous growth—or leave swaths of us behind.”
For me, the most pivotal moment in our near future is that the greatest wealth transfer in modern history has begun. Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades accumulating an enormous stockpile of money. At the end of this year’s first quarter, Americans age 70 and above had a net worth of nearly
$35 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. Estate planning has become a significant business in the United States to carry out this wealth transfer. In 2020, only 16 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 said they have a will or another estate planning document. In 2021, that percentage rose by nine points – an increase of 63 percent in just one year according to www.caring.com. The millennials will be the beneficiaries of this wealth. Today, Millennials earn more money than any other generation has at their age, but hold significantly less wealth. This is because the cost of living has outpaced wage increases and two recessions and student debt has not been helpful. This will be important to our collective future. If fewer people are working as baby boomers retire, then less taxes will buttress our Social Security and Medicare programs just when they are needed the most.
Answers: C, C, C
As these three answers to Rosling’s quiz indicate, the world is doing much better than most of us might have otherwise suspected. Following are some of my suggestions to insure that the next hundred years offer their own improvements:
