Good morning. It has gone largely unreported, but the basic measures of human well-being have continued to get better in recent decades. More on our quiet progress below, along with measles updates and what happened yesterday on the federal election campaign trail.
Today’s headlines
Timothy Moore/The Globe and Mail
Opinion
Despite all the bad news, life for most has been improving
Hi, I’m Marcus Gee and I’m a columnist and feature writer at The Globe and Mail. It’s not often that I look back on what I have written in the past.
Like most of us in the news business, I tend to focus on the here and now. But a few months ago, I started thinking about something I wrote for The Globe more than 30 years ago.
Timothy Moore/The Globe and Mail
I was working as an editorial writer at the time, specializing in foreign affairs. A copy of The Atlantic crossed my desk. In it was an article by Robert Kaplan, a roaming correspondent for the magazine. It was titled: The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of the planet.
The piece was every bit as bleak as the title. Travelling through West Africa, Kaplan found trouble everywhere he went – a foreshadowing, he wrote, of what the world at large was facing.
As he put it, “Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism.”
The article, which he later turned into a book, made a big splash. Everyone in the foreign-affairs field was talking about it. But I wondered: Was the state of the world really so bad?
I decided to do a little research of my own and found that, in fact, many of the basic indicators of human well-being were showing dramatic improvement.
The much-feared population explosion was overblown; fertility rates were dropping everywhere. Thanks to more vaccination, better sanitation and other basic health measures, the toll of disease in poor countries was falling. Literacy, life expectancy and education levels were rising. Democracy was spreading, and the number of conflicts was down.
That was in 1994, just after the end of the Cold War. Anxiety about the future in this new era was rampant.
It is rampant again today – and for good reason. Climate change, trade wars, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the decline of American democracy – all of these have made this a time of global crisis.
But again, I wondered: Were we missing something? Had the progress I wrote about way back then continued?
I plunged into the data again. I found that the answer was yes.
By almost every measure, life for the bulk of humanity has continued to improve.
We live longer, eat better, make more money. Much of what we used to call the Third World has risen to at least middle-income status, a level at which most people can afford all the basics of life. One of the most encouraging things I found was that the gender gap in schooling has disappeared. Girls in most places get as much, if not more, education than boys.
In noting all of this, I know I run the risk of being called a Pollyanna – someone who thinks everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But my aim here was not to paper over our problems.
As I point out, we are going backward on some of the world’s major indicators, like democracy and conflict. I am as alarmed as anyone at the chaos that a crazed American president is unleashing on the world, not to mention the threat from autocracies such as Russia, China and Iran.
My aim was to remind everyone that, behind the scary headlines, some good things are happening. We have made huge strides in the recent past and can do so again in the future.
So don’t get me wrong, this is not the case for optimism – the belief that everything is certain to get better. The way things are looking, it could well get worse.
It is the case for what the Swedish physician Hans Rosling called “factfulness.”
Before we assume that the world is headed for chaos and ruin – the “coming anarchy” – we should take a look at what the facts say about the state of our world. It is better than most of us think.
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Workers sort potatoes at East Point Potatoes in Souris, P.E.I. on Thursday, April 3, 2025.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Lindsay Jones checks in with Prince Edward Island ahead of the federal election. She visits Souris, a potato farming community in the eastern part of the province, where potato farming and potato processing drive the economy. As it happens this year, prep for the spring planting season coincides with the election campaign, and a trade war that is causing a lingering unease among farmers.
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What else we’re following
At home: Ontario’s measles outbreak continues unabated, with 155 new cases recorded over the past week, prompting New York State to issue travel advisory.
Abroad: Sudanese officials accused the United Arab Emirates of being complicit of genocide in Darfur, speaking at the International Court of Justice.
Winning: At a time of despair for U.S. scientists, Gairdner Award winners shine brighter than usual.
Reading: Six Canadian mysteries to make you forget about tariffs.
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