We live in a world that is rapidly becoming freer, cleaner, better educated, healthier, longer-lived, wealthier and more peaceful. Oddly, you and I find ourselves sharing that planet with a huge preponderance of people who are quite convinced that it is going to hell in a handbasket.

In recent years there has emerged into this maelstrom of declinism – nay, catastrophism – a whole literature of scrupulously evidence-based optimism. It started (for me) with Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, and has continued through such important contributions as Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It Looks, and the great Hans Rosling’s posthumous classic Factfulness.   

Now there comes to hand the most accessible, most graphically arresting and in some ways most encyclopedic treatment of the subject: Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know by Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy. The authors are, respectively, the science correspondent for Reason magazine and the editor of the website HumanProgress.org. The book is published by the Cato Institute.

One at a time – giving us time to savor each positive finding – Ten Global Trends covers an absolutely astonishing range of topics. Start with the Great Enrichment: The world’s economy has grown more than a hundredfold since 1820, while global population is up something less than eightfold. Now a little over $120 trillion, the middle-of-the-road scenario by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts global GDP at $600 trillion by 2100 – even as global population peaks at eight to nine billion people.

As recently as 1970, about half the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; fewer than nine percent do now, and the rate continues to fall. At the same time, global literacy among men age 15 and older rose from 77% to 90%, and for women from 61% to 83% -- that gap, too, is closing fast.

Broadly speaking, as world population doubled, food production trebled; meanwhile, the amount of land devoted to agriculture has already peaked. Global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, and is continuing to increase at a bit less than two and a half years per decade, or about six hours per day. Half a century ago, it was considered a given that the world was about to run out of oil, and rather soon at that. But oil production has grown from 32 million barrels a day in 1965 to 95 million in 2018 – while proven oil reserves have tripled.

One can go on and on like this – and Messrs. Bailey and Tupy do just that. But each important fact/trend is given its own richly illustrated page in their book, such that you can sample them randomly, devour the whole 200-page book – or both.

Ten Global Trends is surely a book of the year, and quite possibly the Book of the Year for advisors. At the moment it’s also – for those of you who look for books to give clients at holiday time – the obvious choice. My suggestion: give them the hardcover – they’ll appreciate it.

© 2020 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.