While the long-term trend lines of progress since the Enlightenment are clear, history offers no support for blind optimism. Improvements in human well-being have been repeatedly interrupted by reversals, forcing us to consider the implications of our own age of populism, pandemics, and climate change.
PRINCETON – It has been ten years since I wrote The Great Escape, which tells the story of how human life improved over the past 250 years, particularly in terms of longevity and material living standards. But the past decade has been unkind to my overwhelmingly positive account. My observation that “life is better now than at any time in history” may have been true in 2013, but it probably is not today, even for the typical person. The question is whether this reversal will be temporary, or whether it is only the beginning of worse to come. Do recent events demand that the basic story be retold?
PRINCETON – It has been ten years since I wrote The Great Escape, which tells the story of how human life improved over the past 250 years, particularly in terms of longevity and material living standards. But the past decade has been unkind to my overwhelmingly positive account. My observation that “life is better now than at any time in history” may have been true in 2013, but it probably is not today, even for the typical person. The question is whether this reversal will be temporary, or whether it is only the beginning of worse to come. Do recent events demand that the basic story be retold?