Human Progress in 9 Charts
If a picture is worth 1000 words, here are 9,000.
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With all the negativity of the media and popular culture, it can be very difficult to accept that we are indeed living in the best time in human history. Even the very suggestion often triggers immediate scorn and disbelief, a reflex that we will examine soon. To truly see and understand the depth and breadth of human progress in these past few centuries, we best turn to charts, graphics, and data. Only with our eyes can we visualize the whirlwind of positive change that has enabled unparalleled human prosperity and personal opportunity.
Education
We begin this examination with literacy, as it is one of the key metrics of human progress and individual potential. The ability to read and write unlocks the capability of learning from others through books and written works and the accelerated dispersion of knowledge. From the chart below, we can see that global literacy soared over the last two centuries, inverting the proportion of people who are literate and illiterate. In other words, we went from 12 percent literate in 1820 to 12 percent illiterate in 2020.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, literacy has rapidly improved alongside a rising percentage of children receiving basic education. In 1820, just 17 percent of children under the age of 15 had received any formal education. This reached 86 percent in 2020.
Health
For almost all of human history, there was roughly a 50 percent chance that a parent would see each of their children die before they reached the age of 15. But beginning around the Industrial Revolution, that probability collapsed. With the invention of new technologies and improvements in hygiene, child mortality globally stands at just about 4 percent today and is lower still in wealthy nations.
With a greater share of us less likely to die young, alongside concurrent improvements in medical technology and knowledge, the average life expectancy has risen dramatically. Globally, life expectancy rose from 29 years in 1820 to 72 years in 2020. In many wealthy nations, the average life expectancy is now over 80 years of age.
Wealth
As we will discuss, wealth is a function of human knowledge and progress. Wealth provides us with greater opportunity and individual capability. For most of our history, the vast majority of humanity was extremely poor. Wealth grew very slowly with the agricultural revolution before exploding with the industrial revolution after 1750. That explosion, that “singularity,” can be easily seen in the below graph.
This explosion in global wealth is not only accruing to a select few, either. Even the poorest among us are benefitting, as the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has fallen quickly. The collapse is most pronounced after about 1980, with the rise of globalization and the global market.
Even as the global population has grown, absolute poverty has continued to shrink. Indeed, I will make the case that poverty shrank because, not despite, our growing numbers. The total number of people living in extreme poverty dropped from about 2 billion in 1990 to under 700 million in 2019. This is remarkable, even if much work remains to be done.
War and Peace
State rivalry, which often can lead to war and bloody skirmishes, remains a problem but is improving. The share of countries that coexist in “warm peace” with each other, has grown dramatically since World War 2. The share of countries with so-called “negative peace” has also grown, with rivalrous relationships becoming increasingly rare.
Technology
Perhaps more than any other invention in human history, the internet has accelerated the dispersion and accumulation of human knowledge. From essentially non-existent in 1990, by 2020 about 5 billion people were using the internet. As we will see, this gives them access to billions of dollars of human knowledge and opportunities that otherwise would have been inaccessible.
A Better World
For most of us in most parts of the world life is safer, longer, and more comfortable than it was for our ancestors. To be sure, much work remains to be done. Progress, in my view, is never finished. The goal of Pathways of Progress is to understand how we cultivated progress, how we can sustain it, and how we can spread the fruits of human advancement to more people around the world.
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I remember when Pinker's book Enlightenment Now came out with example after example like this, the main critizism is that it doesn't 'feel' like that to many people and telling them otherwise undermines their 'lived expereince.'
I worked with a woman who was extremely worried about violence on women in 2020 and compared that to her own expereince as a college kid touring India solo in the 90s when she felt it was safer. When I pulled up the numbers and showed her that she was SIGNIFICANTLY more at risk back then, I got HR called on me for the crime of minimizing violence on women. I told HR that I didn't justify it, I contextualized it. That wasn't good enough. Because violence still existed and because this women felt it was worse, my sharing that it was orders of magnitude safer was offensive.
I think few will doubt that a number of challenges have been solved, and in a narrow sense progress is irrefutable. On average people do live longer, are healthier, and have basic literacy. I wonder though, if not a comparable model is the life of many animals in captivity. They too live longer and healthier. If captivity is progress for them, it would seem a rather hollow victory, and more importantly, it challenges the assumption that raising these basic metrics is a good proxy for meaningful progress (whatever that may be).