Is the world getting a better place or not? I meet people over and over again who is thinking the world is in bad shape and is going under. Things are getting worst, people are living on lower levels or the political problems can’t be solved. Disasters are approaching, more and more people dying etc.

Too much pessimism

In my own polls, 5 of 10 voters think the economical-financial crisis isn’t over or will start soon again. But 9 of 10 said people in their countries are living better than before. I think people are supposing the world is in an overall crisis, and their own luck or welfare is only local or temporal.
(Here and here.) I know 10 voters are not enough, not “statistically significant”, very far from it, but you can observe a similar sentiment on all the internet. In posts, chats, articles, many people are pessimistic.

Some scientists are convinced the pessimism has natural reasons: we like bad news because good ones are boring. So, the media is providing us with the bad ones. And then, reading mostly the bad ones all the time, we form us a black image of the world. Another theory is saying we need to be pessimistic and paranoid, genetically, to be cautious and always prepared. Our primitive ancestors needed this to survive in nature or in times of war, to defend themselves.

Humanity never has lived better

Okay, that explains some part of our pessimism, but not all. For example, some countries are much-much more pessimistic than others, some social classes much more than others. In reality, many people in the world are living much better as some decades ago. Try to watch some videos of this man, the Swedish scientist Hans Rosling, like this shorter one:

He was explaining many-many times which advances humanity achieved in the last 100-200 years or recently. His statistics are very convincing. Humanity never has lived better than today.

You not, but others are richer

But many people are unhappy, protesting all the time, like now in France. In some countries, extremists, fascists, communists or other “populists” are gaining power. Followers of Trump, Brexit, right extremists in Brazil or Eastern Europe. What is happening?

I think the issue is, in developed countries, many people can’t see real growth and prosperity. Because the main part of the progress happens in the “developing” or third-world areas. British or American, Polish or Italian middle classes aren’t advancing. But hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indian, South-American workers has emerged, leaving the misery, the poverty, and converting in the middle class.

The charts are talking

Write or copy these words in Google or DuckDuckGo: “charts showing the world is getting better”, than “charts showing the world is getting worse”. Interesting, but you will find many-many articles by the first and almost no one by the second search. I suppose statistics can’t explain why the world would get worse. Because it isn’t.

(Picture: DuckDuckGo)

Economists are explaining the situation with the “elephant chart”, from Branko Milanović. The chart shows globally which income classes have emerged in the last decades, increasing their wages or wealth. To the left, you see the poor, to the right, the rich. The chart has the form of an elephant because the globally poor or middle-income classes emerged from poverty – that gives the large back and head of the elephant.

On the trunk of the elephant

The European, North American middle classes – the trunk (snout, proboscis, nose) – is on very bad shape, in a pit or hole. This is the voters of Trump, the Brexit, the Five Star Movement in Italy, or the far right AfD in Germany. Ex-coal mine workers after the closing of their mine, factory workers after they were replaced by robots or their company moved production to China, Poland, Indonesia etc.

The real globalization

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – wrote Orwell in Animal Farm. That’s the situation now, the voters of rich countries have more influence in the global processes than the poorer third world-voters.

I can only hope inequality in the world will be balanced out (equilibrated), and all the workers of the world will get the same wage for the same (equally effective) work. From that moment on, East and West, South and North can advance together. That would be the true, final globalization. (But no, not the same way as communists imagined.)

And the world is wonderful, as the unforgettable Louis Armstrong sang:

More about the “elephant chart” here.
Inspiration from this poll by @steemingmark

(Cover photo: Pixabay.com)
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