A Golden Age: things were never better!

I am indebted to the Editor of the Speccie for his piece putting our current woes into context.

 

Here is what he says.

 

‘It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age’.

 

So let’s have a look at this.

 

First up, health.

 

We forget that until penicillin came along TB was endemic and for much of the previous times it was epidemic.

 

In the late 40’s my brother was stricken with TB-meningitis, which had previously been almost always fatal. He was one of the first patients to be treated with streptomycin.  He was in hospital for two years but emerged completely clear. For many years now it has been almost an extinct disease (although there are alarming signs of a resurgence from the third world of an antibiotics resistant variety).

 

I was smitten with polio in 1960, fortunately with no permanent paralysis. It is now unknown in the developed world. Smallpox is extinct, when once it was a major scourge. The old child killers, whooping cough, measles and chicken pox have been virtually eradicated.

 

The incidence of AIDS has been falling for the last 8 years, as has an even bigger scourge, malaria

 

At the turn of the 19^th C life expectancy was 48. It is now approaching 81.

 

The biggest killer in the last century has been war. The total dead in WW1and 2 must amount to hundreds of millions. We of our age lived through WW2, 40 years of the constant danger of being incinerated by nuclear warfare. We used to debate whether it was a good thing to have children in that atmosphere. But there have been fewer war deaths in the last decade than at any time in the last century.

 

Poverty? The Millennium Goals were reached in 2008, 7 years ahead of schedule (there was no official announcement of this; it would not have suited Dave’s aid agenda). Many millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years. But not by foreign aid programmes which have little to show for the trillions spent in the last 40 years. It was globalization.

 

The environment? The Greens will tell you that we cannot go on as we are without ruining the planet. But a 6% growth in rich world economies has also seen a 4% decrease in the consumption of fossil fuels, not because of wind farms and other expensive frauds but because of the development of more –fuel-efficient vehicles.

 

Energy? Again we are constantly told that we are going to run out of oil, gas etc. sometime soon. New ways of recovering fossil fuels, such as fracking, means that we are entering an age of energy abundance accompanied by falling prices (the Americans already pay only on-third of what we pay for gas).

 

So have a cheerful New Year in the certain knowledge that things have never been better.