In Some Ways 2024 Was The Best Year Ever

The following is part of an article by Nicholas Kristoff in The New York Times:

For starters, let’s note that the worst thing that can happen is not a Trumpian rant; I’d say it’s to lose a child. And 2024 appears to have been the year in which the smallest percentage of children died since the dawn of humanity.

For most of history, about half of newborns died as children. As recently as 1950, more than one-quarter did. In 2024, the best guess of United Nations statisticians is that an all-time low of 3.6 percentof children died before the age of 5, a bit lower than in 2023 (which set the previous record).

That is still far too many. But the risk of that worst thing happening has dropped by half over the last quarter-century. Just since 2000, more than 80 million children’s lives have been saved.

Likewise, consider extreme poverty, defined as having less than $2.15 per day, adjusted for inflation. Historically, most human beings lived in extreme poverty, but the share has been plummeting — and in 2024 reached a new low of about 8.5 percent of the world’s people.

Another way of looking at it: Every day over the past couple of years, roughly 30,000 people moved out of extreme poverty worldwide. And here’s something to look forward to: This year will probably register even more progress against child deaths and poverty alike.

Education and literacy are the greatest forces empowering human beings, yet when I was a child, a majority of human beings had always been illiterate. Now we’re approaching 90 percent literacyworldwide, and the number of literate people is rising by more than 12 million each year. Every three seconds, another person becomes literate.

Scientists have newly developed the first antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia in decades, and a vaccine against a form of breast cancer may enter Phase 2 trials this year. And with semaglutide medications, Americans are now becoming thinner, on average, each year rather than fatter, with far-reaching health consequences.

Climate change is a growing peril, of course, but stunning improvements in solar, wind, nuclear and other technologies, coupled with advances in batteries, offer a credible path toward decarbonizing the world economy — and might even result in energy becoming cheaper than ever before.