According to these statistics, 2019 was best year ever

If you ask anyone, they’ll tell you pretty quickly that the world’s going to s**t, that the kids of today have lost the plot, that no one’s got any respect any more, and that disease, war, famine, and generic f**kery are more prevalent than they’ve ever been. And, to be fair, with the media carrying on like pork chops – not to mention your Uncle Baz – it’s easy to see why people think that. It’s just that technically, those people couldn’t be more wrong. Check this out to see why…

G’day, ya big bloody bewdiful d*ckheads.

If you read this site a fair bit, you’ll know that we’re often celebrating how great life is.

There’s always new technological advancements to celebrate, people doing awesome s**t, and humans doing everything they can to make the world a better place. We know that there are a few bad eggs out there trying to f**k s**t up for everyone, but we’ve now got some proof to say that the world’s been improving so much that 2019 was legit the greatest year ever!

Credit: The New York Times

Now, obviously, that’s when you pay attention to a few select stats. We can always find reasons to be negative, but according to a New York Times article, some of the things that, subjectively, you have to say are amongst the most important, are all looking pretty f**ken good right now.

“Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline “Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.” Or if one uses a higher threshold, the headline could have been: “The Number of People Living on More Than $10 a Day Increased by 245,000 Yesterday.” – Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times.

Without being too vague, the article talks in terms of poverty, life-expectancy, childhood mortality rates, literacy, education (particularly gender-based), availability of food, and empowerment of women, and it does a pretty good job.

“Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.” Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times.

Credit: The New York Times

What we really like about it, though, is that it doesn’t just use these things to paper over the cracks that do exist in our reality. The author, Nicholas Kristof, goes to great pains to say:

“You may feel uncomfortable reading this. It can seem tasteless, misleading or counterproductive to hail progress when there is still so much wrong with the world. I get that. In addition, the numbers are subject to debate and the 2019 figures are based on extrapolation. But I worry that deep pessimism about the state of the world is paralyzing rather than empowering; excessive pessimism can leave people feeling not just hopeless but also helpless.”

But he also points out some pretty good stuff:

“Readers constantly tell me, for example, that if we save children’s lives, the result will be a population crisis that will cause new famines. They don’t realize that when parents are confident that their children will survive, and have access to birth control, they have fewer children. Bangladesh was once derided by Henry Kissinger as a “basket case,” yet now its economy grows much faster than America’s and Bangladeshi women average just 2.1 births (down from 6.9 in 1973).”

“Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. A half century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90 percent adult literacy. There have been particularly large gains in girls’ education — and few forces change the world so much as education and the empowerment of women.” – Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times.

Credit: The New York Times

So when you read this, it’s pretty good to do so with a bit of scope and know that while there’s still plenty to fix, some of the important stuff has really been getting better for everyone, even if it’s something you’ve taken for granted your whole life.

Final thought: Look, there’s a fair bit to look at here, but it makes for great debate, even if on a personal level you might have had a shocker. Again, though, we reckon this is a pretty balanced way to look at the world, and when you think globally, it’s nice to see some of the good stuff we don’t often have presented in the media. Anyway, let us know how your year was in the Facebook comments!

Just in case you missed it, here’s one of Ozzy’s latest commentary videos…Ozzy Man Reviews: Yoga Fails

H/T: NY TIMES.