It’s 2023. Finally. In South Africa, 2022 was a rather dismal year, and it ended on an even more dismal note, with continuous loadshedding, higher interest rates and petrol prices, flash floods that further tested fragile infrastructure, and concerns about worsening crime. Apocalyptic, even. Globally things are not much better. War rages on in Ukraine. Many fear a cold winter in Europe. And financial markets suggest that a recession is still very likely.
It seems obvious to ask why the world is such a terrible place.
In February last year, Max Roser gave a talk at Stellenbosch University. Roser is the founder of Our World in Data, a website that provides all kinds of global economic, demographic, health, and environmental statistics. Most readers would recognise Our World in Data as the provider of Covid-19 data. I vividly remember at the beginning of 2020 scanning the website daily (sometimes hourly) for the latest infection rates. Roser explains why his team began collecting Covid-statistics, realising soon that the World Health Organisation, for political reasons, could not publish daily statistics. With a handful of team members, a tiny budget (a fraction of what the WHO had access to, for example), and grit, Roser and his team provided the statistics that influenced government policies all around the world.
But OWID is much more than just about Covid. Roser explains that he founded the website as a way to show that the world is not such a terrible place: that our living standards are orders of magnitude better than our ancestors. (An alert reader would note echoes with my book – Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom – which relied heavily on Our World in Data statistics.)
But over the past decade, Roser explained further, he has learned that things are not as simple as saying ‘we live better lives than our ancestors’. Few people compare themselves to their ancestors. We see poverty around us every day. We see images daily of warfare and of famine that flash across our screens. We see forests that burn, flooding, dams that run dry. We worry about the future of our country and of our children.
That made Roser change his story. Yes, we live better lives than our ancestors – only five generations ago half of all children died before the age of five compared to 3.8% today, a remarkable achievement – but the fact remains that many kids (4 in 100) still die before the age of 5! We should thus hold two ideas simultaneously: that the world is much better than before and that there are still a lot of bad things happening.
In fact, Roser argues that we can add another idea on top of those two: that the world can still be much better. In rich countries, infant mortality is less than 0.2%. That means that global infant mortality can (and should) still improve by a factor of 20!
It is the same with almost any other indicator of living standards. Here is the most common one: poverty. In 1990, 37% of all people earned less than $2.15. By 2019, less than three decades later, it is 8%. The world is a much better place than it was before. But consider this: almost half of all humans live on less than $6.85 per day. South Africa is actually above the global average, with 62% of all South Africans living below this poverty line.) This doesn’t feel like a good story to tell. But in countries like England, the Netherlands, or Canada, fewer than 1% of people live at that level. The world can therefore still be a much better place for many.
What do we need to make the world a better place? Roser proposes three steps: That we have to believe that we can make the world a better place. That we have to identify the biggest challenges. And that we have to know how to address those challenges.
The first step seems the easiest: It seems obvious that the world can be better. But for many, that is not so obvious. Increasingly vocal subsections of society believe that technological progress is happening too quickly or in the wrong direction. Opinions range from superficial romanticisations of the past to more sophisticated critiques of the cost of economic growth. Perhaps the slim silver lining on South Africa’s dark cloud is that from all across the political spectrum there is an understanding that things must be better.
The second step is to know the world’s biggest challenges. It is here that information is our greatest asset. Because if we were to only read newspapers (or blogs?!) or, worse, social media, we would probably end up focusing on all the wrong things.
Roser uses the example of an airplane that crashes. It is usually front page news in every newspaper, usually with a tragic image of the scattered remains of the plane. But an airplane seats maximum 600 people. Infant deaths rarely reaches the front page of your daily newspaper, except in the rare cases of a freak accident. And yet, the total number of infant deaths is equivalent to a plane crashing (with only children on board) every hour of every day. Put differently: a newspaper could post the headline ‘14 000 kids died yesterday’ on its cover every day for a year and it would be true.
The point is not to say that infant deaths are the most important challenge of our time, but rather that statistics can help us identify the challenges we need to pay attention to. Only then can we use our limited resources most effectively.
But finding consensus about the most important challenges is hard. Do we maximise the well-being of everyone alive today, or also those of future generations? Followers of a new ethical movement – longtermism – believe that future people are just as important as those that live today, and because it is very likely that billions more people will live in the future, that implies that we have to focus all our attention on those things that are most likely to threaten human survival. This would include things like nuclear war, pandemics, extreme climate change, and artificial intelligence. Infant mortality is certainly not high on the list.
Whether most South Africans share this ethical viewpoint is unclear to me. I would rather have my tax money go towards improving the lives of living South Africans, than those of the year 3000, 30 000 or 300 000. But even knowing we want to improve the lives of those alive right now, what we need to spend our tax money on is not clear.
Economists know well that improvements in sanitation, nutrition, healthcare for women, access to vaccines, safer and secure housing, and better quality education have drastically reduced infant mortality over the last century. But all these things are also closely correlated to economic growth: a prosperous society can afford to buy the things that they value most. As unpopular as it may be at present to say this, economic growth is still the way to a better life for all.
Economic growth is the reason the world is a better place to live in than the one our ancestors inhabited. But we also know that there is still much to do to make the world an even better place for millions of people. Instead of waiting for the government to fix things, perhaps we need to take inspiration from what Max Roser did during Covid: let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. Addressing any big challenge starts with one small step in the right direction.
An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 11 December 2022. Photo by Ben McLeod on Unsplash.