Where I steal all my ideas

In an article in The Economist:

[T]he world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise...

In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history. Poverty alleviation has gone hand in hand with improvements in basic services...

the rate at which people die from infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is falling in most poor countries, Africa excepted.

That in turn has cut child mortality. In 2007 Unicef, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That is still an awful lot but it represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Life expectancy has increased a bit in low- and middle-income countries. The long march to literacy is nearing an end: three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

All these things are the results of patient work over many years. But perhaps the biggest change affecting people's lives has little to do, at least directly, with development policy or public spending. People in poor countries are now able to exert more control over their own fertility, and hence over the size of their families.

A generation ago the biggest worry about poor countries was over-population. Books such as “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The Limits to Growth” (1972) predicted Malthusian crises in countries where women were having five children or more. Since then the fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can expect during her lifetime) in low- and middle-income countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years).

The biggest decline is in those countries that are most involved with globalisation (especially in East Asia, though China is a special case because of its one-child policy). The most important exception to the rule of declining fertility is sub-Saharan Africa. All the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are in Africa (with the one exception of Yemen).

Globalisation, it seems, leads to a shift in the direction of “replacement fertility”: the rate at which the size of a population eventually stabilises. This is a remarkable development. In closed agrarian societies, families need a lot of children as insurance against disaster. But in countries that have opened themselves up, families can rely on other sorts of protection, such as urban jobs or trade.

These demographic changes help to create a virtuous circle of growth...

[A] more dramatic explanation for improved living standards is the decline in the number of wars, and in deaths from violence and genocide...

The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s...

You see a similar pattern with the worst of crimes, genocide. At the moment, Darfur is a stain on mankind. But in a quantitative sense, the late 1980s and early 1990s were worse: that period saw ten cases of the mass slaughter of civilians, says Barbara Harff, of the US Naval Academy, including Bosnia, Rwanda and Burundi...

[T]here has been a dramatic rise in the number of conflicts resolved. During this decade civil wars have come to an end or have been restrained in Aceh, Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Sierra Leone. These places then drop out of the news...

So basically, The Economist agrees with my generally rosy view of the world. As fertility falls worldwide, peace breaks out, economic growth starts up, and poverty falls as a result. This is not to say the world doesn't have big problems - global warming, water shortages, and rising authoritarianism are the big ones - but we should be optimistic about the future.