The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

I love Venn diagrams and especially the one above. Three things can be true at the same time.

The world can be awful, yet be much better than in the past and get better still. 

As says Max Roser over at Our World in Data: 

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.

Discussions about the state of the world too often focus on the first statement: The news highlights what is going wrong, rarely mentioning any positive development. 

A pushback on this narrative takes it to the other extreme, which is equally damaging. Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant, when it glosses over the problems that are real today.

It’s hard to resist falling for only one of these perspectives. But to see that a better world is possible we need to see that both are true at the same time, the world is awful and the world is much better.

To illustrate what I mean, I will use the example of one of humanity’s biggest tragedies: the death of its children. But the same is true for many of the world’s other problems. Humanity faces many problems where things have improved over time, which are still terrible, and for which we know that things can get better.

The world is awful

Globally 4.3% of children die before they are 15 years old. This is the data for 2020, the latest available year.
This means that 5.9 million children die every year – 16,000 children on any average day, and 11 children every minute.
Clearly, a world where thousands of tragedies happen every single day is awful.
The world is much better
History’s big lesson is that things change. But it is hard to imagine how dire living conditions once were and that makes it difficult to grasp just how much the world has changed.
Data can help to bring the scale change to mind. Historians estimate that in the past around half of all children died before they reached the end of puberty. This was true no matter where in the world a child was born and it only started to change in the 19th century, just a few generations ago...child mortality in the very worst-off places today is much better than anywhere in the past.
The world can be much better
Progress over time shows that it was possible to change the world in the past, but do we know that it’s possible to continue this progress into the future? Or were we perhaps born at that unlucky moment in history at which progress has to come to a halt?
Studying the global data suggests that the answer is no....

What if children around the world would be as well off as children in the EU? Five million fewer children would die every year.

IN FULL