It's easy to feel gloomy these days about the geopolitical future. Terrorism, surveillance states, economic crises, etc. But overall life is getting better. Placed behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance", I would chose the present over any point in the past. If you consider the standard of living of the whole world, that should be obvious.
But it's still nice to stumble across a good reminder of things getting better, like the "millennium development goals". The water part in particular was a positive surprise. But it's not just water. The percentages of people who suffer from malnutrition, or don't have shoes, etc. is decreasing dramatically.
The biggest factor in raising global standards of living, in my opinion, is not aid. It's not so much "giving back" as "not taking away in the first place". That is, not denying people the right to create, to own, to trade what they want fairly. Hernando de Soto is right.
So yeah it's getting better. Of course, that doesn't mean we should take it for granted. In particular as I've posted about before, with asteroids and climate change, humanity is being pretty stupid with the odds. When it comes to tail risks, let's hope we collectively don't continue to act like Taleb's turkey.
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