So, this isn’t the end of the world, then?

 

By Laura Bohnert

Believe it or not, the world is safer than ever—even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.

With today’s social media pumping out news headline after news headline—whether fake or real, clickbait or top news story—we are being continuously infiltrated by the bleakness that appears to be our global outlook. However, even though we are far from achieving world peace (and continuing to get further at the rate Trump is going), and climate change and social inequality are still critical issues, statistics show that our outlook may not be quite as awful as it might seem.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that we should all stop worrying about the state of things and resume a perspective of blind complacence to the issues we do need to continue working towards resolving. Climate change might be a good starting point, and I’m sure we’ll get around to that one sometime before we spill so many chemicals and deplete so much ozone that the increasing heat from our sun causes our oceans to ignite.

But keeping the big picture, which considers global scale over a broader time frame, in mind, studies considering global statistics for the past 70 years are indicating that things are trending towards the better, even on a global scale.

The number of annual deaths related to wars and conflict (relative to the size of the conflict), and the number of wars have been decreasing since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. While world peace is still a distant dream, since the decline of wars began, many parts of the globe have been experiencing long periods of peace.

The deadliness of ongoing wars is decreasing as well, thanks in part to technological and medical advancements (as well as international policies that will hopefully continue to ban the use of nuclear warfare), but also thanks to global efforts to help accommodate and provide opportunities for refugees and war victims.

Even deadly and persistent disease outbreaks, like the spread of Malaria in countries near the equator, have seen decreases in fatalities. People, on average, are working less, overall poverty levels are decreasing (despite the fact that income inequality is increasing), access to food is increasing, and homicide rates have been decreasing significantly and relatively consistently since the mid-1400s.

There is also a much stronger and more widely recognized and accepted push for equality—and even though there is still a lot of controversy, discrimination, and dissent, there is in general much more recognition of the fact that there are different gender identities, and there is a stronger push for acceptance and equality among those identities, as well as among different races and cultures.

Again, we haven’t made it to complete equality, and there have been setbacks along the way, but there has also been some significant and important progress—and that is definitely worth recognizing.

Of course, the most up-to-date data only offers statistics inclusive of 2010, and who knows which direction our trends will take now that Trump is in power (and has begun throwing some very large and hypocritically pointy stones at Kim Jong Un).