15 Dec 30 Reasons 2015 Was the Best Year in Human History

Let’s take a moment to recognize and appreciate just how far we’ve come as a species.

Looking at the world’s most recent heartbreak – the ebola epidemic in West Africa, terrorist attacks in France, the Syrian refugee crisis, the frequency of public shootings — it would be easy for you to look back on 2015 and think it was a horrific year that catapulted our species even further in the wrong direction.

But — you’d be wrong.

We have every reason to believe that 2015 was, in fact, the best year in human history.

All of the most important elements that determine things like how long we live, and whether we live happily and freely are trending in an extremely favorable direction.

The fact is, until very recently, life for most people was dark, scarce, brutal, and above all — brief.

According to PRI:

“The causes are pretty obvious: bad food, bad hygiene, bad toilet habits, and almost no understanding of infectious disease. About one in four children born in America or England in the 1860s would die before their 5th birthday. And that was nationally. In crowded cities like Liverpool, in England, that figure could reach 50 percent.”

The more you know about history, the more grateful and happy you become to be alive now.

So let’s take a moment to review the facts, and hold tremendous gratitude for those who have worked tirelessly to make this world a better place… because they have succeeded.

Here are 30 reasons we’re living in the greatest time in human history:

1. Life expectancy at birth was 39 years in 1800, 49 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950, and 79 years today. The average newborn today can expect to live an entire generation longer than his great-grandparents could.
2. A flu pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed as many as 100 million. In his book The Great Influenza, John Barry describes the illness as if “someone were hammering a wedge into your skull just behind the eyes, and body aches so intense they felt like bones breaking.” Today, you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot. It costs 15 bucks. You might feel a little poke.
3. In 1949, Popular Mechanics magazine made the bold prediction that someday a computer could weigh less than 1 ton. I wrote this sentence on an iPad that weighs 0.73 pounds.
4. The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51. Enjoy your golden years — your ancestors didn’t get any of them.
5. “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950,” writes Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who works on global health issues. Infant mortality in America has dropped from 58 per 1,000 births in 1933 to less than six per 1,000 births in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. There are about 11,000 births in America each day, so this improvement means more than 200,000 infants now survive each year who wouldn’t have 80 years ago.
6. America averaged 20,919 murders per year in the 1990s, and 16,211 per year in the 2000s, according to the FBI. If the murder rate had not fallen, 47,000 more Americans would have been killed in the last decade than actually were.
7. Despite a surge in airline travel, there were half as many fatal plane accidents in 2012 than there were in 1960, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
8. No one has died from a new nuclear weapon attack since 1945. If you went back to 1950 and asked the world’s smartest political scientists, they would have told you the odds of seeing that happen would be close to 0%. You don’t have to be very imaginative to think that the most important news story of the past 70 years is what didn’t Congratulations, world.
9. Two percent of American homes had electricity in 1900. J.P Morgan (the man) was one of the first to install electricity in his home, and it required a private power plant on his property. Even by 1950, close to 30% of American homes didn’t have electricity. It wasn’t until the 1970s that virtually all homes were powered. Adjusted for wage growth, electricity cost more than 10 times as much in 1900 as it does today, according to professor Julian Simon.
10. According to the Federal Reserve, the number of lifetime years spent in leisure — time off during your working years plus retirement — rose from 11 years in 1870 to 35 years by 1990. Given the rise in life expectancy, it’s probably close to 40 years today. Which is amazing: The average American spends nearly half his life in leisure. If you had told this to the average American 100 years ago, that person would have considered you wealthy beyond imagination.
11. In 1952, 38,000 people contracted polio in America alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2012, there were fewer than 300 reported cases of polio in the entire world.
12. From 1920 to 1949, an average of 433,000 people died each year globally from “extreme weather events.” That figure has plunged to 27,500 per year, according to Indur Goklany of the International Policy Network, largely thanks to “increases in societies’ collective adaptive capacities.”
13. Worldwide deaths from battle have plunged from 300 per 100,000 people during World War II, to the low teens during the 1970s, to less than 10 in the 1980s, to fewer than 1 in the 21st century, according to Harvard professor Steven Pinker. “War really is going out of style,” he says. In the long arc of human history, both war and other forms of violence are on a centuries-long downward slope.
14. Median household income adjusted for inflation was around $25,000 per year during the 1950s. It’s nearly double that amount today, and there’s been a 34% rise in American home size in just the past 25 years. If you dig into how the average “prosperous” American family lived in the 1950s, I think you’ll find a standard of living we’d call “poverty” today.
15. According to the Census Bureau, only one in 10 American homes had air conditioning in 1960. That rose to 49% in 1973, and 89% today — the 11% that don’t are mostly in cold climates. Simple improvements like this have changed our lives in immeasurable ways.
16. Almost no homes had a refrigerator in 1900, according to Frederick Lewis Allan’s The Big Change, let alone a car. Today they sell cars with refrigerators in them.
17. According to the Census Bureau, the average new home now has more bathrooms than occupants.
18. Google Maps is free. If you think about this for a few moments, it’s really astounding. It’s probably the single most useful piece of software ever invented, and it’s free for anyone to use.
19. The death rate from strokes has declined by 75% since the 1960s, according to the National Institutes of Health. Death from heart attacks has plunged, too: If the heart attack survival had not declined since the 1960s, the number of Americans dying each year from heart disease would be more than 1 million higher than it currently is.
20. In 1900, African Americans had an illiteracy rate of nearly 45%, according to the Census Bureau. Today, it’s statistically close to zero.
21. People talk about how expensive college is today, but a century ago fewer than one in 20 Americans ever stepped foot in a university. College wasn’t an option at any price for some minorities because of segregation just six decades ago.
22. Equality is expanding. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for, and ill-treatment of, other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. Take for example four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable.
23. The average American workweek has declined from 66 hours in 1850, to 51 hours in 1909, to 34.8 today, according to the Federal Reserve. Enjoy your weekend.
24. In 1900, 44% of all American jobs were in farming. Today, around 2% are. We’ve become so efficient at the basic need of feeding ourselves that nearly half the population can now work on other stuff.
25. If you think Americans aren’t prepared for retirement today, you should have seen what it was like a century ago. In 1900, 65% of men over age 65 were still in the labor force. By 2010, that figure was down to 22%. The entire concept of retirement is unique to the past few decades. Half a century ago, most Americans worked until they died.
26. From 1920 to 1980, an average of 395 people per 100,000 died from famine worldwide each decade. During the 2000s, that fell to 3 per 100,000, according to The Economist.
27. As recently as 1950, nearly 40% of American homes didn’t have a telephone. Today, there are 500 million Internet-connected devices in America, or enough for 5.7 per household.
28. 721 million fewer people lived in extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) in 2010 than in 1981, according to a new World Bank study from October. That’s astounding — a decline from 40 to about 14 percent of the world’s population suffering from abject want.
29. You need an annual income of $34,000 a year to be in the richest 1% of the world, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic’s 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. To be in the top half of the globe you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it’s $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000. America’s poorest are some of the world’s richest.
30. Only 4% of humans get to live in America. Odds are you’re one of them. We’ve got it made. Be thankful.

Sources:

http://billmoyers.com/2013/12/26/five-reasons-why-2013-was-the-best-year-in-human-history/

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/29/50-reasons-were-living-through-the-greatest-period.aspx