So much progress to celebrate.

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Matt Ridley has a marvelous article over at the UK Spectator, titled We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously.

The global situation, he reports, is improving at a furious pace. A mere 10 years ago we were immersed in the frigid waters of the 2009 financial crisis, an event which is thought to have killed 30,000+African children. That was a frightening starting point for a new decade.

Since then, however, global poverty has continued its steady decline. Debilitating diseases are in retreat. There’s also growing evidence that our most advanced economies are using less resources rather than more. Writes Ridley:

experts in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the year 2000. In fact, the total usage that year was half as much as predicted. Not because there were fewer humans, but because human inventiveness allowed more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water.

As the folks over at Spiked like to say, on the t-shirts they sell, humanity is underrated.

The world is far from perfect. But so many critical trends are moving in the right direction.

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