If you read the headlines presented to us every day, it’s hard not to feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket:

• the war raging in iraq.
• the global war on terror.
• violent fundamentalism on the rise.
• the increasing divide between rich and poor.
• the mass retirement of the baby boomers.
• birds givin’ us the flu.
• limited and fragile natural resources.
• unchecked human wastefulness.
• genocide in darfur.
• et freaking cetera.

(photo by Flickr user Alicat3)

in the warm spirit of the winter holidays, i would like to bring tidings of good cheer. That glass is more than half-full, my friends. And Egg Nog is delicious. OK so maybe Egg Nog should be listed alongside the other reasons to hate the world… but still!

First, for your ears… EVERYBODY LOVES BEATLES COVERS!!!!
English pop band Gomez covers “Getting Better” by the Beatles:

Second, for that slimy thingy between your ears (brain?), an except from William Bernstein’s book, The Birth of Plenty.

It’s all too tempting to lament the state of the world, particularly when you focus on the melodramas of mankind—violent conflicts, large-scale malfeasance and failure, and the latest installments in the age-old racial and religious hatreds that permeate the human story.

(optimism below the fold!)

A paragon of such fashionable pessimism has been journalist Anthony Lewis, who, at the end of a long and distinguished career, was asked whether the world had gotten to be a better place since he had begun covering it a half century earlier:

“I have lost my faith in the ideal of progress. I mean that in the sense that it was used at the beginning of the twentieth century, that mankind is getting wiser and better and all—how, how can you think that after Rwanda and Bosnia and a dozen other places where these horrors have occurred?”

Mr. Lewis’ problem is that his subjective criterion—that mankind has not achieved moral perfection as defined in Ivy League universities and the editorial suites of the New York Times—sets the bar too high. Mr. Lewis seems unaware that we can measure the welfare of mankind; in fact, we can do it superbly. Contrary to his gloomy impressions, the second half of the twentieth century was far less murderous than the first. Further, the proportion of the world’s population subjected to totalitarianism, genocide, starvation, war, and pestilence has been steadily decreasing over the past two centuries, with most of the improvement coming in the half century that so depressed Mr. Lewis.

Consider that from 1950 to 1999, average life expectancy in the developed world increased from 66 years to 78 years; in the developing world, it increased from 44 years to 64 years. The nearly universal Western outcome of living to old age, rather than resulting from the rare stroke of luck, may be the greatest accomplishment of the past fifty years. Or consider that over the same period, the world’s real per capita gross domestic product (GDP)—the amount of goods and services produced by the average person, adjusted for inflation—nearly tripled. Or that by the year 2000, real per capita GDP in Mexico was significantly greater than that of the world leader in 1900, Great Britain. And if you’re not impressed with mankind’s material progress in the last fifty years, as measured in dollars and cents, you should at least note that almost any measure of social progress you wish to examine—infant mortality, literacy and mortality rates, or educational levels—has dramatically improved in all but a few still-benighted corners of the planet.

Chapter One of the book, in its entirety, with the kind permission of the publisher.

Happy Holidays, people. The world is a good place. But don’t forget to do your part to make it greater.