The best years for humanity in history

Kyle Smith:

Want to know why 1940s Americans were the Greatest Generation and we’re the Grumpiest Generation? For them, at a time when Europe and the Pacific were ruled by actual fascists carrying out mass murder and US troops were under fire, mass culture was all ironclad optimism — “Oklahoma!” and “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

Today, we have mass hysteria when a TV star stages an obviously fake hate crime in Chicago, Chuck Todd calls the 2010s “the worst decade in politics,” a cover story in The Atlantic wonders if we’re on the brink of civil war, and a Washington Post column claims “Americans are at each other’s throats.”

Rubbish. Nearly everything right now is actually awesome.

No matter whether you zoom in or zoom out, from New York to the world, things got much better this decade. Extreme poverty has fallen by more than half since 2008 and is now below ten percent of the world population for the first time ever. Malaria incidence is down nearly 60 percent in Africa. Worldwide AIDS deaths have plummeted 56 percent since the peak in 2004.

The long hangover from the financial crisis is over, and we’ve now surpassed our pre-crisis level of prosperity, meaning we’re the richest we’ve ever been. Wage growth is up and unemployment is near a half-century low. I grew up in the ’70s and when I describe my childhood I sound like a survivor of the Great Depression to my children; imagine, every mother used to have a sewing machine because everyone had to repair their clothes instead of throwing them out!

Meanwhile, investors in the S&P 500 basket of stocks saw returns of a mind-boggling 250 percent this decade, the first the US has ever experienced without a recession since records have been kept. As recently as the ’70s, a cancer diagnosis meant an American had only a 50 percent chance of living five more years. That survival rate is up to two-thirds. (And Americans enjoy some of the highest cancer survival rates in the world).
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I see this as bad news for Democrats who prefer to run for election based on the coming apocalypse.  I think that is one of the reasons they are so determined to push climate change as an excuse for making things worse for everyone.