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A thought that I return to regularly is the disconnect between the gloom and doom pushed by popular media as compared to the reality of incredible human progress. Hat tip to Peter Diamandis‘ for these data points he shared in a recent speech:

• Some 700 years ago, the Plague killed 200 million people in a single year — 40 percent of England.
• About 500 years ago, famine claimed 3 million lives in France.
• 100 years ago (in 1918) World War I claimed 16 million lives, while the flu pandemic caused 50 million deaths. All in a single year.
• In the past century…
  • The per-capita income for every nation on the planet has tripled.
  • The human lifespan has doubled.
  • The cost of food has dropped thirty-fold.
  • The cost of transportation has dropped hundreds of fold.
  • The cost of communications has dropped millions of fold.
• In 1981, 1 gigabyte of storage cost half a million dollars. Today, it’s 25 million times cheaper at 2 cents per gigabyte.
• In 1971, Intel put out its first computer chip, the Intel 4004. It had 2,300 transistors at a cost of $1 each. The recent Core i7 had 14.4 billion transistors at a cost of less than a millionth of a penny each. This represents a 330 billion-fold increase in price performance in 45 years. If you have a smartphone, you have more computational power in your hand than all the governments on the planet had just 30 years ago.

So tune out the factually inaccurate narrative being sold by the media and political parties, be optimistic, and do something interesting.

In the era of the 24/7 news cycle, if it bleeds it leads. CNN may as well stand for Constant Negative News.  In this article, Steven Pinker reminds us that by any objective measure we live in a much safer world than has heretofore ever existed. Pinker’s article reminded me of the excellent Greg Easterbrook book The Progress Paradox. If you’ve even yearned for “the good old days,” then you are likely deluding yourself and should read Easterbrook’s book for an affirming and constructive perspective on human progress. For another take on this, read Neil Strauss’ article in Rolling Stone. Neil takes a shot at explaining why, at the safest time in human history, we are all so afraid.