NY Times: 2017 Best Year in Human History

NY Times: 2017 Best Year in Human History

According to an opinion piece in the New York Times, 2017 was the best year in human history.

I’m inclined to agree. And I bet this writer is a closet Trump supporter!

For many Americans, we feel the reason the author can write this is due to the election of Donald Trump.

The author writes,

We all know that the world is going to hell. Given the rising risk of nuclear war with North Korea, the paralysis in Congress, warfare in Yemen and Syria, atrocities in Myanmar and a president who may be going cuckoo, you might think 2017 was the worst year ever.

Quite an homage to the mess unlikely President Trump inherited.

But the author continues, explaining why after all the mess created by Obama, Donald Trump turned a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

But you’d be wrong. In fact, 2017 was probably the very best year in the long history of humanity.

A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell.

We need some perspective as we watch the circus in Washington, hands over our mouths in horror. We journalists focus on bad news — we cover planes that crash, not those that take off — but the backdrop of global progress may be the most important development in our lifetime.

Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.

Agreed. The Trump administration’s goal to Make America Great Again has the ancillary effect of making the world great again.

As President Trump pressures other governments to get their financial houses in order, the world improves.

The article continues,

As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty. In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.

Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, explores the gains in a terrific book due out next month, “Enlightenment Now,” in which he recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life. “Intellectuals hate progress,” he writes, referring to the reluctance to acknowledge gains, and I know it feels uncomfortable to highlight progress at a time of global threats. But this pessimism is counterproductive and simply empowers the forces of backwardness.

President Trump rode this gloom to the White House. The idea “Make America Great Again” professes a nostalgia for a lost Eden. But really? If that was, say, the 1950s, the U.S. also had segregation, polio and bans on interracial marriage, gay sex and birth control. Most of the world lived under dictatorships, two-thirds of parents had a child die before age 5, and it was a time of nuclear standoffs, of pea soup smog, of frequent wars, of stifling limits on women and of the worst famine in history.

I always love how Leftists showcase how America overcomes the evils of society, as if that evil had been contained.

For 8 years, Obama and Leftist supporters unleashed an evil more vile than brother fighting brother in the Civil War. At least we could easily see the enemy there.

Donald Trump has defused North Korea, put Russia and China on notice on multiple fronts. His presence caused an internal Iranian revolution that will be the undoing of the mullahs.

President Trump gave notice to the world that America will no longer fight its battles, as he forced NATO to pay its bill. Moreover, he sold arms to the Saudis and other Middle Eastern countries with the caveat they nip terrorism in the bud.

In short, President Trump has made the world geometrically more safe than Obama. As for minorities and women, they have only been limited by the mind-screw of Leftism.

Interestingly, to make his point further, the author references a woman likely freed by the efforts of George Bush.

I had a visit the other day from Sultana, a young Afghan woman from the Taliban heartland. She had been forced to drop out of elementary school. But her home had internet, so she taught herself English, then algebra and calculus with the help of the Khan Academy, Coursera and EdX websites. Without leaving her house, she moved on to physics and string theory, wrestled with Kant and read The New York Times on the side, and began emailing a distinguished American astrophysicist, Lawrence M. Krauss.

I wrote about Sultana in 2016, and with the help of Professor Krauss and my readers, she is now studying at Arizona State University, taking graduate classes. She’s a reminder of the aphorism that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. The meaning of global progress is that such talent increasingly can flourish.

This writer can’t fool me. He supports Trump and capitalism. He is likely a Tea Party Community supporter.

Leftists can’t see the good, as the cup is always half empty.

Finally he writes:

So, sure, the world is a dangerous mess; I worry in particular about the risk of a war with North Korea. But I also believe in stepping back once a year or so to take note of genuine progress — just as, a year ago, I wrote that 2016 had been the best year in the history of the world, and a year from now I hope to offer similar good news about 2018. The most important thing happening right now is not a Trump tweet, but children’s lives saved and major gains in health, education and human welfare.

Every other day this year, I promise to tear my hair and weep and scream in outrage at all the things going wrong. But today, let’s not miss what’s going right.

Now I know this person is a closeted Trump supporter!

 

 

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