It's easy to follow the news and feel
like we're living in the most extreme times in history. Democracies
are devolving into right wing authoritarian regimes. Another gang,
drug cartel, or run-of-the-mill psychopath has just gone on a
killing spree. There's ongoing violence and unrest in the Middle East. Still. Some militaristic dictator has just killed a bunch of
dissenters. Three people were murdered in a neighborhood near you.
Politicians can't agree on an issue and people are upset. The planet
is melting. And the Muslims... well I'm sure they're up to no good. I
don't wish to trivialize any of those stories (the ones based in
reality, anyway) which are tragic and almost always feature grave
injustice. Even in mock form those headlines give the impression that things are generally terrible and probably couldn't get worse
But I wanted to see if there was any
data to support or refute that idea. So I decided to look up some
data on how people are actually dying. So join me for a couple of
minutes, take a break from the news, and let's look at the bigger
picture for a couple of minutes. When we do, we will see that things
can get worse for humanity, and in fact they used to be much worse.
Which might, I mean it's possible, that it could maybe indicate, that
things are getting... better?
This next statement might not appear
like a positive piece of news, but it is: More and more people these
days are dying of good old fashioned age-related illness1.
That's is good news because it means that they aren't dying from
other more discouraging things like violence and war, easily
preventable diseases, or malnutrition. People are still dying from
those things, but as a percentage of the world's population it is
much less than it used to be. Here is a breakdown of how we
collectively died in 2016 as a percentage of the total 54.7 million
global deaths:
