This Thanksgiving, be thankful for these 6 ways the world is getting better

A lot of Americans are bummed out this Thanksgiving. Maybe you can’t believe the man in charge of the most powerful country in the world. Maybe you’re tired of all the horrible news coming out about men and sexual misconduct. Or maybe you don’t want to listen to a racist or sexist family member over dinner.

But in all this bad news, it’s easy to forget that the world is generally getting better.

That can be hard to believe at times, but it’s true. By several metrics, people around the world are living better, healthier, happier lives. That doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but at least it’s not worse than it used to be.

Here are just six examples. This is by no means a comprehensive look at the world. But the examples suggest that as harrowing as 2017 has felt at times, a lot of things really are improving.

For much of human existence, life was miserable — full of laborious work, only to end relatively quickly. It’s only recently that this has changed across the world, with global life expectancy rapidly increasing from below age 30 prior to the 1870s to more than 71 in 2015. There are a lot of reasons for this shift, including shrinking poverty, fewer big wars, and enormous medical advances that have exterminated killer diseases. But it’s a welcome sign of all the progress we’ve made in recent years.

As people are living longer, they’re also much less likely to live in poverty. In 1990, about 37 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty, meaning they made less than $1.90 a day (in inflation-adjusted terms). In 2015, less than 10 percent did. This has been driven by the incredible economic growth the world has seen in the past few decades, particularly in giant countries like China and India. As my colleague Dylan Matthews pointed out, there’s still a lot of work left to get that number down further, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. But the global gains are still remarkable.

The number of people going hungry has also dramatically fallen since the 1990s. In 1991, the global undernourishment prevalence rate was 18.6 percent, according to the World Bank. In 2015, it was 10.8 percent. So while this is far from a resolved issue, it’s at least an issue we’re making progress in.

Another reason people are living longer: Many deadly diseases are slowly going extinct. This is in large part thanks to the advent of vaccines, which gave us a much-needed way to fight previously untreatable or hard-to-treat diseases. Polio is one example, with no new cases of polio occurring over the past few years in all but a handful of countries. But it’s not just polio; vaccines also helped entirely wipe out smallpox and rinderpest around the world and nearly eradicated diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, and tetanus, among others, in the US. It’s not something you think about every day, but vaccines could be the reason you’re still alive today.

Much of the world used to be filled with the constant threat of war, from the Roman conquests to the Mongol invasions to the world wars. Today those kinds of threats are vanishingly rare. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp explained, much of that has to do with the spread of democracy, nuclear weapons creating deterrents to conventional war, and increased respect for nations’ sovereignty discouraging wars of conquest:

Whatever the explanation, the result is people are no longer anywhere near as likely to die in war. Events that once crippled entire generations are now thankfully rare.

Meanwhile, crime in America and many other wealthy nations has plummeted over the past couple of decades. The strange thing is criminologists aren’t really sure why this happened — although there are theories (ranging from “tough on crime” policies deterring more crime to less lead in gasoline making people less violent), there is no single explanation that experts have come around to. One caveat is the FBI found that murder rates — and violent crime, albeit less so — ticked up in 2015 and 2016, although no one is quite sure why this is the case either. Still, the result is all the same: Crime is near historic lows.

Again, all of these statistics don’t mean the world is perfect. There’s still plenty of work to do in several of these areas, there’s still a lot of inequality in the gains we’ve seen (particularly based on geography, nationality, ethnicity, race, and gender), and there are other threats that we should remain wary of, from terrorism to global warming.

But these broad measures show the world is generally getting better. We are not only living longer, but our lives are less likely to be hampered by poverty, hunger, disease, war, and crime than before.