Anyone who is suffering is unlikely to want to hear that things are better. In addition, the picture of the happy insulated fool whistling along while everything is going wrong is not one many people want to imitate. Besides, if you are in the habit of being in the present, it may not matter much that things were worse 100 years ago. This morning, a tweet by the psychologist and author Steven Pinker mentioned the website "Our World in Data." Pinker is the author of "The Better Angels of Our Nature" and more recently "Enlightenment Now." That puts him in the group of people like Mona Chalabi, Hans Rosling and others who keep an eye on the big picture.
In graduate school, I had many occasions to admire John Tukey, a statistician at Princeton. He had many very helpful ideas, often of a sort that simplified things. In inventing a quick and easy test of statistical significance, he wrote that if the highest score in one group was lower than the lowest score in another, stop right there. The two groups are significantly different. So, if the scores of the groups don't overlap at all, that is important.
I visited the website "Our World in Data", headed up by Max Roser. There are many data analyses on the site but I clicked on longevity, a basic measure of our lives. The page states the highest longevity in the world in 1800 was lower than the lowest in today's world. No overlap! The website shows progress in lowering poverty worldwide, lowering infant mortality worldwide, lessening hunger worldwide.
You may be having a bad day or a bad month. But worldwide, through effort and excellence and ingenuity, things are getting better.
