We talk a lot about the problems of the world
in these last few years.
We've talked about war, populism, the refugee
crisis, masculinity, all those things that
worry us all the time.
But there are also some bright lights.
And apparently Matt wanted me to put it best
that I gave you all the ten reasons to look
forward to the future.
So I'll do that briefly.
Walk you through these ten reasons to be more
of an optimist about the world we live in.
But first a personal note.
Why am I so obsessed with progress?
Well, it's because I didn't used to believe
in progress.
I was like I think most people, a bit of a
nostalgic at heart, especially when I was
younger and I thought there must have been
some past when we didn't have all these problems
that consume us now, all these risks and all
those threats.
Sometime when we lived more in harmony with
one another and with nature.
And I place that sort of almost fairy-tale
story back in my an assessors northern Sweden,
in Angermanland, where they lived sort of
a decent, calm, steady farmer's life.
But then when I began to study history, I
couldn't really make up stories about what
that life was like.
I had to really ask myself where would I have
been had I lived there 150 years ago.
And it turned out that I wouldn't have been
anywhere, because life expectancy was shorter
than 30 years.
I would have been dead had I lived back then.
Because at that time when they had bad weather,
a crop failure, they were starving.
My ancestors had to put bark from the trees
into the bread to make it go longer so that
fewer children would die when the weather
was bad.
And that made it difficult for me to romanticize
the past.
They didn't live ecologically.
They died ecologically back in those days.
So that taught me respect for history and
statistics because it gives us a more firm
base on which to base our conclusions about
the world.
And I think that it's impossible not to be
an optimist if you're an historian, at least
in the long run.
There will always be diversions, distractions,
periods with backlashes and severe problems,
but the long-term trends, that arc of history
vents towards progress.
Especially in these last 200 years.
Extraordinary 200 years.
Because until then, nothing much had happened
when it came to people's living standards.
But then suddenly everything happened at once
for three reasons.
Because of a perfect storm of the enlightment,
the industrial revolution, the revolution
of openness in politics and economics, which
gave people the freedom to explore strange
new ideas and new knowledge.
It gave them the freedom to experiment with
new technologies and with new business models.
And perhaps most importantly, the freedom
to exchange the results of the technology
and the ideas with others, across borders
and with other nations.
And then everything happened.
At least these ten things that I will now
quickly run through.
And number one is food.
It was not just Sweden that used to starve.
France, one of the richest countries on the
planet, suffered seven national famines in
the 15th century, 13 in the 16th century,
11 in the 17th, and 16 in the 18th century.
And in each century, of course, they had lots,
hundreds of local famines as well.
The French historian Fernand Braudel put it
thus: Famine was a regular phenomenon recurring
so insistently in Europe that it became incorporated
into man's biological regime and built into
his daily life.
And Angus Deaton, the Nobel Laureate, he talked
of a nutritional trap in the 18th and early
19th century in France and England.
Because of a lack of calories, people could
not work hard enough to produce enough food
to be able to work hard.
But then suddenly in these last 100 years
we got more food trade across borders and
across regions.
We got plant science so better high-yielding
crops, and we got artificial fertilizer so
that we can suddenly boost yields.
And then Norman Borlaug, the agronomist from
Iowa, he turned this into a global green revolution
by going to Mexico, to India, to Pakistan
and boost yields with these modern agricultural
technologies.
And they also created some problems, environmental
problems and other things, but other things,
most of all, they saved millions and millions
of lives.
He goes down into history, Borlaug as the
person who probably saved more lives than
anybody else.
And since 1950, we've seen a revolution in
-- in food consumption.
It used to be that every second person in
the world lived in chronic undernourishment.
Today, it's around every tenth person.
But food is not enough to sustain life.
You also need a safe way of dealing with refuse
and waste, without which life is just as miserable
and probably as short.
So we go to number two, sanitation.
Sanitation and water.
Even for the richest, it was very difficult
to get rid of the refuse.
And I often think of this when I go to extravagant
places with great food, like last night.
I often think about the wealthiest, most powerful
people in the past, like the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II who threw this extravagant party,
held court in Erfurt in 1183 and all the nobles,
all the princes and princesses and knights
and priests, they were there.
But while the guests were eating the best
food on the planet, the floor began to sink,
and many noble guests fell into the cesspits
beneath, and many nobles died by drowning
in the slurry that night.
We didn't have to worry about that last night,
and very few people do, because of the improvement
in sanitation technology.
Because of the sewers, but more than that:
the chlorination, the filters that makes water
safe for us to drink.
And I do agree, we've heard that earlier today,
we do have problems with safe water in the
world, but at least over these last 30 years
we've given another 285,000 people access
to safe water every day.
That's a pretty remarkable achievement.
And this food, this sanitation gives us a
longer life.
Number three, life expectancy.
And of course antibiotics and better medicine.
I recently read two news items side by side
which gave me the sense that we've come a
pretty long way.
The first one was about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It turned out that some researchers think
that he probably died from a sore throat.
That's what you died from, even if you were
the best composer of the day.
The other story was about a successful brain
surgery where they had removed a brain tumor
and the patient was now recovering.
The patient was a goldfish.
So the goldfishes of today get better treatment
than the composers 200 years ago.
And that's one of the reasons why in 1800,
there was not a single country on the planet
where life expectancy was longer than 40 years.
Not even the richest ones.
Today, there's not a single country where
life expectancy is shorter than 40 years.
Not even the poorest ones.
And in the leading country, the one that has
the longest life expectancy, life expectancy
has increased by three months every year over
the last 150 years.
With longer lives and smaller families, because
that's what we get when we can see that our
children survive, we also improve literacy,
number four.
200 years ago, only 12% of the world population
could read and write.
Today, around 12%, just around 12%, can't
read and write.
And most of that has happened since the 1950s.
And of course with literacy, you can also
improve wealth, number five.
Literacy is the result of more wealth as well
because then you can improve schooling, you
can forgo your children's work and instead
invest in their future.
But then it also results in more wealth because
they can work in a more productive way.
In the last 200 years, extreme poverty around
the world has declined from 90% to 9%, and
most of that has happened in the last 25 years
because of globalization.
Because big Asian economies have been integrated
into the global economy and suddenly they
can use the ideas, the technologies that makes
them more productive and they can trade with
the rest of the world.
And that's why in the last 25 years, 138,000
people were lifted out of extreme poverty
every day.
Every day over the last 25 years.
Number six, freedom.
200 years ago we had slavery in every country
on the planet.
Today, we don't have slavery formally in any
country on the planet and at least people
are fighting it everywhere.
We didn't have any real formal democracy with
equal rights to vote and government under
the law in any country 200 years ago.
Now we have a majority of countries.
And we are slightly disappointed today.
I am, too, because we've seen a resurgence
of authoritarianism in many countries.
China and Russia didn't become democracies,
and so on.
We raised our expectations in 1990 and thought
that everything would become more free and
liberal.
But even since 1990, the proportion of countries
that are democracies have increased from around
46% to 63% today, despite the fact that this
was 1990 after the walls began to come down.
And very closely associated with this is number
seven, equality.
Minority rights and rights for other groups.
Wealth and literacy and freedom results often
in more tolerance.
A little over a century, no country gave women
the right to vote.
Now, even in Saudi Arabia, in local elections,
women have some part to play.
The only place where they can't do that is
the Vatican right now, and at least it shows
you that rhetorically almost every part of
the world is now saying that they are on track
of improving women's rights.
If we look at polls, men's attitude today
are more feminist than those of women in the
1970s.
That tells you something about the progress
we're making.
It's similar with gay rights.
Just a few decades ago, even here in Britain
we had undercover policemen who would pose
as gay men in public places and arrest those
who took the bait.
In United States they were purged from government
authorities in the 1950s and '60s.
They turned to the American Civil Liberties
Union and they said, no, we won't defend you
because there's no constitutional right to
engage in homosexual acts.
Today, we have 113 countries that have some
sort of gay rights in their policies, and
more of them give now marriage rights as well.
Number eight, violence.
More wealth, more democracy, rule of law,
police forces, centralization of violence
and of courts has resulted in a dramatic reduction
in violence as Steven Pinker and others points
out.
The homicide rates of London in the 14th century,
in London and Oxford, were staggering.
Around 100 people out of 100,000.
100 per 100,000 intentionally killed per year.
Today we think of the United States as especially
violent because the rate there is 4 per 100,000.
In Britain, it's now lower than 1 in 100,000.
And, actually, despite what we see in the
news and experience every day, the world is
becoming a more peaceful place as well.
There will always be wars going on, obviously,
but today the number of battle deaths is a
quarter of what it was when I grew up in the
early 1980s, and of course that was much lower
than that the 1960s, and of course that was
much, much lower than in the 1940s.
Number nine, the environment.
Yes, we're very concerned about the problems
of the oceans, global warming and so on, and
we should be but that's because we solved
many of the problems that were more urgent
and more of a threat to our immediate life.
The biggest environmental problems are still
the problems of a lack of electricity and
gas so that people have to burn wood, biofuels,
indoors to cook, which kills millions of people
because of respiratory diseases and other
things.
We have solved those problems in every industrialized
country.
That creates new industrial pollution which
are problematic.
If you saw the TV series "The Crown" about
Queen Elizabeth recently you were reminded
of the Great Smog in London in 1952.
12,000 people died of that smog over two days
because they had a couple of cold days so
they burned more coal and people died like
flies.
Well, now with wealth and technology, we're
solving those problems as well.
The six leading pollutants in Britain have
been reduced by 70% since the 1970s.
And that is what we can see now as well.
With the fuels, the power sources and with
Deep Mind, I think we are going to be able
to deal with the other environmental problems
as well.
Which brings us to number ten, the next generation.
They will be the ones who can solve this,
because all of these things combine into giving
children today a better start in life than
ever before.
Just 50 years ago, a quarter of all children
around the world were child laborers.
Now child labor is disappearing in every country
that's becoming rich around the world.
A child born today stands a greater chance
of reaching her retirement day than children
in every previous generation had of experiencing
her fifth birthday.
And this is the reason why I am basically
optimistic about the world.
It's not because there aren't any challenges.
They're enormous.
Lots of problems.
Threats to our lives and to nature.
But the reason I'm optimistic is that human
beings are the ultimate resource, as the economist
Julian Simon put it.
The more people who lead longer lives and
get a better education and get more freedoms
and are allowed to participate in the world
in culture, in education and in the global
economy, the more people are able to produce
solutions to our problems.
Human beings, as Julian Simon put it, are
the ultimate resource and it's a renewable
resource.
They can renew.
The brain can actually reproduce by low-skilled
labor on an industrial scale.
So that's why we have to be optimistic.
You know, in programming we talk about given
enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
And I think it's the same thing with the world's
problem.
That's what we've seen over the last 200 years.
The more people that are empowered, the more
problems we solve.
And when I go to a village school in the Saharan
desert and meet a 12-year-old girl who gets
connected to the world for the first time
via the Internet and begins to realize that
there are other people on the other side of
the globe who pay attention to the problems
that she's concerned with and begins to realize
that they have developed lots of knowledge
and ideas, and she can now plug into this,
make use of that accumulated knowledge and
add her own creativity to that, then I know
that we have created, we are creating an architectural
for being lucky.
I don't know how we'll solve the problems
of the world, but I know that if we give more
12-year-old girls in the Saharan desert the
opportunity to use that knowledge and add
her creativity to the mix, we increase our
chances of being lucky.
So these are the good old days.
But with so many silver linings, there's got
to be a dark cloud somewhere there; right?
And there is.
And one of the problems is that no one believes
this when I tell them this.
[ Laughter ]
No, really.
I recently produced a chart of some of these
things, some of these trends over the last
25 years.
Chronic undernourishment, illiteracy, child
mortality, and extreme poverty, how they had
all declined by half in 25 years.
The world had never seen anything like that.
One of the first things that happened is a
woman retweeted me with her own caption.
She wrote, "This is a sad, sad graph that
proves my sense that we are going to hell
in a handcart," because she had read the graph
upside-down and she thought that all those
things had been doubled in the last 25 years.
And she's not alone in doing this.
When you ask the British, so is the world
on whole improving or not, 5% says the world
is improving on the whole.
Americans are much more optimistic, of course.
6% think the world is improving there.
[ Laughter ]
So actually more people think that the moon
landing was fake than believe in progress.
And this is partly because they had not seen
these trends.
Only 10% of the British know that poverty
decreased over the last 30 years.
60% thought that it increased.
A university education gives you a bit more
knowledge.
12% of those with university education thought
that poverty had decreased over this time.
I asked this woman who retweeted me, "Why
did you assume that all those problems of
the world increased to that extent?"
She said, "This was not out of ignorance.
I pay close attention to the news, so I can
say that there are wars, famine, and poverty
every day."
And that I can sympathize with.
I wake up every morning and think that the
world is falling apart because that's what
I tune into on my cell phone every day.
That's the news I get.
And we know that's how the media works.
If it bleeds, it leads, and that's probably
because of our evolutionary predisposition.
We're kind of -- We have to be -- To be problem
solvers, we have to be problem seekers.
It was the ancestors who were worried who
probably solved a lot of problems and then
they passed their genes on to us but then
also their stress hormones on to us, so we
are a worried bunch of people.
But the problem is that we then get this sense
that these problems are increasing even though
they don't.
The homicide rate is declining, but we now
have global media and social media so there
will always be a serial killer on the loose
somewhere and then that will top the news
cycle in every country and then we will think
this is the everyday experience of most people.
But human tragedy is not new.
The cell phone camera is.
The risk is that if we think that the world
is falling apart, it's dangerous.
It's impossible to be a historian without
being an optimist but it's also impossible
to be a historian without being a bit of a
cynic because mankind has developed these
amazing abilities to cooperate, but unfortunately,
we develop them to be able to be able to kill
others in a better way.
That's our evolutionary heritage.
So it's very easy for us to get this sense
of a threat and then to combine against the
common enemy.
It's a kind of flight -- fight or flight instinct
that's triggered when we feel a certain threat.
When we think that the world is falling apart,
a kind of authoritarian disposition is triggered,
social psychologists tell us.
Generally, as Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist,
has explained, in case of a threat, we get
this sense.
It's like we press a button, where we think
that we have to lock down the borders, kick
out those who are different and punish those
who are morally deviant.
We want to fight.
We arm ourselves.
We want to kick out the foreigners and the
minorities.
We want to flee and hide behind tariff barriers
and behind walls.
And if we then have populist politicians who
are eager to exploit this sense that we are
drowning in bad news, the world is on fire,
they know exactly that they can get that power
if they give us the sense that everything
is on fire.
So to sum up, I didn't write this book because
I'm so happy and just sort of everything automatically
be all right in the world.
I wrote this book because we -- this is an
incredible accomplishment the world has never
seen the like of.
But it's also a little bit fragile.
The populist would undermine the openness
that makes this happen.
And that has happened before in history.
So I wrote in book to tell you do not take
this for granted.
We have screwed this up before.
Woody Allen once said that his one regret
in life was that he was not someone else.
[ Laughter ]
And it's easy to get that sense once in a
while when it comes to our civilization as
well, I think.
But this is my main message.
This is a luxury that we do not have.
We have the civilization, and it's a beautiful
civilization, and it's worth fighting for.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
