I suspect it is pretty safe for me to assume that most of you don’t really think of the year 1954. Even in a historical or newsworthy sense, it wasn’t very exciting. I only think about it because it is the year I was born and that isn’t earth-shattering or newsworthy.

With my 70th birthday approaching, I thought I’d examine the progress of a lifetime—not my progress but global progress.

In today’s political climate, many individuals want to panic the populace with dire predictions. Authoritarians rely heavily on creating imaginary monsters and exaggerating bad news. They need to stampede the herd in the direction they desire, and they do it through fear.

As Bellwether, the villain in Disney’s Zootopia says, regarding her drive for power, “Fear always works.”

One of the various facts indicating the widest category of progress is life expectancy. It measures close to everything: health care, food supplies, education, social violence, etc.

According to Macrotrends, the global average life expectancy was 47.44 in 1954; today, they place it at 73.33. When I was born in the U.S. the estimated life expectancy was 66.7, today it is 77.5 years.

One thing this shows is the global improvements we’ve seen over the last 70 years predominantly benefitted developing nations. While life expectancy grew in developed nations, the growth was far more dramatic outside those nations.

We can also look at one of the more heartbreaking problems that plagued humanity throughout history — child mortality. Losing a child is hard for even the stoutest individual. In 1954, the child mortality rate in Africa was an astounding 30.1% but today, according to Our World in Data, they list the 2021 figure at 6.6%.

They put the rate for South Africa at 19.6% in 1954, but it will be 3.5% in 2021.

We can also look at nutrient intake in terms of kilocalories consumed per day. The estimate for the world average in 1961 was 2,181, and for Africa, it was 2,011. By 2021, the estimates were 2,959.11 kcal for the world and 2,573.04 kcal for Africa. This means saved lives.

They estimate that during the 1950s, some 8.9 million died from famines. It jumped in the 1960s to 16.6 million thanks to Maoist Communism in China but by the 2010s, it was down to 250,000, then mostly in Somalia. In terms of deaths per 100,000, it was 32.2 in the 1950s, but down to 0.5 in the 2010s.

When it came to extreme poverty, the World Bank estimated that 56% of the population was in that sad state in 1954, while the general estimate is 9% in 2024.

Another important sign of progress is education, and one key measure is the percentage of primary school-age children who are actually in school. Back in 1955, an estimated 63.6% of the world’s children were in school, while in 2019, it was 89.3%, again, with most of the progress in the developing world.

During the same time period, the percentage of South African children in schools increased from 39.9% to 84.4%.

Another important measure of human progress is the rise of liberal democracies. While this degree of freedom may be considered evil by Putin’s Russia or Communist China, it remains an important measure of human rights and freedom.

Our World in Data uses two main categories: autocracies and democracies. Each is further divided into two groups. There are closed autocracies, such as China, and electoral autocracies, where show elections are held, such as Russia. In democracies, there are both liberal and electoral democracies.

In 1954, they put 64.74% of the world’s nations down as closed autocracies with another 18.59% as electoral autocracies, for a total of 83,33%. By 2022, they dropped to 18.44% and 30.17%, respectively, for a total of 48.61%.

In contrast, liberal democracies rose from 10.26% of nations to 18.99% while electoral democracies rose from 6.4% to 32.4%; an improvement from 16.67% in 1954 to 51.39%.

Of course, there has also been amazing improvement in world technology. For instance, entire regions of the developing world are too remote to access a power grid. Back in 1954, they had few options available. Today, solar panels allow any village with sunlight to have access to power.

When I was born, there simply was no such thing as a home computer or the Internet. You could be a millionaire and still be out of luck. Today, an estimated 42% of the world’s population has home computers, and 63% of the global population has access to the Internet.

Over my lifetime, I’ve seen vast improvements in the world. Yet, I see fear merchants trying to promote bad news, even if they have to invent it.