In most of the world, poverty has fallen a lot. “The proportion of the world’s adults with a net worth of less than $10,000 has plunged this century, from 75% in 2000 to less than 40% in 2023,” reports Axios. “The trend underscores the astonishing decline in inequality that we’ve seen over the past couple of decades….The proportion of adults in the next band up, with wealth of between $10,000 and $100,000, has more than doubled, from 17% in 2000 to 43% in 2023. An adult who was in the lowest bracket in 2000, with a net worth of less than $10,000, has a 62% chance of moving into a higher bracket by 2030,” according to the UBS Wealth Report. “Never before in human history has there been” so much economic mobility upward.
Inequality has declined over time in most wealthy countries as well. “The Gini coefficient — the standard measure of inequality — fell between 2008 and 2023 in such countries as the U.S., Israel, Germany, Switzerland, and Korea.”
Life spans are rising as well. Life expectancy will rise by 5 years in the world as a whole by 2050. In most of the world, life expectancy has risen over the last decade, unlike the United States, where people have shorter lives than they had ten years ago. U.S. life expectancy is now 77.5 years, compared to 78.84 years back in 2014, when the core elements of Obamacare went into effect.
Americans’ health declined even as the provisions of Obama’s healthcare law — the Affordable Care Act — were supposed to have been helping. Life expectancy shrank in 2015, for the first time in many years. As ABC News warned then, “A decades-long trend of rising life expectancy in the U.S. could be ending: It declined last year and it is no better than it was four years ago.” The Economic Policy Journal predicted in 2012 that “life expectancy will decline under Obamacare.” In 2009, the dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, said Obamacare would cost lives by harming life-saving medical innovation. In 2013, two physicians wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Obamacare is “bad for your health,” and would hamper medical innovation by driving down investment in medical devices.
Most of the world’s forests are expanding. The amount of vegetation on the Earth has increased for each of the last 30 years. On the other hand, political and economic freedom have fallen worldwide over the last several years.
Traffic deaths consistently fell worldwide over the past decade, unlike in the U.S., where traffic deaths rose enormously after the death of George Floyd, due to American police pulling back from making police stops. The rise in motor vehicle fatalities was especially sharp for black people, with “motor vehicle fatalities among blacks” soaring “36 percent in June–December 2020 versus the same period in 2019, compared with a 9 percent increase among the rest of the population.” “In the tumultuous first month of the racial reckoning,” that followed George Floyd’s death, “743 black people were killed in traffic fatalities, up from 478 in June 2019, a 55 percent increase.”
As the publication Vox noted about the recent increase in U.S. traffic deaths:
According to a 2021 survey of over 1,000 police officers, nearly 60 percent said they were less likely to stop a vehicle for violating traffic laws than they were prior to 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired nationwide protests……traffic stops are decreasing while deaths are rising….Some experts…think there’s an obvious link. Enforcement efforts that are high-visibility and focused on safety are shown to reduce risky driving.
