Imagining the Future

Through ongoing innovations in agriculture and the development of crops that produce a higher yield — India has become a net exporter of rice, for instance — we are feeding more people. Not the whole world, it must be said, but we have come a long way. According to a 2004 report from the United Nations, more than thirty countries reduced the number of hungry people by at least 25 percent during the 1990s.


I don’t want to sound overly optimistic here. aids continues to ravage Africa, and until we find ways to deal with that tragedy, a deep shadow will haunt our future. However, there is a genuine commitment to finding a cure for big killers like malaria and dysentery. In the past, a disease like sars in China, Hong Kong, and Toronto would have wiped out tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. It didn’t. Because we collaborated globally to fight sars, we lost only hundreds.


Since the sixties, we have halved the rates of child mortality for most of the developing world, including China, India, and Brazil, and at the same time we have increased global life expectancy by seventeen years. The average number of children per woman in most of the developing world has gone from more than five to fewer than four, while child mortality in some countries has gone from between 10 and 40 percent of the population under five to less than 10 percent. According to Gapminder.org, “Today most countries in Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world have small families and infant mortality is low. We now have a completely different world!”

Related to this shift is the changing role of women. In a conversation I had with E.O. Wilson, the author of The Future of Life, he said, “If you want to do something for the environment, educate and liberate women,” because “when women are educated and liberated, the birth rate declines.” The statistics suggest that this is exactly what is happening.


Not literally, of course. I am not that optimistic! But for most of recorded history, life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Many died in infancy. If we survived, we married young, and died young. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy was just over thirty-two years. Today, average life expectancy worldwide is now sixty-five years.


One way to measure global progress is through the United Nations Human Development Index. The hdi measures a basket of factors including life expectancy, school enrolment, adult literacy, and gross domestic product per capita. Taken together, these offer a useful portrait of the development of a society and its ability to meet the needs of its citizens.

Looking at human development around the world since 1975, it is striking to see that with few exceptions the trends are all positive. Not only do the United States, Canada, and other Western nations show steady improvement, but more recently countries like India, China, and Brazil are moving in the same direction. With the glaring exception of Africa, we are moving to a more developed world. Of the thirtytwo countries still classified as low development, with an hdi of less than 0.5, thirty are in Africa. But public awareness of Africa’s situation is at least on an upward swing, a dramatic change in its long and tortured history with the West.