Congratulations Humanity

The silent miracle of human progress. Unspoken, unpublicised and unexpected. World improvements are occurring faster than ever before, but because of the media and the influence of our instincts, less than 10% of people actually know that the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved. Our perceptions of the world need to change. This is a great achievement, so why aren’t we celebrating our successes and broadcasting them for all of humanity to see?

   It’s a journalist’s professional duty to present any event, fact or number as an overdramatic worldview. Although we have increasing access to the media, stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page, even though they occur on massive scales and impact millions of people. Yes, terrorism, overfishing and deterioration of seas, species extinction and sea levels are rising and there are pressing issues we need to deal with before we reach a tipping point. However, there are many more positives that are rarely brought to light. Ozone depletion, child labour, oil spills, illegal slavery and hunger some of the negatives that have been decreasing, whilst women’s rights to vote, literacy, democracy, girls in school, water and child cancer survival are also on the up.

   As humans, we are hardwired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive, including one that Hans Rosling has termed ‘the gap instinct.’ Our brains are product of millions of years of natural selection causing us to automatically categorise and create gaps in reality. These categories are necessary for us to function and create a vulnerability which the media often exploits by promoting stereotypes. Many Westerners use ‘African countries’ or ‘African problems’  to make our ‘third-world problems’ seem insignificant. However, Africa is a huge continent of 54 countries and one billion people living at various levels of development. It is like talking about Ebola spreading in Zimbabwe when it would take nearly 150-hours to drive from Zimbabwe to Sierra Leone. Africa is, on average, lagging behind other continents as the average lifespan of a newborn baby is 65 years but in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Egypt the life expectancy is above the world average of 72 years. Small islands in the sub-Saharan are still part of Africa and in places such as Mauritius, where people live ‘Western’ lives, the HDI is higher than China, Mexico and Brazil. This is incredible and represents how gap stories can reflect reality, but there are still differences both between and within categories.

   The media frequently employs the terms developing and developed, the poor and the rich and the west and the rest but is this just an appeal to our instincts? Many people think the average of people living in low-income countries is 59%. The real figure is 9%. 75% of humans now live in middle-income countries where this so-called ‘gap’ is supposed to be. In 2017, 40% were classed as living in the West and 60% were classed as living in the ‘rest’. By 2040, 60% will be living in these non-Western countries, and 40% will be living in the West meaning that the non-Western countries will actually be the majority. A developed country is classed by the Cambridge dictionary as ‘’a country with a lot of industrial activity and where people generally have high incomes.’’ A developing country is classed as ‘’a country with little industrial and economic activity and where people generally have low incomes.’’ This seems to suggest that developed countries are no longer developing and counterexamples are easily found. England is classed as a developed country but 80% of our GDP is from the service sector, not from secondary industry. Similarly, the World Bank classifies Palau as a ‘developing country’ but also as a ‘high-income country.’ Either the terms or the definitions need to be updated so we can accurately define the status of countries in today’s world.

     So why shouldn’t we celebrate? There are only 800 million people left living in extreme poverty (earning less than $1.9 per day). This may sound like a lot, but now we know the solutions (peace, schooling, universal basic healthcare, electricity, clean water, toilets and contraceptives), eradication of extreme poverty is within our grasp. As part of the UN Millennium Goal 1, an aim was to halve the proportion of those people whose income is less than $1.25 a day between 1990 and 2015 and the UN met their target 5 years before the end goal. Extreme poverty is not to be taken lightly, so, although we should focus on the devastating effect it has on lives, we should also be celebrating its demise. The huge job of eradicating extreme poverty was started in 1800 and our generation has been passed the baton to complete the job. We should have an extraordinary party when we are done.

   Hooray! The world's LLDCs are far more modernised and affluent than they were in the past. Plastic bags are used to store and transport food, plastic buckets are used to carry water and soap to kill germs and most children are vaccinated. We are actually playing catch-up with Kenya’s mobile phone banking system from 2007, M-PESA, which now, in 2018, 93% of Kenyans have access too. Meanwhile, Apple Pay only came out in October 2014. India even has a bank for the poor (the Grameen Bank), authorised in 1983, which helps rural families to break out of the cycle of poverty. We only established a UK version in 2014, using the help extended by Professor Muhammad Yunus who is now a Nobel Prize winner. We are definitely lagging behind in both technology, innovation and knowledge.

  Some of these facts may surprise you and this is not through any fault of our own. Both our instincts and the media are hiding the great achievements we have made. We need to change our perception of the world and start celebrating the positives to learn how we we can be successful as a species. But the reality is, the world in the 21st century is a much better place to live in. Congratulations humanity!