Amanda Starbuck is a senior food researcher and policy analyst at Food & Water Watch.



*****



I’ve talked about the other thing a couple of times already, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough about it by now, and there’s nothing extra that I can say that hasn’t already been said, so let’s talk about something else.







Let’s talk about the state of the world and
its people. Bear in

mind that life expectancy in the US in the year 1900 was about 48. Thinking
of all the countries in the world, taking into account the huge populations of
the poor countries in Africa and Asia, what would you guess is the average life
expectancy of people today? 50 years? 60 Years? No, the

average across the whole world is now 70.







And again, across the whole world, what
percent of the population do you think has access to electricity? The answer is
80 per cent. And if you had to guess what percent of children had at least some
of their vaccinations? Again, across the planet, the answer is 80 per cent.



Finally, if you had to guess, over the last
hundred years, taking into account the massive population explosion we’ve had,
what has happened to the number of people – the absolute number, not the
proportion – the number of people who die each year in natural disasters; has
it more than doubled? Stayed the same? In fact, that number has more than
halved.



All these figures come from a

book by the Swedish academic Hans Rosling, and he formulated them to show
us that sometimes, things are much better than we think they are, and in
particular, for all our cynicism, things can and do get better. Lots better.



By those metrics that he chooses, the
average person in the world today is vastly better off than the average person
was in the United States a hundred years ago.