Going to Heaven in a Handcart

It seems the world is getting better. Bill Emmott, the longtime editor of The Economist, retired recently, and wrote a valedictory piece in which he reviewed events since the beginning of his tenure in 1993:

Worldwide, GDP grew by 3% per annum; or 3.9% in purchasing power parity.

World GDP per head grew by 2.5 % per annum. This means the average person worldwide is now making 40% more than he was in 1993.

The proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day fell from 22% to 17.8 %.

The proportion of the world’s population living in countries that are “fully free” grew from 20% to 46%.

-- “A long goodbye,” Economist, April 1, 2006, pp. 13-4.

In a letter two weeks later, David Harland, of the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, chimed in that during the same time, the number of wars dropped by one third, and the number of battle deaths even further.

-- Letters, Economist, April 15, 2006, p. 15.

So the world is becoming richer and safer.

How does this jibe with the current calls of alarm about growing poverty and starvation in the Third World, and about growing tensions over declining resources?

Both predictions were really always based primarily on Marxist theory. The price of oil aside, they seem to have been proven wrong by events.