Are You Better Off in 2019?

We’re only a week into 2019, but – for those of you who can’t help looking into the rear-view mirror at the market, political and social chaos of 2018 – here are two recent articles that should make you feel a bit better about the New Year.

The first, written by Wall Street Journal economics contributor Greg Ip (a Canadian and therefore by definition more optimistic than most Americans), is headlined “The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better”. 

The second is a New Yorker magazine review of Steven Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now, which makes a similar claim that “despite our dark imaginings” (fueled in part by the negative bias of today’s popular and social media) “life has been getting better in pretty much every way.”

The perplexing and worrisome fact is that a majority of people in 14 countries – including in the United States – believe precisely the opposite. Which raises several questions for me: Are people looking beyond the last market moves in the trading day or the last political election when evaluating how far humanity has come over the past century? Or even how much better off they personally might be today than the generations that came before them? If not, as Jonah Goldberg asks in The Suicide of the West, is it possible that “ingratitude [could be] enough to destroy a civilization”?