2017 was probably the best year in the history of humanity

Just looking at the pictures of Lebanon&#x27;s shores after a regular storm <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;world&#x2F;middleeast&#x2F;trash-lebanon-beach.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;world&#x2F;middleeast&#x2F;trash-le...</a>, the amount of garbage is shocking, even after seeing tons of pictures of garbage.<p>Maybe nature destroyed affects me more than others, but they&#x27;re pictures of regular, ordinary life these days. People didn&#x27;t hunt for them.<p>For those who remember the 1970s &quot;Crying Indian&quot; public service announcement, the chart in this article <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;joshua-spodek&#x2F;remember-single-tear-anti-litter-ads-from-70s-youll-cry-too-at-our-pollution-levels-today.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;joshua-spodek&#x2F;remember-single-tear-anti-...</a> shows its place in the context of global plastic production.<p>When past generations considered garbage levels a crying shame, the global amount plastic produced <i>ever</i> looks something like what we produce in a week today.<p>That&#x27;s just plastic. There&#x27;s also CO2, mercury, etc, plus depletion of topsoil, fish, rain forests, species diversity...<p>I should add my point isn&#x27;t to bring people down first thing in the morning but to call to action to reduce our consumption. We can act on these things.

2017 was good. So was 2016.<p>If I take my mortgage money and blow it all at the casino, that&#x27;s probably fun too.<p>We&#x27;ve been taking out loans from the atmosphere and the oceans for a hundred years and spending like mad. In the end, nature will prove to be a more cruel lender than any human.

I wouldn&#x27;t presume to question Nicholas Kristof&#x27;s awareness of world and humanitarian affairs, given that his career is so focused on it. And I applaud what I perceive to be his intent, to remind all the folks (mostly east coast media folks) that there is a world beyond Trump&#x27;s tweets, and that it is not all crisis.<p>But I&#x27;m unclear how he can say 2017 is the best year in human history. Is it merely an argument of numbers? That since hundreds of thousands more people every day have electricity and water, that the net amount of suffering has surely decreased?<p>To put it another way, what kind of disaster would have to happen in 2017 for us to say that 2017 was worse than 2016? According to his numbers, nearly 100 million people get access to water and electricity every year (300K per day). If we had got into a nuclear war that wiped out 1M people, could we still see stay that 2017 was, all things considered, a better year?<p>Last year, the UN said the Yemen&#x2F;Africa crisis was the worst humanitarian crisis since WW2. That sounds like something that would disqualify 2017 from being considered as &quot;probably the very best year in the long history of humanity.&quot; Unless it is the case that we had far fewer wars and crises elsewhere in 2017? Is that the case?<p>Edit: forgot the link <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2017&#x2F;mar&#x2F;11&#x2F;world-faces-worst-humanitarian-crisis-since-1945-says-un-official" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2017&#x2F;mar&#x2F;11&#x2F;world-faces-wo...</a>

I really believe these will be considered great days. Ignore the political hyperbole, see the actual good being done.

What&#x27;s even more important, this progress is happening without, or with limited amount of, its downsides.<p>Like, fewer and fewer children dying does not result in uncontrollable, Malthusian population explosion: number of children in the world remains constant, population grows just because of growth of life expectancy.<p>More and more people getting electricity does not mean we are using more and more non-renewable resources: consumption of coal and oil remains nearly constant and only natural gas is on the rise (while this is the cleanest fuel and there is a lot of it left).<p>Same can&#x27;t be said about clean water, though.

quote from the article: &quot;The world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats.&quot;

I presume there is a very large proportion of years in the history of humanity which were record best, so not sure how newsworthy this is.

The graph may still have gone up during 2017, but that doesn&#x27;t mean we shouldn&#x27;t worry about the derivative.

How would serious historians weigh in? Im skeptical because the tendency to assume we are always think, THIS is the greatest moment in human history. The last few centuries built up an amazing amount, but also tore alot apart.

Nevermind the global warming

2017 had a few metrics that were better than other years. That&#x27;s all.<p>Also, there&#x27;s a difference between &#x27;thriving&#x27; and &#x27;surviving&#x27;.<p>Less people starving is good, but, less people around the world are &#x27;thriving&#x27;.<p>Fascism is on the rise, nuclear war, environmental devastation, Inequality is massive.<p>This article picks a few metrics but they&#x27;re not the full picture.

Yes, things are improving on a global scale, but that doesn&#x27;t mean that the sense of unease within the United States is baseless. Quality of life for the lower and lower-middle classes has been declining, particularly in rural areas. Medical, educational, and housing costs have been increasing far faster than inflation. Social media combined with legalized bribery and gerrymandering threaten or have destroyed our democracy, with social media in particular amplifying everyone&#x27;s us-vs-them mentality to the point that everyone feels persecuted. Anxiety, depression, and suicide rates are up. Economic growth is mostly limited to a handful of large cities with high costs of living that complain of labor shortages, yet more affordable rural areas continue to suffer from work shortages.<p>Global growth and improvement is great, but if pockets of instability don&#x27;t get addressed and corrected, those trends may change.