Guest Post by John Stossel
Was 2020 the worst year ever? The media keep saying that.
We did have the pandemic, a bitter election, unemployment, riots and a soaring national debt.
But wait, look at the good news, says historian Johan Norberg. His new book, “Open: The Story of Human Progress,” points out how life keeps getting better, even if people just don’t realize it.
2020 was “the best year in human history to face a pandemic,” he says.
Had the pandemic happened in 2005, “You wouldn’t have the technology to create mRNA vaccines.”
“In 1990,” he continues, “we wouldn’t have a worldwide web. If we had had this pandemic in 1976, we wouldn’t have been able to read the genome of the virus. And … in 1950, we wouldn’t have had a single ventilator.”
These last 20 years, adds Norberg, have been especially good. “Mankind has attained more wealth than ever.”
I push back: “There’s more to life than wealth! And lot of this money went to the top 1%. Ordinary people think they’re doing worse.”
“If you look at specifics like global poverty, child mortality, chronic undernourishment and illiteracy,” Norberg replies, “they all declined faster than ever.”
Those things: global poverty, child mortality, undernourishment,and illiteracy are pretty good measures of quality of life.
“Literacy might be the most important skill,” says Norberg. “It’s the skill that makes it possible to acquire other skills. We’ve never seen literacy at these high levels ever before. (Even) in the most problematic countries around the world, it’s better than it was in the richest countries 50, 60 years ago. That’s most important for those who have the least.”
Of course, there were bad trends in 2020. Murder rose in the United States. Social media algorithms divided us further. “Suicide is up,” I tell Norberg.
“I can definitely see the problems,” he replies, “but once upon a time, if you ended up in the wrong school or neighborhood, you had nowhere to go — no other community available to you. Now there is, and that opens up a world of opportunity. Some awful things as well, but some beautiful things.”
That meant that even during this pandemic, people found new ways to help others.
Volunteers used the internet to find better ways to donate their time. Young people brought food to the elderly.
Zoom and Slack taught us that not being in the office sometimes works as well, or better.
Businesses had new tools with which to adapt.
Restaurants moved to takeout and delivery, aided by apps like UberEats and Grubhub.
Such healthy adaptation rarely makes news, because reporters seek out problems.
Many worry loudly about climate change. Some claim the environment keeps getting worse. A dismayed CBS correspondent mourned, “Biodiversity is reportedly declining faster than any time!”
Even if that were true, says Norberg, “We have never made this much progress against pollution. The six leading pollutants, the ones that used to pollute our lungs and forests and rivers, they’ve declined by some 70%!”
In January of this year, when President Trump announced the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, “World War III” trended on Twitter. The Selective Service website crashed for fear there would be a draft.
“People think there’s more war,” I say to Norberg.
“But we’ve forgotten the wars that we had in the past! When I grew up in the 1980s, there were more wars, and battle death rates were four times higher.”
Less war is one reason people keep living longer. After COVID-19, that trend will continue.
“We have this tendency, for good reasons, to focus on problems, because that’s our way of solving problems,” says Norberg. “But then there’s the risk that we’ll just despair and think it’s hopeless and we give up. That’s not the solution to our problems.
“Just cheer up and be happy?” I ask.
He answers, “Be a little bit grateful for what we have.”
John Stossel is author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
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I’ve always appreciated Stossel, until this piece. Hey John, I want some of whatever you’re smoking!
Go. Fuck. Yourself. John.
There once was a time when you had a brain.But that was long long ago.
Sticky did poor little Johnny boy hurt your fweeelings. Maybe you should find a safe space.
I want the five minutes I wasted reading this stupid article back. Stossel has lost the plot.
It is not now, nor ever was a pandemic. It will not now, nor ever decimate the population of the planet. And being told I can’t f-ing go anywhere because everything but f-ing wally mart is closed is no reason to be freaking happy.
Who the fuck wants to actually spend time at
Walmart.!
My sister, sister in law and brother in law each lost their jobs due to Covid. My sister and brother in law may lose their house (my sister is over dramatic so, not sure how true that is). The kicker is, my parents live with my sister. My brother works as a mortgage loan officer and he says, don’t worry the future is bright.
How close together do dots have to be before this moron can easily connect them? We had the plannedemic when we had the plannedemic BECAUSE we have the ability to keep people at home being productive, can order food electronically and have it delivered, can successfully engineer exactly the kind of virus we want, can now create species-destroying RNA vaccines, we had a US president the globalists needed to get rid of, and everything is in place for the “great reset.” Fauci attempted to kick start plannedemics in the past, including the recent Swine Flu one. Nothing stuck because there was too much resistance among those who knew that the people would rebel. It stuck this time because there was enough lying scum mainstream media, enough censoring and lying scum social media, and enough big business folks who could fill the gaps created by all the destruction.
You are all a bunch Fucken retards. Everything in his book is fact. We do live in a better world. However people have not changed. They still want your money. They still want to control your life. Boo fucken hoo the mainstream is out drive fear into every bodies life. Grow up faggots.