... In fact, today there are 570 million people working in the member states of the OECD. That's 30 million more than five years ago.
;By almost every conceivable measure, the world is better than it has ever been.”
This sentence does not come from... someone who would have noticed nothing about the wars, the conflicts, the chaos that apparently dominates humanity. But from one of the richest men in the world, ...who... [now] has dedicated his creative energy to the poor and defenseless. The sentence comes from Bill Gates.
7. Less bureaucracy
for self-employed people
6. More economic freedom
than ever before
5. Political freedom: see graphic ⇒
Freedom House annually measures the level of political rights and civil liberties in the world. Since 2006, there have been more countries each year in which these rights and freedoms have been restricted than countries in which they have been expanded. However: The proportion of states that Freedom House categorizes as “free” was recently at 46 percent. A historically very high level.
4. War: see graphic ⇒
The scourge of war is not going away, as new horror images from the Middle East show. But, at least, it is becoming rarer.
1993, too At the beginning of the recording, the Working Group on the Causes of War (AKUF) counted 63 wars and armed conflicts in the world. In 2013 and 2014, the Hamburg researchers came up with 31 each > The lowest value determined so far.
3. Poverty: see graphic ⇒
The number of people living in&xnbsp;extreme poverty&xnbsp;has dropped very sharply:
In 1990, 1.9 billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day (the World Bank's definition of extreme poverty), it should be 800 million this year.
As the world population has grown,< The proportion of poor people has fallen even more: from 47 percent (1990) to 14 percent (2015).
12. Life expectancy: see graphic ⇒
The life expectancy of an average newborn continues to rise. By around three years in every decade.
And: The poorer regions are gaining significantly on Also in Africa. According to current forecasts, the differences between industrialized and developing countries will continue to shrink.
11. Number of AIDS patients
increases
10. Child mortality: see graphic ⇒
5.9 million live-born children under the age of five are expected to die this year. 2.7 million of them will live to less than a month. Far too many, of course.
But it is also true: The number of such deaths has fallen steadily, year after year, without exception, since 1990.
9. Fewer pirates
8. Crime: see graphic ⇒
The risk of becoming a victim of a crime decreases. Between 2003 and 2013, relative to the size of the world population, murders became less common, rapes as well and robberies too.
Burglaries (currently a major cause for concern in Germany) have declined particularly sharply on a global scale. The same applies to car thefts.
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16. Women become
(very slowly) less disadvantaged
17. World population see graphic ⇒
The population explosion could stop. 7.4 billion today, an estimated 9.7 billion in 2050.
However The birth rate is falling. Since 1970 it has fallen from 4.7 children per woman to 2.5.
15. More middle class
18. The ozone hole
became smaller by four percent between 2000 and 2013.
19. More renewable energy sources
(especially wind power)
20. Technical progress
especially for computers and smartphones
14. Education: see graphic ⇒
204 million children in the world were not going to school in 1999. Currently there are significantly fewer, namely 121 million.
In 2010, an average Indian of working age had a good six and a half years of schooling. An average Chinese had seven and a half years.
13. Hunger and water
795 million people in the world don't have enough to eat. That's still 795 million too many.
But at least the number of hungry people since 1990 decreased by 216 million, a decline of 21 percent.
There were also successes in water supply: In 2012, 89 percent of the world population had access to clean drinking water. In 1990 it was 76 percent.
