Human Life Is Getting Better. Faster Than Ever Before.
Channel: vlogbrothers
Date: 2017-02-14

Read and be inspired by the 2017 Gates Letter: https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter
 In which John discusses the annual letter from Melinda and Bill Gates, and how it shows that the world is getting dramatically better. Since I was your (average) age, global poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10%. Child mortality has been cut nearly in half. And by the time the average vlogbrothers viewer is my age, absolute poverty and child mortality should both be extremely rare everywhere on Earth.

There is a lot of bad news. It is real. It is important. But it's also important to take a step back and look at the human story over time, and each year the Gates letter offers us that opportunity.

SOURCES:

Our World in Data is an amazing resource for understanding changes over time in the human condition, from literacy rates to life expectancy. Their overview of the child mortality situation is excellent: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality/ as is their introduction to absolute poverty rates: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/

The In a Nutshell video I reference (which was made with Our World in Data, incidentally) can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

The 2014 Gates letter pretty well destroyed the argument that foreign aid doesn't work: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Media/Annual-Letters-List/Annual-Letter-2014 (It's true that much of the foreign aid during the Cold War was often minimally effective at reducing poverty and improving health, but it wasn't really DESIGNED to do either; it was designed to sway governments toward capitalism or communism. Foreign aid since 1990 has been been better targeted, especially when it comes to health care. There is a longer and more academic overview of the research here: https://www.oecd.org/dev/34353462.pdf

Less than 1% of the U.S. federal government's budget goes to foreign aid: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/26/the-u-s-foreign-aid-budget-visualized/?utm_term=.48e0f09380d8 (...unless you count defense aid, then it is like 1.2%)

Any other questions, feel free to ask in comments!

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