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"The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.”

— Pete Seeger

Friday optimistic charts

The world has a great story to tell, but no one seems interested in telling it. 

Instead, we are inundated by every bit of bad news that’s fit to print, mostly, of course, because that’s what gets our clicks. 

It should be remembered, however, that bad news is news precisely because it’s the exception to the rule — it’s just that we’re offered so much of it, it feels like it must be the opposite.

It’s not: the good news is all around us, but it goes unnoticed because we take so much of it for granted.

In 1783 — when people still had an undiminished sense of wonder — the first demonstration of flight by hot air balloon attracted 130,000 spectators to Versailles Palace where.

A cotton and paper balloon carried its passengers (a duck, a sheep, and a cockerel) to a previously unimaginable altitude of 600 meters before setting down at a random spot in the woods 3.5 kilometers away — safely, much to the delight and surprise of the crowd.

(Seeing that animals could survive at that unprecedented altitude, a second flight was risked with two human passengers in Paris a month later.)

Today, by contrast, we complain about a one-hour flight delay without giving a thought to the wonder of an airplane firing us 40,000 feet in the air at 600 miles per hour before landing us safely at our chosen destination 100s of miles away just a couple of hours later.

For $200.

Even decades after the invention of hot air balloons, that same trip would have been a months-long journey on horseback — if you could afford a horse, which you probably couldn’t. 

How wonderous would airplanes seem to those not-so-distant ancestors of ours? 

Or electricity? Or Zoom calls?

Things that would have been considered sorcery just decades ago go entirely unnoticed today — except on the rare occasion that something doesn't work, as Louis CK illuminates with his shtick about the absurdity of complaining about airplane WiFi: “Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy.”

If our recent ancestors could see us now, they’d think we live like kings. 

Most of us, at least. 

There is still a lot to improve on, of course: Billions fewer live in extreme poverty, but hundreds of millions still do.

But that’s the exciting part. 

As rapidly as things have improved, they may be about to get even better, even more rapidly. 

Because if human intelligence has gotten us this far, this fast, surely the advent of artificial intelligence will get us much further, much faster? 

There are risks, of course.

But to my (overly optimistic?) mind, the most rigorous studies of AI risk also seem to be the most hopeful ones.

One finds there’s a good chance that “AI automation could accelerate global economic growth by about an order of magnitude”; another found that AI can “boost productivity without replacing workers.”

Better yet, a third study finds that we can (and should) ignore the scarily high estimates of “p(doom)” — the pseudo-precise probability that AGI will end humanity.

The real p(doom) is probably vanishingly low, but, either way, all of that lies in the future and worrying about it unnecessarily diminishes our appreciation of the present. 

We already live in an amazing world of remote surgery, hydrogen-powered helicopters (300 mile range with no emissions other than water), humans talking to whales, audio books read by dozens of actors, exoskeletons that let people work longer in labor-intensive jobs, sideloading trucks, beaches that remove carbon from the ocean, HIV vaccines, the imminent prospect of cancer vaccines and longer lives, plug-in solar panels, and concrete that doubles as a battery.

I think we should stop taking these wonders for granted.

To that end, let’s check some charts (and pictures and infographics). 

When else would you have rather been alive?

To the extent that inflation-adjusted, per-capita GDP is a proxy for living standards, there’s never been a better time to be alive than right now.

Going in the right direction (rapidly):

If your mental response to the first chart was “but, climate change” … I hear you, it’s scary. But, even there, there’s a lot of hopeful news. Per the chart above, natural gas far exceeds coal as a source of electricity in the US and now even wind does, too (the light green line). Better yet, Qatar is (self-interestedly) planning to kill coal in Asia. Best yet, the popular perception of nuclear power (the light blue line at the bottom) is finally changing. 

Solar power keeps beating expectations:

After exceeding expectations (the gold lines above) for two decades, solar cells are on pace to become “the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s,” according to The Economist. “By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy.” 

9% less bad:

Deforestation always seems like a lost cause to me, but even there the news is getting less bad, at least.

We can science our way out of this mess:

Researchers at the University of Michigan have figured out how to convert carbon dioxide into useable methane — one small step for science, but a “leap towards carbon neutrality” for mankind. The best news is, there should be many more such leaps to come with AI speeding up the process of scientific discovery.

A good kind of geopolitical competition:

A new space race is underway, according to the Wall Street Journal, with the US and China both racing to be the first to develop fusion power — the holy grail of energy sustainability.

The robots are coming:

And they’re coming to do the jobs we don’t want to, like clearing beaches of cigarette butts.

The kids are alright:

Contra to popular perception, millennials' finances are booming: “In early 2024, millennials and older members of Gen Z had, on average and adjusting for inflation, about 25% more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at a similar age.” 

Gen Z is on pace to do even better than that:

“Zoomers are much better off than millennials were at the same age, as well as the other preceding generations,” according to the Economist. Now, remind me again how easy everything was in the 1990s?

The magic of Ozempic:

Shares of Dexcom, a maker of diabetes monitors, recently fell 41% in a day on news of declining sales. Shares of Novo Nordisk, maker of the anti-obesity drug Ozempic, have been booming on news of people no longer worrying about diabetes.

Our horse-riding ancestors would never have imagined that food would be so plentiful that we needed to invent drugs to stop us from eating so much of it. 

Yet here we are.

In what other moment of history would you prefer to be alive?

Have a great weekend, good-news readers.

— Byron Gilliam

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