LOOKING BETTER?

That assumes, of course, you were lucky enough to be able to read. Mass literacy is another recent development. For most of human history people were – literally – preoccupied with a life-and-death struggle to find enough to eat. The idea that, at least in the developed world, starvation would no longer be an imminent threat would be hard to imagine. The possibility of people sitting at a computer screen reading articles on the internet would be almost impossible to conceive.

Yet rather than celebrate the immense achievements of economic development, there is a widespread feeling of resentment. Many people in the developed world believe that life is getting worse. Economic growth and technological development are viewed with anxiety and sometimes outright hostility. If our great-grandparents could be brought back to life they would be astonished by humanity’s achievements but also bewildered by our ungrateful attitudes towards these gains.

In this context, The Improving State of the World should be warmly welcomed. Not only does Indur Goklany, a policy analyst based in Washington DC, show how human well-being has improved immensely in recent years. He also points the way to improving things still further in the future.

Goklany, who has worked in environmental policy for over 30 years, says it was partly his Indian upbringing that motivated him to write the book. Most of the people he meets in his professional capacity, specialising in climate change and in health policy, have a bleak view of the world. They tend to assume things are getting worse all the time. ‘I don’t share that point of view,’ he tells me. ‘A lot of that has to do with my background. Because I’m an Indian I’ve got an idea of how bad things can really be.’ That led him to spend seven years ‘moonlighting’ on the book to set the record straight. He has also written previous books on the precautionary principle and on air quality as well as numerous articles.