Call Me Stormy

The Good News Of 2020

The general consensus anywhere on the planet these days is that 2020 ranks as one of the worst years on record. Not only were we consumed with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also a strong economic downturn, political divisiveness like we’ve never witnessed and scandal after scandal.

On the flip side, historian Johan Norberg, author of The Story of Human Progress, says we’ve never had a better year and points out that people don’t realize that life keeps getting better. And he doubles down and says, “If I were to pick a year, the best year in human history to face a pandemic, I would say it’s 2020.”

Facing such a threat, say in 2005, would have been bad news, since we didn’t have the technology to create the vaccines we now have. In the 1990s, we didn’t have the worldwide web and in the 1970s we had no way to read the genome of the virus. Forget the 1950s, we wouldn’t have had a single ventilator.

In addition, Norberg says, the world has become a lot wealthier. “If you look at specifics like global poverty, child mortality, chronic undernourishment and illiteracy, they all declined faster than ever.” He elaborates further on our prosperity in the following interview with John Stossel.