Pick up your phone when you wake up, and it feels as if we’re living in terrible times. On social media, everyone from the US president down is shouting at everyone else. Venezuela and the UK are in political meltdown. Scroll through the daily horrors, from Yemen’s civil war to child migrants kept in cages, and then shoo your kids to school so they can end up on the right side of inequality.
Yet we may remember this era as a happy parenthesis: the good times before everything did go to pot.
Scholars such as Steven Pinker of Harvard and the late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling have long argued that the median human has never had it so good. Things are terrible, except compared with all of history. For instance:
您已阅读14%（719字），剩余86%（4470字）包含更多重要信息，订阅以继续探索完整内容，并享受更多专属服务。