9 charts to be thankful for this Thanksgiving (Really great things)
9 charts to be thankful for this Thanksgiving
Yes, we’re still in a pandemic — but there are some things to be grateful for amid a difficult stretch for humanity.
By Dylan Matthew's at Vox
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22783828/poverty-vaccines-cancer-charts-thanksgiving
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Nov 24, 2021, 8:00am EST
Finding the best ways to do good.
For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. More than 750,000 Americans and 5 million people worldwide have died from Covid-19. A mob tried to violently stop the winner of our most recent presidential election from taking office through an attack on the Capitol. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires and other natural disasters, and we are not on track to avoid large-scale warming by 2100.
This is all real, and truly alarming. But it would be a mistake to view that as the sum total of the world in 2021. Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth — in areas like public health, the economy, science and technology, and animal welfare, among others — are getting better, sometimes dramatically so.
Many of us aren’t aware of the ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias. To be sure, some objective conditions aren’t mere spin: This pandemic has been a horror. But it also happens to be the case that negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones. Survey evidence consistently indicates that few people in rich countries have any clue that the world has taken a happier turn in recent decades — one poll in 2016 found that only 8 percent of US residents knew that global poverty had fallen since 1996.
It’s worth paying some attention to this huge progress. The people benefiting aren’t missing it — 50 percent of Chinese respondents in the 2016 poll said they knew poverty had fallen — and you shouldn’t either.
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