What type of world do we live in

So much happens every day. Some of it is stressful and dangerous. When our minds and hearts are stressed to the point of overwhelm, they do one of three things: flee, fight, or freeze. As things get more worrisome and tension builds to , we need alternatives to react-and-resist mode.

Hundreds of people used bright markers to write words like: Kind. One 4-year-old wrote CATS! Too cute! Everyone longs for something. Every time I look at this poster, I get a little misty. It makes me hopeful. We all need inspiration as counterbalance to the day-to-day realities. Knowing what we long for reminds us who we are and what really matters.

Ponder this for a few moments. If you feel moved, I invite you to share your response below. My creative hour for the day will be designing a postcard incorporating these words.

I will be using them to share with others, but for now, I have postings to do on Facebook…….. Thanks for the inspiration. Thank you, Jen, and all those working with you. That includes me, as I am doing my part and thanks to your work I am learning new ways of being in the world with making a difference. I want to live in a world where everyone is appreciated for being just who they are. Not even just the absence of police brutality and daily shootings.

I long for the peace that arises from justice, reparations, true equality. Peace that encompasses safety, nourishment, quiet and right relationship. So that anyone and everyone has the chance to take a deep breath, look out of their affordable home, and see a neighborhood that is quiet enough to hear the sounds of nature, safe and clean enough to hear the sounds of children at play. I want to live in a world where all beings human and non-human and the Earth are cherished and respected.

A world of people who recognize the deep connection we share to all life and even inanimate beings , thereby allowing us to nurture the earth, and make decisions in harmony with her well-being. A Bangladeshi man in the immigrant prison told me of his suffering. But at a time when doctors did not wash their hands when switching from post-mortem to midwifery the theory finally convinced our ancestors that hygiene and public sanitation are crucial for health.

The germ theory of disease laid the foundation for the development of antibiotics and vaccines, and it allowed humanity to finally gain some ground in the age-old battle against the microbes. Public health mattered hugely: Everybody benefits from everybody else being vaccinated , and everybody benefits from everybody else obeying the rules of hygiene.

With these changes global health improved in a way that was unimaginable to our ancestors. In child mortality was down to 3. You have to take this long perspective to see the progress that we have achieved.

The same data on child mortality also shows us just how large of a problem child mortality still is. On average 15, children die every day. Political freedom and civil liberties are at the very heart of development — as they are both a means for development and an end of development. Journalism and public discourse are the pillars on which this freedom rests, but qualitative assessments of these aspects bears the risk that we are mistakingly perceiving a decline of liberties over time when in fact we are raising the bar by which we judge our liberty.

Quantitative assessments can therefore be useful when they help us to measure freedom against the same yardstick across countries and over time. There is just no way around that. In this analysis I rely on the Polity IV index as it is the least problematic of the measures that present a long term perspective. Again I want to give a long-term perspective to get an idea of how political freedom has changed over these last years.

The chart shows the share of people living under different types of political regimes during this period. Throughout the 19th century more than a third of the population lived in colonial regimes and almost everyone else lived in autocratically ruled countries. The first expansion of political freedom from the late 19th century onward was crushed by the rise of authoritarian regimes that in many countries took their place in the time leading up to the Second World War.

In the second half of the 20th century the world has changed significantly: Colonial empires ended, and more and more countries turned democratic: The share of the world population living in democracies increased continuously — particularly important was the breakdown of the Soviet Union which allowed more countries to democratise. Now more than every second person in the world lives in a democracy. The huge majority of those living in an autocracy — 4 out of 5 — live in one autocratic country: China.

The world population was around 1 billion in the year and increased 7-fold since then. The increase of the world population should evoke more than doom and gloom however. First of all, this increase shows a tremendous achievement. It shows that humans stopped dying at the rate at which our ancestors died for the many millennia before. In pre-modern times fertility was high — 5 or 6 children per woman were the norm.

What kept the population growth low was the very high rate with which people died and that meant that many children were dead before they reached their reproductive age.

The increase of the world population followed when humanity started to win the fight against death. Life expectancy doubled in all world regions. Population growth is a temporary phenomenon , it is the consequence of fertility and mortality not declining simultaneously. The fast population growth happened when fertility was still as high as it was in the unhealthy environment of the past, but mortality has already declined to the low levels of our time.

What we have seen in country after country over the last years is that when women gain more independence, education, and prosperity and realize that the chances of their children dying declined they chose to have fewer children. Rapid population growth comes to an end.

This transition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility is called the demographic transition. In those countries that industrialized first it lasted at least from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century — it took 95 years for fertility to decline from above 6 children to less than 3 children per woman in the UK.

Countries that followed later sometimes achieved this transition much faster : South Korea went from more than 6 children per woman to less than 3 in just 18 years, Iran even went through it in only 10 years. Just as countries went through this transition so is the world going through this transition.

Global fertility has more than halved in the last 50 years, from more than 5 children per woman in the early s to below 2. This means that the world is well into the demographic transition and the global population growth rate has in fact peaked half a century ago. Now that we see fertility declining around the world we approach the end of population growth : The global population has quadrupled over the course of the 20th century, over the course of this century it will not double.

And at the end of the century the UN expects a slow annual population growth of 0. None of the achievements over the last 2 centuries could have been made without the expansion of knowledge and education. The revolution in how we live was not only driven by education it also made education more important than ever. Contrary to many other social aspects where forecasts are of limited use, I think education is an aspect where we can make some useful projections.

The simple reason is that the educational composition today tells us something about the education of tomorrow — a literate young woman today will be a literate old woman in And we know that it will continue as the younger cohort today is much better educated than people in older cohorts.

This visualization shows the projection of the IIASA demographers for the size and the educational composition of the world population until And as mentioned before the IIASA researchers expect the world population to peak in and to decline thereafter. Focusing on the educational breakdown the projection suggests that by , there will be almost no one without formal education and there will be more than 7 billion minds who will have received at least secondary education.

With the great importance of education for improving health, increasing political freedom, and ending poverty this prospect is very encouraging. The motivation for this history of global living conditions was the survey result that documented the very negative perspective on global development that most of us have.

Financial markets may never recover to pre-crisis levels. Restrictions on movement will help some governments tighten autocratic control, and civil liberties could be eroded in the name of gaining information on virus spread. Many are already questioning the merit of multilateral organizations such as the WHO or the United Nations given the perceived lack of a coordinated, global response to an unprecedented health crisis.

Much will depend on how long national economies manage to withstand the storm, and the performance of governments in tackling the threat. China, where the virus is believed to have originated, proudly claims to have quelled the outbreak. US President Donald Trump initially appeared to shrug off the seriousness of the threat and is now faced with a full-scale crisis. While the official figures from India remain far less grim than in the West, there is anxiety that much worse is to come.

But in poorer countries with no such protections, the resulting deprivation risks driving people onto the street. Countries like Russia and Turkey, led by the same strongmen for two decades, will be hoping that their measures will be enough to spare them the worst of the virus and any political consequences.