Our Editor’s 2024 End of the Year Missive

Key metrics show that 2024 has been the best year ever, for the world and for our website.

Marian L. Tupy — Dec 31, 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it reversed some of the most important indicators of human wellbeing, but the upward march of human progress largely resumed in 2023. Consequently, it was of great interest to see if these positive trends continued in 2024. On the plus side, the world’s population is now richer and longer living than ever before. However, trends in violence and autocratic governance have continued to rise from their post-New Millennium lows.

According to the United Nations, the average global life expectancy in 2019 was 72.6 years. It dropped to 70.9 years during the pandemic before climbing to an all-time high of 73.3 years in 2024. The average real, which is to say inflation-adjusted, global gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2019 came to $10,946. That fell to $10,454 in 2020. In 2023, it stood at an all-time high of $11,579. The global absolute poverty rate, measured as the share of the world’s population living on less than $2.15 in purchasing power parity-adjusted 2017 dollars, stood at 8.8 percent in 2019 and climbed to 9.7 percent in 2020. The latest estimates from the World Bank put that rate at 8.5 percent in 2024 – an all-time low.

Last year was also the biggest election year in history. Approximately half of the world’s population went to the polls in 74 countries and voted out 32 percent of incumbents. On the downside, “71 percent of the world’s population now live in autocracies – an increase from 48 percent ten years ago.” Most tragically, there was a 25 percent increase in political violence over the last 12 months, with conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Burma responsible for many of the 233,000 recorded deaths. The bottom line: life continues to improve for many, but (regrettably) not all.

Your favorite team at HumanProgress.org had a busy and productive year. Marian L. Tupy delivered several talks and partook in numerous discussions. Those included: the Festival de las Ideas in Puebla, Mexico; el Fundación Rafael del Pino in Madrid, Spain; the Cato Institute’s conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Freedom Games in Lodz, Poland; and the first-ever Human Progress gathering in Berkeley, California. He has published an essay defending globalization and co-published, with Dr. Gale L. Pooley, the 2024 edition of the Simon Abundance Index. His video with John Stossel, which was shared by Elon Musk, was seen by 60 million people. He intends to start working on a new book in 2025.

Chelsea Follett was hard at work on her second book – you can browse excerpts from some of the books comprising her background research at the Grim Old Days project page – and recording podcasts. She also continued to promote her book Centers of Progress on podcasts and through in-person events, including multiple presentations in Poland. In 2024, she and her husband also welcomed their third child. In 2025, Chelsea plans to complete a draft of Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past and publish a new edition of the Inequality of Human Progress Index, which she co-authors with George Mason University’s Vincent Geloso.

Malcolm Cochran continued to manage our online presence. This year, under his oversight, our follower base grew by 15 thousand, and our content was seen over 25 million times. He also transitioned our newsletter to Substack, where you can now subscribe to and read our work. Part of Malcolm’s duties include collecting news items that document human progress, 1,066 of which you can browse in his annual news roundup.

Saul Zimet has deployed new AI tools across our website. AI-generated videos now make blog posts more dynamic, and an AI avatar of Chelsea Follett, which clones both her voice and appearance, can be seen discussing her Grim Old Days project and other writings in videos on our social media accounts. Saul has also implemented new features to improve search engine optimization and accessibility across HumanProgress.org, including blog-post summaries at the top of each post and alt text for images.

Finally, we are expanding. In 2025, HumanProgress.org will add three new positions. First, a Research Assistant to help us consolidate, expand, and update our database. Second, an economist to help us analyze and address common criticisms of human progress, including environmental degradation, inequality, materialism and consumerism, the ambiguous or harmful nature of technological advances, the loss of meaningful work and skills, atomization, and alienation. Third, a psychologist to help us investigate the potentially negative psychological impacts of progress, including the rise in anxiety and crisis of meaning in wealthy countries, as well as those aspects of human psychology that hinder widespread acknowledgment of real, measurable progress.

May you have a healthy, happy, prosperous, and peaceful 2025.

Blog Post | Human Development

1,066 Good News Stories You Didn’t Click On in 2024

Maintaining an accurate perspective on the world takes work—reading this post will help.

Malcolm Cochran — Dec 26, 2024

Psychologists think that our demeanors are contagious: being around anxious, pessimistic people causes our own moods to tank. Bad news creates a similar phenomenon, with one negative story coloring our perception of other, unrelated events. Good news and cheerful company can have the opposite effect, but the overall battle is tilted toward negativity. As our editor writes, paraphrasing the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker:

Ask yourself, how much happier can you imagine yourself feeling? And again, how much more miserable can you imagine yourself to feel? The answer to the latter question is: infinitely. Psychological literature shows that people fear losses more than they look forward to gains; dwell on setbacks more than relishing successes; resent criticism more than being encouraged by praise.

The media amplifies these tendencies. Thanks to humanity’s evolution, which prioritized threats over all other considerations, negative headlines get more clicks—surely one reason why floundering news outlets are producing more and more of them.

It doesn’t help that most good news is not news at all. Everyone knows that thousands of pilots land safely every day, but the next dramatic plane crash will shock us and command our attention. Ironically, progress contributes to this aspect of our negativity bias. Bad things—like disaster deaths, racial intolerance, and, of course, airline accidents—have become more interesting precisely because they have become more unusual.

All this means that, while rational optimism about the world is the more realistic viewpoint to hold, maintaining such a perspective is a constant, uphill struggle. Below is our latest contribution to that valuable endeavor: a list of all the good news we could round up in 2024. And it’s not saccharine stuff, but meaty feats of human ingenuity, heartening trends, and plain good luck. Read and feel your spirits rise!