 In a time of global pandemic, soaring unemployment, massive wildfires, and racial strife, it feels like the world is going to hell. But it's not. There's a huge amount of progress that's taken place that a lot of people just don't take into account, especially smart people who are attending to the real problems of the world, but not getting the long-term view, which is what we try to provide in this particular book. Ronald Bailey is reasoned science correspondent and the co-author of the new book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Bailey and the Cato Institutes, Mari and Tupi, take a long-term look at positive global developments that have been mostly underreported or ignored. For instance, the world's poorest people have gotten richer at an accelerating pace. The natural state of humanity is abject poverty. And one of the benchmarks you can look at is what they call absolute poverty threshold, which is living on $1.90 per day per person. What we find is is around 18, 20, 84 percent of the world's population lived on less than that a day. And that took 160 years for that to get down to only 41 percent, 160 years. But since then, it's now below 10 percent, in fact. The last data we have from the World Bank is down to 8.6 percent and will probably be 5 percent or less by 2030 of current trends continue. The planet has gotten significantly greener, too, in the last 40 years. Most people don't know that actually forests around the globe have been expanding since the 1980s, and kind of amazingly so. Of course, there's deforestation taking place in places like Brazil and so forth. But if you look broadly across the entire globe, what you find is that the forests have expanded since the 1980s to an area that's about the size of Alaska and Montana combined, basically 800,000 square miles of land. The world is also getting safer for the poor in particular. We're looking at a rate of deaths from natural disasters. That includes earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes. What have you? All natural disasters, as you could think of them. And what we find is that over the period of time is the rate of deaths from natural disasters. And remember, world population has increased four times since the beginning of the century has declined 99% and more. A major environmental problem is climate change. Left unchecked, it is literally an existential threat to the health of our planet and to our very survival. The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. Bailey says these claims are based on a misreading of UN climate change reports. There's no cliff that we're running off of. All it means is, well, it's going to be warmer than 1.5 degrees, most likely. Higher increases will cause real problems. But Bailey says we're equipped to deal with them thanks to technology and economic growth. Climate change is going to become a significant problem. But my best guess is that we'll have the wealth and the technology for future generations will to be able to adapt to it and to start ameliorating what problems do arise. There will be sea level rise and people will have to retreat from the coast. But they're not going to have to retreat tomorrow. Bailey attributes global progress to better ideas about how to organize society. Let's sum it up with the word, the Enlightenment happened, basically, the Enlightenment. Essentially what happened is democracy is the way to decide who gets the wheel of power and to be able to throw that out. The second thing is that we ended up basically with free markets, is that all of a sudden we had property rights and there was respect for the rule of law. The third stool of this, and I think this is the most important one, is called liberal science, how we decide what the truth is. And it's essentially a radical notion of free speech is everybody gets to criticize everybody else and there are no consequences other than you being shown for that criticism. And so it goes from the worst blog post on the planet to peer reviewed science today or the most rigorous thing, everything gets checked by everybody else. And that really speeds up innovation. If human progress is so ubiquitous, why don't we hear about it more? So what we have is a news media that obviously focuses on what sells, and that is bad news. Good news is not news, bad news is news. To build a house takes months, years to do, to burn it down, takes an hour. Another glitch, of course, is that progress hides itself. As things get better and better all the time, we move on and go, all right, we've got that win, we just take it for granted. And what we're trying to do with this book is to not let people take it for granted and remind people this is what has happened and look to the future if we keep the same institutions that enabled this, then much more of it will happen in the future.