It's Getting Better All the Time: 110 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 YearsAnd now, a dose of good news. In a new book that will put the gloom-and-doom industry out of business, the Cato Institute says more human progress has been achieved in the last 100 years than in all of the previous centuries combined. No matter what the variable -- life expectancy, wealth, leisure time, education, safety, gender and racial equality, freedom -- the world is a vastly better place today than it was a century ago, say co-authors Stephen Moore and the late Julian Simon in It's Getting Better all the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. Of course, if things are so great, why do we hear so much bad news? False scares and junk science are partly to blame, but the media also play a role in shaping people's perceptions. In 1998, the authors point out, there was not a single commercial airline crash despite the hundreds of thousands of commercial flights and billions of air passenger-miles traveled. While there was no major news coverage of this amazing record, the media devoted weeks of coverage to the 1999 crash of an Egyptian airliner. This focus on the bad lets us forget how much is good about life in modern America. |
Contents
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25 | |
Section II Diets and Nutrition | 49 |
Section III Wealth | 57 |
Section IV The State of Poor Americans | 73 |
Section V The State of Children and Teens | 81 |
Section VI The American Worker | 91 |
Section VII Leisure Recreation and Entertainment | 105 |
Section XIII Safety | 171 |
Section XIV Environmental Protection | 183 |
An Age of Abundance | 195 |
Section XVI Social and Cultural Indicators | 207 |
Section XVII Human Achievement in Sports | 223 |
Section XVIII The Remarkable Gains by Women | 231 |
Section XIX The Decline of Racism | 241 |
Section XX Freedom and Democracy | 253 |