Thanksgiving is the perfect time to counter all the negative news we’re relentlessly inundated with by the 24/7 Newsbeast that has most people believing the world is getting worse every year and we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.
This is not just an observation, it’s a finding that’s consistent throughout the world and in fact a recent study showed that in the United States, 65% percent thought that the world is getting worse. Only 6% of Americans responded that the world is getting better.
But here’s some facts: Globally, incomes are growing (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the median U.S. income was at an all‐time high), and absolute poverty is declining. We live longer lives, with more mothers surviving pregnancy and more babies living into adulthood. Humanity has access to more food and education, cleaner water and safer sanitation. Homicide rates have fallen from their highs in most places, though that trend has been partly reversed recently. We fight fewer wars and wars that we do fight are shorter and cost fewer lives. The male‐female gap in education and income is rapidly closing.
Funny how our news media never seems to mention these things and in fact seem to be reporting the opposite. Just about every story about Artificial Intelligence, for instance, has a negative spin about how it could go out of control with computers taking over, like in something out of a Terminator movie. The Good News is that AI is also making huge strides in healthcare, like being used to predict the 10-year risk of having a heart attack, which could transform treatment for patients who undergo CT scans to investigate chest pain.
Another really cool use of AI is much better and faster weather predictions which can predict weather forecasts ten days out - in less than a minute! This will save lives as it can better predict the tracks of hurricanes, the onset of extreme temperatures, and the likelihood of floods.
It’s a terrible situation to have both higher frequencies of floods and a growing lack of fresh drinking water, but there’s a company in Canada developing a product that can desalinate up to 13,000 gallons a day of seawater by using the kinetic energy of waves to drive reverse osmosis. Pretty amazing!
And finally, we could certainly use more stories like the one about the missing toddler in Michigan who wandered into nearby woods barefoot with the family’s two dogs in tow. She was eventually found in the woods around midnight, using one of her dogs as a pillow. Good news indeed, here’s wishing a happy Thanksgiving to all.
Thanks for the upbeat message. We do need to be reminded that even amongst the bad there is a lot of good happening that we can pin our hopes to. Happy Thanksgiving to the Mirra family