Updated 1 February 2025

Life expectancy, 1770-2023; source: Our World in Data
First the bad news
Today there is no shortage of discouraging news headlines, among them (as of 21 Jan 2025):
- A war in Ukraine that has dragged on for three years.
- A war in Gaza that raises questions about the long-term stability of the Middle East.
- Simmering conflicts in Sudan, Myanmar, Niger, Afghanistan, Colombia and Somalia.
- A constitutional crisis in South Korea.
- Wildfires in the Los Angeles area that are among the costliest natural disasters in history.
- A never-ending stream of floods, hurricanes and other destructive weather events.
- Worries that the bird flu outbreak may lead to a pandemic.
- Worries about economic and political disruptions in the wake of recent elections.
- Worries about artificial intelligence.
- Frustration over public resistance to addressing climate change and green energy.
- Frustration over the persistence of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.
- Frustration over the persistence of discredited pseudoscientific conspiracy theories.
These are serious problems and must not be minimized. But one has to wonder whether the public’s insatiable appetite for sensational news, together with economic forces in the news world, distorts or ignores other less-well-known, longer-term items of optimism and progress.
Now the good news
Indeed, real sustained progress has been achieved in recent years on numerous fronts. Science and technology, in particular, have advanced at a dizzying pace, driven in part by the unstoppable forward march of Moore’s Law, which continues unabated after more than 50 years (unprecedented in human history). In the 20 years since 2005, aggregate memory and computer power of comparable devices have increased by factors of roughly 1,000,000. Today a typical new smartphone has memory and computing power comparable to that of a 2000-era supercomputer. Genome sequencing technology has advanced even faster — sequencing a full human genome cost $3 billion in 2003, but this currently costs only about $300, which is a 10,000,000-fold reduction. See the listings below for many other notable items of recent progress.
Further, contrary to popular perception, progress has also been made in several metrics of social well-being. For example, after rising worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic, crime fell sharply in 2023 and 2024. The U.S. homicide rate fell 11.6% in 2023 from 2022, the largest one-year percentage decline in history. Overall, U.S. violent crime fell 3%; property crime fell 2.6%; burglaries fell 7.6%. What’s more, these declines continued in 2024: initial reports show a 16% decline in homicide in 2024 from 2023 (which again will break a record). Large U.S. cities had significant drops: according to an initial report, in 2024 Detroit had the lowest number of homicides in 57 years; San Francisco homicides fell by 33% in 2024 over 2023; U.S. auto thefts fell by 20%.
These declines are not limited to the U.S. In the first six months of 2023, the crime rate in England and Wales dropped 28% to an all-time low. In Australia, youth crime rates have also dropped to record lows.
Just as importantly, global poverty continues a remarkable long-running decline: currently over 30,000 persons per day escape extreme poverty. This is not a misprint! Here “extreme poverty” is defined by the U.N. as an income less than $2.15 (2017 U.S. dollars) per day per person, adjusted for inflation. As recently as 1820, 79% of the world population were in extreme poverty; this dropped to 52% by 1950, and is now only 8.4%. The U.N. has established a goal to eliminate extreme poverty worldwide by 2030.
Along this line, global life expectancy continues to increase. As of 2023 (the latest data available) the global figure is 73.2 years, with 77.3 years in the Americas and 79.1 years in Western Europe. By contrast, as late as 1870 the global figure was only 29.7 years, and as recently as 1950 was only 46.4 years. It is worth noting that the current global figure (73.2 years) exceeds that of the wealthy nations of Western Europe in 1970 (70.3 years)! Helping here is the eradication of smallpox and rinderpest and the near-eradication of polio and guinea worm disease; other diseases that may soon be eradicated include measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. The Gates Foundation hopes to end malaria by 2040.
In the same vein, worldwide education continues to advance. In 1820, only 18% of the world population had a formal basic education; in the latest survey, this has risen to over 90%. In 1820, there was a sizable gender gap in education; now virtually the same percentage of girls as boys are enrolled worldwide in primary education (89% vs 91%), and women outnumber men in college in several western nations, including the U.S.
Granted, as emphasized above, progress has certainly not been universal, and many serious challenges remain, notably to restore peace, to address climate change and to further eradicate poverty and social injustice. But we should not lose sight of the substantial progress that has been achieved. Here are just a few of the many items of progress worth celebrating, mostly just in the past year or two, with weblinks. Numerous others are listed HERE, HERE and HERE, from which many of the items below were selected.
Health and medicine
- Sickle cell CRISPR ‘cure’ is the start of a revolution in medicine.
- Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half, says ‘thrilling’ study.
- New mRNA cancer vaccine triggers fierce immune response to fight malignant brain tumor.
- Breast cancer death rate dropped 58 percent over 44 years in U.S..
- New cervical cancer treatment regime ‘cuts risk of dying from disease by 40%’.
- Trial results for new lung cancer drug are ‘off the charts’, say doctors.
- Experimental gene therapy allows kids with inherited deafness to hear.
- Breakthrough Alzheimer’s blood test could detect disease 15 years before symptoms emerge.
- The cystic-fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything.
- First Patient Begins Newly Approved Sickle Cell Gene Therapy.
- Breakthrough Parkinson’s Treatment Enters Human Trials After Primate Success.
- HIV Prevalence Among Pregnant South Africans at Lowest Since 2002.
- India Sees 79% Drop In AIDS Deaths, 44% Decline In HIV Infections Since 2010.
- WHO announces drop in malaria infections, deaths after vaccine rollout.
- India witnessed 85.1% decline in malaria cases & 83.36% decline in deaths during 2015-2022.
- Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort.
- Kenya achieves remarkable 68% decline in AIDS-related fatalities.
- ‘A great day for the country’: Uganda declares an end to Ebola outbreak.
- FDA approves first vaccine for RSV, a moment six decades in the making.
- A new class of drugs for weight loss could end obesity.
- Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought.
- Scientists hail new antibiotic that can kill drug-resistant bacteria.
- GLP-1s like Ozempic are among the most important drug breakthroughs ever.
- US obesity rates FALL for the first time ever, new CDC data shows.
- CDC: US life expectancy rises after 2-year dip.
- Life expectancy has continued to rise in the longest-lived countries.
Artificial intelligence, computer science and mathematics
- DeepMind AI creates algorithms that sort data faster than those built by people.
- A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too.
- New AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly.
- AI race heats up as OpenAI, Google and Mistral release new models.
- Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing.
- Nvidia predicts AI models one million times more powerful than ChatGPT within 10 years.
- Ancestry.com uses AI to boost Black family trees.
- AI Reduces Timescale of Early Drug Development to Weeks.
- A Very Big Small Leap Forward in Graph Theory.
- Google claims math breakthrough with proof-solving AI models.
- AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules.
- Terence Tao’s vision of AI assistants in research mathematics.
Astronomy, physics, cosmology and space travel
- Quantum physics makes small leap with microscopic gravity measurement.
- Most accurate clock ever can tick for 40 billion years without error.
- The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find.
- JWST Discovers Enormous Distant Galaxies That Should Not Exist.
- Mirror-Image Supernova Yields Surprising Estimate of Cosmic Growth.
- Dark Matter Hunters Need Fresh Answers.
- A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus.
- The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.
- A Possible Crisis in the Cosmos Could Lead to a New Understanding of the Universe.
- Cosmology Is at a Tipping Point—We May Be on the Verge of Discovering New Physics.
- Can Axions Save the Universe?.
- ‘We’re in a new era’: the 21st-century space race takes off.
Conservation and the environment
- Genome Editing Used to Create Disease Resistant Rice.
- Scientists Unlock Key to Drought-Resistant Wheat Plants with Longer Roots.
- Global production of corn, soybean, rice and wheat continue steady increase..
- Climate change: Fossil fuel emissions from electricity set to fall.
- A Surprising Success Story for Humpback Whales.
- Bhutan announces a “milestone achievement” with a 39.5% increase in snow leopard numbers.
- Tiger populations grow in India and Bhutan.
- How sustainable tourism helps protect mountain gorillas in Rwanda and strengthens communities.
Crime, poverty and social equity
- After Rise in Murders During the Pandemic, a Sharp Decline in 2023.
- A Plummeting Murder Rate Stuns Boston.
- Crime falls to lowest level on record, ONS [UK’s Office for National Statistics] says.
- Most crime has fallen by 90% [in England and Wales] in 30 years.
- Italy, Home Of The Mafia, Now One Of Europe’s Safest Countries.
- Homicide rates [in Western Europe] have declined dramatically over the centuries.
- Extreme poverty drops to 8.4% of world population.
- U.S. Approval of Interracial Marriage at New High of 94%.
- 6 ways the lives of girls are different today than they were a decade ago.
- 50 million more girls have been enrolled in school globally since 2015.