Life expectancy...

...has doubled in the last 100 years, and is still climbing

Take a few moments to consider the reality behind this graph. For the millennia of humanity’s existence, life expectancy has hovered around 30 years. This is not because most people died at 30. Plenty of people in the distant past lived to 70 or beyond. It is largely because child mortality was so high. The chances of a child dying before the age of 5 has been around 1 in 3 for most of human history. But in the last 100 years or so this has plummeted:

Think of the millions, even billions, of child deaths, each one a tragedy, that have been saved by the improvements in living standards and health care in recent centuries. A phenomenal success. (An extra bit of good news is that when child mortality drops, mothers have far fewer babies, from around 5 to around 2, meaning that the global population, rather than continuing to climb exponentially, is expected to level off at around 10 billion in the coming decades.)

A final bonus graph for today - the risk of pregnancy to mothers has dramatically reduced around the world. Getting pregnant used to be roughly as dangerous as getting breast cancer is today, whereas now in many countries it is very close to zero:

I think that’s something to celebrate.

Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker