Jonathan Power :
We have much to be glum about at the onset of 2015 – the latest is the killings in Paris. But we are brainwashed with bad news. “If it bleeds it leads”. One plane crash is worth more airtime than news that we are winning the fight against early death.
The World Health Organisation has some telling facts. Over the last two decades infant deaths have fallen by a half. Measles deaths by three-quarters and both tuberculosis and maternal deaths by a half. AIDS-related illnesses have been cut by over a quarter. In 1960 one in five children died before the age of five. Today it is one in 20, and falling.
Developing countries have caught up far more quickly in health than in wealth. For instance, Vietnam has the same health as the US had in 1980 but at present the same income per head as the US had in 1920.
Despite the Great Recession of the last six years poverty has plummeted. Although most of that drop has happened in China and India it has also happened in most Third World countries.
Population growth is slowing. The amount of children in the world today is the most there is likely to be. As Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute told the BBC, “We have entered the age of the ‘Peak Child'”.
Education is spreading rapidly for girls. In Bangladesh there are as many girls in school as boys. In Saudi Arabia there are more young women in university than men.
Coming up in 2015 will be more war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan. Of that we can be sure. There will probably be a year of “Cold Peace” between Russia and the West unless both sides can engineer a way out of the quite unnecessary Ukrainian imbroglio. The European Union might be thrown into disarray again if the British vote to leave it. The pace of action against Ebola, malaria and global warming will be out of step with what is necessary.
But also coming up in 2015 are many facts that can be seen already on the radar that suggest that 2015 will be the best year on the planet for humankind. We are outracing the Four Horsemen, extending the length of human life faster than pestilence; war, famine and death can take them.
It has long been intellectually fashionable to debunk the value of foreign aid. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that in most poor countries the great advances in medical care would not have been made without it. Take the programme to fight AIDS in Africa initiated by president George W. Bush, head of a party that has long derided aid. It paid for the successful treatment of over five million people. The US aid programme is relatively smaller than European ones but maybe the important fact is that rich nations these days donate large sums of money out of an altruistic commitment to help the poor get on their feet.
Over the decades since the end of the Cold War, war has become less frequent and less deadly. It is true that in the last few years, mainly because of Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan, the number of fatalities has shown an increase after years of decrease, but the world over the downward trend has continued.
One reason for this has been the fast spread of democracy and the well-proven fact that democracies don’t go to war with each other. At the end of World War-II there were less than 10 democracies. Now it is commonplace.
Charlie Hebdo, bad news, is important but not as important as this good news. Nor, come to that, as the killings of 150 school children in Pakistan by extremist. Nor the US/UK attack on Iraq that disturbed the equilibrium of the Middle East.
In 2015 we need a return to perspective – to seeing the larger picture.
(Jonathan Power is a veteran foreign affairs analyst)
