Today, Explained - The State of the World

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

President Trump delivers his second State of the Union tonight, but how’s the world doing? Believe it or not, Vox’s Dylan Matthews says things are getting much, much better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show today comes from the Quip electric toothbrush, the thinking person's electric toothbrush. If you go to getquip.com slash explained right now, you can get your first pack of refills for free. The Quip starts at just $25 at getquip.com slash explained. Over a million people have purchased the quip. Anywhere you look, online, on the TV, above the fold of the newspaper, there are reminders that things are bad and probably getting worse. Then there's Vox's Dylan Matthews. Yeah. He hosts a podcast called Future Perfect, and it's all about radical ways to make the world a better place. Yeah. And contrary to almost everything you'll see or read out there, Dylan actually believes the world is getting much, much better right now. Yeah, I think the news and social

media platforms both have a kind of negativity bias. I mean, thing goes according to plan isn't really a news story. Thing goes badly arise is a great news story. And I think also things have been going less fantastic in America than they have in the world overall. If you zoom out from the U.S. and look at major trends in living standards for humanity as a whole, the trajectory is pretty good. President Trump delivers his second State of the Union tonight, but we thought we'd take a look at the state of the world with Dylan. When he talks about the world getting better overall, Dylan focuses on three things. Poverty, health, and then governance.

We started with poverty. So we've had a really dramatic drop in extreme poverty over the last 30 years or so. Starting in 1981, when the World Bank started putting these numbers together, the rate of people living under $3.10 a day or less fell from 41% to 8% in Brazil from 1981 to 2014. It fell from 99% in China in 1981 to 11% in 2013. Wow. And you see falls in India. You see a smaller fall in sub-Saharan Africa. And if you look at specific countries like Ethiopia, Niger, Rwanda, You see pretty solid poverty alleviation over that time span.

Since 1990, poverty rates have fallen in every region in the world. The World Bank says this year, the number of people living in extreme poverty is likely to fall to under 10% of the global population. By 2030, we will indeed be the first generation in human history to end extreme poverty. Is it just wages that we're talking about here when it comes to poverty? Are there other measures as well? These are consumption poverty measures. So it's based not on what you're earning, but on what you're getting out of it. How much food are you eating?

What kind of house do you live in? What kind of clothes and goods are you putting together for yourself and your family? Do you have a car or a rickshaw or that kind of thing? And the gap between where everyone sits and the poverty line has just been shrinking. And that's been shrinking no matter where you put the poverty line. The share of people living on $5 a day or less has fallen. The share of people living on $10 a day or less has fallen. The share of people living on ten dollars a day or less has fallen. And to what do we owe the rise in wages and reduction in poverty?

Is it manufacturing going abroad or just a lot more of it? Is it something else? Manufacturing is a big part of it. But I think a lot of it is changes in political systems and changes that enabled people to make decisions that led to economic growth. So in China, 1976, Mao Zedong dies, had overseen the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution where tens of millions of people died. And eventually, after a brief power struggle, Deng Xiaoping comes into power, starts setting up these special economic zones in the south of the country for export-based industries. And you saw this migration from rural poverty where you were relying on subsistence agriculture into cities to do wage labor. Yeah. That's not a glamorous thing. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the conditions in

plants in China are awesome. They're not. Right. here and tell you that the conditions in plants in China are awesome. They're not. But I think if you talk to workers in those factories, and a lot of reporters like Leslie Chang have done these interviews, they'll say, yeah, it's bad. But out there anonymously in rural poverty was so much worse. Across China, there are 150 million workers, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants, and the construction sites of the big cities. And it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet, that has changed the way these millions of people work

and marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be. So does the reduction in poverty in places like South America, Africa, Asia, go hand in hand with better health overall, the second item on your list of why things are getting better? Yeah, I think in general, if you look across countries, the richer a country is, the better their health outcomes. But at the same time, it's not the same thing. Look at a country like Democratic Republic of Congo. Tons of civil wars and conflict was ruled for three decades by Mbutu, who's just like a kleptocrat who plundered the state for all it was worth. But life expectancy went from 38 to 59 from 1950 to 2015.

That's increased health services, increased access to things like bed nets, vaccines. We eliminated smallpox entirely. We are close to eliminating polio. All of those have combined, even in addition to the effects of poverty decreasing, contribute to this growth in health. Is there something specific that countries can do to increase life expectancy? Or is it just more readily available health care? One important thing going forward is resisting big tobacco, that as rich countries like the US and Europe move toward e-cigarettes and become less viable markets for regular tobacco products, those companies are seeing places like Indonesia, India, Sub-Saharan Africa as places they can dump that.

So what they've done is turn like a laser beam to developing countries where you have a rising poor people into the middle class who, for the first time, are able to afford tobacco products. And what we're seeing there is an exact repeat of what we saw in the developed world 50 years ago. Resisting those companies, making sure that cigarettes don't make those kinds of inroads would be really, really important. But also, yeah, just providing health care, if not universal health care, since it's hard enough getting the U.S. to adopt that. Making sure people have access to clinics, getting them vaccines, getting them bed nets, protecting them from really easy to prevent diseases. So we've got poverty reduction, better health outcomes, and then we get to the final and I'm sure trickiest of your three measures of how the world is getting better, governance.

To some extent, this is the story of the first two as well, that I think you wouldn't have seen this decline in poverty and you wouldn't have seen an improvement in health if it hadn't been for good choices made by governments. Yeah. But I think we're seeing increased stability. We're seeing fewer civil wars than we saw in the 90s. And this is a hard area because you can always point to situations that are an exception to a trend. Yemen. Yemen, for example.

What's happening in Yemen is horrifying and indefensible. But that kind of thing just happened more often in the past than it does now. And what does more government do? Well, for one thing, more government, and especially more democratic government that's more responsive to people, has to provide more services. They're going to open more health clinics. They're going to do more anti-poverty programs. They're going to take steps to address the problems that we've been talking about for this show and to do it in ways that their constituents demand. What about this rise in right-wing pseudo-authoritarian leadership

we've been seeing around the world? Doesn't that run against this idea? Yeah, I think one of the biggest threats to the general trend line of progress is the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes, the backsliding in places like Hungary and Poland. But Daniel Treisman, who's a political scientist, had a good conversation with Sean Illion that's on our website, noting that we are near the peak. It could change, but compared to even 1990, we've moved in the right direction, even if things are stalling out right now. If things are getting better, why do they feel like a trash fire?

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You can get like a whole family plan. Either way, you start at the bottom, the top. You're going to get a first set of refills for free. You know that song Getting Better by the Beatles, Dylan Matthews? Love that song, Sgt. Pepper's. It's Paul saying things are getting better, they're getting better all the time And then John comes in and he goes, it can't get no worse I've got to admit, it's getting better, a little better all the time You know, legend has it that these two lines perfectly encapsulate each of their worldviews. That sounds right.

The one charming guy who's like, things are great. And then John being like, things are shit. So, I mean, to push back a little bit on things getting better everywhere, why does it feel like things aren't? Well, I think one thing is that people don't experience life in the world. They experience life in their community, their city, their country. Their bubble. Well, not even a bubble, but just I think to be human is to have a limited window into the world. And our corner of the world has, in certain respects, been left out of some of the progress.

There's a famous chart that was first made by an economist named Branko Milanovic and then updated by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. And it shows where economic growth has gone from 1980 to 2016. If you start on the left side of the graph, you see a big upward hump. And that's the world's poorest people, that they're doing pretty well. Then you see a big dip and a sort of gully there. And that's sort of the poorer middle class in the US and European countries, who really haven't seen wages rise that fast, have not seen living standards increase the way that they had hoped. And then

you see a huge, huge, huge, huge peak right at the very end. And that's the ultra rich. So if you're living in America, you're far away from where the huge poverty reductions have happened. And the huge poverty reductions are still smaller in comparison to their initial income than the huge increase in the wealth of wealthy people you see all the time, the billionaires you see on TV. And I think people are fair in being pissed off about that. It doesn't have to be that all this progress for the world's poorest people comes at the expense of working class people in rich countries. And you mentioned at the top of the show that the world's getting better.

It doesn't look that way for the United States. Is this why? Is it because in the United States we just have this widening income gap? I think that's some of it. And I think there's also a sense of nostalgia that I think is partially fair and partially misplaced. I often hear people across the spectrum talk about the 1950s as sort of a model of American capitalism working the way it was supposed to. See the USA in your Chevrolet. America is asking you to call. It's the era most Americans would want to visit.

The Economist asked nostalgic nincompoops which 20th century decade they'd most like to return to. The most popular was Eisenhower's 1950s. America used to be the best country in the world for families. Americans could get married and afford to raise their own children. If your kids worked hard, you could expect they to be a little more successful maybe than you were. That was called the American dream. You had a union job, you get wage increases, you can work a steady manual labor job at a factory for your whole career, and you get a

pension. I think the problem with that is that that was a very limited experience for a limited group of people. Like white men. Yeah. And the gap between the CEO of GM and the worker on a GM plant was much smaller then than it is today. Women got to work on the floor. People of color got integrated into the economy and got more opportunities. We had a massively expanded immigration compared to the very strict system in the 50s so that more people got to enjoy sort of the benefits of living in America. And in some sense, white men today have a different place in social hierarchies than they did in the 50s.

And I think that's what the phrase Make America Great Again is about. That's what the again is? I think what a lot of his supporters hear is, yeah, there was a time when people like me got treated with respect and we got these good jobs. And we were the man of the house. And we didn't have to compete with immigrants and people of color for these positions. And what I want to argue is that that's a thin slice of experience. No one but a white man today could like rationally want to go back to 1955. No Indian person wants to go back to 1955.

No Chinese person wants to go back to 1955. And I think part of widening our circle of concern isn't just to fellow Americans with different experiences, but to the world and to people who've had very different experiences in other parts of the planet and have related to the economic system in a very different way. There are, though, things right now that are uniformly getting worse, right? Yeah. The way I think about it is that we're on a straight line going up, but there's always something that can make us fall down. What are the risks that worry you most? I'm worried a lot about climate change, as I suspect you are, and I think a lot of people

in the country are now. I don't have a clear image of what America looks like in 2050 when the oceans have risen that much and Miami is maybe underwater, but it looks very different. And it could be that our median forecast for that is off, and it's actually way worse than we think. That will hurt millions of people, but it could also roll back some, if not all, of this progress against poverty. Since a lot of poor countries like Bangladesh are in very low-lying areas and are very vulnerable to rising seas and the effects of climate change. You might see more crop failures because of drought, for instance. I worry about authoritarianism, as we mentioned. I worry about what's happening in Poland and Hungary.

I worry about the potential for that happening in the U.S. and other rich industrialized countries. And I'm worried a lot about CRISPR, which is something we haven't talked about yet. Gene editing, we've talked about on the show a couple times. There are people in labs trying to figure out how diseases work and who are doing that by trying to make versions of the flu deadlier and deadlier. And it's also getting easy enough to edit these things that an enterprising undergrad in biology might be able to do the same with less benevolent intentions. Right. And all it takes is one person doing that to set off something really, really bad.

Or one person in a lab doing that kind of work, making a mistake and leaving a door open or something. So that keeps me up at night. But you're the positive guy. You can't leave it at—Crisper keeps you up at night. There's always going to be things that threaten to knock you off the course. And I think it's good to know that things can get better. I think what's seen, what has happened to poverty and health and governance over recent decades tells me is trying isn't in vain. We have something good that's

happening and that deserves to be protected. And precisely because there are things that could knock it off course, that makes protecting it all the more important. Dylan Matthews writes about how to make the world less bad for Vox. You can find his work in print and podcast under the banner Future Perfect. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Irene Noguchi is the show's executive producer. Afim Shapiro is the engineer.

Noam Hassenfeld, Bridget McCarthy, and Luke Vanderplug round out the team. Siona Petros is our intern. Extra help this week from Samantha Fields. And lots of music from the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And you can make our world a better place by rating and reviewing us in Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or wherever you listen.

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