Ronald Bailey

Think the world is getting worse? You're wrong: the world is, for the most part, not getting worse. But 58 percent of folks in 17 countries that were surveyed in 2016 thought the world is either getting worse or staying the same rather than getting better. Americans were even more glum: 65 percent thought the world is getting worse and only 6 percent thought it was getting better. The uncontroversial data on major global trends in this book will persuade you that this dark view of the prospects for humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken. World population will peak at 8 to 9 billion before the end of this century as the global fertility rate continues its fall from 6 children per woman in 1960 to the current rate of 2.4. The global absolute poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent in 1981 to 8.6 percent today. Satellite data show that forest area has been expanding since 1982. Natural resources are becoming ever cheaper and more abundant. Since 1900, the average life expectancy has more than doubled, reaching more than 72 years. Of course, major concerns such as climate change, marine plastic pollution, and declining wildlife populations are still with us, but many of these problems are already in the process of being ameliorated as a result of the favorable economic, social, and technological trends that are documented in this book. You can't fix what is wrong in the world if you don't know what's actually happening. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know will provide busy people with quick-to-read, easily understandable, and entertaining access to surprising facts that they need to know about how the world is really faring.

In the 25 years since the first Earth Day in 1970, the environmental movement has spawned a new generation of scientists asking vital questions about the true state and fate of the planet. But, surprisingly, some of their answers -- and even the questions themselves -- contradict the movement's deepest beliefs. Why are reserves of oil, precious metals, and other natural resources more plentiful than ever before? Why has the population growth of the twentieth century brought rising standards of living for nearly all? In The True State of the Planet ten premier scholars shatter the myths of overpopulation, food, global warming, and pesticides, while redirecting environmentalists' concerns to the far more urgent problems of fisheries, fresh water, and third-world pollution -- and the political causes behind them.