Good news: less poverty and less war

StrategyPage has an article summarizing the state of the world and the various conflicts in the world.

Overall things are a lot more peaceful than the headlines or Internet chatter would have you believe. Like most major trends, world peace just kind of sneaked up on everyone and a lot of people have not noticed.

blame the internet and twitter and cheap cellphones:

Thanks to modern tech (ubiquitous access to cell phones and the Internet) any mayhem anywhere on the planet easily becomes another news items for a global audience. The gives the impression of more violence when it is nothing more than unprecedented general access to violence that until recently was never broadcast worldwide and accompanied by video. That gives a false impression...

but what about terrorism, you might ask. well, that too is down:

Islamic terrorism gets the most publicity but less glamorous disputes do most of the killing. Islamic terrorism no longer dominates the news now that ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) has been crushed but not destroyed. Global Islamic terrorism related deaths have fallen by over 50 percent since 2014,

they go into details about the countries with terorism and local insurgencies, corruption, and the problem of building a civil society (as opposed to chaotic and tribal societies).

they also point out the resurrection of the idea of empires: the EU as Charlemagne, Turkey as the Ottoman empire, and of course, the resurrection of a China who wants to take over all their neighboring states to get more lebensraum (my term) for it's people.

China has similar goals to 1930s Germany. China has territorial claims on neighbors and needs more territory and resources for its huge population. The Chinese believe in the racial superiority of the Han ethnic group (which most Chinese belong to) and of historical destiny to rule the largest possible empire... 

read the whole thing.

they then go on to note the wars and insurgencies in various countries. Here is part of their assessment of the Philippines:

Decades of effort have finally reduced the internal threat of leftist and Islamic rebellions. So now most Filipinos are more concerned about endemic corruption, the widespread drug addiction and the resulting economic stagnation...

Since elected president in 2016 Rodrigo Duterte did what most Filipinos wanted, not what the local politicians or foreign critics wanted. Duterte had been doing this locally (as mayor of a major southern city) since the 1990s and was ready to try and make it happen nationally. This has led to condoning vigilante tactics by the police to suppress the drug gangs

italics mine.

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in related good news: except in sub Saharan Africa and parts of India, poverty is down and the middle class is growing.

this is not "new" news, but has been ignored, mainly because it goes against the idea that the world needs socialism and a one world government.

Reason Magazine (Jan 2019) noted:

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have argued, in a 2018 study published in Science, we are misled about the state of the world because we have a tendency to continually raise our threshold for success as we make progress. "Solving problems causes us to expand our definitions of them," they explain. "When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn't actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself."

Brookings institute report from Dec 2018 noted:

 More than half the world is now middle class or richer, fueled by a rising Asian middle class. As Steven Pinker and others observed, the rise of the global middle class—and the implications on policies, industry, and political economy—might have been one of the most important “ignored” stories of 2018.

one of the big problems is the tribalism and corruption causing tribal wars in subSaharan Africa (even the Islamic terrorism deaths in Nigeria are essentially tribal wars between the Christian farmers and the Muslim herders).

Traditional NGO's and alas often church NGO types push sustainable development as making traditional ways of living a bit less fraught with poverty and hunger. (see the Pope's glamourization of the Amazon as one example of this).

But another under reported story in Africa is China: bringing modern innovations to lift people out of poverty.

this (July2018) article suggests that China could be an example for Africa. Including the Jack Ma idea of eCommerce.

the People's daily (8-2018) agrees.

one example is introducing GM food: Europeans and NGO's oppose this innovation that could lead to Africa being able to feed themselves.

China is investing in buying land in Africa, and promoting more modern methods of growing food, and of course investing in mining/ oil industries. One major problem with China is that instead of hiring locals, they import Chinese to run many of their projects, and these Chinese live in segregated cities (the European colonialist types did the same of course, but one suspects that eventually the Africans will get tired of the Chinese neoColonialism too.

this is an important story that is under reported: Indeed, it says a lot that trying to google comprehensive reports on this, most of the articles in the think tanks are over 2 years old.