Progress
It's on the televisions, in the papers and in our minds. Every day were bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is-- financial collapse, unemployment, growing poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. But the rarely acknowledged reality is that the economic and social progress of the past few decades has been unprecedented and that by almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost everyone alive. Examining official data fr
