“Threats to health will remain at the center of the story of progress and its setbacks”

2023-12-29 13:00:08

In The great Escape, published ten years ago (translated by PUF in 2016), I told how human life has improved over the last two hundred and fifty years, particularly in terms of longevity and material standards of living. But the last decade has not been kind to my narrative brimming with optimism. I may have been right in 2013, but that’s probably not the case today, even for the average person. We don’t know if this regression will be temporary or if it will only get worse in the future.

If the long-term trends towards progress are clear, history provides nothing to encourage blind optimism. Progress in human well-being has regularly been met with setbacks, some of which have resulted in unimaginable damage. During the 20th century alone, disastrous political games, national or international, caused tens of millions of deaths, with two world wars, the Shoah and the murderous directions decided by Stalin and Mao.

The global influenza pandemic, from 1918 to 1920, may have killed 50 million peopleout of a total population of less than 2 billion. The AIDS epidemic has already caused the deaths of some 40 million people and more than half a million continue to die each year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

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More recently, the World Health Organization estimates that Covid-19 has killed around 7 million people to date – or even several times this number –, most of them in rich countries, including 1.2 million Americans. The pandemic has halted economic growth in many countries and has certainly halted the decline in global poverty (but since it has also disrupted data collection, there is great uncertainty about the numbers).

Depressing catalog

Typically, after such disasters, progress resumes, and the ensuing recoveries result in health and wealth outcomes that surpass the levels of the previous period. Certainly, this historical fact is of no comfort to those who have died or lost loved ones. Progress does not erase horrors. But it maintains the hope of a better life for the survivors and the following generations.

Unfortunately, this time, we are not assured that this progress will continue.

In a thousand years, or perhaps sooner, the 250 years that have passed since the end of the 18th century will perhaps seem a distant and bygone golden age, a flash in the panorama of history, an exception to the normal state of misery and premature death. Recent events paint a depressing catalog: slow or negative growth, rising global temperatures, the resurgence of infectious diseases, a political life where the enemies of democracy and the populist far right are increasingly present, globalization at a standstill, stagnating life expectancy and the multiplication of geopolitical tensions, particularly between the two main economies on the planet, the United States and China.

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