![]() The story is told in James Payne’s The Decline of Force, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code, and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc – an allusion to Theodore Parker’s famous line (beloved of Martin Luther King) that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. It is also decimating child labour, capital punishment and the criminalisation of homosexuality. ![]() Progress is not just material but moral: the world has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, heretic-burning, witch hunts, duelling, apartheid and male-only suffrage. Children of the 1970s will appreciate the title, an allusion to Brand’s groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog, which merged technology with the counterculture and encouraged global consciousness with the breathtaking “Earthrise” photograph on the cover. The equally remarkable decline of armed conflict is recounted in Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War and several irreverent books by John Mueller, including The Remnants of War and the sarcastically titled collection A Dangerous World? The most surprising may be The Internationalists, in which Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that the oft-ridiculed 1928 pact outlawing war deserves much of the credit.Īnd no, the environment is not hopelessly despoiled and depauperate, say “ecomodernists” such as Ronald Bailey in The End of Doom, Ruth DeFries in The Big Ratchet Chris Thomas in Inheritors of the Earth, and Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline. As does Factfulness by the late TED star Hans Rosling, who liked to quiz his audiences on trends in wellbeing and show that they did worse than chimpanzees. More modestly, Charles Kenny tells us how the world is Getting Better. Authors who describe the remarkable decline of poverty, hunger and disease in the developing world anticipate such incredulity that they often flaunt the word “great” in their titles, such as Nobel laureate Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and Steven Radelet’s The Great Surge.
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