We Are the One Percent

Too Many Folks See a Crumbling World, But Look Closer and You'll See We're the Luckiest 1% of 1% of People to Ever Live

If you're reading this, congratulations, you're a part of the 1%.

No, not the richest people in the world (although maybe you're part of that too).

Actually, it's even better.  You're one of the luckiest 1% of 1% to ever live.

Maybe you think that's crazy?  How can that possibly be?  We've got so many problems in the world!  Economic crashes.  Wars.  Political instability.  Propaganda.  People addicted to their phones.  Social media.  Poverty.  Disease.  Racism.  Environmental collapse.

There's so much suffering in the world today, so many problems, so many horrifying existential risks. It's all coming apart at the seams.  It can't go on this way. 

There's just one problem. It's not true.

Don't get me wrong, there are all kinds of horrors in the world, real ones. If you were unlucky enough to be born in North Korea and its terrifying dictatorship or if you were born into a war torn country then life is as bad as it's always been.  And we do have disease and inequality and many other horrors.

But we've always had all that and more in history.

We just have a lot less of it now.  

For the vast majority of people in history, life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as the dour philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said. 

But today is the most amazing time to be alive in history.  And by a huge margin. We're wealthier, with better food security, healthier, living longer, and better educated. We've got amazing systems like the modern wonder of logistics that can get a package from a factory in Asia, ship it on a massive container ship and get it to you less than 48 hours later. You can talk to anyone, anywhere on Earth for practically nothing via video or voice like you’re Dick Tracy.

If you're alive today you've been protected by an invisible shield that was built slowly and then faster and faster, as our ideas, creations and inventions stacked up and reinforced each other.  That shield leaves us safer and living longer than ever before in history.  We have inventions and discoveries like antibiotics that kill all kinds of bugs that usually killed us, MRI machines that can see inside of us and spot cancer before it takes over, and crumple zones in cars that make getting on the road safe. 

We have knives that don't rust because of the magic of stainless steel.  We have refrigerators to keep our food cold and so it stays fresh longer and keeps us better nourished.  Because of air conditioning we can live in places that were basically intolerable only fifty years ago.  Because of glass you can live high up in a building and be protected from rain, wind, sleet and snow but still see outside. 

Airplanes can take you anywhere in the world and they're amazingly safe. In 1959, there were 40 fatal plane crashes for every million flights in the United States. Ten years later, that figure dropped to less than two fatal accidents for every million flights. Today the number is down to 0.1 for every million departures.

Yet for some reason most people don't see any of it.  That's because of a little flaw in our brains that makes it so hard to see reality as it actually is rather than how our brain imagines it to be.  It's a nasty little bug and one that's really hard to shut down.  I'll show you why it's there and what we can do about it.  And then I'm going to show you why right now is the most amazing time and why we should never ever take it for granted because that's a sure fire way to make sure that it disappears. 

But first, let's try a little test.

I'll ask you a question that the late, great statistician Hans Rosling used as part of a larger quiz:

In the last 20 years, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has:

1. Almost doubled

2. Pretty much stayed the same

3. Fallen by half

Go ahead and think about it for a moment before moving on.

What did you get?

If you're like most people you got it wrong.  Don't worry though, you're in good company.

The answer is -- "fallen by half." 

As Rosling wrote in his last book Factfulness, "over the past twenty years, the portion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved.  This is absolutely revolutionary...But people do not know it.  On average only 7% - less than one in ten! - get it right."

Historian Michail Moatsos estimates that in 1820, just 200 years ago, almost 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty. That means people couldn't afford even the tiniest place to live or food that didn't leave them horribly malnourished.  It means living on less than $1.90 a day in 2011 prices and $2.15 in 2017 prices.  Actually you don't even need to go back that far.  In the 1950s, half the world still lived in extreme poverty. 

Today that number is 10%.

This isn't just everyday people who don't know jack about our world.  It's everyone.  It's you and me and everyone else.  Over the years, Rosling spent a lot of time giving people his twenty question test on basic facts about life today (you can try it at the link to see how you do) and almost everyone does terrible, no matter what creed, color, economic strata or intelligence level.

Maybe you think your political stripe matters on how well you do?  In the US, democrats and republicans both believe the other side is utterly stupid of the most basic facts and yet only 5% of people got it right on a survey that checked political affiliation, even lower than the average. The other 95% believed it had stayed the same or, worse, that it had actually doubled.  

Rosling advised people in governments around that world and he gave them the same test. Even folks at the UN and in major government leadership positions, who should be most familiar with these facts, didn't seem to know them and it drove him absolutely crazy trying to understand why. 

Rosling dedicated his life to teaching people how to see more clearly and yet by his own admission he failed.  He built a nonprofit called Gapminder in Sweden to try to get out better information.  He spent much of that time spinning his wheels only to discover that most folks will doggedly cling to wrong information.  He put out Factfulness in 2018, not long before he died, as a last ditch attempt. 

Some people think Rosling was just a relentless optimist who was saying there's nothing wrong with the world and there's nothing more we need to do.  But that's wrong.  As his friend Max Roser said in Rosling's obituary: 

"Rosling...was too often presented as an 'optimist' that tells the world that things will turn out well. This is wrong. What Rosling did was to present the empirical evidence up to the present, and he showed that many vastly underestimate the progress that the world has made in improving living conditions globally. The majority of the world is better off now than at any point in history before. This was his positive message. But he never suggested that this should give anyone any reason to be complacent...Hans Rosling's message was never that all is good; the enthusiasm for his work came from the fact that he was always convinced that a better world is possible if we care to work towards it."

My message is Rosling's message.  We can only build a better future if we believe we can and if we see the world as it actually is rather than how we hallucinate it to be. 

To build a better world you first have to imagine it.  You have to see it's possible to have a different tomorrow. 

The great people of yesterday saw a better future and worked to make it possible. 

We make the future, through our vision, optimism, hope and hard work. 

And the hardest part of seeing a brighter future is overcoming that little bug in our brains that I talked about earlier. What Rosling couldn't understand is something fundamental to the human mind.  It's a basic flaw built right into us. 

Humans have the remarkable ability to create problems where there are none. 

We hallucinate them. 

Why?

Because our minds are problem solving machines.  That's what they're built to do.  And when we don't have them we make them up so we have something to solve. 

Solving problems usually works out really well for us.  We see something wrong and we come up with an elegant solution or even just a quick hack to make it work.  Life gets a little better than it was before.  It's how we got skyscrapers, cars, planes, trains, art, bridges, tunnels, aqueducts, the dishwasher, tractors and smartphones. 

But we often have the magical ability to see what is not there and to believe it with all our heart.  No matter how hard we try, we can't seem to get rid of this bug, probably because it's somewhat of a feature too. It saved our lives in the past.  Anticipating where the tiger might be means you didn't get eaten by the tier.  Beliefs are the things that drive us to do great and terrible things and if they weren't strong we couldn't push forward. 

But beliefs are a big problem when they're wrong.  Wrong beliefs leave us trying to solve problems that don't exist and missing the ones that do exist. 

When you're trying to solve problems that aren't there you can't help but do everything wrong.  It's like those long division problems from your school days.  You got the first step wrong and so every step after is wrong too. You started out trying to go right and turned hard left instead. 

Of course, there are real problems in the world today. Rosling was right that the dramatic drop in extreme poverty, driven by economic growth, is revolutionary and unprecedented in history.  But that doesn't mean everyone is rich just because most people aren't struggling to eat anything at all or have no place to sleep at night.  Most folks live on less than $30 a day and that means there is still a lot further to go to raise the whole world's quality of life.

We can always do better.  Much better.

But that doesn't change the most basic fact about what it means to be alive today. 

Today is one of the greatest times to be alive in the entire history of the world and I'm going to walk you through just why that is and how we got there, so we can chart a future that gets us to an even better place tomorrow.

Reasons To Love Today

If you're alive today and reading this, congratulations.

You're supported by an invisible web of past inventions and a whole range of near magical objects that are infused with the brilliance and creativity of the people who came before us. 

Hobbyists and investors and engineers and architects and stone masons and plumbers and a billion other people got us to where we are today.  People built on the creations of the past and that accelerated progress more and more.

One thing led to another and another and now we just take it for granted that we can flip a switch and the light comes on. 

Today, some folks use progress like a dirty word.  They usually use it in quotes to show how "progress" is just some kind of disgusting fetish.  That is absolutely insane. 

Progress is what made the world today so magical to live in. 

Progress is the ability to pick up the phone and call anyone, anywhere in the world for pennies. It’s diseases we've conquered through medicine that actually works. It’s public transport systems that zip you around your city. It’s light anytime you want it at any hour.

Progress is clean water.

Today you probably don’t pause to think how amazing it is to drink clean water from the faucet.  You don't worry about dying from cholera two days later.  But cholera was a deadly fact of life for most people in the 1800s and as far back as the Roman empire.  Here's an illustration of a beautiful young Victorian woman before and after Cholera.

This cartoon from 1866 shows that just drinking from the local tap could be a death sentence.

What changed was chlorine in drinking water, which killed cholera and other nasty hidden buggers of the invisible world.  This breakthrough didn't make the people who created it rich.  In fact, the engineer who first put chlorine in the water in the US, John Leal, even went to trial because people just couldn't imagine that a very toxic chemical was safe at small doses to humans but lethal to bacteria.  He was acquitted and "by 1918, more than 1,000 North American cities were using chlorine to disinfect their water supplies, which served approximately 33 million people," according to Wikipedia.

Two Harvard professors, David Cutler and Grant Miller, studied the impact of chlorination and other water filtration techniques between 1900 and 1930,  and they found that "clean drinking water led to a 43 percent reduction in total mortality in the average American city," according to Steven Johnson's Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer.  They credited filtration and chlorine with dropped infant mortality by as much as 74% and child mortality almost as much. 

We've bested some of the nastiest diseases in history in the modern world. We eradicated one of the most horrific diseases in history through mass coordination and science. Straight up eradicated it. Go look at pictures of people with smallpox. I'll spare you here. Trust me, this is not a disease you want.  We have evidence from ancient Egypt that smallpox existed 3000 years ago, ravaging people down the centuries.  Smallpox is estimated to have killed more than 300 million people since 1900 alone.

Now it's gone. Just gone.

Medicine today is a miracle. 

But historical medicine was a very different story. Too often medicine before the turn of the century was nothing but quack medicine that was either totally useless or worse that useless because it actually did terrible damage. 

There was even a point near the very beginning of the scientific revolution where being rich actually made it more likely for you to die at a young age.  That's because before we had the widespread use of the scientific method as a way to test medical theories most medicine was worse than garbage.  It was dangerous.  Doctors were no better than witch doctors.  Rich people had access to doctors but doctors didn't know what they were doing just yet.

Take this passage from Johnson's How We Got to Now about the kind of medicine George Washington got.  Johnson notes that it's "practically indistinguishable from a torture manual."

"By the time the sun had risen, Washington’s overseer, George Rawlins . . . had opened a vein in Washington’s arm from which he drained approximately twelve ounces of his employer’s blood. Over the course of the next ten hours, two other doctors—Dr. James Craik and Dr. Elisha Dick—bled Washington four more times, extracting as much as one hundred additional ounces. Removing at least 60 percent of their patient’s total blood supply was only one of the curative tactics used by Washington’s doctors. The former president’s neck was coated with a paste composed of wax and beef fat mixed with an irritant made from the secretions of dried beetles, one powerful enough to raise blisters, which were then opened and drained, apparently in the belief that it would remove the disease-causing poisons. He gargled a mixture of molasses, vinegar, and butter; his legs and feet were covered with a poultice made from wheat bran; he was given an enema; and, just to be on the safe side, his doctors gave Washington a dose of calomel—mercurous chloride—as a purgative.”

It will come as an absolute shocker that none of this actually worked.

It took time, but it was the scientific revolution that really changed the world.  Our ability to understand the world increased exponentially with our ability to objectively test ideas and overcome that bug in the brain that believes things even when they're not true. 

Before the scientific revolution all we had was individual perspectives with no way to really validate that perspective objectively.  People believe all kinds of crazy things that don't match reality.  Without any objective way to test people's ideas and assumptions we're left with a mess of opinions and no way to know which is closest to reality.

I saw a conference once where some kid asked a scientist why science is better than his opinion and the scientist said because when I put a plane into the air it flies.  Your opinion doesn't matter to the airplane.  It flies because it's objectively true that it's correctly designed to fly or it simply wouldn't fly.

To understand just how much science changed the way we think and understand the world today just know that educated people once believed witches caused storms, knives would bleed near murder victims and that mice spontaneously materialized in hay.  You can only imagine what an uneducated person thought.

David Wooton, author of the Invention of Science, takes us through some of the more fantastical beliefs of a well-educated European from the 1600s:

"He believes in witchcraft and has perhaps read the Daemonologie (1597) by James VI of Scotland, the future James I of England, which paints an alarming and credulous picture of the threat posed by the devil’s agents. He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea – James had almost lost his life in such a storm. He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England – he knows they are to be found in Belgium (Jean Bodin, the great sixteenth-century French philosopher, was the accepted authority on such matters)...He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn...He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it...He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours – he has heard mention of Copernicus, but he does not imagine that he intended his sun-centred model of the cosmos to be taken literally."

Now we have medicine that actually works instead of snake oil and we can predict the weather pretty damn well and we can find criminals through finger prints and DNA.

As I write the first draft of this, I had a bad stomach bug that's came back a few times over two weeks.  It had me running to the restroom constantly.  Diarrhea in the past was often a death sentence.  It left people badly dehydrated and unable to keep anything down. The very water they needed to rehydrate was often poison itself.  I simply went to the doctor and they took a stool sample, told me exactly what's wrong and wrote a prescription to kill it that actually worked.

When I got food poisoning in Thailand last year, I woke up woozy and dizzy, unable to stand, vomiting and shitting every ten minutes.  I went from hot to cold in seconds.  My wife took me to a doctor and with a few small pills, I was ready to travel by the very next day.  One pill killed the little parasites in my stomach with antibiotic power.  Another stopped the shits cold.  An electrolyte package kept me super hydrated.  Another pill stopped the dizziness. 

We take medicine like this for granted now.  Of course the doctor has something to stop it, we think.  But that wasn't always the way.  Mostly medicine didn't work for most of human history.  The doctor didn't have a cure and basically the only way you survived a disease was your immune system and a bit of luck.

How much luck?  A lot.  People are not resilient by default.  You probably think we are because of all the medicines we have now and the clean drinking water we have but humans are remarkably prone to death and diseases without these modern masterpieces of invention. 

How do I know?

Because nearly half of all children used to die, in every country on Earth, into the late 1800s.

In most places now it's single digits or a fraction of 1%. 

To see just how stark that drop is from another perspective, take a look at this chart which shows child mortality over two millennia.  You’ll see that for most of human history it was a flat line of death and then it suddenly drops dramatically.

It didn't matter if you were very rich or dirt poor.  Kings and queens were desperate to have as many children as possible because they knew most of them wouldn't make it.

Until the twentieth century, it was a given that at least one of your kids would die at an early age.  Today we see the loss of a child as one of the most horrifying experiences of life and it was a basic, routine fact of existence right up until the turn of the century.  Starting in 1900 those numbers started to fall. 

Today it's less than 4% of all children who die before turning five years old. 

We tend to think of children as paragons of resilience and health.  Kids get sick but they have robust immune systems that make it easy to bounce back like nothing ever happened. 

Except that's not true.

Kids have developing immune systems that are less resilient than adult immune systems.  If a person survived past childhood they were likely to have a very significantly robust immune system or they just managed to get very lucky or both.

Take a moment to appreciate that and just how much it means to your life today.  These aren't just dry statistics in some blog article, they're real examples of how the people of the past laid the bricks that built the better world we live in today.

The life expectancy of adults shot up dramatically starting in 1900 as well.  The average person lived into their 30s or early 40s.  That drop in 2021-2022 is the first big one since the 1960s in Africa, mostly due to the surge of COVID. 

Take a look at the chart below.  Life expectancy was basically unchanged for all of human history.  People died in their 30s or 40s on average.  It's not that people couldn't live to 80, 90 or 100, it's just that they usually didn't.  There were too many diseases waiting for them, not to mention starvation, malnutrition, war and more.  A simple cut on your hand could mean death because we didn't have antibiotics.

I once read a post that said if you could have a billion dollars free but you had to go back 200 years would you do it?  Your answer to that question should be a resounding hell no because lack of medicine and basic sanitation means an early death so better to live today with what you've got because you're living better than most of the mega-rich 200 years ago anyway!

It's not just medicine and science that's gotten better today either.  It's many of the most basic aspects of life. 

Take something like slavery. 

Slavery was the default and depressing fact of life in every country and all ancient empires. If you lost the war, you became a slave.

The Americas were built on the back of slaves, with slave ships sailing for over 400 years all over the world, with people kidnapped, ripped from their homes, torn away from lovers and friends and family, forced to a life of hard labor.  It's estimated that over 15 million people were taken as slaves during those 400 years, when the total population of the Earth was between 450 million and 900 million.

Towards the end of the Roman Empire as many as 80% of the people were descendants of former slaves. "The scale was so great that some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry," says Mary Beard, in her epic history SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 

Entire empires were built on slave trading with the Dutch and Portuguese empires being some of the most enthusiastic and barbaric slave traders in history, according to new world histories like The Silk Roads.

Now very few people live in the horror of legal slavery.  It dropped from 194 countries in 1800, out of 196. 

It dropped to 3 in 2017. 

That is a remarkable and wonderful shift of mass perception.  It means that the idea that everyone is endowed with a basic right to life and freedom to work as they see fit has swept the globe in the last 200 years.  It went from a majority opinion that slavery was just the way things worked and that some people were simply inferior to something that almost nobody supports.  It's gone from majority opinion to taboo, meaning even if you support it you wouldn't dare say it because you'd face brutal backlash from society.  That's an amazing 180 degree turn in world history and one that's truly incredible if you think about it.

Of course, there are still modern forms of slavery (not to mention the after effects of slavery on people's rights, historical wealth and on people's minds and perception of others).  Anti-slavery advocacy groups estimate there are as many as 50 million modern slaves, defined as people who are coerced into work or have no choice but to accept the work and the conditions they work in.  These are horrific numbers indeed and hard to stomach if you live in the thriving east or the affluent west. There are 7.888 billion people on Earth today and 50 million is 0.63% of the world still forced into slavery.  The number should be zero but it is still a tremendous shift from the history of the world where as much and moving in the right direction.

Come to think of it, maybe the most important change in the modern world is a shift in perception, knowledge and understanding. 

The average person today is more educated, better informed and has a wider range of understanding because of technologies like the printing press and the internet, although if you spend too much time on Twitter you might not think so.

While many politicians are eager to crush social media and some folks think of it as the center of all evil in society, it's arguable that with so many people in the world online it subjects every opinion to much more scrutiny.  It may actually be harder to get a true following with a dark message, because it's almost impossible to bamboozle an entire society like it was in the time of Stalin and Mussolini. 

If you think public discourse is bad now, just imagine if we had Twitter in the 1800s, when the Democratic candidates in the US during the Civil War countered Republican talking points that they were “soft on rebellion” by claiming they were the "true white man's party" and that Republican's have "niggers on the brain" and where one of the Democratic anthems was "Nigger Doodle Dandy," sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy," according to the incredible history book Lies My Teacher Told Me.  I can’t imagine anyone publicly getting away with that kind of discourse on today’s social media without massive and swift backlash.

As Paul McCartney once wrote, "you have to admit it's getting better, all the time."

But where did that education come from? Mass printing and mass distribution technology. The printing press single-handedly changed the trajectory of the world.  Much of that world is built by better understanding of the world around us.  Without the ability to share ideas and information we stayed stuck in the dark ages, life barely changing for centuries. 

The printing press leveled up our ability to share and record and trade information.  It's the most important invention in the history of the world because it single handedly raised the intelligence of the entire human race. 

Now more people could print their ideas and share them.  Before that the only ideas that got written down tended to be court proceedings or laws or religious scripture.  Now people were printing cookbooks and philosophical texts and medical texts and political ideas and language learning texts.  Ideas disseminated faster and faster and reached more people.  It accelerated the growth of our minds.

The internet is the spiritual successor to the printing press, a giant web of intercommunication that spans the whole world and lets anybody share anything they want.  There's a downside to everything and when everyone can share it means dark ideas and idiotic people get their message out there too but that's always happened.  Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini didn't need social media to spread their dark messages of hate and destruction.  

Even totalitarian societies struggle badly to control social media.  China employees millions and millions of censors to try to keep people from saying things they don't want but the Great Firewall is often a leaky sieve as people find clever and creative ways to get around it all the time and say what they want. 

The Grass Mud Horse always finds a way. People are clever.

The more we know, the better we're able to moderate and modulate ourselves.  The more we learn, the more we create in society. 

Education is on the rise all across the world.  The number of girls in school is up to 90% as of 2015 when it was as low as 65% in the 1970s. More educated people is always a good thing for society. The smarter we are, the more resilient we are to solving problems.

My grandmother didn’t finish high school, couldn't open a bank account without her husband's permission, and her income wasn't counted when they applied for a loan to buy a house.  They didn't qualify to buy the house because they were about $2 a week short, which wouldn’t be the case if they counted her income.  The only reason they bought their house is that my grandma's boss owned properties and she got him to waive the requirement and sell them the house. 

My mother only attended two years of college but she was able to go back to classes later to become a stock broker and then a wealth manager in an investment bank.  She went from blue collar to white collar because of her change in education and the changing perception of women in society. 

And she opened her own bank accounts with no permission from anyone.

Beyond the progress of young women and scientific knowledge and education, how about the tremendous ability we have to feed people today?

In the 1960s the book The Population Bomb predicted that we'd need to let 2 billion people starve because there just weren't enough resources to go around. Instead we got the Green Revolution and can sustain more folks than ever.

The green revolution was a revolution in farming techniques, from cross breeding resilient plants, to pest control, to soil sustainability. 

It marked the Third Agricultural Revolution, where we saw massively increased crop yields and agricultural production across the world.  In the late 1960s, as Professor Ehrlich was penning the Population bomb, farmers and scientists were getting to work, using fertilizers, high yield wheat and rice, pesticides and irrigation.

Norman Borlaug, the "Father of the Green Revolution”, received the Noble Peace Prize in 1970. His work saved over a billion people from starving.  Yuan Longping did the same for rice, saving as many or more people in Asia.

That’s the thing about doomsday prophets like Ehrlich.  They don’t believe in human tenacity and innovation.  They’re fatalists.  They’re not out there building and working and trying to change things. They’re not the engineers working on aqueducts and irrigation techniques and the people working to find better ways to clean water.  They’re not the ones out there learning how plants grow and how to make them grow better.  They’re talkers, no doers. 

We need less talkers and more doers.  We need more optimists about the future and less fatalists.  

Actually, it’s okay to be a realist too, someone who can see clearly and who knows what it takes to create real change.  People who have a problem for every solution are not the builders of better futures.  They’re the people who keep us trapped.  They’re the ones who would have said “slavery is just the natural order of things” or “people die from Cholera and there’s nothing we can do so just live with it.”

But we don’t have to live with it.  Forget the people who see nothing but death and damnation around the corner and focus on the builders of tomorrow, the people who see problems but also see solutions.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

If it's not clear by now, we're amazingly lucky to live in the world we live in.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.  The people of the past didn't just see problems, they solved them.  They saw a way to make the world better.  And they did it.

Today, we're in danger of doomsday thinking crippling our ability to create solutions to our problems.  If we don't believe the world can change, if we don't see it as possible, if all we do is see the illusion of insurmountability then we can't build a better future. We can't give in to fatalism and thinking there is no way to make things better or that progress is an illusion.

Progress is power.  It's what makes the world so incredible today.  Not perfect, not by a long shot, but better than it's ever been and that's something special.

Anti-progress people will often throw out lines like "well are nuclear bombs good, huh?"  Of course, all progress is not good. Progress is not perfect.  But calling out a single technology that is designed to do one thing and one thing only, kill people, doesn't detract from the rest of the progress we've made in history through science, engineering and advancing our intelligence.  And even dark technologies like nuclear technology gave us nuclear reactors to help power the planet and X-rays.

The fact remains, the smarter we get, the more scientific, the more educated, the better society gets over time. 

But we have to see the future we want.  We have to see real problems and fix them in the real world. We have to invest in smarter people and a smarter world.

To do that we need imagination and creativity.  We have to create the world we want to live in.  The great minds of the past understood this but we're in danger of forgetting it. We've got cynical and short sighted.

But there's still time to turn it around, still time to embrace a better tomorrow.

Progress is real.  The only illusion is not seeing it.

But if you can see it clearly, you can be the change you want to see in the world.