While there is pain and misery on a large scale, there are also powerful trends of benefits and improvements for global humanity. Stories about good news don’t generate many clicks, social media posts, and search hits, and don’t generate much advertising revenue for electronic or paper-based media outlets, so the good news gets ignored, and leaves the public with the general vague impression that the world is a bad place and is getting worse.
Here are some examples:
Education for girls has continued to improve. The significant global improvements more than compensate for the setbacks in places like Iran and Afghanistan. “New data drawing from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics shows that there are 22.5 million more girls in primary school, 14.6 million more in lower secondary and 13 million in upper secondary education now than in 2015,” reported an UNESCO website in 2023, indicating that even the global pandemic did not stop this salutary trend from continuing. “Five million more girls are completing each level of education from primary to upper secondary education now than there were in 2015,” and they are performing at levels comparable to, and in some cases even superior to, their male classmates: “As a global average, girls are now outperforming boys in reading across all education levels and country income groups. They are also performing the same as boys in mathematics.” The trend holds true both in absolute numbers and as percentages of the growing world population.
In 1990, more than 2.3 billion people in the world were living at the level labeled ‘extreme poverty’ by the World Bank and the United Nations. “The remarkable reduction of extreme poverty in the last few decades is one of the success stories of global development. Even as the world’s population has grown, many fewer people are living in extreme poverty,” explains the World Bank. “The number of people living in extreme poverty fell from 1.9 billion to 689 million,” as of 2017. While the decline in absolute numbers is significant, the decline as a percentage of the total population is even greater, because the world’s population grew while the number of people in extreme poverty was declining. Which impact did the pandemic have on global poverty? Depending on the sources, it either held steady, or declined a bit further. In any case, the overall trendline from 1990 to 2026 is a steady improvement.
The Human Development Index, defined and calculated by the United Nations, is an aggregate measure of health and longevity, education, and wealth. From 1990 to 2023, the global index has improved continuously, despite the pandemic. Moreover, it has improved for each region (i.e., continents and sub-continental areas), indicating that this improvement is occurring in both industrialized nations and third-world nations.
The child mortality rate, measured as the death of children under the age of five, has declined consistently, as measured and reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations, from 1957 to 2025, defying the pandemic by maintaining the trend.
Global life expectancy, as measured and reported by the World Bank, retreated for two years during the pandemic, but is now in 2026 better than its pre-pandemic levels, and with the exception of the two pandemic years, has demonstrated continuous annual improvement since 1960, and is at an all-time high.
The global suicide rate declined steadily from 2000 to 2020, according to Macrotrends and the WHO, before worsening in 2021. Post-pandemic, the rate has returned to its pre-pandemic levels.
Despite the Ukraine-Russia war, and despite fighting in the Middle East, the numbers of people who die in combat remained at a low point during the first quarter of the twenty-first century. During the twentieth century, an average of approximately two million people died annually in combat. From 2001 to 2025, the yearly average was between a half and a quarter of that number.
Yes, there really is some good news.
The world is a churning blend of good and evil. Stories portraying the globe as one giant disaster after another are as wrong as stories of boundless optimism; the former are much more numerous than the latter. Bad news gets more attention and generates more money for the news media. Intentionally looking for good news is a corrective. Good news is more difficult to find, but is worth the effort.
