Meanwhile, the World Is Becoming a Better Place

Republicans ran an entire campaign off of hell and high water: chaos is at our door, the NRA howls, danger creeps daily through the porous border. Exit polls last night showed that Americans, by an easy majority, believe the country’s headed in the wrong direction. Half expect life to be worse for the next generation. Eight of 10 don't put trust in the federal government.

But viewed from a different height, a brighter perch, could the wrong track somehow be right? The University of Oxford's Oxford Martin School, a leading center of research and policy, recently spun up OurWorldInData.org, a resource created "to present long-term data on how our world is changing." Turns out the long view is quite a bit brighter than what you see on the Twitterverse. Max Roser, the economist at Oxford responsible for the data, writes, “The evidence shows that we are becoming less violent and increasingly more tolerant, that we are leading healthier lives, are better fed, and that poverty around the world is declining rapidly.”