What a time believe to be alive… Or is it?

It’s all over our televisions, newspapers and the internet. Every day we are bludgeoned by news of how awful things are – financial collapse, environmental disaster, poverty and war. 70 per cent of people in the West think that the world is getting worse (and the better educated they are, the bleaker their outlook tends to be). Many people in the London ‘bubble’, already depressed by Brexit, are now despairing over Trump.

And yet when you step back for a moment and examine the actual data, life is better today for the vast majority of mankind than at any previous time in history. This is the message that we’ll be hearing on January 12th from Matt Ridley, author of the acclaimed book The Rational Optimist, and Johan Norberg, whose new book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, has been described by The Economist as ‘a tornado of evidence… a blast of good sense’.

As they will show, whatever index you look at – health, longevity, poverty or child labour – the facts show that progress has been massive and unprecedentedly fast in the last few decades. 2009, the height of the economic meltdown, was the second best year in mankind’s history when it comes to wealth creation. World poverty has fallen more in the last 50 years than it did in the preceding 500. Of course, war, crime and disasters are still with us, but even so, the evidence shows that they are rapidly declining.

Norberg will also argue that the reason it’s important to counter the perception that everything is going to the dogs isn’t simply to cheer us all up. A widespread negative worldview can have important political implications. A majority of those who voted for Brexit say life in the UK is worse today than 30 years ago – despite vast improvements in human liberties, poverty levels and living conditions.

Similarly, Donald Trump built his presidential election campaign on people’s fear and nostalgia, emotions that are fertile breeding grounds for illiberal policies. And now that he has won, Trump’s opponents are calling his victory the end of democracy or the start of fascism.

Are they falling into the same negative-thinking trap? As Ridley will claim, while there is much cause for concern about what Trump may do – especially his threat to bring in trade protectionism – there are good reasons to think that his presidency may not be as awful as many think.

Steering the conversation between these two resolute optimists will be Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s star political editor. It may be true, she’ll point out, that living standards have risen on average across the world. But in the US inequality has soared and the earnings of poorer households have stagnated for the last 40 years. Millennials in the West are widely predicted to be the first generation to be poorer than their parents. And then there’s the threat of automation wiping out swathes of blue collar and office jobs. These are some of the underlying reasons for the rise of Trump. In this context can we really say that we’ve never had it so good? Are the gloomsters right? Or has there never been a better time to be alive?

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