The Great Escape

The Great Escape challenges the idea that the world is on fire by declaring that things have never been better in many ways, despite the advancements we’ve made not yet having reached everyone equally.

The first humans on earth were hunter-gatherers. While they lived healthily, their lives were short. On average, they lived only until age 40, with most of their life dedicated to finding food and shelter.

As hard as it probably was, they did have the benefit of a very nutritious, balanced diet. They worked together and shared the wild plants and meat they found. There wasn’t disease because they were able to move before there were unsanitary, germ-infested conditions.

It wasn’t until the Neolithic Revolution that hunter-gatherers started to settle into a new, agricultural way of life. Now that they had domesticated animals, disease emerged. This led to a massive increase in mortality.

You’d probably think settling in villages would help their well-being because they wouldn’t have to travel, struggle, and compete to obtain food constantly. But it actually turned out that their well-being decreased. They lived in dirty cities where food and feces were too close together, and epidemics spread like wildfire through trade.

So both their quality of life and life expectancy took a sharp decline during this revolution. People died at even younger ages because of things like diseases, droughts, or famines.

Just in the last century, we have seen the average life expectancy increase by about 30 years in wealthy countries. The biggest driver of this monumental feat is the decrease in child mortality.

Healthcare and disease prevention have meant that children dying is a fairly rare occurrence. Many countries have brought the mortality rate down to only 0.5 percent. This is even more impressive when you consider that only a few centuries ago, about a third of kids didn’t even make it to age five.

Most kids born in wealthy countries can now expect to live long enough to know their grandchildren and even their great-grandchildren. That’s all thanks to better healthcare, nutrition, and education.

Thanks to the spread of scientific knowledge, we understood advances like germ theory. We improved sanitation, increased disease prevention, and discovered how to treat many diseases. One of the first examples of this is when London improved water sanitation in the early nineteenth century. In doing this, they quickly helped fight off the cholera epidemic.

But these advances, unfortunately, have not reached every part of the earth. Sadly, there are children today that still suffer or die from preventable diseases such as measles, cholera, or diarrhea. Then there are 34 million people worldwide who have died of HIV/AIDS.