Is the world getting better or worse? Both, it seems. In January 2018, Time ran a cover story called “The Optimists,” in which the issue's guest editor, Bill Gates, reported that things are on the whole improving. Within the month, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientistsmoved the hands of its Doomsday Clock thirty seconds closer to midnight, signifying that the end is as nigh as it has ever been.
The Doomsday Clock was created in the late 1940s to warn of nuclear Armageddon and now monitors other risks as well. Climate change has been factored in since 2007, bioterrorism and artificial intelligence were included in 2015, and further causes for concern will no doubt be added in due course. The clock's hands have been moved twenty-three times since 1947, mostly in an ominous direction, but it is only a gimmick. There is no pretense that it measures anything except the degree of foreboding felt by a panel of scientists and academics.
Time's optimists, by contrast, claim to base their sunnier outlook on precise quantification. It is “backed by data,” wrote Gates. He mentioned, among other things, a halving since 1990 of the number of children who die before their fifth birthday; a decline in the proportion of the world's population that lives in extreme poverty, from over one third in 1990 to about one tenth now; and a rise during the past century in the number of countries in which it is legal to be gay, from twenty to more than a hundred.
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