Things have been rather gloomy of late here at the Cage and in the wider world where it is hard to escape depressed reflections on the big zero, a decade in which nothing good happened. No job or wealth creation, new major wars, “a decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing” as Paul Krugman put it.
Well that can’t be right. “We” must have achieved something. I am inviting our readers to send me examples of trends where the trendline goes up (if up means something good) in the 2000s. Let me start with some data on armed conflict. While the total number of civil and interstate wars is only slightly lower at the end of this decade than in the beginning, there are fewer high intensity wars. This must be a good thing, no? And, Happy New Year!
ps. (Yes, I would love to see a graph with how many people are living in conditions of armed conflict but that would be quite hard to do given that wars generally affect only part of a country’s population. There also appears to be an uptick in lower-intensity conflicts in the second half of the decade. Clearly, the trend is not all positive.)
Addendum: I see that Tyler Cowen just made the point in the NYT that I had wanted to make with all this: it was a fruitful decade for many around the world.
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If ‘we’ means the US, or the West, it may be a zero, but for the world as a whole, perhaps less so: The BRIC GDPs are way up–mostly China, but they all came close to at least doubling. There may be some negatives to this (smog is also way up, and a semi-unfriendly country is gaining power), and GDP is a very clumsy measure, but it does suggest a lot of people being pulled out of poverty.
Much of sub-Saharan Africa is improving greatly as well, I believe.
Other important measures progressed steadily–child mortality, for example. No major changes, but a continued coasting toward the better, at least.
According the the New York Times, murders in New York City have gone down each year this decade. 2009 had the fewest murders there in over 40 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/nyregion/29murder.html?_r=1&hp
So, although we all may be poor and miserable after this decade, at least we’re killing less than we used to!
China
To add to Samantha Dercher’s insight, violent crime in general, nationwide, has been dropping, though 2005-2006 had a slight uptick, and we don’t have the 2009 data yet (at least not where I looked): http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Though, this trend, too, started in the 1990s. I’m too lazy to graph the data or calculate the actual derivative, but it appears the drop may have actually slowed after 2000. Diminishing returns, perhaps.
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