Reflections on Half a Century of Progress

The year 2026 may seem like a dark time to graduate.

The media bombard us with reminders that we are living in an era of war, inflation, autocracy, poverty, and environmental damage. Polls show that you are pessimistic about the future, many intending to forgo bringing children into such an uncertain world.

I’m here to push back against this fatalism. Exactly fifty years ago, I was in your shoes, graduating from university. When I entered graduate school at Harvard that September, the professor who delivered our welcoming address assured us that by the year 2000, we would all be dead. The fact that you are reading this essay shows that rumors of our death were greatly exaggerated.

I’m a cognitive psychologist who has spent much of my career trying to expose the blind spots that make every generation think it lives in a time of unprecedented peril. Problems are inevitable, and the news media feed us a nonrandom sample of the worst of them. This feeds two cognitive biases: availability, which distorts our judgment with vivid examples, and negativity, which gives greater weight to bad things than good ones. A news feed packed with catastrophes will naturally make us think we’re doomed.

Positive developments, in contrast, consist of things that don’t happen — a region free of wars, a city not attacked by terrorists — and of developments that creep up by a few percentage points a year, compounding over decades and transforming the world by stealth. Only by recalling the bad things in the past, and by plotting data on how they have changed since then, can we tell which way the world is going.

So let’s set the Wayback Machine to the year of my graduation. In 1976, half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain, ruled by totalitarian communist regimes. In the other half, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were just emerging from military or fascist dictatorships. Most of the countries of Latin America and East Asia remained authoritarian, including Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, all of which are democratic today.

In 1976, the U.S. and USSR were locked in the Cold War, poised to attack each other with nuclear weapons (inspiring Bob Dylan’s lyric, “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled: Fear to bring children into the world”). China was ruled by Mao, whose Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had starved and murdered tens of millions. Today, neither Russia nor China is democratic or peaceful, but the scope of their malevolence is orders of magnitude smaller.

In the Middle East, Israel had just fought its fifth war with Egypt in a span of 25 years, wars which killed more than 100,000 people and which had recently triggered an American nuclear alert. Any suggestion that, within a year, the leaders of Egypt and Israel would shake hands, and then, two years after that, hug and sign a peace treaty that would last indefinitely into the 21st century, would have seemed utopian to the point of delusion.

In South Africa, the apartheid regime seemed immortal. Yet in less than two decades, the white minority would cede power to the black majority, without the civil war or bloodbath that many predicted at the time.

Now let’s turn to numbers. In 1976, global life expectancy was 60; today it is 73. Forty percent of humanity lived in extreme poverty; today, it’s less than nine percent. One in three people couldn’t read or write; today, it’s one in eight.

And the United States? In 1976, a newborn American could look forward to 73 years of life; today’s newborn, 79.3 years. That year’s “misery index” (the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates) was 13.5 percent; this year’s is 8 percent. Then, 18 percent of Americans were poor; as of 2024, 11 percent are. The homicide rate was more than 8 per 100,000; today, it has fallen to nearly half that value. And according to a joke of my day, “New Yorkers don’t like to breathe air they can’t see.” Today, though there are 60 percent more of us Americans, we emit 78 percent less toxic air pollution.

Why recount this half-century of progress? It’s not to compete over who had it worse, boomers or zoomers. Nor would I encourage you to relax because things always get better. Quite the contrary: Left to themselves, things get worse. Only when people acknowledge the problems of their day and apply their ingenuity to solve them does anything get better.

Progress came not from optimism alone but from innovation and action aimed at enhancing well-being. On the international front, it required clever diplomacy, the exchange of people and ideas, and the adoption of global norms and institutions that promoted rights and discouraged war. Prosperity grew through technology, trade, and markets moderated with optimal levels of regulation and social spending. Disease, pollution, and crime were mitigated by combinations of technology and policy.

But the agents for these changes had the gumption to try to improve things only because they had a reasonable belief they might succeed. And this is why we must see past our blind spots and not let the morning’s bad news fool us into cynicism and hopelessness.

For all the crises and doomers and existential threats that may darken your graduation day, it’s good to recall that past graduation days were darkened by crises that were as bad or worse. Still, those graduates saw their way through to a better world.

May your 50th reunion in 2076 be an occasion to reflect on the better world that all of you have wrought.

Steven A. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.