Cheer Up, Everything Is More Awesome

"In the time that it takes you to read the first chapter, over 2,000 people will have escaped poverty." So says a blurb on the back cover of Johan Norberg's book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (London: Oneworld, 2016). The book lives up to the hype. In ten chapters, on topics including food, life expectancy, violence, poverty, the environment, literacy, and freedom, Norberg, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. and the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, documents persuasively how pretty much all of the world has gotten better over the last two centuries and even over the last few decades.