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It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 years

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Stephen Moore and Julian Simon have compiled the most significant data of how life in America has improved since 1900.

We all know about major technological advances, but the details of the obliteration of diseases, the accumulation of material wealth and increased opportunities for ownership are astounding.

This book will trounce the nay-sayers, negativists and should silence the loudest "Chicken Little".

This book is as useful as a research tool, as it is for pleasure reading.

It is fashionable to bemoan the state of the world. The conventional wisdom is that global warming, Terrorism, drug abuse, crime, AIDS and all the rest of the crises threatening humanity lead us to the conclusion that the "good old days" were somehow better, safer and saner than today.

But, if things are so bad why is infant mortality going down around the world? If things are on the edge of anarchy why are proportionately fewer of us hungry, or sick today than one hundred years ago. If things are going to hell in a handbasket why is our life expectancy steadily improving?

These are inconvenient questions. The answers are tough on the prophets of doom.

Luckily, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Stephen Moore and Julian Simon prove this convincingly. Facts are often inconvenient. But, if you want to know the facts, this is the book for you.

Stephen Moore, leader of the Club For Growth, and the recently deceased Julian Simon, made famous by his bet with Robert Ehrlich and also from his solution for airline overbooking, have contributed once again to the dragon-slaying of the social justice mythology. Their rigorous compilation of data on the continued ability of free market economies to create an ever rising surplus for all people is unsurpassed. I read Simon's "State of Humanity" a couple of years ago and it was equally as informative. Alm & Cox's "Myths of the Rich and Poor" also correlates with the data presented in this book.

An interesting phenomena occurs when you present this book to die-hard socialists. They continue to disclaim its validity by eg. citing the disparity between CEO compensation and the bottom 25% of the population. In fact they present you with statistics of their own which seemingly refute the data in this book. When you probe and ask them how their statistics were compiled they become evasive and fuzzy, but they continue to rely on them to underpin their position. They engage in the fallacy of inductive logic which consists of reasoning from the particular to the general i.e. if they used the Canadian health care system for a cough and they were satisfied with the results of their medical care then ipso facto such a system is good. In addition it's better than the U.S. system because it's cheaper, etc. They ignore all the other inputs and outputs that any cursory economic study would investigate. It's almost like they would suffer an emotional crisis if they had to accept relity i.e. like the conclusions in this book. Why this is so would be worthy of continued discussion, but the need to denigrate solid evidence seems neccessary in order to retain their sense of self.

Emotional trauma, provided by irrefutable evidence contrary to a belief system, seems to erode one's certainty in adhering to a false construct; but results are uneven and take long periods of time to penetrate society. Statistics, such as we have here, are younger than our century, and have only been subject to accurate number crunching coincident with the rise of the main frame computer (in the 60's). The authors should continue to educate the people. A constitutional republic such as ours works best with the input of an educated citizenry. Kudos to Moore and Simon, may he rest in peace.

There is much excellent information here to gladden the heart of people who are gloomily convinced--as I once was--that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

This book is obviously intended as a reference guide. As such, sometimes the material seems a little shallow. And while very meticulously documented, on occasion the source citations are a little too vague for my tastes. For example, a chart on water pollution trends (on page 189) only cites the "various years" of the Council on Environmental Quality's Annual Report, and only shows numbers for 1972, 1982, and 1992, without showing us clearly whether an actual trend is visible.

Despite these minor flaws, this is an excellent reference guide showing the often startlingly positive outlook for humanity on planet earth. It's a good reference that's worth having on your shelf.

Every four years we're told how civilization has fallen into ill-rebuke. The chattering classes continue to repeat the Marxist slogan that the poor have fallen behind while the idle rich have gotten richer by stealing from the poor. But this rare optimistic book knocks those arguments cold. As a civilization, Americans are healthier, smarter, wealthier, happier, than at any time in America or the world at any point in civilization. There is not such a thing as the so-called "good old days." Today is the good old days, as is the future. In this book, you will see that by any measurement, the American people have continued to make lasting and important changes. From inventions to wealth to health and education, we have made remarkable progress and should be proud that we have a civilization that has encouraged us to do so. And this book will provide the evidence needed to rebuke the annoying liberal noisemakers such as Michael Moore who continue to look to the welfare-states of Europe as the utopian view of the future.

Michael Gordon

Wake up people! The good old days wern't all that good. Too many people are living in their history instead of moving into their destiny. And the sad part is that their history isn't real history, it's fantacy! This book is a real eye opener.

As a well-informed reader of Environment & Climate News, you likely exhibit considerable skepticism toward the drumbeat of fear-mongering anti-capitalists who believe the world is in a death spiral that can be stopped only by increasing the size of government programs and reducing human freedoms.

However, you may find it difficult to contradict the fear-mongers if you lack the hard data to dispute their pessimistic views.

As regular Environment & Climate News readers know, my normal book reviews read more like "Cliff Notes" for students, because I recognize only a small percentage of you will actually buy the books I review. Not this time. I will only surf across this compendium of positive human progress.

You must buy the book, absorb it carefully, and present its contents continually to those who don't recognize they live in the golden days of our nation.


Golden Age

The central premise of It's Getting Better All the Time, published in 2001 by the Cato Institute, is that there has been more improvement in the human condition in the past 100 years than in all of the previous centuries combined.

That is a difficult premise to accept for those who hear and read the daily news of school shootings, homelessness, AIDS, global warming, declining student test scores, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, by nearly every measure of the human condition, life has improved dramatically.

Be it health, wealth, nutrition, education, speed of transportation and communications, leisure time, the proliferation of computers and the Internet, or gains for women, minorities, and children--these all demonstrate an amazing improvement of the human condition.

While much of the rest of the world lags behind the United States, the same trends are nevertheless evident nearly everywhere. And of even greater importance is the fact that freedom is expanding across the globe and tyranny is on the defensive wherever it exists.


Woes of Yesteryear

If you are not convinced the human condition is improving, the authors call your attention to a picture of life but a century ago. It was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, horse manure, candles, Jim Crow laws, 12-hour work days, and premature death. One child in four perished before his or her 14th birthday.

While 100 years ago parents lived in very real fear of their children dying, today, the authors point out, middle-income suburban parents live in fear of their child not making the soccer all-star team.

A hundred years ago, industrial cities were enveloped in smoke, streets smelled of garbage, and the automobile was correctly hailed as a pro-environment invention that would lead to the reduction of the filth associated with horses. Cancer was not a primary cause of death then because most Americans were doomed by infectious diseases, not living long enough to develop degenerative cancers.

Perhaps no fact in this book is more impressive than this: Most Americans who are considered poor today have access to a quality of housing, food, heath care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the superrich Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers did not enjoy in their day.


Numerous Advances

Coauthors Julian Simon and Stephen Moore believe the three most important developments that made all this possible are electricity, modern drugs, and the microchip. The book chronicles the past 100 years through advances in 14 categories, offering charts and graphs to show every significant advance in these areas:

Health: Almost all the major killer diseases before 1900--tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, whooping cough, polio, and malaria--have been eradicated in the United States.

Nutrition: The price of food is now below 10 percent of family income. After spending thousands of years trying to satisfy man's caloric needs, we're now trying to eat less, for health reasons.

Children: Child labor has been eliminated in the developed world, and it is rare that children do not survive to adulthood.

Incomes: Real per-capita income in the United States has quadrupled in the past century.

Poverty: Poverty, by any measure, is declining rapidly in the United States.

Work: Before 1900 most work was physically demanding drudgery, low-paying, and monotonous. Such work is the exception today.

Recreation and leisure: Recreation, sports, dining out, and enjoying professional entertainment are central to American life today.

Housing: In 1900, less than one in five U.S. homes had running water, flushing toilets, a vacuum cleaner, and gas or electric heat.

Transportation, computers, education, environment, natural resources, and the status of women and minorities round out the book's evidence with similar dramatic advances.


Individualism vs. Statism

The authors note America got rich earlier and to a greater extent than all other nations because nowhere else has the entrepreneurial spirit been nurtured as it has been here. Government assistance has had little to do with our progress, they observe.

While we now have substantial prosperity and large government programs, the government has been a consequence of our economic growth rather than a cause of it.

In fact, almost every great tragedy of the twentieth century has been a result of too much government, not too little. Nazism, socialism, communism, Marxism, and apartheid were all simply fancy names for statism, the unreasonable government control over the lives and liberties of citizens. Over 100 million people perished as a result of these tyrannical governments in the twentieth century.

Reassuringly, the authors are as optimistic about the future as they are pleased with recent advances. They predict increases in wealth and health, declining prices for natural resources, improvements in agriculture, further reduction in disease, more abundant free markets--and the continuing embarrassment of doomsayers who routinely predict planetary catastrophe.

It is a shame Simon, who died in February 1998 just a few days short of his 66th birthday, did not live longer to see more of his optimism come true.


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Jay Lehr ([...]) is science director for The Heartland Institute.

Negative and disturbing news sells, but is it the truth? Frequently, news is positive when you look a long-term trends but positive news don't "sell newspapers". In a world filled with negative and disturbing news and events it's nice to come across uplifting and factual news. I hope that more Americans, overcome this morbid curiosity and start realizing that the world has lots of good news which is just not being reported due to fact that a lot of news doesn't have enough "shock factor" or enough "guts and glory" or "entertaining enough".

Great book. Very encouraging. Silences all the negative doom and gloom reports
people can tend to feed on. It's a real education to see how much we have changed
in such a short time and how our quality of life has been so blessed.

It's Getting Better all the Time is an upbeat statistical reference consisting of factual text and colorful graphs.

Fascinating and fun, the book is an essential reference for authors and speakers. It is a treasury of statistics.

And the book has a great title.

As a publisher, author of 28 Books, 109 revised editions, six translations and over 500 magazine articles as well as a consultant to the book publishing industry, I spend much of my time doing research. I will refer to this book again and again.
Dan Poynter, Para Publishing.