Pessimism or progress: What did you see in 2023?

In the sweep of history, what kind of a moment was 2023?

The year will no doubt be remembered for the grisly Hamas attack of Oct. 7 and the violence it unleashed.

But this was also the explosive first year of artificial intelligence surging into households and workplaces, hyperenergizing the race toward what may soon become one of the most powerful tools in human history – with all the existential fear and immense promise that implies.

On climate change, this was the year that China, easily the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, expanded its solar power capacity on such a historic scale as to keep prospects alive, if barely, for holding global warming within a relatively manageable 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

This was the year that the accelerating global drop in extreme poverty – which has plunged by more than two-thirds since 2000 – resumed after its pandemic pause. 

And this was the year of the recession that never came, despite always being forecast as just a few months away.

For most of us, 2023 was not the year we expected, or dreaded. 

In the United States, we started the year with so little confidence in the economy that Gallup analysts called it “among the worst readings since the Great Recession.” Most Americans expected rising joblessness, high inflation, higher taxes, and a falling stock market. They weren’t crazy. In January, a Wall Street Journal survey of economists found 61% forecasting a recession for 2023. 

Most Americans and all those economists, of course, were wrong. 

Joblessness remains solidly in the zone that economists call “full employment,” meaning essentially that people who want a job can find one. From autoworkers to Hollywood screenwriters to hotel cleaning staff, employees have gained leverage. Even those managers who just want their now-remote workers to show up at the office a few days a week are often forced to back down. Inflation – though still above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target – is close to normal. We can’t know where the stock market will be by the time you’re reading this, but the S&P 500 neared the end of the year up more than 25%.

Yet in a recent Gallup survey, only 1 in 5 Americans gave the economy a positive rating. As markets writer Matt Phillips put it in an Axios newsletter in November, “Psychologically, America is experiencing a recession that doesn’t actually exist.”

Never have so many had so much, in relative peace and safety – and been so unsettled about it.

Why the unease? Some of the leading conjectures are these:

•The aftershocks of the pandemic: About 7 million deaths globally were attributed to COVID-19, and there were possibly as many as 20 million. It upended schooling, work patterns, and businesses, while carving new divisions over civil rights, public safety, fairness, and trust in government. 

“It had a lot of knock-on effects,” says Angus Hervey, a political economist and editor of the Future Crunch newsletter. The world is still working back from them. “Globally, we’re still numb.”

•Media tribalism: People are increasingly able to curate and inhabit their own realities digitally, and that often includes a negative view of those outside their bubbles. In the hyperpartisan U.S., many media and political players make a living from riling people up – focusing on threats to their values rather than on trust-building, common ground, or progress. 

•The pace of change: For many people, in many parts of the world, social change has just been too much, too fast. New attitudes toward gender, the computerizing of jobs, the shifting mixes of ethnicities and cultures through immigration – all keep unsettling the familiar and can create insecurity.

“Things are just changing too fast for people to be comfortable with,” says global opinion expert Bobby Duffy, now a professor at King’s College London.

•Rising expectations: As Zachary Karabell, a historian, investor, and founder of The Progress Network, puts it, “Never have so many people felt they have the right to be heard and lead a good life and have their needs respected.” 

That, of course, is not in itself a bad thing. But it’s a yardstick by which it can be hard for reality to measure up. 

As 2024 dawns, the world faces daunting dangers. But most of them – from climate disaster to rogue artificial intelligence – are complications arising from the enormous, sweeping progress the world has made in the human condition. As we face the hard work ahead, we can perhaps draw confidence from the great distance we’ve already traveled.

Here is a review of the state of progress on some major fronts.

The economy and standards of living

Global wealth is rising again after a pandemic dip. The recovery is across the board, but even stronger in poor and middle-income countries than in rich ones.

“The global economy has outperformed even our optimistic expectations in 2023,” summed up Goldman Sachs analysts in a November report.

The positive transformation of billions of lives over the past generation has been enormous and unprecedented in the history of humankind. The explosion of prosperity in China is familiar to many. But it’s a much broader story.

Bangladesh, for example, was the third-poorest country in the world 50 years ago – the flood-soaked endpoint for India’s largest rivers. It has now surpassed upwardly mobile India itself in income per capita and is projected to graduate out of the United Nations’ “least developed countries” status in the next two or three years. Economic confidence there is relatively high.

Since the turn of this century, the wealth of the world’s median family has grown fivefold. Extreme poverty – defined by the World Bank as living on less than the equivalent of $2.15 per day – was the lot of most people up to 1955. By the year 2000, it had dropped to 29.3% of the world population, and the plunge was accelerating – to 8.4% in 2019. The next year, at the height of the pandemic, the rate jogged upward for the first time in decades to 9.3%. In 2023, it headed down again to about 8.6%.

Meanwhile, the net worth of the median American family grew 37% from pre-pandemic 2019 to post-pandemic 2022, after discounting for inflation, according to Federal Reserve Bank surveys. For poorer households, the rising value of their vehicles accounted for the bulk of their assets, but still, wealth grew more for poorer and middle-income families than for richer ones. 

Soaring post-pandemic inflation is quickly losing altitude. Thanksgiving dinner this year actually cost less than in 2022. So did a tank of gas. Wages have pulled ahead of inflation, especially for lower-income workers.

Housing is still stuck at the worst level of affordability since the Reagan years (when it was far worse). For most Americans, about two-thirds of whom are already homeowners, affordability is not a problem until they need a new mortgage. But the national median rent has risen 22.5% since the pandemic began, to about $2,000 per month. It leveled out in 2023, letting incomes catch up a bit. But about half of all renters still spend more than 30% of their income on rent. 

While Americans give their economy dismal ratings, that’s not how they behave. They keep spending briskly. (When people are worried, they save.) And even as households run up credit card bills, the share that have debt in collection is at a historic low.

Americans also believe by 2 to 1 that each generation is faring worse than its parents. Here again the numbers say otherwise. Some 73% of Americans in their 40s have higher incomes than their parents did at the same age, adjusted for inflation, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study. By comparison, in 1979 that figure was 57%. Similarly, University of Central Arkansas economist Jeremy Horpedahl has found that the net worth of millennials, mostly in their 30s, is about the same as it was for baby boomers at the same age. Gen Xers, in their 40s and 50s, have actually done somewhat better than the boomers at their age.

But this is all in the rearview mirror. Looking forward, 2023 was the year millions of people first used a generative AI program (such as ChatGPT), the next great platform for economic productivity. Though too soon to assess its impact, AI has the potential to become as powerful a change agent as the internal combustion engine, mass manufacturing, electricity, and computing itself, says Jason Crawford, a technology historian and founder of The Roots of Progress. “In the most extreme scenario, which I still think is pretty speculative but not impossible, it is the next big thing in human history – after agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.”

Such a powerful tool also raises civilization-scale fears about what could go wrong. But promise and peril both, this brave new world is coming fast.

Inequality in America and the world

The world has become dramatically more equal in recent decades. On measures like life expectancy at birth, average years of schooling, daily calorie intake, and access to the internet, the differences between countries have narrowed. A Cato Institute study looking at eight such quality-of-life measures found that overall inequality between countries had closed by about half in less than 30 years.

The pandemic was a setback, as it hit the economies of poor countries harder than richer ones. But the emergence from the pandemic has also been stronger in poor countries, according to a report by the Swiss bank UBS. So the longer trend is moving back toward its lifting-all-boats course.

In the U.S., on the other hand, inequality has risen significantly since the 1970s – with the concentration of wealth in the top 1% nearing the extremes of the Roaring ’20s. 

But inequality appears to have topped out around the Great Recession in 2008. When taxes and government aid are figured in to get a more accurate view of actual household incomes, a Congressional Budget Office study found that the Gini index, the most common measure of income inequality, actually dropped about 5% from 2007 to 2019. And coming out of the pandemic, wage gains by lower-income workers have accelerated that trend. A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research report found that higher pay has cut the soaring inequality that developed over the previous four decades by 38%, and in just three years.

Earlier this year, the gap between white and Black employment rates reached a historic low. This came a few months after the gap between white and Hispanic rates also reached a historic low. A U.S. Treasury report called the recovery the “most equitable in recent history.”

Homeownership is still highly unequal between races, however. While 74.5% of white Americans own homes, only 45.5% of Black residents do. But a survey this summer of Generation Z (20-something) first-time homebuyers by the insurance-comparison website The Zebra found that 20.2% were Black, far higher than their 13.6% of the population. This may imply a greater degree of homeownership equity for this rising generation.

Most of the gains in equality both around the world and within the U.S. have come not by making the prosperous less so but by raising the incomes of the rest, especially those who are lowest paid. 

Health and safety

The progress in humanity’s health in modern times has been enormous. The most sweeping and inclusive way to track overall health is through changes in life expectancy, which is based on the ages of those who have already died. In 1900, global life expectancy was 32 years. In the U.S., it was 47.3. Today, the global average is 73, many countries have averages into the 80s, and no country in the world, not even Afghanistan, has a life expectancy as low today as America’s in 1900.

The most dramatic gains in the early 20th century were in children surviving past the age of 15 and in mothers surviving childbirth. Much of the later progress has been against tropical diseases like malaria as well as smallpox and polio. It’s also due, especially in the higher-income countries, to the decline in smoking.

Then came the pandemic. It created a dip in life expectancy almost everywhere (hat tip here to no-dip Norway). But by 2022, most of the world was back on the upward path, pushing life expectancy to a new global high. 

But not the U.S. American life expectancy peaked a decade ago at 78.8 years. By 2022, it had slid 2.4 years to a 20-year low. It rose again in 2023 to 77.5 years. But why the slippage?

The biggest factors have been the epidemic of opioid addiction (especially fentanyl), the rise in Alzheimer’s cases, and the spike in homicides seen in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd and during the pandemic. 

The direction at least is looking up. Opioid deaths declined slightly in 2022, but no clear trend has emerged. The number of dementia cases has risen as baby boomers age, but studies now show that in North America and Europe, the percentage of people at a given age who develop dementia has been falling about 13% per decade for the past 25 years. And the surge in homicides is fast heading back downward.

In pre-pandemic 2019, the homicide rate in the U.S. was about half the level of the early 1990s. America had become a far safer place – though still not nearly as safe as any other high-income country. The rate shot up 30% during the pandemic, then dropped 6% in 2022, and at the midpoint of 2023 was on track to drop another 7% to 10%. The latter would be the biggest one-year drop ever.

Yet a Gallup poll found that 56% of Americans thought crime had risen in 2022. In fact, over the past 24 years, majorities thought crime was higher in all but four years, while it had actually fallen in all but four of those years.

Furthermore, violence has declined while incarceration rates have moved toward greater racial equity. Black men are still imprisoned at four times the rate of white men, but the disparity used to be much higher. The Sentencing Project found that from 2001 to 2021, the share of Black men in prison fell by 48%, and white men by 27%.

Falling violent crime is a global phenomenon. But in America, there are also signs of an underlying civility growing in the shadow of rancorous political divides.

An 18-year study of California schools completed in 2023 by a team at UCLA found that in the state’s public schools, fights and weapons-carrying were down dramatically, especially among Black and Latino youth. Students report greater connection, comfort, and what the report calls “belongingness.” And beyond California, despite the fear levels driven by high-profile campus shootings, every available measurement shows American schools to be far safer than they have been in decades.

Environment

The average global temperature has already risen at least 1.2 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times. Sea level is 8 to 9 inches higher than in 1880. The 12 months through this past October were the hottest year, globally, on record. The 10 hottest-ever summers have happened since 2010.

These are signs of our climate-challenged times. But so are the following.

China expanded its solar power output so massively in 2023 as to “all but guarantee” its emissions will go down in 2024 and beyond, according to an analysis by the website Carbon Brief. The country huffs out a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases but also accounts for about half of the world’s clean energy investment. It now looks to hit its ambitious goal of producing 1,200 gigawatts of clean energy by 2030 – five years early. And if 2023 is indeed China’s peak year for emissions, it’s arriving seven years ahead of its declared target.

In fact, the whole world is toeing the edge of peak emissions. Global emissions would have dropped in 2023 except for the widespread droughts that slowed hydropower output, according to the energy think tank Ember. Most of the countries already past peak have reduced emissions even as electricity demand has grown.

The world’s current path is toward a high-impact total temperature rise between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, the latest United Nations report says. This is down from a 3-degree Celsius rise forecast in 2015. A recent International Energy Agency report says the path to holding it to a modest 1.5 degrees Celsius is “very difficult – but remains open.” 

Diplomats achieved a symbolic breakthrough at the U.N. climate summit in December, where nearly 200 nations agreed for the first time to “transitioning away from fossil fuels” in a “just, orderly, and equitable manner.” It’s easier said than done, of course, but this was an important step in articulating a shared global goal.

Democracy

Americans don’t like the quality of their hyperpartisan, deeply divisive political life. And they attach high stakes to it. Majorities in both parties see their individual rights, their values, and democracy itself under attack.

The good news: Surveys still show Americans’ long-standing confidence in local government running strong.

But it falls off sharply from there. A Pew Research Center study this fall found overall trust in government at its lowest levels in nearly 70 years. For the first time ever, a majority now sees the U.S. Supreme Court unfavorably. The share that holds negative views of both political parties has risen to 28%.

Here’s an oddly hopeful note: One of Americans’ top concerns, and one of very few that show complete partisan unity, is the inability of Republicans and Democrats to work together. People still want the relationship to work.

It’s not, as yet, getting better. A Gallup study in the fall found that differences between Democrats and Republicans on each of 24 issues had either widened or stayed the same over the past decade. 

But on 17 of those issues, opinion in both parties was moving in the same direction even when the gap widened. For example, Democrats are far more supportive of stricter gun laws than Republicans are, but support for such laws in both parties is higher than it was 10 years ago. Also, Republican majorities now back the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage, which Democrats have long favored. And Democrats have shifted slightly toward the Republican position on the unfairness of taxes, while Republicans have moved even further in that direction.

In the U.S. over the past 20 to 30 years, political affiliation has become an increasingly central, emotionally charged tribal marker. But on policy issues, says political philosophy professor Robert Talisse at Vanderbilt University, “rank-and-file citizens are no more divided than ever.”

“It’s more like being a Mets or a Yankees fan,” he adds.

For many, the concern is less the direction of change than the speed of change – cultural, demographic, climatic, and economic. On the right, it’s too far, too fast. The left feels it shouldn’t wait any longer. This is a global phenomenon. 

These debates are amped up by real or perceived insecurity when people feel threatened. “There is also agency here, where media and political actors can increase this sense of tension through focusing on differences and tribal identities, in stoking a culture war,” says Dr. Duffy of King’s College.

There are better ways to have these conversations. None have yet found traction in the U.S., but so-called deliberative reform is popular in northern Europe and Canada. Ireland created its first Citizens’ Assembly in 2016, choosing 100 people at random, like a jury, to make recommendations on Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortions. The assembly heard a wide range of testimony and recommended new abortion policies, beginning with removing the ban. The referendum on the latter passed by 66.4% of the vote. Since then, four other assemblies on controversial issues have been held, and 87 of the 128 recommendations of the first four assemblies have been all or partly adopted by Irish governments.

A 2022 survey by The Irish Times found that 80% of the Irish population trusts the assemblies to make good decisions. Versions of the Irish model are being adapted in countries from Belgium to South Korea.

“People are not unwilling to look at information and consider the issues,” says Dr. Duffy. “They will listen and they will adapt.”

But we don’t see each other that way these days.

How far we’ve come

“The social fabric appears to be unravelling: civility seems like an old-fashioned habit, honesty like an optional exercise and trust like the relic of another time.”  

That sentence may seem to capture the tenor of the times. But it was written 2,000 years ago in Rome. It opens a recent study by social scientists from Columbia and Harvard universities of the perception of moral decline across 60 countries over at least 70 years. Researchers found that people in every country and in every decade believed moral and ethical behavior started worsening roughly around the time they were born. 

The study’s conclusion: They are “almost certainly mistaken.”

The past year has seen much tragedy in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Ethiopia, Yemen, and beyond. Some of the dangers ahead are potentially massive in scale. Progress, like all learning, has come in leaps and pauses and some stumbles back. But as we’ve gained ground, our expectations have moved ahead with us. As they keep rising, it’s easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come. 

Marshall Ingwerson is the former editor of the Monitor and founder of The What Works Initiative.