The shortest day of the year is behind us. It’s time to believe in sugar plum fairies, red-nosed reindeer and all that’s good in the world – and good news there is.
The poor may always be with us, but every year fewer of the world’s inhabitants exist in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day. The bank estimates that the rate fell from 13 percent in 2013 to 8.6 percent this year. The poverty rate in the United States, which defines being poor much differently than the World Bank, is at its lowest level since the deep recession of a decade ago.
Gaining ground against global poverty means bringing electricity to those who’ve never had it. It’s hard to imagine, but in 1935, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Rural Electricification Act, only 10 percent of the American countryside had electricity. Today, much of the world still lacks regular service, but last year the number of people without power fell below 1 billion for the first time. More than 120 million people gained access to electricity in 2017 alone. Electricity is being used much more efficiently. LED lighting uses 75 percent less energy to produce the same amount of light as incandescent bulbs, and the LEDs last 25 times longer.
Advances in medicine are eliminating more and more threats to human health and well-being. There is now a vaccine to prevent cholera, one of the world’s most deadly scourges. A vaccine has also been developed to protect against the ghoulish and virulent Ebola virus. Though an effective vaccine against AIDS has yet to be developed, better and more widespread treatment has cut the death toll from the disease in half.
Climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels continues to present a clear and immediate threat to life as we’ve known it. It’s the season to be optimistic so we’re buoyed by the decision, despite U.S. intransigence, of the nearly 200 signers of the Paris climate accords to continue their efforts to curb carbon emissions.
Though nationalism and autocracy have been increasing, driven, we believe, by economic changes almost akin to those of the industrial revolution, the drive for democracy and self-government perseveres. Columnist Frida Ghitis, writing recently in the Washington Post, pointed to three nations that are making a dramatic turn toward freedom and democracy: Peru and the war-torn nations of Ethiopia and Armenia.
On the home front the news is also good. Young people, it seems, are moving to New Hampshire, whose population is the second oldest in the land. Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at UNH’s Carsey Institute, reports that not only did more people move into rather than out of New Hampshire between 2013 and 2017, bucking a regional trend, the increase was greatest for those in their twenties and thirties. The youth moving to the Granite State will have little trouble finding work. The state’s unemployment rate, at a mere 2.5 percent, is the lowest it’s been in a generation.
Focus closer and the view is also rosy. Concord continues to move forward. A new, permanent, overnight homeless shelter opened earlier this month and work on the new skate house at White Park continues. Young people, among them 27-year-old Safiya Wazir, who will represent Concord’s Ward 8 in the House, are getting involved in politics. The next Legislature will be the youngest and most diverse in years.
That too, in this holiday season, is something to celebrate.