Family Update
My oldest boy heads off to college in a week, and we got our first look at his dorm room online yesterday. Five boys, bunk beds, one room. I looked at it and felt nothing but relief that those years are behind me. He, on the other hand, is thrilled.
He does have a meal plan, which sounds responsible until you learn it works at Chick-fil-A. Not exactly the balanced diet I was picturing, though I lived on ramen noodles at his age, so who am I to talk. His roommate, Nico, is from Uganda and is training to become a pastor and missionary. Chris has already been assigned the important job of bringing the mini fridge with a freezer.
Meanwhile, my youngest is a few days into freshman year at Cardinal Mooney, and so far he's loving it. The school has clearly put real thought into making new freshmen feel like they belong from day one, and it shows in how comfortable he already seems.
And closer to home, we had some late-night drama when Stinky the cat proudly dragged a very much alive, decent-sized mouse into the house. Lots of screaming, lots of running, and somehow it fell to me to handle it. Apparently that's still a dad job no matter how old your kids get.
Below are my two favorite girls in my life (my mom is ranked third).
The world seems more unstable than it has in recent memory. It is so easy to focus on all the bad in the world. This is a good time to remind ourselves how lucky we really are.
Imagine the following scenario. It is 1723, and you are invited to dinner in the beautiful New England countryside, still clean and quaint, away from the pollution of the Industrial Revolution. There, you encounter a family of English settlers who left the Old World to start a new life in North America.
The father, muscles bulging after a vigorous day of work on the farm, sits at the head of the table, reading from the Bible. His beautiful wife is putting the finishing touches on a pot of hearty stew. The son, a strapping lad of 17, has just returned from an invigorating horse ride, while the daughter, aged 12, is playing with her dolls. Sounds like the good life, doesn’t it?
This setting sounds like Gone with the Wind. But in reality, it is rubbish, balderdash, nonsense, and humbug. More likely than not, the father is in agonizing and chronic pain from decades of hard labor. His wife’s lungs, destroyed by years of indoor pollution, make her cough blood. Soon, she will be dead. As the family is too poor to afford a dowry, the daughter will spend her life as a single woman, shunned by her peers. And the son, having recently visited a brothel, is suffering from a mysterious ailment that will make him blind in five years and kill him before he is 30. (Sorry this is getting so graphic.)
For most of human history, life was very difficult for most people. They lacked basic medicines and died relatively young. They had no painkillers, and people with ailments spent much of their lives in terrible pain. Entire families lived in bug-infested homes that offered no comfort or privacy. They worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset, yet hunger and famines were common. Ignorance and illiteracy were common. The "good old days" were, by and large, very bad for most of humankind. Since then, humanity has made enormous progress, especially over the last two centuries.
How much progress?
Two hundred years ago, life expectancy was between 25 and 30. My statistical brain can't help but argue that point. The median life expectancy was 25-30. For every one person that lived past thirty, one died before. That means lots of people lived into their 60s, 70s, and 80s, but there was so much infant mortality it pulled down the average. It is an extremely misleading statistic.
Anyway, in the 1800s, 40% of children died before their 15th birthday. That was not unusual. Far back in history, the average child mortality among hunter-gatherer societies was 49%. Today, global child mortality is 4%. It is .3% in the U.S.
Most of the people who survived into adulthood lived on the equivalent of $2 per day, which is a state of extreme poverty. This was present from the start of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago until the 1800s. Today, the global average is $35, adjusted for inflation. Put differently, the average inhabitant of the world is 18 times better off.
With rising incomes came a massive reduction in poverty, which fell from 90% in the early 19th century to 40% in 1980 to less than 10% today. As the Brookings Institution said, "Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history."
Along with poverty came hunger. Famines were once common, and the average food consumption was 2,000 calories per person per day in the 1820s. The global average is approaching 3,000 calories today, and obesity is a bigger problem than starvation. Until the invention of Ozempic, that is. 🙂
In 1820, almost 90% of people worldwide were illiterate. Today, over 90% of people are literate. As late as 1870, the total length of schooling across all levels of education for people aged 24 to 65 was 0.5 years. Today, it is nine years.
These are the basics, but don’t forget other conveniences of modern life, such as antibiotics. President Calvin Coolidge’s son died from an infected blister he developed while playing tennis at the White House in 1924! Four years later, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.
Or think of air conditioning. Could you imagine living in Florida without air conditioning?
Slavery can be traced back to the Middle East, where it flourished between 4,500 BC and 1,900 BC. For the next 4,000 years, every civilization, at one point or another, practiced slavery. Today, it is banned in every country on Earth.
In ancient Greece and many other cultures, women were the property of men. They were deliberately kept confined and ignorant. In 1893, New Zealand was the first country to allow people to vote. In the Western world, women, for the most part, now enjoy the same freedoms as men.
And don’t make the mistake of believing all men enjoy privileges just due to their gender. Most men in history never had political power. The United States was the first country on Earth where most free men could vote in the early 1800s. Before that, men were mostly oppressed peasants, whose job was to feed the aristocrats and die in their wars.
Strange though it may sound, given the current state of the world, the data suggest that humans are more peaceful than they used to be. Five hundred years ago, great powers were at war 100% of the time. Every springtime, armies moved, invaded the neighbor’s territory, and fought until wintertime.
Homicides are also down. In the 1800s, some 73 out of every 100,000 Americans could expect to be murdered in their lifetimes. Today, it is less than one.
Overwhelming evidence shows that we are richer, live longer, are better fed, and are better educated. My point is simple: this is the best time to be alive.
Be Blessed,
Dave