Money and Happiness | Good news: the world has never been better

In the newsletter money and happiness, sent by email on Tuesday, our journalist Nicolas Bérubé offers reflections on enrichment, the psychology of investors, financial decision-making. His texts are reproduced here on Sundays.

Is it due to inflation? To rapidly rising interest rates? To Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? A bit of all of this at once?

The ambient climate is one of anxiety. Personal finance calculations that reassured us just a few months ago (“my house is making more money than me!”) have given way to less pleasant realizations (“my line of credit is making more money than me !”).

We have the impression that society is in bad shape, that the world is in bad shape. This is to forget the unprecedented progress experienced by humanity for a handful of decades. Our world is an unrecognizable place for generations before us.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving American this week, so here are some reasons to take a breather and be grateful.

We make more money than ever

From a strictly pecuniary point of view, Quebec has never done so well.

Median household income in the province now stands at about $87,000, up from $47,000 in 2000. An increase nearly three times faster than the rise in the index of consumer price. In short, we have never earned so much money.

modern medicine

Just over a century ago, doctors and surgeons considered having dirty hands, grimy fingernails, and clothes stained with dried blood from patients as proof that they were working hard. Germs ? It was a joke, a tall tale invented by people who had too much time to think… And that was the medicine of the rich countries. It is not surprising that global life expectancy has risen a lot since then: all countries combined, it has gone from 31 years on average in 1900 to more than 72 years today, a feat mainly due to the drastic drop in infant mortality.

Until the year 1800, one in three children died before reaching the age of 5. In Quebec, life expectancy at birth is now 83 years, six years more than in the United States.

Flush toilets

Speaking of cleanliness… On Wednesday, June 12, 1901, the City of Montreal adopted a regulation making indoor toilets mandatory. Flush toilets were invented in the 16th century.^e century, but for hundreds of years they were reserved for the homes of wealthy people. Montreal having been founded in 1642, this means that nearly two out of three days of the existence of the metropolis, flush toilets were not mandatory in buildings.

More educated

The difference between the secondary school graduation rate of students from privileged backgrounds and students from disadvantaged backgrounds is decreasing in Quebec. This gap was 29% in 2012 and it is now 21%, according to the Institut de la statistique du Québec.

Better fed

For centuries, the majority of people in Western countries worked in agriculture. Mechanization and the use of fertilizers have changed everything. In Quebec, barely 1.3% of the population today works in agriculture. Yet production is at record levels.

Less starvation

In the middle of the last century, researchers predicted that the increase in the world’s population would cause the arrival of catastrophic mass famines. However, the opposite has happened: the rate of malnutrition in the world has fallen from 65% in 1950 to less than 9% in 2019.

less violence

The past was much more violent than the present. According to the website Our World in Data, the great powers were at war between 70% and 100% of the time in the 16^e and XVII^e centuries, a data that has dropped over the following centuries to reach 0% since the beginning of the 2000s. In primitive societies, about 15% of people experienced a violent death; today, 0.03% of people die violently.

The climate challenge

One of the greatest challenges of our time is to stop emitting CO₂ in the air. Our societies are taking it late, and the effects of climate change are already perceptible and will continue to be so. Over the years, the actions to be taken will become more and more urgent. According to Gregor Macdonald, a journalist specializing in energy and energy transition, the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation around the world is now in decline, which was unthinkable just a few years ago. About a quarter of the electricity generated in Texas and California comes from wind and solar. About a quarter of the 25 million new cars sold in China this year are electric. Other energy-intensive industries will have to change their practices in the years to come.

You rarely hear about progress because you get used to it quickly.

Also, our perception of the world is shaped by what we see. As long as there is a house on fire, there will be a television camera to film it. What the camera can’t show, however, is that there were 50 houses on fire before…

Understanding it is not only a duty, but a way to find happiness in our life – especially when things are not going as we would like.

Last week, I asked you if you were attracted to cryptocurrencies. Here are some of the responses received.