Glad tidings

The below is from The Spectator, the best-written and most entertaining magazine in the English language. To read the whole magazine on iPad/iPhone, click here for a free trial. Or click here for a Kindle free trial.

To listen to politicians is to be given the  impression of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015.