Why 2020 was the fourth best year in history

The Spectator has a long and proud history of fact-based optimism, sometimes represented by an end-of-the-year article explaining that statistics bear out that this was the best year ever, even if you didn’t get that impression when following the news.

Well, 2020 is not a good candidate for such an article. ‘The worst year ever’, according to a Time Magazine cover story. We all share that sentiment to some extent. We will remember 2020 as a year of disease and death, and lockdowns that separated friends and relatives, and businesses from customers, causing depressions of both the economic and clinical sort.

But if we were to take it literally – the worst year ever – it’s the kind of statement that can only be explained by a spectacularly short memory. Just since the early 20th century (and mind you, ‘ever’ is even longer than that) we have experienced two world wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the Gulag and Mao’s Great Leap.