Our Editor’s 2025 End-of-Year Missive

Another year comes to an end and, judging by some of America’s smartest commentators, it shan’t be missed. The war in Ukraine rages on. U.S. debt is stratospheric. Conspiracies abound. Populism of left-wing and right-wing varieties marches on. There is plenty that is wrong with the world. But that was always the case and always will be, for, as Immanuel Kant reminds us, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

I am not so dismissive. Though I am frequently described as the Cato Institute’s resident optimist, I prefer to call myself a realist. Let me explain.

First, human “progress does not mean,” in the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s words, “that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle but problem-solving.” And behind the gory headlines that capture the public’s attention, millions of intelligent and industrious people across the globe are doing just that.

Malcolm Cochran, our digital communications manager, has laboriously collected 1,084 good-news stories, most of which never made it onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Here are some highlights:

• Life expectancy has continued to rise in the world’s longest-lived countries, indicating ongoing progress against mortality at older ages.

• In 2024, about 8.2 percent of people (roughly 673 million) were undernourished, 14 million fewer than in 2023.

• Extreme poverty was estimated at 10.5 percent in 2022 (about 838 million people) and is projected to fall to 9.9 percent by the end of 2025.

• Child extreme poverty fell from 507 million (2014) to 412 million (2024).

• The number of child laborers dropped by over 100 million since 2000, even while the global child population grew by about 230 million.

• Safely managed drinking-water access expanded to 2.2 billion more people between 2000 and 2024.

• Safely managed sanitation expanded to 2.8 billion more people between 2000 and 2024.

• Measles deaths fell about 88 percent since 2000, and measles vaccination is estimated to have saved nearly 59 million lives since 2000.

• The global maternal mortality ratio fell by about 40 percent from 2000 to 2023.

• The global suicide rate fell by about 35 percent over the last 20 years.

Second, I believe we are experiencing a contagion of negativity, driven by the hypercompetitive media environment, with newspapers, television stations, radio, and websites presenting a highly skewed picture of the state of the world. If it bleeds, it leads. But do not blame the media alone. Humans evolved to prioritize bad news, which means that, as experiments show, our eyes gravitate toward negative stories even when we deliberately set out to consume positive content. If you doubt that, the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen makes a similar point in a podcast we recorded earlier this year.

So, when I say that I am a realist, I mean to convey that the true state of the world is much better than it seems from the barrage of negativity that the public is exposed to daily.

The problem, as always, is that unless you make a concerted effort to seek out good news, such as by signing up for our Doomslayer newsletter, you may never learn about the gradual, incremental improvements occurring around the world each day. Even then, it is easy to be overwhelmed by terrible headlines elsewhere, contributing to rising anxiety and depression. For that reason, I am particularly pleased that we expanded our team to include Adam Omary, a freshly minted PhD from Harvard University’s psychology department.

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Adam joined Human Progress as a research fellow in October 2025. In his first three months, he published four articles, recorded two interviews for our podcast, and launched The Psychology of Progress on Substack. He is also co-directing a Cato initiative to commission original empirical studies on the psychological trade-offs of material, technological, and social progress. The project aims to understand why mental health appears to be faltering in the some prosperous societies and what psychological or cultural conditions are necessary to promote and sustain human flourishing.

Chelsea Follett recorded several podcasts and authored opinion pieces that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, The Hill, and elsewhere. She gave numerous presentations, including at the New Orleans Book Festival and at universities in Texas and Florida. Her book Centers of Progress was republished in Korean. Chelsea completed the manuscript for her second book, which seeks to de-romanticize the preindustrial past, as well as a draft of a new policy analysis paper coauthored with George Mason University’s Vincent Geloso on global inequality; both will be published next year.

Saul Zimet improved and expanded Human Progress’s use of AI across the website and social media to make our content more visually compelling and better optimized for digital platforms. Most notably, what began as a relatively simple experiment in creating Chelsea’s AI clone in late 2024 has blossomed into a suite of fine-tuned AI avatars of me, Chelsea, and Gale Pooley. That work has resulted in 54 mixed-media videos on our social accounts, along with much more content on our website.

Malcolm Cochran was busy managing our social media presence and newsletter. Across all platforms, our audience grew by 14,000, and our content was viewed more than 32 million times. He also workshopped and significantly improved his progress roundups, transforming them from a low-profile side project into a polished and widely read weekly feature. As noted, you can see the culmination of his efforts in this year’s list of 1,084 good-news stories.

As for me, it has been a busy year. I recorded several podcasts and traveled across the United States to give talks. My articles appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Free Press, The Dispatch, Quillette, and elsewhere. Last month, I recorded what may well be the world’s first course on human progress for the Peterson Academy. The book on degrowth and romanticism that I am co-writing with the State University of New York-Oswego philosopher Craig Delancey is progressing, and we hope to have the manuscript ready in the first half of next year.

Those, then, are some of the efforts our team has made over the last twelve months to promote and defend human progress. The hours are long, but ours is a labor of love.