These series of statistical graphics show that, while there's still plenty of war, hunger, sickness, and poverty in the world, things are much better than what they were only a few decades ago—not to talk about centuries ago. We are still far from utopia, but the data is stubborn: We are getting there. Fast.
Check out this graphic of death in wars since 1947—when the Indo-Pakistani war started two years after the end of World War II (the deathliest human conflict in absolute numbers.) Even while the doomsayers argue that we are in another valley of relative peace preceding a major worldwide conflict, even while we there's the ISS, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, it seems the world is pretty much in calm.
But while war and conflict have terrible consequences, they are temporal events. More important through time is the level of poverty, food consumption, or child mortality. Here's the map of food supply. Click on the years to see the differences since 1961:
# World Maps of Food Supply (kcal per capita per day) 1961-2009 – Max Roser6
This data comes alive in this two insightful (andpresentations by Swedish statistician and expert in development Hans Roslin:
Make sure to visit Our World In Data to dive into all these fascinating stats.