Quite a lot, it turns out
This interesting little table from Goldman Sachs shows a few ways the world changed in the last five years.
Some highlights since 2010:
- The UN Food Price Index fell by a third.
- The price of oil fell by two-thirds.
- Venture capital investments in the US doubled.
- Global smartphone penetration increased from 19 percent to 75 percent.
- The cell phone price index fell by over half.
- Average wages in China rose by more than 50 percent.
- Beijing air pollution is down by a third.
- The cost of sequencing a genome fell by 97 percent.
- The number of summer AirBnB guests increased from 47,000 to 17 million.
- Bitcoin’s value increased 1,500 fold.
But, as GS points out, 2015 was not all good news:
- Economic growth has slowed.
- Life expectancy has not changed much.
- Africa’s share of global trade remained near 3 percent.
- The Patriots won the Super Bowl.
- Japanese GDP per capita remains flat.
Still — on the whole and for most people — things are changing for the better, in more ways than we could ever anticipate.
Here’s to a better today.
(Check out the other data below — lots of amusing and intriguing items.
