More bluebonnets to the horizon

Steve Schwartzman

Apr 5

As we entered the home stretch of what ended up being a seven-hour, 238-mile wildflower circuit south of Austin on March 25th, I spotted a huge colony of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) in the southeast quadrant of US 183 and TX 21 in far north Caldwell County. In the wrong lane to pull over, I had to go on, find the next crossover, and come all the way back around. It was worth it. Mixed with the myriad bluebonnets were a bunch of young honey mesquite trees (Prosopis glandulosa var. glandulosa). All in all, 2023 has proved an excellent year for bluebonnets, as you've been seeing.

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Globally, people live more than 22 years longer [now] than the richest people did in 1900

Human life expectancy at birth averaged approximately 30 years for most of human history. That was in large part because of the sky-high child mortality rate among the rich and poor alike. For example, Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland (1665-1714) lost 17 children; several were stillborn, while the child who lived the longest, William, died in 1700 at the age of 11.... As late as 1800, 43 percent of children globally died before the age of 5. By 2015, only 4.5 percent of children died so young.

In 1800, life expectancy in Europe and North America started to increase at a sustained rate of about three months per year. Within a century, people living in the richest parts of the world could expect to live to the age of 50. The main reasons for increasing life spans included better nutrition and public health measures, such as water filtration and expansion of sewer networks. Both were coterminous with and enabled by the gradual enrichment of the society as a whole.

In 2017, global life expectancy reached 72.4 years, according to the World Bank. Put differently, an average inhabitant of the planet at birth—say someone living in the Dominican Republic today—can expect to live 22 years longer than an average Briton or American would have expected to live just 120 years ago. Life expectancy in the Western world rose to about 80 in the meantime, and in some countries like Japan, it rose to 88 years.

Finally, what happens if the current trend in life expectancy continues? Ronald Bailey crunched the numbers and found that "life expectancy rising by 3 months annually implies a global average lifespan of 92 years by 2100. However, the 2017 United Nations medium fertility scenario more conservatively projects that average life expectancy will rise from 72 years today to 83 years by the end of this [the 21st] century?' We hope that Bailey is correct.

That's from Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley's 2022 book Superabundance, which is chock full of statistics showing how much the modern world has improved.