Plenty good news in 2024, but the struggle continues - Farming Portal
Ivo Vegter
We sometimes gloss over the signs that progress continues, and that we’re still living at the best time ever to be alive.
As we end another year packed with corruption, poor government, socialist economic policies, negligible growth, high unemployment and an ongoing cost of living crisis, we shouldn’t forget that not all the news is bad.
Both the traditional press and social media routinely focus on failures, crimes, scandals and outrages, because those are the issues that require attention and need to be changed. This is right and proper. But it can lead to unnecessary anxiety and depression, because it gives us a perspective on the true state of the world that is biased towards the negative.
There has been a lot of good news in 2024 that can reassure us that, despite troubling headwinds, at a big-picture level it is still the best time ever to be alive – as Marian Tupy, founder and editor of Human Progress, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and fellow Council member of the Institute of Race Relations, never tires of explaining.
So, let’s recap a small selection of the good news that happened in 2024.
South Africa
Top of the list for South Africans must undoubtedly be the end of load-shedding. What many initially suspected was a pre-election effort on the part of the ANC to lull voters into a false sense of security turned out to be a genuine improvement in the energy availability factors of its coal-fired power station fleet, and a reduction in the unplanned capacity loss factor. Long may the reprieve continue.
Vying for a tie at the top of the list will be the result of the national and provincial elections on 29 May 2024, in which the ruling ANC managed to garner only 40% of the vote. Not only that, but it accepted the result gracefully and no political violence broke out. When the ANC negotiated a government of national unity (GNU) that excluded the newly formed MK Party and the EFF, they didn’t riot either. This was a momentous occasion and an important test for South Africa’s democratic maturity.
There’s a lot still to complain about, including that administered prices such as electricity tariffs are continuing their relentless rise, and that the GNU is hopelessly unbalanced in favour of the ANC and seems unlikely to halt the progress of the National Democratic Revolution – the Soviet-inspired roadmap to socialism of the ANC. But baby steps. Things could have gone a lot worse in 2024.
The consumer price inflation rate fell from over 5% in the first half of the year to 2.8% and 2.9% in October and November, respectively, which is the lowest rate in 20 years if you ignore the Covid-19 lockdown outliers of May and June 2020.
One contributor to this decline is slower food price inflation, which last December stood at 8.5%, well down from its alarming 14% peak in March 2023. It decreased first to around 4.7% in April, and in the last two months fell further to a mere 2.3%.
The slowdown in inflation has allowed the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates, which started the year on a 15-year high of 8.25%, to 7.75% in November, and the hope is that inflation numbers, which are both lower than the central bank’s target band of 3% to 6% and lower than economists had expected, could pave the way for further rate cuts, which would bring much-needed relief for debtors, especially home owners.
Positive economic indicators are few and far between in South Africa, so let’s close the year by being grateful for those that do point in the right direction.
The world
The bigger, global picture is a mixed bag, of course. While free markets and free trade appear to be working wonders in Argentina, and Israel seems to be getting the upper hand against Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, Ukraine will likely face a difficult year with continued support from the US now doubtful. Trade wars are also high on the agenda, despite the fact that they destroy wealth and do nobody any good.
Still, the global economy has recovered fairly well from the pandemic. Global GDP growth remains stable, around 3.2% for 2024, with emerging economies growing at 4.2%. While growth could be better, GDP per capita remains on a steady upward slope in both advanced and developing economies.
Fourteen of the world’s 22 fastest growing economies are in Africa, although the continent is being held back by slow growth in South Africa and Nigeria.
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The global poverty rate, which saw a rare reversal from its relentless decline during the pandemic, is back at pre-pandemic levels, and despite a growing population, the total headcount living in extreme poverty is estimated to have declined to below 700 million people in 2024.
Outside the extreme poverty band, the world’s poor are also getting richer. In 2000, about 75% of the world’s population had a net worth below $10,000. In 2023, that number is less than 40%. Meanwhile, the band of people worth between $10,000 and $100,000, which included only 17% of the world’s people in 2000, grew to almost 43%. Combined, these two income bands represent about 92% of the world’s population, a figure which rose marginally from 2000.
With some notable exceptions, including South Africa, inequality both between countries and within countries has declined almost everywhere. An adult who was in the lowest bracket in 2000, with a net worth of less than $10,000, has a 62% chance of moving into a higher bracket by 2030, according to a wealth report by Swiss bank UBS. It notes that meaningful migration out of that bracket has never happened before in human history.
The next few years may see a slowdown, or even a reversal, in these positive trends. As nativism, populism, nationalism and protectionism surge in popularity among the economically illiterate masses, and free trade, tolerance and immigration are pushed to the back burner, expect the world to pay a steep price in lost growth potential.
Other good news
There’s more to the world than just economics, of course (although Ludwig von Mises and Tim Harford would disagree.)
I could list a whole lot of good news stories from 2024, but I wouldn’t be the first. Malcolm Cochran, of the aforementioned Human Progress, has been keeping track, and has curated a list of almost three good news stories for every day in 2024. That’s 1,066 stories in total.
Artificial intelligence is being used in farming to kill weeds without pesticides and to improve African crop yields. Vegetables grew faster than the world’s population for the last 60 years, and more beef is now grown with fewer cows on less land. Global food production is at record highs, thanks to improved farming methods, agri-technology and advances in genetic engineering.
Remember the beepocalypse? Turns out the number of bee colonies is actually rising, and is almost 50% higher than in 1990.
Many successes are being recorded in global nature conservation, with several species being brought back from the brink of extinction, and the world’s forests (and coral reefs, and rivers) doing better than we think.
The nuclear renaissance is gathering pace, with many new approvals, new investments, new builds, and new technologies happening in 2024. Other forms of energy are also doing well, including geothermal energy and all-important battery technology.
The world is still not running out of resources, and climate change is still not running away from us. The world is becoming increasingly resilient to natural disasters, and deaths to catastrophic weather events remain at historic lows.
Pollution is on a downward trend, even in some of the most highly polluting countries, and the world has probably passed peak pollution.
Younger generations are unprecedentedly rich, despite complaining that they can’t afford anything.
Medical breakthroughs are still coming thick and fast, with massive progress being made against some of the world’s most intractable diseases, including obesity and cancer. Technology is not only improving healthcare, but also improving the quality of life of people living with disabilities in ways that were until recently only science fiction.
In science and technology, progress remains largely exponential. There is no sign that even adverse economic conditions will slow down innovation.
And that’s only a small taste of Cochran’s list of 1,066 good news stories.
The struggle continues
When all is said and done, there’s a lot to be happy with, as we bid farewell to 2024. It remains critical, however, to advocate for liberal principles such as tolerance, free markets and free international trade, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Even in countries that should know better, these ideas are under threat. The battle of ideas is not over.
Without a return to the classically liberal economic and political ideas that demonstrably created so much freedom, prosperity and progress in the world in the last century or two, many of the positive trends that make this the best time ever to be alive may not last.
That’s something worth pondering as we enter 2025.
Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker
This article was first published on the Daily Friend.