La Vida es una Porquería

Uno de los mitos favoritos de la progresía internacional: cada vez se vive peor.

It's Getting Better All the Time
by Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon

In their book, Moore and Simon blow that myth out of the water, stating the case that more human progress has been achieved in the last 100 years than in all of the previous centuries combined. No matter what the variable -- life expectancy, wealth, leisure time, education, safety, gender and racial equality, freedom -- the world is a vastly better place today than it was a century ago.

"Never before have quality of life improvements been spread to virtually every segment of the population as has happened in the United States in this century," the authors point out. Because natural resources have become increasingly available throughout history, and because productivity keeps increasing, there is apparently "no fixed limit on our resources in the future," they note. "There are limits at any moment, but the limits continually expand, and constrain us less with each passing generation."

The biggest question of all is why so much of the progress of the past 100 years has originated in America. Moore and Simon provide a simple but compelling answer: "The unique American formula of individual liberty and free enterprise has cultivated risk taking, experimentation, innovation, and scientific exploration on a grand scale that has never occurred anywhere before."