Noah Smith, Columnist

Four Charts Show the World Is Getting Better

Global inequality is falling, renewables are catching on, war kills fewer people.

December 28, 2015 at 6:58 PM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

A bear market for building war memorials?
Photographer: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

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The new year is always a time for reflecting on what happened in the past year. But I think it’s worth stepping back and taking a look at the bigger trends shaping our world. I believe that most of what’s going on can be traced back to a few underlying processes. I’ve written about all of these before, but charts can help us visualize these.

Chart 1: The Great Compression