好英语网这是有史以来最好的一年
If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever.
如果世界的现状使你感到沮丧，请听听我的一个想法：在人类历史的长弧中，2019年是有史以来最好的一年。
The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.
那些让你烦恼的坏事是真的。但下述情况也是真的：自从现代人类在20万年前出现以来，2019年几乎肯定是儿童死亡的可能性最小、成人文盲的可能性最小，以及人类遭受极痛苦、损毁外形的疾病可能性最小的一年。
孟加拉国罗辛亚难民营一所女校的学生。
Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.
在最近几年里，每天都有32.5万人首次用上电。每天都有超过20万人首次获得自来水。每天都有65万人第一次上网。
Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.
对所有的人来说，最大的灾难也许是失去一个孩子。这在过去经常发生：历史上，几乎一半的人类死于童年。直到1950年，全世界仍有27%的儿童在15岁前死亡。现在，这个比例已下降到4%左右。
“If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past,” noted Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs the Our World in Data website. “Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common.”
“如果你有机会选择自己的出生时间，选择在过去几千代人中的任何时间都有相当大的风险，”牛津大学经济学家、“用数据看世界”(Our World in Data)网站的负责人马克斯·罗瑟(Max Roser)指出。“过去，几乎每个人都生活在贫困中，饥饿是普遍现象，饥荒经常发生。”
But … but … but President Trump! But climate change! War in Yemen! Starvation in Venezuela! Risk of nuclear war with North Korea. …
但是……但是……但是现在有特朗普总统！现在有气候变化！有也门战争！有委内瑞拉的饥饿！有与朝鲜发生核战争的风险……
All those are important concerns, and that’s why I write about them regularly. Yet I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans say in polls that the share of the world population living in poverty is increasing — yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction in global poverty.
所有这些都是重要的担忧，也是我为什么经常写这些话题的原因。但我担心，新闻媒体和人道主义领域如此不懈地关注坏消息，以至于我们让公众以为，所有的趋势都在朝着错误的方向发展。半数以上的美国人在民意调查中说，世界贫困人口的比例正在增加，然而，过去50年的一个趋势是全球贫困人口大幅减少。
As recently as 1981, 42 percent of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10 percent of the world’s population now.
近在1981年，地球上还有42%的人口忍受着“极端贫困”，联合国将极端贫困定义为每天的生活费低于两美元。如今，这个比例已降至世界人口的10%以下。
Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline “Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.” Or if one uses a higher threshold, the headline could have been: “The Number of People Living on More Than $10 a Day Increased by 245,000 Yesterday.”
这相当于在十年中的每一天，报纸上都可以刊登这样的头条：“昨天又有17万人摆脱了极度贫困”。如果使用更高门槛的话，标题可以是：“过上每天10美元以上生活的人数昨天增加了24.5万人”。
Many of those moving up are still very poor, of course. But because they are less poor, they are less likely to remain illiterate or to starve: People often think that famine is routine, but the last famine recognized by the World Food Program struck just part of one state in South Sudan and lasted for only a few months in 2017.
当然，许多摆脱了极端贫困的人仍很穷。但因为他们不再赤贫，成为文盲或饿死的可能性就小了。人们常常认为发生饥荒是常规，但得到世界粮食计划署承认的最近一次饥荒是2017年在南苏丹爆发的，它只涉及了南苏丹一个州的部分地区，而且只持续了几个月。
Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. A half century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90 percent adult literacy. There have been particularly large gains in girls’ education — and few forces change the world so much as education and the empowerment of women.
脊髓灰质炎、麻风病、河盲症和象皮病等疾病正在减少，而且，全球的努力已经扭转了艾滋病的形势。半个世纪前，世界上半数以上的人曾经一辈子是文盲；现在我们正在接近90%的成人识字率。我们在女童教育上取得的进展尤其之大——在改变世界方面，几乎没有比教育和赋予妇女权力更有力量的东西了。
You may feel uncomfortable reading this. It can seem tasteless, misleading or counterproductive to hail progress when there is still so much wrong with the world. I get that. In addition, the numbers are subject to debate and the 2019 figures are based on extrapolation. But I worry that deep pessimism about the state of the world is paralyzing rather than empowering; excessive pessimism can leave people feeling not just hopeless but also helpless.
读到这里，你可能会感到不舒服。在世界仍存在如此多问题的情况下，欢呼进步似乎不得体、存在误导或产生适得其反的效果。我明白你的想法。此外，这些数字也存在争议，而且，2019年的数字是推断出来的。但我担心，对世界现状的深度悲观让人麻痹，而不是增强人们的力量；过度悲观不仅让人感到绝望，也让人感到无助。
Readers constantly tell me, for example, that if we save children’s lives, the result will be a population crisis that will cause new famines. They don’t realize that when parents are confident that their children will survive, and have access to birth control, they have fewer children. Bangladesh was once derided by Henry Kissinger as a “basket case,” yet now its economy grows much faster than America’s and Bangladeshi women average just 2.1 births (down from 6.9 in 1973).
例如，读者总对我说，如果我们拯救儿童的生命，结果将会是引发新饥荒的人口危机。他们没有意识到，当父母相信他们的孩子会活下来，而且父母有控制生育的手段时，他们会生更少的孩子。亨利·基辛格曾嘲笑孟加拉国是“经济状况极差的国家”，但现在孟加拉国的经济增长速度比美国快，而且孟加拉国的妇女平均只生2.1个孩子（低于1973年的6.9个）。
Yes, it’s still appalling that a child dies somewhere in the world every six seconds — but consider that just a couple of decades ago, a child died every three seconds. Recognizing that progress is possible can be a spur to do more, and that’s why I write this annual reminder of gains against the common enemies of humanity.
是的，世界上每六秒钟就有一个孩子死去，这仍令人震惊，但想想就在几十年前，每三秒钟就有一个孩子死去。认识到进步的可能，能激励我们作出更大的努力，这就是我为什么每年写篇文章来提醒人们，我们在对抗人类共同敌人上取得的进展。
Climate change remains a huge threat to our globe, as does compassion fatigue in the rich world, and it’s likely that we will miss a United Nations target of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030. Meanwhile, here in the United States, Trump presents a continuing challenge to our institutions, and millions of families have been left behind and are struggling. We should keep pressing on all these fronts (the last one concerns me enough that it’s the topic of my new book), but we’ll get a morale boost if we acknowledge the backdrop of hard-won improvement.
气候变化对我们的地球仍是一个巨大的威胁，富裕国家的同情疲劳也如此，而且，我们很可能实现不了联合国在2030年前消除极端贫困的目标。与此同时，在美国，特朗普对我们的制度构成了持续不断的挑战，数百万个家庭被甩在了后面，并在苦苦挣扎。我们应该在所有这些方面继续努力（我很关心美国家庭的状况，这是我新书的主题），但如果我们承认有来之不易的进步这个背景的话，我们将提升士气。
“We are some of the first people in history who have found ways to make progress against these problems,” says Roser, the economist. “We have changed the world. How awesome is it to be alive at a time like this?”
“我们是一些历史上首次找到办法解决这些问题的人，”经济学家罗瑟说。“我们已经改变了世界。活在这样一个时代多令人惊叹啊！”
“Three things are true at the same time,” he added. “The world is much better, the world is awful, the world can be much better.”
“三个事实同时存在，”他补充说。“世界比以前好了，世界很糟糕，世界可以变得更好。”
I also take heart from the passion so many — especially young people — show to make the world a better place. I recently published my annual “gifts with meaning” guide and suggested four organizations to support in lieu of traditional presents. Readers have so far donated more than $1.6 million to those organizations, saving and transforming lives at home and around the world.
我也从许多人——尤其是年轻人——展现的让世界变得更美好的热情中找回信心。我最近发表了我的年度“有意义的礼物”指南，建议向四个组织捐款来取代传统礼物。到目前为止，读者已向这些组织捐赠了160多万美元，为拯救和改变国内外人民的生活做出了贡献。
So I promise to tear my hair out every other day, but let’s interrupt our gloom for a nanosecond to note what historians may eventually see as the most important trend in the world in the early 21st century: our progress toward elimination of hideous diseases, illiteracy and the most extreme poverty.
所以我保证，我还会在我每隔一天的专栏里为世界发愁，但让我们打断这种忧郁片刻，来看看最终可能会被历史学家视为21世纪初世界上最重要的一个趋势：我们在消除可怕的疾病、文盲和极端贫困上取得的进步。
When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated — and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.
我1959年出生时，世界上半数以上的人一辈子是文盲，生活在极度贫困之中。到我死的时候，文盲和极度贫困有可能差不多已被消除。很难想像人类社会在我们的注视下，取得比这更大的胜利。