Worst of times; best of times

Sydney, Australia can be cold in winter. After walking around the edges of the harbor and contemplating the famous Opera House, we were ready to duck into a bookstore, looking as much for heat as reading material. This proved to a real bookstore of a sort seldom seen in these days of Amazon's supremacy -- two floors of books, annotated with notes from literate and curious store clerks.

I don't often see what serious bookstores are carrying these days. After a pleasantly warm quarter hour browsing a wide-ranging trade fiction section, I realized there was a theme in what appeared to be the most up-to-date entries: their narratives seemed overwhelmingly dystopian. I mean, The Handmaid's Tale looked cheerful in this selection. We're in an anxious moment.

So I was reminded of this Washington Post article which points out that this is no time to wallow in hopelessness.

The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.

Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basic needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home improvements or higher education.

It’s a critical juncture: After thousands of years of most people on the planet living as serfs, as slaves or in other destitute scenarios, half the population now has the financial means to be able to do more than just try to survive. “There was almost no middle class before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1830s,” Kharas said. “It was just royalty and peasants. Now we are about to have a majority middle-class world.”

...[The study notes how] remarkably similar daily life is around the world, with the exception of the very rich and poor. The vast majority of the families have electricity, running water in their home, children that attend school and some sort of transportation.

This is new in the last quarter century. It's hard to see in midst of political trauma (yes, Australia is having a nasty one of these, perhaps as awful as the Trump horror show). But if we can keep from rendering the planet uninhabitable, we can rejoice that more humans are enjoying more of a chance for humane lives than ever before in history. Worth noting.