Also known as: Where did it all go so right?

🌐 The world is a much better place than you think it is. Honestly.

📱The media feed us the news we want to consume – bad news. The media are not to blame for this, they are only feeding us what we want.

We can’t seem to help it. We have an insatiable desire to know what’s wrong. Aeons of evolution have wired us this way – our ancient ancestors had to know where danger lurked so they could avoid it and live to fight another day.

Nowadays the danger is fed to us constantly by 24-hour news channels and social media so that we have a hugely well-informed awareness of what is wrong. This is not good for our mental health, our physical health, or for having a sensible conversation about even a mildly controversial topic.

It’s counterproductive.

It’s counterproductive because we are lacking a corresponding awareness of what is going right in the world.

✅ Our awareness of problems has compounded whereas our awareness of solutions has stayed the same.

✅ For example, global extreme poverty has almost halved in the last 20 years, global life expectancy is now around 70 years and 80% of the world’s one-year-olds have been vaccinated against some disease.

These are amazing stories that the vast majority of people will immediately assume are wrong because it doesn’t fit our innate biases and the narrative of the world we have in our heads.

I don’t deny that problems exist; coronavirus, poverty, war, famine, climate change, corruption… I could go on, but just because some things are bad doesn’t mean they can’t also be improving. Yes, things can be bad and be getting better at the same time.

🔗 Check out the wonderful Hans Rosling at https://www.gapminder.org if you think I’m talking rubbish. As they say on the website, most people are wrong about most aspects of global health and welfare. (Even government policymakers!)

💰 As global poverty falls little by little, people have more money to spend. They might spend it on more food, or rather than walk everywhere they buy a bicycle, or better shelter for their home, or more animals for their farm. Further up the income scale progress means buying a motorbike instead of a bicycle and then a car instead of a motorbike.

📈 No matter what this money is spent on, sooner or later it feeds into the global economy and into the profits of companies where, to butcher a well-known analogy, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can lead to Apple declaring bigger than expected profits on the New York stock exchange.

And that is why, over the long term, it will be worth investing a reasonable proportion of your wealth in the global stock markets.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The world’s population today is close to 8 billion people and it will level out somewhere between 9 and 11 billion people by 2100. Today only 9% of the world lives on less than $2 per day and 5 billion people live in middle-income countries. More amazing stats I bet you think are wrong.

As the world population grows and those in low to middle-income countries become wealthier, their spending will undoubtedly feed into the companies listed on the global stock markets.

💰 Don’t be afraid to invest your money in the future. The world is already better than you think.