Visions of dystopia in the last half century or so are distinctly Western; in that for the most part, situations that seemed like the worst possible outcomes to many of us were reasonably analogous descriptions of what life is like for a large part of the world’s populace. From an io9 interview with William Gibson:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

There’s an interesting contrast between my daily English reading list, where (for the past year or so) the sky has been falling, and the daily grind here (at least in the cities) where most people are exceptionally optimistic. Professor Cowen writes in a similar vein in the NYT that 2000-2010, a really crappy decade for most Americans, was decidedly positive in the annals of human history:

Ideals of prosperity, freedom and the rule of law have probably never been more resonant globally than they’ve been over the last 10 years, even if practice often falls short. And for all of the anticapitalistic rhetoric that has emerged from the financial crisis, national leaders around the world are embracing the commercialization of their economies…

One lesson from all of this is that steady economic growth is an underreported news story — and to our own detriment. As human beings, we are prone to focus on very dramatic, visible events, such as confrontations with political enemies or the personal qualities of leaders, whether good or bad. We turn information about politics and economics into stories of good guys versus bad guys and identify progress with the triumph of the good guys. In the process, it’s easy to neglect the underlying forces that improve life in small, hard-to-observe ways, culminating in important changes.

Equity indices (and a whole lot of other indicators) corroborate this view. Mmm data:

From MSCI Barra. Price levels such as these are nice and neat; it’s much more messy trying to grasp how development has provided greater levels of choice for millions, particularly groups that were traditionally disadvantaged or marginalized – or that you wouldn’t even know about – who outside of academia had ever heard of a Chinese migrant worker prior to 2000? Within China, social progress seems to have followed improvement in underlying material conditions. Broadly, the same trend seems to be part of the Western experience, and should be celebrated rather than vilified or ignored as it expands to a much larger segment of the world’s population.