Things have been rather gloomy of late here at the Cage and in the wider world where it is hard to escape depressed reflections on the big zero, a decade in which nothing good happened. No job or wealth creation, new major wars, “a decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing” as Paul Krugman put it.
Well that can’t be right. “We” must have achieved something. I am inviting our readers to send me examples of trends where the trendline goes up (if up means something good) in the 2000s. Let me start with some data on armed conflict. While the total number of civil and interstate wars is only slightly lower at the end of this decade than in the beginning, there are fewer high intensity wars. This must be a good thing, no? And, Happy New Year!!!!
ps. (Yes, I would love to see a graph with how many people are living in conditions of armed conflict but that would be quite hard to do given that wars generally affect only part of a country’s population. There also appears to be an uptick in lower-intensity conflicts in the second half of the decade. Clearly, the trend is not all positive.)
Addendum: I see that Tyler Cowen just made the point in the NYT that I had wanted to make with all this: it was a fruitful decade for many around the world.