brutish, and short. Today, life expectancy has increased by leaps and bounds virtually everywhere. Infant and maternal mortality have dropped sharply, thanks in part to the spread of clear hygiene standards and the construction of modern hospitals. According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as recently as 1988, polio was rampant in 125 countries; today that number is down to two. Aside from among the Taliban and a few pockets of upscale communities in the United States, the virtues of vaccines are accepted by all, part of a general consensus on the virtues of Western science and technology.
And reason is replacing superstition more generally. People around the world now routinely do basic cost-benefit analyses when looking for solutions to problems, leading to a gradual improvement in outcomes everywhere, from agriculture and construction to social and political life. This helps explain the dramatic long-term decline in the rates of most kinds of conflict and violence that the Harvard scholar Steven Pinker has documented.
After slavery and imprisonment, the most degrading condition a human being can experience is poverty. In 2000, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced as one of the ambitious Millennium Development Goals halving extreme global poverty by 2015. That goal was far exceeded, and the U.S. National Intelligence Council has predicted that extreme poverty will be reduced even further by 2030-which would constitute one of the most remarkable developments in human history. The global middle class, meanwhile, is projected to rise from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020 and 4.9 billion in 2030. The world's infant mortality rate decreased from an estimated 63 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 32 in 2015. This translates into more than four million fewer infant deaths each year.
Instead of optimism based on this recent progress, however, these days in the West, one more often encounters pessimism related to three current challenges: turbulence in the Islamic world, the rise of China, and intra- Western economic and political sclerosis. But the pessimism is unwarranted, because none of these three challenges is insurmountable.
MODERNIZING MUSLIMS
The Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia, comprises 1.6 billion citizens-more than one in five people on the planet. The vast majority of them share the common global aspirations to modernize their societies, achieve middle-class living standards, and lead peaceful, productive, and fulfilling lives.
Contrary to what some assert, Islam is fully compatible with modernization. When Malaysia built the Petronas Towers and Dubai built Burj Khalifa, they were not just erecting physical structures but also sending a metaphysical message: we want to be part of the modern world in all dimensions. Many Islamic societies have educated their women. In Malaysian universities, the
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