(with apologies for the length; it isn’t possible to summarise this in a paragraph)
The U.N. Economic and Social Council presented its first report on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals towards ending extreme poverty, fighting inequality and tackling climate change by 2030. These are some of the main findings:
The good news:
– The proportion of the world’s population living below the extreme poverty line dropped by more than half between 2002 and 2012. Some 800 million people still live under $1.90 a day.
Fewer children are going hungry. The proportion of children under age 5 who are small for their age owing to malnutrition fell from 33 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2014. Still, an estimated 158 million children under age 5 were affected by stunting in 2014.
– Between 1990 and 2015, the global maternal mortality ratio declined by 44 percent to an estimated 216 deaths per 100,000 live births — and the mortality rate of children under age 5 fell by more than half. An estimated 5.9 million children under 5 died in 2015, mostly from preventable diseases.
The not-so-good news
– The share of overweight children under age 5 increased by nearly 20 percent between 2000 and 2014. Approximately 41 million children in this age group worldwide were overweight in 2014; almost half of them lived in Asia.
– Women and girls work longer hours than men and boys and have less time for rest, learning and other activities because they still overwhelmingly do the household chores.
– In 2014, about half the urban population globally was exposed to air pollution levels at least 2.5 times above the standard of safety set by the World Health Organization. Outdoor air pollution in both cities and rural areas is estimated to have caused 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012.
– The incidence of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis declined between 2000 and 2015, although in 2015 2.1 million people were newly infected with HIV, and an estimated 214 million people contracted malaria.
– In 2013, 59 million children of primary school age and 65 million adolescents of lower secondary age were getting no schooling, most of them girls.
– The births of about 220 million children a year go unrecorded. In the least developed countries, one in two children have not been registered by age 5. This means that everything from getting into school to getting a job becomes a struggle.
I personally think the burgeoning population in less developed countries is a huge problem, given climate change, the threat to harvests, the availability of water, increasing pollution, lack of jobs and shrinking resources. What do you think?
I think the world’s biggest social problem is the illiberal attitudes of the vast majority of humanity. Here in the developed world, we’re very used to there being a census in favour of certain rights: democracy, equality between men and women, freedom of speech, freedom of religion (including the separation of church and state), the rule of law, protection of ethnic minorities against discrimination, etc. But outside the West, such attitudes are the exception, not the norm. Michael Hanlon illustrated this in his article, the Great Morality Gap (http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/theres-a-global-morality-gap-and-its-getting-wider/). Its also supported by research from Pew (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/12/americans-more-tolerant-of-offensive-speech-than-others-in-the-world/).
The reason why its such a problem is that is makes the dream of a world run along liberal lines increasingly unlikely. Our national dialogue assumes that as developing nations become richer, their political systems and moral will evolve accordingly. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, non-Western nations are challenging the West with political systems of their own: strongman authoritarian politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, Islamism in much of the Middle East and North Africa, Hindu nationalism in India, socialist demagoguery in a lot of Latin America, one-party statist corporation in China. What unites all these systems is a distrust of ‘Western’ human rights and a belief in a powerful state without the checks and balances we enjoy. To make matters worse, any argument in favour of the superiority of our system above the others is seen as ‘post-colonialism’ and the imposition of our values where they are not welcome. That’s the main reason why I believe this problem is unsolvable, but there are other factors: religious teaching and the belief in implementing it in politics, poor education, the lack of a liberal tradition in the non-Western world (almost all of the political philosophers that influence our way of thinking are European), the culture of deference to authority in the non-political realm (authoritative fathers, husbands, religious leaders, tribal or community chiefs etc), poor economic growth in the West (which will get worse because of our ageing population and increasingly costly welfare state), and seemingly insolvable ethnic tensions- not necessarily wars, but preferences for others in the same ethnic group.