Quite a lot, it turns out

This interesting little table from Goldman Sachs shows a few ways the world changed in the last five years.

Some highlights since 2010:

• The UN Food Price Index fell by a third.
• The price of oil fell by two-thirds.
• Venture capital investments in the US doubled.
• Global smartphone penetration increased from 19 percent to 75 percent.
• The cell phone price index fell by over half.
• Average wages in China rose by more than 50 percent.
• Beijing air pollution is down by a third.
• The cost of sequencing a genome fell by 97 percent.
• The number of summer AirBnB guests increased from 47,000 to 17 million.
• Bitcoin’s value increased 1,500 fold.

But, as GS points out, 2015 was not all good news:

• Economic growth has slowed.
• Life expectancy has not changed much.
• Africa’s share of global trade remained near 3 percent.
• The Patriots won the Super Bowl.
• Japanese GDP per capita remains flat.

Still — on the whole and for most people — things are changing for the better, in more ways than we could ever anticipate.

Here’s to a better today.

(Check out the other data below — lots of amusing and intriguing items.)

Click on the image for a larger version.

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.