As our clients know, we try to take the long view in this portion of the email and draw on perspective as we close out 2024. We like to follow Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology who has written two books on human long-term trends, along with a newsletter that he contributes to called “Human Progress.”

Here are some “big picture” observations he has opined on recently:

• Rising prosperity:In 1789, the average income in the United States, adjusted for inflation, was lower than that in Kenya today. The poverty rate as recent as 1967 was 26%; today it’s 10.5%. Extreme poverty still plagued 70% of the people in the world in 1860. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 9%. And 30 years ago, 2 billion people in the world lived on the equivalent of $2.15 per day. Today, that number has dropped to less than 700 million people.

• Literacy: Being able to read and write is associated with reduced poverty rates, decreased mortality rates, greater gender equality, and increased political awareness and participation. In 1820, 90% of the world’s population was illiterate, and as recently as 1940, it hovered around 50%. Today, 90% of the world’s population can read and write.

• Life expectancy: According to statistics provided by the U.N. World Population Prospects, life expectancy in the United States was 70 years in 1970. In 2023, that number rose to 79.3 years, the highest in our country’s history.

• Standard of living: Most Americans today live like kings compared to their ancestors of yesteryear. But not every king. For perspective, consider the life of the 17^thcentury’s grandest figures, Louis XIV, who ruled France between 1643 and 1715. He was the very essence of wealth in those days; his Versailles palace had 2,000 windows, 700 rooms, 1,250 chimneys and it’s unfathomable what this would cost in today’s dollars. Yet he nearly died of smallpox when he was nine years old. His son, a grandson and a great-grandson all died of smallpox. Eventually, he was succeeded by his second grandson, who became Louis XV and died…of smallpox. The disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980. (Louis XIV died of gangrene, caused by infection.)

• Freedom: Last but not least, let us be grateful for the democracy that rules our land. As the late David Boaz of the Cato Institute once wrote, “let us step back and remember that America is different from much of world history.” Our country birthed modern liberal democracy. While authoritarianism is rising in many parts of the world, democracies still outnumber autocracies. The United States is still among the freest countries in the world, our spirit of entrepreneurism that drives innovation in the largest economy in the world, and also provides freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, and many other freedoms that are the envy of the world. Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan, recently said that if we truly opened our borders, nearly 4 billion people would want to come here, nearly 1/2 the world’s population. The U.S. is truly the envy of the world.

Of course, we have much more to do, and it will be exciting to watch future developments in these areas and the progress that will come from ingenuity, innovation, and hard work.

We wish you and your families the happiest holiday season. We are truly thankful and blessed for your friendship, trust, and confidence, and we are looking forward to a wonderful and prosperous 2025!

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