Are things better? Are we making progress? If we are, you often can’t tell from the news. In fact, the positive tone of news coverage peaked in the 1950s and has trended mostly negative ever since.

For full disclosure: I am a glass half full person who feels that despite our shortcomings, most things have gotten better – in some cases, a lot better — over time. I’m also a curiously analytical person who wonders at times whether my optimism is unfounded and whether I’m the outlier.

That’s why I was pleased to find and read Steven Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now. In it, Pinker frames human progress in a way that is illuminating, insightful, and compelling. He explores and measures it from many angles. And, he does so not over a few years but over decades and centuries. In the book, Pinker demonstrates that life is substantially better on many dimensions.

Let’s start with a common one: life expectancy. Most know that it’s increased dramatically over the past 100 years. But, did you know that it hardly budged from the mid-1700s to the mid-1860s? Or that the average African today lives as long as the average American did in 1950? In fact, the average life expectancy in Kenya increased 10 years from 2003 to 2013 so death’s door was not a step closer after a decade. While genetic advances and precision medicine may drive the next wave of progress, we are currently experiencing stagnation in the U.S., due largely to the opioid crisis.

How about food shortages and hunger? Does anybody remember John Malthus? He predicted in 1798 that massive famines were an inevitable byproduct of population growth. Malthusian thinking was in vogue when I was growing up with books like The Population Bomb and Famine 1975! Turns out that food production, not population, is what grew geometrically. Undernourishment in China alone dropped from nearly 40% of the population in the 1980s to under 10% today. While any undernourishment is too much, today’s world is better than the one 70 years ago when nearly 50% of the developing world was undernourished.

What about the risk of death from wars, crime, accidents or natural disasters? Generally, lower risks and fewer deaths. While it may seem that there are many natural disasters currently wreaking havoc on the planet, the overall death rate as a result is lower than it has been in centuries past. Despite the headlines, it turns out that we’ve mitigated many of life’s risks so that the chance of injury or death from crimes, accidents, acts of terror and even natural disasters continues to fall.

Global literacy? Way up, from 10% in 1800 to nearly 80% today. And, it’s estimated that only 5 out of 200+ countries will have more than 20% of their population uneducated in 2050. Education tends to fuel human rights, democracy and enlightenment, which tend to fuel progress.

How about things we view as essential today? In 1900, only 20% of the U.S. population had running water, less than 5% had electricity and the kitchen appliances we rely on today weren’t invented yet. By 1950, over 98% of households had electricity and 80% had refrigerators but less than half had a washing machine and only 20% had a modern stove. Dishwashers had just been invented (less than 5% had them); microwaves had not. Today, most everyone in the U.S. has life’s basic necessities, and yet we are able to spend less money to get them. In 1930, over 60% of our income went to basic necessities. This was 50% in 1960 and only 33% today.

How about work versus leisure time given today’s ‘always connected’ environment? Over time, more of our income has gone to labor-saving devices, entertainment and leisure. As a result, the amount of time spent on leisure versus work has increased more than 10 hours per week.

Despite all this progress, it seems we are only slightly happier. It turns out that happiness has more to do with how we perceive the world than with how the world actually is. While the world has progressed a lot over the past 100-200 years, this progress often marches on slowly and not every step is a step forward. Also to note, progress is not uniformly distributed so many remain left behind by the various advances we make. To them, the lack of progress feels more real. This, combined with an increasingly negative spin on the world around us, can often create the impression that we are not making progress as a society when in fact, we are.

The actuality that things in general are better doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied. The world has problems – including some big problems – that need to be addressed. In addition, things never stand still. Pinker starts his book by describing the world as an environment of entropy, where things are designed to break down, decay and die unless we take actions to resist this and channel the associated energy for individual or common good.

Similarly, we at HoyleCohen are always striving for progress by making things better for our clients. Each year, we try to add more value to more clients in more ways than we did the year before. As with life, this is more an evolutionary than revolutionary process. And, like any journey, the path we take often has twists and turns as we attempt to get to a better place for all. Whether we are successful or not is for our clients to determine. All we can do is to continue to commit ourselves to progress in the spirit of always putting our clients’ best interests first while maintaining a positive work environment for our staff.

So, the next time you look at that glass, I encourage you to step back and see if it’s more than half full.