Three simple facts...

Ever wanted to shut-up one of those conservative/closet UKIP dinner party bores who constantly bang on how everything is going to "hell in a hand-basket" and no matter what happens everything was "better in the past"...?

Just remember these three facts and reel them out every time you want to inject a little reality into a boring monologue on Brexit/Immigration/Empire/Urban decay/Price of fish etc..

Fact #1. Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to ~6 million a year.

Just imagine that! It must be awful to watch your child die but every single minute somewhere on this planet 11 children (on average) under the age of 5 die. Eleven a minute, 15,500 a day, 5.6 million a year, far too many. But now consider that only 50 years ago (i.e. easily within living memory) the number was nearly four times this amount, not 11 a minute but touching 40. We're still not out of the woods yet, 11 is still too many but no point in looking to the past, back then it was far, far worse.

Fact #2. Since 1960, the fertility rate has fallen by half.

From decades worth of demographic data we can see that when Women are freed from the bonds of animal-like reproductive cycles the conditions of Women, children and populations gradually improves. Fewer children means better access to education, better opportunities in job markets and less pressure on precious resources. When child mortality falls, families don't fear that their children will die young and consequently they decide to have less children in the first place.

Fact #3 137,000 people escaped extreme poverty every day between 1990 and 2015.

Extreme poverty mean less than $2 dollars a day, many people still believe that things are getting worse but the opposite is true. In 1990 1.9 billion people were in extreme poverty, twenty-five years later and that number has more than halved to 700 million, every tenth person.

This is a massive transformation it means that every day around 140,000 people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. 700 million is still a very large number and there is much work to be done but we should all acknowledge that fixing things like extreme poverty is possible and is going on around the world every single day.

Clearly complacency is not yet warranted but the next time some blow-hard starts lecturing on how things were much "better in my-day" just remind them of these three simple facts and make a case for continued progress over rear-view-mirror gazing..

For more amazing facts and figures on Human progress since the Enlightenment check out Stephen Pinker's new book "Enlightenment Now", read it and you start to realise just how fallacious the Daily Mail and Fox news actually are..