Yes Global warming, pandemic and global economic disaster. Enough or do I have to produce my driving licence, British Passport and /or a recent utility bill?
Infant mortality, deaths in childbirth, literacy levels, rates of violent death per capita, life expectancy (discounting infant mortality), access to fresh water, access to power, provision of human rights, protections under the law, religious freedom... Nobody claimed it was perfect.
Global warming - it's the most pressing current concern at a worldwide level, I'd say, but does it compare to the global child mortality rate (pre 15 years of age) of around 46% in around 1500; before that, despite average family sizes of 6-7 children the population grew at barely 0.4% for about 9000 years. Suddenly global warming, for all that it's our most pressing issue, doesn't seem to be the absolute end of the world that it's depicted as. It should get a huge chunk of our current resources because we've already made so much incredible progress on infant mortality.
Pandemic - does it compare to, say, the Black Death, or the Spanish flu epidemic of the WWI era? No, because a) it seems to be less virulent, and less deadly and b) we have a worldwide response (based, in part, on learnings from those earlier events). We'll have to hope that the success of those controls (and the possible overestimation of the danger) will not result in the good work involved in designing the controls being ignored in future events; more pressing a concern in this field is the decline in the rate of discovering new antibiotics in parallel with the continued emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of known pathogens.
Global economic disaster - is it, or is it the normal activity of an artificially maintained economic system which peaks and crashes periodically as a result of various internal pressures. We've weathered them before, and whilst they cause distress it's not on the scale of the economic devastation caused in, say, the middle-ages when the lands were scoured of wealth, foodstuffs and able-bodied men to grind away at the interminable battle-fields of various European wars. As a proportion of GDP, those effects were massively more significant than any of the 20th century slumps, and are unlikely to be matched under the current systems.
So produce the passport that affords you, a common man, a freedom to travel that was unthinkable barely a century ago, produce the driving license that symbolises the personal access to high-tech machinery that would make a Victorian gentleman weep, read the utility bill that shows how you have access to modern amenities that mean you rarely if ever have to wonder if you're going to freeze to death or die of dysentery... and carp about how your pension might decline slightly leaving you only able to eat healthy food into your nineties off a state-provided welfare system that sixty years ago wouldn't have been necessary because the life expectancy of a man in the UK was around 65.
O.
