Healthy babies, to be specific. Because worldwide, infant and child mortality has fallen greatly; and is still falling; and will almost certainly continue to fall.
In premodern societies, meaning pretty much the entire world before 1820 or so, between a fifth and a quarter of all kids died before their first birthday. Then, of the survivors, roughly about another fifth-to-a-quarter died before their fifth birthday. Then, of those survivors, about 10% died before their 20th birthday. If you do the math, that means that every baby had roughly a coin-flip chance of living to adulthood. The exact numbers varied by place, time, and circumstances. But worldwide, that was the general state of affairs.
Today, worldwide about 96% of babies survive their first birthday. Of all babies born worldwide, about 90% live to reach age 20.
That’s a worldwide average. In developed countries, those numbers are “over 99%” and “around 99%”. In the most dangerous, backwards and unhappy corners of the world the numbers are much lower, but they’re still high by historical standards. A baby born in Afghanistan or Niger or the Democratic Republic of the Congo today, in 2026? Has better odds than a baby born in the England of George III and Pitt the Elder.
Nigeria today has an infant mortality rate about what the US had in 1946, when the Baby Boom got started. The Boom peaked around 1952. The infant mortality then (a bit over 3%) is about what you find in current-day Bangladesh. Pretty much the entire human race today faces a lower rate of infant mortality than that faced by our parents and grandparents.
This doesn’t get much discussed, perhaps because it’s a “what about all the planes that land safely” kind of story. Also, when one discusses long-term positive trends, academic friends may become restive and start murmuring about teleological errors and Whig History.
But I think it’s really interesting. That’s partly because it really is very good news, but also — putting my nerd hat on — because this almost certainly represents a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition.
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… to reader and commenter Doctor Memory. We noticed recently that old posts weren’t displaying properly, apparently because we’d used a markup language (Textile) that our current setup doesn’t support. We put out an appeal on Bluesky, and Dr M was one of several people who volunteered to clean up the database for us. After backing everything up and doing the necessary editing, he’s just advise me the job is done.
There are still more problems to work on, including the display of curly quotes in comments. And, if you notice anything else, please mention it in comments.
But for the moment, we just want to thank Doctor Memory for helping to keep this blog (nearly 25 years old now) in working condition.
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