One-quarter through the 21st century, how are we going?
- Brendan Shaw
- 12 minutes ago
- 10 min read
Brendan Shaw
"Today we are in the midst of a crisis of liberalism and liberal democracy. The rise of sordid anti-liberal, anti-democratic far-right movements cannot be understood without recognising this."
-Daron Acemoglu, Nobel-winning economist, Financial Times, 29 Nov 2025.
"The 25th anniversary edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer has revealed a profound shift to acceptance of aggressive action, with political polarisation and deepening fears giving rise to a widespread sense of grievance."
"Governments face a highly complex operating environment marked by major demographic, environmental, and digital shifts, alongside low trust and constrained fiscal space."
-OECD, Government at a Glance, 2025.
At the end of this month, the 31st of December, we will be one-quarter of the way through the 21st century.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the 21st century seemed far into the future.
I used to watch re-runs of The Jetsons with their flying cars, intelligent robots doing housework and even capsule endoscopy, and wonder how far into the future such fantastic things would become reality.
The 21st century seemed such a period of promise. We had programs on television called 'Towards 2000' and 'Beyond 2000' that talked about emerging scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs that had so much promise and could become a reality sometime in the distant, futuristic 21st century.
And now, in the blink of an eye, I'm living in that era. Many of the things that once seemed science fiction are now a reality.
Here, at the end of 2025, we're about to pass the 1/4-way mark through the 21st century.
So, how is humanity tracking since the 31st of December 2000?
What progress has humanity made in the time since?
What we've done well
Assessing human progress over the last quarter century is complicated. However, a few random facts and figures do paint a picture of our progress over the last 25 years.
For a start, how many of us there are on the planet has changed dramatically. We started the 21st century with 6.2 billion people on the planet, while the most recent data shows that today we have just over 8.1 billion. As a species, we managed to increase our total population by more than 30% in less than 25 years - adding 2 billion people on the planet.
Of course, there are many implications of this, for us and the planet. Some are covered below. We know that this population growth will plateau in the coming decades as the world's population ages. We are approaching peak humanity in the next 50 years or so, and it is one of the defining trends of our current historical period.
Science and technology have progressed in leaps and bounds, helping humanity and driving economic growth and prosperity. Just a few examples to consider include:
GPS systems and being to track, navigate and map vast swathes of the world.
what3words.com - the global locating system that lets people easily communicate to anyone where they are anywhere in the world, just be knowing the three words that identify their position.
The IT, tech and internet revolution that has ridden the information age and put a supercomputer in the pockets of many people around the world.
The growth of medicine, biotechnology and genomics, spurred on by the mapping of the human genome at the beginning of this century. New human medical technologies are leading to better treatments and medical devices, and better use of genes and genomics in medicine.
Music and podcast streaming services - 200 years ago, orchestral- and band-level music was really only accessible to the rich who had to listen to it in person. Today, anyone walking around with a mobile device and a few dollars a month can listen to pretty much any music from any era from any country. Podcasts have become a new way to listen to debates, ideas and discoveries - all in the palm of your hand.
The discovery of exo-planets - planets outside our solar system that orbit stars in other solar systems. We've just seen the 30th anniversary of the first discovery of an exo-planet in 1995 by scientists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
Just in the last few years, the potential for artificial intelligence has rapidly transformed from something out of science fiction to social and economic fact that is setting the stage for fundamental developments - both challenges and opportunities - for the next 25 years.
The BBC recently collated a list of the 25 most powerful ideas in the 21st century so far. They are:
Dream engineering
A new type of stem cell
Global heating
Attribution analysis
mRNA vaccines
The Human Genome Project
Solving the 'einstein' problem
The cure for HIV
Transformers and large language models
HPV vaccine
Digital contraception
Tissue engineering
Self-repairing materials
Universal programmable chemical robots
Dark matter
The Higgs boson particle
The James Webb Space Telescope
Exoplanets
Gravitational waves
Psychedelic therapy
Single-cell genomics
CT scanning
NASA's Curiosity Rover
NASA's DART mission
SpaceX's reusable rockets.
The interaction of science, technology and economics is helping humanity in a variety of ways, be it information systems and artificial intelligence, public health, biotechnology extending human life, or renewable energy becoming cheaper and helping overcome emerging environmental problems like climate change.
In terms of health and humanity itself, there has been good progress. The child mortality rate has continued falling since the beginning of the century, particularly noticeable for low- and lower-middle income countries.
While due to various factors like public health systems, sanitation, better nutrition and the like, another reason is the expansion of vaccination. Higher vaccination rates among children have been one of the successes we've had in this century. Vaccination has directly led to lower death rates of children.
One example is measles. At the turn of the century around 780,000 people died from measles each year. Measles is an entirely preventable highly infectious disease where there has been a cheap, effective vaccine available for years. Most of these deaths from measles in 2000 were children under 5 years old. By 2024, only 95,000 people now die each year from measles, still tragic, still largely children under the age of 5, and still entirely preventable. The reduction in measles deaths worldwide is largely due to effective vaccination campaigns. Measles deaths have fallen by 88% since 2000, and the World Health Organization says that nearly 59 million lives have been saved by measles vaccines since 2000.
In other human achievements this century, world life expectancy has continued to rise since 2000. Today, a person in the world will live on average to 73.2 years of age, up from 66.4 years in 2000. That's an improvement in average life expectancy of almost 7 years achieved over the last 25 years. Every region of the world has seen average life expectancy increase, but obviously that is not even across the world. The fact that a person's life expectancy in Europe and Oceania averages 79.1 years compared to 63.8 years for someone in Africa - a difference of 15.3 years - shows that we still have a long way to go.
Generally speaking, we are also becoming wealthier. Since 2000, world income per capita (measured as gross domestic product per capita) has increased by 67%, after adjusting for inflation. Of course, this one statistic masks a multitude of diverse trends. Since the turn of the century, high-income countries, upper middle-income countries, and even lower middle-income countries have all seen their GDP per capita grow. Low-income countries - those that haven't graduated to higher income categories - have seen no growth over that period. Moreover, the obvious disparities between the different income categories are there and in some cases are getting bigger. In addition, the distribution of wealth within countries and between younger and older generations is another emerging issue.
Our level of global connection is, arguably, another major achievement. At one level, the extent to which we can communicate with each other, travel to meet and talk, observe and watch each other, learn from each other and, yes, even at times manage to work together at a global level has never been higher. These days, almost everyone on the planet has a mobile device with them and/or access to the internet and can share ideas, emotions, language, culture, economies, goods, and money in ways that humanity has never been able to before. Managed well, it is a major achievement. Managed poorly, and it presents all sorts of problems.
What's not going so well?
Again, potentially a long list of issues here, but a few examples to mention.
One-quarter of the way through the 21st century, the optimism about the 21st century I saw as a child seems to be fraying somewhat.
Despite having the technology, the tools and the reasons for greater global cooperation, we seem to be in a period of ongoing geopolitical instability, and a decided lack of desire to work together as humans. With increasing trade barriers, rising nationalism and tribalism, walking back globalisation and global initiatives, working 'together' just doesn't seem to be a thing at the moment.
There are various geopolitical and long-term historical reasons for this, among them perhaps is the world taking a step back and having a breath before moving forward to engage in the next phase of global collaboration. However, the lack of success we're having in this at the moment is manifesting in different ways for the peoples, societies, species and environment of the world.
That growth in world population combined with growing inequality and lack of global cooperation is coming back to bite us.
Climate change is one of the obvious environmental impacts of this. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere haven't been this high in 800,000 years. The science of climate change shows that it results from human burning of fossil fuels and release of carbon and other gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Carbon emissions have been increasing ever since, but certainly in the last 25 years. The effect on the world environment and climate systems is becoming more obvious with rising temperatures and long-term catastrophic changes emerging all over the globe, with social, economic, political and environmental implications for us and our planet.
While global initiatives like the Paris Agreement are coming into force, and some constructive action and moderation have taken place, we still have a long way to go. The likelihood is that we will miss the global climate targets we have set ourselves.
We are perhaps the first generation in human history that knows the damage climate change is doing to the planet and ourselves but have chosen not to sufficiently address the problem. History may judge us for this in the future.
Coupled with climate change, environmental destruction is happening everywhere. Whether it is plastic waste in the oceans, microplastics everywhere, land clearing, habitat destruction, the degradation of water systems and quality, air pollution or species extinction, we have become one of the Earth's major environmental problems.
Aside from our effects on everything else, there is also the effects we are having on each other. Geopolitical instability, several major wars, competition over resources, technological developments and capability of killing each other, a growing lack of trust in science and facts, and a disinterest in global collaboration seem to be increasing, not decreasing. In recent years we had the COVID-19 pandemic and major wars occurring in Ukraine and the Middle East that have punctured global progress. Arguably, the optimism we had in the first few years of the 21st century has given way to a sense of loss of global direction. The failure to progress so many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is a case in point. The World Economic Forum reports that in 2025 only 18% of the Sustainable Development Goals are on track to be met by the 2030 deadline, with nearly half progressing too slowly and close to a fifth even regressing.
Vaccination is an area where some people are choosing to ignore the facts and the science. Vaccine scepticism and hesitancy is on the rise in some parts of the world. For example, the WHO has warned that after much progress since 2000, measles cases are surging again on the back of falling vaccination rates. In a report released just last month, the WHO said "Measles has resurged in recent years, even in high-income countries that once eliminated it, because immunisation rates have dropped below the 95% threshold."
There's been something of a breakdown or step backwards in the progress in global cooperation on international issues. The irony of this (or perhaps the cause?) is that this is happening just as we are all collectively confronting major global-level issues, be it future pandemics, ructions in the global economic system, environmental destruction, climate change or the threat of nuclear war.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which came towards the end of this 25-year period, I think showed us the best and the worst of how humanity can work together on global issues. While we saw the downsides, things like misinformation and vaccine nationalism, we also saw people and countries working together, business and governments collaborating on new science and technology, and a perhaps nascent recognition that we are all in this together, sometimes.
Despite the lessons from COVID, trust in political institutions all over the world is breaking down. The 2025 Edelmann Trust Barometer found that the world has undergone a profound shift after recent years of fears. There's a loss of trust in government, corporate and social institutions, and a growth of grievance in the global community. It revealed "a profound shift to acceptance of aggressive action, with political polarization and deepening fears giving rise to a widespread sense of grievance". The Barometer found that:
"Sixty-one percent globally have a moderate or high sense of grievance, which is defined by a belief that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and wealthy people benefit unfairly from the system."
The OECD's 2025 Government at a Glance found similar issues of trust and recommended ways governments could deal with changing structural trends.
And with growing wealth inequality and ageing populations, intergenerational equity is becoming a bigger issue. This debate is only starting and probably has a long way to go.
Clearly, while at one level the world has made a lot of progress in the last 25 years, a lot of people are not happy. World happiness has increased over the last decade in some parts of the world, while in other parts it has gone backwards. There's still a lot of work to do here.
Change in World Happiness Index by country since 2012
Source: World Happiness Report. Dashboard. https://data.worldhappiness.report/map, accessed 30/11/2025.
Going forward
Despite the problems, I confess to being surprised because I am hopeful. We can overcome these issues over the next 25 years through science, ideas, real information, cooperation, competition, and a broader sense of who we are and what we have the potential to do.
There's no doubt we have the intelligence and the capability to solve many of the world's problems in the next 25 years. The question is whether we have the will and desire to do so. That isn't a question of technology. It's about our politics, our economics, our societies, and our ability to collaborate at a global level that better supports ourselves and the planet.
What will the world be like in mid-century at the end of 2050? No one knows, but as largely the dominant species on the planet, we have a big say in what that might look like. The choice is ours.
Wishing you all the best for the festive season at the end of 2025, all the best for 2026, and for a prosperous and progressive next 25 years.
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