A Shocking Combination: Good News and the U.N.

By Michael Medved

The whining and self-pity so prevalent in today's America now face a formidable new foe: the United Nations. The world body released a report called "State of the Future" showing that global conditions have dramatically improved by every significant measure.

The world's increasingly capitalist economy has developed at an unprecedented rate, and people nearly everywhere do better in terms of personal income, food availability, life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, access to health care, access to safe water and much more. At current rates of growth, the report suggests "world poverty will be cut in half between 2000 and 2015."

In the past, grim reports about the state of the world drew screaming headlines by predicting mass starvation or environmental catastrophe. But as Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal notes, the shockingly good news in the new UN study has been "mostly ignored" by the media, reflecting a sick, destructive addiction to gloom and doom.