The Good News You Didn’t Hear

This series is less about optimism than about perspective. The investor saving for a goal decades away is the one most easily shaken by a bad headline, and the most likely to bail at the wrong time. The seven pillars explain why the long arc keeps bending toward progress. This piece does something simpler. It steps back from the daily feed to collect the progress that rarely trends because it arrives without drama. None of it argues that everything is fine. The point is balance. You already have a thousand sources for what went wrong. Consider this the other side of the ledger.

A note on what is and is not here. We have left out anything that belongs to a political argument rather than to measurable human progress, because the value of a list like this lies in things most people, whatever their politics, would recognize as good. What remains is quiet, compounding improvement, and the numbers that go with it.

The economy that refused to break

Recessions get forecast far more often than they arrive. The U.S. economy has a habit of confounding the gloomiest predictions, growing through the very conditions that were supposed to sink it. Inflation has remained a challenge, but employment has stayed near record highs. None of this is ever guaranteed, and time and again it has run directly against the most confident forecasts.

By the numbers (2015 to today)

• Annual U.S. economic output has grown from about $18 trillion to roughly $30 trillion.
• Household net worth has climbed from roughly $87 trillion to about $184 trillion, close to a doubling in a decade.
• After-tax corporate profits have risen from about $1.8 trillion to roughly $3.5 trillion.
• The number of Americans working has grown from about 142 million to nearly 160 million, a record.

Productivity and the early returns on new technology

Productivity, the single most important driver of rising living standards over the long run, has been accelerating, helped by the early deployment of artificial intelligence across the economy. The largest effects, if they come, are still ahead. For an economy facing an aging population, faster productivity is the most durable way to keep growing, and it is the quiet engine beneath corporate earnings. Investment in new capacity continues at a remarkable clip, from semiconductors to data centers to advanced manufacturing. The broad picture is of a country still pouring capital into the future rather than coasting on the past.

By the numbers

• The price of a lithium-ion battery pack has fallen more than 90 percent since 2010, from over $1,400 to about $108 per kilowatt-hour.
• The cost of solar power has dropped by roughly 90 percent over the same stretch.
• The four largest U.S. cloud companies now spend on the order of $400 billion a year on new computing capacity, roughly a billion dollars a day, and data-center investment across the industry is climbing toward $1 trillion a year.

Markets reward the patient

This is the lesson the long arc keeps teaching investors. Markets climb a wall of worry, fall hard from time to time, and recover, and the people who do best are rarely the ones who predicted the path correctly. They are the ones who did not need to. The same record is a reminder of why diversification across regions still makes sense even when one market has dominated for a long stretch.

By the numbers

• The S&P 500 has risen from about 2,040 at the end of 2015 to a record above 7,400, more than tripling once dividends are reinvested.
• The United States now accounts for roughly half of the entire world’s stock-market value.
• Of the world’s hundred most valuable companies, sixty-two are American, a record.

Medicine and science keep their pace

The scientific pipeline that produced the breakthroughs of the past generation keeps delivering. Gene-editing and gene-therapy treatments, once theoretical, are moving from the laboratory to patients, targeting diseases that were untreatable a generation ago. Artificial intelligence has become a working tool in drug discovery and diagnosis, helping detect disease earlier and narrow the search for new treatments. And advances in computing, materials, and energy storage continue the unglamorous, cumulative work that turns into the products and industries of the next decade.

By the numbers

• Sequencing a human genome cost about $14 million in 2006. Today it costs a few hundred dollars, a decline of more than 99.9 percent, far faster than the cost of computing power has ever fallen.
• The U.S. cancer death rate has fallen about 34 percent since its 1991 peak, an estimated 4.5 million deaths averted.
• The first U.S. gene therapy was approved in 2017. In a single recent year, regulators cleared nine new cell and gene therapies.
• The cost to put a kilogram into orbit has dropped from roughly $54,000 in the Space Shuttle era to about $2,700 today, and a single company now launches well over a hundred missions a year.

The long global trends hold

Step back from any single year and the largest trends are unmistakable. Extreme poverty sits near its lowest level in recorded history. Access to education, electricity, and clean water keeps climbing. Childhood mortality keeps falling. These are slow-moving numbers that almost never make news, which is precisely why they are worth pausing on. They represent the steady, grinding improvement in the human condition that the daily feed is structurally incapable of showing you.

By the numbers

• Extreme poverty has fallen from about 38 percent of the world in 1990 to under 10 percent, roughly 1.5 billion people lifted out.
• The number of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen from 12.8 million a year in 1990 to about 4.8 million, even as the global population grew.
• Access to electricity has climbed from about 71 percent of the world’s people in 1990 to roughly 92 percent.
• Two centuries ago, about one person in ten could read. Today nearly nine in ten can.

What to take from it

A piece like this is not a forecast, and it is not a denial that real problems persist. Debt, affordability, division, and plenty else remain genuine and unresolved. The purpose is corrective. Our attention is pulled relentlessly toward what is breaking, and left to itself it produces a picture of the world far darker than the evidence supports.

For an investor, the discipline of occasionally counting the good news is not naive cheerfulness. It is a way of keeping perspective intact, so that when the next wave of pessimism arrives, and it will, you are anchored to the full picture rather than the loudest part of it. Progress happens too slowly to notice and setbacks too quickly to ignore. Now and then, it is worth deliberately noticing.

Sources

Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP, corporate profits). Bureau of Labor Statistics (employment). Federal Reserve, Financial Accounts of the United States, Z.1 (household net worth). S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P 500). Siblis Research (global market-capitalization shares). BloombergNEF (battery prices). National Renewable Energy Laboratory (solar costs). Company filings and Dell’Oro Group (cloud and data-center capital spending). National Human Genome Research Institute (genome sequencing costs). U.S. Food and Drug Administration (drug, cell, and gene-therapy approvals). American Cancer Society (cancer mortality). NASA and SpaceX (launch costs and cadence). World Bank (extreme poverty, electricity access). UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation and UNICEF (child mortality). Our World in Data (literacy). International Telecommunication Union (internet access).

Important Disclosures