The Long Arc of Human Progress
Optimism, grounded in data.
Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
U.S. equities have compounded at roughly 10% annually over the last century — through wars, depressions, recessions, bubbles, and pandemics. The Long Arc chronicles the long-term trends across every facet of human progress, so you can invest with confidence in the case the data actually supports.
10%
S&P 500 average annual return, 1926–2025
NYU Stern
+30yrs
Increase in global life expectancy since 1900
United Nations
−74%
Decline in extreme poverty rate since 1990
World Bank
+9x
Real U.S. GDP per capita growth since 1900
FRED · BEA
The case in pictures
The long arc of progress slopes upward.
The visuals below document it — across centuries of war, crisis, and recovery, the trend in prosperity and markets has bent decisively up.
" Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money. Pessimism reads as analytical because it catalogs specific risks; optimism reads as thin because "things will generally work out" is hard to dress up. The long-term investor's job is to credit the principles, not the pessimist. "
— Adapted from Morgan Housel
The Long Arc Library
The data behind the optimism.
01
The Long Arc of Human Progress
The list of things to worry about is never short. Poverty, crime, disease, war, political dysfunction, and now the question of how artificial intelligence will impact our world.
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Freedom and Liberty
When you buy a share of a company, you are exercising a freedom that most people across most of human history never had: the right to own a piece of a productive enterprise, to keep what it earns, and to sell it to whomever you like, whenever you like.
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The Rule of Law
A share of stock is, when you strip it down, a legal promise. It says you own a fraction of a company, that you are entitled to your share of what it earns, and that no one can quietly take it from you.
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Capitalism
Few words start more arguments. To one person capitalism is the engine that built the modern world. To another it is a system that rewards the few at the expense of the many.
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Democracy
Few phrases are repeated more often right now than democracy is under threat. You hear it from very different corners, often from people who would point to opposite causes.
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Education
In 1900, fewer than one in ten Americans finished high school. A college degree was a rarity reserved for a small elite.
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Scientific Discovery
Consider the list of the most valuable companies in the United States, and then consider what that list looked like forty years ago. Most of today's giants were small, or private, or did not exist.
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Resilience
Resilience is the capacity to take a hard blow and come back, and it is the pillar that turns all the others into a reason for confidence.
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America in Decline? I Don't Think So
When people say the last 25 years have felt exhausting, destabilizing, and chaotic, they are not imagining things.
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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.
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Read some good news for a change.
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