President Cyril Ramaphosa told a global anti-MAGA summit in Spain last week, “This is a time of aggression, war, conflict, and destruction … At the same time, the climate crisis is deepening: sea levels are rising and severe weather events are becoming ever more frequent. Billions of people across the world go hungry, have no work, and few skills. Inequality within and between countries is growing.” Oh woe be mine, oh doom, oh catastrophe, oh wretched world.

It is not really like that, though.

Start with stock markets, as good a benchmark as any, as these hold the investments, savings, and pension funds of billions of people. US markets hit their all-time highs last week, and the South African market has returned over 30% to investors this year. That is all pretty wonderful.

And the global economy? The IMF is the latest group to come out with data that the world’s economy is in a good place. Last week its data on the overall outlook for the global economy were very positive, with the growth number for 2026 being knocked back by just 0.2 percentage points 3.1% from 3.3% in January – despite all the Third-World War doom-mongering in the global press. China’s number was knocked back by just 0.1 percentage point from 4.5% to 4.4%. India’s number was upgraded – showing what a sensible government is able to achieve.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not running around saying things are falling apart.

What about global unemployment? Surely that must be spiking, given those “billions of people across the world [who] go hungry, have no work and few skills”. Well, actually not. According to the latest data, the global rate of unemployment will be 4.9% for 2026. That is about the lowest ever. And it’s virtually at zero in practice, as there are always a few percentage points of people falling through the cracks and bouncing around between things.

And what about all the war and destruction?

Well, around 500 years ago your risk of dying violently was about 15%. Three hundred years ago it was between 5% and 10%, depending on where you lived. One hundred years ago it was between 1% and 2%. Today? Today the figure is < 0.1%.

Along a similar tack, in the 17th and 18th centuries the homicide rate in European cities was often between 30 and 100 per 100 000 people. In most civilised nations today, that rate is now below one per 100 000.

As for the melting world that will soon see us all washed into the ocean, even Bill Gates has recanted and, sensibly, climate hysterics are giving way to the realisation that even if human activity has some influence on climate, and even if carbon emissions have some role in that, human ingenuity will be more than sufficient to overcome the consequences.

So what’s with the doom-mongering? It is much easier to argue, on the evidence, that this is the greatest time ever to be alive. The richest, the free-est, the safest, and the most peaceful.

The best argument on the state of the world is how much a person has to work to earn enough to afford one hour of light. In the 1700s, a worker had to work for about 60 hours to do that. By the 1800s, that time dropped to around six hours of work for one hour of light. Today, a worker only has to work for less than one second to pay for an hour of light, a 500 000-fold increase in affordability over the last three centuries.

On many of these metrics, South Africa is not where it should be. Its stock market has been good, but the rest not so much. The IMF bumped its growth rate down to just 1% last week, a third of the global average. Its unemployment rate is six times higher than the global average. Its homicide rate is up sharply (after having fallen sharply in the decade after 1994) and is now at that 17th-century European city level. And many South Africans struggle to pay their mad electricity bills. Maybe, when Mr Ramaphosa looks at the world, that is what he sees.