Welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

It's August 2016 and the best time in human history to be alive.

Well, that's according to the Swedish writer Johann Norberg, who writes his cover story this week on what he calls the new golden age.

Never, he says, has there been less war, disease,

conflict, discrimination or poverty. His new book, Progress, is full of facts and figures making

this point. He joins me now, along with our editor, Fraser Nelson. So, Johan, your story is

almost unbelievably optimistic, and won't square with what a lot of people experience in their own lives.

How do you expect anyone to believe it?

I don't expect people to believe that because it seems like after I've dwelled into the data,

I've become a bit of a bore at every dinner party because everybody's got their own favorite sort of pessimism and nostalgia about the

world, saying that everything is getting worse. And what I've done is that I look at long-term

data, statistics on all these things, everything from poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy,

to fatalities of war, the risk of dying in a natural

disaster, the risk of being subjected to a dictatorship. And everything is improving. And people

have a hard time believing that because they're hearing all these other messages, from the

newspapers, from TV news, from social media and so on.

And often people prefer those anecdotes, those shocking stories to data.

Yeah, and you're not just saying things are getting better.

You're saying it's the best it's ever been.

I imagine there are quite a lot of people who don't feel that way.

Yeah, and the data is absolutely clear on this point. We've never seen such it's the best it's ever been. I imagine there are quite a lot of people who don't feel that way.

Yeah, and the data is absolutely clear on this point. We've never seen such tremendous progress as we've done over the last 200 years and specifically during these last 20, 25 years.

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