Want to know why 1940s Americans were the Greatest Generation and we’re the Grumpiest Generation? For them, at a time when Europe and the Pacific were ruled by actual fascists carrying out mass murder and US troops were under fire, mass culture was all ironclad optimism — “Oklahoma!” and “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

Today, we have mass hysteria when a TV star stages an obviously fake hate crime in Chicago, Chuck Todd calls the 2010s “the worst decade in politics,” a cover story in The Atlantic wonders if we’re on the brink of civil war, and a Washington Post column claims “Americans are at each other’s throats.”

Rubbish. Nearly everything right now is actually awesome.

No matter whether you zoom in or zoom out, from New York to the world, things got much better this decade. Extreme poverty has fallen by more than half since 2008 and is now below ten percent of the world population for the first time ever. Malaria incidence is down nearly 60 percent in Africa. Worldwide AIDS deaths have plummeted 56 percent since the peak in 2004.

The long hangover from the financial crisis is over, and we’ve now surpassed our pre-crisis level of prosperity, meaning we’re the richest we’ve ever been. Wage growth is up and unemployment is near a half-century low. I grew up in the ’70s and when I describe my childhood I sound like a survivor of the Great Depression to my children; imagine, every mother used to have a sewing machine because everyone had to repair their clothes instead of throwing them out!

Meanwhile, investors in the S&P 500 basket of stocks saw returns of a mind-boggling 250 percent this decade, the first the US has ever experienced without a recession since records have been kept. As recently as the ’70s, a cancer diagnosis meant an American had only a 50 percent chance of living five more years. That survival rate is up to two-thirds. (And Americans enjoy some of the highest cancer survival rates in the world).

More than 500 New Yorkers were murdered in 2010; in 2019 (even with our Mayor de Blundero spending half the year wandering around Iowa state fairs) that number will be just over 300. Since 1958, these are the five years with the fewest homicides in the city: 2018, 2017, 2019 (probably), 2014 and 2016. (In the ’40s and early ’50s, when the city contained hundreds of thousands fewer people, the figure ranged from 201 to 350.)

The global threat from Islamist terror, perhaps humanity’s chief preoccupation of the previous decade, is receding, and terrorists are so frustrated that they’re resorting to running around stabbing people until they get shot. You can only kill so many people with a knife, plus you never know when someone is going to respond, as resourceful Londoner Darryn Frost did, with a modified Crocodile Dundee: “You call that a knife? Here’s a narwhal tusk, mate!”

What about global warming? It’s a challenge but those of us who have been alive awhile can tick off a long list of previous environmental “crises” that humanity, with its amazing capacity for adapting and innovating, has dodged. More terrific breakthroughs are coming. In 20 years cars might be running on sunshine or hydrogen. The world’s dirtiest economies, China and India, are getting so prosperous that their citizens will soon start demanding what citizens of rich countries demand: clean air. Methane (huge amounts of which come from sheep and cow farts) is a leading greenhouse gas. You think smart people aren’t working on a feed that will reduce cow flatulence? They are.

Betting on human ingenuity to falter is like betting on the New York Knicks — to win the Super Bowl.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review