the good news collection
Things that got better, and things that stayed good.
the long line
In 1800, more than four in ten children died before their fifth birthday. Now it is fewer than four in a hundred, everywhere on earth.
Share of children who die before age five, world, 1800 to 2024. Linear scale. Our World in Data, child mortality (CC BY); Gapminder and UN IGME
still good
Wikipedia has run on donations since 2001. No ads, nothing sold about you, and no shareholder to turn on the readers. That is the reason it held: the structure has nobody to enshittify for.
Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit; the text is free to copy under CC BY-SA. wikimediafoundation.org, read 2026-10-29
good news
Leaded petrol is gone from every country on earth. Algeria sold the last of it in July 2021, almost a century after we started putting lead in the air.
Announced 30 August 2021. UN Environment Programme
the long line
The price of a solar panel fell more than a thousandfold in fifty years. Nobody voted for it. It just kept happening, year after year.
Solar photovoltaic module price per watt, 1975 to 2025, constant dollars. Logarithmic scale. Our World in Data, solar PV prices (CC BY); IRENA, Nemet, Farmer and Lafond
the long line
Guinea worm has no vaccine and no drug. It was driven from 892,055 reported cases a year to ten, with water filters, teaching and four decades of patience.
Reported cases worldwide, 1980 to 2025. The line climbs before it falls because the early counts were thin: reporting improved through the 1980s, and the high-water mark on record is 892,055 in 1989. Logarithmic scale. Our World in Data, reported guinea worm cases (CC BY); WHO