It has been 10 years since I wrote The Great Escape , which tells the story of how human life improved over the past 250 years, particularly in terms of longevity and material living standards. But the past decadeHI has been unkind to my overwhelmingly positive account. My observation that “life is better now than at any time in history" may have been true in 2013, but it probably is not today, even for the typical person. The question is whether this reversal will be temporary, or whether it is only the beginning of worse to come. Do recent events...