Is the World Getting Better or Worse? Health, Human Rights, and Quality of Life Around the Globe

Charlie Clements

Since Trump was elected many liberals feel that way, but the data Mr. Clements draw from is from a pre-Nov 8th poll, which asked, “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?” In Sweden, 10 percent thought things are getting better, in the US the figure was only 6 percent, and in Germany only 4 percent. If you are among  the hundreds of millions of Americans, and, indeed, billions of people around the world whose awareness is largely shaped by the media – you’re the audience Mr. Clements seek to engage – whether conservator or liberal.  Mr. Clements is a public health physician and human rights activist and his talk will answer the question “is life getting better for humanity” using a framework of five indicators: poverty, literacy, health, freedom, and fertility. There will be a very brief pre- and post-talk test to see if you leave with a different perception than with which you came.

Charlie Clements is a public health physician and a human rights activist. He’s a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Washington School of Public Health, where he also earned a medical degree. He is the author of Witness to War (Bantam, 1984) and the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary of the same title, which described his journey of conscience from pilot in Vietnam to physician in the civil war in El Salvador, where he worked in a ‘free fire zone’ providing medical care to civilians bombed, rocketed, or strafed daily by some of the same aircraft in which he had once trained. In 1997 as President of Physicians for Human Rights Charlie represented that organization at both the treaty signing in Ottawa and a week later at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies in Oslo for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He was been widely recognized for his humanitarian and human rights work around the world. Most recently he served as Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he also taught human rights. He is now ‘semi-retired’ with his wife Gigi in Durango, Colorado.