You’re in Great Health. Let’s Start Chemo.

It was not in his celebrated oath but rather in Of the Epidemics that Hippocrates wrote: “As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.”

That principle reflects a basic truth of medicine: The misdiagnosis of a disease can be worse than no treatment at all. A serious illness—thought to be something minor—can progress untreated until the patient suffers serious damage or mortality. And mistaking one condition—or no condition at all—for another can result in treatment that is ineffective at best and dangerous at worst.

The same logic applies to what is happening today in the United States and other major countries around the world. At a time of unprecedented prosperity, technological advances that continue to make lives better and longer, and unparalleled distributions of these benefits to every corner of the globe, we endure a constant drumbeat of negativity that tells us this progress is an illusion. The public is persistently told that “the system is rigged” against them, that they are becoming poorer rather than richer and that their children will be the first generation in centuries to be worse off than their parents. The “American carnage” cited by US President Donald Trump in his first inaugural address is the very embodiment of this mindset.

It’s not true. By virtually any measure—income, longevity, hours at leisure, the harnessing of technology for convenience and entertainment, and the diminishment of extreme poverty around the world—today is the best time ever to be alive as a human being nearly anywhere on the planet.

In other words, humanity today is in better health than it has ever been. Populists, in response, are recommending chemotherapy.

And like any misdiagnosis, this one carries big risks of doing harm. It has stoked a populist backlash threatening to move us away from the freedom and openness that have been the engines of our success. It also increases the likelihood that we will double down on bad policies and unhelpful government interventions that are themselves the source of many economic challenges.

Age of abundance

Humorist P.J. O’Rourke was fond of reminding us that the ordinary men and women of today’s world are freer and enjoy more material benefits than at any time since the beginning of civilization. If we were to think there was a golden era of the past in which we’d rather live, P.J.’s famous quip sobers us up with one word: dentistry.

The point is not that the past lacked virtues, but that we often overlook the quiet improvements that make life much better. Extreme poverty has disappeared for much of the world. In 1981, 42 percent of the world’s population lived on less than $3 per day. Today, that has fallen to less than 10 percent. And in the developed world, incomes and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita continue to grow nearly every year.

Innovation doesn’t just make us richer. Medical breakthroughs are removing barriers to longer, better lives: Smallpox has been eradicated; polio is on the ropes; HIV is now treatable for many; and vaccines prevent millions of deaths every year. Since 1990, the global mortality rate for children under five has fallen more than 50 percent, enabling millions more children every year to survive to adulthood.

Time, they say, is our most precious resource, and medical innovation, better nutrition and more comfortable living conditions are creating much more of it. Since 1900, global life expectancy has more than doubled from about 32 years to more than 73 years today. And just recently we learned that life expectancy in the United States likely reached another record high of nearly 80 years in 2025.

Have these data been cherry-picked? Jump into these extensive datasets and explore trends in longevity, income and wealth, medicine, nutrition, violence and tolerance, the environment and more. Decide for yourself. It won’t take long for you to be convinced that human well-being has never been greater in a world that is freer and more peaceful than ever before.

Engine of prosperity

The tremendous progress of the past 300 years has created the extraordinary living standards and conditions we enjoy today. Before this, the human condition had barely changed for thousands of years.

Freedom and openness, exemplified by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the values of the American Revolution, created the conditions under which this improvement could occur. As absolute government gave way to self-government that better protected citizens’ rights and liberties and as freedom allowed entrepreneurs to reap the benefits of their hard work and novel ideas, an incentive structure was created that encouraged individual initiative and innovation.

Meanwhile, freedom and individual liberty engendered the openness by which innovation and progress could flourish: open trade, freer migration and greater receptiveness to new ideas and experimentation. The experience of these last few centuries is a vindication of Adam Smith’s contention that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”.

Smith’s formula captured the essential conditions for sustained progress. Peace provides a positive environment for trade, migration and the sharing of ideas. Easy taxes ensure that entrepreneurs, workers and investors retain enough of the rewards of their efforts to encourage risk-taking innovation. And a tolerable administration of justice preserves the individual rights and freedoms on which markets depend.

As with today’s living standards, this can also be confirmed with data. In the Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report, co-published in the United States by the Fraser Institute and the Cato Institute, the degree of economic freedom is calculated and compared for 165 countries. Economic freedom is measured by reference to the size of government, the protection of property rights, monetary soundness, the freedom to trade and the amount of regulation.

Based on the 2023 data used in the report, the correlation between freedom and income is compellingly strong. The world’s countries are divided into quartiles from least free to most free. Measured by per capita GDP, people in the 25 percent most-free countries earn on average in excess of six times more than people in the 25 percent least-free countries.

And the advantages of living in a free country go well beyond money. Compared to those in the least-free quartile, those in the most-free quartile live an average of 17 years longer and work nearly 17 percent less. In the least-free quartile, the poverty rate is 25 times higher, and the rate of infant mortality is nearly 10 times higher compared to the most-free quartile.

Cognitive dissonance

So, if things are so good, why are we reluctant to believe it? Why are we willing to listen to populists on both sides when they tell us that things are bad and life is getting tougher?

The first reason is that there’s a market for bad news. If The New York Times proclaimed on its front page: “115,000 People Worldwide Escaped from Extreme Poverty Yesterday”, would it sell more newspapers? Probably not. Or at least not as well as a political scandal, natural disaster or other tragedy. But that astounding statistic is, in fact, the average daily drop in extreme poverty over the past 25 years.

Second, without a doubt, life can be difficult. It’s natural to focus on one’s daily challenges and not consider how well off we are in the context of history. Even today, certainly the best time to be alive, earning a living and raising children aren’t easy. And as well off as we may be, there will always be someone more fortunate or some item of consumption that’s out of our reach. This makes us feel worse off.

Many middle-class Americans, while living better than their parents and grandparents, can feel strapped by the high costs of housing, health care for their families and higher education for their children. Ironically, the challenge of accessing these key products has stimulated government interventions that have greatly increased their costs and exacerbated accessibility challenges.

In each of these sectors, policies have been pursued that have restricted supply (for example, through licensing requirements, zoning and land-use regulations or accreditation) while subsidizing demand through a variety of mechanisms. Any economics undergraduate should recognize that simultaneously restricting supply and subsidizing demand will generate price inflation. Yet when it does, the policy response is often not to unwind these counterproductive approaches but to double down and further subsidize demand. Thus, policies that are well-intentioned at best—or politically motivated at worst—can create what is perceived as an affordability “crisis”.

Do no harm

To believe things are getting worse when they have, in fact, never been better is a classic misdiagnosis. And like a medical misdiagnosis, it risks ill-advised treatment when a popular groundswell for government intervention encourages populist leaders happy to oblige. Yet such policies will always have the opposite effect—exacerbating the problems they’re intended to address.

By far the most worrisome dynamic is that these interventions could move us away from the freedom and openness that have been the source of our prosperity and well-being, compromising the beautiful trendline of progress and rising wealth that has persisted for more than two centuries. And the continuation of that trend is not a foregone conclusion. This misdiagnosis fuels zero-sum thinking that motivates attacks on the very things—such as freer trade and migration—that have contributed substantially to our benefit.

Already, this is happening. The index of global economic freedom highlighted in the Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report hit an all-time peak in 2019. It has since declined sharply, particularly in the wake of the heavy-handed policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. (But the rise of economic populism and discontent in developed economies has likely also played a part.) The index of economic freedom in the United States has steadily eroded since 2000 and has dropped sharply since 2017.

But beyond any index, we can see these threats clearly in the policy environment, particularly in the backlash against immigration in much of the West, the turn against open trade and the imposition of high and erratic tariffs in the United States. The US political arena has also experienced a stoking of class warfare, attacks on entrepreneurs as “oligarchs” and agitation for the imposition of wealth taxes. Antipathy toward technology companies exists on both extremes of the political spectrum. And this sentiment is spreading to technology itself, as exemplified by the growing resistance to artificial intelligence (AI) and attendant infrastructure such as data centers.

It’s nothing short of dangerous when public sentiment turns against innovation and innovators and against the very openness and freedom that have created our wondrous modern world. And it’s ironic when this is driven by misperceptions about the true state of the world and the economy. As Daniel Hannan, a notable British advocate for openness and trade, observed, “Open markets lifted billions from poverty, added decades to our lives, gave us powers that previous generations attributed to wizards or gods. And we never noticed.”