Animal Spirits: The Best Decade in Human History

If you’ve ever looked around and thought, “Wow, everything is kind of a mess,” you’re not wrong. But you might also be accidentally auditioning for the role of Human Brain, Professional Doom Curator. Because while the headlines of the 2010s often felt like an endless scroll of chaos, a quieter story was happening underneath: by a lot of measurable standards, the 2010s (2010–2019) make a strong case for being the best decade in human history so far.

The twist is that the decade’s success wasn’t driven only by laws, labs, and logistics. It was also powered by something fuzzier and more human: confidence, risk-taking, and storytellingthe stuff economists call animal spirits. That’s not a compliment or an insult. It’s just a recognition that humans don’t run on spreadsheets alone. We run on vibes, too. Sometimes good vibes. Sometimes vibes that convince us we need a $900 juicer.

What “Animal Spirits” Means (And Why It Matters Outside Wall Street)

“Animal spirits” is a fancy label for the emotional engine behind decisions: optimism, fear, pride, panic, groupthink, and the powerful urge to copy your neighbor because “they seem like they know what they’re doing.” In economics, animal spirits can push people to start businesses, invest, hire, invent, and buy a house. They can also push people to do the oppositefreeze, hoard, and assume the sky is falling because your uncle posted a chart on social media.

The key idea: when confidence rises, people take productive risks. When confidence collapses, even good opportunities get ignored. That feedback loop can shape an entire era. And in the 2010s, after the financial crisis hangover, the world slowly regained enough confidence to build, scale, and innovate at a pace that reshaped daily life.

So… “Best Decade” According to Who?

“Best decade in human history” is obviously not the same as “perfect decade” (the perfect decade doesn’t exist; it’s currently stuck in traffic behind a unicorn). What we can do is judge by outcomes that matter to actual humans:

• Fewer people living in extreme poverty
• More people living longer
• More children surviving
• Lower violence in many places
• Broader access to information, markets, and tools
• Cleaner air and safer environments in key regions

Using those yardsticks, the 2010s look surprisingly strong. Not because the decade was calmit wasn’tbut because progress kept compounding in ways that didn’t always feel dramatic in the moment.

The Big Global Wins: Quiet Progress With Loud Consequences

1) Extreme poverty kept falling (and hundreds of millions climbed up)

For a big chunk of the planet, the 2010s were part of a historic poverty-reduction run. By the mid-2010s, the share of people living in extreme poverty had fallen to around one-tenth of the global populationan outcome that would’ve sounded like science fiction to many policymakers a generation earlier.

Even better: this wasn’t just a statistical rounding error. It meant more families with stable meals, safer housing, access to basic services, and a little breathing room for the future. When people move out of extreme poverty, everything gets easier to improvehealth, schooling, productivity, and resilience. That’s compounding progress in human form.

2) Life expectancy rose (more years, and often better years)

The long arc of human history is basically “we figured out how not to die as often.” The 2010s continued that trend (with a pandemic-sized asterisk arriving later). Over recent decades, global life expectancy increased meaningfully, driven by reductions in major killers like infectious diseases and improved survival for mothers and children.

One reason this matters: life expectancy is a summary statistic for a lot of invisible winsclean water systems, vaccination campaigns, better treatments, safer births, and public health measures that rarely get a parade. (Public health’s branding problem is that success looks like “nothing happened today.”)

3) Child survival improved (fewer empty seats at the table)

Under-five mortality fell dramatically over the longer trendline that includes the 2010s. If you want a single metric that captures real moral progress, it’s this: fewer families losing children to preventable causes. It reflects improvements in nutrition, prenatal care, immunization, sanitation, and treatment access.

4) Cleaner air and safer environments in key places

Environmental progress is uneven and complicatedclimate change got worse in the 2010s even as many local air-quality measures improved. But it’s still worth noting: policies that reduce air pollution can deliver enormous health gains, and long-running efforts to curb pollutants have made everyday life less toxic for millions.

Even one examplereductions in children’s lead exposureshows how “boring” regulation can produce huge benefits. Lead exposure harms developing brains. Cutting it is the kind of societal upgrade that pays dividends for decades.

The U.S. Snapshot: A Decade That Was (Mostly) Productively Uneventful

If global progress is the big picture, the U.S. in the 2010s is a useful close-up of how animal spirits work. After the Great Recession, confidence rebuilt slowlythen steadily.

The longest expansion (and a surprisingly tight job market)

The U.S. expansion that began in 2009 stretched through the 2010s and became the longest on record by early 2020. During the decade, unemployment dropped to levels Americans hadn’t seen in about half a century.

That matters because steady employment is one of the most powerful anti-poverty tools a society has. It improves household stability, raises bargaining power, and gives people the room to plan instead of just survive. Was it evenly shared? No. But the macro backdrop was strong enough to expand opportunities for many workers.

Violent crime drifted down during the decade

Crime is complicated and local, and the U.S. saw a pandemic-era spike later on. But in the 2010s, the national violent crime rate in 2019 was lower than it had been earlier in the decade. Fewer violent crimes means fewer victims, fewer traumas, and fewer lives permanently derailed. It’s hard to put a price on “not being harmed,” but people sure can feel it.

Technology: The Decade Your Phone Became Your Second Brain

If the 2000s introduced the modern internet, the 2010s installed it directly into everyone’s pocket. Smartphone adoption surged, and with it came a wave of practical superpowers: maps that don’t involve printing directions, instant translation, remote work tools, mobile banking, telehealth, and “wait, I can scan a document with my camera?”

This wasn’t just convenience. Smartphones lowered the cost of coordination. They made it easier to find work, start small businesses, learn skills, access markets, and connect with services. That’s a big deal in rich countries, and it can be an even bigger deal in developing ones.

The 2010s also saw major cost declines in clean energy technologies like solar, helping renewables become more competitive. That doesn’t solve climate change by itself, but it changes the menu of options. When the price of a solution drops, it stops being a moral lecture and starts being a practical choice.

Why the 2010s Didn’t Feel Like “The Best Decade” at the Time

Here’s the psychological trap: human brains evolved to notice threats, not trendlines. A plane crash is vivid; a slow decline in child mortality is not. A scandal is shareable; a steady improvement in vaccination coverage is not. Social media then turns the volume knob to maximum.

Add in real pain pointsrising political polarization, housing affordability issues in many cities, anxiety about automation, and growing awareness of climate riskand it’s easy to understand why the mood often felt darker than the data.

The Fine Print: A “Best Decade” Can Still Have Bad Chapters

Calling the 2010s “the best decade in human history” isn’t the same as saying everyone experienced it as the best decade. Many communities endured war, displacement, discrimination, and economic fragility. Inequality remained a serious challenge. Climate change intensified. And social trust frayed in many places.

The point isn’t to deny any of that. The point is that human progress is often lopsided: the world can get better on average while still leaving people behind. Recognizing progress isn’t complacency. It’s fuelbecause it shows that improvement is possible, repeatable, and worth fighting for.

How to Protect the Next “Best Decade”: Bottling Animal Spirits Without the Hangover

1. Invest in systems that compound: public health, education, infrastructure, and basic research. These create “silent miracles” that show up later as longer lives and higher productivity.
2. Make opportunity portable: broadband access, affordable devices, skills training, and flexible credentialing. When tools spread, progress spreads.
3. Keep the story honest: optimism works best when it’s grounded. “Everything is amazing and nobody is sad” is not credible. “We can fix things because we’ve fixed things before” is.
4. Design for resilience: climate adaptation, supply chain robustness, and social safety nets. Confidence grows when people know one bad month won’t ruin a whole life.

Experience Add-On (About ): What the “Best Decade” Felt Like on the Ground

If you lived through the 2010s, you probably remember the strange sensation of the future arriving in small, sneaky ways. It didn’t kick down the door wearing a neon jumpsuit. It just showed up one day as an app update and quietly rewired your habits. You stopped memorizing phone numbers (because why would you?), stopped arguing about directions (because the blue dot has spoken), and stopped carrying a camera that wasn’t also your phone. Photos went from “special occasions” to “my lunch is having a moment.”

For a lot of people, the decade’s progress was felt as friction disappearing. Paying bills got easier. Booking travel stopped requiring a heroic battle with a printer. If your car made a weird noise, you could find ten videos of someone fixing that exact noise, plus three strangers debating whether it was actually a different noise. Remote work, once a niche perk, started becoming normal in more industriesfirst as a convenience, then as a lifeline later on.

The 2010s also had a very specific emotional flavor: optimistic hustle mixed with low-grade overload. You could learn anything, but you were also expected to keep up with everything. Social media made the world feel closer and louder at the same time. One minute you were watching a science explainer; the next minute you were witnessing a feud about pineapple on pizza that somehow escalated into international relations. It was easier to find your peopleand easier to get stuck in a digital food fight.

In many places, people experienced real improvements in health and stability without calling it “historic progress.” It looked like a grandparent living longer. It looked like fewer funerals for preventable illnesses. It looked like a kid staying in school because a family’s income was finally steady enough that every day didn’t feel like an emergency. Those changes don’t trend on social platforms, but they change lives.

And then there was the economic mood: animal spirits in the wild. Startups were everywhere. “Side hustle” became a respectable term, like “small business” but with more caffeine. Sometimes that energy built real value; sometimes it built a gadget that connected to Wi-Fi for reasons no one could explain. But the underlying feeling mattered: people were willing to try. That willingnessconfidence that tomorrow could be better than todayis one of the most powerful technologies humans have ever invented.

Conclusion: The Decade That Proved Progress Still Works

The 2010s weren’t a fairy tale. But if you judge by outcomes that matterpoverty reduction, longer lives, better child survival, expanding access to powerful tools, and stretches of economic stabilitythe decade stacks up extremely well against any other ten-year period we’ve recorded.

The lesson isn’t “relax, everything is fine.” The lesson is “progress is real, but it’s not automatic.” Animal spirits can build or break. The best decades happen when optimism meets competencewhen confidence is backed by institutions, science, and policies that spread gains broadly. If we want the next decade to beat the last, we don’t need a miracle. We need to keep compounding the winsand stop lighting the compounding machine on fire for sport.