Carrying my share of the blogging load, or "Is the world getting better or worse?"

I haven't been blogging much lately, mainly because I've been busy with school and partly because El Tipito (my name for Theodore that I don't use as often as I'd like) has been so sick lately.  Time to start up again now that I'm on the down slope in terms of school and apparently of El Tipito being sick. Which makes me think, is the world on an up slope or a down slope. Is it getting better or worse. I feel like in the LDS church and churches more generally we get a lot of the "getting worse" side. While I certainly think some things in the world are getting worse, pornography use, child trafficking and the ecological damage the average human inflicts on the earth (even if you completely disregard global warming),  and global conflict and military spending. These are all serious problems and are accompanied by many others which certainly need our attention.

But many of the things I would consider to be quite damaging to the human population of the world are falling: poverty; violence; divorce (falling faster than marriage rates); overall crime, including as far as I could tell domestic and child abuse; teen pregnancy and abortion rate, although I understand that this has increased a little in the last few years, malnutrition, although it jumped after food price rises of the last couple years and overall medical care in the world. Some other things such as drug use seem to have leveled off or fallen slightly.  A lot of the statistics that I found were just for the US, but a lot were for the whole world.

So what do you think? What are some of the things you think of when you hear "the world is getting worse?" What do you feel overall trends are if any?

For my part, I would have to say that overall, the average person in the world would say they are in a better off and have more opportunities than their parents, especially in some of the less developed part of the world. But it is definitely a mixed bag, with arguments on both sides.

Here's some graphs that I found for some of these: