Actually, the "best decade" ended shortly after it began. But there is hope.

As the 2010s come to a close, Matt Ridley, a highly-regarded media pundit and businessman, felt inclined to pen an editorial for the news magazine Spectator boasting that this has been the "best decade in human history."
Defending his views, Ridley suggests the following, which I have reformatted in bullet points below:

• "global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline."


• "The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 13.7 tons to 9.4 tons. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall."


• "In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 percent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow."


• "a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminum, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink."

In response, one commentator wrote:

"Imagine the frame of mind that you have to be operating under in order to think that using an example of beverage cans is a good idea to illustrate the point that you’re trying to make about humans experiencing the best moment in their whole history.".

 And supplied the following image:

To give you a better idea of where we are at the close of the decade, nearly ten years ago, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the crime rate was "extraordinarily high" among the country's migrant children, but told us that she would make sure the police would "guarantee" the country's safety and Germans should just accept everything as a fact of life:

Then came the surge in mass migration, which Merkel and her CDU political party opened the borders for. "We will make it work," they said - "wir schaffen das."

All the bleeding hearts out there (who ironically don't give a toss about their own people) would have wanted it no other way:

Then came the bomb attacks by migrants and children of migrants in France. The chaos. The stabbings. And more bombings.

Freedom of speech ended, lest it provoke anyone who was a migrant or who had grown tired of the cycle and given up hope.

 

Then came the lorry-ramming attacks in England and at Germany's Christmas market. Mass rapes followed. The Eifel Tower was almost blown up. And the British Parliament nearly massacred. Merkel's acolyte in France, the press' darling President Emmanuel Macron, basically told us to just get used to this new norm.

But do you know what else came as this terrible decade wore on? Brexit. Merkel's stepdown and the rise of the AfD. The Yellow Vests. The strikes and shutdown in France. The election of Trump, built on the promise to build a wall. The Italian people choosing Salvini and plugging the holes in the sinking ship.

There is hope. And we carry that hope into the 2020s.

"Wir schaffen das - ab"
We are ending that.