I think this is the most important thing to retain from reading this article:

>[...] Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.

>To bring this to mind I need to know both statistics: When someone says we can sit back and relax because the world is in a much better place, I point out that 11 children are still dying every minute. We cannot accept the world as it is today. And when I feel hopeless in the face of this tragedy, I remember that we reduced annual child deaths from 20 million to 5.6 million in the last fifty years.

Keeping this in mind at all times is a very important thing.