Robert Barker/University Photography

Bartels World Affairs Fellow Kishore Mahbubani takes questions after his remarks.

You might not gather as much from the headlines, but the world is in a much better place than ever before, according to a former ambassador and president of the United Nations Security Council, who spoke on campus Feb 13. Non-Western nations teem with optimism as millions rise from poverty into the middle class. Fewer children are dying, wars kill far fewer people, and there is less violence in human society. Global poverty may be eliminated by 2030.

So said Kishore Mahbubani, the 2013 Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellow, in his lecture, "The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World." Mahbubani, now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, says the present is a time of unprecedented improvements in the human condition.

"The paradox of our time is that for a long time, the West always provided the most optimistic societies in the world ... but today, in a remarkable reversal of a very long historical pattern, ... the West has become progressively more pessimistic," said Mahbubani, who planned to become a philosopher before his diplomacy career. "If you want to drown in pessimism, just go to Europe."

Mahbubani said that as recently as the 1950s, half a million people died each year in conflicts; today, about 30,000 die per year in any kind of conflict, despite enormous population growth since the '50s. "We always thought war was a feature of the human condition, he said, but today "wars are becoming a sunset industry all over the world. The danger of a major interstate war is the lowest it has ever been since statistics have been kept."

It's a matter of perspective, Mahbubani said: "Quite remarkably, while the 12 percent of the world which lives in the West are progressively becoming more and more worried about the future, the 88 percent who live outside the West are actually becoming more and more optimistic about the world and about the future."

Mahbubani, born in 1948, said he grew up poor in Singapore in a time of ethnic riots, no flush toilets and per capita income of $500 per year -- "a traditional Third World environment." But in the space of his lifetime, Singapore incomes have superseded those of its former colonial power, the United Kingdom, Mahubani said.

Singapore's rise, rather than being an exception, "is being replicated on a massive scale," Mahbubani said, noting that 500 million people are middle class; by 2020, the number will rise to 1.75 billion -- something never before seen in history, and which he called "a remarkable upliftment of the human condition."

Why is this happening? "In all parts of the world, people are coming to a common understanding of what it takes to build a good society. There's a common set of aspirations developing all over the world," said Mahbubani, including a growing aversion to war. "I actually believe that in the years to come, the world will get better and better, and we should recognize it and take advantage of it and strengthen it."

Of course key challenges remain, Mahbubani said, such as the relationship between the United States and China. There are difficulties, he said, "but overall the level of tension has been going down," reflecting conscious decisions by policymakers to create "a deep [economic] interdependence between the two."

One way to keep the world stable as power shifts from West to East, Mahbubani said, is investment in such "multilateral" organizations as the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization -- each currently undermined by the West, he said.

The Bartels lecture is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.