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The one thing Bill Gates thinks has improved lives the most in the last 300 years

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Ah-ha. Flickr / Sal

Ask yourself what advancement has improved our lives more than anything over the last 300 years, and a few options may come to mind. There's the Internet, modern medicine, and Netflix, to name a few.

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In an interview with Tech Insider on Monday, Bill Gates offered a response you may not expect.

"When I was trying to figure out why lives have improved so much in the last 300 years, where we've gone from a third of kids dying before 5 to — by 1990 it was down to 10% — now it's down to 5%," Gates said. "And saying why, over all history, there were smart people, but that number didn't change. Average life span didn't change. What's magical about what's been deemed the Industrial Revolution?"

"It's really energy intensity," Gates explained.

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Bill Gates. P Yim / Getty

His answer touches on the cornerstone of Gates' 2016 Annual Letter, an address to high school students. In it, Gates credits energy as the reason life gets better — "for most people most of the time."

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He continues in the letter: 

"For thousands of years, people burned wood for fuel. Their lives were, by and large, short and hard. But when we started using coal in the 1800s, life started getting better a lot faster. Pretty soon we had lights, refrigerators, skyscrapers, elevators, air conditioning, cars, planes, and all the other things that make up modern life, from lifesaving medicines and moon landings to fertilizer and Matt Damon movies."

(So, maybe, there is some magic in Netflix, after all.)

There's still work to be done. As Gates mentions in his Annual Letter, there are roughly 1.8 billion people — or 18% of the world's population — living without electricity, heat, air conditioning, or the Internet.

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Investing in clean energy, Gates believes, is the key to unlocking a better future for all.

 

Bill Gates Energy
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