Obviously we know the ways in which the world seems to be getting worse: the COVID-19 pandemic and death + job loss, even in small contextual percentages, is very bad. Income inequality is getting worse overall. Climate change.
But it’s easy, and not always productive, to consistently reside in the negative. What if the world is getting better? At the end of 2019, Bill Gates was arguing that. In early 2019, he tweeted this too:
Gates has spoken on this topic before, too. He points to connectivity as one factor: in 2018, for the first time, half the world was able to access the Internet. (That was largely driven by an uptick in usage in Africa.) The World Economic Forum has jumped on the Bill and Melinda Gates bandwagon too, citing a bunch of charts for why the world is improving, not declining.
Steven Pinker is on the “improvement” train too
Pinker, dubbed a “superstar intellectual,” has also argued the world is getting broadly better. You can find more at 52-Insights, or in this long-form New Yorker article. In that article, they acknowledge Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now, and point to this argument:
In the course of five hundred pages, he presents statistics and charts showing that, despite our dark imaginings, life has been getting better in pretty much every way. Around the globe, improved health care has dramatically reduced infant and maternal mortality, and children are now better fed, better educated, and less abused. Workers make more money, are injured less frequently, and retire earlier. In the United States, fewer people are poor, while elsewhere in the world, and especially in Asia, billions fewer live in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than a dollar and ninety cents per day. Statistics show that the world is growing less polluted and has more parks and protected wilderness. “Carbon intensity”—the amount of carbon released per dollar of G.D.P.—has also been falling almost everywhere, a sign that we may be capable of addressing our two biggest challenges, poverty and climate change, simultaneously.
Pinker cites statistics showing that, globally, there are now fewer victims of murder, war, rape, and genocide. (In his previous book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” he attributed this development to a range of causes, such as democratization, pacifism, and better policing.) Life expectancy has been rising, and—thanks to regulations and design improvements—accidental deaths (car crashes, lightning strikes) are also in steep decline. Despite what we’re often told, students today report being less lonely than in the past, and, although Americans feel overscheduled, studies show that men and women alike have substantially more leisure time than their parents did (ten and six hours more per week, respectively).
Now frame this in a very America-specific way. One of Pinker’s big arguments is that each “side” of American politics and ideology — right and left — has a certain set of fears. The right fears, or at least discusses the fear, of increased drug use, social collapse, and terrorism. Despite the opioid crisis headlines, drug and alcohol use among teenagers, with the exception of cannabis and vaping, is actually at its lowest level in the USA since 1976.
Let’s say the “left,” broadly, views racism and sexism as issues. Pinker has noted that the number of hate crimes in America has fallen for decades, and research on Internet searches — which reveal people’s true beliefs more than what they say, often — shows a decline in racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes.
OK, so if things are getting better, why does it not feel that way all the time?
There are several reasons for this:
- The “world is improving” changes often come about in the second- and third-world: Stats around mortality rate, hunger, income per day, Internet connectivity, etc. are often taken for granted in first-world societies, because many of those benchmarks had already been achieved.
- Negativity bias: Humans have a very deep negativity bias, which has proven across decades of research. We respond much quicker to negative headlines and ideas. Why do you think the media has evolved the way it has?
- Martyrdom: If the sky is consistently falling but we come in and do our best or even thrive/succeed, it allows us to paint a picture of our personal brand / company brand that we are “overcoming,” which is a strong narrative. So framing the negative, then immediately re-framing the positive tied to you, is something many gravitate towards.
- The media and coverage: Because of that negativity bias just mentioned, the media knows it can keep more “eyeballs” (attention) on its products and coverage if it has a more negative spin. Attention is what advertisers seek, and most media companies are over 70% revenue-driven by advertisements, if not significantly higher than that. So, you need to be a little negative to keep people around, because keeping people around gets you paid.
- The Internet’s poles: It is easy to find almost any filter bubble or specific viewpoint online today. If you believe cheeseburgers are the healthiest food in human history, you can probably find that argument online. (Here, we just found that argument for you.) Because it is easy to find anything you want to “prove,” the negativity bias can be reinforced.
- People remember the negative news and info longer: … either this, or they have specific buckets in terms of their thinking. Some people compartmentalize their life so that “news” — i.e. turning on a news show, cable channel, etc. — is expected “negative,” whereas logging onto Instagram is expected “positive.”
- It’s easier to bitch about things than fix them: Isn’t this the truth? Because oftentimes, you don’t have control of enough resources or decisions to fix the bigger issues. You barely have control of the decisions to fix your family, as unfortunate as that can be to admit.
Better or worse?
Broadly, the stats point to “globally better.” That’s good!
Day-to-day, it can feel like “getting worse.” That’s bad!
Where you come down specifically on this is based on millions of inputs including your personality, your brain chemistry, how you look at news, how you look at social media, how you process information, etc.
So the answer is going to be different for literally every single person, to some degree of either “world is getting better!” or “The world is getting worse!”
What’s your answer?
