You can't fix what is wrong in the world if you don't know what's actually happening. In this book, straightforward charts and graphs, combined with succinct explanations, will provide you with easily understandable access to the facts that busy people need to know about how the world is really faring.
Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse rather than better. Consider a 2016 survey by the global public opinion company YouGov that asked folks in 17 countries, "All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?” Fifty-eight percent of respondents thought that the world is getting worse, and 30 percent said that it is doing neither. Only 11 percent thought that things are getting better. In the United States, 65 percent of Americans thought that the world is getting worse, and 23 percent said neither. Only 6 percent of Americans responded that the world is getting better.
This dark view of the prospects for humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken. We demonstrate it in these pages using uncontroversial data taken from official and scientific sources.
Of course, some global trends are negative. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says: "It's essential to realize that progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, that wouldn't progress." For example, man made climate change arising largely from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels could become a significant problem for humanity during this century. The spread of plastic marine debris is a big and growing concern. Many wildlife populations are declining, and tropical forest area continues shrinking. In addition, far too many people are still malnourished and dying in civil and sectarian conflicts around the globe. And, of course, the world is afflicted by the current coronavirus pandemic.
However, many of the global trends we describe are already helping redress such problems. For example, the falling price of renewable energy sources incentivize the switch away from fossil fuels. Moreover, increasingly abundant agriculture is globally reducing the percentage of people who are hungry while simultaneously freeing up land so that forests are now expanding in much of the world. And unprecedentedly rapid research has significantly advanced testing, tracking, and treatment technologies to ameliorate the coronavirus contagion.
PSYCHOLOGICAL GLITCHES MISLEAD YOU
So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that all things considered, the world is getting worse?
Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, "There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time-compare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time need ed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on." News is bad news; steady progress is not news.
Smart people especially seek to be well informed and so tend to be voracious consumers of news. Since journalism focuses on dramatic things and events that go wrong, the nature of news thus tends to mislead readers and viewers into thinking that the world is in worse shape than it really is. This mental shortcut causes many of us to confuse what comes easily to mind with what is true; it was first identified in 1973 by behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as the "availability bias." Another reason for the ubiquity of mistaken gloom derives from a quirk of our evolutionary psychology. A Stone Age man hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor. We are the descendants of the worried folks who tended to assume that all rustles in the grass were dangerous predators and not the wind. Because of this instinctive negativity bias, most of us attend far more to bad rather than to good news. The upshot is that we are again often misled into thinking that the world is worse than it is.
"Judgment creep" is yet another explanation for the prevalence of wrong-headed pessimism. We are misled about the state of the world because we have a tendency to continually raise our threshold for success as we make progress, argue Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues. "When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn't actually gotten better at all," explains Gilbert. "Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself." Social, economic, and environmental problems are being judged intractable because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them. More than 150 years ago, political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville noted a similar phenomenon as societies progress, one that has since been called the Tocqueville effect.
What, though, accounts for progress?
Some smart folk who acknowledge that considerable social, economic, and environmental progress has been made still worry that progress will not necessarily continue.
"Human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing," asserted Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman in a July 2017 Guardian article. He added: "For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile."
Runciman is not alone. The worry that civilization is just about to go over the edge of a precipice has a long history. After all, many earlier civilizations and regimes have collapsed, including the Babylonian, Roman, Tang, and Mayan Empires, and more recently the Ottoman and Soviet Empires.
In their 2012 book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson persuasively outline reasons for the exponential improvement in human well-being that started about two centuries ago.
They begin by arguing that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized around "extractive" institutions-political and economic systems that funnel resources from the masses to the elites.
In the 18th century, some countries including Britain and many of its colonies-shifted from extractive to inclusive institutions. "Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few," they write. "Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions," which "distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy." Inclusive institutions are similar to one another in their respect for individual liberty. They include democratic politics, strong private property rights, the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, freedom of movement, and a free press. Inclusive institutions are the basis of the technological and entrepreneurial innovations that produced a historically unprecedented rise in living standards in those countries that embraced them, including the United States, Japan, and Australia as well as the countries in Western Europe. They are qualitatively different from the extractive institutions that preceded them.
The spread of inclusive institutions to more and more countries was uneven and occasionally reversed. Those advances and in the University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre Mc Closkey's view, the key role played by major ideological shifts resulted in what McCloskey calls the "great enrichment," which boosted average incomes thirtyfold to a hundredfold in those countries where they have taken hold.
The examples of societal disintegration cited earlier, whether Roman, Tang, or Soviet, occurred in extractive regimes. Despite crises such as the Great Depression, there are no examples so far of countries with long-established inclusive political and economic institutions suffering similar collapses.
In addition, confrontations between extractive and inclusive regimes, such as World War II and the Cold War, have generally been won by the latter. That suggests that liberal free-market democracies are resilient in ways that enable them to forestall or rise above the kinds of shocks that destroy brittle extractive regimes.
If inclusive liberal institutions can continue to be strengthened and further spread across the globe, the auspicious trends documented in this book will extend their advance, and those that are currently negative will turn positive. By acting through inclusive institutions to increase knowledge and pursue technological progress, past generations met their needs and hugely increased the ability of our generation to meet our needs. We should do no less for our own future generations. That is what sustainable development looks like.
