Dare to Understand

Pick up any newspaper or browse the internet or TV and it’s almost impossible to escape the sense that the world is falling apart before our eyes. War, terrorism, violent crime, environmental catastrophe, starving children, flu epidemics, opioids, poverty. It’s not your imagination, either. A study using sentiment mining to analyze the tone of New York Times articles from 1945 to 2005 shows a significant downward trend, and I suspect it has gotten worse since then. With all that, how can you avoid being depressed and pessimistic about the state of the world?

It’s actually not that difficult, if you follow the trend lines instead of the headlines, according to a hugely important new book by Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Read this book if you want to be not only smarter but happier.

If you complain about the state of the world, think about it this way: if you could choose any other time in history into which to be born, which would you choose? If you chose any time before about 1800, chances are 9 out of 10 that you would be born into extreme poverty, and you would have had a 30% chance of dying in infancy. You would almost certainly have been born under an authoritarian government, and you probably would have experienced crushing hunger many times in your life.

The headlines are scary, but the trend lines clearly and unequivocally show that the world has gotten better, and continues to get better, in nearly every meaningful way. We are wealthier, healthier, safer and freer than ever in our history.

Feel free to disagree with that last statement, but you would be wrong. Just look at the data. There are 75 graphs in the book to support the case. In my view, this is the most important of all[1]:

As you can clearly see, for almost two millennia after 1 CE, world GDP barely budged, began nudging upward around 1600, and then took off exponentially beginning in the 19^th century.

The other graphs in the book tell the tale of clear improvement in other aspects of human flourishing, but the reason I say this is the most important graph is twofold. First, although money may not buy happiness, it certainly makes it much easier to solve problems that cause unhappiness. It buys scientific research, technology, aid to the poor, infrastructure, and institutions, which is why life span is way up (from 29 to 71.4), poverty is way down from 90% to 10%), transportation is safer (motor vehicle accident deaths per million miles down 96%), great powers almost never go to war anymore, diseases are being eradicated, and even quality of life is rising.

Second, the chart is so absolutely unambiguous that, clearly something happened to cause what some call the Great Escape. That something, according to Pinker, was the combination of four ideals:

Reason: we must hold our beliefs accountable to objective standards. We must dare to understand.

Science: the refining of reason to understand the world.

Humanism: privileges the well-being of individuals over the tribe, race, nation or religion.

Progress: which is not merely technical, but includes intellectual and moral. (Yes, that’s right. Our IQs are actually increasing, and our attitudes toward violence, racism…are changing rapidly)

There are people who disagree with Pinker here. I’m not one of them, although I think he only got four out of five right. What’s missing is at least a chapter explicitly giving credit to free markets. The book does state that in several places, but it’s mostly just in passing. I suspect Pinker felt he was picking enough fights with the “intelligentsia” of both the left and right and decided to stay away from that live wire.

But of course it’s not all good news. We still run the risk of nuclear war, inequality, while less than it has been historically, feeds on ubiquitous media and rising expectations and continues to stoke resentment, and we face tremendous danger from climate change. But human ingenuity can solve even those difficult problems—as long as reason and science are allowed to flourish. If we concentrate on policies to keep making the pie larger instead of fighting over slices, we’ll continue to have the resources to address the significant problems we still face.

The real danger we face, and the reason I urge everyone to read this book, is that relentless pessimism can put us on course to kill the geese that keep laying golden eggs. If everyone thinks things are getting worse, they are more likely to turn to seductively simple solutions such as populism, nationalism, and religious extremism, all of which have a dampening effect on the geese.

The irony is that those who are pessimistic about the world are optimistic about themselves. Most people polled feel they will be better off in the future, but their country will be worse off. Why does this “optimism gap” exist? Part of the problem is that our standards have risen. News events that horrify us today would have gone unnoticed just several decades ago. Because bad stuff makes the news while quiet consistent improvements don’t. When’s the last time you saw a headline about 137,000 people escaping poverty yesterday? (Which would have been true every day for the past 25 years.) and of course, availability bias guarantees that we remember the sensational anomalies.

Besides, being negative makes us sound smarter. As Matt Ridley said, “If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad…If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.” [2]  As Pinker puts it, optimists always sound like they’re trying to sell you something.

In that last point, he’s definitely right. I‘m a long term optimist[3], and I am trying to sell you something: buy this book, read it, and spread the news as far and wide as you can. You’ll be doing yourself, your friends, and the world a huge favor.

[1] Source: Our World in Data website. This site contains many of the same graphical arguments Pinker makes in his book and is well worth visiting.

[2] The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley, p. 280. Also an excellent book if you want to read more.

[3] See my post: The Power of Positive Pessimism