Former Irish president Mary Robinson has been doing the rounds warning the world it needs to wake up as the hands of the Doomsday Clock are moved to 100 seconds to midnight. Apparently things are so bleak that the world is closer catastrophe than at any point in history. Not only is climate change about to wash away most of the world’s coastline, but the threat of nuclear annihilation is greater than at the peak of the Cold War. Basically, we’re doomed.
It’s common currency to believe that the world is in truly awful shape, but is it really? If you had to pick a period of history to be born into – and you didn’t know in advance where you would be born and who your parents would be – you should pick now. Not because the modern world is perfect – far from it – but because it’s a great deal better, on average, for most of the people alive today than was the case in the past.
The late great Hans Rosling spent last few decades of his life trying to teach us the world isn’t as bad as we think it is. The Gap Minder website is a treasure trove of resources for showing people the truth about poverty and population. In his posthumously published book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, he sets out how we come to so misjudge the modern world and presents evidence that people’s understanding of global geopolitics is worse than a chimpanzee’s. Contrary to popular opinion average life expectancies are going up, violence is decreasing, poverty is reducing. Yes, there are still a billion people living in extreme poverty, but the gap between richest and poorest closed substantially in the last 50 years.
So, why do so many people assume the world is getting more dangerous and more unfair? Why do we think problems persist when they become less frequent? One intriguing answer is found in David Levari et al’s 2018 paper Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment. Levari and his team began by demonstrating that when subjects were asked to distinguish between blue and purple dots, they reported seeing an equal number of purple dots even when their frequency reduced. This finding replicated even when subject were told what was happening and when they were offered a financial inducement to ignore fake purple dots! Levari and colleagues then looked at whether this phenomenon could be found in less abstract contexts. First subjects were shown faces and asked to pick out threatening expressions; sure enough, the number of faces that appeared threatening remain consistent even when the frequency of faces that had previously been seen as threatening were reduced. The exact same thing happened then subjects where asked to distinguish between ethic and unethical medical experiments; as the number of genuinely unethical proposal reduced, subjects began seeing experiments they had not previously had a problem with as unethical.
Human beings seem to have a tendency for concept creep. As a concept becomes less prevalent, our definition of that concept expands in fill the gap. As genuine violence and aggression has become ever rarer, our concept of what constitutes aggression has become increasingly broad. The same might be true of other concepts such as trauma. Currently, there is a move in education for schools and teachers to become more ‘trauma informed’. The suggestion is that if a child misbehaves the likelihood is that they’re experienced an incident which has caused them to suffer unresolved trauma. If teachers seek to understand the causes of this trauma then they can connect with the child on a human level, work to heal their wounds and head off bad behaviour.
No, of course, some children really do suffer genuinely traumatic incidents, but to expand the concept so far that it can be used to explain all or most misbehaviour seems naive, misjudged or even insulting. This causes those who object to concept creep to ridicule those advocating for ‘trauma informed’ practice. Discussion turns to name calling and the debate becomes increasingly and unhelpfully polarised.
There are two main takeaways from all this. The first is that if we want to solve problems in the future we are better doing so from a position of knowledge than ignorance. If we don’t know that the world is improving then we are likely to feel helpless or to suggest reckless, ill-conceived ‘cures’ which sometimes end up making the situation worse.* The second is that if we look at concept creep from a position of knowledge we can maybe see the expansion of definitions as a sign that things are getting better. The trouble is, from a position of ignorance, concept creep makes the world seem more fearful and broken than it really is. There is a very real danger that scared, ignorant people start seeing threats were they don’t exist.
So, to help you battle ignorance with knowledge, here’s a link to GapMinder’s free teacher guide to Factfulness and a video of Hans and Ola Rosling urging us to fight our own instincts for ignorance.
I can also recommend Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Natures.
* China’s One Child Policy is an example of this. Conceived as a method for reducing population, it ends up not only with a hugely skewed gender imbalance (far more boys than girls) it has also resulted in an ageing population with too few young people to pay for the numbers of elderly. China is now offering financial inducements for large families. And it didn’t even reduce the population. What does reduce populations is increased living standards and girls’ education; as parents learn to trust that their children are likely to survive, they start having fewer children.
To be fair, China’s one child policy did reduce the population from what it would have been. It didn’t reduce the overall population because other changes meant that people lived a lot longer, so there are more old people. That’s a good thing, but entirely separate.
On your overall point though, I agree wholeheartedly.
We have had a major mania in New Zealand recently about our suicide rate. Most people now think it is high by international standards, and is rising. It is neither, but people are too prepared to listen to “experts” who are motivated to mislead by taking statistics out of context. The government promised to do something about it, and a lot of money has been spent. Achieving nothing, because it’s not the sort of problem that a) is cured by money, or b) can be cured by governments.
The problem with appealing to linguistic relativism in any argument is that it tends to come back to bite you – so if humans are guilty of stretching words over time then our sense of what is “naive, misjudged or even insulting” is also potentially elastic: who is to say whether ‘trauma’@2020 is a worse meaning than ‘trauma’@1990? Perhaps we should go back to ‘trauma’@1700: bring back hangin’ and floggin…never did me any harm..everyone’s gone soft these days..identity politics!…what’s all this wokeness!!..etc etc…
Couldn’t you argue that, if there has been any progress in the last few centuries, it has been because some brave outliers have pushed for ever more politically demanding understandings of what both ‘traumatic’ and ‘naive’ might mean? (‘what do you mean it’s traumatic for Africans to be held as possessions by other people..it’s what they’re used to, how naive!….you’re being pretty insulting to anyone who’s ever REALLY suffered: they get fed, don’t they?…’)
Pinker, I believe, is a proponent of ethical naturalism: the view that there is, in fact, an objective, ahistorical and universal concept of ‘good’ present in nature (sort of like God, really). And of course, Pinker thinks that it’s his mode of language that best captures it: progress is about extending life expectancy – isn’t that just obvious?? (though don’t mention that for many in the US, life expectancy is actually falling: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-life-expectancy/u-s-life-expectancy-declining-due-to-more-deaths-in-middle-age-idUSKBN1Y02C7).
It’s funny how the so-called ‘post-modernists’ are often written off as mumbo-jumbo loving irrationalists, but it’s Pinker and co’s worldview that is reliant on mystical notions of ‘natural good’.
Er…Where to start…?
“The problem with appealing to linguistic relativism in any argument is that it tends to come back to bite you…” I’m not doing that – I’m pointing out the error of doing that. The facts – as Pinker lays out in Better Angels and Rosling in Factfulness – is that the world is objectively a better place now that at any point in the past. By all means questions these facts as presented but attempting to reduce empirical arguments to linguistic games is bizarrely wrong. ‘Progress’ – whatever that means – is a lot more than life expectancy. By pretty much every metric we can conceive of, life is better now, and yet there’s no shortage of nut jobs and doomsayers telling us the end is nigh.
Fear moves people to action in a way that good news don’t. Is the fear that people feel rational? That, somehow, will be connected to the ideological framework they use to look at reality, there’s no observation in the absence of a theory. And as Haidt mentions, biology predisposes people’s political beliefs.
The political divide is in good health and I don’t see it going away anytime soon, no amount of facts is going to change that. I’m trying to learn to live with that, and it ain’t easy!
So, David, in essence you’re saying that there is no disastrous global warming and there are no nuclear weapons in the hands of allegedly stable persons, because the poverty rate is shrinking and average life span is rising?
Good Lord, no! I’m saying we have a tendency to see problems where they don’t really exist. This *obviously* doesn’t mean there are not also problems to see.
As a long-term admirer or Hans Rosling – an amazing statistical communicator – I am all for trying to solve problems from a position of knowledge. But while Rosling rightly challenges our negative bias (nicely summarised at https://www.verywellmind.com/negative-bias-4589618) about global population health, he is no prophet. We should be careful about whose version of truth we believe. His version of ‘facts’ is rightly and, in my view, accurately challenged by an alternative view of world population growth – see https://populationmatters.org/news/2018/04/09/population-factfulness-where-hans-rosling-goes-wrong.
Having followed Rosling’s work since his early GapMinder days, my ‘take’ is that he has said a lot about global socio-economic trends but relatively little about the implications of population growth on the planet’s finite resources. Hardly surprising given his background is in health statistics rather than environmental science. As recent BBC programmes by David Attenborough and Chris Packham have highlighted, exploring environmental degradation through the prism of population growth is a delicate subject. Both agree that planet’s future is likely to be determined by an arc of growth stretching from China through India to Sub-Saharan Africa and the rapid development of mega-cities.
The tone of language you use about “doom mongers” is somewhat concerning. I agree that it would be hard to argue against being born now in most parts of the world rather than in any other century. But if you swap centuries for decades you might get a different answer. I am also far from convinced this will be the case for future generations across the world. Of course the implications of the future, as they sink in and become more tangible, will impact on people now.
When it comes to the climate debate I would refer anyone looking for some ‘factfulness’ to read a recently published (short) book by David Wallace-Wells called ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’. Wallace-Wells claims to be an optimistis realist but his book could easily be accompanied by a health warning. But that is no reason to ignore it…indeed quite the opposite. It certainly appears his book is based on considerable scientific research (which he cites). He also explains, in detail, why so many scientists are reluctant to “tell it like it is”. I was profoundly affected by this book and would encourage anyone interested in the climate debate to read it and make their own conclusions.
So by all means let’s fight ignorance with knowledge, let’s fight our in-built negative bias by actively seeking out positives. But, above all, let’s try to uncover the complexity of reality. Instead of highlighting Rosling’s somewhat imited view of global socio-economic gains, I would suggest getting a more rounded view that presents the implications of this urbanised ‘fossil fuel revolution’ as developing countries follow in our historic footsteps. It has had dramatic implications on Earth’s natural resources with the widespread view that a population of 7bn people is not sustainable, let along 10bn which Rosling predicts as the plateau.
Getting to ‘truthful facts’ is far more likely when you get a large numbers of experts to coalesce around a single view (as has been done by IPCC)…however doom-laden these may be. They are likely to be closer to the truth than the high profile pronouncements of one or two high profile experts even if they encourage our instinct for negative facts.
Hans Rosling seems to have ignored threshold effects (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0) and “black swans” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory).
I don’t know that Rosling ignored threshold effects – he doesn’t really talk much about climate science in Factfulness. But everybody ignores Black Swans – they are, by their nature, impossible to predict.
Black swans may be impossible to predict (at least with the wrong models, such as non-fat-tailed probability distributions). However, they can and need to be anticipated, see the books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Many mathematicians and practitioners in the businesses of finance and insurance know they cannot trust (seemingly) ever-growing curves.
If you could predict a black swan it wouldn’t be a black swan. All you can say is – something no one can predict is likely to happen at some point. This is the message I’ve taken from reading Taleb’s books.