Ask people whether the world is getting better or worse and most will say worse. Ask them about the numbers, and they get them wrong, usually in the gloomy direction.
Hans Rosling spent years testing this. In Factfulness he describes asking thousands of people simple questions about the world: how many girls finish primary school, how many people live in extreme poverty, how life expectancy has changed. Educated audiences, including scientists, doctors and world leaders, scored worse than if they had picked answers at random. Rosling joked that chimpanzees choosing bananas would beat them.
People
know that extreme poverty has almost halved in 20 years (Gapminder surveys)
Chimpanzees
would get it right by luck, with three answers to choose from
The problem is not that people are stupid. It is that our picture of the world is built from what reaches us, and what reaches us is shaped by how news works and how our brains work.
1. Planes that crash, not planes that land
Steven Pinker puts it simply: journalists report plane crashes, not planes that take off. News is about things that happen, and the things that happen suddenly are mostly bad: a bomb, an earthquake, a crash. The things that get better tend to get better slowly, a little each year, and a slow improvement is never news on any particular day.
Max Roser of Our World in Data made the point with one famous line: newspapers could have run the headline “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday” every single day for 25 years. It was true. It was never printed.
Plane crashes in storm
Sudden · gets printed137,000 fewer people in extreme poverty since yesterday
Slow · never printed2. Our brains are built for danger
For most of human history, missing a threat could kill you, while missing a piece of good news cost you very little. So we evolved to notice the bad first and remember it longest. Psychologists call it the negativity bias. Peter Diamandis, in Abundance, describes the amygdala as an early-warning system that is always scanning for trouble, and a news industry that has learned to feed it. “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Add the availability heuristic, described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: we judge how common something is by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid stories on a screen come to mind very easily. That is why people fear plane crashes and shark attacks far more than the far bigger, far duller risks around them.
When a problem is solved, it disappears from the news.3. Progress hides in plain sight
When something is solved, it disappears. Nobody reports on the smallpox that didn’t happen or the famine that didn’t come. Michael Shermer, in The Moral Arc, shows how the moral gains of the last few centuries, the end of legal slavery, votes for women, rights for children and minorities, are now so normal that we forget they had to be won at all. We measure today against an imagined perfect world, not against the real past.
And because the world now reports on itself more completely than ever, we see more of its suffering than any generation before us. More coverage of bad things can feel like more bad things, even when there are fewer.
“Things can be both bad and better.”
Hans Rosling, FactfulnessBad and better, at once. Hans Rosling’s favourite example is a premature baby in an incubator. Her condition is bad. It is also improving. Both are true at once, and to help her you need to know both. The world is the same.
How to read the news like an intelligent optimist
Ask “compared to what?”
One terrible event tells you little. Look for the trend over ten, fifty or a hundred years.
Look for the number
Is it a rate or a raw count? Per person, or in total? A bigger population means bigger totals even when things improve.
Go to the data
Our World in Data, Gapminder, the World Bank and the UN publish long-run figures anyone can check.
Notice the quiet stories
Look for the slow wins: vaccines, school enrolment, clean water, cheaper solar power. They rarely trend, but they change billions of lives.
None of this means ignoring problems. It means seeing them in proportion, so we can put our energy where it does the most good. That is the whole point of Intelligent Optimism: not a rosy mood, but an accurate picture, which turns out to be far more hopeful than the headlines.
Drawing on: Hans Rosling, Factfulness (2018) · Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (2018) and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) · Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance (2012) · Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc (2015) · Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) · Max Roser, Our World in Data