Reasons to be Cheerful

This week I was talking to a bright and idealistic student, who was so pessimistic about the world.  For her, the environmental outlook, the toxic political environment, the problems of social media and the threats from AI seemed to indicate a bleak future.  She longed for a return to the good old days when these were not concerns.  This lack of optimism is a problem, I think; and the danger it that it becomes self-fulfilling.

I am also thinking about what to say to our graduating students; what message for them to leave school with. I think there’s reason for great, great optimism, as long as we don’t get complacent. 

And that’s because there are no ‘good old days’; we forget what the past was really like, and the news cycle leads us to forget that we are living a time of incredible progress.  Of course that’s not to say we can take it for granted – on the contrary it means we have a responsibility to keep the momentum going.

So this week, in response to the student I mentioned, and more broadly too,  I have listed some of Ben Carlson’s ‘reasons to be cheerful’ to remind us about some facts of which we may be unaware.  On an individual level, it’s likely that you, gentle reader, enjoy comfort, health, food, leisure and lifespans that are in excess of what the greatest emperors of the past could command.  On a global level, the facts similarly show that this is the greatest time in history to be alive; and equally importantly, the trajectory is good.  Let me re-state; this is not a call for complacency, but for an informed approach.  So here, to counter any gloomy zeitgeist lets be happy about these facts:

• Every single country in the world today has a lower infant or child mortality rate than it had in 1950.
• Just 200 years ago, 85% of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Today that figure is 9%.
• In 1800, average worldwide life expectancy was  30 years.  Today is is 72 years.
• In 1800the richest country in the world then (the Netherlands) had a life expectancy of 40 years. Today, there are no countries where life expectancy is below 45 years.
• In the late-1600s, one-third of the children born in the richest parts of the world died before their 5th birthday. The figure today is 6%, and almost entirely in the poorest parts of the world (so we can expect it to fall further as wealth increases).
• Between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10-fold-to-50-fold decline in their rates of homicide.
• In the past most people worked until they died. In 1870, 90% of those who lived past age 65 had to work. Today it’s less than 20%.
• One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51. The average American now retires at age 62.
• The proportion of people killed annually in wars is currently less than a quarter of what it was in the 1980s, one-seventh of what it was in the early 1970s, one-eighteenth of what it was in the early 1950s, and one two-hundreth of what it was during World War II.
• Early in the 19th century, 12% of the world could read and write. Today it’s 83%.
• The world’s nuclear stockpiles have been reduced by 85% since the Cold War.
• Between 2000 and 2015, the number of deaths from malaria (which in the past killed half the people who had ever lived) fell by 60%.
• The control of infectious disease since 1990 has saved the lives of more than a 100 million children.
• The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen by an average of 137,000 people every day for the past 25 years.

[For those who want more, do check out Stephen Pinker’s video on this topic, or if you fancy a long read, one of his marvellous books]. 

We know that we remember and react more to bad news than good (psychologists even have special names for these characteristics – negativity bias and availability heuristic).  As Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than  bad memory”.  These days social media amplifies both of these enormously; but before we blame technology for the ills of the world, we should stop to be grateful that we have lives twice as long during which to complain.