Cheer up ... things aren't as bad as you think

I’m reading a cool little book right now called Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think. The authors make the argument that most of us (a HUGE majority of us) are woefully ignorant about the basic status of the world, an ignorance that seems to manifest itself in a choking cynicism in an age when we should be more optimistic than ever. To demonstrate that ignorance, the authors frequently survey audiences with questions like this one:

In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has …

a) Almost doubled

b) Remained more or less the same

c) Almost halved

Very, very, few people get this question right. In fact, only single percentages of respondents answer correctly. Did you? If you answered “c,” you are correct. Extreme poverty around the world has taken a nose dive. The world is richer than it’s ever been. The authors have many questions like this in their book and each question – and the lack of knowledge in the general population about the right answers – illustrates how much we forget that the world is better now than it ever has been. The thing that is shocking is that this is true by almost any measure, yet we seem to refuse to believe it. Some other data points to support this:

? 60% of girls finish primary school in low-income countries across the world.

? Average life expectancy in the world today is over 70 years.

? The number of deaths per year from natural disasters has decreased to less than half of what it was 100 years ago.

? Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school on average. Women have spent 9 years.

While all of these numbers could be better and we should not “settle,” the trends in all of them are dramatically positive. (I should note that the authors’ data comes from United Nations and other international NGO databases. If you’d like to see these numbers in action in a very cool way, visit here).

With the occurrence of yet another school shooting in the U.S. in my home state of Texas last week, I was thinking about the data the authors of Factfulness cite and their commentary about how humans are biased toward negative news vs. positive news which helps explain some of this cynicism in the face of great progress. I saw a slew of articles in the last few days that mentioned that the number of shooting deaths in U.S. schools so far this year surpass the number of combat deaths in the U.S. military over the same period. When I first read this, I thought that it couldn’t be true - but not because it only indicated school deaths are too high, but because it meant that combat deaths were ridiculously low. Yet it is, indeed, true: there have been less than 20 deaths in the U.S. military from combat operations in the first five months of this year. Please don’t misunderstand me; one child killed in a school is one too many. Likewise, wars still ravage parts of the earth – Syria in particular – in horrible ways. But it’s also a fact that war is more uncommon now that at any time in human history.

(For an analysis on the validity of the “more killed in schools than in combat” claim, see here).

The Factfulness authors also note how we tend to amplify things that seem particularly disturbing. Returning to the horrible rash of school shootings this year, 26 students (from a K-12 population of around 56 million) have been killed in shootings along with five adults. Those incidents have involved multiple fatalities at the same time among people who seem particularly vulnerable (students defenseless in a class) and innocent (children), thus accentuating the collective trauma of this special sort of dreadful murder. But during the same period that these deaths happened, somewhere around 1,400 people have died in distracted driving accidents, a majority of them teens (NHTSA 2015 data). In an entire year, 40 to 50 Americans will be killed in lightning strikes. Again, all of these data points are not meant to minimize the horror of a school shooting. And unlike a lightning strike, there are bigger issues wrapped up in shootings that amplify their importance – gun rights, mental illness, constitutional law, bullying, etc. But in general, we tend to disproportionately worry about very stark events that have a low likelihood of occurring and, in the process, convince ourselves that the world is bad and getting worse. I would submit to you that this is not true.

The authors of Factfulness further point out that we tend to romanticize the past. To that point, and sticking with the school violence theme, I have my own quiz:

The deadliest intentional mass casualty event at a school or university in the U.S. was …

a) At a high school in Littleton, Colorado in 1999

b) At a high school in Parkland Florida in 2018

c) At a university in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2007

d) At a K-12 school in Bath, Michigan in 1927

You probably guessed right given the context of the question (but I bet you wouldn’t have in another context!). The answer is “d.” In Bath, Michigan in 1927, A man named Andrew Kehoe – a school board member – rigged a school with explosives and blew it up, killing 44 people, 38 of them students. Some of those deaths occurred after the explosion when Kehoe drove to the site swarming with rescuers, got out of his car, pointed a rifle at his vehicle, and fired. The car was full of explosives and shrapnel. The ensuing blast killed him, the superintendent, and several bystanders. He had moments before murdered his wife at their farm.

This macabre story is meant to illustrate the point about how we tend to think of the problems of today as unique to today. But that is rarely true. And in forgetting that, it’s easier to think the worst of our own time. Yes, we should continue to work to prevent horrible things from happening. But as the authors of Factfulness note, when people reminisce romantically about “the good ole days” they are almost always wrong. The “good ole days” are today and optimism gives hope that drives further positive change. So, give appropriate concern and outrage to events that deserve it. But don’t let those events drive your world view completely. As Max Ehrmann wrote in the poem Desiderata: “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” He was right ... and it’s getting better.