The World Is Doing Better Than You Think: The Case for Optimism

The view from the freeway near my Los Angeles home was apocalyptic again last week. Thick black clouds from a nearby fire stretched across the sky, and ashes covered vehicles as we were all brought to a standstill by a multi-car accident. It was also close to 110 degrees and I thought of the firefighters in their heavy gear working tirelessly to get California’s many wildfires under control. The world has gone to hell in a hand basket, I found myself muttering, while wondering where that saying comes from (I looked it up and it turns out no one really knows). 

Whether you live near a natural disaster or not, it’s easy to have a pessimistic outlook these days: Politics, global warming, harassment, prejudice, disease, and famine all litter the news. Unstable countries have nuclear weapons and Russia is meddling in democratic processes. The national deficit is off the charts and Flint still has dirty water. Kids are addicted to video games and millennials are still living at home with their parents. We don’t know our neighbors anymore and crime seems to be on the rise. 

At least that is the narrative most of us believe. A Pew research study from last year showed that the majority of Americans feel that life in the United States was better 50 years ago. Psychologist Steven Pinker looked at similar studies around the world and found that the majority of Earth’s inhabitants feel the world is getting worse. 

Yet, these feelings simply do not mesh with reality. The world is far better than it was at any other time in history. Consider some of the actual facts. The average life expectancy is way up, and child mortality is down. Famine and hunger rates have collapsed. GDP per capita is up across the world and extreme poverty is down. Inequality has even decreased across the globe. There are fewer wars happening now than at any point in human history, and nations are trending in the direction of democracy. Violence is down worldwide, including bullying, rape, and domestic violence. This is even true for notoriously violent places like Mexico, where violence rates are 1/5 of what they were a century ago. To top it all off, our quality of life is better. We spend more time with our children, less time in the office, and less time doing housework than at any point in the last 50 years, and even the poorest of us have more spending money. You can get the data on all of these topics in Steven Pinker’s well-researched new book Enlightenment Now. 

If the world is objectively better than ever, why are we so pessimistic? Part of the reason has to do with our brains and a quirk called the “availability bias.” When we see negative news reports, we don’t put it in context. Instead, a report of a murder in the town next door makes us think that killings are common, even though we can only name one example. Another factor is the brain’s bias toward negativity. Bad things loom larger in our minds than good things. We evolved that way because paying attention to potential dangers is necessary for survival. 

The news is partially to blame, as objective measures of sentiment show that print and television news coverage has become more negative in the past few decades, even as the actual news grows increasingly more positive. This isn’t surprising. After all, journalists are humans who are subject to their own bias toward keeping the attention of their audiences. A headline proclaiming “the world is doing great” probably won’t keep viewers tuned in through the next commercial break in the same way that “the dangers lurking outside” surely will.

Fascinatingly, while people generally believe the world is falling apart, they also believe that their own lives will be better in the future. When researchers ask people if they will be better off in five years, most say yes. We overestimate our own future happiness, while simultaneously believing the world will generally be worse in the future. In the end, optimism will always drive the human condition.

As an extreme and unapologetic optimist, I’m all for that bias. But I’d like to see us extend a little bit of that optimism to the world around us. Heck, we don’t even have to be optimistic; we just have to consider the facts. The world is objectively better than it was 10, 50, or 100 years ago. We should never stop working to improve it, but even on bad news days we need to keep things in perspective. 

Note: A version of this article was first published in USA Today, but because of the importance of the subject matter, we felt it was worth including on Linkedin, where we tend to get more feedback and a lively discussion.