If you haven’t read Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which clearly shows an improvement in the moral behavior of humanity over the last few hundred years, you should. The book is through, and, while long, pretty darn convincing.
For an equally heartening look at the improvement of lifespan and income (I presume income corrected for changes in the value of money) over the past 200 years, look at this enthusiastic and well-produced video. The speaker is Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and statistician, and is taken from a BBC television show:
In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
A lot of the improvement in lifespan, which is such a precious achievement, comes from improvements in nutrition, public health, and science, perhaps in conjunction with improvements in morality that extend those benefits to poorer nations. Not a day of lifespan has been added by religion.
h/t: Miss May
What he does in 4 minutes with words and figures some people would need 4 volumes of 1000 pages each to pass!
Rosling is a very good communicator. There is a new batch of positive futurists (not arty!) at present, following on from Matt Ridley & The Rational Optimist http://www.rationaloptimist.com/
with authors like Stevenson (An Optimist’s Tour of the Future) and so on. I am very wary though – resource depletion and the giant chemistry experiment we are conducting on Earth do not bode well.
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice”…
Yes I saw this when it was on, spectacular. The whole show is good if you ever get a chance to see it. He’s a great presenter with a great deal of enthusiasm.
I keep meaning to read Steve Pinker’s book. It’s something I’ve thought was probably the case for a while. It reminds me of when people make comments like, ‘People had more respect in the good old days’. It always makes me think, ‘Yes, absolutely. What with all the casual racism, endemic sexism, homophobia, rife domestic violence, and little regard for disabled people. Sounds like a utopia…’ Not that things are perfect now of course. We still have a long way to go. But we’ve come a long way too. Many don’t seem to recognise that.
I reckon it runs along the lines that as societies get more complex & populations denser, we require stronger control of individual & state actions in order to avoid costly conflicts between individuals & states. A very simplistic view!
No doubt the “good old days” are mostly about a time when the narrator was young enough to be effectively sheltered from the problems and worries of the world.
Calls for a return to traditional anything drive me nuts.
I think there’s probably a great deal of truth in that to be honest John K. I also think there’s probably also a degree of “rose tinted glasses” involved as well. Things were probably never as great as people fondly remember them to have been.
“It was so much better in the old days.”
Well, it was for you because you were 25 not 85……
They were the good old days because Jesus!!
When you got a horrible disease like polio it made you stand up and take notice of God’s awesomeness so that you could stand your own suffering while enjoying others suffering.
Also it reminded you of what’s to come if you don’t obey the Pope or Jesus or something.
Yup, just read the biographical sketch of Chester F Carlson, the inventor of Xerox. He had much hardship growing up. That’s a one-person example. He never longed for the “good old days”, and never forgot the “bad old days” when he became rich.
“The Greatest Generation” saw 400,000 Americans killed in World War II, in four years… the same number we now see in the USA, killed in ten years by automobiles. But wait! The 1950s rate of death by automobiles (deaths per passenger mile) was much much greater. Personal observation: I have noticed recently, the distinctly-fewer number of cars broken down by the side of the road, compared to the 1960s. But…is it “true”?? Faster tow trucks, more cellphones, or…???
All these “factoids” show you how, if you don’t use statistics instead of using intuition and “feel”, your viewpoint will always fit your predetermined set of values.
Thanks for the video!!! Good stuff.
I wonder, what about taking into account the effect of longer lifespans on longer lifespans? Given a good Calvinist work ethic, people who live and work a bit longer are able lay down infrastructure, knowledge, understanding, wealth, etc. which makes it better for the next generation, and so on. Think about all those people who have devoted their lives to inventions, discoveries, theories, philosophical works, political freedom, etc. less of which would have been accomplished if their lives had been shorter.
An interesting aside: I saw on the news the other day, an item about the oldest person in South Africa: 120, and a poor, rural man from the Eastern Cape, the poorest and historically most oppressed part of the country. Come to think of it, the last item I saw to this effect a year or two ago was of a Xhosa woman from the same area. I wonder what the graph would look like if one compared rural vs urban over a threshold like 90 or 100 years.
One nice thing that animations show is the dynamics of change. Even though Rosling showed a very nice animation, he focused on the static picture, where the world was at a given point.
One interesting thing is that at the beginning, when the west starts to separate from the rest of the world it is moving in a horizontal direction and while wealth increases a lot life expectancy doesn’t change. Life expectancy starts to improve in the west in 1890. After the WWI it appears to follow the line. On the other hand, Asian countries first increase life expectancy and only recently do they start to get wealthier.
The dynamics of the West and East does not appear to conform to the Calvinist work ethics. In the west the sweatshops of the XIX century really took a toll. And in most of the world, the later increase of life expectancy may be due to scientific progress trickling down the world.
Very interesting observations about the differences between the East and the West. One can’t help but wonder if perhaps the real driver behind longevity is not so much wealth as it is technology.
I wouldn’t equate the Calvinist work ethic with the capitalist exploitation of the poor during the industrial revolution. Asian work ethic has also been around for a lot longer than the industrial revolution.
Here’s another “I wonder”: how does longevity relate to human population movement? Could it be that colonialism and all the sudden associated, large scale human movement set off a massive dip in longevity (I’m thinking about guns germs and steel here) which humanity is only recently recovered from?
I don’t remember any significant such dip in life expectancy, but I’m not at all an expert in the field. If you’re sufficiently interested, though, it shouldn’t be at all hard to dig up the statistics. Wikipedia probably has more than enough for a sniff test.
b&
I looked into it a bit and couldn’t find anything that related life expectancy to colonialism or population movement but what was interesting was that subtler setting out of the figures made a distinction between life expectancy as whole and life expectancy past a certain threshold. So, for thousands of years, people who managed to outlive the hazards of youth – live past 16 – lived to ages like 50. So Hans Rosling’s graph is more a graph of infant and youth mortality than a graph of general life expectancy. Take infant and youth mortality out of the equation and it’s much less dramatic.
A good example of how to make the numbers speak for themselves. I’m curious to know what software he used for animations of the graph, is it something we can all use?
What other broadcast channel would make a programme like The Joy of Stats?
“I kid you not, statistics is now the sexiest subject on the planet” – Hans Rosling
It is hard not to like Rosling. I was charmed when he said in a TV program (made in his country) focusing on his life, that he would have loved to been an actor, but he was told, no way, because he just can’t be anybody else but himself. That is him in a nutshell.
This is a goodie too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
The Better Angels of Our Nature is probably the best book I have ever read! I put a review here: http://someothersuckersparade.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-book.html
Of course, WEIT arrived in the post last week so that might work its way up there after I’m done with my current read 🙂
I’ve read Pinker’s 800+ page book, but still haven’t got round to watching Rosling’s 1-hour TV programme which I recorded over a year ago. Even though I’m a statistician. Oh dear.
I often advise students that, rather than trying to using complicated statistical methods that they don’t really understand, they should concentrate on producing clear and informative pictures. A simple scatterplot can be incredibly useful for minimal effort.
Unfortunately most people tend to use Excel, which has a wide choice of terrible graphs to use and only a very small choice of useful ones.
I have found graphs to be pretty misleading in a lot of places where people demand them. I remember churning out graphs for sales volumes each month on dozens of products, each product and container getting a graph. And each line graph was either an “X”, or two parallel lines.
So I’d ask the manager of sales, when you see all these graphs in sum, you then pick up the telephone, and call….who?..and say ‘what’. It was basically a poor idea of how to manage, so we went on with better comparisons that were not graphs or, (shudder) pie charts!
Of the spreadsheets I’ve used, my favorite for graphing is(was) the archaic Win3.1 version 5 of Lotus 1-2-3, dating from 1994. Some wise person at Lotus had the insight to break down the whole graphing function into a useful set of primitives that could be combined to create very data rich graphs.
After that release, Lotus went downhill in its pursuit of Excel. These days I mostly use Open Office, which does the job and has some nice features lacking in that old standby version of Lotus, but which can drive you wild with its counter-intuitive interface.
Your comments about scatter plots hit the nail on the head. Before I retired, I worked in the property assessment field (as a statistical support wonk), and was regularly sickened by many co-workers’ tendency to force data into pre-conceived models instead of first looking over it to get a feel for the lay of the land.
Agree completely on the Win3.1 version 5 of Lotus 1-2-3. It wasn’t just the graphing functions either. I think it was the most versatile spread sheet application of its era by far. I once used it to create a comprehensive integrated and largely automated project management system complete with materials and other databases, purchasing, estimating, budgeting, job cost reporting, scheduling, contracts and correspondence. Of course I utilized Approach and Wordpro where applicable, but 1-2-3 was the backbone of it.
Around 2004 or so I was asked if I could convert the system to microsoft office products.
which clearly shows an improvement in the moral behavior of humanity over the last few hundred years
Or, if you are a strong moral relativist: morality has become more like its present value as time approached the present.
I wonder why it is so difficult to wrap my head around how bad people used to have it, even a few lifetimes ago. The scatter plot really drives it home.
What a great presentation. Thank you for sharing this.
“Not a day of lifespan has been added by religion.”
Except insofar as religion opposes choice in dying, forcing people who don’t want to to live longer…
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+1
But that’s balanced out by religion forcing people to die who don’t want to die, such as sick pregnant women.
Ah. Perhaps.
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I show this video to my introductory biology students, as a counter-weight to the central thrust of ecological research, which is a pretty bleak picture of incipient mass extinction. Rosling is looking at the exponential phase of a population growth curve. We know for a fact that there will be a plateau, but we just do not know when it will kick in…
I don’t think it was ever exponential but superexponential before the 60s and subexponential since.
I came across this report of a study coincidentally today: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/09/daily-chart
Crime rates are related to belief in hell and suchlike.
The link to the actual article which I am now reading:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0039048#pone-0039048-t001
Pretty neat!
Even better, as I remember it there is a later version that shows that most of the African nations that were lagging in the beginning of the 00’s are truly catching up with the rest of the world. (Except of course remaining warring/dictatorship/religion or any combination whereof nations, which are now surprisingly few. I seem to remember it was only 4-5.)
It is easy to like Rosling. (But of course the positive message that he (and Pinker et cetera) can give is part of that.)
We have come a long way.
1. A century ago, the average lifespan in the USA was 47. We’ve gained 30 years. In our grandparents and great grandparents day, early deaths were common, frequently from infectious diseases.
2. One of my great-grandmothers had 10 children!!!
I only remember there being 4 or 5 great uncles and aunts though. I suspect half of them died young. None of them are still alive so I can’t ask anyone what actually happened.
Sorry to rain on everybody’s parade…but, yes, life is much better than ever before…and it’s almost entirely due to all the petroleum we’ve burned.
But we’ve used up half of that petroleum, and, whether we like it or not, we’re going to stop burning petroleum at roughly the same exponential rate as we started burning it. By mid-century, we’ll be back to the 60s, and all the way back to pre-WWI-levels by the end of the century.
We might figure out how to replace petroleum with other energy sources. Solar is the only long-term option in terms of available energy, but it’s not in a form well-suited to our current industrial base (especially transportation and agriculture — most of the crops we eat wouldn’t exist without petroleum fertilizers).
If we can get there from here, then things will eventually get much better than any of us can imagine; the Jetsons would be envious. But things are going to get much worse in the mean time, and there’s no guarantee that we’ll figure this out.
b&
Somehow, some way, China must cease and desist in building new coal-fired power plants. They bring online a huge number of coal-burners every year. The coal consumption in China has gone from 700 million tons in 2002, to nearly FOUR BILLION tons today! It’s incredible! And horrible. If you’re in the western USA, look up! The slight haze…that’s the effect of coal-burning in China. Irreversible AGW is probably, or nearly, here.
If it makes you feel better, the imminent skyrocketing rise in petroleum is going to slam the brakes on the global economy in such a huge way that I don’t think we have much more to worry about with respect to CO2 pollution.
For one thing, nobody will be able to afford to use petroleum for anything but the true necessities. For another, all those “too-expensive” alternative energy sources (such as biofuels or even synfuel from photovoltaics and atmospheric CO2) are going to be cheaper than petroleum (though still expensive).
Yes, coal will still be relatively cheap for a few more decades, though increasingly less so. But what good does electricity do you if nobody can afford to buy it because everybody’s spending all their money on petroleum (especially food grown and delivered with petroleum)?
The good news is that there’s no (practical) limit to solar power (including biofuels). If and when we make that switch, we’ll be sitting mighty pretty, indeed.
b&
P.S. Corn ethanol is a joke of a waste. Locally-native plants, such as sugar cane in the tropics and switchgrass in the States, are a different story. And algae- and cyanobacteria-based biofuels are true miracles; we only need to industrialize their production. b&
I’ve seen it asserted that two of the most important factors in extending life expectancies were the construction of sewers and the provision of clean water supplies.
The great English engineer Bazelegette, who oversaw the construction of the great London sewer system, can be viewed as personally responsible for a significant fraction of the lifespan improvement there.
Poor one-trick Hans. This is the same talk he’s been giving for years.
Do you see what’s missing? Almost all of those bubbles are getting bigger and bigger. But the non-human resources (not shown) are getting smaller. So, in that context, what is so good about increased lifespan? It should be decreasing.
As for income, again what is so good about it? It doesn’t measure anything except itself. My income changed dramatically in the last few years, but as it turns out, my life has not changed that dramatically. There’s just different stuff in it.
The measures I’m interested are contentment and preparedness.
Then you may be doing it rong.
I made out like a bandit the past few years. The slow weeks were fifty hours. And this was all as a 1099 contractor, so every hour was billable and I was responsible for all those expenses employers are typically responsible for (and I billed accordingly, though still at a bargain rate for them).
I paid off my mortgage and a bunch of home improvements, and I put an oversized solar array on my roof (I generate about half again as much electricity as I consume, or about enough that I could run an electric vehicle for free). I have no debt whatsoever, virtually no expenses, I’ve bought or saved up for all the toys I want, and my rainy day fund would keep me going for years.
Therefore, since this spring, I’ve cut my schedule down to two days a week. I’m still having a hard time digging myself out of the backlog that grew while I was over-working — but, for the first time in decades, I’m making real progress with the things I want to do with my life.
It helps, of course, that my material goals are mostly modest; for example, the mortgage broker was willing to approve me for a loan four times as big as the one I took out, if not more. My home is still (to me) a mansion, though it’s just a generic two-bedroom suburban home with modest improvements. I’m single and childless, too, which certainly helps.
But, if you’ve had a good run of above-average income and you’re not in a position such as I (and if you haven’t been victim to some bad luck such as expensive uncovered medical problems), then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be in the same position I’m in.
Cheers,
b&
Agree with RFW and Ben above that three of the key things making things better are sewers, clean water supplies and abundant cheap fossil fuels, but lets not forget vaccination.
However, one thing to remember is that a lot of the change in average lifespan is often really a difference in infant mortality. If 50% of children don’t make it to 1 year then this really brings the average down. The average future life expectancy of someone who has already reached 15 years will have changed rather less.
Much of the increased average lifespan in 3rd world countries since the war may well be due to vaccination etc lowering infant mortality.
Jerry,
You should add a link in the post to Rosling’s remarkable Gapminder tool (now backed by Google) which is used in this video.
Gapminder adds the dimension of time to statistical data. It is free and open for all here, along with a huge collection of global datasets to play with: http://gapminder.org/
Yes, excellant. Global civilisation is improving, something to be positive about.
I recently finished Better Angels and it was not only an utterly compelling thesis, it was also a really good read – excellently written and fascinating. A huge rollercoaster of a book in ten searing chapters (Thanks Blackadder).
It reminds me of what Sam Harris said of Steven Pinker (and others, including Professor Coyne!) in his acknowledgements in The Moral Landscape – “that with friends like these, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say something stupid. (Though one does what one can)”.
Oh, and one other thing. One of the reasons that I find religion, and Christianity in particular, so baseless and silly is that the religious tend to see the world as fallen, corrupt and evil. While corruption and evil certainly exist in the world (a fair amount of it caused by religion itself), the world is improving for the people in it (lower rates of violence, crime, infant mortality, increasing life expectancy etc). The fundigelicals seem unable to see that, even when the evidence is shoved in their fat, fraudulent faces.
Pinker’s account of the decline of violence is as ever masterly and he makes an incontrovertible case for the relative peacible 20th century compared to its bloody antecedents. What I find less convincing is his explanation for this amelioration in social behaviour. The “rights revolutions” if I understand it, is a movement based on dangerous utopian notions of what we are supposed to be rather than what we are. The countries with the most focussed human rights instruments are the People’s Republic of China and its related satellites, such as North Korea; the country with one of the the highest murder rates in the world, South Africa, has a widely admired “Bill of Rights” which has saved not a single individual from the natural tendency of his neighbour to exercise pre-emptive violence.