There is a subset of people on both Left and Right who are invested in thinking that the world is constantly getting worse. These are the same people who go after Steve Pinker, who has argued that things are getting better on average, even though he notes that there are blips and that he can’t predict whether there may be a hug “worsening” in the future—like a nuclear war or global warming that can’t be overcome. But I’m constantly surprised at how people, in the face of the data, still think the world is on a serious moral and material downslide. Would you rather live in 1880 than now? If so, you might already be dead from a tooth abscess.
In his latest column (click to read), Jesse Singal takes these people to task, especially our old friend Scientific American, which has apparently climbed on the “things are worse” bandwagon, which may now have become one aspect of the woke mindset. Singal gives some data to counteract these claims, and you can see his article for free by clicking on the headline below (his link to the Sci. Am. article is one he found archived).
An excerpt and some corrections given by Singal:
The other day I came across a Scientific American article headlined “We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality.”
The article, by a pair of researchers at Stanford University and York University, attempts to argue that we are living in increasingly terrible, violent, chaotic times.
Is this true? It’s a widely held belief, particularly among academics and media, as well as an interesting horseshoe coalition of far-left (capitalism has destroyed everything) and far-right (multiculturalism and the collapse of traditional values have destroyed everything) thinkers and, perhaps more often, “thinkers.” Steven Pinker wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, published in 2011, in part to rebut this sort of thinking, which is endemic in his own circles.
So, the article: it’s bizarre. Let’s unpack it. The framing presents the thesis as an obvious, established fact, and immediately sets out to describe deniers as Part of the Problem and to explain their false beliefs. The subheadline: “We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our heads in the sand and why we need to pull them out, fast.”
What is particularly terrible about these times? According to the authors:
If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone. Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of our lives.”
Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical moment. Right now more than one million people are displaced and at risk of starvation in Gaza, as are millions more in Sudan. Wars are on the rise around the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.
These are all terrible events, and every one of the lives represented in these statistics is a real-life human person whose death or injury affected others. But at a zoomed-out level, none of this is remotely unusual in human history, and the authors don’t present any evidence — here or elsewhere in the piece — that things really are worse. “The most civilian casualties in almost 15 years” doesn’t mean much. It’s actually 13 years, according to the headline of the linked-to Guardian article. Let’s take a look at the top of that piece:
Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a monitoring group, said 33,846 non-combatants had been killed or wounded during 2023, an increase of 62% on last year, and the largest amount it had counted since it began its annual survey in 2010.
Again: Every one of those is a real-life human. But still, the question at hand isn’t “Is it bad when people are killed or maimed in war?,” but “Are we seeing some sort of scary historical rise in the number of people killed or maimed in war?”
No. Not even close.
There follows a lot of data about deaths in war that far exceeded 33,846, like massive killings in Cambodia, Germany, and Iraq (I’d add Syria). Then Singal says this:
That doesn’t mean that the plight of Ukrainian, Gazan, and Sudanese civilians isn’t horrific, or that the progress we’ve made is permanent. Maybe the 2024 figures will be worse. Maybe all-out war will break out between Israel and Lebanon, China will get more aggressive about Taiwan, NATO will get fully pulled into the Ukrainian-Russian war, and all sorts of other shit will hit the fan. It’s entirely possible! Humanity has never enjoyed permanent peace and it would be delusional and hubristic to think we can get there. But the point is, numerically, the only way you can claim that we’re in some particularly dark era, as this Scientific American article does, is by. . . well, not revealing the numbers.
The authors of the Scientific American op-ed, Marianne Cooper and Maxim Voronov, also claim that “the second biggest covid surge occurred this winter”. (The article was published on June 18) Singal gives graphs of both hospitalizations and death rate to show that this isn’t true.
Singal gives a theory, which he says is not his, that we’ve evolved to pay attention to bad news, and to be very anxious, because in our long 6-million-year history before civilization that mindset was adaptive. And that, he says, is why we get so much Chicken-Little-ism now, and why so much denial of a palpably improving world. I’m not sure about that theory as there’s no way to test it, but Pinker has noted that bad news always gets more airplay than good news, and I suppose Singal’s explanation of this is as good as any.
Singal’s peroration includes this:
But overall, it’s remarkable the progress our species has made, however you slice it, at least in terms of people’s ability to live longer lives, have the food they need to eat, and have shelter. We haven’t solved these problems, of course, and in many instances the political dysfunction frustrating our attempts to do so is agonizing, but perspective still matters a great deal. It’s hard to build a mostly stable, mostly prosperous civilization. It really is! That’s why we only just got around to it recently, and why the job is unfinished.
. . . . . Anyway, I wish Scientific American were a better magazine these days. This was an exceptionally weird article. But I’m not going to pretend it’s the end of the world or anything.
I’ve bashed Scientific American enough that I needn’t do it again here. Singal has done the work for me. It was once an excellent popular science magazine, with explanation of new scientific developments written by scientists themselves and no intrusion of ideology. I don’t know if it can ever return to the earlier format.
Reminds me of the Fleet Street Friday evenng whip-round for the world’s most boring headline. The winner “Very small earthquake in Chile. Hardly anybody hurt” and the 1930s doggerel poem about Albert and the Lion that includes the lines … ‘There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That’s noted for fresh-air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.
A grand little lad was their Albert,
All dressed in his best; quite a swell,
With a stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle,
The finest that Woolworth’s could sell.
They didn’t think much to the ocean:
The waves, they was fiddlin’ and small
There was no wrecks and nobody drownded,
‘Fact, nothing to laugh at at all….’
“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” (NYT) was widely touted as the most boring headline ever back in the 1980s.
That was about a free trade zone (which now exists). Not very exciting, I admit. LOL!
From memory (my parents had a record by Stanley Holloway?)
“So seeking for further amusement,
They paid and went into the zoo.
Where there’s lions and tiger and camels,
and old ale and sandwiches too!”
Oh dear, I remember the whole thing, it goes on for another 5 minutes at least!
Thank you for that memory trigger for an engram almost 60 years old. Now, I just have to remember why I wandered into the kitchen.
I read an article in it a little while ago in SciAm that was looking at the difference between men and women and their facial expressions. The did this by comparing class and graduation pictures over many years and compared men and women and tabulated the differences.
My question to them would be how did they know who was a man and who was a woman from their picture without the person identifying their gender explicitly?
It was similar to the article about who did the hunting in hunter gatherer societies. They identified men and women by their bones which is contrary to their position that biological sex doesn’t exist as a binary but is a spectrum and what matters is what gender people identify as. You can’t tell gender from bones.
1+++
Excellent question.
1+ SciAm is not encumbered by logic
You might argue that the degradation of the Scientific American is itself a ‘sign of the times’.
Yes, a sign that parts of the world suck worse than they used to.
I really loved Scientific American in the 60s and 70s.
Along the lines of Pinker, the SP500 market index has consistently increased, but has a mean increase of X% and a STANDARD DEVIATION of Y%, with Y close to but greater than X.
I really think Pinker is correct and he uses data.
One area where things are trending bad is US deficit as fraction of GDP, where things can go slowly wrong for a long time and then suddenly go really wrong. The USA may be a temporary upswing in global good times, it is not clear what would replace it that would be better.
I urge you to read Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth.” Professor Kelton, an economist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, explains how a country with its own currency, that it does not promise to exchange for some other commodity (say, gold) can never voluntarily fail to meet its financial obligations. That describes the U.S. and its dollar.
In other words, the U.S. deficit is actually not at all the concern most people think it is.
Thanks for the recommendation, will read.
I’d say that high state debt is a problem only if the country depends on a lot of imported goods. The US is big enough and rich enough in resources and qualified manpower and has enough resource rich close allies like Australia to not be seriously dependent on what others sell them and at what price, but outsourcing has made it dependent nevertheless.
Debt and deficit are not the same thing. The debt is the absolute amount of money that a country – or more specifically, its government – owes. The deficit is how much the government’s expenditure exceeds its income. It’s a measure of how fast the debt is growing.
The trouble is that, if the deficit is growing too fast, the government must either increase taxes, decrease spending or print money. These three options all make people poorer. So, while the USA is in no danger of not meeting its financial obligations, its people can suffer anyway.
See link below for a counter to Proff. Kelton’s MMT approach from John Cochrane
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/07/magical-monetary-theory-full-review.html
“Ms. Kelton, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University and senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, starts with a few correct observations. But when the implications don’t lead to her desired conclusions, her logic, facts and language turn into pretzels.”
Okay, I read that critique. I’ve read Kelton’s book twice, and, just my opinion, I realize, but Cochrane dramatically mischaracterizes many of Kelton’s points. Too many to take up space with here.
I think it’s important to note that Kelton’s book is essentially a primer on Modern Monetary Theory. It is not meant to be a scholarly treatise for other economists. It’s not filled with hard to understand mathematical formulae or references to obscure papers (although there are plenty of helpful endnotes). It was written for people like me, a retired middle school English teacher.
For me, the crucial point is that Kelton makes clear that we, lead by most prominent politicians, have been having the wrong argument. The question isn’t, Where will we get the money to pay for the things we want to do (like create a sustainable economy)? The U.S. can create all the dollars it wants to. The real question is, do we have, or can we make, enough of the stuff we would spend those dollars on?
I agree that that is the crucial point, and Cochrane’s crucial point is that you cannot just print money at will. At an intuitive level, one of the basic properties of money is that it at least feign to behave as a value store and it simply cannot do that if you keep spawning new notes at will.
MMT is a highly disputed theory, and I’m being generous. At a minimum, treasuries need a buyer of said treasuries, and buyers are not restricted to U.S. bonds. They can go elsewhere if they sniff risk.
Pinker discusses this in Enlightenment Now. It’s the “availability heuristic”. It’s a consequence of the MSM mostly curating the worst things that are happening in the world (feel-good stories simply aren’t good business). I think it was Pinker who also said “if you look at the news things have never been worse, but if you look at history things have never been better.”
Lack of knowledge about how bad things were in the relatively recent past in the realms of nutrition, health, basic comforts and environmental pollution is one of the bases of the Green movement, which I am sad to say I used to be part of.
From the perspective of Western Europe, and especially West Germany, I have to say that I, too, see a decline in many areas, not even counting the current war and its consequences that are more palpable in Germany than in the US. Lots of infrastructure in decay, educational standards down, a bureaucracy gone wild that is strangling efficiency, problems with the democratic process (e.g. in the way unelected international bodies have decisive influence on a number of crucial issues), and huge challenges ahead that we seem ill equipped for.
Things are getting worse by the moment for those of us who love the beauty and diversity of the natural world.
Yes, it’s important to define “things” in this better or worse argument.
Yes, nature usually gets left out of the equation.
+2
Agreed!
Overall, I’m with Pinker, despite the fact that one of my lab nicknames was ‘doom & gloom’ (I always wanted to be as prepared as possible for the potential adverse events that I could imagine). Most of us are alive thanks to sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, not dying in childbirth, etc. We are communicating via electricity, satellites, etc. We travel all over the world. I can think of hundreds of problems facing us (many of which are caused by the fact that too darn many of us are alive) but I cannot imagine a past time when I think it would have been better. Onward.
“Ohhh, peace! Shut up!”
I cannot imagine a past time when I think it would have been better
That would have been a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way. 😉
I have SW on my mind after that funny meme with Luke moving things with the Force: “admit it, you’ve tried to move things with the Force at least once in your life.” LOL! I did, but not the force, just my mind. I was obsessed with it for a few days. It was simply telekinesis, I think I learned the word from Dungeons and Dragons. Life is strange.
Good news: Gazans aren’t starving.
https://nypost.com/2024/06/20/opinion/there-is-no-gaza-famine-but-the-pro-hamas-crowd-is-silent-about-this-great-news/
The rapid and wide distribution of bad news doesn’t help and likewise the ability to handle it. Cognitive states like acute tribalism makes a short cut to blanket dumbing down… although it could work for a better balance as well, hence (imo) Pinker followed “the Better Angels” with “Rationality”.
So the article missed the fact of global warming and how its effects are getting worse? That at least would lend some actual weight to the despair.
Agreed. And for the people whose homes and communities are likely to be lost to rising sea levels in the coming decades, things are definitely getting worse. Some low-lying Pacific islands are expected to be lost entirely. And the recent dramatic increase of cost of living in my country (New Zealand) threatens my own financial security, with no end to cost rises in sight – so for me I feel like things are getting worse. Civilisations rise and fall. Eventually ours will fall. The question is, are we in the ‘fall’ yet?
American Scientist ( https://www.americanscientist.org/ is better than the declining Scientific American. Not a promotional statement , but a genuine assessment.
I can accept its better, but they have a recent article “Biology is not Binary”, co-authored by Fuentes of all people. So…