Progress exists!

[Skybird]

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:


Take off the negative glasses - the world is much better than you think!

Wars, crises, catastrophes - young people look fearfully to the future, activists even call a birth strike. Yet a rational look at long-term trends shows that the world is developing extremely positively in important areas. But no one wants to see that.

Have you ever used a 60-year-old map as a guide when driving through a city center? No? You certainly had good reasons. All the more strange, then, that in other areas of life, most of us navigate through our jobs and everyday lives with completely outdated knowledge bases. They even make decisions on this basis.

You are in the very best company if you consider the following things to be universal truths: The world is bad, everything used to be better, and it's getting worse. Poverty continues to increase, more and more people are starving, the world population is exploding, more and more armed conflicts are occurring, social and economic inequality is growing. Then there is the poison in the food, the children go gaga in front of the smartphones. And all because of predatory capitalism.

This is not just the worldview of youthful Greta enthusiasts. This is how deep black the majority of people perceive the world. This is shown by the results of a study by health economist Hans Rosling, who surveyed more than 12,000 people in 14 countries about their views on specific issues.

In the utopia of great-grandparents

This disastrous worldview is far, far from reality. Anyone who takes the trouble to pore over statistics from the United Nations and other international institutions will see: The present is by no means the most horrific era ever. Despite some setbacks, the world is developing for the better. Much of what we take for granted today was a distant utopia for our great-grandparents.

Vaccinations, antibiotics, birth control pills, computers, modern plant breeding - these inventions triggered social and demographic revolutions. Since constant progress takes place at the indistinct edge of our field of vision, which is narrowed by the spirit of the times, we hardly notice it. Only in retrospect does it become apparent. However, this harbors dangers. Those who start from the wrong facts may make fatal decisions.

For example, most people are probably unaware of the revolution that has taken place over the past 25 years: The number of people forced to live in extreme poverty has been cut in half. No head of state has announced this, hardly any CNN reporter has trumpeted it into the living room, no influencer has done a podcast about it. It hardly needs to be mentioned that in Germany, 94 percent of those surveyed by Hans Rosling assumed that this figure had either remained the same or grown.

Many clichés about the world are wrong

The data is clear: A great deal of progress has been made in almost all fields in recent decades. Economist Max Roser, a researcher at the University of Oxford's Department of Economics, has taken the trouble to collect large amounts of data, bundle them together and prepare them in graphs. The result is the website "Our world in data," which provides a detailed overview of the state and development of the world. Roser himself was often surprised by the positive results, because they deconstruct common clichés.

The data on hunger, for example, shows that it is still one of the biggest problems facing humanity, with one in ten people undernourished. And due to the war in Ukraine, the number of hungry people is currently rising again in the short term. But in recent decades, the number of hungry people has steadily declined. It did not increase with the growth of the world's population, on the contrary. Since we produce much more food today through modern plant breeding than we did 50 years ago, we have certainly been able to reduce hunger.

The world is also not becoming more unequal. This can be seen, for example, in global health, which has improved greatly almost everywhere. A person born in Africa in 1950 was one-third likely to die within the first five years of life. In Germany at that time, this probability was only six percent. A drastic change has taken place: Today, even in Africa, only eight percent of all children under the age of five die.

Progress exists

There are countless examples of fantastic developments: The number of traffic fatalities has been falling for decades, as has the number of deaths from natural disasters. Almost all the world's children are vaccinated. Life expectancy is rising, illiteracy is on the decline, and physical violence in education has gone from being the norm to the outlawed exception in rich countries. Experts suspect that for this reason, among others, the number of violent acts in Western countries has fallen, as has the suicide rate.

According to Rosling, three quarters of all people live in middle-income countries - so the idea of two irreconcilable blocs of rich and poor competing against each other in the world has long been a thing of the past. It's also a cliché that people in richer countries are unhappier than those in poorer ones. Studies show: People who live with good medical care, good nutrition and prospects are very much happier.

Of course, there are plenty of grievances in the 21st century as well. The war in Ukraine is endangering many people and worsening the food supply situation. The Ukrainians are not helped by the information that, overall, there are far fewer wars and genocides than 30 years ago. And part of our prosperity has the side effect of changing the climate. After all, new solutions often produce new problems. The question is obvious: Can climate change undo all these positive developments?

It could. But we have recognized the problem, and history shows: change for the better is possible. It just happens slowly. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it is driven by human innovation and by science. Rather than by the frequently called for return to nature or to the way of life before industrialization. There is a good chance that we can get CO2 emissions under control with technical innovation - even if scientific and technological progress is currently too slow.

In love with the apocalypse

Objectively speaking, we live in an age of unprecedented freedom from suffering and rare well-being. But why do we not feel this? Why are young people so enamored of the apocalypse and "can't justify putting children in this world," as Birth Strike activists say?

It may be because the human brain is not made to weigh long-term developments against momentary, frightening impressions. In addition, an evolutionary tendency of our psyche to perceive danger and negativity more strongly than positivity has kept humans from being eaten by the saber-toothed tiger for thousands of years. So, biologically speaking, we are negatively polarized from the start.

But not to see the achievements of our grandparents and not to register in what a nirvana-like exceptional situation of history we are allowed to lead our existence is not only unfair, but dangerous.

For those who always expect the worst, do not improve anything. And the need to maintain the foundations of the progress we have achieved fades into the background. Many young activists are calling for a change of system. Being against capitalism, demanding more state regulation, is fashionable. Democracy plays little role in the common narratives of contemporary activist movements. But moving away from democracy and the market economy would probably be a fatal decision, given the systems' record.

Capitalism's record is not so bad

To be sure, science and technological progress can theoretically flourish in different economic systems. But to date, the world's liberal democracies have been by far the best at not only producing innovations - but also making them available to individuals.

Emphasizing the value of democracy is urgently needed. For it is almost ironic that this is almost the only bad news among all the good: For a good five years now, the number of democracies worldwide has been declining - for the first time since World War II. And many existing democracies are rather degrading or already dysfunctional.

So it's hugely important to develop an awareness of the milestones humanity has reached, and of their foundations. The late health economist Hans Rosling saw even this in a positive light: just as we must learn to fill our shopping carts wisely in a modern world full of burgers and cupcakes, despite our evolutionary polarity toward fats and sweets. In the same way, we could learn to put all the negative information around us into perspective.

So if the Birth Strike activists were to adjust their strongly ideologized view of childbearing to reality, they might decide to have children after all. Their child would probably be born in one of the best times history has ever seen.