“Factfulness” — is the world getting better or worse?
There is doom and gloom in the media and on the Left, yet the “facts” say the world is getting better… what’s up with all that?
In this blog post I’ll try to disentangle the cosmos of “mainstream media”, leftist critical theory and the liberal “factism” of the likes of Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling et al and Matt Ridley when it comes to answering the question: “is the world getting better?”. I’ll argue that while Pinker, the Roslings and others are right to point out the negative bias and sensationalism of mainstream media, they wrap their encouragement in a narrative that seeks to discredit systematic, structural critique of the status quo and dissuades constructive action.
The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence
1437–44
Fears vs. facts
Recently I feel like I have encountered the question whether the world is getting better increasingly often (especially with the whole climate emergency context). If you like, I’m pondering the “environmentalist’s paradox”¹ — why is it that so much just seems to be getting worse (especially in terms of environmental degradation), yet a whole range of measures of human development indicate that things are going pretty well — children mortality and extreme poverty seem to be down, there is sustained growth in the developing world, material prosperity seems to be growing, there are fewer and fewer war deaths, diseases are being eradicated and so on. That these metrics indicate that humanity are “doing well” is undeniable — yet there is so much negativity in the mainstream media and on the dreaded Left. What are they so upset about? Can’t they look at the facts?
There is a very emblematic space of this discussion that I will focus on here, and that is recent literature of proposing a world that is actually doing just fine and is only getting better. These include The Better Angles of our Nature and Enlightenment Now by linguist Steven Pinker, arguing that the values of the European enlightenment of the 17–18th century resulted in the worldwide decline of violence and war; The Rational Optimist by journalist and businessman Matt Ridley proposing that free trade and the division of labour has and will continue to drive humanity to prosperity; and Factfulness by statistician Hans Rosling, co-authored with his wife and son, Anna and Ola Rosling.
All of these books contain a very similar argument that runs something like this: “all sorts of metrics and indicators — FACTS! — show that the world and humanity’s condition is getting better, yet the mainstream media selectively only shows the bad bits, which the people uncritically believe without checking the FACTS that clearly show otherwise. People think things used to be better and are now getting worse, whereas it is the other way around.”
- Did you see all those poor African children with Ebola on TV? Well did you know fewer and fewer people die in tropical diseases as they get vaccinated?
- Did you read about the horrors ISIS unleashed in Syria? Well, did you know deaths from war are at an all-time low?
- Do you feel sorry for all those people in the Favelas neighbouring Rio? Well did you know extreme world poverty halved in the past 20 years? Have you not seen the World Poverty Clock?
Before my indoctrination with the opium of critical thinking I used to be fairly convinced by arguments like this, and even ridden with some eco-anxiety, I reasoned: “ah, things are getting better, it is really just climate change we should sort out somehow.” And fair enough — these facts are rather convincing when opposed to an endless stream of depressing, incoherent, sensationalist news pouring out from mainstream media outlets. “Don’t believe all the gloom — check the FACTS” seemed clever and reasonable.
However, there are some problems with this argument (which I’ll call factism; not to be misread as fascism). First, it sets up a false dichotomy: it constructs a “global mainstream” that believes the “world is getting worse” because of a) widespread faulty nostalgia for better times past and b) a sensationalistic media reinforcing that through selectively showing bad news. It then constructs itself as the rational, thoughtful and desireable counterpoint, the smarter option. It declares that contrary to the gloom in the media, the world is actually getting better. By this it achieves two things: it silences/discredits any critique of the status quo as equivalent to the mindless sensationalism of media, and delegitimises the feelings of people worried about the future. “Your fears are not valid — they are just biased nostalgia stemming from your human nature and propaganda from the news. Don’t worry. The objective facts say you shouldn’t.”
Is that valid?
And are the facts themselves right?
There is no “humanity”
Go to Rosling’s website, Gapminder, and fill out their test about the state of the world — it only takes a few minutes.
How did it go? You probably learned from the test that the rates of poverty, illiteracy and gender disparity in education are lower than you’d have expected, and you probably got it right that the climate is set to get warmer by the end of the century. On average, you probably did worse than random, according to Rosling who, based on this evidence, proclaims in Factfulness that people have very distorted views about the world, thinking that everyhting is bad and is getting worse, while according to the facts, the opposite is true.
But both the conclusion and the “facts” themselves have something in common: they hide geography.
First, the test (and the book) is tailored to challenge the perceptions of a very geographically specific audience: the middle-class Westerner (from Europe or North America), with uninformed conceptions about the poverty of the rest of the world, ignorance about the distribution of the population and a general sense that things might be getting worse. The questions themselves are constructed with the care of a advertiser: designed to be shocking and surprising, arranged so that the correct answer is usually the one that is the most optimistic. Do you know the trick with putting a ridiculously expensive microwave alongside a cheap and a somewhat pricier one in the hardware store, so that people will pick the middle option? It’s the same sort of thing. The creators of the test already know that people in the developed world now aren’t hopeful about the future — they want to visualise their bias in a shocking way. And then they provide convincing data that they are too pessimistic. “It is human nature! Older generations are pessimistic about younger ones, always. Have you not seen that Socrates quote?”
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
— SOCRATES, 5th century B.C.*
There is a piece of context, however, which makes this whole process more akin to propaganda than to enlightenment. For this, we need to consider the option that maybe it isn’t just the brainwashing done by the Media and some innate human tendency for nostalgia that turns people into pessimists. Maybe it is their actual experiences? And more importantly: their local experiences?
Horner and Hulme’s research on global development shows that the world is very divided when it comes to expectations about the future. People in poorer, developing countries seem to think their children will grow up into a better world than the one they were born in. Meanwhile, developed countries, home to the factist literature, seem to experience an epidemic of pessimism. Seeing that, does it really seem probable that it’s just “human nature” or the influence of the media that makes us wary of the future? Or perhaps there is something structural in the developed world that makes people wary?
And to state the FACTS, there might just be: astronomical and increasing levels of within-country inequality, stagnant or declining life expectancies (at least in the US), epidemics of stress, mental illness and alienation, increasing prevalence of precarious, short-term service-sector jobs, stagnant wages and towering personal debts. And all these are especially true to the US and the UK, where most of these factists hail from and where most of these books are written. And while it is true, that both in terms of material prosperity and existential safety these populations are better off than most humans in history, that is of little consolation if they feel disempowered and disregarded (by economic inequality or democratic deficit) and hopeless (because of the deteriorating conditions of their children.)
It is relative decline that turns people pessimists; and it is personal pessimism that people then project onto the world. The media cannot take all the blame for spreading bad news. It is indeed sensationalistic, and things evoking anger or sadness as opposed to joy or rational contemplation do make better memes. But there is also a demand for explaining the world’s ills, especially in a part of the world where a general sense of stagnation has taken hold.
The factist argument approaches people with dark views of the world (but really: dark views of their own circumstances) and tell them that their anger and sadness are invalid, because “the world as a whole” is getting better! But who is the world as a whole? And where is it? Talking about the “global” halving of extreme poverty (already a problematic metric**, but we’ll let that pass) suggest that any given population of the extremely poor was halved, which is not the case. Almost all the decline happened in one place: China (and to a lesser degree, India), and mainly by converting a gigantic agricultural population into wage labourers in factories. Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and so on either stagnated or have seen an increase in the numbers of the extreme poor. What this shows is both that these achievements are geographically and politically contingent and that there is no guarantee that they will go on indefinitely. Claiming collective ownership over them and presenting them as “global” phenomena masks this crucial aspect.
Mindsets for change
Here the political importance of this question emerges: if the world is getting better by itself, there is no need to do much to improve it. If my concerns about decline are invalid, there is no need to look underneath the surface, analyse the political economy of my society or engage in political activism. The populations of rich Western countries are probably still in the most privileged position to try and influence their politicians and through them world events, or to stage their own political movements — however, if they are rendered impotent by a belief that there is nothing to be done, since the world is getting better and will just regulate itself, none of these movements will manifest. And if nothing changes — well, who will bring rights and sovereignty to the remaining poor, who will restructure Western societies to be more equitable and progressive, who will cultivate international solidarity? If we keep the status quo the rich will get richer, the rest will stagnate, and the climate and ecological systems will continue to be restructured with hard-to-foresee implications.
In conclusion, if you feel pessimistic about the world, it is probably not because the “media” brainwashed you or because of your human nature — it is probably because of what you see by the virtue of who you are and where you are. And global aggregate statistics, measured from a position of fake omniscience should not thwart your curiosity for explanation. The world is not on some pre-determined path towards utopia; things happen, and it is humans that need to make them happen. The world is getting better by resistance, critique, contesting power and staging transformative events, not by convincing ourselves that everything’s alright by choosing the right set of statistics.
*The common invocation of the Socrates quote as a proof for a general tendency of older-generation pessimism is particularly ironic, because he said this at a time when Athens had just started on its long path of decline from the heights of its imperial power.
**The original Millennium Development Goals set out to halve the absolute number of extreme poor (defined as consuming less than $1 a day). However, when this seemed to be out of reach, the criteria became halving the proportion of extreme poor, which, because of population growth of thericher strate, meant that the absolute number did not have to decrease that much for the goal to be achieved. Also, since the measure is spending, a wealty farmer who doesn’t need to purchase much on the market appears poorer than a starving factory worker who needs to pay for food on the market.
