Is the world better off than I think?
Is extreme poverty on the rise? Are people in my country unhappy? You might be surprised..
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This is part 2 of my series, Making sense of things: Navigating tensions of progress and collapse. Check out part 1 to catch up.
Upon re-reading the heading that I just wrote, a voice within me immediately pipes up, “Hell no the world isn’t better off than we think! How can you even say that?” This part of me—the fiery activist— gets right up in my face. Her hands are on her hips, head cocked to the side. She is clearly confused and offended.
As she does so, I am reminded of the breathtaking number of issues that need our attention—human trafficking, runaway climate change, Indigenous self determination, extreme inequality, nuclear threats… It also brings to mind questions from a decolonized lens like “from whose view is it “better”?” and “according to what timeline?”
But then there is this other voice within me that steps forward too. I see her wearing glasses with her hair tied back. She is a bit more tempered. This other voice—the social scientist—says, “Yes, that is true. And yet look at these numbers…” This part of me invites me into an exploration of the world from the lens that things aren’t that bad. Or, aren’t as bad as some of the feelings I have about things make me think, anyways. So I begin my sense-making journey here, from the proposition that the world is doing better than I think.
Let’s start with a macro-level view from the world of economic development:
As an international community, the traditional goal of economic development is to foster economic growth within a country or city in order to meet people’s needs. These needs are basic ones in alignment with human rights philosophy such as nutritional food, a consistent living wage, a proper home, health care, roads and schools. COVID-19 rocked the world and showed us that there is still undoubtedly world to be done. Cracks in countries’ healthcare systems were exacerbated and exposed due to the pandemic’s pressure. The agility of different economies to bounce back was and is still being tested. Not to mention we live at a time when war, famine, migration, climate change, and so much more are alive and palpable for many.
But even with this in mind, global progress over the past several decades gives hope that we have been on some sort of path of progress. We are meeting people’s basic, physical needs better than any other point in history. Extreme poverty has plummeted, literacy rates are through the roof, and almost all children are vaccinated worldwide. A little over 200 years ago 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Food was inconsistent, work started at a young age. It was the standard way of life. Now a mere 10% of the world lives in those conditions, with that percentage having dropped 20% in the last 30 years.
“Development means making a better life for everyone. In the present context of a highly uneven world, a better life for most people means, essentially, meeting basic needs: sufficient food to maintain good health; a safe, healthy place in which to live; affordable services available to everyone; and being treated with dignity and respect.” p.1 Theories of Development: Contentions, arguments, alternatives Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick (2009)
Especially in a country like the United States, we check off all the boxes that we are taught make up a healthy society. We are “developed,” right? To be developed implies that we’ve reached a state of completion; that we are at a pinnacle point.
Pop that champagne! We did it, y’all!
::Record scratch::
Wait, what?
*cricket noise*
Why is no one cheering?
Instead of being in full party mode, we as a collective are stressed out! We have a deep sense that something’s wrong with our system and feel an urgent call to action. Trends in fatalistic rhetoric about each year being worse than the last; campaigns that yearn for a better time; a rise in conspiracy-based explanations of current events. There are countless examples of this stressed-out collective mindset.
So I’m left scratching my head—if more people’s basic needs are being better met than any point in time, if our status as a country is “developed,” and if the world is becoming more conducive to us as humans then why does this point in time feel so unnerving?
Swedish development data scientist Hans Rosling has been asking himself these questions for decades. In his 2018 book “Factfulness,” he offers us the culmination of his lifelong pursuit to convince the world that we’re better off than we think. Through big data sets, animated presentations, and sword swallowing (seriously), he spent his life trying to “upgrade” people’s knowledge about the state of the world in light of his findings that the vast majority of people are incorrect about their perception of the world’s well-being.
In his book he begins by inviting readers to answer 12 questions to test their knowledge about the state of the world. They are questions about global poverty levels, average life span, population growth, natural disasters… The results? On average, people across disciplines, backgrounds and countries answered only 2 out of 12 questions correctly. Only two! A lower percentage than if the questions were randomly answered by chimpanzees, he purports.
Is the world’s pain just gaps in my perception?
What Dr. Rosling’s work intends to do is to draw our attention to the number of ways we as a world have been accomplishing some really rad things. Max Roser, founder and director of Our World in Data, has a similar mission. His platform brings easy-to-use data and findings about our world’s most pressing issues, both progress and issues, to readers’ fingertips. Our World in Data is a development nerd’s dream. It shows us things like:
More kids are in school: “In 1970, 28% of primary-school-age children in the world were not attending school, today this share has declined to 9%”
Literacy rates are higher: “If you were alive in 1800 there was a chance of 9 in 10 that you weren’t able to read; today more than 8 out of 10 people are able to read,” with most of those who are illiterate are old. skill.”
Global deforestation has declined: “Global deforestation reached its peak in the 1980s. We lost 150 million hectares – an area half the size of India – during that decade. Since then, deforestation rates have steadily declined, to 78 million hectares in the 1990s; 52 million in the early 2000s; and 47 million in the last decade. “
Ozone layer is getting healthier: “[Since the 1980’s] global emissions [of ozone depleting substances] have fallen by more than 99%. The ozone holes [caused by these chemicals] have stopped growing and are now starting to close.”
Less women die from childbirth: “The number of women who die from pregnancy-related causes declined from 530,000 women per year in 1990 to 300,000 per year”
While there is clearly more work to be done on these development needs (300,000 women a year is still a lot), these stats show that we, as a world, have actually achieved some substantial things in this regard. The interesting thing is, though, a lot of people don’t know about them, especially in high-income countries.
Instead, a lot of people in high-income countries believe that things like extreme poverty are on the rise. Circling back to Dr. Rosling’s survey experiment, when I read it I thought, “hm, maybe that is a fluke…” But then I came across a cross-country survey of 28 countries that asked the same thing, “do you think extreme poverty has increased, decreased, or stayed the same in the last 20 years?” Pausing here for a moment, I wonder how you would have answered this question before reading this section and knowing where it is going? If you would have said ‘increased’ in your head (or out loud, no judgment) you would be in good company. Fifty-two percent of people in the survey said the same, that extreme poverty has been on the rise.
But, like I shared earlier, we have made monumental strides in reducing extreme poverty in the last 30 years. Only 20% of respondents knew that, and most of them were from low- and middle-income countries where they see these improvements materially. Since 1990, there are one billion less people who live below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 a day1. One billion! This means that not only do people have more money in their pockets but that the conditions within which they live—which are the most dire and marginalized amongst us—have also been steadily improving. Extreme poverty goes hand-in-hand with access to things so many of us in high-income countries take for granted, like clean drinking water, roadways, nutritious food, healthcare clinics, schools. Even with the global shock of Covid, extreme poverty continues to decrease, albeit at a slower rate.
Extreme abject poverty is different than poverty in America. I’m thinking about an exchange I had recently where someone jumped at me for naming the progress we’ve made here. “Look at the migrants lining up around the block in NYC! Look at the rise of kids in poverty in the US!” Yes, yes. These are all big issues that need our attention. But we’re not talking about the same thing. Poverty in America is different than extreme, abject poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa or India. Extreme poverty is the type in which people die from diarrhea… in the year 2024. These are communities that don’t have access to clean drinking water, roadways, or healthcare clinics. It is a wholly different beast.
Here’s another example of a mismatch between public perception and what’s happening on the ground: the topic of other people’s happiness. How happy do you think other people are in your country? When surveyed, most people think others around them are doing worse than they actually are. In another cross-country survey, people were asked to guess how happy they think people in their country are based on their self-reported well-being. People from all 12 countries guessed wrong. Like, really wrong. Most people guessed that maybe 50% of their fellow citizens are happy. The actual average number? Closer to 90%! South Koreans missed the mark the most, having guessed that only 24% of other South Koreans reported being happy m. Americans landed in the middle, on par with their international counterparts, with the guess that half of their fellow patriots are happy.
I came across this data through an article written by Derek Thompson, a staff writer at the Atlantic, in June 2022. The title of it: ‘Everything Is Terrible, But I’m Fine’ tickled me and shed new light on the tension between data and public sentiment I had been grappling with. In it he refers to this tension as a ‘perception gap’ between how people personally report they are doing and how they think society is doing. It shows up in everything from personal finances to happiness and well-being. Max Roser frames this paradox as one of personal optimism and social pessimism:
It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world.
Another example of this that Thompson writes is from a 2021 Federal Reserve publication on the economic well-being of American households. Despite the pandemic’s upheaval, the report showed that the number of Americans who self-reported improvements in their financial security was the highest it had been in the last 9 years of the survey’s life. Interestingly, this self-reported data of doing financially well at a personal level was juxtaposed to another set of data: when asked about the state of the economy—i.e. the aggregate of everyone’s personal financial health—this same group of people said it was bad.. like really bad. Even though people were seeing improvements in their personal circumstances they perceived the national and local economy to be tanking. Not only that but this gap between perception of ‘personal financial health’ and ‘national economy’ was growing larger each year, even as the American economy got better on key indicators.
Thompson rounds out his article with this:
Even outside economics and finances, a record-high gap has opened up between Americans’ personal attitudes and their evaluations of the country. In early 2022, Gallup found that Americans’ satisfaction with “the way things are going in personal life” neared a 40-year high, even as their satisfaction with“the way things are going in the U.S.” neared a 40-year low. On top of the old and global tendency to assume most people are doing worse than they say they are is a growing American tendency to be catastrophically gloomy about the direction of this country, even as we’re resiliently sunny about our own household’s future.
Here is this interesting tension that I have been coming up against written about so clearly. Despite there being a 40-year high in how people reported about their personal lives, there is a 40-year low in how they feel about the world. It is as if people are feeling fine within their personal bubbles. But as soon as their consciousnesses expands outside of their bubbles and reaches the rest of the world, they feel and sense something much different. It is a curious phenomenon indeed. For instance, when asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither?” a very small percentage of people in high-income countries believe the world is getting better. In Sweden it was only 10%, in the US 6%, and in Germany only 4%.”
When thinking about this in terms of awareness, and that we as conscious individuals can shift our awareness to be in tune with different things, I hear here this divergence between what people feel within their own personal spheres—their home, family life, financial health—and what they feel outside of their little mushroom—how the outer world feels, what is happening in their city, neighborhood, surrounding communities; what is happening in the world at large. One would think that the aggregate of so many individual experiences of well-being would result in a similar outcome: a sense of collective well-being. But instead it seems to be the opposite. While individual bodies, so to speak, are doing well, the collective body is clearly not.
“Change is possible”
So how do people make sense of this perception gap?
Similar to Hans Rosling’s work, Max Roser’s Our World in Data project has a mission to bring better data tools to the masses to help us know: change is possible. His online platform synthesizes big datasets and research on the world’s most pressing issues. It is his hope that by having interactive graphs and straightforward text at our fingertips it will combat the cultural forces that drive social pessimism.
Roser points to drivers like the news media’s sensationalization of negative trends, or how schools do not teach students about how to approach solving global problems (or that a technical field of research and practice in that vein exists!). Ultimately this leads to a “despondency trap,” a term coined by social scientist Alice Evans. People don’t know what they don’t know, therefore if we are not aware of positive change in the world then we will incorrectly think it is not possible.
Roser’s work is a beautiful example of an initiative that aims to help shape people’s narratives about the state of the world, and therefore influence people’s relationship with its pain. “Change is possible” is the narrative he hopes to convey. His platform is a product of his own sense-making about the state of things and what it needs. All with an eye towards continuing to address the big, intractable problems at our doorstep.
So often I believe there is a fear that I see come up within me and my peers to acknowledge the progress we have made as a world. That if we say, “the world has gotten better!” that it will breed some sort of complacency or hurt our social movements. That, as historical political commentator Dan Carlin puts it, it can create a ‘dangerous delusion’ that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice so we can just sit back and relax and not do anything. But, as Evans’ despondency trap suggests, it is also dangerous to get caught in a doom and gloom delusion that creates an impasse due to believing that change is impossible.
Others who have pondered the perception gap have arrived at similar conclusions. Dr. Rosling, for instance, believed that our brains systematically misinterpret the state of the world because of our hardwiring towards drama (and sugar and fat), which has created an “overdramatic worldview.” This is why he spent his life seeking to balance that worldview using ‘data as therapy.’ His understanding of the state of things is directly tied to the way he responded.
From an evolutionary perspective, having a negativity bias has been to our advantage as a species, so it makes sense that it would be baked into our brains and cultures. My chances of survival are better if I assume that that long, brown thing lying in the grass is a snake. Even if in it really is a stick.
But even with all of this in mind, there are still things that don’t add up for me around the state of the world and the amount of collective strife in it. The perception gap narrative feels incomplete to me. I don’t think it is as simple as people being ignorant or needing more data tools. I think there is something deeper happening here.
Join me in the next part of my mini-series where I start to look at collapse head-on.