I wrote a post on Saturday commenting on yet another school shooting in the USA and roxypiper commented:
“Pinker tells us (and demonstrates in Better Angels of Our Nature) that the world is actually becoming less violent. The USA is however acknowledged as being an ‘outlier’ in the data.”
Which reminded me that Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and presents powerful statistical evidence that our world has never been in better shape than it is today and humankind has never been better off.
He also makes a very good scientific case for why the human condition fools us into believing that things are getting worse, when the facts clearly show quite the opposite.
To keep it simple, let me quote some of Pinker’s numbers from a presentation in 2018.
Last year (2017) Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand, had 7% of their citizens in poverty and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and four million tons of sulphur dioxide.
But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 per hundred thousand, poverty rate was 12%, and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide.
What about the world as a whole?
Last year the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10% of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons.
But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37% of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 30,000 nuclear weapons.
Pinker produces many other statistics ranging from health and life expectancy to literacy and leisure time.
While the figures relating to nuclear weapons and world autocracies might be of little relevance to us and arguably things we know little about, it’s clear that by and large, we have a highly pessimistic view of violent crime and ecological disaster including climate change even though the evidence clearly doesn’t support our position.
Pinker puts it down in part to our cognitive psychology in which we:
“Estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the “availability heuristic”. The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be.”
Which is a whole study in its own right, but one definition is that “subjective likelihood is increased by an event becoming easier to imagine” hence the ease with which so many buy into the global warming/climate change fear.
There’s an old saying amongst journalists: “If it bleeds – it leads”. Again, catastrophic events make it. Good news doesn’t.
To quote Pinker:
The papers could have run the headline “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday” every day for the last 25 years. That’s one and a quarter billion people leaving poverty behind – but you never read about it.
Also, the news capitalises on our morbid interest in what can go wrong, captured in the programming policy “if it bleeds, it leads.” Well, if you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why the world has been coming to an end for a very long time indeed.
The mainstream media provides food for the masses and it’s clear that the food has been dumbed down day after day after day to fulfill the public desire for cheap, sensational, mindless entertainment (reality TV) of little mental stimulation – including news and current affairs (what came first – the chicken or the egg?).
Or will statistics prove that just like our view of a deteriorating world, it is our cognitive psychology and availability heuristic that are distorting the facts?