John G. Messerly's Blog, page 10

Eternalism & Free Will

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In the common-sense view of time, called presentism,  each of the four instants of time in the snapshot above exist one after another and only the present exists. The main problem with presentism is that it conflicts with the theory of relativity.

In contrast, according to eternalism, the past, present, and future all exist.1 Eternalism is the theory of time supported definitely by modern physics and advocated by the majority of philosophers.2 But does this conception of time conflict with my previous advocacy of compatibilism regarding free will vs determinism?

I too endorse eternalism—a view of time also referred to as the block universe. In fact, more philosophers defend eternalism as their temporal ontology than presentism and the growing block theory combined.2

The central idea for the possible incompatibility of free will and eternalism stems from the fact that eternalism considers “different times as being as real as different places, and future events are “already there” in the same sense other places are already there.”3 However after some study I’ve concluded that the two are compatible.

In the most relevant and recent peer-reviewed journal article I read the author states that “the idea that eternalism threatens our freedom is problematic” and “The conviction that eternalism threatens our freedom is predicated on a firmer grasp on eternalism than anyone should profess to have.” In short, it doesn’t seem there are definitive reasons to doubt that (my type of) compatibilism and eternalism conflict.

However, researching this topic briefly—as I had recently done with free will—reminded me 1) that I’d need to read and digest everything written on the topic to have a fully informed view; 2) #1 is impossible in a finite lifetime; and 3) even if I achieved #1 (impossible!) I still wouldn’t know the answer to my question with certainty.

And I’ve come to the same conclusion about so many of the philosophical puzzles I’ve encountered in a lifetime of study—we simply don’t know the answers to life’s big questions. For the moment then, intellectual honesty demands living without being sure, tolerating ambiguity about the big questions.

For answers to those big questions, we need better brains.

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Notes.

There is another view called the growing block theory of time where the past and present exist but not the future.From Philosophy Imprint (Eternalism 40%, Presentism 18%, Growing Block 17%, Other 25%.)From Wikipedia.

A Final Note On The Existence of Free Will

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve read quite a bit about free will in the hope of expanding on the position I elucidated in a previous post. What I’ve discovered along the way is a stronger commitment to compatibilism.

In the first place, compatibilism is the view of a large majority of philosophers (60% compatibilism; 19% libertarianism; 11% no free will.)[224]  Furthermore among evolutionary biologists, 80% said that they believe in free will while only 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.[225] (I’d guess physicists would be more drawn to the hard determinist position.)

Now these stats don’t necessitate my position but I’m always interested in the views of other philosophers and scientists. But in the end, I reiterate that freedom—like consciousness and meaning—is an emergent property of the evolutionary process. I know this gives no specifics about how our complex brains make decisions but the ability to deliberate and choose (accepting all the determining casual factors—upbringing, education, neurophysiology, etc.) is a property or ability that slowly emerges in complex brains. Of course I need to further explain emergence here.)

I simply don’t believe that we are as determined as ants or bumble bees. And, as I said before, free will exists to various degrees in individuals.

Finally, let me say that I’m embarrassed that after reading so much in the last few weeks I can’t say more. But the literature on the issue is so voluminous that it would take the rest of my life to adequately digest it. Not wanting to do this I have taken a provisional position which is open to further revisal. For the moment then I’m committed to some form of compatibilism. I’m particularly drawn to the compatibilism of Daniel Dennett in his book Freedom Evolves.

Here are a few of the sources that I’ve been reading over the last few weeks:

Free Will by Sam Harris (a defense of hard determinism.)

Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky (a defense of hard determinism.)

Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett (defends compatibility with an evolutionary twist.)

“Does Quantum Mechanics Rule Out Free Will?” by John Horgan (a critique of superdeterminism.)

“From Chaos To Free Will” by George Ellis (a physicist on why so many other physicists on wrong about free will.)

“Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” by John Martin Fischer (a scathing review of Sapolsky’s book.)

“Some Thoughts on Sam Harris’ Final Thoughts on Free Will” by Ed Gibney (an astute criticism of Harris’ book.)

Existential Physics: A Scientists Guide To Life’s Biggest Questions

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I just finished Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Existential Physics: A Scientists Guide To Life’s Biggest Questions. I intended to do a full review but alas don’t have the time. Still, I wanted to share a few notes I made on key points she made in each chapter. So here goes:

Chap 1 – Does The Past Still Exist?

When our grandparents die info about them becomes irretrievable. We can’t communicate with them. “Nevertheless, if you trust the mathematics, the information is still there, somewhere, somehow,  spread out over the entire universe, but preserved forever. It might sound crazy but it’s consistent with all that we currently know.” (She’s alluding to the block universe.)

Chap 2 – How Did The Universe Begin? How Will It End?

Regarding the beginning of our universe – we just don’t know. all theories are speculative – “modern creation myths written in the language of mathematics.” As for the end of our universe, extrapolating from the laws of physics it will be dark because energy will eventually run out. However predictions about results trillions of years in the future are suspect. In the final analysis, “you shouldn’t trust physicists’ predictions for the end of the universe.”

Chap  3- Why Doesn’t Anyone Get Younger? 

The arrow of time results from the low entropy at the initial state of the universe and the increase of entropy since then. We don’t know why the universe was in this initial state although we have many hypotheses. As for the 2nd law of thermodynamics, H doesn’t think we can trust it to tell us about the fate of the universe because it’s only “based on how we currently understand the universe.” [emphasis mine.] And she doesn’t think “conclusions drawn from it today will remain valid when we understand better how gravity and quantum mechanics work.”

Our subjective experience of “now” makes it seem special, but objectively all moments are equally real. In short, H accepts the block universe of modern physics—the past and future are as real as the present. The reality we experience may be just a construction of our minds and sensory input has been around for a while  (think Descartes and “The Matrix.”) We may be brains in vats. That may be true but she doesn’t think believing it will make much difference.

Chap 4 – Are You Just A Bag Of Atoms? 

Reductionism, the idea that the behavior of an object (like you) can be deduced from its constituent objects, properties, and their interactions is”one of the best-established facts about nature. Fact is we have never observed an object composed of many particles whose behavior falsified reductionism …” Still, she admits that reductionism may fail in the future when we learn even more about nature.

However, what’s important about us are the relationships and interactions of the particles. This suggests that we could in theory replace those physical particles with silicon or some other substrate and if the replacement parts maintained the same functions then even our consciousness could be uploaded into a computer. This is not now possible but “it’s compatible with all we currently know.”

Chap 5 – Do Copies Of Us Exist?

H says that the parallel universes of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanices—including the idea that there are many yous out there—is compatible with what we know scientifically. Yet, for the moment, science tells us nothing about whether any of this is true or not. Like other ideas of multiverses, they are ascientific ideas since other universes are by definition unobservable. As for the simulation argument, she is very skeptical. In the end, the idea that there are copies of ourselves is unscientific “because such copies are unobservable and unnecessary to explain what we can observe.”

Chap 6 – Has Physics Ruled Out Free Will?

Philosophers redefine free will (FW) so that it’s not what people usually mean. Nonetheless, “The currently established laws of nature are deterministic with a random element from quantum mechanics. This means the future, is fixed except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.” In other words, what we do today follows from the state of the universe yesterday and so on all the way back to the Big Bang. Still, we believe we have FW because we don’t know the results of our thinking before we have done it.

Strong emergence isn’t possible–higher-level properties of a system derive from lower levels (particle physics.) And there is no evidence that strong emergence is real; in other words, that the macroscopic can’t be derived from the microscopic. Yes, we may intuitively feel we have FW but analogous to how we understand, contrary to intuition, that the “now” is an illusion, FW is also an illusion. In fact “you’re running a sophisticated computation on your neural processor.”

Again the future is fixed except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence. Whether this eliminates FW depends on how you define FW.

Chap 7 – Was The Universe Made For Us?

Some say that the (supposed) “fine-tuning” of the universe is explained by a god; others say it is explained by the multiverse. H considers both ideas unscientific because “they postulate the existence of things that are unnecessary to describe what we observe.” More importantly, “claiming that the constants of nature are fine-tuned for life is not a scientifically sound argument, because it depends on arbitrary assumptions.”

The brief answer is that we have no reason to think the universe was made for us—with the caveat that “no scientific theory will ever be able to answer all questions.”

Chap 8 – Does The Universe Think?

The universe doesn’t think—if for no other reason than that it is 90 billion light-years across and it would take a lot of time for a thought to get from one end to another! Still “the idea that the universe is intelligent is compatible with all we know so far.”

As for panpsychism—the idea that all matter is at least minimally conscious—H is extremely skeptical. But could it be that every particle is proto-conscious and when arranged properly in brains they become fully conscious? No. The idea that elementary particles think, even minimally, conflicts with the evidence.

However, panpsychism is right in one way. It points to how consciousness (which she thinks of as systems like brains processing information) isn’t binary but a gradient property. Put differently, systems are more or less conscious “because some process more information, others less.” At a certain size and configuration of matter, consciousness emerges.

Mary’s room” is a thought experiment (she grew up in a black-and-white room and knows everything about the physics of color and the brain’s reaction to color.) Defenders of the argument claim that she will learn something new about color if she starts to see color and this shows that the experience of color is more than just brain states—instead, the mind has a non-physical aspect. H replies that this argument confuses knowing about the perception of color with actually perceiving color. The fact is we have no scientific evidence that human perception is non-physical. And the study of consciousness is now in the realm of science.

Chap 9 – Are Humans Predictable? 

Humans are largely predictable; but are they fully predictable in principle, if we have enough knowledge? Now human behavior is partly unpredictable because of those quantum events we talked of previously, but I could still make probabilistic predictions about what you will do. But what of undecidable problems in computer science (the domino and halting problems for instance) and mathematics (the incompleteness theorem)?  What of chaos theory?  H arguments here are complex but the bottom line is that “we have no reason to think human behavior is unpredictable in principle, but good reason to think it’s very difficult to predict in practice.”

Turning to AI, H grants that artificial general intelligence is possible and that we should be concerned. But as she sees it in the near future the problems will arise because of our ethics or lack thereof, not AI’s desire to kill us all.

Epilogue – What’s The Purpose of Anything Anyway?

Here she addresses questions of meaning with both insight and humility. She begins by admitting that science doesn’t have, and almost certainly never will have, all the answers to life’s biggest questions. But, in addition to its practical implications, Hossenfelder practices science to make sense of her life. And this leads to the book’s final question “What’s the meaning of life in the universe revealed by modern science?” She believes that each person must answer this question for themselves but she tells a simple story to explain how she thinks about the issue.

When she was young she asked her mother “What’s the meaning of life?” Her mother was a teacher and she replied that for her “the meaning of life is to pass along knowledge to the next generation.” At the time Hossenfelder thought her mother’s answer was “rather lame. [But] Thirty years later I have come to pretty much the same conclusion.” For most of her life, she has studied the laws of nature and still takes great joy in sharing that knowledge with others. She has found that many people want to know how the universe works because we want to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

Ultimately, Hossenfelder writes that she is trying to do her part “to aid the universe’s understanding of itself.” As she concludes, “So, yes, we are bags of atoms crawling around on a pale blue dot in the outer spiral arm of a remarkably unremarkable galaxy. And yet we are so much more than this.”

Short Philosophy Jokes

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Q: How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Depends on how you define “change”

 

 

Descartes is sitting in a bar, having a drink. The bartender asks him if he would like another. “I think not,” he says … and disappears.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, “I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.” The waitress replies, “I’m sorry, monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?”

 

Dean, to the physics department: “Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff? Why couldn’t you be more like the math department – all they need is pencils, paper, and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper.”

 

A boy is about to go on his first date, and his father gives him the following advice: “If you ever don’t know what to talk about, just remember the three F’s: food, family, and philosophy. You can always start a conversation about one of those subjects.”

The boy picks up his date and they go to a soda fountain. Ice cream sodas in front of them, they stare at each other for a long time, as the boy’s nervousness builds. He remembers his father’s advice, and chooses the first topic. He asks the girl: “Do you like potato pancakes?” She says “No,” and the silence returns.

After a few more uncomfortable minutes, the boy thinks of his father’s suggestion and turns to the second item on the list. He asks, “Do you have a brother?” The girl says “No,” and there is silence once again.

The boy then plays his last card. He thinks of his father’s advice and asks the girl: “If you had a brother, would he like potato pancakes?”

 

An engineer, a scientist, a mathematician, and a philosopher are hiking through the hills of Scotland, when they see a lone black sheep in a field.

The engineer says, “What do you know, it looks like the sheep around here are black.” The scientist looks at him skeptically and replies, “Well, at least some of them are.” The mathematician considers this for a moment and replies, “Well, at least one of them is.” Then the philosopher turns to them and says, “Well, at least on one side.”

 

 

Overheard in 18th century England: “Did you hear that George Berkeley died? His girlfriend stopped seeing him.”

 

Bonus Religion Joke 

Top 10 Reasons Why God Was Denied Tenure

He had only one major publication.And it had no references.It wasn’t published in a refereed journal or even submitted for peer review.And some even doubt he wrote it himself.It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done recently?The scientific community has had a very rough time trying to replicate his results.He rarely came to class, just told students to read the book.He expelled his first two students for learning.Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed his tests.His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.

Society May Be Better But Is It Also More Fragile?

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By Ed Gibney

For the last five posts, we have been discussing the question of whether the world is getting better or not. I’d like to give Ed Gibney the last words (for now?) on the topic:

Thanks for gathering these comments together (including mine) and briefly replying to them. They elicited another idea from me as I was reading this. During my MBA studies, we essentially were trained to *optimize* the operations of organizations. Remove all the fat, redundancies, waste, and poor processes. All this rationalization makes things run better. And this is certainly what we have done to human culture as well. But (!) this also makes things more fragile.

In the business world, this shows up when hiccups happen (think of the supply chain problems during Covid) and there is no extra inventory (aka “waste”) sitting around to fill in the temporary gaps. If things get optimized too much, these organizations become extremely fragile and collapse with problems that no one would have realized ahead of time would be strong enough to cause this. Bankruptcies come on very quickly when cash flow and investment are optimized too much. And, by the way, this is a common problem in environments characterized by higher and higher levels of competition. You are forced to “optimize” to stay alive in the short term. But at the cost of being robust for the long term.

In just the same way, we are removing “redundancy” and “waste” from the ecological systems of the world. This is extremely dangerous! Things feel better in the moment, but as Nassim Taleb wrote about in The Black Swan, this leaves us very vulnerable to “low probability but highly destructive” events. Many of us see this fragility in society and are worried. The techno-optimists are ignoring the long history of things going bust.

I will say that I agree with you that technology and rational improvements are the way out of this. We can decide to be more robust rather than more fragile. It requires more cooperation and limits on competition. But until I hear techno-optimists start using that language, I’m going to be very worried about the kind of progress they think is happening. One is short-term and very dangerous.

This reminds me of another lesson I learned from change management theory. Think of a 2×2 matrix with one axis being if things are being done “well” or “poorly”. The other access is if things are going in the “right” or “wrong” direction. The best situation in this 2×2 matrix is obviously to be in the quadrant where things are going “well” in the “right” direction. But, the worst outcome is surprising. It’s going in the “wrong” direction, but doing things “well”! This is basically running towards the cliff. It’s falling faster and faster and thinking “This is great! We’re moving so quickly!”

Which box are we in?

On Balance There Has Been Human Progress

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I was preparing a critique of Jeremy Lent’s views on our lack of progress but an email from my collegue Francis Heylighen beat me to it. Here is what he wrote.

For everything that is improving in the world, it is possible to find something that is not improving or getting worse, and vice versa. My point (which is also made by Max More and Stephen Pinker on the more free trade side, and by e.g. Hans Rosling, Rutger Bregman and Hanna Ritchie on the more social-democratic/ecologist side) is that if you take everything together at the largest possible scale (population of the world, not of particular regions or groups), most of the trends are consistently positive, and few are negative (release of greenhouse gases e.g.).

That of course does not mean that we live in the best of possible worlds: many things require drastic improvements, and people are right to point that out. But there is really no reason to believe we are on course to collapse, or even to a significant worsening of the present conditions.

Concerning Jeremy Lent: I read and appreciated both his books and the books of Pinker. Lent is excellent in his history of ideas and evolution of Western and non-Western worldviews. But when Lent starts describing societal collapse scenarios, he is out of his league. And his criticism of Pinker I found underwhelming. If you compare the hundreds of statistics and graphs that Pinker has collected with the points made by Lent to argue that Pinker is in error, the weight of evidence remains much stronger for Pinker.

If you haven’t read Pinker yet, I suggest you do, because all the criticism you hear about Pinker makes it look as if he is some horrible reactionary guy, but he is quite the opposite: open-minded, reasonable, looking for facts, admitting problems, arguing for the need for further progress… The main point of contention (which has led one critic to describe Pinker as “the most annoying person on Earth”) is that Pinker criticizes a common Postmodern ideology that is popular within the contemporary humanities and which blames science, rationality and enlightenment for everything bad that is happening in the world. I agree with Pinker that science and enlightenment are our best (or perhaps only) tools to consistently improve the state of humanity, and that this kind of anti-enlightenment rhetoric is counterproductive and dangerous.

But I’d rather not get into the Pinker-Lent (and others) debate, because that has already created much more heat than light, with plenty of strawman arguments making a caricature of Pinker’s position. If you are interested in getting a balanced understanding of why things are much better than most people believe, start with the books of Rosling (about social progress) and Ritchie (about environmental progress). If you want to check the actual data, there is an excellent website from Oxford University that provides about all the available ones: https://ourworldindata.org/

Finally, about the overshoot argument (aka Limits to Growth, or exhaustion of natural resources). That argument came to the fore in the 1960s, leading to plenty of predictions of the exhaustion/collapse of various resources within a few decades (food, fish, mineral resources, soil, water, …). We are now more than half a century later and none of these resources has become less abundant: we produce more food, water, minerals, energy, fish, …) both in absolute terms and per head of the population. That is simply because of ongoing technological innovation making production and consumption ever more efficient. Therefore, there is really no good reason to think that suddenly all this progress will stop. Here is how the situation is summarized in our working paper on “Anxiety, depression and despair in the information age”: https://researchportal.vub.be/en/publications/anxiety-depression-and-despair-in-the-information-age-the-techno-

The standard argument for such collapse scenarios, the “Limits to Growth”, is that an exponentially growing consumption of finite resources can only end in their exhaustion. In practice, however, as a resource becomes less abundant it also becomes more expensive. This incites people to reduce their consumption, through measures such as increasing efficiency, recycling, or switching to a more abundant resource (e.g. sunlight or seawater). On-going technological innovation leads us to achieve ever more with ever less (materials, water, land, energy, time, effort…). This enduring trend is known as dematerialization
(McAfee, 2019) or ephemeralization (Evenstad, 2018; Heylighen, 2008). As a result, as yet no natural resource has ever come anywhere near exhaustion, in spite of dire forecasts made by Malthus, Ehrlich and others (Bailey, 2015; Bailey & Tupy, 2020).

Note that in spite of my optimism about long-term development, I too am quite worried about the present state of society, albeit not so much about the objective, material conditions in which we live, but about people’s subjective experience, which has become much more negative than is healthy. The above paper tries to analyze the symptoms, causes and consequences of that problem, which we call the “Techno-social dilemma”. The ubiquitous pessimism I am arguing against is one of the core symptoms of that problem, and one of its causes is the “bad news bias” that also Max More was pointing out. But there are others, and the paper suggests a number of strategies to tackle the dilemma…

(Author’s Note. I also agree wholeheartedly with Bruce Watson who posted the following questions. “Is humanity really better off being convinced that everything is turning to shit? Isn’t a serious and scholarly attempt to find hope worth more than a serious and scholarly attempt to prove that there is no hope?” The answer to the first is NO and the answer to the second is YES.)

Summary of Lent’s Arguments Against Pinker

[image error]Steven Pinker

Yesterday’s post was of Jeremy Lent’s critique of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. The essay was long so here is a summary of Lent’s positions.

(Note. I don’t necessarily endorse Lent’s views and will comment on them in my next post. This summary was forwarded to me by a collegue.)

Steven Pinker’s work is stocked with charts that provide indeed incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts. But, it’s precisely because of the validity of much of his narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. Rather than ceding the important idea of progress to the neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary audience, we should claim it back by highlighting his erroneous overall analysis.

Graph 1. Ecological overshoot

Pinker ignores overshoot. Overshoot (our civilization consuming resources faster than they can be replenished) is particularly dangerous because of the relatively slow feedback loops. It’s as if we keep taking out bigger and bigger overdrafts to replenish the account, and then pretend that these funds are income and celebrate our continuing “progress”. Besides ignoring this, Pinker also uses the rhetorical technique of ridicule to depict those concerned about overshoot as part of a “quasi-religious ideology”. No arguments whatsoever. Approaching a subject of such seriousness with emotion-laden rhetoric is morally inexcusable and striking evidence. Pinker “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend” (Monbiot). And when Pinker does get serious on the topic, he promotes ecomodernism, the green ideology that doesn’t take into account the structural drivers of overshoot: a growth-based global economy reliant on ever-increasing monetization of natural resources and human activity. (…)  In fact, until an imminent collapse of civilization itself, increasing ecological catastrophes are likely to enhance the GDP of developed countries even while those in less developed regions suffer dire consequences (!).

Graph 2/3. Progress for whom?

Who actually gets to enjoy Pinker’s narrative of progress? His book focuses on the welfare of humankind. That’s convenient because non-human animals won’t agree that the past sixty years have been a period of flourishing. While the world’s GDP has increased 22-fold since 1970, there has been a vast die-off of non-human animals. Human progress in material consumption has come at a serious cost. For every five birds or fish that inhabited a river or lake in 1970, there is now just one. Inside the human race: Pinker claims that “racist violence against African Americans… plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since”, but he declines to report the drastic increase in incarceration rates for African Americans during that same period.

Graph 4. A rising tide lifts all boats?

Pinker unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”. Inequality is not decreasing at all, but going extremely rapidly the other way.

Graph 5: Measuring genuine progress.

One of the cornerstones of Pinker’s book is the explosive rise in income and wealth (the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita). There is no doubt that the world has experienced a transformation in material well-being in the past two hundred years (increased availability of clothing, food, transportation, etc). However, there is a point where the rise in economic activity begins to decouple from well-being. GDP merely measures the rate at which a society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up: the bigger the spill, the better it is for GDP. This divergence is hidden in global statistics of rising GDP, with powerful corporate and political interests destroying the lives of the vulnerable in the name of economic “progress.”

One of the countless examples of how misleading and crude GDP is as a measure. Indigenous people living in the Amazon rainforest being forced off their land to make way for a hydroelectric complex in Altamira, Brazil. One of them tells how “I didn’t need money to live happy. My whole house was nature…I’d catch my fish, make manioc flour… I raised my three daughters, proud of what I was. I was rich.” Now, he and his family live among drug dealers behind barred windows in Brazil’s most violent city, receiving a state pension which, after covering rent and electricity, leaves him about 50 cents a day to feed himself, his wife, daughter, and grandson. Meanwhile, as a result of his family’s forced entry into the monetary economy, Brazil’s GDP has risen.

There is a prominent alternative measure, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), reducing GDP for negative environmental factors such as the cost of pollution and social factors such as the cost of crime and commuting. It increases the measure for positive factors missing from GDP such as housework, volunteer work, and higher education. It turns out that the world’s Genuine Progress peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever since.

Graph 6: What has improved global health?

One of Pinker’s most important themes is the undisputed improvement in overall health and life expectancy in the past century. So, what has been the underlying cause of this great achievement? Pinker melds together his “twin engines of progress”: GDP growth and increase in knowledge. However, more profound research found that a country’s average level of educational attainment explained rising life expectancy much better than GDP. This has enormous implications for development priorities in national and global policy. Instead of following the neoliberal mantra (raise a country’s GDP and health benefits will follow), which has dominated mainstream thinking for decades, a more effective policy would be to invest in schooling for children, with all the ensuing benefits in quality of life that will bring.

Graph 7: False equivalencies, false dichotomies.

Many of Pinker’s missteps arise from the fact that he conflates two different dynamics: improvements in the human experience and the rise of neoliberal, laissez-faire capitalism. By lacing his book with false equivalencies and false dichotomies, he gives the impression that free market capitalism is an underlying driver of human progress. One example is his false dichotomy of “right versus left” based on a twentieth-century version of politics that has been irrelevant for more than a generation. By painting a black and white landscape of capitalist good versus communist evil, Pinker obliterates from view the complex, sophisticated models of a hopeful future that have been diligently constructed over decades by a wide range of progressive thinkers (e.g. Raworth’s Doughnut economics). These fresh perspectives eschew the Pinker-style false dichotomy of traditional left versus right. Instead, they explore the possibilities of replacing a destructive global economic system with one that offers potential for greater fairness, sustainability, and human flourishing. In short, a model for continued progress for the twenty-first century.

Graph 8: Progress Is Caused By… Progressives!

One of Pinker’s graphs shows a decline in web searches for sexist, racist, and homophobic jokes (2004 – 2017), attributing this in large part to “the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream.” Pinker recognizes that changes in moral norms came about because progressive minds broke out of their society’s normative frames, dragging the mainstream in their wake, until the next generation grew up adopting a new moral baseline.

But then, Pinker contradicts himself by lamenting political correctness, social justice warriors, and the environmental movement that “subordinates human interests to a transcendent entity, the ecosystem”. Pinker seems to view all ethical development from prehistory to the present day as “progress,” but any pressure to shift society further along its moral arc as anathema. This is the great irony of Pinker’s book. In writing a tribute to historical progress, he then takes a staunchly conservative stance to those who want to continue it.

In reality, many of the great steps made in securing the moral progress Pinker applauds came from brave individuals who had to resist the opprobrium of the Steven Pinkers of their time while they devoted their lives to reducing the suffering of others. For example, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, with the first public exposé of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, her solitary stance was denounced as hysterical and unscientific. Just eight years later, twenty million Americans marched to protect the environment in the first Earth Day. These great strides in moral progress continue to this day. Not surprisingly, the current steps in social progress are vehemently opposed by Steven Pinker.

It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim. Progress in the quality of life, for humans and nonhumans alike, is something that anyone with a heart should celebrate. It did not come about through capitalism, and in many cases, it has been achieved despite the “free market” that Pinker espouses.

Steven Pinker’s ideas are fatally flawed

By Jeremy Lent (Originally published at Open Democracy. Published here unchanged under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

My previous post discussed the thesis that the world is dramatically better than at any other time in history. Among those who share this view is Steven Pinker. Here Jeremy Lent offers a critique of Pinker’s arguments.

In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world’s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.

His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that “It’s my new favorite book of all time.” On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic, incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it “embarrassing” and “feeble”; David Bell, writing in The Nation, sees it as “a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history”; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian, laments the “poor scholarship” and “motivated reasoning” that “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.” (Full disclosure: Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)

In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read his book carefully, I believe it’s crucially important to take Pinker to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes. Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He spoke to the world’s elite this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Since his work offers an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous response.

Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity, education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph.

This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I’m close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly, ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.

Graph 1: Overshoot

In November 2017, around the time when Pinker was likely putting the final touches on his manuscript, over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued a dire warning to humanity. Because of our overconsumption of the world’s resources, they declared, we are facing “widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss.” They warned that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Figure 1: Three graphs from World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.

They included nine sobering charts and a carefully worded, extensively researched analysis showing that, on a multitude of fronts, the human impact on the earth’s biological systems is increasing at an unsustainable rate. Three of those alarming graphs are shown here: the rise in CO2 emissions; the decline in available freshwater; and the increase in the number of ocean dead zones from artificial fertilizer runoff.

This was not the first such notice. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of living Nobel laureates) sent a similarly worded warning to governmental leaders around the world, calling for a recognition of the earth’s fragility and a new ethic arising from the realization that “we all have but one lifeboat.” The current graphs starkly demonstrate how little the world has paid attention to this warning since 1992.

Taken together, these graphs illustrate ecological overshoot: the fact that, in the pursuit of material progress, our civilization is consuming the earth’s resources faster than they can be replenished. Overshoot is particularly dangerous because of its relatively slow feedback loops: if your checking account balance approaches zero, you know that if you keep writing checks they will bounce. In overshoot, however, it’s as though our civilization keeps taking out bigger and bigger overdrafts to replenish the account, and then we pretend these funds are income and celebrate our continuing “progress.” In the end, of course, the money runs dry and it’s game over.

Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity. Instead, he uses the blatant rhetorical technique of ridicule to paint those concerned about overshoot as part of a “quasi-religious ideology… laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.” He then uses a couple of the most extreme examples he can find to create a straw-man to buttress his caricature. There are issues worthy of debate on the topic of civilization and sustainability, but to approach a subject of such seriousness with emotion-laden rhetoric is morally inexcusable and striking evidence of Monbiot’s claim that Pinker “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.”

When Pinker does get serious on the topic, he promotes Ecomodernism as the solution: a neoliberal, technocratic belief that a combination of market-based solutions and technological fixes will magically resolve all ecological problems. This approach fails, however, to take into account the structural drivers of overshoot: a growth-based global economy reliant on ever-increasing monetization of natural resources and human activity. Without changing this structure, overshoot is inevitable. Transnational corporations, which currently constitute sixty-nine of the world’s hundred largest economies, are driven only by increasing short-term financial value for their shareholders, regardless of the long-term impact on humanity. As freshwater resources decline, for example, their incentive is to buy up what remains and sell it in plastic throwaway bottles or process it into sugary drinks, propelling billions in developing countries toward obesity through sophisticated marketing. In fact, until an imminent collapse of civilization itself, increasing ecological catastrophes are likely to enhance the GDP of developed countries even while those in less developed regions suffer dire consequences.

Graphs 2 and 3: progress for whom?

Which brings us to another fundamental issue in Pinker’s narrative of progress: who actually gets to enjoy it? Much of his book is devoted to graphs showing worldwide progress in quality in life for humanity as a whole. However, some of his omissions and misstatements on this topic are very telling.

At one point, Pinker explains that, “Despite the word’s root, humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book focuses on the welfare of humankind.” That’s convenient, because any non-human animal might not agree that the past sixty years has been a period of flourishing. In fact, while the world’s GDP has increased 22-fold since 1970, there has been a vast die-off of the creatures with whom we share the earth. As shown in Figure 2, human progress in material consumption has come at the cost of a 58% decline in vertebrates, including a shocking 81% reduction of animal populations in freshwater systems. For every five birds or fish that inhabited a river or lake in 1970, there is now just one.

Figure 2: Reduction in abundance in global species since 1970. Source: WWF Living Plant Report, 2016.

But we don’t need to look outside the human race for Pinker’s selective view of progress. He is pleased to tell us that “racist violence against African Americans… plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since.” What he declines to report is the drastic increase in incarceration rates for African Americans during that same period (Figure 3). An African American man is now six times more likely to be arrested than a white man, resulting in the dismal statistic that one in every three African American men can currently expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. The grim takeaway from this is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Figure 3: Historical incarceration rates of African-Americans. Source: The Washington Post.

Graph 4: A rising tide lifts all boats?

This brings us to one of the crucial errors in Pinker’s overall analysis. By failing to analyze his top-level numbers with discernment, he unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phrase he unashamedly appropriates for himself as he extols the benefits of inequality. This was the argument used by the original instigators of neoliberal laissez-faire economics, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to cut taxes, privatize industries, and slash public services with the goal of increasing economic growth.

Pinker makes two key points here. First, he argues that “income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being,” pointing to recent research that people are comfortable with differential rewards for others depending on their effort and skill. However, as Pinker himself acknowledges, humans do have a powerful predisposition toward fairness. They want to feel that, if they work diligently, they can be as successful as someone else based on what they do, not on what family they’re born into or what their skin color happens to be. More equal societies are also healthier, which is a condition conspicuously missing from the current economic model, where the divide between rich and poor has become so gaping that the six wealthiest men in the world (including Pinker’s good friend, Bill Gates) now own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the world’s population.

Pinker’s fallback might, then, be his second point: the rising tide argument, which he extends to the global economy. Here, he cheerfully recounts the story of how Branko Milanović, a leading ex-World Bank economist, analyzed income gains by percentile across the world over the twenty-year period 1988–2008, and discovered something that became widely known as the “Elephant Graph,” because its shape resembled the profile of an elephant with a raised trunk. Contrary to popular belief about rising global inequality, it seemed to show that, while the top 1% did in fact gain more than their fair share of income, lower percentiles of the global population had done just as well. It seemed to be only the middle classes in wealthy countries that had missed out.

This graph, however, is virtually meaningless because it calculates growth rates as a percent of widely divergent income levels. Compare a Silicon Valley executive earning $200,000/year with one of the three billion people currently living on $2.50 per day or less. If the executive gets a 10% pay hike, she can use the $20,000 to buy a new compact car for her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, that same 10% increase would add, at most, a measly 25 cents per day to each of those three billion. In Graph 4, Oxfam economist Mujeed Jamaldeen shows the original “Elephant Graph” (blue line) contrasted with changes in absolute income levels (green line). The difference is stark.

Figure 4: “Elephant Graph” versus absolute income growth levels. Source: “From Poverty to Power,” Muheed Jamaldeen.

The “Elephant Graph” elegantly conceals the fact that the wealthiest 1% experienced nearly 65 times the absolute income growth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Inequality isn’t, in fact, decreasing at all, but going extremely rapidly the other way. Jamaldeen has calculated that, at the current rate, it would take over 250 years for the income of the poorest 10% to merely reach the global average income of $11/day. By that time, at the current rate of consumption by wealthy nations, it’s safe to say there would be nothing left for them to spend their lucrative earnings on. In fact, the “rising tide” for some barely equates to a drop in the bucket for billions of others.

Graph 5: Measuring genuine progress.

One of the cornerstones of Pinker’s book is the explosive rise in income and wealth that the world has experienced in the past couple of centuries. Referring to the work of economist Angus Deaton, he calls it the “Great Escape” from the historic burdens of human suffering, and shows a chart (Figure 5, left) depicting the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which seems to say it all. How could anyone in their right mind refute that evidence of progress?

Figure 5: GDP per capita compared with GPI. Source: Kubiszewski et al. “Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress.” Ecological Economics, 2013.

There is no doubt that the world has experienced a transformation in material wellbeing in the past two hundred years, and Pinker documents this in detail, from the increased availability of clothing, food, and transportation, to the seemingly mundane yet enormously important decrease in the cost of artificial light. However, there is a point where the rise in economic activity begins to decouple from wellbeing. In fact, GDP merely measures the rate at which a society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up: the bigger the spill, the better it is for GDP.

This divergence is played out, tragically, across the world every day, and is cruelly hidden in global statistics of rising GDP when powerful corporate and political interests destroy the lives of the vulnerable in the name of economic “progress.” In just one of countless examples, a recent report in The Guardian describes how indigenous people living on the Xingu River in the Amazon rainforest were forced off their land to make way for the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex in Altamira, Brazil. One of them, Raimundo Brago Gomes, tells how “I didn’t need money to live happy. My whole house was nature… I had my patch of land where I planted a bit of everything, all sorts of fruit trees. I’d catch my fish, make manioc flour… I raised my three daughters, proud of what I was. I was rich.” Now, he and his family live among drug dealers behind barred windows in Brazil’s most violent city, receiving a state pension which, after covering rent and electricity, leaves him about 50 cents a day to feed himself, his wife, daughter, and grandson. Meanwhile, as a result of his family’s forced entry into the monetary economy, Brazil’s GDP has risen.

Pinker is aware of the crudeness of GDP as a measure, but uses it repeatedly throughout his book because, he claims, “it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing.” This is not, however, what has been discovered when economists have adjusted GDP to incorporate other major factors that affect human flourishing. One prominent alternative measure, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), reduces GDP for negative environmental factors such as the cost of pollution, loss of primary forest and soil quality, and social factors such as the cost of crime and commuting. It increases the measure for positive factors missing from GDP such as housework, volunteer work, and higher education. Sixty years of historical GPI for many countries around the world have been measured, and the results resoundingly refute Pinker’s claim of GDP’s correlation with wellbeing. In fact, as shown by the purple line in Figure 5 (right), it turns out that the world’s Genuine Progress peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever since.

Graph 6: What has improved global health?

One of Pinker’s most important themes is the undisputed improvement in overall health and longevity that the world has enjoyed in the past century. It’s a powerful and heart-warming story. Life expectancy around the world has more than doubled in the past century. Infant mortality everywhere is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Improvements in medical knowledge and hygiene have saved literally billions of lives. Pinker appropriately quotes economist Steven Radelet that these improvements “rank among the greatest achievements in human history.”

So, what has been the underlying cause of this great achievement? Pinker melds together what he sees as the twin engines of progress: GDP growth and increase in knowledge. Economic growth, for him, is a direct result of global capitalism. “Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism,” he declares with his usual exaggerated rhetoric, “its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers.” He refers to a figure called the Preston curve, from a paper by Samuel Preston published in 1975 showing a correlation between GDP and life expectancy that become foundational to the field of developmental economics. “Most obviously,” Pinker declares, “GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.” While he pays lip service to the scientific principle that “correlation is not causation,” he then clearly asserts causation, claiming that “economic development does seem to be a major mover of human welfare.” He closes his chapter with a joke about a university dean offered by a genie the choice between money, fame, or wisdom. The dean chooses wisdom but then regrets it, muttering “I should have taken the money.”

Pinker would have done better to have pondered more deeply on the relation between correlation and causation in this profoundly important topic. In fact, a recent paper by Wolfgang Lutz and Endale Kebede entitled “Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve” does just that. The original Preston curve came with an anomaly: the relationship between GDP and life expectancy doesn’t stay constant. Instead, each period it’s measured, it shifts higher, showing greater life expectancy for any given GDP (Figure 6, left). Preston—and his followers, including Pinker—explained this away by suggesting that advances in medicine and healthcare must have improved things across the board.

Figure 6: GDP vs. Life expectancy compared with Education vs. Life expectancy. Source: W. Lutz and E. Kebede. “Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve.” Population and Development Review, 2018.

Lutz and Kebede, however, used sophisticated multi-level regression models to analyze how closely education correlated with life expectancy compared with GDP. They found that a country’s average level of educational attainment explained rising life expectancy much better than GDP, and eliminated the anomaly in Preston’s Curve (Figure 6, right). The correlation with GDP was spurious. In fact, their model suggests that both GDP and health are ultimately driven by the amount of schooling children receive. This finding has enormous implications for development priorities in national and global policy. For decades, the neoliberal mantra, based on Preston’s Curve, has dominated mainstream thinking—raise a country’s GDP and health benefits will follow. Lutz and Kebede show that a more effective policy would be to invest in schooling for children, with all the ensuing benefits in quality of life that will bring.

Pinker’s joke has come full circle. In reality, for the past few decades, the dean chose the money. Now, he can look at the data and mutter: “I should have taken the wisdom.”

Graph 7: False equivalencies, false dichotomies.

As we can increasingly see, many of Pinker’s missteps arise from the fact that he conflates two different dynamics of the past few centuries: improvements in many aspects of the human experience, and the rise of neoliberal, laissez-faire capitalism. Whether this is because of faulty reasoning on his part, or a conscious strategy to obfuscate, the result is the same. Most readers will walk away from his book with the indelible impression that free market capitalism is an underlying driver of human progress.

Pinker himself states the importance of avoiding this kind of conflation. “Progress,” he declares, “consists not in accepting every change as part of an indivisible package… Progress consists of unbundling the features of a social process as much as we can to maximize the human benefits while minimizing the harms.” If only he took his own admonition more seriously!

Instead, he laces his book with an unending stream of false equivalencies and false dichotomies that lead a reader inexorably to the conclusion that progress and capitalism are part of the same package. One of his favorite tropes is to create a false equivalency between right-wing extremism and the progressive movement on the left. He tells us that the regressive factions that undergirded Donald Trump’s presidency were “abetted by a narrative shared by many of their fiercest opponents, in which the institutions of modernity have failed and every aspect of life is in deepening crisis—the two sides in macabre agreement that wrecking those institutions will make the world a better place.” He even goes so far as to implicate Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election debacle: “The left and right ends of the political spectrum,” he opines, “incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.”

Implicit in Pinker’s political model is the belief that progress can only arise from the brand of centrist politics espoused by many in the mainstream Democratic Party. He perpetuates a false dichotomy of “right versus left” based on a twentieth-century version of politics that has been irrelevant for more than a generation. “The left,” he writes, “has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism.” He contrasts “industrial capitalism,” on the one hand, which has rescued humanity from universal poverty, with communism, which has “brought the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.”

By painting this black and white, Manichean landscape of capitalist good versus communist evil, Pinker obliterates from view the complex, sophisticated models of a hopeful future that have been diligently constructed over decades by a wide range of progressive thinkers. These fresh perspectives eschew the Pinker-style false dichotomy of traditional left versus right. Instead, they explore the possibilities of replacing a destructive global economic system with one that offers potential for greater fairness, sustainability, and human flourishing. In short, a model for continued progress for the twenty-first century.

While the thought leaders of the progressive movement are too numerous to mention here, an illustration of this kind of thinking is seen in Graph 7. It shows an integrated model of the economy, aptly called “Doughnut Economics,” that has been developed by pioneering economist Kate Raworth. The inner ring, called Social Foundation, represents the minimum level of life’s essentials, such as food, water, and housing, required for the possibility of a healthy and wholesome life. The outer ring, called Ecological Ceiling, represents the boundaries of Earth’s life-giving systems, such as a stable climate and healthy oceans, within which we must remain to achieve sustained wellbeing for this and future generations. The red areas within the ring show the current shortfall in the availability of bare necessities to the world’s population; the red zones outside the ring illustrate the extent to which we have already overshot the safe boundaries in several essential earth systems. Humanity’s goal, within this model, is to develop policies that bring us within the safe and just space of the “doughnut” between the two rings.

Figure 7: Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economic Model. Source: Kate Raworth; Christian Guthier/The Lancet Planetary Health.

Raworth, along with many others who care passionately about humanity’s future progress, focus their efforts, not on the kind of zero-sum, false dichotomies propagated by Pinker, but on developing fresh approaches to building a future that works for all on a sustainable and flourishing earth.

Graph 8: Progress Is Caused By… Progressives!

This brings us to the final graph, which is actually one of Pinker’s own. It shows the decline in recent years of web searches for sexist, racist, and homophobic jokes. Along with other statistics, he uses this as evidence in his argument that, contrary to what we read in the daily headlines, retrograde prejudices based on gender, race, and sexual orientation are actually on the decline. He attributes this in large part to “the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream.”

Figure 8. Source: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now.

How, we might ask, did this happen? As Pinker himself expresses, we can’t assume that this kind of moral progress just happened on its own. “If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down,” he avers, “it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down… That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely.”

Looking back into history, Pinker recognizes that changes in moral norms came about because progressive minds broke out of their society’s normative frames and applied new ethics based on a higher level of morality, dragging the mainstream reluctantly in their wake, until the next generation grew up adopting a new moral baseline. “Global shaming campaigns,” he explains, “even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.”

It is hard to comprehend how the same person who wrote these words can then turn around and hurl invectives against what he decries as “political correctness police, and social justice warriors” caught up in “identity politics,” not to mention his loathing for an environmental movement that “subordinates human interests to a transcendent entity, the ecosystem.” Pinker seems to view all ethical development from prehistory to the present day as “progress,” but any pressure to shift society further along its moral arc as anathema.

This is the great irony of Pinker’s book. In writing a paean to historical progress, he then takes a staunchly conservative stance to those who want to continue it. It’s as though he sees himself at the mountain’s peak, holding up a placard saying “All progress stops here, unless it’s on my terms.”

In reality, many of the great steps made in securing the moral progress Pinker applauds came from brave individuals who had to resist the opprobrium of the Steven Pinkers of their time while they devoted their lives to reducing the suffering of others. When Thomas Paine affirmed the “Rights of Man” back in 1792, he was tried and convicted in absentia by the British for seditious libel. It would be another 150 years before his visionary idea was universally recognized in the United Nations. Emily Pankhurst was arrested seven times in her struggle to obtain women’s suffrage and was constantly berated by “moderates” of the time for her radical approach in striving for something that has now become the unquestioned norm. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, with the first public exposé of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, her solitary stance was denounced as hysterical and unscientific. Just eight years later, twenty million Americans marched to protect the environment in the first Earth Day.

These great strides in moral progress continue to this day. It’s hard to see them in the swirl of daily events, but they’re all around us: in the legalization of same sex marriage, in the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, and most recently in the way the #MeToo movement is beginning to shift norms in the workplace. Not surprisingly, the current steps in social progress are vehemently opposed by Steven Pinker, who has approvingly retweeted articles attacking both Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and who rails at the World Economic Forum against what he terms “political correctness.”

It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By slyly tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim. Progress in the quality of life, for humans and nonhumans alike, is something that anyone with a heart should celebrate. It did not come about through capitalism, and in many cases, it has been achieved despite the “free market” that Pinker espouses. Personally, I’m proud to be a progressive, and along with many others, to devote my energy to achieve progress for this and future generations. And if and when we do so, it won’t be thanks to Steven Pinker and his specious arguments.

This article is published here unchanged under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Is The World Getting Better?

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My last post highlighted the philosopher Max More’s views that life is getting better. Today I will discuss several readers’ thoughtful comments and then express my thoughts.

(You can view these readers’ full comments in the comment section of the previous post.)

Lyle T wrote “While Mr. More is correct regarding most specifics, I think the conclusions he draws are misguided …” For example, More is right that air quality has improved but that is mostly because of government regulation, something More opposes. Furthermore, much societal progress has brought about environmental destruction. Lyle thinks we need to learn to live with less.

Chris Crawford agrees “that people fail to recognize the enormous improvements we have enjoyed.” But no matter how many metrics show progress we cannot know that these trends will continue in the future. Furthermore, Crawford fears “that we will reach a point where the progress of technology will outpace the progress of our ability to keep it safe.” Thus he concludes that “civilization will destroy itself before the end of this century.”

Ed Gibney’s critique is direct. “This is entirely human-centered. The dread comes from looking at what all this human prosperity is doing to the rest of the planet, which is certain to haunt us as well. Until the techno-optimist people engage with the Planetary Boundaries literature they will stay stuck in a dangerous fantasy.

Bruce Watson is receptive to the progress message. “I have given up trying to convince people that life is better now. I believe most people somehow feel better by feeling worse about the world. If the world “sucks now,” you are freed of responsibility, justified in your own disappointments, and in good company among fellow depressives. That is why news is more negative — because negativity sells.”

My Brief Thoughts

I agree with the critics that 1)much of what we call progress has destroyed the ecosystem, and 2)progress in the past is no guarantee of future progress.

A further critique of optimism about the future is the many existential risks we face. No matter how much progress we have made previously there are many ways humanity might go extinct shortly. (I have previously discussed, for example, the recent UN report on the destruction of the ecosystem, and Jared Diamond’s and Bill McKibbon’s worries about whether the human race will survive our current crises.) Things may be going along just fine and then … it can all be over. This is the best time to live—no doubt—but that says little about whether the future will be better.

Nonetheless, I am sympathetic with Mr. Watson’s view. I’ve often found gloom and doom to be the preferred sentiment of both intellectuals and regular folks. Such an attitude can be helpful if meant to awaken us to the many dangers we face, but it is counterproductive if it leads to despair or apathy.

What I do believe fervently is that, for better or worse, science and technology are the only means by which we might have a better future—we must evolve. So, for the moment I still believe in the transhumanist credo. Transhumanism is:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities … transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.1

However, I may be mistaken, and perhaps humanity will become more morally and intellectually virtuous by less drastic means. Or even if the successful advance of science and technology is the key to our future survival and flourishing it may be that we will destroy ourselves first. I simply do not know how best to proceed into the future or if we will even have one. (Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate in Physics and father of the atomic model, is quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!”)

I simply don’t know the future, and I don’t know how best to proceed into it.

But I certainly prefer to live in the present time compared with any time in the past, and I hope that future beings will say the same.

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1. from the Humanity+ website’s FAQ section.

I just became aware of “Despite Climate Change, Today Is the Best Time To Be Born” and “Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change.”

Life is Getting Better: Why Don’t We Believe it?

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© 2024 Max More
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

According to just about all decent measures the present is better than the past. It is likely that the future will be better than the present. Most people believe the opposite. The mass media promotes this false opposite. The long-established label for this view is reactionary.

The common conviction that things are getting worse presents a major obstacle to the growth and success of life extension and biostasis. If life is getting worse, the future in which we hope to live or to wake from biostasis will be a horrible place, perhaps nightmarish and apocalyptic. Why would you want to take a journey into such a world?

Excessively and misguidedly negative views of the present and future have other bad effects. Overly gloomy views can spur ill-considered and panicky reactions both individually and at the level of policy. These can be expensive and draw resources from more deserving areas. These policies can also have bad side effects, such as when fear of nuclear power led to more dirty energy sources and then to expensive and unreliable sources. Unreasonable gloom seems to be feeding a huge rise in depression, especially in young people.

My interest in countering gloom and doom is straightforward. I want humanity to flourish. I want every individual to have a chance to live much longer and better. Personally, I want to live longer and better. Falsely pessimistic beliefs about the future will reduce my chances and yours. I am much more concerned about passive/fatalistic pessimism than an evaluation-based pessimism that leaves open the objection of corrective action.

The more uninformed a person is about real trends, the more pessimistic they are about the future.

Just how negative are people’s beliefs about progress? I will show that people’s beliefs about the last few decades are highly negative; they are incorrect; and the more uninformed a person is about real trends, the more pessimistic they are about the future. Despite this last point, disturbingly there is evidence that those with more formal education do no better in tracking of reality in important respects than the less formally educated. As Hans Rosling wrote on p.9 of his highly recommended book Factfulness: “Some of these groups are even worse than the general public”

Real concerns

A popular parody of views like mine is to lyingly assert that I am a Dr. Pangloss, a unmitigated optimist who believes that, somehow, everything just works out and nothing could be better than it is right now. (I’ll set aside the clear tension between “things will get better” and “this is the best of all possible worlds.”)

Things obviously don’t “work out” all the time. Plenty of horrible things happen and are still happening – even as, overall, things have been getting better. The long-term trend for violence is down but still we see the mass deaths from Stalin and Hitler and China. In fact, one sign of cultural decay is that such mass deaths are often seen as a good thing – something that reduces human numbers, human effects on the environment, and consumption. As Rosling put it, things can be bad while also getting better.

Things get better because we believe they can and because we then work to make them better.

Some people seem to believe that if we believe things are generally getting better that we will slack off on making things better. They confuse a passive optimism with active optimism. On the contrary, things get better because we believe they can and because we then work to make them better. If we are convinced that the world and its direction is against us, we will are likely to be discouraged from efforts at betterment.

Despite all the measures by which the world (or most of it) improve over time, I am concerned about trends in beliefs and policies. I am concerned about growing fear, regulation, degrowth, anti-capitalism, unreliable energy, and safetyism, and demographic decline leading to stagnation, an innovation famine, plummeting population, and the decline of a truly scientific mindset.

There are reasonable questions about how much we can achieve positive outcomes without negatives – not growth and pollution because they are not permanently tied together, but material abundance and human laziness and abuse of free time.

These philosophical, cultural, ideological, and political trends mean that continued progress is not inevitable. Nothing in this or other essays is meant to suggest that progress just happens. I am opposing false gloom precisely because progress is not inevitable (why would I care otherwise?) and certainly can be slowed down drastically.

Past Golden Ages and Future Ash Ages

In the minds of many, our lives and the world are getting worse and this will continue, so that the future will be worse still. This implies that the past must have been better. Indeed, many cultures include myths of idyllic days of yore. In Western culture, the Arcadian myth conveyed the idea of a past age of pastoralism and harmony with nature. The Garden of Eden embodies some elements of the same idea.

This concept also informed Renaissance mythology. The Golden Age idea similarly saw humans and the world as being corrupted by civilization, production, and rationality (especially in the late 18th to mid-19th century Romantic version in which the past and nature are glorified). The Golden Age as found in Greek mythology describes the decline of the state of peoples though five ages, from Gold to Silver to Bronze and on to the Heroic and Iron ages.

The mythical Golden Age was a time of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity where perpetually youthful people had no need of work to feed themselves. In South Asia, related concepts appear in Vedic or ancient Hindu culture  which saw history as cyclical, with only one age (Satya Yuga) being the Golden Age. Related ideas appear in the ancient Middle East and throughout the ancient world.

We have been used to hearing about “the good old days”. Today, we are more likely to hear this in the form of: “We are destroying the planet and ourselves.”

If the past was golden, the future is ash. Popular narratives of the future revolve around violence, starvation, destruction, devastation, hopelessness, slavery, conquerors, dust, and radiation. Let’s set aside novels and TV shows and just consider the movies.

The 1950s through the 1970s brought us movies such as The Day the World Ended (1955), On the Beach (1959), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Planet of the Apes (1968) – followed by many more, including Planet of the Apes (2001), and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), The Omega Man (1971), The Andromeda Strain (1971), and Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), Holocaust 2000/The Chosen (1977), Mad Max (1979) – followed by Mad Max 2 (1981), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Soylent Green (1973), Zardoz (1974), Logan’s Run, (1976), and Damnation Alley (1977).

The 1980s and ‘90s thrilled us with Bladerunner (1982), The Day After (1983), When the Wind Blows (1986), The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and the sequels, 12 Monkeys (1995), Day of the Dead (1985) and its sequels and remakes and all the other zombie movies, Waterworld (1995), and The Matrix (1999) and its sequels.

The new millennium didn’t change our taste for apocalypse and disaster. We were treated to: World War Z (2013), 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), The Road (2009), Children of Men (2006), The Island (2005), Snowpiercer (2013), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Equilibrium, (2002), The Book of Eli (2010), Geostorm (2017), Cargo (2017), How it Ends (2018), Mortal Engines (2018), Extinction (2018), and A Quiet Place (2018). Most recently, we have seen Light of my Life (2019), I Am Mother (2019), IO (2019), Songbird (2020) – a movie about Covid-23, and The Covid-19 Pandemic (2021). Oh, wait, that last one wasn’t a movie, it was just surreal.

It’s close to impossible to find generally positive portrayals of the future. No wonder so many people reflexively expect the future to be a miserable place they would rather not see.

Mistaken gloom

In his 2017 book, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, historian of ideas Johan Norberg relates the results of a 2005 study he commissioned looking into the views of 1,000 Swedes on global development. Swedes’ answers to eight questions revealed that, in every age and income group, they were wrong on all questions. 73% thought that hunger had increased and 76% that extreme poverty had increased. This was during a period when they had both fallen faster than ever before in history. Disturbingly, those who had been through higher education knew the least about the progress that had been made.

Those who had been through higher education knew the least about the progress that had been made.

It’s not just the Swedes. A YouGov poll conducted in 2015 found that only 5% of Britons thought the world was getting better while 71% said it was getting worse. Respondents in the UK badly underestimated progress in education, health, and fertility reduction in the world. Notably, the results from those with university degrees are not better than the average results. Based on several questions, they are worse. [Norberg, p. 206]

A couple of years ago as I write this, I engaged in a debate at the Oxford Union with some highly educated people. After I had made the case for the desirability of extended longevity, including anticipating objections based on population growth, literature professor N. Katherine Hayles spoke. She reluctantly granted that it might be true that we were polluting less per capita but said she could not imagine that we polluted less in total, including where she lived. If I had been given the opportunity to respond, I would have asked her to step outside and look and smell the air where she was in Los Angeles. Then go and look at pictures of L.A. air a few decades earlier.

More broadly, I would have pointed out that it is not remotely implausible for pollution to fall both relative to population and in total. The population of the USA is growing at around 0.58%. If we can reduce pollution by, say, 0.75% annually, pollution falls absolutely as well as relatively.

In reality, air pollution in major cities has been falling for at least half a century. Soot over Manhattan fell by two-thirds from the end of WWII to the end of the century. In Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Detroit, the average number of days of poor air quality fell by around half in the period from 1978 to 1992. In Los Angeles, the number of days with unhealthy air quality fell by half in one decade, from 1985 to 1995.

Between 1980 and 2014 there was a reduction of more than two-thirds in six major air pollutants: volatile organic compounds, nitrogen dioxide, direct particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, between 1980 and 2014 there was a reduction of more than two-thirds in six major air pollutants: volatile organic compounds, nitrogen dioxide, direct particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead. You can see similar trends in the United Kingdom. The concentration of smoke and sulfur dioxide increased in London for 300 years from the late sixteenth century but then fell rapidly. As Bjørn Lomborg put it, “the London air has not been cleaner than today since the Middle Ages.” [Lomborg, 2001.]

In the US and other wealthy countries, water quality has been improving for decades, greatly expanding the number of streams and lakes suitable for fishing and swimming. The number of oil spills has fallen dramatically – by 99% between 1970 and 2014. Deforestation in wealthy countries has stopped and reversed. [Moore & Simon, 2002; Norberg, 2017.]

The Gapminder Foundation has worked mightily to show the gulf between the actual state of the world and its trends and the public’s understanding. The Foundation asked 12 basic fact questions of the general public in 14 wealthy countries. Respondents choose between three alternatives for each question. Purely at random, monkeys could pick 4 out of 12 correct answers. Alas, the score for humans was a sad 2.2.

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Since people do much worse than random chance, they must have inaccurate assumptions based on misleading or outdated information. Hans Rosling, professor of international health, discussed these results and the causes in his excellent book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better than You Think.

A recent survey asked, “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”. In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US there were only 6%, and France and Australia were the gloomiest at 3%. The most positive were China at 41% and Indonesia at 23%.

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The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a detailed survey of 26,489 people across 28 countries. [Jackson 2017; Our World in Data ref.1 & 2] The first two charts show that people in every country have falsely negative views of changes in global extreme poverty and in child mortality. 52% believe that the percentage of people in extreme poverty (< int-$1.90 per day) is rising. In actuality, this percentage has been declining for two centuries. The reduction in extreme poverty has accelerated in the last 20 years.

On the flip side, the number of people who live on over 10 dollars per day increased by 900 million in the last 10 years. This is not to say that everyone is doing just fine. 730 million people are living on less than int-$1.90 per day. We can expect that number to still be around 500 million in 2030 since the world’s very poorest economies are stagnating.

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The same mismatch between the reality of global progress and subjective, uninformed (or misinformed) belief exists when we consider child mortality. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. In the USA, only 26% answered correctly, and 34% in Britain. Yet the data clearly show that the “child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has halved in the last 20 years to 3.9%”. It’s not a recent trend. That’s a 90% improvement compared to two centuries ago.

Again, in this area, progress has accelerated. Here are the percentages dying in the first five years: 1900: 36.2%. 1960: 18.5%. 1990: 9.32%. 2017: 3.9%. Plenty of room for improvement remains since nearly 15,000 children still die per day.

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When people were asked “over the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?”, 35% answered “better”, 27% “stay the same”, and 29% “will get worse” (with 9% “do not know”). Japan was the least hopeful (10% better, 44% the same, 26% worse) with France and Belgium the gloomiest (49% worse). The percentage expecting living conditions to improve was 27% in the United States, 25% in Great Britain, and 18% in Germany. Interestingly, the most hopeful were all low-income or lower-middle income countries one generation ago (1990): Kenya (68%), Nigeria (67%), India (65%), China (58%), Indonesia (56%), and Peru (49%).

In 1800 there were fewer than 100 million literate people of that age; today there are 4.6 billion.

In 1820 only 10% of people older than 15 years were literate; in 1930 it was one in three and now we are at 86% globally. From a different perspective, in 1800 there were fewer than 100 million literate people of that age; today there are 4.6 billion. When asked about literacy rates today, in the UK, only 8% answered correctly – but only 4% of those with a university education! In the US, 22% answered correctly.

There are “softer” measures of the quality of life in societies that I cannot address here. I will merely quote Andrew Sullivan: “in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era.” He also notes: “The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear.” [Sullivan 2020].

Those with more optimism about people and the world getting better off in the next 15 years answered more questions correctly. Those who are pessimistic are much less likely to have a sound understanding about what is happening in the world.

When in the past would you prefer to live?

How can you make a dent in someone’s pessimism when you have only a couple of minutes? The pessimistic answer is: “You can’t! Forget about it.” A more hopeful attitude looks for a shortcut. Here’s what I have often done:

You are talking to someone who clearly thinks the world has gotten worse and will continue down a path of immiseration, environmental destruction, resource depletion, loss of freedom and dignity, and increasing violence. Ask them this question: “When in the past would you prefer to live, compared to today?” Help them out a little. (You can customize your help a bit to fit their sex and race – or their interest in those factors.) Use clear and vivid examples. Ask them: Would you prefer to live back when

• There were no painkillers? What if you had to have a tooth pulled or a leg amputated or injured your back?• There were no antiseptics? If you need surgery (or what passed for surgery), you would be about as likely to die from infection as from the reason for the operation.• Women could not own property and had no vote?• The streets were full of filth, human and animal feces, and rats?• Slavery was common?• War was perpetual and conscription universal?• You would lose most of your children as infants and you/your wife had a high chance of dying when giving birth?

How has the world changed since you were born?

Here’s a quick, easy, educational, and fun thing to try – and to send to your friends, pessimist or otherwise. Go to this URL to examine “your life in numbers”:

You’ll find a concise summary of six important ways in which the world has changed for the better over the last 50 years. For instance, globally: Life expectancy has increased from 56 to 72; infant mortality has fallen 72%; average income per person rose 372%, after adjusting for inflation; the food supply increased by 22%; the length of schooling increased 110%; and political freedom rose by 55%.

But the fun part comes when you plug in your year and country of birth. Using the massive database at HumanProgress.org, you will then see how your country has changed since you came into existence in terms of the six measures above. You can also plug in another country for comparison. Here are my results:

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Income per person between the USA and UK looks wrong or at least outdated. Economic growth has been stronger in the USA than in the UK for years and the gap has compounded.

This interactive feature only hints at the remarkable depth and breadth of data available on this website. HumanProgress describes itself as “a data-driven educational website devoted to improving the public’s understanding of the state of the world.” Statistics come from reliable third-party sources. You can easily drill down into all kinds of measures of progress. Under “Find Data”, you will find 2259 datasets. You can also dive into the material through around 40 topics. If you like exploring numbers on Worldometer, you will find this absorbing.

Here are some other illustrations of global improvements.

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Child mortality (deaths in the first five years of life) have fallen dramatically around the world:

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Global food supply per person has been growing for decades:

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The percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty has declined tremendously between 1820 and 2015:

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See here at Our World in Data for more.

Whenever there is a plane accident or near-accident, many of us believe air travel is getting more dangerous. The real trend is strongly toward greater safety:

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Air pollution remains a serious problem in some countries but the trend from 1700 to 2016 is down for suspended particulate matter:

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The number of oil spills each year has decreased tenfold compared to the 1970s. From ITOPF.

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You certainly would not get the impression from the news but climate-related deaths have continually declined. Since 1920, the decline is more than 97%.

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In the USA, catastrophic losses as a percentage of GDP have almost halved in the last 40 years. This observation is consistent with a global plunge in vulnerability trends. The global average mortality rate has fallen by 6.5 times and the global loss rate has fallen by almost 5 times between 1980-89 and 2007-16. As societies become wealthier, mortality and vulnerability decline.

Given that the oceans are rising by two or three millimeters per year (with no acceleration), you might reasonably expect that we are losing global land area. In fact, the opposite is true. Between 1985 and 2015, reports Roger Pielke, Jr., global sea levels rose by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches). This increased global coastal land area by almost 34,000 square kilometers which, as Pielke notes, is about the size of Belgium.

Some of this is due to tectonic events such as Japan’s January 4, 2024 7.6 Noto Peninsula earthquake which raised the coast and created in some places more than 200 meters of new shoreline. But it is also due to human activity from damming and building dykes to drainage to building of new land out of the sea. This conclusion appears to be widely shared by researchers.

Why so gloomy?

What factors strengthen pessimism and unrealistically gloomy beliefs about the present and the future? It’s surely unnecessary to mention the news factor. More than ever, the working motto of most media is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The news typically presents us with a tiny selection of the worst events of the last few hours. New stories grab the viewer’s attention by provoking fear with a “teaser”. They want the viewer to stay with them so they suggest that the solution for reducing that fear will be found in the news story. They leave the viewer with more despondency, not less, and wanting more information.

Whenever we are subjected to “the news” – whether in the old-fashioned form on TV, radio, or newspaper, or online – we are bombarded with a concentrated beam of negativity, of violence, hatred, conflict, accidents, disasters, accusations, and fears. Others have provided evidence that this fiendish and entropic signal makes us more depressed. Isn’t that surprising!

Not only are we drowned in negative stories, the trend shows this problem getting worse:

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Fear and worry are tools for survival, productions of evolution. In our culture, the context has changed drastically. We are bombarded by negative inputs. And these are bad things that we can usually do little or nothing about. Positive things typically happen over much longer periods of time than negative things. What takes years to build can be destroyed in a moment.

And even without the media distorting our view, our own psychology creates distortion aplenty. The availability heuristic concerns how easy it is to extract something from memory. The more memorable an incident is, the more probable we think it is. Bad news tends to stick in the mind better and is more easily recalled. There is also “they psychology of moralizing”. Complaining and criticizing sends a signal to others that you care about them. “Bad” information usually gets processed more thoroughly than “good” information.

Our tendency toward “declinism” – a predisposition to view the past favorably and worry that the future is going to be bad – seems to be due to the combination of two factors: the “reminiscence” bump and the positivity effect. The former was identified in studies from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Researchers showed that when they asked 70-year-olds to recall autobiographical memories, they tended to best remember events that happened to them at around the ages of 10-30. Recall dropped for events that happened when the participants were aged between 30-60, and then increased again for ages nearer to 70. So, you’re more likely to remember things that happened to you in late childhood or early adulthood.

The positivity effect is the idea that as people get older, they tend to experience fewer negative emotions, and they’re more likely to remember positive things over negative things. The combination of the reminiscence bump and the positivity effect means that:

people are more likely to remember events from late childhood or early adulthood, and critically more likely to remember positive events from the past. In other words, you remember your younger years more favourably, which might go some way to explaining why some people experience declinism. [Etchells, 2015.]

I have shown that most people believe that life is getting worse. I’ve given or pointed to strong evidence that this belief is mistaken. Over time, life is getting better in numerous important ways. And I’ve briefly noted some of the factors shaping our excessively pessimistic beliefs.

In future entries, I will cover the Simon-Ehrlich bet and look at the appalling number of bad pessimistic predictions – a record of failure from which we fail to learn. I will also look at the infamous Limits to Growth and its equally bad recent update.

[An earlier version of this article appeared in Cryonics, February 2021.]

For the record: This essay draws a lot on Rosling’s Factfulness but also on Norvig’s book, and my view on these issue has been informed by numerous other writers since the 1980s, including Julian Simon, Ronald Bailey, Indur Goklany, Bjorn Lomborg, and recently Steven Pinker

______________________________________________________________________

Here are some relevant sources in support of More’s thesis.

Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A hopeful history. Bloomsbury Publishing.Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking.Ritchie, H. (2024). Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Little, Brown Spark.Roser, M. (2018). Most of us are wrong about how the world has changed (especially those who are pessimistic about the future). Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-worldRosling, H., Rönnlund, A. R., & Rosling, O. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books.

More’s References

Bailey, Ronald. “Earth Day Turns 50: Half a century later, a look back at the forecasters who got the future wrong—and one who got it right.” Reason, May 2020.

Book, Joakim. “Worldviews Are Pessimistic Because They Are Outdated.” HumanProgress, December 19, 2019

Dinic, Milan. “Is the World Getting Better or Worse?” YouGov, January 8, 2016.

Etchells, Pete. “Declinism: is the world actually getting worse?” The Guardian, January 16, 2015.

Highlights from Ignorance survey in the UK

Ignorance Survey in the USA 2013

Goklany, Indur M. The Improving State of the World: Why we’re living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet. Cato Institute, 2009.

Lomborg, Bjørn. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Matthews, Dylan. “23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better.” Vox, Oct 17, 2018.

Jackson, Chris. Global Perceptions of Development Progress: ‘Perils of Perceptions’ Research’, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.

Moore, Stephen & Julian L. Simon. It’s Getting Better All the Time: Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. Cato Institute, 2000.

Norberg, Johan. Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Oneworld Publications, 2017.

Parker, Kim, Rich Morin, and Juliana Menasce Horowitz. “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts.” Pew Research, March 21, 2019.

Pooley, Gale L., and Marian L. Tupy. “Luck or Insight? The Simon-Ehrlich Bet Re-Examined.” Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(2), pages 277-280, June.

Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Harper, 2010.

Rosling, Hans, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Book, 2018.

The Simon Abundance Index

Sullivan, Andrew. “Is There a Way to Acknowledge America’s Progress?” New York Magazine, January 17, 2020.

Our World in Data: Graphs and text used by permission, CC BY 4.0. https://ourworldindata.org/about

1. https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world

2. https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts

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