The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

In the two decades following 1980, the proportion of people in the developing world who were malnourished fell from 28 percent to 17 percent. That’s still unconscionably high, but it’s a lot better than it was. Then there’s the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). It’s probably the best measure of the state of humanity because it combines key data on income, health, and literacy. At the bottom of the HDI list of 177 countries is the African country of Niger—and yet Niger’s 2003 HDI score is 17 percent higher than it was in 1975. The same trend can be seen in almost all very poor countries. Mali is 31 percent better off. Chad is up 22 percent. Doom-mongers like to point to the soaring populations of the poor world as a potential source of future catastrophe, but what the doomsters never mention is that those populations aren’t soaring because women are having far more babies than in the past. It’s that their babies are far less likely to die than in the past—which everybody but the grumpiest Malthusian would consider to be very good news. Put all these numbers together and what do they add up to? In a sentence: We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.