If you open a newspaper today, or browse Facebook, open your
favourite news site or even turn on the television news, chances are you’ll see
stories about death and mayhem, corruption and crime, and other terrible and
depressing events. What is the world coming to? It seems as if the world is
getting worse by the minute, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.
But is it really? We are now living in the information age,
and our consumption of news has also increased as a result. A research team
from the University of Southern California crunched the numbers, and we now
know that in 1986, we received about forty 85 page newspapers worth of
information each day. By 2007, this had skyrocketed to 174 newspapers per day.
Perhaps it’s not the world that is getting so much bleaker – it’s just that we
receive so much more information now than in the past!
Good news seems like a thing of the past. People love to
blame the media for the plethora of negative news. Claims range from journalists
seeking out bad news since it is more compelling to the audience, to the fact
the cynical reports on crime and corruption are simpler stories. But the truth,
alas, is a bit more complex.
Researchers at McGill University in Canada devised an
experiment whereby people were to select news stories to read under the guise
of tracking eye movement. And while the participant afterwards reported that
they preferred reading good news, the study showed that they invariably chose
negative stories. It is, in fact, us that have trained the media to report bad
news, simply by responding more to negative tones.
These researchers suspect this is linked to our ‘negativity
bias.’ As a species, we’ve evolved to react quickly to potential threats, and
we still seek out signals of a bad situation we should avoid. People generally
have more to lose by not learning about a negative event than they have to gain
from absorbing a positive one.
But some good news deserves to be brought to attention.
The world is not as violent as it seems. While there’s a lot
more news about wars, the world is currently in the longest period of peace
ever seen. No major powers have clashed since World War II, and even the wars
we have now would be classified as skirmishes in times past. Global violence
has declined steadily since the end of the World Wars. Instead of causing us to
become more violent, the modern world and its cultural institutions has made us
much more noble. This is the most peaceful period in world history!
AIDS was once an automatic death sentence. But thanks to
antiretrovirals, HIV patients can now live decades past their diagnoses. The
global rate of HIV infections have dropped by 25% since 2001. And access to
these life-saving drugs have increased by 22-fold. Namibia has benefitted
greatly from antiretrovirals, especially its effect of reducing mother-child
transmission of the virus. There are young people in Namibia walking around,
working, starting families and seemingly completely healthy who have had HIV
for their entire lives.
We are also conquering poverty. In 1981, 70 percent of those
in the developing world subsisted on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and
42 percent had to manage with less than $1 a day. Today, 43 percent are below
$2 a day and 14 percent below $1. From 1990 to 2012, worldwide poverty was cut
in half. Never before in the history of the world have so many people been
lifted out of poverty in such a brief stretch of time.
And we’re also living longer. In 1810, the life expectancy
worldwide was below 40. In Africa and Asia, the average life expectancy was
about 25. But science marched on. We’ve increased agricultural output, and
significantly reduced death by hunger. Advances in medicine have enabled us to
emerge victorious against most parasitic and infectious diseases, with diseases
like polio almost wiped out. The average
life expectancy in Africa is now at 60 years, a 50% increase in 45 years. And
while Namibia bottomed out with the AIDS epidemic in 2001 with a life
expectancy of 54 years, we’re now back at 65 years. Between 1840 and 2007, life
expectancy world-wide increased by one year every three years, and it shows no
sign of stopping.
We are actually living in humanity’s golden age. People
sometimes have so little to complain about, that they’ll invent new things to
be upset about – and if that’s not a glowing endorsement of how far we’ve come,
I don’t know what is.
So remember next time you read or watch the news, and browse
Facebook, or visit a website – the world is not as bad as it seems. And if
someone tells you things were better ‘back in the old days,’ you can laugh. The
world is better now than it has ever been, and I cannot wait to see where we’ll
go from here.
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