The World Is Getting Better
Channel: Daily Insight
Date: 2017-12-01

If you pay attention to the news media, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that the world is a terrible place. “Negative news gets more views”, as I’ve often said. It comes down to our evolutionary survival instinct. Back in the day, we had to pay a lot of attention to the lion stalking across the plain. If there was a forest fire coming towards us, we had to react. Early humans faced the interminable problem of how best to survive in their immediate surroundings. 

But nowadays, the forest fire that we’re watching on TV is in a different location. The group of terrorists that are menacing the local village are in a completely different country. Most of the bad news we observe will never ever affect us, but yet our emotional response is identical to when our ancestors saw a prowling lion crossing the savanna.

Negative news is immediate. When a car drives along a footpath killing some pedestrians, the results are clear. The mobile phone footage of the event is broadcast across the globe.

Good news on the other hand, often occurs over a much longer period of time. Reduction in poverty levels, for example, would be a hard thing to show on the nightly news. But according to the historical data, the news could have accurately run the headline, “Number Of People In Extreme Poverty Fell By 137000 Since Yesterday”. And they could have run it every day for the last 25 years. It’s a very good story, but apparently not “newsworthy”.

So that’s what this video is about – covering some of the absolutely amazing things that humans have accomplished in the last few decades.

All of theses statistics tell me one thing – the world is getting better. I have no doubt that the future of the world is bright. Sure, we have our ups and downs with wars and famine, dictatorships and inequality, obesity and diabetes. But ultimately, the human spirit prevails. Automation is only going to bring more abundance and cheaper cost of living. Sure, some people will lose their jobs, but when everything becomes cheap, then there is no need to have a high salary.

So we shouldn’t lose hope. Don’t listen to the negative news all the time. Realise that the world is getting better – poverty rates are declining, food and clothing is getting cheaper, education is abundant, we’re living longer, we’re less violent, we’re more literate – there’s very few bad things happening in the historical sense.

I think Russian writer Leo Tolstoy put it very well, “There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.”

That says it all, I think.

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