Why we ignore progress (2 of 2)

The single most important trend in human history is too often ignored.

Nov 28, 2023

The following is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. It is part of a series of excerpts that I am publishing on Substack in sequential order. For greater context you can start with the first excerpt from this book.

You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.

Material progress is a fact. I am sorry if you do not believe it, but that is just how it is. By any of dozens of metrics, we are better off materially than we have ever been in our history. If you do not believe me, then look at the metrics of economic growth, human development, freedom, slavery, poverty, agricultural production, literacy, diet, famines, sanitation, drinking water, life expectancy, neonatal mortality, disease, education, access to electricity, housing, and violence (to name just a few), and in virtually every nation. And there are plenty more in my book.

Based on the evidence that I have presented here and in my book, one might expect everyone to be well aware of the progress that surrounds them and to have a positive outlook on the future. After all, every metric that I presented to document progress in is easily accessible on the internet.

Unfortunately, this is far from the case.

In my previous post on the subject, I mentioned some of the reasons for these beliefs:

Ignorance of the facts
Willful self-deception
Not understanding what progress actually is

In this post, I will add in more reasons why so many people reject the existence of progress.

Negativity Bias

As Steven Pinker argues in Enlightenment Now, perhaps the biggest reason why people ignore progress and are pessimistic about the future is that we are born with a negativity bias. Instinctively, humans react more strongly to negative information than positive information.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. Our brains are designed to enable us to survive, not be happy. Imagine you are a Hunger-Gatherer roaming the African savannah. You see a cluster of bushes and immediately two thoughts pop into your head. The first is “There are often lions near a cluster of bushes”. The second thought is “There is often food near a cluster of bushes”.

Any person who does not take that first impulse seriously might suffer a sudden death, while a person who does not take seriously the second might pass up one meal. The difference in consequences are just too great. Now if the person is near starvation, the consequences might even up, but that person must still be extremely aware of the threat of lions.

This phenomenon is well known to psychologists. In psychological experiments involving financial transactions, humans react far more strongly to losing ten dollars than winning the same amount. In assessing the character of a person, participants place more weight on bad actions made by the person compared to good actions taken by that same person.

This causes people to view what is happening in the world very differently. No matter how good things are as a result of progress, there are always bad things going on: wars, diseases, recessions, unemployment, and poverty. The brain naturally weighs bad things much more heavily than good things. It is natural for people to believe “the world is going to hell” while being surrounded by widespread progress.

Another important psychological principle is that people tend to view other people outside their immediate personal contact as being worse off than they really are. People generally view the general public as financially worse off than they really are.

The flip side of this is the positivity bias, where people tend to have a more positive view of themselves than they really deserve. So people tend to overestimate themselves and underestimate the general public.

Since the concept of progress is mainly about the outside world, people tend to exaggerate the negative and believe that the progress that they feel in their own life is due to their own accomplishments. “I am doing better off today than ten years ago because I work hard, but those other people who don’t work as hard as I do are having it real bad.”

Another part of the negativity bias is that people are far more likely to believe negative predictions of the future than positive predictions of the future. Anyone who makes a negative prediction of the future is viewed as wise and intelligent, while those who make positive predictions are viewed as uninformed wishful thinkers.

This bias tends to cause pessimistic experts to get far more attention than optimistic experts. The media has learned this, so they are more likely to cover pessimistic experts than optimistic experts. To advance their careers, experts gradually learn to tailor their message to get more attention, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Optimists are gradually squeezed out of the public debate by pessimists. This creates the false impression that all smart people realize that everything is bad and that progress does not exist.

Unreasonable Standards for Comparison

A common phenomenon that I have noticed among progress cynics is that they compare the world as it is (or their country or their community) to an imagined ideal. This is particularly common on the ideological Left and among young people. No matter how much progress has been achieved, the world will never be able to compare favorably with an ideal state. Ideal states have no problems, no trade-offs, no people making choices.

At the same time, those on the ideological Right and older people typically compare society to nostalgic but distorted memories of how they think life used to be. Many of them see any departure from this beautiful vision that exist in their head as decadence or moral decline. They fail to see life, even their own life, as it really was.

The proper standard of comparison is not with ideal images but with how people actually lived in the past or with other societies at the same time period. This is a much fairer standard by which to judge. In previous chapters, I gave a great deal of evidence that there has been progress across the world on many different development metrics.

Despite all this progress, however, no nation today can match the purity of an imagined society. Unfortunately, many people today seem to use an imagined society as their standard, and this standard makes all progress seemingly disappear.

Progress is Ignored in Schools

While understanding past and current progress is critical to maintaining future progress, our educational system does not teach it. Most content in school has nothing to do with progress, for example, reading, writing, mathematics, sciences, and foreign languages. The amount of time that students spend studying history is a relatively small portion of the school year. And when students learn history, it is mainly about names, dates and events.

There is almost no class time devoted to long-term trends of progress in everyday life (although I think this would make a much more interesting topic for students). Students typically graduate secondary school and even university with almost no grasp of how much progress in the past has affected their lives.

Generational Reset

I believe one of the main reasons why people in wealthy nations are so ignorant of progress is what I call “generational reset.” Because few people study history, each generation has very little knowledge of the progress that took place before they were born. Even during their childhood and early adolescence, most people are not very aware of the world outside their immediate family and friends. For most people, the only progress that matters is the progress that has taken place since their late teens.

For a person who was born in 1990, all progress before that year is irrelevant. Even the progress that took place in the 1990s is a distant memory. So for a young person born in 1990, they are probably only aware of any progress that has taken place between say 2008 and 2020. In such a short time span, it is a very high bar to show any substantial progress.

Similarly, for a person born in 1940, all the progress that took place before their adolescence is irrelevant, consigned to the dustbin of history. The enormous progress that happened in Western countries in the preceding century is perhaps sensed, but it is not fully integrated into their perceptions of the world.

At the same time, the bottom limit for what is acceptable is also set early in their lifetime. Anything that gets worse than what occurred previously, no matter how small, is perceived strongly. This means that any bad thing that involves a loss is felt much more strongly than many other good things that occur.

For this reason, a single bad event or trend, a terrorist attack, war, epidemic, recession, is treated as powerful evidence that things are getting worse. All the periods of peace and prosperity have far less of an enduring effect on our psyche.

Progress Is Smooth, but Problems Are Spiky

As one can see from the graphs in Chapter One, progress generally consists of long, slow trends that take time to have a noticeable effect.

Bad events, on the other hand – wars, violence, famines, epidemics and natural disasters come on fast and are very noticeable. Usually they disappear in a relatively brief period of time. Because there are almost always some bad things going on even during periods of great prosperity, it is easy to focus on the bad things.

This is one reason that I believe studying long periods of history is a serious antidote to cynicism. Doing so forces one to ignore sudden changes that come and go and, instead, to focus on long-term trends. It is hard to miss the long-term trends of progress if you look at a long enough timescale.

Negative Media Coverage

As Steven Pinker points out, another factor undermining people’s perception of progress is negative media coverage. The primary means by which people learn about what is going on in the outside world is the media. While it might be via radio, television, newspapers or the internet, the media has some common themes that shape their coverage.

Media researchers, such as Darrell West, have long known that media coverage is overwhelmingly biased towards the negative, the short-term and strong emotional connection. There are an enormous number of studies that show that media coverage is overwhelmingly biased to cover negative events over positive events.

While many journalists feel that they have an obligation to inform the public, the overriding goal of news organizations is to generate high ratings. It is much easier to get people’s attention by shocking them rather than by pleasing them. It is only really in the domains of economic and sporting news that positive events get high levels of coverage. News about progress does not fit into the negativity bias that dominates the media.

In addition, the media has a strong recency bias. The media overwhelmingly covers what happened today, yesterday and this week. Unfortunately, progress is overwhelmingly about long-term trends that show little day-to-day variation.

It is simply not considered news that infant mortality declined 0.0001 percent today. While the media occasionally covers long-term trends, usually in the form of annual reviews in late December, it is not a very large part of the coverage. For that reason, most journalists simply do not consider trends of progress to be news.

News organizations also seek to create an emotional connection with their viewers. The easiest way to do so is to show strong action-oriented visual images of negative events that just happened: a fire, murder, storm, coup, war or natural disaster. Long-term trends simply do not lend themselves to creating this emotional connection in the same way.

When you combine all of these factors, the media presents a highly distorted view of the world. It depicts a world without progress where seemingly random bad events hurt helpless victims. The real lives that normal people lead and the progress that they experience are almost completely absent.

Politicians and Interest Groups

People involved in politics, whether they are political activists, candidates or leaders of interest groups have a strong incentive to focus on the negative. Any interest group that claims that things are going well will find it hard to motivate donors to give them money. Political activists that do the same will find it hard to motivate people to protest or vote. Political candidates who are running against incumbents have a huge incentive to focus heavily on the negative to get votes. In addition, incumbents outside the governing coalition also have a strong incentive to focus on the negative.

The only people in politics who have an incentive to focus on the positive are incumbents of the majority party running for reelection. They have the incentive to say that the economy is doing well as well as talk about all their wonderful legislative accomplishments. But for every incumbent, there is at least one challenger who has a very large incentive to focus on the negative.

Regardless of whether they are an incumbent or challenger, candidates often engage in negative campaigns that accentuate how bad their opponent is. While there is evidence that this hurts the person running the negative campaign, it is clear that it hurts their opponent even more.

And even incumbent candidates that run positive campaigns do not claim that there has been progress in society. They merely claim that their leadership and legislative accomplishments have made things better. Any candidate who claims that there has been a great deal of progress and they had nothing to do with it would probably have a short political career.

No one in the political world makes the claim advanced by this book: that there has been a great deal of progress and not much of it was caused by short-term changes in government policy.

Relentless Negativity of Political Ideologues

Political ideologues of both the right and left have an enormous incentive to focus on the negative. One thing that virtually all ideologues agree on is that “Things are bad, and they are getting worse.”

If people believe that conditions are the best that they have ever been and this trend is likely to persist in the future, ideologues will garner very little support. Ideologues need to persuade people that things are worse than they actually are.

Only by convincing people that the system is not working can political ideologues convince voters that radical changes are necessary. So they relentlessly propagandize about how terrible things are.

In fairness, ideologues often identify very real problems. The problem is that they fail to put them into the proper context, and they do so on purpose. The world is full of millions of little problems that are gradually being solved, usually by the richest nations. Poorer nations then copy those solutions and modify them to fit the local environment.

Some problems are already diminishing in scope and just continuing on our present course is the best solution. Some problems are not solvable under current technologies. Some supposed “solutions” create new problems that are worse than the original problem. Some solutions use up valuable monetary and human resources that would be better used for solving other more serious problems. Most importantly, the vast decentralized problem-solving network that is a modern society is usually far better at solving problems than the solutions presented by ideologues.

Even worse, political ideologues fail to propose workable solutions. One thing that is constant in many political movements, particularly those that protest in the streets or use violence is that they focus far more on the problem than the solution. They want us to “wake up”, as if society is full of sleepwalkers who are doing nothing. But while the ideologues are attacking society, society at large is going about the real task of identifying solutions, testing those solutions, modifying them based upon results and then scaling them up so all of society benefits.

Identifying problems is very easy. Determining which problems are worth focusing resources on is much tougher. Coming up with possible solutions is also relatively easy. But it is much harder to implement them effectively, test their results and then either modify them or toss them out based upon results. Most problems are already being worked on, with varying degrees of success.

Overuse of the Word “Crisis”

Perhaps the most overused term in politics is the word “crisis.” While policy experts, leaders and activists all play important roles in bringing problems to public attention, they generally go far beyond that. They know that the government is simultaneously trying to deal with thousands of different problems. If policy experts, leaders and activists claim their domain has a problem, then they are just adding one more to a long list. The chances of immediate government action are close to zero.

When policy experts, leaders and activists claim that their domain is experiencing a crisis, however, their favored issue can potentially jump to the top of the agenda. By claiming that something is a crisis rather than a problem, they attempt to promote their favorite issue to a higher rank than all the other problems competing to get on the political agenda.

In reality, the world faces thousands if not millions of problems. Society can be thought of as the ongoing actions of millions of people solving problems, most of which have been known for decades or centuries.

But a crisis is so severe and so urgent that everything else should be subordinated to solving that problem. And in a true crisis, there is no time to discuss the severity of the problem compared to other problems and possible alternative solutions. We must act now! (And “act” generally means whatever policy solution that one person happens to believe in). While some problems are serious enough to be considered a crisis, more often than not it is best to allow society to continue its natural problem-solving process.

Stay turned for more…

The above is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. It is part of a series of excerpts that I am publishing on Substack in sequential order. For greater context you can start with the first excerpt from this book.