Is the glass half full, half empty, or laced with cyanide? Last week I wrote about “statistics, fast and slow” — the gap between the world as we intuitively perceive it, and the world as described in spreadsheets. Nowhere is this gap more obvious than when we are invited to reflect on whether things are going well, or badly.
Is the glass half full, half empty, or laced with cyanide? Last week I wrote about “statistics, fast and slow” — the gap between the world as we intuitively perceive it, and the world as described in spreadsheets. Nowhere is this gap more obvious than when we are invited to reflect on whether things are going well, or badly.
With some telling exceptions, the situation is this: the world is getting better in many of the ways that matter, but we simply don’t realise that this is true. Population growth has slowed dramatically. Most of the world’s children have been vaccinated against at least one disease. Girls are rapidly catching up with boys in their access to education. The world is full of flaws, but progress is not only possible — it is happening.
A new book, Factfulness, by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling and the late Hans Rosling, describes this knowledge gap, which is at times grotesque: two-thirds of US citizens believe the global proportion of people living in extreme poverty has doubled in the past couple of decades; it has halved. As Hans Rosling used to say, we don’t become this ignorant by accident.
Nor are our misperceptions limited to global development. Surveys by the polling company Ipsos Mori show that citizens of the developed world are also ignorant about our own countries.
Most people vastly overestimate the prevalence of crime (which in the UK is dramatically down since the 1990s) and teenage pregnancy (which affects fewer than 1 per cent of 13-15 year old girls). We also seriously overestimate the size of the Muslim population in the west, which suggests that the concerns of tabloid newspapers loom large in our imaginations.
This is not just a statistical phenomenon — it’s a political and psychological puzzle. How worried should we be about unemployment, vandalism, immigration, litter, bad hospitals, or drug dealing?
There is no objective answer, but there is a strong tendency for people to be concerned about these issues for their nation, but more relaxed about their local area. We don’t see a serious problem where we live, but we feel strongly that trouble is all around us, just over the horizon. The economist Max Roser — creator of Our World in Data — calls this “local optimism and national pessimism”.
The mismatch is particularly stark when people are asked about their own happiness. Almost all of us are reasonably content: in the UK, 92 per cent of us are “rather happy” or “very happy” with our lives. But we believe that fewer than half of our fellow citizens are in the same cheery situation. The UK is typical in this respect: full of happy people who believe they are surrounded by misery.
This generalised pessimism seems powerful. The one global question that people reliably get right, despite ferocious misinformation campaigns, is the one where the news is bad: do climate experts believe the planet will get warmer over the next century?
So it would be tempting to conclude that we are all systematically too pessimistic about everything except our own experience. That is not quite true. The FT’s chart doctor, Alan Smith, tells me that Saudi Arabians are far too sanguine about the prevalence of obesity: they think a quarter of the nation is overweight or obese, but the true figure is closer to three-quarters. Most people in most countries also underestimate wealth inequality; it’s worse than we think, although, here, the UK is an exception to this belief.
Most people in most countries also underestimate wealth inequality; it’s worse than we think, although, here, the UK is an exception to this belief
The optimists are not right about everything. Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate in economics, has found that we are too optimistic about our own futures: almost everywhere, people tend to feel that they will be living a strikingly better life in five years’ time. We are doomed to disappointment. Life satisfaction is already high, does not tend to move much, and if anything tends to fall as mid-life approaches.
This misplaced optimism about ourselves is a striking contrast to an equally misplaced despair about our children: across Europe and North America, according to the Pew Research Center, twice as many people believe their children will be worse off financially than they are, rather than better off. Given the past decade of recession and slow recovery, that is not impossible. But economies do tend to grow over the long term, so it is a remarkably grim forecast.
What should we conclude from all this? One plausible hypothesis is that we form many of our impressions about the world from the priorities of the mass media. That would explain why we are pessimistic about most things, but not about obesity, since television loves skinny people.
A second conclusion is that many of us — citizens, the media and mainstream politicians — need to take more interest in the way the world really is. I hardly need to list the political movements that have travelled from the lunatic fringe to positions of power by reinforcing people’s worst fears. But when your policy platform is built on misperceptions, little good is likely to come of it.
Optimism and pessimism both have their merits, but right now the world needs a dose of realism.
