Ten Global Trends

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Will have to read this which came out last year.  It says, with oodles of solid data, that the peoples of the world are far better off than we, poisoned by media, think!

https://www.tenglobaltrends.org/

From the Introduction:

You can’t fix what is wrong in the world if you don’t know what’s actually happening. In this book,
straightforward charts and graphs, combined with succinct explanations, will provide you with easily
understandable access to the facts that busy people need to know about how the world is really faring.

Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse rather than
better. Consider a 2016 survey by the global public opinion company YouGov that asked folks in 17
countries, “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting
better nor worse?” Fifty-eight percent of respondents thought that the world is getting worse, and 30
percent said that it is doing neither. Only 11 percent thought that things are getting better. In the United
States, 65 percent of Americans thought that the world is getting worse, and 23 percent said neither. Only
6 percent of Americans responded that the world is getting better.

This dark view of the prospects for humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken. We
demonstrate it in these pages using uncontroversial data taken from official and scientific sources.

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More wise, but startling psychology from the Introduction:

So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that, all things considered, the world is getting worse?

Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo,
observed, “There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and
the negative, which is much easier and takes less time—compare the amount of time needed to bring up
and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time
needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on.” News
is bad news; steady progress is not news.

Smart people especially seek to be well informed and so tend to be voracious consumers of news. Since
journalism focuses on dramatic things and events that go wrong, the nature of news thus tends to mislead
readers and viewers into thinking that the world is in worse shape than it really is. This mental shortcut
causes many of us to confuse what comes easily to mind with what is true; it was first identified in 1973
by behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as the “availability bias.” Another reason
for the ubiquity of mistaken gloom derives from a quirk of our evolutionary psychology. A Stone Age man
hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it’s the wind and the rustling turns out to
be a lion, then he’s not an ancestor. We are the descendants of the worried folks who tended to assume that
all rustles in the grass were dangerous predators and not the wind. Because of this instinctive negativity
bias, most of us attend far more to bad rather than to good news. The upshot is that we are again often
misled into thinking that the world is worse than it is.

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But even if there is progress, we humans will stop and regress, we always have.

The worry that civilization is just about to go over the edge of a precipice has a
long history. After all, many earlier civilizations and regimes have collapsed, including the Babylonian,
Roman, Tang, and Mayan Empires, and more recently the Ottoman and Soviet Empires.

In their 2012 book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, economists Daron
Acemoglu and James Robinson persuasively outline reasons for the exponential improvement in human
well-being that started about two centuries ago.

They begin by arguing that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized
around “extractive” institutions—political and economic systems that funnel resources from the masses to
the elites.

In the 18th century, some countries—including Britain and many of its colonies—shifted from extractive
to inclusive institutions. “Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level
playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic
growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the
few,” they write. “Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive
political institutions,” which “distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to
achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure
property rights, and an inclusive market economy.” Inclusive institutions are similar to one another in
their respect for individual liberty. They include democratic politics, strong private property rights, the
rule of law, enforcement of contracts, freedom of movement, and a free press. Inclusive institutions are the
bases of the technological and entrepreneurial innovations that produced a historically unprecedented rise
in living standards in those countries that embraced them, including the United States, Japan, and
Australia as well as the countries in Western Europe. They are qualitatively different from the extractive
institutions that preceded them.

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A five minute review of the book:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiZd1bKkg50&t=7s