do you think Americans truly understand the history of socialism and actually what it is as you've gone around under you've had when you speak to not just college campuses if you've been events around the world I think 250,000 people you've spoken in front of I mean people are unbelievably ignorant about history and I mean I would include myself in that you know I mean I know what I know about the history say preceding the 20th century is very sketchy it's embarrassingly sketchy you know and what young people know about 20th century history is not existent
especially about the history of the radical left I mean how would they know they're never taught anything about it so why would they be concerned about it and you know what for for many of the people in the audience you know you're old enough so that the fall of the Berlin Wall was well that was part of your life you know that was really the end of the Second World War let's say and in a technical sense and it was very meaningful but that's a long time ago there's mean a lot of people born since
then and it's ancient history and we don't have that many good bad examples left you know there's North Korea there's Venezuela but we're not locked tooth and nail in a war with you know in a proxy war and a cold war with the Soviet Union and and it's easy to understand why people are emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism let's say or the left because it draws on it draws its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion and that is always there in human beings and so that proclivity for sensitivity to that
political message will never go away and so and it's important to understand that you have to give the devil his due unfortunately you you've also said that people aren't as resentful at the success of others as we might think and I think as you watch a lot of people being interviewed today and you watch some of the students being interviewed you saw some of the ones up here you hear people talking a lot about inequality but you say they really aren't as resentful as we might think as long as they don't think the game is
fixed yes well that's certainly the case well first of all I mean if you look at the psychological literature to the degree that it's accurate which is difficult to ascertain often people report far more prejudice against their group than against themselves so so that's quite an interesting phenomenon as far as I'm concerned so there's a tendency for people to exaggerate the degree to which the group they belong to it has is currently suffering from from generalized oppression they've been relatively free of it themselves I also think that if fairness isn't absolutely essential and perceived fairness
is an absolutely essential component of peace because people can tolerate inequality so to speak or even revel in it let's say if they believe that the unequal outcome is deserved I mean look at how people respond to sports heroes you know everyone no one goes to a sports event and boos the star even though he or she is paid much better and attracts the lion's share of the attention hopefully not into narcissistic manner people can celebrate success but they do have to believe that the game is fair and and the game needs to be fair
because otherwise the hierarchy becomes tyrannical the problem with the radical left is that it assumes that all hierarchies are too radical and it makes no distinction between them and that's an absolute catastrophe because you know there's plenty of sins let's say on the conscience of of the West as a as a civilization but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and there are far worse places like all the other places for example that there have ever been well it's the case and people also don't understand that and they also don't understand this is
something that's of particular importance they also don't understand and that that may even characterize you in this audience it's very the knowledge of how rapidly we're making economic improvements around the world in developing world for example how fast that's happening that is not well distributed knowledge you know that between the year 2000 and the year 2012 the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50 percent now it's a UN figure dollar 90 a day that was their cutoff for absolute poverty and so the cynics have said well you know that's pretty low barrier
it's not such an achievement to have attained that I can tell you it's an achievement to obtain that if you were living on less than a dollar a ninety a day to begin with but if you look at if you double the amount to 380 or you double it again to 760 you find the same pattern I mean the poor in the world are getting rich at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in all of human history and I think I think a large part of that large part of that is happening in Africa where
by the way here's another lovely piece of news the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952 which is I mean that's an absolute miracle or it's insane that that's not front-page news right it's that's that's within a lifetime and the fastest-growing economies in the world are also there and so but but as you're saying but why isn't it front-page news and when you considering social media and how fast news and photos and all that can travel and that young people are aficionados of all this technology why
don't they know these things or why aren't they computing what they see as being progress well I think part of it is that things are changing so fast that none of us can keep up like it's hard to keep the story updated I had no idea for example that most of the world's economic news and even a substantial proportion of its ecological news by the way was positive until I started to work on a UN Committee about five years ago on sustainable economic development and I read very widely economically and and also ecologically and realized
that things were way better than I had any any sense of that that that these improvements had come at a tremendous rate and and but you see pardon so so partly it is just that it's so new that we don't know and we don't have a story about it and and and and and who is who who would be driving the communication of such things especially given two other things one is that human beings are tilted towards negative emotion in terms of its potency and so for example people would rather they've much they're much less
happy to lose five dollars than they are happy to gain five dollars we're loss averse or we're more sensitive to negative emotion than we are to positive emotion and there's a reason for that and the reason is well you can only be so happy but you can be dead and right and I mean dead is that's not good and and there can be a lot of misery on the way to that end and so we're we're tilted to protect ourselves and that makes us more interested in some sense and more easily captivated by the negative
than by the positive and so that's that's a hard bias to fight and then when you also take into account and I think this is something that's Sarat worth seriously considering because the other thing we don't understand is the technological revolution that's occurring in every form of media no one understands it and but one of the consequences is is that the mainstream media so to speak is increasingly desperate for attention right there exist in a shrinking market with shrinking margins all of the leading newspapers and magazines are feeling the pinch television is dead you because
YouTube has everything the television has and then an incredible array of additional features and radio is being replaced by podcasts and so it's very unstable time for the mainstream media and what would you expect them to do except to do whatever they can to attract attention in whatever manner they can manage one example of this one very good example of this is you may or may not know that the rates of violent crime in the United States and and actually in most places have have plummeted in the last 50 years it's it's really quite remarkable
the United States is now safer and in terms of violent crime than it has been since the early 60s and that was probably the safest time there ever was but the degree to which violent crime has been reported has increased it's funny the curves are almost completely opposite to one another this is the decline in violent crime this is the increase in the reporting of violent crime and the reason for that is well people read stories about violent crime and then of course they're much more likely to believe that it's on the increase and the
people who are most likely to believe that it's on the increase by the way are also those who are least likely to be affected by it because you know to be a victim of a violent crime what helps to drink too much but it also helps a lot to be young and male and that those aren't the people who are particularly afraid of violent crime even though they're the ones most likely to be implicated in it
