why do progressives hate progress well one answer is that could be that progress is a myth that if you believe in progress you are a Pangloss Pollyanna you're a advocate of Chamber of Commerce Silicon Valley rah-rah boardroom optimistic capitalism but as a matter of fact progress can be demonstrated quantitatively and so I think there really isn't an issue as to why it is so often denigrated and denied but first I just want to establish the premise that there is such a thing as progress here are some examples if you plot war deaths per capita since
the end of World War two it's a roller coaster with some ups and downs but the overwhelming trend is downward and a fraction of the number of people died in war compared to the 50s 60s 70s and 80s despite a lot of talk about a democratic recession and obvious cases such as Turkey and Russia the overall trend of democratization the second wave is continuing not at the same rate as in the 1980s but if you add up the countries and give them a democracy score subtract the autocracy score from the democracy score it continues to
increase across the world homicides have been in decline both for the United States and the world life expectancy has gone up in every region and so the shortest-lived part of the world Africa people live longer than people lived in the longest live parts of the world just a few decades ago extreme poverty is may even vanish in the lifetimes of people in this room the World Bank has set a target of 2030 for the elimination of extreme poverty by their definition and that's certainly the way the world is going 10% of the world was estimated
to be in extreme poverty that's still 700 million people but as you can see not long ago a majority of the world's population lived in extreme poverty and this extends to many aspects of quality of the environment this is my favorite graph on the state of the environment I got it from the EPA website and turns out they kind of distorted the axes to prove the point but even if you make that real in e'er eyes the axes you see that since the 1970s while GDP has increased number of vehicle miles traveled has increases the
United States population energy has increased co2 has started to level off but during this entire time the five major pollutants have declined so the idea that you can have economic growth or you can have environmental improvement but you can't have both is directly negated by this graph the proportion of the world's surface that is protected from economic development and exploitation has continued to increase and the amount of carbon you have to release in the into the atmosphere per dollar of GDP has has declined so there's some some good signs what makes progress possible I in
a forthcoming book called enlightenment now the case for reason science humanism in progress I argue that there are two big ideas that have propelled this progress over the last couple of centuries and one of them science and reason more generally the idea that problems are solvable given the right knowledge and the other is humanism that we ought to the problems that we ought to solve are how to get as many people as possible to live long healthy prosperous and pleasant lives now given all of these positive trends over the last 70 years how have they
been reflected in the news well here's one more graph and this comes from a study of tone mapping where an algorithm simply counts up the number of positive words like improve good better versus negative words like horrific catastrophe crisis worse and so on the black line shows the positive versus negative tone of the New York Times from 1945 to the present the blue line shows a digest of news media from across the world and as you can see during me in decades in which the world has been getting better and better the news has been
getting glamour and glamour so the question is why has the our depiction of the world and our objective measures of the world gone in opposite directions why do intellectuals and journalists or so many of them deny progress I there a couple of psychological explanations Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky many decades ago proposed that the human mind assesses risk via a shortcut they call the availability heuristic namely the people estimate probability according to how easily they can recall examples from memory if you can call to mind a terrorist attack of belching smokestack a an oil covered
sea bird then those images stay with you and that's how you judge how the state of the environment the state of crime the state of war if you combine that with the nature of the news the cliche is if it bleeds it leads and they're actually studies that show that that is accurate that is if you give a sample of newspaper editors a possible stories with the content held constant but with a positive or a negative spin they will choose the one with ones of a negative spin this is I interacts with another part of
our psychology sometimes called the negativity bias summarized in the slogan bad is stronger than good losses hurt more than gains boyss up criticism stings more than praise flatters trauma has more lasting effects than good fortune has positive effects and so on and I think that the negativity bias creates a kind of gravitas market namely that we are vigilant for things that go wrong opening up a niche for people to remind of things that have gone wrong that we may not have noticed Tom Lehrer the great philosopher social critic and a satirical songwriter said always predict
the worst and you'll be hailed as a prophet and the result I think has next there it is obviously a good thing if people are aware of problems and that can motivate them to to solve them and I have many examples where simply putting a hitherto neglected social problem on the agenda can lead to measures that that that improve it violence against women is an example that became a public issue starting in the 1970s and indeed rates of sexual assault rates of domestic violence went steadily downward in the decades since on the other hand it
can also lead to a kind of cynicism that the system is so corrupt so evil so dysfunctional that we may as well smash the Machine we should drain the swamp there's no hope of improvement it is corrupted beyond redemption and some evidence that that may have had an effect in recent political events comes from this graph that plots the support for three populist movements the votes for Donald Trump votes for brexit and a composite of votes for European populist parties as a function of birth cohort so this is not time across the x-axis time in
which the survey was taken this is year of birth and as you can see populism is an old man's movement by old man I mean baby boomers and older but the younger the cohort the lower the support unfortunately young people don't vote if young people voted even a few percentage points a higher rate of participation than they did the results of these elections would be very different and so there are many explanations but one of them I think is so the widespread feeling that the system is just so broken that there's no difference but among
candidates that Hillary Clinton Donald Trump what's the difference there they're both just shore up a rotten system and and so you have a large percentage of especially younger people who either don't vote or vote for third party candidates who have no hope of winning there isn't an alternative which I argue for in the book that three laws that I took from the physicist David Deutsch from his book the beginning of infinity not as don't get the blood pumping as much as a charismatic authoritarian leader but if we could find a way of bringing this into
people's consciousness as the way to approach our problems I think we'd be better off and that is problems are inevitable problems are solvable solutions create new problems which can be solved in their turn I don't think that this would easily fit on a bumper sticker or a lapel button but if we took this attitude towards the state of the world I think we would be better off thanks very much [Applause]
