Sometimes
we feel as if there is no end to the big global challenges that we face. Income
inequality, epidemics, carbon emissions, air pollution, large population
lacking clear water, xenophobia, gender inequality, human rights violations, economic
migration, refugee crisis, terrorism, nuclear weapons, unemployment, social
unrest, autocratic leaders – and the list goes on.
YouGov, a
global public opinion and data company, in 2015 conducted and published a
survey, asking participants ‘All things considered, do you think the world is
getting better or worse?’ The results were unsurprisingly depressing. In the
UK, only four per cent thought things are getting better, and in the US, the
figure was only six per cent. Even in Australia and Germany, two among the world’s
most peaceful countries, only three per cent and four per cent, respectively, thought
the world was getting better. Hardly anyone thinks that things are getting
better.
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| Better Tomorrow by Yuumei |
On the
other hand, we see indications of hope, optimism, and positivity. The number of
the world’s population living in extreme poverty has considerably decreased
since the nineteen-fifties. Majority of people are literate, homicides and war
deaths have decreased, life expectancy has risen, democracy is flourishing in
more countries today, and more countries today are contributing to global
growth, with several nations transitioning to middle-income status.
Assessing
the situation of the world is harder than it sounds. Steven Pinker, a psychology
professor at Harvard University, in his book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress,
argues that the world is, in fact, getting better and better. If not in every
way, things are getting better in many ways that we often overlook.
The power
of bad news is monstrous. Memory is selective. We remember bad incidents more
than we remember good ones. Likewise, negative news receives more attention from
us than positive news do. It is easy to be pessimistic about the world and to think
that nothing is getting better. Following daily news is not a parameter to
ascertain how the world is changing. Progress, our most important product, is a
slow process that seldom makes the headline.
If the
empirical evidence is to be believed, on almost all of the dimensions of material
well-being -health, literacy, poverty, human rights, and freedom - the world at
present is a better place than it was a century or even fifty years ago. The
need is to communicate to the widest audience possible that technical,
political, and socio-economical efforts are in fact yielding a very positive
impact.
