A new -ism is needed for humans who lurch between optimism and pessimism
Is the glass half full, half empty or laced with cyanide? On April 16 I wrote about “statistics, fast and slow” — the gap between the world as it is intuitively perceived and the world as described in spreadsheets. Nowhere is this gap more obvious than when people are asked to reflect on whether things are going well or badly.
With some telling exceptions, the world is getting better in many of the ways that matter, but people 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 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 few decades; it has halved.
As Hans Rosling used to say, people don’t become this ignorant by accident. Nor are their misperceptions limited to global development. Surveys by the polling company Ipsos Mori show that citizens of the developed world are also ignorant about their 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% of 13- to 15year-old girls). They also seriously overestimate the size of the Muslim population in the West, which suggests that the concern of tabloid newspapers looms large in their imaginations.
This is 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. People don’t see a serious problem where they live but they feel strongly that trouble is all around them. 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 people are reasonably content: in the UK, 92% of people are “rather happy” or “very happy” with their lives. But they believe that fewer than half of their fellow citizens are in the same cheery situation.
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 people are all systematically too pessimistic about everything except their own experience. That is not quite true. The Financial Times’s chart doctor, Alan Smith, says 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 people think.
The optimists are not right about everything. Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate in economics, has found that people are too optimistic about their own futures: almost everywhere, people tend to feel that they will be living a strikingly better life in five years. They are doomed to disappointment. Life satisfaction is already high, does not tend to move much and tends to fall as mid-life approaches.
This misplaced optimism about themselves is a striking contrast to an equally misplaced despair about their children: across Europe and North America, according to the Pew Research Centre, 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 is the conclusion from all this? One plausible hypothesis is that people form many of their impressions about the world from the priorities of the mass media. That would explain why they are pessimistic about most things but not about obesity, since television loves skinny people.
Many people — 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 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. /©
MOST PEOPLE IN MOST COUNTRIES ALSO UNDERESTIMATE WEALTH INEQUALITY; IT’S WORSE THAN PEOPLE THINK