Getting Better

Credit – Jenny – CC-BY

We’ve never lived in such peaceful times – from a Slate article by Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and Andrew Mack (The Human Security Report Project)

The numbers show that things are getting better, so why do we think they’re getting worse? Journalists have better access to news than ever, so they have more to report. Naturally, they’re going to report on what is happening, not on what is not happening. More reports of violence, and no reports of no violence. That, put simply, is why things look worse than ever. And it’s a fact of our primitive brains that we assess risk based on the number of times we hear about something.

Quoting Slate

“The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable – homicide, rape, battering, child abuse – have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states – by far the most destructive of all conflicts – are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.”

Image from Slate

More Slate

“Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been” – even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?

Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.”

Read the Slate story to see that things really are getting better.

Merry Christmas

rjb