To be clear, my concerns are with unwarranted pessimism, not all pessimism. Pessimism, if accurate, can serve us well, and ignoring real problems has its own costs. Accurate perceptions of the world, both in the ways that it's getting better and worse, is the ideal.
The Plan of This Book
The goal of this book is not to comprehensively review every single issue facing Americans (that might take two books), but rather to focus on a limited set of issues that I believe are important to most people. Obviously, I judge what is important from my own particular social location. Hopefully most of the topics I cover will strike readers as significant, but some may not. Not only do I examine health, income, wars, and the environment-widely agreed-upon "big" issues-I also explore various less-agreed-upon issues. For example, some people define premarital sex as a social problem, while others think it's not a big deal. My own take on this issue, as well as others', is informed by my Christian faith, so if you do not share my values, as-gasp-some people don't, you might find some issues less compelling than I do.
There are, of course, many, many issues from which to choose, each with copious amounts of available data. Writing this book was like trying to fill a coffee mug from a fire hydrant-there is almost too much information. In fact, my biggest frustration in writing was figuring out how to prune major topics down to several pages of information. I had to drop a lot of elaboration and nuance about each topic in order to highlight its core findings and still leave room to explore other topics. Consider, for example, the annual Health Report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It contains over five hundred pages of detailed information about health trends in the United States. The index alone is eleven pages! In it you can learn about rates of triplets, dental visits, lower back pain, whooping cough, organ transplants, and hundreds of other health-related issues. Every one of these health issues is of importance, but I couldn't possibly cover all of them. When it comes to health, I examine only several of what I deem to be the most important issues, including longevity, major diseases, hunger, and substance abuse.
Evaluating the problems facing society at any given time is inherently subjective. It's natural for people to arbitrarily judge the current situation of an issue as either good or bad. For example, as of 2007, 24% of Americans smoke cigarettes. Is this number acceptable, too high, or too low? There is often no objective definition of problems; rather, they are open to subjective judgment, and two people can look at the same data and come to very different conclusions. One could say the cup is half full, and the other might say, "Hey, that's not my drink."
This book shies away from evaluating current levels of any given issue, and instead focuses on change over time. Is a particular issue getting worse, better, or staying about the same? Advantageously, this approach is reasonably objective, and all parties on a given issue should be able to agree on how it is changing (assuming suitable data). For example, fewer Americans smoke today than in 1965, when 42% smoked; this is true whether you're a tobacco company executive or an anti-smoking activist.
Nonetheless, even trends over time are also subject to subjective evaluation. Just because something is getting better doesn't necessarily mean that it's getting better fast enough to suit people. We can see substantial progress and still want much more. As former president Bill Clinton once said, "The crime rate is down, the welfare rolls are down, the food stamp rolls are down, the teen pregnancy rate is down . . . And yet, we all know that all those things that are going down are still too high." Such ethical judgments are part of living in society, but I don't emphasize them. Instead, I focus on describing how things are changing, and others can debate whether these changes are enough.
The main focus of this book is tracking changes over time, but with some issues I also describe differences between groups-especially when people's experiences with an issue vary widely. With the United States, I highlight differences based on gender, race and ethnicity, class, age, and other social fault lines. With the world, I compare countries or regions to underscore international differences.
Going into this book I didn't have strong preconceptions about whether the world is getting better or worse; I treated this book as a chance to learn about it myself. My goal here is accuracy, and I tried to go wherever the data took me. Ultimately, I conclude that many things in the world are indeed getting better, but I did not set out to write a "positive" book. Indeed, this book catalogues issues that are getting better as well as some that are getting worse. Writer Robert Samuelson underscores the importance of this approach when he writes:
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