Why We're So Pessimistic: Read An Excerpt From Upside

This month in the Patheos Book Club , we're featuring the book Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of Our World , by Bradley Wright. An excerpt of Chapter One follows. Chapter 1 Pessimism About Our Nation and World The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying "the trouble with this country is...." -Sinclair Lewis If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, [America] always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise. -Charles Dickens In an airport bookshop recently, I paused at the current affairs section and looked down the shelves.... All [the books] argued to a greater or lesser extent that a) the world is a terrible place and b) it's getting worse.... I didn't see a single optimistic book. -Matt Ridley, science writer The majority of Americans think that most things in our country and around the world are on a downward spiral, but is such pessimism justified? Is the world really facing impending doom? This book examines data on wide-ranging topics all in service of answering whether things are actually getting better or worse. Think of it as a guided field trip through things that matter. As you read it, you'll find that contrary to popular opinion, life is improving in many ways (though certainly not all), and this improvement is nothing short of remarkable. But before we get into the actual state of the world, let's first look at what we think about the state of the world. Last Thanksgiving I took my nine-year-old son, Floyd,1 to visit family in the Midwest. Since we were there on a Sunday, we went to a service at the local mega-church, which we had attended and enjoyed before. (They have dry-ice fog and rock guitar during worship-big pluses for both of us.) That Sunday, in the midst of his sermon, the pastor started describing the condition of the world. He began with a story from the local newspaper of an unwanted baby being thrown away in a trash can. He followed this with a story of a mass shooting of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. From there he went on to worldwide famine and starvation before finishing with child sex-trafficking. With each malady that he described, he would hang his head and softly cry, "What has this world become?" After about a minute of this litany of suffering, I actually put my hand over Floyd's ears and just smiled at him while he gave me one of his frequent, "Dad, what in the world are you doing?" looks. I'm happy to talk with him about a lot of things, but child sex-trafficking and abandoned babies were not on the docket for that day. I tell you this story not to criticize the pastor for being unduly negative. I realize that he was just trying to help the audience appreciate the need for the truths he was teaching. But his message illustrates what we routinely hear from so many different sources: that life is bad and getting worse. We know where we're going, and we'll arrive there in a hand basket. Now, this story is just that-a story-and we can find anecdotal evidence to support just about any position, no matter how farfetched. So let's consider some systematically collected data to see how widespread our pessimism really is. The Common Perception of Life Getting Worse A 2009 nationwide poll asked Americans the following question: "I'd like you to compare the way things are going in the United States to the way they were going five years ago. Generally, would you say things are going better today, worse today, or about the same today as they were going five years ago?" Do you want to guess how many of the respondents thought things are getting worse? A full 83%! Only 5% thought that things were better. That's right: For every one American who thinks that things are getting better, sixteen think they are getting worse. Another survey question makes the same point. Since 1971, surveys have asked Americans, "Do you feel things in this country are generally going in the right direction, or do you feel things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?" Now, I like to draw pictures of data, so I have summarized the results of these surveys in Figure 1.1. When this question was asked in 2010, 66% of respondents viewed the country as on the wrong track; only 34% thought we were headed in the right direction. This pessimism is rather typical, for as you can see in Figure 1.1, over most of the last forty years, a majority of Americans have viewed our country as on the wrong track in most years. In only nine years did more respondents say America was headed in the right direction. Overall, about two Americans think that we're on the wrong track for every one who thinks we're going in the right direction. Just a thought, but if we've been on the wrong track for forty years, shouldn't we have arrived in a really bad place already? Americans aren't just down about our nation as a whole; we're concerned with just about every aspect of it. A 1996 survey asked respondents if they thought the United States was declining or improving in each of fourteen different areas spanning public life, including moral standards, the criminal justice system, public safety, family life, national leaders, Americans' honesty, Americans' work ethic, the health care system, education, our standard of living, the economy, and racial issues. With each one of these issues, about one-quarter to one-half of Americans thought the nation was "holding steady." Among the respondents who perceived any type of change, however, it was overwhelmingly negative. For every respondent who thought that moral and ethical standards were improving, almost twelve thought they were in decline. For every respondent who thought that the criminal justice system was improving, eight thought it was in decline. The ratio was 1:4 for standard of living and 1:3 for racial tensions. Even when things are objectively getting better, we still think they are getting worse. A 2003 study by the children's advocacy group Child Trends illustrates our propensity for unwarranted pessimism. Child Trends wanted to gauge the accuracy of Americans' perceptions of children's well-being. They found that Americans think young people are far worse off than they really are. For example, three-quarters of the Americans surveyed thought the number of children on welfare had increased or remained steady in the previous decade, but in reality it had declined. Ninety percent thought that crime rates among teens had gone up or stayed the same, but those too had decreased. In fact, at the time of the survey, they were at a twenty-five-year low! Likewise, Americans are overly pessimistic about young people's poverty, lack of health insurance, and teenage birth rate. The authors concluded, "Most Americans think that things are getting worse for children and youth, even when notable improvements have occurred." Of course the United States has children living in difficult circumstances, but it isn't as prevalent as we seem to think. While the United States is the best in the world at some things (e.g., basketball, putting people in prison, and In-N-Out hamburgers), pessimism isn't one of them. In 2010, the Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed respondents in twenty-two different countries, asking them, "Overall, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in our country today?" As plotted in Figure 1.2, the United States is just middle-of-the-pack. In all but one of the nations queried, about half or more of citizens are dissatisfied with the way things are going in their countries, and in most countries two-thirds or more of citizens are dissatisfied. The most dissatisfied country was Lebanon. (National motto: "We don't want to be here either.") The most satisfied, far and away, was China. (National motto: "All 1.3 billion of us are doing quite well. Thank you for asking.") Only 9% of the Chinese were dissatisfied with their country's direction. The Optimism Gap At this point, you might be thinking that most humans (except the Chinese) are just pessimistic by nature, but this is not the case. We're actually quite optimistic about our own lives. This personal optimism sets up a paradox in that we think our own lives are going well, but we're convinced that almost everyone else is doing poorly. Basically, we are exceptions to the rule when it comes to life getting worse. Writer David Whitman labels this phenomenon the "optimism gap," and with it we tend to think that the grass is browner, not greener, in other people's yards. Psychologist Fathali Moghaddam characterizes this optimism gap as our thinking that the sky is falling, just not on us. This optimism gap is demonstrated in a variety of studies. Survey researchers sometimes collect data using what they call the "ladder of life." This type of question asks respondents to rate some aspect of life on a 0-to-10 scale, with 0 representing the worst possible and 10 the best possible. Starting in 1959, the Gallup poll, and later the Pew Foundation, has used this tool to have Americans rate their own life situations as well as the United States as a whole. If the optimism gap did not exist, we would expect these two questions to yield similar results, but that is not the case. As shown in Figure 1.3, in 1959, Americans rated both their personal lives and the nation's condition at the same, relatively high level (6.6 and 6.7 out of 10, respectively). From then on, however, the scores started to diverge, and over the past forty-five years, Americans have consistently rated their own lives better than the nation as a whole. This difference exists both when times are bad, as with the low rating in the early 1970s, and when times are good, as in the mid-1990s. Most recently, in 2008, the average rating for one's own life was 6.8 while for the country it was 5.8. I suppose that I manifest this optimism gap myself. If I had to rate my own life, I would give it an 8, but I'd only give the nation as a whole a 7. The optimism gap was also found in an intriguing historical study. In the 1980s, journalism professor Nicholas Lemann found an archive of photographs taken in the 1940s. He tracked down many of the people in those photographs and interviewed them. Almost to a person they reported that their lives had gotten better since the photographs were taken forty years prior, but the great majority of them thought that American life, as a whole, had gone downhill during that same period. The optimism gap also shows itself with specific issues. Since the early 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked Americans if their financial situation over recent years is getting better, worse, or staying about the same. Similarly, various national surveys have asked the same question about the national economy. Figure 1.4 plots the percentage of Americans who think that their own finances are getting better versus those who think the same about the economy. In every year but one, between 30% and 45% of respondents reported improvement in their own financial situation. In contrast, in most years, only 5% to 25% said the same about the national economy. The crime rate also reveals an optimism gap. A 2007 Gallup poll asked respondents about the severity of crime nationwide compared to their local community. Over half, 57%, viewed crime nationwide as an "extremely" or "very" serious problem, but only 15% said the same about crime in their own community. So not only is the grass browner on the other side of the fence, but a lot of bullets are flying around there too. Similar optimism gaps have been found with the environment, education, governmental officials, moral standards, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and health care. This led Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Lou Harris & Associates survey organization, to summarize people's views on life as follows: "It is as though there are two different countries, the one people know personally, which they are happy with, and the one they see on television and read about in the newspapers, which they think is in bad shape." Once you start paying attention to it, you'll be surprised at how often you witness this optimism gap in everyday life. For example, earlier this year I was asked to record my first book, Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites... And Other Lies You've Been Told, as an audio book. I spent several days at a recording studio and got to know the two young guys who owned it. At one point one of them asked me about my next book. When I told him that it examines whether the world is getting better or worse, he laughed and responded, "What could possibly be getting better?" He said this despite the fact that though only in his late twenties, he owns a successful business, drives a Mercedes, is happily married with a child on the way, and seems to be doing pretty well all around. How can he think the world is spiraling downward when his own life is going so well? The optimism gap. Why does the optimism gap exist? Americans generally have positive views toward their own lives. We value self-esteem, and we display higher levels of it than citizens of other countries, such as China and Japan, who are raised to be more humble and self-effacing. Also, we might give less attention to local problems that affect us personally because they might be too frightening, whereas catching up on bad news someplace else in the world can take on a more recreational form. --- This book closes the optimism gap by providing a more accurate-and in many cases more positive-view of what's going on in the world. It occurs to me, however, that another way to close this gap would be to write a book convincing you that your life is worse than you realize. Chapter 1: "Your family: They don't like you either." Chapter 2: "The nice stuff you own: Somebody is going to take it." But I think I'll stick with my original plan. The Past and Future Survey questions routinely ask Americans how they perceive the past and the future, and one thing is clear: both are better than the present-at least when we evaluate our nation. A 2009 study asked Americans how things are going in the United States now compared to five years ago, and only 5% of Americans said things now are better. Eighty-three percent said worse, and 10% said about the same. When asked to give their impressions of recent decades, Americans have an unfavorable opinion about their current decade. Fifty-seven percent of respondents in another 2009 study had a favorable opinion of the 1990s, 56% did of the 1980s, 40% the 1970s, and 34% the 1960s. When asked about the year 2000, only 27% had a positive impression of it. Likewise, Americans tend to be relatively optimistic about the future, though perceptions of the future vary from year to year. In a 2008 poll, 39% of Americans said that the United States would be better off in five years, compared to 34% who said it would be worse. Just one year later, in 2009, 61% said it would be better, versus 19% who said it would be worse. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans about different aspects of American life and whether these aspects would be better, worse, or about the same in twenty years. Respondents were most optimistic about the future regarding national security, Americans' hard work, race relations, health, and health care. They had mixed feelings about future standards of living and the functioning of democracy, and they reported pessimism about only one issue: the state of moral values. Our good feelings about the future come with a hitch: The future never arrives. Surveys have asked questions about the present and the future for several decades now, allowing us to compare Americans' expectations for a specific year in the future versus their feelings about it once it arrives-but the future never seems to live up to its advanced billing. For example, a 1997 survey asked Americans to rate their current quality of life on a ladder scale of 1 to 10, and they averaged a rating of 7. The same survey asked what they expected for five years from then, and they rated their projected quality of life as 8.2. However, when the year 2002 actually rolled around five years later, another survey asked the same questions, and it found that Americans rated the quality of their current lives at just 6.9, but, again, respondents were optimistic about five years into the future, rating it at 8.3. As phrased by a Pew report, the "future ain't what it used to be." Failed Prophecies of Doom While rank-and-file Americans are modestly optimistic about the future, journalists, academics, and other experts seem to be more negative overall. In fact, forecasting doom is a viable career strategy, complete with strong book sales, frequent media appearances, and the occasional Nobel Prize. In this section I review a couple of the better-known prophecies of doom. It's kind of fun to see experts be so wrong, an intellectual schadenfreude-rejoicing in others' misfortune. Perhaps more important, realizing the errors of previous, widely accepted prophecies of doom should make us a little more skeptical about current ones, many of which could well turn out to be equally preposterous. Perhaps the best known historical gloom-and-doomer was Thomas Malthus, an influential British scholar and Anglican clergyman born in 1766. Malthus predicted that the human population would continue to grow until it exceeded the availability of natural resources needed to keep humans alive, thus resulting in a "Malthusian" crisis of famine, poverty, and vice. According to Malthus, humanity could look forward to a continual cycle of population growth followed by social collapse. This prediction did not come about for two reasons: the human population hasn't grown as fast as Malthus expected, and agricultural productivity has increased even faster-making today's world the best fed in human history (as we'll discover in chapter 5). In recent years, however, the King of Doom has been Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is a biologist at Stanford University who originally trained in the study of butterflies, but he transitioned to human ecology. Though most popular in the 1970s and 1980s, his work is still influential. Ehrlich has taken an updated Malthusian approach, linking sustainability to three factors: population size, affluence, and technology. He identifies larger, more affluent, and more technically advanced societies as using more natural resources than other societies, and since societies worldwide are moving toward affluence and growth, he views the world as headed toward scarcity. Based on this perspective, Ehrlich made the following predictions in the 1970s and 1980s, which I'll present along with what really happened. Hunger: Ehrlich: "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." What happened: The percentage of people starving worldwide has dropped from 38% in 1970 to 18% in 2001. India: "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," or "be self-sufficient in food by 1971." India has grown to over one billion people, and their average caloric intake is 50% higher than in the 1950s. Commodities: "Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity in which many things besides energy will be in short supply.... Such diverse commodities as food, fresh water, copper, and paper will become increasingly difficult to obtain and thus much more expensive." Most commodities are cheaper and more widely available now than ever. Life expectancy: "The U.S. life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics." American life expectancy has steadily risen in past decades, and now it's at about seventy-eight years. Air pollution: "Smog disasters in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles." The air in Los Angeles, New York, and most American cities is substantially cleaner now than in the 1970s. And my personal favorite: "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." I have it on good authority that England is still there. How wrong was Ehrlich with these predictions? As my seventeen-year-old son, Gus, would say, Ehrlich was "epic-ally" wrong. Yet many people believed Ehrlich back then and many still do. Over the summer, I was asked by a publisher to review a forthcoming textbook for introductory sociology. It had a chapter on the environment, and its primary source was Paul Ehrlich and his Malthusian vision, written as if it were still the early 1970s. As an aside, one can only hope that Ehrlich himself experienced an optimism gap, feeling better about his own life than the world as a whole. Can you imagine otherwise? "Hey, Paul, want to eat out tonight?" "No, thanks, the restaurants are probably out of food and there might be food riots." "Okay. How about a drive?" "No, we'll probably choke to death on smog while caught in traffic jams." "Hmm, how about a trip to England?" Paul Ehrlich wasn't the first, nor will he be the last, expert to get these things terribly wrong. In 1980, a lengthy governmental report entitled "The Global 2000 Report to the President" presented the predictions of leading experts of the day about what will happen in the future, and things weren't looking so good. They summarized their predictions as follows: If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.... Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now. As we will see throughout this book, few of these expectations have come to pass. Malthus, Ehrlich, and Global 2000 are far from the only doomsayers. A 1994 Atlantic Monthly article predicted "scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease that would destroy the fabric of our planet." A bestselling book of that time warned that "perhaps hundreds of millions of people would soon die in unstoppable pandemics of mutant diseases, such as Ebola." A well-known futurist has predicted that the United States is headed for food riots and Central Park will be engulfed by shantytowns. The High Cost of Unwarranted Pessimism If this were just an academic exercise, then our perceptions of the world might not really matter, but it's more than that. In various ways, our negatively skewed understanding of the world causes real problems. The prevailing view that most everything is getting worse makes it difficult to prioritize, since we don't know what is actually getting worse. If everything is a problem, then, in a sense, nothing is. David Whitman put it: "False alarms drive out true ones." Our fear of plane accidents might blind us to the reality that driving to the airport is actually more dangerous than flying. Similarly, the steady stream of fear messages about the environment can lead us to incorrectly prioritizing environmental problems. This incorrect prioritization literally can be a life-and-death matter. For example, in the 1990s, AIDS activists sought to raise concern about the disease, so they emphasized heterosexuals' potential risk of contracting it, even though it struck mostly gay men. As a result of this distortion of risk, government agencies shifted their focus to AIDS prevention among straight people-at the cost of giving it to the more needy gays. In California, from 1989 to 1992, only 9% of AIDS prevention funds targeted gay men despite the fact that they constituted 85% of all AIDS cases. This incorrect prioritization probably cost lives. Viewing the world as getting worse also casts doubt on the efficacy of proposed programs and policies to make things better. If everything is getting worse, then the solutions imposed in the past didn't work, so why should we have faith in today's solutions? In general, fear messages are a good short-term strategy for getting people to act, but they are less effective over the long term because they disillusion and discourage. In fact, consistently pessimistic messages about the world can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Hearing that a problem has steadily gotten worse, despite our past efforts to alleviate it, might be enough to make us want to stop trying. Many advocacy groups use pessimistic, fearful messages to raise awareness for their cause, which ironically can actually reduce their effectiveness, as people stop believing they can change the situation. A spokesperson for Greenpeace acknowledged this when he lamented that the constant pessimism put out by environmental groups actually weakens their credibility as the public hears it year after year. Viewing the world as getting worse also bears personal costs. A Mayo Clinic report found that a pessimistic view of life can harm many areas of health and well-being. In particular, constant negative thinking can result in a shorter life-span, increased depression and distress, less resistance to the common cold, worse psychological and physical well-being, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and diminished coping skills during times of stress. Other studies have linked a negative outlook on life to mild cognitive impairment as well as Alzheimer's disease. This doesn't mean that we're all one Greenpeace report away from falling over dead, but rather that the barrage of negative news about the world cannot be good for us. 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: We'd be better off with a more balanced view of our present condition. We need a clearer understanding of our strengths and shortcomings, because we are ill served by either excessive optimism or excessive pessimism. The first regularly leads us into romantic schemes that are doomed to fail, while the second may condemn us to hopelessness and continued paralysis. The meat of this book is statistical description. Surveys, census data, and other sources provide rich and accurate descriptions of the population as a whole. However, sometimes we lose the power of individual actions and local situations when we rely solely on statistical data. To counter this, and to provide a richer understanding of changes in the world, I also include stories that highlight unique, altruistic contributions made by people trying to improve the world. One of the conclusions of this book is that the world is improving so much because so many people are working to make it a better place. To help us appreciate the impact of this altruism, I tell some of their stories.

Why We're So Pessimistic: Read An Excerpt from Upside