Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - The World Is Getting Better

Episode Date: December 22, 2018

Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the Postcard Academy this year. If you’re a fan of this podcast and are feeling generous this year, leaving a review of this show on Apple Podcasts would be a wonderful Christmas present to me. Here’s how to leave a review. Or, you could become a patron of this podcast, which I produce voluntarily as a labor of love for you. Supporting the Postcard Academy via the Patreon site for creators and artists gives you access to members-only content and helps sustain the production of the show, which involves many hours of work and monthly fees.   I really enjoy creating this show for you, and I’m very excited for some things I have planned for 2019. This will include more actionable advice to help you travel more, live abroad — if that is something you’re interested in — and to have more freedom, and free time, in your life wherever you choose to spend it. Less work and stress and overwhelm, and more time to enjoy our very brief time on this Earth. I cannot wait to share this with you!   This week, I’m sharing a Ted Talk that I think is perfect for this time of year. Right now, the media is full of summaries of this year’s news — most of it bad news because that’s what they’ve been covering all year. But guess what? The world is actually getting better. When it comes to homicide, war, poverty, and even pollution, we're actually doing better now than we were 30 years ago, according to Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker. This progress is a fact, not an opinion, and he has the statistics to prove it.    Do we still have life-threatening problems like inequality, war, and climate change? Of course. But these are “problems to be solved, not the apocalypse in waiting.” I hope Steven Pinker’s Ted Talk gives you some peace of mind.   ***   I’m your host, Sarah Mikutel. Ready to travel? Sign up for my newsletter and get your free guide to cheap airfare.    Thank you so much for listening to this show. I know you’re busy and have many listening options, so it means a lot to me that you’re here. You are the best.Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to the Postcard Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Megatil, and I want to thank you so much for listening and subscribing to this podcast this year. I really enjoy doing this show for you, and I am so excited for some things I have planned for 2019. This will include more actionable advice to help you travel more, live abroad if that's something you're interested in, and to have more freedom and free time in your life wherever you choose to spend it. So less work, stress and overwhelm, and more time to enjoy our very brief time on this earth. I cannot wait to share this with you. This week, I'm sharing a TED Talk that I think is perfect for this time of year. Right now, the media is full of summaries of this year's news, most of it bad news, because that's what they've been covering all year. But guess what? The world is actually getting better. When it comes to homicide, war, poverty, even pollution, we're actually doing much better than we were 30 years ago. And this is according to Harvard professor and author Stephen Pinker. This progress is a fact and not an opinion and he has the statistics to prove it. Do we still

have life-threatening problems like inequality, war, and climate change? Of course we do. But Stephen says these are problems to be solved and not the apocalypse in waiting. I hope Stephen Pinker's TED Talk gives you some peace of mind. Before we get to that, the post Postcard Academy has a new membership community on Patreon, where I will share bonus episodes and other fun content with you. Membership helps support the show, and you can find out more if you go to patreon.com slash postcard academy. Now on to Stephen Pinker's TED Talk. Many people face the news each morning with trepidation and dread. Every day we read of shootings, inequality, pollution, dictatorship.

war, and the spread of nuclear weapons. These are some of the reasons that 2016 was called the worst year ever. Until 2017 claimed that record, I left many people longing for earlier decades when the world seemed safer, cleaner, and more equal. But is this a sensible way to understand the human condition in the 21st century? As Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare leading headlines of the present with rose-tinted images of the past. What does the trajectory of the world look like when we measure well-being over time using a constant yardstick? Let's compare the most recent data on the present with the same measures 30 years ago. Last year, Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per 100,000, had 7% of their citizens in poverty,

and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and 4 million tons of sulfur dioxide. But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 for 100,000, poverty rate was 12%, and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide. What about the world as a whole? Last year, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10% of the world population in extreme poverty, and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37% of the world population in extreme poverty, and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons. True, last year was a terrible year for now. terrorism in Western Europe with 238 deaths, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths.

What's going on? Is 1988 a particularly bad year? Or are these improvements a sign that the world, for all its troubles, gets better over time? Might we even invoke the admittedly old-fashioned notion of progress? To do so is to court a certain amount of derision, because I have found, that intellectuals hate progress. And intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress. Now, it's not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you. Most academics and pundits

would rather have their surgery with anesthesia than without it. It's the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class. If you believe that humans can improve their lot, I have been told, that means that you have a blind faith and a quasi-religious belief in the outmoded superstition

and the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inexorable progress. You are a cheerleader for vulgar American canduism with the raw, raw spirit of boardroom ideology, Silicon Valley, and the Chamber of Commerce.

You are a practitioner of Whig history, a naive optimist, a polyana, and of course a pangloss alluding to the Voltanianian. character who declared all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Well, Professor Pangloss, as it happens, was a pessimist. A true optimist believes there could be much better worlds than the one we have today. But all of this is irrelevant because the question of whether progress has taken place is not a matter of faith or having an

optimistic temperament or seeing the glasses half full. It's a testable hypothesis. For all their differences, people largely agree on what goes into human well-being. Life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness. All of these things can be measured. If they have improved over time, that I submit, this progress. Let's go to the data. Beginning with the most precious thing of all, life. For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world more than 80. 250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live

to see their fifth birthday. Before the risk was brought down 100-fold, today that date befalls less than 6% of children in the poorest countries of the world. Famine is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and could bring devastation to any part of the world. Today, famine that has been banished to the most remote and war-ravaged regions. 200 years ago, 90% of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10% of people do. For most of human history, the powerful states and empires

were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. The last great power war pitted the United States against China 65 years ago. More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22,000 per 100,000 per year in the early 50s to 1.2 today. Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey,

and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past day. decade, with two-thirds of the world's people living in democracies. Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms, so that today a Western European has one-ththousth a chance of being murdered compared to his medieval ancestors. It happened again in colonial New England, in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town,

and in Mexico. Indeed, we've become safer in just about every way. Over the last century, we've become 96% less likely to be killed in a car crash. 88% less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk. 99% less likely to die in a plane crash. 95% less likely to be killed on the job. 89% less likely to be killed by an act of God,

such as a drought, flood, wildfire, fire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake, or meteor strike, presumably not because God has become less angry with us, but because of improvements in the resilience of our infrastructure. And what about the quintessential act of God? The projectile hurled by Zeus himself. Yes, we are 97% less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. Before the 17th century, no more than 15% of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90% of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write. In the 19th century, Westerners worked

more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40. Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world, and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves, and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a week. Do all these gains in health, wealth, safety, knowledge, and leisure make us any happier? The answer is yes. In 86% of the world's countries, happiness has increased in recent decades. Well, I hope to have convinced you that progress is not a matter of faith or optimism, but is a fact of human history. Indeed, the

greatest fact in human history. And how has this fact been covered in the news? A tabulation of positive and negative emotion words in news stories has shown that during the decades in which humanity has gotten healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer, and happier, the New York Times has become increasingly morose, and the world's broadcast, too, have gotten steadily glummer. Why don't people appreciate progress? Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology. We estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the availability heuristic. The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be. The other part of the answer comes from the nature of journalism, captured in this satirical headline from The Onion,

CNN holds morning meeting to decide what viewers should panic about for the rest of the day. News is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn't happen. You never see a journalist who says, I'm reporting live from a country that has been at peace for 40 years, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists. Also, bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. The papers could have run the headline. 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday every day for the last 25 years.

That's one and a quarter billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it. Also, the news capitalizes on our morbid interest in what can go wrong, captured in the programming policy. If it bleeds, it leads. Well, if you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why the world has been coming to an end for a very very important. long time indeed. Let me address some questions about progress that no doubt have occurred to many of you. First, isn't it good to be pessimistic, to safeguard against complacency, to rake the muck, to speak truth to power? Well, not exactly. It's good to be accurate. Of course, we should be

aware of suffering in danger wherever they occur, but we should also be aware of how they can be reduced, because there are dangers to indiscriminate pessimism. One of the One of them is fatalism. If all our efforts of improving the world have been in vain, why throw good money after bad? The poor will always be with you. And since the world will end soon, if climate change doesn't kill us all,

then runaway artificial intelligence will, a natural response is to enjoy life while we can. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The other danger of thoughtless pessimism is radicalism. If our institutions are all failing and beyond hope for reform, A natural response is to seek to smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn the empire to the ground, and the hope that whatever rises out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have now.

Well, if there is such a thing as progress, what causes it? Progress is not some mystical force or dialectic lifting us ever higher. It's not a mysterious arc of history bending toward justice. It's the result of human efforts governed by an idea. an idea that we associate with the 18th century enlightenment, namely that if we apply reason and science to enhance human well-being, we can gradually succeed. Is progress inevitable? Of course not. Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle, but problem solving.

problems are inevitable, and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn. The unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like deep decarbonization for climate change and global zero for nuclear war. Finally, does the Enlightenment go against human nature? This is an acute question for me, because I'm a prominent advocate of the existence of human nature with all its shortcomings and perversities. In my book, The Blank Slate, I argued that the human prospect is more tragic than utopian,

and that we are not stardust, we are not golden, and there's no way we're getting back to the garden. But my worldview has lightened up in the 15 years since the blank slate was. published, my acquaintance with the statistics of human progress, starting with violence, but now encompassing every other aspect of our well-being, has fortified my belief that in understanding our tribulations and woes, human nature is the problem, but human nature, channeled by enlightenment norms and institutions, is also the solution. Admittedly, it's not easy to replicate my own data-driven epiphany with humanity at large. Some intellectuals have responded with fury to my book Enlightenment now,

saying, first, how dare he claim that intellectuals hate progress? And second, how dare he claim that there has been progress? With others, the idea of progress leaves them cold, saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry, teaching kids to read, boring. At the same time, the most common response I've received from readers is gratitude. Gratitude for changing their view of the world from a numb and helpless fatalism to something more constructive, even heroic.

I believe that the ideals of the Enlightenment can be cast as a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with greater artistic flair and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it further. It goes something like this. We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a process that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity. Yet, human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption.

We are endowed with a power to combine ideas recursively to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our ingenuity and experience. We are deepened with a capacity for sympathy, for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration. These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed, and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism, and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason. Intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma,

and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality. As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the force, that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, exploited, or oppressed by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing,

and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains and tremendous peril, but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived. We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true. True to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which one's false, as any of them might be and any could become. This story belongs not to any tribe, but to all of humanity, to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition.

Thank you. I hope you're feeling more hopeful about the world after hearing Stephen's talk, and I wish you a very happy and restful holiday season. If you're a fan of this show and you are feeling generous this year, leaving a review of the show on Apple Podcasts would be a wonderful Christmas present to me. Or you could become a patron of this podcast, which I produce voluntarily as a labor of love for you. Supporting the Postcard Academy via the Patreon site for creators and artists gives you access to members-only content and help sustain the production of the show, which involves many hours. of work and monthly phase. If you would like to become a patron, you can go to patreon.com slash postcard academy, and that's Patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N. That's all for now. Thanks for listening,

and have a beautiful week wherever you are. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can news so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.