No Stupid Questions - 132. Is It Wrong to Enjoy Yourself While the World Is Burning?

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Are things as dire as they seem? How big is your moral circle? And should Angela spend time with her kids or answer her emails?

I meant dead in their soul. I didn't mean physically dead. Oh, yes. Air quotes dead. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, how big is your moral circle? Just me. That's all I care about. That's all I care about.

Stephen, we have an email from an Irene Lee that I'm going to read to you. Okay. Hi, Stephen and Angela. I was in painting class yesterday. A woman said, the world is burning. Here we are painting. I think it's true, but I don't know what I can do to help worldly issues like the war, climate, inequality, oppression, and many more problems. So what do you think of that woman's words? What do I think of that woman's words?

I certainly understand the impulse to feel helpless, to feel overwhelmed by negativity. I do think of at least two avenues to push back on. So one would be, I personally do think that it should be a moral imperative, really, for each of us to move forward as productively as we each can in the world, for yourself, for your family and community, but for the world at large, too. I mean, if you think about human innovation and ideas that have made all of us more prosperous and more civilized, honestly, over the millennia, I shudder to think what would have happened had the people involved in all those innovations just thrown up their hands and said, yeah, well, you know, there are wildfires or brutal dictators or mysterious diseases. Why bother? But the other thing is, if you look at the overall global

measures of human prosperity versus human suffering over the last few hundred years, the data are just overwhelmingly positive. This is like the Steven Pinker hypothesis, yes? Yes. Pinker wrote a book about it. I think he did a really good job summarizing it. But there are a lot of people who've been writing about this. They tend to get drowned out by the doomsayers, though. And if it's anything I've learned over the past 10, 20 years about prediction, it's that most predictions about the future are A, wrong. And most predictions about the future that people pay attention to are incredibly dire. If you go back and read predictions 100 years ago, 200 years ago about the fate of humankind, the fate of the planet, it is so incredibly despairingly dark. One easy example is population.

When the global population hit a billion, which was probably, I don't even know when that was, mid to late 1800s, maybe something like that, all the smart money said we are on a path to total starvation. Right. There's no way we can even produce enough food to feed 2 billion people. Now here we are going on 8 billion people, and we have so much food. And that doesn't mean that there aren't people who individually don't get enough food, but it's not for the lack of supply. It's more distribution. It's distribution caused essentially by usually economic and governmental dysfunction. Right. Political instability and corruption and so forth. But the point is that we are not as a

species starving because there are too many of us. Yeah. And we keep getting better at stuff like growing food. I mean, you see how good we humans generally have gotten over the years at doing the things that are important to us. If you look at the rate of global child mortality in the year 1800, about 40% of children died in the first five years of life. Now that number is, I think, gosh, it's less than 1%. No, I don't think it's that low, but it's fallen by multiple multiples. If you look at

literacy, this is a good one. In the year 1800, maybe 15% of the globe was literate. Now it's probably 85%. Even if you look at poverty, the share of people living in extreme poverty has fallen and fallen, fallen. Now, to be fair, just because a percentage shrinks doesn't mean a number isn't still large because the population is growing. But like I said, if you read history, the predictions are always terrible, whether it's about population, famine, violence, etc. You want to say in the macro things are getting better not worse well short answer yes but i mean long answer is i do understand i mean look we're surrounded by bad news but one of the reasons we're surrounded by bad news is because once we solve problem a

we focus on problems b c and d it's human nature to focus on the next problem and i would argue that's a great thing if we felt complac, we would be a really crappy species. It's adaptive to like disproportionately focus on what's wrong and not necessarily to dwell on what's right. you can do rather than quit the painting class because it is all meaningless is you can find a way to keep contributing in whatever way you know how to the continuing advancement of all these measures of prosperity that have been improving, whether you work in education or medicine or academia or media engineering, government, you name it, keep working to seek out and flesh out and distribute ideas that lead to more health and happiness for more people. That's one way to look at it. Sure. But you were making, I think, a more provocative point. I mean, I now have this

mental image of you with an easel and a brush in your hand and a cup of mint tea. You turn to the woman who said, the world is burning. here we are painting. And you say, not only Steven Pinker, but others have pointed out that the macro trends suggest that the world certainly isn't burning any more than it used to be. And if you look at the data, the world is burning less, maybe with the exception of climate, by the way. So, I mean, if the world is burning is meant to be a concern for climate change per se, I think that's the topic that we should talk about. The fact that we now are able to cast so much attention on concerns about pollution and climate change is itself a byproduct of prosperity. Of prosperity and peace, right?

That we can worry about the future of the planet is, in a way, a luxury good. we can worry about the future of the planet is, in a way, a luxury good. We're not ourselves in the moment suffering so much that we can only deal with our more primitive needs. Right. But I think that even if climate change is your one and only concern, what I would argue is that just as everything in life has some benefits and some costs. I think pessimism has its costs. Because if you're overly pessimistic, even if you're right, your odds of actually working towards something that's an improvement just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. If you assume you can't improve things. It's interesting. Here's an example that came to mind recently. So the recent breakthrough in nuclear fusion, which is, you know, decades in the making, it got mostly a yawn from the community of concerned environmentalists who are convinced

that only wind power and solar power can save us. There was a paper not long ago in environmental education research by Maria Ohala. It's called Hope and Climate Change, the importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. And it made the point that a lot of young people think that climate change is very, very important, but that they're also extraordinarily pessimistic about it. And what does that lead one to do? I would argue it leads you to throw up your hands and say, we're all screwed, or to be unrealistic about the different varieties of solutions that might work. And so that's why I note that this fusion breakthrough, which, gosh, if you're interested in clean energy, if you're interested in safe governance, if you're interested in

prosperity generally, it's really good news. And yet it was surprising to me how little enthusiasm it garnered from the pessimistic corners of the movement. That's what I point to as a cost. Right. But I don't think this woman in painting class is advocating for a pessimistic point of view. It's clear to me from the context of Irene's email is that the woman who says the world is burning, here we are painting, is being self-critical, is kind of asking if she shouldn't be doing more. So to me, this bigger question of like, how much should we care about all the things that are not immediate, pressing, urgent problems for ourselves and our immediate kin and, you know, friendship group, I guess. I think that's a great question. I mean, I remember

having conversations with, oh God, get out your shout class, Marty Seligman. I can't help that he was my advisor. I can't help that many of my conversations were with Marty Seligman when he was advising my PhD and then afterwards because I'm in the same department. So it's not my fault. Anyway, Marty liked to bring up this idea of the moral circle. You know, how big is our moral circle? Is it very, very narrow? Like, I only care about my own children, my husband, my best friend. Or is it very wide? Like, do you care about all of humanity? At the time, I thought that Marty came up with the idea of the moral circle. Socrates, maybe? I think it's actually Peter Singer. I'm sure philosophers have thought, you know, generally about this, but Peter Singer, the ethicist and philosopher, I think at Princeton,

speaks about, you know, widening our moral circle. And there is some more recent work on this by a former postdoc of mine who we've spoken about before in conversation. His name is Peter Meindel, and he is a co-author on a paper called Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in the Moral Circle, Competing Constraints on Moral Learning. And I do think this gets to Irene's question and this conversation in painting class, because at the broadest and most encompassing level, your moral circle could include literally all things, animate and inanimate. You know, one layer in, it's like, oh, circle could include literally all things, animate and inanimate. You know, one layer in, it's like, oh, I only care about living things, right? Inanimate objects,

you're on your own. And then if you go narrower, you can say like, well, I only care about mammals and you refuse to eat, you know, mammals. But then, you know, people might have an even more narrow moral circle and say like, I do eat meat, but what I really care about is all human beings. And by the way, we're still pretty broad there., but what I really care about is all human beings. And by the way, we're still pretty broad there. If you're going to care about like 8 billion human beings, the vast majority of whom have no connection to you directly and you'll never meet, then let's go one circle in from that. You might only care about human beings who live in your country. You might go even more narrow and say, like, I only care about human beings in my local

community, right? Like, Stephen only cares about New Yorkers. Angela only cares about Philadelphians. And she hates everyone in New Jersey. And she hates Philadelphia, too. I don't hate the city of Philadelphia. I just wish there were less trash. Less trash and boorishness and noise and violence. And feces and urine, not all of which are from dogs. I think what we're discovering is that Angela's moral circle, it's more like a donut. Like she doesn't care about anyone within 100 miles of her.

But once you get past there, it's OK. OK, but let me complete this, though, Stephen, because I think some people would more clearly recognize that their moral duties don't pertain to their local community, but to their family. Maybe like to their friendship circle, but maybe even more narrowly, like just your nuclear family. And then of course, just me, that's all I care about. That's the middle of this diagram. And I barely care about myself, damn it. So the centrifugal forces, you know, the force that goes outward, if you recall from physics one, which I haven't taken in a long long time but these centrifugal forces compassion fairness equality like make you think about moral concerns that are in the outer circles

there is this values survey that's been given across cultures and you know many different countries and there are 10 values one of the 10 values is called universalism it's basically concern for humanity in general but there is a different and separate value called universalism. It's basically concern for humanity in general, but there is a different and separate value called benevolence. And the idea is that's your inner moral circle, like really caring about people that you know. So those are the centripetal forces, like my familial attachments, my in-group loyalty, worrying about my best friend. And I think the point of this paper is that we sometimes think that like people differ in how wide their moral circles are. You know, some people have a really broad moral circle,

some people have a very narrow one. The thing to recognize about human beings is that we have these competing forces, centrifugal and centripetal, within ourselves. We're conflicted. So you feel like the lady in the painting class, she is a perfect exhibition of the conflict when we think about our moral circle. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that her family's benefiting from her being in painting class, but it doesn't take too much imagination to say that

because if she's taking care of herself and she's basically having some kind of happiness, that's gonna benefit the people in her immediate moral circle. And she's perhaps feeling this conflict between that centripetal force pulling in and the centrifugal force like, oh my gosh, the world is burning. Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss the connection between moral circles and dessert. In 10 minutes, I will full-on regret finishing this pint of ice cream, but that's 10 minutes from now. Right now, this is delicious.

Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about how much we should focus on serious global issues. So what about you? When you think about your moral circle, other than the fact that it really is, as we said, more of a moral donut or bagel, because the people within the Philadelphia and New Jersey areas, you care for zero.

How do you think about how those centripetal and centrifugal forces act on you? Are you conflicted or do you kind of construct in your mind, this is my moral circle, this is who I am, and this is how I'm going to deal with it? I feel like almost everyone, but I'll speak for myself, recognizes this conflict. For example, if I have a very tight focus around my nuclear family, like what's going on with my kids today? What am I doing for them? That can come into direct conflict with like, oh, I should answer this email from this high school principal in Akron, Ohio, who really wants me to give them advice on X, Y, or Z. And there is a zero-sum game. The zero-sum game is time and attention. I experience this, I don't know, on a daily basis. We're always making these choices, these trade-offs, and I think they very often involve the people I care

about that I know and the people that I care about that I don't know. I won't say that I care about, like, all animate objects. Like, I don't have the moral circle that some people do, by the way. It's part of certain religions, right? I think the Jain-like religion to care about all living things. I don't even have a trembling of that urge. But yeah, absolutely. People in general, I often feel that conflict. I think famously some very altruistic role models were not particularly kind to their immediate family and friends, but were amazingly altruistic humans. family and friends, but were amazingly altruistic humans. So people make these trade-offs and they differ across individuals, but they are trade-offs we have to make within ourselves. My mind, when I think about this struggle, goes to one of my favorite philosophers, someone who wrote in the 18th century. Is it Adam Smith? It is Adam Smith. And I'm so glad that I can say the word philosopher and you say Adam Smith as opposed to just thinking of him as the father of economics.

Well, a theory of moral sentiments. Yeah, but in the theory of moral sentiments, Smith wrote about this, you know, all of China was the example he gave. He wrote, let us suppose that the great empire of China with all its myriads of inhabitants was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake. myriads of inhabitants was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake. And let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe who had no sort of connection with that part of the world would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. The implication is that, yeah, okay, that sounds rough, but it's not me. It's not my circle. Doesn't he have a quote there about like your little finger? That's what I remember too. I'm not finding it right now, but I seem to remember something about like. If for 10,000 men in China. If half my pinky

got chopped off, that would cause me much more distress. Right. And if that were the choice, I would pick my pinky. Exactly. But then, you know, a parallel piece of that argument that people often attribute to Smith wrongly, I think, is this notion of self-interest. Self-interest was something that he wrote a bit about in his later book, The Wealth of Nations. But in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he writes about our self-concern in a way that I think would help modern people look at it in a different light. Let me read a little chunk.

This is a very, very famous piece of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others when we either see it or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. In other words, of course we're selfish, we're animals, but we also have within us an inherent drive to care about other people. And I think that is the friction when I hear the question from Irene that just about all of us feel all the time. Do I deserve to feel good about this tiny,

irrelevant thing in my life when there are so many other people who are suffering of a totally different category? There was an interesting example of this recently at the World Cup, maybe a quarterfinal or semifinal. There was an American journalist named Grant Wall who died in the stadium. During the game. He collapsed at least during the game. And it turns out that he died very young. I think he was 49 of an aortic aneurysm. And he was very well known in the soccer journalism community.

He's an American. He's been writing about soccer for Sports Illustrated and elsewhere for a lot of years. And another longtime soccer journalist, who's also just an excellent writer and thinker named Simon Cooper, writes for the Financial Times, he was discussing this very question of like, what should we care about? And he was describing how the match was going on. It was the Netherlands, which is Cooper's home country. He lives, I think, in Paris now, but he considers the Dutch team kind of his home team. Now, he's a journalist.

He's not just there as a fan. But he understood that this guy, Grant Wall, whom he knew and respected a great deal, had just collapsed within eyesight. And he was torn between where are my eyes going to go, to the match in the World Cup in front of me or to Grant Wall? And he said that he pretty much ended up watching the game. And he later learned that his colleague and friend had died. this, a colleague of his expressed that, you know, we shouldn't even really be watching this World Cup. And this had to do with the host country, Qatar, that many people feel very conflicted about. It's a country that bought the World Cup through bribery. I did not know that either. You know, FIFA, the group that administers international football, is a notoriously corrupt organization. So anyway, Qatar is famous for

a lack of what we consider basic human rights. They were famous for not being very humane toward the workers who came in to build the stadiums. They're considered extremely anti-gay. And so one thing that happened was that Grant Wall, the American journalist who died, had showed up, I'm not sure if it was at a match or a press conference or something, wearing a rainbow shirt. So he was trying to call attention to the more substantive issues around soccer, even though they're there to watch soccer. Right, the broader human issues. And then this guy dies. Now, interestingly, his death, having made it clear that he was against the way that Cutter carried itself, started to fuel a sort of conspiracy that, oh, he's maybe been murdered for speaking out.

So it became a very complicated and dark moment that this guy, Simon Cooper, talked out in this Financial Times column about like, what the heck are we doing here watching soccer when there are all these levels of sadness, dysfunction, hatred, etc.? And his conclusion was, there are costs, which we've just discussed, and there are also benefits. The benefit is that the World Cup, as bizarre, as dysfunctional, as corrupt as it can be, is this global event that brings joy to literally billions of people. So is that enough of a benefit to put up with all the costs? That's a really hard question to answer.

that enough of a benefit to put up with all the costs? That's a really hard question to answer. But if you focus only on the horror and the negative, which we humans are really good at doing and which our media is fantastic at doing, that we can totally forget that there's another side of the ledger. And on the other side of the ledger is the joy of being alive, the joy of having friends, the joy of trying to contribute to society in some way, large or small. And that's why I would say to Irene and her friend in painting class, yeah, paint, enjoy it, have a great time with your friends, and then use your frustration and your sense of helplessness to drive you to do something that's going to have some kind of positive impact on the world, as small as it may be. I agree with you. I don't know that I would have ended the sentence that way. Like, let your sense of helplessness and pessimism spur you on to do something. Now, you know, several generations after Adam Smith, economists, but also behavioral scientists documented this hyperbolic discounting curve. In general, this discounting that economists

study is like me now versus me later. And the hyperbolic part, for those of us who don't recall exactly what a hyperbola looks like from like 11th or 12th grade math, it's like a very, very steep curve where it goes down really fast, and then it starts to go down at a much slower rate. But that first drop-off is like, whew, it's like a roller coaster. It's like, boom, you're just in free fall. And that describes how we weigh the consequences to our future self. It explains why we do stupid things, things where we know in 10 minutes, we're going to regret eating all of the ice cream in this pint. It's not even in 10 years. It's like in 10 minutes, I will full on regret finishing this pint of ice cream.

But that's 10 minutes from now. Right now, this is delicious. So that's temporal hyperbolic discounting. But what scientists have also established is that we do this socially. So there's a hyperbolic discount curve for how much other people matter to us as a function of our social distance. So when I paint

this picture of moral circles, you know, there's my two daughters and my husband, and then there's my mother, my best friend, and now we're getting to like people that I work with. One thing to wrestle with, and I think Adam Smith was wrestling with it, and I think Irene and her friend in painting class are wrestling with it, is at some level, we recognize that like when somebody is socially distant from us, you know, it's our friend's friend. My husband just came back from a Shiva. It's like his father's friend's grandfather. You know, how much does that matter to my husband? Wait, his father's friend's grandfather must be like 1800 years old. Yeah, sorry. Right. I almost got that wrong. Let's see. Jason's friend's grandfather must be like 1800 years old. Yeah, sorry, right. I almost got that wrong. Let's see.

Jason's father's friend's father. I think that's right. Anyway, the point is, this is like three degrees of social separation. And, you know, it's very hard to really feel something for them. So this hyperbolic discounting, this very steep discounting, like, yeah, I don't care that much. steep discounting like, yeah, I don't care that much as a function of your distance from me socially. It makes us feel uncomfortable at some level. We know that we shouldn't care about our little pinky more than 10,000 human beings. But it is both true, like paint, take care of yourself, take care of the people that you love, take care of your pinky, take care of your pinky,

paint with your pinky. But the fact that there is this hyperbolic discounting for people who are far away from us, we know kind of upon reflection that they must matter as much as the people who are close to us. So I think that's what Adam Smith is wrestling with. I think that's what Irene and her friend are wrestling with. Also, I want to say something about Dan Batson. No. You may not speak of Dan Batson. How many times have I told you? You may not speak of Dan Batson. How many times have I told you?

This is a professor. He's emeritus now at University of Kansas. And his career has really been about the psychology of altruism. And the famous Good Samaritan study, which is quite well known in Psych I classes, at least, for those who don't have Psych 1 under the belt or just forgot. This study where seminary students, so they're good people. This was at Princeton, maybe? Yeah, I think it was done at Princeton Theological Seminary.

And he has these seminarians in different conditions. Like some of them are supposed to be writing a sermon about the Good Samaritan parable, about helping strangers. And the conceit or the setup of this Good Samaritan parable, about helping strangers and the conceit or the setup of this Good Samaritan study is that the seminarians in between their destination and where they are is somebody who's like homeless and in a doorway and clearly needing help, almost exactly out of the Bible, right? And the seminary students, whether they stop or not, has like nothing to do with like their scores on personality tests and their valuing of being moral people. It has a lot to do with whether they're in a hurry or not.

So if you've told the seminarian that they're like late for some appointment where they're supposed to actually now deliver the speech, well, they step right over this stranger in distress. So that's the famous Dan Batson. That was a very early study. And I actually corresponded with him a little bit by email because I wanted to understand the study a little better. And he pointed out a couple of things. One is that, you know, the fact that these seminary students hurried over the body of a stranger who needed help wasn't just to say that people are callous or like, it doesn't matter that we have moral principles. Who you were trying to help was just a different person in your head. Like you were just trying to be thoughtful and considerate of the person who was waiting for you

and you don't want to be late for them. In a way, you could argue this is a moral circle thing. Like there's a human being that's close in your moral circle, somebody that you know you're going to see them. Then there's this like more distant person, a stranger. It's not that these seminarians were like awful people, but the person who they were trying to help may have been a different person than the person that they were stepping over. That was one of his points. But then another point is other-oriented emotion, where we are feeling sympathy with other people for their suffering. He calls this empathic emotion really the root of altruism. Like the fact that Irene can care about poverty or oppression that doesn't touch her life at all is actually a beautiful thing that is the bedrock of us being

truly good people and altruistic. When you know that somebody else is suffering, you don't have to feel their suffering, like to know that somebody's hungry, you don't have to like feel hunger yourself. But it does seem like a wonderful human thing that we do, that we can feel bad that that person is in a bad situation. And that that motivates a very selfless, other-oriented behavior, which is helping other people. So the take-home, I think, for Irene and her friend in painting class is that they are experiencing some of these tensions that moral people experience. They are experiencing some of this empathic response, and they're feeling a little torn about how

altruistic to be. Right. And if they weren't feeling that, they would be kind of dead. Or just terrible, right? They don't have to be dead. Well, I meant dead in their soul. I didn't mean physically dead. Oh, yes. Air quotes dead. So I have a question I want to ask you, but let me ask the listeners first the same question, which is if what we're talking about here is some stew of potential hypocrisy and helplessness and pessimism, name a thing that you do to combat that. That's what I would like our listeners to tell us. Send us a voice memo. Just use your phone,

record in a nice quiet place, and tell us one thing that you do, or maybe even better, have done successfully to combat this sort of feeling of helplessness slash pessimism slash potential hypocrisy, and send it to nsq at freakonomics.com, and we may play it on a future show. So I've asked the listeners to tell us, but Angie, I want to hear from you, too, because you seem, and not just because you are a practitioner of the field of positive psychology, literally, but you seem temperamentally destined to not get caught too much in this sort of treadmill of concern about, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be experiencing joy when so many other people are experiencing sadness, frustration, danger, violence, hunger, etc. So do you have

any advice? Well, Stephen, I know I have told you this story before. I'm going to tell it to you again because it's true. And it's exactly what I think about when I think about combating the sense of helplessness that one can have when considering all of the problems in the world. I remember reading in French class, I think it was junior year, and Dr. Rowland had assigned Candide by Voltaire. And I hated it, by the way. I was just like, oh my God, I hate this book. But at the end, Voltaire, the author says, il faut cultiver son jardin. You have to cultivate your garden. And the idea is that the world is a complex, sometimes evil place. It can be overwhelming, actually, to really ponder like all the things that are going wrong. that are going wrong, even if, Stephen, as you point out, macro trends suggest things are getting better, but it still can be overwhelming to ponder all things that are wrong, that in theory you could do something about. And the moral of the story, at least as I interpreted it as a high

school junior, was there's what you can't do and there's what you can do. And the things that you can do, just do and don't be paralyzed. So for me, I have my garden, like read these articles on hyperbolic discounting, explain them to other people, and maybe they can live their life a little differently. And I know it's not like, you know, the whole world, but it's my garden. And I remember coming back to that memory of French class and Dr. Rowland getting to the end of that book I hated, but that one little gem of wisdom, cultivate your garden, paint your painting, you know, make a good tuna sandwich, like be nice to one person today. I think honestly, if you were just able to do that, maybe collectively we would help the world not be such a bad place.

So first of all, it always comes back to a sandwich. There's never an answer that doesn't include a sandwich. Think Voltaire was really talking about sandwiches. Tuna sandwiches. Secondly, I am as pro-cultivating one's own garden as can be, but I would just add that there are maybe one or two external factors that I think can really help, which is remember that most predictions throughout history have been garbage. And also just remember how much and how viscerally we all respond to negative news. And if you pay too much attention to that, you can easily convince yourself that, yeah, there's absolutely nothing you can do that

is positive and fruitful. And I would say that for every human on earth, there is something fruitful and productive to do. And of course, it can be incredibly hard to fight through the feelings of helplessness and caring about the things that you can't address directly. But there are some things you can address directly. Maybe it's your garden. Maybe it's your job. Maybe it's your family. Maybe it's your painting. Maybe it's your painting. So paint a better painting, friend of Irene, and then we'll talk. No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas.

And now here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Stephen says he thinks the global population reached 1 billion in the mid to late 19th century. In fact, this milestone occurred in 1804. According to recent data from the United Nations, the world's population reached 8 billion as of November 15, 2022, and is expected to reach 9 billion by approximately 2037. Stephen also says that in the year 1800, approximately 40% of children died within the first five years of life, and Angela believes that today that number is less than 1%.

When it comes to the United States specifically, Stephen wasn't far off. In 1800, about 46% of children did not make it to their fifth birthday. And Angela was correct. Today, that number is approximately 0.7%. The average is higher globally. According to the World Health Organization, about 3.7% of children around the world die before they reach the age of five. Later, Stephen and Angela struggle to recall a quotation from Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments

about how a European man would react to hearing the news that a great number of people in China had died in an earthquake. The passage they were thinking of reads as follows, The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight. But provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting

to him than this paltry misfortune of his own. That's it for the Fact Check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some of your thoughts on our recent episode on crying. We asked listeners to tell us about the last time they teared up. Here's what you said. I remember very clearly the last time I cried. It was June 5th of last year. At about 4 p.m. I was sitting with friends at a gay bar and I saw on a news report that it was the 40th anniversary of the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus. Having been HIV positive for 38 years, I started to cry quietly, but I couldn't stop. Although nobody knew what was going on in my head, I felt completely supported by my friends and the staff and

incredibly grateful to be one who has survived. I like to consider myself a bit of a recreational crier, and a few years ago I became curious about my crying tendencies, so I started to keep a log of each time I cry and what causes it. According to the data, 68.4% of my logged crying instances had a negative cause and 31.6% had a positive cause. The last time I cried for a positive reason, according to the log, was because I saw a video of a toddler who's really good at skiing. And the last time I cried for a negative reason was when I was browsing petfinder.com

and thinking about all of the cats who are waiting to get adopted. Hi, Stephen and Angela. This is Christina Luke from Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Stephen, your description of tearing up over the fiddle music at the end of the Adam Smith episode spoke so deeply to me. All my life, I've been what I call a weird crier. I never cry from physical pain, rarely from overwhelm or sadness, but I'm often embarrassingly moved to tears by the oddest things. My quirkiest cry trigger is probably rounds of applause. I don't know why, but whenever a crowd starts clapping, the floodgates open.

It happens very often in response to music, as you've described as well. Music and applause, like at the theater? Forget it. I was blubbering at Disney on Ice. I'm also a notorious empathic crier. I tear up whenever I see another person having an intense emotional reaction, whether it's in real life or not. It makes it super awkward for me to attend funerals for people I don't know very well, because the second I see the pain on another person's face, it's as if it's my own and I have a true physical reaction. It's actually

becoming a running joke in my family, who all hand over tissues, pointing and laughing at my sobbing face whenever there's a sad moment in a movie where people start clapping. I'm not sure what it all means, but thanks for making me feel like less of a weirdo. That was, respectively, James Campbell, Rebecca Cook, and Christina Luke. Thanks so much to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts. And remember, we'd still love to hear how you deal with feelings of helplessness about the enormity of the world's problems. Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com. Let us know your name and whether you'd like to remain anonymous. You might hear your voice on the show.

hear your voice on the show. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela answer a listener's question about why he finds it impossible to work on airplanes. If you wear over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones, which you must if you're going to travel. Right, then you can pantomime like, I can't hear you. That's next week on No Stupid Questions. then you can pantomime like, I can't hear you. That's next week on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire,

and Freakonomics MD. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston. Catherine Moncure is our associate producer. Our executive team is Neil Caruth, Gabriel Roth, and Stephen Dubner. Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Werner Chapel Music. If you'd like to listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium.

listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at Freakonomics.com. To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ. Thanks for listening. Don't you have any other f***ing stories, Angela? Hello? You gotta read more books. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.