Despite climate, war and Covid, is everything actually … getting better?

You might be forgiven for thinking that we are facing the collapse of civilization when you watch the media over the past year. We have a shrinking economy, a fuel crisis that may bring on energy rationing and forced blackouts, extreme weather events, the increased chance of nuclear war, and the risk of a new epidemic riding on the back of the last. The closest we have been to Armageddon in the project's 75-year history is 100 seconds before midnight.

Unless you are the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, it may be difficult to maintain a rose-tinted view of the future. Enlightenment Now argued that our interpretations of news events make us too gloomy. Thanks to the social, economic, political, technological, and medical advances of the past 300 years, there has never been a better time to live.

Pinker's book was hated at the time it was published. He had neglected any phenomena that might suggest a lack of progress, which was one of the criticisms. The recent challenges facing the world do not seem to have altered Pinker's opinion.

He explained why he thinks there are still reasons to be optimistic in 2022. There is no law of nature that allows bad things to be separated. It doesn't mean that we're being punished for our sins or that we're in a uniquely dangerous moment He believes humanity has the ability to deal with challenges.

It's comforting to see cause for hope in a crisis. We have good grounds for optimism. The Observer looked at four indicators of progress and how they have been affected by recent events.

Health in the time of Covid

There is no better place to start than the Covid-19 epidemic. The World Health Organization says that more than 6 million people have died from the disease. The British Medical Journal found that all but six countries had experienced a reduction in life expectancy as a result. Two million people in the UK are thought to be affected by long Covid.

It's a step backwards for global health. Pinker has never claimed that we will see continuous progress. The way we deal with problems and find solutions is what his argument is about. We would have been able to deal with the threat a long time ago.

The UK government's initial response to the crisis was not well received by the jury. The development of Covid vaccines is a triumph of science. The vaccine programme saved at least 14 million people in its first year according to a recent study.

In the past, all previous vaccines had taken at least five years to develop, and at the start of the Pandemic many scientists believed the possibility of creating a new one from scratch was naive. Our ability to deal with future health threats could be boosted by that.

Wealth and happiness

Enlightenment Now believes that people today are wealthier than in the past and that this has resulted in higher life satisfaction. Pinker doesn't believe that inequality is a cause of unrest because it is each person's wealth that matters

The evidence is not as clear as Pinker would have you believe. China and India's recent economic growth has done very little for the population's overall happiness, according to research by Richard Easterlin. A study by Magorzata Mikucka at the Catholic University of Louvain analyzed life satisfaction in 46 countries from 1981 to 2012 Reducing inequality and increasing social capital were found to bring about greater happiness.

We don't know if this will bode well for our lives over the next few months. The Office for National Statistics has just reported that the UK's GDP has shrunk in the second quarter of 2022, suggesting that we are on the verge of a recession, while the average salary is set to fall behind inflation by 8% this year. According to the International Monetary Fund, the cost of living crisis is likely to widen the gap between rich and poor.

By the beginning of this year, real wages had not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting that this is more than a momentary blip in our living standards.

War and peace

Our tendency to kill each other is one of Pinker's most controversial claims. He first made the case that human violence is at an all-time low in The Better Angels of Our Nature in 2011.

Many of Pinker's arguments concern warfare. Pinker uses data regarding the number of conflicts, their length, the proportion of lives lost, and the level of military investment to show a downward trend. You can only reach his conclusion if you look at average numbers across the globe over large time periods.

The rise of democracy, the increasing importance of international trade, and the actions of institutions such as the UN have made war less desirable for most leaders, according to Pinker.

Many other scholars have doubts about the conclusions. An analysis done by the University of Colorado in Boulder concluded that the "long peace" may be a statistical fluke. It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 Consider how many times you can throw a coin and it will land on the tails. The coin is biased, but with more throws the frequencies will balance out. The long peace may be ephemeral according to Clauset.

The thought of a global war has been placed at the forefront of everyone's mind. When our fate depends on the erratic decisions of dictators such as Vladimir Putin, optimistic historical analyses provide cold comfort.

The environment

With the record-breaking heatwaves this year, and the threat of wildfires sweeping across the UK, it feels like we are already witnessing the start of the climate emergency.

Pinker doesn't deny that climate change is a gargantuan problem, but he doesn't like the idea of eco-pessimism. The elimination of acid rain is one of the environmental successes described in Enlightenment Now. He points to the fact that many countries are no longer emitting CO 2 For an escape route from disaster, he points to ideas such as carbon taxing, combined with a reliance on nuclear power and technologies such as carbon capture, which involves scrubbing CO2 from power stations before it is released and locked underground.

Eco-pessimists are not impressed. Carbon capture offers some promise, but it is not proven to work. Since Pinker's book was published, there has been a lack of political will, which we will need. Most governments are not close to the level of ambition needed to limit climate change to 1.5C and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to a UN report.

According to the Enlightenment principles of reason, science and humanism, we will act rationally. To believe that our politicians will take action in time is a leap of faith.

The Expectation Effect is a book written by David Robson.