The World is Getting Better Than You Think - A Statistical Analysis of Things That Are Improving

3,865 views Wait, is this logic right? • Mar 22, 2024

Slog Reference: The world is improving

Description

Is the world getting better or worse? The answer is quite complex. But there are a lot of good things happening in the world that get overshadowed by the bad ones. Which makes us feel like there is no progress and everything is getting worse than it already was. Therefore, we decided to statistically prove to you how good things are improving in the world, how bad things are reducing, and why you think everything is getting worse in this episode of the FutureIQ podcast.

Links mentioned in the episode:
The Science Of Being Happy: https://youtu.be/reYUf2nkcQg
Antifragile episode: https://youtu.be/75RulJrHFMc

Book - Factfulness: https://tapthe.link/FactfulnessBook

More Videos:
Why Surge Pricing Feels Wrong: https://youtu.be/IsHPxh-C0Sw

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better : The world is much better. But: The world is awful. The world can be much better.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen : Hans Rosling TED Talk
https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world: People are wrong about how good/bad the world is
https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/32-improvements/ : 32 improvements in the world shown in charts (16 bad things reducing and 16 good things increasing)

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

00:00 Introduction
02:52 Things that have improved
10:06 Why do we think it's getting worse?
11:46 Good things getting better
15:38 The importance of good news

#futureiq #goodnews

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Transcript

- all right I'm give you three uh sentences pick which one is the correct one right okay the world is awful the world can be much better mhm or the world is much better the world is awful the world is okay awful so that was a trick question the third one okay all three of those statements are true and that's what we are going to think about today right how can all three of them be true the world is awful the world is much better the world can be much better but what I want to do is go back to the original questions first two questions and you were dead wrong there H and that is true of most people right

0m 41s most people believe that the world is getting worse right you look around you and you see what's going on with the politics with the wars with the social uh stuff right and you think the world is getting bad and you don't it is not getting bad right poverty okay uh most people think that poverty has increased you were at least like maybe it was kind of okay right in reality in 1990 the percentage of world living in extreme poverty was 35% of the world okay today it is less than 10% okay what so it is not like we have like little change in poverty we have massive reduction in extreme poverty yeah 35% to 10% is huge right uh and this is

1m 28s something that uh Hans rosling uh believed deeply in that the there is uh world is getting better in many many many ways it's just that most of us don't know about that and we need to do a better job of letting everybody know this right so um that's what I want to talk about and uh there is a website called our world in data uh run by Max Rosser and his team they're basically taking off from Hans rosling and and uh lot of interesting data there right so I have picked out some of those data items to talk about today just to make you really understand the ways in which world is better and why we don't realize

2m 13s it I mean I agree your point about poverty decreasing and the fact that a lot of people now have access to a lot more stuff uh in many ways but overall the world just seems awful okay so what I'm going to do again taken from our world data is make show you a list of 16 horrible things that have been decreasing okay and another 16 good things that have been increasing okay uh just I mean that's a list of 32 things uh and some of them just seem obvious and like oh that yeah but I mean it'sing right so legal slavery H right uh was practiced by 194 countries out of 195 in 180000 00 today only three countries

3m 03s have legal slavery okay if you know which three countries those are comment oil spills huh in 1980 there were 6 1979 there were 636 oil spills H in 2016 there were only six we have gotten much better at reducing this right uh okay battle deaths huh of course you know the two World Wars killed a lot of people a lot of right so so it was like 20 million people in 1942 uh but since then it has been gradually red I mean of course it reduced immediately after World War II but even then for the next 40 years there were battles lots of people dying but that has steadily reduced to a point where very few people die in Wars these

3m 52s days in spite of is that because there are fewer Wars or is that because the medical technology the combat medical technology has become number of wars has gone down okay so the world is getting better in that sense also absolutely percent of children dying right either uh I mean you know infant mortality is defined as a child dies before the age of five child is born but dies before the age of five right 100 years ago in India it was 53% that means more than half of all the children born would not live to uh until the age of five you know that actually explains why our grandparents generation had four five six kids well

4m 38s because 50% were in case of one grandmother I have it's 14 kids so even when I was born 1970 in India mortality was 25% right so if you one out of four children would not make it past five today in India that number is 4% and in the Western world it is like less than 1% right that's the number of kids di so infant mortality has also reduced has also decreased right and as culture we have figured this out and fixed these problems right child labor in 1950 uh share of uh children aged 5 to 14 who worked fulltime under bad conditions was around 28% right in 2012 it had gone down to 10 % and it

5m 31s continues so uh countries with death penalty in 1863 193 uh out of 194 countries had death penalty in 2016 it is 89 right okay um and I mean most of us would consider this a good thing it is a progressive thing yes uh deaths from disasters H right like floods and other natural disasters uh used to be quite High uh right so uh around a million deaths per year in the 1930s uh and it has gone down to 72,000 in like 2010 200 but is is that because the number of disasters have decreased or is that because we have better Disaster Response now but number of disasters is actually increasing because of climate change right so we just deal

6m 24s with it better right okay okay so our response to disasters is better our disaster preparation is better our buildings are better people are living in better conditions and uh of course even our medical uh fac facilities are better right uh Leed gasoline in 1986 193 countries had Leed gasoline now it is just three countries right so we have managed to get rid of a Scourge something that caused all kinds of problems in children right HIV infections in 1996 it was 549 people per million had HIV okay it went down to 240 by 2016 right cut by half and it is just getting better right share of people who are undernourished right in 1970 it was 28%

7m 18s now it is in 2015 11% it I know I sound like a jerk when I see this but is the percentage lesser because the population is greater no so so even I mean 1970 to 2015 uh if you look at it uh even absolute numbers the number is lower okay okay ozone depletion yeah that one I've heard we we've managed to help the Earth reheal the ozone the whole in the ozone layer right correct we have healed especially right now when we listen to media and our when we listen to stories about climate change it feels like we are never going to make any progress because just everybody is attacking everybody else right but there is this

8m 02s excellent example of a natural uh problem human cause natur climate problem which we fixed but we fixed it we actually did something to fix it I still don't believe we are doing the necessary things to fix whatever are I can bet that when we did whatever it was for the ozone depletion fixing ozone depletion even when it was happening you would have felt the same way about it right because at that time it would have felt like where everybody is fighting and we're not doing anything and so on right it always feels like that it's only in retrospect we find out that oh well we managed to actually do something good yeah the power of hindsight and all

8m 44s that I agree but at the same time when we actually took a decision with the ozone layer we actually took a decision of banning substances that affect the ozone layer yeah and we will it always takes more time than you think I like his optimism so that's why there is data for the optimism right let's see nuclear arms 1986 there were 64,000 Warheads right now it is down to 15,000 and of course the world did not end in World War 3 so as Humanity as Humanity this is something we most probably have managed to fix give it time million crashes have gone down from 2100 deaths per 10 billion passenger miles down one barely one okay that is that is truly a

9m 34s fascinating startat we have gotten rid of small pox and we are this close to getting rid of polio and this is when you know the number of people that used to die was quite horrible or wait didn't the wh announce polio was over I think no it is not there are still a small number of cases in a small number of countries okay but we are that close but hey we bringing back measles so try an old disease for your old time sake I guess idiots it will get better right I mean there is a small number of meil cases a small number of idiots who get a lot of attention and that's what they

10m 11s want but by and large the world is getting better right so in fact that's one something I want to mention that the reason it feels like everything is going to the dogs is because as human beings right we are wired to pay more attention to the bad news right okay and the good news just slips past us as a result what happens is that in single incidents of bad news here and there become big stories they get forwarded to everybody they become media uh hits right they go viral whereas good news is statistical good news doesn't make headlines good news is like you know something which used to be 37% has now become 36% % right nobody

11m 00s forwards that but next year it becomes 34% and then next year it becomes 32% right the world keeps getting better in boring ways and it horrible things happen in exciting Ways by exciting I mean excite as in it just goes and hits the right centers of our brain because we evolved to pay more attention to bad news that's a survival Instinct we have true right true it's it's definitely the survival Instinct and yeah so let me just go through a few more I mean we saw a lot of uh bad news uh I mean we can I also want to show uh examples of uh good news right good things going up so I'll skip some of these things sure let's

11m 42s talk about good things that are getting more or increasing in the world so child cancer survival has gone up from 58% to 80% in like 35 years uh share of people with mobile phones has gone up and that's a good thing right again you the first impression you get is oh my God mobile phone is bad because it is God knows what all it is doing with Twitter and outrage and all that but nobody really talks about things like you know when mobile phone cames to the fisherman of Tamil Nadu right they could use their mobile phones to figure out where on the shore is the best prices for their fish and their incomes increased absolutely

12m 26s and of course the fact that now so many you know close to a billion people in India can take online payments and their lives are much better because of that Commerce is better things agree no no with mobile phones I'm in complete agreement about the fact that they have made lives better uh it is a tool and tools can be used for good and for nonsense as well democracy is increasing right again it seems to us like attacks on Democracy are happening all the time and authoritarianism is increasing and this and that and all that but if you look statistically if you look at the boring news the number of countries with democracy increased steadily from

13m 08s 1800s to uh you know 2000s it has been increasing the share of humans living under democracy has increased the share of the Democracy index has mostly been increasing it had been flat for a few years uh little bit but largely it has been increasing and again it has started increasing in recent times like 2 3 years back there were people worrying that democracy has peaked and now we are sliding back because of Russia and Turkey being more authoritative and so on yeah uh but last two years have shown major missteps in the authoritarian regimes right Russia made big mistakes China seems to have made mistakes and democracy is on the rise again okay uh by the way there is an episode on

13m 57s antifragility which speaks about uh democracy versus authoritarian regime that you should definitely check out we'll put the link in the show not/ descriptions so do that share of people with access to some electricity up from 72% in 91 to 85% in 2014 right okay um that's definitely happening yes girls in school 65% in 1970 90% in 2015 yes the only thing you would have heard about girls in school is that in Afghanistan there is a backslide right but if you look at the big percentages it is still a blip yes it is bad for Afghanistan but as Humanity we are going in the right direction and hopefully Afghanistan will also get reversed at some point because

14m 45s democracy keeps increasing yeah so there is hope there is hope there is hope there is hope right Farm yields right serial yield has gone up from 1.4 tons per hectare to 4 tons per hectare that's nearly a three times increase so the amount of food we can grow with limited land is a significant increase right immunization of one year olds I mean you might have been under the impression that all these antivaxer people and because of that immunization is gone but no it was 22% in 1980 and it is now 88% yeah no I agree that the antix movement is quite small right now My worry is that they are loud enough that they might influence some additional people

15m 31s who should not be influ and in fact it is good that we worry about this that is how we make progress right but we should never lose sight of the fact that ultimately the big story is the progress correct not the things we are worrying about we should worry about the things but we should not lose track of the fact that things are getting better right why is that important this is very important because this allows us to be optimistic this allows us to continue fighting the good fight right because if we felt that in spite of everything the world just keeps getting worse at some point everybody is going to just give up yeah

16m 08s right but when we know that things are getting better all these fights in the past have given big big big results right that helps us to motivates us to fight continue the fight right that is why and that is why the other two parts of those early statements are important yes the world has significant ly improved but it is still awful and it can still get much better so we have to keep fighting so there is a sequence to those statements the world is much better than what it used to be before the world is still awful and the world can be much better exactly fascinating all right uh a lot of good things a lot

16m 48s of good statistics given out by naen in this I hope you have stayed with us until now at this point of the episode if you haven't stayed then you have just proven point and you're not watching that because you haven't stayed so actually you know uh Hans rosling can make uh statistics also exciting so there's a couple of TED Talks that we have linked in the uh description uh basically Hans Ros link TED Talks just check out everything the man does okay excellent stuff right so I just want to point out one thing which is uh a book called factfulness by Hans rosling that has a lot of these statistics and that essentially is going

17m 33s to make you feel optimistic right about the world and about Humanity I suggest you should read it this was nice to get a nice positive reality check from none other than the man himself naen I'm shrikant this is future IQ