This (and alike) conclusion is likely wrong.
If there is a societal/cultural/political expectation to project happiness, people will say they are happy. Many people wouldn’t say they are unhappy to a stranger.
Fun fact, sociologists in Russia asking people nowadays “how do people around you feel? good/bad/worried/etc.” exactly because getting sincere answer to “how do you feel?” is impossible.
The conclusion those "researchers" would like to draw is that the world is better than "the people" think, when the far more plausible interpretation is that the world is so horribly bad that people are scared to even talk about how they feel.
This is the book, it's called Factfulness: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37850908-factfulness
There are a lot of bad things that happen around us (war, hunger, discrimination, etc), but we are at the best time in the entire human history, even with that. Compared with every metric in history, we are better. Even where it's bad, it's less bad than it used to be.
That claim alone should immediately make you doubt the metrics being used. In fact, it's easy to find dozens of metrics for which this isn't true. Housing affordability being a very obvious example. And the average democracy index has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years IIRC. Environmental pollution also most certainly isn't "at the best time in the entire human history". You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.
This book was written by Hans Rosling, a man who was an expert in data analysis and whose mission was to show actual world data to people in fantastic visualizations they could clearly understand. If there's anything that's far removed from propaganda, it's Rosling's data-based approach to what the situation of the world really is.
About house affordability: do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy.
I will leave his quote here, from his Wikipedia entry:
"People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."
> almost every metric
That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s both misleading and false. Take global divorce rate, it’s one metric but you can easily turn it into several others if you’re trying to support a given narrative. Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc.
You can even swap positive metrics for negative ones or do the reverse. Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad. More treatment options is good, but spiraling cost of new treatments is bad
What the book does is ask ordinary people what they think is happening on metrics do they care about, and are those metrics getting better or worse. So the metrics themselves are part of the story, but it's people's perception of them that's the main point. It turns out that people consistently get this wrong, and think that these things are getting worse when actually they are mostly getting much better.
So this isn't so much about the author painting a picture of the world getting better, though maybe that's part of the argument. It's about ordinary people having an extremely distorted view of progress. Whatever you think about these metrics or other metrics, it's hard to argue that this central thesis of the book about people's view of these metrics is wrong.
There’s a few positive trends that show up on thousands of different metrics. Economic growth continues, but as much as that impacts poverty in a positive way it also results in an increasing number of deaths on an absolute scale from air pollution, CO2, plastic pollution etc. I am not saying it’s therefore bad, just that talking about things in terms of statistics is on it’s own misleading.
Those policies might also have negative effects, and that should absolutely be part of the conversation, but let's have a fully informed debate as best we can.
Where I think your point is strongest is people discounting the vast positive influence outsourcing has had on foreign economies long term development. People IMO take issue with sweatshops on products they buy because they can empathize with foreign workers more than vast swaths of poor people who would prefer working in sweatshops than their alternatives.
In the end none of that progress is judged as particularly important when faced with personal problems and any fig leaf issue which can justify their stance. ‘We can’t outsource UAE jobs to foreign workers with poor working conditions’ was really just we ‘can’t afford the competition.’ Farmers make the same basic argument and win not because their arguments are stronger but because they have more political power due to our political system favoring low population states. Which suggests the argument is ultimately meaningless.
It's $10-12 on ebook or paper. Worth a read, certainly.
A high divorce rate is a positive thing if it means people are getting out of bad marriages and living poverty free independent lives. We have a lot of civil law around divorce that makes it expensive and painful, but not Henry 8th.
It's honestly bizarre to see people in this thread coming up with the most ridiculous metrics, like divorce rate, to "contradict" the general trend that the world is improving... it's seriously messed up to think those metrics are in some way similar.
Total number of people dying from air pollution is an easy way to make global economic growth look bad. I am not saying it’s inherently a bad thing, just that painting a very rosy picture means being selective about what’s included and how it’s presented. You can downplay anything by using percent of a growing population even if things don’t actually become less horrific for those impacted just because there’s more people.
Getting/being married is not itself a measure of happiness. Just the ability to get divorced is a huge positive change from the past. It means people don't have to be stuck in bad relationships.
> Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad.
More people with detected cancer is good. A larger swath of the population has access to cancer screening and the capability of detecting cancer early is better than it ever was in the past. Just because cancer diagnosis has increased doesn't mean rates of incidence has increased.
The same could be said for Rosling. How much of his bias has crept into his analysis? Is he measuring the right things -- or simply what is en vogue (or worse, what is best for his interests).
I would trust a basement-dwelling amateur analyst to find the "truth," much sooner than I would a pseudo-celebrity/influencer, going around holding TED talks.
To take an arbitrary example from my own life, the last recession was an incredible time in Ireland. The housing crisis that has boiled for decades diminished, cheap and free property rentals in Dublin lead to an explosion in the creative arts - including dozens of 'open access' non profit creative spaces. Mass underemployment meant that social status briefly became much more about creative engagement and sociability that wealth display. Bars became less the focus of social life, which moved to house parties and non-profit social spaces. It was a creative and social renaissance. All of this disappeared so completely during the 'recovery' that it's difficult to convey what it was like to people who weren't around to experience it.
You can point to crisis of homelessness today, a generation forced to leave with their parents into their thirties, the worsening of the Irish health service, pressures on the cost of living. But you can't easily convey the comparative misery and defensive superficiality wrought by inequality in Dublin today. You can't capture on a chart the experience of living through a beautiful communal creative moment when an entire society caught a collective breath.
That seems shortsighted at best. Theres certainly a case to be made that increased life expectancy, increased consumption of goods and services, access to education and health services, reduction in poverty etc. outweigh those things you cited.
Also, those things you cited are all highly political issues and arguably not true so be careful about suggesting people have fallen prey to propaganda. Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Are you comparing comparable houses when comparing housing prices? In places with similar demand?
The comment I responded to claimed that "we are better" according to "every metric". It wasn't about one thing "outweighing" the other.
> Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down.
Not compared to 500 years ago. The comment I responded to was talking about all of history.
Environmental pollution especially in developed countries is now way lower than in any point in the living memory, plus quite a bit more. In developing countries, it's hit and miss.
Democracy only went down recently because it was forced upon many countries simply due to their defeat in the Cold War, those countries never been democratic before, never had any internal impulse to become democratic, and their peoples despised democracy and wanted this chaos to end as soon as possible. Reversal from artificial, externally forced democracy made vast majority of them happier. In many cases, their entire culture, religion and language itself precludes sustainable democracy. "Freedom" is not the universal desire of all people, time to get over it.
The last 50 decades have probably been the golden years of western civilization and democratic freedom, despite the evidence of decline within the last few years
Sure, some things are "objectively" better, like lower child mortality and so on. But happiness is so subjective. It's entirely possible that when we were hunter gatherers, the average person was happier, even though child mortality and life expectancy were considerably lower.
It's easy to think that access to high tech like iPhones and a toilet to shit in makes people happy, but I don't think this is the case.
Also sitting on a cold toilet seat is now particularly jarring. What a luxury! I highly recommend!
I think this idealization of “hunter gatherer” society is absolutely insane. It’s like arguing the moon is made of cheese. People were likely not happy being hungry, scared, and afraid most of fucking the time.
For all we know when people start to travel cross continent in minutes, press a button and have instant steak printed, we cannot assume they will be happier than everyone alive today. They will have their own set of issues to weight them down. If nothing, boredom.
A person that had 'happiness' and now is in a less secure position.
A person surrounded by happy people, but doesn't feel that way themselves.
Relative privation does weird things to people.
I constantly see this claim and I have really grown to hate it. It is a simple lie, in three ways, and thirds one is the worst.
Firstly, the statement is only true if you compare human history over hundreds of years. So you comparing modern society to people who haven't discovered soap and hygiene. If that is your benchmark, even USSR looks good if you compare it to 1500's - at least you had real medical system and toilets. Clearly medieval social order in not our benchmark of success, no-one is arguing we should bring back the inquisition, burning witches and bloodletting.
It is not actually true if you compare human experience over last few decades - look at suicide rates and debt burden amongst young people, climate change, etc.
Second reason your claim is terrible, is it conflates social order and technological progress. So when I question social policies, like why did I alone pay more tax in UK in 2015 than the entire corporation of Starbucks, people go - 'things have never been so good, so current social policies should not be questioned.' Well, things get better because technology get's better. Even in USSR technology got better. So if all you knew was living in USSR, you'd be making the same argument, and it would be equally valid/invalid.
Third reason this is terrible, is it fails to take into account inertia. So in Britain we question the way our railways are run, and this argument gets throw around. But majority of railways were built in Victorian Era, under completely different social order. American economy was made great decades ago, when corporate tax rates were like 3x higher, education was free, etc. We are just living off success of the past, it does not mean current social order, which is different, will lead to success.
American economy was made great when America was practically the only developed country in the world that wasn't devastated (in the literal sense of the word) by the WWII. It was trivially easy to outcompete everyone else and flood the world with US exports, which triggered the US Golden Era, during which uneducated people working jobs that could be learned in half a day could afford to live in detached houses - something to this day completely unheard of in the rest of the world.
I've heard this ad naseum during my whole life. The word they always forget is "materially". People are on average better off materially than ever before (maybe), but that is far from taking into account what it means to be human and what life is.
One example is that we have better quality beds than ever before in history, but maybe that doesn't matter since people in the past had tougher skin and didn't need better beds.
These "best time in human history" doesn't take into account things such as freedom, purpose in life, dignity and any other factors of life that cannot be measured, because scientists can not deal with things that aren't measurable.
I call this the "Hobbes fallacy" and it seems to be in vogue among a certain literati a la Steven Pinker who have taken up the task of proving that lay people's pessimism and anxiety are unfounded.
I propose an alternative: that when we expand the timeline of humanity back far enough, many of the improvements in the modern era disappear and are seen to only be improvements from local minima occuring during the last several hundred or thousand years.
Go back further to pre-agricultural times when big game and forage were still abundant and hadn't been depleted from population growth. Humans had excellent health, a modal survival after childhood comparable with modern humans, easily obtainable food, few working hours, lots of social support, living with friends and family. Nowadays that type of lifestyle would be an idyllic luxury for many.
After the resource crunch and transition to sedentary agriculture you start seeing lifespan and health plummet, food insecurity, caste societies, endemic war, slavery. These things were not widespread for most of human history, just the agriculture era, which can be viewed as a time of unusual scarcity that created a high degree of competition and adaptation.
Technology has merely clawed back much of what used to be the common human condition.
This graph by itself is hard to interpret anyways. Though pessimistic, your interpretation is a valid one, but so is the optimistic "people are happier than you think they are" conclusion.
More neutrally, I think the chart is more about social expectations that have little to do with how bad the environment is. For example, I would expect people who believe in a religion that says that life on earth is horrible and ones goal is to reach heaven to say that they are unhappy even if they are doing fine. That's because no matter how they feel, this is earth and not heaven, and true happiness is unreachable. Anyways, too many possibilities to interpret this without additional data.
The metrics themselves may be objective, but which metrics you apply is very much subjective, and a potent tool for spinning propaganda. You don't even have to lie, you just have to be selective about which facts you present. And the great news is, the world is so incredibly complex that for literally anything you can find some metric that will present it in a positive light (or in a negative light, depending on which message you want to convey).
They would consistenly underestimate Conservative votes, because conservative voters would shy away from publicly admiting their voting intentions.