https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=heqZuvIDo5o
I wanted to talk to Matt primarily because I’ve been struck in my career as a university professor and also on my tours talking to thousands of people, many of whom are desperate, especially young people, because they’re fed a never-ending diet of gloom and doom. It seems to be an Armageddon-like cultural predisposition to assume without… Now, to only look at evidence that suggests that the future is going to be much worse than the past, despite the fact that the present is much better than the past, and that’s been the case for many decades, I would say. And Matt’s books, they’re a lovely read during the COVID crisis, I would say, because of course it’s a very rough time for everyone, I would say, with the lockdowns and the uncertainty that reigns as a consequence of that. He very carefully documents the improvements that have been made in all around the world over the last, especially over the last 400 years, this incredible explosion of technological intelligence that’s produced an unparalleled increase in human living standards by virtually any measure across virtually all dimensions. And so, well, that’s my rationale for talking to Matt. He’s a very straightforward author, despite the complexity of the ideas, and so I’m really happy to be speaking with him today. Well, Jordan, thank you very much. It’s a real honour to be speaking with you, and I’m someone who enormously admires your courage and intellectual gravitas that you bring to discussions. And I think it’s just fantastic to be able to meet you, albeit online. And just on that question of optimism, it’s a bit of a evangelical cause for me, this, because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man, as a boy in school at university. I believed that the population explosion was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life unlivable, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse during my life, dramatically so. And so I want to tell today’s young people that there is another possibility to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they’re being fed by everybody, not just the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups. I think it’s quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we’re to expect nothing but deterioration before us? That’s a great quote, and it’s not me, it’s Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the doomsday saying it can’t get better. It’s been getting better in the past, but it’s going to get worse in the future. And that’s what every generation says. And I think so far they’ve been wrong. And I think there’s a good chance they’re wrong now. Well, it might be a consequence of our of the human tendency to overweight negative information, right? We’re wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that’s because you can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy. And so it’s better. It’s better in some sense to err on the side of caution. And maybe when that’s played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better. I mean, it’s a real mystery, right? Because the news tilts itself very hard towards the catastrophic. And I can’t think of any explanation for that, given that news purveyors seek attention. I can’t come up with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity for negative emotion. But we do have to overcome that to some degree if it’s not in accordance with the facts. Yeah, there’s an interesting angle there that I think might be a clue to what’s going on. Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units. So we’re not very pessimistic about our village. We’re not very pessimistic about our town, but we’re very pessimistic about our country. And we’re extremely pessimistic about the planet. The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are. And of course, you know, so people on the whole think their own life is going to work out. It’s going to be fine. They’re going to stay married. They’re going to earn a lot of money. You know, they’re OK when they talk about themselves. And I think what that’s telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience. Your information about the planet comes from the media. And that implies to me that it’s not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this, that there is a there is a top down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us. Do you have any sense of the motivation for that? I mean, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes. And you’d expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention grabbing form. Right. And so. Apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the is the is the sales item of the day from the perspective of the news companies? Exactly. And this is where my argument breaks down a bit, because it becomes circular, because I say, yeah, you’re right. The reason they’re telling us bad news is because they know they know we’re interested in bad news. So on the whole, we don’t look at good news stories to anything like the same degree. So we’re avid consumers of pessimism and that and they they they play to that. But there’s another phenomenon, too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden. That’s not always true, of course, but it surprisingly often is true. You know, one hundred and sixty eight thousand people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. It’s a it’s a it’s never newsworthy. Whereas three thousand people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper. That is newsworthy because it’s so sudden, so unexpected, so so new. Well, it’s funny when I when I when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted, which I think is worth repeating over and over. One hundred and seventy thousand people lifted out of poverty today could be three inch headlines every day because it’s an unparalleled event in human history, although it’s occurring every day right now. But maybe it’s also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don’t really have to prepare for the best. You know, if if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you’re doing. But if the but if there’s a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason why we’re we’re prone to seek out negative information. And does that explain why we’re loss averse to the extent we are? Well, I think so. I think it’s the same phenomenon. So anyways, the point is, is that one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive to negative information, it can really get out of hand, right, because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future or depression or high levels of anxiety or or resentment or even hatred of humanity, for that matter, if we’re the destructive species that we’re always made out to be. And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward.