https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WACsDUuc6-c
I was really struck to begin with by your introduction. You talked about why you and Ronald Bailey wrote this book. And so let’s start with that. What were your motivation? What did you want to accomplish with this book? And what do you think it does accomplish? Well, fundamentally, the reality of the world, the reality of human existence is much better than people understand, let alone appreciate. Most people assume that the world is in a much worse shape than it really is. But the data points in a different direction. It points in the opposite direction. When you look at long term trends, and we will talk about some of them, most of them are pointing to gradual, incremental long term improvement. Now, on top of that, we live in a world where a lot of people find meaning and excitement in embracing a lot of movements to, quote unquote, improve the world. But you cannot improve the world if you don’t know what the reality of the world is. And so if you think the reality of human existence is different from what really is. Then your improvement can actually detract from human flourishing rather than contribute to it. So the idea behind the book was to inform. And it is not really an attempt to produce a polyanish, all optimistic view on the world. Clearly, there are problems that remain and there will be new problems that will arise, but we believe there is some value in people knowing the facts, factfulness that Hans Rosling used to talk about. And the book is largely free of theory. It is only facts that we have gotten from third parties, with one exception of a trend on natural resources that we will discuss. Everything else comes from third sources, which are the World Bank, the IMF, Eurostat, OECD, or well-established independent and creditable academics. So and of course, there are footnotes so that people can check that we are not trying to deceive them into anything. And the reason why we structured the book we did, the reason why we introduced a lot of nice illustrations is because we wanted to be a coffee table book of facts. So in addition to all the architecture books and books about dogs and cooking that people put on their dining room tables or living room tables, we are hoping that they will include this book. And so whilst people are fixing food or drinks, maybe their guests are going to open the book and look at something interesting or counterintuitive, and maybe that will lead to a conversation. Well, it’s a book you can sit and read. Which is what I did. But it’s also clearly a book that you can leave through. And it is, as I mentioned earlier, beautiful. So that’s an additional advantage. It’s a very high quality book. And that’s a nice accompaniment to its essentially optimistic message. I found it interesting overall and also bit by bit. You said 10 glow, it’s laid out in sort of increasing resolution. So you start with the narrative that there are reasons to be radically optimistic about the future, especially when you compare that future to the past, rather than some hypothetical ideal. Go at the lowest possible level of resolution, the most general level of resolution, there’s reasons to be optimistic. You lay out 10 reasons that are really profound. But then you differentiate into a more detailed analysis. And I found the details as interesting as the global trends. And it’s really something to be confronted by something like an unending stream of positive information. And one thing that I guess two questions sort of naturally arise out of that is why should people believe this positive narrative that you’re putting forward given the the undeniable negativity that seems to be part of our current view of the world are speaking broadly and also seems to be something that’s constantly pushed in front of us or consumed by us or demanded by us. Why should we believe that that’s wrong? Well, partly because I think that the most obvious reason is that people shouldn’t believe lies and they shouldn’t believe wrong stuff. People should be well informed about all sorts of things. They should be aware of risks and benefits of individual actions, of what different politicians are offering. In other words, people should seek facts regardless of the negativity biases which which we have in our brains. So, you know, as you well know, being a psychologist, a lot of research has been done on these negativity biases. Why do people prefer to believe the bad news? And one of the reasons is that the bad is stronger than good. It has more emotional impact. It’s more memorable as well. Precisely. The way I like to think about it is that when I have my annual review with my boss, you know, he can spend 90 percent of the time telling me about the things that I’ve done right, which is always appreciated, and then also mention some of the things that I have done wrong, and there are always many. And when I walk out of the interview or the review, the only thing that’s in my mind is always the criticism and never the praise. And I think that this is sort of this applies to a lot of people is that they focus on the slights, the criticisms rather than the praise. I think you see that with people’s use of social media, too. If I scan comments on any given YouTube discussion like this one, it’s definitely the case that the negative comments stick out and are memorable compared to the positive comments. I mean, I think there is an impact of proportion. So if I see that the vast majority are positive and a small minority are negative, I can discount the negative to some degree, but it still has a disproportionate impact. I’ve thought often that’s because you can be in extreme pain and dead, which is pretty damn final. And so negative news carries this walloping potential impact given our susceptibility to threat, but you can only be so happy. It’s not like there’s an infinite amount of happiness that you can be, but there’s certainly a final amount of death and pain that you can experience. And so that is there any other reasons you think that like is it easy rationale for cynicism and nihilism, for throwing your hands up in the air and giving up? I mean, are there other reasons that we seem so hungry to believe the worst? Yes, before going there, let me just confirm what you said about social media. People who like something that you have posted tend to simply click on the love button or the heart button. It’s people who disagree with you that usually leave the comments saying what a horrible person you are and how bad your ideas are. So that exacerbates the feeling that that the feedback is negative. Yeah, it could be on places like Twitter, too. And we don’t know this is that people are having a bad day and who are angry. Are much more likely to actually leave a comment or use Twitter for that matter than the same person, even who’s having a good day. We just don’t know anything about how these communication technologies, how our emotions affect our use of these communication technologies and how that’s going to play out in the future. We usually have a certain time that we need in order to accumulate to new technologies and we’ll see how this one plays out. But we certainly discovered in use of other technologies that it took some time before we got mastery of them. Cars are a typical example. People used to have many more accidents, used to speed much more. They used to drink before driving. And it took a while before before the safety culture set in. And who knows, maybe over time people will leave Facebook or Twitter and switch to something else. I’m proud to be Facebook free. Since 2012. And I don’t have a personal Twitter for precisely that reason. Well, you do see the emotional tenor of different social media platforms does differ. I mean, I found that Instagram seems to be a much more positive place. All things considered than Twitter. It’s a little more complex to use, but it seems to be less corrosive. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s more image heavy. I don’t know exactly. Possibly. The other negativity bias is that psychologists have identified is, for example, the availability heuristic. As you well know, more dramatic and traumatic events tend to be revisited in our memory with greater frequency than the positive memories, and so we get a sense that they are much more numerous and much more frequent than they really are. Also, positive positive things happen over much longer periods of time than than negative things. You know, it takes years to build a skyscraper, but it takes hours to pull it down in a terrorist attack. It takes years to to acquire a lot of human capital through education, but it takes only a second for you to die in a car crash. So a typical example when it comes to global well-being would be something like poverty reduction, as Max Rosa from Oxford University pointed out. Every day over the last, goodness knows how many decades, 175,000 people have been raised out of poverty every day, out of absolute poverty. But those are not the kinds of headlines that will make it into the newspapers.