Whenever there is an act of violence in my community, it’s pretty reliable that people express a belief that things are more dangerous these days. And, just reading national news and related commentary, I think it’s common to think that things are more dangerous these days. I don’t know what the statistics are locally, but I know that – despite how people may feel – violent crime is down over the last 20-30 years. “Using the FBI numbers, the violent crime rate fell 51% between 1993 and 2018. Using the BJS data, the rate fell 71% during that span.”
I think reasons we don’t feel safer include: 1) Nostalgia softens the rough edges of the past; 2) our brains are wired to amplify current concerns about danger; and 3) we’re exposed to more information — including bad news about violence — than we were in the past. On that last point, I don’t think our brains are wired to distinguish very well between reports of violence in the immediate vicinity and reports of violence that are more distant. In terms of how we feel reports of violence, near and far, just get added to one big bucket of anxiety. Intellectually, we know that there’s a difference, but I don’t know that our minds and bodies readily make that distinction on an emotional level.
Dog, we are predisposed to negativity as you accurately point out. But on this next-to-last day of decade of the 21st century, here is some darn good news that buoy humans as a species.
If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever.
The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.
Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.
Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27% of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4%.
“If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past,” noted Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs the Our World in Data website. “Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/why-2019-has-been-the-best-year-in-human-history/
Thanks for posting that. Here is some more from that same column:
It’s received its fair share of criticism, but I really enjoyed Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” which made a lot of these points and looked at statistics that, globally, things were mostly improving over the last 50 years. (I’m not entirely sure he used that time frame, but that’s the gist.)
Cool. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some positivity in the media and the political arena.
But who is going to read a Chicago Tribune article that says, “Today, 2,999,995 people got up, went to work and came home tired”? A few years ago, I needed to take the train to Chicago in the morning and late at night. People asked if it was dangerous on the train. I noticed that people who got on the train looked nice but hadn’t been up long, so they were tired and listened to music. At night, people were quiet and tired and wanted to go home, so they listened to music. I don’t remember reading that in the Tribune.