Is the World Getting Better?
Most people say the world is getting worse. On a lot of measures — how long people live, how many children survive, how many people are in extreme poverty, how many can read, how likely you are to be murdered — it has gotten dramatically better, and it's not close. This week is about that gap: what the numbers show, why almost nobody believes them, and which problems really are getting worse.
Reading List
Read and watch these before Tuesday — they're also in Canvas. They're all about the same puzzle: why the news you see doesn't match what the long-run data says.
Required
- Bad News Bias — The New York Times
- Why Bad News Dominates the Headlines — BBC
- Outrage Spreads Faster on Twitter — Harvard Business School
- Are You Stuck in the Sad Gap? — Hank Green (video)
If You Want More
- Social Media and Moral Outrage — The Decision Lab
- The Dark Psychology of Social Networks — The Atlantic
- Waiting for Steven Pinker's Enlightenment — The Nation. The strongest published pushback on the optimistic case you'll see this week. Worth reading if you don't buy the data.
One-Week Plan
Here's the shape of the week. Your guide will set the exact timing for your section.
Say What You Think First
Five minutes of writing: is the world getting better or worse? Commit to an answer before you see anything.
Then a lot of charts — how long people live, how many children die before age five, how many people are in extreme poverty, deaths from war, murder rates going back centuries, smoking, literacy, air pollution. Some of these will not match what you expected.
Then two turns. First: why would this surprise us? Slow improvement isn't a news story, bad news gets more attention, and outrage is what algorithms reward. Second: so is everything fine? Carbon emissions, rising temperatures, collapsing wildlife populations, how much land humans have taken, the wealth gap between Black and White families in the US, and the fact that real COVID deaths were probably around 21 million against 6 million officially reported.
You'll finish with one way the data backed up your opening answer and one way it pushed against it.
Small Groups, by Position
You'll group up as optimists or pessimists and build the strongest version of your case.
The optimistic case: the progress came from things we can name — education and literacy, science, technology, democracy and open markets. Keep those and we can handle what's next; and we're adaptable enough to cope if some of them slip.
The pessimistic case: what happened before doesn't guarantee what happens next. That progress burned finite resources. We're demonstrably bad at solving problems together — global carbon emissions haven't fallen, and the pandemic response was badly coordinated — and we're too divided and distrustful to fix much.
Both groups get the same hard question: what's the best evidence against your own position? Write it down. That's where Wednesday comes from.
The Whole Group
Everyone together:
- Did anything in the data surprise you? What was much better or much worse than you expected?
- Is the world getting better? Which measures would you point to?
- What does "better" even mean? Does human welfare count more than everything else?
- Optimistic or pessimistic about what's coming — and what's the best argument against you?
The third question is the one that cracks this open. If you find yourself saying "better for people, worse for everything else," you've found the real argument.
Before you leave: themes, lingering questions, and one new source for Thursday.
Your Sources This Time
Share what you found and write down what everyone else brought.
Today's question is who counts? Almost every chart from Monday is a global average, and averages hide the people at the bottom. "The world is getting better on average" and "the world is getting better for everyone" are not the same claim — and the wealth-gap slide is the evidence that they come apart.
Score Your Own Week
What went well, what to improve, what you learned, and whether anything you believed changed. On this topic, answer that last one against what you actually wrote on Monday — go back and look.
Then the participation matrix. Be honest with yourself.