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56043	Optimism and Pessimism	optimism-and-pessimism	post	publish	<!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature, the media, and social circumstances.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ourworldindata.org/about/" target="_blank">our motivation</a> for publishing Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. </p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Why is that we – especially those in the developed world – often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we are so pessimistic about our collective future?</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>Human nature and pessimism</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Individual optimism and social pessimism</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. <em>The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain</em>. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.<br><br>Sharot, Tali. <em>The Science of Optimism Why We're Hard-wired for Hope</em>. New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Consider the following graphs from the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys; they report people's expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual's true job prospects?</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism - Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":6393,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-750x281.png" alt="EU survey responses on optimism" class="wp-image-6393"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists – in politics</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: "Thinking about ..., how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?" Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 – Ipsos MORI{ref}"Perils of Perception: Topline Results." Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online <a href="https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":4867,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-750x511.png" alt="LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori" class="wp-image-4867"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists – in environmental aspects</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries. No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away – places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad – Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bjørn. "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet." (2001).<br> Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. "Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":4870,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-550x550.png" alt="Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality" class="wp-image-4870"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Why are we social pessimists?</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons:</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:list {"ordered":true} --> <ol><li>Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an 'on-the-spot' answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs.</li><li>The framing can influence the individual's response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; 'who would bother to ask if everything were okay?'</li><li>Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the 'availability bias'.</li></ol> <!-- /wp:list --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. <a href="http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Gapminder Ignorance Project</a> – which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development – suggests the reason for all this ignorance is:</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:quote --> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>"Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the “news-worthy” events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don’t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school)."</p></blockquote> <!-- /wp:quote --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we are also unaware of past improvements</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp-block-tombstone 26272 --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary?</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">detailed survey</a> of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is ‘Chris Jackson (2017) – Global Perceptions of Development Progress: ‘Perils of Perceptions’ Research’, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: <em>“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?”</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The majority of people – 52% – believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty">Poverty</a>). For the recent era it doesn't even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a>).</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it’s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand – in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS">some generations ago</a> – have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":19967,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-750x398.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19967"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Most people don’t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: “In the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?”</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">halved</a> in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref}<br>The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you <a href="https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">share our work</a>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":19968,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-750x403.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19968"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>How does this matter?</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4><span class="s1">1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing</span></h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">This chart</a> shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":19986,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-750x525.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19986"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects?</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing – arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book ’<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/" target="_blank">Factfulness</a>’ coauthored by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes – the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world – so that we end up with what they call the ‘overdramatic worldview’, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer ‘not much’. This chart documents the survey answers to the question “over the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?”.  More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don’t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":19969,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--750x403.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19969"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people’s knowledge about global development.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one <i>change</i> one’s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.maxroser.com/about/" target="_blank">get in contact</a> if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post – and I’d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future?</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":19970,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-550x550.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19970"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Declinism</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Declinism and development</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: "Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage."{ref}David Edgerton. "The Decline of Declinism." <em>The Business History Review</em>, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157" target="_blank">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157</a>{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump's campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was "Make America Great Again!"</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/" target="_blank">economic growth page</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies -- the UK, France, Germany and Italy -- are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>Optimism about the future of the next generation by country - Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":6397,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-208x550.png" alt="Optimism surveys on the next generation by country" class="wp-image-6397"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>Lifespan memory retrieval curve - Wikipedia{ref}<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump" target="_blank">Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia</a>.<br> Journal references:<br> Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. "Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past." <em>Journal of Gerontology</em> 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short" target="_blank">here</a>.<br><br>Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. "Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory." <em>Psychology and Aging</em> 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85" target="_blank">here</a>.<br> {/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":6403,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg" alt="Lifespan Retrieval Curve" class="wp-image-6403"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have – on average – fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. <em>Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered</em>. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}:</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:list {"ordered":true} --> <ol><li>"The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted." (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, <em>What's Happening to American English?</em>, <strong>1978</strong>)</li><li>"From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments." (C. H. Ward, <strong>1917</strong>)</li><li>"Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman..." (Captain Thomas Hamilton, <strong>1833</strong>)</li><li>"Our language is degenerating very fast." (James Beattie, <strong>1785</strong>)</li></ol> <!-- /wp:list --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students' writing ability.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>Why does realism matter?</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Perception and Priority</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it. This is one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public's confidence in the government's ability to crack down on crime. As the public's confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public's confidence.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 - Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":6437,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-750x502.png" alt="Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI" class="wp-image-6437"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>The media matters for pessimism</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>One contributing factor to some of the widespread misinformation seems to be the content consumed through media channels.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost half suggested that what they read in newspapers was a factor.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 - Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":6438,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-750x446.png" alt="Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI" class="wp-image-6438"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting." <em>The Quarterly Journal of Economics</em> 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion."</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. "Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America." American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that "the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties." This effect is attenuated by the people's trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>Things are getting better and it is good to know that</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world's problems. We discuss many important improvements in our <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts">history of global living conditions</a>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>The relation between health and optimism</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes. While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal:</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Studies have found a link between an individual's optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. "The heart's content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health." <em>Psychological bulletin</em> 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: “For example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers."{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. "A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease." <em>Health Psychology</em> 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Further research using data from the Women's Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. "Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women’s Health Initiative." <em>Circulation</em> 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the <em>Archives of General Psychiatry</em>; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>The future is always bad – and always was</h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>End of the world predictions</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This infographic shows a series of predictions for the year in which the world will end – from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>End of the world predictions – The Economist{ref}"Doomsdays." The Economist (2012). Available online <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11">here</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":4901,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-415x550.png" alt="20121222_woc6530" class="wp-image-4901"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":4} --> <h4>The future of the world in literature</h4> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This beautiful visualization presents a time of predictions of the future as foretold in novels.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":6} --> <h6>The future as foretold in the past – Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://giorgialupi.com" target="_blank">http://giorgialupi.com</a>.{/ref}</h6> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:image {"align":"center","id":6492,"linkDestination":"custom"} --> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-750x338.jpg" alt="futureevents_giorgialupi_large1" class="wp-image-6492"/></a></figure></div> <!-- /wp:image -->	{ "id": "wp-56043", "slug": "optimism-and-pessimism", "content": { "toc": [], "body": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature,\u00a0the media, and social circumstances.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/about/", "children": [ { "text": "our motivation", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " for publishing\u00a0Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Why is that we \u2013 especially those in the developed world\u00a0\u2013 often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we\u00a0are so pessimistic about our collective future?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Human nature and pessimism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Individual optimism and social pessimism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ". New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": "Sharot, Tali. ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "The Science of Optimism Why We're Hard-wired for Hope", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ". New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Consider the following graphs from the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys; they report people's expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual's true job prospects?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism - Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "EU survey responses on optimism", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in politics", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: \"Thinking about ..., how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?\" Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 \u2013 Ipsos MORI{ref}\"Perils of Perception: Topline Results.\" Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in\u00a0environmental aspects", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries.\u00a0No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away\u00a0\u2013 places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad \u2013 Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bj\u00f8rn. \"The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet.\" (2001).", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": " Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. \"Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey.\" Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Why are we social pessimists?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "numbered-list", "items": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an 'on-the-spot' answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The framing can influence the individual's response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; 'who would bother to ask if everything were okay?'", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the 'availability bias'.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/", "children": [ { "text": "The Gapminder Ignorance Project", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": "\u00a0\u2013 which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development \u2013 suggests the reason for all this ignorance is:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "\"Statistical facts don\u2019t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the \u201cnews-worthy\u201d events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don\u2019t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school).\"", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "type": "blockquote", "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we\u00a0are also\u00a0unaware of past improvements", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research", "children": [ { "text": "detailed survey", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is \u2018Chris Jackson (2017) \u2013 Global Perceptions of Development Progress: \u2018Perils of Perceptions\u2019 Research\u2019, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "\u201cIn the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?\u201d", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The majority of people \u2013 52% \u2013 believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty", "children": [ { "text": "Poverty", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": "). For the recent era it doesn't even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ").", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it\u2019s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand \u2013 in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS", "children": [ { "text": "some generations ago", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " \u2013 have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Most people don\u2019t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: \u201cIn the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?\u201d", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions", "children": [ { "text": "halved", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": "The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/", "children": [ { "text": "share our work", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "How does this matter?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "children": [ { "text": "1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-fallback" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: \u201cAll things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?\u201d there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA", "children": [ { "text": "This chart", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Optimistic-about-the-future.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing \u2013 arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book \u2019", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/", "children": [ { "text": "Factfulness", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": "\u2019 coauthored by Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes \u2013 the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world \u2013 so that we end up with what they call the \u2018overdramatic worldview\u2019, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer \u2018not much\u2019. This chart documents the survey answers to the question \u201cover the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?\u201d. \u00a0More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don\u2019t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people\u2019s knowledge about global development.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "change", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " one\u2019s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.maxroser.com/about/", "children": [ { "text": "get in contact", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": " if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post \u2013 and I\u2019d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Declinism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Declinism and development", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: \"Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage.\"{ref}David Edgerton. \"The Decline of Declinism.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "The Business History Review", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ", Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157", "children": [ { "text": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": "{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump's campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was\u00a0\"Make America Great Again!\"", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/", "children": [ { "text": "economic growth page", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies -- the UK, France, Germany and Italy -- are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Optimism about the future of the next generation by country - Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "Optimism surveys on the next generation by country", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Lifespan memory retrieval curve - Wikipedia{ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump", "children": [ { "text": "Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": " Journal references:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": " Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. \"Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Journal of Gerontology", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": "Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. \"Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Psychology and Aging", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "spanType": "span-newline" }, { "text": " {/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "Lifespan Retrieval Curve", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg", "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have \u2013 on average \u2013 fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated\u00a0by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ". Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "numbered-list", "items": [ { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "\"The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted.\" (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "What's Happening to American English?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": ", ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "1978", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": ")", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "\"From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.\" (C. H. Ward, ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "1917", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": ")", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "\"Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman...\" (Captain Thomas Hamilton, ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "1833", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": ")", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "\"Our language is degenerating very fast.\" (James Beattie, ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "1785", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-bold" }, { "text": ")", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising\u00a0that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students' writing ability.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Why\u00a0does realism matter?", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Perception and Priority", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it\u00a0demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it.\u00a0This is\u00a0one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public's confidence in the government's ability to crack down on crime. As the public's confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public's confidence.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 - Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The media matters for pessimism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "One contributing factor to\u00a0some of the widespread misinformation\u00a0seems to be the content consumed through media channels.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost\u00a0half suggested that what they read in newspapers was\u00a0a factor.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 - Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. \"The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "The Quarterly Journal of Economics", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find \"a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.\"", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. \"Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America.\" American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that \"the greater people\u2019s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties.\" This effect is attenuated by the people's trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "Things\u00a0are getting better and it is good to know that", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world's problems. We discuss many important improvements in our ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts", "children": [ { "text": "history of global living conditions", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The relation between health and optimism", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 3, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes.\u00a0While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully\u00a0if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal:", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Studies have found a link between an individual's optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. \"The heart's content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Psychological bulletin", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": " They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: \u201cFor example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers.\"{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. \"A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Health Psychology", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Further research using data from the Women's Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. \"Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women\u2019s Health Initiative.\" ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Circulation", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": " 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "children": [ { "text": "Archives of General Psychiatry", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-italic" }, { "text": "; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The future is always bad \u2013 and always was", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 2, "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "End of the world predictions", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This infographic shows a series of\u00a0predictions for the year in which the world will\u00a0end\u00a0\u2013 from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "End of the world predictions \u2013 The Economist{ref}\"Doomsdays.\" The Economist (2012). Available online ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11", "children": [ { "text": "here", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "20121222_woc6530", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png", "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The future\u00a0of the world in literature", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 4, "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "type": "text", "value": [ { "text": "This beautiful visualization presents a time of\u00a0predictions of the future as foretold in novels.", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "parseErrors": [] }, { "text": [ { "text": "The future as foretold in the past \u2013 Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at ", "spanType": "span-simple-text" }, { "url": "http://giorgialupi.com", "children": [ { "text": "http://giorgialupi.com", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "spanType": "span-link" }, { "text": ".{/ref}", "spanType": "span-simple-text" } ], "type": "heading", "level": 6, "parseErrors": [] }, { "alt": "futureevents_giorgialupi_large1", "size": "wide", "type": "image", "filename": "ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg", "parseErrors": [] } ], "type": "article", "title": "Optimism and Pessimism", "authors": [ "Hannah Ritchie" ], "dateline": "February 23, 2023", "sidebar-toc": false, "featured-image": "" }, "createdAt": "2023-02-23T14:58:08.000Z", "published": false, "updatedAt": "2023-02-23T14:59:23.000Z", "revisionId": null, "publishedAt": "2023-02-23T14:58:08.000Z", "relatedCharts": [], "publicationContext": "listed" }	{ "errors": [ { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag list" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag quote" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag list" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" }, { "name": "unexpected wp component tag", "details": "Found unhandled wp:comment tag image" } ], "numBlocks": 113, "numErrors": 17, "wpTagCounts": { "list": 2, "image": 14, "quote": 1, "heading": 33, "paragraph": 63 }, "htmlTagCounts": { "p": 64, "h2": 3, "h3": 8, "h4": 13, "h6": 9, "ol": 2, "div": 14, "figure": 14, "blockquote": 1 } }	2023-02-23 14:58:08	2024-02-16 14:22:54	1Lo3CtGGESA3iQVrlhlQZbtG15ecUNt1Qfk2X3iBlwIk	[ "Hannah Ritchie" ]		2023-02-23 14:58:08	2023-02-23 14:59:23		{}	This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature, the media, and social circumstances. We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to [our motivation](https://ourworldindata.org/about/) for publishing Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. Why is that we – especially those in the developed world – often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we are so pessimistic about our collective future? ## Human nature and pessimism ### Individual optimism and social pessimism It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. _The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain_. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Sharot, Tali. _The Science of Optimism Why We're Hard-wired for Hope_. New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref} That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics. Consider the following graphs from the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys; they report people's expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual's true job prospects? ###### EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism - Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online [here](http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png" alt="EU survey responses on optimism"/> #### We are local optimists and national pessimists – in politics This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: "Thinking about ..., how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?" Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area. ###### Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 – Ipsos MORI{ref}"Perils of Perception: Topline Results." Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online [here](https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png" alt="LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori"/> #### We are local optimists and national pessimists – in environmental aspects This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries. No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away – places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media. ###### Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad – Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bjørn. "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet." (2001). Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. "Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png" alt="Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality"/> #### Why are we social pessimists? How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons: 0. Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an 'on-the-spot' answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs. 1. The framing can influence the individual's response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; 'who would bother to ask if everything were okay?' 2. Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the 'availability bias'. This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. [The Gapminder Ignorance Project](http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/) – which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development – suggests the reason for all this ignorance is: -- undefined Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves. ### Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we are also unaware of past improvements At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary? The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a [detailed survey](https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research) of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is ‘Chris Jackson (2017) – Global Perceptions of Development Progress: ‘Perils of Perceptions’ Research’, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref} #### Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: _“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?”_ The majority of people – 52% – believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on [Poverty](https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty)). For the recent era it doesn't even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see [here](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL)). There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it’s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand – in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty [some generations ago](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS) – have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty. <Image filename="Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png" alt=""/> #### Most people don’t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: “In the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?” Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has [halved](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions) in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref} The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you [share our work](https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/). <Image filename="Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png" alt=""/> ### How does this matter? #### 1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better. And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}[This chart](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA) shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref} <Image filename="Optimistic-about-the-future.png" alt=""/> #### 2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects? First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now. Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing – arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book ’[Factfulness](https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/)’ coauthored by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes – the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world – so that we end up with what they call the ‘overdramatic worldview’, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref} #### 3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future. If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer ‘not much’. This chart documents the survey answers to the question “over the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?”. More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years. On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future. This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don’t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting. <Image filename="Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png" alt=""/> ### Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people’s knowledge about global development. Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years. This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one _change_ one’s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do [get in contact](https://www.maxroser.com/about/) if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post – and I’d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref} Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world. Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future? As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same. In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did. <Image filename="Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png" alt=""/> ### Declinism #### Declinism and development Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: "Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage."{ref}David Edgerton. "The Decline of Declinism." _The Business History Review_, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157](http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157){/ref} Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump's campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was "Make America Great Again!" The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the [economic growth page](https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/).{/ref} In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies -- the UK, France, Germany and Italy -- are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic. ###### Optimism about the future of the next generation by country - Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online [here](http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png" alt="Optimism surveys on the next generation by country"/> #### Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution. ###### Lifespan memory retrieval curve - Wikipedia{ref}[Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump). Journal references: Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. "Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past." _Journal of Gerontology_ 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online [here](http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short). Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. "Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory." _Psychology and Aging_ 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online [here](http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85). {/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg" alt="Lifespan Retrieval Curve"/> Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have – on average – fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online [here](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005).{/ref} This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. _Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered_. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}: 0. "The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted." (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, _What's Happening to American English?_, 1978) 1. "From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments." (C. H. Ward, 1917) 2. "Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman..." (Captain Thomas Hamilton, 1833) 3. "Our language is degenerating very fast." (James Beattie, 1785) In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students' writing ability. ## Why does realism matter? There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health. ### Perception and Priority The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it. This is one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem. The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public's confidence in the government's ability to crack down on crime. As the public's confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public's confidence. ###### Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 - Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png" alt="Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI"/> #### The media matters for pessimism One contributing factor to some of the widespread misinformation seems to be the content consumed through media channels. Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost half suggested that what they read in newspapers was a factor. ###### TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 - Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png" alt="Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI"/> Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting." _The Quarterly Journal of Economics_ 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online [here](http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf).{/ref} DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion." Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. "Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America." American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x).{/ref} Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that "the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties." This effect is attenuated by the people's trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics. ### Things are getting better and it is good to know that With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend. Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world's problems. We discuss many important improvements in our [history of global living conditions](https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts). ### The relation between health and optimism There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes. While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal: Studies have found a link between an individual's optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. "The heart's content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health." _Psychological bulletin_ 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online [here](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/).{/ref} They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: “For example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers."{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online [here](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php).{/ref} Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. "A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease." _Health Psychology_ 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online [here](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/).{/ref} Further research using data from the Women's Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. "Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women’s Health Initiative." _Circulation_ 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online [here](http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract).{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the _Archives of General Psychiatry_; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death. ## The future is always bad – and always was #### End of the world predictions Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world. This infographic shows a series of predictions for the year in which the world will end – from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton. ###### End of the world predictions – The Economist{ref}"Doomsdays." The Economist (2012). Available online [here](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png" alt="20121222_woc6530"/> #### The future of the world in literature Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature. This beautiful visualization presents a time of predictions of the future as foretold in novels. ###### The future as foretold in the past – Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at [http://giorgialupi.com](http://giorgialupi.com).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg" alt="futureevents_giorgialupi_large1"/>	{ "id": 56043, "date": "2023-02-23T14:58:08", "guid": { "rendered": "https://owid.cloud/?p=56043" }, "link": "https://owid.cloud/optimism-and-pessimism", "meta": { "owid_publication_context_meta_field": [] }, "slug": "optimism-and-pessimism", "tags": [], "type": "post", "title": { "rendered": "Optimism and Pessimism" }, "_links": { "self": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/56043" } ], "about": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/types/post" } ], "author": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/users/17", "embeddable": true } ], "curies": [ { "href": "https://api.w.org/{rel}", "name": "wp", "templated": true } ], "replies": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=56043", "embeddable": true } ], "wp:term": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/categories?post=56043", "taxonomy": "category", "embeddable": true }, { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/tags?post=56043", "taxonomy": "post_tag", "embeddable": true } ], "collection": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/posts" } ], "wp:attachment": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/media?parent=56043" } ], "version-history": [ { "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/56043/revisions", "count": 1 } ], "predecessor-version": [ { "id": 56044, "href": "https://owid.cloud/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/56043/revisions/56044" } ] }, "author": 17, "format": "standard", "status": "publish", "sticky": false, "content": { "rendered": "\n<p>This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature, the media, and social circumstances.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/about/\" target=\"_blank\">our motivation</a> for publishing Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why is that we \u2013 especially those in the developed world \u2013 often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we are so pessimistic about our collective future?</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Human nature and pessimism</h2>\n\n\n\n<h3>Individual optimism and social pessimism</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. <em>The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain</em>. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.<br><br>Sharot, Tali. <em>The Science of Optimism Why We’re Hard-wired for Hope</em>. New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Consider the following graphs from the European Union’s Eurobarometer surveys; they report people’s expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual’s true job prospects?</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism – Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"281\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-750x281.png\" alt=\"EU survey responses on optimism\" class=\"wp-image-6393\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-750x281.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-150x56.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-400x150.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in politics</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: “Thinking about …, how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?” Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 \u2013 Ipsos MORI{ref}”Perils of Perception: Topline Results.” Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online <a href=\"https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"511\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-750x511.png\" alt=\"LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori\" class=\"wp-image-4867\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-750x511.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-150x102.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-400x272.png 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in environmental aspects</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries. No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away \u2013 places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad \u2013 Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bj\u00f8rn. “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet.” (2001).<br> Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. “Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey.” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"550\" height=\"550\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-550x550.png\" alt=\"Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality\" class=\"wp-image-4870\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-550x550.png 550w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-150x150.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-400x400.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png 617w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Why are we social pessimists?</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons:</p>\n\n\n\n<ol><li>Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an ‘on-the-spot’ answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs.</li><li>The framing can influence the individual’s response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; ‘who would bother to ask if everything were okay?’</li><li>Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the ‘availability bias’.</li></ol>\n\n\n\n<p>This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. <a href=\"http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Gapminder Ignorance Project</a> \u2013 which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development \u2013 suggests the reason for all this ignorance is:</p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>“Statistical facts don\u2019t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the \u201cnews-worthy\u201d events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don\u2019t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school).”</p></blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we are also unaware of past improvements</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a <a href=\"https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">detailed survey</a> of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is \u2018Chris Jackson (2017) \u2013 Global Perceptions of Development Progress: \u2018Perils of Perceptions\u2019 Research\u2019, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: <em>\u201cIn the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?\u201d</em></p>\n\n\n\n<p>The majority of people \u2013 52% \u2013 believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty\">Poverty</a>). For the recent era it doesn’t even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">here</a>).</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it\u2019s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand \u2013 in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS\">some generations ago</a> \u2013 have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"398\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-750x398.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19967\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-750x398.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-150x80.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-400x212.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-768x408.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Most people don\u2019t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: \u201cIn the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?\u201d</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">halved</a> in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref}<br>The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">share our work</a>.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"403\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-750x403.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19968\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-750x403.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-150x81.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-400x215.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-768x412.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h3>How does this matter?</h3>\n\n\n\n<h4><span class=\"s1\">1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing</span></h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: \u201cAll things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?\u201d there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}<a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This chart</a> shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"525\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-750x525.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19986\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-750x525.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-150x105.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-400x280.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-768x538.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing \u2013 arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book \u2019<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Factfulness</a>\u2019 coauthored by Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes \u2013 the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world \u2013 so that we end up with what they call the \u2018overdramatic worldview\u2019, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<h4>3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer \u2018not much\u2019. This chart documents the survey answers to the question \u201cover the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?\u201d.  More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don\u2019t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"403\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--750x403.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19969\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--750x403.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--150x81.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--400x215.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--768x412.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h3>Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people\u2019s knowledge about global development.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one <i>change</i> one\u2019s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.maxroser.com/about/\" target=\"_blank\">get in contact</a> if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post \u2013 and I\u2019d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"550\" height=\"550\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-550x550.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19970\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-550x550.png 550w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-150x150.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-400x400.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-768x768.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h3>Declinism</h3>\n\n\n\n<h4>Declinism and development</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: “Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage.”{ref}David Edgerton. “The Decline of Declinism.” <em>The Business History Review</em>, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157\" target=\"_blank\">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157</a>{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump’s campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was “Make America Great Again!”</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/\" target=\"_blank\">economic growth page</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies — the UK, France, Germany and Italy — are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Optimism about the future of the next generation by country – Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"208\" height=\"550\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-208x550.png\" alt=\"Optimism surveys on the next generation by country\" class=\"wp-image-6397\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-208x550.png 208w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-57x150.png 57w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-151x400.png 151w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png 309w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 208px) 100vw, 208px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Lifespan memory retrieval curve – Wikipedia{ref}<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump\" target=\"_blank\">Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia</a>.<br> Journal references:<br> Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. “Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past.” <em>Journal of Gerontology</em> 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.<br><br>Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. “Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory.” <em>Psychology and Aging</em> 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.<br> {/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"531\" height=\"374\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg\" alt=\"Lifespan Retrieval Curve\" class=\"wp-image-6403\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg 531w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve-150x106.jpg 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve-400x282.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 531px) 100vw, 531px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<p>Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have \u2013 on average \u2013 fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. <em>Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered</em>. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}:</p>\n\n\n\n<ol><li>“The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense…. In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted.” (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, <em>What’s Happening to American English?</em>, <strong>1978</strong>)</li><li>“From every college in the country goes up the cry, ‘Our freshmen can’t spell, can’t punctuate.’ Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.” (C. H. Ward, <strong>1917</strong>)</li><li>“Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested…there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman…” (Captain Thomas Hamilton, <strong>1833</strong>)</li><li>“Our language is degenerating very fast.” (James Beattie, <strong>1785</strong>)</li></ol>\n\n\n\n<p>In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students’ writing ability.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Why does realism matter?</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>Perception and Priority</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it. This is one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public’s confidence in the government’s ability to crack down on crime. As the public’s confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public’s confidence.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 – Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"502\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-750x502.png\" alt=\"Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI\" class=\"wp-image-6437\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-750x502.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-150x100.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-400x268.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-360x240.png 360w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png 1157w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>The media matters for pessimism</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>One contributing factor to some of the widespread misinformation seems to be the content consumed through media channels.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost half suggested that what they read in newspapers was a factor.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 – Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"446\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-750x446.png\" alt=\"Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI\" class=\"wp-image-6438\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-750x446.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-150x89.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-400x238.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png 1159w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<p>Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting.” <em>The Quarterly Journal of Economics</em> 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find “a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.”</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. “Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America.” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that “the greater people\u2019s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties.” This effect is attenuated by the people’s trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>Things are getting better and it is good to know that</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world’s problems. We discuss many important improvements in our <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts\">history of global living conditions</a>.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>The relation between health and optimism</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes. While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal:</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Studies have found a link between an individual’s optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. “The heart’s content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health.” <em>Psychological bulletin</em> 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: \u201cFor example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers.”{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. “A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease.” <em>Health Psychology</em> 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Further research using data from the Women’s Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. “Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women\u2019s Health Initiative.” <em>Circulation</em> 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the <em>Archives of General Psychiatry</em>; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>The future is always bad \u2013 and always was</h2>\n\n\n\n<h4>End of the world predictions</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This infographic shows a series of predictions for the year in which the world will end \u2013 from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>End of the world predictions \u2013 The Economist{ref}”Doomsdays.” The Economist (2012). Available online <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"415\" height=\"550\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-415x550.png\" alt=\"20121222_woc6530\" class=\"wp-image-4901\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-415x550.png 415w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-113x150.png 113w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-302x400.png 302w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png 595w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 415px) 100vw, 415px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>The future of the world in literature</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This beautiful visualization presents a time of predictions of the future as foretold in novels.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>The future as foretold in the past \u2013 Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://giorgialupi.com\" target=\"_blank\">http://giorgialupi.com</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"338\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-750x338.jpg\" alt=\"futureevents_giorgialupi_large1\" class=\"wp-image-6492\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-750x338.jpg 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-150x68.jpg 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-400x180.jpg 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n", "protected": false }, "excerpt": { "rendered": "", "protected": false }, "date_gmt": "2023-02-23T14:58:08", "modified": "2023-02-23T14:59:23", "template": "", "categories": [ 1 ], "ping_status": "closed", "authors_name": [ "Hannah Ritchie" ], "modified_gmt": "2023-02-23T14:59:23", "comment_status": "closed", "featured_media": 0, "featured_media_paths": { "thumbnail": null, "medium_large": null } }

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Optimism and Pessimism

optimism-and-pessimism

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<p>This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature, the media, and social circumstances.</p>   <p>We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ourworldindata.org/about/" target="_blank">our motivation</a> for publishing Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. </p>   <p>Why is that we – especially those in the developed world – often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we are so pessimistic about our collective future?</p>   <h2>Human nature and pessimism</h2>   <h3>Individual optimism and social pessimism</h3>   <p>It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. <em>The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain</em>. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.<br><br>Sharot, Tali. <em>The Science of Optimism Why We're Hard-wired for Hope</em>. New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref}</p>   <p> That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics.</p>   <p>Consider the following graphs from the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys; they report people's expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual's true job prospects?</p>   <h6>EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism - Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-750x281.png" alt="EU survey responses on optimism" class="wp-image-6393"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists – in politics</h4>   <p>This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: "Thinking about ..., how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?" Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area.</p>   <h6>Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 – Ipsos MORI{ref}"Perils of Perception: Topline Results." Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online <a href="https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-750x511.png" alt="LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori" class="wp-image-4867"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists – in environmental aspects</h4>   <p>This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries. No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away – places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media.</p>   <h6>Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad – Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bjørn. "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet." (2001).<br> Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. "Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-550x550.png" alt="Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality" class="wp-image-4870"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>Why are we social pessimists?</h4>   <p>How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons:</p>   <ol><li>Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an 'on-the-spot' answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs.</li><li>The framing can influence the individual's response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; 'who would bother to ask if everything were okay?'</li><li>Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the 'availability bias'.</li></ol>   <p>This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. <a href="http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Gapminder Ignorance Project</a> – which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development – suggests the reason for all this ignorance is:</p>   <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>"Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the “news-worthy” events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don’t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school)."</p></blockquote>   <p>Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves.</p>   <h3>Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we are also unaware of past improvements</h3>    <p>At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary?</p>   <p>The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">detailed survey</a> of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is ‘Chris Jackson (2017) – Global Perceptions of Development Progress: ‘Perils of Perceptions’ Research’, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref}</p>   <h4>Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening</h4>   <p>The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: <em>“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?”</em></p>   <p>The majority of people – 52% – believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty">Poverty</a>). For the recent era it doesn't even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a>).</p>   <p>There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it’s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand – in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS">some generations ago</a> – have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty.</p>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-750x398.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19967"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>Most people don’t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries</h4>   <p>We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: “In the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?”</p>   <p>Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">halved</a> in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref}<br>The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements.</p>   <p>And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you <a href="https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">share our work</a>.</p>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-750x403.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19968"/></a></figure></div>   <h3>How does this matter?</h3>   <h4><span class="s1">1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing</span></h4>   <p>The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better.</p>   <p>And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">This chart</a> shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref}</p>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-750x525.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19986"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems</h4>   <p>What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects?</p>   <p>First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now.</p>   <p>Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing – arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book ’<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/" target="_blank">Factfulness</a>’ coauthored by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes – the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world – so that we end up with what they call the ‘overdramatic worldview’, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref}</p>   <h4>3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future</h4>   <p>Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.</p>   <p>If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer ‘not much’. This chart documents the survey answers to the question “over the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?”.  More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years.</p>   <p>On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future.</p>   <p>This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don’t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting.</p>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--750x403.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19969"/></a></figure></div>   <h3>Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism</h3>   <p>Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people’s knowledge about global development.</p>   <p>Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years.</p>   <p>This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one <i>change</i> one’s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.maxroser.com/about/" target="_blank">get in contact</a> if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post – and I’d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref}</p>   <p>Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world.</p>   <p>Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future?</p>   <p>As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same.</p>   <p>In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did.</p>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-550x550.png" alt="" class="wp-image-19970"/></a></figure></div>   <h3>Declinism</h3>   <h4>Declinism and development</h4>   <p>Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: "Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage."{ref}David Edgerton. "The Decline of Declinism." <em>The Business History Review</em>, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157" target="_blank">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157</a>{/ref}</p>   <p> Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump's campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was "Make America Great Again!"</p>   <p>The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/" target="_blank">economic growth page</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p> In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies -- the UK, France, Germany and Italy -- are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic.</p>   <h6>Optimism about the future of the next generation by country - Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-208x550.png" alt="Optimism surveys on the next generation by country" class="wp-image-6397"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump</h4>   <p>One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution.</p>   <h6>Lifespan memory retrieval curve - Wikipedia{ref}<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump" target="_blank">Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia</a>.<br> Journal references:<br> Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. "Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past." <em>Journal of Gerontology</em> 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short" target="_blank">here</a>.<br><br>Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. "Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory." <em>Psychology and Aging</em> 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85" target="_blank">here</a>.<br> {/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg" alt="Lifespan Retrieval Curve" class="wp-image-6403"/></a></figure></div>   <p>Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have – on average – fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p> This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. <em>Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered</em>. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}:</p>   <ol><li>"The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted." (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, <em>What's Happening to American English?</em>, <strong>1978</strong>)</li><li>"From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments." (C. H. Ward, <strong>1917</strong>)</li><li>"Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman..." (Captain Thomas Hamilton, <strong>1833</strong>)</li><li>"Our language is degenerating very fast." (James Beattie, <strong>1785</strong>)</li></ol>   <p>In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students' writing ability.</p>   <h2>Why does realism matter?</h2>   <p>There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health.</p>   <h3>Perception and Priority</h3>   <p>The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it. This is one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem.</p>   <p>The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public's confidence in the government's ability to crack down on crime. As the public's confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public's confidence.</p>   <h6>Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 - Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-750x502.png" alt="Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI" class="wp-image-6437"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>The media matters for pessimism</h4>   <p>One contributing factor to some of the widespread misinformation seems to be the content consumed through media channels.</p>   <p>Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost half suggested that what they read in newspapers was a factor.</p>   <h6>TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 - Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-750x446.png" alt="Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI" class="wp-image-6438"/></a></figure></div>   <p>Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting." <em>The Quarterly Journal of Economics</em> 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p> DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion."</p>   <p>Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. "Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America." American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p> Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that "the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties." This effect is attenuated by the people's trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics.</p>   <h3>Things are getting better and it is good to know that</h3>   <p>With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend.</p>   <p>Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world's problems. We discuss many important improvements in our <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts">history of global living conditions</a>.</p>   <h3>The relation between health and optimism</h3>   <p>There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes. While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal:</p>   <p>Studies have found a link between an individual's optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. "The heart's content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health." <em>Psychological bulletin</em> 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p> They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: “For example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers."{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p>Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. "A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease." <em>Health Psychology</em> 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref}</p>   <p>Further research using data from the Women's Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. "Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women’s Health Initiative." <em>Circulation</em> 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract" target="_blank">here</a>.{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the <em>Archives of General Psychiatry</em>; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death.</p>   <h2>The future is always bad – and always was</h2>   <h4>End of the world predictions</h4>   <p>Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world.</p>   <p>This infographic shows a series of predictions for the year in which the world will end – from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton.</p>   <h6>End of the world predictions – The Economist{ref}"Doomsdays." The Economist (2012). Available online <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-415x550.png" alt="20121222_woc6530" class="wp-image-4901"/></a></figure></div>   <h4>The future of the world in literature</h4>   <p>Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature.</p>   <p>This beautiful visualization presents a time of predictions of the future as foretold in novels.</p>   <h6>The future as foretold in the past – Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://giorgialupi.com" target="_blank">http://giorgialupi.com</a>.{/ref}</h6>   <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><a href="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg"><img src="http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-750x338.jpg" alt="futureevents_giorgialupi_large1" class="wp-image-6492"/></a></figure></div>

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                        "text": "This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature,\u00a0the media, and social circumstances.",
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                        "text": "We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/about/",
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                                "text": "our motivation",
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                        "text": " for publishing\u00a0Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. ",
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                        "text": "Why is that we \u2013 especially those in the developed world\u00a0\u2013 often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we\u00a0are so pessimistic about our collective future?",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Human nature and pessimism",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Individual optimism and social pessimism",
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                        "text": "It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. ",
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                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain",
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                    {
                        "text": ". New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.",
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                        "text": "Sharot, Tali. ",
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                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "The Science of Optimism Why We're Hard-wired for Hope",
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": ". New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref}",
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                        "text": " That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics.",
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                        "text": "Consider the following graphs from the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys; they report people's expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual's true job prospects?",
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                        "text": "EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism - Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online ",
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                        "url": "http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm",
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                                "text": "here",
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                        "text": ".{/ref}",
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                "alt": "EU survey responses on optimism",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in politics",
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                        "text": "This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: \"Thinking about ..., how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?\" Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area.",
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                        "text": "Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 \u2013 Ipsos MORI{ref}\"Perils of Perception: Topline Results.\" Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online ",
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                        "url": "https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf",
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                                "text": "here",
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                        "text": ".{/ref}",
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                "alt": "LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in\u00a0environmental aspects",
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                        "text": "This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries.\u00a0No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away\u00a0\u2013 places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media.",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad \u2013 Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bj\u00f8rn. \"The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet.\" (2001).",
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                        "text": " Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. \"Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey.\" Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online ",
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                        "url": "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122",
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                                "text": "here",
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                        "text": ".{/ref}",
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                "alt": "Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Why are we social pessimists?",
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                        "text": "How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons:",
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                                "text": "Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an 'on-the-spot' answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs.",
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                                "text": "The framing can influence the individual's response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; 'who would bother to ask if everything were okay?'",
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                                "text": "Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the 'availability bias'.",
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                        "text": "This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. ",
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                        "url": "http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "The Gapminder Ignorance Project",
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                    {
                        "text": "\u00a0\u2013 which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development \u2013 suggests the reason for all this ignorance is:",
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                                "text": "\"Statistical facts don\u2019t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the \u201cnews-worthy\u201d events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don\u2019t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school).\"",
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                        "text": "Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we\u00a0are also\u00a0unaware of past improvements",
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                        "text": "At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary?",
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                        "text": "The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research",
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                                "text": "detailed survey",
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                        ],
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                        "text": " of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is \u2018Chris Jackson (2017) \u2013 Global Perceptions of Development Progress: \u2018Perils of Perceptions\u2019 Research\u2019, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref}",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening",
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                        "text": "The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: ",
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                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "\u201cIn the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?\u201d",
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                        "text": "The majority of people \u2013 52% \u2013 believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty",
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                                "text": "Poverty",
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                        "text": "). For the recent era it doesn't even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL",
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                            {
                                "text": "here",
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                        "text": ").",
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                        "text": "There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it\u2019s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand \u2013 in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "some generations ago",
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                        "text": " \u2013 have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Most people don\u2019t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries",
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                        "text": "We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: \u201cIn the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?\u201d",
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                        "text": "Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has ",
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                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "halved",
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                        ],
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                    {
                        "text": " in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref}",
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                        "text": "The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements.",
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                        "text": "And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you ",
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                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "share our work",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
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                    {
                        "text": ".",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "How does this matter?",
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                "text": [
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                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing",
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                        "text": "The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: \u201cAll things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?\u201d there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better.",
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                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "This chart",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref}",
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                "size": "wide",
                "type": "image",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems",
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                "type": "heading",
                "level": 4,
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                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects?",
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now.",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing \u2013 arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book \u2019",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Factfulness",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
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                    {
                        "text": "\u2019 coauthored by Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes \u2013 the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world \u2013 so that we end up with what they call the \u2018overdramatic worldview\u2019, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref}",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future",
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                "type": "heading",
                "level": 4,
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.",
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer \u2018not much\u2019. This chart documents the survey answers to the question \u201cover the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?\u201d. \u00a0More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years.",
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future.",
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don\u2019t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism",
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                "level": 3,
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                    {
                        "text": "Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people\u2019s knowledge about global development.",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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            {
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years.",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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            {
                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "change",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " one\u2019s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://www.maxroser.com/about/",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "get in contact",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post \u2013 and I\u2019d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world.",
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                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future?",
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same.",
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did.",
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                "alt": "",
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                "type": "image",
                "filename": "Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png",
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            {
                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Declinism",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
                "type": "heading",
                "level": 3,
                "parseErrors": []
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            {
                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Declinism and development",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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                        "text": "Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: \"Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage.\"{ref}David Edgerton. \"The Decline of Declinism.\" ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "The Business History Review",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ", Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": "{/ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
                "parseErrors": []
            },
            {
                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": " Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump's campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was\u00a0\"Make America Great Again!\"",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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                "type": "text",
                "value": [
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                        "text": "The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "economic growth page",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".{/ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": " In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies -- the UK, France, Germany and Italy -- are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic.",
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            {
                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Optimism about the future of the next generation by country - Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "here",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".{/ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
                "type": "heading",
                "level": 6,
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            },
            {
                "alt": "Optimism surveys on the next generation by country",
                "size": "wide",
                "type": "image",
                "filename": "ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png",
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            {
                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
                "type": "heading",
                "level": 4,
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                        "text": "One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution.",
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            {
                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Lifespan memory retrieval curve - Wikipedia{ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "spanType": "span-newline"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " Journal references:",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "spanType": "span-newline"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. \"Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past.\" ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Journal of Gerontology",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "here",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "spanType": "span-newline"
                    },
                    {
                        "spanType": "span-newline"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": "Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. \"Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory.\" ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Psychology and Aging",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "here",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "spanType": "span-newline"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " {/ref}",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
                "type": "heading",
                "level": 6,
                "parseErrors": []
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            {
                "alt": "Lifespan Retrieval Curve",
                "size": "wide",
                "type": "image",
                "filename": "ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg",
                "parseErrors": []
            },
            {
                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have \u2013 on average \u2013 fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "here",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".{/ref}",
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                    }
                ],
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            {
                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": " This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated\u00a0by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ". Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}:",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
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            {
                "type": "numbered-list",
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                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "\"The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted.\" (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "What's Happening to American English?",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-italic"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ", ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "1978",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-bold"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ")",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                        ],
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                    {
                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "\"From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.\" (C. H. Ward, ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "1917",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-bold"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ")",
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                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "\"Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman...\" (Captain Thomas Hamilton, ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "1833",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                "text": ")",
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                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "\"Our language is degenerating very fast.\" (James Beattie, ",
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                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "1785",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                "text": ")",
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                        "text": "In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising\u00a0that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students' writing ability.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Why\u00a0does realism matter?",
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                        "text": "There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Perception and Priority",
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                        "text": "The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it\u00a0demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it.\u00a0This is\u00a0one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem.",
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                        "text": "The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public's confidence in the government's ability to crack down on crime. As the public's confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public's confidence.",
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                        "text": "Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. \"The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting.\" ",
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                        "text": " DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find \"a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.\"",
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                        "text": "Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. \"Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America.\" American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online ",
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                        "text": " Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that \"the greater people\u2019s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties.\" This effect is attenuated by the people's trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics.",
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                        "text": "There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes.\u00a0While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully\u00a0if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal:",
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                        "text": "Studies have found a link between an individual's optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. \"The heart's content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health.\" ",
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                        "text": " They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: \u201cFor example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers.\"{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online ",
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                        "text": "Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. \"A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease.\" ",
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                        "text": "Further research using data from the Women's Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. \"Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women\u2019s Health Initiative.\" ",
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                        "text": ".{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the ",
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                        "text": "; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death.",
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                        "text": "This infographic shows a series of\u00a0predictions for the year in which the world will\u00a0end\u00a0\u2013 from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton.",
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                        "text": "The future as foretold in the past \u2013 Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at ",
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2023-02-23 14:58:08

2024-02-16 14:22:54

1Lo3CtGGESA3iQVrlhlQZbtG15ecUNt1Qfk2X3iBlwIk

[
    "Hannah Ritchie"
]

2023-02-23 14:58:08

2023-02-23 14:59:23

{}

This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature, the media, and social circumstances. We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to [our motivation](https://ourworldindata.org/about/) for publishing Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. Why is that we – especially those in the developed world – often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we are so pessimistic about our collective future? ## Human nature and pessimism ### Individual optimism and social pessimism It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. _The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain_. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Sharot, Tali. _The Science of Optimism Why We're Hard-wired for Hope_. New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref} That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics. Consider the following graphs from the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys; they report people's expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual's true job prospects? ###### EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism - Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online [here](http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png" alt="EU survey responses on optimism"/> #### We are local optimists and national pessimists – in politics This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: "Thinking about ..., how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?" Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area. ###### Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 – Ipsos MORI{ref}"Perils of Perception: Topline Results." Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online [here](https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png" alt="LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori"/> #### We are local optimists and national pessimists – in environmental aspects This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries. No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away – places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media. ###### Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad – Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bjørn. "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet." (2001). Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. "Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png" alt="Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality"/> #### Why are we social pessimists? How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons: 0. Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an 'on-the-spot' answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs. 1. The framing can influence the individual's response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; 'who would bother to ask if everything were okay?' 2. Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the 'availability bias'. This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. [The Gapminder Ignorance Project](http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/) – which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development – suggests the reason for all this ignorance is: -- undefined Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves. ### Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we are also unaware of past improvements At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary? The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a [detailed survey](https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research) of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is ‘Chris Jackson (2017) – Global Perceptions of Development Progress: ‘Perils of Perceptions’ Research’, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref} #### Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: _“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?”_ The majority of people – 52% – believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on [Poverty](https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty)). For the recent era it doesn't even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see [here](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL)). There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it’s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand – in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty [some generations ago](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS) – have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty. <Image filename="Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png" alt=""/> #### Most people don’t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: “In the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?” Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has [halved](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions) in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref} The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you [share our work](https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/). <Image filename="Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png" alt=""/> ### How does this matter? #### 1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better. And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}[This chart](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA) shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref} <Image filename="Optimistic-about-the-future.png" alt=""/> #### 2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects? First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now. Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing – arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book ’[Factfulness](https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/)’ coauthored by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes – the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world – so that we end up with what they call the ‘overdramatic worldview’, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref} #### 3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future. If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer ‘not much’. This chart documents the survey answers to the question “over the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?”. More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years. On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future. This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don’t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting. <Image filename="Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png" alt=""/> ### Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people’s knowledge about global development. Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years. This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one _change_ one’s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do [get in contact](https://www.maxroser.com/about/) if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post – and I’d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref} Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world. Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future? As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same. In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did. <Image filename="Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png" alt=""/> ### Declinism #### Declinism and development Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: "Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage."{ref}David Edgerton. "The Decline of Declinism." _The Business History Review_, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157](http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157){/ref} Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump's campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was "Make America Great Again!" The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the [economic growth page](https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/).{/ref} In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies -- the UK, France, Germany and Italy -- are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic. ###### Optimism about the future of the next generation by country - Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online [here](http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png" alt="Optimism surveys on the next generation by country"/> #### Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution. ###### Lifespan memory retrieval curve - Wikipedia{ref}[Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump). Journal references: Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. "Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past." _Journal of Gerontology_ 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online [here](http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short). Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. "Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory." _Psychology and Aging_ 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online [here](http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85). {/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg" alt="Lifespan Retrieval Curve"/> Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have – on average – fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online [here](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005).{/ref} This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. _Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered_. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}: 0. "The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted." (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, _What's Happening to American English?_, **1978**) 1. "From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments." (C. H. Ward, **1917**) 2. "Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman..." (Captain Thomas Hamilton, **1833**) 3. "Our language is degenerating very fast." (James Beattie, **1785**) In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students' writing ability. ## Why does realism matter? There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health. ### Perception and Priority The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it. This is one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem. The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public's confidence in the government's ability to crack down on crime. As the public's confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public's confidence. ###### Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 - Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png" alt="Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI"/> #### The media matters for pessimism One contributing factor to some of the widespread misinformation seems to be the content consumed through media channels. Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost half suggested that what they read in newspapers was a factor. ###### TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 - Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png" alt="Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI"/> Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting." _The Quarterly Journal of Economics_ 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online [here](http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf).{/ref} DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion." Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. "Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America." American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x).{/ref} Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that "the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties." This effect is attenuated by the people's trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics. ### Things are getting better and it is good to know that With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend. Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world's problems. We discuss many important improvements in our [history of global living conditions](https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts). ### The relation between health and optimism There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes. While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal: Studies have found a link between an individual's optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. "The heart's content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health." _Psychological bulletin_ 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online [here](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/).{/ref} They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: “For example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers."{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online [here](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php).{/ref} Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. "A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease." _Health Psychology_ 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online [here](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/).{/ref} Further research using data from the Women's Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. "Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women’s Health Initiative." _Circulation_ 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online [here](http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract).{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the _Archives of General Psychiatry_; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death. ## The future is always bad – and always was #### End of the world predictions Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world. This infographic shows a series of predictions for the year in which the world will end – from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton. ###### End of the world predictions – The Economist{ref}"Doomsdays." The Economist (2012). Available online [here](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png" alt="20121222_woc6530"/> #### The future of the world in literature Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature. This beautiful visualization presents a time of predictions of the future as foretold in novels. ###### The future as foretold in the past – Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at [http://giorgialupi.com](http://giorgialupi.com).{/ref} <Image filename="ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg" alt="futureevents_giorgialupi_large1"/>

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        "rendered": "\n<p>This page is dedicated to the research why people are optimistic or pessimistic about certain things and how this is influenced by human nature,&nbsp;the media, and social circumstances.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We are interested in this topic also because it is closely linked to <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/about/\" target=\"_blank\">our motivation</a> for publishing&nbsp;Our World in Data. We face big global problems, but living conditions around the world have improved in important ways; fewer people are dying of disease, conflict and famine; more of us are receiving a basic education; the world is becoming more democratic; we live longer and lead healthier lives. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why is that we \u2013 especially those in the developed world&nbsp;\u2013 often have a negative view on how the world has changed over the last decades and centuries? Why we&nbsp;are so pessimistic about our collective future?</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Human nature and pessimism</h2>\n\n\n\n<h3>Individual optimism and social pessimism</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>It is a peculiar empirical phenomenon that while people tend to be optimistic about their own future, they can at the same time be deeply pessimistic about the future of their nation or the world. Tali Sharot, associate professor of psychology at UCL, has popularised the idea of an innate optimism bias built into the human brain.{ref}Sharot, Tali. <em>The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain</em>. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.<br><br>Sharot, Tali. <em>The Science of Optimism Why We&#8217;re Hard-wired for Hope</em>. New York: Ted Conferences, 2012.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> That is, we tend to be optimistic rather than realistic when considering our individual future. If you were to ask newlywed couples to estimate the probability they will divorce in the future, they would likely reject the possibility outright. Yet today roughly 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Another example is asking smokers to estimate their chances of getting cancer and again, most would underestimate their risk. This optimism persists even when people are presented with the relevant statistics.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Consider the following graphs from the European Union&#8217;s Eurobarometer surveys; they report people&#8217;s expectations about their own personal job situation and of the economic situation in their home country. From the end of 1995 to the middle of 2015, around 60% of people predict that their job situation will remain the same, while 20% expect their situation to improve. Compare that with the response of the same group of individuals considering the future of the economic situation in their home country. Although far less stable, the results show that most people expect the economic situation in their home country to get worse or stay the same. The expectation that things are going to worsen nationally is correlated with recessions, yet there is remarkable stability in the results for individual expectations. Does the response to the question about national economic well being better correspond to an individual&#8217;s true job prospects?</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>EU survey responses on individual and economic optimism &#8211; Eurobarometer surveys{ref}Eurobarometer surveys. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"281\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-750x281.png\" alt=\"EU survey responses on optimism\" class=\"wp-image-6393\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-750x281.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-150x56.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism-400x150.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_eu-survey-responses-on-optimism.png 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in politics</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This pattern is also observed on a larger scale. This chart shows how individuals in the UK respond to the question: &#8220;Thinking about &#8230;, how much of a problem do you think each of the following are in your local area and in the whole of the UK?&#8221; Individuals tend to believe problems are more pronounced nationally than in their local area.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Local optimists and national pessimists in the UK, 2013 \u2013 Ipsos MORI{ref}&#8221;Perils of Perception: Topline Results.&#8221; Ipsos MORI (2013). Available online <a href=\"https://www.west-info.eu/files/Perils_of_perception_Topline1.pdf\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"511\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-750x511.png\" alt=\"LocalOptimismGlobalPessimism_IPSOSMori\" class=\"wp-image-4867\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-750x511.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-150x102.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_localoptimismglobalpessimism_ipsosmori-400x272.png 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>We are local optimists and national pessimists \u2013 in&nbsp;environmental aspects</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This chart shows how many individuals rate the environment in their local area as fairly or very bad, compared with the environment nationally and globally. Again, we observe a similar pattern for most countries.&nbsp;No matter where you ask people are much more negative about places that are far away&nbsp;\u2013 places which they know less from their own experience and more through the media.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality of their local community, their nation and the world as very or fairly bad \u2013 Lomborg (2001){ref}Figure: Lomborg, Bj\u00f8rn. &#8220;The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet.&#8221; (2001).<br> Data: Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup Jr, and Alec M. Gallup. &#8220;Of global concern: Results of the health of the planet survey.&#8221; Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 35, no. 9 (1993): 7-39. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.1993.9929122\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"550\" height=\"550\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-550x550.png\" alt=\"Percentage of respondents who evaluate the environmental quality\" class=\"wp-image-4870\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-550x550.png 550w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-150x150.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality-400x400.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_percentage-of-respondents-who-evaluate-the-environmental-quality.png 617w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Why are we social pessimists?</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>How can we reconcile this individual optimism with social pessimism? Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at LSE, believes people respond pessimistically to questions about national or international performance for three reasons:</p>\n\n\n\n<ol><li>Individuals rarely think about grand issues such as the state of the nation or world, and so respond with an &#8216;on-the-spot&#8217; answer that may not be well considered or even a true reflection of their beliefs.</li><li>The framing can influence the individual&#8217;s response. Moreover, the question itself may bias responses; &#8216;who would bother to ask if everything were okay?&#8217;</li><li>Responses to questions such as these (and more general questions about happiness or life satisfaction) are heavily influenced by ephemeral recent events. In psychology this is referred to as the &#8216;availability bias&#8217;.</li></ol>\n\n\n\n<p>This explanation suggests there is a problem of information. If we do not pay attention to human development, then our judgement may suffer from a bias related to transient events or framing. <a href=\"http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Gapminder Ignorance Project</a>&nbsp;\u2013 which studied how wrong or right people are informed about global development \u2013 suggests the reason for all this ignorance is:</p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;Statistical facts don\u2019t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the \u201cnews-worthy\u201d events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don\u2019t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school).&#8221;</p></blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Another explanation put forward by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests a link between control and optimism. If we feel more in control of our lives, we tend to be happier, healthier and more optimistic about the future. This could also help to explain the gap between individual and societal optimism: since we are in direct control of our own lives but not the destiny of the nation we feel more optimistic about ourselves.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>Information matters: We are not only pessimistic about the future, we&nbsp;are also&nbsp;unaware of past improvements</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>At Our World in Data we aim to bring together the empirical data and research to show how living conditions around the world are changing. Is that necessary?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The opinion research organization Ipsos MORI conducted a <a href=\"https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-perceptions-development-progress-perils-perceptions-research\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">detailed survey</a> of 26,489 people across 28 countries that gives us an answer.{ref}The full reference of the survey is \u2018Chris Jackson (2017) \u2013 Global Perceptions of Development Progress: \u2018Perils of Perceptions\u2019 Research\u2019, published by Ipsos MORI, 18 September 2017.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Most people think global poverty is rising when in fact the opposite is happening</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The first chart shows how the surveyed people answered the following question: <em>\u201cIn the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased, increased, or remained the same?\u201d</em></p>\n\n\n\n<p>The majority of people \u2013 52% \u2013 believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. The opposite is true. In fact, the share of people living in extreme poverty across the world has been declining for two centuries and in the last 20 years this positive development has been faster than ever before (see our work on <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=global-extreme-poverty-declined-substantially-over-the-last-generation#key-insights-on-poverty\">Poverty</a>). For the recent era it doesn&#8217;t even matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below any poverty line has fallen (see <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-up-to-30-dollars?stackMode=relative&amp;country=~OWID_WRL\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">here</a>).</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are some people who answered the question correctly: every fifth person knows that poverty is falling. But it\u2019s interesting that the share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago (in 1990). In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed. People in richer countries on the other hand \u2013 in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?time=1800..latest&amp;country=SWE~USA~GBR~FRA~DEU~AUS\">some generations ago</a> \u2013 have a very wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"398\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-750x398.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19967\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-750x398.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-150x80.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-400x212.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-poverty-768x408.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Most people don\u2019t know that child mortality is declining in poor countries</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>We are not just wrong about global poverty. In the same survey people were asked: \u201cIn the last 20 years, has the child mortality rate in developing regions increased, decreased or stayed about the same?\u201d</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here again the data is very clear. The child mortality rate in both the less- and least-developed countries has <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-around-the-world?country=OWID_WRL+Less%20developed%20regions+Least%20developed%20countries+More%20developed%20regions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">halved</a> in the last 20 years.{ref}In fact not only the average child mortality rate has fallen, but the child mortality rate has fallen in all countries (except for two very small ones).{/ref}<br>The survey once more shows that most people are not aware of this. On average only 39% know that the mortality of children is falling. And what greater achievement has humanity ever achieved than making it more and more likely that children survive the first, vulnerable years of their lives and sparing parents the sadness of losing their babies? This has to be one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And just as with knowledge about extreme poverty, the share of uninformed people is much higher in the rich countries of the world. So is our work at Our World in Data needed? This survey shows that few Senegalese or Kenyans will learn something new; but if you have some friends in the US or Japan you will probably help them if you <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/OurWorldinData/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">share our work</a>.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"403\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-750x403.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19968\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-750x403.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-150x81.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-400x215.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Public-perception-of-Change-in-u5mr-768x412.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h3>How does this matter?</h3>\n\n\n\n<h4><span class=\"s1\">1. Misperceptions about specific trends reinforces general discontent about how the world is changing</span></h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing. When YouGov asked in a separate survey the more general question: \u201cAll things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?\u201d there were very few who gave a positive answer. In France and Australia only 3%(!) think the world is getting better.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And again we see that in poorer countries the share of people who answer positively is higher.{ref}<a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-per-capita-pennwt?tab=chart&amp;country=AUS~CHN~FRA~DEU~IDN~THA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This chart</a> shows the income level difference between the very negative rich countries and the somewhat less negative poorer countries.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"525\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-750x525.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19986\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-750x525.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-150x105.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-400x280.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-768x538.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>2. Misperceptions reveal a failure of our media and our education systems</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>What should we make of the fact that many perceive the world to be stagnating or even declining in global health or poverty while we are in fact achieving the most rapid improvements in our history in these very same aspects?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, this is simply sad. It means that we think worse of the world than we should. We think more poorly than we should about the time we are living in, and we think more poorly than we should about what people around the world are achieving right now.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second it makes clear that we are doing a terrible job at understanding and communicating what is happening in the world. Particularly in rich countries the education systems and media are failing to convey an accurate perspective on how the world is changing \u2013 arguably one of the main expectations we should have of them.{ref}This finding is the starting point for the recently published book \u2019<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Factfulness</a>\u2019 coauthored by Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund, and Hans and Ola Rosling. The authors go on to explain that our perception is so very wrong because our minds are paying attention to extremes \u2013 the very richest, very poorest, most violent and most corrupt aspects of our world \u2013 so that we end up with what they call the \u2018overdramatic worldview\u2019, which is pieced together by all the most dramatic aspects of our world, but has a massive blind spot for the world that is the reality of most people in the world. The overdramatic worldview leaves us with a picture of the world that includes all the stories that are in fact rare (the fact that they are extraordinary is why they are reported in the media), but which has no understanding of what is actually common.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<h4>3. We are not just negative about the past, we are also pessimistic about the future</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we ask people about what is possible for the world, then most of us answer \u2018not much\u2019. This chart documents the survey answers to the question \u201cover the next 15 years, do you think living conditions for people around the world get better or worse?\u201d. &nbsp;More than half of the people expect stagnation or that things will be getting worse. Fortunately, the places in which people currently have the worst living conditions are more optimistic about what is possible in the coming years.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the whole, the findings from the surveys are clear: we do not only believe that the world is stagnating or declining, we also expect that this perceived stagnation or decline will continue into the future.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This pessimism about what is possible for the world matters politically. Those who don\u2019t expect that things get better in the first place will be less likely to demand actions that can bring positive developments about. The few optimists on the other hand will want to see the necessary changes for the improvements they are expecting.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world-.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"403\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--750x403.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19969\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--750x403.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--150x81.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--400x215.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Optimistic-about-the-future-of-the-world--768x412.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h3>Knowledge about what we have achieved leaves no place for cynicism</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally the survey suggests that there is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future. This chart shows that the degree of optimism about the future differs hugely by the level of people\u2019s knowledge about global development.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those that were most pessimistic about the future tended to have the least basic knowledge on how the world has changed. Of those who could not give a single correct answer to the survey questions, only 17% expect the world to be better off in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, those who had very good knowledge about how the world has changed were the most optimistic about the changes that we can achieve in the next 15 years.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a correlation and as we know, correlation does not imply causation. To understand whether there is a causal link we would need to know whether getting a more accurate picture of how the world is changing makes one <i>change</i> one\u2019s belief about what will happen in the future. Unfortunately I am not aware of a study that looked into this question.{ref}Please do <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.maxroser.com/about/\" target=\"_blank\">get in contact</a> if you are aware of a study that investigates this question and I will update this section of the post \u2013 and I\u2019d be really grateful as I would very much like to understand this link.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course no one can know how the future turns out and there is nothing that would make the progress we have seen in recent decades continue inevitably and not every global development pessimist is ill-informed. But what we do know from these surveys is that these two views go together: Those who are pessimistic are much more likely to have little understanding about what is happening in the world.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Obviously the question then is, why is it that better informed people are more optimistic about the future?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>As we have seen, being wrong about global development mostly means being too negative about how the world is changing. Being wrong in these questions means having a cynical worldview. Cynicism suggests that nothing can be done to improve our situation and every effort to do so is bound to fail. Our history, the cynics say, is a history of failures and what we can expect for the future is more of the same.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In contrast to this, answering the questions correctly means that you understand that things can change. An accurate understanding of how global health and poverty are improving leaves no space for cynicism. Those who are optimistic about the future can base their view on the knowledge that it is possible to change the world for the better, because they know that we did.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"550\" height=\"550\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-550x550.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19970\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-550x550.png 550w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-150x150.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-400x400.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2018/07/Share-who-believe-that-the-world-will-be-better_by-knowledge-about-the-world-768x768.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h3>Declinism</h3>\n\n\n\n<h4>Declinism and development</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Declinism refers to the belief that a country or some other institution is in decline. Declinism was a prevalent feature of British political and economic history, whereby the decline of Britain as a world power was seen as the result of internal failures rather than international forces or global convergence. David Edgerton writes: &#8220;Declinism is beginning to appear as one of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur: for declinism holds, implicitly but clearly, that if Britain had done better it would have remained a much larger player on the world stage.&#8221;{ref}David Edgerton. &#8220;The Decline of Declinism.&#8221; <em>The Business History Review</em>, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Available online at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157\" target=\"_blank\">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3116157</a>{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> Today declinism in the United States is fashionable with many politicians. Donald Trump&#8217;s campaign slogan for the 2016 Republican nomination election was&nbsp;&#8220;Make America Great Again!&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The major flaw in much of the declinist narrative is the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative changes. Between 2010-14, US real GDP growth rates have fluctuated between 1.5-2.5% and yet, the US economy was recently overtaken by the Chinese economy measured in PPP-adjusted terms.{ref}For more information on PPP-adjustments, please visit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth/\" target=\"_blank\">economic growth page</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> In many ways this may capture the reason why the most developed nations tend to believe that their economy is in decline: relative decline is interpreted as absolute decline. Unsurprisingly, new EU member states tend to be much more optimistic about the future. The four largest economies &#8212; the UK, France, Germany and Italy &#8212; are the most pessimistic. This pattern persists when considering economies at different stages of development: developing countries are more optimistic about the future, while developed ones tend to be pessimistic.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Optimism about the future of the next generation by country &#8211; Pew Research Center{ref}Global Publics: Economic Conditions Are Bad. Pew Research Center (2015). Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/23/global-publics-economic-conditions-are-bad/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"208\" height=\"550\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-208x550.png\" alt=\"Optimism surveys on the next generation by country\" class=\"wp-image-6397\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-208x550.png 208w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-57x150.png 57w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country-151x400.png 151w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_optimism-surveys-on-the-next-generation-by-country.png 309w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 208px) 100vw, 208px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>Declinism and Age: The Reminiscence Bump</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>One interesting explanation for declinism is that it is the result of the way we encode memories and what we remember. Firstly, researchers have long established a robust pattern in the age at which we retain the most memories. In old age, memories from our lives are not evenly distributed but instead concentrated in two regions. These regions are (1) memories formed in adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 10-30, and (2) recent memory of events. The following figure is a useful representation of this distribution.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Lifespan memory retrieval curve &#8211; Wikipedia{ref}<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump\" target=\"_blank\">Reminiscence bump, Wikipedia</a>.<br> Journal references:<br> Hyland, Diane T., and Adele M. Ackerman. &#8220;Reminiscence and autobiographical memory in the study of the personal past.&#8221; <em>Journal of Gerontology</em> 43, no. 2 (1988): P35-P39. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://geronj.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/2/P35.short\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.<br><br>Jansari, Ashok, and Alan J. Parkin. &#8220;Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory.&#8221; <em>Psychology and Aging</em> 11, no. 1 (1996): 85. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.1.85\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.<br> {/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"531\" height=\"374\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg\" alt=\"Lifespan Retrieval Curve\" class=\"wp-image-6403\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve.jpg 531w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve-150x106.jpg 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_lifespan-retrieval-curve-400x282.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 531px) 100vw, 531px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<p>Secondly, research finds that as we get older we tend to have \u2013 on average \u2013 fewer negative experiences and that we are more likely to remember the positive ones over the negative ones.{ref}Mara Mather, Laura L. Carstensen, Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2005, Pages 496-502, ISSN 1364-6613. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> This effect combined with the reminiscence bump could explain why declinism exists among older generations, and why your parents could never stand the music you listened to! The universality of this effect is illustrated&nbsp;by Harvey Daniels with the use of these quotes about the decline of the English language{ref}Daniels, Harvey. <em>Famous last words: The American language crisis reconsidered</em>. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.{/ref}:</p>\n\n\n\n<ol><li>&#8220;The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense&#8230;. In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously distorted.&#8221; (A. Tibbets and C. Tibbets, <em>What&#8217;s Happening to American English?</em>, <strong>1978</strong>)</li><li>&#8220;From every college in the country goes up the cry, &#8216;Our freshmen can&#8217;t spell, can&#8217;t punctuate.&#8217; Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.&#8221; (C. H. Ward, <strong>1917</strong>)</li><li>&#8220;Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested&#8230;there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman&#8230;&#8221; (Captain Thomas Hamilton, <strong>1833</strong>)</li><li>&#8220;Our language is degenerating very fast.&#8221; (James Beattie, <strong>1785</strong>)</li></ol>\n\n\n\n<p>In the light of this research on human nature it is then not surprising&nbsp;that one of the earliest Sumerian tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was a complaint by a teacher about his students&#8217; writing ability.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Why&nbsp;does realism matter?</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>There are three main reasons we should try to combat social pessimism and declinism. The first reason is simple; indicators of living standards are significantly improving around the world. By monitoring and researching these changes we can identify ways in which progress can be achieved. Over the long-run, say 50-100 years, human progress has been staggering with the benefits not confined to the richest or most powerful. The second reason is that if our perceptions of the reality are wrong, we can end up prioritising the wrong things and making ineffectual change. Finally, being optimistic can be good for your health, while having a pessimistic outlook can be detrimental to your health.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>Perception and Priority</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The public perception of these indicators matters because it directly influences the priorities of voters in democratic countries and politicians. If, as in the example above, the public believes crime is increasing, it is likely that it&nbsp;demands more policing not for a reason grounded in reality, but for an imagined worsening of the society they live it.&nbsp;This is&nbsp;one reason why incorrect public perceptions can be a problem.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The following figures underline just how sizable these effects can be. The first shows how spending on crime has moved with the public&#8217;s confidence in the government&#8217;s ability to crack down on crime. As the public&#8217;s confidence fell, spending on crime increased and recorded crime fell; without any uptick in the public&#8217;s confidence.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>Public confidence, recorded crime and government spending in the UK, 1997-2007 &#8211; Ipsos MORI (2008){ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"502\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-750x502.png\" alt=\"Spending on crime, crime levels and public confidence - Ipsos MORI\" class=\"wp-image-6437\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-750x502.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-150x100.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-400x268.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori-360x240.png 360w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_spending-on-crime-crime-levels-and-public-confidence-ipsos-mori.png 1157w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>The media matters for pessimism</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>One contributing factor to&nbsp;some of the widespread misinformation&nbsp;seems to be the content consumed through media channels.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of those who believed crime was increasing, more than half suggested that information on TV was a reason they believed there was more crime. In addition to this, almost&nbsp;half suggested that what they read in newspapers was&nbsp;a factor.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>TV and newspapers are largest factors driving crime perceptions in the UK, 2007 &#8211; Ipsos MORI{ref}Closing The Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions. Ipsos MORI (2008). Available <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600860801924899\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"446\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-750x446.png\" alt=\"Why do people think there is more crime? - Ipsos MORI\" class=\"wp-image-6438\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-750x446.png 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-150x89.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori-400x238.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2015/08/ourworldindata_why-do-people-think-there-is-more-crime-ipsos-mori.png 1159w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<p>Research conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan highlights the degree to which the media can influence voting behaviour.{ref}DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Daniel Kaplan. &#8220;The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting.&#8221; <em>The Quarterly Journal of Economics</em> 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187-1234. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> DellaVigna and Kaplan looked at how the introduction of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 in different towns affected voting patterns and turnout in the Presidential election of 2000. They find &#8220;a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another dimension to this debate is the extent to which the perceived terrorism threat affects the willingness of individuals to trade-off civil liberties.{ref}Davis, Darren W., and Brian D. Silver. &#8220;Civil liberties vs. security: Public opinion in the context of the terrorist attacks on America.&#8221; American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28-46. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00054.x\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> Darren Davis and Brian Silver find that &#8220;the greater people\u2019s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties.&#8221; This effect is attenuated by the people&#8217;s trust in government but fairly consistent across nearly all political affiliations and demographics.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>Things&nbsp;are getting better and it is good to know that</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>With all the negative news stories and sensationalism that exists in the media it may be hard to believe things are improving. These events can be contextualized as short-term fluctuations in an otherwise positive global trend.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Quantifying this progress and identifying its causes will help researchers develop successful strategies to combat the world&#8217;s problems. We discuss many important improvements in our <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts\">history of global living conditions</a>.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>The relation between health and optimism</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a large literature that links an optimistic outlook on life to positive health outcomes.&nbsp;While it is interesting to read and think about this, one should be prudent not to over-interpret these findings and consider carefully&nbsp;if it is possible to think of these relationships as causal:</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Studies have found a link between an individual&#8217;s optimism/pessimism (measured by surveys) and their health outcomes. Julia Boehm and Laura Kubzansky reviewed over 200 published studies to investigate the link between a positive psychological outlook (optimism, life satisfaction and happiness) and cardiovascular health.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., and Laura D. Kubzansky. &#8220;The heart&#8217;s content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health.&#8221; <em>Psychological bulletin</em> 138, no. 4 (2012): 655. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/138/4/655/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p> They found that a positive psychological outlook was strongly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: \u201cFor example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers.&#8221;{ref}Positive feelings may help protect cardiovascular health. Harvard School of Public Health (2012). Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/hsop-pfm041312.php\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Boehm et al. (2011) also find a link between optimism and the composition of cholesterol in the blood. Optimistic individuals had higher levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of triglycerides.{ref}Boehm, Julia K., Christopher Peterson, Mika Kivimaki, and Laura Kubzansky. &#8220;A prospective study of positive psychological well-being and coronary heart disease.&#8221; <em>Health Psychology</em> 30, no. 3 (2011): 259. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/30/3/259/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Further research using data from the Women&#8217;s Health Initiative found that over an eight year period, the most optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause.{ref}Tindle, Hilary A., Yue-Fang Chang, Lewis H. Kuller, JoAnn E. Manson, Jennifer G. Robinson, Milagros C. Rosal, Greg J. Siegle, and Karen A. Matthews. &#8220;Optimism, cynical hostility, and incident coronary heart disease and mortality in the Women\u2019s Health Initiative.&#8221; <em>Circulation</em> 120, no. 8 (2009): 656-662. Available online <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/120/8/656.abstract\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.{/ref} Similar results were also found by researchers writing in the <em>Archives of General Psychiatry</em>; using data from the Netherlands, they found that the most optimistic individuals had a 55% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular death.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2>The future is always bad \u2013 and always was</h2>\n\n\n\n<h4>End of the world predictions</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. Indeed we can go back centuries or even millennia and find plenty of examples of pessimistic accounts of the future of the world.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This infographic shows a series of&nbsp;predictions for the year in which the world will&nbsp;end&nbsp;\u2013 from religious figures to scientists like John Napier and Isaac Newton.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>End of the world predictions \u2013 The Economist{ref}&#8221;Doomsdays.&#8221; The Economist (2012). Available online <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11\">here</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"415\" height=\"550\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-415x550.png\" alt=\"20121222_woc6530\" class=\"wp-image-4901\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-415x550.png 415w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-113x150.png 113w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530-302x400.png 302w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_20121222_woc6530.png 595w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 415px) 100vw, 415px\" /></a></figure></div>\n\n\n\n<h4>The future&nbsp;of the world in literature</h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Predictions of dire futures are also common in fictional literature.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This beautiful visualization presents a time of&nbsp;predictions of the future as foretold in novels.</p>\n\n\n\n<h6>The future as foretold in the past \u2013 Giorgia Lupi and Accurat{ref}This infographic is the work of Giorgia Lupi, and more of her work can be found at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://giorgialupi.com\" target=\"_blank\">http://giorgialupi.com</a>.{/ref}</h6>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"750\" height=\"338\" src=\"http://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-750x338.jpg\" alt=\"futureevents_giorgialupi_large1\" class=\"wp-image-6492\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-750x338.jpg 750w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-150x68.jpg 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1-400x180.jpg 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2014/11/ourworldindata_futureevents_giorgialupi_large1.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" /></a></figure></div>\n",
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