Risk & Progress| A hub for essays that explore risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future for all. Subscriptions are free, paid subscribers gain access to the full archive, including the Pathways of Progress essay series.
For billions of people on this planet, life is better than ever. We are better educated, living longer, wealthier, and freer than at any time in human history. Yet most people believe exactly the opposite. They see a world that is dying, becoming more impoverished and more dangerous. It is easy to understand why so many are misled; the factors of progress are deeply counterintuitive to our nature. This fact that is exploited by critics, pundits, the media, for their own agendas.
The Reality Distortion Field
Life was better in the good old days, they say. It may feel awkward for most to admit, but even on a good day we cannot trust our own memories. A nostalgic appeal to the past and the idyllic concept of the “good old days,” is likely an appeal to a false version of reality. Our brains have built-in mechanisms that suppresses negative memories over time. Thus, the past will almost always be remembered more fondly than it probably deserves.
A viral “meme” circulating online serves as a great example of an appeal to a false version of reality that undermines our vision and understanding of progress. The meme features an illustrated image of the “typical” American family circa 1960, with kids going to college, a house, and a car, all allegedly affordable on the income of a sole male breadwinner. The wife, as it were, was free to tend to the home and the children. The characters in the meme all smiling and content.
But the image that it presents, that one income could buy a life that requires two incomes today, is false. In 1960, the car ownership rate in America was half of what it is today. The average new home was about 25 percent smaller and lacked amenities like garbage disposals, dishwashers, fire alarms…etc, and that is new homes. Most lived in older, smaller homes with no air conditioning or washing machines either. College is certainly a lot more expensive now but children at the time would likely have not attended anyway.
The fact is, a family can certainly live on a single income today…if that family were content living like the average one did in 1960. That is, to own only one car, a small home, 1 television with 3 channels, take road trips instead of flying…etc. In fact, you would live better than they did, because you would have access to modern medicine, cheaper clothing, cheaper food, and your car and home would be vastly safer, more energy efficient, and probably have features that would have been unimaginable luxuries at that time, if they existed at all.
Our vision of reality is further distorted by the fact that while our brains suppress negative memories and feelings over the long term, they amplify them in the short term. Psychological studies repeatedly illustrate how the impact of losing $5 dollars in a bet is emotionally more impactful than winning $5, for example. The media seizes upon this deeply biological reaction for their benefit.
To keep us glued to the television or engaged online, they purposely flood the airwaves with negativity. A country in the midst of a bloody civil war will draw news correspondents, clicks, and taps: a country prospering at peace will not. Thus, when our brains compare the past with the present, they compare an overly negative portrayal of the present in sharp relief with a rose-colored version of the past. It should be no wonder then that most people cannot accept that poverty is lower, and famines and war less frequent than they were in the “good old days.”
Zero Sum Fallacies
Our innate reality distortion field often dovetails with a deeply human propensity to subscribe to “zero-sum” thinking; the idea that for me to “win,” you must “lose.” This often comes up in the realm of global trade; the “loser” incurs a “deficit” and the “winner” a “surplus.” But (generally) countries do not trade with each other, people and companies do. Transactions only take place to the extent that both parties “win.” While individual firms may find competition difficult to bear, in the aggregate, trade is not zero-sum. Trade enriches everyone by broadening competition, bringing prices down, and jump-starting innovation.
We also see zero-sum fallacies cloud our judgement when discussing immigration. The arrival of immigrants from abroad, we think, must “steal jobs” from the “native” population. But economists have long understood this notion to be mostly false, they even have a term for it: the Lump of Labor Fallacy. More immigrants do bring in more competition for jobs, but they also bring in more demand for jobs as well.
Combined, our affinity to zero-sum thinking and our susceptibility to the “reality distortion field” can be used more broadly to stir up negative emotional responses to globalization and progress. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, some now contend that an interconnected and globalized world is a dangerous hotbed of new diseases and therefore borders should be shut. However, this neglects that new viruses are derived from existing strains. In an interconnected world, we are indeed exposed to a greater variety of viruses, but this makes our immune systems more resistant to their derivatives, should they arise. Counterintuitively, a globalized world makes novel viruses less, not more, dangerous.
The cousin of zero-sum thinking, Malthusianism, also clouds our judgement and reason. Malthusianism holds that population and economic growth necessary and inevitably lead to resource depletion. As we will see, history has shown this to be incorrect. The cornerstone of progress is the ability to do more with less. We grow more food using less land, we produce more goods with fewer people, our cars drive further with less gasoline, our fuels create less pollution with more energy…etc.
Contrary to our innate assumptions and seemingly defying all logic, as the human population has grown, the availability of resources has also grown as technology and progress unlocked more for human use and made better use of the existing supply. In fact, resource abundance has grown faster than the population itself, a concept that
and call “Superabundance.” Oddly, the more mouths to feed, the more food there is for each of us.Nor does growth automatically imply more pollution or environmental degradation. On the contrary, instead of deforestation ravaging the world’s forests, forest cover and greenery are spreading as countries get wealthier. Indeed, instead of spiraling out of control, climate-changing CO2 emissions are falling as nations develop and advance. The case I make here is that progress is the solution, not the cause, of these challenges. I recognize, however, that this is completely counterintuitive to our biology and certainly run against popular depictions in media and culture.
Safeguarding the Future
The key thing to remember here is that we ought to take care to not fall victim to our own “reality distortion field,” zero-sum thinking, or blind Malthusianism. The truth, as they say, is rarely pure and never simple. The truth is that the factors that enable human progress are counterintuitive and this gives critics many avenues through which to turn us against those very factors. This makes progress particularly fragile and illustrates why we need to better understand how it works.
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I'm finishing an essay on this topic from a different interaction but we've landed on the same thing. The apocalypse is always in front of us though, never behind us. There's a lot of psychology baked in that most of us are unaware of.
A very thought provoking read! While I would certainly agree with your statement on how the brains has a built-in-mechanism to suppress negative memories over time and thus the past will almost always be remembered fondly than it deserves, I would add that the US was a nation that was on the rise post WW2, compared to the other nations when it came to education, military strength, technological innovation, industrial production, etc. There is no doubt that that the human race has progressed over the course of this time, US specifically has been in a state of decline, as government spending and debt have reached new levels and productivity growth has slowed. At the same time, there are emerging nations that are quietly yet quickly catching up, which has weakened the US's negotiating power at a global scale. Unfortunately, one of the undesired natural side effects of capitalism is inequality, and if over a period of time, the government does not work in unison with companies to build the right infrastructure in place to equip people and societies with jobs and other resources, negative sentiment is bound to take hold. I think, that is a driving factor today in many of America's societies that have been left behind, though as a whole human society and the race has progressed further.