
The World Is Getting Better and Nobody Knows It - okket
https://fee.org/articles/the-world-is-getting-better-and-nobody-knows-it/
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niftich
It's an interesting point of view; one often raised in less-serious contexts
lamenting the 24-hour news cycle and the sensationalism of news. The
psychology behind how we tend to remember bad events over good is also a
likely contributor, as they point out.

But perhaps it's even more obvious why the survey-takers in such developed
countries as Sweden, UK, and USA are of the belief that the world is not such
a good place after all: it's not getting better for them.

The World Economic Forum came to this conclusion in their study asking
essentially the same thing [1]. Globalization's main beneficiaries are
developing countries' lower working class, who can luck out and be uplifted
with higher wages and higher quality of life -- and, of course, the global
rich. Meanwhile, the extreme poor and developed countries' working class sees
little tangible improvement. This is reflected in the rise of political
movements that are isolationist, protectionist, and anti-immigration, as they
believe (whether rightfully or falsely, that's an open question) that those
policies will improve their local fortunes when the opposite policies did not.

This appears to show that as the economic outlook of certain classes of people
improves, the economic outlook of other classes remains stagnant or worsens.
Some people insist that the economy isn't a zero-sum game -- and perhaps
pedantically, they are correct -- but yet we observe this behavior time and
time again. So what gives?

[1] [https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/people-are-angry-
abou...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/people-are-angry-about-
globalization-this-chart-explains-why/)

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Tempest1981
And my first reaction was to find a flaw in their statistics.

I always questioned why the media reports every instance of "adults behaving
badly". Is there an upside to the reader/watcher?

Excerpt: "Why do we make these false assumptions? Many of them are formed by
the media, which reinforces a particular way of looking at the world – a
tendency to focus on the dramatic and surprising, which is almost always bad
news, like war, murder and natural disasters."

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toor2
What about the rise of global mass surveillance, climate change and income
inequality?

Poverty, hunger and crime levels aren't the only metrics that gauge 'world
goodness'. This article screams "Don't complain, your problems don't matter,
the world is better than it ever was!"

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Tempest1981
The paragraph near the end addresses this, somewhat (to keep us from feeling
too good):

"The fact that things have in fact been getting better – overwhelmingly so –
does not guarantee progress in the future. After years of easy money and debt
financing of companies and governments, a large-scale financial crisis is
possible, when all the bills come due. Global warming may threaten ecosystems
and affect the lives of millions. Large-scale war between major powers is
possible. Terrorists could wreak havoc on a massive scale ..."

