against doomerism

the world is better than it's ever been

It is easy to go online or watch the news and see bold declarations that we are living in the most fallen, wretched time in human history. A common theme is that the world is so bad today that it is traumatizing the youth in unique and unprecedented ways, while pushing our elders to support reactionary parties.

This view is wrong. Both the Make-America-Great-Again hankerers for a bygone age and the Gen-Z proclaimers of unique and rarefied pain are wrong. They are wrong in basically the same way, except the former are longing for an idealized past and the latter pine for either an imagined past or an idealized future.

There is extremely strong evidence that the world is better than its ever been. In this post I’ll give you the basic argument and links for further reading. I’ll then discuss why this is a cause for optimism but not an antidote to all pain. If you expect rising GDP and party politics to alleviate all of your personal suffering, you will always be disappointed. This point is generally missed by commentators who mistake personal suffering for the fallen-ness of the world, and want squarely personal problems to be fixed via the government.

Even though we are richer and living longer, we still suffer. No amount of material wealth and political stability will change that, ever. Our human drama will continue to be, well, dramatic as we go through breakups, losses, dashed dreams, and so on.

This isn’t to say that none of our personal suffering comes from the political sphere. I’m just saying I think the line has gotten very blurry, to the detriment of our politics. Some things that cause personal suffering, such as racism, belong in the political sphere. Racism is not a personal problem that the government should stay out of. But if you think your generalized anxiety disorder is caused exclusively by late capitalism, well, I’ll bet you’d also be anxious under luxury space communism as well.

let’s have gratitude for the progress we have made

The argument I’m going to make can be found in many places, my top of mind reference is Factfulness by Hans Rosling and the associated website Gapminder.

Here is a side-by-side from Gapminder plotting life expectancy in 1922 vs 2022 by country. In 1922, a country with $2000/year per capita income had a life expectancy of roughly 35 (!) years at birth. Today, a country in that same income bracket has a life expectancy of about 60 years at birth. That is amazing!

You’ll also notice the countries are plotted by income horizontally. It’s easy to see from this chart as well that there are just a lot more rich countries today than there used to be. The world is wealthier and living longer, and this progress has been made in the relatively short span of a century. This progress is across countries with differing ideologies, levels of political stability, and so on. And even poorest countries in the world today have life expectancy comparable to the richest countries a century ago. That’s amazing!

You can see similar progress along tons of other dimensions: democracy, women’s rights, human rights, speed of travel, safety of travel, medicine, sharing of information, labor laws, education, and so on. The world really has gotten a lot better over the last hundred years or so.

Some may argue: well, sure 100 or 150 years ago the world was pretty bad, caught in the grip of colonialism, boom-and-bust capitalism, and so on. It is true—human life expectancies actually declined in some places during the industrial revolution. You can see that people actually got physically shorter as a result of malnutrition.

But if you go back farther than that, was the world better than today? Maybe the Irish monks in the 13th century had it good, or maybe the Ancient Greeks really had it figured out. Well, they didn’t. Remember that like, there was *slavery* in Ancient Greece and life expectancy was roughly 30.

When we look back on other cultures and societies, we are generally viewing the absolute all-stars from an entire civilization. Homer, Dante, Cicero, Newton. This can lead us to believe that all Ancient Greeks or Renaissance Italians were peripatetic philosophers. In fact, the vast majority of people in those societies were peasants or slaves who had short, difficult, and malnourished lives. In contrast, every Fortune 500 company today has a few Newtons and a Dante or two. We produce geniuses at such a high rate it’s no longer exceptional.

We have also made this progress routine. We have companies that will keep inventing better medicine because they get money if they do. We have more-or-less stable governments. We have an increasingly democratic world, and world where an absence of democracy causes big legitimacy problems. It is worth being grateful for this progress, and for the fact that we have made this progress routine. It’s a safe bet that we will keep growing in terms of material wealth, that each hour of our labor will produce increasingly more stuff, that we will get raises, that our children will have better educations than we did, and so on.

permanent revolution

This is not to say there are no issues—there are plenty of issues! We stopped building housing so it’s too expensive. We need to reduce the cost of colleges and universities. The American healthcare system has huge cost issues that we need to get a handle on more quickly than we have—even though we have made some progress in the last decade and certainly have made progress during the Biden presidency. Racism and bigotry are too common. It is too expensive to build transit. We don’t do enough for workers hurt by technological change.

The thing is, though: these are all issues that are addressable within our current political system. In fact, many of them have been partially addressed. Our healthcare system is better than before Obamacare. We have made enormous strides toward equality for Black Americans in the last 100 years. Some states have actually reduced costs for higher education in the last 5 years. Some cities have taken enterprising steps towards liberalizing housing development and have brought costs down for both renters and homeowners.

We need to continue to do the unsexy work of electing leaders who will pass laws to make progress on these issues. No one law will fix all the problems in a given domain, but we need to keep the ball moving forward. During the Biden presidency, we have passed laws to build infrastructure, cap drug costs, fight climate change with a giant pile of money, reduce gun deaths, increase unemployment benefits while COVID was happening, and build semiconductors here in the US. This is all great.

tail risks

The big two counterarguments to the life-is-better narrative I just laid out are nuclear war and climate change.

Nuclear war is like, scary. We could blow the world up at any time. A mistake could end the world. I mean, that sucks. We live with this risk every day and it’s not great. The benefit of nuclear weapons is that it’s not really feasible for major powers to directly fight a war, because a serious conflict would mean the end of the world which is bad for everyone. However, you could still get a truly delusional leader who doesn’t care about that, and that is bad.

However, it’s not all pessimism on the nuclear bombs front. International arms control agreements between the US and the USSR/Russia have dramatically lowered the number of nuclear bombs in the world, and we can hope that closer international cooperation in the future may let us further reduce this number. The vast majority of the bombs are held by Russia and the US at this point, which is also cause for optimism: the fewer countries that hold nukes the fewer bilateral relationships you need to worry about blowing the world up.

We have effective international regulation of nuclear weapons at the nation-state level as well, including China acting as an anti-proliferation force. See the Iran Deal.

OK—let’s talk about the most persistent source of doom—climate change. It’s undeniable that climate change is scary. It poses risks that will look different than what we’ve all experienced. It also presents us with ongoing quiet moments of sadness—a late fall, lack of snow, more intense rainfall. As we’re living through these events we ponder how the world is changing.

Despite the risks climate change poses, I think that the level of doom is way too high. You commonly see people saying it’s unethical to bring children into the world because of climate change. I personally think this is a wacky take. While it is bad that the earth is warming and causing problems, a bad thing happening does not mean everything is doomed forever. It does not mean there is some point in the future 50 years from now where everything will be a hellscape. We have to remember the good things happening (better living standards, a generally more stable world politically, etc) along with the bad things, and balance them.

Additionally, while we can predict some of the effects of climate change, we do not fully know how people will respond to these changes. It is likely that humans will make decisions to mitigate some of the harms of climate change, and that is good!

Finally, our carbon reduction efforts are starting to pay off—we have successfully decoupled growth and carbon emissions in the US. Greenhouse gas emissions are falling while we had like 5% growth last quarter. This is amazing. It means we can continue materially improving the human condition while also living sustainably.

We certainly have a long way to go before we’re carbon-zero or even carbon-negative. But the wheels are turning and the question now is speed. We can do the thing, we just need to do it fast enough.

How do we get people to adopt electric cars more quickly. How do we turn old coal power plants into new nuclear and solar power plants? We have the technology now, it’s amazing! We need to do politics to put that technology into use fast enough. Even though Biden and the Dems passed the largest climate investment in history as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, we need to keep going. This means advocating at the state level for incentives to reduce carbon usage by buildings and to build nuclear/solar/wind. At the federal level, this means making sure our pro-climate message has broad electoral appeal and brings as many people into the Democratic coalition as possible.

balance

When something is bad and scary—like climate change—it’s useful to take a step back and try to put it in perspective. First, are there other things going well? As we’ve seen—yes! The world is richer and more just than it’s ever been. Second, are things going in the right direction? Again—yes! We are making progress on the big issues we’re facing, from racism to inequality (which is falling!!) to climate to nuclear weapons.

This perspective helps us remember that even though we face risks, we are moving in a way to reduce these risks and increase wellbeing. This perspective also helps us remember how far we have come and it makes us comfortable as coalition partners working with others to continue to make progress on these issues, while remembering that not everything will be fixed today.

This perspective doesn’t minimize the importance of the problems in front of us, but it helps us avoid midwit despair, where we get seduced into a worldview of pessimism and then blame our personal problems on some grand decline of society. Like, it’s true that climate change poses big risks, and that our economic system could be fairer. But these social problems are not the cause of your depression, and rationalizing that they are just puts you in a state of helplessness. It’s in fact not true that we live in uniquely dangerous or economically unfair times. We live in the safest time to be alive in human history, and if you could choose to be born at any point you’d probably choose today.

Anyway, here’s a meme. Don’t be a midwit.