The world has lots of problems that we need to do disciplined and diligent politics to fix. But to avoid purely despairing over the state of the world, we have to put those problems in the context of how bad should we *expect* the world to be. And by this metric, the world is pretty good.
I wrote about this last month and coined the term “midwit despair.” This is despair from learning a little bit about the world and realizing there are problems, without the next step of learning how many (larger!) problems we’ve overcome in the past.
I want to provide another striking example of the progress we have made here. Here’s a chart I saw on Twitter today. Pink is “recession” and blue is “not recession.” We move through time from left to right. There used to be a lot of pink and now there’s much less of it. That’s amazing.
We used to be in recessions (or “panics”) a lot. As our monetary and fiscal policy knowledge has improved… that happens less. It’s great. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 partly in response to the Panic of 1907, and its first few decades weren’t exactly spectacular. Its actions before and during what became the Great Depression made the crash and subsequent depression worse (if you don’t believe me, Ben Bernanke being a little glib said, “We did it. We’re very sorry.”).
But a cool thing about humans is that we learn stuff. The Great Recession was a recession and not a depression largely because the Fed had decades of knowledge and could manage the crisis better.
Karl Marx (somewhere, can’t find the ref, maybe it was Engels) complained that capitalism had crises every decade like clockwork. In his time, that was true! Look at the plot! Here’s another viz from Fidelity, you can just look at how much less gray there is over time and look at the declining recession odds. People in the 19th century lived half their lives in a recession or depression! That sucks!
So I’ll say it again: we live during the best time to be alive in history. Don’t despair simply because problems remain in the world. Let’s work diligently to fix the problems but do so knowing that our actions matter, that our effort and the effort of our ancestors is paying off. It’s a pretty rad time to be alive.