circa 1945: Arms of a man drawing an upward line on a graph. (Photo by Hirz/Getty Images)
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co‐author of The Simon Project. He is the co‐author of the recent book, Ten Global Trends that Every Smart Person Needs to Know: And Many Other Trends You Will Find Interesting. Tupy is best known for arguing that when viewed over the long term, things are getting better, better all the time. Here are three questions:
Q: Are things really getting better? It seems like 2020 has been a pretty rough year—COVID, racial injustice and the retreat of democracy around the globe.
A: Progress doesn’t go on a smooth line upward. It’s jagged. There are ups and downs. Look at the first half of the twentieth century. There was a pandemic, a global depression, and two world wars. Still, by the end of the twentieth century the world was better off than it was at the start of the century. To see the progress, it’s necessary to take a longer view.
Covid is a similar event, but as I pointed out in a recent article in Quillette, we’ve even made progress with diseases. Coronavirus is deadly, but the bubonic plague had a mortality rate of 50 percent [Covid is 0.6%—Ed.] It took 3500 years to eradicate smallpox, 15 years to learn how to treat HIV/AIDS, and five years to come up with an Ebola vaccine. The new Covid vaccines were developed in under a year.
Still, I understand people’s unease. I think we are going through a period of great upheaval. Many of the old truths are no longer being accepted. We don’t know where this will end. I don’t think humanity has any appetite for outright autocracy or war, but things could always get out of hand. People no longer have a sense of where things could go wrong. Our education system has failed us. We don’t teach history and civics. And our elites have failed us. Covid is a good example. Direction from our scientists and leaders has been all over the place—wear masks, don’t wear masks, masks do more harm than good, and so forth.
Q: If things are getting better, why is everyone’s inbox full of emails every day explaining how the world (and the U.S.) is going to hell in a handbasket?
A: Basically it boils down to natural selection. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years or so. For most of that time, life has been incredibly difficult. If one of our ancestors was walking past a bush and thought he heard it rustle, he could either figure it was nothing and keep going or he could run away. Maybe it was nothing, but then again, maybe it was a lion. There’s no penalty for overreacting, but there’s an extreme penalty for underreacting. The genes of underreactors got weeded out of the gene pool. That’s left us with a vast array of negativity biases. The human brain craves bad news. It’s always on the lookout for threats and dangers. And of course, if that’s what people want, the market will provide it.
Q: So does that mean we should all relax, that everything’s going to be all right?
A: I would never say that everything’s going to be all right, that we’re steadily marching toward some sort of utopia. If we solved every problem in the world, new ones would arise. And there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong—more than there are for things to go right. Progress isn’t inexorable. Even if it were, an asteroid could strike tomorrow morning. But there are reasons to be optimistic. There’s only one animal that generates ideas, us. Ideas are the raw material of progress. In my next book I talk about the formula for progress. People times freedom. The more people we have, the more likely we’ll come up with geniuses. It’s probably not coincidental that progress has come as the world’s population has grown. People are instrumental, but that’s not enough—they need freedom. If they have the freedom to think and act on their ideas, the more likely we’ll come up with solutions.
For leaders, it pays to watch out for those negative biases, and deliberately correct for them.
