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Why Are We So Gloomy?

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Why Are We So Gloomy?

Our evolved instincts are making us more anxious and depressed than we should be.

Summary: Many young people today are pessimistic about the future of the planet and humanity, believing that environmental degradation, poverty, violence, and inequality are getting worse. However, this gloomy outlook is not supported by the facts, which show remarkable improvements in living standards, health, education, peace, and prosperity over the last century. This article explores why people are so prone to pessimism and how to overcome it by examining the evidence of human progress.


Do you believe that the world is coming to an end? If so, you are not alone.

In 2021, researchers at the University of Bath polled 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 in Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, and the United States. The researchers found that, on average, 83 percent of respondents thought that “people have failed to care for the planet.” Seventy-five percent thought that the “future is frightening.” Fifty-six percent thought that “humanity is doomed.” Fifty-five percent thought that they will have “less opportunity than [their] parents.” Finally, 39 percent stated that they were “hesitant to have children.”

The study remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of young people’s perception of the environmental state of the planet. But is this kind of doom warranted? The following global statistics paint an entirely different picture:

Between 1950 and 2020, the average inflation-adjusted income per person rose from $4,158 to $16,904, or 307 percent. Between 1960 and 2019, the average life expectancy, rose from 50.9 years to 72.9 years, or 43.2 percent. (Unfortunately, the pandemic reduced that number to 72.2 years.)

Between 2000 and 2020, the homicide rate fell from 6.85 per 100,000 to 5.77, or 16 percent.

Deaths from inter-state wars fell from a high of 596,000 in 1950 to a low of 49,000 in 2020, or 92 percent (though the war between Russia and Ukraine is bound to increase that number).

The rates of extreme poverty have plummeted, with the share of people living on less than $1.90 per day declining from 36 percent in 1990 to 8.7 percent in 2019. Though, once again, the pandemic has temporarily worsened that number somewhat.

Between 1969 and 2019, the average infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births fell from 89.7 to 20.9, or 77 percent.

Between 1961 and 2018, the daily supply of calories rose from 2,192 to 2,928, or 34 percent. Today, even in Africa, obesity is a growing concern.

The gross primary school enrollment rate rose from 89 percent in 1970 to 100 percent in 2018. The gross secondary school enrollment rate rose from 40 percent to 76 percent over the same period. Finally, the gross tertiary school enrollment rate rose from 9.7 percent to 38 percent.

The literacy rate among men aged 15 and older rose from 74 percent in 1975 to 90 percent in 2018. The literacy rate among women aged 15 and older rose from 56 percent in 1976 to 83 percent in 2018.

In 2018, 90 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 24 were literate. That number was almost 93 percent among men of the same age. The age-old literacy gap between the sexes has all but disappeared.

There is plenty of good news on the global environmental front as well:

The chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe — earthquake, flood, drought, storm, wildfire, landslide or epidemic — fell by almost 99 percent over the last century.

Between 1982 and 2016, the global tree canopy cover increased by an area larger than Alaska and Montana combined.

In 2017, the World Database on Protected Areas reported that 15 percent of the planet’s land surface was covered by protected areas. That’s an area almost double the size of the U.S.

That year, marine protected areas covered nearly seven percent of the world’s oceans. That’s an area more than twice the size of South America.

There is more good news for the fish: Since 2012, more than half of all seafood consumed came from aquaculture, as opposed to the fish caught in the wild.

And while it is true that the total amount of CO2 emitted throughout the world is still rising, CO2 emissions in rich countries are falling both in totality and on a per capita basis.

With so much good news around us, why are we so gloomy? We have evolved to look out for danger. That was the best way to survive when the world was much more threatening. But, while the world has changed, our genes have not. That’s why the front pages of the newspapers are always filled with the most horrific stories. If it bleeds, it leads.

To make matters worse, the media compete with one another for a finite number of eyeballs. So, presenting stories in the most dramatic light pays dividends. Or, as one study recently found, for a headline of average length, “each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.” And so, in a race to the bottom, all media coverage got much darker over the last two decades.

We are literally scaring ourselves to death, with rates of anxiety, depression and even suicide rising in some parts of the world. To maintain your mental composure and to keep matters in perspective, follow the trendlines, not the headlines. You will discover that the world is in a much better shape than it appears. You will be more cheerful and, most importantly, accurately informed.

This article was originally published at RealClearPolicy on May 31st, 2023.

Associated Press | Food Consumption

Will US Convenience Stores Find the Secret to Selling Better Food?

“Americans who think of petrified hot dogs, frozen burritos and salty snacks when they imagine getting food at a gas station or truck stop may be pleasantly surprised during their next road trip: U.S. convenience stores are offering them more and better — though not necessarily healthier — choices.

From 7-Eleven to regional chains like QuikTrip, the operators of c-stores, as they’re known in the trade, are looking overseas for grab-and-go inspiration, adding sit-down seating at some locations, expanding their coffee menus to rival Starbucks and experimenting with made-to-order meals for busy families.

The moves are happening as convenience stores seek ways to offset slowing sales of cigarettes, maps and soft drinks. By tempting customers’ palates with fresh deli sandwiches and build-your-own burgers, the humble food marts want to become an alternative to fast-food restaurants for busy Americans who crave easy, interesting and less expensive eating options.”

From Associated Press.

Blog Post | Food & Hunger

Grim Old Days: Tom Standage’s Edible History of Humanity

So many of history's twists and turns have been guided by what people ate.

Summary: Tom Standage’s book explores how history’s major events and periods are reflected in the history of food, from the agricultural revolution to the spice trade of globalization. The book reveals the harsh realities of pre-industrial food production and the deadly consequences of misguided beliefs about food. It recounts how past societies waged wars and committed atrocities in the name of different foods, and how food has had profound historical influence over major events.


Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity traces how food impacted major world events in different eras, from the agricultural revolution to the spice trade’s role in early globalization. The book covers the industrial and post-industrial eras with harrowing descriptions of the horrific famines wrought by communism’s price controls and collectivization of agriculture. Its insights into the pre-industrial age are also noteworthy.

Standage reminds the reader that food is a product of innovation and progress, saying that “a cultivated field of maize, or any other crop, is as man-made as a microchip” and that the barely edible wild ancestors of today’s foods were nothing like their modern counterparts. The book also reveals that many foods of the past looked less appetizing and tasted worse. Consider the carrot. “Carrots were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange.” And that is not the only royal anecdote in the book. In the late 17th century, pineapples were known as “the fruit of kings” in Europe because they were so rare; King Charles II of England even posed for a painting with a pineapple and held a feast in which he “cut the fruit up himself and offered pieces of it from his own plate. This might sound like a gesture of humility, but was really a demonstration of his power: only a king could offer his guests pineapple.”

An Edible History also reminds the reader that poverty was the default throughout much of history, quoting a Mesopotamian proverb from around 2,000 BC that notes, “Wealth is hard to come by, but poverty is always at hand.” In ancient Uruk, according to Standage, “80 percent of the population were farmers.” In nonindustrialized corners of the modern world, not much has changed on that front. “In poor countries such as Rwanda, the proportion of the population involved in agriculture is still more than 80 percent—as it was in Uruk 5,500 years ago.”

The vast majority of people in pre-industrial societies the world over labored on farms, and the backbreaking work took a heavy toll on their bodies. Archeology reveals that historically in agricultural societies, “female skeletons often display evidence of arthritic joints and deformities of the toes, knees, and lower back, all of which are associated with the daily use of a saddle kern to grind grain.”

The book describes how difficult life was for agricultural workers, once the greater part of humanity. Many people viewed the ceaseless agricultural labor that defined their lives as a form of divine punishment: Standage quotes a verse in the biblical Book of Genesis that reads, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” In some cultures, the painful struggle to produce food from the earth was likened to fighting a war. “For the Incas, agriculture was closely linked to warfare: The earth was defeated, as if in battle, by the plow. So the harvest ceremony was carried out by young noblemen as part of their initiation as warriors, and they sang a haylli [a military victory chant] as they harvested the maize to celebrate their victory over the earth.”

Sometimes, local beliefs connected to food could prove lethal. The Aztecs thought the “Earth Mother was nourished by human blood . . . and the crops would only grow if she was given enough of it” in the form of innumerable human sacrifices. “Sacrificial victims were referred to as ‘tortillas for the gods.’” The Incas also practiced human sacrifice. “After subjugating a new region, the Incas sacrificed its most beautiful people.”

Other bizarre beliefs related to food are detailed in the book. “Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the ‘father of history,’ explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon, involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes. Only then would the wearer be protected from the ‘winged creatures like bats [which] have to be kept from attacking the men’s eyes when they are cutting the cassia.’” Theophrastus, another ancient Greek philosopher, believed cinnamon “was guarded by deadly snakes” and that “the only safe way to collect it was . . . to leave a third of the harvest behind as a gift to the sun, which would cause the offering to burst into flames.’” The Roman writer Tacitus worried about “spendthrift table luxuries,” such as spices now considered unremarkable. The book examines how the acquisition of what are today ordinary spices that can be purchased for a few dollars at any grocery store once inspired wars, including wars of conquest and destructive battles over trading rights. “After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood,” the author quotes Voltaire as quipping in 1756.

The book describes how in the quest for spices, often “violence was used arbitrarily and unsparingly.” For example, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama arrived in India, he “arbitrarily burned and bombarded towns on the coast in order to force key ports to [trade spices to Portugal rather than rival Muslim merchants] and his men also sank and looted Muslim and local vessels, on one occasion using prisoners for crossbow practice; the hands, noses, and ears of the remaining prisoners were cut off and sent ashore.” This violence was over pepper, something that is now inexpensive and thoroughly unremarkable. The quest to attain nutmeg, meanwhile, led the Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), to commit human rights abuses in the Banda Islands: “Villages were burned down and the inhabitants were killed, chased off, or sold into slavery. The village chiefs were tortured and then beheaded by the VOC’s samurai mercenaries, brought in from Japan.” Again, that was over nutmeg. As the book notes: “Today most people walk past the spices in the supermarket, arrayed on shelves in small glass bottles, without a second thought.” It can be hard to imagine, but people once killed and died to obtain the likes of pepper and nutmeg.

An Edible History’s discussion of the spice trade also makes vivid how poor the state of geographic knowledge was in the past. In the 1420s, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator sought in vain to “make contact with Prestor John, the legendary Christin ruler of a kingdom thought to be somewhere in Africa or the Indies.” In the 1480s, when Christopher Columbus tried to convince the Portuguese crown to fund his voyage, he was turned down in part because his calculations relied on the writings of Marco Polo, and Polo’s “book describing his travels in the East was widely regarded at the time as a work of fiction.” In fact, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scholars began to accept Polo’s travelog as a genuine historical account. When Columbus finally did make his voyage in 1492, he spread further confusion, believing he had visited Asia rather than a continent unknown to Europeans. And that was not all. “He claimed to have found the footprints of griffins.” “In the 1540s [the] conquistador, Gonzalo Pizarro, scoured the Amazon jungle in a doomed search for the legendary city of El Dorado and the ‘país de la canela,’ or cinnamon country. It was not until the seventeenth century that the search for Old World spices in the Americas was finally abandoned.”

The book also details the strange dietary advice of the past, such as dietary guidelines meant to ward off the devastating bubonic plague: “There are accounts of people being sealed into their houses to prevent the plague from spreading, and of people abandoning their families to avoid infection. Medical men proposed all sorts of strange measures that would, they said, minimize the risk of infection, advising fat people not to sit in the sunshine, for example, and issuing a series of baffling dietary pronouncements. Doctors in Paris advised people to avoid vegetables, whether pickled or fresh; to avoid fruit, unless consumed with wine; and to refrain from eating poultry, duck, and meat from young pigs. ‘Olive oil,’ they warned, ‘is fatal.’” What, then, was a person properly worried about the plague to eat? “The French doctors recommended drinking broth seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cloves. The plague was thought to be caused by corrupted air, so people were advised to burn scented woods and sprinkle rosewater in their homes, and other aromatics when going out. . . . This helped to conceal the smell of the dead and dying, as well as supposedly purifying the air. John of Escenden, a fellow at Oxford University, was certain that a combination of powdered cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves had enabled him to survive even as those around him succumbed to the plague.”

Superstitions initially prevented Europeans from eating potatoes when that vegetable arrived on their continent: “Potatoes resembled a leper’s gnarled hands, and the idea that they caused leprosy became widespread. According to the second edition of John Gerard’s Herball, published in 1633, ‘the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that eating them caused leprosy.’ . . . Potatoes became associated with witchcraft and devil worship.” In fact, even in the 1770s, “potatoes were still widely believed to be poisonous and to cause disease.”

Wall Street Journal | Food Consumption

Forget Cutting Sugar—New Tech Makes It Healthier Instead

“A guilt-free chocolate bar, full of sugar, could someday land at a supermarket near you.

The chocolate would look and taste normal, and contain the same amount of sugar. But an enzyme, encased in an edible substance and added to the bar, would reduce how much sugar is absorbed into the bloodstream, and even turn it into a fiber that is good for your gut.

The product is the brainchild of scientists at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2018, Kraft Heinz tapped the scientists to help develop a sugar substitute that would enable the food giant to cut the sweetener from its food without losing its benefits. The scientists had a different idea—save the sugar but devise a way to make it healthier.”

From Wall Street Journal.

Blog Post | Science & Education

Introducing Our Upcoming Book, Heroes of Progress

Over the past two centuries, humanity has become massively more prosperous, better educated, healthier, and more peaceful.

The underlying cause of this progress is innovation. Human innovation―whether it be new ideas, inventions, or systems―is the primary way people create wealth and escape poverty.

Our upcoming book, Heroes of Progress: 65 People Who Changed the World, explores the lives of the most important innovators who have ever lived, from agronomists who saved billions from starvation and intellectuals who changed public policy for the better, to businesspeople whose innovations helped millions rise from poverty.

If it weren’t for the heroes profiled in this book, we’d all be far poorer, sicker, hungrier, and less free―if we were fortunate enough to be alive at all.

Considering their impact on humanity, perhaps it’s time to learn their story?

Heroes of Progress book advertised on Amazon for pre-order

Heroes of Progress Book Forum

On March 21st, the author of Heroes of Progress, Alexander Hammond, will present the book live at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He will be joined by Marian Tupy, the editor of Human Progress, and Clay Routledge, the Archbridge Institute’s Vice President of Research, who will speak on the individual’s role in advancing human progress and the need for a cultural progress movement.

Learn more about the event here.

Praise for Heroes of Progress

Making an inspiring case for progress at this time of skepticism and historical ingratitude is no easy feat. Yet, by relentlessly outlining the extraordinary ability of individuals to shape our world for the better, Alexander Hammond does just that.

Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Innovation is a team sport achieved by people working together, using precious freedoms to change the world, so it’s sometimes invidious to single out one person for credit. But once an idea is ripe for plucking, the right person at the right time can seize it and save a million lives or open a million possibilities. Each of these 65 people did that, and their stories are both thrilling and beautiful.

Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

The figures in this book are the overlooked and often unknown figures who have transformed the lives of ordinary people, for the better… This book is a correction to widespread pessimism and is both informative and inspirational.

Dr. Stephen Davies, author of The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity

Superman and the Avengers are all very well, of course, but the real superheroes are thinkers, scientists, and innovators of flesh and blood who saved us from a life that used to be poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Alexander Hammond tells their inspiring stories in this magnificent book that will leave you grateful to be living in the world these men and women created.

— Johan Norberg, author of Open: The Story of Human Progress

The 65 innovators honored here made us happier, healthier, and longer-lived. Indeed, it is thanks to some of them that we are here at all. Their story is the story of how the human race acquired powers once attributed to gods and sorcerers―the story of how we overcame hunger, disease, ignorance, and squalor. I defy anyone to read this book and not feel better afterwards.

Lord Daniel Hannan, president of the Institute for Free Trade

The 65 fascinating stories in Heroes of Progress are
testaments to the ingenuity of humankind in delivering a richer,
healthier, and hopefully freer world. Alexander C. R. Hammond
provides an inspirational reminder that when individuals are
free to speak, think, innovate, and engage in open markets, the
heroic potential of humanity knows no bounds.

Lord Syed Kamall, Professor of politics and international relations, St. Mary’s University

In Heroes of Progress, Alexander Hammond reminds us that human minds are the fundamental driver of every discovery, invention, and innovation that has improved our lives. By telling the stories of pioneering men and women who have advanced civilization, this book not only honors past heroes of progress, but also provides inspiration for the next generation to use their uniquely human imaginative and enterprising capacities to build a better future.

— Clay Routledge, Vice President of Research and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute