What % of children finish school in low income countries?
1. 60%
2. 30%
3. 80%
Pause and take a guess before you read on. Ready?
When I first read this question, I guessed 30% and I was fairly confident. You cannot be too optimistic when you think of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Tanzania or Yemen. Even 30% seemed a bit too much. Do children attend school at all let alone finish them? The right answer is 80%. Yep. 80 percent children finish school successfully.
Think about the world. War, natural disasters, man-made disasters and corruption. Things are pretty bad and every news leads us to believe they’re only getting worse every day. We will run out of resources very soon, the world is getting increasingly polarized and war is imminent, everyone you meet has an angle -all of this is an overdramatic worldview and often if not always misleading.
Why did most of think the answer was 30%? Because we inherently assume, expect and believe in the worst. Hope is vital for any quantifiable progress and most of us today are devoid of that sentiment. People who are optimistic about the future of this world are often tagged as foolish.
Most of our assumptions are based on the things we hear and see in the news, naturally, that being our most readily available source of information.
But, Good News is not News.
Bad news is like forest fire, it spreads quickly. Information about bad events is much more likely to reach us compared to good news. When things are getting better we don’t hear about them. Good news is almost never reported. A very recent example of this would be the COVID 19 pandemic. Everyday the news channels flashed numbers- people infected by the virus and people who succumbed to the virus. Why did they not talk about the number of people who tested negative or people who recovered on a daily basis? Because 99% people have recovered isn’t much of a click bait. 1% of all infected people have died, is. It is much easier to find news on ‘endangered animals’ than ‘animals that are not endangered’. So, expect bad news.
Gradual Improvement is not news.
When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are mostly likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement. Gradual but conspicuous improvements often go unreported. 20 years ago, 29% of the population lived in extreme poverty, its now down to ~10%. Did it happen overnight? No. Precisely why you didn’t hear about it.
Better and Bad.
Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad. Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The important signs are being tracked, we see that her condition has improved over the last one week. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s condition is improving? Yes. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes. Does saying “Things are getting better” imply that we should all relax? No, absolutely not. Should you choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. Because its not. It is bad and better. News will often focus on how the situation is still bad, but never talk about how it is better than what it was.
Try remembering your younger self. How much has your world changed? Well, this is how much the world has changed.
The world is better than what we think it is. Before thinking or assuming the future it is important to know about the present. We have made incredible progress in the last few decades. The change we imagine, the change we want is within reach. I want us all to believe that we are all closer to that change, more than we’ve ever been. The first step towards that change is being hopeful. And I want this article to leave you a little more hopeful about the future of the world.
This article is based on one of the ten instincts covered in the very popular book — Factfulness by Anna, Hans and Ola Rosling. The book tells us why the world is better than we think and it does so with a data backed, fact based approach. I highly recommend it.
