The Arc of Progress in the 21st Century

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Steven Pinker: Hello, my name is Steve Pinker, and I'm going to speak to you today about the arc of progress in the 21st century, which immediately raises some questions. What is progress? How can we tell whether there has been progress? Are we making progress today? And why is progress so hard, and how can it happen at all? Can anyone answer, really define progress, say what it is? Well, here's an attempt. Most would agree that progress would consist in improvements in human flourishing. What do I mean by human flourish? Again, not that hard to define. It comprises life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, happiness, things that all of us strive for for ourselves, that we can't deny to the rest of humanity, and that are pretty much prerequisites to our being here and having this conversation in the first place. If these have increased over time, I would call that progress. Has there been progress? Well, here's a way not to tell whether there has been progress, and that is to follow the news. The news is a systematically misleading way to assess whether the world has been making progress. Not because editors have a bias toward the negative, though they do. But because the very nature of news is biassed against showing progress. For one thing, news is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn't happen. And most things that happen suddenly are bad things. Many good things consist of things that don't happen at all. A school that was not shot up by a rampage killer, a city that was attacked by terrorists, a country that's at peace. None of those make news, even if they have increased over time. News is what happens suddenly, not what happens gradually. If 100,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, and the day before, and the before that, that's not news. And news is what changes, not persist. If every year the world gets a little richer, a little longer-lived, well that's pretty boring. It happened last year too. You can even imagine a hypothetical extreme. Consider some measure of well-being that increases most years, say nine out of every 10 years. Very 10th year, there is a step back. Well, this year, nothing newsworthy happened because it's the same as 14 out of the last 15 years. And this year nothing happened. But then all of a sudden, if it goes in the wrong direction, well, that's news. And 10 years later, there's a backtracking and that's the news and so on. And so over a period of 40 years, All of the news stories that you have read are about things getting worse, even though the overwhelming trend is for things to have gotten better. Still worse, the nature of news interacts with two of our cognitive biases, the availability bias, namely, we tend to assess probability and risk in terms of how easily examples come to mind, things that are available in memory, images and anecdotes and narratives, and the news is an availability machine, and a negativity bias, that is bad registers more strongly in our minds than good. If you combine the very nature of news with the way that we tend to process events, Uh, you- naturally come away with the impression that everything is getting worse and always has been. A better way to tell whether there's been progress is to plot data on human well-being over time. Now, I've tried to do that in two books, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. Last time I was on this stage six years ago, I spoke about Enlightenment Now, and those data since it takes a few years to accumulate data were largely from 2015, and as of then, it was I think safe to say that the world had never been healthier, richer, safer, happier, or better educated compared to any period in the past. And it's in recognition of trends like that, that in what now seems like a very long time ago, the president of the United States, Barack Obama, said if you had to choose moment in history to be born. And you did not know ahead of time who you'd be, you'd choose now." He said that in 2016. OK, well, that was then. And frequently asked questions are, were the trends cherry-picked? Did they just happen to catch the world at a lucky high point? And hasn't the world fallen apart since then? That's all I'm going to speak about this morning. I'm gonna take a look at How is the world doing now? What is the most recent report card on human flourishing in the world today? So I'll show you data on the state of the world, today, compared to past decades and centuries, but also compared to 2015, the last data that I presented here, and the basis for Obama's rather optimistic summary of the word. Well, let's begin with the most basic thing of all, life. For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was pinned at about 30 years. Then, starting around the 19th century, because of advances in public health and medicine and prosperity, life expectancy at birth increased to more than 70 years. That is, not only do we have extra life, but we have an extra life. It's as if we've been granted two lives compared to our ancestors. Now like all trends, all measures of human progress. It is not monotonic. There can be setbacks. Most recently, of course, the COVID pandemic, which resulted in that backtracking. But when the pandemic came under control, thanks to vaccines, the progress resumed and we are, humans have now a longer expected life than they did at any previous time in history. Now as they say about getting older, the problem with getting older and living longer is that the extra years come at the end when you're old. And so this would be a dubious measure of progress if it simply consisted of more years bedridden in an old age home. But if you, I'm sorry, before I, I will go to that, but if you look at measures of health, that is years lost to death and disability. Then you see that that has gone down since records were first kept with an obvious reversal during the COVID pandemic, but we lose fewer years to disease and disability than we ever have in the past. Let me just backtrack now to the rest of the world, to breaking it down by continent. As you can see, there are still pretty big... Disparities in different regions of the world, North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and we will obviously want those gaps to disappear, but every region of the world has shown progress in extending life expectancy. Sustenance. Famine was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and food doesn't fall from the sky so it is a constant threat to human well-being. In the last couple of hundred years, the population of the world has increased by about seven-fold, from about a billion to eight billion, leading to obvious predictions that widespread famines would be inevitable, from Thomas Malthus, of course, and more recently from Paul Ehrlich. But if you plot famines over time, it's actually gone in the other direction, thanks to advances in agronomy, the green revolution, and ability to move. Food from farm to table, famines are close to an all-time low. Let's zoom in on the most recent period. Here you see that there is, again, some unevenness across the world, undernourishment, which is less severe than famine, but still of concern, is still pretty much along the floor in the affluent parts of the world—Europe and North America—still in decline in Asia and Latin America, although with a little bit of backtracking. In Africa, there has been a rather tragic reversal in the decline in undernourishment, though not wiping out the progress that was enjoyed before that time, but another area of concern against a backdrop of overall progress. Prosperity, as economists point out, poverty needs no explanation. It's the natural state of humanity. What needs an explanation is wealth. And for most of human history, there was no increase in wealth, no economic growth. This graph, really from the long view, starting at the year one, shows that for most of the human history economic growth was less than one pixel high. Then the Industrial Revolution happened. Capture of energy, markets, and other financial institutions, and economic growth increased economically, sorry, exponentially, increasing by a factor of more than 100. If we zoom in on the most recent period since the 1990s, we see that after 2015, and despite some backtracking during the pandemic. Global world product has continued to increase and the world is richer today than it has been at any time in the past. Now if all of the gains went to the proverbial 1%, this would be a dubious example of progress, but in fact it has also lifted up the poorest on earth. 200 years ago, about 90% of humanity lived in what today we would call extreme poverty. That fell to less than at 9% by the 21st century. And if we zoom in on the last few decades, then we see that the progress against reducing extreme poverty, although again, had a backtrack during the COVID pandemic, the progress resumed. And there are fewer poor people, extremely poor people today than at any time in history, even though there are far more many of us all together. Peace, for most of human history, the natural state of relations between empires and great powers was war, and peace was merely a brief interlude between wars, culminating over the course of the 20th century with the two horrific spikes of bloodletting corresponding to the two world wars. But then an unexpected thing happened, despite predictions when I grew up that a Third World War. A thermonuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union was inevitable. World War III didn't happen. Wars between great powers ceased, and wars of all kinds diminished in frequency and magnitude. Now, there's a period called the Long Peace. Now, if we zoom in on this period, we see a disconcerting backtracking over the few years because of the wars in Ukraine, in Ethiopia, in Sudan, and in Gaza, war deaths have increased. This is a terrible tragedy, deeply concerning, although it is, like many reversals of progress, it's worth keeping in perspective that although it's a backtracking, it has not come close to erasing the progress that we have had over the last few decades. And it is not true, as some journalists say, that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are unprecedented in size. They're actually quite moderate compared to wars that the world went through in my lifetime. Democracy and rights and freedom. We've read much about the recession in democracy, and a quantitative index in electoral Democracy shows that it is a real thing. Over the last decade or so, there has been a decline in electoral democracy and in liberal democracy. Again, it's worth keeping it in perspective. The world is less democratic than it was at the turn of the 21st century, but it is still far more democratic than had been in my lifetime. In the 1970s, when I was a student, the world only had about 33 democracies. Big swaths of the world, like Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, were under the control of totalitarian or military dictatorships, which remain democratic today. If we drill down to rights of particular groups, we see that women's empowerment, their economic and political power, has come down a little bit compared to 10 years but still close to all-time highs. And for LGBTQ rights, we're seeing pretty steady progress with some minor backtracks in decriminalisation of homosexuality, and more gradually and more recently in gay marriage, the ability of gay couples to adopt children and other legal forms of equality. Violent crime. Again, I'm going to take a long view, this time a really long view. Take you back to the Middle Ages in which The homicide rate in Europe on this logarithmic scale used to be about 35 per 100,000 per year. That came down by the 20th century to something closer to 2 per 100 thousand per year, came down by a factor of 10. If we zoom in on the most recent decades, and this time we have data for the entire world, we see that the world has continued. To reduce the toll of violent crime, probably in this case, homicide. Knowledge. We all are born illiterate and ignorant. Again, taking the long view, 200 years ago, no more than 15% of humanity could read and write. Today, it is, I'm sorry, closer to 80%, even higher for younger cohorts. That's also true of basic education, that is elementary school and some years of high school. What good does it do if it doesn't make us happier? Well, there's reason to suspect that the world has gotten happier, even though we don't have happiness data going back very far, because we do know that wealthier countries have people who are more satisfied with their lives than poor countries. And within countries, wealthier people are more satisfied with their life, since as I've shown the world has gotten richer, one would expect that it's gotten happier. And for countries where we do have data at two or more points, going back to the 1980s, a majority of them, as they have become richer, they have also become happier. Not all, but most. If we zoom in on the 21st century, then we see. That for people, both young people, under 24 and people over 25, the overall trend is a very slight increase in happiness averaged over nations. So to, oh I'm sorry, we also read about an epidemic of suicide, and it is true that in some countries, in some demographic sectors, like younger people in the United States and middle-aged men, the suicide rate. Has increased over the last couple of decades, but if we zoom out and take the global view, we see that it's quite the opposite, that in fact there has been a massive reduction in the rate of suicide globally over the past 40 years or so. So to sum up, of the 14 trends that I have plotted, for 10 of them, progress has continued and the world is in a better state than it ever has been. These would include life, health, prosperity, poverty, gay rights, homicide, literacy, education, happiness, and suicide. For another four trends, there has been some backtracking. Women's rights, we've gone back to about 2010. In undernourishment, in the poorest parts of the world, we've gone back to the first decade of the 21st century, about 2005. Democracy, we have gone back 2000. Peace, we go back to around 1990. How many trends have been absolutely reversed or erased? That is, is history cyclical so that any advance will inevitably follow by a decline? But the answer is no, that has happened for zero trends. For all of these, we're better off now than we were in the 20th century. So let me conclude now with some reflections on the nature of progress. Why is progress so hard? Why is there always one step back for every few steps forward? Why are there often recessions? In a way, it's the wrong question, because... There's no reason to expect things to go well at all. The universe has no benevolent interest in our well-being, and there are many forces in nature that just kind of naturally grind us down. There's the second law of thermodynamics. There are many more ways in which the world can be in a disordered state than in an ordered state. Evolution is a competitive process where organisms evolve at each other's expense. Particularly pathogens and parasites, which can evolve much faster than we can, as we have been reminded during the COVID pandemic. Human nature has many demons, including greed, dominance, revenge, sadism, superstitious thinking, cognitive fallacies and biases, and there are inherent trade-offs in any policy that we adopt. If you give people greater opportunities, then some people will take greater advantage of them than others and you get more inequality. If you give people more freedom, that includes the freedom to screw up their lives. Then how could progress have happened at all? That sounds rather depressing. Well, in a nutshell, it's because our species does have the power to use knowledge to to improve human well-being. Knowledge is made possible by the fact that, together with our inner demons, we have the better angels of our nature, creative cognitive processes that can explore an unlimited space of ideas by recombining simple ideas with a potential for exponential growth of ideas. And we're equipped with an instinct for language that allows us to share the fruits of our cognition to pool our hard-won discoveries. We have augmented these powers of cognition and language through institutions that can compensate for our cognitive biases by pooling good ideas and weeding out bad ones, institutions like science, scholarly societies, responsible journalism, record-keeping agencies, and even meetings like the World Economic Forum. The other set of our better angels include our capacity for sympathy, for having a benevolent concern for the well-being of others. Now, by default, our circle of sympathy is rather small. We tend to care innately about our blood relatives, our friends and our allies, cute little furry baby animals, and that's about it. But the circle of sympathy can be expanded. By the forces of cosmopolitanism, by education, by journalism, by art, by mobility, even by reason, the realisation that I can't privilege my interests over others just because I'm me and they're not. Here again, we've developed institutions that try to magnify our circle of sympathy and apply them more widely. Institutions like Social Democracy, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Philanthropies, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which despite all of the divisions across the planet, were adopted by 193 out of 193 member states of the United Nations with a commitment to try to improve the state of humanity. I'll sum up the capacity that we have to make progress with two quotes, one of them from the physicist David Deutsch. Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. And a statement from the otherwise rather pessimistic historian Arnold Toynbee, chronicler of civilizations, who said the 20th century will be chiefly remembered in future centuries not as an age of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective. Let's hope that that can be said of the 21st century as well. Thank you. Thank you. And we have some time for questions. And there will be a microphone that will find the person with the raised hands, starting with Paula Escobar.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. It was wonderful. Conference. So the institution that, you know, help human beings have sympathy for more people and to get away from the trap of egocentrism or individualism are most of them in crisis. Social democracy in the world, 2030 agenda of United Nations is part of a ideological dispute right now and philanthropy, well, is at least in my region is facing a lot of problems to deliver to the people that need them. What do you think about that? What is a smart way of not getting into a pessimistic mood with the reality of this institution in crisis? Thank you.

Steven Pinker: Yes, no, they are, and that is a valid concern that gives me anxiety that the institutions that have made us better off are being demonised and discredited. And so we should try to push back and, well, first they have to earn trust, but then we should vest them with that trust. There is a kind of resilience. So when it comes to social democracy, and by that I don't mean... Necessarily liberal democracy, civil rights and elections, but just basically redistribution to help the worst off, the poor, the sick, the elderly, children. Even in countries like the United States, which have a very strong anti-redistributionist libertarian ethos, there seems to be a process where, despite that, governments become more magnanimous. Even in the administration of George W. Bush, there was an expansion of prescription drugs. During the Obama administration, there was Obamacare, which withstood attempts to dismantle So there is a process where as countries get richer, they redistribute more, they get more generous. Not always and everywhere and there are ideological pushback, but it does kind of tend to happen. So I suspect that the welfare state is not going away, and in fact, as countries get richer, they tend to expand their welfare state. Organisations of international cooperation, as we know, are also under threat. On the other hand, it was known as withdrawn from the United Nations, and 193 out of 193 nations signed onto it. And there is, again, despite a lot of... Opposition such as Brexit, at the same time, there's another force that is pushing toward institutions of international cooperation. The inescapable fact that many of humanity's problems are inherently global and no society can solve them on their own, they kind of have to join forces with others to fight things like international terrorism, climate change, piracy, pandemics, AI and so on. Now, it doesn't mean that... Countries will be wise enough to recognise that these problems are global, but the problems are going to be global no matter what. And so reality is going to push back and say, you kind of can't abandon these things altogether. If you do, things get worse, and they'll become more attractive. But they can get worse in the meantime.

Speaker 3: What do you think are the most significant factors that are impacting this back trend in women's rights?

Steven Pinker: Yes, hard to see. So that's an index from VDEM, the Norwegian organisation that aggregates a lot of things. I think the Dobbs decision in the United States that returned abortion to the states made an impact. When you break that down country by country, the United states had a backtracking. I don't know what the other, I think so that was a major thing just because it so prominent. And the other things are probably a lot of little things in a lot of different countries because it is a global aggregate. But by and large, things like education of women is relentlessly increasing, representation of women in parliaments and national assemblies, women in positions of corporate power and institutional leadership. There, there's a pretty relentless wave. I mean, we don't know how long it'll continue. Whether there'll be more backtracks, but but that's the kind of the background state Yes, where's the microphone?

Speaker 4: So how do you think we could change the news cycle, really? Because we're all upset about it in a way. It's negative, negative. Meanwhile, when one reads your books, listens to your lecture and others, the world is becoming a better place. But it's so difficult to make that statement even right now with all the wars going on. What is wrong with our news? How can we change this?

Steven Pinker: Two things, one of them is to have, I think the culture of journalism should acknowledge that this is a problem, both because of the nature of news and because of actual stated biases among journalists. I've heard journalists say this, I'm not being paranoid, that editors have said, well, our background attitude is bad news is serious journalism, good news is advertising, you know, or government propaganda. Now, it's good to have that scepticism. I don't begrudge them that scepticism. Bad things do happen. It's important we know about them. But at the same time, there is the danger that both the inherent bias in news and the conscious bias can lead people to become fatalistic, cynical, destructive of institutions that actually have made things better, even though problems remain. Problems are inevitable. There will always be problems. So certainly a recalibration that not everything that goes wrong shows the failure of institutions to appreciate how far we've come, a bit more of a historical consciousness. If there is a war, a pandemic, a terrorist attack, just how frequent are they compared to how they were in the past. And a little more data journalism. That is, instead of something bad happens, you have the Vox Pop interview of the person who's been affected. People naturally come away thinking, oh, I hear about it more than ever. It must be happening more than every. Put it into perspective. It's not so terrible to show the homicide graph or the war death graph, which won't always tell a positive story. Sometimes things do get worse. But even when they do get worse, the graph puts it into perspective, how much worse. So I'd like to see more data in journalism and more just awareness of the inherent negative bias so there can be some compensation. There are news sites like Fix the News and Positive News and reasons to be cheerful, that try to compensate by taking stories of things that have improved. And these aren't crucially the first reaction of journalists is, oh, yeah, sure, well, we always like feel good stories like, you know, puppy befriends orangutan or, you know, cop buys groceries for single mom. But no, it's not that. These are cases of species that were endangered that have been taken off the endangered species list of advances in solar power. In conservation areas, in countries that have decriminalised homosexuality or expanded women's rights, diseases that have been eradicated, real stories that affect people by the millions or tens of millions that you just don't read about, and we really should read about them too. And it is I'm seeing our host gesturing at the back reminding me that the time has come to an end. So thank you for your attention.