Trendlines over headlines: why the world is doing much better than you probably think

in #economy7 years ago (edited)

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If you watch the news, you might think that we are all doomed and that the apocalypse is nigh!

All too often media is pointing to the outlying disasters, disease outbreaks, famines, water shortages.
And yes there are unfortunately crises. And yes I write a lot about the upcoming economical transitions from knowledge economy to idea economy and how that will be a brutal transistion for many people.
But I remain an optimist about the future... overall as a human race in fact we aren't doing badly, most of the trendlines are positive.

But how can that be, if you watch the news you don't hear anything about things getting better. Why is that?

Through a Darwinistic process of 200 years of media publications, media editors have figured out what works.

To get attention of readers, it boils down to "If it bleeds, it leads" .

Here is more info on why this is:
EDIT wrong link;
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/two-takes-depression/201106/if-it-bleeds-it-leads-understanding-fear-based-media

Well it helps to know a bit about the Limbic system and the Amygdala: this is a small part of our brain which largely in charge of our emotions. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings but in fact much of our reaction in day to day life is influenced by this emotional system.
The amygdala is responsible among other things for our fear and anxiety response. It is our survival mechanism, making us hyper alert for dangerous situations.
While in nature this is very useful, it creates very vivid memories of dangerous situations which helps us survive when we see similar situations again, in modern life this fear response is being hijacked.

The media is not in the business of informing people, the name of the game is getting attention. A shortcut which the media constantly exploits is this biological preference for bad news, because they understand that to get attention, negative news beats positive news every time. It provokes a much stronger emotional reaction and will keep our attention.

The last 2 decades, this Darwinistic process has ever increased, because now there are much better metrics about what "gets clicks". As a result, most of the media has become a constant stream of "bad news" which is playing with our "availability heuristic".

"If you don't watch the news you're uninformed, if you are watching it you are dis-informed..."
Heard it from Denzel Washington, probably quoting someone else but sounded pretty deep for an actor.

What we are becoming through this focus on news headlines is ignorant about what is really happening in the world.

I want to give some antidote sources about this "the sky is going to fall" narrative.

If you find these things over optimistic, take that as a sign that you have been programmed by the media already.
You might have to try a media detox :

To give some idea about how we are becoming ignorant about the world I highly recommend watching this video of Hans and Ola Rosling about how not to be ignorant about the world.

Some shortcuts rules to recalibrate your intuition when guessing about the world and its development :

  1. Most things are improving
  2. Most extreme poverty is being eradicated, yes there is inequality but the people at the bottom overall are doing much better
  3. First social progress and then nations become rich: it is a fallacy to think that social progress comes only with wealth, it's the other way around
  4. "Sharks kill few" assume that most of the things on the news that are pointed at as dangerous, terrorism, shark attacks, accidents, natural disasters are actually not that important in the large scheme of things. Yes of course that depends on where you are, but remember that most headlines are as likely as winning the lottery.

Here is some more antidote if you are feeling pessimistic...

We still think about world population as exploding and that there will be a food crisis:

In fact the world population is going to stabilise:

This one is longer (1 hour) but well worth watching

Sure there are major challenges. Here is Hans Rosling again, talking about the refugee crisis and inequality.

But our ability to invent new technology to deal with those challenges is not to be underestimated.

Here are some recommendations from
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/two-takes-depression/201106/if-it-bleeds-it-leads-understanding-fear-based-media

News media needs to return to a sense of proportion, conscience, and, most important, truth-telling. Until that happens, help inoculate yourself against feeling overwhelmed by doing the following:

  • Consider limiting your exposure to media. Give yourself a set time once or twice a day to check in on local and global happenings.
  • Consider choosing print media for your information gathering rather than visual media. This can reduce the likelihood that you get exposed to emotionally laden material. Home pages on the internet can give you an overall sense of what's going on, as can headline news channels that update stories on the hour.
  • Remember that you have the power to turn off the remote, link out of a website or change the radio station. Don't let yourself be passive when you feel media is overwhelming you.
  • Know that other people will have a different tolerance for media stories and their details. If someone is expressing too much of a story for your own comfort, walk away or communicate your distress.
  • Consider having an electronic-free day, and let your senses take in the simpler things in life.

This post is part of my JULY EXPERIMENT: I share ALL SBD's earned from this post with:

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1 Re-steemer (that gives me a good reason why they are re-steeming)

See here why

What else am I missing with this article, agree? Don’t agree?

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PAYOUT!

This post earned me almost 3.00 SB so that will be split between 2 commenters.

The people who undoubtedly contributed most to this post's comments are:
@anarcho-andrei and @chelsea88 both had for great comments and the re-steemed. Thanks so much for your support!

They get 1.5 SBD each.

This is part of my JULY EXPERIMENT where I share ALL my SBD's earned with one commenter and one resteemer.
I'd love to be able to give 100 SBD prizes, for an article which did well for me would be awesome! But we are not there yet...

Thanks so much for your support and constructive comments!!

I think commenting is undervalued at the moment on steemit.com yet it is crucial for the platform to grow.

EVERY POST I MAKE IN JULY WILL SHARE THE SBD's It PAYED OUT, even if that means I make 1000 SBD, I'll GLADLY share that with people who make constructive comments.
I explain why here

Upvoted and resteemed because this is absolutely on point. Things are getting better, despite the picture that media sources (especially the mainstream ones) would like to paint. Case in point, here in the US we've been constantly bombarded about shootings in public places and the gun rights debate has been pushed consistently over the last several years. Yet, despite this obsession with painting mass killings as some sort of regular thing that only happens here because we're horrible, gun-loving psychos, the US hasn't been safer. Violence is down over all.

That's why I think a lot of people have turned to alternative news sources or to podcasts and a wide variety of contributors. It's a lot harder to be bamboozled when you're collating a lot of information from multiple sources. It gives me some hope for the future of information media. :D

Yeah, i like wouldn't watch cnn or fox or any of them really. I only do bevause it is on at effing work all the time.
Id much prefer it delivered in Stephen colbert fashion or the daily show

Hi Chelsea! Thanks for the discussions!
See the answer to Andrei regarding the news organisations!

Hi Andrei,

The problem is that the brain is terrible at statistics.
We simply don't pay attention to all the stuff that DIDN'T happen.
The media knows it would be bad headlines and would not grab attention so the whole system perversely evolved to this bad news delivery machine.
I don't think there are evil forces really, it is in the nature of the beast, can't blame the scorpion for stinging.

What I do wish is that more people understood that the media is not (never has been) about objective information, it is a machine specifically designed to grab our attention.
And they have consistently hacked this bad news loophole since the beginning.

Unfortunately now in the next step in that evolution seems to, instead of only reporting bad news that actually happened, going a few steps further by manufacturing opinion and distorting information even more to keep people ever more emotional.

"News" organisations have found out that actually it is a lot cheaper to have a few people yelling opinions at each other than actually spend money to send people abroad to go look for themselves.
So far as they can tell it seems to hijack attention just as well...

ALL of them are guilty of this, no matter political slant...

I disagree. I think brains are great with statistics. It is easy to pay attention to the things that aren't happening because you can know they aren't on the news. Housing market=GREAT! Stock market=GREAT! Commercial real estate=GREAT! Rental market=GREAT! The problem with people's brains is they love to predict what will happen. If people would just realize that they cannot predict the future everybody would be OK. But, then we wouldn't have a market or Las Vegas. People are strange, but by saying that the brain isn't good with statistics is too broad of a statement. I do, however, agree with your negative comments on the news and the media. I am not the biggest Trump fan, but I am very happy that he is spreading the Fake News movement. What people need to keep in their mind, is that all news is fake if they are trying to predict what will happen. The only way to keep news real is to show video of the facts that hasn't been edited or tampered with. The local news seems to be the only real news. But, even the local news leaves out stories of all time new highs in the stock market. But, right when the market goes down 1% they have a conniption fit. It is unfair to the people! Trump also has called out the media on their negativity.

Thanks for disagreeing :)
Human brains are capable of rational thought yes, and when in that mode it is possible to understand statistics.

Most of the time we are not thinking rationally though: here is a pretty good write up:
http://www.burns-stat.com/review-thinking-fast-slow-daniel-kahneman/

Marketers, news agencies, banks, creditcard corporations, car salesmen have understood this for decades already and have been using this weakness of human minds quite successfully to rip people off constantly.

Why do people take on credit card debt, get car loans which almost double the cost of the car, buy stocks that are too expensive? Yes on paper this all should be obvious if you do a few simple sums, but most successful corporations have found that if you can keep the emotional part of the brain flooded with stimuli, people never get around to engage the rational part of their brain. Why do you think car ads had nice looking girls next to them? That is no accident,
it works and has a measurable impact on bad decision making.

Thinking, fast and slow should be mandatory reading for anyone with a brain...

Yep, politics aside they are all pressing the emotional hot button for attention. Or worse, tweeting! I really wish people would stop clinging to tweets so much. But they do the trick don't they? Vague little blurbs that push the hot button

I agree with you and think we should largely ignore all the Cassandras. The media focuses on the bad stuff and wants you to believe the sky is falling in.

However. you're right in that people are generally better off because of technology and health care, less people are living in extreme poverty, even terrorist attacks are fewer now compared to the 70s and 80s (IRA bombings and ETA attacks anyone?). But if you follow the news, you wouldn't know any of this. They'd have you think ISIS and the Middle East is the worst crisis we've ever faced.

Good post, thanks for writing it.

Thanks for that, terrorism is terrible, but people are too easily terrified.

The media is almost an eager accomplice of the terrorists, they do the work for them of terrorising the population by constantly focussing on these issues. I think overall the media does more real damage than the idiots blowing themselves up.
It is only by this attention that the media pays to them that it is worth it for them...

In the '80s indeed there were a lot of bloody attacks but life went on...
I know a lady who was in a parking lot where an ETA bomb went off, she did not let it affect her life and continued shopping at that same mall.
People seem to forget that terrorists only win if you let them terrorize you...

The problem is that things simply seem worse than they are usually. When something is freaking hammered it becomes more severe. Increasing peoples fears or, more accurately feeding off them.
In the "olden" times we wouldn't hear about the catastrophic tsunami on the other side of the globe within seconds of it Happening. Then simultaneously getting local news coverage of some crazy person going on a shooting spree. And bam, we also have a POTUS that just sparked bigotous rioting in a major city. To, your fave celebrity just died from a drug overdose!
All these chains of Information is media bombardment of info. All coming at us at once. We didn't use to have that bevause our news came at a much slower pace. Micro-atrocities That people are filming on their phones going viral left and right. No wonder most people’s heads are spinning and "the end is near"
Resteemed

Not only that, but people retreat from it. With the information overload, people become less engaged, not more engaged. There's just too much to take in. So people become desensitized to it and chalk it up to the background noise, which brings down their overall outlook on the world. In the same way that victims of abuse tune out all but the worst abuses over a long enough period of time, the average person is tuning out most of the bad stuff and just accepting that things are all bad, all the time.

Yeah, good analogy about the victim of abuse. I can relate. <_<
But this isn't about that. Yeah you're right though. I think there are kind of two categories the ones that retreat and tune out, then the ones that are almost too tuned in. I can go either way depending on where i am at emtionally. But when I'm tuned in i get hypervigilint also like abuse /trauma victims. There's no happy medium for me with the news /media.
Bleh, am I making any sense here

You totally are. I understand completely, and I do the same thing myself. Like I have to tune out sometimes because if I don't, I'm going to be consumed by all the negative shit out there.

Totally. Otherwise as an empath, i get way overwhelmed. That's why when i post on a super serious subject (like one of my early posts - "the executioners life") i have to have a completely set aside time mentally to be both rational but edgy and raw at the same time. So, that's why i can not do those posts all the time. Happened to be my most successful post too. But that's why i get kinda annoyed when ppl are like oh, just do more documentary posts. It's not that simple!
Sorry, Rambling ....

Nah! Go ahead and ramble! Part of the beauty of Steemit is that we can build a community, and part of that is talking like this in the comments section.

So, in the eternal words of Led Zeppelin: ramble on!

Unfortunately you are correct, this constant bombardment of bad news has physical effects on our body, the Amygdala is generating cortisol, a stress hormone which has very real negative effects on your body and anxiety...

Yeah, cortisol is a bad one. Can cause weight gain, heart issues, etc!

Hi Chelsea,

Thanks so much for the re-steem!
Our emotional buttons are being pushed by people who have decades of experience in button pushing.

Unfortunately the press still has this cloak of respectability from true journalism, from a time when newspapers actually were able to speak truth to power.
And undoubtedly there are individual journalists who still mean well, the problem is that they participate in an industry which is built on capturing human attention.
To do that, it knows what works: drama, murder and mayhem.

Of course there is still plenty of that but it depends on how you frame it.
If as you say you zoom in closely, you can portray a world on fire, if you have a helicopter view, most things actually are going relatively well.

Very true words. I hear so many complaints of poverty and while i do not doubt it, as you said, the cases of extreme poverty are decreasing daily.
Another issue i see with "poverty " in America and ill preface this by saying, I lived for many years in a very racially and economically divided area. These "poor" are poor only in their minds. Many of them that were living off government funded programs had huge tvs, nice cars, phones, etc. I don't see that as poor. But maybe I'm missing something

Absolutely, the trick is though in their mind they truly think they are poor because they are comparing with those that have more. As you say most of it is mental.
I'd like to see the people you talk about explain how poor they think they are to the family from Mozambique (in the long Hans Rosling video) who were saving up to buy a bike....

"So you say you are poor, yet you have time to get obsese because you don't exercise enough, because you drive everywhere in your car talking on your phone and sit around all day watching television (never mind the size)... suuuurrrre"

Now don't get me wrong, there are people who are truly suffering and unfortunately people even in the US who can't afford proper food. That is poverty indeed.

You got me! Yes most of these individuals were obese. There were even some selling their food stamps. Which makes me really mad. >_< they were not truly poor and YES there are some truly poor people in America but nothing like the video you're referencing. Not even close. These individuals think that society owes them something and that's a disease itself - the entitlement disease

Thanks for this! I am writing the first video now, it's quite good.

This all reminds me of a book I read a few years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

Seems the world is NOT going to hell, it's actually getting better, on average, over time. As the video and your article says, the media seem to be feeding us stories that make us think the scary things are happening more often then they are. Pinker uses a lot of data to create charts that come to the same conclusion.

Thanks for writing about this interesting topic, and hopefully some people will get some insight into the way things really are, rather then what we are led to believe.

Yes Steven Pinker is a pretty famous proponent.
Nassim Taleb, whom I also admire, took issue with some statistical approaches in the book.

Overall I think Pinker is right.
When talking about violence specifically: it is very anecdotal as well.
I spent a year backpacking in Argentina, Brazil and a bit in Columbia. Never had one thing happening.
Yes you need to be careful and you definitely can't walk around as if it is Disney land.
Even in big cities, this are not the same depending on where you go.

What is striking though compared to Europe, is most people you meet have second hand experience (some close to them) who had a violent event happen in their life. You feel violence is a factor that is much closer to everyday life. Nevertheless life goes on, and people live their life, they are not terrified to go outside.
Neither was I. It is a constant vigilance mode though, you have to be aware of your surroundings.

In a sense that is what makes me laugh when I come back to Europe and hear people talk about how bad things are! Compared to South America this is truly Disneyland...

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O wow, gem of a post, if you put it that way :) of course you can share !

Thanks for the video of why the population won't grow over 11 billion. Interesting argument against over population. First good one I've heard. It makes sense. Hopefully he is correct.

I've been wondering what will happen when the population of asia and africa increases even more. I'm still slightly concerned even after the video, because his argument is only valid if they can gain a good enough quality of life. Otherwise they will continue depending on making 5 children of which they think 3 will die. As horrible as that sounds.

The only antidote to population increase is more quality of life.

Overall the trends are looking pretty good, the news focusses on the edge cases which don't represent even 5%. Obviously terrible things happen, but less and less people are affected. The "problem" now is that the bad stuff gets so much more attention. I think world population has a very different problem, demographics are very troubling, not enough people are born in certain economies. There will be a huge demographic crunch with the current models. The population pyramid is less and less a pyramid, in many countries it is a column and slowly going upside down. Less and less young people to do the work to pay for the pensions of the old people.
Japan is an extreme example, but even China is going to have this problem soon. A lot of this stuff is counterintuitive, we come back to education, what we learn in school is mostly stuff that was valid when our professors were being educated. That means we have roughly a 30 year world knowledge delay. I remember I was backpacking in Mozambique in 2007 and did not bring my cell phone with me because I thought it was too flashy. Imagine my surprise when in the middle of nowhere in Mozambique a Toyota Hiace bus with 7 seats and 30 people my neighbour pulled out the successor model of my phone! Things move fast, much faster than our knowledge sources unfortunately...

A lot of stuff is counter intuitive, but that is why studying it is important :) haha. But you know, it might reflect the culture of Mozambique more than the economic situation. I have no idea, but I'm just guessing that maybe those flashy things are a status symbol there. Mobile phones used to be in many western countries also. But then again, wealth is distributed very scarcely in Africa, doesn't mean that everyone is poor there. Just that the gap is huge.

It was a good wake up call for me, there obviously is a lot of poverty but you can't make too much assumptions... I saw how for instance the road situation was changing massively, some roads the standard pothole / concrete mix and some new ones put in with EU funding, they were just starting then. But the step change with some basic infrastructure is massive.

And it gets even stranger: People, both in Germany and the US for example, say today is more dangerous then e.g. 30 years ago.

Not mentioning the real possibility of humanity being killed in a nuclear war, which was a lot higher then, practically all external reasons for an untimely death are falling. Car accidents, murder, illnesses...

The only things rising are death by cancer - because we are getting older then before - and by illnesses based on bad eating habits (Or lack of movement. I just say Drive Ins US!).

I think this is the true danger of this focus on "drama".
What will kill most people is actually what you described, life style factors which they are mostly ignorant about.

Where is the indignation in the media when you hear that almost ALL wheat is treated with Round-up before harvest?

That is exposing literally BILLIONS of people to Glyo-phosphate and increased risk of cancer:
That is true violence on an epic scale, which ALL of us are exposed to DAILY.
http://realfarmacy.com/reason-toxic-wheat/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/widely-used-herbicide-linked-to-cancer/

Found an excellent blog article of Ramit Sethi about this topic:
https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/rant-know-nothing/

What confuses me is how everybody in the comments section commends this article, which I do also. But, on the next steemit article in line it says "Market crash imminent!" "Run for the hills!" AND, all the commenters agree. How can people agree with this and those? If so many people agree with this article.... How come they aren't in zerohedge's comment section berating their fraudulence?

emotions are much stronger than rational thinking. It is the equivalent of a security vulnerability in software and it is constantly exploited. Successful investors have systems in place that prevent emotional decision making . Most people apparently don't ...

Interesting analysis - though I think it could go further...


  • The money angle - there is that. 💰
  • Addressing extreme poverty. Yes - but extreme poverty in my view has been foisted upon humanity by design. So it is a symptom of the problem - not the root cause.
  • Technology? Oh my - sophisticated technology is being suppressed/withheld from humanity for two reasons: to population control (power), and profit. Imagine, how almost everyone on earth could thrive with free/clean energy?
    Yet, even the electricity bill is taxed into oblivion. Tesla. Zero Point Energy. Amazing things do exist - hidden from us - who are no 'illuminated'...

So much more to look at.

-ch @globocop