Earlier this year I was speaking to a friend about writing this blog, and he responded ‘what does it matter, we’re all going to die soon anyway’. I’m not sure if he was referring to COVID, the climate crisis, AI, or some collection of other existential threats, but he expressed a view that is shared by a lot of people: that humanity will, sooner or later, destroy itself.

It is worth remembering that the majority of all human civilisations have ended, and indeed that 99% of all species have become extinct (most without our help). While it may well be that technology does destroy us, it is precisely that technology that has enabled humanity to continue to thrive (at least in numerical terms) in the modern era. We are no longer so susceptible to changes in the weather or cataclysmic events, and our global supply chain makes us far less vulnerable (although of course not invulnerable) to changes in local availability of food and water.

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Existential concerns were certainly in my mind when I started researching this blog - I found myself wondering if my children, or even myself - would see some sort of apocalypse. And of course we can’t draw graphs of the future. But we can perhaps argue that the end of the world has never been far from mankind’s collective mind, and it is only the precise nature of the inciting incident that has changed.

For decades, in most people’s minds nuclear weapons were the most likely cause of humanity’s end. But the story (so far) of that outcome is, yet again, a good one. No bomb has been used in anger since Nagasaki, and the total number of nuclear warheads in existence has decreased from around 60,000 in the 1980s to around 15,000.

Of course, the risk caused by those 15,000 warheads is still substantial and we should do all we can to limit the significant dangers caused by such technologies, but the fact is that the doom-mongers from the 1950s (who include Albert Einstein amongst many others) were wrong, and that gives me hope that humanity will face its current challenges in the same way.

Suicide, like loneliness, is another factor of modern society that is often said to be on the increase, and even at ‘epidemic’ levels. Like loneliness, we have limited historical data, but in the three countries we do have data for, you can see clearly that there is no epidemic, although rates are clearly not decreasing as fast as we would like.

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Suicide is not actually as useful a measure of a society’s mental state as it might seem. Happier western countries tend to have slightly higher suicide rates. And rates are highly affected by economic trends and the age make-up of the population. Males are more likely than females to commit suicide, and the most at-risk stage of life is early retirement, which likely explains some of the recent rise in the suicide rate of the US, as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement.

It is a complex and difficult issue, and is still the 15th most common cause of death worldwide, and thus certainly deserves our attention. But rates are roughly steady or declining - there is no epidemic.

We’ve seen that on the whole people around the world are getting happier. But what about social interaction? There is much talk of a ‘loneliness epidemic’ as we all spend more time on our phones and less time with each other IRL.

As with a lot of the negative news we encounter every day, this feels believable, but does the data bear it out? The answer, surprisingly to me, is no. Long term loneliness data is in short supply, and very recent data even less so, but US college students have been responding to comparable questionnaires on loneliness for the last few decades, and overall loneliness figures have dropped across all grades.

Other studies bear this out, finding that ‘It’s not the case that loneliness is increasing across generations’ (Our world in data).

So while we are spending more time alone, that doesn’t mean we’re more lonely. In fact when I look at my own technology use, it brings me far closer to my friends and family than I think I would be without it. Free worldwide video calls, instant messaging and group chats give us the ability to keep in touch with those most important to us in ways that were impossible in even the recent past. Why not take a moment to use those technologies to tell someone you love them and make the world a little more cheerful?

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We’ve seen over previous posts that by almost every measure our lives have got better over recent decades. As Stephen Pinker puts it:

An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure. He or she can spend that leisure time reading on the Web, listening to music on a smartphone, streaming movies on high-definition TV, Skyping with friends and relatives, or dining on Thai food instead of Spam fritters.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 262)

But are we any happier? It could even be argued that all of this “progress” is for naught if we are simply spending out extra time on social media, becoming more distanced from genuine community, nature and spirituality. If our children, as is generally believed, are more anxious and troubled than ever, and suicide rates are increasing, then what is the point of it all? Are things actually getting worse, even if by many measures they appear to be getting better?

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Over the next few posts we’ll tackle these questions head on.

First though, we’ll answer the central question - do people get happier as countries get richer? If so, we have good reason to believe that all this development and growth is indeed, on at least one level, worthwhile.

And the answer, of course, is that yes, they do. As you can see from the graph above, which shows average happiness ratings within individual countries and then (via the arrows) happiness ratings within countries as people get richer, the trend is remarkably consistent. People do get happier as they get richer. And as the world has got substantially richer over recent decades, the world has got happier.

A couple of things to note. The x axis here is a logarithmic scale, meaning that as people get richer, the amount of extra income needed to make them happier increases. And unlike income, reported happiness has a cap - usually ‘very happy’ is the top category. Thus increases in happiness must hit a limit over time, and in some countries that limit is being approached. But worldwide there is still a fair way to go before that happens, and thus continuing to increase income for most people will continue to lead to real happiness gains.

If you want to see world happiness increases over time broken down over time, check out this graph - it’s a cheerful one!

We saw in the previous post that time spent doing household chores has declined massively in recent decades. A similar drop has been seen in the proportion of our income that we spend on necessities (food, cars, clothing, household items, gas/petrol and utilities). This is a direct result of improvements in technology and the political and economic systems that we have built around us in the last century.

This extra money is largely spent on what might be termed ‘luxuries’ - travel, leisure activities and other services that enrich our lives.

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We saw in the previous post that time spent doing household chores has declined massively in recent decades. But despite that you probably still feel rushed, and there remains a feeling today that perhaps more than ever we work hard and never really get to enjoy the fruits of our labours. What is the point of all this development if we spend our best years hunched over a laptop?

From this perspective, there is more good news. While you might feel busier than ever, the reality is in the US (and most developed nations) we have more leisure time than at any point in the past, up from 31 hours a week in 1965 to 38 hours in 2015. This time is spent pursuing our hobbies, playing sports, gardening and volunteering - surely things we all value highly.

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The drop in leisure time in the late 90s and early 2000s is not due primarily to us working harder, but to spending more time with our children. You might think that the rise of two-income households would have resulted in parents spending less time with their children, but that is simply not the case. In most developed countries time spent with children has massively increased in the last 50 years. And that time is not included in the leisure graph above.

So, assuming most of us want to spend time on leisure activities and with our kids, from that perspective life is better today than it ever has been.

Sources: Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker, and https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids

I have a vague memory from my youth of hearing that despite the invention of the vacuum cleaner and washing machine people spent the same amount of time on household jobs as they did in the past. Well, I’m pleased to say that is simply not true. The rapid adoption of these time saving devices, alongside revolutionary technologies like piped water and electricity have resulted in the time spent on housework decreasing from around 60 hours to around 20.

In surveys housework is regularly given as the least favourite way to spend one’s time, and we’re doing a pretty good job of eliminating it. In the more recent past, I know that my robotic hoover, mop and lawnmower have saved me a huge number of unpleasant hours that instead I get to use how I wish.

If only they could make a vacuum cleaner that could do the stairs…

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Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

One of the more common reactions from people when I tell them about this column is an initial acceptance of the health, wealth and peacefulness developments that we have achieve, but then moving on to the more difficult question of ‘are we actually happier’? What good is all this extra life, freedom, education and security if people spend it working, staring at their phones and arguing on social media? It’s easy to look back at a golden age of the past (a phone-free photo of a 90s rock concert for example), and compare it to the current era, showing how much worse our lives are despite all the improvements in living standards.

So let’s look at the question of well-being, and try and extract the reality behind the nostalgia goggles. First, work. It might feel we are all working harder than ever, but that really is not the case. Work hours are down, in the west in particular, over the last century. Due to earlier retirement (see below), stronger laws regarding working hours and increasing holiday, we’ve essentially gained about one day a week in leisure time in the last 60 years.

Retirement is a fairly recent invention - for almost all of human history, if you were alive, you were working. Hunter gatherers may only have spent a few hours a day gathering their food, but they spent many more preparing it, carrying firewood and water and other chores. The recent past wasn’t much better - as you can see from the top graph, in 1870 most people worked 60+ hour weeks, and these were largely uncreative, often back-breaking farming or factory-based jobs.

So the next time you feel your 9 to 5 is killing you, take a moment to consider the amount and nature of the work you would be doing if you were born at any other time in human history.

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Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

Data for the title claim calculation by Jesse Ausubel, graphed at http://www.humanpro-gress.org/static/3261.

Just one post this week, because this week’s graph encompasses the last few weeks’ posts in one. Two attempts have been made to measure overall well-being over the last 100-200 years, the UN’s Historical Index of Human Development, and the Well-Being Composite (which comes from the ‘How was life’ project.

They use a variety of measures, such as height (which is a good proxy for health), GDP (which as we’ve seen correlates with many good things), education and homicide rates.

As you can see, both have massively increased over the years, fairly consistently. This is a global effect as well - life in the poorest countries now is better (by these measures) than life in the richest countries not long ago.

This is something worth reflecting on - clearly there are still struggles today (two factors in the Well-Being Composite, income inequality and biodiversity, have not increased in the last 200 years) and there is work to be done. But on the whole our lives today are immeasurably better than those who lived 100 to 200 years ago. And of course we could extrapolate back further to the rest of human history and the measures of well being would stay low.

I hope that’s a reason to be cheerful!

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Today’s graph is another surprising one! Known as the Flynn effect after James Flynn suggested it in 1984, it was met with cynicism but has become accepted, confirmed in a meta-analysis of 271 samples from 31 countries with including million people. These IQ gains are real (the tests aren’t getting easier), and in general follow the other socioeconomic trends we’ve been seeing that align with GDP and economic growth.

So what could be the cause of this phenomenon?

It’s not straightforward, but it’s likely the better nutrition and health, particularly in childhood, have an impact, but don’t tell the whole story - although all countries sampled got smarter, in many cases it wasn’t because the poorer were getting richer (and thus healthier and better fed), but the whole curve was moving up, even those who were already well-fed and healthy were increasing in IQ.

Education likely has an effect as well, but surprisingly the biggest gains in intellectual performance have not been found in skills like arithmetic or general knowledge, but in more abstract forms of intelligence - finding commonalities between pairs of objects or solving logical problems. This could bode well for the continuing value of human intelligence in a world of computers, the internet, and AI.

Has this increase had an impact on individual people? Almost certainly. IQ correlates to better life chances, higher salaries, less trouble with the law and a longer and happier life. It may well be a cause of, as well as a result of, many of the other social improvements we have seen.

While we’re on the subject of violence, domestic violence has decreased massively in the US in the last 20 years. As always, the current rate is still too high, but it is just a fraction (400 cases per year per 100,000 women vs 1600 in 1995) of what it was in the 90s, just 30 years ago. Rape and sexual assault numbers are down as well, by a similar fraction (800 to 200 cases per 100,000 women per year).

I’ve never seen these statistics in a newspaper, and I wouldn’t have been aware of this situation at all if I wasn’t researching for this blog. I suspect you’re the same - please share this post if so!

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Similar ‘progressive’ developments persist elsewhere - despite the current discourse around online hatred (of course, still a real problem which needs to be worked on), searches for sexist, racist and homophobic jokes are all down to a fraction of their search volume in 2005:

Would you have guessed this from the way the media portray social media? I certainly wouldn’t.

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Abuse and victimisation of children is also down since the 1990s, in particular, violent victimisation is down by 70%:

Hate crimes are also down, particularly against black people:

And the decriminalisation of homosexuality has seen amazing growth in recent decades:

In fact, throughout the whole world, ‘emancipative values’ have increased steadily over time:

Of course, as always there is still much more to be done, but the direction of progress is positive, and there is no reason to suspect that won’t continue.

Just another thing that the media does a very good job of hiding, and another thing to be cheerful about.

Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

A common thread of this blog has been the idea that the richer a country, generally speaking, the more it spends on keeping people safe, alive and well. A parallel trend to this is increased understanding of the causes of illness and death. When cars were introduced in the early 20th century they were extremely dangerous. Gradually, as the years have gone by, technological developments alongside government-led requirements for things like seatbelts, air bags and road signs have dropped the death rate massively.

But it’s not just true for cars - transport across the board is safer for everyone. Pedestrians:

Plane passengers:

Workers:

Even those struck by lightning:

By almost any measure, we are living in the safest time humanity has ever seen. Enjoy it!

Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

We’ve looked at battle deaths and genocide deaths, but how about murder? Once again, the trend, in general, is positive. In particular, the US has seen a dramatic drop in its murder rate since 1990 (although, as you can see, it did increase during the 1970s). But the worldwide homicide rate has fallen from 9 per 100,000 to 6 per 100,000 in just 15 years.

Homicide rates correlate strongly with other violent crimes this means a general reduction for person-on-person violence in general. What is behind this change? Once again, homicide rates tend to drop as countries get richer. There are several reasons for this, but better policing and a stronger social safety net seem to be at the centre of the process.

In fact, homicide rates vary substantially around the world:

The highest rates tend to be in South America and sub-Saharan Africa, where the rates can be up to 100 times other (generally more developed) countries. Helping these countries along the path to development will likely reduce those rates substantially.

As a whole, however, we are living at the time in history when an average person is least likely to be murdered, which is surely something to be cheerful about.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides and Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

In our previous post we saw how battle deaths had declined (although not in a smooth way) in recent decades. The same is true of deaths by genocide - those who remember the recent past through rose tinted spectacles may be forgetting the mass killings in Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Sudan, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and more. As always, any number greater than 0 is a travesty here, but the recent trend of very low numbers since 2005 is still very welcome.

Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

Is the world more peaceful now than in the past? With deaths from wars discussed regularly online and in newspapers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it wasn’t, but it largely is.

The above graph misses out the world wars, for obvious reasons (they would reduce the rest of the graph to a flat line), but shows an uneven path to a relative peace. Of course, 50,000 battle deaths is still too many, and there were a handful of equally peaceful years in the 1950s, but overall the world is a much more peaceful place than it was in the past. (Also, these are absolute numbers, in a time when the world population has more than tripled - change the y axis to deaths per capita and the decrease is even more dramatic.)

Unlikely, say, the decreasing trend of poverty, these numbers could increase again if more or bigger conflicts break out in the coming years. But once again it looks like economic growth, which is likely to continue, is driving this positive development - put simply, “peace has become more profitable”.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

Continuing our theme of looking at the ways in which humanity could survive despite its burgeoning resource usage and increasing population, we have been increasingly effective at doing more with less as time has gone one. This graph shows the carbon intensity of electricity production in the EU, along with best- and worst-case predictions for the next 15 years.

In short, the move to ever-more efficient energy sources means that we can make more electricity for every unit of CO2 produced. While a lot of work still needs to be done on this, governments and companies around the world are spending billions to find more efficient ways to make energy, and this graph gives me a glimmer of hope that we just might manage it in time.

If you’re interested in total carbon emissions, that’s mostly bad news - they are higher than ever. But, in recent years they have levelled off, and are dropping in most OECD countries. There’s still a lot of work to do before we can be cheerful about our overall emissions.

Source: https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intensity-of-1 and Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker

One of the many positive side effects of countries getting richer is that they can afford to spend more on programs that make people’s lives better, such as healthcare, pensions and social support.

There is no escaping the fact that times are tough for a lot of people right now. Inflation is high, salaries for many have been flat (or even decreasing when accounting for inflation), and in the UK we are experiencing long delays and funding problems in the NHS.

But zooming out a little enables us to see how much more money is being spent on these programs than in the past (the graph is even steeper in absolute terms as GDP itself has greatly increased over the same time period). This means more social programs, more parks, and a greater social safety net.

Like developed countries in the recent past, developing countries today cannot afford to spend similar amounts on social spending - India spends 2.5% of its GDP, Kenya 3% and China 7%.

The precise nature (and ideal level) of government spending can, and should, be strongly debated, but the fact that as countries develop they spend more on social support should be something we can be very proud of.

Humans use a lot of the world’s resources. Sometimes it feels like we are wholly inadequate stewards of the planet we live on, polluting recklessly and over-using land and sea for food. To some extent, this is certainly the case - beef production in particular is the major driver of deforestation worldwide (eating 1/5 less beef would halve deforestation rates). But humans are allocating increasing portions of the world to wildlife.

Again, this is only happening because the world is getting richer. As countries have to worry less about individual survival, getting enough calories, basic healthcare and income, they can start to worry about things like environmental impact.

So, in short the total percentage protected land has increased from 8% to 15%, and protected seas have increased from 5% to 11%, in the last 30 years. That’s a total of 24 million square kilometres that is protected now that wasn’t 30 years ago. As always, there’s a lot more we can do (in this case, eating less beef would be a good start!), but this is already a huge achievement.

One of the potential problem’s with the world’s plunging poverty levels, exponential economic growth and increasing life expectancy (all broadly speaking ‘good things’) is that more developed nations use greater resources, and create more pollution per capita than less developed ones. This, combined with the rapidly increasing world population, leads many to believe we are heading towards an unavoidable resource crunch. Whether it be food, water or greenhouse gases - a growing, developing population cannot last forever.

You probably remember a graph like this from Geography lessons at school:

Source

This is quite a terrifying graph in many ways, and our extrapolating minds can’t help but see a near future of a simply untenable number of people on the planet.

But you probably didn’t see the graph at the top of this post in your Geography class. It shows the predicted future population, based on the most accurate forecasts from population experts. In short it predicts that population growth will decrease rapidly in the coming decades, with the global population peaking at around 10 billion and reducing to a roughly static 9 billion.

Why is this?

It’s actually pretty simple - as countries develop (and particularly as child mortality drops), families have fewer babies. When you don’t have to worry about a significant fraction of your children dying, you don’t need to over-compensate by having extra babies. So most families end up having an average of around 2 babies, roughly keeping the population steady.

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Of course, 10 billion people is still a lot. We’re going to need to find ways to feed everyone (meat consumption also increases as countries develop, and as meat requires a relatively large amount of land per calorie, this is a problem), and to keep greenhouse gas production low despite a growing, developing population. These are big, complex issues, and we will need to work hard to solve them. But they are not intractable, and the potential of a long term future for the human race with a stable population, and a stable environment, is not unthinkable.

That’s something I didn’t know a month ago, and it makes me very cheerful!

In my previous post we saw how the majority of income gains in recent decades have been made by middle-income countries. However, there is some pretty great news for developed countries too, and today’s graph is one example of that.

There are many different ways to measure poverty, but perhaps the most accurate one is to measure the percentage of people unable to reach a certain standard of living in terms of things like food security, home appliances, clothing, healthcare and other necessities. This is known as ‘consumption poverty’.

Looking at things that way, you can that in America since the 1960s (often seen as a ‘golden age’), the proportion of people that would be considered poor has dropped from 30% to just 3%. That’s an incredible change, and is thanks to three main factors:

1. Increases in income (as we’ve seen) both individually and in the US as a whole

2. Improvements in technology, which mean that every dollar buys more than before

3. Improvements in social care programs such as medicare

While the lives of the rich in rich countries have got better in the same period, they haven’t improved as much as those of the poor. As Stephen Pinker puts it, “the most precious resources of all—time, freedom, and worthy experiences—are rising across the board,” which is something to be cheerful about.

Source: Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker