It is hard to see any of this global progress by looking out your window. And then, let’s look at 16 wonderful things that have gotten better.

Let’s start with 16 terrible things that are on their way out, or have even already disappeared. (And where I can’t, it’s because we haven’t asked these questions yet.) But I can’t fit all these explanations into this book, so here are just the charts. For many of them I could show you that people are consistently more negative than the data says they should be. For each one, I could tell a similar story to those I have told about extreme poverty and life expectancy. “32 More Improvements Is the world in your head still getting worse? Then get ready for a challenging data encounter. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.”įactfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes-a system. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong (which sometimes they do, but often with good intentions). What do we gain from pointing our fingers at them? Similarly, resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately). “It’s not the boss or the board or the shareholders who are to blame for the tragic lack of research into the diseases of the poorest.

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