If a news story claimed we just experienced the best decade in human history, would you believe it? Consider this evidence in the Spectator and Axios:
- Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time (it was 35 percent in 1987).
- Child mortality has fallen to record low levels.
- Famine has virtually gone extinct.
- Malaria, polio, and heart disease are all in decline.
- Half of the world is now middle class or wealthier.
- Mortality rates for women and infants have been halved since 1990.
- Primary education has become near-universal in nearly all of the world.
In addition, the average income of the world’s bottom 50 percent earners nearly doubled between 1980 and 2016.
“Good news is no news”
Why, then, is frustration so high these days? According to Gallup, Americans are among the most stressed people in the world. The younger we are, the angrier and more worried and stressed we are.
One explanation is that, as the Spectator article observes, “good news is no news.” Geopolitical researchers Stephen Soukup and Mark Melcher note in a recent email essay that “there is a bias among the media in favor of stories that are ugly, dark, or bloody. Conflict, dissension, and frustration sell newspapers—or advertising spots, as the case may be.”
Soukup and Melcher discuss a second factor as well: our perceived loss of control over our lives and world. They note that we have created enormous bureaucracies to accomplish all sorts of tasks and services such as air travel, internet communications, health care provision, and public defense. Each does something we do not know how to do, from flying an airplane to managing the digital infrastructure.
Thus, we feel impotent to manage our world and frustrated when it does not (indeed, cannot) fulfill our wishes for it.
One frustration behind our frustration is that this nameless, faceless bureaucracy is beyond our accountability or control. Soukup…
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