Pessimistic Optimism

The world’s in a mess.  No, in fact if you look at any relevant data, things are better than ever.  Correction: the quality of life is getting worse.  Just a minute, the evidence shows, step by step we are improving everything around us.  Mind you, it is always best to assume the worst; yet seeing things in a positive light is good for your health.  Yes: the glass is half empty; no, the glass is half full.  As has been the case for a long time, the optimism-pessimism wars continue!

Many observers can see a way around this confusion and disagreement, proposing we become  realists, resting on the facts.  Here’s a good example to cheer us up:  the world is steadily getting better.  Just look at the evidence of reducing poverty levels around the globe, with innumerable articles citing statistical trends.  Sifting through, here are some of the key facts, according to the World Bank:  94% of the world’s population was poor in 1820 [i], but this had dropped to 36% by 1990, and has continued to plummet, with a figure of just under 10% in 2015. [ii]  Even a pessimist would have to agree this is a remarkable improvement, an outstanding indicator of the extent to which more people across the globe are acquiring a better, reasonable standard of living.

Did I say a remarkable improvement?  A reasonable standard of living?  The World Bank data is based on its international poverty line, which is currently set at $US1.90 a day (using 2011 as the base).  The figure is translated into local currencies, the purchasing power parity approach, determining the local equivalent of what $1.90 would get you in a day in the US.  Now that seems odd.  The official US poverty line was $12,490 a year (in 2019), not the $700 a year you would derive from the $1.90 figure, which sounds more like a starvation line!  It turns out the World Bank is aware of this problem, and recommends higher poverty lines depending on a country’s income level. The highest, $5.50 a day, is still remarkably low, coming in at close to $2,000 a year, which is still a starvation level for the US, and something like a twelfth of the income for a 40hr a week worker on the federal minimum wage (currently $7.25 per hour, although it is higher in some states). If we use the $5.50 figure as the international poverty line, we find that the actual level of global poverty is much higher: 46%.  Getting confused?

It gets worse.  Two countries, China and India, have worked hard to alleviate poverty.  If we leave them out of the calculations, and stick with the $5.50 figure for the poverty line, then global poverty for the rest of the world dropped from 57% in 1981 to 50% in 2015, yet global GDP nearly tripled during same period.  As shop floor workers and agricultural employees in the developed world will tell you, the real value of their wages has remained the same over thirty years, or even declined.  “It is hard to argue in favour of progress when you are still as poor, relative to the rich countries, as you were in the 1980s”. [iii]  There is less poverty, but …

Let’s call in the experts.  Steven Pinker is clearly an optimist.  In Enlightenment Now, he provides several examples as to how much better the world is today. [iv]  One of the most publicised of these was the observation that there are less wars today, and less deaths from wars.  He argues human violence, a dominant characteristic of our history, is lower than it has ever been.  That makes sense.  The last world war finished 75 years ago.  Certainly, any number of researchers have demonstrated there have been less deaths from warfare in recent decades.  However, (and you knew there would be a however), it isn’t that simple.  As researchers have pointed out “improved medicine and health care mean that a decline in battle deaths does not necessarily equate to a decline in violence, as wounded soldiers and civilians are more likely to survive”. Others have suggested this apparent trend could simply be a result of random variations over time rather than a decline in the probability of war – and deaths – occurring. [v]

As is the case on so many issues, research and the re-evaluation of data on war deaths continues.  What is the current state of affairs?  More detailed research has found the last two decades have been more peaceful than average. However, the statistical record provides little, if any, evidence that this recent peaceful period represents a long-term decline in interstate war. “While there may be some changes in the probability of war deaths, these changes appear to be either temporary or random variation around a flat base probability.  Despite this, I think there may be reasons to hope that the recent more peaceful period may continue.”  And just before you get optimistic again, that same paper ends by adding, “there are also reasons to be concerned. In particular the probable increase in geopolitical competition between China, Russia, and Western countries could easily reverse the peaceful period we have experienced. While we can be hopeful that the current trend towards fewer wars represents a lasting decline, there is little evidence to suggest that such a hopeful future is assured.” [vi] I guess that could take us back to pessimism?

Trying to be a realist turns out to be rather difficult.  An alternative perspective is to look at the consequences of optimism and pessimism.  Entrepreneurs are usually optimists, even when their ventures fail (as they often do).  Failure turns into lessons learnt, and off they go again: a good thing, too, as these are the people driving innovation, and especially important when we look at social entrepreneurs trying to make the world a better place  Other research has found optimists have larger social networks, solve problems cooperatively, and are more likely to seek help in difficult situations. They even make good spouses:  people with optimistic spouses were healthier according to a finding in a 2014 study by researchers at the University of Michigan. [vii]   When I read about coronavirus, climate change, or the latest outrages by Trump, I keep my balance and shore up my optimism with humour, from crazy videos about a penguin wandering around a zoo [viii] to checking the cartoons in my local paper, along with the New Yorker’s regular and very funny stories and the accompanying biting satire in the Borowitz Report.  It helps me!

Let’s assume things are better than they were. It’s not an unreasonable assumption looking back at life 100 years ago or more.  A good question might be, why shouldn’t we be optimistic, given this is the case?  The pessimist would reply that while life is better than it was 100 years ago, right now things are going badly.  Up until recently we have reaped the rewards of democracy, as well as the improvement goods and services in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, the energy revolution, and more recently the information revolution.  We’ve cast off aristocratic government and a marginal peasant existence for most of humanity, and our material well-being has improved to an extraordinary degree.  But now it is coming to a halt.  Perhaps not ‘the end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama announced thirty years ago, with the best of political and economic systems we can devise, but rather the end of growth, with disasters are emerging on every front.

First, we are slipping back to levels of inequality comparable to those which existed back in late medieval times.  As the gap between the small number of the very rich and the rest keeps growing, attempts to redress the balance would require a massive effort at income and wealth redistribution, a return to re-regulating the economy and stopping the runaway influence of corporate power in political and public life.  It would require abandoning much of our current capitalist economic system and the free market, the very things that brought about the material well-being we have (and enjoy?) today.  You can see the pessimists shaking their heads.  It is a change impossible to consider, an attack on our way of life, socialism taking over from free markets and free enterprise.  We have seen what happens in communist countries: no thank you, they say.

The challenges are even more intractable when we turn to the other major disaster, climate change.  “Many optimists are convinced that some new technology – such as cold fusion – will emerge at the last minute and save us from crossing the point of no return. But if we were to take the climate crisis for the existential threat that it is, nothing would stop us from making the necessary investments to mitigate it using the green technology we already have. Again, these ‘radical’ proposals get shot down the moment they begin encroaching on the bottom lines of the companies that are doing much of the polluting.” [ix]  Evidence of pessimism or realism?

This year, it is very hard to be an optimist.  Democracy is under attack by far-right populism, inequality is increasing, and the threat of climate change is becoming ever more real, with the fires in Australia and California precursors of a likely climate disaster  In global politics, Iran, China and North Korea are still on a collision course with the US and what remains of a western alliance.  The promise of war not enough for you?  A coronavirus pandemic has been sweeping across countries, exposing the limits of preparedness and medical systems in many ‘advanced’ societies.  I keep reading Covid-19 will change our world forever: such fervent speculation!

So the pessimists are right.  Except, almost every week we read governments and experts telling us things have never been better.  It was Steven Pinker in his book, Enlightenment Now, who told us the problems the world is facing are trivial compared what has been accomplished. [x]  Another commentator who agrees with Pinker is the late Swedish academic and TED Talk guru Hans Rosling, who claimed in Factfulness that “we are wired to see the bad and to ignore the good. [xi]  And there is so much data to suggest the world is getting better that once we are presented with such overwhelming evidence of human progress, it is impossible to argue otherwise. Pessimism is not just factually wrong, it is irrational.”

If we step back, we might be able to reframe this debate in a different perspective.  From a self-centred point of view, optimism trumps pessimism: look what we’ve got!  But what’s good for the individual may not be good for society.  At one level, that’s obvious.  My fancy, expensive iPhone contributes to the huge profits paid out to Apple senior managers and shareholders, while its real price is kept low through the miserable hourly pay and working conditions for factory workers in China.  My life is getting better (better because I have a mobile telephone packed with applications I never use?), at the expense of the marginal lives of others.  Boosters talk about the free market and free enterprise.  Forget that. We know the market isn’t free, but badly skewed; free enterprise is managed exploitation, all the way from smartphones to medical care.

As one critic of the over-optimistic out it, “The optimism that people like Pinker and Rosling pursue might seem like a ray of hope in a world gone mad, but reading between the lines reveals little more than a defence of the status quo in language that is music to the ears of elites. Bill Gates, for example, has called Enlightenment Now his “new favourite book of all time” (his previous favourite was another of Pinker’s books), and he even gave out free copies of Factfulness to all US university graduates in 2018.”  [xii]

I think it’s even more than that.  I share the view of others that Pinker is not just an optimist, but a dangerous man.  “His view of the universe is no less “fallen” than that of the most disenchanted existentialist or religious penitent. The result of all this is that human endeavor must be conceived as essentially “heroic.” We are always fighting against the encroaching night of a hostile universe.”  If that sounds a little overblown, the commentary continues,  “Pinker’s viewpoint is demonstrated by his statements on poverty, war, and human ignorance.  For example, Pinker maintains that poverty needs no explanation at all.  It is the natural (entropic) state of things.  We are born poor, dumb, and violent, and it is only through great effort — effort that runs against the grain of nature itself — that we can hope, however tentatively, to emerge from this fallen first position  … Pinker, for instance, is quite explicit that we needn’t blame anyone for the inequality that marks our economic and financial lives.  Again, it’s merely “natural.”  What does that mean?  “Pinker is eager to explain why he thinks that inequality is not harmful in itself, but rather an occasional cause of subjective unhappiness at worst. In any case, his political program is clear: Marxism, socialism, and indeed any form of egalitarianism are ultimately equated with the heat-death of society, and so these count as existential threats to civilization.” [xiii]  Did I say Pinker’s dangerous?  Loose wording, what I really meant is that he’s a ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ pimp for capitalism.

Where does all this lead us?  Recently a journalist posed the question as to whether it was better to be led by a pessimist of an optimist.  The conclusion reads a bit having you cake and eating it:  “When testing strategic plans, deploy defensive pessimism, imagining all the things that can go wrong in the future. But when the task requires flexibility and hard work toward uncertain goals, build teams with optimists.  As a determined optimist who has grown a bit more pessimistic during my life, I do want to share one important finding from my 35 years of field research: Effective long-term planning and investment requires an optimistic approach, with contingency planning by pessimists—because things never go exactly as you want them to.” [xiv]  When I think about the challenges we face today, I guess, reluctantly, I’m somewhat similar in my views to John Davis.  I remain an optimist, firmly believing we can make things better and we will, but with just enough of a pessimistic perspective to keep any of my truly unrealistic hopes in check!

[i] Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820-1992’ by François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, American Economic Review, September 2002: Vol 92, no 4, pp 727-744

[ii] https://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty

[iii] Figures and comment from The Best Medicine, Rodrigo Aguilera, RSA Journal, 2109-20, No. 4, pp 16-21

[iv] Viking, 2018

[v] Steven Beard, Political Forecasting, Political Conflict, OEF Research, May 08, 2018

[vi] Ibid

[vii] Kim et al., Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 2014. Vol. 76 Issue 6. No. 2. Lang et al., Psychology and Aging 2013. Vol. 28, No. 1.

[viii] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/15/us/coronavirus-penguins-shedd-aquarium-trnd/index.html

[ix] Aguilera, op cit

[x] Allen Lane, 2018

[xi] Flatiron, 2018.  The quotes are from Aguilera, op cit.

[xii] Aguilera, op cit

[xiii] Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenment, by Landon Frim And Harrison Fluss, Jacobin, 10.10.2018

[xiv] Are Optimists or Pessimists Better Leaders? John A. Davis, Forbes, 17 November 2014

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