Is everything really getting worse? Here’s how progress creates its own obstacles

Do you believe that life is really better now than it used to be, despite what the headlines say? Do you believe that life in the future could be much, much better if we simply removed the brakes society has placed on science, technology, and entrepreneurship? Do you want to build, build, build, whether it’s a house in a seaside town, a nuclear power startup or a colony on Mars?

In that case, my friend, you are part of the progress movement. And I have just returned from a summit of your people.

I spent last weekend at a fascinating two-day conference hosted by the Roots of Progress Institute in Berkeley, California. Founded and led by Jason Crawford, a writer and thinker (and past Future Perfect 50 honoree), Roots of Progress aims to build the intellectual foundation of what Crawford has called “a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century -to”. The conference was a chance for several hundred people on the move to meet, mingle, and plot how to create a future that would presumably look like this:

I’m not much of a fan, which is half the reason I became a cynical journalist, but I must say in advance that I am very sympathetic to the goals of the progress movement. I believe – from health to wealth to security to human rights – life today in general is unimaginably better than before. (And if you don’t believe me, go read Our World in Data.) I believe that the doomsayers are wrong and that our future can be better yet, provided we make the political and personal choices to unlock growth . Fitter, happier, more productive – to me that’s a worthy goal for humanity, not just the creepy robot-voiced Radiohead song.

Partly because of its Bay Area orientation, the progress movement is sometimes labeled as science fiction utopians who are overly focused on frontier technological innovation. And while I love a fusion energy conversation as much as any other Star Trek geek, what I saw at Berkeley was a movement with much broader aspirations than just technological moonshots.

It was Our World in Data Saloni Dattani (another Future Perfect 50 honoree), giving a talk on how we could save millions of lives – most in the Global South – by speeding up the timeline for trials of vaccines and new drugs. It was Alec Stapp of the Institute for Progress (same here) getting everyone excited about how fast the solar revolution has been and how much faster it could get. It’s not just high tech, either: The discoveries and policies that made cars safer and took driving away from the environment are also evidence of progress.

You don’t have to accept some of the wildest ideas – artificial wombs, anyone? — to see that scientific and economic progress have made human life much better balanced than before, and that it makes sense to study why progress has occurred in the past and how we can make it more likely in the future. Because it doesn’t just happen by itself, and for most of human history, it hasn’t happened at all. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said in his opening remarks: “Progress is an unusual state of affairs. It is not the default.”

A prerequisite for supporting policies that make progress more likely in the future is the recognition that progress has happened—that human choices and discoveries have made life meaningfully better, and that they can continue to do so. Given the wealth of evidence that this is so, who would doubt it?

As it turns out, many people.

As fascinating as the talks on biotechnology advances or the politics of artificial intelligence were, the most important questions raised at the conference were not technological, but psychological. Given the clear evidence of past progress in key indicators such as life expectancy or GDP per capita – progress which, for the most part, has continued to this day – why are so many people convinced that life getting worse? Why won’t they just read the charts?

I don’t think it takes much convincing to see that we are not in what you would call an optimistic age. The US is less than two weeks away from an election that has been largely defined by fear and negativity. Although the US economy, especially compared to the rest of the world, is really good, nearly half of Americans rate it as “poor”. The percentage of voters who see the economy as their top concern is almost as high as it was in 2008 — a year you may recall that marked the beginning of the worst global recession since the Great Depression.

Looking ahead, we seem to be even more fearful and pessimistic. The day before the start of the conference, the diary Lancet Planetary Health published a study that surveyed nearly 16,000 young people in the US on their attitudes about climate change and found that 62 percent agreed with the statement “mankind is doomed.” This is not hopeful, both in its appearance and in what it implies about how the next generation sees its future.

In fact, you could argue that the biggest evidence against the progress narrative is all in our heads. The US economy has not actually declined, and we are, in fact, making real progress in reducing carbon emissions – but there is no doubt that measures such as happiness and depression deaths have worsened in the US. If the material masses have been largely improving all along, why do so many of us refuse to believe it – and are generally so miserable?

Here’s an option: It’s my fault.

By me I mean the media, the institution to which I have dedicated my professional life. From time to time during the conference, I heard versions of the following argument: The media’s obsession with negative stories and the default cynical position have led people to believe that the world is much worse than it really is. It got to the point where I just started introducing myself to people like, “I’m from the media and I’m the reason you’re not getting the progress you want.”

To be clear, it is not NO true! As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote in March 2023, the media exhibits a clear negativity bias that seems to have gotten worse. We pay much more attention to short-term downward trends—say, the increase in violent crime seen during and immediately after the pandemic—than to long-term trends that lean positively. We write far more about what people get wrong than what they get right. We can even turn good news into bad news:

Future Perfect was founded in part to counter these trends. That doesn’t mean we have a big happy face all over our coverage; rather, we try to identify the problems that really matter, which include core problems that the media often ignore because they don’t make good headlines (like the millions of people in the Global South who still die from preventable diseases or the failure to learning the lessons of past pandemics). But we try to recognize and even celebrate progress when it happens. However, it is still an uphill battle in the media in general.

But there is one thing these media critiques tend to leave out: the role of the audience. I’ve worked more or less in mainstream media for nearly 25 years, and one of the biggest changes over that time is that we have a much clearer understanding of what our audience responds to. And I can tell you that audiences respond much more strongly to negative stories and negative headlines than positive ones. And the media, like all businesses, responds to its customers.

This should come as no surprise. People, and not just members of the media, have a well-demonstrated negative bias. Combine this with the recency effect—our tendency to focus excessively on the newest information and events—and you have a population that is highly susceptible to any recent change that could be interpreted as negative.

Which provides one more reason why the progress movement is so hard to believe in for so many people: progress itself.

Here’s what global economic growth looked like over the past 2,000 years:

But if you look at just the last 10 years, you’ll see a much less steep line. And that’s the problem. Humans, as Pinker said in his speech, are much more sensitive to the slope of change than we are to absolute levels—that is, our emotions respond to our perception of what has changed recently. We are not naturally long-term thinkers, neither forward nor backward.

What this means is that while progress has raised our overall standard of living—lengthening our lives, making us richer, reducing the violence that was once an ever-present part of human life—it has also raised the bar for yourself. And the higher that bar rises, the more the low-hanging fruit of progress is plucked, and the harder it is to keep meeting that bar.

Like many others, you can see that process unfolding rapidly in China. Thanks in part to regular double-digit growth rates in the decades following economic liberalization — plus the last memory of total poverty — China’s population was not long ago one of the most optimistic in the world. They had experienced the improvement of life and expected it to continue to improve.

But recently, as economic growth has slowed, the Chinese have turned, as one recent newspaper put it, “from optimism to pessimism.” The percentage of people expressing a pessimistic view of their economic prospects five years into the future rose from 4.4 percent between 2004 and 2014 to 16.6 percent in 2023. Compared to their grandparents, everyone in China today is almost certainly vastly better off , at least economically. But as those improvements waned, public expectations waned.

To put it in Silicon Valley terms with which many of the progress conference attendees would be familiar: the flywheel is broken. Progress improves life, which leads to increased expectations that are harder to meet. This helps people turn pessimists, which can lead them to question whether progress is happening at all. Even worse, that pessimism diminishes the kind of optimism about the future that you need to lay the groundwork for more progress.

This will not be easy to solve, especially when you consider how the divisive politics and veto landmines embedded in our political system make transformative change so difficult to achieve. But I wouldn’t be the least bit progressive if I didn’t have some hope for a better future. An effort to better understand how progress has occurred is the first step to making it fully real once again.