Doug Sheridan remarks…
“Media-driven fear demoralizes us—particularly when we’re young—and engenders terrible political decisions by crippling our ability to do better.”
Doug Sheridan remarks…
Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson write in the National Post, it’s easy to believe that the world is falling apart while watching the news. Media-driven fear demoralizes us—particularly when we’re young—and engenders terrible political decisions by crippling our ability to do better.
Take climate change reporting. A pervasive and false apocalyptic narrative draws together every negative event—ignoring the bigger picture almost entirely.
Last summer, for example, forest fires made headlines, but coverage largely failed to mention that the annual burned global area has been declining for decades, reaching the lowest level ever last year. Likewise, deaths from droughts and floods fill the front pages, but we don’t hear that deaths from such climate-related disasters have declined 50-fold over the past century.
The data show what we all fundamentally know—the world has improved dramatically. If we could choose when to be born, having all the facts at hand, few would choose any time before today.
This incontrovertible progress has been driven by ethical and responsible conduct, trust, well-functioning markets, the rule of law, scientific innovation and political stability. We have to recognize, appreciate and proclaim the value, and comparative rarity, of each of these.
The constant barrage of negative stories may lead us to imagine that forward progress is about to end. The evidence at hand does not support this conclusion. The latest IPCC scenarios indicate that, without climate change, the average person would be 4.5-times richer by 2100. With climate change, that person will be 4.34 times as rich.
This small decline is by no means the end of the world. Yet fear pushes many to demand an inefficient diversion of hundreds of trillions of dollars to steer the global economy abruptly towards zero carbon emissions.
To Sum It Up 1: We need to foster an environment that challenges fearmongering and promotes optimistic yet critical thinking and constructive discussion about the future. To drive progress for the world’s poorest, we should similarly focus on efficient and well-documented policies with real and large benefits.
To Sum It Up 2: If we stop being driven by fear, and instead look to the data and the bigger picture, we can see that the world is better than it was, and is likely to get better still. We have a responsibility to adopt the very best policies to move ahead.