Book Tip No. 37 (2019): GREGG EASTERBROOK: WHY THE WORLD SIMPLY DOESN’T END.
Munich 2019.
More than 15 years ago, Gregg Easterbrook’s book titled “The progress paradox: How life gets better while people feel worse” provided extremely readable insights into the way people perceive general progress in the world and the improvement of living conditions and why disaster scenarios enjoy considerable popularity.
His new book picks up on these topics and describes trends and changes in people’s living conditions in a fact- and detail-rich manner. The headlines of the first part are very revealing:
- Why don’t we starve?
- Why do we live longer despite our bad habits?
- Will nature perish?
- Will the economy collapse?
- Why is violence decreasing?
- Why is technology becoming safer instead of more dangerous?
- Why don’t the dictators win?
How pessimism became fashionable
Also very worth reading is the chapter with the headline “How pessimism became fashionable”. Indeed, pessimism plays an important role in the media: it attracts attention and increases circulation. But this is the great danger: pessimism obscures developments that are taking place beneath the surface.
Given the considerable ignorance of most people in most countries about the progress made in living conditions over the past 50 or 100 years, it is necessary for us to deal with these topics differently than before. Thanks to decades of research by Hans Rosling (see his book “Factfulness”), we know very well how little knowledge the majority of the population in the majority of countries have about the state of our planet.
Gregg Easterbrook makes an important contribution to enlightenment here. He also offers many suggestions where we should do more than before, where we need to use resources differently and which topics have received too little attention in public so far. It is to be hoped that it will receive sufficient (media) attention.
Dr. Hans-Christian Riekhof