‘It’s Better Than It Looks’ Review: Why Things Are Looking Up

Michael Shermer, Wall Street Journal

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Though declinists in both parties may bemoan our miserable lives, Americans are healthier, wealthier, safer and living longer than ever. Michael Shermer reviews ‘It’s Better Than It Looks’ by Gregg Easterbrook.

In April 2016 President Barack Obama addressed a German audience with a message of uplift: “We’re fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history,” he said, adding that “it’s been decades since the last war between major powers. More people live in democracies. We’re wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty.” So what exactly changed a few months later, when Donald Trump was elected to America’s highest office, to put so many of the world’s observers in a foul mood of doom?

Nothing important, suggests Gregg Easterbrook in “It’s Better Than It Looks,” his masterly and comprehensive exposition on why we should be optimistic in an age of pessimism. The author backs his sanguine perspective with copious data, noting, for example, that even as Mr. Trump growled that our economy “is always bad, down, down, down,” the unemployment rate had in fact reached 4.6%, “a number that would have caused economists of the 1970s to fall to their knees and kiss the ground.” Today’s liberals and progressives, too, take a tack of gloomy pessimism, as when both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders bemoaned that the U.S. has been “destroyed” by the wealthy and “poisoned” by greedy corporations polluting the environment.

By leading the American populace to despair, Mr. Easterbrook suggests, politicians on both sides may have encouraged voters to elect the man who looked at the country and saw “American carnage.” But while declinists were bemoaning our miserable lives during the last election, Mr. Easterbrook argues, “at no juncture in American history were people better off than they were in 2016: living standards, per-capita income, buying power, health, safety, liberty, and longevity were at their highest.”

A potent counter to today’s unwarranted pessimism, the author claims, is not just the evidence that can be seen (rising employment, wages, wealth, health, lifespans and so on) but what has not been seen. Granaries, for instance, are not empty: The many predictions made since the 1960s that billions would die of starvation have not come true. “Instead, by 2015, the United Nations reported global malnutrition had declined to the lowest level in history. Nearly all malnutrition that persists is caused by distribution failures or by government corruption, not by lack of supply.” In fact, obesity is rapidly becoming a global problem.



‘It’s Better Than It Looks’ Review: Why Things Are Looking Up
PHOTO: WSJ
IT’S BETTER THAN IT LOOKS
By Gregg Easterbrook
PublicAffairs, 330 pages, $28

Similarly, even though there are occasional panics, “resources have not been depleted despite the incredible proliferation of people, vehicles, aircraft, and construction.” Instead of oil and gas running out by the year 2000, as some in the 1970s predicted, both “are in worldwide oversupply” along with minerals and ores. Likewise, there are no runaway plagues. “Unstoppable outbreaks of super-viruses and mutations were said to menace a growing world; instead, nearly all disease rates are in decline, including the rates of most cancers.” Western nations are also no longer choking on pollution. Smog in major cities like Los Angeles, for example, is in free fall as measured by the number of air-quality alerts. Sulfur dioxide, the main source of acid rain, is down by 81% in the U.S. since 1990, and forests in Appalachia “are in the best condition they have been in since the eighteenth century.”

In America as well as the rest of the world, crime and violence are getting less, not more, frequent, Mr. Easterbrook points out. Homicide rates have plummeted since their post-World War II high in 1993, while “the frequency and intensity of combat have gone down worldwide.” And despite worries about rising authoritarianism, the dictators aren’t winning. In the 1980s dictators ravaged countries on nearly every continent; today, the Kim family’s lock on North Korea stands out as an aberration.

Data supporting this author’s optimistic observations are presented throughout “It’s Better Than It Looks.” Similar catalogues can be found in books like Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” (2018), Johan Norberg’s “Progress” (2016), Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s “Abundance” (2012) and Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist” (2010). I even touched on some of the same points in my own “The Moral Arc” (2015). Apparently, though, this chorus is not loud enough, since pessimism remains as prominent as it ever was.

Besides providing new ammunition for optimists, Mr. Easterbrook’s aim in this important book is to identify what we’ve been doing right and to consider what we can do about the still pressing problems we face, most notably the “impossible” challenges of inequality and climate change—along with health-care costs, nuclear proliferation and others. These puzzles are solvable, he insists, if we make the effort.

After all, each of the many areas of progress that he documents were the result of individuals and organizations—both private and public—deciding to solve particular problems, as President Franklin Roosevelt prophesied in 1938 when the world was much darker than it is today: “We observe a world of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.” As Mr. Easterbrook notes with some irony, early 20th-century progressives were at that time the optimists who envisioned an America the Beautiful where, in the words of the hymn, “alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.” Today that sort of vision is, notably, not embraced by either major party.

Mr. Easterbrook wants to make optimism intellectually respectable again, and he has done so with cogent arguments and bountiful evidence. “History is not deterministic, teleological, or controlled in any manner,” the author concludes. Yet he shows that “history has an arrow” and—thanks to human ingenuity and effort—“the arrow of history points forever upward.”


Mr. Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and the author, most recently, of “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.”