Antidoters Assemble! Pt 1: The Risks of a Doom Economy
Antidoters Assemble! Pt 1: The Risks of a Doom Economy
I’m kicking off this week with a quiz. 8 truths and a lie. Can you guess which of the below is the lie?
(another gorgeous image c/o Maddy Butcher)
You have a greater probability of being struck by lightning than falling victim to a homicidal stranger
150 000 women a year die of anorexia in the US.
The biggest nutritional problem in the world today is obesity
You are more likely to die in a bathtub than be a victim of terrorism
Female leaders are much more likely to wage war than male
UK men have experienced higher rates of redundancy and furlough than women during Covid
According to UK death statistics over the last 50 yrs (as % of pop) 2020 came 35/50
In the last 30 years 25% of the world’s population have moved out of the category of ‘extreme poverty’
Looking at # of hours worked, full-time men work an average of 18 days more/ year than full-time women and commute 40 mins longer/ day (equiv of 20 days/ year)
Irrespective of whether you pick the right one (answer in the text below), the real test is... what was your emotional reaction to seeing some of these statements written down? Smugness? Interest? Confusion? Cynicism? Or most interestingly… Irritation?
The above is a method that has been employed by Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling as a way of demonstrating how positive, nuanced or broader perspective data simply doesn’t reach our news cycle. Perhaps understandably, slow, steady progress is not news. Data that doesn’t fit the popular narratives is not news... but bad day-to-day events are. So instead we’re deluged by stories of horrifying experiences, cherry-picked statistics (of which I’m guilty above) and depressing ‘facts’. Each adds a pebble to the ever increasing mountain of evidence that the world we live in is unfair and getting worse and meaner by the day. Like many, I have simply stopped watching mainstream TV news, but I’m unable to avoid the online onslaught. It’s designed to keep us outraged and clicking in an attention economy predicated on time and shares.
Last year, I discovered a book called ‘The Power of Bad’ by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister - an utterly fascinating read. It managed to achieve what all the best books do - brilliantly articulating and surfacing a gnawing sense of unease I’d felt for the last few years with regards to how my view of the world was potentially being manipulated.
It details and explains the phenomenon of negativity bias in our psyche - something we all recognise. One bad sexual experience can haunt us whilst the great ones become a hazy recollection; an affair has the power to destroy a marriage yet no one devoted act can permanently bond a couple; we look in the mirror and see wrinkles and podge as opposed to smile lines or a healthy body; we discount praise and forget our successes whilst dwelling painfully on criticism and errors (I still cringe about a TV interview 15 years ago when I said that Borat made me “squeam”. A creative mash-up of ‘squirm’ and ‘squeamish’ I think?).
The authors refer to a ‘rule of 4’ and say that it takes on average at least four good things to counteract one bad and the lower the ratio, the happier, healthier and more successful a person tends to be… a huge issue when I suspect the ratio of good to bad news we’re now faced with is more like 1:40.
But in many ways, this is nothing new. Tierney and Baumeister refer to the ‘merchants of doom’ having been active throughout history in the form of witch-burners or priests warning of ‘judgement day’. Except today they are our journalists, politicians, academics or activists and they come armed not with pitchforks but fear-inducing images, choice data and theories. Arguably, terrorism is a creation of this media age as randomly murdering innocent civilians was pointless until the late 19th century with the rise of mass media.
And there are, of course positive byproducts to negativity bias. Caution where caution may be required or an opportunity to self-analyse and learn from failures and criticism. Even as a content trend, it makes intuitive sense when you appreciate that no one, let alone a journalist, would wish to be seen as naive... or worse, complacent in the face of persistent societal problems. Understandably, we all want to be seen to advocate for those less fortunate, so what’s a little massaging of the status quo if the result is better awareness and change?
Well, increasingly I am convinced that it is a problem. Why?
Firstly, because it’s fundamentally distorting our sense of the world and creating an overriding sense of gloom and pessimism in an era when mental health challenges have exploded. On every objective measure - life expectancy, health, literacy, leisure time, equality, deaths through war or disaster - humankind has never had it so good. And yet we feel more hopeless about the future than ever before (only 10% of people think the world is ‘getting better)’. A third of American teenagers believe that the world may cease to exist in their lifetime; many are resolving to remain childless to save the planet; and 1 in 5 UK children reported having nightmares about climate change. Irrespective of the fact we seem to be happy to put the weight of the world on our children (prior to arming them with the tools to understand the complexities behind ‘fact’), at the most basic level, depressed and disheartened people tend to wallow. They’re not in a mindset to look for proactive solutions and opportunities.
Secondly, because it’s divisive when stats are presented as binary, particularly when aligned with an ideological camp who has a vested interest in data that supports their narrative. All nuance or perspective is lost from the factors behind it, correlation is frequently conflated with causation and over-simplistic explanations create heroes and villains. Any scepticism or even mere attempts to put things in perspective are denounced as whataboutery, strawmanning, apologism, denialism or worse, as ‘x-ist’. It simply doesn’t serve the debate well if you can’t properly understand context or respectfully debate the problem you’re seeking to solve (see my TedX attempt at this which proved to be much more divisive than I had foreseen, despite the fact that I share the ultimate ambitions of my detractors - an equal playing field for women).
No one has the time to research the grey behind every such stat or damning conclusion - we trust our media to do that for us - and frankly, I think they’ve broken that trust. Wrong statistics are sometimes repeated so much that they become fact (quiz answer alert). For example - the annual 150K US anorexia deaths that Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf amongst others, confidently quoted in their writing for years, despite that statistic actually being for ‘sufferers’ and the mortality rate - although still tragically - falling between 100 and 400.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, media storms and the resulting explosion of activism they prompt resulting in knee-jerk ‘solutions’ despite the fact that easy wins are rarely either easy, or wins. Aaargh, a problem! Quick, here’s a solution.
Examples given by Tierney and Baumeister of this phenomenon include
The population explosion crisis: The doomsaying around population growth and famine crisis in the 70s and 80s resulted in some of the worst human rights abuses the world has seen: compulsory sterilisation of millions of women in Latin America, Bangladesh and India. Millions of abortions during the 1-child policy in China. All despite the risk being unfounded (currently fewer than 40K die from famine annually - the lowest ever in history - and primarily due to civil wars, not food shortage)
GMO: 50% of the population think GMOs are unhealthy, resulting in dramatically less funding and preventing farmers from using crops that could feed more and combat nutritional deficiencies. One million people die each year and 250K children go blind because of deficiencies that could be alleviated with fortified varieties of rice, bananas and other GM foods (considered safe by the majority of scientists incl 140 nobel laureates, who consider the anti-GMO campaign a ‘crime against humanity’)
911: After the tragedy of 911 in which 3000 lost their lives, an additional 2000 people died on the roads after air travel was suspended and fear of flying went up
Smoking: Smoking causes 100s of 1000s of deaths but interestingly, nicotine isn’t what makes fags fatal (it’s no more harmful than caffeine). 15% of people smoke in every European city, except Sweden where it’s 7% due to the success of a smokeless tobacco product called ‘Snus’, banned in the rest of Europe. Looking at the statistics and assuming a similar reduction elsewhere, 350K lives could have been saved if it had been introduced to the rest of Europe. (Note - reaction vs. e-cigs is going the same way… stigmatised and banned alongside cigarettes despite their huge success in smoking cessation. And yes, I have a vested interest here).
Abducted children: In the 80s the US campaign to put missing children on milk-cartons seemed like a fantastic initiative, but actually it just put the terrifying prospect of our children being abducted and murdered on the centre of every breakfast table in the country, despite the probabilities being miniscule. Cue a growing culture of over-protectionism, increasing levels of child obesity and social distrust (other factors, of course involved).
Medical research is stymied by enormous regulatory barriers that are both hugely costly and time consuming. Whenever there’s a problem with a drug or treatment, victims are immediately visible and easy fodder for journalists and trial lawyers. This typically results in a crisis response and a rash of new safeguards and processes which have dramatically slowed the pace of drug development. The average approval process for a drug can now take 10 years, and 100s of 1000s of pages of paperwork. Tierney and Baumeister refer to the ‘invisible graveyard of millions’ that such delays and precautions have undoubtedly resulted in.
And so what of our Covid response? Might the cure - its impact on inequality, mental health, other health conditions, or the debt it saddles the next generation with - prove to be worse than the disease? We won’t know for years, possibly decades. Certainly long after the current government has moved on to memoir-writing. What is clear is that evidence will appear in dribs and drabs and as such, won’t make the same media splash that the current daily infection and death rates do.
A lot of this (and indeed our experiences of the last year) boils down to the precautionary principle of ‘better safe than sorry’ - which provides easy, short-termist, populist opportunities for politicians who are only ever a year or two away from being unelected.
And yet (and this blew my mind) political scientist Philip Tetlock found by tracking 30K predictions by academics, columnists and others paid-for public prognostications, the accuracy rate was barely better than chance (‘a dart-throwing chimp’ as he put it) - and actually worse than that of some non experts. Ouch! (Place your bets ladies and gentlemen as to who’ll be proved right: Government advisor, Neil Ferguson or lockdown sceptic and London mayoral candidate, Laurence Fox. Answers in 2031).
So I’ve probably depressed and befuddled you enough for one post - but let me leave you with some hope… as next week I’ll be looking at possible solutions to all this - both big and small. This is the current question that consumes me and one that I’ll be returning to in various guises in successive blogs. Many that I’ll share will be gleaned from people smarter than me who have spent careers thinking about these challenges but I hope to throw a few of my own in and do please contact me if you want to be part of a broader ‘Antidoter’ conversation. I am aggregating together a collective of people motivated by these questions to brainstorm solutions with. Hit me up on twitter or instagram if you’re interested in getting involved and do subscribe here to receive Pt 2 to your inbox.
I’ll leave you for now one of the many positive, fascinating nuggets from the book- did you know that post traumatic growth is actually much more prevalent than post-traumatic stress? Most people mistakenly believe that exposure to a bad event will have a negative, lasting impact on them …and yet 80% of people that undergo trauma ultimately find the experience has made them stronger, wiser, more tolerant, understanding and a ‘better person’.
We are more resilient than we think. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Doomsayers.
Now read Antidoters Assemble: Part 2: Stop Shouting, Get Curious
Data sources:
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06838/SN06838.pdf