Over the years. Can you see the western middle class so to speak increased their income from zero percent to 10 percent reedit but theres another graph as well, the red line. In the redline, compensates for Something Else. That population growth was bigger in poor countries and rich countries which means a lot of people took a larger part of every percent and it means that they, especially incomes of the population growth in asia, pushed the western middle class from the lower percentile into the higher so what used to be the 80th and 90th percentile of western middleclass people were replaced by the richest people in china. And they are still poor, some 60 percent as rich as the western middle classes which means it looks like its Income Growth is coming down in those areas as well but thats more an illusion that comes from population growth. If you keep population growth, if you pretend the population is stable over these years, the elephant wrath shifts to the redline instead and then its not the zero percent Income Growth, its not a 10 percent Income Growth, its 25 percent Income Growth to the 80th and 90th percentile. But then Something Else interesting happens when you look at the raw data. There are countries that really stagnated or even saw a reduction in incomes for those 20 years. Japan and excommunist countries like bulgaria and they made more progress over 2008 but thats not relevant to this graph because it only goes until 2008. So thats true that it happens but that is not what the western middle classes with. They dont live in eastern europe, they dont live in japan. If you adjust for that as well and you look at a new version of the elephant graph, you can see that a constant population with constant countries and you accept japan and communist countries, we have the redline where the percentage that we talk about is the western middleclass increase their incomes by some 40 percent over these 20 years. We dont need to bother about the yellow as well. So there has to be an increased in incomes in western countries for western middleclass as well but i also have to say the most important thing, the most important thing isnot what you have in your wallet but what you can buy. Its the kind of purchasing power, the kind of technology at your disposal is much more than income and weve seen progress from many other areas. Cleaner air , since the 1970s weve seen more than half the leading pollutants that affect your lungs, your forests, your rivers. You have to crime rates, homicide rates have been cut in half since 1980 including Better Technology and another 10 years of life expectancy. If thats the losers of globalization, then we need to reconsider what we mean by a loser. What is progress . What does it mean . To me, it means we can do more things today that we could before. We know more things and are able to create more things and thats the great thing that as robert highline put it. Progress is not made by early risers, its made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. We do more things with the resources that are at our disposal. We can solve more problems, we can deal with more of our problems. We cansatisfy more of our ambitions. And we do that by exploring, thereby finding new, better knowledge about how the world works and not just exploring but also experimenting with those ideas. Producing new innovation technology, artificial fertilizers, better crops, container shipping that makes it possible to exchange all those but its not just that we explore and experiment but its also that we exchange the results of this. Trade, communication, movement over borders which means we can use knowledge that we do not have ourselves. Exploration, experimentation and exchange which means that we need freedom. Freedom to think, freedom to be innovative, freedom to implement your ideas and experiment and freedom to trade across borders. We need liberty so its no coincidence this began to happen in Northern Europe and western europe and north america and began to happen in china, asia, vietnam after aid began to open up their economy. More people than ever can now contribute to this progress because they have access to more knowledge than ever and they are freer than ever to experiment with those ideas and exchange them with other people. The grand old man of development put it , the human being, the human brain is the ultimate vehicle. And thats also something thats reproducible. The human brain is pleasantly reproducible. Its a beautiful thing when it happens between consenting adults. But the problem is that almost no one believes this. Lets go back to this graph about Human Progress since 1990 in all those areas and dimensions. I posted this on twitter to tell world outlook, this is the world in one graph. Why are we complaining . This is what happens to the world. And one of the firstresponses i got was this. Someone retweeted this and said my god, this is a started starling graph confirming my hell in a hand basket feeling. She read the graph upside down. She thought that Child Mortality had doubled, that pollution, that illiteracy had doubled around the world and i asked her, how did you get that impression . She responded , i do pay close attention to the news. Consider the media. I followwhat happens in the world, i read about the floods, the war, the famine and so on and thats true. That is something thathappens but it also means that she misses out on the great press around the world. So as miriam put it, all the gallops show that people are almost by nature pessimistic. 60 percent of americans think that the world is becoming a better place. More people believe in ghosts and ufos than progress. Mobile poverty had almost half that remain the same the past 20 years. Only five percent of americans said it hit half and its actually had more than half. Most polls said it was stable or had doubled. My guessing random, you would pick the answer out of three choices far more often which means that you cannot call it ignorance if you cant beat a random choice. We must have inaccurate assumptions of the world based on some misleading or outdatedinformation. And as this british woman said, most people get it from the media. From the headlines, from the breaking news. I think this illustration is from the biggest newspaper, i love that headline because it says total payouts everywhere. And we had some bad weather and some traffic after thousands of people were stuck at airports and it was total chaos everywhere. Because they are plane accident news, 40 million flights landing safely every year. The fact that we have seen since the 1970s and increase in the number of passengers tenfold and yet the number of accidents and fatalities has half. Thats not news, thats statistics. Thats something we dont care about and in a way thats a good thing. If there were news like planes landing safely that would mean it was a strange occurrence, it wouldnt be news. The problem is when we hear about those accidents and disasters, then we think this is the only thing that goes on in the world. Its made the news recently that tens of thousands of people in Northern Nigeria are written by chronic malnourishment and thats correct. That happens. We need to know about that. But i have never read a story about the fact that 8 billion nigerians were liberated from chronic undernourishment over the last 25 years because thats not the kind of choking, instantaneous, horrific thing that makes the news. Its not really about the media. Its not the journalists fault that news is bad because when the news is not there, we invent stories, rumors that are even worse. It seems like we are to blame , the readers and thats what all the journalists tell me as well when i asked them. It doesnt sell, good news. We need something dramatic and shocking to give to sell the news. And i think this is because we are genetically predisposed to pay more attention to bad. Bad is stronger than good because bad it could be a threat to our survival. Our hunters and gatherers who were a bit more worried who didnt look anxiously towards the horizon, where there might be predators, they probably survived more often than others. They passed on their genes to us but also their threat knowledge and their attention to all the bad things that could go wrong in the world. Now, add to this another factor. The fact that we are by nature nostalgic. We tend to think that the good old days were in another era, a previous era. In ourchildhood or even before this. These are some themes from a brilliant french movie in 1959, love bill knew we about a man who goes back in time to the good old days where everything was wonderful. But then hes there and he thinks its pretty good but then he meets an old man who tells him all, you should have been there when i was young, life was much better and he travels back in time to that era and its okay, but an old man tells him no, you should have been there in that era when i grew up. And he travels back to that time as well and he goes through andnostalgia is always there. Virtually every culture past and present has believed men and women are not up tothe standards of their parents and forebears. And if you havent seen this film you might recognize 1920s paris where we use the same kind of story to show us that we always think and everybody has always thought that the good old old days were in days past. Interestingly, when i ask people about those good old days, when were they . If this is not the golden era, whenwas society at its most harmonious . They most often happen to mention the era when they grew up. People from my generation say its the 1980s. The baby boom generation often say its the 1950s. And the most common one i got is that this nostalgia is a result of the baby boomer generation retiring and looking back to good old days in the 1950. Where might be that great after all where in old age that you were poor. Where we had racial segregation in the United States, where we had the threat of immediate nuclear annihilation. But we know that we solve those problems. We know we got through those bad old days. So now we can back to them, this era when we grew up when things were exciting because we were young and the future was full of promise and at the same time, we feel secure because our parents were good and they paid the bills and they were worried about all the bad things that could happen to their kids. As we grow up, as we become parents, we begin to think that this is much more difficult nowadays to be much more simple and this is what herman thought as well, that often we confuse a certain shift, a change in ourselves, taking on new responsibilities, perhaps some physical decay and we confuse that with the world and think that this goes on everywhere. So if we have that aesthetic programming where we pay more attention than to everything bad that happens and could happen in the future and we think the good old days are behind usand you add another factor. A new factor. Global media. Global media, 24 hours a day media that looks at everything around the world. Then we have more bad things to take into consideration because even though homicide rates have declined, theres always a serial murderer on the loose somewhere. Even though we have international wars, theres always a war going on somewhere and those bad things will always dominate the news even though the risk of being killed in a Natural Disaster has declined by almost 99 percent over the last 100 years, there are always people dying in a Natural Disaster and thats the news cycle everywhere and we get the impression that this is an everyday occurrence for most people around the world. And that social media, twitter, facebook, instagram and all those places where anyone could add their particular perspective on the world. What do you share with people your self on the platforms . It happens that we share some good news. Most often something horrific, something dramatic, something shocking. Human suffering is not news but Television Cameras are and that means we can see anything that goes wrong anywhere in the world instantaneously which is why it happens before we know whether people will survive or not and that triggers our fear, it triggers our fight or flight hormones and it makes us care about the world. What do i share on social media . Often its some weirdo that ive never heard of in a city with a name i cant even pronounce but its something stupid. Then i think i have to tell people about this thing and everybody does the same thing. We wake up in the morning and hear about all those weirdos, all those people doing bad things everywhere and we think most people are like that. Theyre not and thats why we are sharing, because its strange, a bizarre occurrence. So unfortunately, i think this is has accelerated with the rise of social media. At an accelerating pace, we Pay Attention to all those bad things and get the impression that the world is falling apart. Even though all the objective data proves otherwise. Thats dangerous. Its dangerous politically. As donald trump put it when he first made his ambition to run for president of the United States, this country is a hellhole and we are going down fast. Morning in america it aint anymore. And that changes perspective on the world. If you look at trumps vote, compared to 50 years ago, life in the us is worse. 75 percent of his voters say that but so does Bernie Sanders. Its the same thing among the leftist populace. They also think this country is a hellhole, partly for different reasons. Its inequality, its risingsea levels, Global Warming. Empirical evidence says the same thing only in full sentences. She tells us that yes, you are angry, you should be angry because everything is awful and only i can make things right. And this is the problem. Fear is the health of the state. Political forces can always stifle progress. They can block the technology, they can block trade if they like. You know the old joke, if the opposite is pro is con, then what is the opposite of progress . I yes. That has always happened and in every election season we say the same thing. You threaten people that if the other guy wins, the water taps will run dry, the sun will not set tomorrow but this is news, the sense that everything is already awful in the us. And in other places. The world is dangerous. It is dangerous and if its dangerous, if the world is falling apart, we need a strong man or a strong woman. If a martian from mars tried to understand what goes on in planet earth by listening to donald trump or Bernie Sanders or marine the pen in france, he would think that everything is on fire on planet earth. Because they only talk like violence is spiraling out of control. Inequality, poverty, rising everywhere. Everything is dangerous and if everything is dangerous, we have to protect what little we have and we need that strong person, that Big Government that helps us. People if left to their own devices create a lot of progress. In that case, we can have more freedom and open economies because we will see more progress in the future but if we think that people left to their own devices are free to do things and trade and move, if we think they create chaos, chaos everywhere, then we need those strongmen who will take care of all of us. In social psychology there is a discussion about an authoritarian reef, people like jonathan hite, they pointed out that authoritarianism which is kind of a loaded term but we can say some kind of statism, some sort of interest in blocking peoples freedom, blocking globalization, controlling people rather than setting them free, that kind of authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is more like a redisposition that a lot of people have and it, when people get their sense that the threats, when they have the sense that their society, that people like them, that country is being threatened. By internal forces or by chaos, that dynamic sets in. When people read fake stories about things going wrong in society, they become more authoritarian in other spheres. On other questions that are not related at all to the very thing that went wrong. Which means that we all sort of got in this protective mode when we think that things are going wrong. If you only seek order and horrible people, do you wake up and listen to breaking news and find out there are only weirdos out there and theyre out for your way of life, you become more authoritarian, more statist and you oppose or vote for the strongman or the Big Government. I wrote this book to sum up not out of complacency, not as a way of telling people that everything is in order, we dont have to bother with things anymore, lets go home for a quiet night. I wrote this book because im worried about this progress because we cannot take it for granted. It didnt happen automatically by itself. It happened because people were given more freedom to explore, to experiment and to exchange the results of that. If we have Political Forces in power that block those freedoms, those individual liberties, those Economic Freedoms, we willsee less freedom, less progress in the future so we have something to fear. And that is fear itself and the risk that fear will become a selffulfilling prophecy, it will be self generated. If we think there are only problems out there, only stagnation and we vote against reform, new technologies for free trade reform that should take place create more progress and we see more stagnation and we will be more fearful in the future. It will be more difficult to pursue the reforms we need to make progress. It could happen. We can rock progress like that. It happened before, it can definitely happen again, its bad for mankind but more than that, its a boring way to spend your life. To stand in the way of other peoples progress so to conclude, another one of my intellectual heroes, captain james t kirk of the Starship Enterprise from the United Federation of planets. Only a fool stands in the way of Human Progress. [applause] thank you very much johan. I was hoping to have it on sale and for reasons that i shall apologize for, its not on sale. They make wonderful presents, both of them for the upcoming holiday. Ron bailey is an awardwinning science correspondent for reason magazine and reason. Com. He writes the wee