Is the world actually more better off than the dumpster fire the news and social media would have us believe? Journalist and an American Academy of Arts and Science academic Gregg Easterbrook argues that we should be more optimistic rather than pessimistic about the state of affairs today. In his latest work It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear, he posits that major indicators in environmental and human health, pollution, conflict and democracy today are overall positive and continuously improving despite serious challenges humanity faces, such as the looming menaces of potential nuclear war and climate change.
Making a case against what Easterbrook terms the increasingly toxic "declinism" of our times, the collective anxiety that the world is in a tailspin, Part 1 first guides readers through the major issues of our time that many fear could be a potential avenue for the end of civilization: agriculture, health, the economy, conflict, technology and democracy (Easterbrook, 2018, p. 210). One by one, Easterbrook makes a case for why such scenarios of apocalypse are unlikely to occur. Starting with agriculture, Easterbrook shows how fossil-fueled Green Revolution technologies like improved fertilizers and irrigation techniques along with genetically engineered crops have "decoupled crop production from acreage," meaning that feeding a projected 12 billion people by 2100 is possible because less land is now needed to produce more food (Easterbrook, 2018, p. 136). In other words, we have enough food to feed ourselves and more. Coupled with reducing food waste and improvements in food distribution, the world can adequately provide for the growing human family.
Most importantly, because food production and overall land use are the cornerstones of civilization, Easterbrook sees the fruits of the Green Revolution as critically important in other important positive trends: reduced conflicts over land as controlling vast swaths of acreage in the past meant wealth and a means to feed one's population; the decline of malnutrition, especially in the developing world; the dramatic reduction in extreme poverty (as of 2015, 10% of the global population still lives in destitution); increased educational prospects; improving lifespans; and overall betterment of living conditions across the board (Easterbrook, 2018, p. 19). The vehicle driving the collective uplifting of the world to Easterbrook is primarily that of market forces, seeing it as the better way to incentivize production and provision of goods and services necessary to modern society, like food, improved medicines, vaccines that help to eradicate or ameliorate the plagues of the past that are communicative diseases (and may also help the spread of democracy in its tendency to reward change, new ideas, and innovation while providing the necessary production base for the defense of free society). This holds true for worrying trends of violence (which have shifted largely from inter-state to intra-state conflicts), environmental problems like climate change and increased resource consumption (i.e. aiding in the more efficient use of resources as populations expand), and technology (for example, the market trend towards ever-safer and more fuel-efficient vehicles and safer and less resource-intensive methods of production).
But isn't laissez-faire economics by itself not a cure-all for society's ills? I had that doubt throughout the book. Easterbrook acknowledges that market failures like increased income inequality, monopolies, and other negative outputs like greenhouse gas pollution still happen and that the system isn't perfect, necessitating some regulation to help guide the world to prosperity and more open, economically-interdependent societies. Nevertheless, I felt in Part 1 that Easterbrook was putting too much stock in the latter, while seeming to gloss over many of the thorny issues that remain today (income inequality, climate change) in favor of seeing civilization as always getting better. In other words, yes, the world isn't so bad and many indices of wellbeing are up and continue to go up, but that doesn't make the remaining issues that less harmful to the people that suffer from them, even if they are as Easterbrook asserts, temporary blips in the upward arc of civilization.
In Part 2, Easterbrook redeems himself on the latter somewhat where he explains why declinism, the opposite of putting on rosy glasses and viewing the world, has become so prevalent and puts forward more detailed policy prescriptions for the challenges raised in Part 1. News flash: this current age of pessimism has come before, but has been augmented by the spread of social media (which can be a great way to spread incorrect and unverifiable information as fact); a tendency of the media to highlight the rare instances of societal downsides; educational trends towards atoning for the past sins of slavery, imperialism and other forms of slaughter and exploitation by emphasizing those past failures without highlighting at the same time the positives of society; increased distrust of a distant Washington; and the twisting of minority group acknowledgement into the claiming by those minorities and co-option of by threatened majorities the "coveted status of victimhood" that can easily turn from being about a legitimate process of achieving reparations to dangerous us-versus-them group-blaming (Easterbrook, 2018, p. 204). Then, this latter collective pessimism can make it that more difficult for people to see the solutions for challenges like climate change, nuclear weapons and income inequality, which to Easterbrook are everything from market-based systems of carbon trading to a Universal Basic Income (UBI), to a heavier emphasis on diplomatic processes like the creation and enforcement of international and bilateral treaties.
Overall, while I did not agree with all of the potential reforms suggested by Easterbrook in It's Better Than It Looks, such as a heavy reliance on a carbon-trading system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without other regulations or enforcement measures, and his rosy view of the magic of market forces (of course, somewhat reined in by regulative reforms, but still somewhat untethered), he makes an overall good point that we all need to take a collective deep breath. Yes, the spread of problems we have facing us today are daunting, but not as illusorily daunting as the constant barrage of negative news and social media accounts would have us believe. Of course, this overcoming of these surmountable, yet intimidating obstacles is possible through (again) a collective rolling-up-of-sleeves and carrying out of plausible reforms that can create the solutions to our problems, or what Franklin Roosevelt termed "great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems" (Easterbrook, 2018, p. 281).
Yes, that quote that Easterbrook leaves the reader with is maddeningly broad and seems like a mere platitude, but it makes sense: the problems we face are complex and require equally complex and creative solutions. But first, we all need to stop an unnecessary degree of collective panic and choose to view the world and its betterment as something worth continuing to fight for.
Works Cited:
Easterbrook, Gregg (2018). It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons For Optimism In An Age of Fear. New York: PublicAffairs.
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