The following submission statement was provided by /u/tonymmorley:

>"The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time."

Want to learn more about progress studies? Dive into "The Progress Dashboard" for heaps of resources.

Building a better future for humanity requires understanding that civilization has made enormous progress over the last 200 years. Child mortality fell from 40% to 3.7% in 200 years, and life expectancy and average global wealth have grown enormously. We can't build a better future for civilization without understanding human progress, while also keeping at the forefront of the mind, "progress forward isn't progress completed."

To quote Hans Rosling in his seminal 2018 book Factfulness,

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"The solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. It would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt. It would make things more exciting, but maybe even less healthy. A solution that works for me is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time.
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It seems that when we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying “don’t worry, relax” or even “look away.” But when I say things are getting better, I am not saying those things at all. I am certainly not advocating looking away from the terrible problems in the world. I am saying that things can be both bad and better. Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen.
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After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world."

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yvske7/the_world_is_awful_the_world_is_much_better_the/iwfxkmu/