Viewing things as worse when they are getting better

As we move closer to the goal of obviating something we dislike, there is a tendency to invest more in proving how bad the remaining problem is. This is particularly true when we never paid close attention to how to measure the goal in the first place or when we never clarified priorities and trade-offs.

There is a tendency to refocus from first-order impacts to second-order impacts and to make the case that the second-order has a greater impact than the first order. In 1950, there were many forms of first order institutionalized racism, de facto and de jure. Today there is no de jure racism and very little first-order (overt) de facto racism. The focus has shifted from the obvious first-order issues to second-order issues of unconscious racism, racism manifested by unintended systemic design etc. It is indisputable that first order racism was materially deleterious to all concerned in 1950. We tend to treat second-order racism, much less measurable and to some extent therefore much less real, as if it were as consequential as first-order racism. It is not. We have made progress and yet in the noise of our discourse it would seem we have not.

Part of this is perhaps owing to a shift from systemic driven events to events driven by randomness. We have control over systemic events, we do not have control over random events (though we can mitigate them). Of the top twenty systemic events by loss of life in the US (building fires, shipwrecks, explosions, mining disasters, etc.) none of them have happened in the past fifty years. Even among the randomly driven events (tornadoes, floods, forest fires, hurricanes, blizzards, earthquakes, etc.), only three of the largest events by loss of life have occurred in the past fifty years.

Virtually all desirable human goals (such as longevity, health, wealth, education levels, etc.) have dramatically improved in the past fifty years to levels never seen before.

At the same time, virtually all negative outcomes (such as infant mortality, crime, environmental degradation, wars, etc.) have also dramatically declined.

Logically, one would conclude that we are living in a privileged and halcyon period of the human species (as I believe we are) but there is little sense of that in our common forms of shared communication (songs, movies, news reports, popular novels, etc.). In fact the reverse. Things are always painted as getting worse. Why?

It is good to always be striving to improve things but it is also important to maintain a sense of perspective and reality. The more we exaggerate the consequences of second-order issues, the less likely we are to focus on other first-order issues we have not yet tackled and which might have greater consequence. In other words is this simply a function of social inertia? We rally around some set of issues that need resolving. After twenty years we make great progress but instead of then reexamining what are now the top list of things that need fixing, we continue to focus everything on the remaining agenda of the original problems despite the declining return on the effort.