If TOA existed in 2010, I would have written quite a few posts about Gregg Easterbrook's work. I was a regular reader of his 'Tuesday Morning Quarterback' column for ESPN Page 2, which appealed to me mostly because it mocked coaches who kicked instead of going for it on fourth down, and I eventually dug into his books. You could say his unique combination of interests - economics, spirituality, the environment, helmet football - along with a nonnegotiable aversion to alarmism was perfectly suited to me; I suppose it still does, though I've drifted from his work in recent years.
It's Better Than It Looks by Gregg Easterbrook (March 2019)
The premise of this 2018 release is that despite the world's endless insistence on predicting doom around every corner, a closer examination of the underlying indicators recommends a more optimistic view. It's a challenging premise for many to accept, which is understandable - it's like being asked to walk upstream against the roaring current of fatalism, cynicism, and pessimism sent down from the high peaks of big news and social media. The book is necessarily supported by an endless string of facts and figures, the most interesting of which I've collected in my book notes, but beyond the statistics is a much simpler observation about our time on this planet - it's certainly been far worse than it is now.
Of course, such a conclusion is almost always reached at scale, which alleviates our natural concern for individuals by forcing them to disappear into aggregates. If we present a statistic to someone concerned about poverty - such as how extreme poverty has fallen from 37% to 10% worldwide since 1990 - we are not going to change that person's perspective if the concern is with those remaining 10%, which I will remind you represents over half a billion people. It goes the same way in the context of disease - if I am struggling with COVID, it doesn't matter that I don't have smallpox - or crime - if my neighbor feels unsafe, it doesn't matter that Boston is much safer than it was fifty years ago.
I suppose this brings me to some kind of hypothesis about this book - your reaction will reveal something about you. Does it matter that history almost assures our future to be better than the present, as it has been the case for many decades? A friend once noted that he always retained a certain skepticism about the kind of spirituality that encouraged followers to let go, to let things be, to accept life for what it is - a healthy idea, he said, but didn't it subtly encourage complacency and inaction? I wonder what we would make of Easterbrook pointing out that The Green Revolution has increased the planet's food production to where some suggest we can feed between 10 and 20 billion people. One way to see the statistic is to cite it as confirmation that life is indeed "better than it looks", at least in contrast to those who worry about our ability to feed the entire world. But this would ignore another reality, which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, that people continue to battle hunger worldwide despite our alleged "capacity" to feed 20 billion people.
The most valuable conclusion a reader could take from this work is that we are perhaps right to be worried, but we worry about the wrong details. Some organizations estimate malnutrition causes half of all deaths in children under the age of five each year, so when we worry about hunger we should stop worrying about supply and, as Easterbrook points out, turn our concerns toward the politics that confuse and obstruct distribution. When we worry about disease or climate change, we should not worry about individuals and their mostly symbolic gestures, but rather concern ourselves with the large corporations that delay change and hoard resources just to boost stock prices. Easterbrook's title implies that the problems we see are hardly worthy of the concern we lavish upon them; my recommendation is to keep looking until we find the real issues.
TOA Rating: Three out of four (but that's before the curve, or grade inflation)
