Dangerous To Know
The world could be getting more dangerous. But our views on it are unchanging.
I’ve been thinking about risks and danger lately. The news offers plenty of stimulus for this.
A few weeks ago a presidential candidate in Ecuador was assassinated, while in America, the leading presidential candidate for the 2024 election might be in jail by the time votes are cast. In Europe, the war in Ukraine remains both entrenched and unstable – about to mark its 18 month anniversary just a few weeks after the Russian leadership faced down a mutiny from the Wagner militia.
There’s been a coup in Niger and the situation in Israel and Palestine is particularly volatile after the election of new ruling coalition in the Knesset. The Taliban are back in control in Afghanistan, while US and European relations with China are increasingly frosty. On the other hand, the world is boiling: record temperatures across Southern and Eastern Europe, wildfires in Canada and the US. It’s increasingly difficult to get home insurance in California, partly because the models say that your house has a better than even chance of being destroyed by extreme weather.
Closer to home, a nurse has just been sentenced to a whole life term for murdering seven infants, and attempting to murder six more. The economy is stuttering and interest rates are rising. The personal details of 10,000 police offices and staff in Northern Ireland were leaked a few weeks ago. Across the UK, NHS waiting lists continue to rise while public services creak at the seams. It’s never a good time to fall ill, or lose your job, but this feels like a particularly bad time.
The world feels dangerous, and makes us feel vulnerable. In surveys we’ve conducted so far in 2023, around three-quarters of the UK population say that the world is a more dangerous place than it used to be.
So far, so expected (having just re-read the opening few paragraphs I’m surprised it isn’t higher). But we aren’t any more likely to think the world is dangerous today than we were a few years ago, or last decade.
This is slightly surprising. Was the pandemic – in which a theoretical danger became an actual danger – really no scarier than the very non-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019? There’s actually, remarkably, a small drop in 2020. Has the presence of war and risk of nuclear catastrophe in Eastern Europe not moved the dial on consumer anxiety? Do stories, like this one, about ambulances taking more than an hour to arrive not (dangerously) quicken the pulse?
The Doomsday Clock is currently set just 90 seconds from midnight – up from a breezy five minutes in 2012. But consumers, apparently, feel no more worried about the world than they did back then.
What does this mean?
There’s something paradoxical about our relationship with danger in the world. On one hand, most of us are perpetually worried about the risks the world poses, and we’re ready to believe that we’ve got it particularly bad right now. This is known as Mean World Syndrome, and tallies with other trends we see in nostalgia (longing for a golden age, when life was better and simpler) and optimism (many of us feel that life is getting worse and will continue to get worse).
But at the same time, we don’t react to big, scary global events in the way you’d expect us to. In the last few years, according to these data, we’ve taken a global pandemic, war in Europe and double digit inflation in stride. Crisis, what crisis?
One explanation for this is that we’re constantly resetting our priors. We’re through the pandemic, so it doesn’t seem so scary in the rear view mirror, and for some people doesn’t contribute to our fear of the world today. In a sense, it’s one in, one out for worries. There’s enough bad news to keep the base level high, but our capacity for fretting is only so high. Perhaps part of this resetting is that terrible, scary things drift from view, or are forgotten about. It’s for this reason that I’d be confident that the recent events in the UK don’t have any long term impact on trust in health professionals. Trust in doctors and nurses has remained high for decades, through Beverley Allitt and Harold Shipman, Colin Norris and Victorino Chua.
Another explanation is that we continually offer ourselves reassurance. Or at least, some of us do. During the early stages of the pandemic, boosterism was being issued daily from Downing Street – reminding us of the gravity of the situation but also that we’d flatten the curve and beat the virus back within 12 weeks. There was early optimism about vaccines and gratitude that weathering a pandemic in 2020 – with access to online entertainment, work and shops – was a decent time in human history to endure a lockdown.
Overall, the chart above is a useful reminder that while we might have very good reason to see the world as more dangerous1 – or even uniquely dangerous – consumers only partially agree. The next scary thing won’t make people more anxious about the world, it’ll just help keep them as anxious as they are at the moment.
Actually, I don’t think the world is a more dangerous place than it used to be. People (mostly) live longer, the proportion living in poverty around the world has dropped sharply and in many countries around the world, violent crime is down. We can make a vaccine for a novel coronavirus in less than a year. People wear seatbelts in cars and go through scanners at airport security. The opening paragraphs of this piece are the argument for the statement, but I’d rather be alive now than any other time in history.