2023: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year (Not)
(Note: A shorter version of this article appeared on wral.com as “2023: A Horrible, Awful, Terrible Year (Not)” on January 4, 2024. You can read that version here.
At least some good news is already here (Unsplash photo by Jon Purdy)
A few years into my time as a television reporter I came up with a brilliant (I thought) idea for a recurring segment. It would be called, simply, “Good News.” The idea would be to feature someone doing something “good” once a night on our news show. Not the kind of fluff you might normally see during the final 30 seconds of a show (think dogs water-skiing - what producers call “the kicker”), but stories about politicians or bureaucrats or normal people pulling off a positive change; nonprofits solving a big problem in a new way; statistics showing things were getting better in an important area.
The idea went nowhere. There was an obvious reason. The phrase, “if it bleeds, it leads” had recently been invented to summarize one of our most gruesome tendencies – we pay more attention to bad news than good.
We care more, spend more time with, and watch more carefully and more frequently if news is negative. As an added bonus, bad news is also generally cheaper to cover – it doesn’t take much effort to write a basic story about a car crash or murder.
In our current era of online news we’ve refined the bleeding theory to a bloody art. Online ad purveyors, what Talbot Brewer calls the “attention brokers,” have learned that bad news gets more clicks than good news. And academics have validated their findings: in an article published in Nature Human Behaviour last year, Claire Robertson and her co-authors found that each additional negative word added to a headline increased the clickthrough rate by 2.3% (I’m testing this out with this post’s headline).
From our earliest days we find it easier to see the negative than the positive (Unsplash photo by Zachary Kadolph)
There’s something in us that predisposes us to get more excited about the negative over the positive: already at one-year-old we pay more attention to adults showing negative emotion (maybe because it’s more important to survival to react to threats than bribes); researcher Dr. Barbara Fredrickson from UNC-Chapel Hill has discovered that as adults it takes three positive emotional experiences to outweigh one negative; John Gottman finds we focus more on one negative marital interaction than on five positive ones. Think back on job reviews you may have gotten. Which do you remember more: the praise or the criticism? Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson summarizes our negativity bias this way: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but like Teflon for positive ones.”
I mention all this because I am having so much trouble squaring the difference between what people think is going on in the world with crime, the economy and disease, and what the data shows is actually happening.
The latest Gallup Poll of Americans shows 53% of Americans think crime is either an “extremely” or “moderately” serious problem in the country; 77% think crime rates are increasing. In fact, in 2023, in almost every major category – rape, aggravated assault, robbery -- crime went down. The homicide rate dropped by nearly 13%, the biggest year-to-year decline on record and half the rate in 1991.
Similarly, an October AP poll finds that 78% of Americans think the country is going in “the wrong direction.” But holy smokes: on the economic front, unemployment has been below what I was taught was “full employment” (4%) for 25 straight months, the longest such run since the 60’s. The labor force participation rate is going up (a turnaround from earlier in 2023) as we added more than 2.7 million jobs for the third straight year. Inflation-adjusted average wages have risen faster than inflation between October 2019 and November 2023. This past year the S&P was up 24%; the NASDAQ 43%. Inflation is down to an annual rate of 3.1%. Our GDP in 2023 grew at an annual rate of 4.9%, the kind of numbers China used to put up. And a lot of the projections for 2024 are positive as well. Hard to see how any of that is the “wrong direction.”
Is the negativity just a US thing? Nope. Some 63% of people in a global survey believe their country is going in the “wrong direction.”
What are they worried about? The top four worries – inflation, crime, poverty and unemployment – are actually (slightly) improving in most of the world. And other indicators are better than ever in our history. In a recent column, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff made the case that this past year was “maybe the best one yet for humanity.” Here are a few things he noted:
· We have NEVER had such a low percentage of the world in extreme poverty – on average of 100,000 people a day are emerging from extreme poverty;
· We have NEVER had such a low rate of child mortality – a million fewer children died before age 5 in 2023 than died in 2016;
· We are on the verge of completely eradicating two catastrophic diseases, polio and Guinea worm disease and making real progress on sickle cell disease, Alzheimers, and obesity.
In my reporter days, I know exactly what I would have done with the information above: 1) I would find people who could blame politics or social media for our misunderstandings (I would have them on speed dial, of course); 2) I would find the exceptions to the positive data that are negative (murders were up last year in Wake County, where I live and conditions are horrible in Syria, Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, etc.); or 3) I would focus on indicators other than crime, the economy, or health (“hey, let’s talk about war, global warming or the deficit!”), or just remind people that poverty, disease and child mortality are still too high. There is always a ready supply of bad news.
There are some bright spots as 2024 gets underway… if you look for them.(Unsplash photo by Helena Lopes)
As a recovering reporter, I am hoping you’ll join me in taking a moment at the start of the year to appreciate some good news about this world that we live in. Flawed and imperfect, facing all sorts of challenges, but trending better in more ways than we think. Then we can get back to work making 2024 the best yet.
-Leslie
Notes:
Talbot Brewer’s excellent article on “attention brokers”: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/theological-variations/articles/the-great-malformation
Scientific analysis of influence of negative words on clickthrough rates: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
12-month-olds attend more to negative caregiver emotions than positive: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0012-1649.43.1.54
Fredrickson on emotional interactions: https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/barb-fredrickson/#:~:text=In%20her%202009%20book%2C%20Positivity,to%20as%20the%20Losada%20Ratio).
Gottman on marital interactions: https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/
Rick Hanson’s website: https://rickhanson.com See June 2015 blogpost.
November 2023 poll on people’s attitudes toward crime in the US: https://news.gallup.com/poll/544442/americans-crime-problem-serious.aspx
Almost all crime rates down in 2023: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/28/us-murder-violent-crime-rates-drop
Record decline in murder rate in 2023: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-murder-rate-dropped-by-13-percent-in-2023
Wrong direction poll, October 2023:
https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Topline-Oct2023-Biden.pdf
Job growth in 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/05/business/jobs-report-december-economy?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare#a-monthly-gain-of-175000-is-foreseen-with-a-slight-uptick-in-unemployment
Wages vs inflation: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20workers%20receiving,2023%20to%20pre%2Dpandemic%20levels&text=Line%20graph%20showing%20that%2040,of%20the%20pre%2Dpandemic%20average and https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-purchasing-power-of-american-households#:~:text=Real%20Wages%20Across%20the%20Income%20Distribution&text=As%20a%20result%2C%20earnings%20have,percent%20between%202019%20and%202023.
Stock performance 2023: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stock-market-up-24-percent-2023-rally/#textThe20benchmark20S26P2050020indexincluding20Nvidia2C20Amazon20and20Microsoft
Partial summary of 2023 economic indicators: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/12/19/ten-charts-that-explain-the-u-s-economy-in-2023/
2024 economic projections: https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/expansion-continues-in-2024.html
IPSOS poll on global optimism: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-07/Global%20Report%20-%20What%20Worries%20the%20World%20Jul%2023-WEB.pdf
A very good year for the world: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/opinion/2023-humanity-poverty-growth.html
Countries in crisis: https://concernusa.org/news/worlds-worst-humanitarian-crises/