CHAPTER 7 HOW THE COMPARISONS PEOPLE MAKE AFFECT THEIR BELIEFS ABOUT WHETHER THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER OR WORSE Now we turn to the first of the internal psychological mechanisms that affect what people believe in connection with the information they receive from outside them: specifically, the cognitive mechanism of the comparisons that people make as affected by the continuing increase of their expectations. *** The evidence is overwhelming - the bet offered in the introduction dramatizes the facts - a trend is toward the material conditions of life getting better rather than worse. Why, then, do people have a negative perception about trends in environment and resources despite the positive trends? An important source of the belief that things are going poorly, and that the future outlook is gloomy, surely is the reference point for the comparisons that a person makes. Wise people have written for thousands of years that whether a person feels happy or sad depends in considerable part on the benchmark against which one compares beliefs about the current state of affairs. So important is this element in our mood that it is the key element in psychological depression<1>. The choice of benchmark for comparison is seldom forced on us by the world, but rather is mainly within our control. The development of the personal computer and people's feelings about it illustrates the point. People commonly are delighted with their first computer because they immediately see how much it eases their work. But we quickly take the computer for granted, and even become dissatisfied that it does not work even faster. A delay of a few seconds becomes irksome, even as the computer is saving hours or days compared to the pre-computer situation. The old programs feel "clunky." The result is a continual desire for faster and faster computers, bigger and bigger hard drives, more worksaving utilities, and ever-fancier refinements on the programs we use. Because of these rising expectations and heightened desires, some people wind up no happier in their work than before they had computers. Another example: An obstetrician in Washington, D.C. announced in 1990 that he was quitting the practice of obstetrics because (for the second time) a prospective mother had asked of him the impossible - that he guarantee her a perfect baby. In years past, when life in general, and childbearing in particular, were so much more risky than now, no woman would have even thought of such a request. But now women expect and demand complete safety and flawless offspring. This shows how quickly we take for granted an improvement in our lives, and how we compare other states of affairs to the new and improved state, rather than the state of affairs in the more distant past. And if our prospects are not better than the newly improved state, we grouse. This psychological mechanism of rising expectations explains much about people's thinking about population, resources, and the environment. A skater who has won the Olympic championship in the past may become very sad about only achieving second place this time<2>, showing how our feelings depend upon our expectations, and our expectations change as a result of our experiences rather than depending only on fixed values and attitudes. This shift in expectations is also shown in the weak (though not insignificant) relationship between income and happiness (Easterlin, Simon). It is also relevant that persons who win bronze medals in the Olympics (third place) have been found [give cite] to be in better spirits that people who win silver medals (second place); the third-placers apparently compare themselves to not winning at all whereas the second-placers compare themselves to winning the gold medal. The public demands an ever-increasing purity of air and water, which is certainly a good thing. But a judgment that our air and water now are "dirty" and "polluted," is not reasonable when compared with the terrible pollutions that were banished in the past century or so - the typhoid fever that polluted even the Hudson River at New York, the smallpox that humanity has finally pursued to the ends of the earth and apparently eradicated, the dysentery and cholera that distressed and killed people all over the world as it still does in Asia and Africa, the plagues and other epidemics that harm us much less than in generations past, or not at all. Not only are we in the rich countries free of malaria (largely due to our intensive occupation of the land; see Simon, 1994? chapter 00), but even the mosquitoes that only cause itches with their bites are now so few in many affluent urban areas that people no longer need window screens for their homes, and can plan garden parties at dusk. It is a proof of our extraordinary success in healing the earth that the horrors of the past, that were transmitted by filthy air and water, are no longer even thought of as pollutions. Now that we have largely overcome humanity's historic enemies - wild animals, hunger, epidemic disease, heat and cold - we worry about a large new class of phenomena in the environment and in society. The following saying expresses this idea: No food, one problem; plenty of food, many problems. Apparently it is built into our mental systems that no matter how good things become, our aspiration level rises so that our anxiety level declines hardly at all, and we focus on ever- smaller actual dangers. Parents manage to worry about their kids' health and safety even though the mortality of children is spectacularly less than in prior decades and centuries. And orthodox Jews and Muslims in the United States continue to worry about whether their food is ritually pure even though the protections against ritual contamination are remarkably better than in the past. Once upon a time orthodox Jews said that "A Jew eats a small pig every year without knowing it." Nowadays, with plastic wrapping at the manufacturer, and the microscopic examination techniques of modern science, the level of purity is much higher than in the past. But the level of concern does not seem to abate. The choice of comparison one makes always is crucial. It usually makes sense to compare our present state of affairs with how it was before. This is the comparison that is usually relevant for policy purposes because it measures our progress. But many private and public discussions instead compare a present state of one group to the present state of other groups, as a supposed measure of "equity," or as the basis for indignation and righteousness, or to support their political positions. Others compare the actual situation to the best possible, or to ideal purity, ostensibly to motivate improvement. A typical front-page story from The Washington Post (July 5, 1991) does both; it headlines a complaint of blacks that a nearby county "Isn't Drawing Upscale Stores," and the caption under a picture says "Prince George's resident Howard Stone is angered by the shortage of upscale retail stores in his community." (Yes, that was on the front page.) This issue is very different from the sorts of problems that most of humanity has faced throughout most of its history, the sorts of problems that are addressed in this book. Many events that on first reaction people tend to consider bad because of an intergroup comparison have more good than bad about them. And if we act on that first negative reaction instead of a balanced assessment, we risk making unsound social decisions. Consider this example: Is the trend of black infant mortality encouraging? I've asked this question of many audiences, both laypeople and professionals--even demographers. Almost everyone's reaction in the United States is that black infant mortality is a bad situation. But look at Figure 00, showing infant mortality by race in the United States since 1915. White infant mortality in 1915 was almost 100 deaths per 1000 births, and black infant mortality was fully 180 deaths per 1000 births. Both rates are horrifying. And the rates were even worse in earlier years in some places--up to 300 or 400 deaths per thousand births. Nowadays, white infant mortality is about nine per thousand, and black infant mortality is about 18 per thousand. Of course it is bad that mortality is higher for blacks than for whites. But should we not be mainly impressed by the tremendous improvement for both races--rates falling to about ten percent of what they were--with the black rate coming ever closer to the white rate? Is not this extraordinary improvement for the entire population the most important story--and a most happy story? Yet the press gives us the impression that we should be mainly distressed about the state of black infant mortality. Figure 00 Someone said to Voltaire, "Life is hard." Voltaire replied, "Compared to what?" Every evaluation requires that we make some comparison. The comparisons one chooses are decisive in the judgments one makes about whether things are getting better or worse. (Here we have the old joke. Woman 1: "How is your husband?" Woman 2: "Compared to what?" Or in another version, "Compared to whom?") We cause ourselves lots of grief by the comparisons we make. We fail to enjoy our good fortune. In a very poor largely-His- panic town of New Mexico this sign was in front of a ramshackle church: "The proper attitude is gratitude." Yet the more we really have to be grateful for, it seems, the less grateful and the more dissatisfied we become - the phenomenon noted by the philosophers of all ages. Instead of gratitude, our attitude is "What have you done for me lately?" Here I offer a saying from a football coach's wall: "Attitude is a matter of choice." This mental quirk has consequences beyond keeping us from enjoying our improved life as much as we might. It also leads to the call for government to "fix" the supposedly bad conditions. And these calls for more government, predicated on the assertion that things have been getting worse when in fact they have been getting better, are likely to lead to fixing what ain't broke, and causing trouble thereby. One of the problems in understanding modern life are the implicit comparisons to the past (often a non-existent past) that people often make. We imagine Africa as people swinging from the trees like Tarzan, pre-Columbus North America as native Americans sitting around campfires and growing up to tall strong adulthood on plentiful organically grown pesticide-free food, never suffering the difficulties of adolescence; the U. S. Middle West as a fertile area where people needed to do no more than throw seeds upon the ground for there to be bountiful harvests; Europeans spending most of their time dancing around the Maypole and only rarely having to pull a forelock in respect to some authority; almost no one dying before old age, death being sudden and painless; and micro-organism diseases such as tuberculosis and plague being mere romantic interludes suffered by a few artists. But these faulty comparisons are not inevitable. You can train yourself to reflect on the comparison between what you have and what you had in the past, rather than on between what you have and what you might have, or what others have. I get enormous pleasure from having an alarm clock with a snooze bar so that I can be awakened, hit the bar, and grab another 9 minutes of lovely sleep. I keep in mind how it was to work without a computer and a copy machine. And I remember how Oliver Wendell Holmes carried in a satchel the manuscript of his first book with him to every social engagement, for fear of losing it in a fire while he was away. Nor was this an imagined fear; at least one author lost forever the only copy of his novel on the New York subway. Copy machines and electronic copy relieve authors of this nightmare. If one does not reflect on comparisons with how things used to be, and instead one focuses on some particular phenomenon which has temporarily gotten worse, or spends one's time thinking about politics or relative poverty where there are by definition as many losers or winners and where some sordidness is an inevitable outcome of our human nature, then one will fail to see all the long-term good news about the material conditions of life. Consider the data in various countries in various years asking people how happy they are. The distribution of poll results in any year is relatively independent of how rich the country is, or compared to itself in other years, or compared to other countries (though there is some slight positive association with income). Apparently individuals' benchmarks move in such a fashion that people stay in much the same relationship to their personal benchmarks. As to why there is a distribution among individuals, one might just as well put it down to genetic and/or early influences as to anything else. Some Comparisons Made While Jogging Through San Francisco Jogging and walking through the beautiful streets and extraordinary modern buildings of downtown San Francisco, I thought: Instead of standing in the present and making comparisons backwards, let us place ourselves at various moments in the past and look forward, asking at each point: What is it that at this moment I most want for humanity and civilization? Our early wants were material. The first great environmental want surely was defense against wild beasts. Not only have we learned how to protect ourselves against big lions and bears, but we have also succeeded in conquering most of the small things - mosquitoes, microbes, and soon even viruses. Thousands of years ago we also wanted a steady supply of food. Progress was slow and irregular, but now we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We have wanted cheap energy to heat and fuel our lives. That problem is solved forever with nuclear power. We have wanted metals and spices, and people foraged and traded for them all through the world in ancient times. Nowadays, abundant quantities of them cost only insignificantly small parts of our total expenditures. The human mind fulfilled these wants, as Prometheus bragged. More than anything else, we have wanted to forestall bad health and early death, particularly for our children. In the past couple of centuries we have succeeded spectacularly well in our fight against untimely mortality. Only quantitatively small parts of the job remain yet to be done. Starting a few hundred years ago during the Industrial Revolution, reformers most wanted liberation from back-breaking and mind-stultifying work in factories. Machines and robots now do that work for us, as they have also liberated women from heavy and repetitive chores in the home. We have wanted such great wars as the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and World War II to cease, and for our world to be at peace. The world is now safe from mass war to an almost unprecedented degree. We have wanted our fear of war reduced, and in the past few years we have received that gift, too. Is this assessment balanced? What about the supposed ills and evils of today that were not foreseen in the earlier times - the supposed breakup of the family, increasing numbers of homeless people on city streets, automobile and airplane deaths, nuclear fear in children, and other contemporary pathology (actual or mythical)? Here we must come to grips with the central premise of economic thought -- that what the individual chooses is called "better." We can try to imagine whether people in those earlier times would prefer to have had the troubles which they wished to end, and which we have ended, versus the supposed new troubles of today. My guess is that when faced with wild beasts and decimated by plague, and given an imagined choice, earlier people would have chosen life in the twentieth century with its attendant new worries in preference to their problems. Furthermore, in our times one almost always has a choice between living with and without any particular pathology. If one does not like the supposed high urban crime rate, one may live in a small town and be free of urban problems - yet still be safe from the evils of earlier times that we have eliminated. As to the supposed new threats of destruction such as nuclear war, it seems to me that a fair and rational assessment must be in terms of their demonstrated destruction up till now; the number of people killed by nuclear warfare until now is minuscule compared to other destroyers. Of course this is not a fair way to look at the overall risk. But neither would be the kind of scary scenario cooked up by some anti-nuclear war protesters. Footnote: Nowadays in San Francisco one sees pedi-cabs carrying tourists and powered by healthy, well-muscled college boys. These pedi-cabs are almost a parody of the pedi-cabs that one saw in China years ago and can still see in India, ridden by bone-thin family heads eking out a bare living as long as health holds. The San Francisco pedi-cabs dramatize how our world has changed. Pedi-cab work nowadays can be done as an amusing and lucrative summer job. Can one doubt that this change, getting rid of back-breaking life-destroying labor, is for the better? Low calorie cheese also shows how much we have achieved in things that people wanted in the past - to eat more rather than fewer calories. And the cheese can be eaten solely for its taste value; ignoring and even trying to get rid of calories. CONCLUSIONS The evidence is overwhelming that the overall trend is toward all the material conditions of life getting better rather than worse. Yet people have a negative perception about trends in environment and resources despite the positive trends? An important cause of the belief that things are going poorly, and that the future outlook is gloomy, surely is the type of comparisons that a person makes. ENDNOTES **ENDNOTES** <1>: Full discussion of the subject of comparisons, especially in connection with psychological depression, fills another book (Simon, 1993). <2>: This example comes from Thomas Moore (1993, p. 15) page 1 /mediabk compar7m/October 10, 1996