What a time to be taking a social problems course! In some respects, we are living in a social problems society, in which we are constantly confronted with stories about troubling issues and people telling us what we should think and do about them.

This is partially an artifact of 21st Century communication networks – social media, internet, and streaming services – that have transcended the traditional information gatekeeping roles played by universities, the news media, and government agencies. Today, ordinary citizens have quasi-public platforms to air grievances, express viewpoints, share experiences, and connect to organizational networks. The accessibility of information is heightened, but control over the quality of that information is weakened.

Therefore, adult participants in the 21st Century information environment need to be able to discern between information that is credible and information that is crap. In this class, we are going to work on developing your ability to research, analyze, and present information about problems currently impacting our social world. Along the way we’ll hold each other accountable by adhering to these information ground rules:

• Avoid generalizing about an entire group, especially based on a single case or example.
• Reject a singular explanation or solution about a problem. Assume problems are multifaceted.
• Resist using extreme cases to represent average experiences.
• Assess research methodology critically for errors that could invalidate results.

Product Disclaimer

As a first generation college student, I am familiar with the challenges of juggling jobs, classes, and extracurriculars, and I wanted to find an open access, concise, and entertaining book for my social problems students. Nothing available cut the mustard, so I decided to write my own. The topics and perspectives offered in this text therefore reflect my personal experiences and interests.

I’m an applied researcher and a pragmatistic. Within the sociological field there is a strong intellectual tradition of deconstruction. Many argue that contemporary problems are so entrenched, the only way to solve them is to scrap and recreate our social, political, and economic systems. I am not that guy. I use data to analyze and develop solutions for problems affecting people right here, right now.  Imperfect as they may be, the systems we have are what we’ve got to deal with today, and it seems important that someone gets to work right away. 

That’s why I helped co-found the GVSU Social Science Lab. My students and I help area watershed organizations assess people’s knowledge about actions that affect local water quality. We gather data to help direct the public outreach plans of our community partners in the interests of more effectively stewarding taxpayer dollars devoted to watershed education and management actions.

It’s currently popular to teach a class about social problems by focusing on everything that is wrong with the world. I mean “problems” is literally the title of the course, right? But lately I’ve had quite enough of hearing about all the things that are going wrong – there is plenty of bad news available without spending an entire semester of college dissecting it further. I think it’s time for a fresh approach.

Upgrading Your Worldview

Lately I’ve developed an interest in ideas coming from a group of intellectuals who call themselves rational optimists. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more in need of a dose of optimism than I do right now. You may be wondering what there could possibly be to feel good about. I admit it’s a stretch. But if we take a step back from the non-stop noise of gas prices, global warming, and guns, and actually take a look at the facts about global indicators of human well-being, we see a surprising picture taking shape.

Stop right now and use the link below to take the Gapminder test.

How did you do? If you did badly on the Gapminder test, you’re probably not alone. Hans Rosling, author of the (2018) book Factfulness, was a Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. From 1998 to his death in 2017, Professor Rosling posed hundreds of fact questions about global patterns and trends – including poverty and wealth, population growth, births, deaths, education, health, gender, violence, energy, and the environment – to thousands of people across the world. His audiences have included medical students, teachers, university lecturers, prominent scientists, investment bankers, corporate executives, journalists, activists, and senior politicians. The majority of even these educated, interested individuals got the basic facts about the world wrong.

Professor Rosling noticed that not only are most people’s worldviews inaccurate, they are also systematically wrong. On test questions with three answer options, if you selected an answer at random you would have a 33% chance of getting it right. But when Rosling averaged the scores from his audiences, over and over, less than 33% chose the right answer. They were worse than randomly wrong.

Further, random selection would result in the wrong answers being equally split between the two incorrect answer choices. But instead, most people picked the wrong answer in each case that was more frightening, more violent, more hopeless than is actually true. Prof. Rosling calls this the overdramatic worldview writing, “We need to learn to control our drama intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray” (2018: 15).

To help people start developing a more accurate worldview, the Gapminder team created an amazing collection of digital resources that allow users to access data visualizations from statistics compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. When we examine this empirical, or observable, data, we see that a broader trajectory of human improvement is occurring across the globe, and it has experienced a remarkable jumpstart over in the last fifty.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Professor Rosling has to say:

Social Problems or Social Progress?

The very fact that we have gone from chasing down rabbits with spears to fretting about the carbon footprint of an avocado in a time span that is – in planetary terms – merely a blink of an eye should be cause for celebration. But no one is celebrating. Everyone is anxious, depressed, outraged even. According to Boston University’s The Brink (see link below), this is particularly true of college students.

So maybe it’s insulting to suggest there is actually reason for hope. However, when we set aside the hysterical emotional rhetoric and take a look at the data, what we actually see is clear picture of progress that is slowly and steadily reaching all corners of the planet. So, as unconventional as it might seem, we are going to spend as much time talking about progress as we are talking about problems, because we can’t accurately understand the implications of solutions to those problems if we don’t have an idea of the broader context of progress they are situated within.

Lack of context, derived from lack of data, results in people thinking that the only way to solve our current problems is to completely abandon the institutions, social systems, structures, and technologies that brought us to our current moment. If we understand the current moment as inherently bad, we think the only solution is to scrap it all and start anew. But this is a deeply misguided worldview that fails to recognize the remarkable enrichment our current path has achieved.

“Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world” (Rosling 2018: 71).

This is not to say that everything in the world is “just fine” or that serious problems that cause human suffering don’t exist. Everything is not fine. But, Professor Rosling argues, “When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work” (2018: 69). Rosling tells us that it is important to maintain the perspective that things can be both bad and better.

In Sum

I’ve found in the last few years that I have developed a profound lack of patience for solutions to social problems whose entry point involves flipping our current world completely upside-down. That’s not to say that I don’t think there are grave and deeply rooted problems in our society. But it is to say that I’ve lost interest in ideas that refuse to consider empirical data about the condition of people’s lives, which are not – on the whole – actually in a state of disaster. Quite the opposite! There are some up’s and down’s (you guessed it, we’re in a down-tick), but overall the global trajectory for humanity is tracking on a long arc of betterment.

You don’t have to believe me right now, but I intend to dislodge your overdramatic worldview and complicate the cultural narrative of catastrophe now dominating conversation about current events. If you can’t stand the thought of considering how our world may not actually be a complete dumpster fire, this may not be the text (or professor!) for you. If you’re up for some optimism, you’re in the right place. May we find it together.