Upgrading Your Worldview

At this point, we have established that social problems must be made to mean, and that claimsmakers and activists have an elevated capacity to persuade their audiences through the access provided by 21st Century communication technologies. With all this noise about what’s wrong in the world, how can we determine which problems deserve our attention or resources?

In this section, we’ll dive into data about social problems to help us gain an empirical snapshot of the scope and severity of globally pressing issues today, and to see how their trajectory has evolved over time. To help us on our journey, we’ll read several data-rich chapters of Laurence Siegel’s book, Fewer, Richer, Greener, which explores the unconventional thesis that some problems may be getting just a little bit better.