It's effective.

Take girls' education, for example. Educating girls has proven to be a very successful initiative. When girls are educated, a lot of wonderful things happen in this society. As our workforce becomes more diverse, we can make better decisions and solve more problems. An educated woman would have decided to have fewer children, and more children survived. They will put more energy and time into the education of each child, which is a positive cycle.

Poor parents cannot afford all their children's school fees, and they often give preference to having boys go to school. But we've come a long way since 1970. Regardless of religion, cultural background or country, almost all parents now have the ability to send all their children to school. The proportion of girls attending school now almost catches up with that of boys. For girls, 90 per cent of school-age children attend school, while for boys the figure is 92 per cent, making little difference.

However, in addition to primary school, the difference in the proportion of men and women is evident in countries where the income level remains at the first level. But there is still no reason to deny that we have made progress. I never felt that there was any contradiction between cheering for the progress that has been made and continuing to work hard for greater progress. I am a possibilityist, and the progress we have made is ample proof that we are capable of getting all girls, all boys, to school. We should certainly continue to work towards that goal. If we are carried away by the delusion of foolishness, we will never reach this goal. The worst consequence of negative thinking and the ignorance it entails is that it can lead to a loss of hope.



When everyone is shouting that things are getting worse, how can we recognize that things are actually getting better?

Bad and better

The solution is not to hedge against the negative news by watching more positive news, because that would bring another kind of self-deceptive, self-soothing, misleading bias. It's as if you put a lot of sugar in an attempt to counteract the saltiness of the salt, which is useless. That will only make some things look better, but in fact this approach is even more unhealthy.

For me, the real solution was to convince myself while keeping both ways of thinking in my head.

It seems that when we hear people say things are getting better, we always think they mean not to rush, to take it easy, or even "this is not worth your attention". But when I'm saying that things are getting better, I'm not telling people not to rush and take it easy. And I'm in no way trying to suggest that people shy away from some of the terrible questions in the real world. What I want to tell people is that things can be both good and bad at the same time.

You can think of the world as a baby living in an incubator. The baby's health is extremely poor, so we need to monitor his breathing, heart rate, and other important indicators at all times to see if his health is getting better or worse. A week later, his health improved considerably. By all means, his condition has improved, but he still has to stay in the incubator because his health is still not good enough. So can we say that the baby's health has improved? Yes, that's definitely the case. Can we say that his health is still not good? Yes, absolutely. So when we say that something is getting better, is it implying that everything is good, that we can relax, and that we don't need to worry? No, absolutely not. So, do we have to choose between being bad and getting better? Definitely not. Things can be bad, but at the same time they are getting better. Bad and better can go hand in hand.

That's the right way we think about the world.

Be mentally prepared for bad news

Another way to help us control negative thinking is to be prepared for bad news.

Keep in mind that the media and social activists rely on exaggerated things to get your attention. Keep in mind that negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive stories. Remember, it's easy to nitpick a short dip in the context of long-term sustained progress and tell a crisis story based on it. Remember, we now live in a widely connected and transparent world, and there are far more reports of unfortunate events than ever before.

When you hear about something terrible, calm down and ask yourself, if there is an equally big positive improvement happening right now, will it get such coverage? Would I have heard of hundreds of large-scale advances in the world? Will I hear about children not drowning? When I look out the window, or I look at the news, I look at the reports of charities, can I see about the decrease in the number of children drowning, or the decrease in the number of children dying from tumors? Keep in mind that positive changes, while more common, are often rarely reported and need to be discovered for yourself. (And if you look at the statistics, you'll easily see these improvements.) ）

As long as you pay attention to these, you and your children will not be misled when watching the news and thus have a pessimistic view of the world.

Don't glorify history too much

If we deliberately try to cloak history in a beautiful garment, we and our children will miss the truth of history. The horrific facts about history, perhaps, are scary, but they are a very good resource. It helps us to value what we have today and is able to give us hope. We will believe that the human beings of the future, like our ancestors, will be able to overcome difficulties, get out of the troughs, and move forward in the direction of peace, prosperity, and continuous solution of problems.

When I was struggling in the gutter, I couldn't have imagined that I would be the first person in my family to go to college. I can't imagine that I would become a professor of global health and go to Davos to lecture the world's experts and tell them that they don't know as much about the world as gorillas.

Of course, 65 years ago, I didn't know anything about the trends of the world. I have to keep learning that if one wants to study the different causes of death and how they have evolved throughout history, the only way to do that is to track each death and the cause of his death, and record them, and then put all the data together and compile them. It's going to be a time-consuming thing. There is only one database in the world that can provide such detailed information, and it is called Global Death Analysis. When I entered this database many years ago to do my research, I realized that my NDE as a child was not