Editor’s Notes: Our world is getting better all the time; a G&T at 28,000ft; knocking down the door to the City; and Andrew Adonis is triggered by City A.M.
Ignore the misery merchants, the world is getting better all the time
When voters are asked to estimate the size of the immigrant population, the rate of teenage pregnancy or the level of unemployment, they routinely overshoot. This mindset is prevalent among voters right across the world according to Bobby Duffy, author of a new book called The Perils of Perception.
Duffy chairs the polling and research company IpsosMORI and is taking a role at King’s College London to further research our warped relationship with reality. In researching his book he surveyed populations across 40 countries and found a strikingly familiar tendency to assume the worst.
The Times columnist David Aaronovitch points to evidence suggesting we’re hard-wired to be pessimistic – once upon a time, an abundance of caution and heightened threat instincts may have kept us alive. Duffy argues that today, emotion still trumps data and evidence. There’s another reason why we’re so often wrong about the bigger picture: confirmation bias. If you feel that the world is going to hell in a handcart, you’re drawn to evidence that supports that. Indeed, you can ignore the evidence if it contradicts your senses – or your politics.
Yesterday, Guardian columnist Ellie Mae O’Hagan launched a broadside against our “laconic decadence” in the face of “unrelenting doom and gloom.” Fever-Tree tonic was the unlikely object of her fury, along with other “inane products” made and enjoyed by people whose gratuitous frivolity should not be tolerated while life around the world gets worse. But life isn’t getting worse. As the Oxford scientist Max Roser is dedicated to pointing out, using data rather than emotion, almost everything is getting better.
From levels of extreme poverty and infant mortality to the rate of wild fires. Yet this is not our perception, and our perception shapes our politics and our national conversation. So, pour a posh G&T, study the data and cheer up.
Opportunity knocks
A wonderful short film produced by Cebo Luthuli for the BBC tells the story of Reggie Nelson – a young man from East London who, while still at college, set out to create his own opportunities. “An idea came into my head, to go and knock on people’s doors and ask them what skills and qualities they had to become so wealthy, so that I could…use that for myself.” Reggie set off for Kensington, walked down a residential street and knocked on doors. The second door opened, and a woman invited him in.
Reggie explains, “as we were speaking, a gentleman walks through the room…that guy was Quintin Price, at the time Head of Alpha Strategies at BlackRock.” Price offered to mentor Reggie, who gained an internship at BlackRock before going to university and getting a job in the City. Price is to be commended, as he speaks with passion about opening up his sector to people from minority backgrounds. As for Reggie, his story is inspirational and the City is lucky to have him.
Anti-Brexit peer just needs to calm down
I always hope that this column provokes a reaction, but I was taken aback by one reader’s response to last week’s Notes. On Monday morning, the @CityAM twitter account was bombarded by Labour peer Andrew Adonis, accusing us of being a “Brexit rag”. Given that Adonis spends most of his time lambasting news organisations, especially the BBC – of all outlets – for peddling a pro-Brexit agenda, I suppose it was only a matter of time before he turned his fire on us.
Adonis explained, in a polite email exchange, that my column last week (in which I cautioned against holding a second vote) had sent him over the edge. Well, this page is for my own views. The news pages are something else – and Monday’s paper (which I know Adonis read) carried three Brexit stories: one on activists’ demands for a fresh vote, one on business fears over No Deal and one on the City’s desire to extend the Article 50 deadline. Hardly stories you’d find in a “Brexit rag.”
Just calm down, Andrew.