The future has passed. October 21, 2015 was the date that Marty McFly and Emmett Brown travelled to in the film Back to the Future Part II. They encounter a 2015 full of flying cars and hoverboards. Of course, 2015 has turned out to be very different. College Humor created a video in which Marty and Doc Brown travel to the real 2015 and lament the lack of progress made in the last several decades.
Yet when one looks at the present state in context, it is clear that the world has gotten better than it was three decades ago. While technology hasn’t delivered us hoverboards and flying cars, we live in an era of many other wonders that even the creators of Back to the Future couldn’t predict. Back to the Future II depicted video conference calls that require a whole TV. An iPhone can do that with a screen that fits in the palm of your hand. In general, information technology has been advanced than anyone could have imagined 30 years ago. Imagine trying to explain Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon to people in the 1980s. Imagine trying to explain to them that in just a few decades handheld devices would fulfill the role of phone, calendar, alarm clock, VCR, video camera, cassette player, and then some. The computers of today are a banality to us, but they would have seemed like magic 30 years ago. I still remember the era of Blockbuster and videotapes and yet I have to constantly remind myself how amazing it is to be able to stream movies online. Yes, this new technology has downsides, such as the decline of privacy and face-to-face interactions. Yet there have also been many positive attributes, such as the fact that millions of people in poverty are getting online for the first time.
Medical technology has also advanced. Deaths from heart disease have decreased by 40 percent in the past decade due to a combination of prevention measures and new treatments. In 1996, a 20-year-old person in the United States with HIV could expect to live another three to five years. Today, that person could expect to live another five decades. In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed after 15 years and $3 billion. The cost of sequencing a genome today is only a few thousand dollars and is expected to drop even lower, allowing for a new era of personalized medicine.
Technology isn’t the only area where progress has occurred. Crime has dropped precipitously over the past 20 years and is still going down. Between 1990 and 2009, the national violent crime rate was halved, while property crime fell by 60 percent. My parents told me stories about how dangerous New York City was, even in areas like Times Square. Since 1990, the homicide rate in New York has gone down by 82 percent, robbery by 84 percent, and rape by 77 percent.
Perhaps the greatest area of social progress has been in regards to LGBTQ+ rights. In the 1980s, not a single state had legalized same-sex marriage. Massachusetts became the first to do so in 2004. Now, same-sex marriage is legal nationwide. Public opinion on the issue has also gone through a stunning shift, from 27 percent of Americans supporting marriage equality in 1996 to 53 percent in 2011. A lot more work needs to be done for sure, but there is no denying that things have gotten immensely better in a very short amount of time.
Improvements have not been limited to developed countries. Some of the most stunning developments have been in impoverished nations. India has gone for years without a single case of polio. The number of people living in extreme poverty has halved since the 1990s, as has the number of children who die before the age of five. Poverty has gone down so much that the World Bank has changed its definition of extreme poverty, from $1 a day to $1.90. Again, more work needs to be done but the situation has definitely improved.
If things are better, why doesn’t it seem that way? First of all, people get used to their new situation. This is known as the hedonic treadmill. Although smartphones and the Internet might be incredible wonders to people in the 1980s, those of us who have had them for years have gotten used to them.
Second, human beings are biased in regards to the information they internalize. Humans tend to pay more attention to individual stories than statistics. This comes from our evolution; when we evolved on the plains of Africa, there were no such thing as statistics, and individual stories were the only way to gain information that was not experienced firsthand. More importantly, humans are biased toward bad news rather than good news. There is a lot of truth to the saying “if it bleeds it leads.” Again, this is due to evolution; if a lion was approaching, there would be no time to look on the bright side of life. These biases are exacerbated by a media that is well aware of what grabs attention. Ebola outbreaks, civil wars, terrorist attacks, and brutal murders make headlines, statistical declines in crime and poverty do not.
My dad used to say that people always think that things are getting worse, but what they don’t realize is that things have always been terrible. The world is certainly full of horrible things, but it has improved in recent years. Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world and more work needs to be done. But it is important to remember how much progress has been made. We now live in what was the future to the 1980s. It’s not everything Back to the Future II said it would be, but it isn’t all that bad. In some ways it’s a lot better.