Newsworthy?

The news seems to come at us faster and faster these days. With so many channels and so many media, it can be hard to keep track. Hard, too, to keep away from the insistent, worrisome chatter. Might our job/investment portfolio/health care/retirement income go up in smoke if we don’t pay close enough attention? Might the next global conflict be just around the corner? Might the U.S. devolve into its next civil war during the current congressional or presidential term? Will we ever get to civil peace again?

Most mental health advice suggests that limiting our news consumption helps maintain our sanity. When we pay too much attention, we can easily succumb to the belief that everything is out of control, that things are bad and getting worse. 

It helps me to take a step back. Being older in this instance can also be an asset. Having endured prior booms, busts, and disasters helps me put things into perspective. 

As a lifelong bookworm, I’ve also developed during the past couple of decades some “go to” volumes for perspective adjustment. Two stand out, both for their global range, and for their hopefulness: 

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Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, was published in 2009. Its title derives from the Chinese folk proverb, “Women hold up half the sky.” The book focusses on women’s situations in the developing world and how we might achieve women’s development goals globally. Kristof and WuDunn explore some of the gaps and practices that continue to disenfranchise women and girls. The authors stress adequate health care, education, and entrepreneurship as avenues for progress, benefitting both women and men. They present vivid examples, while being realistic about roadblocks. One is our human tendency to focus on individual stories over the “big picture.” For example, in discussing maternal mortality ratios, they touch briefly on overall statistics. Global data on such rates, from 2005, ranged from 1 death per 100,000 live births in Ireland to 2,100 in Sierra Leone. The authors then write: “…[W]e hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. …[S]tatistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act.” (p. 99)  

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, was published in 2018. The subtitle to the Roslings’ book is attitude adjusting all by itself: “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” Hans Rosling died while the book was in progress and was succeeded in authorship by his son and daughter-in-law. Hans gained wide recognition as a global health researcher who made statistics both more approachable and more relevant. He pioneered representing global datasets with proportionately sized bubbles for different countries or regions. He also showed bubbles in motion for longer term trends. (You may want to watch his TED talk from 2006 on late 20th century human fertility, health, wealth, and change titled “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen,” or a 4-minute BBC presentation of “200 years of health and wealth in 200 countries.”)  

In Factfulness, the Roslings sum up Hans’ life’s work by pointing out the harmful “instincts” that can skew our assessments of overall conditions. One that I find especially prevalent in current news is the “size instinct.” As they explain: 

“You tend to get things out of proportion. I do not mean to sound rude. Getting things out of proportion, or misjudging the size of things, is something that we humans do naturally. It is instinctive to look at a lonely number and misjudge its importance. …

The media is this instinct’s friend.  …

The size instinct directs our limited attention and resources toward those individual instances or identifiable victims, those concrete things right in front of our eyes.”  (pp. 128-129)

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Much of our current media, it seems to me, suffers greatly from overuse of the  “size instinct.” Though huge numbers can get bandied about without much context, much of our media highlights whichever isolated facts promote their respective political agendas. Our size instinct is not new, but can get amplified in our media-saturated lives. 

Several decades ago, I was exposed to the slogan “Think globally, act locally.” The Kristof/WuDunn and Rosling books remind me to pay attention to widespread, longer term trends, while at the same time concentrating my energies and skills toward making the locale where I live a little bit more humane, a little bit more equitable. Facts are mutable over time. Women do hold up half the sky. And if enough of us make small improvements wherever we are, over time we’ll become worthy of better news.