Jun 15, 2024

The Good News You Might Have Missed

We get to choose whether to despair or hope. And it is increasingly difficult to choose hope in a world with headlines about famine, war, intolerance, and disaster. That choice, however, can be made more equitable, when we also choose to widen our field of vision to include less attention-grabbing, click-oriented headlines.

In a brief TED2024 talk, Angus Harvey delivers a striking reminder that there are plenty of hopeful stories worth bringing into focus: diseases like Hepatitis C were eliminated in Egypt, AIDS prevalence declined worldwide, extreme poverty declined to its lowest level in human history, and deforestation across the Amazon Basin declined by 55 percent.

“This is not some weird attempt to cancel or balance out the bad news,” Harvey admits. “But if we want more people to devote themselves to the task of making progress, then maybe we should be telling more people that it's possible to make progress.”

Check out the 9 minute talk below or find the full transcript here.