Three true statements at once
Max Roser · 2022
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Roser opens with three verdicts that sound like they cancel each other, shows how each one-sided story fails, and states what seeing clearly requires. The excerpt is the opening five paragraphs.
What you will practice
- 01Put the whole thesis in the first four sentences
- 02Rule out two opposite errors before offering your own position
- 03Concede without letting go of the claim
Prepared source text
207 words · 12 sentencesThe world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.
Discussions about the state of the world too often focus on the first statement: The news highlights what is going wrong, rarely mentioning the positive developments in our country or the world as a whole.
A pushback on this narrative takes it to the other extreme, which is equally damaging. Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant, when it glosses over the problems people are facing.
If we only see the problems and only hear what is going wrong, we have no hope that the future can be better. If we only hear about progress and what is going right, we become complacent and lose sight of the problems the world is facing. Both of these narrow perspectives have the same consequence: they leave us doing nothing — they are worldviews that paralyze us.
It’s hard to resist falling for only one of these perspectives. But to see that a better world is possible, we need to see that both are true at the same time: the world is awful, and the world is much better.
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Required credit
Max Roser (2022), “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”, published online at OurWorldInData.org, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Reproduced here as an excerpt — the opening five paragraphs, unchanged.