The Progress Report: Shifting Attitudes

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host, co-conspirator, Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network. And this is our weekly progress report, an adjunct to our interview based Longer, What Could Go Right podcast, where we take a look at some of the news that you may have missed, but Emma Varvaloucas and the team at The Progress Network did not miss because they are every day, 24/7, in their sleep and during their waking hours, scouring the planet for news that points in a somewhat different direction or even a radically different direction than what the mainstream media would suggest, i.e. The world may not be falling apart, everything may not be going to hell in a handbasket, there may be good things happening, we may be solving our problems, not creating worse ones, we may be climbing out of our holes rather than digging ourselves deeper into one. We may be extracting our collective foot from our collective mouths rather than placing it deeper.

All of those things that you would not know from our daily digest of dystopian despair that characterizes the news. There’s a lot going bad in the world. We all know what it is. There’s a lot of risks ahead from politics to climate change to war to nuclear proliferation. Or as George W. Bush would have said, nuke chiller proliferation. But there’s also a lot that’s going on in the world that we should be paying heed to that suggests that human beings are making, yes, progress. Hence, The Progress Report. So, Ms. Varvaloucas coming to us from an undisclosed location somewhere in Athens. What is going on in the world that we should be paying attention to?

Emma Varvaloucas: If I said the name of my neighborhood, no one would be able to pronounce it anyway, so it’ll remain undisclosed.

Zachary Karabell: Even if you knew where it was, you couldn’t find

Emma Varvaloucas: it. You couldn’t find it. It doesn’t translate well into English. Alright. We’ve got a vibe shift. Or maybe a perceived vibe shift to start out with today.

I thought this was surprising. So the Quinnipiac poll just came out at the end of August, actually, and they ask a slew of different political, mostly politically oriented questions, opinions, blah, blah, blah. And this one especially caught my eye. More than two thirds of likely voters, so 69 percent of likely voters, think America’s best days are ahead of us.

And I was like, oh, okay, that is a lot more optimistic than I would have expected.

Zachary Karabell: And more than certainly Gallup and Pew, which ask similar questions, you know, do you think the future will be better for your children or not? There’s variants of it. Most of those have been the obverse of that. There’s like been two thirds of people think the best days are behind us or the future will be worse.

And So that is quite different than what has been the read for, well, really most of the past 15 to 20 years. Maybe it’s a snapshot in time, maybe it’s an August thing maybe it’s an outlier and therefore should be, you know, treated with some skepticism, but at least it suggests that people’s attitudes, I think we’ve talked about this a lot, right, are malleable.

Cultural attitudes about optimism, pessimism oscillate. They are not fixed in time and space. So maybe they’re shifting. Maybe some of the economic reality of the past two years, which again, we’ve talked about this before, right, is statistically quite favorable, but experientially for most people, quite negative.

So maybe the data is catching up or the attitudes are catching up to the data. Of course, the data may suddenly be getting worse now, given the job market softening. So people have gotten optimistic about the data just at the time the data is changing. I don’t know.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think that probably is what’s happening because there are other, like, economic optimism, like poll readings that have come out in the last few weeks, and that is ticking up as well.

And as you say, it doesn’t exactly match the data that’s coming out. So there’s always a bit of a lag. They’re never really quite apace with each other, but so it goes. That was just a little flash of happiness. Let’s move on to Brazil. So Brazil’s they have an inequalities observatory. That’s kind of a new government thing.

And they came out with a report recently that has said that extreme poverty in Brazil has dropped by 40%. in 2023, so that’s between 2022 and 2023. Of course, I cannot find anywhere, now this might be different if I could read Portuguese, but I can’t I can’t find anywhere what the poverty rate is now versus what it was in 2022, but they did say that in absolute numbers that represents about 8.5 million people.

Zachary Karabell: And do we know why? Is this Lula government transfer programs? Is this post COVID?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, you got it exactly right the first time. It is a cash transfer program that was introduced in the early millennium, and it has been going on, I think, since the 80s. 2003, something like that.

But Lula, when he got into the presidency, and I believe 2021, he redid and expanded the program. So, it’s essentially, you know, the cash transfer programs like this exist in a lot of places. It’s a conditionality one, meaning that people get money if they send their kids to school and vaccinate them and are below a certain income threshold.

Zachary Karabell: Well, there you go.

Emma Varvaloucas: There you go.

Zachary Karabell: And, of course, Brazil’s mood may also improve in addition to its poverty rate going down by virtue of having banned X formally Twitter, which I’m sure will. At least in the short term, improve the public mood, given the utter, well, kind of shit show that X and Twitter is now.

Look, we use it at The Progress Network, I use it too, it’s still fascinating and interesting, but it is clear that the Elon Musk version of X slash Twitter is an even more chaotic, cacophonous, and somewhat disturbing place than it was before, and it was pretty much that before as well. And as some of you may know, High Court of Brazil, or one judge in Brazil banned X or not, I guess it was a content moderation issue, right?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and I read also that Elon Musk had fired the entire, like, safety and quality team in Brazil when he took over, so it’s probably like, I mean, someone made this point, I forget when or where I read this, but they were like, what you’re experiencing in the United States is the best case version of social media platforms, so if you’re feeling like Twitter is chaotic in the U.S., like in Brazil or India, like, it’s orders of magnitude worse.

Zachary Karabell: Great. Well, there you have it.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So, yeah, maybe optimism reading would be good in Brazil right now.

Zachary Karabell: That’s right.

Emma Varvaloucas: Just to be fair, to, you know, show all sides of the data, there was some consternation that inequality has widened in Brazil, even as extreme poverty has dropped.

So, do with that what you will.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And there is that question, which we have examined a little bit in some of the podcasts with people like Natalie Foster and others of, does inequality Everybody’s tide is rising, right? So it seems like societies are much more rent by the problems of inequality when there’s stagnation for most and huge gains for a few, as opposed to decent gains for everybody, even if outsized gains for the very very wealthy, meaning that, that seems great, greater social.

Dislocations and problems when there is stagnation overall. But a very few people are getting really rich as opposed to everybody’s getting more prosperous and a few people are

Emma Varvaloucas: Right. Like I would mind a lot less if like there’s a bunch of Jeff Bezos is wandering around if I felt good about my financial situation, but if I was married in poverty I would really not.

I really hate the guy, like many people do. All right, last but not least, I know it is way no longer invoked here on Google, but Google actually has some very useful climate change tools that have come out. I mentioned one of them in the newsletter a few weeks ago. This I happened upon by accident because there is a big wildfire as there are, there always are in Greece over the summer.

My apartment started to be blanketed in smoke and it was in that point in time that I thought to myself, maybe I should find out where this fire is. So I opened Google Maps and they actually have this new tracker tool that shows you the exact live edges of the fire and where it’s moving and growing and stuff like that, which is a pretty new tool.

They built it in like 2019 or 2020 in the US. So, in addition to that, they’ve just unveiled something new. It’s a heat resilience tool for cities and it’s. Not really aimed at the general public. It’s more aimed at policy makers, but it’s still pretty cool. What it can basically do is read by satellite the land surface temperature data, so it can tell you, like, where in your city you have, like, hot spots that you need to address.

And it can also, like, visualize if you say, okay, I’m going to put in a bunch of trees here, or I’m going to, like, paint a bunch of white paint on the roofs to make things cooler, or I’m going to try this solution and that solution. It will Visualize how that will work and how that will affect land surface temperature.

So this is kind of like wonky and nerdy and not going to be in anyone’s life anytime. But it’s still actually very neat. And I’m a fan.

Zachary Karabell: Well, there you go. A Google tool that we should use. Is it in English or in Greek? Just,

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, the Wildfire one is, so they launched that in the U.S. and then they brought that internationally.

So that’s like, that’ll be, that’s in 30 or 40 different countries. It’ll be in whatever language your phone is set to. And then the second one for heat surveillance is not really for the general public. It’s more for policy makers. So I imagine right now it’s just in English. I think they’ve only launched that in the States, but they tend to obviously launch things in the States and then bring them international later.

Zachary Karabell: What’s it called? 

Emma Varvaloucas: Good question. What is it called? They didn’t tell me in this article. Let’s see. Ah, there’s no real name. It’s like our heat resilience tool. But it doesn’t seem to have a particular name, like the wildfire tool. It’s just like our wildfire map tool. They’re just calling it using the heat resilience tool with heat resilience and cap.

So I guess that’s the name.

Zachary Karabell: That may be why more people haven’t found it. It’s like a bunch of Google engineers with that, you know, that it used to be you had 20 percent of your time for a passion project. Yeah. So maybe they need to I think they may need to market that tool a little bit better.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, like I will say in defense of the wildfire one, what was cool about it is that it just like popped up. Like I like went into maps and would like put in fire, like the way you would search for brunch. I was like fire. Like, I don’t even know what possessed me to do this. And like the whole big wildfire map just popped up and I was like, Hey,

Zachary Karabell: That’s cool.

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s cool. 

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, definitely. All right. On that note, thank you for scouring the planet for news. Happy to do it. We’ll be back next week. And All of you, please listen to our longer podcast and sign up for our newsletter. Also, albeit perhaps confusingly called What Could Go Right?, which you can get at theprogressnetwork.org weekly and free. Send us your thoughts, your comments, you’re tired, you’re hungry, and we will continue the conversations. Talk to you all soon.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Zachary.