How Progress Blinds People to Progress

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a 2018 poll of 548 experts on women’s rights that recently went viral, the US was voted the tenth most dangerous country in the world for women. It was also voted the third worst country in the world for sexual violence, which put it ahead of South Sudan, where forced marriages are common and mothers routinely teach their daughters how to survive a rape, Afghanistan, where rape victims are often punished instead of their rapists, and South Africa, where lesbians are raped because it’s believed it can make them straight and virgins are raped because it’s believed to cure the rapist of HIV (which is epidemic in the country).
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The 2018 poll, therefore, seems anomalous. But what could account for 548 experts suddenly deciding that one of the countries considered safest for women had become one of the most dangerous?

The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has noted that there’s a tendency for people to become selectively blind to social progress, particularly in Western nations. Despite the West (and the world) making huge advances across almost all major metrics, from crime to poverty, many believe the world has made no progress, or is getting worse.'

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