🏅 Not celebrating a Nobel Prize is far from being clear-sighted, Han Kang

When Han Kang learned she had been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, she refused to celebrate.

"Please don't celebrate while witnessing these tragic events. The Swedish Academy didn’t give me this award for us to enjoy, but to stay more clear-sighted," she said through her father. She also declined to hold a press conference for the same reason.

The ever-perceptive Klas Hallberg then posed the question: Is that truly being clear-sighted?

It is true that terrible wars are raging. It is also true that the world is filled with other misery. But if you only see that, are you really clear-sighted?

When Han Kang is in Sweden to receive her prestigious prize (congratulations!), someone should slip her a copy of Factfulness. In it, Professor Hans Rosling writes:

"It is both bad and better. Better and bad, simultaneously. That’s how we must think about the state of the world."

Seeing both the negative and the positive, the terrible and the wonderful, the problems and the possibilities — that is being clear-sighted.

You only have to glance at the other Nobel Prizes to feel optimism. People have managed to teach machines to learn, enabling us in a couple of years to go from knowing the structure of two hundred thousand proteins to understanding 200 million proteins. This has drastically increased our understanding of all living things.

And there are other kinds of progress—steadily ongoing for decades. Since the turn of the millennium, over one billion people have escaped extreme poverty. Every day, 132,000 people leave extreme poverty behind.

But Hans Rosling argued that child mortality is an even better measure of progress. What’s the first thing parents prioritize when they achieve better circumstances? Their children’s well-being. Reduced child mortality is therefore a powerful indicator of improved living conditions.

Since 2000, child mortality has been halved, and over 100 million children have survived who would otherwise have died.

At the same time, five million children still die every year.

"Better and bad, simultaneously."

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist