The invisible riches

Everyone knows the three monkies - see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil. But the reality is exactly opposite - we keep our eyes and ears open to find if there is any evil around, we tell about it to warn others, and that's how we have survived.

Harsh forces of evolution have taught us human being to be always vigilant. We are always on the lookout lest some predator be lurking behind the bushes or snakes under the stone. So every time we hear a suspecious movement, see something wrong we go into the fight or flight mode. We yearn to see it, crowd around to hear it, worry about it and spread the message by talking about it. The media of course makes there living by utilizing these innate tendancies.

The upshot of all this is that we are always more fine tuned to the visible, the tangible and the dangerous. Train crashes, explosions, terrorist attacks - all catch our eye, numb our minds and scare us. They stay with us in our memory - we remember where we were, how we heard it, proudly tell if we saw it. These add up in our mind to make a picture of a bleak and scary world.

The bad things that did not happen (and used to happen) on the other hand are invisible. You can't send a camera crew to a house, with the reporter saying "Neither of Mr. Smith's two children has died in the last twenty eight years, and he might become a grandfather soon - which would have been highly probable had he lived 20,000 years ago. Yey for them."

The point is that disaster is tangible. You can point a finger to a dead body. You can show the burned down bus. You can view the fallen buildings. And you can parade martyrs. Everyone knows that at least a few million lives were saved by penicilin, it is difficult to pinpoint - which millions? Who exactly? So there is no cheer for those millions of lives, but the mourning for ten deaths in shooting by a madman? It's on!

Let's take a very recent example. In United States, car occupant deaths have been almost constant at 35000 a year for 15 years between 1983 to 1998. This does not sound like progress - but during that time more and more states passed and enforced seat belt laws. The population increased, the travel increased even more than the population did. So if there was no progress, that means there should be about 52,000 deaths a year by now. But the laws, technology, better roads, and many other factors combined to reduce the numer of deaths per passenger mile. So a back of the envelope calcuation tells us that about 120,000 lives were saved. Do you know if you are one of them? Can you imagine those 120,000 families that did not go through devastation? There is no way to know who, but someone has to be it. (The following paper talks about gory details of each aspect of the law's effect)
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/341.pdf

And I gave these numbers because the data was easily available and quantifiable. That's the other problem, the data needs a fair amount of digging. But these numbers pale in comparison to the number of children saved by malnutrion over the last 100 year. That number is in billions. Do you know how many of them have become great artists, great scientists, or plain old fashioned good kids who took care of there parents, raised good kids themselves and did the hard work to make society prosper? (The health and life improvements are such a huge part of the world getting better, it deserves few articles in its own right.) Each and every one of us has benefitted from their contributions, every one of us lives in a world that is better because it did not suffer those deaths.

Maybe the monkies that have evolved into human beings aught to try hard to see, hear and talk about the invisible treasures that we take so much for granted, that we don't even know about it.