Catastrophising is my idea of a good time

When, on a test of general knowledge, the highly educated score far worse than chimpanzees, university degrees may be overrated (definitely). But something more interesting may also be going on.

According to the newly released Factfulness by Hans Rosling, we would-be smart people would improve our results on multiple-choice questions about the current state of the world (16 per cent) if we picked the answers at random (33 per cent). We all seem to think that humanity is in the toilet, and swirling more deeply into the sewer by the day. We’re wilfully blind to social progress. The more cheerful a host of indices look, the more belligerently we cling to the conviction that everything is getting worse.

Strictly speaking, I might score more highly than the average chimp on Rosling’s 12-question quiz, because I’m technically aware that human history has become steadily less violent, extreme poverty has plummeted during my lifetime, education of girls is on the increase, and immunisation against the likes of polio has been so successful that until very recently the WHO was on the cusp of eliminating the disease from the planet.