The world’s descent to hell in a handbasket exists mostly on the news

If your impression of the state of the world comes mostly from the 6:00 news, you can’t be blamed for wondering if we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But if you approach the question rationally — noting what the great economist Adam Smith called the “duties of the sovereign” — you’ll better understand some of the bad news and notice more of the good.

Speaking in a significant year, 1776, Smith argued that the government’s first duty is to protect its nation from invasion, the second to maintain civil order, keep people from harming each other and provide justice and the third to engage in public works, including education. Failure tends to mean bad things happen.

For years now, we’ve seen those failures in news images of death and destruction in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Congo and the Red Sea. Then the camera moves to our southern border and an endless stream of families from a score of countries struggling to make it to America. We hear the latest on hate crimes, mass killings, or both. 

If this isn’t enough, it’s a political crazy season, when presidential candidates exchange verbal slings and arrows about everything from bribery, corruption, insurrection, mumbling, stumbling and stealing state secrets. There’s less discussion about the duties of the sovereign or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unable to get the matter off my mind, I asked a man I met at a Waffle House restaurant whether we were going to hell in a handbasket. “No,” he replied. “We’re already there! Contacting hell used to require a long-distance telephone call. You don’t even have to dial an area code anymore.” 

Apparently, the news had gotten to him.

So, I turned to data on human well-being. It doesn’t sugarcoat the bad news but it does offer something else.

One data lode spoke directly to the failed-state problem: the worldwide count of refugees granted asylum between 1990 and 2022. Abandoning one’s home to pursue asylum abroad must reflect a failed sovereign problem — one such as war or domestic persecution. 

The count ran between 15 and 20 million per year until 2015, then accelerated and reached a 2022 peak of 35 million. Illegal, unprocessed migrants are not counted. Some 52 percent of recent seekers are from Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. While not heading to hell in a handbasket, I suspect these refugees are escaping one they’ve already experienced.

Since much of evening news horror involves invasions by one group against another, I next decided to look at an annual count of deaths in state-based conflicts worldwide from 1946 to 2022. 

There are mountains of data for the years just following World War II when annual numbers of deaths for combatants were around 500,000. Then there are smaller tragic mountains for the Vietnam and Iran versus Iraq years, where the annual counts rose to 250,000-300,000. Things calmed for a few decades until 2022 and the Russia-Ukraine and Sudan wars, when the count rose back to above 200,000. 

These counts are not just sad evidence of governments providing a national defense — they can reflect the failures that drove or invited conflicts.

Yet abroad is also where we find perhaps the most fundamental good news of all: the falling percentage of people in most regions living in poverty, as estimated by the World Bank. In the last two years measured, this long-term trend continued and another 28 million people across the globe rose above the U.S. poverty line. The war-torn Middle East and North Africa are the recent exception.

Moving to civil order at home, the bad news is similarly easy to see first. FBI hate crime data shows a mostly downward trend from above 9,000 incidents in 2001 to 5,590 in 2014. It then reversed, reaching an all-time high of 10,299 in 2020. Crimes involving race and ethnicity are the main drivers. The U.S. homicide rate has also generally fallen since 1990 before ticking up lately. The number of U.S. mass killings bounced from one to five events for decades. It hit seven in 2012 and 12 events in 2022 and 2023.

Yet there are brighter data here, too. It’s hard to argue that everything is getting worse in our towns and neighborhoods. For example, the number of prisoners in federal and state prisons fell to 1.2 million in 2022 after being as high as 1.6 million in 2010. U.S. alcohol-related arrests have generally fallen since 1980 for large and small cities as well as suburban and rural areas.

I’ve only scratched the surface. What’s clear is that failed states merit much of the evening news misery. Large regions of the world are in chaos. People are fleeing. There are also vast regions and countries where order is maintained, domestic peace prevails and major elements of life continue to improve. 

Americans grappling with our own country’s failures should remain grateful that we are no failing state.

Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the Clemson University’s College of Business and Behavioral Sciences.