What are people worried about – and can it be fixed?
AUGUST 3, 2025
Mike Phipps reviews The Next Crisis: What We Think about the Future, by Danny Dorling, published by Verso.
What worries people? Danny Dorling’s first finding is that the things we are told we should be concerned about are not necessarily the things that worry most people: “The things that actually concern the majority of people worldwide are often dismissed as local issues of lesser importance, or even as simply how the world is. But if we came to see crises more clearly and how unevenly their impacts fall on people around the world, it might not have to be that way.”
The high cost of living
Between July 2022 and 2024, people in the world were most concerned about inflation, poverty and social inequality, and unemployment. The rising cost of living is the top concern for 93% of Europeans, followed by the threat of poverty and social exclusion (82%).
We are often told that the numbers of people living in extreme poverty have fallen dramatically over the last fifty years. Dorling looks behind the sometimes misleading statistics to show that it is in fact the sharp decline in the numbers of young people in the world that has contributed most to the decline of poverty. For example, women in China have gone from having six children each on average, to their daughters having just two, in just a single generation. But such a change does not mean that more people are necessarily becoming better off.
Meanwhile, inequality in most Western countries is now higher compared to the best times in living memory. People get this and are concerned.
In 2023 and 2024, around 30% of adults worldwide listed unemployment among their top three concerns. The issue of immigration in that period rose from 11% to 17% of people saying it was what they found most worrying about the country they lived in. Dorling links the two, not because immigration causes unemployment – although unemployment causes emigration – but because of the connection of immigration to the labour market. Dorling writes: “Calls for migration controls in affluent countries such as the UK are always trumped by the real demand for people who will more willingly and ably do the often poorly paid, insecure, difficult work that locals do not usually want to do or cannot afford to do because they can’t live on the wages.”
As Dorling freely admits, people’s priorities often reflect their media consumption. In March 2023, when people in the US were polled, their second government-spending priority was increasing the size of the military, despite it already being the world’s biggest. Within any country, people’s views are highly variable. But “if you are not afraid that you will never again find work, it can come as a shock to discover how many people in the world list unemployment in their top three concerns.”
War, crime, violence
Crime and violence are the fourth-highest concerns of people worldwide. Mostly, it’s highest in poorer countries, in Latin America especially. With the exception of Canada, the countries where the fear is lowest are mostly those further away from the influence of the United States.
Many of these fears are intimately connected. Wars, crime, and unsafe housing are all perpetuated by inequality, whose evils Dorling and others have explored elsewhere. “To what extent are we made unsafe by allowing others to be so rich?” asks Dorling. Furthermore, studies show that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their sense of entitlement increases. Meanwhile, increasing concentrations of wealth leads to multiple property ownership, driving up housing costs, gentrification and social segregation.
Fears about health show some interesting results. The country that spends the most on health care in the world, with the least measurable beneficial effect, is the US. Children there are twice as likely to die in any given year as their counterparts in comparable affluent nations, and young adults are up to four times more likely to die. The underlying reason for the US’s bad health outcomes is that most care is accessible only to those that can pay, not to those in greatest need. Yet “health care is considered one of the four greatest crises not in those countries where it is worst but in the ones where people appreciate its importance. People in other affluent countries worry that their health care, drug use, road deaths, and social collapse might deteriorate to the extent that they have in the US.”
Higher income inequality and less solidarity in the culture also take their toll. People die younger in more individualistic societies, even the richest of all. The best-off people in England live as long, if not longer, than those in the US despite having four or five times less annual income.
Save the planet
What about the big issues we are supposed to worry about? The Ipsos April 2024 survey of 24,000 people in 33 countries found: “After the tenth consecutive monthly heat record, apathy reins in the fight against climate change, especially among young men.” Moreover, across all age groups, conviction on climate change action was on the wane. “Climate change is only the fifth most important crisis, even for better-off people; and for poorer people – it is even lower down the list of priorities,” notes Dorling.
The shift to the right in the beliefs of young men is something we have explored before. One report concluded that social media algorithms were magnifying this trend by drawing “moderately conservative young men towards more extreme and radical conservative male role models and world views.”
Furthermore, powerful interests are invested in climate change denial. As Dorling says, “The climate crisis is almost entirely a crisis of overconsumption by the undertaxed rich.” It’s estimated that between 1990 and 2015, the world’s richest 1% caused more than double the carbon emissions of the poorest 50%. Yet it is frequently people from the world’s richest countries, with far larger carbon footprints, who bemoan population growth in poorer countries.
Climate denialism is not the whole explanation for rising apathy, however. Drilling into UN figures, Dorling finds that while climate change-related disasters are very much on the increase, fewer people are dying from them, partly because they are better prepared for them. He is withering about inaccurate predictions about the future, which serve only to demoralise people and undermine the need for systemic change, and focuses on the real causes – and therefore solutions to – global crises.
Global food-price fluctuations, for example, are hardly ever the result of environmental factors. “They are about wars, commercial financial speculation and profiteering.” Likewise water. The reason a country that receives as much rain as the UK does runs out of drinkable water is because of bad management by under-investing profit-seeking private water companies.
Which brings us back to what most people in the world are concerned about – inflation, poverty, inequality. All are fixable.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
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