These are trying times and interesting times—in line with the proverbs. And there is nothing that unique about it. It just seems unique from our perspective, which is always distorted. The thing that is actually fairly unique for us is how good things are and how much better they are getting—despite so many setbacks.
So, I’m not here to diminish or downplay suffering. Nor am I suggesting improvements are inevitable or easy.
But a better and better world is increasingly around us. Why is this underappreciated if not flat out unappreciated? I think a big factor is perspective bias as alluded to above and explored in this post by Adam Mastroianni:
I’ve got a different theory: people are predisposed to believe the end is coming not because it feels good,but because it seems reasonable.
GOOD CUP BAD CUP
In The Illusion of Moral Decline, my coauthor Dan and I showed how two biases could lead people to believe that humans are getting nastier over time, even when they’re not.
Humans pay more attention to bad things vs. good things in the world. And they’re more likely to transmit info about bad things—the news is about planes that crashed, not planes that landed, etc. We call this part biased attention.
In memory, the negativity of bad stuff fades faster than the positivity of good stuff. There’s a good reason for this: when bad things happen, we try to rationalize them, reframe, distance, explain them away, etc., all things that sap the badness. (Much of this might be automatic and unconscious.) But we don’t do that when good things happen, and so good things keep their shine longer than bad things keep their sting. We call this part biased memory.3
Here’s what it looks like when you combine those two tendencies. Imagine you’ve got two cups in your head: a Bad Cup that fills up when you see bad things, and a Good Cup that fills up when you see good things. Every day you look out on the world, and thanks to biased attention, the Bad Cup gets fuller than the Good Cup.
But thanks to biased memory, stuff in the Bad Cup evaporates faster than stuff in the Good Cup:
When you remember the past, then, the Good Cup has lost some good stuff, but the Bad Cup has lost even more bad stuff:
So when you compare the past to the present, it seems like there was a more positive ratio of Good Cup to Bad Cup back then:
That can explain why things always seem bad and why things always seem like they’re getting worse. Which is exactly what we see in the data: every year, people say that humans just aren’t as kind as they used to be, and every year they rate human kindness exactly the same as they did last year.
Another factor for the mistaken belief and the point of this post is that when good news conflicts with dogma, the good news is willfully ignored by those wishing to propagate the dogma. Consider these examples.
We hear A LOT about inequality. Long-time readers will know how little respect I have for this as a problem. The problem when it does exist is absolute levels of wellbeing not relative ones. If you have more than you used to have, you should be happy. If you’re not because someone else still has more, that is probably a problem of your own making—a “you” problem.
To wit, Daniel Waldenström points out in this piece,
A closer look at household wealth shows some surprising results.
Firstly, private wealth has risen sharply across the West since 1950. But importantly, this growth has been shared. Most wealth is now held in homes and retirement accounts—not in elite corporate shares. Today, 60–70% of households in Western countries own their homes, and most workers have pension savings in funds that track the stock market. This is financial democratization.
Secondly, wealth is less concentrated. In Europe, the richest 1% now hold only about one-third of the wealth share they had in 1910. In the U.S., there has been an uptick since the 1970s, but even there, wealth concentration is closer to its 1960s level than to the early 20th century. The most recent data show that U.S. wealth inequality has actually fallen slightly since the mid-2010s. Thus, the main story is not growing inequality, but growing ownership.
Thirdly, mobility matters. People move between income brackets over their lifetimes. Many in the bottom 10% today won’t stay there long, and some at the top may fall due to job losses or market changes. Also, pension rights and welfare reduce inequality further. For instance, in Sweden, counting public pensions cuts measured wealth inequality nearly in half. In the U.S., if we add Social Security and employer-provided health insurance, middle-class living standards look far better than raw income data shows.
. . .
Focusing too much on inequality can distract from real challenges: slow productivity growth, aging populations, and the costs of adapting to climate change. These issues will require investment and innovation—both of which depend on a healthy private sector.
Overreacting to inequality can also be regressive. Taxing housing wealth, for example, may hit retirees who are rich in assets but poor in cash. Heavy taxes on small businesses might force them to sell to multinational corporations with easier access to credit.
Mistrust also grows when people are told that only the elite benefit from capitalism—even when their own lives are improving. That opens the door to populist promises that often worsen the situation.
. . .
This is not a call for total laissez-faire nor for extreme equality. It is a recognition that the most important achievement of Western economies is the broad rise in living standards—not the fortunes of a few billionaires, but the everyday comfort of millions whose grandparents lived without antibiotics, central heating, or higher education.
Before declaring a crisis, policymakers should double-check the data. And they should keep doing what works: protecting markets, encouraging wealth-building, and lifting the bottom.
Zooming in on a particular area of concern, fresh water, where absolute levels of scarcity are quite rightfully raised, we see another area where worry outruns reality. Kyle O’Donnell explains how “humans are not running out of fresh water.”
Critics warn that humanity is depleting Earth’s finite fresh water supplies through overuse and pollution, urging drastic conservation measures. But this narrative misunderstands what “fresh water” is. Rather than a fixed natural endowment, fresh water is largely a product of human innovation and engineering. As technology advances and economic incentives align, humans continue expanding usable water supplies—turning the ocean, wastewater, and even air into sources of clean, drinkable water.
The vague concept of “fresh water” is actually very nuanced. And clean, fresh water itself is not something that occurs naturally. Rather it is the product of human ingenuity and hard work.
As he concludes:
From ancient aqueducts to modern desalination plants and atmospheric water generators, humans have never accepted natural limitations on freshwater supplies. The same creativity that turned seawater into municipal water supplies and transformed sewage into drinking water continues expanding the definition of usable water. Global markets further reduce water stress by enabling regions to specialize by importing water-intensive goods from water-abundant areas rather than producing everything locally.
Rising demand creates rising incentives for innovation. As traditional sources become more expensive, market signals encourage both conservation and technological advancement, resulting in a continuously expanding water supply that grows to meet human needs and capabilities.
The lesson is clear: Water scarcity isn’t about planetary limits but about the pace of human innovation relative to demand growth. Given the remarkable technologies already emerging and the powerful economic incentives driving their development, the future promises water abundance through human ingenuity and market-driven innovation, not sacrifice and restriction.
Perhaps there is no area where factual news (be it good, bad, or mixed) is lost to dogma is the environment and climate. Fortunately, we have people like Roger Pielke, Jr. to keep us grounded.
I’d go so far as to suggest that it is likely that the first half of 2025 has seen the fewest deaths related to extreme weather of any half year in recorded human history, given how large losses were in decades and centuries past, as you can see below.
Estimated decadal deaths related to weather and climate for four decades: 1870s, 1920s, 1970s, 2020s (estimated based on deaths over the past decade). These estimates are highly uncertain and the 1870s and 1920s numbers are certainly underestimates. They should be interpreted as order-of-magnitude and not as precise figures. Sources: Davis 2017, Our World in Data.
The put the 2025 first half numbers into context, we can also look at deaths in the second half of each year this century, shown below and zoomed in as above.
The first half disaster deaths of 2025 are also lower than any second half deaths in any year this century.
Some additional context:
This century, during Jan-Jun ~408,000 people died related to extreme weather;
During Jul- Dec the total is ~288,000;
In 2000 (July 2000 to June, 2001), the global death rate related to extreme weather was ~1.4 people per million;
in 2025 (July 2024 to June 2025), the global death rate related to extreme weather was ~0.9 people per million.
The decrease in global death rates related to extreme weather from 2000 to 2025 was ~60%;
Of course large losses of life related to extreme weather are still possible — and perhaps even likely if we do not emphasize disaster risk reduction.
. . .
Not only do opinion polls show that this theory of change is misguided as politics, so too does the real world. In contrast to apocalyptic sermons, at no point in human history have humans had less risk of death related to extreme weather and climate. Understanding why that is so is central to keeping that trend moving forward into the future.
Smart energy and climate policies, as I’ve long argued, make good sense. Climate evangelism centered on scaring people about the weather does not make sense — in politics, policy, or science.
So should we be pessimistic about how pessimistic the narrative tends to be despite the optimistic reality? I say, “cautiously, no”. The world has always had this bias. It might be more pronounced today, but that is simply a byproduct of the achievements we’ve enjoyed—information flows easier today, which is great except it can be bad when that information flow is mistaken or maligned.
Regardless, stay the course. Case in point: I offer this from Alex Tabarrok as an implied lesson from the various links I’ve offered in this post. Since it is brief and has been up for over 30 days, I will quote it nearly in full:
Every generation launches a new competitor to America and the people who don’t like capitalism and America’s individualist, free market economy trumpet that now the American way is being left in the dust. In the progressive era it was the Germans (how did that work out?), then it was the Russians (remember Sputnik?), then it was the Japanese (buying up Rockefeller center! the horror!), then it was the Chinese (look at those high speed rail lines!). My message to Americans is to double down on America. Double down on immigration, entrepreneurship, innovation, building for tomorrow, free markets, free speech and individualism and America will take all new competitors as it has taken all comers in the past. The world should be more like America not the other way around.
Dogma is often standing athwart reality and shouting, “IT CANNOT BE!” It is vital that we stand athwart dogma and calmly argue back, “But it is, and here is how and why.”
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