Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Selective Reporting
We are subjected to never-ending cascades of negative news from across the
world: wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget
cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror. Journalists who reported flights that
didn’t crash or crops that didn’t fail would quickly lose their jobs. Stories
about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur
on a dramatic scale and impact millions of people.
And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear
more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered
indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the
news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in
rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving
communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or

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ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the
other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved
tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but
it creates the impression of the exact opposite.
At the same time, activists and lobbyists skillfully manage to make every
dip in a trend appear to be the end of the world, even if the general trend is
clearly improving, scaring us with alarmist exaggerations and prophecies. For
example, in the United States, the violent-crime rate has been on a downward
trend since 1990. Just under 14.5 million crimes were reported in 1990. By
2016 that figure was well under 9.5 million. Each time something horrific or
shocking happened, which was pretty much every year, a crisis was reported.
The majority of people, the vast majority of the time, believe that violent
crime is getting worse.

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No wonder we get an illusion of constant deterioration. The news
constantly alerts us to bad events in the present. The doom-laden feeling that
this creates in us is then intensified by our inability to remember the past; our
historical knowledge is rosy and pink and we fail to remember that, one year
ago, or ten years ago, or 50 years ago, there was the same number of terrible
events, probably more. This illusion of deterioration creates great stress for
some people and makes other people lose hope. For no good reason.