It treats every human life as equal, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. A quantitative mind-set, despite its nerdy aura, is not just a smarter way to understand the world but the morally enlightened one. Numbers, after all, aggregate the good and the bad, the things that happen and the things that don’t. The cure for these biases is numeracy: basing our sense of the world not on bleeding headlines or gory images but on measures of human flourishing such as longevity, literacy, prosperity and peace. As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” Also, we are liable to confuse the heavier burdens of maturity with a world that has lost its innocence, and the inevitable decline in our faculties with a decline in the times. Time heals most wounds: the negative coloring of bad experiences fades with the passing of years. Psychologists have identified other reasons we are nostalgic about the past and jaundiced about the present. Those who point out that the world is getting better–even hardheaded analysts who are just reading out the data–may be dismissed as starry-eyed naïfs.

Biblical prophets, oped pundits, social critics, dystopian filmmakers and tabloid psychics know they can achieve instant gravitas by warning of an imminent doomsday. This creates a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have overlooked.

Irrational pessimism is also driven by a morbid interest in what can go wrong–and there are always more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. It’s easy to see how this cognitive bias–stoked by the news policy “If it bleeds, it leads”–could make people conclude the worst about where the world is heading.

People rank tornadoes (which kill dozens of Americans a year) as more dangerous than asthma (which kills thousands), presumably because tornadoes make for better television. Our intuitions about risk are driven not by statistics but by images and stories. The bad habits of media in turn bring out the worst in human cognition.

Unsustainable optimism meaning