Progress can often be defined as the stuff that happens while humanity is preoccupied with everything that is going wrong

From Toward the Conquest of World Poverty by Steve Chapman.

Progress can often be defined as the stuff that happens while humanity is preoccupied with everything that is going wrong.

Matt Ridley documented this pretty thoroughly in The Rational Optimist. It is easy to overlook that much of the commentary in the daily news that so often is focused on grave problems, is actually pushed forward by individuals with a stake in addressing that problem, i.e. they are advocates rather than empirical reporters. The environment, economic development, over-fishing, child abuse, crime, etc. are all important issues but the factual truth on most is that things are better than they were recently and getting better faster.