The Argument from Crisis and Pessimism Bias

There is a rational difference between "crimes (or inequality) has gone up and we need to do something" and "crimes (or inequality) has gone down, but we still need to gain more" : diminishing returns/feasibility issues.

If crimes (or inequality) was indeed lower 10 years ago, it means that reaching a lower point in crime/inequality was possible with a reasonable cost. Of course, it might be impossible now (because of a change in technology, in the environment, in whatever external things we don't really control), but the fact that it was lower before is valid evidence (even if not proof) that is possible to get it lower with a reasonable effort.

On the other hand, if crime or inequality is at an absolute low, it's harder to know if it's possible to get it even lower, or how much effort that would require.

Of course, that doesn't change the core of your reasoning, but it does make the "Argument from Crisis" more than just a rhetorical device - at least, when it's used accurately, ie, when the things are actually getting worse.

Measuring crime rates isn't easy. If citizens don't trust the police to go after criminals they report less crimes. The article you linked to along with many other source therefore use the murder rate as a proxy because presumably most murders get reported to the police. That's problematic because better emergency medicine decreased the death rate among people who get shot.

One standard explanation is that good news isn't news - only bad news is. A murder or a famine is news; their absense isn't. Hence people listening to the news gets a skewed picture of the world.

It's stronger than that. Over time newsrooms in a lot of countries have made the decision to spent more time reporting crimes.

No doubt there is something to that. In this post I want, however, to point to another mechanism that gives rise to a pessimism bias, namely the compound effect of many uses of what I call the Argument from Crisis. (Please notify me if you've seen this idea somewhere else.)

Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine" might be relevant.

There's Rahm Emanuel with "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

You have a good case that pessimistic rhetoric is effective, but I'd hesitate to conclude that pessimistic bias is primarily caused by exposure to such rhetoric.

It's an interesting question how to test this. Do people in controlled-media states consistently think things are getting worse? Do hunter-gatherers?

For instance, this survey shows that the British public think that the crime rate has gone up, even though it has gone down.

OK, but note that the most reliable crime statistics also come from a survey. In fact, the same survey! So rather than saying that this is because people are too negative, you have to tell a more subtle story.

What we really have is a seeming inconsistency in the way people are answering the survey - in effect, they are saying that they personally have suffered less crime, but that crime overall is up. That can't be true for the country as a whole, but it can be true for the Crime Survey. Leading candidates:

• The Crime Survey deliberately ignores certain categories of crime, such as drug offences. These are (1) very common, (2) don't have a direct victim, (3) have been de-prioritised by the police. So if I see increasing drug dealing around my area, I can say there is increasing crime, yet at the same time it won't show up on how much crime I've suffered.
• Biased sampling.
• Respondents are measuring crime changes over a different (presumably longer) period than mere comparison of the Survey statistics would suggest.

On the other hand, perhaps there genuinely is a gap in perception. But it's far from clear that this should be chalked up as people being "too pessimistic." On the contrary, you are implicitly conceding that their model of their immediate community is accurate.

The standard view is of course that [radicals] want radical change because they believe that the world has got worse, but I think that to some extent, the causality is reversed: they believe that the world has got worse because they want radical change.

This, however, is very insightful.

I would throw in the third possible cause for the pessimism bias, besides the Argument From Crisis and the slanted news coverage. Many organizations (both governmental and private) have incentives to make the population more fearful. Few (and in case of governments, very few if any) organizations want to make the population fearless.

Examples are trivial: the police want the population to be afraid of crime because it gives them more power, guarantees their jobs, raises their status, makes compliance easier and oversight harder, etc. etc.

This principle applies widely and includes the top levels of the government -- a scared population is just more malleable and more convenient to govern.

Turning from radicals to reactionaries, loss aversion could also support the perversity & jeopardy tropes Albert Hirschman identified in The Rhetoric of Reaction. Maybe loss aversion boxes us in from two directions: while it drives some people to conclude that things are worse than ever, it might discourage other people from trying to improve things.

I'd like to put this in relation to the recently featured Cost for Irrationality post. I think this bias is a prime example of a bias capable of cripling a society.

I totally agree that this Argument from Crisis is (ab)used a lot. And I'm inclined to say that its massive use (obviously because it is so effective, even more so with our mass-media) has a profund effect on a lot of areas. I think it causes e.g. overprotection of children - making them more dependent and less autonomous with each generation.

I think the Argument from Crisis effect is able to persist across multiple generations precisely because it is not founded in facts but colored perception which may well be applicable over time. In fact it may even worsen because a perceived effect appears to continue. Except if it is explicitly countered, for which I see little general evidence though there may be specific examples. In the end you probably can't argue for all time that some evil continues to increase when in fact it by now has almost been eradicated. Or can you?

The word you are looking for is nostalgia. The argument from crisis is very similar to restorative nostalgia ( http://samirchopra.com/2013/06/20/kinds-of-nostalgia/ ). The first study I found didn't find much of a link between nostalgia and pessimism ( http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1998.87.2.411?journalCode=pms ).

I've seen Moldbug post of graph of assaults/stabbings etc... in England from 1900 to 2000. It went up by a factor of 30. You also have to consider that modern tech allows for the consequences of violence to be ameliorated. It's genuinely hard to compare today to the past because we don't live there and we have to rely on others accounts of it.

Looking at the bottom line of this post I can say that one of the things are missing is who does the pessimism bias serve? It serves interests and those interests are interested in keeping a pessimistic view of the world going because they can make sales and increase their bottom line. They can sell commodities and make the public believe that they need to do things for themselves to make life better because things are bad. This noble myth keeps people in jobs they hate and keeps them docile. If the world was a bright and wonderful improving place then people would do radical things that would upset the social order and the accepted way of things. That is why radicals want radical change and why, packaged in the right way, they can become a representative of the whole. If you look at the wave of communism in the early 20th century, you had people getting behind the ideas of just a few radicals because of an overwhelming problem and a social order that was unwilling to change. That is what we face now. Facts have no place in this space because it is all about perception and perception is crafted. What you are describing is how people keep the status quo going.