Trends Are Bad, Events Are Worse, But ‘Trevents’ May Surprise Us
We exaggerate the importance of breaking news but we also project illusions about the future. History really gets made in between the short and long runs.
Larry Summers — Davos Man.
Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
Back in the summer, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and I were discussing the global economic and political situation. Just how bad were things going to get? Larry came up with a characteristically pithy formulation: “Events are 75% bad,” he said. “Trends are 75% good.”
I could see what he was getting at. His aphorism is a distillation of the argument of another longtime Harvard friend, the psychologist Steven Pinker. “Journalism by its very nature hides progress,” Pinker argued in a recent interview, “because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends … the press is an availability machine. It includes the worst things to happen on Earth at any given time.” But, he adds, “human progress is an empirical fact.” (This is a view Pinker has propounded in several books: Rationality (2021), Enlightenment Now (2018) and The Better Angels of our Nature (2011).)