I sent this letter to the Financial Times:
Sir, Gideon Rachman ("In defence of gloomy
columnists", May 24) is right to point out that terrible blips
will still happen in an improving world. Another way of making the
same point is that good news tends to be gradual, incremental and
barely visible, while bad news almost by definition comes in
sudden, newsworthy lumps: wars, crashes, disasters, epidemics. It
is impossible to see a field of wheat growing, but easy to see it
washed away by a flood.
Matt Ridley
