INTRODUCTION Public-opinion surveys make amply clear that most persons in the United States. believe that our environment is getting dirtier, we are running out of natural resources, and population growth in the world is a burden and a threat. Ten minutes asking questions of grade-school children will confirm for you that these beliefs are held even among our youngest citizens. It also is amply clear by now that these beliefs are entirely wrong. Though it is not known to the public, there is broad scientific consensus that the air and water in the United States are getting clearner rather than dirtier, natural resources are become less scarce rather than more scarce, and there is no quantitative evidence that population growth is detrimental to economic growth in poor countries or rich ones. Why do we hear so much false bad news about the subjects of the environment, resources, and population? From the very first public talk about population growth that I gave in 1969, and the first article aimed to the broad public in 1980, this question arose again and again from the few people who took me seriously. The better question, however, is this one: Why do we believe so much false bad news about the environment, resources, and population? What we hear would not matter unless we also come to believe that that "news" is true. Hence this book is about the entire complex of the production of false bad news by researchers, organizaions, and the press and television, the nature of what is produced for our consumption, and our propensities as human beings that lead us to consume (and be consumed by) that body of false statements. In that 1980 article in Science I gave this brief answer: Why do false statements of bad news dominate public discussion of these topics? Here are some speculations. 1) There is a funding incentive for scholars and institutions to produce bad news about population, resources, and the environment. The AID and the U.N.'s Fund for Population Activities disburse more than a hundred million dollars each year to bring about fertility decline. Much of this money goes to studies and publications that show why fertility decline is a good thing. There are no organizations that fund studies having the opposite aim. 2) Bad news sells books, newspapers, and magazines; good news is not half so interesting. Is it a wonder that there are lots of bad-news best-sellers warning about pollution, population growth, and natural-resource depletion but none telling us the facts about improvement? 3) There are a host of possible psychological explanations for this phenomenon about which I am reluctant to speculate. But these two seem reasonably sure: (i) Many people have a propensity to compare the present and the future with an ideal state of affairs rather than with the past or with some other feasible state; the present and future inevitably look bad in such a comparison. (ii) The cumulative nature of exponential growth models has the power to seduce and bewitch. 4) Some people publicize dire predictions in the idealistic belief that such warnings can mobilize institutions and individuals to make things even bet- ter; they think that nothing bad can come of such prophecies. But we should not shrug off false bad news as harmless exaggeration. There will be a loss of credibility for real threats as they arise, and loss of public trust in public communication. As Philip Han- dler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified to congressmen in the midst of the environ- mental panic of 1970: "The nations of the world may yet pay a dreadful price for the public behavior of scientists who depart from ... fact to indulge ... in hyperbole". (Simon, 1980, pp. 1436-7.) Since then I have added to the list the following: 5) The preservationists who prefer bucolic surroundings to resource development. 6) Psychological propensities deep in our psyche that predispose us to warnings of doom. 7) The marvelously evocative inflammatory rhetoric that has been created to arouse fear -- "population bomb", "empty pumps", "save the children", "end of the world as we know it", and "end of the age of affluence", for example. 8) Simple racism, especially with respect to population growth in other parts of the world, and with respect to immigrants of various shades and ethnicities entering the United States. 9) An attitude toward the factual truth that induces people to exaggerate and even lie when convinced that the eleventh-hour danger to the public justifies such dishonest practices. Joining the environmental movement is seen by many as a last chance to do good, just as joining the Communist Party in the 1930's seemed an opportunity for social contribution by many generous-minded people. Once having joined the movement, foul means are deemed acceptable by many if the end is thought to be beneficial. 10) The ideas that undergird the newspaper and television stories, the intellectual infrastructure which give these stories credibility. These ideas fall into two categories: misunderstandings of the nature of resource creation and population economics, and misunderstandings of the nature of a modern complex social-economic system. As I gradually learned that there is much more to be said on the matter than I originally thought, and having realized that the tapestry of explanation for this mass belief is even more complex than I ever dreamed, I began to duck the question and instead answer: You should address that question to social psychologists and scholars of communications. But then I found that there has been no wide-ranging inquiry into the subject. While journalists have given us at least occasional essays on the subject, the psychologists have not addressed the issue at all. Nor have I been able to enlist the research interest of the cognitive psychologists who have learned so much in recent decades about errors in human thinking, even though this could be a wonderful showcase for their analyses of thought beyond the category of simple rationality. Foolish writers (such as this one) allow themselves to be sucked into a vacuum of literature. So even while I was publicly ducking the question, and concentrating on my technical work, I was picking away at the various aspects of the issue, often in response to particular needs of the day. This book is the culmination and the integration of those individual studies. HOW CAN IT BE THAT PEOPLE THINK WHAT THEY DO? My mother was born in 1900. One of her brothers died of diphtheria in infancy, with the doctor looking on helplessly. In 1937, her only son was saved from death at age 5 by the first new wonder drug, sulfanilamide. In her eighties Mohter knew that her friends had mostly lived extraordinarily long lives, mostly in good health. She was grateful for the new miracles of medical science, and she appreciated the convenience and comfort provided by such modern inventions as the telephone, air conditioning, and airplanes have brought. Yet Mother insisted that life was worse in the 1980s than it was when she was young. When I pressed her why she thought so, she said, "The headlines in the newspaper are all bad." When I occasionally say to my wonderful aunt Ruth, now in her 80s, that pollution is decreasing in the U. S., she responds, "But the pollution in the bay [near her home in Queens, New York] is much worse than when we moved here." When I remind her of the pollution in the drinking water from the Hudson River that killed children with typhoid and diphtheria in her part of the world when she was a girl, she sighs, "I guess you're right," but I don't think I have changed her outlook much. When I say to my wonderful Aunt Anna, also in her 80s, that everything material is better now than when she was young, she answers, "But you read in the papers about so much wrong-doing." Reminding her of the horrors of two world wars - when paradoxi- cally the good news often was featured in the papers - and mentioning the frauds of the 1920s, brings her to nod agreement, but that's only because she loves her nephew, I think. Lest one think that those who are more involved in the business of the world than my mother and aunts, and whose opinions shape events, somehow have the ability to discount false bad reports and are able in any mysterious prescient manner to peer to the heart of truth, consider this incident reported by journalist David Broder. Broder certainly is as generally well- informed as any human being on the face of the earth, and is as respected for his clear understanding and fair and balanced reporting as any newsperson. Following a trip to Europe in the spring of 1993, Broder wrote this report about his trying to understand the attitudes toward the U. S. of the attendees at a conference of movers and shakers from various countries in Europe and Asia: [Y]ou have to make a mental adjustment that I found difficult. You have to see the United States, not as most Americans do, as a nation beset by problems and maybe headed down the chute, but as a citadel of economic and political strength in a world of stumbling economies and faltering leaders. It is startling to be told that no major economy is growing as fast or genrating jobs as well as the United States is today. But the figures are irrefutable (June 9, 1993, p. A19) If David Broder entirely misunderstood whether conditions had been getting better or worse in the U. S., and midjudged the overall standing of the U. S. relative to other countries, should we be surprised that less-informed persons also have things backwards and upside down? And - what possible explanation can there be for Broder's fundamental confusion except that the impression left by the information provided him by the media is upside down and backwards? THE FACTUAL CONTEXT This is a brief overview of the relevant facts that one must recognize if one is to make sense of the events of the day concerning the enviroment, resources, and population - and that one must recognize if the rest of this book is to make any sense. This is the economic history of humanity in a nutshell: From 2 million or 200,000 or 20,000 or 2,000 years ago until the 18th Century there was slow growth in population, almost no increase in health or decrease in mortality, slow growth in the availability of natural resources (but not increased scarcity), increase in wealth for a few, and mixed effects on the environment. Since then there has been rapid growth in population due to spectacular decreases in the death rate, rapid growth in resources, widespread increases in wealth, and an unprecedently clean and beautiful living environment in the richer capitalistic countries along with a degraded environment in the poor and socialist countries. The increase in the world's population represents our victory over death. In the 19th Century the earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years ago, only 1 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on average. The current gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that U.S. air and our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world's population has been eating ever-better since World War II, defying simplistic Malthusian reasoning. Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world - life expectancy almost tripling in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the poor countries in just the past four decades. This is the most important and amazing demographic fact -- the greatest human achievement in history. It took thousands of years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high '20's about 1750. Then about 1750 life expectancy in the richest countries suddenly rose so that the length of life you could expect for your baby or yourself in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to perhaps 75 years. Then starting well after World War II, the length of life you could expect in the poor countries has leaped upwards by perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the l950s, caused by advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. It is this decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a larger world population nowadays than in former times. The picture also is now clear that population growth does not hinder economic development. All the statistical studies show that faster population growth does not cause slower economic growth. In the 1980s there was a complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of population economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences completely overturned its "official" view away from the earlier worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any statistical evidence of a negative con- nection between population increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth". Chapter 3 shows how these same trends looked in 1980 - which is exactly the way they look now. These trends are robust; it doesn't matter whether you look at the "latest" data or not; that is a crucial lesson. Hence one can have confidence in projecting them into the future. For proper understanding of the important aspects of an economy we should look at the long-run trends. Almost every long-run trend in material human welfare points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. And there is no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not continue indefinitely. But the short- run comparisons - between the sexes, age groups, races, political groups, which are usually purely relative - make more news. Would I bet that these have been the "real" trends and that they will continue into the future? For sure. I'll bet a week's or month's pay - anything I win goes to pay for more research - that just about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse. You pick the comparison and the year. For more information on these facts and the theory that explains them, please see my other books. WHAT DOES THIS BOOK CONTAIN? Following this introduction come three chapters that show examples of the false bad news, and some analysis of how it emerges from advocacy organizations and the press. Chapter 1 contains a case study of an environmental news scam: the scare about how our farmland is vanishing due to the increased rate of urbanization. Chapter 2 collects dozens of examples of how my hometown newspaper, The Washington Post - one of the world's great news media - twists actual good news into false bad news with misleading headlines, captions, graphs, and the text itself. Chapter 3 contains another case study - my 1981 critique of the world-famous 1980 Global 2000 Report to President Jimmy Carter. Global 2000 was the classical government-produced and environmentalist-engineered false forecast of doom, drawing the appearance of validity from its thick size, hundreds of tables, computer gobbledygook, and hundreds of advisers with fancy credentials, and official imprimatur. The criticism in Chapter 3 has proven to be exactly correct in all details. Every single proposition in Global 2000 has proven wrong - perhaps a world record - as I then pointed out. But as I also predicted then, the critique and the subsequent experience of the Report proving wrong would bounce off that Report like a pebble off an elephant, and it would remain the common wisdom until displaced by another fearsome "official" report, which turned out to be the Brundtland Report later in the decade. So it happened. And the individuals and institutions who produced the discredited Global 2000 Report are still the gurus that the press turn to most frequently for their "expert" opinions. The trend data contained in Chapter 3, which end in 1980 or earlier, are useful both because of the essential information that they represent, as well as showing that such trends are reliable; updating them until the writing of this book (as I do in the Appendix to that chapter) makes only cosmetic differences. If trends in the social sciences are to matter at all, they must cover many decades and even centuries; only then can one feel any confidence in them; reports of scary recent blips based on a few years' data turn out to be false scares just about every time. Chapter 4 is the first of two chapters showing poll data on public opinion; it presents survey evidence on what the public believes about the ERP topics - environment, resources, and population - together with related topics of relative perceived risks to life and health versus the actual risks. Chapter 5 begins a series of chapters delving into why people believe things are bad and getting worse. Chapter 00 shows objectively that the information people receive from the media must be responsible in considerable part because - as the poll data in the chapter show - there is a huge discrepancy between (one the one hand) people's assessments of their personal situation, and (on the other hand) the abstract experience outside of their personal experience. A case study that helps us understand how people's wrong beliefs can be influenced by what the information they receive from outside, especially when there is a large volume of media coverage and there is no contrary information to be heard, is the case of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, and a contemporary parallel in the United States seen in the the population control movement. This case study is in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 turns to one of the internal psychological mechanisms which affects what people believe in connection with the information they receive from outside them: the cognitive mechanism of the comparisons that people make as affected by the upward ratchet of their expectations. Another internal mechanism that affects what people believe about the ERP subjects is the predisposition to be attracted by prophecies of doom - and in the case of some, the propensity to make such prophecies. Chapter 8 discusses these predispositions historically. Chapter 9 begins a set of chapters on the behavior of the press and television, attempting to explain why they pump out - and into the minds of the public - so many wrong facts and so much bad thinking about the ERP subjects. Discussed in this chapter are the mundane reasons for bad-news bias - self-interest of media as served by scare-created audiences (some examples are given of how the news is manipulated to achieve this effect), and the propensity of organizations and individuals to produce false statements about trends in ERP to promote budgets, grants and fundraising. Another reason why the media publishes wrong information is faulty journalistic practices that arise because of the scientific nature of the material in ERP topics. Chapter 10 discusses the nature of these ways of journalistic thinking - which seem to be getting worse as journalists turn from the traditional topics such as war and politics to scientifically- based questions. Much of the alarms about ERP originate with biologists, as has been the case for centuries. Chapter 11 discusses what is special about the thinking of biologists that makes so many of them become so alarmed about these topics. The ecologists among the biologists have much of their basic outlook in common with economists, yet reach radically different conclusions about the environment. Chapter 12 delves into this particular aspect of the biology-economics divide. Some mean motives such as racism and eugenics affect the flow of false information about ERP. There also are idealistic ones at work, such as the desire that a greed-free government take responsibility for improving our planet. Chapter 13 touches on these motives. Chapter 14 discusses some of the rhetorical devices used to communicate false messages of doom in prose discourse and politics. Chapter 15 does some of the same for statistical manipulations. Chapter 15 asks: Can the situation be improved? It first notes that conditions have improved in the past two decades, because there are now some voices and organizations that work to refute false bad news about ERP. And it discusses what might be done in the future. The Conclusion offers a bright note: Progress will win out despite the false messages, and explains why. I do not promise you a complete and coherent explanation of why we hear so much false bad news. The book inevitably will leave you with open questions about the relative importance of the various factors discussed, and how they interact; it does not have the systematic satisfying wholeness of a manual explaining the workings of the internal combustion engine. There may even be important elements in operation that I do not discuss. I can promise you, however, that reading the book will enable you to appreciate that the overabundance of false bad news is a very complex phenomenon that has roots in our psyches, our economic system and the incentives it provides, the history of the past few decades, and a host of other factors that influence why some organizations supply, and many individuals demand, the scary misinformation. Also, please do not expect a shivery-delicious orgy of press-bashing; though there is a fair amount about the press and other institutions (and a bit of blood and gore), the core of the book is its analysis of the intellectual and emotional processes of thinking, rhetoric, and belief. These subjects have woven through my avocational and professional life since I was an undergraduate at college doing a senior experimental thesis on concept formation in humans. As a result of observing the results of the evolving series of experiments, I innocently arrived at conclusions consistent with a cognitive outlook on the subject - even though I was a student in the most behavioral laboratory in the world, and not knowing that cognitive psychology was just getting started a building or so away. Since then - as side-interests to my main work in population economics - I have written books about research methods in social science, and the modes of thinking that enter into sound (and unsound research, all of which is germane to the perversions of research that enter prominently into arguments about resources, environment, and population; the "new statistics" of the resampling method, which is intertwined with the abuses of statistics that too often enter into discussions of these issues; and psychological depression (because I fell onto a new theoretical way of looking at depression, which pertains to the subject of this book). I hope that you enjoy and profit from the book. page 1 mediabk mintro June 9, 1995 OUT OUT OUT Relevant here that notions of rationality and irrationality are far too thin to help us. Inborn predispositions, Humean incapacity to must informationa nd process it, etc. Heuristics of thought, division into two camps, etc. page 2 mediabk mintro June 9, 1995