Tired of the media telling you the world is going to hell in a handbasket?  Tired of hearing about how the economy is getting worse and worse and how living standards are declining and morality is collapsing?  Tired of hearing of how the world is running out of resources?  Me too, especially because none of it is true!  This portion of my website will hereby be dedicated to compiling the good news that is life in the 21st Century.  As I find bits and pieces of information that the major media are failing to report, or are reporting wrongly, or even underreporting, I'll pass them along to you here.

One good place to start would be with my responses to five contemporary economic myths:  living standards are declining, the 80s were a decade of greed, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, jobs are paying less than they used to, and the world is running out of resources.  After that, you can click on others to your heart's content.

Contemporary Economic Myths

Incomes are up across the board! - Update from 1998 Census Bureau Income Data

Population explosion?  What population explosion?  - UN report on the Day of 6 Billion

General good news and so forth:

• The ATM Fee Caper  -  Remember all the talk awhile back about trying to put legal limits on the fees that banks charge for using their ATMs, or the ATMs of other banks?  Everyone was so worry about how people were going to get ripped off and the like.  Critics of the pro-regulation crowd (like myself) pointed out that if such fees were really too high, it was relatively simple for people to avoid them by using debit cards or checks and the like.  We were scoffed at for being lackeys for the greedy banks.  Well guess what?  We were right - people have found numerous ways around the fees.
• High School Violence on the Decline - Columbine is the exception not the rule, as written by the LA Times, and reported in the Watertown Times of Aug. 4, 1999:  The number of students who said they carried weapons to school declined 28% from 1993 to 1997. Students who said they got in schoolyard fights fell by 9% over the same period.  The proportion who said they carried guns on or off campus fell by 25%
• School is a safe place for kids - "But understand that school is still one of the safest places your children can ever go, and multiple shootings at school are very rare.  In fact, a child is vastly more likely to have a heart attack, and heart attacks in children are so rare that most parents (correctly) never even consider the risk.  Today's teens live in a much different world from the one their parents grew up in.  In most ways, it's a safer one.  Young people are far more likely to survive childhood today than in 1960.  Vehicle fatalities have dropped by almost 20% since the mid-60s, deaths by other accidents have been cut in half and cancer deaths for the young have been reduced by 30%."  -  Gavin De Becker, USA Weekend magazine, Aug. 20-22, 1999, p. 6.
• Health insurance numbers - An often-quoted number is that during 1998, something like 43 million Americans did not have health insurance.  The problem with that piece of data is that it doesn't always finish the thought.  The actual number is that 43 million Americans did not have health insurance at some point during the year.  Granted, there are many, many problems with the US health care system, most of which are caused by government intervention of some type or another, but one should not have the image that there are 43 million Americans totally devoid of health insurance for the entire calendar year.  That's simply not true.  There are certainly a good number of folks who fit that description, but many of the 43 million are simply people who are between jobs, or between school and a job, and who are, therefore, without health insurance for some portion of the year.  Being without health insurance for a couple of months is quite different from being without it for the whole year.

Page last updated 10/3/99.