Diseases eradicated, endangered species saved and millions of people lifted out of poverty don't make the headlines. There "is a way not to tell whether there has been progress, and that is to follow the news," warned Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, January 22. His remarks seemed aimed at distracting the après-ski-clad festival-goers from their obsession with Donald Trump. But then again, it all comes back to the same thing.

"Editors have said, well, our attitude is bad news is serious journalism, good news is advertising," he explained, adding that, in essence, news is about reporting what happens. And, more often than not, it's bad news, like a school attacked by a madman, as opposed to all the other news. Could this negative media and social media bias be fueling the prevailing pessimism? With data to back him up, the American-Canadian professor, with his white mane, demonstrated that the world has never been better off than it is today.

Of course, since the epidemics of the Middle Ages and the centuries when peace was just a parenthesis amid war. But he also referenced the year 2016, when Barack Obama wrote: "If you had to choose a moment in history to be born and you did not know ahead of time who you'd be, you'd choose now."

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