The media are full of headlines about war, sexual assault, inequality, obesity, cancer risk, environmental destruction, economic crisis, and other disasters. It’s enough to make people think that the world of their children and grandchildren will be worse than today’s world.

But the real story, which rarely makes headlines, is that, to paraphrase Indur Goklany’s book title, we are living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner and more peaceful planet. (Allister Heath summed up his argument in a cover story for the Spectator of London, without all the charts and tables.) Fortunately, beyond the headlines, more people do seem to be recognizing this.

The Cato Institute, for instance, has created an ever-expanding website on human progress, known simply as HumanProgress.org.

Here’s Steven Pinker expanding on the information in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined in Slate:

The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. 

He has charts of the data in each of those areas. And here’s Pinker at the Cato Institute discussing why people are so pessimistic when the real trends are so good:

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I’m tempted to feel a certain degree of sympathy for Paul Krugman.

As a leading proponent of the notion that bigger government stimulates growth (a.k.a., Keynesian economics), he’s in the rather difficult position of rationalizing why the economy was stagnant when Obama first took office and the burden of government spending was rising.

And he also has to somehow explain why the economy is now doing better at a time when the fiscal burden of government is declining.

But you have to give him credit for creativity. Writing in the New York Times, he attempts to square the circle.

Let’s start with his explanation for results in the United States.

…in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments.

If you define “austerity” as spending restraint, Krugman is right. Overall government spending has barely increased in recent years.

But then Krugman wants us to believe that there’s been a meaningful change in fiscal policy in the past year or so. Supposedly there’s been less so-called austerity and this explains why the economy is doing better.

The good news is that we…seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along… What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity…now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.

But where’s his evidence? Whether you look at OMB data, IMF data, or OECD data, all those sources show that overall government spending has been steadily shrinking as a share of GDP ever since 2009.

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This spring, the Affordable Care Act will make its third trip to the Supreme Court. But King v. Burwell is different from its predecessors. Instead of challenging Obamacare’s constitutionality, or the way certain regulations burden particular types of plaintiffs, this lawsuit questions how the executive branch has enforced the law generally—or, more precisely, modified, delayed, and suspended it.

After supporting the challengers’ successful request that the Supreme Court take up this case, the Cato Institute has now joined with Professor Josh Blackman on an amicus brief that alerts the Court to the separation-of-powers and rule-of-law violations attending the ACA’s implementation. Through a series of memoranda, regulations, and even blog posts, President Obama has disregarded statutory text, ignored legislative history, and remade the law in his own image.

King focuses on tax credits—the subsidies that allow people to pay increased premiums—one of the key pillars of Obamacare that the administration has toppled. To assist those who lack employer-sponsored insurance, and because it couldn’t command states to establish exchanges, Congress authorized these credits for residents of states that do create the exchanges. The statute expresses this design in language that is clear as day: Individuals receive tax credits if they bought a qualifying health plan “through an Exchange established by the State.”

In other words, if a state failed to establish an exchange, its residents—who would end up buying plans through the federal HealthCare.gov—would not be eligible for the subsidies. (The ACA’s Medicaid expansion plan operated with a similar carrot-and-stick approach until the Supreme Court rewrote it.)

But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia: only 14 states set up exchanges, meaning that the text of the law denied subsidies in nearly three-quarters of states. This result was untenable to an administration intent on pain-free implementation. To obviate the uncomfortable compromises Congress reached, the executive engaged in its own lawmaking process, issuing a regulation that nullifies the relevant ACA provision.

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