Recently I was struck by a conversation I had with a progressive friend. When I noted the significant decrease in extreme world poverty over the past two decades — a remarkable achievement that has attracted relatively little news coverage — he responded by confidently denying that this was so. His reasoning was instructive: If this were true, he said, he would have heard about it by now.
Reasoning from an absence of news is a familiar, and often justified, phenomenon. If you are worried that your favorite sports team is thinking of trading its star player, it would be reasonable to regard the absence of news as indicating that the player has not yet been traded.
But as my friend’s case makes clear, this sort of reasoning can also lead us badly astray. Suppose that your preferred news sources do not regularly report on a given topic. If you assume that they do offer coverage on that topic, you risk making the sort of mistake my friend made.
