That is, the Environmental Quality Index represented casual observation and opinion rather than statistical facts. In 1984, as it got harder and harder to reconcile the real facts and the foolish numbers, National Wildlife dropped the numbers and retreated to words only, which are less easy to confute and make ridiculous with the actual data. I hope that my criticism in the first edition helped sink the numerical index by making it seem ridiculous. The trends in proportions of people expressing worry about pollution problems show large increases over recent years. Also see figure 14-3.
People expect worsening.
This finding is similar to the polls on energy mentioned in chapter 12. In this subject one will arrive at sound understanding and predictions only if one pays much attention to historical experience and does not allow oneself to be carried away by elegant deductive and mathematical constructions such as exponential growth in a finite system. Education in large quantities would seem to increase one's propensity to rely on such abstractions. In this instance, people feel that the grass is greener on his or her side of the street - or more precisely, that the grass is browner on the other person's side of the street which the comparer has never even seen. This cuts the logical ground out from under the abstract aggregate judgments, because they are not consistent with the sum of the individual judgments.