Today’s Solutions: August 18, 2026

OK, we stole that headline; it’s a popular rubric in our quarterly magazine. (We guess you can’t really call it “stealing” then, can you?) Stealing, and crime in general, is on the decline. That’s one of many important, positive long-term trends that we describe on the very last page of each issue. So one reader of The Optimist Daily alerted us to this blog post on Vox with 11 maps and charts, showing how the world is getting better all the time, despite the impression you may get from the “regular” news that all is, well, going to hell. Now you know it’s not just us who say that’s not true.

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