“It’s tough to be alive now,” the actor Timothée Chalamet recently said. “I think societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it.”

It’s one of those lines that got picked up by dozens of media outlets. Because those outlets know it’s one of those headlines people can’t resist clicking on. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey once put it, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.”

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