Opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap. For more than two decades, through good times and bad, when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 40