[nonethewiser]

Divorce rate isnt strictly good but or bad though. Some of the increase in divorce is due to increased economic opportunity for women. To put it another way, we could decrease divorce rates by eliminating economic opportunities for women.

[Retric]

I didn’t mean to single out divorce as a bad thing just that you can create multiple statistics around the same thing. Economic growth itself is an extreme example of this you can find many positive and many negative statistics resulting from the same underlying trend.

Total number of people dying from air pollution is an easy way to make global economic growth look bad. I am not saying it’s inherently a bad thing, just that painting a very rosy picture means being selective about what’s included and how it’s presented. You can downplay anything by using percent of a growing population even if things don’t actually become less horrific for those impacted just because there’s more people.