Beautiful places are more crowded, but the world is getting better, not worse

The media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us what in the world goes wrong.
Max Roser, Our World in Data

Last week an article in the Guardian about the rapid increase in popularity of US national parks was widely shared on social media.

The article described how the launch of Instagram in 2010 had caused visitor numbers to a popular viewpoint above the Grand Canyon called Horseshoe Bend to grow from a few thousand a year to 100,000 in 2010, to a predicted two million this...