In reality, on most metrics, income inequality is lower than it was in the 1990s. Britons believe that income inequality has exploded in their country. Most Americans think that homicides have increased in the last few decades, while the real picture is one of a drastic decline. While trivial, my Christmas story shows that scattered memories of the past can be turned into rosy retrospections of things that never happened. Of course, we never consider that our memory is playing tricks with us. I have clear memories of snow and clear memories of Christmas – they just did not happen simultaneously. When we endure another Christmas in slush and mud, we recall these pristine winters of our childhood and blame our unusually bad luck, climate change, or some other handy explanation for why nothing today seems at great as it once was. Indeed, since 1981, only a single record exists of a Christmas Eve more than 10 centimeters deep in snow. When Swedish meteorologists looked at the local weather over the last 100 years, they noted that my region sees snow at Christmas only about once every five or ten years. Except, it turns out that these memories are confused and inaccurate. Every Christmas, my sister and I would play in the snow, build igloos and snowmen, and marvel at the Christmas lights. I distinctly remember the snowy winters of my childhood, growing up in southern Sweden. The saying about “ good old days” and imperfect memory has been attributed to many people and the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker used it in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now! to explain why we repeatedly underestimate progress in the world.
It is a well-established neuroscientific fact that memory is often unreliable and subject to priming, mistakes, and erroneous recall. We are absolutely sure that we left the car keys on the counter or that a particularly bad storm happened in the spring of 1983 and not in the autumn the year before. Memory often plays tricks with our understanding of the world.
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