I like this. It's insightful, and stated in a plain way.

And equally we can say, once we start regarding good news as a gain, very bad stuff happens.

The idea of "confidence" rather than measurable, tangible facts as an economic basis has been the road to many bad things. In some ways confidence and pessimism can be seen as the ability to ignore reality. We've been inventing ways to delude ourselves in western economies for decades. For example, film and record companies counting copyright infringement as if it were an actual loss, or Twitter over-counting its users as a kind of corporate egotism.

What might really help our societies on multiple levels is a return to fact-based economics, instead of what is essentially information warfare directed at pulling off ever more audacious confidence tricks.