system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Name for this "paradox": When common things become more rare, they stand out more, which makes them seem more common?

I'm thinking of things like crime and world conflict, not to mention infant mortality.  I've seen it stated repeatedly that the world/country (I'm from the US) is generally getting better in these regards, yet people think it's getting worse.  Could that be, at least in part, because these terrible things are more rare, and are getting toward the other end of the maxim "One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic"?  And if so, is there a name for this effect/paradox?

edit to expand on what I mean (the following is meant to express an idea or proposition, not as any kind of authoritative statement): If people become used to a thing, then by default it is no longer noteworthy, no matter how many times they hear about it, and no matter how many times they experience it.  So, the "psychological weight" they attach to it goes down; <insert bad thing here> is "just a part of life."  This minimization could be a defensive mechanism so you don't psychologically exhaust yourself with worry.  If this mechanism exists, then there is some threshold of prevalence, above which the defense is active, below which it is not.  If the prevalence of <insert bad thing here> dips *below* the threshold, then society members lose the benefit of the defense mechanism, and their reactions go *up*, despite the fact that the bad thing is getting *less prevalent*.  Similar logic could be applied to good things, I think; it's still exhausting to always be euphoric.  Another possible reason for this adjustment might be to adjust one's psychological "baseline" to best cope with reality.

Does this concept have a name, or does it even make sense?
gpt
Um...the Availability Heuristic may come into play here - rare things are reported more frequently in the news than common things (you read about every plane that has ever crashed, but not every instance of petty theft), and because of this, it is easier to recall examples of rare things (like planes crashing), and because they are easy to recall, you assume they happen all the time.