Why Pessimism Sounds Smart

A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song ... If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a Mc

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Matt Ridley wrote in his book The Rational Optimist: A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song ... If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand,

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constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song ... If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McAr

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We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of living is now going to slow down—at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely t

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We increasingly believe that progress is inevitable. Progress, though, is not guaranteed. We must work for it. Otherwise, our living standards will not improve, and may get worse. 

When you realize how much progress humans can make during a lifetime in everything from economic growth to medical breakthroughs to stock market gains to social equality, you would think optimism would gain more attention than pessimism. And yet. The intellectual allure of pessimism has been known for ages. John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I h

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The most influential pessimist in modern economic thinking has no doubt been Thomas Robert Malthus, an English pastor writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Malthus famously warned against trying to improve the lot of the poor, and even against the chances for long-term economic progress. He argued that following any rise in

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The third source of optimism is a kind of more recent understanding that progress—the progress that we have had—is not really visible. It’s a very small delta. So, we may only create 1% more progress every year than we destroyed. Net progress of 1% is really not visible in any given year. But 1% compounded over decades and even centuries is what ci... See more