Why Optimism Rules

In this earlier post, I mentioned a book that was purchased through some careful price checking across the several platforms for purchasing books on Amazon. I just managed to read through that book through the holiday and was quite impressed with it save for the monotony suffered on account of author's inability to avoid making cheap jabs at Obama's science advisor. The author's foibles aside, one has to say that it would be one of the few books to buy and circulate to the cult of the pessimists.

In short, the book adopts the ideas of Adam Smith in terms of the value of exchange on the one side and the tendency for evolution on the other to lead to betterment in human life over centuries without fail. In it one finds a clear text hat is largely free of an ideological bias in arguing that human progress is bound to continue provided the simple freedom to exchange is maintained. Among the impressive chapters within the text is the demolition job on neo-Malthusians who continue to find new reasons to argue that humanity is doomed on account of population growth.

John Tierney, writing in the NYT here reminds me of the same argument that in spite of the evidence, many people remain pessimistic. In John's case, he takes the opportunity to state that he and Julian Simon's wife won a wager against an academic who argued that the price of petroleum would triple in the five year period ending in January 2011. Were it not an act of shameless lack of originality, I would form the club of Incorrigible Optimists.