Anxiety about some imminent catastrophe seems to be hardwired into our genome. We are killing the planet! Our borrowing is unsustainable! Immigration will overwhelm us! The world is frying! We’re overdue for an ice age! We’re overdue for an epidemic! We’re overdue for an asteroid strike! Pessimism sells. Editors publish it, politicians preach it, voters echo it. But, they’re all wrong!!! Every civilization has separately evolved its own End of Days scenario… Ragnarok or Judgment Day or Apocalypse or Armageddon. The eschatology varies, but the idea that life as we know it will soon come to an end doesn’t. Here, to pluck an example more or less at random, is the Zoroastrian version: At the end of the tenth hundredth winter, the sun is more unseen and more spotted; the year, month, and day are shorter; and the earth is more barren; and the crop will not yield the seed. And a dark cloud makes the whole sky night, and it will rain more noxious things than water. Why just in 1948, George Orwell was fretting about being watched through massive screens by an all-powerful state. A generation later, we carry our own screens with us and they place more information in our hands than an entire government department could have managed in Orwell’s day. Foods that were recently exotic and expensive are available on every shelf. We buy clothes so cheaply that we rarely bother mending them. Household appliances do in minutes what might take our grandmothers days. Globally, poverty is being eroded. By any metric, longevity, literacy, infant mortality, calorie intake, height, the human race is improving. Fact is, most people in most places at most times in the human story keep getting richer. It has been happening for thousands of years, driven by specialization and exchange, and accelerating enormously since the 17th century… nowhere more so than in societies built on free competition, of which the United States is the foremost example. Don’t confuse “ Change “ with the “ End of Days. “ The private sector will always, over time, grow faster than any form of government, because entrepreneurs are smarter, collectively, than bureaucrats. Vast new wealth will be created from 3-D printing, driverless cars, advances in biotechnology and other sectors that we can’t even now imagine. State regulators will always be playing catch-up. Free enterprise will outgrow the State, just as the Mexican and Central American jungles swallowed up the Mayan ruins. Now here is an idea. Cheap energy is a pretty reliable forerunner of growth, lowering production costs, boosting competitiveness and increasing disposable income. Which is why it is so important to pessimists to keep predicting a looming price rise. They simply can’t keep up with the progression of inevitable change.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 16:01:15 +0000
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