An Antidote of Optimism

This is very good. This is the pick-me-up that people need this day: optimism.

Here is an article by Daniel Gross in Slate that gives us the needed jolt of positive attitude:

The dumb, willfully blind optimists who dominated the late boom have slunk into exile. They've been replaced by the ardent declinists, the bears, and the prophetic historians, armed with copies of Gibbon and Malthus and wielding reams of data. There are economists predicting double-digit unemployment through 2011, with the housing and stock markets reeling through 2010. Historians, meanwhile, warn that the United States may be losing some of its capitalistic essence as the government increases its involvement in the financial sector. At Davos, Niall Ferguson, a brilliant, young, Oxford-educated, Ivy League-employed historian (Harvard), said the United States isn't in another Great Depression but rather a "Great Repression," in deep denial of its problems. The go-go Age of Leverage is over, and a go-slow Age of Big Government has begun. High levels of debt, imperial overreach, and heightened government influence in the economy mean the United States is in for a Japan-style lost decade, in which it could struggle to chart growth of 1 percent.

...

Things have been going downhill in America since the very beginning: Imagine the economic forecasts made in Plymouth in the bitter winter of 1619. In the early 1990s, a recession lengthened, executives took huge paychecks while firing thousands of workers, and Americans began to lose faith in the capitalist systems. No economist or historian stood up and predicted that globalization, intelligent fiscal and monetary policy, and this thing called the Internet would launch the United States into an unprecedented era of growth, prosperity, and rising asset prices.