Matt Ridley: Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists

This Huffington Post Article is wonderful:

Matt Ridley: Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists

He had me in the first paragraph, "When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end." I was a student in the 1970s, and at my college, I heard the same horrendous predictions.

Maybe the pessimists galvanized people to make the world better, but I don't think so. Progress comes from a few heroes, like Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution," but mostly, from people doing what people do with the available capital, ambition, and technology. The point isn't that everything is wonderful, but that the fear-mongers keep generating crazy predictions for questionable motives, like selling books, magazines, movies, and political agendas. How's that ice age working out? How do we tell whether to be concerned or whether we are listening to Chicken Little?

I contend that a realistic recognition of the difference human progress has made in the quality of human life will motivate our kids to go forth and do something worthwhile more than yet another wave of doomsday predictions.

I remember what the pessimists were pushing in the 1970s. The question is, what are the pessimists pushing now?