Why We're So Pessimistic: Read An Excerpt from Upside

Our good feelings about the future come with a hitch: The future never arrives. Surveys have asked questions about the present and the future for several decades now, allowing us to compare Americans' expectations for a specific year in the future versus their feelings about it once it arrives-but the future never seems to live up to its advanced billing. For example, a 1997 survey asked Americans to rate their current quality of life on a ladder scale of 1 to 10, and they averaged a rating of 7. The same survey asked what they expected for five years from then, and they rated their projected quality of life as 8.2. However, when the year 2002 actually rolled around five years later, another survey asked the same questions, and it found that Americans rated the quality of their current lives at just 6.9, but, again, respondents were optimistic about five years into the future, rating it at 8.3. As phrased by a Pew report, the "future ain't what it used to be."

Failed Prophecies of Doom

While rank-and-file Americans are modestly optimistic about the future, journalists, academics, and other experts seem to be more negative overall. In fact, forecasting doom is a viable career strategy, complete with strong book sales, frequent media appearances, and the occasional Nobel Prize. In this section I review a couple of the better-known prophecies of doom. It's kind of fun to see experts be so wrong, an intellectual schadenfreude-rejoicing in others' misfortune. Perhaps more important, realizing the errors of previous, widely accepted prophecies of doom should make us a little more skeptical about current ones, many of which could well turn out to be equally preposterous.

Perhaps the best known historical gloom-and-doomer was Thomas Malthus, an influential British scholar and Anglican clergyman born in 1766. Malthus predicted that the human population would continue to grow until it exceeded the availability of natural resources needed to keep humans alive, thus resulting in a "Malthusian" crisis of famine, poverty, and vice. According to Malthus, humanity could look forward to a continual cycle of population growth followed by social collapse. This prediction did not come about for two reasons: the human population hasn't grown as fast as Malthus expected, and agricultural productivity has increased even faster-making today's world the best fed in human history (as we'll discover in chapter 5).

In recent years, however, the King of Doom has been Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is a biologist at Stanford University who originally trained in the study of butterflies, but he transitioned to human ecology. Though most popular in the 1970s and 1980s, his work is still influential. Ehrlich has taken an updated Malthusian approach, linking sustainability to three factors: population size, affluence, and technology. He identifies larger, more affluent, and more technically advanced societies as using more natural resources than other societies, and since societies worldwide are moving toward affluence and growth, he views the world as headed toward scarcity. Based on this perspective, Ehrlich made the following predictions in the 1970s and 1980s, which I'll present along with what really happened.

Hunger:

1. Ehrlich: "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."
2. What happened: The percentage of people starving worldwide has dropped from 38% in 1970 to 18% in 2001.

India:

1. "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," or "be self-sufficient in food by 1971."
2. India has grown to over one billion people, and their average caloric intake is 50% higher than in the 1950s.

Commodities:

1. "Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity in which many things besides energy will be in short supply. . . . Such diverse commodities as food, fresh water, copper, and paper will become increasingly difficult to obtain and thus much more expensive."
2. Most commodities are cheaper and more widely available now than ever.

Life expectancy:

1. "The U.S. life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics."
2. American life expectancy has steadily risen in past decades, and now it's at about seventy-eight years.

Air pollution:

1. "Smog disasters in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles."
2. The air in Los Angeles, New York, and most American cities is substantially cleaner now than in the 1970s.

And my personal favorite:

1. "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
2. I have it on good authority that England is still there.