17 Reasons to be a Rational Optimist

My favorite science and environmental columnist and author of the must read Rational Optimist, the eminent Matthew Ridley propounds 17 reasons why we should be cheerful:

1. We're better off now

2. Urban living is a good thing

3. Poverty is nose-diving

4. The important stuff costs less

5. The environment is better than you think

6. Shopping fuels innovation

7. Global trade enriches our lives

8. More farm production = more wilderness

9. The good old days weren't

10. Population growth is not a threat

11. Oil is not running out

12. We are the luckiest generation

13. Storms are not getting worse

14. Great ideas keep coming

15. We can solve all our problems

16. This depression is not depressing

17. Optimists are right

Read Mr. Ridley’s explanations here.

All the above redounds to a single most important theme: the human being.

Rational optimism is a bet on human capital, or in the context of the Austrian economic school, praxeology or the science of human action—purposeful behavior towards the fulfillment of an end which aims to substitute present unsatisfactory conditions.

Human actions in pursuit of constant improvements is likely to bring about positive changes, despite attendant challenges (especially from politicians, the regulators and cronies).

People are the ultimate resource, as the great author and Professor Julian Simon once wrote,

Only one important resource has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. It is the most important and valuable resource of all—human beings

Mark Twain’s Rational Optimism

Samuel Langhorne Clemens popularly known by his pen name Mark Twain reveals his rational optimism, in a letter birthday greeting letter to contemporary Walt Whitman.

Here is part of that letter (hat tip Matt Ridley, go to Letters of Note see the complete letter)

Transcript as follows: [bold emphasis mine]

You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world's history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.

What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen the monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence & attention to business, but isn't connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen much — but tarry yet a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last! — & still growing, visibly growing while you look.

Read the rest here

Well, Mark Twain was right. Such marvels has been brought about by capitalism.