One of the constant writing habits to guard against, if you are an economic liberal like most of us who write for this blog, is the tendency to complain all the time. Before writing this post I looked back through the last dozen or so postings here. By the time you read this it may have changed, but at that particular time, a comfortable – if that's the word – majority of recent postings either included or simply were complaints of one kind or another, about bad government, and about bad ideas about how there should be yet more bad government.

Good. It is good to complain about badness. But, a balance should be struck, if only to avoid demoralising both ourselves and all our readers.

And we economic liberals do have plenty of good news to celebrate. Capitalism, the myriad attacks on which make us so gloomy, now produces, despite all the attacks, a never-ending stream of wondrous new products and services.

For me, one the most delightful recent products of capitalism has been digital photography. Hardly a week now goes by without me having digital camera fun of some kind, often bloggably so.

My current camera, a Canon S1 IS, is my best yet. It has an "image stablizer", which is invaluable, and it has a mega powerful (10x!) optical zoom lens, ditto.

But my buying brief was: the best cheap digital camera that I could fit into my jacket pocket, and fitting my Canon S1 IS into some pockets is a tight squeeze. The problem is that zoom lens. If Canon could, Canon would just love fit it into a camera the size of a cigarette packet. But, Canon can't.

Only a few weeks ago, a friend patiently explained to me that optical zoom lenses – such is the nature of the universe – cannot stick out any less than they now do. But the universe, it seems, has just changed its nature:

Québec City, May 18, 2005 – Scientists from Université Laval's Faculty of Sciences and Engineering have invented a lens five times thinner than a sheet of paper that is able to zoom in and out without mechanical parts. Tigran Galstian and Vladimir Presnyakov present this amazing piece of optical instrumentation in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Physics.

"There are several possible applications for such a lens. We believe one of its most promising developments could be in camera-embedded cell phones," says Galstian. "Our opto-electrical zoom lens would be of much higher quality than the ones that currently equip these phones."

This won't just make small cellphone cameras far better; it will make better cameras, like mine, far smaller. Superb. Obviously there is much further work to be done before this magic can be sold in the high street, so: patience. But: superb.

I only learned of this latest capitalist triumph by reading the August 2005 issue of Digital Camera Shopper, which I only bought because it has a review of the Canon S2 IS, which is my camera only better. (Dead tree publications have their uses.) The story I then googled my way to is over two months old.

But that's the thing about good capitalist news. It's easy to miss.

(Brian Micklethwait also writes here.)