Why I Am an Optimist
My optimism is more of a conclusion than a temperament, and it has four roots.
The first is empirical. I set out the case in The Optimistic Outlook that progress is real, that human ingenuity solves problems faster than pessimists predict, and that the historical record bears this out far better than doom-laden forecasting ever has. This is not a matter of disposition but of evidence.
The second is epistemological. My empiricism, filtered through Popper, treats knowledge as something that grows through trial and error rather than something that decays or runs out. Problems are soluble, with each one solved opens the way to solving the next. An epistemology built this way cannot help but be optimistic, since it has no concept of a permanent obstacle, only of a problem not yet addressed.
The third is economic. Adam Smith's account of the effort to better one's condition is not, for me, a technical mechanism to be footnoted. It is a statement about human nature. People improve things, and left the room to do it, they generally do. It is the founding assumption behind everything the Adam Smith Institute stands for.
The fourth is experience. I watched ideas dismissed as fringe in the 1970s, privatization, deregulation, market-based reform, become the mainstream policy of a decade later. That is not abstract optimism, it is optimism earned from having been right when it went against the consensus of the time.
Julian Simon supplies the wider frame for optimism. In The Ultimate Resource, he argued that human ingenuity is not a fixed stock to be rationed but a resource that expands with use. Every generation that has predicted exhaustion, of food, of minerals, of room to grow, has been proved wrong by the next generation's capacity to solve the very problem it was warned it could not solve. Simon staked money on that conviction, and won. My own optimism rests on the same wager, that ingenuity, not scarcity, is the ultimate resource.
It turns out that this disposition serves the body as well as the argument. Optimists live happier lives, and the evidence of several studies increasingly shows they live healthier and longer ones too. The connection holds even after accounting for diet, exercise, and the other habits one might expect to explain it away. Optimism itself, not merely the behaviour that sometimes accompanies it, seems to matter, with better management of stress, a lower incidence of heart disease, and a mind that stays sharper for longer.
I find this fitting rather than surprising. A cast of mind that expects things to improve is a cast of mind less burdened by dread. If Simon was right that ingenuity is the ultimate resource, then optimism is the disposition that keeps drawing on it, in argument, in policy, and, it seems, in life itself.
Madsen Pirie