A pep talk for the middle class
"Since 2000," the Pew Research Center reported last week, "the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some but by no means all of its characteristic faith in the future."
Lost faith in the future? Now that is ominous.
See here, middle class: We need a pep talk. Sure, it can appear gloomy out there.
cheap jordans We've got trillion dollar deficits, a feeble recovery, a looming "fiscal cliff," a dysfunctional Congress, a president blindly dedicated to populist bromides, a Eurozone recession looming, and Congressman Todd Akin.
No wonder only "43 percent of those in the middle class expect that their children's standard of living will be better than their own," according to Pew, and barely half are optimistic about the nation's long term economic future.
However understandable the pessimism, though, odds are it's wrong. Buck up, friends. We may have endured a lost decade and our political leaders may contrive to extend stagnation for some years to come. But in the long run their incompetence is unlikely to stifle the ideas, innovations and investment that always propel us forward.
"So long as somebody allocates sufficient capital to innovation, then the credit crunch will not in the long run prevent the relentless upward march of human living standards," writes Matt Ridley in his powerful book "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves." "If you look at a graph of world per capita GDP,
cheap jordans free shippingthe Great Depression of the 1930s is just a dip in the slope. By 1939 even the worst affected countries, America and Germany, were richer than they were in 1930. All sorts of new products and industries were born during the Depression: by 1937, 40 per cent of DuPont's sales came from products that had not even existed before 1929 . ."
No matter how bleak the moment, he argues, "somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my life easier."
Ridley, the former Economist science editor, promotes optimism as a rational outlook because of his view of the history of innovation extending back thousands of years. And the engine of this "perpetual innovation machine" broadly speaking, markets in goods, services and, most importantly,
Cheap Jordans For Men ideas has only accelerated over time. Indeed, the Internet "is the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen."
Ridley is by no means the only stubborn optimist rowing against the tide. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler make a parallel case in their book "Abundance: Why the Future is Better Than You Think." In a recent interview, Diamandis cited "exponentially growing technology" that will enable "artificial intelligence, and robots, and digital medicine and synthetic biology" as among reasons to keep the faith.