Reason Writers Around Town: Matt Welch Makes the Case for Optimism in Commentary

Writing in a Commentary symposium on whether one should be optimistic or pessimistic about the future, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch doubles down on positivity. Excerpt:

The year I was born, the nonviolence champion Martin Luther King Jr?. was slain by an assassin's bullet, touching off race riots in more than 100 American cities that left 46 people dead and a trail of physical destruction still visible to the naked eye. It was the deadliest year for the United States in the Vietnam War, with more than twice as many servicemen dying than have succumbed, combined, in every U.S. military action since. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Americans elected a future crook as president, and most right-thinking people were convinced by Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb?, that "hundreds of millions of people" would soon "starve to death," particularly in India.        

The year I turned 21, elite anxieties had moved on to Japan's imminent takeover of the U.S. economy. Entire American cities (including New York City) had been given up as lost causes, Nelson Mandela? was still a prisoner in apartheid South Africa, and then all at once the world as we thought we knew it fell on its head. As predicted by no one, imperial Communism collapsed largely without a shot, proxy superpower wars all over the globe gave way to fragile but lasting peace, and a decade of unparalleled prosperity and freedom tumbled happily forth. […]

It requires a surplus of myopic self-regard to gaze upon this undeniable and thrilling human advancement and proclaim a wasteland of impending decline, but we Americans have always had a difficult time distinguishing between our market share of global responsibility and the overall health of the world.

Read the whole thing here.