Caplan sul pessimismo:
"The intelligent pessimist’s favorite refuge is to argue that
standard statistics such as GDP miss important components of our standard of
living. The leading candidate is environmental quality. Pessimists often add
that our failure to deal with environmental destruction will soon morph into
economic disaster as well. If resources are rapidly vanishing as our numbers
multiply, human beings are going to be poor and hungry, not just out of touch
with Mother Earth.
A number of economists have met these challenges. The
most wide-ranging is the late Julian Simon, who argued that popular
“doom-and-gloom” views of resource depletion, overpopulation, and environmental
quality are exaggerated and often the opposite of the truth. Past progress does
not guarantee future progress, but as Simon explained in his 1995 book The State
of Humanity, it does create a strong presumption: “Throughout the long sweep of
history, forecasts of resource scarcity have always been heard, and—just as
now—the doomsayers have always claimed that the past was no guide to the future
because they stood at a turning point in history.”
Simon has been a lightning
rod for controversy, but his main theses—that natural resources are getting
cheaper, population density is not bad for growth, and air quality is
improving—are now almost mainstream in environmental economics. Since the
Harvard economist Michael Kremer’s seminal 1993 paper “Population Growth and
Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” even Simon’s “extreme” view
that population growth raises living standards has gained wide acceptance.
The UCLA geographer Jared Diamond’s immensely popular 1997 book Guns, Germs,
and Steel links population and innovation in essentially the same way, albeit
with little fanfare. The upshot: GDP may not be the best conceivable measurement
of our well-being, but refining measures of economic welfare does not revive the
case for pessimism. In fact, more inclusive measures cement the case for
optimism, because life has also been getting better on the neglected
dimensions.
This pessimistic bias is a general-interest prop to political
demagoguery of all kinds. It creates a presumption that matters, left
uncontrolled, are spiraling to destruction, and that something has to be done,
no matter how costly or ultimately counterproductive to wealth or freedom. This
mind-set plays a role in almost every modern political controversy, from
downsizing to immigration to global warming."
