But pessimism is not without its cost. If you teach children that things can only get worse, they will do less to make it untrue. I was a teenager in Britain in the 1970s, when every newspaper I read told me not just that oil was running out, a chemical cancer epidemic was on the way, food was growing scarce and an ice age was coming, but that my own country’s relative economic decline was inevitable and its absolute decline probable. The sudden burst of prosperity and accelerating growth that Britain experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the improvements in health, lifespan and
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