The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

Pessimism has always been big box office. It plays into what Greg Easterbrook calls ‘the collective refusal to believe that life is getting better’. People do not apply this to their own lives, interestingly: they tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do. Some 19 per cent of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1 per cent of income earners. Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic. Dane Stangler calls this ‘a non-burdensome form of cognitive dissonance we all walk around with’. About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy. It goes with the fact that they are risk-averse: a large literature confirms that people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum. And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 per cent of people are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side.