Living Within Limits - Chapter 6

The Ambivalent Triumph of Optimism

Reserves or Resources?

When you hear people talking about oil, have you ever gotten the two terms mixed up?  (Proved) reserves are oil deposits which can economically produced with today's technology at current prices.  Resources are the total oil deposits available on Earth.  To economists, when the price of oil moves up, more oil reserves are 'produced', as it becomes economically viable to extract more oil (scarcity creates more oil).  Geologists believe otherwise.  Thinking in terms of resources, they know that human beings have never produced a single drop of oil, ever.  Maybe it was a coincidence that the two terms sound so similar.  Yet, they paint decisively different pictures.

Does that cause you to pause the next time you read a headline like this one?

http://www.france24.com/en/20100318-venezuela-ups-proven-oil-reserves-23-percent

Optimism, Pessimism, and Journalism

For mainstream press, there are a couple good rules to follow for writing an article:

1. Catch the reader's attention with the first sentence (see above)
2. Optimism attracts more readers than pessimism (see above)
3. If a last minute cut must be made, cut the end
• Due to space requirements, and attention span of audience
• (Pessimistic) Qualifications for (optimistic) headline grabbers typically come at the very end of the article

This confluence of factors contributes to a optimistic bias in most major news reports.  However, don't fault journalists too much, because there is much more happening here besides biased news reporting.

Chicken Little...

For roosters, attracting the attention of the hens is an exercise in machismo, involving the parading of their brightly colored facial ornaments, as well as the strutting out of their chests.  In fact, when hormones have been injected into roosters which reduced the behavior and coloring, hens were less sexually attracted.  Darwin seems to favor machismo (if you don't believe me, think of some other examples yourself). 

"An entrepreneur is an optimist by definition" -Kenneth Eaton, Management Consultant

Optimists are praised for stimulating demand in the community and economy.  Pessimists are shown to be wrong, time and again, in their predictions of the inevitable falling in of the sky.  For structural reasons hinted at in the last sentence, 'optimists prosper in every decade, but the last' - tho pessimists are also unlikely to prosper should the sky fall.

Most of us enjoy hanging out with optimists.  Consider the last dinner party you attended.  Was the center of attention the one proclaiming that better day were sure to come, or the prophet of doom admonishing sinners to turn away from their sins lest they be consumed like a moth?  It is no stretch from here, to presume that optimists enjoy advantages in other areas as well, for example in attracting sexual mates, and enjoying higher rates of reproduction.  Over time, this will serve to strengthen the positive bias in a population group.

We have to be mindful of our natures, b/c it can be hazardous to view the world through such rose-tinted lenses all the time.