The pessimism industry has grown exponentially in modern times.
It found its stride in the early 1800s, after Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. In it, he claimed that humankind was doomed because, sometime in the next one-hundred years, the population would inevitably outrun food supply.
Subsequently, many “Malthusians” welcomed famines and epidemics as opportunities for the population to “correct itself.”
To this day, Malthus’s mindset is the foundation and inspiration for much of the contemporary pessimism industry.
For instance, Paul Ehrlich, Stanford professor and author of The Population Bomb, predicted in 1968 that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s and that life expectancy would plummet in the 1980s.
It didn’t happen.
The infamous Club of Rome report published in 1972 said we’d run out of raw materials by the 1990s.
Wrong.
In 1989, a UN official declared that entire nations could be underwater by the year 2000 if the global warming trend—which, we’re told by experts, is primarily caused by the existence of too many people doing too many things—wasn’t reversed; similarly, in 2006, Al Gore prophesied a twenty-foot surge in sea levels in the near future; and in 2008, the Western media apparatus was blazoning forecasts of an ice-free Arctic by 2013.
None of these presentiments came to pass.
The same pattern can be observed in just about every area of human activity in just about every period of history.
In 1881, doomers at The New York Times decried telegraphy as dangerous and even cited research from a “prominent academic journal” that claimed that wrapping the earth in telegraphic wire could disrupt our planet’s axis and in turn “upset the whole time table of the solar system, and bring about a series of frightful collisions.”
Somehow, the cosmos scraped through.
In the 1950s, a geologist named M. King Hubbert developed an influential theory that global oil production would soon peak and then decline, leading to economic instability, social unrest, and even war. Instead, oil production boomed in the decades that followed, contributing to an explosive growth in global prosperity.
Fittingly, portentous Peak Oil prognoses have persisted with new timelines.
In the 1970s and 1980s, scientists observed bacteria developing a resistance to antibiotics, and some authorities were convinced that this trend would continue inexorably until routine surgeries are perilous and infections like pneumonia, tuberculosis, and sepsis are untreatable.
Yet again, however, the optimists prevailed—new drugs and alternative therapies were developed, medical procedures were improved, and public health strategies were upgraded.
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