The Futurist

Almost every article in the excellent blog The Futurist is a tasty morsel of good news in the poisonous soup of negativity we are force-fed day after day by the mainstream media. (Unlike in the MSM, these articles started appearing well before the electoral victory of the Democrats. Were it not for this victory, we would never have learned from the likes of the New York Times that the American economy is doing quite well, actually.)

Check out, for example, The US Economy Today - Amazing Resilience, in which the Futurist looks at the numerous negative forces that could be expected to put a damper on our economy: terrorism, corporate scandals, Hurricane Katrina, high oil prices, and points out that only a few decades ago a subset of those would have thrown the US economy (and most other economies) into a deep recession, while today all of them combined manage, at most, to knock off a couple of percentage points from our rate of growth.

Yet the Futurist is not a Polyanna, nor a Buddhist monk reaching for a strawberry while being chased by tigers. He (I'm guessing the writer is a man) is not an incurable optimist, but someone who is very capable of backing his positive outlook with strong, rational arguments. Of course, some of this is merely predicting, which can always prove to be off the mark in a big way, but given the equally (im)plausible predictions that in the next few decades the polar ice caps will melt, or that advancements in biotechnology will increase our expected lifespans to 130 (or more) years, I'm inclined to give more weight to the latter, if only because it is something to hope for, instead of fear.Â