| The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, April 08 2009, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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Pessimists don't get a free pass. Thomas Homer-Dixon is a deep thinker who matters. Lots of smart people read his books and plenty of powerful people -- some of whom are smart, too -- seek his counsel. So it matters when the leading light of the University of Waterloo's Balsillie School of International Affairs writes something that is seriously misguided. "Collectively, we have been behaving like adolescents --believing we're invulnerable, living for today while ignoring tomorrow, and sneering at anything that smacks of prudence," Homer-Dixon complained in Saturday's Globe and Mail. "But grownups do take life seriously, and they pay attention to their fears." What irked Homer-Dixon is an earlier Globe article in which the author had a little sport with the likes of Niall Ferguson and Nouriel Roubini -- experts who are doing very well for themselves making gloomy predictions about the state of the world. "People who disparage such analysis have things exactly backward," Homer-Dixon wrote. "Ultimately, it isn't undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism." Unfortunately, people have a natural "tendency toward optimism," Homer-Dixon wrote. "Psychological research has shown that we have, on average, a bias toward hopefulness when we gauge possible threats in our environment and our ability to respond to those threats." Modern culture only enhances this tendency, Homer-Dixon claims. "Fear and pessimism aren't cool. We live in an age when happiness is the highest achievement, and no one admires people who are scared or downbeat. So it's easy to put down anyone who points to future dangers -- to ridicule them as doomsayers or Cassandras and impugn their motives." The economic crisis underscores the dangers of oblivious optimism, Homer-Dixon wrote. It generated speculative bubbles. And it led people to ignore those -- like Roubini -- who worried about what would happen when the bubbles popped. As usual with Homer-Dixon, much of this analysis is fresh, informed, and correct. Undue optimism certainly is irrational, and it can be dangerous.
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He's also right that we have a psychological bias that skews our perceptions. Researchers have shown we consistently underestimate the likelihood of bad things happening to us -- divorce, job loss, death -- while overestimating the likelihood of happy outcomes. But the effect of optimism bias is limited because it's personal. Imagine a man who is 42 years old, obese, and a smoker. If that man were asked how likely it is that a 42-year-old, obese smoker will drop dead of a heart attack in the next year, he would provide on estimate. But if he were asked "how likely is it that you will drop dead of a heart attack in the next year," he would provide a different estimate -- a lower estimate. Obviously, optimism bias matters when it comes to judging personal risks. But it will make no difference to how people evaluate social or systemic risks such as climate change or an over-leveraged financial system. Homer-Dixon's claim that the culture is unduly optimistic and that "no one admires people who are scared or downbeat" is still more dubious. Pessimism is so popular it's practically a literary genre of its own. Gloomy observers such as James Howard Kunstler have huge followings. And then there's environmentalism. It is very much "cool." Its leading voices -- including Al Gore and David Suzuki -- are revered. And yet, the overwhelming message it promulgates is profoundly pessimistic. In fact, most sociologists see something quite different than Homer-Dixon: Over the last several decades, they feel, developed nations have evolved into what they call "risk societies." We worry. We worry about the future. We worry about threats to health and safety. We worry about science and technology. Wall Street and neo-con economists certainly embraced gung-ho optimism -- until recently -- but in society at large, that attitude seems much more a relic of the 1950s than anything contemporary. But Homer-Dixon's most consequential mistake is to assume that either undue pessimism or undue optimism is dangerous.
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It's a false choice: Both are dangerous. Undue pessimism can induce inaction, for one thing, and doing nothing can cost money and lives. It can also produce over-reactions of the sort we became all too familiar with after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If even a fraction of the vast sums poured into counter-terrorism had gone to other priorities -- the fight against child malnutrition, for example -- far more would have been done for human welfare. Opportunity costs of this sort are routinely inflicted by undue pessimism. Irrational fear can also produce dangerous responses. Following the 9/11 and anthrax attacks of 2001, perceptions of the threat of bioterrorism were so inflated that more than half of Americans worried that the next attack would involve smallpox -- even though the virus existed nowhere on the planet aside from two secure laboratories. The Bush administration responded with a plan for voluntary smallpox inoculations of some 10 million health care workers. There were was even talk of vaccinating the whole country. But few health care workers volunteered and the plan came to nothing -- which is fortunate because the vaccine's rare side-effects include encephalitis and death. Very simply, undue pessimism nearly took the health and lives of many people. "We'd be foolhardy to ignore people who warn of the dangers around us," Homer-Dixon insisted. He's right. That would be foolhardy. But it would be equally foolhardy to ignore the fact that many warnings turn out to be exaggerated or false, or that undue pessimism can do real harm. What's needed is not, as Homer-Dixon suggests, to put the burden of proof on optimists. It is to put that burden on optimists and pessimists alike -- which is what rational people have been doing all along. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |