On the value of doom-saying
Still thinking about Future Imperfect, Friedman appears to be broadly optimistic about our chances of successfully negotiating all of the technologies that he discusses. He clearly believes in the power of the market to resolve resource shortages, for example, and he happily points out the unfulfilled predictions of The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth.
Technological optimists might well feel justified by a history of "so far, so good". Despite the creation of potentially catastrophic technology like nuclear weapons, and numerous localised mishaps like oil spills and factory explosions, the human race is still here. And, while occasional shortages of commodities might cause temporary price spikes and the world is right out of dodos, our material wealth continues to increase.
"So far, so good" is a fairly shallow analysis, though. I recently read a joke about an economist falling from an aeroplane without a parachute. The economist has no fear because "the market will provide a solution". Perhaps it will, given that markets have provided solutions in the past, but does this tell us much about who, specifically, is going to realise that a parachute is necessary, and by what mechanism the parachute is to be created and delivered in time to save the economist from an abrupt end on the ground?
Here, perhaps, is a job for pessimists. Predictions of doom can fail to materialise because, being made aware of the danger, we can change our behaviour. Why haven't nuclear weapons made the world uninhabitable? Because we saw how much destruction they could cause and refrained from using them. Why hasn't the global ecology collapsed? Because we realised that cutting down every tree and eating every fish means there won't be any trees or fish left.
Predictions of global catastrophes and collapses of civilisation no doubt gain much more attention than sober and careful examination of the dangers that attend some technology. Perhaps doom-sayers have a bad reputation as a result. Yet I think few people would say that blind optimism alone ensured that so far, so good.
