Gloomy Times, Happy Days

In the long run we are all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes

Keynes said what can safely be said about the future. But it can be safer to project longer-term trends than what’s immediately around the corner, simply because time and distance bring perspective. Today, nothing seems more important than the financial crisis that's in our face. But just as a housing bubble must burst, so too must the current housing-based financial crisis end someday with the resumption of buying and selling.

French philosopher Andre Glucksmann [picture] is, by contrast, more focused on what went wrong yesterday. He writes:

• our age is the first to proclaim the power to reduce risk to zero simply by spreading it around. It is the smiling reign of "positive thinking"--with ultimately disastrous effects.

• capitalism involves at once prudent regulation and the imprudent transgression of old rules, the sharing of risks and the audacity to risk more successfully than others. Economic progress is always alternating between creation and destruction, as old productive forces are left behind and new sources of wealth explode.

• But after the end of the Cold War, the promise of a pacified world seemed to announce the blessing of a postmodern history without challenges, without conflict, without tragedy.

Glucksmann’s denunciation of postmodern optimism is hard to argue with today. But I argue. Capitalism’s creative destruction, even with its downside, is uplifting and empowering the world’s people as never before. In the long term, we will be comfortable before we die.