As we embark on a new decade, do we approach the 2020s with hope or with a sense of doom and gloom? As we look back on the past decade, do we see the best of times or the worst of times?
“We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio, and heart disease are all in decline.”Ridley isn’t alone in rejecting doom-and-gloom scenarios of economic decline and impending ecological catastrophe. Steven Pinker at Harvard and Andrew McAfee at MIT, for example, also describe a modern world of greater prosperity, less violence, and more freedom. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey shows how anti-capitalist rhetoric and denial of the basic facts of economic history—of the Great Enrichment of modern times—perpetuate tyranny and poverty rather than alleviating them.
The Politics of Doom and Gloom
If you want to gain support for a cause, however, it sometimes seems you have to show how bad things are.Socialists, social workers, reformers, and revolutionaries all dramatize the seriousness of a problem or state of affairs to motivate us to political or personal change. No one is going to support draconian legislation—on alcohol prohibition, automobile emissions, gun control, or anything else—unless they are convinced that there’s a serious problem and that something can and must be done about it.
This sometimes takes a quasi-religious, sanctimonious form, as when the “woke” call us to personal repentance about our sins against the environment or tell us that the end is nigh. We must change our ways or have them changed for us by the government.
Over the past decade, we have seen something different. Predictions of doom and gloom have become the stock in trade of elites in politics, academia, law, even entertainment—but as a way to defend the status quo, to resist change.
The Brexit referendum in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, both in 2016, produced unexpected outcomes. They broke the consensus established by political and cultural elites and repeated daily throughout the major organs and institutions of society.
Brexit
In the referendum, the largest vote in British history, a majority voted to leave the European Union (EU). Britain had been a member of the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. Leaving meant bringing to an end that status and the mass of formal political, legal, and economic ties that bound the country to that transnational entity. It meant restoring Britain to its position as a sovereign, independent, self-governing national democracy.Those inclined to vote Leave were warned that Brexit would lead to economic disaster, with mass unemployment, financial ruin and stock market collapse, people forced out of their homes by skyrocketing interest rates, shortages of essential foods and medicines, grounding of air travel, bottlenecks at ports, and other catastrophes.
None of it has happened, despite three and a half years of political and economic uncertainty. Parliament did all in its power to stop Brexit and prevent the government from governing. The major parties had promised to respect and implement the result of the referendum, but a majority of MPs wanted to remain in the EU. Promises notwithstanding, they threw up one procedural or legal obstacle after another.
Trump
The U.S. election—in which the more educated and affluent strongly supported Hillary Clinton—resulted in Clinton’s defeat by Trump.The winning candidate had no experience in government and little respect for most of those who do. He opposed the conventional wisdom of established politicians and experts on religious freedom, on abortion, on Iran, Israel, on pursuing America’s national interest as other nations pursued theirs, controlling the country’s borders, appointing judges who would interpret the law rather than legislate from the bench, challenging China’s unfair trade practices, and restoring vitality to the country’s neglected heartland.
“The consensus around the liberal elite, who never truly trusted the people, has been broken. The people once again hold sway and have given Boris [and Trump] an instruction to do things differently. The message has gone out—never take us for fools again.”Paul Adams is a professor emeritus of social work at the University of Hawaii and was a professor and associate dean of academic affairs at Case Western Reserve University. He is the co-author of “Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is” and has written extensively on social welfare policy and professional and virtue ethics.