The Daggatt Dare: prove your pessimism!

I'll chime in - at the end - with my comments on the New Hampshire Primary. But first ... Seattle Venture Capitalist Russ Daggatt is big on competitive enterprise.  So why is he – along with nearly all of the tech mavens and moguls – a democrat?

Results. Outcomes that can be measured and compared, and under which Republican governance has proved an utter disaster for market economies and the United States, while most metrics improved markedly across both the Obama and Clinton Administrations.  

This plus the blatant truth that – were he alive today – the oligarchy-hating founder of modern market economics, Adam Smith, would be a democrat, too.

I go into comparison of outcomes in my own way elsewhere. 

But let’s give the floor to Russ, whose long list of statistical comparisons bears no overlap at all with my own!  And yet his scan reaches the same conclusion. If you want market economies to fail and if you are truly suicidal, for the sake of wrathful dogma, then you should vote republican. 

Now, over to Russ Daggatt’s missive:

== The Daggatt Dare ==   

What's incredible is this apparently widespread sense of dissatisfaction. I attribute it to the relentless right wing media Wurlitzer, on one side, and cowardly or cynical Democrats, on the other side.  Whatever the cause, it really is long overdue for some of to speak up and tout the extraordinary success of the Obama presidency. (The Reagan presidency was far less successful and was scandal ridden. But Republicans and their alternative media spent decades spinning it into a legendary success.)

Let me take the obverse of David Brin’s challenge to Republicans to cite any meaningful metric that improved under Bush.  Name any meaningful metric that got worse under President Obama:

When President Obama took office, the economy was declining at a 9% rate and shedding 800,000 jobs a month and we had a $1.4 trillion deficit. Since then, the U.S. has experienced the strongest recovery from the Great Recession of any major industrialized country. In fact, we are the locomotive pulling the rest of the world ahead.

The Recovery Act, in addition to boosting aggregate demand, spurred 45 states to undertake reforms to their education systems. It prompted doctors and hospitals to shift to electronic medical records and provided $90 billion in funding for green energy sources. The portion of the stimulus that lent capital to unproven clean energy firms (which came under withering assault from Republicans, who relentlessly touted the failure of Solyndra, just one firm out of scores that received loans) is projected to earn taxpayers a net $5 billion. Thanks to public investment in the U.S. and abroad, solar energy has undergone revolutionary growth, with capacity growing 130-fold since Obama took office.

Oh, and here is some great data on the revolution in renewable energy under President Obama.

President Obama saved the U.S. auto industry (and with it, millions of jobs) which just set new sales records in 2015. At the same time, new (CAFÉ) regulations that were blocked for 25 years by the GOP are making autos cleaner and more energy efficient, saving drivers billions.

After losing 463,000 private sector jobs during eight years under Bush, we have had a record 70 consecutive months of private sector job growth (beating the old record of 51 months), adding over 14 million new jobs. (And during that time, part-time jobs and minimum wage jobs have actually declined. Which means that more than 100% of the new jobs have been full-time jobs paying more than the minimum wage – despite the minimum wage going up under President Obama.) Unemployment has fallen in half, from 10.0% to 5.0%.

Inflation over the last 12 months has been 0.6%. (The core rate, excluding food and energy, has gone up 1.4%.) Under President Obama, we’ve had the lowest inflation in 50 years. The dollar is up 15% under President Obama (after declining 20% under Bush).

The federal deficit was $1.4 trillion when President Obama took office. It was $439 billion last year – a decline of more than two-thirds. -- But the more relevant metric is the deficit as a percentage of GDP, which peaked at 9.8% as President Obama took office. Last year it was 2.4% - a decline of more than three-quarters and lower than its average over the last 50 years. It is now lower than the nominal growth of GDP, which means total federal debt is declining as a share of the economy.  In other words, much the same as happened under Bill Clinton.  So who are the responsible ones?

(Brin aside: see my own simple chart revealing the Second Derivative of Deficit Spending and how blatant it is that democrats are vastly vastly and vastly more fiscally prudent than republicans. Refute my chart if you can! )

The number of Americans without health insurance has declined by 17 million or more, and since the passage of the Affordable Care Act health care costs have increased at their slowest rate since records have been kept.  Oh, and by the way, what is your gripe again, Republicans? Obamacare started out as your own… damn… plan.

The S&P 500 has more than doubled under President Obama. (It went down 37% over eight years under Bush.) Corporate profits are at record levels.

Dodd-Frank required that banks hold more capital, derivatives must be traded openly on exchanges, large institutions must separate their riskiest forms of trading, and any too-big-to-fail institution must create an advance plan for systemic failure. The law also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects customers from financial industry abuses in much the same way as the Food and Drug Administration ensures the safety of our food.  

Granted that Dodd-Frank didn’t go far enough in reducing the too-big-to-fail risk and other financial sector sins. So, replace this Congress to fix that.

Undocumented immigrants in the country have declined from 12 million to 11 million. Net migration from Mexico has actually turned negative. At the same time, in the face of Congressional inaction on comprehensive immigration reform, President Obama established enforcement priorities that would allow “Dreamers” who came to this country as young children, and who have no serious criminal record, to stay and work in the country, while focusing limited enforcement resources on criminals and recent arrivals.  Again, and your complaint is…?

(Brin aside: The immigration matter is even more skewed than this. Always (except right after 9/11), republican presidents cut the Border Patrol and dem presidents bolster it, diametrically opposite to their constituent dogmas.  Why?  Find out here.) 

Under President Obama, U.S. oil and gas production has doubled, and we have become the world's largest producer of petroleum products. That has driven down the price of oil, benefiting US consumers while crippling the economies of countries like Russia and Iran.

The cost of electricity generation using wind power fell 61 percent from 2009 to 2015, while the cost of solar power fell 82 percent. These numbers show progress at rates we normally only expect to see for information technology. And they put the cost of renewable energy into a range where it’s competitive with fossil fuels, even at low oil prices.

On the most important long-term issue facing the planet, climate change, President Obama reached a major climate agreement with China, which resulted in the first-ever international agreement by industrialized and developing countries alike to curtail their emissions (an agreement made easier by the revolutionary improvements in green energy, which could allow developing economies to leapfrog straight past the dirty energy stage). The success of this agreement will take decades to measure, but it could well go down in history as Obama’s most significant legacy. He helped jumpstart this historic agreement by enacting new Clean Power Rules that will reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

Under Obama, the U.S. resumed launching climate study satellites that were canceled or sabotaged by the previous administration. You are free to proclaim that his support of scientists is wrong and the House “Science” Committee’s seething hatred of science is appropriate.  But you’d be very wrong.

President Obama took office with almost 200,000 troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the U.S. was bogged down in the two longest wars in its history. Multiple tours of duty of not only active duty soldiers, but also reserves and national guard troops, left our state of military readiness the worst it’s been in our lifetime. Today we have about 10,000 troops in those countries and our military readiness is nearly restored to the 100% level at the end of the Clinton administration. (Does anyone really wish we had still had hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers mired down in the midst of a regional Shia-Sunni intra-religious war?)

In 2008, before President Obama took office, Cheney insisted that we had to attack Iran with Iran only a few months away from a bomb. President Obama & Secretary of State Clinton got pretty much everyone in the world that mattered (including the EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, etc.) to impose crippling sanctions on Iran, which eventually brought them to the table. Not only will we have gone eight years with no Iranian nuclear weapons, but President Obama will leave office with Iran’s nuclear program out of commission for many years into the future. 

(Brin aside: Twenty five tons of enriched Uranium eliminated and Iran’s plutonium reactor filled with cement. Attacking Iran wouldn’t have come close to achieving that.  Moreover even a little rapprochement with Iran let’s us do what Nixon did, by going to China… play Iran and Saudi Arabia off each other, instead of being played.)

President Obama did what Bush only promised but failed to do in seven years: He got Bin Laden. Please repeat that sentence as many times as it takes to sink in. And we have had no major act of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil during his presidency.

He finally ended our pointless 55 year Cold War diplomatic freeze with Cuba. And the Florida Cuban-expat community is gearing up to start businesses that will undermine communism the smart way.

He added over two million acres of Wilderness Area and over 1000 river miles to the protections of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

He reformed the student loan program, cutting out redundant middle men and using the billions of dollars in savings to increase Pell grants. Granted, it will take a new Congress to end the nasty provision that declares student loans to be the only kind that cannot be refinanced.

Oh, and despite 24/7 right wing media hyperventilation for weeks, not a single American died of Ebola contracted in the U.S.

The national abortion rate declined roughly 15% under President Obama. And it wasn't because of increased restrictions in some states - in those states, abortions actually went up (they are the same states that make family planning, women's health services and contraception more difficult to access). If it was just due to restrictions, then you would expect teenage pregnancies and births to increase. Instead, they went down, as well. 

And there is much, much more.

If he was a Republican they would be naming airports after him. An aircraft carrier. But listening to Republicans, you’d think he has been a disaster. It is the centerpiece of every GOP candidate’s campaign rant that President Obama has been a disaster!  Only note the lack of actual statistics. Outcomes. Comparison of results.

== A Brin remise ==

Me again, in awe of how well Russ makes this crucial point, how for your own pragmatic self interest, you should never again allow this generation/type of republicans anywhere near a burnt match, let alone a modern, entrepreneurial economy.  

(There used to be grownup republicans who liked science and facts – I even know some of these relics!  May they be seeds for a restored, mature conservatism, out of the coming ashes.)

I will only add this.  If you look at the zillionaires who are democrats… or else libertarians who avoid the GOP like the plague … you’ll see that these are the tech guys who have actually invested in new products, services, and productive capacity.

How ironic! The ones who are enhancing our economy on the supply side are the ones who despise the tax-tomfoolery-voodoo called “Supply Side Economics” – a GOP religious dogma that never had one successful prediction or positive outcome to its credit.  Ever.

It is the other type of mogul – those rich from resource extraction subsidized off public lands, or from inheritance or rent-seeking or Wall Street manipulation, who invested almost none of their Supply Side tax cut largesse in new, productive enterprise, who spend lavishly instead on cheating, bribing officials and buying elections, with the core aim of keeping Supply Side voodoo alive.

Go figure. Only know this.  Ever more of the smart ones are seeing what’s in their own self interest.  As Joe Kennedy said – (I paraphrase) - when his fellow moguls yelled at him, for supporting FDR:

“If Roosevelt’s reforms make the working class happy and healthy and prosperous, I’ll get to keep half my wealth.  That’s better than clutching it tight, then losing it all in revolution.”

===

Oh, I promised to offer my comments on the New Hampshire primary... but this posting is too long.  So I will give them below, as the first comment in this thread.  Chime in with your own!  We have a great, lively blog-cummunity (blogmunity?) down there!  Maybe a bit intellectual... ah well.

Optimism vs Pessimism

Speaking of the tradeoffs between optimism and pessimism....

While cynics get a brief tactical advantage by getting to sneer, like playground bullies, they undermine their own effectiveness at generating changes - in society or in their own lives.  And there is another major drawback, pointed out by "Paul" over in my cogent-smart comment community. 

"Self-identifying pessimists I have known claim that by being pessimistic they avoid being ripped off, but if you read the literature on stress you find that they pay a high price for it. Having a negative outlook causes your endocrine system to release cortisol and a host of other stress-related hormones (as does insufficient sleep). This chronic release has some serious side-effects, including the shrinking of the hippocampus. Anyone who wishes to know their enemy needs to accept that their own body can be one of their worst. Grumpy old men trap themselves in a feedback loop of hypochondria and failing mental health. Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford makes the point that thinking positive thoughts all by itself cuts off these stress hormones and releases others that have more beneficial health effects. Optimists might get cheated once in awhile, but they tend to live longer and happier lives."

Here's the Amazon link to Sapolsky's most well-known book: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases and coping. 

I would add that optimist-pragmatists live vastly more effective lives since they believe their efforts can change their circumstances, their lives and even their nation or society.  This may make them seem fools, part of the time. But they are also more likely to try collaborative or competitive efforts to make change. Automatically that means they are more likely (even occasionally) to succeed.

The world was made by the Franklins and Lincolns and Edisons and Roosevelts and Marshalls who believed it could be changed.

== They WANT us afraid ==

One commenter said "9/11 was a huge kick in the nuts for our culture. Maybe I am wrong, but people did not seem so unkind and paranoid and crazy with religion before then."

Ah, but 9/11 was a "kick in the nuts" only because we let it be. Our parents suffered such losses weekly during WWII and they were the lucky ones, compared to Britain... and then Germany, Russia, Japan. Yes, we entered a ridiculous state of panic.  But it was deliberately pushed upon us... and especially upon Red America. 

The media and the Bushes portrayed us as wimps and we swallowed it. 

 Except many of us didn't! Read Rebecca Solnit's A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL. (See below.) There is an industry based on keeping us panicky.  But we don't have to buy the product.  Steven Pinker proved... most things are getting better!  We need to note that, not  in order to kick back, but to have the confidence it will take to evade further mine-fields...

...and get to Star Trek.

== Can mythology and Sci Fi help?==

"The future was better when Star Trek: The Next Generation was making it."  So asserts an interesting rumination on how only one major media sic fi franchise has ever taken on the hardest and best challenge — telling good stories, criticizing possible errors, while assuming that maybe - just maybe - our grandchildren mights be better than us.  That Hard Assumption terrifies most lazy producers, directors and writers.  How much easier to make the Dullard-Dystopic Assumption, that we will fail and that our descendants will all be fools? It makes plotting and action trivial.  At the small cost of chopping away at our confidence as a civilization and a people.!

Glimmers of the finer path were seen in Babylon Five. I see hints of it in Halle Berry's EXTANT. Maybe the star-trekkian mantle of adventure-with-critical-optimism will be taken up by Marc Zicree's Space Command.  Oh, and I  left out STARGATE! Very upbeat. Except for one huge flaw. They stuck - till the end - with the insane premise that it would panic all of humanity senseless, if they revealed to citizens that Earth was now the lead planet in a newly hopeful galactic federation. Um?

Still… the irony is stunning.  That my own chief pessimism about our future is rooted in Hollywood's absolute determination to undermine our confidence with pummeling after pummeling of relentless pessimism.

 == Future Tech ==

Wow. Read this from Mark Anderson: 

“At the CEATEC Japan electronics industry trade show held in October, Rohm exhibited its wearable key device, a multi-function, key-shaped item capable of counting your steps, telling you if you are walking up and / or down stairs, are on a bicycle or in a car or on a train (in case you didn't know), estimating distance (point and triangulate), counting calories, detecting metal particles in your food or somewhere else they shouldn't be, locking and unlocking your cellphone, and monitoring UV exposure so you can avoid sunburn. It contains a gyroscope, a proximity sensor, an accelerometer, a pressure sensor, an ambient light sensor, a color sensor, a UV sensor, a magnetometer, a Bluetooth Low Energy wireless communication IC, and a microcontroller. Bought in volume, the unit price is one US dollar.”  

What an age.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is asking for ideas from the private sector on breakthrough technologies to guide military investment for the next decade and beyond. 

As war drones improve, disturbing questions arise. As John Markoff says in the New York Times: “Britain’s “fire and forget” Brimstone missiles, for example, can distinguish among tanks and cars and buses without human assistance, and can hunt targets in a predesignated region without oversight. The Brimstones also communicate with one another, sharing their targets.”

The U.S. Defense Dept actually takes these issues seriously: “In a directive published in 2012, the Pentagon drew a line between semiautonomous weapons, whose targets are chosen by a human operator, and fully autonomous weapons that can hunt and engage targets without intervention."

Weapons of the future, the directive said, must be “designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”

== ... and prescience... ==

Rumors fly about, that Apple has teamed up with SpaceX and Tesla... or is it Google?... to create a new "iCar!" The patent cited here is just one of many that might be involved. As both a future-pundit and a stockholder in all those companies (Apple, since 1981), I approve!

Still might I point to this image from my 2009 graphic novel TINKERERS, kinda foreseeing this event?  Someone put it on my predictions wiki?

== Be prepared! ==

A fascinating glimpse of a study of disasters, showing that most people die because they are too passive, when situations become dire. Rather than madness, or an animalistic stampede for the exits, it is often people’s disinclination to panic that puts them at higher risk.  Very interesting and important…

…and yet, it does not tell the whole story.  Which Rebecca Solnit does in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, showing that, when they get a little time to think, many people respond to baad situations with courage and grit and dedicated citizenship.

Following up on that… I am doing my part: I took the CERT Civil Defense training and upgraded so I am now in California's Disaster Corps. They might call me up to head for any disaster site in the state. But CERT is lower level - local and neighborhood oriented with training that a busy person can take. You get certified and received tools... and confidence. It makes you part of the civilization's network of resilience.

== Miscellaneous ==

New and exciting: The Brighter Brains Speaker Bureau will connect your group, company or conference with dazzlingly interesting keynoters. It’s just getting started, but I confess to being impressed!  (If a bit biased ;-)

This list of "52 common misconceptions" is useful and fun... but I do know that the left-right brain "debunking" is very misleading.  It is more false than true.

PODCASTS!  A couple of new ones. First on Bloomberg… Predicting and Inventing the Future: Bill Frezza’s interview with me is available on SoundCloud and YouTube:

On some similar topics, I get carried away and blather on and on about the power of sci fi in self-preventing prophecies on The Note Show. The host seemed pleased, despite hardly getting a word in! Available at www.thenoteshow.com/david-brin and also on itunes and stitcher.

Yikes! Can the decline in marriage be attributed to … free online porn?

So cool! But this dinosaur costume could give some stranger a heart attack! 

Probing the future: very good news… and some very bad...

We'll get to weighing some very good news… and some bad… in a second. But first --

So You Think You're Smarter than a CIA Agent? asks an article on NPR News, citing The Good Judgment Project -- a four-year research study organized as part of a government-sponsored forecasting tournament. Thousands of people around the world predict global events. Their collective forecasts are surprisingly accurate. 

For the past three years, 3,000 average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of  an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community. According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, according to Alix Spiegel on NPR News.

Philip Tetlock, one of the three psychologists who came up with the idea for the Good Judgment Project, also wrote Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can We Know? His concept started simple:

First, if you want people to get better at making predictions, you need to keep score of how accurate their predictions turn out to be, so they have concrete feedback.

But also, if you take a large crowd of different people with access to different information and pool their predictions, you will be in much better shape than if you rely on a single very smart person, or even a small group of very smart people.'

These desiderata will sound familiar to some of you, who have read my own, decade-old calls for new kinds of Predictions Registry concept — which ought to be civilization’s utter-top priority, for a number of reasons that I lay down in that article.  As for "collective smarts" see how Smart Mobs are portrayed in Existence!

== Reasons for optimism, while everyone goes grumpy ==

A fascinating study for the US Defense Department concludes that three "almost shocking" dollops of positive news are transforming our prospects for the better -- even as the public mood in the U.S. keeps sinking into inexplicable funk. The report: "Some Aspects of the Future Security Environment: Considering 1987, 2012, and 2037," looked back and forward 25 years, according to an unclassified summary released by Office of Net Assessment of a Summer Study in late 2012, by Jesse H. Ausubel and Alan S. Curry.

It begins by surveying the world effects of globalization, an ongoing phenomenon which remains fraught with tension and opportunities for economic setbacks… but under which vast numbers of human families are rising, every year, out of grinding poverty, into some level of (very) basic comfort. Those who complain about other effects of globalization, while conceding the good things, have some credibility. Those who do not, have none.

Then comes a real surprise: "Water provides a second big change in resource concerns during the past 25 years. In 1975, almost all experts forecast large increases in use of water by the United States. In fact, most of the forecasts vastly overestimated demand -- and water withdrawals in the United States peaked about 1980. The trend in actual use has been flat for decades, even as U.S. population has grown about 80 million, the population of Turkey. Agriculture consumes far the most water. In the United States the decoupling of food production from land accounts for much of the moderation of demand. Sparing land usually means sparing water, both here and abroad. We see in farming in other industries increasing precision where we use more bits of information but less stuff -- less energy, fertilizer, pesticide and water. So the idea of a global water crisis seems far-fetched."

How fascinating. We've become so used to gloom and assuming the world will burst into flame everywhere over water. Indeed, there will likely be some local stress!

"At the same time, some regions clearly experience stress because of weak management and complex borders. Among regions to watch are upper basins where nations are building dams to capture water that flows downstream through other nations, e.g. the upper Indus, Mekong, and the Tigris and Euphrates, where Indian, China and Turkey; respectively, are adding storage with all its benefits and risks, including political consequences downstream.”

Okay, as Forest Gump would say – “one less thing….” Sort of. But then…

== Is fracking your friend? ==

"A third big surprise in resources of the past 25 years is the discovery and acceptance of the abundance of natural gas, methane."  Since this report was issued in 2012, the arrival of frack-released gas and oil has crashed into public attention, with nearly everyone leaping to take one extreme position or the other. Either this is capitalism at its best, with no need to regulate, or else it is satanic poisoning of the air and aquifers.

In fact, there are many reasons to believe the trend needs and merits strongly assertive regulation by a government that implements the public will, to get both the economic stimulation/jobs/security that come from energy independence and the capping of leaking greenhouse gas sources and tight protection of aquifers. Both the benefits of methane weaning us off of filthy coal and continuing the spectacularly successful incentives that have brought sustainables like solar and wind into the mainstream, becoming viable at a rate that’s far faster than automobiles and airplanes became practical, a century ago.

The potential harms that accompany good news seem to set members of my Baby Boomer generation a-quiver with agitation and zero-sum thinking. Almost never do boomers, of left or right, contemplate the positive sum, win-win. The possibility that we might enhance the good effects and minimize the bad.

Our calmer and more pragmatic heirs will be better off without our grumpy-boomer asses around.

== Feed us! ==

Then there’s agriculture. It was thought that the increases in crop yield that happened under Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” were peaking just as populations were rising, bringing the curse of Malthus back into play. In fact, the verdict is mixed, so far. There is clear evidence that climate change is affecting crop yields - destroying both farmlands and grazing zones. These problems are exacerbated by many stupidities in re water use, pest management, monoculture, monopoly controlled GM seeds and a myriad other vexing perplexities and needs for action. On the other hand, new kinds of crops emerge all the time. And we also have on the horizon algae-culture, and tissue-culture meat, and far better fish farming, any of which may be game changers.

We’ll need them. For when fertile zones at lower latitudes turn to desert, we lose areas with two growing seasons. Canada and Siberia may get warmer but the new “farmlands” lack topsoil and languish in total darkness for half the year. This is not a fair trade.

The report also discusses mixed news about population. There is the aging developed world, with fears of demographic collapse. There is China, with it’s own one-child-affected situation. There are realms like Africa and India where Malthus looms as a spectre… and a few places of relative balance like the US and Canada, who benefit from the invigoration of immigration. It is WAY too soon to breathe any sigh of relief!

Still… it don’t look (yet) like Soylent Green.

Ah, but then there’s worrisome news….

== China on the brink? ==

“China is like an elephant riding a bicycle. If it slows down, it could fall off, and then the earth might quake.” – James Kynge, China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America.

John Mauldin and his partners are worried about China.

“After 30 years of sustained economic growth topping 8% and a successful bank cleanup in 2000, the People’s Republic was well on its way to blowing through the “middle income trap” and transitioning to a more advanced consumption-based economy. But then in 2008 the banking crisis in the United States abruptly ushered in a painful era of balance sheet repair across the developed world and delivered a demand shock to emerging markets. Rather than allow the Chinese economy to fall into recession at such an inconvenient time, the Party leadership sprang into action to stimulate demand with its largest fiscal deficit in more than 60 years and to mobilize bank lending with historically low interest rates and enormous liquidity injections.”

As a result, China’s total debt-to-GDP (including estimates for shadow banks) grew by roughly 20% per year, from just under 150% in 2008 to nearly than 210% at the end of 2012 … and continued rising in 2013. Even more ominous, corporate debt has soared from 92% in 2008 to 150% today. 

“China has consumed just 65pc of the cement it has produced in the past five years, after exports. The country is currently outputting more steel than the next seven largest producers combined – it now has 200m tons of excess capacity, more that the EU and Japan's total production so far this year.”

But property is the biggest bubble, as it was in the U.S. and Europe. “The average price-to-rent ratio of China's eight key cities is 39.4 times – this figure was 22.8 times in America just before its housing crisis.”

George Soros holds that “The major uncertainty facing the world today is not the euro but the future direction of China.”

== The lesson: optimism? Pessimism? ==

It’s neither! It is that the world is far, far too filled with good trends and news to make cynicism and gloom anything other than wretched, simplistic treason. Show me the cynic who is actually and pragmatically useful to anyone! Or who actively and effectively helps to solve any of the problems that he (almost never “she”) grouses about!

I would say the same thing about fizzy, polyanna, best-of-all-worlds optimists, too… if you could point me at any. Sure, I know a few “singularity” types who think we’ll all be gods within 30 years. But none of them prescribe indolent shrugs, the way cynics do. Most optimists admit the desperate need for action!

But cynics aren’t our worst adversaries. The very worst people – enemies of your future and of your grandchildren – are the manipulators who are propagandizing to millions that they should hate science. Hate the people who know stuff. Hate the very idea of mixed, vigorous, confident, can-do effort to solve problems, partly together, via consensus government, while mostly through our markets and families and individual efforts.

Those are the folks who are waging war against your kids.