Even though 2019 will seem just as crazy, backward, and obscene as every other year people claim to loathe, ultimately, like 2018, we will not just survive; we will be better off by its end.
Many people, myself included, wished good riddance on 2018.
Yet, with 2019 still emerging from the neonatal intensive care unit, pundits and economists are already predicting doom and gloom. Trump’s trade war is expected to slow the U.S. gross domestic product through 2021. Inflation is expected to rise.
Of course, all economists are notoriously bad at forecasting recessions—and they have been for centuries.
Intellectuals have mostly been wrong about the future
English cleric turned soothsayer Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 we would never produce enough food to feed a geometrically growing population. Limited food supplies would lead to society’s ruin. Today, Earth is home to more than 7 billion human beings. Farms worldwide produce over a quadrillion kilocalories—enough food to feed 10 billion people.
Looking at what he considered the capitalist exploitation of labor, Karl Marx prophesied the proletarian revolution and the coming of a communist utopia. Though his fervent disciples continue to insist on his accuracy—and continue to wait for a non-totalitarian version of their utopia—most intellectuals agree he was dead wrong.
His theory of exploitation was disproven in theory in the nineteenth century by Austrian economists Carl Menger and Eugen Böhm-Bawerk and in reality in the twentieth century by the survival of capitalist institutions. Regimes based on his ideas fell as fast as they rose and killed 100 million people.
Contemporary cynics operate largely on Malthusian and Marxist ideas.
As Todd Buccholz explains in New Ideas from Dead Economists, alt-right talkingheads stomping their feet for border walls and trade tariffs are the intellectual descendants of Malthus. So too are environmentalists who year after year change their predictions of when humankind will eventually destroy ourselves and our Earth.
Today’s progressive clamoring about an unjust world run by greedy white, male sexual deviants is yesterday’s Bolshevik bitching about a bourgeois society ripe for revolution. Trump supporters combating cultural Marxism with their own brand of identity politics are merely buying into the Marxist narrative that capitalism is a zero-sum game.
Todd G. Buccholz makes the history of economic thought accessible, useful, and fun. He reminds us ideas, even bad ones, rarely die; they adapt. No doubt intellectuals will try to ruin your 2019 by resurrecting Malthus and Marx’s thoughts.
Lessons from trying to predict the future
The lessons from Malthus, from Marx, and from your resident Facebook doomsayers are:
Predicting the future is fraught with peril. Controlling the future is impossible.
Don’t let people who profit from fear make you deranged. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. You’re not starving. You’re probably healthier than me.
Utopias cannot be planned and rushed. Let progress unfold in its own time.
The world is never as bad as those in power would have you believe. Violence, as Steven Pinker demonstrates, is the lowest its ever been. Europe has not seen war since 1945. Per capita income between 1960 and 2016 rose 183 percent throughout the world. Less than 10.7 percent now live in poverty, down from 42.2 percent in 1981. Never in our history have humans expected to live so long.
Don’t blame your current misfortune on the sitting president, on Congress, on the system, on the economy.
The president is a power-obsessed egomaniac stuck in Freud’s phallic stage who prides himself on his encounters with models and porn stars. He will be gone in a few years.
Congress is so out of touch with twenty-first-century reality they don’t understand how Facebook works. Humor columnist Dave Barry called the senators investigating Facebook’s role in their re-elections the “Senate Committee of Aging Senators Who Cannot Operate Their Own Cell Phones Without the Assistance of Minions.”
Economics are the study of human choice. Until Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, or some senate committee has you starving in a locked cell, you control most of your choices, however constrained. You are the author of your own story. You own yourself.
Don’t let people who profit from fear make you deranged. Don’t be these people. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. You’re not starving. You’re probably healthier than me.
Humans have steered our course upward for centuries. Even though 2019 will seem as crazy, backward, and obscene as every other year people claim to loathe, ultimately, like 2018, we will survive; we will be better off by its end. The story of humankind has a happy ending. So too will 2019.