THE FIRST PARAGRAPH of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Citiesbegins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and continues: “it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” The early twenty-first century appears to resemble the late eighteenth century in at least this one respect. Assurances of progress alternate with threats of catastrophe; promises of endless improvement are answered by warnings of terminal decline; every Steven Pinker produces an equal and opposite Wendell Berry.
What's at issue is not merely the accuracy of these dueling predictions—only the most long-lived participants in these debates will get to see their forecasts confirmed or falsified. In any case, the future is not a scientific experiment, in which one variable and then another is changed while the initial conditions are held constant. We have to make crucial long-term policy choices without the hope of knowing even many decades on whether different choices would have turned out better. (Yes, I know: “we” is a pleasant fiction; elites will make those policy choices. But let's pretend we live in a democracy.)
Read Full Article »