Be Thankful That Doomsday Never Comes

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Headlines have been full of gloom and doom for some time: high unemployment, the housing industry in a depression, record government debt, governments dysfunctional, and on and on.

 Fear-mongers and ‘big picture’ theorists are having a field day with it all.

The record government debt in the U.S. and Europe, the result of the massive 2008-2009 efforts to prevent the Great Recession from falling off a cliff into another Great Depression, can only result in an even worse catastrophe down the road, and an unbearable debt load on the next generation. Devastation is on the way.

Here’s something to be thankful for.

Those long-term doomsday scenarios that always pop up during bad times are the result of simply extending whatever is the current trend in a straight line into the future. They almost never materialize because they don’t allow for the changes that take place before they can materialize. In fact, they usually work out to the opposite extreme.

The examples are endless. In the 1940s, by extending the trend of how fast population growth was taking over former farm land, it became undisputed fact that there would not be enough arable land to feed the growing U.S. population by the year 2000. The hunger and near starvation conditions of the Great Depression would become even worse.

However, farmers learned new soil management, new cattle feeding and breeding techniques. Science developed healthier seeds. Farm machinery manufacturers provided more efficient machinery. And the trend reversed to the opposite extreme of food surpluses, overflowing food warehouses, gifts of surplus grains to foreign countries, even subsidies to farmers to leave their fields unplanted.

For many years the fear-mongering scenario was that communism would soon take over the world. The USSR was a powerful nuclear-armed world power. Under Russia and China’s sponsorship, communism was spreading around the globe, even to the western hemisphere with its arrival in Cuba, and Cuba’s successful efforts to move it on into South America.

The Korean and Vietnam wars were fought in attempts to halt its onslaught. But as is often the case the eventual reversal was created by the trend itself. In the process of its expansion, the untenable economics of communism were stretched past their limit and the trend reversed, even the USSR and China eventually adopting free market economics.

Failures of big picture analysis were also seen in the repeated fears regarding human survival, such as those that came about by extending the trends of polio, swine flu, Asian flu, AIDS, the depletion of the ozone layer, and so on.

 
Source: Forbes.com