Globalisation

The redistribution of hope
The Economist, Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITIONhttp://www.economist.com/node/17732859

Optimism is on the move —with important consequences for both the
hopeful and the hopeless

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“HOPE” is one of the most overused words in public life, up there with
“change”.
Yet it matters enormously. Politicians pay close attention to
right-track/wrong-track indicators. Confidence determines whether
consumers spend, and so whether companies invest.
The “power of positive thinking”, as Norman Vincent Peale pointed out,
is enormous.

For the past 400 years the West has enjoyed a comparative advantage
over the rest of the world when it comes to optimism.
Western intellectuals dreamed up the ideas of enlightenment and progress,
and Western men of affairs harnessed technology to impose their will
on the rest of the world.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, who firmly believed that
the country they created would be better than any that had come
before, offered citizens not just life and liberty but also the
pursuit of happiness.

Not that the West was free of appalling brutality. Indeed, the search
for Utopia can bring out the worst as well as the best in mankind. But
the notion that the human condition was susceptible to continual
improvement sat more comfortably with Western scientific materialism
than with, say, the caste system in India or serfdom in Russia.