Market Optimists' Uphill Climb

As folks around here surely know by now, I tend to be an optimist about the ability of relatively free markets and free people to produce society-wide abundance over the long term. I’ve written at length about how pervasive economic doomerism in Washington systematically ignores decades-long trends in American wages and inequality and living standards and growth and industry and so on and so on. One thing I haven’t discussed, however, is why many normal Americans—not the Beltway planners incentivized to find doom everywhere—share in this economic pessimism. And since it’s still August and a few commenters have asked about this very thing, now’s a perfect time to dig in.