Page 171 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

the next Great Depression and you’ll get on TV. But mention that good
times are ahead, or markets have room to run, or that a company has huge
COBACOBA
potential, and a common reaction from commentators and spectators alike is

that you are either a salesman or comically aloof of risks.

The investing newsletter industry has known this for years, and is now
populated by prophets of doom despite operating in an environment where
the stock market has gone up 17,000-fold in the last century (including
dividends).

This is true beyond finance. Matt Ridley wrote in his book The Rational
Optimist:

A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist
song ... If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with
being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on
getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand,

you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award
or even the Nobel Peace Prize. In my own adult lifetime ... the fashionable
reasons for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant.

“Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more
violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is,”
Hans Rosling wrote in his book Factfulness.

When you realize how much progress humans can make during a lifetime in
everything from economic growth to medical breakthroughs to stock market
gains to social equality, you would think optimism would gain more

attention than pessimism. And yet.

The intellectual allure of pessimism has been known for ages. John Stuart
Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when
others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a
large class of persons as a sage.”