Let's be honest here...you clicked on this link as the headline drew you in.  It was a shock.

If I had written "Property Prices Stable - nothing to see here"  you would have though to yourself "Meh" and moved on to read another article.

Historian Professor from the University of Illinois, Deirdre McCloskey writes, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.”

This isn’t new. 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.”

Part of this is natural. We’ve evolved to treat threats as more urgent than opportunities. 

Warren Buffett even says, “In order to succeed, you must first survive.”

But pessimism about money takes things to a different level. 

Say there’s going to be a recession and you will get retweeted. Say we’ll have a big recession and newspapers will call you. Say we’re nearing the next Great Depression and you’ll get on TV. But mention that good times are ahead, or markets have room to grow, or that a company has huge potential, and a common reaction from commentators and spectators alike is that you are either a salesman or are unaware of the risks.

A few things are going on here.

First is that money is universal. So if something bad happens it tends to affect everyone, albeit in different ways. That isn’t true of, say, weather. A hurricane barreling down on Florida poses no direct risk to the majority of Americans. But a recession barreling down on the economy could impact every single person – including you, so pay attention. 

This goes for something as specific as the stock market: More than half of all US households directly own stock or shares in a company.

Secondly,  pessimism requires some kind of action on your part – Move! Get out! Run! Sell! Hide! Optimism is mostly a call to stay the course and enjoy the ride. So it’s not nearly as urgent.

Third is that there is a lot of money to be made in the finance industry, which – despite many regulations – has attracted armies of scammers, hustlers, and the like promising riches. A big enough bonus can convince even honest, law-abiding finance workers selling sub-standard products that they’re doing good for their customers. Enough people have been conned by the finance industry that a sense of, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” has enveloped even rational promotions of optimism.

Most promotions of optimism are quite rational. Not all, of course. But we need to understand what optimism is. 

Real optimists don’t believe that everything will be great. That’s known as complacency. Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favour over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way. The simple idea that most people wake up in the morning trying to make things a little better and more productive, than wake up looking to cause trouble, is the foundation of optimism. 

It’s not complicated but it’s not guaranteed, either. It’s just the most reasonable bet for most people. 

The late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling in his book "Factfullness" put it differently: “I am not an optimist. I am a very serious possibilist.”

More on Hans Rosling here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/good-news-at-last-the-world-isnt-as-horrific-as-you-think