With the unemployment rate hitting double digits for the first time in a quarter century, 2009 will not go down as a great year. Come to think of it, the whole decade has been rather wretched.The 2000¡¦s included, in chronological order, a disputed presidential election, a tech bust, a terror attack, an anthrax attack, a war premised on faulty intelligence, a terrible hurricane, a college massacre, a housing debacle, a financial panic and the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of mankind.
As if all that weren¡¦t enough, the decade featured a proliferation of TV and radio ranters and Internet bloggers in a kind of amplified re-emergence of a crowd Vice President Spiro Agnew once dubbed the ¡§nattering nabobs of negativism.¡¨ To these naysayers, bad isn¡¦t good enough. We should be mortified. Despondent. Depending on which political wing they are coming from, the president is either socializing health care or selling out liberalism. The banking system is on the brink of collapse.
Quick, get angry! Get depressed! Buy gold!
Time out.
Amid the gloom, we see cause for cheer this holiday season. That¡¦s right. Call us the Pollyannaish potentates of positivism.
For starters, this miserable annum is almost over. The decade is kaput as well (that is, if we follow the protocol that decades, like odometers, are counted from zero to nine, rather than one to 10). That means that we can not only turn a page but move on to a whole new chapter.
In addition to these calendrical blessings, we have identified some other glimmers of good tidings as the twenty-teens approach:
„P The Economy Is Improving.
The last time unemployment topped 10 percent was in 1983. That was the year before President Ronald Reagan declared it ¡§morning in America.¡¨
At the time--after a decade of oil shocks, stagflation and very bad men¡¦s fashion--it did not feel like the pre-dawn hours of economic recovery. Nor does it now. But last month, the unemployment rate dropped from 10.2 percent to 10 percent. The economy grew by 2.2 percent in the third quarter. The Dow Jones average is up 60 percent from its bottom in March.
Even the pessimistic projections for next year have businesses creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. More optimistic ones say that job growth will be robust because, after years of downsizing and productivity gains, companies will be forced to hire as their business picks up.
„P Banks Are Repaying Bailout Money.
A number of major banks have either paid back their money from the 2008 bailout, or have announced plans to do so. These are the same institutions that were written off early this year as ¡§zombie banks¡¨ that would have to be nationalized. The Treasury Department recently gave an upbeat assessment, saying that most of the $700 billion appropriated by Congress would either be returned or never spent.
True, the banks are mainly motivated by self-interest--a desire to get out from government-imposed pay restrictions. True, some economists have begun to fret about banks being too quick to repay the taxpayer. That latter concern may be evidence of some folks not having enough real things to worry about. A sure sign of a bottom.
„P Crime Is Down.
Despite the recession, crime rates kept dropping during the first half of 2009. Murder and manslaughter were down 10 percent. Property crimes dropped 6.1 percent. Violent crime dropped 4.4 percent. Rates haven¡¦t been this low since the early 1960¡¦s. Criminologists have a variety of explanations. Is it government safety-net spending?
Tougher sentencing laws? The settling of gang wars associated with crack cocaine? The aging of the population? The product of Roe v. Wade, as the authors of the best-selling book, ¡§Freakonomics,¡¨ argued? No one is sure. But the experts¡¦ befuddlement is society¡¦s gain.
„P The Swine Flu Not So Bad.
At least so far, only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of people who got the H1N1 virus have died from it. In part, that¡¦s because the virus has been milder than once feared. And, in part, it¡¦s because of improvements in intensive care and antiviral medications. The low death rates are of little consolation to the victims and their loved ones, of course, but the nation got lucky. Slowness in vaccine production and distribution would likely have led to national panic had this flu been more lethal.
Despite these hopeful trends, there¡¦s no guarantee the 2010¡¦s will be better than 2000¡¦s. Terrorists and rogue states are still trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. The United States is drowning in debt, and the nation¡¦s political system seems incapable of addressing intractable long-term problems.
But, as the new decade begins, the world keeps spinning on its axis from darkness toward morning. There will be new inventions, new heroes and new works of art. There is every reason to believe, as author William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech six decades ago, that mankind ¡§will not merely endure: he will prevail.¡¨
