Divided we save

摘要

Pessimism usually seems smarter than optimism. The pessimist is the ant in Aesop's fable: the realistic, sage, cautionary voice. The optimist is the grasshopper: the naive, un-analytical fool. Thomas Malthus was perhaps the most famous pessimistic intellectual, writing in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population: "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."