Let’s start the new year on an upbeat note:

When we focus on the day’s headlines, or get caught up in the petty frustrations of everyday life, it’s easy to overlook how dramatically the world has changed for the better in the last decade or two.

We get frustrated when a call gets dropped on the cell phone, forgetting that mobile phones were a luxury until the mid-1990s. I got my first phone–no texting! no photos! no maps! no web access!–in 2001.

We don’t like to wait in line for cappuccino, forgetting that few Americans had the chance to enjoy such brews until recently.  Hard as it may to believe, there were a mere 165 Starbucks’ stores in this great land of ours when the company went public in 1992. Today, there are more than 11,000. We forget, too, the magic that goes into the making of a cappuccino.

More importantly, we worry–as well we should–about the state of the U.S. economy, but we overlook the happier news that about half a billion people have emerged from poverty in China since 1990. Well, that’s China, you says, but even here in the U.S. — despite legitimate concerns about income inequality and declining social mobility — Americans are demonstrably wealthier, healthier and more free than we were at any time in our history.

Declinism–the idea that things are getting worse–has a long history, and it remains fashionable on the left and on the right.

But if history is any guide, and it is, there’s overwhelming evidence that life on this planet, and in this country, is, in the words of Lennon & McCartney, “getting better all the time.”

I’m feeling unfashionably upbeat at the moment because I’ve been reading The Rational Optimist (Harper Collins, $26.99) by Matt Ridley, a sweeping history that attempts to explain how prosperity evolves.  The book is controversial, especially around the issue of climate–here’s an attack by George Monbiot, and Ridley’s response–but its core argument is persuasive: That prosperity is driven by man’s unique ability to trade, specialize and innovate. (“The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another” is the way Adam Smith put it.) Ridley’s claim that the world is richer, healthier and kinder seems to me to be unassailable, based as it is on both statistical and anecdotal evidence:

Ridley writes:

In 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer….She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

They had it right: It is getting better all the time.

He goes on to say:

The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before that: years of lifespan, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of travelling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout. This generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles and, of course, cash than any that went before. They have more Velcro, vaccines, vitamins, shoes, singers, soap operas, mango slicers, sexual partners, tennis rackets, guided missiles and anything else they could even imagine needing.

Ridley’s book is an intellectually ambitious, touring 10,000 years of human history and building upon the insights of Smith and Charles Darwin. (The prologue is called “when ideas have sex.”) How prosperity evolves is through trade–simply put, the idea that people are always working for one another, whether they know it or not. Trade is among the most boring of journalistic topics, but if you set aside the back-and-forth about negotiations with Columbia or Korea, it is a marvelous thing.

The cappuccino, for instance, is unimaginable without trade, as the economist Tim Harford writes in the introduction to his book, The Underground Economist. As he explained on a recent Planet Money podcast, no one can make a cappuccino: You have to grow the coffee, raise the cows for the milk, produce steel and manufacture a machine (the ones in my favorite coffee shop come from Italy), and we haven’t even considered how the electricity to run the machine is generated, who fabricates the chairs and tables in the shop, and so forth.

A famous 1958 essay called I, Pencil — the autobiography of an Eberhard pencil by an economist called Leonard Read — makes a similar point, as does Ridley when he writes about Louis XIV, who had 498 people devoted to preparing his meals at Versailles in 1700. Yet the supermarket shopper or restaurant goer in suburban Washington (or LA or Paris or Warsaw) has more dining options than the Sun King ever did.

Fresh Alaskan salmon? Frozen pizza? Chinese take-out? Yes, yes and yes.

“Never before this generation,” Ridley writes, “has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals…My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective, what is the difference?”

Think about it–it’s remarkable that whatever it is that you have chosen to do has enough value in the market (or at least I hope it does) to provide you with access to the products and services made by literally millions of people who do what they do. Ridley makes this point nicely in an entertaining podcast with my friend, the economist Russ Roberts, at EconTalk.

Now — I am not at all persuaded by Ridley’s last chapter, and certainly not by his argument that the threats we face from climate change are overblown. (His blog links to Bjorn Lonborg and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That, neither of them climate scientists.) Having said that, he doesn’t advocate ignoring the problem; to the contrary, he says that the best way to promote alternatives to fossil fuels (or encourage geonengineering schemes) is to “enact a heavy carbon tax and cut payroll taxes.” That would discourage carbon emissions and encourage employment. I couldn’t agree more.

Nor do I want to leave you with the impression that Ridley’s worldview is in any way an excuse for doing nothing about the world’s great problems. Exactly the opposite: His is a robust optimist, a believer in economic progress, human ingenuity and bold experimentation:

It is precisely because there is so much poverty, hunger and illness that the world must be very careful not to get in the way of the things that have bettered so many lives already — the tools of trade, technology and trust, of specialization and exchange.

So next time you make a call on your cell phone, order a cappuccino or write with a pencil (or on a laptop), take a moment to feel a sense of gratitude–to the millions of people whose ingenuity and interdependence make it all possible.

Some years ago, we decided to cover up a small indoor swimming pool (don’t ask) in our home in Bethesda, Md., and turn it into a sunroom. The cost was about $25,000 and, although I tend to be averse to debt, we applied for a home equity loan to pay for the renovation. We had, by my reckoning, a couple of hundred thousand dollars of equity in the house,  perhaps a bit more. So we asked Bank of America, our mortgage holder, for a home equity line of credit for $25,000.

No problem, said the banker who called me back. We’re giving you $250,000. Assuming that an extra zero had been added to the loan amount by mistake, I told him we’d asked for $25,000. Yes, the banker said, but we’ve qualified you for $250,000, and so the line of credit will be $250,000. You’re under no obligation to use it, he added, unnecessarily.

Is this predatory lending? Carelessness? Rational behavior? Or some mix of all three?

Regardless, we know now that banks across the country were acting the same way–throwing money at some people (like us) who didn’t want it and at others who would soon prove unable to pay it back. I’ve read and thought a lot about how and why this happened; my three favorite accounts are Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, the radio broadcast The Giant Pool of Money by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, of NPR’s Planet Money fame and a paper and podcast from economist Russ Roberts of EconTalk called “Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverted Incentives Created the Financial Crisis. All are eye-opening and fascinating–I kid you not.

The housing meltdown is, needless to say, still with us today. It’s the single biggest reason why millions of Americans are unemployed, people aren’t spending and the economy remains choppy, at best. It’s also a cause of what, at the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, looks to me like an erosion of moral values, as many thousands of borrowers simply refuse to pay what they owe.

Under the headline Debts Rise and Go Unpaid, as Bust Erodes Home Equity, The Times reports today that delinquency rates on home equity loans are soaring, in part because people choose not to pay them back:

The delinquency rate on home equity loans is higher than all other types of consumer loans, including auto loans, boat loans, personal loans and even bank cards like Visa and MasterCard, according to the American Bankers Association.

Lenders say they are trying to recover some of that money but their success has been limited, in part because so many borrowers threaten bankruptcy and because the value of the homes, the collateral backing the loans, has often disappeared.

…Lenders wrote off as uncollectible $11.1 billion in home equity loans and $19.9 billion in home equity lines of credit in 2009, more than they wrote off on primary mortgages, government data shows. So far this year, the trend is the same, with combined write-offs of $7.88 billion in the first quarter.

Even when a lender forces a borrower to settle through legal action, it can rarely extract more than 10 cents on the dollar.

According to the Times, borrowers say they can’t or won’t pay for a variety of reasons. The banks were careless lenders. The banks got  government bailouts. Their homes have lost value. And, most of all, they know they don’t have to pay. They threaten to declare bankruptcy–the term of art for this is a “strategic default”–and offer the banks a fraction of what they owe. The paper quotes a Phoenix lawyer named Marc McCain, who represents hundreds of borrowers:

“People want to have some green pastures in front of them,” said Mr. McCain, who recently negotiated a couple’s $75,000 home equity debt into a $3,500 settlement. “It’s come to the point where morality is no longer an issue.”

Yes, it has. Just as it was rational for banks to heedlessly make loans during the housing bubble because they weren’t going to hold onto the loans for long, it’s now rational for borrowers to walk away from their obligations, simply because they can. But being rational doesn’t make it right.

After all, someone will pay because so many loans have gone bad. It may be our children, and other new home-buyers, who will be charged higher mortgage interest rates in the future because the banks anticipate more “strategic defaults.”  It may be small businesses that find it harder to borrow money to expand and create jobs. It may be anyone who wants credit card or an auto loan, and can’t get one as lenders recognize that fewer and fewer people feel obliged to pay what they owe.

Worst of all, it may be American taxpayers who are left holding the bag because of all the money the government has spent propping up the housing market and bailing out failed banks.

This would be the worst outcome because we don’t want to socialize the losses in a profit-and-loss system. Without the fear of losses, after all, there’s no reason for either banks or borrowers to act prudently. They can take risks and know that someone else — namely the taxpayers — will rescue them.

Besides, I don’t mind paying for our sun room–we’re really happy with it–but I hope you understand that I’d rather not pay for yours.

If there is one thing we can learn from the headlines of the past week or so – Market Plunge Baffles Wall Street, Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico is Larger Than Thought, ‘Amateurish’ Bomb Defused in Times Square—it is that we cannot reliably forecast the future, that the world is bound to surprise us, frequently in unpleasant ways, and that, as the poet Robert Burns wrote, the best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry.

Shit, as they say, happens.

And yet we keep on devising those well-laid schemes, don’t we? We extrapolate the future based on the past. We imagine that we can make useful economic forecasts (because now we have more data than we did before). We imagine that regulation will protect use from the meltdowns of markets (as well as off-shore oil drilling platforms and nuclear power plants). We imagine that the Department of Energy can lead us to a clean energy future, or that scientists can make geo-engineering safe. We imagine that we understand things better than we do. And we forget the words of that other poet, John Lennon, who wrote that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

So the timing is excellent for this week’s updated version of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which includes a new essay called “On Robustness and Fragility.”  I’ve haven’t read the essay yet, but Taleb discussed the book and much more with my friend Russ Roberts, the Hayekian economics professor, at EconTalk. Their 67-minute conversation is never dull.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Black Swan, the title refers to the fact that the phrase “black swan” was used for hundreds of years in Europe to describe the impossible or near-impossible–until, that is, a Dutch explorer discovered black swans in western Australia in 1697, at which point the term morphed into the idea that the impossible sometimes happens. In Taleb’s account black swan events are rare, extreme, impossible to foresee and often world-changing. “History does not crawl, it jumps,” he writes. Brilliant and egotistical,  Taleb worried in the book, which was published in 2007, that

Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall.  The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.

You know what happened next.

And yet, as he tells Russ, Taleb recently spoke on a panel with a top official of the International Monetary Fund, who began his remarks by offering his economic forecast for the years 2011 through 2014–infuriating Taleb, who thought

Anyone in this room who’s listening to this forecast without asking what his forecasts for 2008 and 2009 were in 2001, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 needs to blow up again…

How can people still listen to the No. 2 man of the IMF talking about his forecasts for the future when he never got anything right in the past?

And why are we building systems based on these forecasts?

Some people say having an imperfect forecast is better than having no forecast at all. But of course that’s not so, at least not if we make big decisions based on that imperfect forecast that can impact all of our lives. The banks, remember, bet their future on complex computer models saying that housing prices could never decline by 15 to 20% in a year. Their formulas, they said, reduced the amount of value at risk. Unhappily, the fact that they were so tragically mistaken does not seem to have diminished the supply of hubris at, say, Goldman Sachs.

Now, the problem with wrong-headed forecasts is not that they are wrong-headed; that’s inevitable. The problem comes when our collective well-being depends on them. This, Taleb says in his essay, is why we need to build robust systems and not fragile ones. The global banking system was and is fragile. So was BP’s oil-rig. So, we were reminded last Friday, are stock markets when a “glitch” can cause a 1,000 point drop. So is the economy of Greece, which in an interconnected world, has global repercussions.

Taleb says:

I want to live in a society in which human error doesn’t penalize the multitudes. This is pretty much my mission. To try to figure out how to build a society in which people can make mistakes and mistakes are inconsequential.

One way to do that is to reduce debt. Personal debt, corporate debt and government debt all make borrowers more fragile. Surplus cash makes us more resilient, better able to withstand the unforeseen. (Recall the pre-recession balance sheets of GM and Ford.) Debt is driven, at least in part, by hubris. The shoppers who flock to the mall despite their negative balance sheets, GM, Chrysler, Sam Zell when he bought the Chicago Tribune, Greece or the people in charge at the U.S. Treasury grow overconfident about the future; they make their plans, borrow money and then life gets in the way and the rest of us get stuck with the bill. This can’t go on forever. As Russ put it during the podcast: “We’ll bail out Greece” — he could as easily have said Citi or AIG — “and then we’ll get bailed out by Mars or Neptune.”

Interestingly, western religions have understood hubris and debt for a long time. “All Mediterranean religions had either an explicit or implicit ban on debt,” Taleb notes. “We’ve known about how debt fragilizes systems since the Babylonians.”

So beware of economists bearing forecasts, bankers offering teaser rates and governments when they take on obligations that our children and grandchildren will have to repay. In a fragile and interconnected world, we all pay for their mistakes.

During one of my morning runs this week, I was listening to the Slate Culture Gabfest on my iPod shuffle, where Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner were having a lively conversation about Twitter, when it struck me: This is a digital media moment to remember.

I’m a big fan of podcasts. I enjoy Slate’s Political Gabfest as well as the Culture Gabfest, This American Life, the occasional Fresh Air and Frank Deford’s sports commentaries. One of my favorites is Sea Change Radio, which covers environmental and social issues from a liberal perspective. Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon do a great job, and I’d say that even if I were not interviewed on the latest edition of the show, about green jobs. I’ve also learned a lot from EconTalk, a weekly in-depth podcast about economics, usually reflecting free market ideas, hosted by Russ Roberts. (Russ is also the author of The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance, a surprisingly entertaining novel about a libertarian teacher of high school economics who is smitten with a liberal English instructor.)

Why am I telling you all this? Because, although I’m as unhappy as anyone about the terrible things happening to the newspaper and magazine businesses these days, what’s often overlooked in all the laments for the decline of print journalism is the other side of the story: the explosion of ideas and (less so) information in the digital media. Just this week, Portfolio magazine closed and the Baltimore Sun laid off nearly a third of its staff. But barely a day goes by when I don’t discover a new and worthwhile blog. Twitter and Facebook point me to news stories and commentary that I would otherwise have missed. A growing number of college courses by great teachers are being put online. And of course thanks to Google, we all have access to more information at our fingertips than we have ever had before. I can barely remember life before Google.

For me, this is personal, of course. I spent more than 30 years as a writer of print journalism—newspaper and magazine stories and books. Now more of my time is spent producing digital media–not just stories and columns but podcasts and Tweets as well.  Much as I love magazine journalism (and I’m about to get to work on a story for FORTUNE), I must say that I have come to enjoy the immediacy of blogging, the feedback that I get from writing for Greenbiz.com and The Energy Collective, the chance to contribute to a fine publication like Slate. Like most people, I’m also spending more time consuming digital content and less time with print.

The economist Josephy Shumpeter called this “creative destruction,” and it is both creative and destructive–as well as fascinating and a little scary to watch as it unfolds. For the second time in a week or so, I’m going end with by quoting Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”