The Speculist

You are correct. Right after 9/11, the media was predicting that we would have a terrorist attack in the US almost every week. Many people hunkered down believing that we would be attacked every week. Economic activity dropped dramatically for three months.

However, the American spirit of optimism recovered and the government went to work removing the terrorists from our midst. It is no accident that there have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11. A lot of people using advanced technology have done a lot of work and sacrificed their lives to make that possible.

I am optimistic about America's future. I see no reason not to be.

A strategy based solely on defense would mean that we'd have to be successful all the time, and they would only have to be successful occasionally.

While I agree that a strategy based solely on defense is flawed, so is your claim above. The US economy can suck up a certain level of terrorist activity much higher than it is today IMHO. Even a pure defense strategy wouldn't have to stop all terrorist attacks. It just needs to keep them at a manageable level. And if society were restructured so that terrorist attacks caused less damage - either because the infrastructure had been hardened against attack or because it was decentralized to the point that an attack couldn't cause a lot of damage. Conversely, if a terrorist group loses enough, then it isn't worth their while to commit attacks.

The problem as I see it, is that a purely defensive strategy wouldn't work because there isn't the will to restructure society to the extreme level that probably would be required for an effective pure defense strategy to work. And the reward versus cost for terrorist groups is pretty high especially if they're sponsored by countries or other powerful entities.

You are correct. Right after 9/11, the media was predicting that we would have a terrorist attack in the US almost every week. Many people hunkered down believing that we would be attacked every week. Economic activity dropped dramatically for three months.

Jake, I don't know where you got this idea from. I never ran across this level of angst (there was plenty of the "no one could have expected this" nonsense) despite reading a lot about the media's reaction to 9/11 over the years. I'm sure this was believed or propagated somewhere, but it wasn't a widespread belief.

Second, while 9/11 might have depressed economic activity early on, it sparked a massive jolt in the form of a huge increase in US government borrowing and spending. I think this actually prematurely ended a recession sparked by the dotcom bubble.

Good ideas. And the one on pre-emptive force is articulated better than I have seen.

Free markets, yes - but the difference is 'modernization' generally, which includes free markets, democracy, rule of law, not being ruled by the military, not being ruled by priests, free science and technology, free mass media and much else.

It all goes together, and grows together (although with different systems lagging in different cultures - eg in China democracy is notably lagging - but not forever...).

I wonder where all those faux cynics were during the dotcom bubble when optimism of a sort was cool? My take is that there's nothing magically accurate about optimism or pessimism.

My take is that optimism and pessimism in a sense is like consistently betting respectively on the long shot or on the most likely event to happen. The pessimist is less likely to be wrong, since they consistently predict things that are likely to go wrong. Most significant endeavors fail to some extent. This is especially true if the pessimist has some influence over the outcome. It's far easier to sabotage or to fail to support an activity than it is to carry it through. The optimist takes on these big projects and tries to make them happen. But the odds are naturally against him so he often fails.

So IMHO, an optimist is usually wrong while a pessimist is usually right. But the really interesting stuff happens when the opposite is true.