Verified by 
With an economy that looks sluggish, it's worth asking: Is one of our great economic assets, our optimism, at risk?
For centuries, we've been notorious for our optimism. Americans believe in rags-to-riches, in stars being discovered sitting in drugstores or singing on You Tube, and in scoring the winning Powerball ticket, sooner or later.
Yes, American Optimism even has its own Facebook page.
You see this trait in our television. When Ricky Gervais began to create the American version of The Office, he realized our version would have to be different, because we are.
"You're smarter, you have better teeth, you're more ambitious, you're slightly broader," he told an interviewer, then turned more serious.
"But the big difference is, Americans are more optimistic. You are told you can be the next President, and you can. In Britain, it's "What happened to you?'"
Gervais learned about our optimism from watching our movies. Our movies so consistently end happily that when the screenwriter in Robert Altman's satire on American movie-making, The Player, said he was resisting a happy ending for his movie, he added a perfect observation.
"It's really not an American film at all."
Many experts say that our native optimism explains why we tend save less and spend more than people in other countries. Our excessive optimism also may have helped to cause the subprime loan crisis. Bankers wearing rose-colored glasses believed that their borrowers could afford homes that they could not, and the wide-eyed couples across the banker's desk enthusiastically agreed.
"Of course the money will be there!"
As readers know, most economists agree that optimism fuels economic growth. (David Landes, in his epic The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, concluded that the difference between rich nations and poor ones was exactly that: the optimists prosper while the pessimists damn their usual lousy lucky.) The Conference Board recognized the confidence-growth correlation explicitly when in 1967 it first started measuring consumer confidence.
But you wonder. Over 6.5 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months, 1.4 million for two years. Might that affect our confidence and stall, or even prevent, any possible recovery? .
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke looked at this and other data last summer and told Congress that our economic outlook looked "unusually uncertain." Bernanke unwittingly may have struck at the true force that has been at work: uncertainty. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes insisted that it's uncertainty that prompts pessimism. Remove uncertainty, he said, and pessimism disappears with it. So as our future starts to appear clearer, our optimism--if Keynes was right--will rebound with it.
If Keynes does not offer enough consolation, our history might. Americans were known for their optimism a century before the Great Depression, and soon after it ended--perhaps reassured by Franklin Roosevelt's message that all they had to fear was fear itself. By the early 50's, our joints were jumping. By the late 50's, we were flying so high that we started driving cars patterned after jet fighters.
And there's this question, too: Have we lost confidence?
The Conference Board thinks so. It recently reported that our level of confidence stood a sobering 20 points below Americans' average level of confidence during previous recessions.
But the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research found otherwise. Consumer confidence, the Institute reported, was a full point higher than in previous recessions.
(Taken together, one might wonder if our next major decline will be our confidence in consumer confidence reports.)
As a third measure of our optimism, consider the Unthinking Super Bowl Indicator. On January 20, 2009, just weeks before last year's Super Bowl, 10% of the advertising slots had not been sold. The final slot for this year's gala/Christina Aguilera freelance, by contrast, sold before Halloween.
So this observer's optimistic money is on the University of Michigan study, the USBI, and our history. We are the men and women observed by foreign visitors in the 1800's and by Ricky Gervais in the 2000's, armed for generations with a resilience that gives us a potent and useful weapon for the hard work ahead.
Plus we can always heed this good advice, from a bumper sticker you may have seen:
"No use being pessimistic. It won't work anyway."
> Harry Beckwith (beckwithpartners.com)(follow on Twitter) speaks and lectures on marketing and buyer behavior all over the world. He wrote the worldwide bestseller Selling the Invisible and the just-released Unthinking: The Surprising Forces Behind What We Buy. Both his glass and his 401(k) are half-full.
