Up The Down Escalator: Why The Global Pessimists Are Wrong

The 1990s were utopian. Some of the big issues that had dominated world politics since the end of the Second World War seemed to get settled, if not sorted. The Cold War came to an end. Democracy spread around the world. Peace of a kind eventually came to Bosnia and seemed possible in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

At home it was a decade of creativity, invention, entrepreneurship and new beginnings - the new economy, New Labor, new Britain - that declared a decisive break with the past.

The roaring nineties came to an abrupt end with the terrorist attacks of September 11th. But then, with the collapse of the high-tech stock boom, and fears about globalisation and technological advances that spawned riots in Seattle and Genoa, the shadows had been gathering for some time.

Here Charles Leadbeater argues that pessimism is the most powerful ideology of our times, and it is wrong. He takes on the high-priests of global pessimism - Naomi Klein, John Gray, Robert Kaplan - and shows that they are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.