I’m way behind on this (it came out August 8th), but Joel Mokyr posted an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about being optimistic regarding growth. I liked this particular passage:
The responsibility of economic historians is to remind the world what things were like before 1800. Growth was imperceptibly slow, and the vast bulk of the population was so poor that a harvest failure would kill millions. Almost half the babies born died before reaching age 5, and those who made it to adulthood were often stunted, ill and illiterate.
I’d like to think that growth economists are also here to spread this message. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the near-term economic future when we are slogging our way slowly out of a terrible recession. But extrapolating from the current situation to say that long run sustained growth is over is taking it too far.
Mokyr (and us…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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