When the world changes, for good or bad, some people seem to get carried away.

When the Soviet empire collapsed, for example, a former State Department official proclaimed "the end of history" - indeed, the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" - and Francis Fukuyama was hardly alone in this fantasy.

When the Dow Industrials streaked toward 11,000 in the late 1990s, two usually sober-minded writers from the American Enterprise Institute dashed off a book titled Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. They published this exercise in euphoria just in time for the collapse of the tech bubble.

Now, of course, the economic news is bleaker than it's been in decades - and sure enough, serious people are beginning to suggest that we'd better get used to it, that trouble is possibly here to stay.

Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson wonders, for example, if the economy is "at a historic inflection point when it changes fundamentally." He seems to think so: "Our new economic era may lapse into 'affluent deprivation' " in which "people feel poorer, because sluggish income gains get siphoned off into higher taxes, energy costs and health spending."

Samuelson is a terrifically smart guy whose arguments aren't easy to summarize, but suffice it to say that he is bearish on the future.

So is The New York Times' David Brooks, who assures us that "in the next few years, the nation's wealth will either stagnate or shrink. . . . There will be a fiercer struggle over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines," as a new generation meets a "stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for."

Stone-cold scarcity? What would be a good plan for that?

Now, these gloomy pundits may of course be correct. As Samuelson reminds us, "Americans do not have a divine right to rapid economic growth" - nor, I might add, to any economic growth at all. Growth could be stifled for years, for example, with the wrong set of economic, trade and energy policies.

Still, I'm old enough to remember the economic pessimism of the 1970s, when forecasters told us to lower our sights and be prepared to adjust to the "limits of growth." Indeed, a best-selling book by that title argued that a no-growth world was not only likely, it was essential to save civilization itself. So what happened? A quarter-century of unprecedented expansion ensued, bringing prosperity to more of the world's population than ever before.

We have no idea what our economy will be like in 2025, or who will create the industries that turn into the next engines of expanding wealth. But the economic history of the past 200 years suggests that in the long run, pessimists rarely rule the day.

More of the same

I had to do a double take when reading Pat Hamill's recommendations for the incoming Obama administration. "What we need in this country is an economic stimulus plan that focuses on housing," the president and CEO of Oakwood Homes said. "We need lower interest rates. We need to figure out a way that the government can supply 3.9 percent, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage loans. And we need a tax credit and economic assistance with down payments, which would stabilize the existing housing stock."

Won't a tax credit and economic assistance with down payments help perpetuate the same sort of environment that led to the current crisis, with people buying homes they can't really afford because they're given artificially attractive deals?

Hamill is a shrewd businessman and true community asset, but like a lot of people these days, he is apparently reluctant to let the housing market find a bottom on its own. The sooner we let that happen, however, the better off we'll all be going forward.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.