Pessimism is the world’s main economic problem

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. POSITIVE THINKING can help people who are feeling down. Politicians, too, have long understood that gloomy expectations can become self-fulfilling.

In the late 1970s, as America grappled with an energy crisis and stagflation, President Jimmy Carter warned that the country’s gravest danger was a “crisis of confidence", one capable of corroding both public institutions and private enterprise. Decades later Abe Shinzo, Japan’s longest-serving leader, argued that stagnation was sustained by a “deflationary mindset", and tried to jolt households and firms out of it. More recently Xi Jinping, China’s paramount ruler, has made the promotion of “positive energy" a national priority.

Today, if ever, positive energy is in short supply. Pessimism has become both widespread and persistent. In America consumer sentiment is near its lowest on record.

Across Europe economic confidence has remained below its long-term average for more than three years, even as inflation has eased. Surveys from the start of the year show just how pervasive the gloom has become. A new poll by FGS Global, a consultancy, of 20,000 voters and business leaders across America, Britain, Canada, the European Union and Japan finds a bleak consensus: in all 27 countries, majorities believe life will be harder for the next generation and that the system is rigged in favour of the rich.

In all but Denmark, majorities judge public institutions ineffective and wasteful. Other polls tell a similar story. In a Gallup International survey of nearly 60,000 adults, economic pessimists outnumber optimists by about two to one in Britain and Japan.