Madsen Pirie at The Adam Smith Institute has a link to a tongue-in-cheek article on "hedonomics" - the "dismal science with its own happy ending". I think there are mostly two types of people (10, if you speak binary) - hedonomicists, and their opposite number (although I haven't decided what best to call them - maybe skeptonomicists, or gloomonomicists?) Here's an excerpt:
This is the newly identified branch of economics which exists to show that every story has a happy ending. As so often happens, practice has been running far ahead of theory. Chancellors work on it, deal-makers live by it, tycoons try their luck with it. In the stock market, hedonomics finds its natural home.Click here for the whole thing.
Two observations:
- I wonder how much of which camp a person is in is is determined by their basic nature, and how much by their incentives to be optimistic or pessimistic.
- IMHO, many journalists tend to be practitioners of gloomonomics.