Reading Chicago Metropolis 2020 plan tonight, I ran across the following…
“The sustaining force of this historic process of renewal is Chicago’s strongest spiritual asset: its swaggering self-confidence. This cannot be underestimated as a propellant of economic and civic revitalization. As historian David S. Landes writes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, his important book about why some nations create great wealth and others do not: ‘In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when they’re wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Education, eyes-open optimism pays. Pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.'”
