Niall Ferguson addresses a subject that has interested me for some time -- in the face of overwhelming good news, sustained over many years, most of the public throughout the West remains pessimistic and considers things to be on the wrong course.

Ferguson writes:

Democracy is on a roll. There have never been so many democracies in the world. More than half the world's people now enjoy at least some measure of political representation....

Peace, too, is breaking out all over. The amount of armed conflict is lower than it has been at any time since the end of the Cold War. What is more, the world economy is going great guns. For the first time since 1969, there isn't a single major economy around the world that is in recession. On average, growth rates are above 4 per cent. Stock markets are up in both developed and emerging markets. Inflation is low, despite the recent hike in energy prices. There has been some monetary tightening lately, yet interest rates are still at historically low levels.

By the standards of my lifetime - the past 42 years - this is surely about as good as it gets. What, if anything, should we be worried about?

My timeline is a bit longer than Ferguson's, but the same point could be made -- by a wide range of measures things have never, ever in the history of the human race been as good as they are today.

So why aren't people more appreciative? Why are they so worried? And why do they worry about ridiculous things. War and crime rank high on any poll of things to worry about, but as Ferguson points out,

on a world-wide basis, people in my age group (30-44) are seven times more likely to die of Aids than from violent crime, and six times more likely to die from heart disease than in war.

In my older age group the disparity would be much greater. So why are we so worried about things like war and crime that have so little impact on our daily lives? Ferguson has an answer -- the media.

Why do we worry about the wrong things? A facile answer is that the media distort our sense of probability by focusing on fairly unusual dangers, such as war and violent crime. A better answer is that the biggest risks we face are so commonplace as to be boring, which is why the media generally downplay them. An even better answer is that there is no money to be made, outside the insurance industry, from predicting the incidence of high probability events.

Sure there are any number of low-probability, high-impact events that could upset the applecart, and we have made preparations for many of them -- things like another Katrina, Iraq's descent into civil war, etc. However, we are not prepared for the most likely of catastrophes -- one that is already emerging.

The headline event has been the newly-elected Bolivian President Evo Morales's decision - predicted in this column on February 12 - to nationalise his country's energy sector. But the swing to the Left is not a purely Central American story. The Left won last month's Italian elections. The French government recently caved in to street protests by trade unions and Leftist students. And in the United States, the Democrats are poised to make gains in the November midterms.

This resurgence of the Left is a catastrophe already underway, one that threatens the well-being of people throughout the globe. A political swing to the left is one of the few things that could bring worldwide prosperity slamming to a halt.

Leftist resurgence is driven, Ferguson writes, by increasing inequality and by ethnic conflict [which splits the Right and opens the way for the Left to assert itself in democratic systems]. He offers no solution to the looming crisis, save increased progressivity in taxes, and determined efforts to heal divisions on the Right, but his warning is something to be heeded. We who would oppose such a shift indulge the fantasies of the Left and allow ourselves to be diverted into internecine conflict at great peril, not just for ourselves, but for all mankind.

Read Ferguson's piece here.