Well, I'm an optimist. I mean basically I'm an optimist.

You're an optimist.

I am an optimist by nature.

I am an optimist by nature.

You're a Californian utopian. You're a wild eyed optimist.

I am by turns an optimist and a pessimist.

Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist.

But for me, I have another reason to be an incurable optimist.

I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist.

With that as my heritage, how can I not be an optimist about our future?

Call me a growth optimist , but Europe looks poised for another good growth year in 2007.

And then I'll let you in on a secret, which is why I am an incurable optimist.

So I thought this morning I would try to be the optimist, and give reason to hope for the future of the Internet by drawing upon its present.

The best that can be said is that Europe will no longer be able to delay making the choice that the Greek affair has laid bare. If you are an optimist, you might even conclude that Europe will therefore ultimately emerge stronger.

The drubbing that many governments suffered in the recent elections to the European Union Parliament places them in a difficult position as they maneuver ahead of this week's EU Summit. Only an incurable optimist can hope that the summit will bring glory to any of them.

Though I am, by nature, an optimist, I have to admit that it is very difficult not to be pessimistic as 2014 comes to a close. Nonetheless, we must not submit to panic and despair, or allow ourselves to be drawn into a vortex of negative inertia.

Now that the talks are to begin, will they achieve anything substantial, or will the summit in Washington merely be another photo opportunity, like President George W. Bush s Annapolis summit in 2007? Only an unreconstructed optimist would give the talks more than a 50 chance of succeeding.

Well, yes and no. An optimist (or an apologist) could argue that, though market income has indeed become grossly more unequal since 1979, with the slots in the bottom half of the income distribution losing absolute ground in real income, and with taxation becoming less progressive, welfare state growth substantially moderated this increase in inequality.

The optimist may reply that the pessimist s imagination is too weak to envisage the full range of wonderful new job possibilities that automation is opening up. But perhaps the optimist s imagination is too weak to imagine a different trajectory toward a world in which people enjoy the fruits of automation as leisure rather than as additional income.

Though I am an optimist, I am not blind to the problems that we face, or to the challenges that we must overcome to accelerate progress in the next 15 years. The two that worry me the most are the possibility that we will be unable to raise the funds needed to pay for health and development projects, and that we will fail to align around clear goals to help the poorest.

Obviously, I'm the optimist and a big believer in what's going on here, but I think that as even a sober, you know, the most sober, disconnected thinker about this, looking at it from the side, has to conclude, based on the data, that with those kinds of economic forces at play, there is definitely going to be a sea change, and that change is going to be intensely disruptive relative to our concept of our very lives and being, and our identities, as well.