¿Por qué los chinos son más optimistas que los estadounidenses?

En esta entrada destacaba que los chinos se muestran en las encuestas más optimistas que los estadounidenses con respecto al futuro de su país. ¿Por qué? Mi explicación rápida fue: "los chinos no se están comparando con los estadounidenses o con los japoneses, sino consigo mismos en el pasado. De ahí su optimismo." John Derbyshire desarrolla un poco más esta idea en Taki's Magazine.

The optimism of today’s Chinese is not hard to understand. To be sure, China is still a poor country, with a per capita GDP only a ninth that of the U.S.  Look back at your own life, though. The times when you felt most upbeat were not the times when you had the most money. They were the times when you had that rising sensation: “I’m on my way up!” That’s how the Chinese feel. Life has been getting better for them very fast these past few years, and there doesn’t seem any clear reason why this shouldn’t continue. (...)

The U.S.A., by contrast, has been Top Dog among nations for decades now. Life is good here—better, by any metric, than in China—but it has been good for rather a long time, and seems not to have been getting significantly better. We have more gadgets than twenty years ago, and some marginal improvements in health care, but nothing that remotely compares with having a factory job versus being a peasant, or having disposable income versus just keeping up with necessities, or having a car versus having a bicycle. For happiness and optimism, it’s the gradient that counts, the first derivative.