While carpooling recently with a fellow GCAer to a round of golf 50+ miles away, he commented that the negativity which pervades the news can turn mostly false perceptions into reality. Though he was referring to the economy and the business environment in general, I think it also applies to what Mike Cirba, Geoff Shackelford, and others have noted on this site regarding the future of golf.
The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy is well known. A book by Bryan Caplan, "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" (
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8262), provided me with some new insights. He identifies four biases which lead to misunderstandings, with the pessimistic bias the one which might be relevant here.
Many of us focus on the high cost of playing golf in large metropolitan areas and upscale resorts, long rounds, and crowded conditions. We then extrapolate from our own circumstances to the rest of golfdom and conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket.
As Mr. Caplan shows in his book, we're not going down the tube. By definition, no matter how much we prefer otherwise, things don't stand still. Mostly for the better, our economy has changed continuously in the past and it will do so as well in the future. Ditto for golf. The courses most of us play today are far superior than those we played 30 years ago.
As long as individuals are largely allowed to make decisions for themselves, we have nothing to fear. When the politicians start talking about the collective and have the power to coerce individual behavior accordingly, then we should be "mortified" about the future of golf and, for that matter, everything else. Admitedly, fighting the pessimistic bias is not easy for me these days.