Half of the latest Commentary — a full 40 pages — compiles the assessments of more than 40 pundits and prognosticators who’ve been asked whether they approach America’s future with optimism or pessimism.

The longest articles spotlight Commentary editor John Podhoretz’s optimistic approach and Mark Steyn’s pessimistic outlook.

Podhoretz contends Americans will respond once they are no longer responding to incentives that lead to harmful behavior:

Americans made entirely rational choices in the years leading up to the crisis in 2008; they responded properly to a series of incentives created over the preceding decades by politicians who meant well but were satisfying the interests not of the public as a whole but of constituent groups that stood to benefit far more than the ordinary voter from the creation of those incentives. Just as Americans responded to the realities of the time before the crisis, they will respond to the realities of the United States in which we now live. And the nation will come out the stronger for it.

Steyn’s more pessimistic take includes a discussion of American government debt, starting with the observation that the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s cost taxpayers $2 billion.

What a primitive society that must have been, barely advanced out of subsistence agriculture! Today, the government of the United States borrows $2 billion every 11 hours. We could have 220 Savings and Loan scandals for the cost of the Obama jobs bill. We could have 500 Savings and Loan scandals for the cost of one Obama stimulus package. We could have 850 Savings and Loan scandals for the cost of this year’s budget deficit.

But Steyn also offers an optimistic note. It’s tied closely to the “much-maligned Tea Partiers” who “moved the meter of public discourse significantly back in the direction of sanity.”

In 1975, Milton Friedman said this: “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Just so. Every time Barack Obama stands at his teleprompter and is forced to pretend that he’s interested in deficit reduction, we have taken a step toward that Milton Friedman reality. You have to create the conditions, as the Tea Party and the town hall meetings did, whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things.