This sort of pessimistic attitude is, in my opinion, the reason why we have economic stagflation. The entire history of humanity can be summarized with:

"People arrogant and self-confident enough to think they'd be the one and they could do no wrong and who'd hold little to no regards for the status quo and the concept of opportunity cost"

The self-confidence of people is dropping at an ever increasing rate ever since the turn of the millennium, concurrently the awareness of the concept of opportunity cost is skyrocketing. People blamed the Financial Crisis but I think it's the other way around. The financial crisis happened because people self-confidence and risk-taking suddenly collapsed (it's not going fast that kills you, becoming immediately stationary does).

Economists claim that the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' are taxation or the taking care of the environment or public parks.

In reality the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' is people not having the confidence to try out whatever crazy idea they have in mind with regards to the natural world or the entrepreneurial world or the industrial world etc.

It's like we know it's a tragedy of the commons because we encourage (or at least we did) people to follow their dreams, but in the dark of our office with the curtains closed we play it safe .

We need to try a lot of crazy ideas, some of them will stick and we could go back at having 10% YoY real growth...but we are afraid to do so ourselves because we don't want to try and fail, we want to try and win! And get the accolades and status which goes with it.

At the same time who knows if other people are trying themselves or they are playing it safe? Maybe in the dark of their office with the curtains closed, just relentlessly buying the S&P and index funds in awe of their preacher John Boogle....the similarities with tax avoidance/climate/public good care is again there to be seen.

I think it's a known problem outside of academia.

Ray Dalio mentions it very often [1] and Sergey Brin [2] dedicated a couple of minutes to this problem in a talk he gave at Davos (I guess if you follow your dream long enough that's where you end up!) and thinks the Internet is at fault for this pessimistic attitude

The internet might have complicated things even further, people were already becoming more and more risk averse, now they have a projection of all the things which could go wrong as well as rapid access to the info about the #1 person in that domain so they can compare themselves against their accomplishments. They become stuck in a "play it safe" and "analysis paralysis" mode for a very long time before actually experimenting.

Other than the internet I guess the only other reason could be the ever diminishing levels of testosterone in the median male (of all age groups and ethnicity). Testosterone has been declining and nobody knows why.

It makes sense in theory, Testosterone is correlated with risk-taking, might also explain societal changes and the constant level of stress which is put nowadays on security, safety, financial stability. In one word Stasis. Might also be the reason why a President like Trump is not acceptable whereas John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who were exactly the same personality and all around the same persona were elevated as heroes (initially by the left but also nationally)

There is some hopes though, people who take shots have a much less crowded trade so to speak. There is also the reason why I should remember myself that a guy like Musk extracting his richest man in the world wealth and status from Tesla before the company is even out of the woods of bankruptcy and insolvency would have earned him the title of scam artist and fraudster a while ago. Today people are so adamant and desire to see somebody take a shot that would elevate him and praise him, because in a world where nobody tries , he does.

[1] https://youtu.be/XTKXrojiCrA?t=235

[2] https://youtu.be/ffvu6Mr1SVc?t=1630