Michael Lewis meet John Milton

The name of of the story is California and Bust.

It's by Michael Lewis,  Moneyball author (and also Blind Side and many others) and presents (in the best feature style) a California future that is very bleak, indeed, actually terrifying to the point of hopeless. And then he concludes:

When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their pres­ent wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that, when the future difficulty arrives, they’ll figure it out. They don’t always do that. But you can never rule out the possibility that they will. As idiotic as optimism can 

sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

And I'm thinking: John Milton would have loved you, man.