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This article is a response to a critique by professor Matthew S. Carroll and colleagues to a longitudinal analysis of logging industry job losses. The critique by Carroll and colleagues has two main parts. The first involves questions of scientific and technical judgments, the second has to do with what is sometimes called the moral exclusion literature and with the perceptions of those who live in the logging-dependent communities of the Pacific Northwest. There are a number of statistical and inferential problems with their argument. At the outset, however, it is worth pointing out that the arguments of Carroll and colleagues ignore the extensive work that has been done by historians who have explicitly examined the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest. Those historians, including Carroll's respected Washington State University colleague Paul Hirt, have reached a very different set of conclusions. In Hirt's memorable terminology, the ready embracing of optimistic assumptions, combined with the failure to note the more ominous warning signs, amounted to a veritable conspiracy of optimism. Still, like another distinguished historian of the forests of the region, Nancy Langston, he notes that the conspiracy was not a matter of straightforward venality. Instead another crucial consideration involved the realm of psychology.