It is only dismal if you think money should grow on trees which seems to be the premise behind FED policy today.

Is physics "dismal" because we can't have free energy or perpetual motion machines (that can do work)?

Trivia: The term "dismal science" was coined when economists argued for abolishing slavery:

> Carlyle attacked Mill, not for supporting Malthus’s predictions about the dire consequences of population growth, but for supporting the emancipation of slaves. It was this fact–that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty–that led Carlyle to label economics “the dismal science.”

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/07/the_origins_of_1.ht...