What is Birling's outlook on life? Use his speech on pages 6 and 7 as a focus of your answer.

During his speeches in the beginning of the first act, Mr. Birling reveals his optimistic—perhaps naive—outlook on life. He says that "there isn't a chance of war" and celebrates the rate of technological and industrial progress, citing as an example the "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" ocean liner (implied to be the Titanic). An Inspector Calls is set in 1912 but was written and first performed in 1945. The first audiences therefore had the advantage of hindsight and may have laughed at Mr. Birling's insistence that war was impossible and that the Titanic was unsinkable. After all, World War I began just two years later, in 1914, and the Titanic famously sank on its maiden voyage, in 1912.
During Mr. Birling's speech, he also proudly boasts (several times) that he is a "hard-headed business man." He is very much a capitalist, defining success exclusively according to "increasing prosperity," and he enthusiastically assures his audience that business men like him are "at last coming together to see that [their] interests—and the interests of capital—are properly protected."
He derides that the "Bernard Shaws" and "H. G. Wellses" shouldn't be allowed to "do all the talking." George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells were both famous socialist thinkers. The former was an Irish playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, and the latter was an English novelist who wrote The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.