Read The Rational Optimist Online
Authors: Matt Ridley
The Rational Optimist (41 page)
It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world back into pre-industrial poverty some time during the coming century. There is even a new reason for such pessimism: the integrated nature of the world means that it may soon be possible to capture the entire world on behalf of a foolish idea, where before you could only capture a country, or perhaps if you were lucky an empire. (The great religions all needed empires within which to flourish and become powerful: Buddhism within the Mauryan and Chinese, Christianity within the Roman, Islam within the Arab.)
Take the twelfth century as an example of how close the world once came to turning its back on the catallaxy. In one fifty-year period, between 1100 and 1150, three great nations shut down innovation, enterprise and freedom all at once. In Baghdad, the religious teacher Al-Ghazali almost single-handedly destroyed the tradition of rational enquiry in the Arab world and led a return to mysticism intolerant of new thinking. In Peking, Su-Sung’s astronomical clock, the ‘cosmic engine’, probably the most sophisticated mechanical device ever built at that date, was destroyed by a politician suspicious of novelty and (t)reason, setting the tone for the retreat to autarky and tradition that would be China’s fate for centuries to come. In Paris, St Bernard of Clairvaux persecuted the scholar Peter Abelard, criticised the rational renaissance centred on the University of Paris and supported the disastrous fanaticism of the second crusade. Fortunately, the flames of free thought and reason and catallaxy were kept burning – in Italy and North Africa, especially. But imagine if they had not been. Imagine if the entire world had turned its back on the catallaxy then. Imagine if the globalised world of the twenty-first century allows a globalised retreat from reason. It is a worrying thought. The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth. Already lords don boiler suits to destroy genetically modified crops, presidents scheme to prevent stem-cell research, prime ministers trample on habeas corpus using the excuse of terrorism, metastasising bureaucracies interfere with innovation on behalf of reactionary pressure groups, superstitious creationists stop the teaching of good science, air-headed celebrities rail against free trade, mullahs inveigh against the empowerment of women, earnest princes lament the loss of old ways and pious bishops regret the coarsening effects of commerce. So far they are all sufficiently localised in their effects to achieve no more than limited pauses in the happy progress of the species, but could one of them go global?
I doubt it. It will be hard to snuff out the flame of innovation, because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world. However reactionary and cautious Europe and the Islamic world and perhaps even America become, China will surely now keep the torch of catallaxy alight, and India, and maybe Brazil, not to mention a host of smaller free cities and states. By 2050, China’s economy may well be double the size of America’s. The experiment will go on. So long as human exchange and specialisation are allowed to thrive somewhere, then culture evolves whether leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands. Said Lord Macaulay, ‘We see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations, mischievous prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates faster than governments can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can destroy.’
Human nature will not change. The same old dramas of aggression and addiction, of infatuation and indoctrination, of charm and harm, will play out, but in an ever more prosperous world. In Thornton Wilder’s play
The Skin of Our Teeth
, the Antrobus family (representing humankind) just manages to survive the ice age, the flood and a world war, but their natures do not change. History repeats itself as a spiral not a circle, Wilder implied, with an ever-growing capacity for both good and bad, played out through unchanging individual character. So the human race will continue to expand and enrich its culture, despite setbacks and despite individual people having much the same evolved, unchanging nature. The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive.
Dare to be an optimist.
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Prologue
p. 1 ‘In other classes of animals, the individual advances from infancy to age or maturity’. Ferguson, A. 1767.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society
.
pp. 1–2 ‘On my desk as I write sit two artefacts of roughly the same size’. Photographs of the hand axe and computer mouse reproduced by permission of John Watson.
p. 3 ‘from perhaps 3 million to nearly 7 billion people’. Kremer, M. 1993. Population growth and technical change, one million B.C. to 1990.
Quarterly Journal of Economics
108:681–716.
p. 4 ‘The human being is the only animal that ...’ Gilbert, D. 2007.
Stumbling on Happiness
. Harper Press.
p. 4 ‘with the possible exception of language’. Pagel, M. 2008. Rise of the digital machine.
Nature
452:699.
p. 4 ‘compared with even chimpanzees humans are almost obsessively interested in faithful imitation’. Horner, V. and Whiten, A. 2005. Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes
) and children (
Homo sapiens
).
Animal Cognition
8:164–81.
p. 5 ‘We may call it social evolution when an invention quietly spreads through imitation.’ Tarde, G. 1969/1888.
On Communication and Social Influence
. Chicago University Press.
p. 5 ‘selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits’. Hayek, F.A. 1960.
The Constitution of Liberty
. Chicago University Press.
p. 5 ‘Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term “meme” for a unit of cultural imitation’. Dawkins, R. 1976.
The Selfish Gene
. Oxford University Press.
p. 5 ‘Richard Nelson in the 1980s proposed that whole economies evolve by natural selection’. Nelson, R.R. and Winter, S.G. 1982.
An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
. Harvard University Press.
p. 6 ‘a culture or a camera’. Richerson, P. and Boyd, R. 2005.
Not by Genes Alone
. Chicago University Press: ‘adding one innovation after another to a tradition until the results resemble organs of extreme perfection’.
p. 7 ‘“To create is to recombine” said the molecular biologist François Jacob’. Jacob, F. 1977. Evolution and tinkering.
Science
196:1163.
p. 8 ‘what Adam Smith said in 1776’. Smith, A. 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
.
p. 9 ‘sluiced artificially cheap money towards bad risks’. For a good account of this see Norberg, J. 2009.
Financial Fiasco
. Cato Institute.
p. 9 ‘The crisis has at least as much political as economic causation’. Friedman, J. 2009. A crisis of politics, not economics: complexity, ignorance and policy failure.
Critical Review
23 (introduction to special issue).
Chapter 1
p. 11 ‘On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’ Macaulay, T.B. 1830. Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society.
Edinburgh Review
, January 1830.
p. 11 World GDP graph. Maddison, A. 2006.
The World Economy
. OECD Publishing.
p. 12 ‘But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been’. Kremer, M. 1993. Population growth and technical change, one million
BC
to 1990.
Quarterly Journal of Economics
108:681–716. See Brad De Long’s estimates at http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html.
p. 12 ‘the number of different products that you can buy in New York or London tops ten billion’. Beinhocker, E. 2006.
The Origin of Wealth
. Harvard Business School Press.
p. 13 ‘As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy’. See McCloskey, D. 2006.
The Bourgeois Virtues
. Chicago University Press: ‘Let us then be rich. Remember smoky crofters’ cabins. Remember being tied in Japan by law and cost to one locale. Remember American outhouses and iced-over rain barrels and cold and wet and dirt. Remember in Denmark ten people living in one room, the cows and chickens in the other room. Remember in Nebraska sod houses and isolation.’
p. 14 ‘income has risen more than nine times’. Maddison, A. 2006.
The World Economy
. OECD Publishing.
p. 15 ‘The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day’. Norberg, J. 2006.
When Man Created the World
. Published in Swedish as
När människan skapade världen
. Timbro.
p. 15 ‘The poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980 and 2000’. Lal, D. 2006.
Reviving the Invisible Hand
. Princeton University Press. See also Bhalla, S. 2002.
Imagine There’s No Country
. Institute of International Economics.
p. 15 ‘The percentage living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more than half – to less than 18 per cent’. Chen, S. and Ravallion, M. 2007. Absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981–2004.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA (
PNAS
). 104: 16757–62.
p. 15 ‘The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.’ Lomborg, B. 2001.
The Sceptical Environmentalist
. Cambridge University Press.
p. 16 ‘In 1958 J.K. Galbraith declared’. Galbraith, J.K. 1958.
The Affluent Society
. Houghton Mifflin.
p. 16 ‘This would have been unthinkable at mid-century’. Statistics from Lindsey, B. 2007.
The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture
. Collins.
p. 17 ‘Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks.’ Pollution facts from Norberg, J. 2006.
When Man Created the World
. Published in Swedish as
När människan skapade världen
. Timbro.
p. 17 ‘Within just five years both predictions were proved wrong in at least one country. ’ Oeppen, J. and Vaupel, J.W. 2002. Demography. Broken limits to life expectancy.
Science
296:1029–31.
p. 18 ‘People are not only spending a longer time living, but a shorter time dying.’ Tallis, R. 2006. ‘Sense about Science’ annual lecture. http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/pdf/Lecture2007Transcript.pdf.
p. 18 ‘The same is true of cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease: they all still increase with age, but they do so later and later, by about ten years since the 1950s.’ Fogel, R.W. 2003.
Changes in the Process of Aging during the Twentieth Century: Findings and Procedures of the Early Indicators Project
. NBER Working Papers 9941, National Bureau of Economic Research.
p. 19 ‘Yet the global effect of the growth of China and India has been to reduce the difference between rich and poor worldwide.’ This is especially clear in Hans Rosling’s animated graphs of global income distribution at www.gapminder.com. Incidentally, the individualisation of life that brought personal freedom after the 1960s also brought less loyalty towards the group, a process that surely reached crisis point in the bonus rows of 2009: see Lindsey, B. 2009.
Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics: Economic Policy, Social Norms and Income Inequality
. Cato Institute.
p. 19 ‘As Hayek put it’. Hayek, F.A. 1960.
The Constitution of Liberty
. Chicago University Press.
p. 19 ‘Known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn who first drew attention to it’. Flynn, J.R. 2007.
What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
. Cambridge University Press.
pp. 19–20 ‘To date 234 innocent Americans have been freed’.http://www.innocenceproject.org/know.
p. 20 ‘the average family house probably costs slightly less today than it did in 1900 or even 1700’. Comparing house prices over long periods of time is fraught with difficulty, because houses vary so much, but Piet Eichholtz has tried to index house prices by comparing the same area of Amsterdam, the Herengracht, over nearly 400 years: Eichholtz, P.M.A. 2003. A long run house price index: The Herengracht Index, 1628–1973.
Real Estate Economics
25:175–92.
p. 20 ‘the same amount of artificial lighting’. Pearson, P.J.G. 2003.
Energy History, Energy Services, Innovation and Sustainability
. Report and Proceedings of the International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability 2003: Energy and Sustainability Science, Science Council of Japan, Tokyo.
pp. 20–1 ‘an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light’. Nordhaus, W. 1997.
Do Real-Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not
. Cowles Foundation Paper no. 957, Yale. A modern check using British figures of £479 average weekly income and £0.09 per kilowatt-hour electricity cost produces a similar result: 1/4 second of work for 18 watt-hours, plus a little more for the cost of the bulb.
p. 21 ‘using the currency that counts, your time’. Nordhaus, W. 1997.
Do Real-Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not
. Cowles Foundation Paper no. 957, Yale.
p. 21 ‘The economist Don Boudreaux’. http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2006/08/were_much_wealt.html.
p. 22 ‘The average Briton today consumes roughly 40,000 times as much artificial light as he did in 1750.’ Fouquet, R., Pearson, P.J.G., Long run trends in energy services 1300–2000. Environmental and Resource Economists 3rd World Congress, via web, Kyoto.
p. 23 ‘Healthcare and education are among the few things that cost more in terms of hours worked now than they did in the 1950s.’ Cox, W.M. and Alm, R. 1999.
Myths of Rich and Poor – Why We Are Better Off Than We Think
. Basic Books. See also Easterbrook, G. 2003.
The Progress Paradox
. Random House.
p. 23 ‘observe what
Harper’s Weekly
had to say’. Gordon, J.S. 2004.
An Empire of Wealth: the Epic History of American Power
. Harper Collins.
p. 23 ‘They were enricher-barons, too’. McCloskey, D. 2006.
The Bourgeois Virtues
. Chicago University Press.
p. 24 ‘Henry Ford got rich by making cars cheap’. Moore, S. and Simon, J. 2000.
It’s Getting Better All the Time.
Cato Institute.
p. 24 ‘The price of aluminium fell from $545 a pound in the 1880s to twenty cents a pound in the 1930s’. Shermer, M. 2007.
The Mind of the Market
. Times Books.
p. 24 ‘When Juan Trippe sold cheap tourist class seats on his Pan Am airline in 1945’. Norberg, J. 2006.
When Man Created the World
. Published in Swedish as
När människan skapade världen
. Timbro.
p. 25 ‘Where it took sixteen weeks to earn the price of 100 square feet of housing in 1956, now it takes fourteen weeks and the housing is of better quality.’ Cox, W.M. and Alm, R. 1999.
Myths of Rich and Poor – Why We Are Better Off Than We Think
. Basic Books.
p. 25 ‘To remedy this, governments then have to enforce the building of more affordable housing, or subsidise mortgage lending to the poor’. Woods, T.E. 2009.
Meltdown
. Regnery Press.
p. 25 ‘according to Richard Layard’. Layard, R. 2005.
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.
Penguin.
p. 26 ‘The hippies were right all along’. Oswald, Andrew. 2006. The hippies were right all along about happiness.
Financial Times
, 19 January 2006.
p. 26 ‘a study by Richard Easterlin in 1974’. Easterlin, R.A. 1974. Does economic growth improve the human lot? in Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (eds).
Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz
. Academic Press.
p. 26 ‘the Easterlin paradox does not exist’. Stevenson, B. and Wolfers, J. 2008.
Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox.
NBER Working Papers 14282, National Bureau of Economic Research; Ingleheart, R., Foa, R., Peterson, C. and Welzel, C. 2008. Development, freedom and rising happiness: a global perspective, 1981–2007.
Perspectives on Psychological Science
3:264–86.