Raise a half-full glass to this brave new world
It was ever thus. The end of the world was widely anticipated in AD1000. The Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century was hailed as a sign of divine retribution for sin. One of the bestsellers of 1923 was Decline of the West. “Optimism is cowardice,” proclaimed its author, Oswald Spengler.
The truth is rather different. Worldwide life expectancy is up by more than a third in the past 50 years. We have cleaner air and rivers than we have enjoyed for centuries, and birth rates are falling dramatically everywhere. Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or vaccination rates in Bangladesh or life expectancy in Japan, things have got better for most people in most places.
“Over that half-century, real income per head ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none. In the rest, they have rocketed upward,” notes Matt Ridley, scientist, journalist and former chairman of Northern Rock.
It is no surprise to him that the countries that have lagged behind have been riven by war or wrecked by dictatorship.
What is humanity’s secret? Why has homo sapiens come so far so quickly when our hominid predecessors were stuck in a rut for thousands of generations? Matt Ridley has a simple answer. Trade.
As Ridley sees it, we owe the forward march of humankind to the benefits of barter. Because we exchange, specialisation is possible, and each of us can draw on the skilled talents of many. “There is strikingly little use of barter in any other animal species,” Ridley writes. “There is sharing within families, and there is food-for-sex exchange in many animals including insects and apes, but there are no cases in which one animal gives an unrelated animal one thing in exchange for a different thing.”
The primitives who exchanged fish hooks for furs enabled the fisherman to keep warm and the fur trapper to eat fish. They each enjoyed the work of both and were thus lifted out of self-sufficiency.
Compare a modern computer mouse to a hand axe. Both artefacts have been designed to fit into a human hand, but there the similarities end. One is the product of a single person’s ingenuity and labour, and of a single substance, while the other is a complex amalgam of materials and labour and strands of human cleverness.
But why us? Ridley speculates that our ‘discovery’ of fire probably had something to do with it. Fire is hard to start but easy to share, creating incentives for trade. It also led to the invention of cooking, which had a huge evolutionary bonus: because we no longer had to spend hours of time and energy digesting raw food, our bodies could dedicate more nutrients to growing larger, more intelligent brains.
Ridley’s underlying argument is that it’s not merely biological evolution but cultural evolution — a process by which “ideas begin to meet and mate” — that drives prosperity. Once goods are exchanged, the possibility opens up for the exchange of ideas. It is no accident that the busy trading areas of the Mediterranean and the Middle East became hotbeds of philosophy, science and mathematics.
This is not a book of unthinking praise of all markets, but it is an inquiry into how the market process of exchange and specialisation is older and fairer than many think and gives a vast reason for optimism about the future.
Ridley’s proposition is that humankind has become a collective problem-solving machine which solves problems by changing its ways. It does so through invention driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price and that in turn encourages the development of alternatives and efficiencies.
History confirms this. When whales grew scarce, for example, petroleum was used instead as a source of oil.
Ridley boldly predicts that a century from now, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today — and even return lots of farmland to wilderness.
However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on innovation. Feeding another two billion people or more will, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water.
The pessimists are right when they say that if the world continues as it is it will end in disaster. If all transport depends on oil, and the oil runs out, then transport will cease. If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and water stocks are depleted, then starvation will ensue. But that assumes the future is just a bigger version of the past. On the contrary, the world will not continue as it is. That is the whole point of human progress.
Ridley shows a commitment to rational optimism that will no doubt appal some people as a thought crime against the world’s parlous state. Some people will continue to insist that everything is going to the dogs irrespective of the evidence.
And his thesis does not hold for all places at all times. China’s burst of continuous economic growth in history has occurred without the benefit of free markets. Wealth there has been created as never before — as a product of revolution and dictatorship.
But China is probably the exception which proves the rule. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.
“The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive,” Ridley concludes his enlightened and enlightening book.
“Dare to be an optimist.”
