Saturday, August 25, 2007
The improving state of the world, and questions for our readers
In the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs James Surowiecki reviews Indur Goklany's book The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet
Goklany depicts a global economy in which nearly all signs are positive -- and in which the problems that do exist, such as stagnation or setbacks in sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, will be solved if economic growth and technological improvements are allowed to work their magic. Nor is this, in Goklany's account, a new phenomenon. He marshals an impressive array of historical data to argue that the trajectory of the twentieth century has been generally upward and onward. Taken as a whole, Goklany argues, humanity really has been getting better and better day by day, so that today, as his subtitle puts it, "we're living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet."
Seen from a broad historical perspective, this description is, for most people, accurate enough. Just about everyone living today is the beneficiary of what can almost certainly be called the single most consequential development in human history -- namely, the onset of industrialization. As the economic historian Angus Maddison has shown in a series of studies of economic development over the past two millennia, human economies grew very little, if at all, for most of human history. Between 1000 and 1820 or so, Maddison estimates, annual economic growth was around 0.05 percent a year -- which meant that living standards improved incredibly slowly and that people living in 1800 were only mildly better off than people living in 1000. But sometime around 1820, that all began to change. Between 1820 and today, world per capita real income grew 20 times as fast as it did in the previous eight centuries.
In the West, above all, the effects of this transformation have been so massive as to be practically unfathomable. Real income, life expectancy, literacy and education rates, and food consumption have soared, while infant mortality, hours worked, and food prices have plummeted. And although the West has been the biggest beneficiary of these changes, the diffusion of technology, medicine, and agricultural techniques has meant that developing countries have enjoyed dramatic improvements in what the United Nations calls "human development indicators," even if most of their citizens remain poor. One consequence of this is that people at a given income level today are likely to be healthier and to live longer than people at the same income level did 40 or 50 years ago.
In one sense, all of this should be obvious, since a moment's thought -- or a quick read of a nineteenth-century novel -- should suffice to remind you of how much better, at least in material terms, life is today than it was a century ago, let alone in the 1600s. But as behavioral economists have persuasively demonstrated, human beings quickly adapt to their surroundings and come to take their current state of affairs for granted. In other words, it is difficult, even after your life has changed dramatically for the better, to remain aware of just how much better it is, and even harder to truly appreciate how much better you have it than your great-grandparents did. So part of Goklany's project here -- and it is a valuable part -- is to make clear just how much real progress there has been over the past two centuries and even (in many places) over the past two decades in the life of the average human being.
THE ANTI-MALTHUS
Goklany's target is not just the natural tendency of human beings to take things for granted. His real opponents are what he calls the "neo-Malthusians" -- those who are convinced that there are natural limits to growth and that humanity has been butting up against them for quite some time now. The neo-Malthusians had their heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome's appropriately titled The Limits to Growth. Although their doomsaying about population growth and industrialization is no longer front-page news, their deep-seated skepticism about the virtues of economic growth and their conviction that the richer people get, the worse things become for the earth remain an important strand of modern environmentalism. If Goklany sees progress everywhere he looks, the neo-Malthusians see impending disaster: air pollution, the disappearance of habitats, the emptying of aquifers, the demolition of forest cover, and the proliferation of new diseases. Day by day, in every way, in other words, we are getting worse and worse.
The problem with neo-Malthusianism, as Goklany appropriately suggests, is that it has consistently underestimated the beneficial effects of technological change. The e = mc2 of the neo-Malthusians was introduced three decades ago, when Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren invented the equation I = PAT. Environmental impact (I) was said to be the product of population size (P), level of affluence (A), and technological efficiency (T). According to this logic, not only are population growth and economic growth bad for the earth, but so, too, is technological change, since it has a multiplier effect on the other two factors. The only way to save the planet, from the neo-Malthusians' perspective, is to set strict limits on human behavior, doing everything possible to rein in businesses and consumers.
The I = PAT formula was not pulled completely out of thin air. As societies get richer and more populous, they do consume more resources, and, especially in the early phases of economic growth, they do so with a measure of indifference to the overall impact on the environment. But what the equation misses, and what Goklany spends a good chunk of his book demonstrating, is that technology can actually reduce environmental impact, thereby diminishing the demands made by affluence and population growth. A classic example of this effect is the massive expansion in the efficiency of agricultural productivity over the past 40 years. Productivity gains have dramatically reduced the environmental burden of farming (at least on the land -- there have not been similar advances in the efficient use of water) and shrunk the amount of land needed to feed the world. More recently, technological improvements in the scrubbing of power-plant smokestacks have brought about a sharp reduction in the amount of sulfur dioxide in the air. Improvements in the efficiency of wind and solar power have reduced (albeit only a little) the demand for fossil fuels. And although the impact of these innovations has been felt most strongly in the developed world, they have also improved conditions in the developing world, at least with regard to things such as access to clean water and some types of air emissions. Goklany may be exaggerating somewhat when he says that the entire planet -- as opposed to just the developed world -- is cleaner, but it is in fact not an outrageous claim.
The paradox here is that technological change is generally associated with (or is actually the result of) increased affluence, which makes it likely that an economy will get cleaner even as it gets richer. And empirically, that does seem to be the case. After all, developed countries do generally have cleaner air, cleaner water, more forest cover, and less cropland devoted to food production than developing countries do, even though the latter are much poorer. The obvious, and important, exception is CO2 emissions and the broader problem of climate change. But Goklany -- who spends too much of his book offering an overly familiar critique of excessive action in response to global warming -- argues that now that Americans are increasingly concerned about climate change, technology will soon help mitigate the problem.
All of this does not mean that the United States is less polluted than it was in 1787, let alone than it was when it was inhabited only by Native Americans. But it does mean that the United States is arguably less polluted today than at any time in the last 100 years and that the last 40 years or so, in particular, have seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of air and water. And the same is true, to lesser and greater extents, in the rest of the developed world. One hypothesis for why this has historically occurred is demonstrated by what is called the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). When graphed, the relationship between prosperity and environmental degradation looks like an upside-down U. Initially, as countries grow, they trade off environmental well-being for economic growth -- that is, as they get richer, they also get more polluted. At some point, however, they become prosperous enough to shift their priorities and begin to seek out ways to grow more cleanly. Goklany suggests a variation on the EKC, the "environmental transition hypothesis," which tries to account for time and technology as well as affluence. The invention and spread of new technologies, he suggests, make it easier and more likely for countries to get on the right side of the U-curve quickly, even before they have become rich; the "green revolution," for instance, allowed poor countries to reduce the environmental burden of farming.
Of course, no regular reader will be surprised that I, the author of a post titled "The total greatness of modernity," agree with this point of view. Note, though, Surowiecki's almost apologetic agreement, as though he is worried that Goklany has written something that is not more or less self-evident. Who, precisely, is the audience that will take issue with Goklany's argument? The academic left, obviously.
My questions for your discussion: Why do so many highly educated people who have presumably read more history than the average bear hate modernity? Is it because they imagine that they, in any case, would have also been rich and highly educated even before modernity, they are ignorant, or they loathe the popularization of wealth so much that they cannot fathom that things could be any worse? Is there another explanation that I might have missed?
For the average American and the average person on the planet, there is no luckier time to be alive. So far, at least.
7 Comments:
By 
Country Squire, at
Sat Aug 25, 11:00:00 PM:
The only suggestion I can offer about why so many highly educated people hate modernity is that they may have read more history than most, but they view it quite differently than you and I do.
It’s a classic case of the glass being half empty.
I see our founding fathers setting in motion the greatest social experiment of all time, proving that free men can and should govern themselves. Combine that experiment with capitalism and industrialization and the United States ends up becoming the engine for global prosperity on an undreamed of scale.
But what the intelligentsia concentrates its attention on are our perceived shortcomings as a nation and a people i.e. the effects of Manifest Destiny on the native population, slavery, the robber barons rape of our natural resources, segregation, consumerism, etc. Many of these issues are highly regrettable and should never be repeated but they do not disqualify all of the truly great things this country has accomplished.
When you find and read your copy of Goklany's book you should also read (if you haven’t already) Brink Lindsey’s “The Age of Abundance”. Lindsey contends that in the 25 years from 1970 to 1995 the material living standard of the poor in this country equaled or surpassed that of the middle class a generation earlier. If that is not a measurement of the betterment of mankind, I don’t know what is.
By 
, at
Sun Aug 26, 05:01:00 AM:
Actually, I think the question posed is backwards. Some people hate modernity - because they were raised that way, or indoctrinated, or because of personal failues - and may as a result selectively "educate" themselves to explain why modernity is worth hating. But no person who is actually highly educated and capable of rational thought -- one may debate how strongly linking those traits are -- hates modernity.
By kreiz1, at
Sun Aug 26, 08:39:00 AM:
I linked to your previous post and saw a reference to nuclear power- that's the first place I went when I started reading this piece. Do some really pine for the days when horse carcasses littered city streets?
In 1900, the average American man's life expectancy was 46.
You pose a great question, and I don't know the answer. It's an unslightly brew of adolescent fantasy, ignorance and self-delusion- mostly fantasy. Some folks don't handle limits and choices well- flights of fantasy are so much cleaner.
By kreiz1, at
Sun Aug 26, 09:55:00 AM:
Perhaps modernity has sown the seeds of its destruction by making material abundance look easy. When coupled with our lack of a shorthand way of comparing new with old, some assume that reality has always looked this way- a terribly myopic view.
By , at
Sun Aug 26, 03:20:00 PM:
The eco-wackos want us to return the old so called good old days WELL THE PEABODY and SHERMAN can stick them all in the WAYBAC machine set it for the 1880s and let them breath deep and smell the ripe smell of human and horse poo
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sun Aug 26, 07:35:00 PM:
kreiz1 suggestion that the fact that modern advantages happened make it look easy in retrospect is an excellent one. I would go farther: because of our fondness for simple narratives of our history, the better health, better communication, better food, etc now look inevitable to modern eyes. They are taken for granted because they are seen as normal. That these advances were bought at a cost to both individuals and societies is now invisible.
Stephen Rittenberg over at Horsefeathers has an excellent expansion on your idea of the intellectual's resentment of the lesser classes having status and good things: http://doctor-horsefeathers.com/archives2/000701.php#000701
By , at
Mon Aug 27, 07:17:00 PM:
Of course none of us grew up then, so we naturally think we are living in the greatest of times. We think because we have all this technology, we must be much better off than they were. This is the "End of History" argument again, in another form. I have talked to enough elderly people including my Great Grandmother who had been born in the early 1890's and lived to 105 to know that, yes they love the running water, and sanitation, etc. But I have never heard them say that these are the "Best of Times". She grew up at a time when families lived near each other, you had the same friends most of your life. A person lived in a world of relationships and connections, that people in this time can't even imagine. We are spread all, over the place. We live a long time, most of it in dozen places in our lives. We have many acquaintances, rarely lifelong friendships. We often even die alone. We quote"Feed the World" but we destroyed topsoil, and rural america, to do it. Spiritually, we live in a world filled with things, but often, not much peace. Yes, we have lots of nice things, but please don't get arrogant and think because we now have everything we want, that makes us better off than our ancestors. We also take things for granted, because this world is all we know. If we went back to certain periods in history, we might find it less oppressive than we think.
