CHAPTER 9: Turning points: pessimism after 1900 (The Rational Optimist)

A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song of the kind I have vented in this book so far. If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naive and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. When the economist Julian Simon tried it in the 1990s, he was called everything from imbecile and Marxist to flat-earther and criminal. Yet no significant error came to light in Simon’s book. When Bjørn Lomborg tried it in the 2000s, he was temporarily ‘convicted’ of scientific dishonesty by the Danish National Academy of Sciences, with no substantive examples given nor an opportunity to defend himself, on the basis of an error-strewn review in Scientific American. Yet no significant error has come to light in Lomborg’s book. ‘Implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress’ said Hayek, ‘has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind.’Let me make a square concession at the start: the pessimists are right when they say that, if the world continues as it is, it will end in disaster for all humanity. If all transport depends on oil, and oil runs out, then transport will cease. If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and aquifers are depleted, then starvation will ensue. But notice the conditional: if.The world will not continue as it is. That is the whole point of human progress, the whole message of cultural evolution, the whole import of dynamic change – the whole thrust o f this book. The real danger comes from slowing down change. It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problemsolving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways.It does so through invention driven often by the market:scarcitydrives up price; that encourages the development of alternatives and o f efficiencies. It has happened often in history. When whales grew scarce, petroleum was used instead as a source of oil. (As Warren Meyer has put it, a poster of John D. Rockefeller should be on the wall of every Greenpeace office.) The pessimists’ mistake is extrapolationism: assuming that the future is just a bigger version of the past. As Herb Stein once said, ‘If something cannot go on forever, then it will not.’There has probably never been a generation since the Palaeolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past. The endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shortening the attention span go back to Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorising. The ‘youth of today’ are shallow, selfish, spoiled, feral good-for-nothings full of rampant narcissism and trained to have ephemeral attention spans, says one commentator. They spend too long in cyberspace, says another, where their grey matter is being ‘scalded and defoliated by a kind o f cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences’. Balderdash. O f course, there are twerps and geeks in every generation, but today’s young are volunteering for charities, starting companies, looking after their relatives, going to work – just like any other generation, maybe more so.Or ‘our stolen future’? In 1996 a book with this title claimed that sperm counts were falling, breast cancer was increasing, brains were becoming malformed and fish were changing sex, all because of synthetic chemicals that act as ‘endocrine disruptors’, which alter the hormonal balance o f bodies. As usual, the scare proved greatly exaggerated: sperm counts are not falling, and no significant effect on human health from endocrine disruption has been detected.In 1995 the otherwise excellent scientist and writer Jared Diamond fell under the spell of fashionable pessimism when he promised: ‘By the time my young sons reach retirement age, half the world’s species will be extinct, the air radioactive and the seas polluted with oil.’ Let me reassure his sons that species extinction, though terrible, is so far under-shooting that promise by a wide margin. Even if you take E.O. Wilson’s wildly pessimistic guess that 27,000 species are dying out every year, that equates to just 27 per cent a century (there are thought to be at least ten million species), a long way short o f 50 per cent in sixty years. As for Diamond’s other worries, the trends are getting better, not worse: the radioactive dose his sons receive today from weapons tests and nuclear accidents is 90 per cent down on what their father received in the early 1960s and is anyway lessthan 1 per cent of natural background radiation. The amount of oil spilled in the sea has been falling steadily since before the young Diamonds were born: it now is down by 90 per cent since 1980.As the average age of a country’s population rises, so people get more and more neophobic and gloomy. There is immense vested interest in pessimism, too. No charity ever raised money for its cause by saying things are getting better. No journalist ever got the front page by telling his editor that he wanted to write a story about how disaster was now less likely. Good news is no news, so the media megaphone is at the disposal o f any politician, journalist or activist who can plausibly warn of a coming disaster. As a result, pressure groups and their customers in the media go to great lengths to search even the most cheerful o f statistics for glimmers of doom. The day I was writing a first draft of this paragraph, the BBC reported on its morning news headlines a study that found the incidence of heart disease among young and middle-aged British women had ‘stopped falling’. Note what was not news: the incidence of heart disease had until recently been falling steeply among all women, was still falling among men, and was not yet rising even among the female age group where it had just ‘stopped falling’. Yet all the discussion was of this ‘bad’ news. Or note how the New York Times reported the reassuring news in 2009 that world temperature had not risen for a decade: ‘Plateau in temperature adds difficulty to task of reaching a solution’Diseases of my childhood, like measles, mumps and rubella, are now prevented by a single vaccine. Where it took more than ten years to understand HIV, it took just three weeks a couple of decades later to sequence the entire genome o f the SARS virus and begin a search for its vulnerabilities. It took just months in 2009 to generate large doses of vaccines for swine flu.The total eradication of many diseases is now a realistic prospect. Although it is now more than forty years since smallpox was exterminated and hopes of sending polio after it to the grave have been repeatedly dashed, none the less, the retreat of infectious killers from many parts o f the world is little short of astounding. Polio is confined to a few parts of India and West Africa, malaria is gone from Europe, North America and nearly the whole of the Caribbean, measles is reduced to a tiny percentage of the numbers recorded even a few decades ago; sleeping sickness, filariasis and onchoceriasis are being steadily eliminated from country after country.In the centuries to come there will certainly be new human diseases, but very few o f them will be both lethal and contagious. Measures to cure and prevent them will come quicker and quicker.

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Related posts:

1. Chapter 3: The Manufacture of Virtue: barter, trust, and rules after 50,000 years ago (The Rational Optimist)
2. Chapter 5: The Triumph of Cities: Trade after 5,000 Years Ago (The Rational Optimist)
3. Chapter 6: Escaping Malthus’s Trap: Population after 1200 (The Rational Optimist)
4. Chapter 7: The Release of Slaves: Energy after 1700 (The Rational Optimist)