The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
MR's view is that human technology and culture changes over time have so far avoided the predicted catasrophes of famine and resource scarcity (despite the doomsayers), and that this will continue. This is an interesting alternative viewpoint to the usual eco/green version.
Humanity is experiencing a burst of evolutionary change - but in ideas not genes.
Early humans needed a huge gut to digest digest raw vegetation and raw meat. Hand axes and blades meant an increasingly meat-rich diet, while fire and cooking made food even more digestable, resulting in an increase in brain size. Better and more varied tools appeared alongside evidence of swap, barter and trade. While other animals will exchange favours, only humans exchange and trade.
Specialisation of efforts and talents for mutual gain. Hunter-gatherer society sexual division of labour with women collecting dependable, staple carbohydrates and men getting protein - precious but not as reliably obtained. Specialisation leads to expertise; increased trading kept skills levels high enough for improvements to occur. (Very small, isolated populations tend to regress in skill range and ability.)
Exchange/barter/trade. All known human tribes trade. Experiments indicate that fairness seems to be innate in humans; dealing with strangers teaches you to be polite to them, with unfair traders being punished and people are surprisingly good at guessing who to trust. The win-lose view says exports make you rich an imports make you poor; MR says this is a fallacy. The market is a bottom-up world with no-one in charge. Wealth creation: the rich have got richer but the poor have done even better. He also sees commercialism as improving human sensibility (torture, slavery, racism, sexism, child molestation, battery farming, etc). The environmental Kuznets curve shows that when per capita income reaches about $4,000 (2011), people demand a clean-up of their local streams and air. Liberty and welfare go hand in hand with prosperity and trade.
Food production. Early humans expanded the range of foods they ate and in some areas made bread from gathered wild grains. These skills lapsed in periods when poor weather conditions meant grain was not reliably available. Around 11,500 years ago climate changes allowed people to become more settled, and they started saving seed to plant, and storing surplus food. Farming settlements also seem to have been trading towns.Farming replaced gathering, herding replaced hunting, concept of land ownership. Fertilizer revolution first organic (e.g. guano) then artificial.Breeding more productive varieties. Weeds controlled by herbicides > more seeds sown direct without tilling first > reduces soil erosion and silt run-off. Organic farming is low yield. Genetic modification. Cotton plants now produce a toxin that kills bollworms (that live inside the plant) without harming other insect life. No single case of human illness due to GM food. GM pest resistant plants mean less use of pesticides.
Housing. Government policies often prevent it becoming cheaper (planning or zoning laws, using the tax system to encourage mortgage borrowing, and policies designed to stop property prices falling after an economic bubble). This makes life harder for those who do not yet have a house and massively rewards those who do; governments then have to enforce the building of more affordable housing or subsidise mortgage lending to the poor.
Inequality. While this is currently increasing in some countries, globally it has been falling. The spread of IQ scores has been shrinking because the low scores have been catchingup with the high ones, due to equalisation of nutrition, stimulation and diversity of childhood experience.
Health. Average life expectancy continues to improve, so the number of years in retirement increases and there is a shorter period in chronic illness before death. While cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease are age-related, they are occurring later.
Urban v Rural. Cities exist for trade, which became increasingly global. Early communities had limited laws and restrictions. Unification into an Empire > more regulation > less innovation. Protectionism causes poverty, free trade makes for mutual prosperity. People move to cities for opportunity.
Population. More food > more babies >specialised tasks. Food scarcity > shared preferentially with kin > rise and fall in specialisations. Boom times and famines. Britain > the relatively rich had more children than the relatively poor > by 1700 most of the poor were descended from the rich, with their habits and customs - literacy, numeracy, industriousness, financial prudence. Concern about over-population > some countries tried coerced sterilisation, China the one-child policy. Not only counter-productive, but likely not needed. Birth rates were falling voluntarily in the 1970s all across Asia without coercion and continue to fall today. Birth rates. Bangladesh (1955) 6.8 children per woman, down to 2.7 in 2011. India (1955) 5.9 children down to 2.6 in 2011. This is happening in all continents and cultures (inlcuding Mormons). Birth rate collapse seems to be bottom up emerging from cultural evolution; falling child mortality, wealth, female emancipation, urbanisation.
Innovation. Not mainly due to science, nor money (not always limiting), nor patents (can get in the way) or government (poor at innovation). Knowledge can be given away and kept at the same time. Innovators share. Knowledge does not necessarily equal material wealth (knowing how to put man in space has not not much to enrich us) but some knowledge does.
Environment. While in some places there deterioration, in many others there is improvement. Rivers, lakes, seas and the air are getting cleaner. [2016: The Global Carbon Project annual analysis shows that CO2 emissions were almost flat for the third year in a row, despite a rise in economic growth. Key factors seem to be declining demand since 2012 for coal in China due to a slowdown in the economy, and in the US due to wind, solar, and gas continuing to displace coal in electricity production. However India's emissions have been growing by
around 6% per annum over the last decade and slowed marginally to 5% in
2016. This is expected to be continued as India looks to double domestic
coal production by 2020. BBC News item 14 Nov. 2016.]
Pessimism. Reasons for pessimism change (famine, population, climate change); each era focuse on something. The problem is partly nostalgia - the lost golden age. Scares are exagerated. People are personally optimistic ('I will live longer than others') but socially pessimistic. Humans are risk averse; this might be a genetic tendency - only 20% of people have a long version serotonin transporter gene, possibly making them more optimistic. Older populations are more pessimistic. Vested interest - charities focus on the bad to raise money, newspapers to get readers. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring predictions have not materialized. Childhood cancer has not increased, but fewer children die of other causes. Excepting lung cancer, incidence and death rates from cancers reduced by 16% between 1950 and 1997, and even further subsequently. Acid rain - the nitric acid acted as a fertilizer, with increased growth rates; sulphuric acid - some small pockets of damage.
Poverty. Aid cannot reliably start or accelerate economic growth. Most aid is delivered by government to government; can be a source of corruption and discourage entrepreneurship, vanity projects, conditional on importing specific goods from aid giver. Giving away free has its risks: mosquito bed nets often became wedding veils or fishing nets; selling them to mothers at antenatal clinics for 50 cents, subsidised by selling to richer urban people for $5, more were used properly. The poor have taken up mobile phones - calling markets beforehand for trading prices, to pay and pay for things in an informal banking system.
Botswana. Land-locked, drought-prone, high poulation growth, eight different tribes and languages. Independent in 1966 after British colonial rule which was minimal. Has secure, enforceable property rights that are fairly widely distributed and respected. Cattle were privately owned but land was owned collectively. It has had no coups, civil wars, dictators, hyperinflation or debt default.
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