The Rational Optimist (32 page)

Yet if innovation is limitless, why is everybody so pessimistic about the future?

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

J
OHN
S
TUART
M
ILL
Speech on ‘perfectibility’

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 naïve 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.’

If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize. The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth.

The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went. Were we just lucky? Are we, in the memorable image of the old joke, like the man who falls past the first floor of the skyscraper and thinks ‘So far so good!’? Or was it the pessimism that was unrealistic?

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 of this book. The real danger comes from slowing down change. It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It does so through invention driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price; that encourages the development of alternatives and of 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.’

So, for example, the environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in 2008, was pessimistic about what will happen if the Chinese are by 2030 as rich as the Americans are now:

Brown is dead right with his extrapolations, but so was the man who (probably apocryphally) predicted ten feet of horse manure in the streets of London by 1950. So was IBM’s founder Thomas Watson when he said in 1943 that there was a world market for five computers, and Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, when he said in 1977: ‘There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.’ Both remarks were true enough when computers weighed a tonne and cost a fortune. Even when the British astronomer royal and the British government space adviser said that space travel was respectively ‘bunk’ and ‘utter bilge’ – just before Sputnik flew – they were not wrong when they said it; just the world changed rather soon after they said it. It is the same with modern predictions of impossibility, like Lester Brown’s. Paper and oil will all have to be used more frugally, or replaced by something else, by 2030, and land will have to be used more productively. What is the alternative? Banning Chinese prosperity? The question is not ‘Can we go on as we are?’ because of course the answer is ‘No’, but how best can we encourage the necessary torrent of change that will enable the Chinese and the Indians and even the Africans to live as prosperously as Americans do today.

A brief history of bad news

There is a tendency to believe that pessimism is new, that our current dyspeptic view of technology and progress has emerged since Hiroshima and got worse since Chernobyl. History contradicts this. Pessimists have always been ubiquitous and have always been feted. ‘Five years have seldom passed away in which some book or pamphlet has not been published,’ wrote Adam Smith at the start of the industrial revolution, ‘pretending to demonstrate that the wealth of the nation was fast declining, that the country was depopulated, agriculture neglected, manufactures decaying, and trade undone.’

Take the year 1830. Northern Europe and North America were much richer than they had ever been. They had enjoyed more than a decade of peace for the first time in more than a generation and they were brimming with novel inventions, discoveries and technology (a word which was coined that year): steam boats, cotton looms, suspension bridges, the Erie Canal, Portland cement, the electric motor, the first photograph, Fourier analysis. It was a world, in retrospect, pregnant with possibility, ready to explode into modernity. To be born then you would see a life of ever-increasing wealth, health, wisdom and safety.

Yet was the mood of 1830 optimistic? No, it was just like today: fashionable gloom was everywhere. Campaigners who went under the pseudonym of ‘Captain Swing’ took precisely the same approach to threshing machines in 1830 as their 1990s equivalents would take to genetically modified crops: they vandalised them. Some of the vociferous and numerous opponents of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway, which opened that year, forecast that passing trains would cause horses to abort their foals. Others mocked its pretensions to speed: ‘What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches!’ cried the
Quarterly Review
. ‘We trust that Parliament will, in all rail ways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.’ (Dr Arnold was more enlightened about the first steam train: ‘I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone forever.’)

In that year, 1830, the British Poet Laureate Robert Southey had just published a book (
Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society
) in which he imagined his alter ego escorting the ghost of Thomas More, the Tudor author of
Utopia
, round the English Lake District. Through the ghost of More, Southey rails against the condition of the people of England, and especially those who have left their rose-fringed cottages for the soulless tenements and factories of the industrial cities. He complains that their condition is worse than in the days of Henry VIII or even than in the days of Caesar and the Druids:

Not content with denigrating the present, Southey castigates the future. He – in the form of his fictional ghost of More – forecasts imminent misery, famine, plague and a decline of religion. The timing of this jeremiad was, in retrospect, hilarious. Not only technology, but living standards themselves, had begun their extraordinary break-out, their two centuries of unprecedented explosion. For the first time people’s life expectancy was rapidly rising, child mortality rapidly falling, purchasing power burgeoning and options expanding. The rise of living standards over the next few decades would be especially marked among the unskilled working poor. British working-class real earnings were about to double in thirty years, an unprecedented occurrence. All across the world countries were looking enviously at Britain and saying ‘I want some of that.’ But for the reactionary, Tory, nostalgic Robert Southey, the future could only get worse. He would have been at home in the modern environmental movement, lamenting world trade, tutting at consumerism, despairing of technology, longing to return to the golden age of Merrie England when people ate their local, organic veg, danced round their maypoles, sheared their own sheep and did not clog up the airports on the way to their ghastly package holidays. As the modern philosopher John Gray puts it, echoing Southey, open-ended economic growth is ‘the most vulgar ideal ever put before suffering mankind’.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a poet, too, the author of ‘Horatius’ and other such well remembered ditties. In the
Edinburgh Review
of January 1830 he reviewed Southey’s
Colloquies
and did not pull his punches. Far from idyllic, the life of the rural peasant was one of hellish poverty, he said; the factory towns were better off, which was why people were flocking to them. The poor rate was twenty shillings a head in rural Sussex and only five shillings in the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire.

As for the notion that life was better in the past, Macaulay warmed to his theme:

He went on (twenty-five years later, in his
History of England
):