The Rational Optimist (42 page)

p. 26 ‘In the words of one of the studies’. Stevenson, B. and Justin Wolfers, J. 2008.
Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox
. NBER Working Papers 14282, National Bureau of Economic Research.

p. 27 ‘a tax on consumption to encourage saving for investment instead’. Frank, R.H. 1999.
Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
. The Free Press.

p. 27 ‘to be well off and unhappy is surely better than to be poor and unhappy.’ The journalist Greg Easterbrook’s prayer goes: ‘thank you that I and five hundred million others are well-housed, well-supplied, overfed, free, and not content; because we might be starving, wretched, locked under tyranny and still not content.’ Easterbrook, G. 2003.
The Progress Paradox
. Basic Books.

p. 27 ‘psychologists find people to have fairly constant levels of happiness’. Gilbert, D. 2007.
Stumbling on Happiness
. Harper Press.

p. 27 ‘political scientist Ronald Ingleheart’. Ingleheart, R., Foa, R., Peterson, C. and Welzel, C. 2008. Development, freedom and rising happiness: a global perspective, 1981–2007.
Perspectives on Psychological Science
3:264–86.

p. 28 ‘Ruut Veenhoven finds’. Veenhoven, R. 1999. Quality-of-life in individualistic society: A comparison of 43 nations in the early 1990’s.
Social Indicators Research
48:157–86.

p. 28 ‘some pressure groups may have exacerbated real hunger in Zambia’. Paarlberg, R. 2008.
Starved for Science
. Harvard University Press.

p. 28 ‘The precautionary principle’. Ron Bailey points out that most renditions of the precautionary principle boil down to the injunction: ‘Never do anything for the first time.’ http://reason.com/archives/2003/07/02/making-the-future-safe.

p. 29 ‘By the same age, human hunter-gatherers have consumed about 20 per cent of their lifetime calories, but produced just 4 per cent.’ Kaplan, H.E. and Robson, A.J. 2002. The emergence of humans: the co-evolution of intelligence and longevity with intergenerational transfers.
PNAS
99:10221–6; see also Kaplan, H. and Gurven, M. 2005. The natural history of human food sharing and cooperation: a review and a new multi-individual approach to the negotiation of norms. In
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests
(eds H. Gintis, S. Bowles, R. Boyd and E.Fehr). MIT Press.

p. 31 ‘curse of resources’. Ferguson, N. 2008.
The Ascent of Money
. Allen Lane.

p. 31 ‘the Great Depression of the 1930s is just a dip in the slope’. Findlay, R. and O’Rourke, K.H. 2007.
Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy
. Princeton University Press.

p. 31 ‘All sorts of new products and industries were born during the Depression’. Nicholas, T. 2008. Innovation lessons from the 1930s.
McKinsey Quarterly
, December 2008.

p. 31 ‘Arcadia Biosciences in northern California’. http://www.arcadiabio.com/pr_0032.php.

p. 33 ‘Henry David Thoreau asked’. Thoreau, H.D. 1854.
Walden: Or Life in the Woods
. Ticknor and Fields.

p. 34 ‘In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37’. Cox, W.M. and Alm, R. 1999.
Myths of Rich and Poor – Why We Are Better Off Than We Think
. Basic Books.

p. 34 ‘To produce implies that the producer desires to consume’ said John Stuart Mill; ‘why else should he give himself useless labour?’. Mill, J.S. 1848.
Principles of Political Economy.

p. 34 ‘Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster’. http://www.the toasterproject.org. ‘Kelly Cobb of Drexel University set out to make a man’s suit’. http://www.wired.com/print/culture/design/news/2007/03/100milesuit0330. See also http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/10/30/the-10000-suit.

p. 37 ‘In civilized society,’ wrote Adam Smith’. Smith, A. 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
.

p. 38 ‘Leonard Read’s classic 1958 essay “I, Pencil”’. Read, L.E. 1958. I, Pencil.
The Freeman
, December 1958. For a fine modern rerun of the same subject see the novel by Roberts, R. 2008.
The Price of Everything.
Princeton University Press.

p. 38 ‘As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw’. Hayek, F.A. 1945. The use of knowledge in society.
American Economic Review
35:519–30.

p. 39 ‘a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work’. Smith, A. 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
.

p. 39 ‘you would have spent your after-tax income in roughly the following way’. Data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics: www.bls.org.

p. 40 ‘An English farm labourer in the 1790s spent his wages roughly as follows’. Clark, G. 2007.
A Farewell to Alms
. Princeton University Press.

p. 40 ‘A rural peasant woman in modern Malawi spends her time roughly as follows’. Blackden, C.M. and Wodon, Q. 2006.
Gender, Time Use and Poverty in SubSaharan Africa
. World Bank.

p. 40 ‘the Shire River in Machinga province’. http://allafrica.com/stories/200712260420.html.

p. 41 ‘not just the services you need but also those you crave.’ The distinction between needs and wants, as expressed by Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is a mischievous one: people evolved to be ambitious, to start exaggerating their social status or sexual worth, long before they have satisfied their basic needs. See Miller, G. 2009.
Spent
. Heinemann.

p. 41 ‘the entire concept of food miles is “a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator”’. Bailey, R. 2008. The food miles mistake.
Reason
, 4 November 2008. http://www.reason.com/news/show/129855.html.

p. 41 ‘Ten times as much carbon’. See https://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles/final.pdf.

p. 42 ‘six times the carbon footprint of a Kenyan rose’. Specter, M. 2008. Big foot.
The New Yorker,
25 February 2008. http://www.new yorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_specter. See also http://grown underthesun.com.

p. 42 ‘just as it did in Europe in 1315–18’. Jordan, W.C. 1996.
The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century
. Princeton University Press.

p. 43 ‘Today, 1 per cent works in agriculture and 24 per cent in industry’. Statistics in this paragraph from Angus Maddison (
Phases of Capitalist Development
), cited in Kealey, T. 2008.
Sex, Science and Profits
. Heinemann.

p. 43 ‘the original affluent society’. Sahlins, M. 1968. Notes on the original affluent society. In
Man the Hunter
(eds R.B. Lee and I. DeVore). Aldine. Pages 85–9.

p. 43 ‘They lived into old age far more frequently than their ancestors had done.’ Caspari, R. and Lee, S.-H. 2006. Is human longevity a consequence of cultural change or modern biology?
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
129:512–17.

p. 43 ‘they had largely wiped out the lions and hyenas’. Ofek, H. 2001.
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 44 ‘Geoffrey Miller, for example, in his excellent book
Spent
’. Miller, G. 2009.
Spent
. Heinemann.

p. 44 ‘The warfare death rate of 0.5’. Keeley, L. 1996.
War Before Civilization
. Oxford University Press.

p. 44 ‘a cemetery uncovered at Jebel Sahaba’. Otterbein, K.F. 2004.
How War Began
. Texas A & M Press.

p. 45 ‘asks Geoffrey Miller’. Miller, G. 2009.
Spent
. Heinemann.

Chapter 2

p. 47 ‘He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor.’ McEwan, I 2005.
Saturday.
Jonathan Cape. The person taking the shower is Perowne, the surgeon at the centre of the plot.

p. 47 Life expectancy graph. World Bank Development Indicators.

p. 48 ‘One day a little less than 500,000 years ago, near what is now the village of Boxgrove’. Potts, M. and Roberts, M. 1998.
Fairweather Eden
. Arrow Books.

p. 49 ‘a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history’. Klein R.G. and Edgar B. 2002.
The Dawn of Human Culture
. Wiley.

p. 49 ‘Its brain was almost as big as a modern person’s’. Rightmire, G.P. 2003. Brain size and encephalization in early to Mid-Pleistocene
Homo. American Journal of Physical Anthropology
124: 109–23.

p. 51 ‘the erectus hominid species’. For simplicity, I am going to call all the species of hominid that lived between about 1.5 million and 300,000 years ago ‘erectus hominid’ after the longest-established and most comprehensive name used for hominids of this period. The current fashion is to include four species within this group:
H. ergaste
r earliest in Africa,
H. erectus
a little later in Asia,
H. heidelbergensis
coming out of Africa later into Europe and its descendant,
H. neanderthalensis
. See Foley, R.A. and Lahr, M.M. 2003. On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture.
Evolutionary Anthropology
12:109–22.

p. 51 ‘it was a natural expression of human development’. See Richerson, P. and Boyd, R. 2005.
Not by Genes Alone
. Chicago University Press: ‘Perhaps we need to entertain the hypothesis that Acheulean bifaces were innately constrained rather than wholly cultural and that their temporal stability stemmed from some component of genetically transmitted psychology.’

p. 51 ‘Meat enabled them to cut down on the huge gut’. Aiello, L.C. and Wheeler, P. 1995. The expensive tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution.
Current Anthropology
36:199–221.

p. 52 ‘the toolkit was showing signs of change as early as 285,000 years ago’. McBrearty, S. and Brooks, A. 2000. The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior.
Journal of Human Evolution
39:453–563. Morgan, L.E. and Renne, P.R. 2008. Diachronous dawn of Africa’s Middle Stone Age: New 40Ar/39Ar ages from the Ethiopian Rift.
Geology
36:967–70.

p. 52 ‘by at least 160,000 years ago’. White T.D. et al. 2003. Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia.
Nature
423:742–7; Willoughby, P. R. 2007.
The Evolution of Modern Humans in Africa: a Comprehensive Guide
. Rowman AltaMira.

p. 52 ‘Pinnacle Point in South Africa’. Marean, C.W. et al. 2007. Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene.
Nature
449:905–8.

p. 53 ‘a few slender-headed Africans did begin to colonise the Middle East’. Stringer, C. and McKie, R. 1996.
African Exodus
. Jonathan Cape.

p. 53 ‘at Grottes des Pigeons near Taforalt in Morocco’. Bouzouggar, A. et al. 2007. 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior.
PNAS
2007 104:9964–9; Barton R.N.E., et al. 2009. OSL dating of the Aterian levels at Dar es-Soltan I (Rabat, Morocco) and implications for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens.
Quaternary Science Reviews
. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.03.010.

p. 53 ‘obsidian may have begun to move over long distances’. Negash, A., Shackley, M.S. and Alene, M. 2006. Source provenance of obsidian artefacts from the Early Stone Age (ESA) site of Melka Konture, Ethiopia.
Journal of Archeological Science
33:1647–50; and Negash, A. and Shackley, M.S. 2006. Geochemical provenance of obsidian artefacts from the MSA site of Porc Epic, Ethiopia.
Archaeometry
48:1–12.

p. 54 ‘Lake Malawi, whose level dropped 600 metres’. Cohen, A.S. et al. 2007. Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene megadroughts in tropical Africa.
PNAS
104:16422–7.

p. 54 ‘Their genes, marked by the L3 mitochondrial type, suddenly expanded and displaced most others in Africa’. Atkinson, Q.D., Gray, R.D. and Drummond, A.J. 2009. Bayesian coalescent inference of major human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup expansions in Africa.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
276:367–73.

p. 55 ‘living in large social groups on a plentiful diet both encourages and allows brain growth’. Dunbar, R. 2004.
The Human Story
. Faber and Faber.