The Rational Optimist (45 page)

p. 106 ‘the environmental Kuznets curve’. Yandle, B., Bhattarai, M. and Vijayaraghavan, M. 2004.
Environmental Kuznets Curves
. PERC.

p. 106 ‘when per capita income reaches about $4,000, people demand a clean-up of their local streams and air’. Goklany, I. 2008.
The Improving State of the World
. Cato Institute.

p. 107 ‘because people were enriching themselves and demanding higher standards’. Moore, S. and Simon, J. 2000.
It’s Getting Better All the Time
. Cato Institute.

p. 107 ‘The “long tail” of the distribution’. Anderson, C. 2006.
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
. Hyperion.

p. 108 ‘now-unfashionable philosopher Herbert Spencer who insisted that freedom would increase along with commerce’. Quotes are from 1842 essay for
The Nonconformist
and 1853 essay for
The Westminster Review
. Both quoted in Nisbet, R. 1980.
History of the Idea of Progress
. Basic Books.

p. 108 ‘The American civil rights movement drew its strength partly from a great economic migration’. Lindsey, B. 2007.
The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture
. Collins.

p. 109 ‘much argument about whether democracy is necessary for growth’. Friedman, B. 2005.
The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth
. Knopf.

p. 109 ‘I am happy to cheer, with Deirdre McCloskey’. McCloskey, D. 2006.
The Bourgeois Virtues
. Chicago University Press.

p. 110 ‘One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.’ Lindsey, B. 2007.
The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture
. Collins.

p. 111 ‘Like Milton Friedman’. Quoted in Norberg, J. 2008.
The Klein Doctrine
. Cato Institute briefing paper no. 102. 14 May 2008.

p. 111 ‘serfs under feudal brandlords’. Klein, N. 2001.
No Logo
. Flamingo.

p. 111 ‘Shell may have tried to dump an oil-storage device’. Greenpeace claimed that the
Brent Spar
had 5,500 tonnes of oil in it, then later admitted the true figure was nearer 100 tonnes.

p. 111 ‘Enron funded climate alarmism’. Ken Lay had ambitions for Enron to ‘become the world’s leading renewable energy company’ and it lobbied hard for renewable energy subsidies and mandates. See http://masterresource.org/?p=3302#more-3302.

p. 111 ‘half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980’. Micklethwait, J. and Wooldridge, A. 2003.
The Company
. Weidenfeld.

p. 112 ‘According to Eric Beinhocker of McKinsey’. Beinhocker, E. 2006.
The Origin of Wealth
. Random House.

p. 113 ‘Like corrugated iron and container shipping’. The development of containerisation in the 1950s made the loading and unloading of ships roughly twenty times as fast and thereby dramatically lowered the cost of trade, helping to start the boom in Asian exports. Today, despite the advent of the weightless information age, the world’s merchant fleet – at over 550 million gross registered tonnes – is twice the size it was in 1970 and ten times the size it was in 1920. See Edgerton, D. 2006.
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900
. Profile Books.

p. 113 ‘A single, routine, minuscule Wal-Mart decision in the 1990s’. Fishman, C. 2006.
The Wal-Mart Effect
. Penguin.

p. 114 ‘As Kodak and Fuji slugged it out for dominance in the 35mm film industry’. The remarkable thing about the death of film cameras is how blind the film companies were to it. As late as 2003, they were insisting that digital would only take some of the market and film would endure.

p. 114 ‘In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year’. Kauffman Foundation estimates: cited in
The Economist
survey of business in America, by Robert Guest, 30 May 2009.

p. 114 ‘“This isn’t about auctions,” said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay’. ‘ebay, inc’. Harvard Business School case study 9-700-007.

p. 117 ‘In a sample of 127 countries’. Carden, A. and Hall, J. 2009. Why are some places rich while others are poor? The institutional necessity of economic freedom (29 July 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1440786.

p. 117 ‘the World Bank published a study of “intangible wealth”’. Bailey, R. 2007. The secrets of intangible wealth.
Reason
, 5 October 2007. http://reason.com/news/show/122854.html.

p. 118 ‘
lex mercatoria
’. I discuss this in more detail in
The Origins of Virtue
(1996).

p. 118 ‘When Michael Shermer and three friends started a bicycle race across America’. In Shermer, M. 2007.
The Mind of the Market
. Times Books.

Chapter 4

p. 121 ‘Whoever could make two ears of corn’. Swift, J. 1726.
Gulliver’s Travels
.

p. 121 Global cereal harvest graph. See FAOSTAT: http://faostat.fao.org.

p. 122 ‘Oetzi, the mummified “iceman”’. See http://www.mummytombs.com/otzi/scientific.htm for sources on Oetzi.

p. 122 ‘The biologist Lee Silver’. Lee Silver, personal communication.

p. 123 ‘For Adam Smith capital is “as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion”.’ Smith, A. 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
.

p. 124 ‘At one remarkable site, Ohalo II’. Piperno, D.R., Weiss, E., Holst, I. and Nadel, D. 2004. Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis.
Nature
430:670–3.

p. 124 ‘One study notes an “extreme reluctance to shift to domestic foods”’. Johnson, A.W. and Earle, T.K. 2000.
The Evolution of Human Societies: from Foraging Group to Agrarian State
. Stanford University Press.

p. 125 ‘The probable cause of this hiatus was a cold snap’. Rosen, A.M. 2007.
Civilizing Climate: Social Responses to Climate Change in the Ancient Near East
. Rowman AltaMira.

p. 126 ‘the survivors took to nomadic hunter-gathering again’. Shennan, S. 2002.
Genes, Memes and Human History
. Thames & Hudson.

p. 126 ‘Peru by 9,200 years ago’. Dillehay, T.D. et al. 2007. Preceramic adoption of peanut, squash, and cotton in northern Peru.
Science
316:1890–3.

p. 126 ‘millet and rice in China by 8,400 years ago’. Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. 2001. Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis.
American Antiquity
66:387–411.

p. 126 ‘maize in Mexico by 7,300 years ago’. Pohl, M.E.D. et al. 2007. Microfossil evidence for pre-Columbian maize dispersals in the neotropics from San Andrés, Tabasco, Mexico.
PNAS
104: 11874–81.

p. 126 ‘taro and bananas in New Guinea by 6,900 years ago’. Denham, T.P., et al. 2003. Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea.
Science
301: 189–93.

p. 126 ‘This phenomenal coincidence’. Recent scholarship has made the coincidence much more striking. Until recently, agriculture in Peru, Mexico and New Guinea was believed to have started much later.

p. 127 ‘agriculture was impossible during the last glacial, but compulsory in the Holocene.’ Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. 2001. Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis.
American Antiquity
66(3): 387–411. Incidentally, there is a fascinating parallel between the sudden appearance of farming at the end of the last ice age and the sudden appearance of multicellular life after the mother of all ice ages, the snowball-earth period between 790 and 630 million years ago, when from time to time even the tropics lay under thick ice sheets. The isolated pockets of shivering bacterial refugees upon snowball earth found themselves so inbred, goes one ingenious argument, that individuals clubbed together as a ‘body’ and delegated breeding to specialised reproductive cells. See Boyle, R.A., Lenton, T.M., Williams, H.T.P. 2007. Neoproterozoic ‘snowball Earth’ glaciations and the evolution of altruism.
Geobiology
5:337–49.

p. 127 ‘It is no accident that modern Australia, with its unpredictable years of drought followed by years of wet, still looks a bit like that volatile glacial world’. Lourandos, H. 1997.
Continent of Hunter-Gatherers
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 127 ‘One of the intriguing things about the first farming settlements is that they also seem to be trading towns’. Sherratt, A. 2005. The origins of farming in South-West Asia. ArchAtlas, January 2008, edition 3, http://www.archatlas.org/OriginsFarming/Farming.php, accessed 30 January 2008.

p. 128 ‘Jane Jacobs suggested in her book
The Economy of Cities
’. Jacobs, J. 1969.
The Economy of Cities
. Random House.

p. 128 ‘In Greece, farmers arrived suddenly and dramatically around 9,000 years ago.’ Perles, C. 2001.
The Early Neolithic in Greece
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 128 ‘so the genetic evidence suggests’. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Cavalli-Sforza, E. C. 1995.
The Great Human Diasporas: the History of Diversity
. Addison-Wesley.

p. 129 ‘Other descendants of the Black Sea refugees took to the plains of what is now Ukraine’. Fagan, B. 2004.
The Long Summer
. Granta.

p. 129 ‘a genetic mutation, substituting G for A in a control sequence upstream of a pigment gene called OCA2’. Eiberg H. et al. 2008. Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression.
Human Genetics
123:177–87.

p. 130 ‘The carbon dioxide released by the fires may even have helped to warm the climate to its 6,000-years-ago balmy maximum’. Ruddiman, W.F. and Ellis, E.C. 2009. Effect of per-capita land use changes on Holocene forest clearance and CO
₂
emissions.
Quaternary Science Reviews
. (doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.05.022).

p. 130 ‘the stamp seals of the Halaf people, 8,000 years ago’. http://www.tellhalaf-projekt.de/de/tellhalaf/tellhalaf.htm.

p. 131 ‘Haim Ofek writes’. Ofek, H. 2001.
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 131 ‘in the words of two theorists’. Richerson, P.J. and Boyd, R. 2007. The evolution of free-enterprise values. In Zak, P. (ed.) 2008.
Moral Markets
Princeton University Press.

p. 131 ‘very early mining of pure copper-metal deposits around Lake Superior’. Pledger, T. 2003. A brief introduction to the Old Copper Complex of the Western Great Lakes: 4000–1000
BC
. In
Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Forest History Association of Wisconsin, Inc.
Oconto, Wisconsin, 5 October 2002, pp. 10–18. See also http://www.uwfox.uwc.edu/academics/depts/tpleger/oldcopper.html.

p. 132 ‘the Mitterberg copper miners’. Shennan, S.J. 1999. Cost, benefit and value in the organization of early European copper production.
Antiquity
73:352–63.

p. 132–3 ‘typical modern non-industrial people, living in traditional societies, directly consume between one-third and two-thirds of what they produce, and exchange the rest for other goods’. Davis, J. 1992.
Exchange
. Open University Press.

p. 133 ‘Up to about 300 kilograms of food per head per year, people eat what they grow’. Clark, C. 1970.
Starvation or Plenty?
Secker and Warburg.

p. 133 ‘Stephen Shennan satirises the attitude thus’. Shennan, S.J. 1999. Cost, benefit and value in the organization of early European copper production.
Antiquity
73:352–63.

p. 134 ‘The ‘kula’ system of the south Pacific’. Davis, J. 1992.
Exchange
. Open University Press.

p. 135 ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’. Diamond. J. 1987. The worst mistake in the history of the human race?
Discover
, May: 64–6.

p. 136 ‘polygamy enables poor women to share in prosperity more than poor men’. Shennan, S. 2002.
Genes, Memes and Human History
. Thames & Hudson.