I wanted to share with you my favorite excerpts from the excellent new book by Matt Ridley, which debunks a number of toxic memes popular in the press these days. Many people call me cynical or pessimistic, but this book made me feel like an chirpy cheerleader in a crowd of academic doomsayers. See how he applies his rational thinking on the hot topics of precautionary principles, consumer society, innovation, trust, organic farming, the rise and fall of empires, the Malthusian crisis, pessimistic thinking, and many more…
On the precautionary principle….
To prevent change, innovation and growth is to stand in the way of potential compassion. Let it never be forgotten that, by propagating excessive caution about genetically modified food aid, some pressure groups may have exacerbated real hunger in Zambia in the early 2000s. The precautionary principle -better safe than sorry– condems itself: in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.
On why we consume…
So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else’s: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet, though you have no slaves, today when you got out of bed you knew that somebody would provide you with food, fibre and fuel in a most convenient form. (…) So it is time to earn something more interesting: the satellite television subscription, the mobile phone bill, the holiday deposit, the cost of new toys for the children, the income tax. ‘To produce implies that the producer desires to consume’ said John Stuart Mill; ‘why else should he give himself useless labour?’
On innovation…
According to the anthropologist Joe Henrich, human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements – that is how culture evolves. The bigger the connected population, the more skilled the teacher, and the bigger the probability of a productive mistake.
On trusting others…
As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, an trust growth seems to precede income growth. This can be measured by a combination of questionnaires and experiments (…) By these measures, Norway is heaving with trust (65 % trust each other) and wealthy, while Peru is wallowing in mistrust (5% trust each other) and poor.’A 15% increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy’, says Paul Zak, ‘raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter.’
On organic farming….
Should the world decide to go organic – that is, should farming get its nitrogen from plants and fish rather than direct from the air using factories and fossil fuels – then many of the nine billions will starve and all rainforests will be cut down. Yes, I wrote ‘all’. Organic farming is low-yield, whether you like it or not. The reason for this is simple chemistry. Since organic farming eschews all synthetic fertiliser, it exhausts the mineral nutrients in the soil – especially phosphorous and potassium, but eventually also sulphur, calcium and manganese. It gets round this problem by adding crushed ro to ck and squashed fish to the soil. These have to be mined or netted. Its main problem, though, is itrogen deficiency, which it can reverse by growing legumes (clover, alfalfa or beans), which fix nitrogen from the air, and either ploughing them into the soil or feeding them to cattle whose manure is then ploughed into the soil. With such help a particular organic plot can match non-organic yields, but only by using extra land elsewhere to grow the legumes and feed the cattle, effectively doubling the area under the plough. Conventional farming, by contrast, gets its nitrogen from what are in effect point sources – factories, which fix it from the air.
On the rise and fall of empires…
Emperors, with their ziggurats and pyramids, were often made possible by trade. Throughout history, empires start as trade areas before they become the playthings of military plunderers from within or without. The urban revolution was an extension of the division of labour.
On Malthus…
The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation. Increasing self-sufficiency is the very signature of a civilisation under stress, the definition of a falling standard of living. Until 1800 this was how every economic boom ended: with a partial return to self0sufficiency driven by predation by elites, or diminishing returns from agriculture.
(…)
The modern transition began without any government family-planning policies in many countries, especially Latin America. China’s highly coerced (‘one-child’) birth-rate decline since 1955 (from 5.59 to 1.73 children, or 69%) is almost exactly mirrored by Sri Lanka’s largely voluntary one over the same time period (5.70 to 1.88, or 67%).
(…)
Human beings are a species that stops its own population expansions once the division of labout reaches the point at which individuals are all trading goods and services with each other, rather than trying to be self-sufficient. The more interdependent and well-off we all become, the more population will stabilise well within the resources of the planet. As Ron Bailey puts it, in complete contradiction of Garret Hardin: “there is no need to impose coercive population control measures; economic freedom actually generates a benign invisible hand of population control.’
On pessimists…
The craze for eugenics that swept the world, embraced by left and right with equal fervour, after 1900 and caused the passage of illiberal and cruel laws in democracies like America as well as autocracies like Germanu, took as its premise the deteriotration of the blood lines caused by the overbreeding of the poor and the less intelligent. A huge intellectual consensus gathered around the idea that a distant catastrophe must be averted by harsh measures today (sound familiar?). ‘The multiplication of the feeble-minded’ said Winston Churchil in a memo to the prime minister in 1910, ‘is a very terrible dangerto the race’. Theodore Roosevelt was even more explicit: ‘I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding: and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbiddent to leave offspring behind them.’ In the end, eugenics, did far more harm to members of the human race than the evil it was intended to combat could ever have done. Or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.’
