In chapter 2, we outlined our hard targets for abundance. This was an introductory look at our finish line, but the destination is not the journey. To fully understand where we want to go, it helps to have an accurate assessment of our exact starting point. If we can strip away our cynicism, what does our world really look like? How much progress has been made and not noticed?
Matt Ridley has spent the past two decades trying to answer these same questions. Ridley is in his early fifties, a tall Englishman with thinning, brown hair and an easy smile. He’s an Oxford-trained zoologist but has spent most of his career as a science writer, specializing in the origins and evolution of behavior. Lately, the behavior that has most caught his attention is a strictly human outpouring: our species’ predilection for bad news.
“It’s incredible,” he says, “this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.” In trying to make sense of this pessimism, Ridley, like Kahneman, sees a combination of cognitive biases and evolutionary psychology as the core of the problem. He fingers loss aversion—a tendency for people to regret a loss more than a similar gain—as the bias with the most impact on abundance. Loss aversion is often what keeps people stuck in ruts. It’s an unwillingness to change bad habits for fear that the change will leave them in a worse place than before. But this bias is not acting alone. “I also think there could be an evolutionary psychology component,” he contends. “We might be gloomy because gloomy people managed to avoid getting eaten by lions in the Pleistocene.”
Either way, Ridley has come to believe that our divorce from reality is doing more harm than good, and has lately started to fight back. “It’s become a habit now for me to challenge such remarks. Whenever somebody says something grumpy about the world, I just try to think of the other side of the argument and—after examining the facts—again and again I find they have it the wrong way round.”
This conversion to positive thinking did not happen overnight. As a cub science reporter, Ridley encountered hundreds of environmentalists fervently prophesying a much glummer future. But fifteen years ago, he started noticing that the doom predicted by these experts was still nowhere in evidence.
Acid rain was the first sign that the facts were not matching the fanfare. Once considered our planet’s most dire environmental threat, acid rain develops because burning fossil fuels releases sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, causing an acidic shift in the pH balance of precipitation—hence the name. First noticed by English scientist Robert Angus Smith in 1852, acid rain took another century to blossom from scientific curiosity to presumed catastrophe. But by the late 1970s, the writing was on the wall. In 1982 Canada’s minister of the environment, John Roberts, summed up what many were thinking, telling Time magazine, “Acid rain is one of the most devastating forms of pollution imaginable, an insidious malaria of the biosphere.”
Back then, Ridley agreed with this opinion. But a few decades passed, and he realized that nothing of the sort was happening. “It wasn’t just that the trees weren’t dying, it was that they never had been dying—not in any unusual numbers and not because of acid rain. Forests that were supposed to have vanished altogether were healthier than ever.”
To be sure, human innovation played a huge role in averting this disaster. In America, that hand-wringing produced everything from amendments to the Clean Air Act to the adoption of catalytic converters for automobiles. The results were a reduction in sulfur dioxide emission from 26 million tons in 1980 to 11.4 million tons in 2008, and nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 16.3 million tons during the same period. While some experts feel that current SO2/NO emission rates are still too high, the fact remains that the eco-apocalypse predicted in the 1970s never did arise.
This absence got Ridley curious. He began looking into other dark prophecies and found a similar pattern. “Predictions about population and famine were seriously wrong,” he says, “while epidemics were never as bad as they were supposed to be. Age-adjusted cancer rates, for example, are falling, not rising. Furthermore, I noticed that people who pointed these facts out were heavily criticized but not refuted.”
All of this led him to another question: If the really negative predictions weren’t coming true, what about the veracity of more common assumptions, such as the idea that the world is getting worse? To figure this out, Ridley began examining global trends: economic and technological; longevity and health-care related; and a host of environmental concerns. The result of this inquiry became the backbone of his 2010 The Rational Optimist, a book about why optimism rather than pessimism is the sounder philosophical position for accessing our species’ chances at a brighter tomorrow. His uplifting argument sits atop an obvious but often overlooked fact: time is a resource. In fact, time has always been our most precious resource, and this has significant consequences for how we access progress.
Each of us starts with the same twenty-four hours in the day. How we utilize those hours determines the quality of our lives. We go to extraordinary lengths to manage our time, to save time, to make time. In the past, just meeting our basic needs filled most of our hours. In the present, for a huge chunk of the world, not much has changed. A rural peasant woman in modern Malawi spends 35 percent of her time farming food, 33 percent cooking and cleaning, 17 percent fetching clean drinking water, and 5 percent collecting firewood. This leaves only 10 percent of her day for anything else, including finding the gainful employment needed to pull her off this treadmill. Because of all of this, Ridley feels that the best definition of prosperity is simply “saved time.” “Forget dollars, cowrie shells, or gold,” he says. “The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”
So how have people managed to save time over the years? Well, we’ve tried slavery—both human and animal—and that worked okay until we developed a conscience. We also learned to boost muscle power with more elemental forces: fire, wind, and water, then natural gas, oil, and atoms. But at each step on this path, we have not only developed more power, we’ve also saved more time.
Light is a fabulous example. In England, artificial lighting was twenty thousand times more expensive circa AD 1300 than it is today. But when Ridley extended the equation and examined how the amount of light bought with an hour’s work (at an average wage) has changed over the years, there is an even bigger savings:
Today [light] will cost less than a half a second of your working time if you are on the average wage: half a second of work for an hour of light! Had you been using a kerosene lamp in the 1880s, you would have had to work for 15 minutes to get the same amount of light. A tallow candle in the 1800s: over six hours’ work. And to get that much light from a sesame-oil lamp in Babylon in 1750 BC would have cost you more than fifty hours work.
Put another way, if you compare today’s cost of lighting with the cost of sesame oil used in 1750 BC, you’ll find a 350,000-fold time-saving difference. And this covers only the savings of work-related time. Since those with electricity rarely knock over a lantern and set the barn on fire or suffer the respiratory ailments resulting from breathing in candle smoke, we have furthered gained those hidden hours once lost to poor health and habitat repair.
Transportation follows an even bigger time-saving developmental curve. For millions of years, we went only where our feet could carry us. Six thousand years ago, we domesticated the horse; a vast improvement, to be sure, but equines have nothing on airplanes. In the 1800s, going from Boston to Chicago via stagecoach took two weeks’ time and a month’s wages. Today it takes two hours and a day’s wage. But when it comes to crossing oceans, well, the horse isn’t much use, and our early boats weren’t exactly models of efficiency. In 1947 Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl spent 101 days sailing the raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to Hawaii. In a 747, it takes fifteen hours—a 100-day savings that has the added bonus of exponentially decreasing one’s chances of dying along the way.
And saved time isn’t the only unsung quality-of-life improvement to be found. In fact, as Ridley explains, they turn up almost every place we look:
Some of the billions alive today still live in misery and want even worse than the worst experienced in the Stone Age. Some are worse off than they were a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want has been going rapidly upward for two hundred years and erratically upward for ten thousand years before that: years of life span, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of traveling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout. Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square-feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometers, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and, of course, dollars than any that went before.
What all this means is that if your case against abundance rests upon “the hole we’re in is too deep to climb out of” defense, well, you might want to find a different defense. But if this familiar charge against abundance isn’t nearly as bad as most suppose, then what about that other common criticism: the ever-widening gap between rich and poor?
This too is not the problem many suspect. Take India. On August 1, 2010, India’s National Council of Applied Economic Research estimated that the number of high-income middle-class households in India (46.7 million) now exceeds the number of low-income middle-class households (41 million) for the first time in history. Moreover, the gap between the two sides is also closing rapidly. In 1995 India had 4.5 million middle-class households. By 2009, that had risen to 29.4 million. Even better, the trend is accelerating. According to the World Bank, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has more than halved since the 1950s to below 18 percent of the world’s population. Yes, there are still billions living in back-breaking destitution, but at the current rate of decline, Ridley estimates that the number of people in the world living in “absolute poverty” will hit zero by 2035.
Arguably, the number won’t actually drop that low, but absolute poverty measures aren’t the only metrics to consider. We also need to examine the availability of goods and services, which, as already established, are two categories that seriously impact quality of life. Here too there have been incredible gains. Between 1980 and 2000, the consumption rate—a measure of goods used by a society—grew in the developing world twice as fast as on the rest of the planet. Because population size and population health and longevity are impacted by consumption, these numbers improved as well. Compared to fifty years ago, today the Chinese are ten times as rich, have one-third fewer babies, and live twenty-eight years longer. In that same half-century time span, Nigerians are twice as well off, with 25 percent fewer children and a nine-year boost in life span. All told, according to the United Nations, poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.
Moreover, it’s a pretty safe bet that these rates won’t start rising again. “Once the rise in the position of the lower classes gathers speed,” economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, “catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed toward the needs of the masses. Those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating thus later tend to diminish it.”
And this is exactly what’s happening in Africa today: the lower classes are gathering speed and gaining independence. For example, the spread of the cell phone is enabling microfinance, and microfinance is enabling the spread of the cell phone, and both are creating greater intraclass opportunity (meaning fewer jobs that directly depend on the rich) and greater prosperity for everyone involved.
Beyond economic measures, both political liberty and civil rights have also improved substantially these past few centuries. Slavery, for example, has gone from a common global practice to one outlawed everywhere. A similar change has occurred in the enshrinement of human rights in the world’s constitutions and the spread of electoral processes. Admittedly, in far too many places, these rights and these processes are more window dressing than daily experience, but in less than a century, these memes have risen to such prominence that global surveys find democracy the preferred form of government for more than 80 percent of the world’s population.
Perhaps the best news is what Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker discovered when he began analyzing global patterns of violence. In his essay “A History of Violence: We’re Getting Nicer Every Day,” he writes:
Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
What all this means is that over the last few hundred years, we humans have covered a considerable stretch of ground. We’re living longer, wealthier, healthier, safer lives. We have massively increased access to goods, services, transportation, information, education, medicines, means of communication, human rights, democratic institutions, durable shelter, and on and on. But this isn’t the whole of the story. Just as important to this discussion as the progress we’ve made is the reasons we’ve made such progress.
Humans share knowledge. We trade ideas and exchange information. In The Rational Optimist, Ridley likens this process to sex, and his comparison is more than just florid metaphor. Sex is an exchange of genetic information, a cross-pollination that makes biological evolution cumulative. Ideas too follow this trajectory. They meet and mate and mutate. We call this process learning, science, invention—but whatever the term, it’s exactly what Isaac Newton meant when he wrote: “If I have seen further, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Exchange is the beginning, not the end of this line. As the process evolves, specialization comes next. If you’re the new blacksmith in town, forced to compete with five other already established blacksmiths, there are only two ways to get ahead. One is to work like mad and perfect your skills, becoming the very best blacksmith of the lot. But this is a risky option. You’re going to need to be good enough at blacksmithing that the excellence of your craft overpowers the bonds of nepotism, because in a small town, most of your customers are close friends or relatives. Unfortunately, evolution worked very hard to craft these bonds. But develop a new technology—a slightly better horseshoe or a faster shoeing process—and you incentivize people to look beyond their social network.
This process, Ridley feels, creates a further feedback loop of positive gain: “Specialization encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, is proportional to the division of labor. The more human beings diversified as consumers and specialized as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be.”
For a concrete example, let’s return to Thor Heyerdahl’s boat trip from Peru to Hawaii. Say you wanted to take that same trip today. What you don’t have to do is hike into the forest, fell a tree, spend days tending a slow-burning fire to hollow out that tree’s core, work for weeks chiseling that core into a seaworthy vessel, take however long it takes dragging a seaworthy vessel to the beach or however long it takes hauling freshwater or hunting meat or finding enough salt to preserve that meat or doing any of the other tasks that would have to precede sailing to Hawaii. Instead, because specialization has already taken care of all those intermediate steps, you go to a website and book a ticket. That’s it. The result is a big boost in your quality of life.
Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas. This vast cooperative system has always been one of abundance’s largest engines. When the good ideas of your grandfather can be improved upon by the good ideas of your grandchildren, then that engine is up and running. The proof is the enormous bounty of cumulative innovation produced by specialization and exchange. “A large proportion of our high standard of living today derives not just from our ability to more cheaply and productively manufacture the commodities of 1800,” writes J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, “but from our ability to manufacture whole new types of commodities, some of which do a better job of meeting needs that we had back in 1800, and some of which meet needs that were unimagined back in 1800.”
We now have millions of time-saving choices that our forebearers could not begin to imagine. My ancestors could not conceive of a salad bar because they could not imagine a global transportation network capable of providing green beans from Oregon, apples from Poland, and cashews from Vietnam together in the same meal.
“This is the diagnostic feature of modern life,” writes Ridley, “the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots. The self-sufficient peasant or hunter-gatherer predecessor is in contrast defined by his multiple production and simple consumption. He does not make just one thing, but many: his shelter, his clothing, his entertainment. Because he only consumes what he produces, he cannot consume very much. Not for him the avocado, Tarantino, or Manolo Blahnik. He is his own brand.”
But the very best news in all of this is that we have lately become specialized enough that we now trade in an entirely different kind of good. When people say we have an information-based economy, what they really mean is that what we have figured out is how to exchange information. Information is our latest, our brightest, commodity. “In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”
Hans Rosling is in his early sixties, with wire-rimmed glasses, a penchant for elbow-patched tweed, and more energy than most. Starting out as a physician in rural Africa, where years were spent on the trail of konzo—an epidemic paralytic disease that he eventually cured—Rosling went on to cofound the Swedish chapter of Doctors Without Borders, become a professor of international health at one of the world’s top medical schools, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and write one of the most ambitious global health textbooks ever (examining the health of all 6.5 billion people on the planet).
The research for this textbook sent Rosling into the bowels of the UN archives, where reams of data about global poverty rates, fertility rates, life expectancy, wealth distribution, wealth accumulation, and so forth had been carefully disguised as rows of numbers on obscure spreadsheets. Rosling not only plundered these data but also discovered a new way to visualize them, turning some of the world’s best kept secrets into a presentation beyond belief.
The first time I caught Rosling’s act was the first time that most people caught it: at the 2006 Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference in Monterey, California. Rosling’s TED presentation—now known as “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen”—began with him onstage, a theater-size screen behind him, a giant graph filling the screen. The graph’s horizontal axis was devoted to national fertility rates, while the vertical axis showed national life expectancies. Plotted on this graph were circles of different colors and sizes. The colors represented continents; the circles, nations. The size of the circle correlated to the size of that nation’s population, while its position on the graph represented a combination of average family size and average life span for a given year. When Rosling started his talk, a large “1962” appeared across the screen.
“In 1962,” he said, pointing toward the screen’s upper right corner, “there was a group of countries—the industrialized nations—that had small families and long lives.” Then, turning his attention to the bottom left corner: “And here are the developing countries, which have large families and relatively short lives.”
This brutal visualization of the 1962 difference between the haves and the have-nots was striking, but it didn’t last. With a mouse click, the graph began to animate. The date changed—1963, 1964, 1965, 1966—about one year for every second. As time marched forward, the dots began bouncing about the screen, their movement driven by the UN database. Rosling bounced with them. “Can you see here, it’s China moving to the left as health is improving. All the green Latin American countries are moving toward smaller families, all the yellow Arabic countries are getting wealthier and living longer lives.” The years ticked by, and progress became clearer. By 2000, excluding the African nations hit by civil war and HIV, most countries were congregated in the upper right corner, toward a better world of longer lives and smaller families.
A new graphic came onto the screen. “Now let’s look at the world distribution of income.” Along the horizontal axis was a log scale of per capita GDP (the average income per person per year); on the vertical left-hand axis was the child survival rate. Once again, the clock began in 1962. At the bottom left sat Sierra Leone, with a child survival rate of barely 70 percent and an average income of $500 a year. Just above it was the largest ball, China, both financially poor and in poor health. Once again, Rosling clicked his mouse, and his graphic soothsayer moved forward through time. China moved up, then to the right. “This is Mao Tse-tung,” he said, “bringing health to China. Then he died … And Deng Xiaoping brought money to China.”
China was just part of the picture. Most of the world followed the same pattern, the end result being a dense aggregation of countries in the upper right corner, with a pixilated tail of smaller dots trailing down and to the left. It was a graphic representation of the gap between rich and poor, but even with that tail, there wasn’t much of a gap. In a 2010 updated presentation, Rosling summarized these findings thus: “Despite the disparities today, we have seen two hundred years of enormous progress. That huge historical gap between the West and the rest is now closing. We have become an entirely new, converging world. And I see a clear trend into the future. With aid, trade, green technology, and peace, it’s fully possible that everyone can make it to the healthy, wealthy corner.”
So what does this all mean? If Rosling is correct that the gap between rich and poor is mostly a memory, and if Ridley is correct that the hole we’re in is none too deep, then the only remaining gripe against abundance is that today’s rate of technological progress may be too slow to avert the disasters we now face. But what if this were a different kind of visualization problem, one that wasn’t as easily solved by Ridley’s theories and Rosling’s animated graphics? What if this last issue isn’t our current rate of progress; what if, as we shall soon see, it’s really our linear brain’s inability to comprehend our current rate of exponential progress?