Rob's Blog

The mainstream news media presents a very pessimistic view of the world. Being an optimist, I’m naturally skeptical of stories about doom and gloom apocalypse scenarios. Such stories are especially irksome when accompanied by calls for someone, usually at my expense, to Do Something About It.

I have just bought a couple of books that I plan to read in due course that for once present evidence that there is cause to be optimistic about the state of the world and where it is going. The first is In Defence of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg.

In chapter one, he explains how capitalism has improved the lives of even the poorest people.

The chorus of the debate on the market economy runs: “The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.” This statement is offered as a dictate of natural law, not as a thesis to be argued. But if we look beyond the catchy slogans and study what what has actually happened in the world, we find this thesis to be a half-truth. [...] The poor have not, generally speaking, come to be worse off in recent decades. On the contrary, absolute poverty has diminished, and where it was quantitavely greatest–in Asia–many hundreds of millions of people who barely twenty years ago were struggling to make ends meet have begun to achieve a secure existence and even a modest degree of affluence.

Norberg goes on to give the example of the authors of On Asian Time: India, China, Japan 1966-1999, who on revisiting these places after thirty years discovered that where before they saw “poverty, abject misery and imminent disaster”, on returning they found that, “Mud huts have given way to brick buildings, wired up for electricity and sporting television aerials on their roofs.”

The second book I bought is The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. A former left-wing member of Greenpeace, he set out to study the statistics in order to discover the real state of the world. Using the same official figures used by the WWF, Greenpeace and the Worldwatch Institute, he finds that the air is in the developed world is getting less polluted, world forest cover increased between 1949 and 1994, people in the developing countries starving less, only 0.7 per-cent of species are due to go extinct in the next 50 years, and global warming…

…will not decrease food production, it will probably not increase storminess or the impact or the frequency of hurricanes, it will not increase the impact of malaria or indeed cause more deaths. It is even unlikely that it will cause more flood victims, because a much richer world will protect itself better.

So there you have it: the world is not coming to an end and everyone is getting richer. Don’t worry, be happy!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2004 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Introspection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.