Review of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Richard Hoste 

June 27, 2010 

One thing that many paleoconservatives share with the Far Left is a tragic view of where progress has taken us.  While one side romanticizes the hunter-gatherer, or more “sustainable,” past and the other preaches the virtues of a simpler agrarian life, there is the common thread of a fall from grace and a corruption of modern man.  While the mainstream embraces the present-they do control it after all-those who warn about global warming, running out of resources, nuclear proliferation, Y2K or whatever the scare of the month is are still treated as sages doing their best to wake up a complacent public. 

Pessimism seems hardwired into the brains of intellectuals.  Take the case of famine. Nobody is better known for his predictions of doom and gloom than the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who argued in 1798 that while population increases exponentially, the food supply grows linearly and therefore can’t keep up, which means mass starvation in the long run.  As the next few centuries would see more and more people with bigger and bigger stomachs, he was undoubtedly wrong.  In the late 1960s the book Famine, 1975! asserted that “Population-food collision is inevitable.”  Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb promised “In the 1970s and 80, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash program embarked upon now.”  By the twenty-first century the same author was still making similar forecasts while prudently not giving any dates.  Modern day starvation only exists not because of scarcity but because of state oppression and war. 

In such a climate, seeing the sunny side of the present and future is truly a radical position.  Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves argues that thinking the world is getting better isn’t vain cruelty or naiveté, but is backed up by the evidence once one looks at just about any measure of human well-being.  And he gives the credit to what too many others lament: the division of labor and technological advancement. 

The story starts with the very first division of labor, the sexual one. In all hunter gatherer societies studied, the males hunt and women gather and cook.  The economics of such a division make sense: obtaining protein is hard work and not often successful.  While the stronger and more aggressive members of the tribe undertake such a mission with usually limited prospects of success women gather the carbohydrates that provide a predictable source of calories.   

Going past the pair bond, Ridley believes that division of labor between non-relatives began in the Upper Paleolithic (40,000–10,000 years before present).  Vestments in a 28,000 year-old children’s grave close to Moscow were made up of such diverse materials that it’s impossible to believe they didn’t come from a number of individuals (with different specialization) specializing in the production of different goods. A burial site from 10,000 years later in the Ukraine had amber from the Baltic and shells from the Black Sea.  While one ape may scratch another’s back or share calories now in hopes of getting some back later, humans were the first species to trade objects unlike one another between non-relatives.  One day Adam decided that instead of making a spear and fishing hook in order to hunt deer and catch fish he could simply use his spear to catch extra deer and trade the surplus to Oz for fish.  Specialization led to improvement.  If Oz can now dedicate all his time to catching fish instead of some towards hunting deer, others to making clothes, etc. he has the incentive and opportunity to invent machinery to become a better fisherman.  While previous species of Homo would use the same tools for millions of years, modern man since his emergence has been remarkable for his rapid innovation.  The way Ridley puts it is that poverty means diverse production and simple consumption while wealth is specialized production and diverse consumption.   

The economist David Ricardo figured out that specialization leads to mutual enrichment even if one party is better at everything, as long as each individual or group concentrates on what they’re relatively good at.   The more humans there were and the more variable their skills, the better off everybody was.  Calls for countries to be self-sufficient are arbitrary and economically illiterate.  Why not have every province make everything it produces or every town or every family?   

The next major trick was the discovery of agriculture about 10,000 years ago followed by the first city, which may have been Uruk in present-day Southern Iraq.  With settlements and surpluses of goods came organized robbers and parasites: priests and governments.  The market preceded and made possible the state. 

Ever since then among high-IQ populations — Ridley of course ignores human biodiversity — the story has been one of creators and exploiters.  Some cultures and peoples embraced trade, while others glorified and empowered the state.  China throughout its history has been the prime example of what not to do.  In 1950, it was the only nation in the world to have a lower GDP than it did in 1000 AD!  At that time the Chinese peasants worked for money and could afford consumer goods.  After the Black Death came the Ming Dynasty, which “nationaliz[ed] much of industry and trade, creating state monopolies in salt, iron, tea, alcohol, foreign trade and education.”  Among other stifling regulations, they also required merchants to report on inventory once a month and that peasants grow only for their own consumption.  

Unlike China, Europe was lucky enough to be fragmented thanks to its geography.  The great cities of the Renaissance were controlled by merchants.  Between 1846 and 1860, Britain in particular “adopted a string of measures to open its markets to free trade to a degree unprecedented in history.”  All tariffs were removed, including the Corn Laws.  Unprecedented freedom to trade led to unprecedented wealth.  Since World War II we’ve seen autarky and statism fail in Cuba, Albania, China and North Korea and free markets succeed in West Germany, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.  The historical record is as clear as can be. 

One may give capitalism credit for leading to economic growth, but have humans really come out better off through each transition and revolution?  Let’s take the much maligned Industrial Revolution with its crowded factories, child labor, long working hours, barbarous working conditions and dirty cities.  In 1688 half of the British population would’ve starved without charity.  While the 1800s look miserable compared to today, it must be contrasted with what was before it.  Between 1750 and 1850 the average worker’s salary rose 50 percent while infectious disease and infant mortality fell.  This era gets a bad rap because it was the first time in history that writers and intellectuals noticed poverty; complaining had a point because never before was there enough surplus wealth created to potentially seize and redistribute.  The greatest proof of the superiority of urban life to farming is that “in the New England in the 1870s, in the American South in the 1900s, in Japan in the 1920s, in Taiwan in the 1960s, in Hong Kong in 1970s and in China today” we see people running to factories from farms.   

Virtually uninterrupted Western progress has continued from the Industrial Revolution to today.  In 1800 an average employee would work an hour to get ten minutes of reading light.  In 1950 you would need eight seconds and today an hour of your labor buys 300 days’ worth of artificial illumination.  The typical American alive now spends $37 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter instead of the $76 he did a century ago.  Such comparisons greatly understate the improvement in living standards, as they consist in comparing likes with unlikes.  Consider the cleanliness and convenience of a modern light switch in contrast to the fire hazard, smell and smoke from candles or kerosene.  In addition, methods trying to measure relative wealth between today and an arbitrary year in the past, say 1967 for our example, have no way of factoring in the fact that no matter what your wages were 43 years ago, you couldn’t have Google, Starbucks, Amazon, the Internet, Viagra, an Apple laptop, a Kindle or an iPad.   

The reason that doomsayers have been so wrong is that they don’t, because they can’t, foresee what resources will be found and what new technology developed.  Thirty years after Malthus’ Essay on Population large nitrogen and phosphorus deposits were discovered in South America and South Africa.  These and other finds lasted until the turn of the 20th century and by 1913 Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch discovered how to make nitrogen fertilizer from air, methane and steam.  The invention of the internal combustion engine allowed tractors to replace horses, once again increasing productivity.  Today we have just started tinkering with the genomes of crops and this will lead to yields beyond what anyone has imagined.  True, we’d all be starving with 19^th-century technology and a 20th century world population but that’s not our situation.  It would be foolish to think that we’ve just had a string of lucky coincidences; the world of ideas is infinite and increasing demand brings forth innovation.  The more scarce a resource becomes, the greater the incentive to find a replacement.  Today we’re told we need to “get off oil,” and we will, as soon as the market, not a central government planner, tells us that such a course is necessary.   

Experts haven’t learned their lesson.  One argues that if China becomes as rich as the United State by 2030 and needs as much paper per person, the world’s forests will be gone.  Such a forecast requires the assumption that information written or printed on physical paper today won’t be digitalized.  Today kids send text messages rather than pass notes and customers are starting to buy digitalized readers instead of books.  For a large percentage of the population websites and magazines have replaced newspapers as the tool for keeping up with current events.  The argument that we will have less of a need for paper in a few decades than we do today doesn’t even need to predict any kind of technological advancements, which will certainly come.   

It would be highly dishonest to pretend that economic progress hasn’t had an environmental cost. But what gets less coverage is the benefit that’s come from finding more efficient sources of energy (the unfairly defamed oil and gas).  The author asks us to imagine if Britain tried to power itself without fossil fuels.   

There would be sixty nuclear power stations around the coasts, wind farms would cover 10 per cent of the entire land...there would be solar panels covering an area the size of Lincolnshire, eighteen Greater Londons growing bio-fuels, forty-seven New Forests growing fast-rotation harvested timber, hundreds of miles of wave machines off the coast, huge tidal barrages in the Severn estuary and Strangford Lough and twenty-five times as many hydro dams on rivers as there are today.  The prospect is unappetizing: the entire country would look like a power station.  

The US would need solar panels equal to the area of Spain or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan instead of a handful of plants, refineries and pipelines.  The damage done to wildlife and ecosystems would be worse than anything that comes from oil drilling and consumption, even taking into account a once-in-a-century type disaster such as the recent BP oil spill.  “Clean” sources of energy and biofuels are equally land hungry.  They are also a fraud that wouldn’t survive without government support.  Wind turbine, for instance, doesn’t even generate electricity worth the subsidy it receives. 

Ridley is correct that while businesses are generally happy to receive a bailout or put restrictions on competition, the biggest enemy to increasing human happiness remains government with its protectionism, socialism and war.  Of the largest American corporations in 1980 half have either folded or been taken over.  If only such a large percentage of government agencies met such a fate.   

The author believes that the rate of advancement depends on culture, freedom to trade and connectivity.  With the Internet still a new invention and travel never having been cheaper, there are grounds for predicting that the rate of technological change will speed up, rather than slow down due to diminishing returns.  Unfortunately, I must differ with Ridley on one point, and it is an important one.  No reader of this website will be surprised to learn that I believe he misses the key ingredient that is intelligence.  The entire story of advancement, from the first Paleolithic traders to the computer age has been an exclusively non-African affair.  He incorrectly assures us that geniuses exist in all places and all times; it’s just the environment which determines which ones have the opportunity to make their mark on the world.  Unfortunately, numbers from this book belie this particular case of optimism.  The only region to see no economic overall growth in the last 25 years is sub-Sahara Africa.  Real income in the last 50 years has dropped in only six countries: five of them black and the other Afghanistan.  It’s also not insignificant that Africa has by far the highest birth rates in the world.  To Ridley, all this will take care of itself as Africans are allowed to trade and develop better institutions.  While unquestionably things can get better with wiser policy, dysgenics is the one crisis we should worry about.  Fortunately this is only a long term problem and could be solved by genetic engineering. 

All of this sunshine is hard to accept in the dark brooding corner of those of us who believe that we’ve been going the wrong way politically for the last hundred years.  Despite fiat money, the increasing welfare state, feminism and forced racial integration, life continues to get better thanks to the ever increasing returns that the (half) free market brings.  A part of me wants society to suffer for rebelling against the healthy attitudes that were there at America’s founding, and it certainly has to some extent, but life is so good now that nobody can be bothered to care.   

By all means, let’s keep fighting for the gold standard, immigration restriction, non-interventionism and a healthier culture.  Of course, we also mustn’t let joy over how far we’ve come blind us to the dangers of a growing state and how much better we could be without it.  But The Rational Optimist is a needed refutation of the arguments of those so addicted to visions of apocalyptic cataclysms and slow declines that they refuse to accept the torturous but ultimately heroic story of man.   

 

Richard Hoste (email him) writes on race, immigration, political correctness and modern conservatism.  His articles have appeared at VDARE.com, The Occidental Observer, The Occidental Quarterly and TakiMag among other places.  His writes the HBD blog at Alternative Right, where he regularly reviews classic and modern works on these topics.