Source: Institute of Public Affairs
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v86K5awl_s
Date: 14/11/2013
Event: Matt Ridley: Freedom and Optimism: Humanity's Triumph
Attribution: Matt Ridley, Institute of Public Affairs
People:
[Matt Ridley's C.D. Kemp Lecture: "Freedom and Optimism: Humanity’s Triumph".]
Matt Ridley: Thank you, Tom, for that incredibly generous introduction, and thank you, Rod Kemp, John Roskam and others for your generosity and kindess in inviting me here. I must say it's a terrific testament to the power of ideas, here in Australia, that you can get this many people in a room to get ideas going in this way.
It's great to have Bjorn Lomborg here, too. Having Bjorn Lomborg as a warm-up act is like following John Lennon. [Audience laughter.] He's one of my heroes, a man of enormous courage and integrity. And, Bjorn, I may be wrong but I think it's the first time the "skepical environmentalist" and the "rational optimist" have appeared on the same stage. [Audience laughter and applause.] So, it's a historic evening.
It is a huge honour to give the C.D. Kemp lecture. I'm conscious of the privilege of addressing such a distinguished audience and also following in the footsteps of so many renowned speakers. And I'm a great admirer of what the IPA has done and is doing, especially in standing up for freedom of speech in the press, and for, as has been mentioned, rational scepticism about exaggerated claims of climate change. On both of those issues the UK is currently going in the wrong direction still, but I have hopes. Because I think Australia is showing a lead to the world. As Tony Abbott has shown, you can get elected as a climate sceptic - it's not something to be frightened of. And, in rolling back the carbon tax, as the Canadians have said only this week, you are setting a lesson for the world.
Well, I took the opportunity to look up Charles Denton Kemp's book Looking Forward, which has already been mentioned, published at the end of the Second World War, because John Roskam kindly sent me a copy. And what a remarkable document it is. It reminded me very much of Hayek's Road to Serfdom, with its far reach - far-sighted understanding of how misguided central planning would be for human prosperity in the post-war world. And it's also clear, from various things that Charles Denton Kemp writes, that his was still a very unfashionable view at the time. And it took real courage to make the case for free enterprise in the 1940s, just as it takes real courage, or took real courage, to be sceptical about dangerous climate change in the early 2000s.
There's a parallel example. Many of you may already know the story of the German Finance Minister Ludwig Erhard, under American occupation after the Second World War. The American commander, General Lucius Clay, telephoned Erhard one day and said "My people tell me that you are thinking of lifting all rationing and price controls. My people think that's a very bad idea". Erhard replied "My people think it's a bad idea, too. But I'm going to do it tomorrow". Germany's miraculous prosperity began from that moment. It's a remarkable fact that Britain rationed food for four years longer than Germany, after the war. Our rulers just could not understand that the rationing was the cause of shortages, not the other way round.
In his book, Kemp writes "It is clearly an unsound and contradictory policy to maintain a system of private enterprise over a large economic activity and, at the same time, curtail its freedom of initiative, dampen its spirit of adventure and remove its incentives to progress." Amen to that. It is people like Kemp that we have to thank for the fact that humanity has indeed triumphed in the succeeding 70 years, as I shall shortly detail. And if it had not been for a few lonely voices like his, central planning would have been the fate of all the world, not just half of it. We'd all be much poorer.
Now, Woody Allen once said that mankind stands at a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. [Audience laughter.] Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose the right path. [Audience laughter.] All too often, it's how everybody - conservative and socialist, old and young, rich and poor - speaks about the future of the planet. For the left, the world is going to hell in a handcart because of unrestrained greed. For the right, all is lost because of unrestrained government. But I'm going to argue that both are wrong, and that today's prosperity and freedom are astonishing, compared with what mankind has ever experienced before - but nothing, compared with what our grandchildren could enjoy. And that free-market liberals should, where possible, take a more optimistic tone.
The Golden Age was not in the past - it is in the future. At the time that Botany Bay was first seen by Captain Cook, the living standard of the average Brit was probably about the same as that of Mozambique today. People died of starvation and disease in their tens of thousands every winter. As late as 1800, you had to work for six hours, on the average wage, to earn enough money to buy a candle that would burn for an hour. Today you have to work for less than half a second, on the average wage, to earn enough money to switch on a lamp for an hour. Compared with almost any time in the past, human beings today are immeasurably better off. In my lifetime, as Bjorn has mentioned, life expectancy has gone up globally by about one third. Child mortality has fallen by two thirds, globally, and income per head has trebled in real terms.
Both the rate of poverty and the number of people in poverty are falling faster than at any time in history. And we are not only wealthier and healthier than ever before. We are happier, safer, better fed, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal. I won't get stuck in the details but the evidence on each of those adjectives is clear. Life satisfaction, for example, increases with wealth, both within and between countries. Death rates from storms, floods and droughts have fallen by 98% since the 1920s. I.Q. is increasing in most countries, and so is participation in education. Air and water pollution are dramatically reduced in the rich world. A modern car emits less pollution at 70 mph than a parked car with the engine off in 1970 [audience laughter], because of leaks from the fuel tank.
People are giving more to charity, as a proportion of income, than ever before. More people live in democracies and fewer in autocracies than at any time in history. Fewer people died in warfare in the first decade of this century than in any other decade since the early 1940s. And people in poor countries are getting rich much faster than people in rich countries are getting rich, which is closing the global gap between rich and poor, especially since the recession.
Now maybe these trends will not continue. Maybe we stand at a turning point. Many people think so. But they've always thought so. What I call "turning-point-itis" is the belief that your generation is the one that will see things starting to get worse, and it goes back all the way to ancient Greece.
Here's the historian and politician Lord Macaulay in 1830, railing against the pessimists. "We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point and we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason. And what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us." He was fed up with the turning-point mob even then.
Global pessimism was a very that I used to share. When I was a student in the 1970s, the grownups promised me that unbroken misery lay in the future. They said population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten lifespans, the Sahara was advancing at a mile a year, the Ice Age was returning, the oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and a nuclear winter would finish me off. [Audience laughter.] By the time I was 21 years old, I realised that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.
Here's a quote from an article written by two young men in 1971, one of whom is now President Obama's science advisor, while the other went on to win a Genius Award from the MacArthur Foundation - John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich. "We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of eco-catastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the 20th century." Well, it didn't happen.
The next two decades, in the '70s and '80s and '90s, were just as bad. Acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of ozone layer was going to fry us. Sperm counts were falling. Swine flu, bird flu and the ebola virus were going to wipe us out. In 1992 the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the 21st century with the words "Humanity stands at a defining moment in history" - there's that turning point again. "We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being." Actually, poverty, hunger, ill-health and illiteracy were already retreating fast, and the improvement was about to accelerate.
By the 1990s, even I had begun to notice that this terrible future was not all that bad. In fact, every single one of the dooms that I had been threatened with had proved either false or exaggerated. The population explosion was slowing down. Famine had largely been conquered, except in war-torn tyrannies. India was exporting food. Cancer rates were falling, not rising, when adjusted for age. The Sahel was getting greener. The climate was warming, gently. Oil was abundant. Air pollution was falling fast. Nuclear disarmament was proceeding apace. Forests were thriving. Sperm counts had not fallen. And, above all, prosperity and freedom were advancing, at the expense of poverty and tyranny.
As Bjorn Lomborg and 21 other top economists have recently shown in their new book, which he mentioned, the cost of poor health, at the outset of the 20th century, was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today it's down to about 11%, and by 2050 it will be half that. The cost of pollution, gender inequality and many of the other barnacles on the hull of human progress have also been falling fast.
Even climate change is currently benefiting the world, as Bjorn mentioned, more than it is harming it, and will continue to do so for the next seven decades, as documented by Professor Richard Tol.
Yet, if anything, despite the failure of their predictions, the pessimists only grew more certain, shrill and apocalyptic in the 1990s and 2000s. We were facing the end of nature, the coming anarchy, a stolen future, our final century and a climate catastrophe. By the way, if I really wanted to write a bestseller - Bjorn, if we we really wanted to write a bestseller - we should write a pessimistic one, we would sell far more copies.
Why, I began to wonder, did the failure of the previous predictions have so little impact on this litany? Well, I soon found out one reason. Like others who have tried to draw attention to the improving living standards, notably Julian Simon and Bjorn, I was subject to a sustained campaign of vilification by the pessimists, once I started voicing doubts about the apocalypse. They just cannot bear to let an optimistic view be heard - they think it's complacent, conservative, callous and crackpot. Good news is no news. Bad news sells newspapers and brings in donations. Optimists rock the boat.
John Stuart Mill once wrote: "I have observed that not the man who hopes, when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage".
[TO BE CONTINUED.]