Source: BBC Radio 4: A History of Britain in Numbers
URL: N/A
Date: 29/11/2013
Event: "Today we live beyond the dreams of our ancestors"
Credit: BBC Radio 4, A History of Britain in Numbers
People:
Andrew Dilnot: It's easier to romanticise the past than the present. People know every blemish on the here and now, and we dwell on them - our daily toils and woes, with a foul crime and injustice or the late-running 8:03. At the same time, familiarity can breed a habit of taking the good for granted. It doesn't make for a balanced judgement of how we're doing. But it's the end of this series - time to decide where we stand, in the long run of history.
For me, the "groans" have it the wrong way round. Today we live beyond the dreams of our ancestors. If you doubt that, pull out half your teeth, solve your pension problem by dying early, contract TB, quarter your income, make your home more affordable by stripping out the toilet, hot water, heating, phone lines, let it grow damp, dark, cold, overcrowded. Cancel all leave, bar bank holidays - and work, work, work hard, until you drop. If you're a woman, give up all hope of the same freedoms and opportunities as men, have four or five extra kids, then mourn the death of a few of them in infancy.
And yet - there are problems with this account of progress. The History of Britain in Numbers doesn't measure our spirit or sense of fulfilment. It doesn't record how happy we were or the quality of our art. It says nothing of love. In fact, the past can't tell us fully about the past, since we still don't know if that same tide of progress was also sweeping away the Earth's ability to keep us. We do know for sure that people leave their mark, and this alone ought to give us some pause before drawing up a final account. The more we consume, the bigger the mark. So we count the sparrows and the cod, and wonder if we've blown it, unsure if the gains are sustainable, the oceans emptied, nature spent.
This is a question we've put aside until now, since it's not only historical - it also looks ahead. And so we've invited two writers to use history to inform their very different views of where it leaves us. First, Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, who I met at his home in Northumberland.
Matt Ridley: When I was young, in the 1970s, the future was bleak. Economic growth would not return, communism was winning, nuclear war was likely, chemicals were going to poison our environment, the population was exploding, oil was about to run out, deserts were advancing, famine was inevitable, an Ice Age was on the way, bird flu would wipe us out and sperm counts were falling. Or so the grown-ups told me. However good things had been up until then, they said, we now stood at a turning point. I believed them.
Instead, in my lifetime, globally, average income has trebled. Population growth rate has halved. Life expectancy is up 30%. Poverty has fallen fast. Child mortality is down by two thirds. The air is cleaner and people are healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal than they have ever been.
Go look up the graphs, if you don't believe me. On a global scale, every single one of those adjectives is correct. Yet the experts are just as gloomy about the future as they were 40 years ago. Currently it's climate change, or the euro crisis or obesity that's the cause of pessimism. But guess what - this generation stands at a turning point in history.
The trouble is, every generation always thinks it stands at a turning point, and that things can only get worse. In fact, when I traced the history of this "apocoholism" - the word is Gary Alexander's - I found there never was an age when experts believed in a happy future. Pessimists always dominated the discourse, whether they were fire-breathing Puritan preachers predicting Judgement Day or modern eco-toffs lamenting the air-miles of green beans. For some reason, Cassandra sounds wise and Pollyanna foolish.
But, surely, after many centuries of the pessimists being proved wrong, again and again, we would learn to take their prognostications with a grain of salt. True, we have encountered disasters and tragedies. But the promised Armageddons, the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to life as we know it have consistently failed to materialise. Even the climate threats are now fading. Climate change is real, but scientists are tiptoeing away from the most dire threats invoked in its name.
There's a reason life keeps defying the pessimists. Human ingenuity is steadily raising people out of poverty and steadily reducing our need to exploit natural resources. Back in 1830, Lord Macaulay, the historian, fed up with the nostalgic green reactionaries of his day, said "On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?"
Andrew Dilnot: Matt Ridley. Next is Andrew Simms from Global Witness, also fellow of the New Economics Foundation and author of Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity.
Andrew Simms: Imagine trying to run a small business with no record of your cashflow or assets. Bankruptcy would come as no surprise. But the economy itself is like that - a wholly owned dependent subsidiary that fails to keep books on its parent company, the biosphere. In the last 50 years, the global economy has grown vastly, both in size and inequality, threatening the environment in which civilisation evolved and the bonds which hold it together.
Since the 1970s, the last time global economy fitted the shoe size of the Earth's resources, we've been running up an ever larger ecological debt. It's an age of diminishing returns, in which the world's wealthy get less satisfaction from consuming more, and the great majority get a shrinking share of economic benefits. But push ecological debt too far over a planetary boundary - whether climatic upheaval, tropical deforestation or mass extinctions - and nature won't bail you out. And it's already happening.
Is there really no alternative to more of the same broken model? To find out, I came up with a version of fantasy football for economics. Instead of the perfect team, I imagined the kind of country I'd like to live in, and called it Goodland. You could do it, too. In my Goodland, the banks are useful, socially and economically, mostly local and mutually owned. Instead of ever longer hours, you can choose to work just a four-day week. There's comprehensive care for the young and old, and free education. There's a plan for rapid, near-total carbon cuts. Big businesses are cooperatives. Neighbourhoods decide on their spending priorities, and citizens design the constitution. Cities are green, clean, with fewer cars. To cap it, the head of state sets an example by voluntarily living on the national average wage.
Of course, it's crazy, utopian - or, is it? All of these things already exist, somewhere. The banking system can be found in Germany, the four-day week in the Netherlands, those care and education systems in Denmark and Sweden. Nicaragua is decarbonising. Iceland's citizens are rewriting their constitution, while social protection actually expanded after the crash, and guilty bankers were taken to court. That head of state, too, is real - Uruguay's Jose Mujica gave away 90% of his pay and has just two policemen and a three-legged dog for protection.
None perfect, perhaps. But alternatives are all around us. Yet a perception problem stops us seeing them, and the urgency of change. Climate science is well over 90% certain, yet about eight out of ten media stories focus on doubt. A tiny minority of sceptics dominate the agenda. Yet we need an economy that won't eat the biosphere it depends on. Now, as the great writer Raymond Williams said, to be truly radical, we must make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.
Andrew Dilnot: Andrew Simms and Matt Ridley. Poles apart, but oddly call for the same solution - ingenuity. The past was certainly full of that. Throw in one last thought - that human history has been about a struggle simply to survive. In rich countries today, that's pretty much over - a titanic change. But that struggle has been replaced by a new one - to work out how to live. The writer P.D. James was born in 1920 and grew up in the Depression. Much of her long career has been as a crime writer, reflecting on the moral side of life. I went to meet her.
P.D. James: Looking at things, one often feels that for every improvement, there's been the obverse side, particularly I think in easier divorce. I mean, when I was at school, throughout the whole of my schooling, I didn't know one single child whose parents were separated or divorced - not one. Of course, for most poor people it was not a possibility. You couldn't run two households. And the attitude to marriage was, I think generally, that you made vows, you made promises and then, if there were bad times, you somehow got through them, because there was really no alternative.
But, thinking of it now, when divorce is so easy, and obviously there's absolutely no disgrace attached to it, the liberalisation of the divorce laws has made adults much more free, and neither men nor women are tied for ever to a very unhappy marriage. But we adults have not paid for it - the children have paid for it.
Andrew Dilnot: And do you think there's a link between our material progress and the concerns you have about our moral progress, or lack of it? Do you think that growing richer, materially, has made it possible to lose our way, in some higher moral sense?
P.D. James: Well, I think it's very tempting to think that, but I'm not absolutely sure it's true. I think that greater prosperity does bring more happiness. It relieves so many people of anxieties about money - they're not going to end up in the workhouse. I mean, it seems incredible to think in my childhood that's how you could, in fact, end up. I'm loath to say that, but it's always very tempting to feel that morally we're not - we're somehow not quite up to the mark. But even there, it's difficult to know. I think that every generation probably behaves in much the same way - there probably is cruelty and unkindness.
There must have been terrible cruelty and unkindness in some marriages, where women had to endure because there was nothing else they could do. And one is glad that that doesn't happen now, can't happen now - women are able to work and they can just get free. In fact, the change in the lives of my sex have [sic] been absolutely remarkable, that independence which just depends on having a job, having ability, being able to get work, being able to support yourself, which, in my childhood, I don't think women could.
Andrew Dilnot: When you were ten, John Maynard Keynes wrote a chapter in a book called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. And he said: things are very bleak at the moment - it's easy to be overcome by pessimism. But I expect that a hundred years from now, our grandchildren will be between four and eight times as well off as we are now. And he said that he imagined that we would then have to face the difficult challenge that we would have solved the economic problems that had dogged humanity for thousands of years, getting enough to eat - we'd actually have to decide how to live. Do you think that's where we are?
P.D. James: I think that's - I think that's very true. I think we've become too clever for our ability. morally, to keep pace with it.
Andrew Dilnot: P.D. James. But that we will live - well, of course, that's nothing. We expect that. If nothing else, the History of Britain in Numbers is a history of life. Now, as Keynes said, how to live it?