Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labour and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history. Life expectancy at birth has increased more than twice as much in the last century as it did in the previous 200,000 years. The risk that any individual will be exposed to war, die in a natural disaster, or be subjected to dictatorship has become smaller than in any other epoch. A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday.

Sometimes it seems that we are willing to try our luck with any demagogue who tells us that he or she has quick, simple solutions to make our nation great again, whether it be nationalizing the economy, blocking foreign imports or throwing the immigrants out.

At the end of the eighteenth century, ordinary French families had to spend about half their income on grains alone – often this meant gruel. The French and English in the eighteenth century received fewer calories than the current average in sub-Saharan Africa, the region most tormented by undernourishment.

A hundred and fifty years ago it took twenty-five men all day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain. With a modern combine harvester, a single person can do it in six minutes.

From 1961 to 2009, farmland increased by only twelve per cent, while farm production increased by about 300%.

In 1183, for instance, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II organized a great feast while holding court in a castle in Erfurt, Germany. While the guests were eating, the floor of the great hall began to sink and many noble guests fell into the cesspit beneath. Many drowned in the slurry.

Until modern times, taking a bath was rare, even controversial. The Spanish saw it as a Muslim custom, and the French thought that it softened the body and opened the pores to disease. It was seen as more hygienic for the élite to change clothes often and wear them tight. But there were some early adopters. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have taken a bath once a month whether she thought she needed it or not, and one member of the British élite wrote in his diary in 1653 that he would start experimenting with an ‘annual hair wash’.

One study found that clean water was responsible for forty-three per cent of the total reduction in mortality, seventy-four per cent of the infant mortality reduction and sixty-two per cent of the child mortality reduction.

Since 1990, 2.6 billion people have gained access to an improved water source, which means that 285,000 more people got safe water every day for twenty-five years.

In 1980, no more than twenty-four per cent of the world’s population had access to proper sanitation facilities. By 2015, this had increased to sixty-eight per cent.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013. After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime.

A research group on ageing led by Oskar Burger at the Max Planck Institute has pointed out that the bulk of humanity’s mortality reduction has been experienced by only the last four of the roughly 8,000 generations of homo sapiens since we evolved around 200,000 years ago.

Average life expectancy in the world was thirty-one years in 1900. Today, amazingly, it is seventy-one years.

Between 1950 and 2011 world population grew from 2.5 to seven billion. This did not happen because people in poor countries started breeding like rabbits, as people sometimes assumed; it happened because they stopped dying like flies.

A country with a GDP per capita of $3,000 today has the same life expectancy as would have been predicted for a hypothetical country with a GDP per capita of $30,000 in 1870. This is the great health story of our time: low prices for a good life.

There is no guarantee that life expectancy will keep on increasing. HIV/AIDS led to a sudden plunge in life expectancy in several African countries that is rarely matched even in war. Zimbabwe and Botswana lost more than fifteen years in life expectancy. In the years after the planned economy collapsed, life expectancy in Russia fell by five years. On the other hand, life expectancy in Africa is now seven years higher than it was before HIV/AIDS took its toll, and life expectancy in Russia is now higher than it ever was under communism, so there is a case to be made that life expectancy moves in a general direction, even though we also see obstacles and even temporary reversals.

Between 1820 and 1850, when the population grew by a third, workers’ real earnings rose by almost 100 per cent.8 If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person 2,000 years to double his income, but the English achieved this in only thirty years.

Almost nine in ten Chinese lived in extreme poverty in 1981. Only one in ten do today.

The average interstate war killed 86,000 people in the 1950s and 39,000 in the 1970s. Today, it kills slightly more than 3,000 people.

The political scientist Audrey Cronin looked at 457 terrorist groups active since 1968. None of them managed to conquer a state and ninety-four per cent of them failed to secure even one of their operative goals.

As we saw in the chapter on food, farming technologies employed since the early 1960s have saved an area equal to two South Americas from being turned into farmland. Between 1995 and 2010, land used for farming increased only by 0.04% annually. The researchers Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick even project that humanity has reached ‘peak farmland’, and that land use for agriculture will decline by 0.2% annually from 2010 to 2060.

In 1975 Paul and Anne Ehrlich predicted that around half of all species on the planet would have become extinct by now. Since the world is estimated to be home to something like five to fifteen million species, several million would have gone extinct since then. But the International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists no more than 709 species as having become extinct since 1500.14 Most of these extinctions have taken place in isolated areas, such as oceanic islands, which suggests that many life forms are flexible and can migrate and survive in modified environments.

Amazingly, a modern car in motion emits less pollution than a 1970s car did in the parking lot, turned off, due to gasoline vapour leakage.

In the year 1900, exactly zero per cent of the world population lived in a real democracy, in which each man or woman had one vote. Even the most modern and democratic countries excluded women, the poor or ethnic minorities from elections.

When General de Gaulle wanted French troops to lead the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, American and British commanders accepted it on the condition that no black colonial forces were included, even though they made up two-thirds of the Free French forces.

Political scientists Victor Asal and Amy Pate have looked at discrimination against 337 ethnic minorities in 124 countries since 1950 and conclude that the last half-century has seen a significant improvement in the treatment of minorities, with respectful attitudes becoming the ‘global norm’.

When psychologist Jean M. Twenge asked Americans for their opinions on women’s duty to obey their husbands, whether their primary responsibility is to be good wives and mothers, and whether women have the same right to act and move about as men, it turns out that men’s attitudes today are more feminist than those of women in the 1970s.

No country accepted same-sex marriage until the Netherlands did in 2001. Today it is accepted in twenty-one countries, including the staunchly Catholic Ireland.

the notion that child labour in either theory or practice was a result of the Industrial Revolution is diametrically opposed to reality. Under mercantilism it was an ideal to employ children almost from the age when they could walk, and, for example Colbert [King Louis XIV’s statist Minister of Finances from 1665 to 1683] introduced fines for parents who did not put their six-year-old children to work in one of his particularly cherished industries.