Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

I used to share their pessimism. When I began to shape my worldview in Sweden in the 1980s, I found modern civilization hard to stomach. Factories, highways and supermarkets to me were a dismal sight, and modern working life seemed sheer drudgery. I associated this new global consumer culture with the problems of poverty and conflict that television brought into our living room. Instead, I dreamed of a society that put the clock back, a society that lived in harmony with nature. I hadn’t thought about the way people had actually lived before the Industrial Revolution, without medicines and antibiotics, safe water, sufficient food, electricity or sanitary systems. Instead I had thought of it more in terms of a modern excursion into the countryside. Source: Maddison 2003.8 But I started reading history and travelling the world. I found I could no longer romanticize the good old days once I began to understand what they had really been like. One of the countries on which I focused my studies experienced chronic undernourishment – it was poorer, with shorter life expectancy and higher child mortality than the average sub-Saharan African country. That country was my ancestors’ Sweden, 150 years ago. The truth is that the good old days were awful.

This progress started with the intellectual Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when we began to examine the world with the tools of empiricism, rather than being content with authorities, traditions and superstition. Its political corollary, classical liberalism, began to liberate people from the shackles of heredity, authoritarianism and serfdom. Following hot on its heels was the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, when the industrial power at our disposal multiplied, and we began to conquer poverty and hunger. These successive revolutions were enough to liberate a large part of humanity from the harsh living conditions it had always lived under. With late twentieth-century globalization, as these technologies and freedoms began to spread to the rest of the world, this was repeated on a larger scale and at a faster pace than ever before.

This book is about humanity’s triumphs. But it is not a message of complacency. It is written partly as a warning. It would be a terrible mistake to take this progress for granted. There are forces at work in the world that would destroy the pillars of this development – the individual freedoms, open economy and technological progress. Terrorists and dictators do what they can to undermine open societies, but there are also threats from within our societies. Nationalist and authoritarian politicians want to dismantle individual freedoms and start building walls between countries again. These forces want us to think that the world is dangerous and that things are spiralling out of control, because frightened people think differently.

Frightened people do not ask for opportunities, but for protection. They don’t vote for openness and freedom, but for the strongman who promises them security and provides easily identifiable scapegoats. If we think we don’t have anything to lose in doing so, it’s because we have a bad memory.

It is surely humanity’s greatest achievement. If we could divert our eyes from our cellphones’ news flashes more often, and look around us, at the science, technology and wealth that are now an integrated part of our lives, we would see proof of our abilities every day. So I borrow my dedication from the epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who built and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (‘If you are looking for a monument, look around you’).

Malthus concluded in 1779: The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of humanity [infanticide, abortion, contraception] are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the great precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world.13

One of the most powerful weapons against the scourge of hunger was artificial fertilizer. Nitrogen helps plants to grow and some of it is available in manure, but not much. For more than a century, the world’s farmers used bird droppings accumulated over centuries on the coast of Chile, which contained huge quantities of sodium nitrate. But not enough of it was available. Scientists and entrepreneurs thought that there must be some way of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere, where it is abundant. The German chemist Fritz Haber, working at the chemical company BASF, was the first to solve the problem. Based on his theoretical work, and after several years of experiments, in 1909 he succeeded in producing ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen.

‘What has been the most important technical invention of the twentieth century?’ asks Vaclav Smil in Enriching the Earth. He rejects suggestions like computers and aeroplanes, going on to explain that nothing has been as important as the industrial fixing of nitrogen: ‘the single most important change affecting the world’s population – its expansion from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to today’s six billion – would not have been possible without the synthesis of ammonia.’ Without the Haber-Bosch Process about two-fifths of the world population would not exist at all, Smil claims.17 Sadly, Fritz Haber’s brilliant mind was also put to the task of killing. He was a pioneer in chemical warfare and developed chlorine gas for the German troops to use against enemy forces. He directed the first release of fatal gas himself on 22 April 1915, at the Second Battle of Ypres. Six thousand French soldiers were killed. As Haber put it, ‘During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country.’18 Coming from a man who saved more lives than perhaps anyone else, but also destroyed lives on a massive scale, this might be one of the best possible arguments against war.

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.

It was not just an increase in food that saved us from Malthus’s nightmares, but also lower fertility. As people became richer and better educated, they had fewer children, not more, as had been predicted. US fertility rates plummeted from seven children per woman in 1800 to 3.8 children in 1900, and to 1.9 children in 2012 – below the replacement rate. The trend is the same all over the Western world.22 It seems that, when child health improved, parents could assume that their offspring would survive to adulthood, and as human capital increased in value, economically it made more sense to have fewer children and bestow them with a longer education instead. The argument of Malthus was turned on its head – food production exploded, but population growth slowed.

The story of Borlaug and the global Green Revolution that he initiated begins in Mexico in 1944, when he started working there for the Rockefeller Foundation on agricultural development.25 The programme was initiated to teach Mexican farmers new methods, but Borlaug was obsessed with coming up with better, higher-yield crops. He grew up in the US Midwest, and noticed that horrible dust storms and crop failures had the least impact where farmers had begun with high-yield approaches to farming. He wanted more countries to have access to this. After thousands of crossings of wheat, Borlaug managed to come up with a high-yield hybrid that was parasite resistant and wasn’t sensitive to daylight hours, so it could be grown in varying climates. Importantly, it was a dwarf variety, since tall wheat expended a lot of energy growing inedible stalks and also collapsed when it grew too quickly. When he introduced this new hybrid, Borlaug also showed farmers how modern irrigation and artificial fertilizer increased the yields. The new wheat was quickly introduced all over Mexico, and amazingly in 1963, the harvest was six times larger than in 1944. Overnight, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat.

Just a few years later the impossible had happened, and India and Pakistan were self-sufficient in the production of cereals. Today they produce seven times more wheat than they did in 1965. Despite a rapidly growing population, both countries are much better fed than they used to be. Borlaug also convinced many governments to pay their farmers world market prices for their grain, rather than forcing them to sell at a fixed, low price. This widespread price regulation was a policy intended to help the urban population, but resulted in lower production and hunger. Inspired by his success with better crops, colleagues of Borlaug developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread around Asia.

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

In 1970, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in increasing the global food supply. As US Senator Rudy Boschwitz put it: Dr. Norman Borlaug is the first person in history to save a billion human lives. But he must also get credit for saving the wild creatures and diverse plant species on 12 million square miles of global forest that would long since have been ploughed down without the high-yield farming he pioneered. The two accomplishments combined make him dramatically unique.

Nonetheless, arguments against modern agricultural technology have had a huge impact on the debate, and some environmentalists object to nitrogen fertilizer on principle, despite the human cost. Today we see the same objections to genetically modified crops, which would increase our yields even further. Environmental campaigners have had an impact on one continent, Africa, where they pressured big foundations and the World Bank to back away from introducing the Green Revolution, which Borlaug had considered the next priority. This is now the only region where the number of undernourished people has continued to increase, and where wild habitats are being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture.

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.33

Quite possibly, the most important long-term effect of the Green Revolution was that it reduced the number of mouths that had to be fed, long-term. When children began to survive to adulthood, parents began to have fewer children. The demographic transition that the West has already gone through is now being repeated across the developing world. The neo-Malthusians claimed this wouldn’t happen at all, but in fact it has happened much faster in low- and middle-income countries.

In our own time, the most ruthless regimes still produce the most horrific conditions. Jang Jin-sung, a member of North Korea’s élite, described what he saw in the late 1990s, before he fled to the West. The starving were sent to parks to beg until they died. A special ‘Corpse Division’ would poke at bodies with sticks to see if they were already dead. He saw them loading corpses on a rickshaw, on which bare and skeletal feet poked out in odd directions. In a crowded market, Jang saw an adult woman and a girl of about seven. The woman had hung a sign around the girl’s neck: ‘I will sell my daughter for 100 won’ – less than ten pence. Apparently, the father had already died of starvation. An army lieutenant agreed to take the girl. The mother ran away with the money, but soon returned with a packet of bread. She asked her daughter for forgiveness, sobbing violently while she began to put pieces of bread into the child’s mouth: ‘This is all I can give you before I go.’ Several in the crowd began to cry.36

Strange as it sounds, democracy is one of our most potent weapons against famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, there have been famines in communist states, absolute monarchies, colonial states and tribal societies, but never in a democracy. Even

There is probably no country that has suffered greater famine than China. From 1958 to 1961, the dictator Mao Zedong tried to show the superiority of his brand of communism by a ‘Great Leap Forward’ of forced industrialization. Remaining private land and even cooking utensils were confiscated and agricultural workers were diverted to steel making and public works projects. As a result, around forty million people are estimated to have starved to death, and life expectancy collapsed by twenty years. Even after this disaster, food was scarce in China because the collective farms stifled work and innovation. No one could make more by working harder or investing in better methods.

Today, China’s leaders are proud of its productive agricultural sector, but it did not change because of a top-down decision. It was started by a few brave peasants in the Xiaogang village in Anhui province in December 1978. The eighteen families of the village were desperate. The communist system did not supply them or their children with enough to eat. Some families had to boil poplar leaves and eat them with salt; others ground roasted tree bark to use as flour. So they met in secret late one night and agreed to parcel out the communal land among themselves. Every family would make its own decisions on what and how to farm and how much to work, and each family would be allowed to sell what they produced themselves, after the government took the share it demanded. They wrote it down as a formal contract so that everyone would be bound to it, and signed or gave their fingerprints by the light of an oil lamp. Now that it was down in writing, the stakes were incredibly high. If the document was found, they would be punished with the full weight of the regime. The villagers agreed that if word got out and any of them were jailed or executed, the others would raise their children. The farmer who had drawn up the contract hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house, and hoped that the officials would never find it. In the end, word of this secret privatization got out. The result was just too good to keep a secret. The farmers did not start the workday when the vi...

Flush toilets have been used in many civilizations, including the Roman Empire, but the modern water closet was invented in 1596 for Queen Elizabeth I by her godson Sir John Harrington. In the absence of an extensive sewer system it wasn’t very useful. Indoor plumbing and widespread installation of water closets would take another 300 years. There are contemporaneous accounts of aristocrats soiling the corridors of Versailles and the Palais Royal. Indeed, the reason why Versailles’s hedges were so tall was so that they could function as toilet partitions. One eighteenth-century writer described Versailles as ‘the receptacle of all of humanity’s horrors – the passageways, corridors and courtyards are filled with urine and faecal matter’.4 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’.5 As late as 1882, only two per cent of New York’s homes had water connections.6

Toilets were built by rivers and brooks, which polluted the waterways, and if a river was not available, the filth was held in cesspits or thrown out on the street. When pedestrians heard the shout of ‘Gardyloo!’ they ran for cover. This phrase, taken from the French for ‘Look out for the water’, was your only warning that someone was about to throw their waste out of the window.

This tragedy made one of the world’s great medical experiments possible, ‘one of the most important of all time’, according to Angus Deaton.9 John Snow, a physician in London, thought that cholera was borne by water rather than foul air. He mapped the deaths in detail and found a revealing link. All the cholera cases seemed to originate from the water company that had its inlet downstream of the sewage discharge, whereas no deaths were found among those who got their water from the other company, which had recently moved its inlet to purer water upriver. This convinced the local council to disable the offending well pump. The discovery of waterborne infection has since saved countless lives.

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. Nearly a third of the current global population gained access in the last twenty-five years – 2.1 billion people. Eighty-two per cent of the urban population now have access, compared to fifty-one per cent of the rural population. A quarter of those in rural areas still practice open defecation, though this has been reduced from thirty-eight per cent in 1990. Countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam have reduced open defecation by around a third since 1990.

More than eighty per cent of the freshwater in developing countries is used for agriculture, and only around one per cent of irrigation agriculture uses the most efficient drip irrigation system, so most of that water is wasted. One major problem is that underpricing – and sometimes zero pricing – reduces the incentive to invest in water-saving technologies and results in overuse. As the United Nations Development Programme points out: ‘if markets delivered Porsche cars at give-away prices, they too would be in short supply’.14

Sub-Saharan Africa achieved a twenty-percentage-point increase in the use of improved sources of drinking water from 1990 to 2015. During this period, 427 million more Africans gained access.17 The process may be too slow to make the news, but we must remember that it is happening much faster than it did in the world’s richest countries. 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. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

So in the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m going to have to science the shit out of this. Matt Damon in The Martian

In 1586, the essayist Montaigne had to leave Bordeaux, where he was mayor, when the plague arrived. He and his family wandered around for six months in search of somewhere to live, but merely frightened old friends and caused horror wherever they appeared. In Savoy, rich people would first install a poor woman in their disinfected house for a few weeks, as a guinea pig, before they returned. Samuel Pepys wrote about ‘the plague making us cruel, as dogs, one to another’.5

In prehistoric times, the average hunter-gatherer is estimated to have had a life expectancy of around twenty to thirty years depending on local conditions.6 Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since larger, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation. In classical civilizations such as Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, life expectancy has been estimated at around eighteen to twenty-five years. In medieval Britain, estimates range from seventeen to thirty-five years.7

Before the year 1800, not a single country in the world had a life expectancy higher than forty years.

Average life expectancy in the world was thirty-one years in 1900. Today, amazingly, it is seventy-one years. We instinctively assume that we approach death by one year for every year we age, but during the twentieth century, the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.

A professor of epidemiology, Abdel Omran, has divided humanity’s relationship with mortality into three major successive stages:11 1. The Age of Pestilence and Famine. In this era, which was in place for most of humanity’s history, mortality is high and fluctuating, as a result of chronic malnutrition and endemic diseases and sudden disasters like famines and war. Life expectancy is vacillating between twenty and forty years. 2. The Age of Receding Pandemics. Now mortality begins to decline as epidemics recede. Life expectancy increases steadily from about thirty to about fifty years. As a result, population growth is sustained. 3. The Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases. Infectious disease becomes rarer, mortality declines further and life expectancy exceeds fifty years. Fertility, not mortality, becomes the crucial factor in population growth. We begin to worry about cancer and an increasing number of cardiovascular diseases, which is actually great news, because that is a sign that people aren’t expecting to die at the age of twenty or thirty.

Avoiding bacteria is beneficial, but it is even better to be able to kill them off. Otherwise anything that breaks through the skin, our first barrier against disease, can be lethal, even something as innocuous as a scraped knee. Before penicillin, hospitals were full of people dying from tiny cuts and children dying from scarlet fever and infections.

The next big killer that may be beaten is malaria, which was endemic to almost every country in the world in 1900 and killed about two million a year. At that stage, rich countries drained swamps and ditched marshy areas to remove breeding sites for the mosquitoes that carry the parasite. This and the widespread use of insecticides such as DDT eradicated malaria in more than 100 countries. After a recent push by the Gates Foundation and other groups, there is now a chance that malaria could be beaten globally in the next few decades. Between 2000 and 2015 malaria death rates around the world have reduced by around half, declining fastest among children. According to the WHO, this has averted 6.2 million deaths.

One of the people responsible for saving the most lives in history is Maurice Hilleman. He originally intended to become a manager at a J. C. Penney store, but apparently did not have the right personality for retail. That was lucky for us, because he studied for a PhD in microbiology instead, got a job at Merck and went on to develop over twenty-five vaccines, including most of those now recommended to children.

An especially promising solution was a mixture of salt and sugar in water, and its promise was demonstrated during a cholera outbreak in Indian and Bangladeshi refugee camps in the early 1970s. Three thousand patients were treated and their mortality rate was reduced by almost ninety per cent.

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. But it did not take long until families started adapting. As parents came to realize that their children were less likely to die young, they stopped having as many babies.

The infrastructure that has been created for trade and communication also makes it easier to transmit ideas, science and technology across borders, in a virtuous cycle.25 Interestingly, even though there is a strong relationship between health and wealth, it is difficult to find a relationship between health and recent growth rates. The economist William Easterly has shown that the correlation between a country’s health indicators and its own growth rate is not as strong as the correlation between its health indicators and global growth. In this era of globalization, the most important factor behind a country’s success is the success of other countries.

Perhaps it is time to start talking about a fourth stage of mortality: the Age of Receding Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases.

Following the H1N1 flu in 2009, a totally new version of the virus from 1918, we saw the quickest response to a pandemic in history. The internet made it possible to track the outbreak and facilitated co-operation between institutions, scientists and health workers around the world. After American scientists got a sample of the virus from a patient in mid-April 2009, the gene sequencing was done in just one day. Within a week the full H1N1 virus genome was published online, for the whole world to use. This made it possible for test developers around the world to modify existing tests and find new cases. Before the month was over, new test kits were sent to clinical and public health laboratories. At the same time, drug companies used this information, new cell culture technologies and other new breakthroughs to start working on vaccines. In June 2009 the WHO declared that H1N1 was a pandemic. Just three months later several manufacturers had already completed vaccine development and started producing it. By December, over fifty countries had started vaccine programmes.

Some say that we have reached the limits of what is possible, that life spans can’t increase much further. But they have said this before, again and again, and they have always been wrong. In 1928, when US life expectancy was fifty-seven years, the statistician Louis Dublin calculated that the ultimate possibility was sixty-five years. Since he did not have numbers for New Zealand, he did not know that this cap had already been surpassed by the women there. Another research team repeated the exercise in 1990, and settled on a limit of eighty-five years. That was reached by Japanese females in 1996.28

[P]overty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Jane Jacobs1

We do not need an explanation for poverty, because that is the starting point for everybody. Poverty is what you have until you create wealth. It is easy to forget the dreadful circumstances of our ancestors’ lives even in the richest countries. The accepted definition of poverty in a country like France was very simple: if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor. In hard times, towns were filled with armies of poor, dressed in rags, begging for something to eat.

An inquiry in 1564 into Pescara on the Adriatic, a not particularly poor town with a fortress and a garrison, found that three-quarters of the families in the town lived in makeshift shelters. In wealthy Genoa, poor people sold themselves as galley slaves every winter. In Paris the very poor were chained together in pairs and forced to do the hard work of cleaning the drains. In England, the poor had to work in workhouses to get relief, where they worked long hours for almost no pay. Some were instructed to crush dog, horse and cattle bones for use as fertilizer, until an inspection of a workhouse in 1845 showed that hungry paupers were fighting over the rotting bones to suck out the marrow.

Despite a few ups and downs, humanity had experienced almost no economic development until the early nineteenth century. According to the rough estimates by the economist Angus Maddison, GDP per capita – the value of goods and services per person – increased by only fifty per cent between the year 1 ce and 1820, not enough for people to experience any increase in wealth during their own lifetime.3

Until then, the dominant economic school, Mercantilism, taught that poverty was necessary. It was considered the only way to incentivize people to work hard, and it was thought that only low wages could reduce the cost of production so that a country could remain competitive. If the poor got a raise, they would leave the job and end up in the alehouse, according to many thinkers of the time. The Scottish economist Adam Smith, the arch-enemy of the Mercantilists, thought that this was wrong, arguing that higher wages could in fact make people work more and that ‘no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.’7 The ideas of Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers developed a growing respect for the hard-working poor.

Karl Marx thought that capitalism would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. If someone was to gain, someone else had to lose in the free market. The middle class would become proletarians, and the proletarians would starve. But when Marx died in 1883, the average Englishman was three times richer than he was when Marx was born, in 1818. By 1900, extreme poverty in England had already been reduced by three-quarters, to around ten per cent. Never before had the human race experienced anything like it.

In India they found that even the poorest villages no longer smelled of urine and faeces, and mud huts had started to be replaced by brick buildings, keeping the heat in and the insects out. They were wired up for electricity and had television sets. When they showed young Indians what things looked like on their last visit, the young people refused to believe it was the same place. Could things really have been that miserable here? When Berg returned again in 2010, the transformation had gone even further. There were motorcycles and big markets and all the villagers walked around with mobile phones. Now even the poorest live in brick buildings with iron bars in front of the windows. The casual observer would say that this means that crime is up. Berg points out that it means that even the poor now own something worth stealing.

In no place has this happened on a larger scale than in China, a country where three generations around a dinner table can tell the whole rags-to-riches story, from hunger and subsistence agriculture to programming computers and making cosmetics. At the start of the 1980s the city of Guangzhou, in the south-east Chinese province of Guangdong, had two buildings of more than ten floors. This was one of the poorer provinces of a desperately poor China, with neither capital nor resources for development. But farmers and villagers had started small businesses and began to improve production. As we saw in the case of the farmers in Xiaogang, they often did so without official recognition, but it inspired the leadership to think differently. In its efforts to raise the country out of its abysmal poverty, the Chinese communist party learned from the Asian ‘tiger’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, but also from local experiments with private farming and township enterprises. So it allowed special economic zones in Guangdong from 1980, which were exempt from the rules of the command economy. Production was mostly based on market forces, international investments and technologies were welcome, and they could engage in international trade. Business there combined investments from Hong Kong and Taiwan, received workers from northern provinces and sold to Western markets.