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.