Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

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

After China came the other giant, India. One Indian economist I met, Parth Shah, said that the country learned from Taiwan and South Korea, but obviously also from its big neighbour, China: ‘we saw that they actually changed their model and they did succeed in what they had done and it was time for India to learn the lesson.’

The transition can be seen even among the dalits in India, who occupy the lowest level of the caste system. Making up nearly a quarter of the population, they were denied an education and given the worst and the dirtiest jobs, cleaning toilets, flaying and tanning skins, and handling the dead. Since this exposed them to filth and germs, it became taboo for others even to be close to them, and so they became known as ‘untouchables’. They were forced to live in ghettoes and could not even enter temples, but had to pray from outside.

In a documentary that I made in 2015, India Awakes, we profiled one dalit, Madhusudan Rao, who moved from his village to Hyderabad looking for a better life. There he overheard a contractor scolding an employee for failing to supply enough workers to dig trenches for telecom cables. Madhusudan stepped up and offered to find twenty-five workers by 10 p.m. that night. He borrowed money from his sister to hire a truck, went out into the countryside and found whatever men were willing and able. The contractor was satisfied and the workers were paid immediately. Madhusudan earned more money that day than he had seen in his entire life. Since then he moved on in the sector and has formed a construction company with 350 workers.

According to some statisticians, 28 March 2012 was a big day for humanity. It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of global GDP, up from thirty-eight per cent ten years earlier.18 This convergence makes sense. If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else. A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce around a fifth of its wealth. That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism and protectionism. But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour, and use technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.

This marks a historic rupture. For the first time, poverty is not growing just because population is growing. Because of this reduction, the number of people in extreme poverty is now slightly less than it was in 1820. Then it was around one billion, while today it is 700 million. If this does not sound like progress, you should note that in 1820, the world only had around sixty million people who did not live in extreme poverty. Today more than 6.5 billion people do not live in extreme poverty. So the risk of living in poverty has been reduced from ninety-four per cent to less than eleven per cent.21

However, many African countries brought spending and inflation under control and began to improve the business climate. Many armed conflicts ended. Since then, growth has picked up strongly. A continent once synonymous with stagnation has grown by around five per cent annually since 2000. It is often assumed that this was just a commodity boom, but natural resources generated just a third of the growth, with the rest coming from sectors such as manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation and retail. In fact, African countries had similar growth rates regardless of whether they had natural resources to export or not. Extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa has been reduced from fifty-seven to thirty-five per cent since 1990. It is still a sign of widespread misery, but for the first time less than half of all Africans live in extreme poverty.

War appears to be as old as humanity, but peace is a modern invention. Henry Maine, 18751

The Bible is also full of brutal violence – perpetrated by the good guys. In the Old Testament people casually kill, enslave and rape even family members. And the scale is staggering. When Moses discovers that some of his people worship a golden calf he executes 3,000 of them, and then goes on a merciless ethnic cleansing spree, ordered by God: ‘do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites – as the LORD thy God has commanded you’ (Deuteronomy 20:16–17). At one point, Moses scolds his men for letting women and children survive, so he orders them to go back: ‘Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourself every girl who has never slept with a man’ (Numbers 31:17–18). God even gives advice on rape himself: ‘if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife’ (Deuteronomy 21:11).

Our tales of medieval knights, written between the eleventh and thirteenth century, are of course orgies of extreme violence, often for no other reason than to prove one’s bravery and honour. Knights killed for the slightest insult. Their supposed chivalry does not correspond to anything we would call by that name. One of the knight’s means of battle was to ruin his enemy by killing as many of his peasants as possible, and destroying his crops and possessions. One knight tries to woo a princess by promising to rape the most beautiful women he finds in her honour.

A third factor was the rise of more humanitarian attitudes. As life expectancy increases and families have fewer children, the perceived value of each human life increases. Early death is no longer a norm. Many thinkers and historians have pointed out that the rise of free markets contributed to a long-term mindset and control of the emotions. Market exchange meant that other individuals became potential assets as buyers, sellers, investors or colleagues, and not just potential threats. In order to be successful on the free market, you have to understand your customer’s point of view.

The government’s use of violence for political purposes and for war has not diminished. In the twentieth century, the world experienced two of the bloodiest wars ever and Hitler, Mao, Stalin and other despots murdered around 120 million people. The Second World War stands out as the bloodiest war in history, with its estimated fifty-five million deaths. But despite this carnage, Steven Pinker argues that the twentieth century may not have been the bloodiest after all. Two things cloud our judgement. First of all, we suffer from historical myopia and remember mostly what is close to us in time. If we are asked to think about violence, we think about the most recent headlines, and conclude that our time is particularly dangerous. It’s more difficult for us to recall the Algerian War of Independence, which killed more than half a million people, and the Korean War where 1.2 million died, and it’s even more difficult to call to mind the Thirty Years’ War in which around a third of the German population perished.

The United Nations was founded in 1945, with the explicit goal of avoiding another such conflict, and it worked hard to make borders sacrosanct. The old idea that war was merely the continuation of politics by other means, just one of the tools for statecraft, was replaced by the idea that war is a crime and illegal unless in self-defence. European powers gave up the idea of territorial expansion and dismantled their empires, sometimes after revolts and conflict, sometimes peacefully, which meant the end of colonial wars and atrocities. A new Cold War between America and its allies and the Soviet Union broke out, and many experts were certain that it had to end in a global war at some point, with the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. It didn’t. It resulted in proxy wars and civil strife in several countries, but World War III never came.

It was only after the unrivalled evil of the Holocaust that the victims began to tell their own story, and advocates of Nazism felt the need to deny that it had ever happened. It was a unique episode of industrial destruction of an entire people, which changed the world’s perspective of genocide. Even during the war, when Americans were asked what should be done with the Japanese after a decisive victory, ten to fifteen per cent volunteered the response that they should be exterminated.

Contrary to popular belief, terror is a very inefficient way of accomplishing ideological goals. For a long time, it was considered efficient because of the success of violent anti-colonial campaigns, but opposition to colonialism succeeded whether it was violent or not. Violent campaigns in general are great failures.

So it seems that the only way for terrorists to win is if its victims overreact, dismantle civil liberties and blame whole groups for the actions of a few. Doing so stirs up the very conflicts that the terrorists seek and makes it easier to recruit terrorists and continue the battle.

Interestingly, poor countries often begin to clean up their act at a much earlier stage of development than rich countries did. This is partly because they can learn from our mistakes, but also because green technologies that were developed in industrialized countries can be used straight away in poorer countries. One example is unleaded gasoline. The United States started using it in 1975. India and China made the same transition in 1997, at which point they had only thirteen per cent of the wealth of Americans in 1975.24

But drastic and far-reaching efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions might be counter-productive. It is not necessarily true that the best way forward is to limit emissions to such an extent as to prevent climate change. What is important is that our climate policies don’t hurt our ability to create more wealth and better technologies and to bring power to the world’s poor. That would be a case of killing the patient to cure the disease. The biggest problems in the world are still problems of poverty and traditional environmental hazards, such as polluted air and water. Forcing too many restraints and costs on today’s global population might make life more difficult for the poor today because we want to reduce the risks to tomorrow’s rich.

There is a popular perception that technology-dependent civilizations are worse at handling a collapse than others, because they are so dependent on complex systems that might fail. It seems intuitive and plays into the collapse anxiety that rich Westerners, dependent on technologies we don’t understand, often feel. But it does not seem to be correct. When relatively developed Yugoslavia imploded during the wars of the early 1990s, people there were able to apply innovative solutions to maintain at least a minimum level of hygiene, safe water, and energy for heating and cooking. When civil war broke out in already underdeveloped Sierra Leone, no such improvised safety net could be created and its population fell into destitution of prehistoric proportions. A textbook on global health summarizes it neatly: ‘Quite contrary to common perceptions, highly-developed, technological societies seem to have better resources to maintain health during a war than poorer societies using less modern technology.’29

There are ways of reducing carbon dioxide without reducing growth, trade and access to energy. These include more efficient production processes, less energy-consuming construction and new energy sources and fuels.

Right now scientists and companies are working on Generation IV nuclear power. It is a summary term for reactors that are so far only experimental. They all have passive safety systems, get hundreds of times more energy from the same fuel and don’t have the same problems with waste. Fast reactors can burn the waste as well. One clever safety innovation is that a fast reactor burns liquid metal fuels. When they overheat, the fuels expand and slow down the reaction on their own. A Chernobyl or Harrisburg disaster would not be possible. The real game changer would be the small, modular reactors that some companies are working on. Bill Gates has invested in TerraPower, which wants to build a travelling wave reactor that uses radioactive waste as a fuel, doesn’t have to be refuelled and cannot melt down. The idea is to have them built in factories, completely sealed and set to run for several decades without human intervention. The reactor could also serve as its own burial casket. If this works, they could just be dropped into a concrete hole – ‘build, bury, and forget’. TerraPower’s founder thinks that we could ‘power the world for the next one thousand years just burning and disposing of the depleted uranium and spent fuel rods in today’s stockpiles’.

Ethanol in the versions governments have subsidized was a costly failure, but now we are starting to see exciting developments in bio-fuels. Both big oil companies and small, innovative startups are working on a new generation of biofuels made from algae.

There are also fascinating new possibilities that might help us get more energy from the sun. Graphene is an incredible new material created in 2004 at the University of Manchester. It is unbelievably thin and flexible, just one carbon atom thick, which makes it almost two-dimensional. At the same time it is remarkably strong, doesn’t corrode and conducts heat and electricity efficiently. This one material could drastically change the economics of solar power, because most solar cells today use expensive indium, whereas carbon atoms are not exactly rare. So far graphene is not very good at collecting the electrical current from the solar cells, but scientists are hard at work trying to solve that problem. If they do, we could turn anything into a solar power station in the future. Imagine if your house, your clothes, your car or the road was covered in solar film.

Some are dreaming of solar power in space, where there is no night and no atmospheric gases or clouds ever block the sun. Some sort of microwave transmitter or laser would direct energy to the areas of earth that need it. But we would probably need big breakthroughs in telerobotics to build and maintain solar panels in space.

As the spread of electricity and the internet connects us, more people learn about what is going on in the world and get the tools to participate. I have had the pleasure of watching young boys and girls in Moroccan villages get access to electricity for the first time, as they take their first steps online. They are about to enter a global world. Not only can they learn to read and write; they now have access to the sum of humanity’s knowledge, and can add their own ingenuity to it. The problem at the heart of global warming – our thirst for energy – is, in fact, also the solution.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting. Plutarch1

The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.21

In the end, it took an anti-slavery president and a brutal civil war to end slavery across the union. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on a platform hostile to slavery, several Southern states ceded from the Union, created the Confederacy and seized and attacked federal forts. The Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens explained that Thomas Jefferson’s idea that all men are created equal was a lie, and that: ‘Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’10

The anti-slavery bandwagon was seemingly unstoppable. Even the more authoritarian countries followed suit eventually. Russia freed its serfs in 1861, the Ottoman Empire ended slavery in 1882 and China in 1906. In the next century, Nazi Germany and communist states re-introduced slavery on a massive scale, but they were also the two systems that were most decisively defeated, militarily and ideologically, during the twentieth century. The long arc bends towards emancipation. Slavery has been most persistent in the Arab world, but even there, the last states abolished slavery after the Second World War. Oman abolished slavery in 1970 and Mauritania in 1981, even though it was not criminalized there until 2007. There can hardly be a stronger example of human progress than the fact that slavery, which existed in almost all countries as late as 1800, is now formally banned everywhere. But this does not mean that slavery is not still practised. Millions still suffer from forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking and forced marriages. Sometimes bans are not enforced by governments, and sometimes it takes place in the informal sector where governments are not able to combat it. The 2014 Global Slavery Index from the Walk Free Foundation estimates that more than thirty-five million people live in modern slavery. The worst offenders are Mauritania and Uzbekistan, where around four per cent of the population lives in some kind of slavery. Islamist terrorist groups like IS and Boko Har...

Today, we don’t have to win the legal battle; there’s a law against it in every country. We don’t have to win the economic argument; no economy is dependent on slavery (unlike in the 19th century, when whole industries could have collapsed). And we don’t have to win the moral argument; no one is trying to justify it any more.12

In the modern era this battle was waged against the royal absolutism of the Stuarts in Britain, the Bourbons in France and the Habsburgs on various European thrones. In the seventeenth century, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke presented a principled case that monarchs don’t have a natural right to rule, and that their right to govern was conditional on them protecting individuals’ rights to life, liberty and property. If they did not respect those rights, the people had the right to dispose of their rulers. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 were important milestones, when rulers were replaced by governments that were limited by individual rights and parliamentary control.

By 1950, the share of the world population living in democracies had increased from zero to thirty-one per cent, and by 2000, increased to fifty-eight per cent, according to Freedom House, the civil liberties watchdog. Today, even dictators have to pay lip service to democracy and hold staged elections.

Democracy did not win out everywhere. In China, hundreds of pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen Square were killed on the same day the Poles crushed communism at the voting booths.

In 1959 the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset made the case that one important factor that contributes to democratization is increased wealth. He argued that development consolidates democracy, since it increases levels of education and literacy, reduces poverty and builds a middle class. This rising middle class gives energy to civil society and demands certain freedoms.

We must also remember that just because many people vote for a song it doesn’t mean it’s the best one. Governments with majority support can also oppress people. If a population holds deeply anti-liberal views, empowering them might result in more oppression, rather than less. Eighty-eight per cent of Egyptians favour the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion, and sixty per cent of Afghans think that relatives are entitled to kill a woman who engages in premarital sex or adultery.17 What use is democracy in a country where the majority opinion is brutally oppressive?

Even though we still have a few classical totalitarian governments in our world, which try to control every aspect of people’s lives, such as in North Korea, they are much rarer now. With a more literate population that knows how people in other countries live, this requires a form of oppression that is too brutal to be practicable, so most dictatorships have given their citizens more freedom in their everyday lives in the last few decades. China is still a dictatorship that treats its critics harshly, but there is no comparison to Mao’s China, where people belonged to a government work unit that decided what they could do with their lives and even who they could marry or divorce. Back then, even your choice of clothing could get you in trouble with the government. The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labour camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to all men of all nations and races. Charles Darwin1

Empathy requires contemplation. And the first arguments for tolerance came from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, who wrote in 1689 that ‘neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.’4

Additional factors behind increased tolerance are open markets and rising affluence. As Voltaire pointed out, at the Royal Exchange in London the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian transacted with and trusted each other and each gave the name infidel only to the bankrupts. Adam Smith and the classical economists showed that the economy does not have to be a zero-sum game. If all transactions are voluntary, no deal is ever made unless both sides believe they will benefit. In a commercial transaction, foreigners and ethnic and religious minorities are not necessarily our enemies, since we do not have to fight them or discriminate against them to protect ourselves.

The political scientist Ronald Inglehart concludes something similar from his decades of research into changing global values: Individuals under high stress have a need for rigid, predictable rules. They need to be sure of what is going to happen because they are in danger – their margin for error is slender and they need maximum predictability. Postmaterialists embody the opposite outlook: raised under conditions of relative security, they can tolerate more ambiguity; they are less likely to need the security of absolute rigid rules that religious sanctions provide. The psychological costs of deviating from whatever norms one grew up with are harder to bear if a person is under stress than if a person feels secure.9

In the mid-eighteenth century the Western world experienced a reading explosion, and people began to read novels, with the story unfolding in a character’s own words, so that the reader got to hear her side of the story, and understand her thoughts, emotions, suffering and joy. Bestsellers by Rousseau and Samuel Richardson had female protagonists and male readers everywhere began to imagine what a woman’s life was like, from the joy of love to the horrors of arranged marriages. Later on, Charles Dickens explained what the British orphanage and workhouse looked like from the perspective of children, Herman Melville told the reader what it was like for a sailor to be flogged and Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced many to confront the human realities of slavery. It may be that novels made it easier for people to put themselves in other people’s shoes and empathize with them even if they belonged to another gender, class or ethnicity, and as a consequence people became more sympathetic to others.

A similar development took place on the other side of the Atlantic. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, regarding female suffrage, was being hotly debated in the summer of 1920. Thirty-six of the states had to ratify it to make it law, but only thirty-five had done so. A special session in Tennessee was the last hope. During the voting session, the vote was at 48-48, when the twenty-four-year-old Harry T. Burn cast the decisive vote. He had made it clear in advance that he opposed reform. But just ahead of the vote, he got a letter from his mother, urging him to vote in favour. And so he did, and thus – by a whisker – female suffrage came to America.

Every country has its own heroes of female emancipation, some unlikelier than others. Austrian-Ukrainian Beate Sirota moved with her parents to Japan in 1929 when she was six. Ten years later she was sent to college in California, and because of the war she lost contact with her parents. She went back to occupied Japan after the peace as a translator for the US Army, mostly in order to reconnect with her family. One of the US Army’s first tasks was to draw up an entirely new constitution in just seven days and Sirota was enlisted to assist. Since she was the only woman on the subcommittee on civil rights, her supervisor thought that she could write the section on women’s rights.

The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people – especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty – who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well. Julian Simon1

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.2

What was needed was to reduce the supply and the demand. That came in the nineteenth century in the form of rising wages, universal education and technological change. Rising wages meant that parents were not as dependent on their children’s labour as they used to be. At the same time routine jobs in industry were mechanized. This resulted in a reduced demand for children who could perform simple tasks, and an increased demand for skilled adults.

These are not just fantastic numbers in their own right, but they also say something interesting about child labour itself. It seems to suggest that parents put their children to work not to maximize income, but because they have no alternative. Rapidly increasing rice exports in the 1990s meant that the value of Vietnamese children’s potential work increased, so if parents simply wanted more resources, they would have put their children to work. Instead, the number of child labourers declined by several million in just a few years. This indicates that children only work because their families cannot afford to raise them without help. Parents will remove their children from work as soon as they no longer risk starvation, even where child wages are increasing.

Since then, humanity has experienced a revolution in living standards. We have now almost completely solved the problem of hunger and sanitation, which has helped to improve health and more than double life expectancy. In contrast to what many feared, this resulted in smaller families, more literate children and the eradication of extreme poverty. The rising middle class, anticipating longer lives for their children, began to abandon violence as a way of solving private and political conflicts, and it began to pay off to invest in the future. The environment had previously been a low priority because of the daily struggle for survival, but as our lives improved, we began to address the wider world. Wealth and knowledge contributed to Enlightenment ideals and to the advent of democracy and human rights, including rights for women, and for ethnic minorities. This in turn has made it possible for more people to contribute to our stock of knowledge and wealth, making it increasingly likely that the future will be even better. Humanity has climbed the development ladder. Every major breakthrough has facilitated the next one, but has also reinforced the gains we have already made. Literacy has increased wealth, and that new wealth has also made it possible to extend literacy further. Better access to food and health care has made it possible to work more, so that we can ensure even better nutrition and even better health.

Regression analyses suggest that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and increasing social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world, as the human development model suggests.14

Now we know more than ever, we are more literate than ever, and we can find almost anything we are interested in, in just a few seconds. Soon every person in almost every country will have a smartphone or a computer with a connection to almost anyone else on the planet. Considering what humanity has been able to accomplish when only a fraction of us had access to a fraction of that knowledge, and could collaborate with only the people we met and knew of, it is easy to predict that a world without such limitations will unleash incredible creativity.