nearly all of the astonishing productivity gains of the last century trace back to the work of a single man, Norman Borlaug, perhaps the best argument for the humanitarian virtue of America’s imperial century. Born to Iowa family farmers in 1914, he went to state school, found work at DuPont, and then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a new collection of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are now credited with saving the lives of a billion people worldwide. Of course, if those gains were a onetime boost—engineered, in large part, by a single man—how
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