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October 21 - November 3, 2019
the world. I call tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government the “four horsemen of the optimist.”I When all four are in place, countries can improve both the human condition and the state of nature. When the four horsemen don’t all ride together, people and the environment suffer.
Malthusian has become one of those words that function simultaneously as a label for an argument, a dismissal of it, and an insult toward the person advancing it.I This adjective has come to signify unwarranted and underinformed pessimism about the future. In
this also required many other kinds of innovations including joint-stock companies, patents and other types of intellectual property, and the diffusion throughout society of scientific and technical knowledge that had previously largely been reserved for elites—but without them there would have been nothing that merited the term revolution. The title of William Rosen’s book about the history of steam power is apt; it was The Most Powerful Idea in the World.
Luckily for the British, free trade also exposed the superiority of their manufacturing and mining industries. England became a powerhouse in global trade, and its economy grew and diversified rapidly.III
“as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse,” events were showing just how durably wrong that statement was.IV Capital was accumulating and economies were growing as never before in human history, but instead of growing worse, workers’ situations were also improving as never before.V
England’s cities and towns had dense populations, poor sanitation, and many unhealthy practices long before they were dotted with steam-powered factories. Available evidence suggests that cities in many ways became more healthy, not less, as the Industrial Era advanced. This is because while cities lend themselves to the spread of many diseases, they also lend themselves to epidemiology—the study of disease—and to effective interventions.
its home in the Ganges River delta two
Eventually, they could afford them. In 1935, the English social reformer B. Seebohm Rowntree found the working classes in York were eating much the same diets as their employers, a huge change from what he had found during a similar 1899 survey.
the internal combustion engine, electrical power, and indoor plumbing.
This sounds inefficient, but it wasn’t. An
in Texas’s Hill Country the typical well was located so far from the house that bringing water required more than five hundred hours of labor and 1,750 miles of walking each year.IX
we and our tamed animals now represent 97 percent of the earth’s mammalian biomass.
Marx thought workers’ situations would be bad even if they had high wages because the prices they would have to pay for things would be even higher. He thought, in other words, that their real wages would not increase. As Clark’s graph shows, this was not at all what happened.
One way to look at the moral failures of this era is to see that they’re perversions of the desire to produce more. The great mistakes we made were to force people to become part of the machinery of production (slavery and child labor), to take their land and resources and use them as inputs (colonialism), to use animals as inputs so wantonly that we wiped them out or nearly did, and to pay too little attention to the terrible pollution generated as a side effect of industrial production.
“if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in an 1864 letter.
It took the American Civil War—still by far the bloodiest in the country’s history—to end slavery.
“The pretext upon which the Spanish invaded each of these provinces and proceeded to massacre the people and destroy their lands… was purely and simply that they were making good the claim of the Spanish Crown to the territories in question.… Whenever the natives did not drop everything and rush to recognize publicly the truth of the irrational and illogical claims that were made… they were dubbed outlaws and held to be in rebellion against His Majesty.… Everybody involved in the administration of the New World was blind to the simple truth enshrined in the first principles of law and
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“The most modern pretense for colonial conquest is condensed in the slogan ‘raw materials.’ Hitler and Mussolini tried to justify their plans by pointing out that the natural resources of the earth weren’t fairly distributed. As have-nots they were eager to get their fair share from those nations which had more than they should have had.”
“Industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during [the] period [1851–60].” Among
As we increased our use of steam, electricity, and internal combustion, we relied less on the muscle power of animals. But we still ate them and turned their bodies into products. During the Industrial Era a clear distinction emerged: the animals we domesticated increased greatly in number and range, while many of the ones we hunted withered.
Before humans with harpoons appeared, whales had faced few predators for 50 million years. Since these cetaceans had little to fear, many of them evolved to become massive, slow swimmers.V They also became abundant throughout the world’s oceans.
According to Jevons, this was because we’d use the greater efficiency not to get the same amount of the desired output (steam power) while using less of the resource (coal), but instead to get more and more of the output, thereby using more of the resource in total. As steam engines became more efficient—as they were able to supply the same amount of power while using less coal—more uses would be found for them. Steam
Rather than making a dry point about economic growth rates, Marshall was making a deep statement about human nature: we want more. We do not get satisfied at any level of affluence or consumption. Instead, even as we grow comparatively rich, we continue to want more.
Earthrise helped us see that the human condition is inseparable from the state of the planet that we all live on.
A graph of US GDP and energy consumption from 1800 to 1970—almost the entire period between the start of the Industrial Revolution and Earth Day—shows that the two went up essentially in lockstep for well over 150 years:
The American economy is now experiencing broad and often deep absolute dematerialization.
want to show that the CRIB strategies born around Earth Day and promoted since then for reducing our planetary footprint—consume less, recycle, impose limits, and go back to the land—have not been important contributors to the dematerialization we’ve seen.
But we don’t make them the same way we used to. We now make them using fewer resources. To
but my intuition is that if recycling didn’t exist, our total consumption of resources such as aluminum, copper, iron, and steel would be declining even more quickly.
First, small-scale farming is less efficient in its use of resources than massive, industrialized, mechanized agriculture. To get the same harvest, homesteaders use more land, water, and fertilizer than do “factory farmers.” Farms
Second, rural life is less environmentally friendly than urban or suburban dwelling.
The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped.
cows. In 1950 we got 117 billion pounds of milk from 22 million cows. In 2015 we got 209 billion pounds from just 9 million animals. The average milk cow’s productivity thus improved by over 330 percent during that time.
2014 Steve Cichon, a “writer, historian, and retired radio newsman in Buffalo, NY,” paid $3 for a large stack of front sections of the Buffalo News newspaper from the early months of 1991. On the back page of the Saturday, February 16, issue was an ad from the electronics retailer Radio Shack. Cichon noticed something striking about the ad: “There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page.… 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.”
We do want more beverage options, but we don’t want to keep using more aluminum in drink cans. We want to communicate and compute and listen to music, but we don’t want an arsenal of gadgets; we’re happy with a single smartphone. As our population increases, we want more food, but we don’t have any desire to consume more fertilizer or use more land for crops.
When fracking made natural gas much cheaper, total demand for coal in the United States went down even though its price decreased.II
Materials cost money that companies locked in competition would rather not spend. The
Finally, some materials get replaced by nothing at all. When a telephone, camcorder, and tape recorder are separate devices, three total microphones are needed. When they all collapse into a smartphone, only one microphone is necessary. That
Innovation is not steady and predictable like the orbit of the Moon or the accumulation of interest on a certificate of deposit. It’s instead inherently jumpy, uneven, and random. It’s also combinatorial, as Erik Brynjolfsson and I discussed in our
It’s not easy to foresee when or where powerful new combinations are going to appear, or who’s going to come up
As the Second Machine Age progresses, dematerialization accelerates.
“the organization of knowledge for the achievement of practical purposes.”
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world. Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?), what they build with and what they build, their medicine—and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them.”
For our purposes, capitalism is a way to come up with goods and services and get them to people.
Absence of central planning, control, and price setting. The government does not decide what goods and services are needed by people, or which companies should be allowed to produce them.
Some important “market failures” need to be corrected by government action.
The second thing I want to point out is that all of today’s rich countries are capitalist,
Today’s poorer countries, in sharp contrast,
Poorer countries don’t lack laws; they often have extensive legal codes. What’s in short supply is justice for all. Officials are corrupt; the elite get special treatment and rarely lose in court; police, regulators, and inspectors can expect bribes; and contested markets, property rights, and voluntary exchange suffer in countless other ways. It’s not that these abuses don’t occur in rich countries, but they occur much, much less often.
the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”
