More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next

by Andrew McAfee

Many countries that look inclusive on paper are actually extractive in practice. As Acemoglu and Robinson point out, the United States and many Latin American countries have similar constitutions and written laws, but throughout parts of Latin America formal laws don’t mean much because courts are weak or biased, bureaucracies are vast and unresponsive, and corruption is widespread. As a result, only the elites have a real chance at success. These

New heavy-duty trucks and buses are roughly 99 percent cleaner than 1970 models.”

“A car today emits less pollution traveling at full speed than a parked car did from leaks in 1970.”

Automakers as a group showed little enthusiasm for increasing fuel efficiency when no unmet mandate was in place.

Then why the huge sustained hunt? Alfred Berzin, a Russian scientist who worked on Soviet whaling ships, offered in his memoir a clear, convincing, and heartbreaking reason: “The plan—at any price!”

In The Truth About Soviet Whaling: A Memoir, Berzin documented how the USSR’s extensive and unresponsive economic planning bureaucracy doomed so many whales.

Ishokov returned an abominable, criminal, and chilling response that should be carved upon the gravestone of the Soviet economic system: ‘These descendants will not be the ones to fire me from my job.’ ”

Peter Diamandis observed in 2012, “Right now, a Maasai warrior on a mobile phone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile communications than the president did twenty-five years ago. If he’s on a smartphone using Google, he has access to more information than the US president did just fifteen years ago.”

During the ceremony the Russian-made felt pen Gorbachev tried to use didn’t work, so he borrowed a fountain pen from CNN president Tom Johnson.

When introducing these reforms, Singh paraphrased Victor Hugo by stating, “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” That idea was for India to become more capitalist.

tech progress and capitalism are natural partners, combining the fuel of interest with the fire of genius.

So a broad decline in authoritarianism and growth in democracy around the world is a strong sign that governments are becoming more responsive.

The recent authoritarian wave seems contrary to that

“Much as we might regret partial setbacks to liberal democracy in Hungary, population 10 million, developments there pale in significance when compared with democratic progress in Indonesia, population 261 million.… Witness South Korea, which impeached a president earlier this year but seems no worse for the wear. Or Brazil, dealing with similar political problems in an ugly yet still constitutional manner. Or India, where a strongman leader is nonetheless checked in some of his ambitions by a balance-of-powers system.… Democracy is fragile and can never be taken for granted. But declarations about democracy’s demise, or even its significant decline, go too far.”

The cumulative changes are huge. As Pinker writes, “Young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s.”

Or, as the playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1928 in The Threepenny Opera, “First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.”

Three main things, which we’ll examine in the next three chapters. First, they’ve contributed to widespread improvement in both the human condition and the state of nature. Second, they’ve contributed to concentration of economic activity: more and more output coming from a smaller and smaller number of counties, farms, and factories, and more and more gains going to fewer and fewer companies and people. Third, they’ve helped create increasing disconnection among people and declines in social capital.

The evidence presented in Our World in Data and in books like Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, Bjørn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness shows clearly that most of the things we should care about are getting better. Not

We should document the improvements because they tell us something critically important: what we’re doing is working and therefore we should keep doing it instead of contemplating huge course changes. As

In an essay for the online magazine Aeon, however, Stewart Brand explained how implausible this is: “If all [currently threatened species] went extinct in the next few centuries, and the rate of extinction that killed them kept right on for hundreds or thousands of years more, then we might be at the beginning of a human-caused Sixth Mass Extinction.”

years) and appear to have slowed down in recent decades; for example, no marine creatures have been recorded as extinct in the past fifty years.

Third, we humans have created a great many new species around the world. We do this both deliberately by crossbreeding, as with the cattle-bison hybrid “beefalo,” and inadvertently.

Brand argues, though, that the biggest threat to animal species isn’t absolute extinction, but instead huge declines in population size due to overhunting and habitat loss. Here,

across the planet as a whole we have, as an international research team concluded in 2015, experienced a “recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass.” For the first time since the start of the Industrial Era, our planet is getting greener, not browner.

The major contributors to global warming thus include the most fundamental things that we people do—make things, shelter ourselves and keep warm, get from place to place, and eat—all around the world.

The United States has reduced its total emissions in recent years because of the huge rise in fracking discussed in chapter 7. Burning natural gas releases much less CO2 (per unit of energy) than does burning coal, so as the fracking revolution led America to shift from coal to gas for generating electricity, total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions decreased.

It’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. The corollary might be that ignorance is not examining the results of what’s being done. Over and over, when we look at the evidence, we see that the four horsemen are improving our world.

It’s pretty well known that around the world societies are urbanizing; people are leaving the countryside and moving to cities. What’s much less well-known is that this process might be nearly complete.

Dijkstra and his colleagues found that by 2015 the world was already 84 percent urbanized, and that contrary to previous estimates Asia, Africa, and Oceania were already more urbanized than both North America and Europe. The

whereas earlier estimates had relied on countries’ own lists of their cities. These lists used incompatible definitions and were often incomplete.

First agriculture, then manufacturing, hit “peak jobs,” followed by a decline in total employment even as the industries themselves grew.

Capitalism and tech progress have another fundamental effect. They don’t just lead to fewer people working on farms and in factories; they also lead to fewer farms and factories in total.

“The data show sharp increases in concentration across the whole US economy in the last 30 years, with the growth generally stronger in the second half of the sample.… Within the 9 EU countries where comprehensive data is available, sales concentration has risen since 2000. This remains true when adding other non-EU OECD countries such as Australia, Japan and Switzerland.”

His work suggests that industrial concentration is rising globally not because of a decline in capitalism and tech progress, but rather because of an increase in them. Recent

companies within the same industry have become more dissimilar from one another. In particular, differences have increased in productivity and in pay. A few companies have become much more productive and have started paying much higher salaries (two developments that are closely related), while the rest have seen near-stagnant productivity and pay. The

Many companies are willing to spend money on the new technology, but surprisingly few are ready, willing, or able to make the changes required to fully exploit it.

Van Reenen and others believe that the main causes are structural. The two tectonic forces of globalized capitalism and tech progress are creating more winner-take-all or winner-take-most industries characterized by a few superstar companies and many zombies. People associated with the superstars see their wealth and pay grow quickly, while those who work in or around the zombies see their fortunes stagnate. At the heart of this explanation are large differences among companies during this period of great technological upheaval.

available. It seems unlikely to me that labor mobility and unions could be simultaneously on the decline in so many countries, or that employee noncompetes have become globally important.

First, rising inequality itself isn’t the problem; unfairness is.

cause problems. Perceptions also matter a great deal. Scenario 3 has no bad actors, but a lot of people still feel that what’s happening to them isn’t fair.

he argues that suicide is primarily a social phenomenon, rather than one rooted in individuals’ personalities or mental illnesses. Suicides rise as people lose close ties to their extended family, their spouse (through divorce), or their place of work (through unemployment).

“The classic conditions that typically activate and aggravate authoritarians—rendering them more racially, morally, and politically intolerant—tend to be perceived loss of respect for/confidence in/obedience to leaders, authorities and institutions, or perceived value conflict and loss of societal consensus/shared beliefs, and/or erosion of racial/cultural/group identity. This is sometimes expressed as a loss of ‘who we are’/‘our way of life…’

Authoritarianism is triggered by how people feel, at least as much as by economic, political, and social realities.

Once one company shows what’s possible, others use hardware, software, and networks to catch up to the leader. Even if they can’t copy exactly because of intellectual-property restrictions, they can use digital tools to explore other means to the same end.

calls “the capitalist makeover of production.” This makeover doesn’t enslave people, nor does it befoul the earth.

Opposition to genetically modified organisms is fierce in some quarters, but isn’t based on reason or science. This opposition will, one hopes, fade.

Details about these bets—what data they draw on, how quantities are calculated, how payouts will be handled, and so on—are available at the Long Bets website (longbets.org). This site is also where you can sign up for one or more bets if you’re interested, and confident enough that these predictions are wrong. Each bet can be between $50 and $1,000. I’m putting up $100,000 of my own money.

A “revenue-neutral” carbon tax is an interesting variant on the basic idea. Under it, money collected from carbon producers goes not to the government, but directly to people.

“Nobody died from radiation at Three Mile Island or Fukushima,III and fewer than fifty died from Chernobyl in the thirty years since the accident.”

Major automobile companies including Toyota, Ford, BMW, General Motors, and VW have announced plans to stop producing internal combustion engines within the next few decades.