The text below is an excerpt from Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the third volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
And there are doubts from the right, too. Some students of the economy, such as Robert Gordon, Lawrence Summers, Edward Gordon, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McFee, Edmund Phelps, Edward E. Gordon, Jeffrey Sachs, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Tyler Cowen, have argued that countries in the position of the United States, on the frontier of betterment, are facing a slowdown, with a skill shortage, and that technological unemployment will be the result.1 Maybe. The economists would acknowledge that in the past couple of centuries numerous other learned commentators have predicted similar slowdowns—such as the Keynesian economists in the late 1930s and the 1940s, confident in their theory of “stagnationism”—only to find their predictions once again falsified by the continuing Great Enrichment.2 The classical economists of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, Marx included, expected landlords, or in Marx’s case capitalists, to engorge the national product. In a cartoon cover of the National Review by Thomas Reis, a supercool little Karl Marx with a Starbucks coffee in his hand and an MP3 player in his ear sports a T-shirt inscribed, “Still Wrong.”3 Right.
Marx supposed that wages would fall and yet profits would also fall and yet technological betterments would also happen. Such an accounting, the left-Keynesian and eventually Maoist economist Joan Robinson used to point out, is impossible. At least one, the wages or the profits, has to rise if technological betterment is happening, as it so plainly did. In the event, what rose were wages on raw labor and the return to human capital, owned by the wage-earners, not the bosses. The return to physical capital was higher than a riskless return on British or American government bonds, in order to compensate for the risk in holding the capital (such as being made obsolete by betterment—think of your computer, obsolete in four years). But the return on physical capital was anyway held down, I just noted, by competition among the proliferating capitalists, to its level of 10 percent. Imagine if real wages had experienced a similar history of stagnation since 1800. Instead they increased by a factor of twenty or thirty or one hundred.
Startlingly, the learned economists from the right of politics join their colleagues from the left in predicting that machines will cause low wages. They haven’t yet. But soon. Tyler Cowen, for example, an economist I admire, spends many pages of his book Average Is Over (2013) describing breathlessly “the increasing productivity of intelligent machines,” such as those used for dating services. Your fate is determined, he says, by how you answer the technological-unemployment question: “Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? . . . This is the wave that will lift or that will dump you.”4 He concedes that “it was true in the great Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and it is true now: machines do not put us all out of work, as eventually machines will create jobs.”5 I italicize the words amazing in an economist of Cowen’s ability. Not “all” jobs, he concedes. Well, actually, machines have put no one out of work who can move to another job, and on balance not anyway the bulk of workers, as you can see in the absence, 1848 to the present, of a rising reserve army of unemployed. The other italicized locution, “create jobs,” is regularly a sign of a slot theory of labor supply and demand, which no economist since J. R. Hicks published The Theory of Wages in 1932 has believed. A job is a voluntary deal between a worker and a boss. It is the opportunity, not the job, that is “created” by a newly invented machine. Government can “create jobs” only by taxing some deal to subsidize another, with no net gain unless the government is wiser about trading opportunities than people in trade.
On the preceding page Cowen had characterized some things as “scarce” (high-quality labor with unique skills, for example) and others as “not scarce” (unskilled labor). It is a meaningless locution in economics. It ‘s like saying that gold is scarce but water is not. No: they have a relative price, that is all. Both are scarce, in the sense that neither is free of opportunity cost, and it is meaningless to compare them, or apples and oranges, by the ounce, something Cowen teaches his students in Economics 1 during the third week of the course. And in any case the economics and the history says that in the long run unskilled and skilled people are substitutes. The unskilled benefit as much—more when the standard of genuine comfort is applied to rich and poor. Remember Robert Frost choosing at the margin between teaching and farming, which keeps the wage in each occupation within hailing distance of the other. And if goods and services are provided by machines we will still have “jobs,” that is, ways of spending our time that other people will pay for—deciding what to buy, for example, or who to vote for or what is to be done or what machines to invent next, which cannot in its nature be eliminated by mechanization.
Later Cowen gives a chart of labor’s income as a share of the total, showing an alarming fall since the 1970s. “If there is one picture that sums up the dilemma of our contemporary economy, it that one.”6 But the chart is what we used to call a Time-magazine chart—it cuts off the top and bottom in order to exaggerate a relatively slight change. How alarming is the decline? It is a decline in Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from 63 percent to 61 percent—a decline of labor’s share by two percentage points of national income. On this Cowen erects his terrifying case that “average is over.”
Something is driving intelligent economists out of their economic minds. Perhaps it is the short run, the first act. Before they have well lost their minds, some of them acknowledge what has been true of every economy since the beginning, that “jobs”—that is, opportunities for mutually advantageous exchange—adjust to the skills available. Better tools or better skills make for higher income in total. But if not, the economy finds something to do with the badly skilled. The principle is called comparative advantage, one of the few nonobvious propositions in economics.
Of course, if one raises wages artificially, by union or by statute, unemployment will result. The argument one hears from, say, Paul Krugman—that raising wages is good for the company because workers will work harder as a result—seems implausible, considering that the company in such a case would already have raised wages, for its own good. And working harder worsens the conditions of work. Both the company and the workers suffer. Cowen notes that one can observe “labor market troubles of the young” “in many countries.”7 Yes, one observes such troubles in Egypt and South Africa even more than in France and the United States, which suggests that laws protecting the employment of favored classes (old people, for instance, or government-approved union members, often grotesquely favored in poor countries), not the advanced machine tools of advanced economies, imitated in poor countries, are what is causing the troubles.
Joel Mokyr, a deep student of the history of technology, has recently offered some persuasive Whiggish assurances on the matter of slowdown, observing that by now the sciences behind biology and computers and the study of materials promise gigantic enrichment.8 And Patrizio Pagano and Massimo Sbracia argue that failures of previous stagnationisms—proposed after every major recession, they observe—failed not so much in not anticipating wholly new technology as in not grasping the further rewards of existing technology, such as, now, computers.9 As Macaulay asked in 1830, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but betterment behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”10 He continued:
If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty million, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, many people would think us insane.11
Whiggish and bourgeois and progress-minded and vulgarly pro-betterment though Macaulay was, he was in his prediction exactly right, even as to the British population in 1930. If one includes the recently separated Republic of Ireland, he was off by less than 2 percent.
And even the pessimistic, anti-Whiggish economists—”gloomsters,” the headline writers call them—would not deny that we have before us fifty or a hundred years in which now middling and poor countries such as South Africa and Brazil and Haiti and Bangladesh will catch up to what is already, in the rich countries, a stunningly successful level of average real income. Edward Phelps, among the pessimists, believes that many rich countries lack dynamism.12 But nowadays China and India, making up 37 percent of world population, have become more free-market than they once were, and therefore are quickly catching up, growing with notable dynamism at upward of 7 to 12 percent per person per year. All the economists who have looked into the evidence agree that the average real income per person in the world is rising faster than ever before.13 The result will be a gigantic increase in the number of scientists, designers, writers, musicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, and ordinary businesspeople devising betterments which spill over to the now rich countries allegedly lacking in dynamism. Unless one believes in mercantilist/business-school fashion that a country must “compete” to prosper from world betterment, even the leaky boats of the Phelpsian undynamic countries will rise.
To appreciate what will happen in the world’s economy over the next fifty or a hundred years it’s a good idea to pause to learn the “Rule of 72.” The rule is that something (such as income) growing at 1 percent per year will double in seventy-two years. The fact is not obvious without calculation. It just happens to be true. You can confirm it by taking out your calculator and multiplying 1.01 by itself seventy-two times. It follows that if the something grows twice as fast, at 2 percent instead of 1 percent, that something will double, of course, in half the time, thirty-six years—as a runner going twice as fast will arrive at the mile marker in half the time. Similarly, something growing at 3 percent a year will double in a third of the time, or twenty-four years. And so forth. The general formula, then, says something growing at N percent per year doubles in 72/N years. The approximation gets less exact for higher growth rates—clearly something growing at 72 percent per year won’t double in a year—but for the growth rates we’re considering, it’s accurate enough.14
Consider some Rule-of-72 calculations. At 7 percent per year a real income will double in 72 divided by 7 years, or a little over 10 years; at 12 percent it will double in about 6 years. Even at the modest 4 percent per year per person that the World Bank implausibly reckons China will experience out to 2030 the result will be a populace almost twice as rich.15 The specialists on China’s economy Dwight Perkins and Thomas Rawski (2008) reckon a 6 to 8 percent annual growth out to 2025, by which time the average Chinese person will have a 1960s-U.S. standard of living.
China and India during their socialist experiments of the 1950s through the 1970s were so badly managed that there was a great deal of ground to be made up merely by letting people open shops and factories where and when they wanted to, without approval from the authorities. As Perkins pointed out in 1995, “When China stopped suppressing such activity, . . . shops, restaurants and many other service units popped up everywhere . . . [because] Chinese . . . had not forgotten how to trade or run a small business.”16 No genetic argument can be put forward that implies that Chinese or Indians or Africans or Latin Americans should do worse than Europeans permanently. The environmental limit can reasonably be expected to be overcome by serious environmentalists implementing serious technologies, such as carbon capture and nuclear power (India in 2014 bought ten nuclear reactors from Russia). No limit to fast world growth of per-person income is close at hand—not in your lifetime, or even that of your great-grandchildren. Then, in the year 2100, with everyone pretty rich, and hundreds of times more scientists and entrepreneurs working on improvements in solar power and methane burning, we can reconsider the limits to growth.
§
The environmental limit, which worries even the middle of the political spectrum, is often inferred from a use of merely mathematical arguments, which are identically true but scientifically irrelevant. “After all,” it is said, “nothing can grow forever” when the practical limit is scores of times larger than the present level. The actual carrying capacity of the earth, as one can judge from such densely populated place as Holland or Java, is on the order of a hundred billion people, not the ten or eleven billion at which it will soon peak and then start falling in response to rising per-person incomes. “After all, resources are finite,” the doubters continue, when what is a “resource,” as Julian Simon showed, is ever changing in response to human ingenuity.17 Bauxite ore was once useless dirt, but became valuable for making aluminum. Rare earths were not economically rare until they came to be used for computer batteries. Valuable whale oil became almost useless (and saved the whales) compared with the newly exploited oil from the ground. Black rock from the ground called “coal” was rediscovered many centuries ago in Europe and known two thousand years earlier in China to be useful for heating houses and making glass. Underground water inaccessible with old drilling techniques suddenly became minable, and its large if limited amount is soon to be supplemented, as it already is in some arid places, by ingenuity in finding ways to desalinate sea water cheaply, powered as in Western Australia by wind and sun. The man in the street thinks that countries are rich because of “resources,” in which case Japan and Hong Kong would be poor and the Russian Federation and the Democratic Republic of te Congo rich. In a modern economy in which people on farms are 2 percent of population, presently used resources earn 5 percent or less of national income, and do not determine much of its level.
The environmental limit looks to be solved by the ingenuity that caused the Great Enrichment in the first place. It will not be solved by some of the stranger anti-economic suggestions, such as Eating Local. As Robert Wuetherick asks, “What will be next? 100-mile-sourced medicines? 100-mile-sourced ideas? 100-mile-sourced economic history?”18 Some of the more unreasonable environmentalists in this line have campaigned against genetically modified bananas delivering vitamin A, an innovation that could save seven hundred thousand children’s lives each year and prevent three hundred thousand cases of blindness.19
Yet reasonable environmentalists have for decades been solving problems such as smog caused by soft coal for heating, or intelligence-reducing emissions from cars using lead-enhanced fuels, and will continue their virtuous labors with the hearty approval of us economists and calculators. After all, the goal is not growth-regardless, in the style of the North Carolina legislature in 2014 requiring science to be revised to make rising ocean levels appear less threatening or the governor of Florida issuing instructions that the phrase “global warming” be banished from official documents. The goal is ethical trade-tested betterment, such as making poor people rich, which has happened, or reducing inequality in essentials, which has also happened. Making people dangerously ill with bad air (or for that matter denying children life-saving genetically modified crops) is not ethical, or bettering. Nor is it something “the corporations” want. Nike and Toyota, unlike some governments with their local monopoly of violence, do not want to sicken or kill us.
The rich countries decided to take seriously the threat to the ozone layer from air-conditioning fluid and hair spray (hair spray!), led by Margaret Thatcher the Conservative British prime minister (and a big user of hair spray) , and now the ozone gaps at the poles are getting smaller. Waterways, which were open sewers until the development of effective waste treatment at the end of the nineteenth century, are in rich countries largely cleaned up.20 Levels of particulate matter from burning coal for house heating in American cities in the 1930s and 1940s—American income per head then was as I have noted about the same as Brazilian income now—were comparable to those in present-day poor countries, and fell by the late twentieth century to an eighth of their previous level. In 1912–1913 a poor and therefore smoky Chicago was smothered in suspended particulates 50 percent higher than those in 58 poor Chinese cities in 1980–1993.21 Since the use of soft coal in British cities was banned in 1954 and then more rigorously in 1968, the Royal Courts of Justice in now-rich London have been scrubbed to return to their original white stone facing. Little but rich Denmark spends a good deal of its riches on avoiding carbon-based fuel and is prominent, for example, in the world market in windmills.22 As the libertarian columnist at the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman, reported: “Since 1980, carbon monoxide pollution in America has been cut by 83 percent, lead by 91 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 78 percent. But total economic output per person, adjusted for inflation, has risen by 77 percent. We’ve gotten greener and healthier as we’ve gotten richer.”23 If we care about the environment, then, let us become prudently and temperately rich. Then we can do some good.
What, then, about the polluting poor countries? Rising real income per person at such heady rates as 6 or 12 percent per year, with the level quadrupling in a generation, is understandably popular with ordinary Chinese and Indian people. Yet when their incomes went up, the formerly poor, such as the Danes and the Australians and the British, came to value the environment more. Sometimes, true, they have valued it irrationally, as for example by stopping nuclear power, which has made dirty old coal the fastest growing source of energy worldwide.24 Yet China, bettering but still very poor, has now a vigorous environmental movement—a movement against coal, not against nuclear power—with numerous riots substituting for democracy. In a nervous response to the movement, and maybe even because it is good for people, the Chinese government in January 2014 started requiring fifteen thousand factories to report their air and water pollution in real time, and to release the results to the public.25 If they actually do so (don’t hold your breath; and when visiting Beijing, do), the Chinese standard of transparency in pollution control will be higher than in the United States. Also in 2014 China signed an agreement with the United States to work seriously on restraining the release of atmospheric carbon. China is now at a stage of industrialization similar to England’s in the 1870s or the United States’s in the 1890s, during which sulfur-laden coal smoke rising from Birmingham, Warwickshire or from Birmingham, Alabama was viewed not an occasion for rioting but as a good sign. In the 1940s, when my grandparents would drive to Chicago around the southern edge of Lake Michigan, they would note with pleasure the smoke rising from US Steel in Gary, Indiana—an improvement, they implied, over the shuttered mills of the 1930s.
Oil supply, too, is no long-term limit, as the failures of limits-to-growth predictions from the 1960s to the present have shown, and as fracked gas in Pennsylvania and oil sands in Alberta and deep discoveries in the Falklands/Malvinas seas and in the Australian outback are showing again, whenever the price of oil rises. The rhetorical triumph of fossil fuel over nuclear power has, to be sure, worsened global warming. But this too can be overcome (some reasonable people have argued) by realizing that even Chernobyl, incompetently managed by the USSR, resulted in few fatalities (a onetime event of fifty-six direct fatalities and a few thousand shortened lives, it is claimed, which is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the coal-caused deaths in the same region yearly). Fukushima resulted in still fewer fatalities, and Three Mile Island, unless you believe conspiracy theories on the left, none. We can return to an improved nuclear power—or, if you are optimistic, and understandably resistant to the evidence about nuclear power, and determined to stay spooked about the One Big Disaster, which French nuclear engineering has obviated—you can wait for clean coal, on which Southern Illinois University is feverishly working.26 The present engineering is clear. France, with 80 percent nuclear power for its electricity, the cheapest in Europe, has one-fifth the carbon pollution of neighboring, coal-fed-if-green-obsessed Germany. In any case, however you come down on nuclear power, on what principle is it that, when we see nothing but betterment behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
Consider more Rule-of-72 calculations: If we take 9 percent as the combined annual per-person growth rate in the 37 percent of world population living in China and India, the rest of the world could have literally zero growth per person and yet the world’s average growth per year of real income per person would be 0.37 × 9, or 3.3 percent, which is a little faster even than during the great postwar boom of 1950–1972. If the rest of the world were to grow merely at the subdued rates of 1973–2003 (namely, 1.56 percent per person per year conventionally measured, without allowance for improved quality), the world result, factoring in the Chinese and Indian marvels, would be (if the population share held up) (0.37 × 9.0) + (0.63 × 1.56), or 4.3 percent per year, the highest in history.27 A rather lower sustained growth rate worldwide of, say, 4 percent per year per person would result in a doubling of the material welfare of the world’s average person within a short generation (72/4 = 18 years), with economies of scale in world invention kicking up the rate in addition. In two such generations, just thirty-six years, that would mean a quadrupling, which would raise the average real income in the world to the levels attained in 2012 in the United States, a country that for well over a century has sustained the world’s highest per-person income of any place larger than Norway. Pretty good. And it will be good for solving many if not all of the problems in the environment and in the society.
§
The resulting spiritual change, as I have noted, has been and will be as impressive as the material change. At the level of the purpose of a human life it is the more important outcome. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? The sacred and meaning-giving virtues of hope, faith, and transcendent love for science or baseball or medicine or God are enabled by our riches in our present lives to bulk larger than the profane and practical virtues of prudence and temperance necessary among people living in extreme poverty. True, in our modern times even unworthy uses of our higher income—eating more Fritos, watching more reality TV—are better physically than in ancient times starving in beggary by the West Gate. Look again at falling death rates worldwide. But one would hope that the Great Enrichment would be used for higher purposes.
And, on the most hard-minded criteria, it has been, and will be. Enrichment leads to enrichment, not loss of one’s own soul. The American journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken, no softie, noted in 1917 à propos of Sister Carrie’s good fortune, that “with the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an increased capacity for loving and living.”28 Nor was the University of Iowa economist Frank Knight a softie, yet he too spoke in 1923 about such an increased capacity: “As the standard of living rises, the economic interests of people are transferred more and more out of the sphere of fundamental needs into that of aesthetic and social gratification and pure experimentation.”29 And no blame attaches.
Know also a remarkable likelihood in our future. Begin with the sober scientific fact that sub-Saharan Africa has great genetic diversity, at any rate by the standard of the narrow genetic endowment of the ancestors of the rest of us, the small part of the race of Homo sapiens that left Mother Africa in dribs and drabs after about 70,000 BCE.30 The lower diversity outside Africa comes from what geneticists call the founder effect, that is, the dying out of genetic lines in an isolated small group, such as those that ventured into west Asia and then beyond. The founder effect is merely a consequence of the small samples dribbling out, as against the big sample of the Homo-sapiens folk that stayed put in Africa. Any gene-influenced ability is therefore going to have more African extremes. The naturally tallest people and the naturally shortest people, for example, are in sub-Saharan Africa. The naturally quickest long-distance runners are in East Africa. The best basketball players descend from West Africans. In other words, below the Sahara the top end of the distribution of human abilities—physical and intellectual and artistic—is unusually thick. (Yet even in Africa the genetic variability in the Homo-sapiens race appears to have been thinned repeatedly before the time of the modest emigrations, by population crashes, such as when the super volcano Toba in Sumatra went off, suggestively also around 70,000 BCE.31 It reduced our Homo-sapiens ancestors to a few thousand—a close call.)
The thickness of sub-Saharan abilities at the high end of the distribution is a mere consequence of the mathematics. Greater diversity, which is to say in technical terms, higher variance, means that unusual abilities at both ends of the distribution, high and low, are more common. Exactly how much more depends on technical measures of genetic difference and their expression. The effect could be small or large depending on such measures and on the social relevance of the particular gene expression.
The high end is what matters for high culture. Sub-Saharan Africa, now at last leaning toward liberal democracy, has entered on the blade of the hockey stick, growing since 2001 in per-person real income by over 4 percent per year—doubling that is, every eighteen years. A prominent Nigerian investment manager working in London, Ayo Salami, expects an ideological shift among African leaders in favor of private trading as the generation of the deeply socialist anticolonialists born in the 1940s dies out.32 The 6- to 10-percent growth rate available to poor economies that wholeheartedly adopt liberalism will then do its work and yield educational opportunities for Africans now denied them.
The upshot? Genetic diversity in a rich Africa will yield a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. In a century or so the leading scientists and artists in the world will be black—at any rate if the diversity is as large in gene expression and social relevance as it is in, say, height or running ability. Today a Mozart in Nigeria follows the plow; a Bashō in Mozambique was recruited as a boy soldier; a Tagore in East Africa tends his father’s cattle; a Jane Austen in Congo spends her illiterate days carrying water and washing clothes. “Full many a gem of purest ray serene / The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear.”
§
We should expect during the next hundred years, then, a world spiritual change enabled by much higher real incomes. In fifty-four years at that conservative 4 percent per year, world income per person will rise by a factor of about eight—that is, 700 percent. The figure is not much below the factor of ten and the percentage of 900 by which conventionally measured income averaged over the rich and poor parts of the world has risen in the span of the fully four half-centuries since 1800. The growth rate will probably be higher than such a calculation assumes, when the increasing returns from discoveries shared worldwide is allowed for, and when more and more countries see the Chinese and especially the Indian light of liberty and dignity for the bourgeoisie, first lit in Holland and then in Britain. In fifty years, in other words, if tyrants, robbers, militarists, populists, Maoists, and the less thoughtful among socialists, regulators, end-state egalitarians, Bakuninite anarchists, and environmentalists do not break it, the businesslike blade of the hockey stick will have eliminated the worst of human ignorance and poverty, the malaria-crippled, soldier-raped, zero-schooling lives of the poorest among us. By the middle of our twenty-first century it will have resulted in a big bang of world culture, with sub-Saharan Africa by the early twenty-second century in the lead.
The text above is an excerpt from Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the third volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
Notes
Robert Gordon 2012; Summers 2014; E. E. Gordon; Brynjolfsson and McFee 2014; Phelps 2013; Edward Gordon 2013; Sachs and Kotlikoff 2012; Cowen 2011, 2013.
Fogel 2005.
National Review, May 19, 2014.
Cowen 2013, pp. 4, 6.
Cowen 2013, p.20.
Cowen 2013, p. 39.
Cowen 2013, p. 3.
Mokyr 2013, 2014.
Pagano and Sbracia 2014; compare again Fogel 2005.
Macaulay 1830 (1881), pp. 186, 187.
Macaulay 1830 (1881), p. 185.
Phelps 2013, pp. viii, x, 14, 15, 21, and throughout.
Population shares from Maddison 2007, p. 378.
I realize that a Rule of 69 would be a little more accurate for continuous as against periodic (that is, annual or quarterly) compounding, and that perfectly accurate continuous compounding would involve e = 2.718281. . . . But 72 has lots of integer divisors, is pretty accurate except at very high (for example, 30 percent) interest rates, and is honored by history.
Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2013, p. A14.
Quoted in Brandt, Ma, and Rawski 2014, p. 99.
Simon 1981 (1996).
Wuetherick, personal communication, January 26, 2014.
Independent, June 17, 2014, p. 9.
Troesken 2014.
Barreca, Clay, and Tarr 2014, p. 5, table 1 (p. 37). I can remember my father shoveling coal in the basement of our apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947, and my mother can remember trying to keep clothing and windowsills clean in the face of coal heating.
The Danish philosopher of science Hans Siggaaurd Jensen tells me in a personal communication that windmills are designed with three vanes mainly because farmers have always used three vanes—one vane is from an engineering point of view more efficient.
Chapman 2014.
Stone 2013.
Denyer 2014.
Stone 2013, quoting studies following Chernobyl. One student of the matter concludes that “losses arising from Chernobyl were not of sufficient magnitude and the event was so long ago that the accident should not be definitive in decisions about investment in new reactors” (Simmons 2011, p. 12). Cleanup workers at Fukushima have no discernible rise in disease. See Rivkin 2013.
Maddison 2007, p. 383. I am aware that China and India should be removed from the 1973–2003 rate to make the hypothetical exact, which would make it a trifle lower—say, 4 percent. But 4 percent is still, as I say, unprecedented.
Mencken 1917 (2006), p. 63.
Knight 1923 (1997), p. 137.
For example, “The migration of modern humans out of Africa resulted in a population bottleneck [in the small bands of humans migrating] and a concomitant loss of genetic diversity”(Campbell and Tishkoff 2008); “all systems show greater gene diversity in Africans than in either Europeans or Asians” (Jorde et al. 2000, abstract). There is, they say, “a marked founder effect associated with the expansion out of Africa.”
Pritchard et al. 1999, pp. 1795, 1797.
Personal communication at HedgePo’s Global CIO Summit, Gleneagles, Scotland, October 23, 2014.
Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.
Nothing earlier came remotely close.
It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.
Though Brazilians and many other Latin Americans are uneasily aware that their economies lag some, and sometimes a lot, the Great Enrichment is nonetheless evident everywhere from the Border to Tierra del Fuego, from Santiago in Chile to Recife in Brazil.
The Latin Lag can be overcome. Brazil, like much of Latin America, needs essential liberalism to do it.
Check out my new book, Liberdade: 100 Conversation Starters on Liberalism, Latin America, and Brazil
