Child mortality in the poorest, least-healthy part of the world (Sub-Saharan Africa) is plummeting, thanks in large part to improved medical care and the proliferation of anti-malarial mosquito nets. From the report:
New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years. From the middle to the end of the last decade, rates of child mortality across the continent plummeted much faster than they ever had before.
The rates are decreasing by as much as 10% per year in some countries. These improvements are thanks in large part to technical advancements, human empathy and charity, and (yes) globalization. Three of the many great trends of the modern era and three of the reasons why things are better than you think.
In this excellent TED talk, Peter Diamandis, Founder of the X-Prize Foundation and Co-Founder of Singularity University talks about the coming era of abundance.
I was particularly interested in his comments on the fact that anything that becomes an Information Technology also becomes an exponentially growing technology. This is not itself a novel idea, but it is relatively new. Moore’s Law is just over 50 years old. Ray Kurzweil and others began generalizing it just a couple decades ago. What isn’t widely understood, however, is that Moore’s Law-like effects are not limited to computation and that the roster of “Information Technologies” is broad and growing.
Take, for instance, the fact that the cost of sequencing a genome (integral in several of the trends and technologies Diamandis mentions in his talk), is collapsing at an exponential rate. Expressed as cost per megabase or cost per genome, the cost is, in fact, dropping much faster than the .5 / 18-month period specified by the original Moore’s Law:
Cost per Genome, from genome.gov. Click for full size.
Genetics and Genomics mean that medicine is becoming an information technology. 3D printing means that manufacturing is an information technology. Nanoscale manufacturing means that material science is becoming an information technology.
And the single biggest driver of both the growth of and the real world impacts of information technology is the Internet.
After all, the Internet is the world’s first and only globally-spanning, format-agnostic data network.1 Which means, per Diamandis’ talk, that in the next two decades the population of people participating in this set of super-exponentially growing information technologies will more than double.
The super-exponential growth of these technologies, plus the exponential growth of the population of Internet users, plus the radically combinatorial growth of collaboration in the global consciousness caused by networking effects2 means that unfathomable levels of abundance and prosperity are just around the corner.
This, of course, doesn’t stop the doomsayers from plying their ancient and despicable trade. Bad news and scare tactics appeal to the lizard brain, and so as long as human beings manage to see existential threats in even the slightest bit of bad news, we’ll still be in the strange position of heading into an ever brighter future, while cynically raving that it’s the end of days.
1 – That the Internet is format-agnostic is extremely important, because it means that any digital artifact of information technology can, in principle, be transmitted to anywhere in the globe. That artifact might be a picture of a cat, it might be schematics for a 3D printed statue of a cat, or it might be the complete genome of a particular cat. Whatever kind of information it is, the Internet will transmit it. Believe it or not, it doesn’t even have to be cat-related.
2 – To see why this is such an important part of the growth equation, it’s important to understand that the complexity of the network (as expressed in terms of two-way links in that network) grows exponentially with the number of nodes. So for any network of size N, there are N(N-1)/2 possible connections. But the Internet allows for collaboration among huge numbers of people, so the networking effects are not limited to edges, but to subsets of the nodes in the network. This means that the growth of collaboration is potentially much higher than the exponential rate suggested by the growth of the possible edges. I’m personally tempted to say that the growth of such collaboration is approximately factorial, but I don’t know if I have strong evidence to defend that assertion.
When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.
Hey guys, remember when people used to die of Chickenpox? That sucked, right? Good thing it doesn’t happen so much anymore.
And did you ever hear of the rinderpest thing that killed, like, millions of cattle over the course of centuries causing suffering and starvation? Turns out that that doesn’t happen at all, anymore.
The average American worker can buy much more with his or her wage today than they could in 1975. Don’t believe me? Is your objection that mean or median wages have been roughly flat since then?
Here’s some excellent work by the economist Donald Boudreaux (who, hereafter, will be referred to as DBx, since I have a devil of a time spelling his name, and that’s how he shortens it) on the purchasing power of wages over the years. In it, he compares the price of a wide variety of goods between 1975 and today. But, in a masterfully clear-headed stroke, he expresses these prices not in nominal dollars, or even inflation-adjusted dollars, but rather in terms of the number of hours of labor the average American wage earner would need to invest in order to purchase the product.
The results are illuminating.
DBx’s post, presentation, and linked explorations of the Sears catalog (which are all well worth your time) all point to one of the most important things that gets lost in economic debates: wages don’t really matter. (This goes doubly so for that ridiculous shibboleth of populist shit-stirrers: “income inequality”.) What really matters is not the number of bartering tokens a person trades their time for, but rather the amount of tangible goods they can turn those tokens into. In other words, what matters isn’t wages, but purchasing power. I would be thrilled if, over the next 10 years I received a 50% pay cut, but the cost of all goods dropped 90%. That would increase my purchasing power by a factor of five!
And yet every discussion of the American economy is mired down in this ridiculous fallacy of equivocation that insists that money is wealth, when really, it’s nothing but a token for deferred barter. Money is not wealth, the goods and services that it buys are wealth. Money is only potential wealth. (Potential, in this case, meant in the same sense that a skier at the top of a slope has a great deal of potential energy.)
But enough of my mutterings. Go read DBx’s work. He typically makes my point twice as well in half the number words.
The routinely excellent Foreign Policy recently posted an article by Charles Kenny about Pre-Modern peoples and the dangers of helping to “protect” them from modernity. A quote from the article:
“The glorification of … tribal life, with its supposed freedom from violence, poverty, drugs, crime, and overpopulation, is part of a dangerous denial of the huge benefits that modernity has brought to the vast mass of humanity. It is easy to get emotional about a supposedly idyllic Stone Age existence when we’re staring at elegant photographs on a computer screen while sipping our Starbucks chai latte. But if we decided to actually return to the lifestyle of uncontacted peoples, the vast majority of the planet would die off from starvation, and those who remained would face nasty, brutish, and short lives. Romanticizing that lifestyle provides no insights into how we can better run a planet of 7 billion people on a sustainable basis — and does little to illuminate the challenges and needs of tribal people themselves.”
Modernity has brought us untold wealth, health, knowledge, prosperity, peace and happiness. We are, by any objective measure one cares to offer, much better off than so-called “uncontacted peoples”. Such people are at the mercy of famine and natural disaster, they routinely suffer and die from treatable or curable ailments, and they labor for hours just to ensure the basic necessities of life. Theirs is not a life situation to be envied.
Put another way, there’s a simpler word for subsistence living absent of modern infrastructure, medicine, and food supplies. It’s called poverty.
As with other breeds of Malthusians, Primitivists and Neo-Luddites, I have the following offer to make to those people who seriously suggest that we should emulate the strife and hardship of uncontacted peoples:
“Once thought to be endemic mostly to richer nations with their longer life expectancies, malignancies now confront denizens of lower and middle-income nations. A new global effort now focuses on the issue.”
But what’s actually happening to cancer rates? In the west, they’re falling rapidly. Oh, and outcomes for cancer patients are improving, too. The (modest) increases in cancer rates in the Third World? Largely due to increased life spans. After all, expected life span in many places in the third doubled in the 20th century.
Okay, so maybe the Scientific American headline isn’t lying, per se. Maybe my headline about duplicitous media headlines was, itself, a bit duplicitous. (Meta-duplicity!) But the fact of the matter is that cancer stats are improving in developed nations and their deterioration in the Third World is largely due to the incredible boom of wealth and prosperity that those countries are experiencing. For Scientific American to treat cancer in the Third World as an epidemic is, at best, half the story. And it’s the worst half of the story because Scientific American, like the rest of the modern news media, benefits when people are scared or concerned.
Moral of the Story? Things Are Better Than You Think. Any time a news outlet (even one as good as Scientific American, which is admittedly quite good) puts up a story of the form “Terrible Thing X on the Rise; The Poor Hardest Hit”, take the time to ask what the other half of the story is. Chances are you’ll be surprised just how good things are.
Peak oil is bullshit. Is oil a limited resource? All signs point to yes. Are we ever going to run out of it? Highly unlikely.
This seeming contradiction comes from the fact that oil (technically petroleum), like most finite resources, has diverse sources and uses. This leads to demand and competition which influence prices. As prices rise, new sources of oil become profitable to explore and people start looking for substitutes. Oil is also extremely sensitive to improvements in methods of extraction and refining. These economic and technological forces have lead to proven reserves of oil increasing more than 13000 times since 1882. And all the while, people have been predicting that we would be running out within a few years.
For more on this, including the source figures I’m working from, please watching this excellent video by Dr. Steve Horwitz of St. Lawrence University:
To recap: during a ~130 span, our reserves of oil increased by 1,300,000%. And during that entire period, people have been predicting peak oil. You’d think they’d have learned by about the 100th year of being proven wrong, but alas, it turns out that resource doom-saying never goes out of style.
And lest you think resource panics are limited to “Peak Oil”, there are a host of other resources currently being fretted about by the media and the chattering classes. The many “Peak Resource” panics include:
This list is certainly not exhaustive. For these and many other resources, people are predicting that we’re in the last years before we start running out or until our production peaks. And yet almost every resource that people have fretted about is getting increasingly plentiful or is no longer needed because a better material has been discovered or synthesized. The forces of Economics and human ingenuity ensure that finite resources are used in increasingly efficient fashions and tend to get more, not less, plentiful.
Basically, if running out of a resource would suck, there’s someone yelling that we’re gonna run out of it any year now. And it’s flat not true. Most of these doomsayers are simply misinformed and sadly don’t understand that Things Are Better Than They Think. But some, well, some of those people have things to sell you. They care neither about Peak Whatever! nor about your and yours. They just want your money and probably your vote, as well.
Three special instances of these resource panics that I’ll cover in future installments are food, energy, and land. Another sort of panic that is orthogonal to resource shortage worries is population growth problems, which will also be a topic for another post.
Hans Rosling gives a 200-year overview of the history of 200 countries with respect to life expectancy and per capita GDP. Pay particular attention to the massive booms of wealth and health after World War II:
The entire global population today are living longer, healthier lives. And while there are significant disparities in wealth and health those disparities are extremely misleading. Every single one of the countries Rosling measures are better off today than they were 200 years ago. Most are much better, and even those with the smallest levels of improvement have seen their life expectancy almost double. Most of the poorest countries have seen real (and, one hopes, lasting) improvements to their economic positions as well.
But what’s really interesting about this chart from a healthy perspective is how flat it starts out and how flat it ends up. 200 years ago, where you lived didn’t appreciably influence how long you lived. Now, no matter where you live, your expected lifespan has increased by somewhere between 100% and 200%. Sure, where you live matters a lot more now than it did two centuries ago, but regardless of what nation or continent you’re born in, you’re still living a lot longer.
Another way to frame this is by looking at the much larger trend. (Note: These are numbers I used for a paper I wrote years ago, and I can no longer find my original source for them.)
Average life expectancy in Europe in 1000AD: ~25 years.
Average life expectancy in Europe in 1900AD: ~45 years.
Average life expectancy in Europe in 2000AD: ~75 years.
We made bigger gains to life expectancy in the past century than we did in the 900 years before that.
But it’s not just life expectancy that’s getting better, but health, too. People aren’t just living longer, they’re living better. One of the drivers of life expectancy is simply that we can treat or cure more illnesses, including some very severe ones for which we only recently have developed treatments. One of the great success stories of the latter part of the 20th century was cancer. Many historical studies that tracked cancer mortality rates found them improving (in some cases dramatically) throughout last 50 or so years.
Take, for instance, mortality rates in children from all forms of cancer. A statistical review by the National Cancer Institute found major impovements in long-term (5-year) survival rates amongst children diagnosed with cancer. Summation from Cancer.gov:
“…the 5-year survival rates for all childhood cancers combined increased from 58.1 percent in 1975–77 to 79.6 percent in 1996–2003 (2). This improvement in survival rates is due to significant advances in treatment, resulting in a cure or long-term remission for a substantial proportion of children with cancer.”
In just over 20 years, the rate of survival from all forms of childhood cancer rose over 20%.
Similar improvements in mortality rate have been made in just the past 20 years in breast cancer patients. Between 1990 and 2007, mortality rates fell by about 2.2% per year
Even more impressive than these stunning improvements in mortality rate are the number of diseases that we’ve effectively cured and some even eliminated. Remember polio? Chances are, if you live outside of Africa, you don’t. Even in Africa it has become so rare that many countries go years without any confirmed cases. Polio crippled and killed children for centuries before we ingenious apes decided we’d had enough of its shit and essentially wiped it out of existence. I say essentially because there are still a few cases around the world every year, mostly in the Third World.
Our response as H. Sapiens? Mobilize 290,000 people to immunize children all over Africa. Because when it comes to eradicating an age-old enemy, we don’t stop at “good enough.” It won’t be too much longer before no child in the world will suffer the ravages of polio ever again.
But it’s not enough that we’re living longer, more disease-free lives. We’re almost universally better fed, too. Famine has essentially been eradicated in the developed world. In the rest of the world, we’re trying very hard to bring about a post-hunger age. And you know what? We’re doing pretty damn well.
Slight tangent: if there was someone in the 20th century who had saved upwards of a billion lives, how famous do you think that person would be? Would he be “giant, solid-gold statues in every city on Earth” famous? Maybe just “universally showered in gifts and praise” famous? How about even just “get his/her name in high school textbooks” famous?
Turns out that saving one billion lives doesn’t earn you much acclaim at all. By show of hands, how many in the audience are familiar with the name Norman Borlaug? (To be fair, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970).
Borlaug’s work on weather- and pest-resistant wheat, as well as his propagation of modern agricultural techniques, has probably saved hundreds of millions of lives in Central and South America and hundreds of millions more in the Indo-Pakistani Subcontinent. Famine has plagued human beings since before we were human beings. And Borlaug dealt the first really big blow against it since some wise-ass in prehistory said “hey guys, what if we just put the seeds in the ground ourselves?”
So there you have it. Here, a decade into the 21st century, we are living between 100% and 200% longer than people just 200 years ago. We’re dying from diseases at a lower rate, including some diseases that we can now cure or even eradicate. Finally, we’ve made huge strides against one of the all-time great historical causes of death and illness: famine. Thanks to genetic engineering, modern agricultural techniques, and better land-management processes, hunger is on the decline, even as our population continues to grow.
In other words, things are better than you think, and they’re just getting better.
Back in late 1999, I was a Sophomore in high school and, like most Sophomores in High School, I was convinced that the world was some kind of terrible. So when I started to hear talk of this dreaded “Y2k” bug, my general response was one of “of course, that makes perfect sense, now the world’s gonna suck in one more way.”
But the more I read about it, the more I realized that the people talking about Y2k fell into two broad categories:
1.) Those who knew a lot about Y2k.
2.) Those who could make money off of Y2k
Unsurprisingly, the people in category 1.) weren’t very worried. The people in category 2.) couldn’t stop talking about how worried everyone should be (oh and by the way buy our product.)
So I formed a hunch that maybe, just maybe, Y2k wasn’t that big a deal. Uncharacteristically for a teenager, I assumed a stance of cautious optimism.
And then, when Jan. 1st, 2000 CE rolled around, something funny happened.
Nothing at all.
Not a single glitch that I can recall. Pretty much all the computers seemed to work more or less as they had the previous day. Y2k was, essentially, an over-hyped myth that was all fear.
And it was hardly an isolated incident. Over the intervening decade, I started seeing an amazing and heartening trend: doomsayers were almost always wrong, and the rare optimists among us were usually right. What’s more, the closer I looked at the world around me and the more I learned about history, economics, and the world at large, the more I realized that it wasn’t just the doomsayers that were wrong. It was pretty much everyone who, like me, thought the world was a shitty place to begin with.
Simply put, the more I learned, the more awesome the world turned out to be. Almost everywhere I looked, I found that things were better than I’d expected.
Now that’s not to say that there isn’t real horror in suffering in the world, as there certainly is. But for a large part, I consistently found things to be better off than I initially expected them to be. And I don’t think that I’m alone in my misguided pessimism.
What got me thinking about this today was reading this Op Ed in the Washington Examiner, and the article (PDF warning) to which it links. The punch line? People (even students of Economics) are unduly pessimistic about the state of the economy.
I think that the phenomenon is more general than that. Furthermore, I think that the source of this pessimism is the structure and incentives of the modern media, combined with modern democracy’s obsession with security and centrism.
My thesis can be broken down into the following three points:
Things are better than you think.
You think things are bad because the media tells you they are. The media does this because fear and horror sell.
Politicians exploit this fear by telling you they can and will fix these problems, even though they can’t and won’t.
I intend to try and prove my case by examining several common areas of pessimism, including but not limited to Crime, Terrorism, the Economy, Disease and Healthcare, Technology, War, and Trade. I, of course, won’t be tackling these all at once, rather I’ll do this as an occasional series.
So stay tuned for the first installment coming . . ., uh, at some point, when I have time to research it properly.
1.) Carry out your own dead.
2.) No opium smoking in the elevators.
3.) In Competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.
4.) A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place.
4a.) Penalty one stroke.
5.) Pilsner should be in Roman type, and begin with a capital.
