History Makes Case for Positive Spin on Future
Scientific journals brim with tales of doom like loud tabloids. The human population is exploding like a fungal scourge, and the Earth doesn’t have the resources to keep up. Third World poverty is disastrous. The environment is being poisoned to death. Killer viruses are coming to a town near you.
Are they crying wolf, or are we rightly pessimistic these days?
Who says we never report the good news? Just when we need it, along comes USC economics professor Richard A. Easterlin. Don’t worry, he says, be happy. Or at least, be more realistic. Look at history: Know that humankind has always faced doom-and-gloom scenarios. And humankind has always thrived.
“We’re so beset by everyday problems and we have no sense of where history is taking us in the long run,” Easterlin says in his USC office, which is piled with files and books.
In his new book, “Growth Triumphant: The Twenty-First Century in Historical Perspective” (University of Michigan Press), Easterlin says that in the next 100 years global economies and living standards will continue to grow and uplift the Earth’s people as the population levels off and life expectancies climb.
“During the last century and a half, economic growth has been spreading across the world,” he says. “Rising life expectancies have been spreading across the world. The prospect is that these processes will continue.”
Easterlin, a down-to-earth prof with a penchant for polo, is part of a line of academics who have been insisting that things aren’t so bad. He belongs to a new school of “Cornucopians,” who enlist computer models, mind-numbing numbers and more pie charts than Ross Perot to predict that the fate of humanity is peachy. The University of Maryland’s Julian L. Simon in particular has led this new group of boomsters to challenge most ecologists and predict that “natural resources are not finite,” as he wrote in his 1982 book, “The Ultimate Resource” (Princeton University Press).
Easterlin is a unique member of this school, however, on a few fronts. He relies heavily on human history, particularly since the Enlightenment, to demonstrate successions of human achievement that seem to show no end. These include two scientific revolutions (the first establishing scientific method of gaining knowledge, the second establishing modern medicine), and two industrial revolutions. He argues that each crisis (using coal or crop shortages as examples) was met with the discovery of new resources or technical innovations, and future crises will continue to do so.
Though he is an economist, Easterlin is a well-respected population expert. He argues that as world economies develop, birth rates rise then level off as people realize they don’t need to have as many children to ensure the survival of their lineage. Finally, he’s a classic liberal who believes in protecting the environment and in the role of strong government, especially in moderating this predicted growth.
Among his predictions for the next century:
* World per-capita incomes will grow at 2% a year, faster than in this century.
* Third World per-capita incomes will actually grow even faster--as much as 3% per year.
* In about 50 years, the Third World’s living standard will be at a level only slightly below the 1990 U.S. living standard.
* By 2025, life expectancy in the Third World will rise to current Western world levels (71.2 years).
* Population growth in the Third World will drop to below 1%.
Of course, environmentalists often say hogwash to this line of thought. With a world population nearing 6 billion, an ozone hole that is starting to show signs of warming the globe and a lot of suffering still going on in developing nations, they predict the tide will turn the other way. “Mankind,” writes population expert Paul Ehrlich, “will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”
Easterlin doesn’t discount the doomsayers. He indeed worries about the environment, resources and killer viruses. He also notes that one major downside to world economic prosperity is the fact that developing countries will want and deserve more power--and that developed nations such as the U.S. will have to give up influence in the same way our British motherland had to succumb to our power.
The other downside is that culture will become--and already is becoming--monolithic as technology and media deliver the same messages of writing, music and fashion throughout the globe; he calls it “the Los Angelesization of the world.” But he argues that we will use our “three pillars of science, technology and education” to solve problems as we have for the last three centuries.
The bad news is that we won’t be any happier.
Easterlin says wealth will only put us on a “hedonic treadmill.” “Each step upward on the ladder of economic development merely stimulates economic desires,” he writes. “In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity.”
