The Birth of Plenty:
How the Prosperity of
the Modern World was Created
by William Bernstein
Posted on 08/20/2007 5:27:43 PM PDT by Lorianne
The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet. . Indur M. Goklany. : Cato Institute, 2007, 516 pp.$29.95
... Goklany depicts a global economy in which nearly all signs are positive -- and in which the problems that do exist, such as stagnation or setbacks in sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, will be solved if economic growth and technological improvements are allowed to work their magic. Nor is this, in Goklany's account, a new phenomenon. He marshals an impressive array of historical data to argue that the trajectory of the twentieth century has been generally upward and onward. Taken as a whole, Goklany argues, humanity really has been getting better and better day by day, so that today, as his subtitle puts it, "we're living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet."
Seen from a broad historical perspective, this description is, for most people, accurate enough. Just about everyone living today is the beneficiary of what can almost certainly be called the single most consequential development in human history -- namely, the onset of industrialization. As the economic historian Angus Maddison has shown in a series of studies of economic development over the past two millennia, human economies grew very little, if at all, for most of human history. Between 1000 and 1820 or so, Maddison estimates, annual economic growth was around 0.05 percent a year -- which meant that living standards improved incredibly slowly and that people living in 1800 were only mildly better off than people living in 1000. But sometime around 1820, that all began to change. Between 1820 and today, world per capita real income grew 20 times as fast as it did in the previous eight centuries.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignaffairs.org ...
In political theory this is known as the ‘Liberal Theory of History’,or the ‘Whig Theory of History’. Basically it is the idea that history is a continuing story of things going from worse to better — little things like going from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages take some explaining, but they do it.
Hmm.. isn’t it interesting that the real take-off in standard of living occurred just after the founding of a certain nation. Hmm.. which one could that be? The one that the post-modernists and multiculturalists all revile as the great evil of the world. Maybe because the beginnings of freedom began to set minds free to invent and produce and innovate without the overbearing government or upper classes ( nobility) in the way.
I once heard a comic on television say something sorta like this, “when the white man came to this continent, the Indians were running things, there were no taxes, no jails, no telephones, no forms to fill out, the men fished or hunted every day and the women did all the work. Naturally the white man thought he could improve on a system like that”.
If this is rationalized away as the “breaking of eggs to create the omelet of progress,” one can ask - as Orwell did - where is the omelet?
The growth is narrowly channeled, though. Toilets, refrigerators, and furniture have hardly changed in the last fifty years.
Plus, when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, we really expected to have been there by now.
We’re sending landers to the Martian polar region on missions hardly different from the Viking landers of thirty years ago.
The difference in automobiles since 1957 is noticable, though, until you compare 1957 vehicles to those of 1907. Now THAT’S a difference!
All in all, the more familiar one gets with the changes that took place from 1920 to 1970, the more one realizes the last fifty years have produced much less of an impact on daily life than you’d think.
My, How Fast Liquidity Disappeared
Forbes | 8/20/2007 | Robert Lenzner,
Posted on 08/20/2007 8:47:06 PM EDT by bruinbirdman
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1884088/posts
The Birth of Plenty:
How the Prosperity of
the Modern World was Created
by William Bernstein
The Improving State of the World:
Why We're Living Longer,
Healthier, More Comfortable
Lives on a Clean Planet
by Indur Goklany
(paperback)
Well put.
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