Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [63]
As effective as it was, the forceps did not save as many lives as it should have. It is thought to have been invented in the early seventeenth century by a London obstetrician named Peter Chamberlen. The forceps worked so well that Chamberlen kept it a secret, sharing it only with sons and grandsons who continued in the family business. It wasn’t until the mid–eighteenth century that the forceps passed into general use.
What was the cost of this technological hoarding? According to the surgeon and author Atul Gawande, “it had to have been millions of lives lost.”
The most amazing thing about cheap and simple fixes is they often address problems that seem impervious to any solution. And yet almost invariably, a Semmelweis or a team of Semmelweises ride into view and save the day. History is studded with examples.
At the start of the Common Era, just over two thousand years ago, there were roughly 200 million people on earth. By the year 1000, that number had risen only to 300 million. Even by 1750, there were just 800 million people. Famine was a constant worry, and the smart money said the planet couldn’t possibly support much more growth. The population in England had been decreasing—“essentially because,” as one historian wrote, “agriculture could not respond to the pressure of feeding extra people.”
Enter the Agricultural Revolution. A variety of innovations, none particularly complex—they included higher-yielding crops, better tools, and a more efficient use of capital—changed farming and, subsequently, the face of the earth. In late eighteenth-century America, “it took 19 out of 20 workers to feed the country’s inhabitants and provide a surplus for export,” wrote the economist Milton Friedman. Two hundred years later, only 1 of 20 American workers was needed to feed a far larger population while also making the United States “the largest single exporter of food in the world.”
The Agricultural Revolution freed up millions of hands that went on to power the Industrial Revolution. By 1850, worldwide population had grown to 1.3 billion; by 1900, 1.7 billion; by 1950, 2.6 billion. And then things really took off. Over the next fifty years, the population more than doubled, reaching well beyond 6 billion. If you had to pick a single silver bullet that allowed this surge, it would be ammonium nitrate, an astonishingly cheap and effective crop fertilizer. It wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that ammonium nitrate feeds the world. If it disappeared overnight, says the agricultural economist Will Masters, “most people’s diets would revert to heaps of cereal grains and root crops, with animal products and fruits only for special occasions and for the rich.”
Or consider the whale. Hunted since antiquity, by the nineteenth century it had become an economic engine that helped turn the United States into a powerhouse. Every square inch of it could be turned into something, so the whale afforded one-stop shopping for a fast-growing nation: material for the manufacture of paint and varnish; textiles and leather; candles and soap; clothing and of course food (the tongue was a particular delicacy). The whale was especially beloved by the finer sex, surrendering its body parts for corsets, collars, parasols, perfume, hairbrushes, and red fabric dye. (This last product was derived from, of all things, the whale’s excrement.) Most valuable was whale oil, a lubricant for all sorts of machinery but most crucially used for lamp fuel. As the author Eric Jay Dolin declares in Leviathan, “American whale oil lit the world.”
Out of a worldwide fleet of 900 whaling ships, 735 of them were American, hunting in all four oceans. Between 1835 and 1872, these ships