The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [130]
The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. This is the biggest cause of all for my optimism. It is a beautiful feature of information systems that they are far vaster than physical systems: the combinatorial vastness of the universe of possible ideas dwarfs the puny universe of physical things. As Paul Romer puts it, the number of different software programs that can be put on one-gigabyte hard disks is twenty-seven million times greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Or if you were to combine any four of the 100 chemical elements into different alloys and compounds in different proportions ranging from one to ten, you would have 330 billion possible chemical compounds and alloys to test, or enough to keep a team of researchers busy testing a thousand a day for a million years.
Yet if innovation is limitless, why is everybody so pessimistic about the future?
Chapter Nine
Turning points: pessimism after 1900
I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.
JOHN STUART MILL
Speech on ‘perfectibility’
A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist song of the kind I have vented in this book so far. If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. When the economist Julian Simon tried it in the 1990s, he was called everything from imbecile and Marxist to flat-earther and criminal. Yet no significant error came to light in Simon’s book. When Bjørn Lomborg tried it in the 2000s, he was temporarily ‘convicted’ of scientific dishonesty by the Danish National Academy of Sciences, with no substantive examples given nor an opportunity to defend himself, on the basis of an error-strewn review in Scientific American. Yet no significant error has come to light in Lomborg’s book. ‘Implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress’ said Hayek, ‘has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind.’
If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize. The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth.
The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went. Were we just lucky? Are we, in the memorable image of the old joke, like the man who falls past the first floor of the skyscraper and thinks ‘So far so good!’? Or was it the pessimism that was unrealistic?
Let me make a square concession at the start: the pessimists are right when they say that, if the world continues as