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By Root 472 0

it is, it will end in disaster for all humanity. If all transport depends on oil, and oil runs out, then transport will cease. If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and aquifers are depleted, then starvation will ensue. But notice the conditional: if. The world will not continue as it is. That is the whole point of human progress, the whole message of cultural evolution, the whole import of dynamic change – the whole thrust of this book. The real danger comes from slowing down change. It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It does so through invention driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price; that encourages the development of alternatives and of efficiencies. It has happened often in history. When whales grew scarce, petroleum was used instead as a source of oil. (As Warren Meyer has put it, a poster of John D. Rockefeller should be on the wall of every Greenpeace office.) The pessimists’ mistake is extrapolationism: assuming that the future is just a bigger version of the past. As Herb Stein once said, ‘If something cannot go on forever, then it will not.’

So, for example, the environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in 2008, was pessimistic about what will happen if the Chinese are by 2030 as rich as the Americans are now:

If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China’s 1.46 billion people will need twice as much paper as is produced worldwide today. There go the world’s forests. If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice. By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.

Brown is dead right with his extrapolations, but so was the man who (probably apocryphally) predicted ten feet of horse manure in the streets of London by 1950. So was IBM’s founder Thomas Watson when he said in 1943 that there was a world market for five computers, and Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, when he said in 1977: ‘There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.’ Both remarks were true enough when computers weighed a tonne and cost a fortune. Even when the British astronomer royal and the British government space adviser said that space travel was respectively ‘bunk’ and ‘utter bilge’ – just before Sputnik flew – they were not wrong when they said it; just the world changed rather soon after they said it. It is the same with modern predictions of impossibility, like Lester Brown’s. Paper and oil will all have to be used more frugally, or replaced by something else, by 2030, and land will have to be used more productively. What is the alternative? Banning Chinese prosperity? The question is not ‘Can we go on as we are?’ because of course the answer is ‘No’, but how best can we encourage the necessary torrent of change that will enable the Chinese and the Indians and even the Africans to live as prosperously as Americans do today.

A brief history of bad news

There is a tendency to believe that pessimism is new, that our current dyspeptic view of technology and progress has emerged since Hiroshima and got worse since Chernobyl. History contradicts this. Pessimists have always been ubiquitous and have always been feted. ‘Five years have seldom passed away in which some book or pamphlet has not been published,’ wrote Adam Smith at the start of the industrial revolution, ‘pretending to demonstrate that the wealth of the nation was fast declining, that the country was depopulated, agriculture neglected, manufactures decaying, and trade undone.’

Take the year 1830. Northern Europe and North America were much richer