The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [133]
Thomas Babington Macaulay was a poet, too, the author of ‘Horatius’ and other such well remembered ditties. In the Edinburgh Review of January 1830 he reviewed Southey’s Colloquies and did not pull his punches. Far from idyllic, the life of the rural peasant was one of hellish poverty, he said; the factory towns were better off, which was why people were flocking to them. The poor rate was twenty shillings a head in rural Sussex and only five shillings in the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire.
As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we must beg leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a mind so imaginative as that of Mr. Southey, the proportion of births and deaths. We know that, during the growth of this atrocious system, this new misery, to use the phrases of Mr. Southey, this new enormity, this birth of a portentous age, this pest which no man can approve whose heart is not seared or whose understanding has not been darkened, there has been a great diminution of mortality, and that this Turning points diminution has been greater in the manufacturing towns than any where else.
As for the notion that life was better in the past, Macaulay warmed to his theme:
If any person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the crash in 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams ..., that the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half of what it then was ..., that stage-coaches would run from London to York in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver’s Travels. Yet the prediction would have been true.
He went on (twenty-five years later, in his History of England):
We too shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty working man.
The extraordinary thing about Macaulay’s predictions is not that they were too barmy in their optimism but that they were far too cautious. Last week I took a stagecoach (well, a train) from London to York in two hours, not twenty-four, and ate a take-away salad of mango and crayfish (£3.60) that I bought at the station before I boarded. The week before I sailed without wind (at 37,000 feet) from London to New York in seven hours watching Daniel Day Lewis cover himself in oil. Today I rode my trusty Toyota without horses ten miles in fifteen minutes, listening to Schubert. A ‘peasant’ in Dorsetshire would indeed think himself miserably paid at twenty shillings (£70 in today’s money) a week. Sanitation and medicine have not added several years to life expectancy, as Macaulay rashly predicted, they have doubled it. And as for comforts and luxuries, even the indolent and spendthrift working man has a television and a refrigerator, let alone the diligent and thrifty one.
Turning-point-itis
‘We cannot absolutely prove,’ said Macaulay in 1830, ‘that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.’ So, too, would say all that came after him. Defining moments, tipping points, thresholds and points of no return have been encountered, it seems, by pessimists in every generation since. A fresh crop of pessimists springs up each decade, unabashed in its certainty that it stands balanced