The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [145]
On top of this, the weapons in the physician’s armoury just keep on getting better. Diseases of my childhood, like measles, mumps and rubella, are now prevented by a single vaccine. Where it took more than ten years to understand HIV, it took just three weeks a couple of decades later to sequence the entire genome of the SARS virus and begin a search for its vulnerabilities. It took just months in 2009 to generate large doses of vaccines for swine flu.
The total eradication of many diseases is now a realistic prospect. Although it is now more than forty years since smallpox was exterminated and hopes of sending polio after it to the grave have been repeatedly dashed, none the less, the retreat of infectious killers from many parts of the world is little short of astounding. Polio is confined to a few parts of India and West Africa, malaria is gone from Europe, North America and nearly the whole of the Caribbean, measles is reduced to a tiny percentage of the numbers recorded even a few decades ago; sleeping sickness, filariasis and onchoceriasis are being steadily eliminated from country after country.
In the centuries to come there will certainly be new human diseases, but very few of them will be both lethal and contagious. Measures to cure and prevent them will come quicker and quicker.
Sounding the retreat
Many of today’s extreme environmentalists not only insist that the world has reached a ‘turning point’ – quite unaware that their predecessors have made the same claim for two hundred years about many different issues – but also insist that the only sustainable solution is to retreat, to cease economic growth and enter progressive economic recession. What else can they mean by demanding a campaign to ‘de-develop the United States’, in the words of President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren; or ‘isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?’, in the words of Maurice Strong, first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); or that what is needed is ‘an ordered and structured down-sizing of the global economy’ in the words of the journalist George Monbiot? This retreat must be achieved, says Monbiot, by ‘political restraint’. This means not just that growing your company’s sales would be a crime, but failing to shrink them; not just that travelling further than your ration of miles would be an offence, but failing to travel fewer miles each year; not just that inventing a new gadget would be illegal, but failing to abandon existing technologies; not just that growing more food per acre would be a felony, but failing to grow less – because these are the things that constitute growth.
Here’s the rub: this future sounds awfully like the feudal past. The Ming and Maoist emperors had rules restricting the growth of businesses; forbidding unauthorised travel; punishing innovation; limiting family size. They do not say so, but that is the inevitable world the pessimists want to return to when they speak of retreat.
Chapter Ten
The two great pessimisms of today: Africa and climate after 2010
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G. WELLS
The Discovery of the Future
Sooner or later, the ubiquitous pessimist will confront the rational optimist with his two trump cards: Africa and climate. It is all very well Asia lifting itself out of poverty, and perhaps Latin America too, but surely, says the pessimist, it is hard to imagine Africa following suit. The continent is doomed by its population boom, its endemic diseases, its tribalism, its corruption, its lack of infrastructure, even – whisper some, more in sorrow than in prejudice – its genes. ‘It’s blindingly obvious,’ says the environmentalist Jonathan Porritt: ‘completely unsustainable population growth in most