The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [15]
The declaration of interdependence
Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever). There is no real need to do much else. Now imagine you are a human being. Even if you only count the basic things, you have rather more than four things to do: sleep, eat, cook, dress, keep house, travel, wash, shop, work ... the list is virtually endless. Deer should therefore have more free time than human beings, yet it is people, not deer, who find the time to read, write, invent, sing and surf the net. Where does all this free time come from? It comes from exchange and specialisation and from the resulting division of labour. A deer must gather its own food. A human being gets somebody else to do it for him, while he or she is doing something for them – and both win time that way.
Self-sufficiency is therefore not the route to prosperity. ‘Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,’ Henry David Thoreau asked: ‘the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father?’ Contra Thoreau, it is the latter, by a mile, because he has far more spare time to learn other things. Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau). Every day you must get up in the morning and supply yourself entirely from your own resources. How would you spend your day? The top four priorities would be food, fuel, clothing and shelter. Dig the garden, feed the pig, fetch water from the brook, gather wood from the forest, wash some potatoes, light a fire (no matches), cook lunch, repair the roof, fetch fresh bracken for clean bedding, whittle a needle, spin some thread, sew leather for shoes, wash in the stream, fashion a pot out of clay, catch and cook a chicken for dinner. No candle or book for reading. No time for smelting metal, drilling oil, or travel. By definition, you are at subsistence level and frankly, though at first you mutter, Thoreau-like, ‘how marvellous to get away from all the appalling hustle and bustle’, after a few days the routine is pretty grim. If you wish to have even the most minimal improvement in your life – say metal tools, toothpaste or lighting – you are going to have to get some of your chores done by somebody else, because there just is not time to do them yourself. So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else’s: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years.
Yet, though you have no slaves, today when you got out of bed you knew that somebody would provide you with food, fibre and fuel in a most convenient form. In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37. If you are on an average wage you knew that it would take you a matter of tens of minutes to earn the cash to pay for your food, some more tens of minutes to earn the cash to buy whatever new clothing you need and maybe an hour or two to earn the cash to pay for the gas, electricity and oil you might need today. Earning the rent or mortgage payment that ensures you have a roof over your head might take rather more time. But still, by lunchtime, you could relax in the knowledge that food, fuel, fibre and shelter were taken care of for the day. So it was time to earn something more interesting: