The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [162]
The way to choose which of these technologies to adopt is probably to enact a heavy carbon tax, and cut payroll taxes (National Insurance in Britain) to the same extent. That would encourage employment and discourage carbon emissions. The way not to get there is to pick losers, like wind and biofuel, to reward speculators in carbon credits and to load the economy with rules, restrictions, subsidies, distortions and corruption. When I look at the politics of emissions reduction, my optimism wobbles. The Copenhagen conference of December 2009 came worryingly close to imposing a corruptible and futile system of carbon rationing, which would have hurt the poor, damaged ecosystems and rewarded bootleggers and dictators.
Remember I am not here attempting to resolve the climate debate, nor saying that catastrophe is impossible. I am testing my optimism against the facts, and what I find is that the probability of rapid and severe climate change is small; the probability of net harm from the most likely climate change is small; the probability that no adaptation will occur is small; and the probability of no new low-carbon energy technologies emerging in the long run is small. Multiply those small probabilities together and the probability of a prosperous twenty-first century is therefore by definition large. You can argue about just how large, and therefore about how much needs to be spent on precaution; but you cannot on the IPCC’s figures make it anything other than very probable that the world will be a better place in 2100 than it is today.
And there is every reason to think that Africa can share in that prosperity. Despite continuing war, disease and dictators, inch by inch its population will stabilise; its cities will flourish; its exports will grow; its farms will prosper; its wildernesses will survive and its people will experience peace. In the mega-droughts of the ice ages, Africa could support very few early hunter-gatherers; in a warm and moist interglacial, it can support a billion mostly urban exchanger-specialisers.
Chapter Eleven
The catallaxy: rational optimism about 2100
In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls ‘bubble-up’ evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men and women discernible beneath the chaos of their actions. A flood tide, not an ebb tide.
Somewhere in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, a phenomenon new to the planet was born. A Species began to add to its habits, generation by generation, without (much) changing its genes. What made this possible was exchange, the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain. Two individuals could each have two tools or two ideas while each knowing how to make only one. Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one. In this way exchange encouraged specialisation, which further increased the number of different habits the Species could have, while shrinking the number