The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [8]
Take stroke, a big cause of disability in old age. Deaths from stroke fell by 70 per cent between 1950 and 2000 in America and Europe. In the early 1980s a study of stroke victims in Oxford concluded that the incidence of stroke would increase by nearly 30 per cent over the next two decades, mainly because stroke incidence increases with age and people were predicted to live longer. They did live longer but the incidence of stroke in fact fell by 30 per cent. (The age-related increase is still present, but it is coming later and later.) The same is true of cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease: they all still increase with age, but they do so later and later, by about ten years since the 1950s.
Even inequality is declining worldwide. It is true that in Britain and America income equality, which had been improving for most of the past two centuries (British aristocrats were six inches taller than the average in 1800; today they are less than two inches taller), has stalled since the 1970s. The reasons for this are many, but they are not all causes for regret. For example, high earners now marry each other more than they used to (which concentrates income), immigration has increased, trade has been freed, cartels have been opened up to entrepreneurial competition and the skill premium has grown in the work place. All these are inequality-boosting, but they stem from liberalising trends. Besides, by a strange statistical paradox, while inequality has increased within some countries, globally it has been falling. The recent enrichment of China and India has increased inequality within those countries by making the income of the rich grow faster than that of the poor – an income gap is an inevitable consequence of an expanding economy. Yet the global effect of the growth of China and India has been to reduce the difference between rich and poor worldwide. As Hayek put it, ‘once the rise in the position of the lower classes gathers speed, catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed towards the needs of the masses. Those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating thus later tend to diminish it.’
In another respect, too, inequality has been retreating. The spread of IQ scores has been shrinking steadily – because the low scores have been catching up with the high ones. This explains the steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average IQ scores people achieve at a given age – at a rate of 3 per cent per decade. In two Spanish studies, IQ proved to be 9.7 points higher after thirty years, most of it among the least intelligent half of the group. Known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn who first drew attention to it, this phenomenon was at first dismissed as an artefact of changes in tests, or a simple reflection of longer or better schooling. But the facts do not fit such explanations because the effect is consistently weakest in the cleverest children and in the tests that relate most to educational content. It is a levelling-up caused by an equalisation of nutrition, stimulation or diversity of childhood experience. You can, of course, argue that IQ may not be truly representative of intelligence, but you cannot argue that something is getting better – and more equal at the same time.
Even justice has improved thanks to new technology exposing false convictions and identifying true criminals. To date 234 innocent Americans have been freed as a result of DNA fingerprinting after serving an average of twelve years in prison; seventeen of them were on death row. The very first forensic use of DNA in 1986 exonerated an innocent man and then helped to catch the real murderer, a pattern that has been repeated many times since.
Cheap light
These richer, healthier, taller, cleverer, longer-lived, freer people – you lot – have been enjoying such abundance that most of