So too with moral progress. History tells us that barbaric customs can not only be reduced but essentially abolished, lingering at most in a few benighted backwaters. Not even the most worrying worrywart expects a comeback for human sacrifice, cannibalism, eunuchs, harems, chattel slavery, dueling, family feuding, foot-binding, heretic burning, witch dunking, public torture-executions, infanticide, freak shows, or laughing at the insane. While we can’t predict which of today’s barbarisms will go the way of slave auctions and autos-da-fé, heading that way are capital punishment, the criminalization of homosexuality, and male-only suffrage and education. Given a few decades, who’s to say they could not be followed by female genital mutilation, honor killings, child labor, child marriage, totalitarianism, nuclear weapons, and interstate war?
Other blights are harder to extirpate because they depend on the behavior of billions of individuals with all their human stains, rather than policies adopted by entire countries at a stroke. But even if they are not wiped off the face of the earth, they can be reduced further, including violence against women and children, hate crimes, civil war, and homicide.
I can present this optimistic vision without blushing because it is not a naïve reverie or sunny aspiration. It’s the view of the future that is most grounded in historical reality, the one with the cold, hard facts on its side. It depends only on the possibility that what has already happened will continue to happen. As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, “We cannot absolutely prove 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 before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”4
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In chapters 10 and 19 I examined replies to Macaulay’s question which foresaw a catastrophic end to all that progress in the form of climate change, nuclear war, and other existential threats. In the rest of this one I’ll consider two 21st-century developments that fall short of global catastrophe but still have been taken to suggest that our best days are behind us.
The first raincloud is economic stagnation. As the essayist Logan Pearsall Smith observed, “There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.” Wealth provides not just the obvious things that money can buy, such as nutrition, health, education, and safety, but also, over the long term, spiritual goods such as peace, freedom, human rights, happiness, environmental protection, and other transcendent values.5
The Industrial Revolution ushered in more than two centuries of economic growth, especially during the period between World War II and the early 1970s, when the Gross World Product per capita grew at a rate of around 3.4 percent a year, doubling every twenty years.6 In the late 20th century, eco-pessimists warned that economic growth was unsustainable because it exhausted resources and polluted the planet. But in the 21st, the opposite fear has arisen: that the future promises not too much economic growth but too little. Since the early 1970s, the annual rate of growth has fallen by more than half, to around 1.4 percent.7 Growth over the long term is determined largely by productivity: the value of goods and services that a country can produce per dollar of investment and person-hour of labor. Productivity in turn depends on technological sophistication: the skills of the country’s workers and the efficiency of its machinery, management, and infrastructure. From the 1940s through the 1960s, productivity in the United States grew at an annual rate of around 2 percent, which would double productivity every thirty-five years. Since then it has grown at a rate of around 0.6 percent, which would require more than a century to double.8
Some economists fear that low rates of growth are the new normal. According to “the new secular stagnation hypothesis” analyzed by Lawrence Summers, even those paltry rates can be maintained (in conjunction with low unemployment) only if central banks set interest rates at zero or negative values, which could lead to financial instability and other problems.9 In a period of rising income inequality, secular stagnation could leave a majority of people with static or falling incomes for the foreseeable future. If economies stop growing, things could get ugly.
No one really knows why productivity growth slacked off in the early 1970s or how to bring it back up.10 Some economists, like Robert Gordon in his 2016 The Rise and Fall of American Growth, point to demographic and macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working people supporting more retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a rise in government debt, and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for goods and services, because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer people).11 Gordon adds that the most transformative inventions may already have been invented. The first half of the 20th century revolutionized the home with electricity, water, sewerage, telephones, and motorized appliances. Since then homes haven’t changed nearly as much. An electronic bidet with a heated seat is nice, but it’s not like going from an outhouse to a flush toilet.
Another explanation is cultural: America has lost its mojo.12 Workers in depressed regions no longer pick up and move to vibrant ones but collect disability insurance and drop out of the labor force. A precautionary principle prevents anyone from trying anything for the first time. Capitalism has lost its capitalists: too much investment is tied up in “gray capital,” controlled by institutional managers who seek safe returns for retirees. Ambitious young people want to be artists and professionals, not entrepreneurs. Investors and the government no longer back moonshots. As the entrepreneur Peter Thiel lamented, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”
Whatever its causes, economic stagnation is at the root of many other problems and poses a significant challenge for 21st-century policymakers. Does that mean that progress was nice while it lasted, but now it’s over? Unlikely! For one thing, growth that is slower than it was during the postwar glory days is still growth—indeed, exponential growth. Gross World Product has increased in fifty-one of the last fifty-five years, which means that in each of those fifty-one years (including the last six), the world got richer than it was the year before.13 Also, secular stagnation is largely a first-world problem. Though it’s a tremendous challenge to get the most highly developed countries to become even more highly developed, year after year after year, the less developed countries have a lot of catching up to do, and they can grow at high rates as they adopt the richer countries’ best practices (chapter 8). The greatest ongoing progress in the world today is the rise of billions of people out of extreme poverty, and that ascent need not be capped by the American and European malaise.
Also, technologically driven productivity growth has a way of sneaking up on the world.14 People take a while to figure out how to put new technologies to their best use, and industries need time to retool their plants and practices around them. Electrification, to take a prominent example, started in the 1890s, but it took forty years before economists saw the boost in productivity that everyone was waiting for. The personal computer revolution also had a sleeper effect before unleashing productivity growth in the 1990s (which is not surprising to early adopters like me, who lost many an afternoon in the 1980s to installing a mouse or getting a dot matrix printer to do italics). Knowledge about how to get the most out of 21st-century technologies may be building up behind dams that will soon burst.
Unlike practitioners of the dismal science, technology watchers are adamant that we are entering an age of abundance.15 Bill Gates has compared the forecast of technological stagnation to the (apocryphal) prediction in 1913 that war was obsolete.16 “Imagine a world of nine billion people,” write the tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and the journalist Steven Kotler, “with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy.”17 Their vision comes not from fantasies out of The Jetsons but from technologies that are already working, or are very close.
Start with the resource that, together with information, is the only way to stave off entropy, and which literally powers everything else in the economy: energy. As we saw in chapter 10, fourth-generation nuclear power in the form of small modular reactors can be passively safe, proliferation-proof, waste-free, mass-produced, low-maintenance, indefinitely fueled, and cheaper than coal. Solar panels made with carbon nanotubes can be a hundred times as efficient as current photovoltaics, continuing Moore’s Law for solar energy. Their energy can be stored in liquid metal batteries: in theory, a battery the size of a shipping container could power a neighborhood; one the size of a Walmart could power a small city. A smart grid could collect the energy where and when it’s generated and distribute it where and when it’s needed. Technology could even breathe new life into fossil fuels: a new design for a zero-emissions gas-fired plant uses the exhaust to drive a turbine directly, rather than wastefully boiling water, and then sequesters the CO2 underground.18
Digital manufacturing, combining nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and rapid prototyping, can produce composites that are stronger and cheaper than steel and concrete and that can be printed on site for construction of houses and factories in the developing world. Nanofiltration can purify water of pathogens, metals, even salt. High-tech outhouses require no hookups and turn human waste into fertilizer, drinking water, and energy. Precision irrigation and smart grids for water, using cheap sensors and AI in chips, could reduce water usage by a third to a half. Rice that is genetically modified to replace its inefficient C3 photosynthesis pathway with the C4 pathway of corn and sugarcane has a 50 percent greater yield, uses half the water and far less fertilizer, and tolerates warmer temperatures.19 Genetically modified algae can pull carbon out of the air and secrete biofuels. Drones can monitor miles of remote pipelines and railways, and can deliver medical supplies and spare parts to isolated communities. Robots can take over jobs that humans hate, like mining coal, stocking shelves, and making beds.
In the medical realm, a lab-on-a-chip could perform a liquid biopsy and detect any of hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood or saliva. Artificial intelligence, crunching big data on genomes, symptoms, and histories, will diagnose ailments more accurately than the sixth sense of doctors, and will prescribe drugs that mesh with our unique biochemistries. Stem cells could correct autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, and could populate cadaver organs, organs grown in animals, or 3D-printed models with our own tissue. RNA interference could silence pesky genes like the one that regulates the fat insulin receptor. Cancer therapies can be narrowcasted to the unique genetic signature of a tumor instead of poisoning every dividing cell in the body.
Global education could be transformed. The world’s knowledge has already been made available in encyclopedias, lectures, exercises, and datasets to the billions of people with a smartphone. Individualized instruction can be provided over the Web to children in the developing world by volunteers (the “Granny Cloud”) and to learners anywhere by artificially intelligent tutors.
The innovations in the pipeline are not just a list of cool ideas. They fall out of an overarching historical development that has been called the New Renaissance and the Second Machine Age.20 Whereas the First Machine Age that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution was driven by energy, the second is driven by the other anti-entropic resource, information. Its revolutionary promise comes from the supercharged use of information to guide every other technology, and from exponential improvement in the technologies of information themselves, like computer power and genomics.
The promise of the new machine age also comes from innovations in the process of innovation itself. One is the democratization of platforms for invention, such as application program interfaces and 3-D printers, which can make anyone a high-tech do-it-yourselfer. Another is the rise of technophilanthropists. Instead of just writing checks for the naming rights to concert halls, they apply their ingenuity, connections, and demand for results to the solution of global problems. A third is the economic empowerment of billions of people through smartphones, online education, and microfinancing. Among the world’s bottom billion are a million people with a genius-level IQ. Just think what the world would look like if their brainpower were put to full use!
Will the Second Machine Age kick economies out of their stagnation? It’s not certain, because economic growth depends not just on the available technology but on how well a nation’s financial and human capital are deployed to use it. Even if the technologies are put to full use, their benefits may not be registered in standard economic measures. The comedian Pat Paulsen once observed, “We live in a country where even the national product is gross.” Most economists agree that GNP (or its close relative, GDP) is a crude index of economic thriving. It has the virtue of being easy to measure, but because it’s just a tally of the money that changes hands in the production of goods and services, it’s not the same as the bounty that people enjoy. The problem of consumer surplus or the paradox of value has always bedeviled the quantification of prosperity (chapters 8 and 9), and modern economies are making it more acute.
Joel Mokyr notes that “aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”21 The dematerialization of life that we examined in chapter 10, for example, undermines the observation that a 2015 home does not look much different from a 1965 home. The big difference lies in what we don’t see because it’s been made obsolete by tablets and smartphones, together with new wonders like streaming video and Skype. In addition to dematerialization, information technology has launched a process of demonetization.22 Many things that people used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news, encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-and-mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they have vanished from GDP.
Human welfare has parted company from GDP in a second way. As modern societies become more humanistic, they devote more of their wealth to forms of human betterment that are not priced in the marketplace. A recent Wall Street Journal article on economic stagnation noted that a growing share of innovative effort has been directed toward cleaner air, safer cars, and drugs for “orphan diseases” that each affect fewer than 200,000 people nationwide.23 For that matter, health care in general has risen from 7 percent of research and development in 1960 to 25 percent in 2007. The financial journalist who wrote the piece noted, almost in sadness, that “drugs are symptomatic of the rising value affluent societies place on human life. . . . Health research is displacing R&D that could have gone toward more mundane consumer products. Indeed, . . . the rising value of human life virtually dictates slower growth in regular consumer goods and services—and they constitute the bulk of measured GDP.” A natural interpretation is that this tradeoff is evidence for the acceleration of progress, not the stagnation of progress. Modern societies, unlike the miserly comedian Jack Benny, have a quick reply to the mugger’s demand, “Your money or your life.”
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A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—again
st the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.
Chapter 23 will probe the intellectual roots of authoritarian populism more deeply; here I will concentrate on its recent rise and possible future. In 2016 populist parties (mostly on the right) attracted 13.2 percent of the vote in the preceding European parliamentary elections (up from 5.1 percent in the 1960s) and entered the governing coalitions of eleven countries, including the leadership of Hungary and Poland.25 Even when they are not in power, populist parties can press their agendas, notably by catalyzing the 2016 Brexit referendum in which 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the European Union. And in that year Donald Trump was elected to the American presidency with an Electoral College victory, though with a minority of the popular vote (46 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 48 percent). Nothing captures the tribalistic and backward-looking spirit of populism better than Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.
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