In a follow-up to a couple of recent pieces on Ray Kurzweil and his unusual views of the future, John Tierney has dared to ask a question that we deal with all the time here at The Speculist: Why Not Perpetual Progress? The answer that comes through loud and clear in the majority of the comments to these posts is a resounding because.
Because the Law of Accelerating Returns is just an illusion.
Because Kurzweil’s ideas aren’t really science.
Because climate change is going to wipe us out.
Because all the accelerating improvements in the world can’t stop the inevitable catastrophe that’s going to get us.
Tierney links to this almost two-decades-old article about the great debate between Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, one of the most highly respected ecologists of his day, and Julian Simon (who died in 1998), a researcher whose work in the same field has received scant attention over the years.
Beginning in the late 60′s, Ehrlich began making dire predictions about where the world is heading. A few choice examples:
“The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death.” (1968)
“Smog disasters” in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (1969)
“Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (1976)
So basically, Ehrlich has been making these outrageous and demonstrably inaccurate predictions of catastrophe for some 40 years. For this, he has been lauded as a genius — literally — he received a MacArthur Foundation Genius award, among his many honors and distinctions. Ronald Bailey, in a review of one of Ehrlich’s books for the Wall Street Journal, described the situation thusly:
So why pay him any notice? Because he is a reverse Cassandra. In “The Illiad,” the prophetess Cassandra makes true predictions and no one believes her; Mr. Ehrlich makes false predictions and they are widely believed. The gloomier he is and the faultier he proves to be as a prophet, the more honored he becomes, even in his own country.
Ehrlich reverses the Cassandra story one way; Julian Simon, another. Unlike Cassandra, Simon predicts a positive and hopeful future. Like Cassandra, nobody believes him. (Well, okay, some do. But his work doesn’t receive anything like the attention that Ehrlich gets, and he is widely viewed as a crackpot.)
Oh, and like Cassandra (and unlike Ehrlich) he appears to be right.
Simon famously wagered with Ehrlich in 1980 as to whether the prices of copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten would go up or down by 1990. Ehrlich’s position was that — with demand increasing and total supply impossible to increase — these metals would have to go up in price over a decade. Simon predicted they would go down. On paper, they purchased $200 of each metal ($1000 total) with the agreement that in 1990 the winner would pay the loser the inflation-adjusted difference in price. If they went up in price, Simon would pay Ehrlich. If they went down, Ehrlich would pay Simon. In the end, Ehrlich wrote Simon a check for $576.07 — reflecting a substantial net decrease in the price of those metals. Interestingly, Simon would have collected a small amount even without the inflation adjustment.
Julian Simon was just getting started on proving his thesis.
His book It’s Getting Better All the Time, co-authored with Stephen Moore, lists 100 verifiable ways in which the human condition has improved. (Our own Better All the Time feature was inspired by Simon’s book.) His book The State of Humanity provides a more in-depth exploration of these issues.
Simon enjoyed cataloging the overwhelming evidence for improvement of the human condition, and he believed that the evidence was readily available for anyone who wanted to bother to look:
Test for yourself the assertion that the physical conditions of humanity have gotten better. Pick up the US Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States and Historical Statistics of the United States at the nearest library. They’re accessible to any schoolkid. Start at 1800. Those books have half the data you need for almost anything.
With such evidence so readily available, you have to wonder why Ehrlich’s views — so consistently wrong — have received so much acclaim, and why all those commenters over at the NYT website were ready to jump down Tierney’s throat for daring to suggest that there might be something to all that talk about “accelerating returns.” The idea that the world is going to hell in a handbasket is a powerful memeplex. It is supported by the view that anyone who draws a grim picture of the future is “serious,” and that anyone who takes a positive view is suspect.
This is a memeplex that needs to challenged. If we are to take full advantage of what the future promises to be, the first thing we have to do is get past the idea that catastrophic failure is inevitable. Catastrophes, even civilization-ending catastrophes are a definite possibility, and we need to do what we can to prevent them. But to assume any of them to be inevitable is a mistake. To assume improvement of the human condition to be inevitable would also be a mistake, but — based on the record — it’s the most likely outcome. Somehow, people need to start coming to terms with that.
How do you start a new memeplex?
