Matt Ridley believes that life on Earth is getting better. But he is interested not just in how it has improved, citing that in the past 50 years alone the income of the average citizen has trebled; lifespans have increased by one-third and child mortality has decreased by two-thirds. The Oxford-educated author and journalist is also interested in why. In his latest book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, he pins his hopes on the human habit of exchange and specialization, which started 100,000 years ago. Oh yes, the book covers the sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, arguing that ideas have sex just like people, producing a collective intelligence that promotes innovation. And that, he says, will always make for a happier future, in the long run.
Dr. Ridley spoke to The Globe and Mail when he was in Toronto recently as part of the Grano Speaker Series.
You are a singular voice in a crowd of pessimists. Why was it important to write your book?
I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.
But what is there to be optimistic about when International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde, among other economic experts, warns of the potential for a “lost decade?”
Clearly, we're in a very precarious position in many parts of the world, particularly Europe at the moment, but also in North America. We've over-borrowed and now we have to work out a way of either defaulting or deflating away our debts, and that's something that has to be done. We've got to get poorer before we can get richer probably. But this has happened before. You do get asset bubbles. They do pop. The South Sea bubble [of 1720]; the tulip bubble [of 1636]; the railway stocks bubble [of 1893], and on the whole it doesn't affect the real economy. The real livelihoods of people are about what they can afford to do for each other, through manufacturing or though agriculture or through services. That is determined by technology more than by what's happening in financial markets.
The second point is that the world as a whole is not in debt. Some parts of the world are over-indebted and have over-borrowed and are going to pay for it, but other parts of the world are actually doing extraordinarily well.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, Africa was, on the whole, going slowly backward. Now, Africa is going rapidly forward while we are going slowly backward. Is it a good thing if the poor people are getting rich rather than the rich people getting richer? Yes, it is. That's not much fun for me living in a rich country. But it's great for Africans. It's something to be very optimistic about. Because not only does it raise their living standards, but it gives us a market. In the long run, in the big picture, we are still advancing technologically, and some parts of the world are still advancing economically, and they will gradually pull the rest of the world up with them.
Some people think we may have progressed too much. Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
We have a very selective memory about the past. So, for example, when you watch an adaptation of Jane Austen, you think, “That's rather nice.” You don't think that 99 per cent of the people couldn't afford a candle let alone go to a ball in Meriton under a chandelier and dance with Mr. Darcy. And of course you forget that there was no deodorant, no toothpaste, and there were very bad dentists. So even Mr. Darcy wasn't probably all that clean.
In your determination to put a positive spin on world history, you even say the Black Death was not entirely bad.
Well, some of the consequences of a disastrous thing like the Black Death are not necessarily as negative as the thing itself. Certainly there is an argument that the Black Death empowered labour at the expense of capital, for example. In the 13th century, people had had so many babies that the price of labour had gone right down. By the end of the 14th century, it has turned around. People were able to bargain for higher wages. And that then leads to an interest in labour-saving devices, which then leads to innovation.
You're unafraid to take on some sacred cows, the very things many people point to as reasons to be happy. Organic food, for example, is very popular trend. Yet you lambaste it.
I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, “I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.” And just do the calculation: Most agriculture was organic in the 1950s. Only in America and Europe, it wasn't. The rest of the world was still basically relying on manure for its fertilizer, which requires land to graze cows. If you were to try to feed the current population of seven billion people with the yields of the 1950s, you would need to cultivate 82 per cent of the land instead of 38 per cent of the land. So not only has non-organic agriculture enabled us to feed seven billion, mostly – much better than we were feeding three billion 50 years ago – but it has also allowed us to do so without destroying all the rain forest. The surest way to keep some wilderness is to make sure our farming is intensive.
But you do concede that the 20th-century drive to provide a growing population with faster-growing, calorie-heavy food has led to public health issues: obesity, heart disease, diabetes. Still, to address that problem, you suggest that genetic modification of food, which worries a lot of people, is an “obvious solution.”
I think simply it is one of those fantasy scares that was got up by pressure groups on the basis of very little science and on an idea that anything new must be worse than anything existing.
Climate change is the great despair of our time. But you're painstakingly positive about the factual realities of what we face. It's a stance that has led some to call you a denier.
I'm not a denier. I absolutely accept we've increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I absolutely accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. What I don't accept is that there is a consensus that makes any sense at all about the feedback effects that would make that dangerous. Carbon dioxide on its own cannot produce dangerous warming. All the models are based on there being positive feedbacks in the atmosphere through moisture. But I don't find the science on that at all persuasive. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there's an 80-to-90-per-cent chance of there being mild, slow and harmless warming. It then says we should worry and panic about the 10 to 20 per cent. I think it's lower than 10 to 20 per cent, but I very carefully say in the book that even if you accept all of that, the probability is still that we won't experience dangerous climate change.
But you're negative about renewable energy, generally, an initiative that cheers the heart of many environmentalists.
Getting energy from wind is unreliable. You need fossil fuels as backup. And it takes up huge amounts of land. It's very low-density energy, whereas coal or gas or oil is very dense energy. And the objection is, ‘What if the gas runs out?' Well, it turns out we were wrong about that. The gas ain't going to run out because of shale gas, which made us realize that actually we have plenty of time to sort this out. The one renewable energy that I think probably does have a future is solar. The density of power in solar is hugely higher than wind, hugely higher than hydro, higher than tide – tidal power is lethal to environments because you have to block estuaries. So solar may have a future. The problem is cost at the moment, but that may come down.
The human population has just surpassed seven billion. How can we feel good about a crowded planet?
The rate of population growth is half of what it was in the 1960s. It has come down from over 2 per cent to just about 1 per cent a year. At this rate, it looks like we will only increase human population by one and a half times in the second quarter of this century. We quadrupled it in the 20th century while rapidly increasing the amount of food per person. If we can't do that again with the technology at our disposal and the enormous gap that we know exists in the productivity of land in places like Africa, then we really have no business being here.
Is coercion to have fewer children a good tactic to slow population growth?
Well, we did that in China, but it turns out we did it just as well in other countries without coercion. We got it down through public-health measures so kids didn't die – which people think makes it worse but which actually makes it better because people plan smaller families – through economic growth, so there are real jobs to go to, which again makes mothers try to produce educated kids rather than lots of kids, through education and through female emancipation. And if we look at what's happening in Africa at the moment, in terms of economic development and public-health improvements, the retreat of AIDS and malaria at quite rapid rates, I suspect we're going to find that the demographic transition – which is already begun in Africa whereby birth rates are falling – may well accelerate much more than we think. The lowest population estimate the United Nations produces may end up being more realistic, which has us down to 6.2 billion by end of century. That's less than we are now.
You decry government intervention in your book, insisting that markets deliver the greatest possible benefits to society when left to their own devices. And yet, arguably, that was disproved by your own experience at Northern Rock. You were non-executive chairman of the U.K. bank when it neared collapse in 2007 and had to be bailed out by the British taxpayer to the tune of £27-billion ($50-billion).
I fully accept that I should have seen our business model was too reliant on liquidity in the markets. I would love to turn the clock back and ask more searching questions. But did anyone else see this coming? No. Did all the other mortgage banks in the U.K. end up in exactly the same boat? Yes. So I did a terrible job, and I regret that, but I did no worse than the much more experienced bankers running other banks.
Sorry, I have to ask: Are you always contrarian at home? Does anyone in your family ever win an argument with you?
Better ask my wife that. She would certainly see where you are coming from.
Sarah Hampson is a Globe and Mail writer.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
