Subtitled: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
(UK: Oneworld, Oct 2016, 246pp, including 28pp notes, acknowledgements, and index)
Rather as I did with Rutger Bregman a few days, here’s an author who has a new book out recently, but before reading the new one I decided to back up and read two earlier books of his on my shelves. The author is Johan Norberg, a writer and filmmaker originally from Sweden and now stationed in DC working for the Cato Institute (which I did not realize until just now, the Cato Institute being a libertarian think tank and thus making him slightly suspect). His newest book, from 2025, is called Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations (which sounds like it might align with Jared Diamond’s COLLAPSE), a big 500 page book; before that was Open: The Story of Human Progress, from 2020, a big 400 page book; and before that, the one I just read this past week, is Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, from 2016, a much slenderer book of only some 200 pages. He’s written lots of other books, mostly published only in Swedish, since 1994. And I’ll mention that the three books of his that I have, though ordered from Amazon.com, are British publications; the books apparently aren’t available from US publishers.
PROGRESS aligns neatly with books by Hans Rosling (et al) and Steven Pinker, documenting in great detail the ways progress has been made along various dimensions, mostly just in the past couple hundred years, despite common beliefs that the world is getting worse all the time. (Wikipedia suggests books by Shermer and Ridley as well.) Norberg places progress in historical context, though he doesn’t examine proximate causes as deeply as Pinker does. He does, however, close with a chapter exploring why people resist the implications of all his evidence, and this focuses on the familiar topics of human biases….
Once again, I’ll decant my notes taken while I read the book below, and then return here with numbered key points.
Key Points
People who dream of a simpler past in harmony with nature don’t realize what the past was actually like, up to the Industrial Revolution and especially before the past couple hundred years.
- Famines were common in Europe up until the past century. The invention of artificial fertilizer (via nitrogen fixing) is one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. Food productivity has increased 2500-fold.
- Until 150 years or so ago, indoor plumbing was not common. Cities stunk; sewage was dumped in rivers. Only with filtering and chlorination, and the germ theory of disease, has access to clean water reached 91% worldwide.
- People seldom lived past 30 years; there was no medicine except praying, or letting blood. Agriculture and globalization spread diseases. Only in the past four generations has mortality reduction occurred, via sanitation, evidence-based science, vaccines, etc.
- Until 200 years ago, half of the US, Britain, and France lived in what we now call extreme poverty. Largely solved by technology, beginning with steam engines, and steady globalization, which arguably has had a greater effect than the Industrial Revolution in making the world wealthy.
- The chapter on violence here is largely drawn from Pinker’s BETTER ANGELS: the violence of ancient history, from the Trojan War to the Bible; how pacification occurred via judicial rules and central governments; cultural changes from Enlightenment perspectives. Now most nations have abolished the death penalty, and the UN has made war a crime.
- Pollution was extensive as late as a century ago; recall Dickens, and the Great Smog of London in 1952. A green movement began after WWII, water treatments have cleaned up rivers, acid rain was avoided, deforestation has stopped in wealthy countries.
- Literacy has improved as education has, especially via technology. Literacy is more than reading and writing, it’s about knowing the world and your place in it. Two centuries ago only 12% of world population could read and write. Then came public schools, greater literacy, higher incomes. There are still fundamentalists who oppose education for girls.
- Slavery was common worldwide until Enlightenment thinkers objected; their ideas spread, leading to the end of slavery in England in 1772, later in the US, eventually everywhere. In 1900 there were no democracies (in which both men and women could vote) anywhere in the world. Now democracies are the norm; even dictators hold staged elections.
- Racism has existed since ancient times, and has only legally disappeared in the past century. Economic growth after WWII triggered the demise of segregation. Similarly women, as Enlightenment ideas, and exposure to books, changed attitudes about ownership of women and their right to vote. And homosexual acts were illegal in every state in 1960, due to Christian intolerance, until the civil rights movements made the culture more tolerant.
- Child labor was common up until the Industrial Revolution; child labor was seen as an education, a way of preventing idleness. It disappeared by the early 20th century.
Finally, why would you not be convinced by all this? Surveys show most people are wrong about most things. The media tends to highlight the bad things in the world, and there’s always something bad somewhere. Human nature gives us biases for survival than tune into potential threats. People have always thought the past, especially the era they grew up in, was better than their present.
Detailed Notes
Intro
Quote by Franklin Pierce Adams: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
Author discusses how the sense of doom fed the fear on which Trump built his campaign. And Brexit. Sweden. Quotes from a general, the pope, Naomi Klein, John Gray (on the right). Author used to share their pessimism, in the 1980s. He dreamt of turning the clock back to a society that lived in harmony with nature. Without realizing what life was actually like before the Industrial Revolution… Then author read history and traveled the world. Learned how back Sweden (his homeland) was 150 ya.
Things got better because of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, p4. This book partly a warning: don’t take this progress for granted. Familiar hostility, 5m. Nativist backlash. …
1, Food, p7
Author recalls 1868, his grandfather, a famine in Sweden. Thousands died of starvation. Famine was common in Europe. Several every century, p9. Worse in Asia, China, India. Typical diet in author’s home province 100 ya, 11t (a lot of gruel). Studies of nutrition, life expectancy. Work hours were short because they didn’t have calories. Malthus thought it would always be true. But the problem he worried about were solved – via open borders, international trade, etc. Famines gradually disappeared. A few even after WWI. Then came the invention of artificial fertilizer. Nitrogen fixing. Fritz Haber. Carl Bosch. Vaclav Smil called it the most important technical invention of the 20th c. Still, Haber also developed chlorine gas for the Germans. And consequences of fertilizer include dead zones in the oceans. Meanwhile food productivity has increased 2500-fold. Etc. People are taller. Fertility dropped, because offspring lived longer. And now we worry about obesity. Ehrlich predicted new famines. They didn’t happen. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. Etc. Malnutrition reduced. Example Peru. Statistics. Borlaug won a Noble Peace Prize. Today we see arguments against nitrogen fertilizer, and GMOs, by elitists. The demographic shift is happening around the world. From 6.1 to 2.6. … There’s never been a famine in a democracy. The greatest famine might be the one in China, under Mao, 1958-61. 40 million. Reforms came from the bottom, not the top. 18 families in a village in 1978. A contract. And others followed their lead. In 1982, China reversed course.
2, Sanitation, p31
Water is the source of all life but also spreads diseases. Typhoid. Water spreads microbes. The modern flush toilet wasn’t invented until 1596. But it took another 300 years for indoor plumbing to become common. Bathing was rare until modern times. Cities stunk. Horses in NYC. “Gardyloo.” There was no science beyond the theory of ‘miasma.’ Sewage was dumped in rivers. Cholera, shown to be borne by water. Then came filtering and chlorination, the germ theory of disease, and life expectancy increased rapidly. Access to clean water went from 52% to 91% from 1980 to 2015. And so on. Time spent simply fetching and carrying water has dropped. The worst area now is sub-Saharan Africa. Kibera in Nairobi. ‘Flying toilets’ spread disease. But progress is being made.
3, Life Expectancy, p41
High mortality was primarily due to disease and bad sanitary conditions. Plagues spread. The Black Death seemed like the end of the world. Montaigne. Chart p43.
Prayer was the commonest medicine. Physicists let blood, or used leeches. Hunter-gatherers lived 20 to 30 years. Agriculture didn’t help, and perhaps brought more harm overall, because diseases spread more rapidly and sanitation became a problem in settlements. Globalization brought exchanges of disease. Mortality reduction came only in about the last four generations. It used to be common for parents to bury their children. Three stages: the age of pestilence and famine; the age of receding pandemics; the age of degenerative and man-made diseases. Sanitation improved. Evidence-based science. E.g. smallpox. Immunization. Edward Jenner. Developed vaccines. Physicians washing their hands reduced maternal deaths. Microscopes. Standards improved. Penicillin, 1928. Polio. Malaria. Now HIV/AIDS. Ebola, handled well, 2014-2015. Still, in some countries many children die young. 53. More vaccines. Oral hydration therapy. World population grew because fewer people died young. Wealthy countries are healthier. A result of globalization. Cancer rates are falling. Etc etc. H1N1. But life expectancy may be hitting a ceiling. Yet they keep rising.
4, Poverty, p63
The question isn’t why some people are poor, it’s why some are rich. Chart of falling poverty, p65. There was very little economic development until the early nineteenth century. Improvements since 1ce were so slow they weren’t noticeable in one person’s lifetime. In early 19th century, even US, Britain and France had nearly half the population living in what we now call extreme poverty. Economists argued the poor were necessary. Adam Smith disagreed. Then came new technology: steam engines, etc. Marx thought there must be both winners and losers in the free market. 66b. [[ i.e. zero-sum ]] Yet during his life, Englishmen became three times richer. The West continued to grow into the 1900s. A first Great Ascent was complete by the 1950s; a second occurred in east Asia. China and India opened their economies in 1979 and 1991. Experts of the ’60s and 70s predicted the opposite; they saw what really happened by the 90s. Even the poorest villages greatly improved. They integrated into the global economy. China especially. Details. 9 in 10 Chinese lived in extreme poverty in 1981. Now just 1 in 10. Protectionism and planned economies held India back until independence in 1947. Details. India, the Dalits, or untouchables. [[ how caste systems, hierarchies, were dismantled. ]] By the 2000s, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US. Etc etc. Table, p76. The population is growing, but the absolute number of poor is being reduced. It’s more about overall growth, than about income redistribution. In contrast to ‘trickle-down’. 78,79. The exception to much of this is sub-Saharan Africa. It’s improved since 2000. The majority of the world’s extreme poor are in just a handful of countries. And global inequality is going away by itself. The Gini coefficient fell from 0.69 in 2013 to 0.65 in 2013. It may be that globalization is bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Maybe 50 times bigger, p82.
5, Violence, p83
Drawing heavily on Pinker’s BETTER ANGELS. It’s all about what we currently bring to mind. Chart p85. Examples from cultural history. Trojan War. Odysseus. Bible. Ethnic cleansing, ordered by God. Rome, bread and circuses. Crucifix. Torture, throughout history. Against witches. Knights. Back to the hunter-gatherers. Human sacrifice. Etc. Tuchman on the 14th century. Violence declined in the modern era. Via a pacification process: judicial rules and central governments. Yet punishments were often severe. Codes of honor. Rule of law, civil liberties, democracy. Moral individualism. Culture of honor gave way to culture of dignity; e.g. the British stiff upper lip. Humanitarian attitudes rose. Enlightenment perspectives. Nations abolished torture, cruel and unusual punishments. Most abolished the death penalty. WWII was bad, but we suffer from historical myopia. And it’s about proportion, not absolute numbers. Examples of ancient wars. Number of conflicts per century. Attitudes have changed in recent centuries, due to Enlightenment values and the retreat from religion. Example Sweden. Consider the Great Powers, p98. The UN made war a crime. Conflicts have become less lethal. Genocide has mostly ceased. When it did, survivors denied it, e.g. the Holocaust. But hasn’t terrorism increased? It sows fear, but it kills very few. It seldom accomplishes its ideological goals. Despite current threats (China, Russia, Middle East) the trends are strong. Democracies seldom go to war against each other. Especially with open market economies.
[[ of course Trump is reversing the trend, e.g. by renaming the department of defense to the department of war ]] [[ and Israel is perhaps committing genocide ]]
6, The Environment, p107
Recalling the Great Smog in London, 1952. Chart of UK pollution, p109. A feature of Dickens novels. Increased production and transportation. Fossil fuels. A green movement began after WWII. Since then we have made great improvements, and the worst scenarios of that era haven’t come true. Club of Rome, 1972. Statistics. Ozone layer in the 80s: countries phased out damaging substances and now it’s recovering. How the Thames river has recovered, thanks to water treatments. Oil spills have reduced. Acid rain was mostly avoided. Deforestation has stopped in wealthy countries, and declined in in the Amazon. We’ve reached ‘peak farmland,’ in turn avoiding extinction scenarios. It’s hard to find proof of a mass extinction. Wealthy areas manage the environment better than poor areas. A cancer epidemic never appeared, though there’s more cancer now because people live longer. Synthetic components in our foods may be safer than natural ones; tobacco is natural. [[ That is, just because something is “natural” doesn’t mean it’s better. ]] Our creativity has enabled us to avoid the worst imagined scenarios. Julian Simon. Old estimates have proven wrong, etc. Problems are due to lack of technology and affluence. Most countries are getting better. Drastic efforts to limit emissions might be counter-productive, if they hurt our ability to create wealth and better technologies. [[ Here he’s being a bit contrarian. ]] And other problems, from pandemics to tsunamis, must be addressed too. The poor nations are more vulnerable than the wealthy ones, which are not as fragile as some think. Efficiency of engines is increasing. New kinds of nuclear power. Other ideas… solar power in space, internet for energy. How to remove CO2 from the air.
7, Literacy, p129
Author visited Dalits [i.e. the lowest Indian caste, aka the untouchables] in an Indian village in 1977. No education. They didn’t know that they lived in India, and so on. By 2010 everything had changes: internet, mobile phones, learning they were part of a bigger world. Chart of illiteracy, p131. At the same time, the consequence of that now the young don’t ‘know their place,’ and contradict their parents, want more in life.
[[ Good point – literacy isn’t just about reading and writing, it’s also knowing about the world. ]]
200 years ago only 12% of the world’s population could read and write. Churches taught reading only for reading religious texts. Public schools started in the early 19th century. Once it gets going, it becomes self-sustaining. Developing counties became literate faster. Even in Africa. Global literacy in 2015 was 86%. Etc etc. Higher incomes and peaceful conditions support education. Parents realized their kids do better. Girls were barred from education by men who feared their independence. Fundamentalists still oppose education for girls. Frederick Douglass, and how he taught himself to read and write. And of course he did learn about the world and became dissatisfied with his own station. And developed a thirst for liberation.
8, Freedom, p139
More about Frederick Douglass, after his slave-owner died. All the slaves were shipped off to uncertain fates. Slavery was common and brutal around the world. It was common in the Bible, even in the NT. Chart p141. Routine in Europe, given the Pope’s blessing. The indigenous peoples of the New World were enslaved. A few objected, but the slave-owners couldn’t imagine how a world without slavery would work. So slaves were brought from Africa. Perhaps 10 million, of which 1.5 million died en route. But some leaders and intellectuals did object, and by 1772 England declared slavery illegal. Diderot. Voltaire. There were fears of Barbary pirates enslaving whites. The Declaration of Independence drafted a ban on slavery, but the clause was omitted. But it was gradually phased out in the northern states. In Britain, by 1834. The southern states held on. Opponents created an ‘underground railroad’. It took Lincoln to end it, triggering a civil war. P147. An anti-Enlightenment revolution. Other countries followed suit: Russia, the Ottoman Empire, China. Even Arab nations gave in by the late 20th century. Still, slavery is practiced illegally. But no one actually defends it. And state power has become more limited. People were given control of the government… a process that was slow for centuries, then happened all at once. In 1900 there were no democracies (in which both men and women could vote) in the world. By 1950, 31% of the world’s population could vote; 58% by 2000. Even dictators now hold staged elections. Communist systems were undermined. Poland, Hungary. The Iron Curtain fell, gradually. And by 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved. And so on. But not everywhere. China. Russia, and Putin. But democracies popped up around the world. A correlation with wealth. Yet keep in mind that the majority isn’t always right, 156t. [[ current US and MAGA fit this pattern. ]] But Karl Popper pointed out, it’s not about the majority, but about popular control of government power. One aspect of liberty is freedom from censorship and control of information. Free press. And economic freedom. Free trade. China is much freer now than it was under Mao. Milton Friedman summary, p159.
9, Equality, p161
Note Darwin quote – he understood as far back as then.
Ethnic minorities:
Democracies don’t necessarily grant equal rights. Racism has been part of people’s mindsets since ‘ancient times’. Pogroms against Jews. Muslims exiled from Spain. Religious wars. Slavery in the US gave way to Jim Crow laws. Lots of riots against every minority. Even Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Churchill, FDR expressed racist sentiments. Evolution. But the advance of civilization makes us expand the circle of interests… Shermer’s interchangeability of perspectives. Locke. Intelligence: the Flynn effect. Pinker and the moral Flynn Effect, and the ability to think in hypotheticals. [[ SF is all about hypotheticals ]] Open markets and rising affluence increase tolerance. Adam Smith showed the economy does not have to be a zero-sum game. Marx and Engels, quote 166. Ronald Inglehart about stress and tolerance 166b:
Individuals under high stress have a need for rigid, predictable rules. They need to be sure of what is going to happen because they are in danger == their margin for error is slender and they need maximum predictability. Postmaterialists embody the opposite outlook: raised under conditions of relative security, they can tolerate more ambiguity; they are less likely to need the security of absolute rigid rules that religious sanctions provide. The psychological costs of deviating from whatever norms one grew up with are harder to bear if a person is under stress than if a person feels secure.
[[ This echos books about how stress makes people susceptible to conspiracy theories ]] Economic growth after WWII triggered the demise of segregation. Civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s. MLK. Changes in attitudes: stats. Etc. Yet hate crimes are still common.
Women’s rights
In most of history women have been the property of their fathers, or their husbands. Men have attempted to control the sexuality of women. Thus prohibitions against adultery, infidelity, etc. Things changed with the Enlightenment. Jeremy Bentham. Mill. Mary Wollstonecraft. The mid 18th century brought a reading explosion: readers could see other people’s points of view. Women’s fight were compared to slaves’. Tennessee, 175t; Sweden. Suffragettes. The vote by 1928 in Britain. By 1920 in the US. Laws changed. Contraception and abortion rights. Marital rape criminalized. Right to vote. Chart p178. The Golden Gender Gap. Inequality gap. Details. Attitudes about wifely duties. Example of rewriting Japan’s constitution.
Gay rights, 181
In the early 1960s homosexual acts were illegal in every American state. Concerns about security risks. Joseph McCarthy. Eisenhower. Police entrapment. ACLU got involved. Alan Turing. Some cultures have always tolerated homosexual acts, but Christian tradition has not. Dante. Spain, France, Italy. England. Things changed, again, with the Enlightenment. France, England. Organizations. Stonewall in 1969. Gay Pride marches. Laws gradually stricken down. The culture became more tolerant. Today most people know someone who is homosexual. Gay marriage still contentious. Homosexuals still illegal in some countries. But the forces of tolerance are global.
10, The Next Generation, p189
Quote from Julian Simon. Author visits Vietnam, seeing child labor. Chart p191. Child labor wasn’t the product of the Industrial Revolution; rather the IR was when it began to be reduced. In medieval times children were part of the household economy. Sometimes hired out to others. Some worked by age 7. Child labor was seen as education, a way of preventing idleness. Examples. Ideas taken for granted. When children began to be sent to factories, criticism began. 28% of children worked in 1851, England and Wales. A century later it was much higher in China and elsewhere. Reductions came with rising wagers, universal education, and technological change. Down to 14% by 1911, then disappeared. It happened in every industrialized country. The girl in Vietnam now has a job and giving her son a proper education. Studies show that once they can afford to do so, parents will remove their children from the workforce. Etc etc. Conditions for children now have never been as good. Compare 200ya, 196b. A revolution in living standards since then, 198. Nice long para. Does progress bring happiness? Debate. Just compare 200 years ago. Smartphones etc etc. everyone will have access to knowledge. … Pictures of the hands a girl, now a woman.
Page 196b:
Consider a ten-year-old girl 200 years ago. Wherever she had been born, she could not have expected to live longer than around thirty years. …
A long passage that covers living conditions, health, schooling, violence, and the other themes of this book.
Epilogue: So Why Are You Still Not Convinced?, p205
An inscription from 3800 bce about how the world was going to ruin.
Most people don’t believe that things are getting better, and they never have. Chart, p207. Surveys show most people are wrong about most things. Gapminder studies. The results must be from misleading or outdated information. The media, 207.6. Impressions of crime. Bad elsewhere. Unhappy people make for good stories. Only airplane crashes are reported. Etc. There’s always a war, or a child murderer, somewhere. Worst case scenarios scare people. Ebola. Local media, on average, is fairer. But it’s not the media’s fault, it’s our fault. Kahneman and Tversky, the availability heuristic; we’re built to be worried. Hardwired by evolution. Pinker cites three biases that make us think the world is worse than it really is. Bad is stronger than good; the psychology of moralization; and nostalgia for a golden age when life was simpler and better. Most people say their ideal era is the one they grew up in. The Romantic philosophers thought life was infinitely worse than before. Populists and demagogues play on this. And memories aren’t reliable.
Still, there’s no guarantee of progress in the future. Financial crises, global warming, war, terrorism. Matt Ridley: superstition and bureaucracy. History did not appreciate progress. Examples. Ming dynasty, the Islamic world, turned inward. Ottoman empire. Europe, 14th century. But new ideas spread despite obstruction – a prelude to modern globalization. If progress is blocked in one place, others will take it up elsewhere. Last paragraph:
Even though wealth and human lives can be destroyed, knowledge rarely disappears. It keeps on growing. Therefore any kind of backlash is unlikely to ruin human progress entirely. But progress is not automatic. All the progress that has been recorded in this book is the result of hard-working people, scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs with strange, new ideas, and brave individuals who fought for their freedom to do new things in new ways. If progress is to continue, you and I will have to carry the torch.
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Sites cited in the acknowledgments:
gapminder.org
humanprogress.org
ourworldindata.org
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Comments:
- And of course application of current-day US to these principles is easy. At the same time, the evidence suggests that progress will prevail over MAGA.
- And religion, which has almost always hindered progress.
