Transcript World economic growth World GDP per capita

Reasons To Be Cheerful:
How Prosperity Evolves
Matt Ridley
Neuberger Berman
23 Jan 2013
Are we better off?
World economic growth
World GDP per capita
http://www.krusekronicle.com/2008/07/index.html
The fall of poverty
*At 2005 PPP
The Economist
How long does it take to earn
an hour of reading light?
Tallow candle
1800 – 6 hrs
Labour cost of 1,200 lumen
hours at average US wage
Kerosene lamp
1880 – 15 mins
Incandescent bulb
1950 – 8 secs
CF bulb
1997 – ½ sec
Nordhaus 1997: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064.pdf
But are we healthier,
happier, safer, better fed,
cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer,
more peaceful, more equal?
Healthier
Child mortality
http://www.unicef.org/progressforchildren/2007n6/index_41802.htm
Happier
Pew Survey
Safer
Deaths from extreme weather
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/1378-indur-m-goklany-global-death-toll-from-extreme-weather-events-declining.html
Better fed
N America
Europe
S America
Asia
Africa
Kilocalories per head per day
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/04/food-consumption-around-world.html
Cleverer
IQ scores
Cleaner
Kinder
BBC, ONS
Freer
More peaceful
More equal
Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin 2009
How is this possible?
Hybrid ideas
``No man ever saw a dog
make fair and deliberate
exchange of a bone with
another dog’’
Adam Smith 1776
Comparative advantage
Adam takes 4 hours to make a spear and
3 hours to make an axe
Oz takes 1 hour to make a spear and 2
hours to make an axe
If Oz makes 2 spears
And Adam makes 2 axes
And they trade…
David Ricardo
1817
Then they each save an hour of work
Division of labour in nature
Species working for each other
The earliest evidence of trade
Bouzougar et al. 2007. PNAS 2007 104:9964-9969; Barton et al 2009 doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.
Neanderthal localism
Dzudzuana cave,
Georgia
http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/staff/hublin/pdf/Hublin_Steele_2006_CurrAnth.pdf
Where does innovation come
from?
Ray Kurzweil
Trial and error
“Innovation is a
numbers game. You
have to go through
5,000 to 6,000 raw
ideas to find one
successful business.”
Art Fry, inventor of the
Post-it note at 3M
Tasmania
Two Tasmanians repairing and making spears (B.
Duterrau, 1855)
Henrich 2004 American Antiquity
Tierra del Fuego
The ancient cloud
Maori fishing tackle; Kline and Boyd 2010
Can it go on?
``We cannot absolutely prove that those
are in error who say society has reached
a turning point, that we have seen our
best days, but so said all who came
before us and with just as much
apparent reason...On what principle is it
that with nothing but improvement
behind us we are to expect nothing but
deterioration before us?’’
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830
Population growth rate is falling…
…we can feed the world
http://www.kipnotes.com/Commodities.htm
More food from less land
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/PDR.SUPP%20Final%20Paper.pdf
More food from less land
We’re using less land to produce
more food
After 50 years the world uses 65% less land
to produce the same amount of food
“Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing”
Jesse H. Ausubel, Iddo K. WernIck, Paul E. Waggoner
…and land is being returned to forest
Metals are getting more abundant
Fossil fuels will not “run out”
Shale gas
The shale gas bonanza
http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2012/07/02/more-shockingly-good-news-fromshale-gas-co2-emissions-will-likely-fall-this-year-to-1991-levels/
Climate change is slower than
expected
http://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/files/
Hearings/EP/20120920/HHRG-112-IF03-WState-ChristyJ-20120920.pdf
So is sea level’s rise
1900
Malaria
won’t
get
worse
2007
Change
P. Gething et al Nature 2010
Decarbonisation continues
Wood
90% carbon
Coal
Oil
Gas
90% hydrogen
1800
1850
1900
1950
2000
2050
2100
2150
Jesse Ausubel
More growth, less harm
“energy and mineral resources are
abundant...because of rapid technical
progress, which both reduces the
resources needed to produce a given level
of output and increases the economically
recoverable reserves…
rapid technological progress "frees"
natural resources currently devoted to
provision of human needs for other
purposes…which increases ecologic
resilience.”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f296645337804p75/fulltext.html#CR11
Isn’t pessimism necessary?
The collective brain
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