Women’s empowerment in many developing countries is in its early phases, but the right policies can set women everywhere on a path toward the same prosperity and freedom enjoyed by women in today’s advanced countries.
The report builds on the famous wager between biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist and former Cato Senior Fellow Julian Simon on the effect of population growth on the Earth’s resources. While Ehrlich warned that population growth could deplete resources and lead to global catastrophe, Simon saw humans as the “ultimate resource” who could innovate their way out of such shortages. The Ehrlich-Simon wager tracked the real price of a basket of five raw materials between 1980 and 1990, finding as Simon hypothesized that all measured commodities decreased in price by an average of 57.6 percent, despite a population increase of 873 million.
In addition, the authors develop the concept of price elasticity of population (PEP), which allows them to estimate the effect of population growth on the availability of resources. Over the time period studied the population grew from 4.46 billion to 7.55 billion, a 69.3% increase. The PEP indicates that the time-price of the basket of commodities declined by 0.934% for every 1% of increase in population. Every additional human being born on our planet appears to make resources proportionally more plentiful for the rest of us.
The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have.
Between 1960 and 2016, the world’s population increased by 145%. Over the same time period, real average annual per capita income in the world rose by 183%. Instead of a rise in poverty rates, the world saw the greatest poverty reduction in human history.
In 1981, the World Bank estimated, 42.2% of humanity lived on less than $1.90 per person per day (adjusted for purchasing power). In 2013, that figure stood at 10.7%. That’s a reduction of 75%. According to the Bank’s more recent estimates, absolute poverty fell to less than 10% in 2015.
Rising incomes helped lower the infant mortality rate from 64.8 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 30.5 in 2016. That’s a 53% reduction. Over the same time period, the mortality rate for children under five years of age declined from 93.4 per 1,000 to 40.8. That’s a reduction of 56%. The number of maternal deaths declined from 532,000 in 1990 to 303,000 in 2015 — a 43% decrease.
In 1960, average life expectancy in the world was 52.6 years. In 2015, it was 71.9 years — a 37% increase.
In 1960, American workers worked, on average, 1,930 hours per year. In 2017, they worked 1,758 hours per year — a reduction of 9%. The data for the world are patchy. That said, a personal calculation based on the available data for 31 rich and middle-income countries suggests a 14% decline in hours worked per worker per year.
Enrollment at all education levels is up. For example, the primary school completion rate rose from 74% in 1970 to 90% in 2015 — a 20% increase. The lower secondary school completion rate rose from 53% in 1986 to 77% in 2015 — a 45% increase. Tertiary school enrollment rose from 10% in 1970 to 36% in 2015 — a 260% increase.
Even our air is getting cleaner. In the United States, for example, aggregate emissions of six common pollutants (i.e., carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, fine and coarse particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide) fell by 67% between 1980 and 2016.
Although past performance does not guarantee future results, constant predictions of doom and gloom should be put in perspective. Humanity has solved many challenges in the past, and there is no reason to believe that we will not be able to solve problems in the future.
Over the last few decades, however, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of extreme poverty. In fact, the share of the world’s population, as well as the total number of people living in poverty, is at an all-time low, despite a population increase of 143 percent since 1960. The left-leaning Brookings Institution predicts that absolute poverty will have been practically eliminated throughout the world by 2030. If this is not good news what is?
When something as horrific as last Friday’s Paris attacks unfolds on the news, it’s hard not to feel that the world is a very dangerous place. It can be difficult to remember that what makes acts of terror, so shocking and newsworthy is that violence is becoming rarer. In fact, the vast majority of human interactions are peaceful.
Of course, even one violent death is too many. Still, we must not lose sight of the fact that though some violent fanatics may stand athwart the trend towards greater peace and tolerance, violence is slowly retreating.
There’s a tendency for human beings to believe that change comes from the top down. We believe that world leaders or top scientists can make significant changes in the way we live our lives. Author and journalist Matt Ridley challenges this notion in his book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. He argues that we give too little weight to the bottom-up processes of evolution and that “Evolution is far more common, and far more influential, than most people recognize.”
Marian L. Tupy of HumanProgress.org will moderate the discussion featuring Matt Ridley and Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. Attendance is free and there’s a luncheon following the forum.
If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using#EvolutionofEverything. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute.
“In a process that began some 250 years ago, most of humanity has managed to progress beyond the grinding poverty and early death that characterized its existence for thousands of years.”
This past October, economist Angus Deaton was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his study of individual consumption choices. The Princeton economic professor’s research shone light on wealth and poverty, savings and consumption, and economic development.
Ian Vasquez, Cato’s director of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, writes on Cato@Liberty:
“[Deaton’s] work on carefully measuring consumption and other measures of well-being led him to understand development as a complex process not susceptible to improvement by technical or top-down interventions. For Deaton, knowledge is a key to development—even more so than income—and helps explain the tremendous progress humanity has experienced in the last 250 years when parts of the world we now call rich began their ‘great escape’ from poverty and destitution.”
Vasquez notes in the blog post that Deaton is among a growing crowd of development experts who are skeptical of foreign aid, and Deaton discusses this at length in The Great Escape.
Deaton’s careful work shows that humans are better off today than at any time in history—a point that other scholars have amplified at Cato, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, and Cato’s own Marian Tupy, editor of HumanProgress.org.
In 2013, the Cato Institute hosted Professor Deaton in December, 2013, for a discussion, which you can view here, on his most recent book, The Great Escape.
The Human Freedom Index is the most comprehensive measure of freedom ever created for a large number of countries around the globe.
It captures the degree to which people are free to enjoy major liberties such as freedom of speech, religion, and association and assembly, as well as measures freedom of movement, women’s freedoms, crime and violence, and legal discrimination against same-sex relationships.
The authors of the study also measure the rule of law, which they consider “an essential condition of freedom that protects the individual from coercion.“
Over time, the index could be used to explore the complex ways in which freedom influences, and can be influenced by, political regimes, economic development, and the whole range of indicators of human well-being.
Temperatures have reached the mid-90′s this week in Washington, D.C., when it’s gets this balmy we are very thankful for air-conditioning.
Best of all, air-conditioning is much, much cheaper and more available than it has ever been!
“Air-conditioning makes our lives more comfortable, but let us not forget the importance of air conditioning for the economy,” writescatoinstitute Senior Policy Analyst Marian Tupy.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
