Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist (London: Fourth Estate, 2011)
Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are fields usually associated with cynicism about human nature and skepticism regarding our capacity to change this fundamental nature in order to produce the utopian societies envisaged by Marxists, feminists and other such hopeless idealists.
It is therefore perhaps surprising that several popular science writers formerly known for writing books about evolutionary psychology have recently turned their pens to a very different topic – namely, that of human progress, and, in the process, concluded that, not only is societal progress real, but also that it is likely to continue in the foreseeable future.
Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, was the trailblazer back in 1999, with his ambitiously titled Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which argued that human history (and indeed evolutionary history as well) is characterized by progressive increases in the levels of non-zero-sum interactions, resulting in increased cooperation and prosperity.
Meanwhile, the latest onboard this particular bandwagon is the redoubtable Steven Pinker, whose books, The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, and Enlightenment Now, published seven years later in 2018, both focused on societal progress, the former focusing on supposed declines in levels of violence, while the latter is more general in its themes.
Ridley’s ‘The Rational Optimist’, first published just a year before Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, was also more general in its theme, but focuses primarily on improvements in living standards.
Ridley argues that, not only is human progress real, but that it has, a few temporary blips and hiccups apart, occurred throughout virtually the entirety of human history and is in no danger of stalling or slowing down, let alone going into reverse any time soon.
From Futurology to History
For a book whose ostensible theme is optimism regarding the future, Ridley spends an awful lot of his time talking about the past. Thus, most of his book is not about the probability of progress in the future, but rather the certainty of its occurrence during much of our past.
We have a tendency to look back on the past with nostalgia as a ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Lost Eden’. In reality, however, the life of the vast majority of people in all eras periods prior to the present was, to adopt the phraseology of Thomas Hobbes, compared to our lives today, ‘short, nasty and brutish’.
As Ridley bluntly observes:
“It is easy to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet” (p12).
Although we all habitually moan about rising prices, in fact, he argues, almost everything worth having has become cheaper, at least when one measures prices, not in dollars, cents or euros (which is, of course, misleading because it fails to take into account inflation and other factors), but rather in what Ridley regards as their true cost – namely the hours of human labour required to fund the purchase.
Indeed, Ridley claims:
“Even housing has probably gotten cheaper too… The average family house probably costs slightly less today than it did in 1900 or even 1700, despite including far more modern conveniences like electricity, telephone and plumbing” (p20).
Moreover, he insists:
“Housing… is itching to get cheaper, but for confused reasons governments go to great lengths to prevent it” (p25).
In Britain, he protests, the main problem is “planning and zoning laws”. These are the laws and regulations that which prevent developers from simply buying up land and putting up housing estates and tower blocks in much of the countryside and green belt (p25).
Unfortunately, however, Britain is a small island, and, in the precise places where there is greatest demand for new housing (i.e. the South-East), it is already quite densely populated.[1]
Giving developers a free hand to put up new housing estates on what little remains of Britain’s countryside is a strange proposed solution to rising housing prices for someone who, elsewhere in his book, claims to “like wilderness” (p239). It is certainly a policy unlikely to find support among environmentalists, or indeed anyone concerned about protecting what remains of our once ‘green and pleasant land’.
Ridley is certainly right that there is a shortage of available housing in the UK, owing to both:
- The greater number of people divorcing or separating or never marrying or cohabiting in the first place and hence requiring separate accommodation; and
- A rising population.
Yet, with fertility rates in Britain having been at well below replacement levels since the 1970s, the increase in population that is occurring is entirely a product of inward migration from overseas.
However, rather than destroying what remains of Britain’s countryside in order to provide additional housing for ever increasing numbers of immigrants, perhaps the more sustainable solution is not more housing, but rather fewer people (see below).
Pollution
Ridley is on firmer ground in claiming, again contrary to popular opinion and environmentalist dogma, that, at least in developed western economies, pollution has actually diminished over the course of the twentieth century.
Thus, smog was formerly quite common in many British cities such as London until as recently as the Sixties, but is now all but unknown in the UK.
Thus, Ridley reports how, in a typical case of media scaremongering:
“In 1970, Life magazine promised its readers that scientists had ‘solid experimental and theoretical evidence’ that ‘within a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.’ Urban smog and other forms of air pollution refused to follow the script, as technology and regulation rapidly improved air quality” (p304).
On the other hand, however, while air quality may indeed have greatly improved in advanced Western economies such as Western Europe and North America, the direction of change in much of the so-called ‘Developing World’ has been very different, precisely because much of the Developing World has indeed so rapidly economically developed.
Moreover, a case can be made that improvement in air quality in the west have been possible only because developed western economies have ‘outsourced’ much of their industrial production, and, with it, much of their pollution, overseas, to developing economies, where labour is cheaper and environmental protection regulations much laxer, and where many of the goods consumed in western economies are now increasingly manufactured.
This means that, while Britain may have reduced its carbon emissions, albeit at the cost of abandoning its manufacturing base and thereby crippling its economy with unecessary environmental regulations, this will have had no effect whatsoever in reducing the pace of climate change, let alone reversing it, since any decrease in carbon emissions emanating from the west are more than offset by increases in carbon emissions emanating from the Developing World.
It also suggests that, while parts of the Developing World have indeed imitated the West in industrializing, and hence experiencing declining levels of air quality, they will not be successful at imitating the West in ‘deindustrializing’, and hence improving air quality, unless they too are able to outsource their industrial production to other parts of the ‘Developing World’ that have yet to ‘develop’. But, in the end, we will run out of places to ‘develop’.
Thus, when I was a child we were taught in school (or perhaps politically propagandized at) about how wonderfully environmentally friendly the communist Chinese were because, instead of driving cars to work, they all rode bicycles, and we were shown remarkable photographs from Chinese cities with hundreds of Chinese people cycling to work during rush-hour.
Now, however, with increasing levels of wealth, industrialization and development, the Chinese have largely abandoned bikes for cars, and Chinese cities seemingly have as big a problem with smog and air quality as Britain did in the early twentieth century. There are similar problems regarding air pollution in many other cities across the Developing World, especially in Southeast Asia.
Yet a case can be made that even cars themselves represented an environmental improvement. Thus, before the spread of the much-maligned motor car, a major source of pollution was the emissions emitted by the form of transport that preceded the motor car – namely, horses.
Thus, in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the streets of major cities were said to be fast disappearing under rising mountains of horse dung and the motor car was initially hailed as an “environmental savior” (SuperFreakonomics: p15).
Indeed, automobiles have themselves become less polluting over time.
The removal of lead from fuel is well-known, and may even have contributed to declining levels of violent crime, but Ridley goes further, also claiming, rather remarkably, that:
“Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks” (p17).
However, Ridley’s sources for this claim are rather obscure and difficult to verify.
Elaborating on his source for this claim in a blog post on his website, he cites a book by Johan Norberg, ‘När Människan Skapade Världen’, written in Swedish and apparently unavailable in English translation, together with a blog post by Henry Payne, published at National Review, which, in turn, cites an article from the motoring magazine, Autoweek, that does not currently seem to be accessible online.
Moreover, investigating his sources more closely, it appears that the reference by Ridley to “a car” from today, and “a parked car” from 1970, seems to mean just that – namely, just one particular model from each era (namely, the 1970 and 2010 Ford Mustangs).
Whether this claim generalizes to other models is unclear (see Payne 2010; Ridley 2010).
Blips in History?
Ridley argues that progress has been long-standing, and the even worst catastrophes in history were at most mere temporary setbacks.
Thus, during the Great Depression, Ridley readily concedes, living standards did indeed decline precipitously. However, he is at pains to emphasize, the Great Depression itself lasted barely a decade, and, once it was over, living standards soon recovered and soon thereafter surpassed even those standards of living enjoyed during the economic boom of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ that immediately preceded the Great Depression.
Ridley also argues against the view, fashionable among anthropologists, that hunter-gatherer cultures represented, in anthropologist anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s famous phrase, ‘the original affluent society’, and that the transition to agriculture actually paradoxically lowered living standards and reduced available leisure-time.
Indeed, not just the agricultural revolution but also the industrial revolution was, according to Ridley, associated with improved living standards.
The immediate aftermath of the industrial revolution is popularly associated with Dickensian conditions of poverty and child labour. However, according to Ridley, the industrial revolution was actually associated with improvements in living standards, not just for wealthy industrialists, but for society as a whole – indeed, even for what became the urban proletariat.
After all, he explains, the Victorian-era urban proletariat were, for the most part, the descendants of what had formerly been the rural peasantry, and, while the Dickensian conditions under which they lived and laboured in nineteenth century cities may seem spartan to us, compared to the conditions under which people laboured a generation or two before, they represented a marked improvement. This is why so many so gladly left their rural villages behind for the towns and cities.
On the other hand, however, the conventional view has it that, far from happily leaving rural villages behind because of superior living conditions offered in industrial cities, people were actually forced to leave because jobs were destroyed in the countryside by factors such as enclosure, the mechanization of agriculture and traditional cottage industries being outcompeted and destroyed by more efficient factory production in the cities.
On this view, while living conditions may indeed have been better in the cities than in the countryside at this time, this was only because job opportunities and living standards in had declined so steeply in rural areas.
Yet, according to Ridley, the only reason that the industrial revolution came to be associated with poverty and squalor was, not because of declines in living standards, but rather simply because, Ridley tells us, this was the first time activists, campaigners, politicians, and authors drew attention to the plight of the poor.
The reason for this change in attitudes was that this was the first time that society was sufficiently wealthy that it could afford to start doing something about the plight of the poor. This rising concern for the poor was therefore itself paradoxically a product of the increasing prosperity that the industrial revolution ushered in (p220).
Past Progress and the Problem of Induction
In a book ostensibly promoting optimism regarding the future, why then does Ridley spend so much time talking about the past?
The essence of his argument seems to be thus: Given all this improvement in the past, why is there any reason to believe that this pattern will suddenly cease tomorrow?
Thus, he quotes Whig historian Macaulay as demanding back in 1930 that:
“On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” (p11).
Thus, Macaulay concluded:
“We cannot absolutely prove… that those are in error who tell us that 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” (p287).
Unfortunately, this argument seems to be vulnerable to what philosophers call ‘the problem of induction’.
In short, just because something has long been occurring throughout the past, is no reason to believe that it will continue occurring in the future, any more than, to quote a famous example, the fact that all the swans I have seen previously have thus far proven to be white necessarily proves that I won’t run into a black swan tomorrow.[2]
In other words, just because previous generations have always invented new technologies that have improved standards of living, or discovered new energy sources before the previously discovered ones have been depleted does not necessarily mean that future generations will be so fortunate.
In the end there might simply be no new technologies to invent or no new energy sources left to be discovered.
Self-Sufficiency vs Exchange
The only threat to continuing improvements in human living conditions across the world, in Ridley’s telling, is misguided governmental interference.
He attacks, in particular, several misguided but fashionable policy proposals.
First in Ridley’s firing line is what we might term the cult of self-sufficiency.
Following Adam Smith, Ridley believes that increasing prosperity is in large part a product of the twin processes of specialization and exchange.
These two processes go hand in hand.
On the one hand, it is only through exchange that we are able to specialize. After all, if we were unable to exchange the product of our own specialist labour for food, clothes and housing, then we would have to farm our own food, and knit our own clothes and construct our own housing.
On the other hand, it is only because of specialization and the increased efficiency of specialists that exchange is so profitable.
Thus, Ridley is much taken with Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage, which he writes has been described as “the only proposition in the whole of the social sciences that is both true and surprising” (p75).
In contrast, self-sufficiency, whether at the individual or familial level (e.g. living off the land, growing your own food, building your own home, making your own clothes), or at the national level (autarky, protectionism, embargoes, tariffs on imports), is a sure recipe for perpetual poverty.[3]
Thus, making your own clothes now costs more than buying them in a store. Likewise, DIY may (or may not) be a fun and relaxing hobby, but for well-qualified people with high salaries, it may be a more efficient use of time and money to hire a specialist.
Indeed, even the recent much maligned trend towards eating out and buying takeaways instead of cooking for oneself may reflect the same process towards increasing specialization first identified by Adam Smith.
Thus, Ridley, himself a large landowner and the heir to a peerage, observes that:
“You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals” (p36-7).[4]
Environmentally-Unfriendly ‘Environmentalism’
Other misguided policies skewered by Ridley’s mighty pen include various fashionable environmentalist causes – or, rather, causes which masquerade as environmentally-friendly but are, in practice, as Ridley shows, anything but.
One fad that falls into the latter category is organic farming.
Organic farming is less efficient and more land intensive than modern farming techniques. It therefore requires more land to be converted for use by agriculture, which therefore requires the destruction of yet more of the rainforest and wilderness, yet nevertheless still produces much less food per acre.
Yet organic farming is not only bad for the environment, it is also especially bad for the poor, since it means food will be more expensive, and, since it is the poor who, having less income to spend on luxuries, already spend a greater proportion of their income of food, it is they who will suffer most.
Ridley applies much the same argument to biofuels. Again, these would require the use of more land for farming, depleting the amount of land that can be devoted either to the production of food, or to wildlife, resulting in increasing food prices and decreasing food production, with the global poor suffering the most.
In contrast, genetically modified foods promise to make the production of food cheaper, more efficient and less land intensive. Yet many self-styled environmentalists oppose them.
Why Fossil Fuels are Good for the Environment – and Renewables Bad
Perhaps most controversially, Ridley also argues that renewable energies are, paradoxically, bad for the environment. Again, this is because they are less efficient, and more land-hungry than fossil fuels.
Thus, he reports that to supply the USA alone with its current energy consumption would require:
“Solar panels the size of Spain; or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan; or woodland the size of India and Pakistan; or hayfields for horses the size of Russia and Canada combined; or hydroelectric dams with catchments one third larger than all the continents put together” (p239).
Meanwhile, to provide Britain with its current energy needs without fossil fuels would necessitate:
“Sixty nuclear power stations around the coasts, wind farms… cover[ing] 10 per cent of the entire land (or a big part of the sea)… solar panels covering an area the size of Lincolnshire, eighteen Greater Londons growing bio-fuels, forty-seven New Forests growing fast-rotation harvested timber, hundreds of miles of wave machines off the coast, huge tidal barrages in the Severn estuary and Strangford Lough, and twenty-five times as many hydro dams on rivers as there are today” (p343).
The prospect would hardly appeal to most environmentalists, certainly not to conservationists, since the result would be that:
“The entire country would look like a power station” (p343).
Yet, despite this, “power cuts would be frequent”, since tidal, wind and solar power are all sporadic in the energy they supply, being dependent on weather conditions. Ridley therefore concludes:
“Powering the world with such renewables now is the surest way to spoil the environment” (p343).
In contrast, fossil fuels are much less land hungry relative to the amount of energy they provide.
Therefore, he concludes that, contrary to popular opinion, “fossil fuels have spared much of the landscape from industrialization” and have hence proven an environmental boon (p238).
Only in respect of solar power, does Ridley actually has rather higher hopes (p345). The sun’s power is indeed immense. We are limited only in our current ability to extract it.
Indeed, besides nuclear power, geothermal power and tidal energy, virtually all of our energy sources derive ultimately from the power of the sun.
The Industrial Revolution, Ridley proposes, was enabled by “shifting from current solar power to stored solar power” – and, since then, progress has involved the extraction of ever older stores of the sun’s power – i.e. timber, peat, coal and lastly oil and gas (p216).
Each development was an improvement on the energy source that preceded it, both in terms of efficiency and environmental impact. To turn once again to relying on more primitive sources of energy would, Ridley argues, be a step backwards in every sense.
How Fossil Fuels Freed the Slaves
Fossil fuels are not only better for the environment, Ridley argues, they are also better for mankind, and not merely in the sense that humans benefit from leaving in a better environment. In addition, there are other, more firect benefits to mankind. Indeed, according to Ridley, it was fossil slaves that ultimately freed the slaves.
Thus, Ridley’s chapter entitled ‘The Release of Slaves’ says refreshing little about the familiar historical narrative of how puritanical Christian fundamentalist do-gooders and busybodies like William Wilberforce successfully campaigned for the abolition of slavery and thereby spoiled everybody’s fun.
Instead, Ridley shows that it was the adoption of fossil fuels that ultimately made freeing slaves possible by enabling technology to replace human labour – and indeed animal labour as well.
Thus, he reports:
“It would take 150 slaves, working eight-hour shifts each, to pedal you to your current lifestyle. Americans would need 660 slaves… For every family of four… there should be 600 unpaid slaves back home, living in abject poverty: if they had any better lifestyle they would need their own slaves” (p236).
Thus, Ridley concludes:
“It was fossil fuels that eventually made slavery – along with animal power, and wood, wind and water – uneconomic. Wilberforce’s ambition would have been harder to achieve without fossil fuels” (p214).[5]
Will the Oil Run Out?
As for the perennial fear that our demand for fossil fuels will ultimately exceed the supply, Ridley is unconcerned.
Fossil fuels may be non-renewable, he admits, but the potential supplies are still massive. Our only current problem is accessing them deeper underground in ever more inaccessible regions.
However, Ridley maintains that, one way or another, human ingenuity and technological innovation will find a way.
By the time they do run short, if they ever do, which they probably won’t, Ridley is confident we will have long since already discovered, or invented, a replacement.
In contrast, so-called renewables energy sources, such as wind and water power, while they may indeed be renewable, can nevertheless be very limited in the power they supply, or at least our capacity to extract it. Thus, there may indeed be great power in the wind, the waves and the sun, but it is very difficult, and costly, for us to extract anything more than a very small proportion of this.
This is, of course, one reason such technologies as windmills and watermills were largely abandoned in favour of fossil fuels over a century ago.
Many species, Ridley observes, have gone extinct, or are in danger of going extinct. Yet, since species are capable of reproduction, they are, Ridley argues, ‘renewable resources’.
In contrast, he observes:
“There is not a single non-renewable resource that has yet run out: not coal, oil, gas copper, iron, uranium, silicone or stone… The stone age did not come to an end for lack of stone” (p302).
The Back to Nature Cult and the Naturalistic Fallacy
What then do these misguided fads – self-sufficiency, living off the land, organic food, renewable energies, opposition to GM crops etc. – all have in common?
Although Ridley does not address this, it seems to me that all the misguided policy proposals that Ridley excoriates have one or both of two things in common:
- They restrict the free operation of markets; and/or
- They seek to restrict new technologies that are somehow perceived as ‘unnatural’.
Thus, many of these misguided fads can be traced to a version of what philosophers call the naturalistic fallacy or, more specifically, the appeal to nature fallacy – namely the belief that, if something is ‘natural’, that necessarily means it is good.
Yet the lives of humans in our natural state, i.e. as nomadic foragers, were, as Hobbes rightly surmised, ‘short, nasty and brutish’, at least as compared to our lives today.[6]
Thus, renewable energy sources, biofuels and organic farming all somehow seem more ‘natural’ than burning, mining and drilling for coal, oil, and gas.
Likewise, genetically modified crops (aka ‘Frankenstein foods’) seem quintessentially ‘unnatural’, with connotations of eugenics and ‘playing god’.
In fact, however, we have been genetically modifying domesticated species ever since we began domesticating them. Indeed, this is the very definition of domestication.
Moreover, organic farming and so-called renewable energies are not a return to what is ‘natural’ (whatever that means), but simply a return to technologies that were surpassed and rendered obsolete hundreds of years ago.
If anything, returning to what is natural would involve a return to subsisting by hunting and gathering, but not many environmentalists this side of the Unabomber are willing to go that far. Instead, they only want to turn back the clock so far.[7]
Similarly, nuclear power is rejected by most environmentalists, primarily because it seems quintessentially ‘unnatural’ and the very word ‘nuclear’ is, I suspect, associated in the public mind with nuclear weapons, since the very word ‘nuclear’ invariably conjures images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the prospect of nuclear apocalypse.[8]
Yet nuclear power is actually much less costly in terms of human lives than, say, coal mines or offshore oil rigs, both of which are extremely dangerous places to work.
Likewise, being self-sufficient and ‘living off the land’ may seem intuitively ‘natural’, in that it is the way our ancestors presumably lived in the stone age.
However, Ridley argues that this is not true, and that humans have been, for the entirety of their existence as a species, voracious traders.
Indeed, he even argues that it is humankind’s appetite for and ability to trade, rather than language or culture, that distinguishes us from the remainder of the animal kingdom (p54-60).[9]
Global Warming
Necessarily, Ridley also addresses perhaps the most popular, and certainly the most politically correct, source of pessimism regarding the future, namely the threat of global warming or climate change.
Identifying climate change as both “by far the most fashionable reason for pessimism” and, together with the prospects (or alleged lack of prospects) for economic development in Africa, as one of the “two great pessimisms of today”, Ridley begins his discussion of this topic by acknowledging that these problems “confront the rational optimist with a challenge, to say the least” and as indeed representing “acute challenges” (p315).
Having made the acknowledgement, however, in the remainder of his discussion he suggests that the threat posed by global warming is in fact vastly exaggerated.
Like most so-called global warming skeptics (e.g. Bjørn Lomborg), or at least the more intelligent, knowledgeable ones who are actually worth reading, Ridley is no ‘denier’, in that he denies neither that global warming is occurring nor that it is caused, at least in part, by human activity.
Instead, he simply questions whether the threat posed is as great as it is portrayed as being by some scientists, politicians and activists.
Thus, he begins his discussion of the topic by pointing out that climate has always changed throughout human history, and indeed prehistory, not so as to suggest that the changes that are currently occurring are of the same type and cause (i.e. not man-made), but rather to emphasize that we are more than capable of adapting, and that changes of similar magnitude will not mean the end of the world.
“There were warmer periods in earth’s history in medieval times and about 6,000 years ago… and… humanity and nature survived much faster warming lurches in climate during the ice ages than anything predicted for this century” (p329).[10]
“People move happily from London to Hong Kong or Boston to Miami and do not die from heat, so why should they die if their home city gradually warms by a few degrees?” (p336).
Indeed, far from denying the reality of climate change, Ridley follows former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, in his interesting book An Appeal to Reason, in actually, at least hypothetically and for the sake of argument, accepting the projections of the mainstream Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding future temperature increases.
Yet the key point emphasized by both Lawson and Ridley is that, under all the IPCC’s various projections, increased global warming results from increased carbon emissions, which themselves result from economic growth, particularly in what is today the Developing World.
This means that those projections which anticipate the greatest temperature increases also anticipate the greatest economic growth, which, in turn, means, not only that the future descendants on whose behalf we today are asked to make sacrifices will be vastly wealthier than are the people asked to make these sacrifices, but also that they will have far greater resources – and, of course, more advanced technology – with which to deal with the problems posed by rising temperatures
Thus, with regard to rising sea levels for example, one of the most often cited threats said to result from global warming, it is notable that much of the Netherlands would be underwater at high tide were it not for land reclamation (e.g. the building of dykes and pumps).
Much of this successful land reclamation in the Netherlands occurred in previous centuries, when the technologies and resources available were much more limited. In the future, with increased prosperity and advances in technology, our ability to cope with rising sea levels will be even greater.
Ridley also points out that there are likely to be benefits associated with global warming as well as problems.
For example, he cites data showing that, all around the world, more people actually die from the extreme cold than from extreme heat (Zhau et al 2021).
“Globally the number of excess deaths during cold weather continues to exceed the number of excess deaths during heat waves by a large margin – by about five to one in most of Europe” (p335).
This suggests that global warming will actually save lives overall, especially since global warming is anticipated to reduce the severity of conditions of extreme cold to a greater extent than it increases the temperature in warm conditions.
Thus, Lomborg reports:
“Global warming increases cold temperatures much more than warm temperatures, thus it increases night and winter temperatures much more than day and summer temperatures… Likewise, global warming increases temperatures in temperate and Arctic regions much more than in tropical areas” (Cool it: p12).
Indeed, with regard to food supply and farm yealds, Ridley concludes:
“The global food supply will probably increase if temperature rises by up to 3°C. Not only will the warmth improve yields from cold lands and the rainfall improve yields from some dry lands, but the increased carbon dioxide will itself enhance yields, especially in dry areas… Less habitat will probably be lost to farming in a warmer world” (p337).[11]
Finally, Ridley concludes by reporting:
“Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger” (p388).
Actually, however, judging by Ridley’s own associated endnote, this is not the conclusion of “economists” in general at all, but rather of one particular writer who is not an economist either by training or profession – namely, leading climate change skeptic Bjørn Lomborg.
Overpopulation?
Though conveniently left off the agenda of most modern mainstream environmentalists, a strong case can be made that it is overpopulation that represents the ultimate and most fundamental environmental issue. Other environmental problems are strictly secondary – because the reason why we wreak environmental damage is precisely because we need to provide for the increasing demands of a growing population.
Thus, concerned do-gooders who seek to lower their carbon footprints by cycling to work every day would arguably do better to simply forgo reproduction, since, by having children, they do not so much increase their own carbon footprint, as create another whole person complete with a carbon footprint all of their own.
However, in recent decades, talk of overpopulation has become politically-incorrect and taboo, because restricting reproductive rights seems redolent of eugenics and forced sterilizations, which are now, for entirely wrongheaded reasons, regarded as a bad thing.
Moreover, since population growth is now occurring largely among non-whites, especially black Africans, with whites themselves (and many other groups, not least East Asians) reproducing at well below replacement levels and fast being demographically displaced by nonwhites, even in their own indigenous ethnic homelands, it also has the faint whiff of racism and eugenics, making it especially politically incorrect.
Overpopulation has thus become ‘the environmental issue that dare not speak its name’.
Ridley concludes, however, that overpopulation is not a major concern because it handily solves itself through a curious though well-documented phenomenon known to demographers as the demographic transition, whereby increasing economic development is seemingly invariably accompanied by a decline in fertility.
There are, however, several problems with this rather convenient conclusion.
For one thing, while fertility rates have indeed fallen precipitously in developed economies in recent decades in concert with economic growth, no one really fully understands why this is happening.
Indeed, Ridley himself admits that it is “mysterious”, “an unexplained phenomenon” and that “demographic transition theory is a splendidly confused field” (p207).
Indeed, from an evolutionary psychological, sociobiological or Darwinian perspective, the so-called demographic transition is especially paradoxical, since it is elementary Darwinism 101 that organisms should respond to resource abundance by channeling the additional resources into increased rates of reproduction so as to maximize their Darwinian fitness.
Although Ridley admits that the reasons behind this phenomenon are not fully understood, he identifies factors such as increased urbanization, female education and reduced infant mortality as the likely causal factors.[12]
However, uncertainty as to its causes does not dampen Ridley’s conviction that the phenomenon is universal and will soon be replicated in the so-called ‘Developing World’ just as surely as it occurred in ‘developed economies’.
Yet, with the stakes potentially so high, can we really place such confidence in the continuation, and global spread, of a process whose causes remain so little understood?
The second problem with seeing the demographic transition as a simple, hands-off, laissez faire solution to overpopulation is that the observed association between economic development and population growth and stagnation is much more complex than Ridley makes out.
Thus, as we have seen, according to Ridley, living standards have been rising throughout pretty much the entirety of recorded history, and indeed prehistory. However, the below replacement level fertility rates now observed in most developed economies date only to the latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, even as recently as the immediate post-war decades in the middle of the twentieth century, there was a famous ‘baby boom’.
Until then, fertility rates had indeed already been in decline for some time. However, this decline was more than offset by massive reductions in the levels of infant mortality owing to improved health, nutrition and sanitation, such that industrialization and improved living standards were actually, until very recently, accompanied by massive increases, not decreases, in population-size.
Given that much of the so-called ‘Developing World’, especially in Africa, is obviously still at a much earlier stage of development than is the contemporary west, we may still expect many decades more of population growth in Africa before any reductions eventually set in, if indeed they ever do.
Finally, this assumption that decreased fertility will inevitably accompany economic growth in the ‘Developing World’ itself presupposes that the entirety of the so-called ‘Developing World’ will indeed experience economic growth and development.
This is by no means a foregone conclusion.
Indeed, the very term ‘Developing World’, presupposing as it does that these parts of the world will indeed economically ‘develop’, may turn out to be a case of wishful thinking.
A case in point is the nation of South Africa, which was, as recently as the 1960s, widely regarded as the only ‘developed economies’ in Africa. Today, however, South Africa is usually classed as a ‘developing economy’.
This suggests that South Africa is indeed, in some sense, ‘developing’, but, unfortunately, that it just happens to be ‘developing’ in altogether the wrong direction.
Africa, Aid and Development
This leads to a related issue: if Ridley’s conclusions regarding overpopulation strike me as overly optimistic, then his prognosis for Africa seems similarly naïve, if not borderline utopian.
Critiquing international aid programmes as having failed to bring about economic development and even as representing part of the problem, Ridley instead implicates various factors as responsible for Africa’s perceived ‘underdevelopment’. Primary among these is a lack of recognition given to property rights, which, he observes, deters both investment and the saving of resources necessary for economic growth.
Yet, Ridley insists, entrepreneurialism is rife in Africa and just waiting to be provided with a successful economic infrastructure (e.g. property rights) necessary to encourage and harness it to the general welfare.
Certainly Ridley is right that there is nothing intrinsic to the African soil or air that prevents economic development as has occurred elsewhere in the world.
However, Ridley fails to explain why the factors that he implicates as holding Africa back (e.g. corrupt government, lack of property rights) are seemingly so endemic throughout much of Africa but not elsewhere in the world.
Neither does he explain why similar problems (e.g. high rates of violent crime, poverty) also beset, not just Africa itself, but also other parts of the world populated by people of predominantly sub-Saharan African ancestry, from Haiti and Jamaica to Baltimore and Detroit.
This, of course, suggests the politically-incorrect possibility that the perceived ‘underdevelopment’ of much of sub-Saharan Africa simply reflects something innate in the psychology of the indigenous people of that continent.
Immigration and Overpopulation
Yet, if Africa does not develop, then it presumably will not undergo the demographic transition either, since the latter, whatever its proximate explanation, seems to be dependent on economic growth and modernization.
This would mean that population in Africa would continue to grow, and, as population growth stalls, or even goes into reverse, in the developed world, people of sub-Saharan African descent will come to constitute an ever-increasing proportion of the world population.
Of course, population growth in a ‘Developing World’ that fails to ‘develop’ is, from a purely environmental perspective, less worrisome, since living standards are lower and hence the environmental impact, and carbon footprint, of each additional person is lower.
However, permissive immigration policies throughout much of the West have resulted in African populations, and populations from elsewhere in the Developing World, migrating into Europe, North America and other First World economies at ever increasing rates and, moreover, fast becoming acclimatized to western living standards, but also, in addition to being younger on average and hence having more of their reproductive careers ahead of them, often retaining higher fertility levels than the indigenous population for several generations after migrating.
Thus, open-door immigration policies are transforming a Third World overpopulation problem into a First World overpopulation problem and into a global environmental issue as well.
The result is that white Europeans will soon find themselves as minorities even in their own indigenous European homelands. As a result, European peoples will effectively become stateless nations without a country to call their own or whose destiny they can control through the electoral system.
Of course, we are repeatedly reassured that this is not a problem, and that anyone who suggests it might be a problem is a loathsome racist, since immigrant communities and their descendants will, of course, undoubtedly successfully integrate into western culture and become westerners.
History, however, suggests that this is unlikely to be the case.
On the contrary, the assimilation of culturally, religiously and racially distinct immigrants has proven, at best, a difficult and fraught process.
Thus, in America, successive waves of European-descended immigrants (Irish, Poles, Italians, Jews) have indeed successfully assimilated into mainstream American society and lost most of their cultural uniqueness. However, African-Americans remain very much a separate community, with their own neighbourhoods, dialect and culture, despite their ancestors having been resident in the USA longer than any of these European descended newcomers, and longer even than many of the so-called ‘Anglos’.
This cannot be attributed to the unique historical experience of the African diaspora population in America (i.e. slavery, segregation etc.), since the experience of European polities in assimilating, or attempting to assimilate, nonwhite immigrant communities in the post-war period has proved similarly fraught.
Thus, quite apart from the environmental impact of a rising population with First World living standards and carbon footprints to match, to which I have already alluded, various problems are likely to result from the demographic transformation of the west, which may threaten the very survival of western civilization, at least in the form in which we have hitherto known it.
After all, civilizations and cultures are ultimately the product of the people who compose them. A Europe composed increasingly of Muslims will no longer be a western civilization but rather, in all likelihood, a Muslim one.
Meanwhile, other peoples have arguably failed to independently found civilizations of any type sufficient to warrant the designation ‘civilization’, nor arguably even to maintain advanced civilizations bequeathed to them, as the post-colonial experience in much of sub-Saharan Africa well illustrates.
Yet it is, as we have seen, these peoples who will, on current projections, come to constitute an increasing proportion of the world population, and hence presumably of immigrants to the west as well, over the course of the coming century.
This suggests that western civilization may not survive the replacement of its founding stock.[13]
Moreover, increasing ethnic diversity will also likely foreshadow other problems, in particular the sort of ethnic conflict that seemingly inevitably besets multiethnic polities.
Thus, multiethnic states – from Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia to Rwanda and Northern Ireland – have frequently been beset by interethnic conflict and violence, and even those multiethnic polities whose divisions have yet to result in outright violence and civil war (e.g. Belgium) remain very much divided states.[14]
In transforming what were formerly monoracial, if not monoethnic, states into multiracial states, European elites are seemingly voluntarily importing the exact same sorts of ethnic conflict into their own societies.
On this view, the Muslim terrorist attacks, and various race riots, which various European countries have experienced in recent decades may prove an early foretaste and harbinger of things to come.
In addition, if western populations are currently undergoing a radical transformation in their racial and ethnic composition, these problems are only exacerbated by dysgenic fertility patterns even among white westerners ourselves, whereby it is those women with the traits least conducive to maintaining an advanced technological civilization (e.g. low intelligence, conscientiousness, work ethic) who are, on average, the most fecund, and hence disproportionately bequeath their genes to the next generation, while improved medical care increasing facilitates the survival and reproduction of those among the sick and ill who otherwise would have been weeded out by selection.[15]
However, besides a few paragraphs dismissing and deriding the apocalyptic prognoses of early twentieth century eugenicists (p288), these are rational, if politically incorrect, reasons for pessimism that Ridley, the self-styled rational optimist, evidently does not deign – or perhaps dare – to discuss.
The Perverse Appeal of the Apocalypse
Ridley is right to observe that tales of imminent apocalypse have proven paradoxically popular throughout history.
Indeed, despite only being barely an ‘Xennial’ and having lived most of my life in Britain, I have nevertheless already been fortunate enough to have survived several widely-prophesized apocalypses, from a Cold War nuclear apocalypse, to widely anticipated epidemics of BSE, HIV, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, the coronavirus and the ‘millennium bug’, all of which proved damp squibs.
Yet prophesizing imminent apocalypse is, on reflection, a rather odd prediction to make. It is rather like making a bet you cannot win: If you are right, then everyone dies, and nobody is around to congratulate you on your far-seeing prescience – and neither, in all probability, are you.
It is rather like betting on your own death (i.e. paying for life insurance). If you win (if you could call it ‘winning’), then, by definition, you will not be around to collect your winnings.
Why then are stories about the coming apocalypse so paradoxically popular? After all, no one surely relishes the prospect of imminent Armageddon.
One reason is that catastrophism sells. Scare-story headlines about imminent disaster sell more newspapers to anxious readers (or, in contemporary formulation, attract more clicks) than do headlines berating us for how good we have it.
Activist groups also have an incentive to exaggerate the scale of problems in order to attract funding. The same is true even of scientists, who likewise have every incentive to exaggerate the scale of the problems they are investigating (e.g. climate change), or at least neglect to correct the inflated claims of activists, in order to attract research funding.
Yet I suspect the paradoxical human appetite for pessimism is rooted ultimately in what psychiatrist Randolph Nesse refers to, in a medical contex, as ‘the Smoke Detector Principle’ – namely the observation that, when it comes to potential apocalypses, since false positives are less costly than false negatives, it is wise to err on the side of caution and prepare for the worst, just in case.
Our penchant for apocalypses may even have religious roots.
Belief in the imminence of the end time is a pervasive religious belief.
Thus, the early Christians, including in all probability Jesus himself (so historians speculate), believed that Judgement Day would occur within their own lifetimes.
Later on, Jehovah’s Witnesses believed the same thing, and actually set a date, or rather a succession of dates, rescheduling the apocalypse each time the much-heralded end time, like a British Rail train in the 1980s, invariably and inconsiderately failed to arrive on due schedule.
The same is true of countless other apocalyptic Millennarial religious cults, scattered across history.
Interestingly, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, suggests the scare over global warming thus reflects an ancient religious belief translated into the language of ostensibly secular modern science.
Thus, he observes, throughout history, God’s vengeance on the people for their sins has been conceived of as occurring through the medium of the weather (e.g. storms, floods, lightning bolts):
“Throughout the ages… the weather has been an important part of the religious narrative. In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people; and there is no shortage of examples of this theme in the the Bible, either, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Old Testament” (An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming: p102-3).
Thus, Lawson concludes that, with the decline of traditional religion:
“It is the quasi-religion of green alarmism and what has been well described as global salvationism… which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege” (An Appeal to Reason: p102)
In doing so, climate change alarmism has also replaced another substitute religion for the pseudo-secular that, like Christianity itself, now appears to be in its death throes, and that brought only suffering and destruction in its wake – namely, Marxism.
Thus, Lawson observes:
“With the collapse of Marxism, and to all intents and purposes of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism, not least on the global scale, and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed. For many of them, green is the new red” (An Appeal to Reason: p101).
Global warming alarmism thus provides an ostensibly secular and scientific substitute for eschatology for the resolutely irreligious.
The Cult of Progress
On the other hand, Ridley surely exaggerates the ubiquity of pessimism.
While there is indeed a market for gloom-mongering prophets of doom, belief in the reality, and the inevitability, of social, economic, political and moral progress is also pervasive, especially (but not exclusively) on the political left.
Thus, Marxists have long held that the coming of communist utopia is not just desirable but wholly inevitable, if not just around the corner, as a necessary resolution of the contradictions allegedly inherent in capitalism, as Marx himself purported to have proven scientifically.
This belief too may have religious roots. The Marxist belief that we pass into communist utopia (i.e. heaven on earth) after the revolution may reflect a perversion of the Christian belief that we pass into heaven after death and the Apocalypse. Thus, Marxism is, as Edmund Wilson first put it, “the opiate of the intellectuals”.
Nowadays, though Marx has belatedly fallen from favour, leftists retain their belief in the inevitability of social and political progress. Indeed, they have even taken to referring to themselves as ‘progressives’ and dismissing anyone who does not agree with them of being ‘on the wrong side of history’.
On this view, the process of liberation began with the abolition of slavery, continued with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the granting of independence to former European colonies, proceeded onwards with the so-called ‘civil rights movement’ in the USA in the 1950s and 60s, then successively degenerated into so–called women’s liberation, feminism, gay rights, gay pride, disabled rights, animal rights, transsexual rights etc.
Quite where this process will lead next, no one, least of all leftists themselves, seems very sure. Indeed, one suspects they dare not speculate.
Yesterday’s reductio ad absurdum of what was, in Britain, once dismissed ‘loony leftism’, the prospect of which everyone, just a few decades earlier, would have dismissed as preposterous scaremongering, is today’s reality, tomorrow’s mainstream, and the day after tomorrow’s relentlessly policed dogma and new orthodoxy. Of this, the recent furores over, first, gay marriage, and now transsexual bathroom rights, represent very much cases in point.
Yet the pervasive faith in progress is by no means not restricted to the left. On the contrary, as the disastrous invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan proved all too well, neoconservatives believe that Islamic tribal societies, and former Soviet republics, can be transformed into capitalist liberal democracies just as surely as unreconstructed Marxists once believed (and, in some cases, still do believe) that Islamic tribal societies and capitalist liberal democracies would themselves inevitably give way to communism.
Indeed, neoconservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama arguably went even further than Marx: the latter merely prophesized the coming end of history, the former insisted it had already occurred, and, in so doing, became instantly famous for being proven almost instantly wrong.
Meanwhile, free market libertarians like Ridley himself believe that Western-style economic development, industrialization and prosperity can come to Africa just as surely as surely as it came to Europe and East Asia.
Indeed, even Hitler was a believer in progress and utopia, his own envisaged ‘Thousand Year Reich’ being almost as hopelessly utopian and unrealistic as the communist society envisaged by the Marxists.
Marx thought progress involved taking the means of production into common ownership; Thatcher thought that progress involved privatizing public utilities; Hitler though progress involved eliminating allegedly inferior races.
In short, left and right agree on the inevitability of progress. Each are, in this sense, ‘progressives’. They differ only on what they believe ‘progress’ entails.
Scientific and Political Progress
In conclusion, I agree with Ridley that scientific and technological advances will continue inexorably.
Scientific and technological progress is indeed inevitable and unstoppable. Any state or person that unilaterally renounces modern technologies will be outcompeted, both economically and militarily, and ultimately displaced, by those who wisely opt to do otherwise.
However, although technology improves, the uses to which technologies are employed will remain the same, since human nature itself remains so stubbornly intransigent.
Thus, as philosopher John Gray writes in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (which I have reviewed here):
“Though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive animal that is also one of the most predatory and destructive” (Straw Dogs: p28, p4).
The inevitable result, Gray concludes, is that:
“Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war” (Straw Dogs: p123).
References
Payne H (2010) Environmental Progress: The Parked Mustang Test, at Planet Gore: The Hot Blog, National Review, April 23, 2010.
Ridley M (2010) The Mustang Test, RationalOptimist.com, 25 May, 2010.
[1] Of course, the reason that there is a demand for additional housing in the UK is that the population of the country is rising, and population is rising entirely as a consequence immigration, since the settled population of Britain actually reproduces at well below replacement levels. The topic of immigration is one to which I return later in this review (see above). Another factor is increasing proportions of people living alone, due to reduced levels of marriage and cohabitation, and increased rates of divorce and separation.
[2] This example is said to be actually historical, and not purely hypoethetical. Thus, the idea that black swans did not actually exist was widely believed in Europe for centuries, supposedly originating with ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s poem Satire IV in the late first or early second century AD. Yet this conventional wisdom was supposedly overturned when Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh sighted a black swan in Australia, to which continent the species is indigenous, in January 1697.
[3] Given his trenchant opposition to autarky, protectionism and tariffs, and support for free trade, it is interesting to note that Ridley was nevertheless a supporter of Brexit, despite the fact that promoting trade, competition and the free movement of goods, services and workers across international borders was a fundamental objective of European integration.
Presumably, like many Eurosceptics, Ridley believed that integration in the EU had now way beyond this sort of purely economic integration (i.e. a common market), as indeed it has, and that the benefits of continued membership of the EU, in terms of the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital was outweighed by the negatives.
However, it ought to be pointed out that European integration was, from its post-war inception, never purely economic. Indeed, economic integration necessarily entails some loss of political sovereignty, since economic policy is itself an aspect of politics.
[4] I agree with Ridley that free trade is indeed beneficial, and tariffs and protectionism counterproductive, at least in purely economic terms. However, I believe that there is a case for retaining some degree of self-sufficiency at the national level (i.e. autarky), so that, in the event that international trade breaks down, for example during wartime, the population is nevertheless able to subsist and maintain itself. Today, we in the west tend to see the prospect of a war that would affect us in this way as remote. This, however, may prove to be naïve.
Perhaps analogously a similar case can be made for maintaining some ability to ‘live off the land’ and, if necessary, become self-sufficient at the individual level (e.g. by hunting, fishing, and growing your own crops), so as to prepare for the unlikely circumstance of the domestic economic system breaking down, whether due to natural disaster, civil war and foreign invasion. This is, of course, the objective of so-called survivalists.
[5] Although slavery may indeed eventually have become “uneconomic”, as claimed by Ridley, thanks to fossil fuels, this is not, contrary to the implication of the quoted passage, the reason slavery was abolished in the nineteenth centiry, although it is indeed true that, at the time, many economists claimed that it would be cheaper to simply pay slaves rather incur the expense of forcibly enslaving and effectively imprisoning them, with all the costs this entailed. In fact, however, on the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, former slaves were unwilling to work in the horrendous conditions on sugar plantations of the Caribbean, preferring to eek out an existence through subsitance farming, and the plantations themselves became “uneconomic” until indentured labourers (slaves in all but name) were imported from Asia to take the place of the freed slaves.
[6] Despite pervasive myths of ‘noble savages’ existing in benign harmony with both nature and one another, the ‘nastiness’ and ‘brutishness’ of primitive premodern humans is beyond dispute. Indeed, even the !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa, long extolled by anthropologists as ‘the gentle people’ and ‘the harmless people’, actually “have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities” (The Blank Slate: p56). Thus, Steven Pinker reports:
“The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are often held out as a relatively peaceful people, and so they are, compared with other foragers: their murder rate is only as high as Detroit’s” (How the Mind Works: p51).
However, if the life of early man was indeed ‘nasty and brutish’, the ‘shortness’ of the lives of premodern peoples is sometimes exaggerated. Thus, it is often claimed that, prior to recent times, the average lifespan was only about thirty years of age. In fact, however, this is misleading, and largely reflects the much higher rates of infant mortality.
[7] In fact, a return to a foraging lifestyle would not be ‘natural’ for most humans, since most humans are now to some extent evolutionarily adapted to agriculture, and some may even have become adapted to the industrial and post-industrial societies in which many of us now live. The prospect of returning to what is ‘natural’ is, then, simply impossible, because there is no such thing in the first place. Though evolutionary psychologists like to talk about the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’, this is, in truth, a composite of environments, not a single time or place any researcher could identify and visit with the aid merely of a compass, a research grant and a time machine.
[8] The comically villainous Mr Burns in the hugely popular animated cartoon ‘The Simpsons’ both illustrates and reinforces the general perception of nuclear power in the western world. Of course, no doubt many wealthy businessmen and investors do indeed make large amounts of money out of nuclear energy. But many wealthy businessmen and investors also make large amounts of money investing in renewable energies.
[9] In fact, of course, there is not one single factor that distinguishes us from other animals – there are many such things, albeit mostly differences of degree rather than of kind.
[10] While Ridley may be right that “nature” as a whole “survived much faster warming lurches in climate during the ice ages than anything predicted for this century”, many individuals species did not. On the contrary, many species are thought to have gone extinct during these historical shifts between ice ages and interglacials.
Humans have indeed proven resilient in surviving in many different climates around the world. However, this is largely on account of our cultural inventiveness. Thus, on migrating to colder climates, we are able to keep warm by making fire, wearing clothes and building shelter, rather than having to gradually evolve thicker fur and other physiological adaptations to cold as other animals must do. Other animals lack this adaptability.
Therefore, if our concern extends beyond our own species, perhaps we should be concerned about such fluctuations in temperature. On the other hand, however, it is almost certainly the destiny of all species, humans very much included, to ultimately go extinct, or at least evolve into something new.
[11] More specifically, at least according to Bjørn Lomborg in his book Cool It, global warming will reduce farm yields and agricultural output in Africa and other tropical regions, but increase farm yields in Europe and other temperate zones, and the increases in the latter will be more than sufficient to offset the reduced agricultural output in Africa and the tropics.
[12] Many of the frequently offered for the decline in fertility rates in the west do not hold up to analysis. For example, many authorities credit (or sometimes blame) feminism, or the increase in female labour force participation, for the development. However, this theory seems to be falsified by the fact that fertility rates are even lower in countries such as Japan and South Korea, although rates of female labour force participation, and of feminist ideology, seem to have been much lower, at least until very recently.
My own favoured theory for the demographic transition, not mentioned by Ridley, implicates the greater availability of effective contraception technologies. Effective and widely available contraceptive technologies represent a recent invention and hence an ‘evolutionary novelty’ that our species has not yet had sufficient time to evolve psychological mechanisms to deal effectively with yet.
The problem with testing this theory is that, until recently, many forms of contraception were illegal in many jurisdictions, and also taboo, and therefore use was often covert and surreptitious, such that it is difficult to gauge just how widely available and widely used various contraceptive technologies were, until recently.
However, some evidence in support of this theory is provided by the decline in fertility rates in countries such as the US and UK. Thus, in the US, the baby boom reached its peak, and thenceforth began a steep decline in 1960, exactly the same time that the contraceptive pill first came on the market. In Britain, the availability of the pill was initially quite restricted and, perhaps partly as a consequence, fertility rates peaked, and the downward trend began, somewhat later.
However, looking at the overall trends in fertility rates over time, the availability of contraception certainly cannot be the sole explanation for the changes observed.
[13] In fact, the survival of western civilization, and the form it may come to take, may depend, in part, upon which peoples and ethnicities western populations come to be predominantly replaced by.
Thus, it is often claimed by immigration restrictionists, especially those of a racialist bent, that immigrants from developing economies invariably recreate in the host nation to which they migrate the same problems that beset the country they left behind, often, ironically, the very factors (e.g. poverty, corruption) that motivated them to leave this previous homeland behind.
In fact, however, this is not always true. For example, though heirs to among the oldest and greatest civilizations of the ancient world, both India and China are, today, despite recent economic growth, still relatively poor countries, at least as compared to countries in the West. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, people in the west of Indian and Chinese ancestry resident in the west (and indeed in other parts of the world as well) tend to be disproportionately wealthy, substantially wealthier, on average, than the white western populations among whom they live.
However, Chinese and Indian populations resident in the west also seem to have low birth rates, as does China itself, while the fertility rate in India, while still just around replacement levels in the latest available data, seems to be in free fall. In short, for better or worse, it appears that the future is African, or, as increasing numbers of Africans migrate abroad, at least of African descent.
[14] For example, much is made, and rightly so, of the success of the peace process, and subsequent settlement, in bringing (relative) peace to Northern Ireland. Yet Northern Ireland nevertheless remains, today, very much a divided society, in which ethnic tensions simmer below the surface, and no one would hold it up a good example of a united, cohesive, functional polity, let alone as an example that all but the most conflict-ridden and divided of polities should ever seek to emulate.
[15] Of course, concerns regarding overpopulation, which I have discussed earlier in this piece, will only exacerbate dysgenic fertility patterns, since it is only those with high levels of altruism who even care about the problems posed for future generations by overpopulation, and it is only those with high levels of self-control who will be able to actually act of these concerns by restricting their fertility, and all these personality traits are socially desirable traits that we would wish to impart upon future generations and also partly heritable.
The Contemporary Heretic 