Super-abundant economic progress

EVER SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION in the nineteenth century and ever-increasing global freedom in this one, human progress has been on a roll -- so says author and rational optimist Marian Tupy. He outlined his arguments and data a few nights ago at an enjoyable NZ Initiative presentation.

Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, the world's most comprehensive database tracking improvements in human wellbeing, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of the acclaimed book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.

He's one of the good guys.

Miserabilist Thomas Malthus famously expressed the idea that while resources would only expand at a linear rate, population will expand exponentially -- a disaster waiting to happen. But Malthus was writing about rabbits, or animals without the brain that humans have; and he was writing before the industrial revolution, when that brain was put to powerful practical use. Malthus was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, as Tupy's data abundantly proves.

Take that Malthus!

In just the last four decades alone, commodities across the board have become more abundant thanks to globalisation and increasing freedom. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, long a source of concern, the average calorie intake is now ticking up to 2,500!

Take that Paul Erlich!

THAT FAMOUS PANGLOSSIAN THOMAS BABINGTON Macaulay talked in the nineteenth century about the inevitability of progress: “In every age," said Macaulay, "everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” It's still possible to remain optimistic even with the many steps backwards anti-freedom forces insist we take.

I was reminded of Peter Boettke's analogy of the horse race between Smith, Schumpeter, and Stupidity -- the progress of Smith's Division of Labour and Schumpeter's progress in technology (well explained by our presenter) has to continually stay ahead of the various degrees of Stupidity inflicted on us all. It's a tribute to human reason and the power of human freedom to wield it that we have to thank for continuing and ongoing progress.

OUR PRESENTER DID GET A LITTLE  pushback from a questioner who interrogated his concept of abundance. Is abundance always good, asked his questioner? A super-abundance of nuclear weapons, for example, or opioids, is hardly a good thing for human progress, he maintained.

It's a fair point, and it resonates with those who argue that to expect infinite growth on a finite planet you must be either insane or an economist. For both points, I think, economist George Reisman makes a profound point in response: the loss of the concept of economic progress.

Tupy still talks of human progress but of economic growth. Reisman (a student of Von Mises) would suggest he'd be better to combine the two to answer both objections: i.e. to talk of economic progress rather than economic growth.

Growth is a concept that applies to individual living organisms. An organism grows until it reaches maturity. then it declines, and sooner or later dies. The concept of growth is also morally neutral [the point made by our questioner], equally capable of describing a negative as a positive: tumours and cancers can grow. Thus the concept of growth both necessarily implies limits and can easily be applied negatively.

In contrast, the concept of progress applies across succeeding generations of human beings. The individual human beings reach maturity and die. But because they possess the faculty of reason, they can both discover new and additional knowledge and transmit it to the rising generation ... with each succeeding generation receiving a greater inheritance of knowledge than the one before it and making its own fresh contribution to knowledge. This continuously expanding body of knowledge, insofar as it takes the form of continuously increasing scientific and technological knowledge and correspondingly improved capital equipment, is the foundation of continuous economic progress.

Progress is a concept unique to man: it is founded on his possession of reason and thus his ability to accumulate and transmit a growing body of knowledge across the generations. Totally unlike growth, whose essential confines are the limits of a single organism, progress has no practical limit. Only if man could achieve omniscience would progress have to end. But the actual effect of the acquisition of knowledge is always to lay the foundation for the acquisition of still more knowledge. Through applying his reason, man enlarges all of his capacities, and the more he enlarges them, the more he enlarges his capacity to enlarge them.

He notes here that it Ludwig Von Mises who had first alerted him to this vital distinction.

The concept of progress differs radically from the concept of growth in that it also has built into it a positive evaluation: progress is movement in the direction of a higher, better, and more desirable state of affairs. This improving state of affairs is founded on the growing body of knowledge that the possession and application of human reason makes possible. Its foundation is the rising potential for human achievement that is based on growing knowledge.

While it is possible to utter denunciations of too rapid "growth" as being harmful, it would be a contradiction in terms even to utter the thought of too rapid progress, let alone denounce it. The meaning would be that things can get better too quickly -- that things getting better meant they were getting worse. [Capitalism, p.106]

FYI, Professor Reisman has kindly made his book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (in which you can read all his arguments) freely available for reading, saving, and printing. Download the link here.

For an extra bonus, you can head to his index and check out everything he's written there on economic progress ...