Everything new is good again

Here are some notes about two books that share an optimistic world view: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and Factfulness by Ola Rosling. Both the books state that the world is now a much better place than a few generations ago, though some may feel nostalgic about the good old times. They were really not that good. As Rosling points out, in the 1970's there were some high income countries, lots of poor countries with big populations, and only a few inbetween. Now the situation has thoroughly changed -- though cooperation, trade and technology.

Ridley's book reflect his political stance: trade and communication bring wealth and innovation, government control stifles them. Additionally, he points out that doomsday prophets have been wrong, and often their message has been based on false assumptions (like the famous The Limits to Growth that seems to have predicted that our oil reverses would be depleted within 20 to 50 years). Some of his analysis is very good. With some issues he ignores the "bigger framework"*. And since he is an optimist, he dares to predict a pretty good run for the world for the next 10 years. That 10
years has now almost passed. It hasn't been quite that rosy. For example he could not have predicted the spread of disinformation and hatred through social media. On the other hand, as Rosling would say “When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them."

*Ridley uses the case of acid rain as an example of an exaggerated doomsday scenario. According to him in the 1980's scientists and media often stated that German forests were dying because of acid rain, though "the truth is that there were small pockets of damage to forests in the 1980s some of which were caused by pests, others by natural senescence or competition and a few by local pollution. There was no great forest die-off due to acid rain." This can be the case. Media attention can lead to regulations like amendments of the U.S. Clean Ait Act to combat acid rain tough the Clean Air Act by itself may have been sufficient. But I'd like to discuss another example. Leaded gasoline is toxic. There was a lengthy process where scientists and activists fought to inform the public and legislators about the health hazard. The opponents were of course the Ethyl Corporation (the producer of "anti-knock agent" that contained lead) and its lobbyists. Eventually the toxicity of leaded gasoline was recognized and it was banned by the aforementioned Clean Air Act. This was not an exaggerated doomsday scenario. It has been estimated (research mentioned in Freakonomics) that declining exposure to lead is responsible for an up to 56% decline in crime from 1992 to 2002.