The Quality of Life Improves but War Is One Exception

Many are pessimistic about progress. Yet, the concrete evidence is mostly of improvement in living conditions. However, war is one evil product of agriculture and industry. Population collapse is another.

If our civilization collapses like all others before it, we will have had a better quality of life than ever before. This is true despite the increased deadliness of modern warfare and other worsening problems, including global warming.

The Case for Progress

The argument for progress is quite compelling. Every index of human welfare marches steadily up the page in lockstep with economic growth (1).

It doesn't matter whether one looks at wages, health, longevity, happiness, or leisure time and spending (2). Oddly, this uniformly good news has gone unnoticed in the mass media. Their tone has become darker as the world has become brighter.

An obsessive focus on bad news, bloodshed, violent crime, and political conspiracies is matched only by the dystopian trend in entertainment. It is as though we need constant jolts to the threat detection mechanism of our brains to feel alive in a world that is actually very safe for most.

Mass media may give an unduly negative spin to economic development also. This could explain why, in a world where most people live far better, and far longer, than nobles of earlier times, we hear only about poverty, inequality, ethnic tension, civil wars, terrorism, and disease outbreaks.

Not everything is getting better, of course, although Steven Pinker makes essentially this case in his current optimistic book.

One example is warfare. Pinker evokes the savage-ape stereotype of a former era and contrasts the supposed violent depravity of our ancestors with modern civility.

Warfare as a Side Effect of Agriculture

Having lived through part of the twentieth century that featured the two most deadly wars that the world has ever seen, it is implausible that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were actually more warlike.

Yet, the evidence that hunter gatherers were inherently warlike is spurious. The societies for whom this evidence was drawn were often forced to become more warlike thanks to colonial attacks on their territories.

Most pre-agricultural societies had little or no warfare for the simple reason that they had little that was either defensible, or worth defending. Human populations were sparsely distributed and they typically moved camp every few days in search of new food sources.

One exception to this rule involved inhabitants of the land around Lake Turkana. This turf was well worth defending because it was not only a place where game animals congregated to drink but also a good location for fishing.

This site was the location of organized warfare some 20,000 years ago that took the form of an ambush attack. Its discovery occasioned great excitement as the earliest reliable archaeological evidence for war. Otherwise, there is an overwhelming lack of convincing evidence for simultaneous mass slaughter. Many hunter gatherers died violently but their deaths were due mainly to individual homicides that were substantially higher than those in most modern societies.

Modern warfare death rates may be generally declining over the centuries but it remains substantially worse than the virtual absence of organized warfare in hunter-gatherer societies.

Another problem passed over by many optimists is the serious existential threat posed to our species by low fertility that is induced by modern economic conditions.

Population Collapse as a Product of Economic Development

Recently, fertility in developed countries fell substantially below replacement level (2.1 children per woman). This is worrying to scholars because there is no society that ever had fertility this level previously without declining, and falling (3).

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Fertility collapses around the globe as countries undergo economic development (4).

This is due to a complex slew of interconnected causes related to changing economic roles for women. They include more education, more labor participation, more careers, and rising age of marriage, as well as non marriage rates.

Perhaps the biggest single factor is the high cost of raising children that outstrip general inflation in highly developed countries. This includes rising costs of housing, education, health care, daycare, etc., that make raising children prohibitively expensive, even for wealthy families in Singapore, Hong Kong, or New York (5).

Low fertility is fairly insensitive to government attempts to boost childbirth using substantial government subsidies. The incentives for women to develop careers and delay childbearing just remain too strong.

Demographic winter is already biting Japan where some cities are expected to lose half of their population this century. The key reason that Japan's population is so old is that they were too slow to welcome immigrants that are the life blood of other countries, including the US.

Climate Change as an Existential Threat

If there are no people around, they won't worry about climate change! Although not enough has been done to forestall extremely unpleasant disruption to weather, and inundation of coastal communities, such problems are solvable in principle, as illustrated by successful worldwide action to redress the ozone hole (by banning chlorofluorocarbons).

Steven Pinker emphasizes the positive in the ability of developed countries to clean up the environment (2). Yet, much of the world is still developing and increasing carbon output, and other pollutants.

Climate change may make life very unpleasant but people have coped with difficult climates before, permitting us to inhabit the Arctic, high mountains, deserts, and other challenging ecologies.

Humans are good at adjusting to extremes where few other mammals can flourish. Even if we are forced to grow food underground, in principle we have what it takes to survive global warming and challenging weather conditions. Yet, few people see climate change as an arena for progress.

Conclusion

Our lives are better than humans experienced in past civilizations, based on every broad measure of health, wealth, even happiness. That is really the best we can hope for given the fragility of individual existence, the ephemeral nature of complex societies, and the impermanence of all complex species.