How does the reduction of global poverty substantiate Teilhard’s insights on human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw statistics from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’ which documented the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’.  They point not only to a general improvement in human welfare, but also to a distinct quickening of this improvement over the last two to three of the some eight thousand generations of human existence.  We also saw, once again, how the data of this improvement also correlate with Teilhard’s insights into the human capacities that drive the continuation of human evolution.

This week we will take a last look at Norberg’s metrics of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records.  Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger, and disease, especially in third world and ‘developing’ countries.

Generally, we have become numb to this phenomenon, with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted.  Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as Matthew cites Jesus claiming that “The poor you will always have with you.”

Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising.  As the Economist reports, when asked by the Gapminder Foundation whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half.  This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out: “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”

So, what ‘cogent experimental grounds’ might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes.   Only prosperity has causes.”  By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with most of our ancestors spending most of their lives like the animals they evolved from: looking for food and struggling to survive.  The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.

Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to quantify poverty is that of prosperity.  She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’  Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?

Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’.  He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%.  This meant that, on average, people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.

In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GDP.  He puts this into perspective:

“Even if all incomes had been perfectly equally distributed (which they certainly weren’t) it would have meant a life of extreme deprivation for everybody.  The average world citizen lived in abject misery, as poor as the average person in Haiti, Liberia, and Zimbabwe today.”

   So, in 1820, the average percent of poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%.  If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years.  By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income.  (This increase did not emerge because of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time.)

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East:  As the United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

   The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented, with China at 2000%, Japan at 1100% and India at 500%.

The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing.  The data shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty (source: World Bank).  Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.

The reductions over the entire two-hundred-year span show an overall decrease from 94% to 12% by 2018.

Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years.  The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the remainder required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’.

Seeing This Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

This clearly substantiates the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard:

• Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
• Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted, and globalization is fostered. Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly.  Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.
• These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, substantiates Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution continues through the human species, but also how this evolution is contributing to human welfare and how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing.  Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as seen here.

Next week we will overview Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.

   How can human evolution be seen in the improvement of ‘lifespan’?

Today’s Post

   In the last two weeks we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species.  Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:

–  human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of improvements in human welfare over time.

–  the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing

–  these increases are spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.

We saw last week how these evolutionary trends substantiate Teilhard’s insights into the positive direction of human evolution.

This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.

The History of Life Expectancy

As Norberg points out:

   “Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish, and short.  More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation.”

   Plagues frequently caused massive deaths.  The ‘Black Death’ in the fourteenth century is thought to have killed more than a third of Europe’s population.  Such plagues continued on a regular basis and were joined by infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox, in deadly cycles continuing until the nineteenth century.  In Eastern Europe, for example, forty occurrences of plague were reported in the two hundred years between 1440 and 1640.  As Norberg notes

 “Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since large, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation.”

   Considering this, it is not surprising that individual life expectancy was not much different in the West by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

The ‘Knee in the Curve”

As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules.  Thus, he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time.  The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state.  Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.

   At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen.  Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20^th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.

This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred-thousand-year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees in the curve’.  Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’.  Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles, and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.

He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results.  As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly.  Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:

Asia:  Increases from 42 to 70 Years

Latin America:  Increases from 50 to 74 Years

Africa:  Increases from 37 to 57 Years

  We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the rapid improvements to food production, and in the previous look at ‘fuel’.

Seeing Lifespan Through Teilhard’s ‘Lens’

As we saw with the subject of ‘food’, these statistics prove out Teilhard’s insights,

• Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society. Historically, this appeared first in the West.
• Such innovation and invention require the grouping of human minds into ‘psychisms’ in which these gifts are reinforced and focused
• Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted. Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese cultures and early empires of Islam but died still- born because restricted from trade.
• These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.

The Next Post

This week we saw another of Norberg’s measures of human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.

Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.

   How can Teilhard’s optimistic insights be seen in the human evolution of food?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at the phenomena of ‘food’ from Norberg’s perspective, charting the recursive process of innovation, invention and incorporation that underlies the increase of human welfare that he documents.

This week, we will relook at this data to see how it offers an example of the ‘cogent experimental grounds’ that Teilhard suggests is necessary to increase our confidence in the future.

From Teilhard’s Perspective

As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s eight insights into human evolution to see how well they correlate.

   Human Invention As we saw last week, history shows humans as capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction.  Without increasing crop yield, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now.   With the population growth that has occurred, we would have by now required nearly all arable land to feed ourselves.

   Dissemination Growing enough food would not suffice if it couldn’t be put in the mouths of the populace.  As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise his or her creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control.  The effect of globalization appears as the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions.  In general, as Teilhard notes, this is nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.

  Psychisms Innovations and inventions such as automations and fertilizer would not have been possible without the information amassed by globalization and the expertise harvested from the many ‘psychisms’ (human groups free to innovate) which came together to perform the many complex studies and tests required to produce them.

   Speed.  It’s not just that solutions to the problems were found; note that most of them seen in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years.  In the estimated eight thousand generations which have emerged in the two hundred or so thousand years of human existence, the many innovations that Norberg observes have just emerged in the past three.  Due to Teilhard’s ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading to the East more quickly than they came to initial fruition in the West.  For example, the change in height of Western humans occurred at 1 cm per year over 100 years in the West, but in the East, it is proceeding today at twice this rate.

   Failures in Forecasting As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the ‘end of times’ did not occur.  While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially.  Even today, there are still those today who predict that we will run out of resources in the next fifty years or so.

   Changes of State As Teilhard noted, evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time.  The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations we have seen this week.

Timeliness As we saw in our example of data, each new innovation seems to arrive in time to prevent a critical point after which human evolution would begin to ebb.  With enough malnutrition and famine, the amount of human energy need to deal with problems would wane past the point that it could develop a tactic to do so.

   Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious, and philosophical resistance.  In the yearning for an imagined but attractive past can undermine the practices of invention and globalism.  The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of how little faith (well-justified faith, if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s insights are to be believed) is manifested in today’s ‘conventional wisdom’.  In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.

Many politicians today sow the seeds of pessimism to reap the crop of fear thought to insure their election.  As Teilhard notes in several places, in a future in which we do not believe, we will not be able to exist.

The Next Post

Having seen the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’, we saw this week how Teilhard’s eight evolutionary insights can be shown to be found in them.

Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Life Expectancy’ to see some statistics along the same line of improvements in human welfare.  As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary insights that we saw this week.