Today’s Post

   Last week, we did a brief overview of the fourth of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing progress of the human species.  We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

This week, I’d like to wrap up this part of the blog, in which we have looked at the data which substantiate Teilhard’s audacious optimism, with a summary of what we have seen in the past four posts.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   These four examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that contrary to ‘conventional wisdom’, human evolution can be seen to be advancing on nearly all fronts.  We have not only seen the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norbergs’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

In the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, for example, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997.  He asserted that “Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history.  Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”  He is saying that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that is exactly what has happened.  Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually.  In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low and middle income countries has doubled.”

   He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP.  Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

   And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else.   A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth.  That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism and protectionism.”

   And what’s changing?

 “But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour, and use technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

   As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

   Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply noted that

 “…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how this is less a statement that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas have to start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the noosphere, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be added: “When allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where they are not allowed, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.

…And Why Can’t We See it?

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book, with the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

Norberg cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years.  Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled.  Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

   What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now seen as clearly incorrect?  More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?

Next week we will take a look at this phenomena and its roots in today’s Western culture.