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The Improving State of the World

Iqbal Latif - 5/31/2007

"This optimistic view of the impact of economic growth and technological change on human welfare is an antidote to the prophecies of an imminent age of gloom and doom."
–Robert W. Fogel, Nobel Laureate in Economics

"There is much to commend this book. For those interested in countering the pessimism that infects public media, or who wish to understand the different strategies available to tackle climate change, this is an important work."
–London Book Review

Many people believe that globalization and its key components have made matters worse for humanity and the environment. Special interest groups – anti-poverty, developmental, environmental – have a vested interest in making everything seem as bad as possible, but also a genuine concern that unless they do this, people will stop helping. The left is anti-globalization and is deeply reluctant to admit that free markets and free trade may actually do a whole lot more good for the poor (after a harsh transition) than foreign aid and government intervention. Mostly, though, you'd have to guess the cause is human nature itself.We only feel good when the news is bad. We fear that if we allow ourselves to become optimistic, the step beyond that is complacency, and the step beyond is arrogance, and after that an inevitable, resounding, crash. Which of course may well be true.

Indur M. Goklany exposes this as a complete myth and challenges people to consider how much worse the world would be without them.

Goklany confronts foes of globalization and demonstrates that economic growth, technological change and free trade helped to power a "cycle of progress" that in the last two centuries enabled unprecedented improvements in every objective measurement of human well-being. His analysis is accompanied by an extensive range of charts, historical data, and statistics.

The Improving State of the World represents an important contribution to the environment versus development debate and collects in one volume for the first time the long-term trends in a broad array of the most significant indicators of human and environmental well-being, and their dependence on economic development and technological change. While noting that the record is more complicated on the environmental front, the author shows how innovation, increased affluence and key institutions have combined to address environmental degradation.


Overall Improvement in Human Well-Being

The author notes that the early stages of development can indeed cause environmental problems, but additional development creates greater wealth allowing societies to create and afford cleaner technologies. Development becomes the solution rather than the problem.

He maintains that restricting globalization would therefore hamper further progress in improving human and environmental well-being, and surmounting future environmental or natural resource limits to growth.Key points from the book•


Global Poverty

The rates at which hunger and malnutrition have been decreasing in India since 1950 and in China since 1961 are striking. By 2002 China's food supply had gone up 80%, and India's increased by 50%. Overall, these types of increases in the food supply have reduced chronic undernourishment in developing countries from 37% in 1970 to 17% in 2001, despite an overall 83% growth in their populations.•


Infant Mortality Rates

Economic freedom has increased in 102 of the 113 countries for which data is available for both 1990 and 2000.•

Disability in the older population of such developed countries as the U.S., Canada, France, are in decline. In the U.S. for example, the disability rate dropped 1.3 % each year between 1982 and 1994 for persons aged 65 and over.•


Life Expectancy

Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the global illiteracy rated dropped from 46 to 18 percent.•

Goklany, though, has assembled persuasive evidence that the state of the world is indeed, "improving." Moreover, that some of the most dramatic improvements have come among the poorest people.

Some examples:

Since the 1960s, the daily food intake in poor countries has increased by 38 per cent (to 2,666 calories per person). This has happened even though the population of these countries has almost doubled, by 83 per cent.

The consequence, when combined with a 75 per cent decline in global food prices (adjusted for inflation), has been that chronic undernourishment has dropped by half, from one-third of the population of poor countries to just under one-fifth – 17 per cent.

The poor are becoming a good deal less poor than they once were. Those getting by on $1 U.S. a day have dropped from 16 per cent of the world's population in the late 1970s to 6 per cent today; those living on $2 a day have gone down from 39 per cent of the total to 18 per cent.

Life expectancy has improved dramatically. In 1900, average life expectancy the world over was 31 years; today it is 67 years.

Education is far more widely available. The global illiteracy rate has been more than halved, from 46 per cent in 1970 to 18 per cent today. One reason for this has been a sharp decline in the proportion of children working.

Goklany forecasts that, absent some future global catastrophe, we may before long be living in a world where "hunger and malnutrition have been virtually vanquished; where malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and other infectious and parasitic diseases are distant memories; and where humanity meets its needs while ceding land and water back to the rest of nature."