The Rational Optimist (36 page)

If this is so, why then did H1N1 flu kill perhaps fifty million people in 1918? Ewald and others think the explanation lies in the trenches of the First World War. So many wounded soldiers, in such crowded conditions, provided a habitat ideally suited to more virulent behaviour by the virus: people could pass on the virus while dying. Today you are far more likely to get the flu from a person who is well enough to go to work than one who is ill enough to stay at home. By contrast, it is no accident that water-borne and insect-borne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, typhus and malaria are so much more virulent, because they can spread from immobilised victims. Malaria spreads more easily if its victims are laid low in a darkened room – bait for mosquitoes. But in most of the modern world, people are increasingly protected from dirty water and from insects and therefore lethal diseases that debilitate their victims are in retreat.

On top of this, the weapons in the physician’s armoury just keep on getting better. Diseases of my childhood, like measles, mumps and rubella, are now prevented by a single vaccine. Where it took more than ten years to understand HIV, it took just three weeks a couple of decades later to sequence the entire genome of the SARS virus and begin a search for its vulnerabilities. It took just months in 2009 to generate large doses of vaccines for swine flu.

The total eradication of many diseases is now a realistic prospect. Although it is now more than forty years since smallpox was exterminated and hopes of sending polio after it to the grave have been repeatedly dashed, none the less, the retreat of infectious killers from many parts of the world is little short of astounding. Polio is confined to a few parts of India and West Africa, malaria is gone from Europe, North America and nearly the whole of the Caribbean, measles is reduced to a tiny percentage of the numbers recorded even a few decades ago; sleeping sickness, filariasis and onchoceriasis are being steadily eliminated from country after country.

In the centuries to come there will certainly be new human diseases, but very few of them will be both lethal and contagious. Measures to cure and prevent them will come quicker and quicker.

Sounding the retreat

Many of today’s extreme environmentalists not only insist that the world has reached a ‘turning point’ – quite unaware that their predecessors have made the same claim for two hundred years about many different issues – but also insist that the only sustainable solution is to retreat, to cease economic growth and enter progressive economic recession. What else can they mean by demanding a campaign to ‘de-develop the United States’, in the words of President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren; or ‘isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?’, in the words of Maurice Strong, first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); or that what is needed is ‘an ordered and structured down-sizing of the global economy’ in the words of the journalist George Monbiot? This retreat must be achieved, says Monbiot, by ‘political restraint’. This means not just that growing your company’s sales would be a crime, but failing to shrink them; not just that travelling further than your ration of miles would be an offence, but failing to travel fewer miles each year; not just that inventing a new gadget would be illegal, but failing to abandon existing technologies; not just that growing more food per acre would be a felony, but failing to grow less – because these are the things that constitute growth.

Here’s the rub: this future sounds awfully like the feudal past. The Ming and Maoist emperors had rules restricting the growth of businesses; forbidding unauthorised travel; punishing innovation; limiting family size. They do not say so, but that is the inevitable world the pessimists want to return to when they speak of retreat.

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

H.G. W
ELLS
The Discovery of the Future

Sooner or later, the ubiquitous pessimist will confront the rational optimist with his two trump cards: Africa and climate. It is all very well Asia lifting itself out of poverty, and perhaps Latin America too, but surely, says the pessimist, it is hard to imagine Africa following suit. The continent is doomed by its population boom, its endemic diseases, its tribalism, its corruption, its lack of infrastructure, even – whisper some, more in sorrow than in prejudice – its genes. ‘It’s blindingly obvious,’ says the environmentalist Jonathan Porritt: ‘completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly, stuck in deepest, darkest poverty.’

And in any case, continues the pessimist, Africa cannot hope to boom because climate change will devastate the continent during the coming century before it can prosper. At the time of writing, global warming is by far the most fashionable reason for pessimism. The earth’s atmosphere has warmed, and it seems that the great 100,000-year experiment of human progress is about to be tested against rising sea levels, melting ice caps, droughts, storms, famines, pandemics and floods. Human activity is causing much of this change, especially by the burning of fossil fuels, whose energy has been responsible for raising the living standards of many of the world’s nearly seven billion people, so humankind faces a stark dilemma in the coming century between continuing a carbon-fuelled prosperity until global warming brings it to a calamitous halt, or restricting the use of carbon and risking a steep decline in living standards because of the lack of alternative sources of energy that are cheap enough. Either prospect might be catastrophic.

Africa and climate therefore confront the rational optimist with a challenge, to say the least. For somebody who has spent 300 pages looking on the bright side of human endeavour, arguing along the way that the population explosion is coming to a halt, that energy will not soon run out, that pollution, disease, hunger, war and poverty can all be expected to continue declining if human beings are not impeded from exchanging goods, services and ideas freely – for such a person as your author, African poverty and rapid global warming are indeed acute challenges.

Moreover, the two issues are connected, because the models that predict rapid global warming take as their assumption that the world will prosper mightily, and that the poorest countries on the planet – most of which are African – will by the end of this century be about nine times as rich as they are today. Unless they are, carbon dioxide emissions will be insufficient to cause such rapid warming. And at present there is no way to make Africans as rich as Asians except by them burning more fossil fuels per head. So Africa faces an especially stark dilemma: get rich by burning more carbon and then suffer the climate consequences; or join the rest of the world in taking action against climate change and continue to wallow in poverty.

That is the conventional wisdom. I think it is a false dilemma and that an honest appraisal of the facts leads to the conclusion that by far the most likely outcome of the next nine decades is both that Africa gets rich and that no catastrophic climate change happens.

Africa’s bottom billion

Of course, not all poverty is in Africa. I am well aware that there is terrible want in many other parts of the world, in Haiti and Afghanistan, in Bolivia and Cambodia, in Calcutta and São Paolo, even in parts of Glasgow and Detroit. But compared with a generation ago, thanks chiefly to progress elsewhere, poverty has come to be concentrated in that one continent as never before. Of the ‘bottom billion’ left behind by recent booms – Paul Collier’s phrase – more than 600 million are Africans. The average African lives on just $1 a day. Saving Africa has become both the goal of idealists and the despair of pessimists. Not only has Africa failed to join Asia’s boom since 1990, it has spent much of the time stagnant or going backwards. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Africans living in poverty doubled. War in the west of the continent, genocide in the east, AIDS in the south, hunger in the north, dictators in the middle, population growth all over: no part of the continent has escaped the horror. Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Zimbabwe, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone – the very names of countries have taken their turn as synonyms of chaos on the lips of newsreaders in the West.

Moreover, although Africa’s demographic transition has begun, it has a long way to go before population growth decelerates. Nigeria’s birth rate may have halved, but it is still twice as high as ‘replacement rate’. Where will Africa’s ghost acres, its emigration valve, or its industrial revolution come from?

There are hopeful exceptions, like Mali, Ghana, Mauritius and South Africa – countries that have achieved a measure of freedom, economic progress and peace. All across the continent, economic growth has picked up in recent years, and in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Botswana even life expectancy is rising rapidly after falling while AIDS took its toll (South Africa and Mozambique have yet to follow suit). It is a false Western cliché that all African lives are spent dodging poverty, corruption, violence and disease. But far too many are, and the contrast with much of Asia grows more acute by the year. Whereas income per head stood still in Africa in the past twenty-five years, in Asia it trebled. Then tragically, Africa’s promising economic boom in the 2000s was cut short by the credit crunch.

Some Westerners have been heard to say that growth is not what matters, that what Africa needs is an improvement in the human development index, towards the Millennium Development goals and to erase suffering without raising income, or that it needs a new kind of sustainable growth. Paul Collier and his colleagues at the World Bank encountered a storm of protest from non-governmental organisations when they published a study entitled
Growth Is Good for the Poor
. This suspicion of growth is a luxury that only wealthy Westerners can indulge. What Africans need is better living standards and these come chiefly from economic growth.

Aid’s test

Some of the most urgent needs of Africa can surely be met by increased aid from the rich world. Aid can save lives, reduce hunger, deliver a medicine, a mosquito net, a meal or a metalled road. But statistics, anecdotes and case histories all demonstrate that the one thing aid cannot reliably do is to start or accelerate economic growth. Aid to Africa doubled in the 1980s as a percentage of the continent’s GDP; growth simultaneously collapsed from 2 per cent to zero. The aid that Zambia has received since 1960, if invested instead in assets giving a reasonable rate of return, would by now have given Zambians the income per head of the Portuguese – $20,000 instead of $500. Although in the early 2000s some studies managed to find evidence that certain kinds of aid sometimes trigger growth in countries with specific economic policies, even these conclusions were later dashed by Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the International Monetary Fund in 2005. They could find no evidence that aid resulted in growth in any countries. Ever.

It is worse than that. Most aid is delivered by governments to governments. It can therefore be a source of both corruption and discouragement to entrepreneurship. Some ends up in dictators’ Swiss bank accounts; some goes to make billion-dollar steel mills that never work; some is given on condition of importing certain goods from a Western country; some is not independently evaluated for efficacy either by the donor or the recipient. Some African leaders are so disenchanted with government aid that they even embraced the recommendations of the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo who concludes, bleakly, ‘aid doesn’t work, hasn’t worked, and won’t work ... no longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid
is
the problem.’

Moreover, in recent years much aid has been granted on condition of free-market economic reform, which far from kick-starting economic growth, frequently proves damaging to local traditions, undermining the very mechanisms that get enrichment started. As William Easterly puts it while criticising the shock therapy that did such harm in both the Soviet bloc and Africa, ‘you can’t plan a market’. The top-down imposition of a bottom-up system is bound to fail.

Easterly cites the example of insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets, which are a cheap and proven way of preventing malaria. A bed net costs about $4. Encouraged by a flurry of publicity at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2005 from Gordon Brown, Bono and Sharon Stone, bed nets became a fashionable icon of the aid industry. Unfortunately, when given out free by donor agencies, they often become fashion items instead, being sold on the black market for wedding veils or used as fishing nets. They undercut local merchants supplying them for money. One American charity, Population Services International, came up with a better idea. It sold the nets for fifty cents to mothers attending antenatal clinics in Malawi and subsidised this price by selling the nets for $5 to richer urban Malawians. The poor mothers who bought these nets with half a day’s wages made sure they were used properly. In four years, the proportion of children under five sleeping under such nets went up from 8 per cent to 55 per cent.

To do more good and less harm, says Easterly, the aid business could be transformed into a more transparent marketplace where donations compete to fund projects and projects compete to attract donations. Fortunately, the internet makes this possible for the first time. Globalgiving.com, for instance, allows projects to bid for donations from any donor. In the week I was writing this paragraph, projects that needed funding on the site ranged from feeding Ethiopian refugees, to building the fence around a retirement home for a pet cheetah used to inspire underprivileged children about conservation in South Africa.

In forums like this, aid could be democratised, taken out of the hands of inefficient international bureaucrats and corrupt African officials, taken away from idealistic free-market shocktherapists, separated from arms deals, removed from big industrial projects, distanced from patronising do-gooders and given person-to-person. A rich country could give each taxpayer a tax break for each suitable donation. To those who say that this would make an uncoordinated, unplanned business, I reply: exactly. Grandiose goals and centralised plans have just as long and just as disastrous a history in aid as they do in politics. Nobody planned the industrial revolution, or China’s economic surge. The planners’ role was to get out of the way of bottom-up evolutionary solutions.

Bound to fail?

Most economists are agreed on a list of reasons for the failure of Africa to generate economic growth. Many African countries are more or less landlocked, which cuts them off from world trade. They have poor and deteriorating roads linking distant cities. They have exploding birth rates. They suffer from epidemic malaria, AIDS and other diseases such as sleeping sickness and guinea worm. Their institutions have never fully recovered from the disruptions caused by the slave trade. They were once colonies, which meant rule by minorities uninterested in allowing the development of an entrepreneurial class. Thanks to their imperial colonisers, their Marxist independence leaders and their monetarist aid donors, most African countries have lost many of their informal social traditions and institutions, so property rights and justice have become arbitrary and insecure. Their most promising industry – agriculture – is usually stifled by price controls and bureaucratic marketing agencies imposed by urban elites, and stymied by trade barriers and subsidies in Europe and America, not to mention devastated by a proliferation of over-grazing goats. Ethnic strife between the biggest tribe, which maintains one-party rule, and its hated rival usually poisons politics. Paradoxically, African countries are often also cursed by sudden windfalls of rich mineral wealth, such as oil or diamonds, which serve only to corrupt democratic politicians, strengthen the power of dictators, distract entrepreneurs, spoil the terms of trade of exporters and encourage reckless state borrowing.

Take, therefore, one such typical African country. It is landlocked, drought-prone and has a very high population growth rate. Its people belong to eight different tribes speaking different tongues. When freed from colonial rule in 1966 it had eight miles of paved road (for an area the size of Texas), twenty-two black university graduates, and only 100 secondary school graduates. It was later cursed by a huge diamond mine, crippled by AIDS, devastated by cattle disease, and ruled by one party with little effective opposition. Government spending has remained high; so has wealth inequality. This country, the fourth poorest in the entire world in 1950, has every one of Africa’s curses. Its failure was inevitable and predictable.

But Botswana did not fail. It succeeded not just moderately well, but spectacularly. In the thirty years after independence it grew its per capita GDP faster on average (nearly 8 per cent) than any other country in the entire world – faster than Japan, China, South Korea and America during that period. It multiplied its per capita income thirteen times so that its average citizens are now richer than Thais, Bulgarians or Peruvians. It has had no coups, civil wars or dictators. It has experienced no hyperinflation or debt default. It did not wipe out its elephants. It is consistently the most successful economy in the world in recent decades.