The Rational Optimist (48 page)

p. 185 ‘the Dutch so dominated European international trade that their merchant marine was bigger than that of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal – combined’. Blanning, T. 2007.
The Pursuit of Glory
. Penguin.

p. 186 ‘Both sides of the estuary of the River Plate became a vast slaughterhouse’. Edgerton, D. 2006.
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900
. Profile Books.

p. 186 ‘Yet in the aftermath of the First World War, one by one countries tried beggaring their neighbours in the twentieth century’. Findlay, R. and O’Rourke, K.H. 2007.
Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy
. Princeton University Press.

p. 187 ‘China’s Open Door policy, which cut import tariffs from 55 per cent to 10 per cent in twenty years, transformed it from one of the most protected to one of the most open markets in the world.’ Lal, D. 2006.
Reviving the Invisible Hand
. Princeton University Press.

p. 188 ‘Farm subsidies and import tariffs on cotton, sugar, rice and other products cost Africa $500 billion a year in lost export opportunities’. Moyo, D. 2009.
Dead Aid
. Allen Lane.

p. 188 ‘Ford Madox Ford celebrated in his Edwardian novel
The Soul of London
’. Ford, F.M. 1905.
The Soul of London
. Alston Rivers.

p. 189 ‘says Suketa Mehta’. Mehta, S. Dirty, crowded, rich and wonderful.
International Herald Tribune
, 16 July 2007. Quoted in Williams, A. 2008.
The Enemies of Progress
. Societas.

p. 189 ‘writes Stewart Brand’. Brand, S. 2009.
Whole Earth Discipline
. Penguin.

p. 189 ‘says Deroi Kwesi Andrew, a teacher earning $4 a day in Accra’. Harris, R. 2007. Let’s ditch this nostalgia for mud.
Spiked
, 4 December 2007.

p. 190 ‘people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other in glass towers to do their exchanging’. Jacobs, J. 2000.
The Nature of Economies
. Random House.

p. 190 ‘As Edward Glaeser put it’. Glaeser, E. 2009. Green cities, brown suburbs.
City Journal
19: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_greencities.html.

p. 190 ‘the ecologist Paul Ehrlich had an epiphany’. Ehrlich, P. 1968.
The Population Bomb
. Ballantine Books.

Chapter 6

p. 191 ‘The great question is now at issue’. Malthus, T. R. 1798.
Essay on Population
.

p. 191 Percentage increase in world population graph. United Nations Population Division.

p. 192 ‘The economist Vernon Smith, in his memoirs’. Smith, V.L. 2008.
Discovery – a Memoir
. Authorhouse.

p. 193 ‘The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation.’ My argument here is part-way between the Malthusian one advanced by historians such as Greg Clark and the view that pre-industrial economies were always capable of greater productivity, but predation and other intrinsic factors prevented them – as advanced by George Grantham. See e.g. Grantham, G. 2008. Explaining the industrial transition: a non-Malthusian perspective.
European Review of Economic History
12:155–65. See also Persson, K.-G. 2008. The Malthus delusion.
European Review of Economic History
12: 165–73.

p. 193 ‘As Greg Clark puts it’. Clark, G. 2007.
A Farewell to Alms
. Princeton University Press.

p. 193 ‘Malthus’. Malthus, T.R. 1798.
Essay on Population
.

p. 193 ‘Ricardo’. Ricardo, D. 1817.
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
. (Adam Smith, looking at China, India and Holland, had thought the same.)

p. 194 ‘the Wiltshire village of Damerham’. Langdon, J. and Masschaele, J. 2006. Commercial activity and population growth in medieval England.
Past and Present
190:35–81.

p. 195 ‘a miller in Feering in Essex’. Langdon, J. and Masschaele, J. 2006. Commercial activity and population growth in medieval England.
Past and Present
190:35–81.

p. 195 ‘It came suddenly in the sodden summers of 1315 and 1317, when wheat yields more than halved all across the north of Europe.’ Jordan, W.C. 1996.
The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century
. Princeton University Press.

p. 196 ‘neither the boom of the thirteenth century, nor the bust of the fourteenth, can be described in simplistic Ricardian and Malthusian terms’. See Meir Kohn’s book
How and Why Economies Develop and Grow
at www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/Papers/ lessons%201r3.pdf.

pp. 196–7 ‘the site of a new windmill being constructed at Dover Castle in 1294’. Langdon, J. and Masschaele, J. 2006. Commercial activity and population growth in medieval England.
Past and Present
190:35–81.

p. 197 ‘in Joel Mokyr’s words’. Mokyr, J. 1990.
Lever of Riches
. Oxford University Press.

p. 197 ‘the Japanese had conquered Korea carrying tens of thousands of home-made arquebuses’. Noted in Perrin, N. 1988.
Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword.
Grodine.

p. 197–8 ‘As the traveller Isabella Bird remarked in 1880’. Macfarlane, A. and Harrison, S. 2000. Technological evolution and involution: a preliminary comparison of Europe and Japan. In Ziman, J. (ed.)
Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process.
Cambridge University Press.

p. 198 ‘Where Europeans used animal, water and wind power, the Japanese did the work themselves.’ Macfarlane, A. and Harrison, S. 2000. Technological evolution and involution: a preliminary comparison of Europe and Japan. In Ziman, J. (ed.)
Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process.
Cambridge University Press.

p. 198 ‘They even gave up capital-intensive guns in favour of labourintensive swords’. Perrin, N. 1988.
Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword
. Grodine.

p. 199 ‘Sir William Petty’. Petty, W. 1691.
Political Arithmetick
.

p. 199 ‘Adam Smith begged to differ’.
The Wealth of Nations
, quoted in Blanning, T. 2007.
The Pursuit of Glory
. Penguin.

p. 200 ‘By the 1800s, Denmark had become a country that was trapped by its own self-sufficiency.’ Pomeranz, K. 2000.
The Great Divergence
. Princeton University Press.

p. 200 ‘On average a merchant in Britain who left £1,000 in his will had four surviving children, while a labourer who left £10 had only two’. Clark, G. 2007.
A Farewell to Alms
. Princeton University Press.

p. 203 ‘Johnson supposedly replied’. Epstein, H. 2008. The strange history of birth control.
New York Review of Books
, 18 August 2008.

p. 203 ‘Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay’. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons.
Science
162:1243–8.

p. 203 ‘Hardin’s view was nearly universal’. An exception was Barry Commoner, who argued at the UN conference on population in Stockholm in 1972 that the demographic transition would solve population growth without coercion.

p. 203 ‘wrote John Holdren (now President Obama’s science adviser) and Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1977’. Ehrlich, P., Ehrlich, A. and Holdren, J.F. 1977.
Eco-science
. W.H. Freeman.

p. 203 ‘Sanjay Gandhi, the son of the Indian prime minister, ran a vast campaign of rewards and coercion’. Connelly, M. 2008.
Fatal Misconception: the Struggle to Control World Population
. Harvard University Press.

p. 204 ‘Bangladesh had a birth rate of 6.8 children per woman’. The standard way of measuring the birth rate is the ‘total fertility rate’, which presumes to average the completed family size of each age cohort of the population. This is imperfect and confuses deferred reproduction with falling family size. But it is the best that is available and I have used it in this chapter for lack of a better measure.

p. 205 ‘As the environmentalist Stewart Brand puts it’. Brand, S. 2005. Environmental heresies.
Technology Review
, May 2005.

p. 206 ‘the entire world is experiencing the second half of a “demographic transition”’. Caldwell, J. 2006.
Demographic Transition Theory
. Springer.

p. 207 ‘a condescending blast by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren’. Maddox’s book was called
The Doomsday Syndrome
(1973, McGraw Hill) and Holdren’s and Ehrlich’s review is quoted by John Tierney at http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/the-skeptical-prophet/.

p. 207 ‘demographic transition theory is a splendidly confused field.’ Or to put it in academic-ese, ‘the debate continues with a plethora of contending theoretical frameworks, none of which has gained wide adherence.’ Hirschman, quoted in Bongaarts, J. and Watkins, S.C. 1996. Social interactions and contemporary fertility transitions.
Population and Development Review
22:639–82.

p. 208 ‘Jeffrey Sachs recounts’. Sachs, J. 2008.
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
. Allen Lane.

p. 209 ‘Probably by far the best policy for reducing population is to encourage female education.’ Connelly, M. 2008.
Fatal Misconception: the Struggle to Control World Population
. Harvard University Press.

p. 210 ‘A bold programme, driven by philanthropy or even government aid’. Sachs, J. 2008.
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
. Allen Lane.

p. 211 ‘Seth Norton found’. Norton, S. 2002.
Population Growth, Economic Freedom and the Rule of Law
. PERC Policy Series no. 24.

p. 211 ‘The Anabaptist sects in North America, the Hutterites and Amish, have largely resisted the demographic transition’. Richerson, P. and Boyd, R. 2005.
Not by Genes Alone
. Chicago University Press.

p. 211 ‘As Ron Bailey puts it’. Bailey, R. 2009. The invisible hand of population control.
Reason
, 16 June 2009. http://www.reason.com/news/show/134136.html.

p. 212 ‘Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania’. Myrskylä, M., Kohler, H.-P. and Billari, F.C. 2009. Advances in development reverse fertility declines.
Nature
, 6 August 2009 (doi:10.1038/nature 08230).

Chapter 7

p. 213 ‘With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back in the laborious poverty of earlier times’. Jevons, W.S. 1865.
The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines
. Macmillan.

p. 213 Metal prices relative to US wages graph. Goklany, I. 2009.
Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development.
www.ejsd.org.

p. 214 ‘Writes the economist Don Boudreaux’. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/boudreaux/s_304437.html.

p. 215 ‘In England, horses were 20 per cent of draught animals in 1086’. Fouquet, R. and Pearson, P.J.G. 1998. A thousand years of energy use in the United Kingdom.
Energy Journal
19:1–41.

p. 215 ‘one for every fifty people in southern England’. Mokyr, J. 1990.
Lever of Riches
. Oxford University Press.

p. 215 ‘At Clairvaux’. The abbot of Clairvaux is quoted in Gimpel, J. 1976.
The Medieval Machine
. Penguin.

pp. 215–16 ‘peat gave the Dutch their chance’. De Zeeuw, J.W. 1978. Peat and the Dutch golden age. See http://www.peatandculture.org/documenten/Zeeuw.pdf.

p. 218 ‘In Gregory King’s survey of the British population in 1688’. Kealey, T. 2008.
Sex, Science and Profits
. William Heinemann.

p. 218 ‘Even farm labourers’ income rose during the industrial revolution’. Clark, G. 2007.
A Farewell to Alms.
Princeton University Press.

p. 218 ‘a patent for a hand-driven linen spinning machine from 1678’. Friedel, R. 2007.
A Culture of Improvement.
MIT Press.

p. 218 ‘The average Englishman’s income, having apparently stagnated for three centuries, began to rise around 1800’. This is Clark’s estimate. Others argue that because of the rapidly falling prices of goods like sugar, the purchasing power of average income was rising steadily in the 1700s. See Clark, G. 2007.
A Farewell to Alms
. Princeton University Press.