Émile Coué taught his patients to repeat as a mantra, "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better." It is no coincidence that he is a co-discoverer of the placebo method. There is no irony in saying that many of his patients did indeed improve, because reassurance can powerfully influence our feelings and speed our healing, whether emotional or physical. Now, if only we could induce society as a whole to adopt this mantra!
Byron Reese may be the man to do it. He just needs a bigger pulpit. For the time being, his book must do: Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War. The book was published in 2013, shortly after the beginning of the second term of President Obama. The one positive thing to come out of Mr. Obama's work is his book The Audacity of Hope. By comparison with Mr. Reese's book, it seems short-sighted.
Using the past as a springboard into the future, Infinite Progress outlines the large trends that the author expects to continue into the future, and to produce ever-increasing prosperity, from which the other benefits will be derived. Thinking back over his contentions and discussions, I must agree in part. These things can happen. Whether they will or not, human nature will have a big part to play, but so will nature. The current Coronavirus pandemic and the over-reaction of the immune system of the body politic is a Black Swan to beat all black swans.
I was much enamored with the book The Black Swan, and have written about the principle a few times. However, I was seduced, as was N.N. Taleb, the author, by the Cauchy Distribution he cites as a good model for stock market activity (it isn't, but that's another story). I was seduced into thinking that black swans are part of the normal course of things; that they are extreme but otherwise unexceptional. Of course, they are not. The Europeans who were astonished to see black swans in Australia didn't initially realize that the Australian Swan is a different species, Cygnus atratus, than the mute swan, Cygnus olor. I also considered floods and the seeming over-abundance of 1,000-year floods in some areas. However, on closer examination, the extreme floods are produced by a different climatic mechanism than the more ordinary seasonal floods of the five-to-hundred-year variety. They are part of a different population, a different species of storm, if you'll forgive me the use of a biological term.
As dominant as the present pandemic seems to be, the trends Byron Reese outlines may be delayed, but possibly not by very much. I like his analyses, and I hope he is right. But allow me to comment on the five trends, not as a skeptic, but for a cautionary purpose.
- Ignorance – To summarize a story from a century-old Christian tract: A believer was witnessing to a friend who owned a soap factory. The friend was skeptical. They came across a dirty boy playing in a mud puddle. The believer asked, "Why is this boy dirty? Your soap factory is nearby!" The friend said, "Soap is only helpful if you use it." The believer replied, "So is the Gospel." Then, from a piece of calligraphy on my bedroom wall: "Wisdom is knowing what to do / Knowledge is knowing how to do it / Success is doing it". Near-infinite knowledge on more subjects than any person will ever even know exist (Wikipedia has 6+ million articles in English and many more in 300+ other languages; Google indexes 30 trillion web pages). It isn't hard to find out a lot about anything. But I have a maxim and a corollary that are worth a book of their own: "Those who will learn from others have fewer scars. Most people have too many scars."
- Disease – Most doctors begin their careers full of optimism and altruism. Far too many succumb to a profit motive and end up using "treatments" that maximize cash flow rather than minimizing suffering. Most drug and medical equipment companies were begun similarly, and followed a similar, cynical path. Perhaps we must adopt an attitude of "I pay only for success, not for 'trying'." By the way, it is stated on page 90 (in the eBook), "Even smallpox has been sequenced and is available for download." One insane person can bring it back; millennials and younger are not vaccinated… But to the point, let's make sure cures are profitable and infinitesimal "improvements" are not.
- Poverty – Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you." He knew human nature. People differ dramatically in ability, and some just roll nothing but Snake Eyes. However, as prosperity spreads, as Reagan's Trickle-down Theory works its magic (don't scoff, it led to the biggest postwar boom ever, including the recent one from 2/2017-2/2020), "poverty" will be defined as having a smaller TV, and perhaps only one thereof (rather than not having a house in which to put one); having only one "good suit" (rather than having only rags); and so forth. America's poor are better off than all but the richest Africans. The other question to ask is, can Earth sustain that level of prosperity for all? Is our planet big enough? This is not sufficiently addressed in the book. A big part of the book's plan is offloading all dehumanizing tasks to machines. Are we ennobled by idleness? Because there may not be enough "humanizing" tasks to go around.
- Hunger – The author seems to have assimilated without question a statement by Colin Clark in 1967, that the minimum space necessary to feed a person was 27 square kilometers. I beg your pardon?? He must have misread Clark. The land surface area of Earth is about 148 million sq km, and the arable (farmable) area is 31 million. At 27 per, that could only feed a little over one million of us. Arable surface per person is presently just over one acre. I looked up Colin Clark's writings. His estimate of maximum population ranged from 28 billion to about twice that (…for American standard of living, and 148 billion at a Japanese standard of living), but he over-measured the arable surface, so as well as I can determine, he considered the land needed per person at about 270 square meters (Japanese standard) or 680 sq m (American standard). As the author tells us, most hunger is structural, meaning people can't afford food or can't travel to where it is affordable, because the Earth still has a food surplus. I'll comment later on population growth. The author believes we'll always find away to increase yields.
- War – The trends and discussion boil down to this: Make war economically unaffordable, and most warfare will end. More trade, more co-industry and so forth. Of course, there is still fanaticism we must deal with, and the lesson of the 9/11 disaster and the ensuing 19 years is that the existence of "The Great Satan" (i.e., the USA) is sufficient reason for ongoing warfare between Islam and the West. (Note, I consider the term "radical Islam" to be a redundancy). Ideology will always trump prosperity.
Will there come a time of plenty and peace? As a Christian, knowing human nature from decades of counseling unhappy people, and believing the Bible, I see peace only in the kingdom of God. But of course this book has no relation to anything Biblical. The author is a historian, not a theologian. So let's suppose his dream largely comes true. Not as all problems being solved, but the five big ones he identifies being largely mitigated. Will the 24th Century be a Star Trek century of peace and plenty? A lot depends on how rapidly human population approaches the "Japanese standard of living" threshold of 148 billion. For it is sure to do so.
The global rate of population growth is 1.1%/yr. That's lower than it was when I was a child, by about half. Will it go lower? First let's look at what results if it doesn't:
- near-Today (3/2020): 7.8B
- Year 2100: 18.7B
- Year 2200: 56B
- Year 2300: 167B – This is close to the year the Enterprise would be launched in Star Trek.
Oops! We've already passed 148B. Will farming methods have improved enough that we can feed one-sixth of a trillion people? Probably. But there won't be a chicken in every pot, that's for sure. Not even a vat-grown pseudo-chicken. So here is another maxim of mine:
Just because Malthusian predictions have been shown to be wrong several times, doesn't mean that will happen forever.
OK, Let's cut the rate of population growth in half, or a bit better, to 0.5%/yr. Then:
- Year 2100: 11.6B – Better…
- Year 2200: 19.1B
- Year 2300: 31.5B
- Year 2400: 52B – About where the table above was in 2200.
And so it goes. Hundreds of years may seem like a long time, but sooner or later the permanent mantra of all living things, "Reproduce or else!" must come to an end or we'll just eat the whole planet. Isaac Asimov once showed that, if 10% of all substances on the surface of the earth could be converted to food, Earth would still be exhausted, at a 0.5% growth rate, in a couple of thousand years, and if we have gone to the stars by then, all possible planets in this galaxy will be comprised or people and people's food from pole to pole, in another 11,000 years.
And all that is not even a black swan. The sixth item that needs to be tackled is the human drive to reproduce, or everything else is temporary. Thus, I must conclude, even though the book's title is Infinite Progress, we must content ourselves with "Really immense progress" followed by some very well-thought-out Plan B when that isn't enough.
Does that mean I deny the author's reasoning? Not at all. I hope he is at least partially right. But there are so many ways to go wrong, and so few ways for things to go right, that it will be an uphill slog. I like the optimism. That alone makes it worth reading and thinking about.
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