Reasons to be cheerful
Winter sunshine | The Spectator
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Every day of this new year, some 200,000 people are likely to be lifted out of what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty: living on $1.25 a day or less. This remarkable pace of improvement will probably quicken over the rest of the decade. This is not due to any government development goal or charity outreach programme. It is driven by global capitalism, just like the transformation of India, China and other emerging markets. We are living in a golden age of poverty reduction, yet we seldom hear about it. Politicians and the media tend, for good reason, to focus on the world’s problems. This can often mean not enough attention being placed on what is going right. The new year is a good a time as any to take stock.
Let us start at home. The era of government cuts is upon us, but the degree has been much exaggerated. A simple figure puts the hyperbole into perspective. George Osborne is trimming government spending by just 3.3 per cent over four years, and is likely to cut the government payroll by some 330,000. But the same forecasts envisage 1.5 million new jobs will created in the wider economy, so the outlook is one of greater employment and prosperity. There are ways in which this recovery could be at risk, as Johan Norberg outlines on page 12. But this year still looks set to be the third most prosperous in British history, and the most prosperous for the world. It is an odd kind of financial calamity.
This prosperity is not coming at the expense of the environment, contrary to what many campaigners would have you believe. Britain is becoming cleaner, as can be seen in the air quality figures. The level of unpleasant chemicals in the atmosphere has fallen by a quarter over a decade, according to government measurements. Carbon, of course, is not pollution — but even if it was, the average person in Britain emits 20 per cent less of it than five decades ago, according to the World Bank. We jet around more, use dishwashers with abandon and build houses with twin garages, but the technology we employ is cleaner and greener. It uses less fuel because consumers like low running costs.
There is, alas, no shortage of human misery in Africa and beyond. But the globalisation of commerce — prawns peeled in Malaysia, shirts made in Bangladesh — is bringing prosperity to countries whose poverty rates are falling as their economies boom. The proportion of the world’s population regarded as malnourished has halved over four decades. The United Nations estimates that 925 million souls are still in this category, but also that the tally fell by 98 million last year. Most of the improvement is in India and China. The invisible hand of the market does not wear a wristband saying ‘Make Poverty History’. But that is its effect.
Advances in medicine, too, have been extraordinary. Across the world, life expectancy is rising relentlessly, while infant mortality has halved over a decade and is falling still. Perhaps the most extraordinary, but least remarked-upon success of recent years is in the fight against the HIV virus. UN data shows infections have fallen by a fifth over ten years, with HIV-related deaths falling even faster. Some 30 million are still living with the disease, but this is in part because developments in medicine and treatment allow more people to live with it for longer. Governments and aid agencies have played a full part in this battle, and its successes. It is reasonable to expect that 2011 will set new records for the decline in HIV infections.
Even the weather is showing some pleasant surprises. Ten years ago Dr David Viner from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia warned that snowy winters were to become a thing of the past and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’. The winter is back, and the National Trust says that our wildlife is the better for it. Hedgehogs are hibernating for longer, puffins are building stronger nests and the winter has proved a godsend for many insects, butterflies and berries. The snow may play havoc with the airport, but there are good things even in bleak midwinters.
So the world is becoming wealthier, cleaner, healthier and fairer — and very little of this is thanks to the action of government. Addressing the United Nations last July, the Queen remarked how few of the sweeping advances she had witnessed over the past half-century had come about from ‘governments, committee resolutions, or central directives’. The state played a role in certain things, of course. But by and large, improvements tended to come about ‘because millions of people around the world have wanted them’. So 2011, too, should be a year of sweeping advances — because free people, co-operating through the free market, want them.
Capitalism is not, as the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has absurdly claimed, a vicious dog-eat-dog system. Faith in capitalism is, in effect, faith in mankind — and successful governments have plenty of it. It is creating jobs at home, fighting poverty abroad, nurturing innovations and does not pose a mortal threat to mother nature. We have our calamities, recessions, famines and wars. But overall, we have solid grounds to wish each other a happy and more prosperous new year.
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Sure, some of the stats can be quibbled with, as can the conclusions drawn, but I thought it was a nice antidote to the hell-in-a-handcart material that is so ubiquitous these days.
Do we really produce less carbon than 50 years agao?
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