Reasons for Optimism XI

Civil Rights
1. There is quite a bit of good news for civil rights. First, National Security Letters--which the federal government uses to get personal information on thousands of Americans from companies like Google--have been ruled unconstitutional. What made NSLs particularly disturbing was that the recipient companies were forbidden from ever acknowledging that they had given the government any information. Thankfully, these gag orders have also been ruled unconstitutional.

2. Second, the Supreme Court limited the use of sniffer dogs and expanded the Fourth Amendment's protection of the home by declaring that porches count as part of the home.

3. There's good news for civil rights in Canada as well. The Supreme Court there recently ruled that police need special wiretapping orders, not just ordinary search warrants, to intercept text messages.

Deficit & Spending
4. Via PostLibertarian, the federal deficit for the first six months of fiscal 2013 is 23% lower than the deficit for the same period in fiscal 2012. Government spending in March 2013 was more than 20% lower than in March 2012, a $76 billion fall from $369 to $293 billion. Moreover, an analysis of four major budget plans (President Obama's, Senate Democrats', House Republicans' and Senator Rand Paul's) shows that all four cut spending over the next ten years relative to the current-law baseline. The coming debate won't be whether or not to cut spending, it will be how much.

Energy & Climate
5. In November 2012, U.S. oil production surpassed that of Saudi Arabia! U.S. oil production also remained higher than Saudi Arabia's in December 2012. While month-to-month production fluctuates, and there may again be months where the Saudis produce more oil than we do, for at least two months in 2012, the United States was the largest oil producer in the world. U.S. oil production has continued to grow since then, and is now more than 7.2 million barrels per day, a level not seen since July 1992. Also in December, another country (China) imported more oil than the U.S. for the first time in four decades (ht).

6. Coral reefs are more resilient than we thought. Reefs damaged in super-hot 1998 were presumed to have little chance of recovery, yet they're recovering nonetheless.

Health
7. A new Bluetooth-enabled implant (ht) can monitor blood levels of up to five chemicals and transmit that data to a smartphone or tablet (and from there to the internet) in realtime. It can currently detect glucose (useful for diabetics), troponin (which is released during a heart attack) and a few other substances, but the device has been designed to accommodate sensors for substances not yet covered.

8. Functioning kidneys can now be grown in a lab, at least for rats. Doing the same with human kidneys will take some time, and even then the lab-grown versions are only 5% as efficient as natural, healthy kidneys. But if your natural kidneys aren't healthy, 5% could be enough of an improvement to be worth the transplant. No doubt researchers will also be working on improving that efficiency as well.

Poverty
9. Two recent studies, one from Oxford University and the other from the UN, highlight the improving conditions of the world's poor (ht via @LDoren). Many of the world's poorest nations are on track to eliminate acute poverty and growth is lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. From the UN report: "Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast."

Other Optimists
10. Ezra Klein (ht MR) has his own list of reasons for optimism. Among others, he lists the slowing rise of health care costs, a turnaround in housing, corporate profits, natural gas and technological advances.

11. Stephan Kinsella (ht Bob Murphy) says, "The Golden Age of America is Now." Kinsella writes from a libertarian viewpoint, and therefore includes items like imminent marijuana legalization that some might not agree are actually good things. But many of his points cut across ideologies--there is no draft, air travel is safer and cheaper than ever and technology is amazing, from cell phones to the internet to 3D printing to private spaceflight. He also cites increased diversity and tolerance, saying, "some people are vegetarians, vegans; no big deal... Some people have nose rings, multiple earrings. Tattoos. Nobody cares... Mixed-race couples? Nobody bats an eye."

Abundance and Overpopulation

I've finally gotten around to reading Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. The book is divided into six parts, and so far, I've only read the first. What follows is, therefore, only my preliminary reflections.

You might expect a blog with "optimism" in the title to have a certain amount of mood affiliation for a book like Abundance, and it's true. Nevertheless, I have a few points of contention with the opening chapters. The first is overpopulation.

Overpopulation
In the first chapter, the authors approvingly cite Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome. They say that among "scientists who study the carrying capacity of the Earth," the "wild-eyed optimists" think the carrying capacity is two billion, with the "dour pessimists" saying 300 million. Call me crazy, but I don't think someone counts as a wild-eyed optimist if they believe 5/7ths of the world's humans are doomed to die.

There is one simple reason I am not concerned about drastic overpopulation. With some exceptions, food is generally produced on an annual basis. Crops are planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. Some crops take longer, especially animal crops, but food production generally takes place on annual time scales. By contrast, food demand is daily for the vast majority of the population. Hunger strikes or religious fasts may put off food demand for short periods, but not for most people, and even then not for very long. (Although this guy may be an exception.)

If our population is really so much larger than the carrying capacity of the planet, why haven't we already died? Food is produced very slowly compared to our demand for it, so if we're really going to run out, it would happen quite quickly. We should start dying out when our population is just slightly larger than the carrying capacity, not when we're 3-20 times larger than the carrying capacity! There are more than 7 billion of us right now, most of us eating every day. The carrying capacity of the planet therefore has to be at least 7 billion!

Of course, the central premise of the book is abundance, and it's possible that the section on overpopulation is just a fluff tactic to get the majority who are (sadly) overpopulationists to lower their guard and be receptive to abundance. I will have to read the rest of the book to find out. But so far at least, the possibility of lower population through birth control is considered a good thing, and a static future population is cited as a reason for abundance. Diamandis and Kotler also don't seem to be the kind of authors to use fluff tactics in that way. Indeed, the third chapter explains that people often don't agree with abundance because they have cognitive biases preventing them from agreeing, which is not exactly a claim that would make someone lower their guard.

Everything We Hold of Value

The company Planetary Resources, and their plans to mine asteroids for gold, platinum and water, have been all over the news and the blogosphere the past few days. Now that I've stopped jumping up and down in excitement, here are a few thoughts I've had.

I) This is yet another piece of evidence to counter Tom Murphy's idea that the space age is over. As such, it's also another piece of evidence against his idea that growth must stop.

II) The announcement came just days after the space shuttle Discovery's last flight over DC on her way to the Smithsonian, and while the other shuttles are still being sent out to their final resting places. I can think of no better timing-- and indeed, maybe this was intentional-- to symbolize the transition from public to private. Space exploration is no longer the sole domain of government. As the private sector takes over, the industry will grow like never before.

III) The venture very well may fail. As the New York Times notes, it wouldn't be the first time a company had aimed to mine asteroids only to fail before getting there. That kind of thing happens in the private sector. It also happens in the public sector, with one very important difference. When Solyndra failed, it took with it my money, as well as yours, if you're an American taxpayer. The continuing failure of the United States Postal Service keeps taking taxpayer money with no end in sight. But if Planetary Resources fails, the only people who will lose money are those who are running it.

IV) One piece of evidence cited by reporters and bloggers as a reason they'll fail is NASA's upcoming OSIRIS-REx mission, which is spending a billion dollars to bring back just two ounces of material from a near-Earth asteroid. If they succeed, it will be an amazing example of the private sector's ability to do the same thing government does only cheaper. And even if they fail, they will surely develop some technologies along the way that will make things easier and cheaper for NASA's next asteroid mission, as well as the rest of the private space industry.

V) If they succeed, the added supply of gold will wreak havoc on any country using gold as a base for their currency. Anyone who still wants to go back to the gold standard needs to convince themselves that Planetary Resources-- and any successor companies-- will fail.

VI) In related news, a Canadian company recently got its first customer for material mined from the bottom of the sea near Papua New Guinea, with what they say is the "world's first commercial sea-floor mine." They're planning to begin operations in 2013. With mining on the bottom of the sea and in space, in a couple decades everything we now think is rare will be plentiful.

I'll close this with a quote from Peter Diamandis, one of the billionaires backing this enterprise: "If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation, it has been going after resources, whether it's the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land. Those precious resources caused people to make huge investments in ships and railroads and pipelines. Looking to space, everything we hold of value on Earth - metals, minerals, energy, real estate, water - is in near-infinite quantities in space."

The Undiscovered Country and the Final Frontier

Tom Murphy at his Do the Math blog recounts a conversation between an "Exponential Economist" and himself, a "Finite Physicist" (ht Marginal Revolution). Murphy's basic point is this:

Earth’s physical resources—particularly energy—are limited and may prohibit continued growth within centuries, or possibly much shorter depending on the choices we make.

As the discussion continues, Murphy settles on something of an upper limit to growth at around 400 years, which roughly corresponds to two limits. First, in about 400 years the waste heat from our energy use will be so great as to raise the average temperature of Earth to the boiling point. Second, in about 400 years, the energy we use will reach the "total solar input striking Earth."

There are a few specific problems with his argument that need to be countered.

I) The economist in Murphy's discussion says that economic growth is not equivalent to energy growth, and that growth in both GDP and utility can continue even if energy use stagnates. Murphy hand-waves this away by insisting that energy underpins the entire economy and that it will drag down the rest of the economy when it stagnates. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias and the commenter Vaniver on Hanson's post both raise direct critiques of Murphy's point. Vaniver points out that even with a constant quantity of energy, the price and therefore percentage of real GDP of energy can continue to rise. Hanson shows mathematically that even if one economic factor is held constant, the economy can continue growing as long as any other factor continues to grow. Hanson agrees that exponential economic growth will eventually cease, but only because he expects "diminishing returns to everything," not just energy or other physical resources.

II) Both of Murphy's above limits rest critically on the assumption that the discussion remains "grounded to Earth," that there is no "exodus to space, colonizing planets, living the Star Trek life, etc." When the economist for whatever reason accepts this assumption, Murphy says he sighed in relief that he wasn't dealing with "a space cadet." Indeed, in a previous blog entry, Murphy had derided the idea that we'll leave Earth as "escapism." You can read his full argument for why we won't go into space at the above link, but it basically amounts to two ideas: space is really, really big ("You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is," as Douglas Adams would say), and all the good stuff is here on Earth, so why would we even want to leave?

In other words, if we never leave Earth, we'll be doomed to economic stagnation; but we'll never choose to leave Earth, because there's no reason to. Well call me a space cadet, but the counterargument is obvious. If the only way to achieve economic growth is to go into space, why would we ever stay on Earth? Indeed, the more we find ourselves constrained by Murphy's energy limits, the more we will want to go to space and the more resources the market will make available to do so.

His two constraints on energy are easily overcome by a space-based civilization. First, the waste heat of energy use is far easier to get rid of in the depths of space than in Earth's atmosphere; here, the bigness of space works to our advantage. Waste heat is only a constraint if we stay on Earth, which no doubt is why Murphy is so keen to stay on Earth in the first place. Second, there's no reason at all to think that a space-based civilization would be limited to the amount of energy in the sunlight that strikes Earth. The total energy output of the sun is about 2.2 billion times the amount that hits Earth. Even if we don't leave the solar system, and even if we don't become any more energy-efficient than we are right now, that would give us quite a few centuries of extra growth. Even modest gains in energy efficiency will add millennia of extra growth before we hit the limit, and non-solar sources of energy will extend that even further.

Murphy might counter that the space age is over; we once went to the moon but haven't been back for decades, and now even the shuttle will never take flight again. This, of course, ignores the continuing advances being made by other countries and even private organizations, at a time when the only real economic value in space comes from tourism and national bragging rights. By the time Murphy's constraints begin to come into play, there's no reason to think that we'll still be constrained to Earth. A few centuries from now, we could easily be more of a space-based species than a planet-based one, especially once you consider likely advances in genetics and cybernetics that will help us adapt to life in space.

III) In contradiction to Cowen's and Hanson's summaries, Murphy's point is not that exponential growth will stop, but that all growth will stop. He doesn't say our limited resources may prohibit exponential growth, but rather, they "may prohibit continued growth." His epilogue makes it clear that he foresees "a model in which GDP is fixed—under conditions of stable energy, stable population, steady-state economy."

Other commenters on Hanson's post suggested that space only provides linear expansion opportunities, and that we would eventually outpace the speed of light if we grew exponentially. Once our civilization becomes large enough, this is true. If the speed of light is as fundamental a constraint as physicists believe, we will eventually run up against it. But once we've extended our growth limit to the speed of light itself, I think it's fair to say that Murphy's limit of "centuries, or possibly much shorter" has been soundly defeated. Moreover, growth even at some fraction of the speed of light is still growth! We're not going to hit that "steady-state economy" until the accelerating expansion of space pushes all other galaxies beyond the edge of the visible universe in a trillion years or so. Maybe I'm just short-sighted, but that's far enough in the future that it's not gonna keep me up at night.

(Translated from Trek-ese, the title of this post is, of course, The Future and Space.)

New Open Borders Website

A new website, Open Borders: The Case, started up a few weeks ago (ht Bryan Caplan). The site, run by one Vipul Naik, gathers many of the arguments for and against open borders in one place. Naik's viewpoint is clear-- he supports open borders, and much of the site is dedicated to various arguments for that position. The pages featuring arguments against open borders sometimes include counter-arguments, though not always. Despite his viewpoint, Naik seems to take a special interest in overcoming his own bias, even including a specific feedback form to let him know whether he's treating the other side fairly.

Some highlights:

• Doubling world GDP: Various studies have found that removing barriers to labor mobility would increase world GDP by at least 67% and possibly as much as 147%. [For comparison, world GDP increased about 67% from 2003-2010, and about 147% from 1993-2010. In other words, with open borders we could see an extra decade's worth of economic growth, bringing new meaning to the term "lost decade."]
• Competitive government: Free movement between US states allows Americans to "vote with their feet," putting a check on state and local government power. Open borders would do the same to national governments.
• The Gumball Video: Since I wrote my own response to Roy Beck's gumball video last year, I found it interesting to read Naik's response, which is somewhat more kind to Dr. Beck than I was.
• Interesting analogies: In making the moral case for open borders, Naik raises some interesting thought exercises, such as Starving Marvin, which asks whether it's right to use force to keep a starving man out of a grocery store; John and Julio, which asks what level of force is appropriate to keep a competitor out of a job interview; and the Drowning Child, which asks whether we can use force to prevent someone else from saving a drowning child.

On the whole, the site is still very new. Many of its pages are just short blurbs, especially in the list of objections. Bryan Caplan quotes also dominate quite a few pages; at times, you could be forgiven for thinking Caplan set up the site himself. But websites unfortunately don't spring forth fully formed from the internet ether, so hopefully both of those issues will fade away as the site matures.

The case presented is explicitly based on libertarian, utilitarian and egalitarian reasons to support open borders. Those with strong objections to one or more of those philosophies might not find the site as interesting as I did. Either way, the site certainly has the potential to become a valuable resource to anyone who wants to learn more about the issue, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on it as it grows.

17 Reasons to be a Rational Optimist

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, was recently interviewed by Reader's Digest, leading to an article listing "17 reasons it's a great time to be alive" or "17 reasons to be cheerful." (The first link leads to the Reader's Digest article, the second to Ridley's blog about the article.)

The list includes a couple points I've made here, and lots more. He says the environment is better than we think, partly thanks to urbanization, partly thanks to technology, especially in agriculture. Also, despite inflation, many things cost far less than they used to. In 1800, an hour's light cost the average person six hours' worth of wages, while today it costs half a second.

By all means, read the full list. As Ridley says, "The world has never been a better place to live in, and it will keep on getting better."

Some other choice quotes:

• "Self-sufficiency is poverty."
• "It's easier to wax elegiac for the life of a pioneer when you don't have to use an outhouse. The biggest-ever experiment in back-to-the-land hippie lifestyle is now known as the Dark Ages."
• "The more we prosper, the more we can prosper. The more we invent, the more inventions become possible. The world of things is often subject to diminishing returns. The world of ideas is not: The ever-increasing exchange of ideas causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world. There isn't even a theoretical possibility of exhausting our supply of ideas, discoveries, and inventions."

Optimism Week

This week saw quite a few optimistic stories in the news and the blogosphere, so I thought I'd bring them together in one place here.

Over at The Economist, the Schumpeter blog highlights two new books, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler and The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care by Eric Topol. According to The Economist, "These books are a godsend for those who suffer from Armageddon fatigue."

For more on Peter Diamandis, see the one-minute video Evidence for Abundance embedded below. For even more, check out his 16-minute TED talk, where he points out the progress we've made over the last hundred years, and makes the case for future abundance in energy, water, communications, health and education.

The Economist (ht PostLibertarian) also ran a story this week with the tag-line "For the first time ever, the number of poor people is declining everywhere." That tag-line is a bit misleading-- it may be "the first time ever," but the global decline in poverty has been going on since 2005, a point I've raised before.

The optimism hasn't been limited to The Economist, however. New Scientist ran several features this week focusing on optimism in "the deep future." These range from the availability of natural resources to why we won't kill ourselves off. One of them even includes a tag-line guaranteed to tickle my mood affiliation: "The more optimistic we are about the future of our species, the better we can focus on today's challenges." Although some of those stories are slated to drop behind a paywall soon, NS's non-paywalled blogs were also optimistic this week.

It doesn't end there. Charles Kenny at Foreign Policy magazine (ht To Get Rich is Glorious) notes that pretty much all of us here in the West are in the top 1% globally. They say, "America's rich are really, really rich," but "by global standards, America's middle class is also really, really rich."

Finally, David Boaz at Cato@Liberty points to George Vanderbilt, one of the richest men of his time who despite a massive library and music collection, had less access to books and music than today's internet-connected poor. He also mentions JFK's son Patrick, who was born to the most powerful man on Earth yet died in infancy from a condition that would be "routine" to cure today.

If you've seen any optimistic news lately, please let me know about it in the comments!

Less Poor than Ever Before

This is old news, but I recently rediscovered the Brookings Institution's "Poverty in Numbers" report [PDF] thanks to Bryan Caplan. The results of their analysis are so stunning that they bear repeating.

In 2005, over 1,300 million people lived in extreme poverty, defined by Brookings (and the World Bank) as living on less than $1.25 a day. By 2010, that number had fallen to less than 900 million, and if trends continue, that will fall to less than 600 million by 2015. Considering that this is happening while the human race is adding about a billion people per decade, this should put an end to Malthusian fears of overpopulation once and for all.

Expressed as a percentage of the population, the trend is even more astonishing. In 1981, the global poverty rate was higher than 50%. In 1990, when the UN established the Millennium Development Goals, the poverty rate had fallen to 41.6%. The MDG target of 20.8% by 2015 was already met in 2008. According to Brookings, in 2010 the poverty rate was 15.8%, and if trends continue, that will fall to only 9.9% by 2015.

To put that another way, not only have we achieved the Millennium Development Goal of halving the global poverty rate seven years early, but we are on track to halve it again by the MDG's deadline.

Not only is the overall poverty rate falling, but poverty is falling in every region studied by Brookings. The slowest progress is in Sub-Saharan Africa, but even there we have reason for optimism. For decades, the number of poor in Sub-Saharan Africa just continued to grow. Since 2005, for the first time on record, the total number of poor in that region has fallen. Also for the first time on record, the Sub-Saharan poverty rate fell below 50% between 2005 and 2010. If trends continue, it will fall below 40% by 2015.

It's worth noting that this is not a pre-recession report painting an overly rosy picture. The result was released in January 2011, and these results are despite an extra 64 million people kept in extreme poverty by the Great Recession. As the report says, "if not for the financial crisis our results would be even more dramatic than they are."

To emphasize just how dramatic these results are, the global poverty rate is lower than at any other point in human history. There has truly never been a better time to be human.

Richer than Ever Before

There has never been a better time to be human. Even in the depths of the global Great Recession, average per capita incomes are higher than they have been for most of human history. This is true in rich and poor countries alike, and within developed countries it's true at all income levels. The rich are getting richer while the poor and middle class are getting richer too!

It's true, the last couple years have been a struggle for many around the world. Lots of people, including me, lost their jobs to the Great Recession. However, despite the hardships of the last couple years, we are still living in the greatest era in human history.

According to the World Bank, world GDP per capita in 2010 was $6,035, which is 99.77% of 2008's peak of $6,049. (All dollar amounts in this entry are expressed in constant 2000 US dollars.) GDP per capita in 2010 was 3.04% higher than in 2009, nearly twice the 1970-2008 average of 1.60% growth. The world economy is well on the way to recovery, and there's every reason to expect 2011's GDP per capita to be higher than ever before.

The Great Recession is clearly visible in the graph to the right, as are a handful of other global recessions and slowdowns over the past forty years. The Great Recession is clearly the sharpest decline the world has seen lately, and GDP per capita in 2009 was less than it had been in 2006. Even so, incomes were 2.59% higher in 2009 than in 2005. Indeed, in 2006, for the first time in human history, the average human being earned $16 per day. The average person has not earned less than $16 per day since 2005. To put that another way, the five most prosperous years in human history so far were 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

This is especially true for the low- and middle-income countries, who as a group have not seen a decline in GDP per capita since 1983. The 2010 GDP per capita of $1,834 was the highest ever recorded for this group of countries, and a full 6.26% higher than the previous record set in 2009. The past decade in particular has seen incredible growth, averaging 4.53% growth in GDP per capita per year. Income per person in 2010 was three times higher than in 1969.

An income of $1,834 per year might not sound like a lot to those of us in first-world countries. Indeed, it's just a little more than $5 per day. But 2010 was the first year ever when the average person in these countries earned $5 per day. It's not a lot, but it's more than they have ever had before. As an indication of just how fast the poor countries are joining the rich, the $4-per-day threshold was first passed as recently as 2006, and the $3-per-day threshold in 1998.

The Great Recession has hit high-income countries much harder than low- and middle-income countries. GDP per capita in high-income countries was still 2.23% lower in 2010 than the 2007 peak of $28,095. Per capita incomes were higher in 2006, 2007 and 2008 than they were in 2010, and even 2005 was higher than 2009.

However, the hardships of the last few years have not undone the prosperity we have achieved. At the lowest point of the Great Recession, in 2009, income per person in high-income countries was $26,807. This was a full 6.92% higher than the heights of the dot-com bubble in 2000. As this video posted by Greg Mankiw notes, "Even after the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, US per capita income is still higher than at the peak of the 1990s boom."

We are also on the road to recovery; incomes grew 2.47% between 2009 and 2010. If we achieve a similar level of growth in 2011, we will set a new record for the most prosperous year ever. Even if we don't set a new record, GDP per capita in the high-income countries will still be twice what it was in the mid-1970s.

Despite the great recession, incomes are at or very close to the highest they have ever been for most people around the world. This is especially true for poorer countries, but it's also true for the recession-ravaged wealthy countries. No generation in human history has had it better than we do. There has never been a better time to be human.