Earth has amazing history. The human race is alongside of our planet. People are astonished at how much things have changed. In some’s eyes, the world is getting worse while, in others’ eyes, the world is getting better. Norberg, especially in his book 「Progress」, states “life on earth has never been as good for as many people as it is right now” (as cited in Black, 2018, p. 1). This essay will examine why Norberg believes it in that manner and whether it is convincing or not.
Thanks to trade, immigration, knowledge, goods and experimentation, global living standards have greatly improved. The greatest improvement is seen as follows. In the recent 100 years, global wealth skyrocketed. Meanwhile, undernourishment rates around the world went down from 50% to 10% from 1945 to 2015. Illiteracy rates have considerably declined from 90% to 10% from 1820 to 2010. Rates of infant mortality is decreasing and children labour is disappearing as well. The most importantly, life expectancy has increased. During this research, it turned out that this is golden era. Another contributor to the increase of life expectancy is the reduction in the risk of wars. Norberg argues that most people do not believe it because people has a tendency to remember well the most recent events. That is why the most recent war remains the most brutal one. The view that the most recent war which is WWⅡ is the worst is wrong in proportionate terms. In fact, the percentage of deceases by the Mongol invasion in total population overtook the percentage by WWⅡ. Besides, it turned out that people had a fallacy that the world was getting worse in the Norberg’s survey aimed at 1000 Swedes about the global development. In other studies aimed at UK, only 10% of the people responded that world poverty had declined in the past 30 years. Norberg takes media and people’s tendency as the reasons of this pessimism. Because media pursue unpredictable and exceptional events, they skew the fact. Moreover, people instinctively remember the bad events compared to the jolly news (Norberg, 2016 as cited in Black, 2018).
People were wrong on global statistics. People may have misunderstood but those graphs that Norberg shows can just tell people from the past to the present about the quantitative trend. It is not enough to explain that pessimism about the future world is wrong. Rather, he has already misunderstood the reason why people, have pessimistic view and misled into putting the blame on media and human instinct. He did not take into account varieties of predicted indexes such as predicted global cancer cases from 2012 to 2035 shown by World Economic Forum (2006). From the viewpoint of psychology, people also tend to have happy memory, contrary to what Norberg talked about the bad memory and recent effect. People synthetically make a judgement because much more people are educated as Norberg mentioned.
Norberg shows ten reasons for optimism including environment. Environmental concern is one of the reasons that people become pessimists. Norberg believes that the progressive knowledge and technology will mitigate the mounting environmental concerns although Norberg is unsure. He also enunciates the priority which is that creating wealth and new technology is more important than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He argues that this is because poverty is still the biggest problems. Even though there were some unfairness between generations in terms of a housing bubble, he denies that the pinnacle of the human race will finish due to depletion by the current generation. As he argues, poverty is the biggest threat. There is no issue here, but a solution to the environmental problems does not necessarily mean that the poor will be neglected. For example, plastic generation has gradually increased for the recent 50 years reaching over 30 million tons in 2014. However, the plastic recycled has been just over 3 million tons which is 10% of plastic created (Lusher, 2015). It is well known that it affects on marine environment. Encouraging people to reuse plastic or banning plastic bag in the supermarket does not discourage to create wealth and new technology. If there is a social agreement that it is important to protect our environment, every citizen and government will seek the measures to deal with it by finding the equilibrium point which balances environment and economy.
To conclude, this essay described what Norberg wrote about the world in his book and why he believes that the world is getting better. Many of his arguments are undoubtedly true but there are some questions in terms of environmental pollution and sustainability of development. The present borrows earth from the future generation so we take a huge responsibility for that. It is time to need feasible policies rather than have a clumsy expectation for the next generation.
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References:
Black, A. (2018, Jan 27 – Feb 2). The view from the bright side. The Listener
Lusher, A. (2015). Microplastics in the Marine Environment: Distribution, Interactions and Effects. In M. Bergmann et al. (Eds.), Marine Anthropogenic Litter (pp. 245-307). DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16510-3_10
World Economic Forum (2006). Why is the global financial crisis linked to extra cancer deaths? Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/why-is-the-global-financial-crisis-linked-to-extra-cancer-deaths
Topic:
To what extent do you agree with Johan Norberg that “life on earth has never been as good for as many people as it is right now” (Black, 2018). Use information and visuals from input texts 1 and 2 to support your opinion.
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