Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.³⁶ These included famines in the Soviet Union in the aftermaths of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and World War II; Stalin’s Holodomor (terror-famine) in Ukraine in 1932–33; Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958–61; Pol Pot’s Year Zero in 1975–79; and Kim Jong-il’s Arduous March in North Korea as recently as the late 1990s. The first governments in postcolonial Africa and Asia often implemented ideologically fashionable but economically disastrous policies such as the mass collectivization of farming, import restrictions to promote “self-sufficiency,” and artificially low food prices which benefited politically influential city-dwellers at the expense of farmers.³⁷ When the countries fell into civil war, as they so often did, not only was food distribution disrupted, but both sides could use hunger as a weapon, sometimes with the complicity of their Cold War patrons.

Fortunately, since the 1990s the prerequisites to plenty have been falling into place in more of the world. Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy. Let’s turn to the progress that has been made against each of these scourges.

CHAPTER 8WEALTH

Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.” In a world governed by entropy and evolution, the streets are not paved with pastry, and cooked fish do not land at our feet. But it’s easy to forget this truism and think that wealth has always been with us. History is written not so much by the victors as by the affluent, the sliver of humanity with the leisure and education to write about it. As the economist Nathan Rosenberg and the legal scholar L. E. Birdzell Jr. point out, “We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.”¹

Norberg, drawing on Braudel, offers vignettes of this era of misery, when the definition of poverty was simple: “if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor.”

In wealthy Genoa, poor people sold themselves as galley slaves every winter. In Paris the very poor were chained together in pairs and forced to do the hard work of cleaning the drains. In England, the poor had to work in workhouses to get relief, where they worked long hours for almost no pay. Some were instructed to crush dog, horse and cattle bones for use as fertilizer, until an inspection of a workhouse in 1845 showed that hungry paupers were fighting over the rotting bones to suck out the marrow.²

Another historian, Carlo Cipolla, noted:

In preindustrial Europe, the purchase of a garment or of the cloth for a garment remained a luxury the common people could only afford a few times in their lives. One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes—which generally had the effect of spreading the epidemic.³

The need to explain the creation of wealth is obscured yet again by political debates within modern societies on how wealth ought to be distributed, which presuppose that wealth worth distributing exists in the first place. Economists speak of a “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy” in which a finite amount of wealth has existed since the beginning of time, like a lode of gold, and people have been fighting over how to divide it up ever since.⁴ Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created.⁵ It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary, just as radical, is that we can figure out how to make more of it.