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

Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing, as we will repeatedly see in the chapters to come. Most obviously, GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.⁵⁷ Less obviously, it correlates with higher ethical values like peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.⁵⁸ Richer countries, on average, fight fewer wars with each other (chapter 11), are less likely to be riven by civil wars (chapter 11), are more likely to become and stay democratic (chapter 14), and have greater respect for human rights (chapter 14—on average, that is; Arab oil states are rich but repressive). The citizens of richer countries have greater respect for “emancipative” or liberal values such as women’s equality, free speech, gay rights, participatory democracy, and protection of the environment (chapters 10 and 15). Not surprisingly, as countries get richer they get happier (chapter 18); more surprisingly, as countries get richer they get smarter (chapter 16).⁵⁹

In explaining this Somalia-to-Sweden continuum, with poor violent repressive unhappy countries at one end and rich peaceful liberal happy ones at the other, correlation is not causation, and other factors like education, geography, history, and culture may play roles.⁶⁰ But when the quants try to tease them apart, they find that economic development does seem to be a major mover of human welfare.⁶¹ In an old academic joke, a dean is presiding over a faculty meeting when a genie appears and offers him one of three wishes—money, fame, or wisdom. The dean replies, “That’s easy. I’m a scholar. I’ve devoted my life to understanding. Of course I’ll take wisdom.” The genie waves his hand and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The smoke clears to reveal the dean with his head in his hands, lost in thought. A minute elapses. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Finally a professor calls out, “Well? Well?” The dean mutters, “I should have taken the money.”

CHAPTER 9INEQUALITY

But is it all going to the rich?” That’s a natural question to ask in developed countries in the second decade of the 21st century, when economic inequality has become an obsession. Pope Francis called it “the root of social evil”; Barack Obama, “the defining challenge of our time.” Between 2009 and 2016, the proportion of articles in the New York Times containing the word inequality soared tenfold, reaching 1 in 73.¹ The new conventional wisdom is that the richest one percent have skimmed off all the economic growth of recent decades, and everyone else is treading water or slowly sinking. If so, the explosion of wealth documented in the previous chapter would no longer be worth celebrating, since it would have ceased contributing to overall human welfare.

Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”² But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.