Perspective on Progress, Part 2

In my post yesterday we saw how much human life expectancy has improved over the centuries. From less than 30 years, where it had remained for centuries if not thousands of years, it began to skyrocket in the period after The Enlightenment. From then until today, life expectancy has far more than doubled almost everywhere in the world and nearly tripled in some countries.

But, what good is a long, miserable life? If we are starving, depressed, tortured, and/or subjected to the arbitrary whims of some despot, a long life can be a curse and not a blessing.

For the next several days we’ll be looking at these and other “quality of life” factors. We’ll start today with sustenance—access to a sufficient amount of high quality food.

It’s easy for us to forget just how common hunger and famine, the latter an every-few-decades phenomenon even in Europe, once were. However our ignorance on this subject is not for lack of evidence. It persists despite the frequent references to hunger and famine in the literature and records of the time.

Today we worry about the poor “only” having access to cheap, processed food, but not very long ago at all the poor had much, much more pressing concerns. As Harvard Professor Steven Pinker explains in his wonderfully researched book “Enlightenment Now”:

The historian Fernand Braudel has documented that premodern Europe suffered from famines every few decades. Desperate peasants would harvest grain before it was ripe, eat grass or human flesh, and pour into cities to beg. Even in good times, many would get the bulk of their calories from bread or gruel, and not many at that: in “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death”, 1700–2100, the economist Robert Fogel noted that “the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the eighteenth century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.” Many of those who were not starving were too weak to work, which locked them into poverty. Hungry Europeans titillated themselves with food pornography, such as tales of Cockaigne, a country where pancakes grew on trees, the streets were paved with pastry, roasted pigs wandered around with knives in their backs for easy carving, and cooked fish jumped out of the water and landed at one’s feet.

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Braudel recounts the testimony of a Dutch merchant who was in India during a famine in 1630–31: “Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty. . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.” The familiar human dramas followed: wives and children abandoned, children sold by parents, who either abandoned them or sold themselves in order to survive, collective suicides. . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and “drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies.” “Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it. . . . In the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.”

This systemic and constant lack of food had a devastating physical and mental impact even on those who managed to survive. In Bangladesh, as recently as 1985, 70 percent of the children showed signs of stunted growth. Today it’s less than 40 percent. In China in 1985 the number stood at about 40 percent, today it’s less than 10. In Columbia it’s gone from about 40 percent in 1965 to about 15 percent today. (All stats are from Professor Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now”).

We’ve not only managed to defy Malthus’s predictions that population growth would outpace food supply, but we’ve managed to feed an increasing number of people increasingly well. The average calories per person in France increased from about 1700 per day in 1700 to 3500 per person today. In England its gone from 2250 to nearly 3500. In the world as a whole it’s gone from an average of about 2250 in 1970 to about 2750 today. In 1970, fully 35% of the developing world was malnourished by clinical standards. Today that figure is less than 15 percent.

How have we managed to defy Malthus’s dire predictions of systemic starvation and famine? Mostly as a consequence of increased food production efficiency resulting from use of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, GMO crops, and more efficient farming techniques (all of which are nearly universally criticized by modern privileged intellectuals with a “let them eat cake” attitude). As Pinker explains in “Enlightenment Now”:

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food. Another way of stating the bounty is that between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent. In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet. Despite their bucolic charm, farms are biological deserts which sprawl over the landscape at the expense of forests and grasslands. Now that farms have receded in some parts of the world, temperate forests have been bouncing back, a phenomenon we will return to in chapter 10. If agricultural efficiency had remained the same over the past fifty years while the world grew the same amount of food, an area the size of the United States, Canada, and China combined would have had to be cleared and plowed. The environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel has estimated that the world has reached Peak Farmland: we may never again need as much as we use today.