Ferraris for All: In Defence of Economic Progress
by Daniel Ben-Ami
Policy Press Pp 282
People who are sceptical about the virtues of economic growth are, writes Daniel Ben-Ami, “inhumane, elitist, conservative, misanthropic and more preoccupied with consumption than anything else.” This is not true but it’s a good start to an extremely bitter and important debate.
Economic growth is a recent phenomenon. For 200 years the developed world has grown at 2 per cent per year. Industrial civilisation has brought a level of wealth to the workers that would have glazed over the eyes of the Emperor Nero.
This is unprecedented. Some, like Ben-Ami, assume that it represents a fundamental change in the human world and that growth has become a law of nature and a more or less unconditional good. Others point out that all civilisations come to an end and this one is no different. How it will end is up for discussion, that it will end is not.
The primary reason for thinking the Ben-Amists are right is science. This, for the first time, introduces an objective form of cumulative wisdom into human affairs. So, if this civilisation does collapse, someone, somewhere, will still know that the earth revolves around the sun and how to make a car. Growth is conceptually and actually tied to the progress of science.
The primary reason for thinking the Ben-Amists are wrong is also science. Humans, being human, use science to extend their capacities for good but also for evil and excess. Science has given us weapons capable of destroying civilisations and mechanisms of consumption that could deplete the planet or render it uninhabitable by humans. Growth, therefore, is necessarily limited by human wickedness and planetary capacity.
This book is a pro-growth polemic. Ben-Ami lines up his ducks – tree-huggers, over-population obsessives, liberal wets, happiness theorists, hyper-egalitarians – and blasts away at them. Mostly he misses but that does not make this book any less important.
He misses because he does not have an argument as such. It is not, as he seems to think, proof that somebody is wrong simply because the same argument was put before. The greens are not wrong, for example, because they dislike industrialisation like those silly old romantics. And, secondly, it is no refutation of an idea to say that all these scientists say one thing but this other guy, whom Ben-Am happens to think is much smarter, says another. So global warming sceptic Bjorn Lomborg is not right just because he disagrees with deep green James Lovelock.
Furthermore, the author has a habit of saying things in such a way that one instantly thinks of the obvious refutation. So to prove how well we are doing he says, “A visit to an ordinary supermarket would amaze our ancestors with its huge range and high quality of food.” Well, yes, but a visit to Auschwitz or Hiroshima in 1945 would also have amazed our ancestors, just not in a nice way.
Also Ben-Ami’s intellectual history seems a bit dodgy. He quotes a perfectly sane remark by the sociologist Daniel Bell about human limits and then says, “It would be hard to think of a statement more directly contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment.” Ben-Ami believes the thinkers of the eighteenth century thought human capacities were limitless. The two greatest Enlightenment philosophers, Kant and Hume, would be startled, though the half-witted French thinker Auguste Comte would perhaps have agreed. Thomas Jefferson would also have been uneasy. America was not founded in the belief that humans were omnicompetent but in the conviction that they were fallible.
Stripping all that out, however, all Ben-Ami is saying is that economic growth is a good thing. It relieves poverty, extends life, alleviates suffering and generally improves the quality of human life. Furthermore, only through growth can we hope to cure the problems of growth – global warming being the obvious example. Resource depletion, meanwhile, has repeatedly been offset by increased ingenuity and efficiency.
We thus have no choice but to jog frantically on the growth treadmill. Not to do so will harm others but not, if we live in the rich, developed world, ourselves.
What should make you uneasy about this is its hectoring, utopian tone. What should make you uneasier is the fact that Ben-Ami believes in the conquest of nature. He is a hard human exceptionalist who think it is our particular destiny to remould the natural world in our image.
The problem with this is it cannot ever work. Our so-called conquest of nature would be news to rubble-dwelling Haitian earthquake victims or Aids sufferers. We are not remoulding nature, we are just pathetic tinkerers. And, anyway, why should we? Nature is just another word for our home.
Growth is, indeed, one of the great issues of our time. Its benefits are manifest and anybody arguing against it will have to take on Ben-Ami’s core opinions. They are, in certain circles, commonplace – all the more reason to think they are probably wrong.
I think this will look nice sitting next to my EF Schumaker. In the words of Pte. Frazer, we’re doomed.
Talking about “saying things in such a way that one instantly thinks of the obvious refutation”…
The earthquake in Haiti was an example of how vulnerable people can be to the whims of nature, but, crucially, only where the benefits of economic growth have not been felt. It seems foolish to hold up Haiti as proof that man will always be pathetically helpless in the face of nature, when a comparison between the earthquake in Haiti and earthquakes in developed areas of similar magnitudes will show the enormous protective value of economic development, of proper infrastructure and proper housing, against nature. Aids too is a problem which could be greatly alleviated by development in Africa. I fail to see how holding up some areas which are not developed demonstrates that economic growth has failed as a project.
This seems like little more than deference to a perceived “natural” state of things, which amounts to the status quo, or a romantic, imagined past “natural” state. But there is no one natural state of things, only what is possible under natural laws. All this flimsy talk about nature actually represents a reluctance to make moral choices.
I can appreciate that handpicking natural disasters from the world’s poorest regions and holding them up as great modern morality tales about humanity’s subservience to nature fits nicely with the romantic myths many seem to have about the poor and their relationship with nature, but it would be nice to hear about instances where development has been a shield against disaster for a change.
Thanks Brian for yet another entertaining review! But as Ben-Ami does not argue for ‘the conquest of nature’ in his book, methinks your own value framework has slightly crept in here to produce a distorted version of his argument, the better to defeat him with. Ah, a straw man! How much more comforting to bang on about the evil of humanity – with which you evidently feel at home with – than confront the real argument in this book. But thanks for drawing it to my attention anyway. Your rant immediately alerted me to the fact that this was one well worth getting!
Furthermore, the author has a habit of saying things in such a way that one instantly thinks of the obvious refutation. So to prove how well we are doing he says, “A visit to an ordinary supermarket would amaze our ancestors with its huge range and high quality of food.” Well, yes, but a visit to Auschwitz or Hiroshima in 1945 would also have amazed our ancestors, just not in a nice way.
Um….eh?