Humanity Not Ready for Age of Abundance

April 18, 2016

Humanity Isn’t Yet Prepared for the Age of Abundance

Dear TransTech Reader,

Despite important scientific and philosophical progress in the brief Hellenic period of ancient Athens, it was the emergence of the Enlightenment in 1700s Europe that finally liberated science to improve the human lot. Human progress has accelerated exponentially since then, and with it, affluence and health. Unfortunately, few people seem to understand how fortunate we are to be alive today. So I’m always happy when someone puts things in perspective.

Billionaires lived worse a hundred years ago than most Americans today

Economist Carol Boyd Leon recently wrote an article titled “The life of American workers in 1915” for the Monthly Labor Review using data from the US Bureau of Labor. It is a fascinating analysis of how America has changed in a single century.

The overview prompted significant follow-up coverage. The most useful analysis, I think, came from economist and author Donald Joseph Boudreaux. The title of his article “Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than Was John D. Rockefeller in 1916” tells the whole story.

Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire back when a billion dollars was serious money. His quality of life, however, was clearly inferior to most Americans today. The standard of living the richest people enjoyed just a hundred years ago didn’t measure up to ours.

Perhaps the best example provided by Boudreaux is the death of President Calvin’s Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son in 1924. Tragically, the young man died from a staph-infected blister he developed on a toe while playing on the White House tennis court. Today antibiotics routinely cure such infections, and despite periodic sensational headlines in the media, new drugs will soon end the fear of the worst antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Travel and communication were also difficult and time-consuming a hundred years ago—even for the wealthy. Telephones were still luxury items, with only one primitive phone per ten people in the United States. Radio technology, along with access to recorded music and professional entertainment, didn’t penetrate America until the Great Depression. Food was not just bland for almost everybody; it was expensive.

More than 40% percent of American family budgets went to food a hundred years ago. Today, we spend less than 10% on average, despite having access to chicken tikka masala, fettucine Alfredo, and Cantonese sweet and sour in practically every American town.

The ever-improving quality of life should make us an optimistic species.

Not so much…

Predictions about future life have always been split into two general categories. On one side are the techno-optimists who believe that science and technology will continue to improve the human lot delivering longer lives and abundance. On the other side are the pessimists, in particular the Malthusians. They believe that human activity will lead inevitably to scarcity and a return to the primitive.

Statistically, the techno-optimists have won the argument so far. The world’s standard of living has improved for centuries but soared in just the last few decades. Most humans on our planet have emerged from extreme poverty and continue to make economic, health, and educational progress at a dramatic rate.

Almost nobody, however, is aware of it and polls show that media professionals are even less aware of this transformation than the general population.

Abundance brings new problems we don’t know how to deal with

We have reached the tipping point in the West where our lives are increasingly characterized by abundance rather than scarcity. Until very recently, most humans have struggled to obtain the basic necessities. It’s no longer the case, and the most obvious sign is in the realm of basic nutrition.

The Lancet medical journal published an article in April that reviews trends regarding the global body mass index (BMI). Simply put, the paper documents the fact that world is getting fat. That led to a series of articles in major media, such as “Obesity Is Now a Bigger Global Problem Than Hunger.” Bloomberg’s rather amusing take on this trend was the article “The World May Have Too Much Food.”

Here’s a chart from the article:

Diagram shows arrows bottom left diagonal up to upper right corner rise in abundance.

So what should we learn from this? First of all, we should recognize that intellectual elites seem particularly susceptible to apocalyptic thinking. While they worried about famine, scientists, engineers, and business people ushered the world into a new world of abundance.

Does this mean our problems are over? Not at all. When we should have been preparing for abundance, governments were obsessed with scarcity. Now, abundance is creating an entirely new set of problems.

The rapid increase in worldwide obesity has enormous implications, including a quadrupling in adult diabetes since 1980, but it is only one aspect of abundance. Despite these problems, life spans continue to increase. So we are going to see more and more people who are older suffering from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and the other diseases that go up with BMI.

These conditions tended to kill people much earlier before the arrival of modern biotechnology. Today government budgets creak under the strain of increasingly older populations. For most Western governments, transfer payments to the aged are already the single largest budgetary component. The situation, however, will get even worse.

In the past, each generation tended to be significantly larger than the preceding generation, which made it easier to pay its forebears’ debts. That is no longer the case. Every subsequent generation from now on will be smaller than the one before it.

This is what abundance looks like—longer lives and cheaper consumer goods, including food. So we will have more and more obesity and its related diseases.

We know that most people won’t adopt the life-style changes needed to significantly reduce obesity. The human race has never before experienced affluence of the sort that is common in the West and spreading throughout the rest of the world.

The instinctive drive to consume excess calories in times of plenty worked well for our ancestors who experienced periodic cycles of feast and famine. However, that drive causes diseases and huge medical bills in the modern world of permanent feast. As a result, medical solutions for obesity and obesity-related diseases are the only answer for most people.

Why hasn’t science delivered solutions?

Why hasn’t abundance come to health care?

Well, actually, it has. I’ve written about some of the revolutionary biotechnologies waiting in the wings. They include DNA vaccines, stem cell therapies, and anti-aging therapeutics. The problem is that medical science is not keeping up with other areas of the economy. The primary reason is that the same people who told us that overpopulation and resource depletion were going to be the big problems have control over biotech innovation.

Healthcare innovation is unique because it has to get through politicians, regulatory agencies, and bureaucrats. The regulatory process adds decades of delay and trillions of dollars to the cost of new biotechnologies.

The justification for this system is safety. We are told that more people would die if doctors and patients were free to try therapies that haven’t been approved by the government. The widespread fear of less regulated health care, however, isn’t data supported.

In fact, many medical economists believe that tight regulatory control is killing more people than it saves… while raising costs significantly. What we have is artificially created healthcare scarcity in an era of growing abundance.

There are solutions for obesity and the diseases it causes. I’ve written about many. Eventually, these revolutionary therapies will be made available, but every day that passes without them causes unnecessary suffering, death, and budgetary strains. The authorities who believe health freedom will create a medical apocalypse were also wrong about overpopulation, resource depletion, dietary fats, vitamin D, and even contact lens prescriptions. Medica l abundance is the only solution to medical conditions caused by long lives and abundance.

(If you’d like to see the big picture, watch these two videos by the brilliant and entertaining Swedish statistician and professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute: How Not to Be Ignorant About the World | Hans and Ola Rosling and How To End Poverty in 15 years.)

Here’s what we should learn from this

Until very recently, intellectual elites were predicting global famine due to overpopulation and resource depletion… while heaping scorn and mockery on those who said they were wrong. They, however, were wrong.

Demographers tell us that world population is still growing but only because people are sticking around longer. Fertility rates have peaked and are now falling below replacement levels. Birthrates are catastrophically low in many Western countries, and global population is already on track to decline.

The fact that “the authorities” were so wrong proves that the human condition can improve despite the failures of the elite political and intellectual classes. As economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, innovators and entrepreneurs are the two groups that actually wield science and technology to improve human life. As the rest of the world attains the level of prosperity needed to contribute to Western technological progress, they will continue to do that at an even faster rate.

This is great news for lots of reasons, but it will create unprecedented levels of obesity and age-related medical problems. These are the problems of abundance… and the only solution is more abundance in the form of liberated biotechnology.

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Patrick Cox
Editor, Transformational Technology Alert

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