Better and Better: The Myth of Inevitable Progress

The I = PAT formula was not pulled completely out of thin air. As societies get richer and more populous, they do consume more resources, and, especially in the early phases of economic growth, they do so with a measure of indifference to the overall impact on the environment. But what the equation misses, and what Goklany spends a good chunk of his book demonstrating, is that technology can actually reduce environmental impact, thereby diminishing the demands made by affluence and population growth. A classic example of this effect is the massive expansion in the efficiency of agricultural productivity over the past 40 years. Productivity gains have dramatically reduced the environmental burden of farming (at least on the land -- there have not been similar advances in the efficient use of water) and shrunk the amount of land needed to feed the world. More recently, technological improvements in the scrubbing of power-plant smokestacks have brought about a sharp reduction in the amount of sulfur dioxide in the air. Improvements in the efficiency of wind and solar power have reduced (albeit only a little) the demand for fossil fuels. And although the impact of these innovations has been felt most strongly in the developed world, they have also improved conditions in the developing world, at least with regard to things such as access to clean water and some types of air emissions. Goklany may be exaggerating somewhat when he says that the entire planet -- as opposed to just the developed world -- is cleaner, but it is in fact not an outrageous claim.

The paradox here is that technological change is generally associated with (or is actually the result of) increased affluence, which makes it likely that an economy will get cleaner even as it gets richer. And empirically, that does seem to be the case. After all, developed countries do generally have cleaner air, cleaner water, more forest cover, and less cropland devoted to food production than developing countries do, even though the latter are much poorer. The obvious, and important, exception is CO₂ emissions and the broader problem of climate change. But Goklany -- who spends too much of his book offering an overly familiar critique of excessive action in response to global warming -- argues that now that Americans are increasingly concerned about climate change, technology will soon help mitigate the problem.

All of this does not mean that the United States is less polluted than it was in 1787, let alone than it was when it was inhabited only by Native Americans. But it does mean that the United States is arguably less polluted today than at any time in the last 100 years and that the last 40 years or so, in particular, have seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of air and water. And the same is true, to lesser and greater extents, in the rest of the developed world. One hypothesis for why this has historically occurred is demonstrated by what is called the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). When graphed, the relationship between prosperity and environmental degradation looks like an upside-down U. Initially, as countries grow, they trade off environmental well-being for economic growth -- that is, as they get richer, they also get more polluted. At some point, however, they become prosperous enough to shift their priorities and begin to seek out ways to grow more cleanly. Goklany suggests a variation on the EKC, the "environmental transition hypothesis," which tries to account for time and technology as well as affluence. The invention and spread of new technologies, he suggests, make it easier and more likely for countries to get on the right side of the U-curve quickly, even before they have become rich; the "green revolution," for instance, allowed poor countries to reduce the environmental burden of farming.

FREE MARKETS, FREE PEOPLE

The environmental transition hypothesis is a reasonable way of thinking about the relationship between prosperity, technology, and people's expectations about the environment. And Goklany's rebuttal to the environmental doomsayers is both welcome and convincing. So why, then, is his overall take on the world -- and in particular on how we got to where we are and what we need to do to keep things moving in the right direction -- unsatisfying in that Couéist way? The simple answer is that Goklany's account leaves out too much that matters and pretends that incredibly complex phenomena can be explained away with a few catch phrases. In its overly sanguine and simplistic take on globalization, regulation, and the role of state and economic power, The Improving State of the World is symptomatic of what has become, in the eyes of many, a quintessentially American point of view -- a view according to which the task of creating a better world can ultimately be boiled down to the motto of the Wall Street Journal editorial page: "free markets and free people."

Free markets and free people are, to be sure, wonderful things. But what Goklany offers up in his book is a fundamentally deterministic take on the world: as countries get richer and more technologically advanced, their citizens (all, or almost all, of them) naturally get healthier and better educated, eat better, live longer, and care more about the environment. The free market, recognizing people's resulting desires, delivers the goods they want.