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from HumanProgress.org Education Website
Ridley: Why Is It so Cool to Be Gloomy?
Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.
Are we running out of resources? That’s been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. According to Ehrlich, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”. The University of Maryland economist Julian Simon rejected Ehrlich’s thesis. In his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, he argued that humans were intelligent beings, capable of innovating their way out of shortages through greater efficiency, increased supply, or development of substitutes. He wrote: “There is no physical or economic reason why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.”
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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from TheWire.in
Media/News Company
Noam Chomsky and the Question of Individual Choice in a Vastly Unequal World
As he turns 90, the world’s foremost intellectual activist continues to speak to our collective conscience with rare energy and passion.
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Noam Chomsky and the Question of Individual Choice in a Vastly Unequal World
As he turns 90, the world’s foremost intellectual activist continues to speak to our collective conscience with rare energy and passion.
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