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- Edmund Burke posited two major hypotheses about
discussions
of the future: that the future cannot be determined from
the past, and
that the present is pregnant with the future. These
propositions may seem
mutually exclusive, but they are not. There are
some matters, such as demographic
profiles, that can be predicted, and
some, like the next technological
breakthrough, that cannot.
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- A poll regularly
conducted of college freshman asks,
"Do you think your future will
be filled with success?" More
than 95 percent invariably say,
"I will be successful."
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- The second question is,
"Do you think the country
will be successful?" Some 55
percent of these students agree.
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- The third question is, "Do
you think the world will
be successful?" No more than 25 percent
think so.
-
- These attitudes are like having a first-class ticket
on the
Titanic, but expecting it to sink.
-
- Examples of this cultural
pessimism abound, as is clear
from the following discussion of recent
media accounts. Each example is
misguided, misleading, or simply
wrong.
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- Land of Pessimism
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- The first example of public
gloom and doom is the notion
that the U.S. is running out of arable
land. Vice President Al Gore said,
"We are losing fifty acres of
farmland every hour." Let's take
him at his word for a moment.
That is 430,000 acres per year, and at that
rate, over the course of a
hundred years, all the farmland in the United
States will disappear.
But Gore does not mention that we had 44 million
acres of farmland in
the 1930s and we still have 44 million today. And
thanks to vastly
increased productivity, that amount of land is more than
sufficient to
feed our population and a significant portion of the globe.
The U.S.
currently gives away enough food to provide every hungry person
in the
world with 2,500 British thermal units per day. (Around the world,
mass
starvation occurs only where governments withhold food as an instrument
of political intimidation.)
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- Actually, land under cultivation and food production
worldwide are increasing. Between 1974 and 1995, rice production in China
increased by 88 percent. Indonesia's food production increased by 69
percent,
Bangladesh raised its output by 100 percent, India by 117
percent, and
the UK by 50 percent. Brazil has increased its corn
production by 63 percent,
China by 213 percent, and the U.S. by 118
percent. And these increases
are occurring even though the U.S. is
still spending more than $24 billion
per year on farm subsidies,
deliberately taking land out of cultivation.
Clearly, we are not
running out of farmland, but the specter of farms disappearing
into the
dust has a nostalgic and emotional appeal.
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- Population
Pessimism
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- Overpopulation is another subject of unjustified
pessimism.
Some 44 percent of the globe's population is now reproducing
below replacement
level (2.1 children per woman). Birth rates are
declining everywhere. Demographer
Nicholas Eberstadt projects that by
2050 the world's population will begin
declining, for the first time in
recorded history, after reaching a peak
of eight billion.
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- This projection
firmly refutes population-control advocate
Paul Ehrlich's widely quoted
1960s prediction that the world's population
will double every
thirty-five years. (No serious demographer believes this
any longer.)
Yet the popular press and the philanthropic community continue
to make
these claims, to convince us that we are facing an imminent apocalypse
and must take drastic measures to avert it.
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- Energetic
Pessimism
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- Environmental degradation is another source of
apocalyptic
rhetoric, but the facts belie the hysteria. Since 1970, air
quality in
every major American city has improved. The percentages of
carbon monoxide
and sulfur dioxide have declined precipitously.
Moreover, as the United
States moves further into the information age,
we increasingly disengage
from the "smokestack" industries.
The United States will remain
a manufacturing nation, but much of this
manufacturing will be far cleaner
than it was thirty years ago. In this
light, the Kyoto Accord is not primarily
a means of controlling
environmental pollution but a way of extending international
government
control over the economy.
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- Scaremongers have also written much about nuclear
energy,
particularly the Three Mile Island incident. But no one really
suffered
any measurable harm from the accident"the expiration of
radiation
was no greater than at French and Dutch installations during
the same period,
none of which caused a public panic. U.S. media
analysts, however, largely
ignored the question of risks and
benefits.
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- Another popular subject of dire forecasts is energy and
minerals. Here again, the facts belie the scare stories. With the
exception
of tungsten (and even then only for a period of five years in
the 1970s)
the price of every major mineral relative to wages has
decreased in recent
decades. The reason for this is clear: market
conditions affect price.
Buckminster Fuller's popular notion of a
"spaceship earth" is
decidedly inappropriate. The earth is
much more fungible than a spaceship.
Copper provides a classic example.
The price of copper increased dramatically
when Chile nationalized its
copper mines in the 1960s. Since then, however,
it has consistently
decreased. Customers switched to less-expensive alloys,
and providers
of transcontinental communications switched from coaxial
cables to
satellites.
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- This is the paradigm for almost any mineral of value
to humans.
A 1979 New York Times editorial declared, "We are running
out of
energy," referring to predictions that oil would soon cost
$100 a
barrel. Today, oil futures are at $5 a barrel. The increase in supply
has been quite staggering, and it occurred because of innovations
introduced
in the last twenty years after the initial OPEC price
increases.
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- Economic Pessimism
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- Many people have
argued that there is a widening gap
between the rich and poor. These
arguments, however, tend to ignore the
context. One of the great
achievements of the twentieth century has been
the creation of a large
middle class, a condition relatively unknown in
the previous century.
Worldwide, per capita income in the year 1800 was
$100; in 1900 it was
$500; in 2000 it will be $5,000, and in 2100, using
the most
conservative extrapolation, it will be something like $30,000
in
current dollars. This trend has applied to almost every country in the
world, despite the glib assertion that the rich are getting richer and
the poor poorer.
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- There is data to support the latter claim, however, and
here is
where context becomes crucial. For illustration, compare a nation
that
has a $1,000 per capita income with one that has income of $10,000
per
capita. Suppose that the first nation achieves 100 percent growth (going
from $1,000 to $2,000) and the second's per capita income increases by
15 percent (to $11,500). The numerical spread between them widens, but
the relative numbers tell the more compelling story. The rich are growing
richer, the poor are growing richer, and the poor are doing so more
rapidly
than the rich.
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- In this era of remarkable pharmaceuticals, biogens,
robotics,
prosthetic devices, and carbon 14 products more powerful than
steel with
the properties of plastic, technological wonders once only
dreamed of are
within our grasp. The Internet has changed the manner
and speed of communication.
Fiber optics and high-definition TV are
changing the way we live and even
see and think. Of course, such rapid
technological changes can engender
spiritual malaise and cultural
degradation, but the people who needlessly
fear that we are going to
run out of land, energy, and food usually ignore
that possibility.
Almost everywhere in the world, people live longer, healthier,
and
wealthier lives than their forebears, yet the stories about world
conditions
as the new millennium nears are usually negative.
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- Technological Pessimism
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- Clearly, the only news that's
newsworthy is negative
news. Attention-grabbing reports of impending
doom, such as the famous
1960s Club of Rome report on Limits to Growth,
indicate that if the world
continues to use resources at the present
rate, life as we know it will
cease to exist in a hundred years. But
will we use resources at the present
rate? People are not lemmings.
When we have a problem, we examine our options
and change.
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- The culture of
pessimism is not only a dead end; it is
patently false, as the
following true story illustrates.
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- In 1903 in a small Ohio town,
Milton Wright, a minister
in the Church of Christ, was looking for an
appropriate sermon topic. He
found his theme in a very unlikely
place"a U.S. Patent Office report
on the future. The report said
that everything that could conceivably be
invented had already been
discovered. There are strict limits to human
ingenuity, the report
argued, and no major advances were likely to occur
in the twentieth
century.
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- Wright delivered a sermon based on that notion. At the
end, a
young man raised his hand and said, "You know something, sir,
I
believe that one day people will fly."
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- "Fly?" responded
Minister Wright, "If
God wanted us to fly, He would have given us
wings; He would have made
us angels; He would have made us birds. Let
me assure you, you will not
see people fly." The young man,
however, got the last laugh. Three
months later, Wright's two sons,
Orville and Wilbur, flew the first airplane,
from Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina.
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- Fooling the Experts
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- The future is not
predetermined"far from it. Although
clues in the present can help
us anticipate the future, the human factor
often makes fools of those
who too confidently make predictions. The following
are just a few
examples of experts who were sure about their pessimistic
predictions.
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- In 1927, film producer Harry Warner said, "Who the
hell
wants to hear actors talk?"
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- In 1905, Grover Cleveland said,
"Sensible and responsible
women do not want to vote."
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- In the 1830s,
Dionysius Lardner, author of The Steam
Engine Explained and
Illustrated, said, "Rail travel at high speeds
is not possible
because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
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- When told of Robert
Fulton's steamboat, Napoleon said,
"What, sir, would you make a
ship sail against the wind and currents
by lighting a bonfire under her
deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not
the time to listen to such
nonsense."
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- On the eve of World War II, Admiral Clark Woodward said,
"As far as sinking a ship with a bomb is concerned, it can never be
done."
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- Thomas Edison said, "Just as certain as death, George
Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in an
electric system of any size," and "the phonograph has no
commercial
value at all."
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- "This telephone has too
many shortcomings to be
considered as a means of communication,"
said the president of Western
Union in 1876. "The device is of
inherently no value to us."
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- The president of Michigan
Savings Banks advised Henry
Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford
Motor Company because, he said,
"The horse is here to stay, the
automobile is a novelty."
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- In 1921, radio pioneer David Sarnoff said, "The
wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for
a message sent to nobody in particular?"
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- In 1926, Lee DeForest, inventor
of the vacuum tube, said,
"While theoretically and technically
television may be feasible, commercially
and financially I consider it
an impossibility."
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- "Heavier-than-air flying machines are
impossible,"
said Lord Kelvin, president of the British Royal
Society and one of the
nineteenth century's greatest experts on
thermodynamics.
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- "A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's
atmosphere," stated the New York Times in 1936.
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- "Space travel is utter
bilge," said a British
astronomerin 1956.
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- "There is no likelihood
man can ever tap the power
of the atom," said Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Robert Milliken in
1923.
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- "Taking the best
left-handed pitcher in baseball
and converting him into a right fielder
is one of the dumbest things I
ever heard," said Tris Speaker in
1919. He was talking about Babe
Ruth.
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- In 1929, Yale economist Irving
Fisher said, "Stock
prices have reached what looks like a
permanently high plateau." Two
weeks later, the stock market
crashed.
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- MGM executive Irving Thalberg had this for Louis B. Mayer
regarding Gone With the Wind: "Forget it, Louie, no Civil War picture
ever made a nickel."
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- The director of Blue Book Modeling Agency advised
Marilyn
Monroe in 1944, "You better learn secretarial work or else
get married."
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- "You ain't going nowhere, son. You ought to go back
to
driving a truck," said Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry,
in firing Elvis Presley after a performance in 1954.
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- "We don't like their
sound, and guitar music is
on the way out anyway," said the
president of Decca Records, rejecting
the Beatles in 1962.
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- Darryl Zanuck
observed, in 1946, "Television won't
last because people will soon
get tired of staring at a plywood box every
night."
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- The chairman of IBM
said, "I think there is a world
market for about five
computers," in 1943.
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- "There is no reason for any individual to have a
computer in his home," said the president of Digital Electronic
Corporation
in 1977.
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- "We will bury you," predicted Nikita Kruschev
in 1958.
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- Visionary designer Buckminster Fuller said, in 1966,
"By
2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political
parties."
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- Social scientist David Riesman declared, in 1967, "If
anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of
women."
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- And here's one for those who worry that the world will
end in
the year 2000: Henry Adams said, in 1903, "My fingers coincide
in
fixing 1950 as the year when the world must go smash. The world is coming
to an end in 1950."
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- As Fats Waller, one of the great philosophers of the
twentieth century, observed, "One never knows, do one?" That
is an excellent adage for futurists.
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- Herbert I. London is President
of the Hudson Institute
and publisher of American Outlook.
-
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- Contact World Tribune.com at
- <mailto:worldtri@worldtribune.com
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