Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Two economists have developed their own versions of a human development index that can be estimated retroactively into the 19th century, each of which aggregates measures of longevity, income, and education in different ways. Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s Historical Index of Human Development, which goes back to 1870, averages the three measures with a geometric rather than an arithmetic mean (so that an extreme value on one measure cannot swamp the other two), and transforms the longevity and education measures to compensate for diminishing returns at their high end. Auke Rijpma of the “How Was Life?” project (whose data have appeared in a number of graphs in this book) developed a Well-Being Composite that goes back to 1820; together with the big three, it throws in measures of height (a proxy for health), democracy, homicide, income inequality, and biodiversity. (The latter two are the only ones that don’t systematically improve over the past two centuries.) The grades for the world on these two report cards are shown in figure 16-6.

Figure 16-6: Global well-being, 1820–2015

Sources: Historical Index of Human Development: Prados de la Escosura 2015, 0–1 scale, available at Our World in Data, Roser 2016h. Well-Being Composite: Rijpma 2014, p. 259, standard deviation scale over country-decades.

To behold this graph is to apprehend human progress at a glance. And packed into the lines are two vital subplots. One is that although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been improving, and the worst-off parts of the world today are better off than the best-off parts not long ago.⁴⁵ (If we divide the world into the West and the Rest, we find that the Rest in 2007 had reached the level of the West in 1950.) The other is that while almost every indicator of human well-being correlates with wealth, the lines don’t just reflect a wealthier world: longevity, health, and knowledge have increased even in many of the times and places where wealth has not.⁴⁶ The fact that all aspects of human flourishing tend to improve over the long run even when they are not in perfect sync vindicates the idea that there is such a thing as progress.

CHAPTER 17QUALITY OF LIFE

Though only the callous would deny that the conquests of disease, hunger, and illiteracy are stupendous achievements, one can still wonder whether continuous improvements in the kinds of things that economists measure should count as genuine progress. Once basic needs are satisfied, doesn’t additional affluence just encourage people to indulge in shallow consumerism? And weren’t increases in health and literacy trumpeted by the Five-Year Planners in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, all of which were rather grim places to live? People can be healthy, solvent, and literate and still not lead rich and meaningful lives.

Some of these reservations have already been answered. We’ve seen that totalitarianism, the main impediment to the good life in communist so-called utopias, has been receding. We’ve also seen that a major dimension of flourishing that is not captured by the standard metrics—the rights of women, children, and minorities—is on a steady rise. This chapter is about a broader cultural pessimism: the worry that all that extra healthy life span and income may not have increased human flourishing after all if they just consign people to a rat race of frenzied careerism, hollow consumption, mindless entertainment, and soul-deadening anomie.

To be sure, one can object to the objection, which comes from a long tradition of cultural and religious elites sneering at the supposedly empty lives of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Cultural criticism can be a thinly disguised snobbery that shades into misanthropy. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, the critic John Carey shows how the British literary intelligentsia in the first decades of the 20th century harbored a contempt for the common person which bordered on the genocidal.¹ In practice, “consumerism” often means “consumption by the other guy,” since the elites who condemn it tend themselves to be conspicuous consumers of exorbitant luxuries like hardcover books, good food and wine, live artistic performances, overseas travel, and Ivy-class education for their children. If more people can afford their preferred luxuries, even if they are frivolous by the lights of their cultural betters, that has to be counted as a good thing. In an old joke, a soapbox orator addresses a crowd on the glories of communism: “Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream!” A man at the front whimpers, “But I don’t like strawberries and cream.” The speaker thunders, “Come the revolution, you will like strawberries and cream!”²