I had the pleasure of getting to know Herman Kahn in the early ’80s, shortly before his death.
Kahn is best known as the author of “On Thermonuclear War” (1960) and “Thinking About the Unthinkable” (1962), which made him a bete noir of the peace movement during the ’60s. Those books were about war, but Kahn was far from a warmonger. To the contrary, he was, as he accurately described himself, “a reasonably realistic observer whose imagination and logic often lead to unfamiliar (sometimes apparently outrageous) conclusions and speculations.” Perhaps because he had not been trained as an economist, he had not cluttered his mind with the irrelevancies occupying the minds of most trained economists. Instead his training was in mathematics and physics, occupations that gladly bow to the demands of logic, and the facts of the real world.
We are now approximately in the middle of what Kahn called the “Great Transition.” Like all periods of rapid change, this one has its dangers, discomforts and inconveniences.
Not until the industrial revolution, about 200 years ago, did man gain the ability not just to modify but literally to create his environment. Muscle power was replaced by mechanical energy. Materials that didn’t occur in nature were developed. Man’s place in the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time began a rapid transformation.
As a result, the earth could sustain infinitely more people than it could in the primeval era, and in far more comfort and safety. Excepting anomalies caused by war and politics, even the poorest primitive people today live as well and (what is far more important) with infinitely more prospect for improvement than any of their pre-agricultural forebears.
It is probable that we are now only halfway through the Great Transition in years and in the numbers of people affected. Soon the billions of people (in China, India and the rest of the third world) emerging from the last epoch will of necessity adopt the attitudes and values of those who went first. Population will level off, and then probably decline, as capitalism allows people to save for their future instead of raising many children to provide for their old age. Modern technology will allow people to create far more wealth, more efficiently, and with less input. They will stop regarding nature as an adversary and instead come to view it as a valuable asset to be conserved and used wisely.
Today the average middle-class member of an industrialized country lives better and, in general, longer than even royalty did in pre-industrial times. And there is even more reason to believe that the trend will accelerate. You will recall how Hobbes described the lot of man in his time, which was only 350 years ago, as a life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” This is no longer true, mainly because of capitalism and technology. But many people, for ideological reasons, do not like to be reminded of that truth. They are one of the few reasons the trend could change.
Kahn’s optimistic view of the future was based on the same factors that set the mainspring of progress in motion 200 years ago – a work ethic, political freedom and technology. They are still in play and will remain so, notwithstanding the best efforts of people who are misinformed, ill-intentioned or just plain stupid. (After all, those folks have been around since day one.) In the future we will endure wars, pogroms, plagues, persecutions, natural disasters, confiscations, inflations, depressions and a whole list of other calamities that can make the world a vale of tears, just as in the past. But life, if likely to get better – just as it has in the past – most likely will improve at an accelerating rate.
The rate of technological advance is accelerating faster than ever and much faster than the economy itself. More scientists are alive today than ever before and science is breaking barriers at an unprecedented rate. And although we complain about the collectivist inclinations of politicians, the fact is that mankind has advanced from the primeval era’s state of nearly 100 percent theft and slavery to a level of around 50 percent today, if we consider taxes in all forms and at all levels as a proxy for robbery. From the long-term view of centuries, the trend is clearly positive. Unless we are really unlucky, a hundred years from now our present problems will be considered teething pains.
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