'Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests'

Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity

Ronald Bailey from the February 2009 issue

Matt Ridley, an Oxford-educated zoologist, turned to journalism in 1983, when he got a job as The Economist’s science reporter. He soon became the magazine’s Washington correspondent and eventually served as its American editor. This time in the United States had a profound intellectual effect on Ridley, ultimately leading him to become a self-described classical liberal, a “person who believes in economic freedom and social freedom, too.”

Ridley, 50, has written several superb books that combine clear explanations of complex biology with discussions of the science’s implications for human society. In The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (1997), Ridley showed how natural selection led to human morality, including the development of property rights and our propensity to exchange. At the end he warned that government can subvert our natural tendency to cooperate. “We are not so nasty that we need to be tamed by intrusive government, nor so nice that too much government does not bring out the worst in us,” he concluded. Reviewing the book for reason, the UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer noted that “Ridley leans in the anarchist direction.”

Written just before researchers announced the completed sequencing of the human genome, Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (2000) toured our 23 chromosome pairs to illustrate how genes cause disease, direct the production of proteins, and influence intelligence. While pointing out the differential heritability of many human characteristics, Ridley condemned genetic determinism and eugenics as unscientific. “Many modern accounts of the history of eugenics present it as an example of the dangers of letting science, genetics especially, out of control,” he wrote. “It is much more an example of the danger of letting government out of control.” Ridley further deflated genetic determinism in Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (2003), which explained how genes change their expression in response to environmental influences.

Ridley is now working on a book about how and why progress happens. During a visit to Blagdon Hall, Ridley’s home outside Newcastle upon Tyne, I took advantage of the author’s weakened state (he had broken his collarbone falling from a horse) to talk about the new book.

reason: What’s the book about?

Matt Ridley: My last three or four books have all argued that there is such a thing as an evolved human nature which is true all over the world and has been true throughout history. But something changes. Clearly, my life is completely different from what it would’ve been if I was an Ice Age hunter-gatherer. Technology changes. Society changes. Prosperity changes.

What I want to do is turn the question on its head and come at it from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist who looks at this species—man—which has a constant nature but has somehow acquired an ever-changing lifestyle. I want to understand what’s driving that change. Let’s give it the obvious word, even though it’s a very unfashionable one: progress. The book is about where progress came from, how it works, and, most important, how long it can continue in the future.

My major themes are specialization, exchange, technology, energy, and then population. Human beings have progressed in material living standards, on the whole, since the Stone Age, but they’ve also progressed enormously in terms of the number of people on the planet. That’s because we got better at turning the energy available into people, and the denser the population has got, the more things we’ve been able to invent that we wouldn’t have been able to invent with a sparse population. For example, if you’re going to smelt metals, you need a fairly dense population of customers before it’s worth building kilns.

Population density can also lead to reductions in the standard of living. There must be cases in history where people have tried to live at too a high a density for the resources that were available to them. They’ve either then suffered one of Malthus’ positive checks—war, famine, and disease—or, and this is a slightly more original point, they’ve reduced their division of labor, i.e., they’ve returned to self-sufficiency.

If you look at the Bronze Age empires in Mesopotamia or Egypt, or the Roman Empire, or some of the Chinese dynasties, at a certain point the population density gets too high for people to be able to generate a surplus of consumption income to support trade and specialization by others, and you have to go back to being self-sufficient. Essentially that’s what happened to every surge in productivity, wealth, and technology up to the one that came around 1800, the Industrial Revolution.

At some point there’s something you’re relying on that gets more and more expensive. If you look at Mesopotamia, it deforested itself. It has to go further and further for wood, for construction. Maybe it’s food.

The English Industrial Revolution had been bubbling along very nicely in the 18th century, with fantastic increases of productivity, particularly with respect to cotton textiles. We saw a quintupling of cotton cloth output in two consecutive decades, in the 1780s and 1790s, none of it based on fossil fuels yet but based on water power.

At some point, you run out of dams. You run out of rivers in Lancashire to dam. At some point England would suffer the fate of Holland, or Venice before that, or of China, Egypt, or Japan. What did England do that others didn’t? It started using fossil fuels.

By 1870 Britain is consuming the coal equivalent to 850 million human laborers. It could have done everything it did with coal with trees, with timber, but not from its own land. Timber was bound to get more expensive the more you used of it. Coal didn’t get more expensive the more you used of it. It didn’t get particularly cheaper either, but it didn’t get more expensive, so you don’t get diminishing returns the more you use of it.

reason: One of the things that Marco Polo reported to the amazement of Europe was that those Chinese people are burning rocks. So the Chinese had access to coal already, and that extra energy didn’t make them wealthy.

Comments

|1.7.09 @ 1:10PM|#

He says, "Priests-well, I must admit I don't think one can necessarily blame religion for shutting down trust, trade, and exchange. But there's little doubt that it didn't help in the Middle Ages, surely. I won't go further than that."

So... he just used the word 'priests' in the title of his book because it made the title look better and a bit catchier-sounding? And maybe because it's OK to smear the priest class these days?

That's really crass.

Franklin Harris|1.7.09 @ 1:26PM|#

No. If Ridley had wanted to smear priests, he would have used the synonym "boy-buggering frauds."

|1.7.09 @ 1:42PM|#

I think the "Hit & Run" article is titled "Chiefs, Thieves and Priests", not Ridley's book(s).

|1.7.09 @ 1:45PM|#

Kris is right.

|1.7.09 @ 4:11PM|#

Sorry, I thought 'boy-buggering fraud' was a synonym for 'Massachusettes Congressman'.

My apologies to Mr. Ridley. I guess Mr. Bailey is the one who is crass for grouping thieves, priests and a crappy football team from Kansas City.

BlueBook|1.7.09 @ 7:43PM|#

I think chiefs, thieves and priests all have the same impact on an economy, they just go about it in different ways.

Kolohe|1.7.09 @ 8:12PM|#

"Chiefs, Thieves and Priests" would be a great name for the new book, though, if it covers the themes in this interview. If I was Ridley's publisher, I'd pay off Bailey for the rights to it.

What I'm still trying to get my head around, though, is the passage on how increasing population density leads to a reduction in the division of labor. Specifically this passage:

"at a certain point the population density gets too high for people to be able to generate a surplus of consumption income to support trade and specialization by others, and you have to go back to being self-sufficient."

I am not understanding how this works as an *economic* principle. Now, it makes perfect sense as a socio-political principle - namely, what he talks about in other parts of the interview regarding 'trust'. Once you get to a certain population, where your next meal comes from likely becomes more uncertain, causing you to retreat into self-sufficiency as an insurance policy. But I don't understand how his mechanism of 'insufficient surplus income' operates differently than straight up pre-industrial maluthusian mechanisms - a distinction he makes.

The only other quibble is that while the 'demand side' part is important to specialization and economic growth, he seems to entirely discount the 'supply side'. For instance in his 'mango slicer' parable, it would also have been likely for the man to invent a mango slicing machine if he's in a forest full of mangos - even if he and his town are the only ones that are going to use it. The benefit of globalization, is that, in theory at least, those Mango Machinists are able now to expand their comparative advantage into the entire world. (Incidently, describing this mechanism is how Krugman won his nobel prize)

Guy Montag|1.7.09 @ 10:20PM|#

Ron,

Why did Reason use a picture of you from 20 years ago for this story?

|1.8.09 @ 4:04AM|#

[Ridley]:... Priests-well, I must admit I don't think one can necessarily blame religion for shutting down trust, trade, and exchange. But there's little doubt that it didn't help in the Middle Ages, surely. I won't go further than that.

reason: They did try to adjust prices in the marketplace. Whether that actually had an effect I don't know.

Ridley: Usury laws and that sort of thing. That's exactly right.

What the ...? Yeah, that's just really bizarre. I can't figure out why "priests" were even mentioned, except that maybe somebody doesn't like them.

It's as if the title of the article were "Statism, Misinformation and Snakes" and ...

BAILEY: So the greatest threats to American liberty right now are statism, mis-education, and snakes, right? Explain.

RIDLEY: Right. See, a pervasive statist philosophy [blah, blah, explains persuasively].

And the fact that many Americans are poorly informed means that they don't understand how liberty works and [blah, blah, explains persuasively].

As for snakes ... well, I must admit, I don't think you can necessarily blame snakes for endangering American liberty. But they certainly aren't helping much, that's for sure. I won't go further than that.

BAILEY: Poisonous snakes do sometimes bite people who are pro-liberty. Whether that actually has any effect on the struggle for liberty, I don't know.

RIDLEY: Yes -- see, snake venom attacks the central nervous system, which makes it hard to think about liberty. That's exactly right.

****************************

It's just ... bizarre.

Guy Montag|1.8.09 @ 6:56AM|#

Stevo,

Snakes were probably featured on many early flags of independence because of this. Perhaps the Reason foundation will fund a research study?

BlueBook|1.8.09 @ 7:27PM|#

Snakes are far more totalitarian than is generally known, but the evidence of this is suppressed by the influential pro-ophidian lobby.

Jeremy|1.13.09 @ 4:24PM|#

Well, here on Reason it seems that you have to bash religion in equal proportion to thieves and totalitarians.

Usury laws? Wow, that's a stretch.

How exactly did the priesthood hurt the economy during the Middle Ages?

By establishing the university system?
By preserving nearly all of the ancient writings of the greeks and romans that we have today?
By preserving such technologies as irrigation, and writing?
By promoting the idea of an ordered universe that obeys laws of nature (which paved the way to the scientific method)?
By creating an international banking system (the Templars) that stretched from England to the Middle East?

Okay, we all know that Reason mag hates religion, but come on, at least when the title of your book blames Priests, along with Thieves, for the destruction of the economy, come up with at least ONE example. Even one as lame as usury laws.

Nathan Bowers|1.16.09 @ 9:14PM|#

Re: "Priests"

Monks that kept to themselves making beer and manuscripts were great, but the Church was mostly about transferring wealth and power to itself.

Today's Islamic extremist clerics count as priests and they certainly are on the wrong side of classical liberalism.

Religion + Power = Suck