'Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests'

Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity

Ronald Bailey from the February 2009 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Ridley: Very nice point. I find myself completely surrounded by pessimists, people who think that Africa is never going to get rich, that it’s deteriorating rather than improving, that living standards are about to get worse. And they’re not convinced they have been getting better in the last few years because things like congestion at airports have gotten worse. There’s a tremendous tendency to take improvements for granted and to notice deteriorations.

There are a lot of people who think, “Ah, we are in a uniquely dangerous situation in my generation. Back in my parents’ generation, they looked forward to the future with confidence and happiness.” That ain’t true either. If you go back and look at every generation, it was dominated by pessimists. There is this wonderful quote from Lord Macaulay in 1830, who says, why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we anticipate nothing but disaster before us?

What the precautionary principle [the idea that when science has not yet determined whether a new product or process is safe, the government should prohibit or restrict its use] misses is the danger that in not progressing you might miss out on future improvements in living standards for poor people in Africa. I’m desperately hoping to persuade the world, not that everything’s going to be fine, but that there’s a chance everything’s going to be better for everybody and that we should be very careful not to cut ourselves off from that chance.

reason: How would you describe your politics?

Ridley: I’m a good old-fashioned 19th-century liberal. I love progress, and I love change. What makes what I’ve just said seem right-wing, particularly in Europe, is that it seems to be more concerned with wealth creation than social justice, i.e., with baking another cake rather than cutting up the existing cake. Actually, to some extent, I am an egalitarian. I think that there are ways in which you have to keep equal opportunities in life in order to generate the incentives for people to generate wealth. But I think I’m that classically underrepresented voter, the person who believes in economic freedom and social freedom, too.

I lived in America for three years, which is not a long time, but it was a very influential time for me. I arrived there a pretty standard statist in my views of the world and left a—not a completely convinced libertarian but a person who had suddenly started thinking about politics from the individual’s point of view much more than I had before. Meeting Julian Simon and Aaron Wildavsky and people from the Property and Environment Research Center and George Mason University had an influence on me. I encountered a view that’s hard to come across in Europe.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was also a very important moment in my life. It told me that all those people who said that the Soviet Union was actually a lot better place than it was made out to be, and I’d come across tons of them in my life, were plain wrong, not just a little bit wrong.

I recalled one conversation I had around 1985. A singer who is now a famous labor activist and a highly respected elder statesman, Billy Bragg—I happened to sit next to him on an airplane. He had just come back from playing East Berlin. He was perfectly friendly, but he spent most of that plane ride trying to persuade me that East Germans were much happier than West Germans and it was complete bollocks, this propaganda from the West that they were unhappy. And he’s hugely respected still as a Labour Party grandee.

reason: What would you say to people who say that progress is simply unsustainable, that the Africans and the Indians and the Chinese will never be able to live at the same living standards as we do?

Ridley: I’d respond to that by saying that in a sense they’re absolutely right. If we go on as we are, it’ll be very difficult to sustain things. But we won’t go on as we are. That’s what we never do. We always change what we do and we always get much more efficient at using things—energy, resources, etc.

Just take land area for feeding the world. If we’d gone on as we were, as hunter-gatherers, we’d have needed about 85 Earths to feed 6 billion people. If we’d gone on as early slash-and-burn farmers, we’d have needed a whole Earth, including all the oceans. If we’d gone on as 1950 organic farmers without a lot of fertilizer, we’d have needed 82 percent of the world’s land area for cultivation, as opposed to the 38 percent that we farm at the moment.

Sure, if every office in China uses as much paper as every office does in America now and there’re just as many of them, then we’re going to run out of trees to chop down to make the paper. Well, I’m willing to bet that we’ll have found ways of recycling paper or making paper from less material or not using so much paper. It might take paper getting expensive before that happens.

Ronald Bailey is reason’s science correspondent.

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