In the Spain of Charles V and Philip II, the gigantic wealth of the Peruvian silver mines was wasted. The same ‘curse of resources’ has afflicted countries with windfalls ever since, especially those with oil (Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria) that end up run by rent-seeking autocrats. Despite their windfalls, such countries experience lower economic growth than countries that entirely lack resources but get busy trading and selling – Holland, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea. Even the Dutch, those epitomes of seventeenth-century enterprise, fell under the curse of resources in the late twentieth century when they found too much natural gas: the Dutch disease, they called it, as their inflated currency hurt their exporters. Japan spent the first half of the twentieth century jealously seeking to grab resources and ended up in ruins; it spent the second half of the century trading and selling without resources and ended up topping the lifespan league. In the 2000s the West misspent much of the cheap windfall of Chinese savings that the United States Federal Reserve sluiced our way.
So long as somebody allocates sufficient capital to innovation, then the credit crunch will not in the long run prevent the relentless upward march of human living standards. If you look at a graph of world per capita GDP, the Great Depression of the 1930s is just a dip in the slope. By 1939 even the worst-affected countries, America and Germany, were richer than they were in 1930. All sorts of new products and industries were born during the Depression: by 1937, 40 per cent of DuPont’s sales came from products that had not even existed before 1929, such as rayon, enamels and cellulose film. So growth will resume – unless prevented by the wrong policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my life easier in the future. I cannot know who or where he is for sure, but let me give you a candidate. In the week I wrote this paragraph, a small company called Arcadia Biosciences in northern California signed an agreement with a charity working in Africa to license, royalty-free to smallholders, new varieties of rice that can be grown with less nitrogen fertiliser for the same yield, thanks to the over-expression in the roots of a version of a gene called alanine aminotransferase borrowed from barley. Assuming the varieties work in Africa as well as they do in California, some African will one day grow and sell more food (for less pollution), which in turn means that he will have more money to spend, earning the cost of, say, a mobile phone, which he will buy from a Western company, and which will help him find a better market for his rice. An employee of that Western company will get a pay rise, which she will spend on a new pair of jeans, which were made from cotton woven in a factory that employs the smallholder’s neighbour. And so on.
As long as new ideas can breed in this way, then human economic progress can continue. It may be only a year or two till world growth resumes after the current crisis, or it may for some countries be a lost decade. It may even be that parts of the world will be convulsed by a descent into autarky, authoritarianism and violence, as happened in the 1930s, and that a depression will cause a great war. But so long as somewhere somebody is incentivised to invent ways of serving others’ needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume.
The declaration of interdependence
Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever). There is no real need to do much else. Now imagine you are a human being. Even if you only count the basic things, you have rather more than four things to do: sleep, eat, cook, dress, keep house, travel, wash, shop, work…the list is virtually endless. Deer should therefore have more free time than human beings, yet it is people, not deer, who find the time to read, write, invent, sing and surf the net. Where does all this free time come from? It comes from exchange and specialisation and from the resulting division of labour. A deer must gather its own food. A human being gets somebody else to do it for him, while he or she is doing something for them – and both win time that way.
Self-sufficiency is therefore not the route to prosperity. ‘Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,’ Henry David Thoreau asked: ‘the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father?’ Contra Thoreau, it is the latter, by a mile, because he has far more spare time to learn other things. Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau). Every day you must get up in the morning and supply yourself entirely from your own resources. How would you spend your day? The top four priorities would be food, fuel, clothing and shelter. Dig the garden, feed the pig, fetch water from the brook, gather wood from the forest, wash some potatoes, light a fire (no matches), cook lunch, repair the roof, fetch fresh bracken for clean bedding, whittle a needle, spin some thread, sew leather for shoes, wash in the stream, fashion a pot out of clay, catch and cook a chicken for dinner. No candle or book for reading. No time for smelting metal, drilling oil, or travel. By definition, you are at subsistence level and frankly, though at first you mutter, Thoreau-like, ‘how marvellous to get away from all the appalling hustle and bustle’, after a few days the routine is pretty grim. If you wish to have even the most minimal improvement in your life – say metal tools, toothpaste or lighting – you are going to have to get some of your chores done by somebody else, because there just is not time to do them yourself. So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else’s: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years.
Yet, though you have no slaves, today when you got out of bed you knew that somebody would provide you with food, fibre and fuel in a most convenient form. In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37. If you are on an average wage you knew that it would take you a matter of tens of minutes to earn the cash to pay for your food, some more tens of minutes to earn the cash to buy whatever new clothing you need and maybe an hour or two to earn the cash to pay for the gas, electricity and oil you might need today. Earning the rent or mortgage payment that ensures you have a roof over your head might take rather more time. But still, by lunchtime, you could relax in the knowledge that food, fuel, fibre and shelter were taken care of for the day. So it was time to earn something more interesting: the satellite television subscription, the mobile phone bill, the holiday deposit, the cost of new toys for the children, the income tax. ‘To produce implies that the producer desires to consume’ said John Stuart Mill; ‘why else should he give himself useless labour?’
In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about £4. He needed only a few raw materials: iron, copper, nickel, plastic and mica (an insulating mineral around which the heating elements are wrapped). But even to get these he found almost impossible. Iron is made from iron ore, which he could probably mine, but how was he to build a sufficiently hot furnace without electric bellows? (He cheated and used a microwave oven.) Plastic is made from oil, which he could not easily drill for himself, let alone refine. And so on. More to the point, the project took months, cost a lot of money and resulted in an inferior product. Yet to buy a £4 toaster would cost him less than an hour’s work at the minimum wage. To Thwaites this illustrated his helplessness as a consumer so divorced from self-sufficiency. It also illustrates the magic of specialisation and exchange: thousands of people, none of them motivated by the desire to do Thwaites a favour, have come