Part 3 of "The Evolution of Human Progress Through the Liberal Enlightenment"

5. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE CAUSE OF HUMAN PROGRESS?

Readers of Bailey and Tupy's book can see suggestions about four possible causes of human progress.  Two are explicitly stated by them--inclusive institutions and bourgeois ideas.  Two others are implied--the military success of liberal regimes and the evolved natural desire for freedom.  All four causes jointly contribute to the convergent evolution of liberal free-market democracies as the best social order.

Inclusive institutions.  At the beginning of their book (3), Bailey and Tupy embrace the argument of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their 2012 book--Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty--which turns on the contrast between "inclusive institutions" and "extractive institutions."  Acemoglu and Robinson have adopted the institutionalist theory of Douglass North and his colleagues in Violence and Social Orders (2009).  And the contrast between inclusive and extractive institutions corresponds to the contrast made by North and his colleagues between "open access societies" and "limited access societies."  (I have written about Violence and Social Orders here.)

Since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the establishment of bureaucratic states, most societies have had extractive institutions through which a few ruling elites extract resources from the multitude of people excluded from power.  Only in the last 300 years, have a few societies--beginning in Great Britain and in North America--developed inclusive economic and political institutions that distribute economic and political power widely.  Inclusive institutions such as property rights, the rule of law, free markets, and political freedom create incentives for innovation through evolution by "creative destruction"--economic and political entrepreneurs who innovate in profitable ways succeed, and those who do not fail.  These inclusive institutions have created the conditions for all the great improvements in human well-being--the progressive global trends--that Bailey and Tupy present in their book.

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Great Britain created the world's first inclusive institutions, which became the turning point in human history towards modern liberal social orders.  In the Glorious Revolution, King James II was forced off the throne by the Whig revolutionaries, who then invited William and Mary to take the throne under the condition that they accept Parliament's Declaration of Rights, which ended divine right monarchy and established the supremacy of Parliament as representing a broad coalition of economic and political groups.  This liberal Whig movement was supported by a coalition of merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groups.  New merchants and businessmen wanted free markets that allowed for innovative creative destruction in ways that would benefit them.  Eventually, this led to the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the 18th century, and then to the Great Enrichment, beginning in the 19th century.

North and his colleagues emphasize the importance for the new open access orders of the general laws of incorporation enacted in Great Britain and the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.  These laws allowed citizens to form corporations with legally stipulated rights and duties through procedures for registration and minimal conditions impersonally applied.  What previously was an elite privilege was openly available based on impersonal standards for registration as a corporation.  This created open entry to forming economic, social, and political organizations that were free to compete with one another.

In this way, inclusive or open access institutions allow creative political, economic, and social destruction through competition, in which successful enterprises proliferate and failed enterprises are eliminated.  Society secures open access to organizations as vehicles for political, economic, and social entrepreneurs to compete in implementing their ideas.  Such free competition in social experimentation allows a social order to achieve adaptive efficiency in responding to new and unpredictable challenges.

Bourgeois ideas.  Even if Acemoglu, Robinson, and North are right about the importance of inclusive or open access institutions as the necessary conditions for the modern liberal social order, we might still wonder whether Deirdre McCloskey is right in arguing that this is not sufficient to explain the uniqueness of the Great Enrichment, which required an intellectual change in ideas.  The triumph of liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life--a commercial way of life--could be seen as virtuous.  Bailey and Tupy apparently accept this point when they endorse McCloskey's point about the need for "major ideological shifts" (3-4).

In their account of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as initiating the turn to inclusive institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson rely on Steven Pincus' history--1688: The First Modern Revolution--which argues that this political revolution was a revolutionary transformation that prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution.  But Acemoglu and Robinson ignore Pincus' stress on the importance of the Whig ideas of John Locke and other writers in driving the revolutionary resistance to the Stuart monarchy and in shaping the Glorious Revolution into a modern revolution that established a "bourgeois culture."  What McCloskey identifies as bourgeois ideas are actually the Lockean ideas of natural human liberty and equality--the moral ideas that constitute and sustain the inclusive institutions that have promoted modern human progress.  (I have written about this here and here.)

Might makes right.  Because of his involvement in conspiracies for violent revolution, Locke was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being beheaded by the King, like Algernon Sydney and other radical Whig theorists.  Locke saw appeals to natural right as ultimately appeals to the force of arms--the "appeal to Heaven"--so that disagreements over right are settled by conspiratorial violence and military conflict.  Contrary to the common belief that the Glorious Revolution was a bloodless revolution, there were many violent clashes in the revolution; and the revolution would have failed if the military forces of James II had defeated the military forces of William II.

Acemoglu and Robinson recognize this point, and they note that even as late as 1746 the revolution could have been overturned by the Jacobite rising if the army of Charles Edward Stuart had not been defeated at the battle of Culloden in Scotland.  This shows, they observe, that the history of inclusive institutions has often been decided by the contingencies of warfare.

Bailey and Tupy also seem to recognize this when they note that "confrontations between extractive and inclusive regimes, such as World War II and the Cold War, have generally been won by the latter," because "liberal free-market democracies are resilient in ways that enable them to forestall or rise above the kinds of shocks that destroy brittle extractive regimes" (4).  Do they mean to suggest here that liberal regimes will always prevail in military conflicts with illiberal regimes?  If Hitler had not committed the blunder of attacking the Soviet Union in June of 1941, which forced the German armies to fight on two fronts--western and eastern--is it possible that Nazi Germany might have won the war and thus turned the tide of history towards illiberal regimes?

Or can the assertion of natural rights in Lockean liberalism be grounded in the natural human propensity to forceful resistance to oppression and tyranny, so that it really is true that might makes right?  (I have written about this here, here, and here.)

The evolved natural desire for freedom.  If inclusive institutions have caused the global human progress surveyed by Bailey and Tupy, and if "inclusive institutions are similar to one another in their respect for individual liberty" (3), then the ultimate cause of this progress would seem to be liberty.  That this is so can be confirmed by the fact that the "Human Freedom Index" correlates with all of the progressive trends towards increasing human well-being: the free societies tend to be the societies were human life is flourishing.  (I have written about the "Human Freedom Index" here.)

The universal appeal of freedom is perhaps most clearly manifested in what Francis Fukuyama in 1989 called "the end of history."  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order has come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger, and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the final form of government.  Bailey and Tupy see this as Trend 8--"Democracy on the March."  The proportion of countries with autocratic governments has declined, while the proportion with democratic governments has risen.

One possible explanation for this is offered by Spinoza in The Theological-Political Treatise, perhaps the first full defense of modern liberal democracy.  He declared that the democratic state is "the most natural state," because it approaches most nearly the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

Darwinian evolutionary psychology can confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors manifests the individual liberty and equality that liberal theorists have attributed to the state of nature.  And therefore the liberal conception of government as instituted among men to secure the individual rights that first arose in the state of nature might indeed be "the most natural state."

Foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over them.  So the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states (with extractive or limited access institutions) can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, Christopher Boehm, and Christian Welzel.

Part Two of "The Evolution of Human Progress Through the Liberal Enlightenment"

 4. ARE THERE OTHER IMPORTANT TRENDS OF HUMAN PROGRESS?  INCREASING RELIGIOSITY OR INCREASING SECULARIZATION?

In explaining some of the trends in their book, Bailey and Tupy rely on the World Values Survey, which has been collecting social survey data for 40 years in over 120 countries around the globe, under the direction of Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel, and others.  Bailey and Tupy cite this survey data as evidence for Trend 12--"Global Happiness Is Rising."  They write:

"University of Michigan sociologist Ronald Inglehart, founder of the WVS, reports in his book Cultural Evolution that ascending levels of subjective well-being correlate strongly with rising per capita income, rising levels of democracy and increasing social liberalization as expressed by growing tolerance for racial, sexual, and religious outgroups.  Those three factors combine to broaden the range of free choices available to people, thus enhancing happiness" (31).

Their graph showing increasing "global average happiness, 1981-2012" is taken from Inglehart's book.

If you look at Inglehart's book, you will see that he does report, as Bailey and Tupy indicate, that "rising freedom of choice" is correlated with "rising happiness."  But he also reports that "religious people tend to be happier than non-religious people," and therefore "both faith and freedom can be conducive to happiness" (Inglehart 2018, 164-172).  Oddly, Bailey and Tupy are silent about this--how increasing religiosity contributes to increasing happiness.  In fact, they say nothing about religion anywhere in their book, although they do casually refer to increasing religious toleration, as they do in the passage I just quoted.

For Trend 17--"Choosing Smaller Families"--Bailey and Tupy present the evidence that women in the richer and freer countries are choosing to have so few children that fertility has fallen below replacement levels.  A fertility rate of 2.1 children per average female is required to keep the population from shrinking--one child to replace each parent and a small fraction to cover infant and childhood mortality.  European fertility rates are generally below this replacement level.  If this were to continue, eventually there would be no Europeans left in Europe.  Bailey and Tupy regard this as a positive trend because it shows that women in these modern countries have more reproductive freedom than women in traditional societies who were forced to spend their lives bearing and caring for large numbers of children.  

Bailey and Tupy are silent, however, about the success of the alternative reproductive strategy adopted by religious people, who tend to have high fertility rates.  Inglehart reports: "Due to these demographic trends, the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before-and they constitute a growing proportion of the world's population" (68).  To recognize this, Bailey and Tupy could have added to their list of trends the trend towards increasing religious belief.

Perhaps they didn't do this because they agree with Inglehart's claim that modernization brings secularization--declining religious belief.  But then it seems Inglehart is contradicting himself in saying that religious belief is both increasing and declining.  Inglehart denies that there is any contradiction here by explaining:

"Rich societies are secularizing, but they contain a declining share of the world's population; while poor societies are not secularizing, and they contain a rising share of the world's population.  Thus, modernization does indeed bring a de-emphasis on religion within virtually any country that experiences it--but the percentage of the world's population for whom religion is important is rising" (68).

So it is consistent to say that we see opposing trends in different parts of the world: religion is declining in rich societies but increasing in poor societies.

That this is not exactly true, however, becomes clear as soon as one notices the differences in fertility rates within societies.  In European societies, average fertility rates are generally well below replacement levels--around 1.50.  But serious religious believers are the one European group showing fertility rates well above replacement. In Western Europe, the more religious Christians continue to have large families: for women ages 18-44 who attend a religious service more than once a week, the average fertility rate is 2.66, although it's lower in other parts of Europe (Frejka and Westoff 2008, 23).  In Israel, Ultra-Orthodox women have very high fertility rates--an average of 7.1 per woman compared to 3.1 in the general population (Malach and Cahaner 2018).  

If this trend continues, the religious people will always outnumber the irreligious people around the world, in both the poorer and the richer societies.  In the evolution of religion, it's survival of the fittest; and the religious have higher reproductive fitness than the irreligious (Sanderson 2018; Stark 2015).

To be continued . . .

REFERENCES

Frejka, Tomas, and Charles F. Westoff. 2008. "Religion, Religiousness, and Fertility in the US and in Europe." European Journal of Population 24:5-31.

Inglehart, Ronald F. 2018. Cultural Evolution: People's Motivations Are Changing, and Reshaping the World.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Malach, Gilad, and Lee Cahaner. 2018. "2018 Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel." The Israel Democracy Institute.

Sanderson, Stephen K. 2018. Religious Evolution and the Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests to Prophets. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Stark, Rodney. 2015. The Triumph of Faith: Why the World Is More Religious Than Ever. Wilmington, DL: ISI Books.

The Evolution of Human Progress Through the Liberal Enlightenment: Bailey and Tupy

 "All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?"

In 2016, the global public opinion survey company YouGov asked people in 17 countries to answer that question.  58% thought the world was getting worse.  30% thought it was neither getting better nor worse.  Only 11% thought the world was getting better.  Other surveys with similar questions yield the same results.  Most people around the world think things are getting worse, so that on the whole there has been no human progress.

This is especially remarkable if one considers that most of these surveys are online surveys, and the people answering such surveys are probably smart and well-educated people.  So smart people around the world think things are generally getting worse.

They are wrong.  

If one looks at the relevant factual evidence for global trends over the past few centuries, it is clear that the world is getter better, because human life is more satisfying for more people that ever before in human history.  On the whole, people are living longer, healthier, and happier lives.  Their lives are generally more peaceful--less exposed to violence--than ever before.  They have more opportunity to live their lives as they wish.  They have more chances to satisfy their natural human desires and thus to live a flourishing human life.

The reason for this is freedom.  Over the past two centuries, there has been a progressive expansion of freedom around the world.  It has been freedom at all levels: economic freedom, social freedom, political freedom, and intellectual freedom.  This has been driven by the global spread of liberal free-market democracies.

We can call this the Liberal Enlightenment. I have written about the empirical data showing human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment throughout history--in ancient Athens, for example.  But the accelerating growth in this progress has come over the past few centuries with the global spread of Lockean liberal ideas and institutions.  Some of my posts on this are here, here, here, here, here, here. and here.

Much of this evidence for human progress through liberalism has been presented by Max Roser at his "Our World In Data" website, by Steven Pinker in his books--Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now--in the Cato Institute's Human Freedom Index, and in Marian Tupy's "Human Progress" website of the Cato Institute.

Now we have a new book that conveniently and beautifully presents this evidence--Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy's Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know--And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute).  They present 78 global trends showing that the world really is getting better.  For each of these trends, they provide a one-page vignette accompanied with a one-page chart or graph displaying the data showing the progressive trend.  In this way, they follow the example of Pinker in the deft use of the visually engaging presentation of data to support his argument for human progress through modern liberal enlightenment.  (I must complain, however, that those of us with declining eyesight in our old age have to use a magnifying glass to read this book because of its tiny font.)

Here are their Top 10 Trends:

1.  The world economy has grown more than a hundredfold since 1820.

2.  While most people throughout history have lived in extreme poverty, today less than 10% of the global population lives in poverty.

3.  We are not running out of natural resources, because resources have become more abundant relative to the demand for them.

4.  We are moving towards a "Peak Population": the world population has grown from under one billion in 1800 to about 7.7 billion today, although this rate of growth is now slowing; and demographers are now projecting that the population will peak later this century at somewhere between 8.9 and 10.9 billion, and then it will probably decline.

5.  Because of the growing supply of food around the world, there is very little famine.

6.  The forested areas of the Earth have been expanding overall, despite the deforestation in the tropics, which shows that human beings are withdrawing from the natural world.

7.  While throughout history, most human beings have lived in rural areas and engaged in agricultural labor, now most human beings live in cities; and this urban life brings economic, cultural, and environmental improvement.

8.  Over the past 200 years, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of countries under autocratic governments, along with a steep increase in the proportion under democratic governments, which confirms Francis Fukuyama's claim that liberal democracy has become the final form of government for humanity.

9.  Over the past half century, the number of interstate wars has declined; and this seems to be because capitalist democracies are more peace-loving than other regimes.

10. Because of increased wealth and technological progress, the deaths from natural disasters--such as earthquakes, floods, storms, wildfires, and epidemics--have declined dramatically.   

Looking at such claims, a critical reader of this book might ask at least five questions.  (1) Can Bailey and Tupy explain why so many smart people think the world is getting worse?  (2) How do they explain the negative trends that apparently show historical decline?  (3) How persuasive is their evidence for these 78 progressive trends?  (4) Have they ignored some important trends--such as religious toleration and secularization?  (5) If they are right about this human progress, have they explained its ultimate cause?  I will take up each of these questions.

(1) WHY DO SO MANY OF US THINK THE WORLD IS IN DECLINE?

The answer, Bailey and Tupy suggest, is that the human mind suffers from some psychological glitches that mislead us so that we pay more attention to what's negative in our lives than what's positive.  We are surrounded by the journalistic reporting of news, and news is generally bad news, because that's what grabs our attention.  

So, for example, acts of violence--murders, terrorist attacks, killing in war--are dramatic news; but the fact that the rate of killing through homicide and war has been declining is not news.  This is what behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the "availability bias": shocking events come easily to mind, but that there has been a slow decline in such shocking events does not catch our attention.  

When Bailey and Tupy report that there has been a slow but steep decline over the past one hundred years in the rate of deaths from infectious disease, many of us will think: But what about COVID-19?  The disturbing harm from this pandemic today so fills our minds that it's hard to believe the historical data showing the general progressive trend towards protecting us from infectious diseases.

It is also possible that we have an evolved instinct for negativity.  If you're an ancient hunter-gatherer wondering whether that rustle in the grass is caused by a lion or the wind, it's best to assume it's a lion.  So perhaps we have inherited from our evolutionary ancestors a propensity to see threats everywhere.

Moreover, Bailey and Tupy observe, progress tends to mask itself, because as we become better at solving our problems, our expectations are raised, and we are frustrated by any problems that are not yet solved.  So, for example, it's hard to feel good when Bailey and Tupy report that there has been a big decline in hunger and malnutrition around the world, because we worry about the many people who are still hungry and malnourished.

(2) WHAT ABOUT THE NEGATIVE TRENDS?

The 78 global trends that Bailey and Tupy present in their book are all positive trends that show human progress towards a better life.  But of course they have to admit that some global trends are negative.  And so we must wonder whether they are justified in not giving prominence to those negative trends, and whether recognizing those negative trends negates their story of progress.

They respond to this concern by quoting Steven Pinker: "It's essential to realize that progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time.  That would be a miracle, that wouldn't be progress" (1). So does this imply that true progress means that most things get better for most people, most places, most of the time?  Must the positive trends outweigh or outnumber the negative trends?  Or must we see evidence that the positive trends are likely over time to eliminate or slow down the negative trends?

Bailey and Tupy mention seven examples of global negative trends.  Manmade climate change from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is creating serious problems for human beings in this century.  Increasing plastic debris in the oceans is harmful to the environment.  Many wildlife populations are declining.  The areas of tropical rainforest are shrinking.  Many people around the world are malnourished.  Many are dying in violent conflicts.  And we all know about the global coronavirus pandemic.

But then they try to show how some of their 78 positive trends can alleviate these negative trends.  For example, while there has been no reduction in the absolute quantities of carbon dioxide emissions, they observe, there has been a decline in emissions per dollar, which they call "decarbonizing the economy," because there's an economic incentive for businesses to reduce their energy costs (115-16).  And in the United States, over the past 50 years, although carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 22%, the total emission of six principal pollutants dropped by 74%; and during this period, the gross domestic product increased 275%.  This shows that "richer becomes cleaner" (169-70).

Another positive trends is the accelerating speed of vaccine development (77-78).  It took thousands of years before scientists developed vaccines for polio, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and measles.  But the vaccine for Ebola was developed only 43 years after the discovery of the virus.  And human trials for a COVID-19 vaccine began only four months after the virus was discovered.  Even if a COVID-19 vaccine is not discovered, Bailey and Tupy suggest, other treatments are likely to be developed quickly to end the pandemic.

As long as the positive trends outweigh the negative trends, we can see that on the whole the arc of history bends towards progress.

(3)  ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE FOR THE POSITIVE TRENDS

For each of their 78 trends, Bailey and Tupy provide a chart or graph that displays the empirical evidence for that trend.  The evidence comes from databases compiled by various scholars and reputable agencies--such the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

I think that most readers will find this evidence to be reliable in most cases.  But I did see a few places in the book where the evidence looks dubious.

For two of their trends--Trend 1 ("The Great Enrichment") and Trend 13 ("Global Income Is Rising")--Bailey and Tupy rely on the database for the statistics of economic history compiled by Angus Maddison.  Maddison (1926-2010) was a scholar of quantitative macroeconomic history who spent his life collecting and analyzing statistical estimates for gross domestic product (GDP) and population for countries around the world and throughout history from ancient Rome to the present.  When he died in 2010, his database was preserved and extended by people at the "Maddison Project" at the University of Groningen.

Using Maddison's data, Bailey and Tupy were able to design graphs showing the growth in the total world economy and in global GDP per capita from year 1 AD to the present.  These are two of the most dramatic hockey-stick graphs in the book.  Global GDP per capita starts in year 1 at $800 (as measured in 2011 US dollars), and the line stays flat until the year 1800, when it rises to $1,140 per person per year, then to $2,180 in 1900, and finally to $13,172 in 2008.  Bailey and Tupy can point to this as showing that between 1800 and 1900, "humanity made over twice as much progress in 100 years as it did in the previous 1800 years."  This also shows that "the real standard of living rose by more than tenfold between 1800 and 2008" (33).

Any careful reader will ask how Maddison came up with these numbers.  By the middle of the 19th century, modern statistical offices and censuses were collecting statistics for the economies of Europe and North America.  But for the thousands of years of economic history prior to 1800, it's hard to find documented economic statistics.

If one goes to Maddison's books, one can see that his estimates for GDP per capita in the year 1 AD in 20 countries as measured in 1990 international US dollars ranges mostly from $400 to $450.  For example, for Sweden, Mexico, and North America, it's $400; for Belgium and Portugal, it's $450 (Maddison 2007, 382).  One looks in vain for any explanation as to how he decided on these numbers.  How does he know that in 1 AD the North American Indians were living on the equivalent of $400 per person per year?  

Maddison says: "Before 1500, the element of conjecture in the estimates is very large indeed" (Maddison 2001, 259).  He uses the words "conjecture" and "assumption" a lot.  He assumes that prior to the year 1000, most people in most countries lived close to subsistence levels of income, which he sets at $400 per capita per year.  But he does not explain how he arrived at this $400 number.  

Some of his colleagues at the University of Groningen have said that "his strategy was to produce numbers even if a solid basis for them did not always exist" (Bolt and van Zanden 2014, 628).  They correct Maddison's estimate for subsistence by lowering it to $250-$300, but they don't explain how they arrived at this new number.

Economic historian Gregory Clark identifies this "element of conjecture" in Maddison's numbers as the problem at the core of the whole Maddison Project.  "All the numbers Maddison estimates for the years before 1820 are fictions, as real as the relics peddled around Europe in the Middle Ages" (Clark 2009, 1156).

For this reason, I think Bailey and Tupy are mistaken in relying on Maddison's fictitious database for the economic history prior to 1820.  Remarkably, they are not alone in this.  Many economists and economic historians have used Maddison's data for developing and testing theories of economic development while remaining silent about the "element of conjecture" in his numbers.

There are a few other points where Bailey and Tupy make conjectural projections about future trends that cannot be decisively confirmed by empirical evidence.  Two examples of this are "Peak Population" (Trend 4) and "Peak Farmland" (Trend 48).

The demographic data show that there has been a stunning growth in world population over the past 200 years, so that now the world population is around 7.7 billion.  The demographic data also show that over the past 75 years the growth in population has continued, but the rate of growth has slowed, because as people become wealthy and well-educated, their fertility rate tends to decline.  As women gain social and economic freedom, they choose to have fewer children, so that they can invest resources in those children, allowing them to flourish in a modern economy.  This is called the "demographic transition," and I have written about it (here).

This demographic database provides empirical evidence for the growth of human population--first rapid and then slowing--up to the present.  But of course it does not allow us to precisely predict the future.  If there is going to be a "peak population," as Bailey and Tupy claim, identifying it requires a speculative projection that cannot be settled by empirical evidence.  The United Nations' World Population Prospects 2019 projects that the world population will reach 10.9 billion in the year 2100.  Bailey and Tupy say that this is too high, because it does not put enough weight on the demographic transition that will lead more and more women to choose to have few children, which is likely to keep the peak population well below 10 billion; and after that peak, the world population will decline.  This seems plausible to me, but this can only be a conjectural projection that cannot be confirmed by present evidence.

Similarly, their "Peak Farmland" trend is a speculative prediction that has some plausibility based on some evidence, but the evidence cannot precisely confirm the prediction.  Here's the figure used by Bailey and Tupy that presents the data showing the gradual rise of global arable land from 1961 to 2009, followed by projections of a drop of global arable land to 2060.

This figure comes from Jesse Ausubel and his colleagues (Ausubel 2014, 2015; Ausubel et al. 2012).  Ausubel is often identified with "ecomodernism"--the idea that the best way to reverse environmental degradation and restore natural wildness is to liberate technological innovation in response to free-market incentives to solve environmental problems.  So, for example, he foresees that advances in farming technology along with changes in consumer tastes and a slowing growth in human population could bring about what he calls Peak Farmland, which would allow for a large global restoration of land to Nature.

Compared with what they were doing 40 years ago, American potato farmers grow about 40% more tons of potatoes, while planting about 20% fewer acres.  Similarly, American corn farmers now grow about five times as many bushels as they did in 1940 on the same land.  Because of the technological ingenuity of farmers, less land can produce more calories, so that agricultural food production can increase while farming acreage decreases.  At the same time, there has been rising demand for chicken and corn and falling demand for potatoes and beef.  Depending on how these and other trends play out, it is possible that over the next 40 years we could see nearly 988 million acres restored to nature, which is twice the size of the United States east of the Mississippi.

That's the optimistic projection in the figure above.  But while this is based on the empirical evidence for some trends in recent history, this projection for the future is conjectural.

To be continued . . .

REFERENCES

Ausubel, Jesse H. 2014. "Peak Farmland and Potatoes." Plenary address to the 2014 Potato Business Summit of the United Potato Growers of America, San Antonio, 8 January.

Ausubel, Jesse H. 2015. "The Return to Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment." Breakthrough Journal 5 (Summer).

Ausubel, Jesse H., Iddo K. Wernick, and Paul E. Waggoner. 2012. "Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing." Population and Development Review 38 (Supplement): 221-242.

Bailey, Ronald, and Marian L. Tupy. 2020. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, and Many Others You Will Find Interesting. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

Bolt, Jutta, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2014. "The Maddison Project: Collaborative Research on Historical National Accounts."  The Economic History Review 67 (3): 627-651.

Clark, Gregory. 2009. Review of Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD.  Journal of Economic History 69: 1156-1161.

Maddison, Angus. 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Maddison, Angus. 2007. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.