Economy
Materialist success has come at a cost
Tired of obsessing over what happened in the economy yesterday? Well, just this once, let’s go to the opposite extreme and look at what’s been happening during the past 200 years. And let’s broaden the focus from poor ailing Oz to the whole world.
Earlier this year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a report, How Was Life? Global Wellbeing Since 1820 ( Here ). It’s an extension of the work of one of the world’s greatest economic historians, a Scot who was a professor at a Dutch university, Angus Maddison.
Maddison’s life work was to piece together estimates of real gross domestic product for all the big countries and regions of the world between 1820, which he took to be the end of the (first) industrial revolution, and 2000.
This latest study has extended the GDP figures to 2010, but also tried to estimate measures of various other socio-economic indicators of well-being.
It paints a picture of the way economic development has spread throughout the world, raising living standards, widening but then narrowing the gap between incomes, fostering population growth and, when you combine the two, doing great damage to the globe’s natural environment.
The world’s population stood at about a billion at the start of the 19th century, but has grown to more than 7 billion today. That growth was both a cause and a consequence of economic development and the technological advance it promotes.
Advances in public health – particularly sewerage and clean water – led to falling death rates, which slowly encouraged people to have fewer children. Then advances in medical science took over, eventually including more effective means of contraception. But these improvements took a long time to spread from Western Europe and the “Western Offshoots” (Maddison’s name for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to the rest of the world.
This is the story of the huge challenge the world economy has faced in the past 200 years: how to feed, clothe and house this growing world population. Overall …