By James Pethokoukis

I hope most people have the opposite reaction of this “volcanologist, climate scientist, broadcaster, activist, socialist, best-selling author” to this picture of the Ever Ace, the world’s largest cargo ship, docking at the Port of Felixstowe in Suffolk, England:

(Side note: According to a BBC report, the Ever Ace, while capable of holding nearly 24,000 shipping containers, is here unloading 3,267 containers.) To some people — again, I hope not many — the sight of a massive cargo ship represents a world where rampant consumerism is rapaciously devouring the Earth’s bounty and recklessly destroying Earth’s climate. For them, it’s like when physicist Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the Trinity atomic blast and was reminded of Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s an image of humanity killing Gaia.

What I see is a secular miracle, the result of a quarter millennium of economic progress raising living standards (and knitting together the globe) after thousands of years of hardly any progress. My response to that tweet: “Beautiful. Trust me, you don’t want to live in a world where these wondrous manifestations of prosperity become impossible. #SuperAbundance.” Of course, a better response can be found in the writings of economist and evangelist for liberalism Deirdre McCloskey. This is from her 2016 book, the last of a trilogy, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World:

We’ve not yet achieved, God knows, an earthly paradise. A little over seven billion people inhabit the planet. One billion of them live still in nations of economic hell: a loaf of moldy bread, some curdled milk, bad schools, bad shelter, bad clothing, bad sanitation. Most people in Haiti or Afghanistan live so, as do, in richer countries, many of the very poor. God knows that too. Until 1800, though, such a hell was what everybody except a handful of nobles and priests and merchants expected, year after terrible year. We have achieved over the past two centuries for ordinary people worldwide, materially speaking, unevenly, for the first time, a pretty good purgatory. . . . The whole world’s average income, for example, now approaches that of present-day Brazil, or of the United States in 1941. Since 1800, in other words, and especially since 1900, the goods and services available to the average human being, and the scope for a full human life, have startlingly expanded. The event justifies its label, “the Great Enrichment.” . . . The signs are good that if we keep our wits about us we can, within a few generations, achieve for everyone on earth the riches of Sweden and America. All the formerly poor can enjoy bourgeois incomes and can pursue, if they wish, the spiritual enrichment that such an income permits. We’re on the way to a pretty good material paradise.

I would especially hope the pro-progress, pro-abundance attitude of McCloskey — supported by overwhelming evidence that we are not yet running out of Earth and that technological progress (nuclear/geothermal power, carbon capture) is the key to tackling climate change — would be the widespread default attitude after the disruption of the past two and a half years. I would hope that the shortages spawned by the pandemic, along with the job loss from the economic shutdown, would remind us all of the value created by a well-functioning market economy. In this sense, Amazon’s logistical prowess during the pandemic nicely represented the ability of market capitalism to adapt to crisis and provide for our needs.

Of course, some have not learned that lesson. Perhaps a portion of that group will be persuaded if the economy slips into recession and unemployment rises, as a growing number of economists and CEOs are forecasting. This from Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh:

The looming recession will be painful. But it will also drive a certain kind of post-materialist humbug from polite discourse. Growth will be harder to dismiss as a bean counter’s tawdry obsession when there is so little of the stuff to go round. There are two problems with the line that GDP isn’t everything. One is that no sentient being has ever claimed that it is. The other is that GDP is very nearly everything. . . . It was always there, I suppose, in Nimbyism. It was there in a certain appetite for the medieval in 21st-century entertainment: Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones, the pre-industrial Britain of the otherwise well-judged Olympic opening ceremony 10 summers ago. What the pandemic did was bring this nostalgia for a less dynamic past out of people and lend it a spurious credibility. That political space where the green, the conservative and the leftist meet turned out to be crammed. No doubt, a recession will concentrate minds. As public spaces fray, and relationships come under strain, and leisure becomes less affordable, people will rediscover the foundational role of growth to almost everything they cherish.

Here’s hoping for that rediscovery of the value of growth.

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