A new age of discovery
During this time of change, we have the power to create a fairer world
WITHIN every news story, talking point and research paper that floods our present awareness, the same question emerges over and over. We hear it in the World Bank’s poverty estimates, in the increasingly frequent headlines of gun violence and terrorism in the US and Europe, and in the press releases logging Google’s latest achievements with artificial intelligence.
It’s a question so pervasive to our discourse, we barely register its existence. Yet it shapes the frame through which we interpret most of the information we consume daily.
Should we be optimistic, or pessimistic, about where the world is heading?
Our recent book, argues that the present is a second Renaissance. That sounds solidly optimistic – but only until one digs deeply enough into history.
One then recognises the first Renaissance struggled with the same doubts and uncertainties we face today as new maps, new media, and a flourishing of genius and risk transformed European society and the world.
The early Renaissance artist, Brunelleschi, who introduced linear perspective into European art (showing depth on a flat canvas by drawing faraway objects smaller), taught his generation that what they saw depended on how they looked at it. Right now, that seems true in every domain of human endeavour.
Take economic development. Step back and view humanity as a whole, and the absolute story is broadly positive. The emerging global middle class – the middle third of humanity by income – have seen real incomes rise some 60 percent to 70 percent since 1988.
The bottom third have seen theirs rise more than 40 percent. But the relative view is sharply different. Rank humanity by wealth, and last year the top 62 people in the world held more wealth than the bottom 3.6 billion.
Move one step closer. Break humanity down into component countries, and the picture changes again.
In aggregate, over the past quarter-century, the average income in poorer, developing countries has been catching up to the average income in richer economies – and quickly.
Since 2000, the number of countries classified as “low income” by the World Bank has halved, from more than 65 to 33. But as with people, so with states: the relative fortunes of the global top and bottom diverge widely.
Since 1990, the average income in the world’s 20 poorest countries has risen some 30 percent in real terms, from about $270 to $350 – an increase of $80. Income in the 20 richest countries has also risen about 30 percent, from $36 000 to $44 000 – an increase of $8 000.
Finally, take one more step closer to peers within countries, and divergence once again dominates the picture. Within almost all countries, from the least developed to the most, the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past few decades.
Nigeria, now Africa’s biggest economy, has also become one of the world’s most unequal. In the last two decades, the total income generated by Nigeria’s economy has almost doubled, in real per person terms. Shockingly, so has the share of Nigerians living in poverty (from more than 30 percent to more than 60 percent).
In the US, the top fifth have seen their real incomes rise more 25 percent since 1990; the bottom fifth have seen theirs fall 5 percent. Put another way, America’s bottom fifth were earning more money back when the US economy had 40 percent less income per person to spread around.
The above suggests our current ills are “merely” a matter of distribution. If we could but better spread the gains being registered we’d realise a world in which we’re all much better off than just a generation ago.
Surely recent political events – notably Brexit and the rise of populists like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – have strengthened the case for that redistribution to happen. The case for optimism may be getting stronger every day.
But wait. Even brushing aside the political and institutional obstacles to making that redistribution a reality, such optimism oversimplifies humanity’s present picture.
To see our aggregate situation fairly, we must first discount our absolute gains by the additional risk – environmental, biological, financial and, increasingly, cyber. These are the risks we are all suffering as an unintended but unavoidable by-product of global economic opening and connecting up.
The growth-plus-entanglement of everything from bank balance sheets to air passengers to data traffic has strained virtually every natural and social system. This has made their malfunction or collapse more likely to occur, harder to see coming and more devastating when it does happen.
Consider that in just two years, from 2007 to 2009, the global financial crisis tallied up direct losses of more than $4 trillion, across every market in the world, forced 50 million people out of work and forced another quarter-billion into the ranks of the “working poor”.
Consider recent pandemic simulations showing that a contagious airborne pathogen (like H5N1) carried into any major airport, on any continent, would be global within three days at most.
What about the scientific realm? Is there a clear case for either optimism or pessimism within the present pace of scientific and technological advancement?
Again, the headlines pose more questions than answers. On the one hand some economists, led by Robert Gordon, argue innovation is slowing down.
If productivity statistics are any guide, the computer and the internet have done less so far to lift people’s incomes than the flush toilet. But that pessimism may say more about the limits of economic forecasting than the present scale or pace of scientific discovery.
Quantum computing promises to break through the physical limits that our ever-shrinking transistors will quickly run up against by instead scaling up the weird entanglements that exist at quantum scales. Artificial intelligence is here and steadily growing stronger.
The stronger case for pessimism may be to worry these fresh technological powers will outstrip our collective wisdom for wielding them.
If we automate half of all jobs in the current economy, as some studies suggest we are on track to do, to whom will the gains of this wrenching retooling flow?
To those who own the machines, or to those whose jobs have been destroyed? Such difficult policy questions may divide humanity more profoundly than the Atlantic Ocean ever did in the pre-Columbus era.
Optimism or pessimism? Either stance can be backed by solid argument, but we argue neither suits the Renaissance age we live in so much as a third frame: activism.
The present is best understood as a contest: between the good and bad consequences of global entanglement and human development; between forces of inclusion and exclusion; between flourishing genius and flourishing risks. In a general way, of course, this is always true, but the truth has never been more urgent.
The scale of the risks that threaten global well-being have never approached their present gravity, and the opportunity costs of being excluded from humanity’s aggregate flourishing have never been higher.
We need to champion critical thinking in a time of irresponsible rhetoric. To celebrate diversity and stamp out prejudice.
We need to raise public and private patronage. To dare failure, and strengthen public safety nets in ways that embolden us all. To build new crossroads and welcome migrants. To tear up the (mental) maps that unhelpfully divide people according to national, race, gender, religious or other stereotypes and replace them with new ones that recognise our common humanity and interests. To stoke public trust in democratic institutions, so we may vest them with the powers to meet new transnational threats.
Luminaries of the first Renaissance saw their own time in a similarly urgent light. There is “no greater harm than that of time wasted”.
“People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them.
They go out and happen to things.” Tradition attributes these words to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, respectively.
In his conclusion to Machiavelli urged the rulers of Italy “everything has converged for your greatness. The rest you must do yourself ”.
They recognised their age offered blinding possibilities, but any gains would have to be achieved amid relentless shocks.
What we all do now to promote the possibilities and dampen the dangers that this moment brings will determine whether we repeat the glories of the first Renaissance, the miseries, or both.
If the present climate of instability is any guide, “neither” is not one of the options before us.