Review

The State of Humanity

This book is a fully-stocked arsenal of empirical ammunition with which to defend industrialism and technology. Its theme is that human living standards have risen enormously – a fact due primarily to the freedom enjoyed by producers.

Simon has gathered together 65 impressive defenders of industry and capitalism, from such fields as population, health, mortality, economic growth, natural resource development, agriculture, climatology and pollution. Together, they show how industrialism creates longer, healthier lives, better working conditions, higher education and greater material comforts. For example:

Until the Industrial Revolution, life expectancy was about 30 years; today it is about 76 in the industrialized world, and around 45 elsewhere. Cancer rates have fallen during this century. Incidences of typhoid and bronchitis, highly sensitive to the quality of air and water, have plummeted in the last two centuries. Child labor has been largely eliminated. Leisure time has risen dramatically in the last century.

The sheer wealth of illuminating information is astounding. It is almost in and of itself an unanswerable defense of capitalism.

The only drawback is the occasional theoretical misinterpretation of the data, primarily in Simon's concluding remarks. For example, he says technology (not ideas) moves history, and he believes that future progress is virtually inevitable. But the reader can largely ignore these unwarranted digressions.

It would take years for even the most dedicated capitalist, trained in the best of research techniques, to gather the data presented in this volume. Pro-capitalists require empirical as well as theoretical ammunition. This volume provides it, in essentialized spades.

(694 pages)

Books

• The State of Humanity by Edited by Julian L. Simon.