NY Review of Books Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Review Bigger and Better? By William H. McNeill
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100:Europe, America, and the Third World
by Robert William Fogel
Cambridge University Press, 191 pp., $70.00; $23.99 (paper)
The Escape from Hunger is an important book by the Nobel economist Robert Fogel. The first three chapters offer a novel, tightly constructed, and convincing argument for a distinctively human form of what Fogel calls "technophysio evolution," described as "biological but not genetic, rapid, culturally transmitted, and not necessarily stable." At first blush, biological evolution that is not genetic may sound surprising, but it rests on firm and quantitative evidence, as he explains:
The theory of technophysio evolution rests on the proposition that during the past 300 years, particularly during the past century, human beings have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment.... This new degree of control has enabled Homo sapiens to increase its average body size by over 50 percent and its average longevity by more than 100 percent since 1800, and to greatly improve the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems.
The two concluding chapters of the book are also surprising and boldly speculative since Fogel devotes them to an assessment of prospects for further technophysio evolution across the next hundred years, and explores the economic and social implications of making health care "the growth industry of the twenty-first century."
No one can deny that the human record in the twentieth century was indeed extraordinary. For in spite of all the wars, massacres, and famines that figure in the conventional history of that century, human numbers quadrupled, and most people consumed more and suffered less deprivation than before. This is what Fogel undertakes to demonstrate statistically by applying an economist's habits of mind to recent biological, physiological, and thermodynamic transformations of the human work engine, our bodies. This ambitious enterprise deserves both admiration and careful scrutiny.
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What are we to make of Fogel's marriage of economics, nutrition, physiology, and prophecy? I will begin with prophecy, for when looking ahead, my views are firm and darkly familiar. Consequently, his rosy vision of what is likely to happen in the twenty-first century seems unlikely to me. Surely warfare and a struggle for security against enemies at home and abroad are far more plausible "growth industries" in the United States than lifelong education and health care; and if they continue to increase, their share of GNP may be expected to reverse the worldwide technophysio evolution that Fogel celebrates. Human societies have often been ravaged and impoverished by war; and mighty governments have sometimes collapsed when violence became unsupportable. Such a future for the United States seems possible, even probable, despite expanding popular demands for health care.
A second source of instability in human affairs is demographic and stems from the breakdown of traditional village communities among the majority of the world's population. Like the nutritional and physiological changes Fogel describes so convincingly, this change is recent and profound. One result is the decay of long-standing patterns of nurture whereby, as they grew up, youths acquired the full array of adult skills and moral expectations needed to carry on local practices and reproduce their kind, generation after generation. Ever since neolithic times, villages were the places where the very large majority (about 85 percent to 95 percent) of human beings lived and died, and the survival of villages was what allowed cities and states to regenerate after local disasters. That means in turn that recent imperfect absorption of village communities into urban-based social networks puts social and cultural continuity at risk as never before.
For the basic fact is that sanitary and educational reforms of the nineteenth century did not make cities hospitable to child raising; and birth control pills now allow adults to indulge their sexual impulses without giving birth to unwanted children. As a result, in rich, urbanized countries human beings are no longer reproducing themselves. Maintenance of existing cities therefore requires immigration from increasingly distant rural reservoirs. Yet worldwide population growth is fading rapidly as village communities wither, while the ancient bane of urban life, germs that cause infectious diseases, are acquiring resistances to antibiotics that once promised to make infections readily curable. By mid-century, therefore, it seems pretty sure to me that declining populations will prevail worldwide, and the biological and cultural continuity of human societies will come into question as never before.
Deliberate public action almost certainly will alter the course of this prospective demographic collapse; and, to be a bit more cheerful, warfare may also wane among increasingly geriatric urbanized populations. But the impact of such responses remains wholly unforeseeable and so is the future of our general encounter with the organic environment, which sustained the growth of food production since 1700 and permitted Fogel's technophysio evolution to run its remarkable course. But whether that evolution can continue and usher in the utopian age that Fogel foresees seems improbable to me, since the environment is not infinitely malleable and the prospects for mounting violence in the short run and demographic decay in the slightly longer run seem so great.
full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17488
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