My column this week discusses “Getting Better,” a new book in which the economist Charles Kenny argues that many people have overlooked the enormous improvements in human well-being over the last few decades. Mr. Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington. Foreign Policy magazine, where Mr. Kenny is a contributing writer, recently organized a discussion of his book. He also wrote a recent article for Time on the world’s youth.
Our conversation follows.
Q. You write that Africa, like the rest of the world, has escaped the Malthusian trap. What do you mean by that?
Mr. Kenny: Parson Malthus’s miserable vision of the world was that each country’s output was pretty much limited by the amount of land available. That meant if more kids were born, the same output was spread amongst more people — so average incomes would fall. In turn, Malthus argued that would push up mortality as people died from malnutrition or famine or disease.
In Malthus’s time, output worldwide was indeed pretty much static — for most of history, global G.D.P. had expanded by much less than half a percent a year. But since then, output has exploded — everywhere. Between 1960 and 2000, only one country worldwide -– the Democratic Republic of the Congo — saw G.D.P. growth slower than 0.5 percent per year, and only 11 countries saw output grow at less than 2 percent a year.
And looking at African countries in particular, while populations have been rising, there is no significant link between population growth and income growth. Furthermore, population increases have been associated with better health, not increasing mortality — between 1960 and 2005, the proportion of children in the region dying before their fifth birthday fell from 26 to 15 percent. So, the Malthusian trap is history in Africa as much as everywhere else.
Q. What about the sharp, recent rise in food prices? On some level, doesn’t that suggest demand for food is outpacing supply, at least in the short run?
Mr. Kenny: I think that’s right as far as it goes. But a lot of factors are behind the rise — weather, oil prices, growing demand for meat in middle income countries like China, ethanol subsidies in the U.S. and so on. And it isn’t Malthusianism at work. The big problem isn’t more mouths to feed, it is that a lot of the existing mouths want more meat, and we’re using land to make fuel not food. Again, it isn’t that we couldn’t produce a lot more nutrition at the same price — there’s immense untapped potential to increase output using existing technologies in Africa, for example, and considerable inefficiency in the global food industry. We are far away from any natural limit to agricultural output, so the problem is one of policy, not immutable laws of biology or geography.
Q. When we were talking earlier about the book, you mentioned that rich people (like Americans and Europeans) are a much bigger drain on the world’s resources than poor people. Can you explain that, with some of the same back-of-the-envelope calculations you did before?
Mr. Kenny: Rich people consume more — that’s pretty much what being rich is all about. They live in larger houses, they have cars, they have multiple TVs, they fly around the planet, they use more water and electricity. So carbon dioxide output per head is really closely related to average incomes, for example. And doubling the income of the world’s poorest 650 million people would take the same amount of money as adding 1 percent to the income of the world’s richest 650 million people. So if we’re worried about sustainability, we shouldn’t be worried about population policy in Niger or Liberia, but in Manhattan and Monaco.
