Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong amid all the economic bad news and anxiety calms himself down by taking "The Long View...." (here):
If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry and worry about famine, enough shelter not to be wet and worried about trenchfoot, enough clothing not to be cold and worried about hypothermia, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and the majority of their children will die of microparisites well short of their biblical three-score-and-ten years. The big problems of the bulk of humanity will then be those of finding enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and play lives so as not to be bored, enough relative status not to be green with envy of their
fellows—and, of course, avoiding and quickly disposing of the thugs who used to have spears and will have cruise missiles and H-bombs who have functioned as macroparasites infecting humanity ever since the first farmers realized that now that they had crops running away into the forest was no longer an option.
He also asks "Why did this miracle come about?"
To which he concludes (after rambling through some other possibilities) that:
It is hard looking back to avoid the conclusion that it was at the end of the nineteenth century that something really special happened—and that really special thing had three parts:
First, the coming of global communications so that ideas invented or found or applied in one part of the world could be quickly made known to and adapted to other parts rather than waiting decades or centuries to percolate across the oceans.
Second, the coming of global transportation so that any good economic idea could be turned to produce enormous profits as it was leveraged across the entire globe.
Third—and in large part a consequence of the other two—the coming of the professional inventor and the industrial research laboratory: people whose business wasn’t to make and apply a single invention, but instead to invent the process of continuous and constant invention and innovation itself.
And when all three of these happened together, we had our critical mass and our chain reaction that has brought us here.
Let’s hope we can keep it moving, and don’t spoil it.
Amen.
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