Humanity's progress may be in peril as climate change sweeps in

It is all too easy to focus on current threats, while ignoring the past and discounting the longer-run forces that prevailed even in the face of terrible setbacks. But one must remember that we have an enormous accumulation of useful knowledge—more than any of our predecessors. It won’t allow us to solve every urgent problem, but it is neither easily lost nor forgotten.

We also should remember how and why things got better in the past; how the desire to escape from poverty, disease, and death brought steady improvements. Solutions were rarely immediate, but after the Enlightenment, the triumph of reason over unthinking obedience and dogma increasingly produced reliable answers to questions old and new. To take just one notable example, the germ theory of disease furnished humanity with some of the most useful knowledge ever discovered.

Still, while the long-term trends of progress are clear, history offers no support for blind optimism. Improvements in human well-being have repeatedly confronted reversals, many of them lengthy, and some characterized by unimaginable devastation. In the twentieth century alone, disastrous national and international politics caused tens of millions of deaths in two world wars, the Holocaust, and from the murderous policies of Stalin and Mao. The global influenza pandemic of 1918-20 killed perhaps 50 million people out of a world population of less than two billion. The HIV/Aids epidemic has killed around 40 million people to date, and more than half a million continue to die each year from it, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Most recently, the World Health Organization estimates that covid-19 has killed close to seven million people—and possibly multiples of that number—many of them in rich countries, including nearly 1.2 million Americans. The pandemic arrested economic growth in many countries and almost certainly halted the ongoing reduction in global poverty. (But since it also disrupted data collection in many places, the uncertainty around such numbers is even higher than usual.)

Typically, after such catastrophes, progress eventually resumes, with the subsequent recoveries delivering health and wealth outcomes that exceed their previous highs. True, this historical fact offers no comfort to those who died or lost relatives and friends. Progress does not expunge previous horrors. But it does hold out the hope of better lives for the survivors and for subsequent generations.

Moreover, history’s worst horrors often do not recur, because the tools for handling and avoiding catastrophes tend to improve over time. After the germ theory of disease became the basis for public health at the end of the nineteenth century, vaccines were developed to prevent much sickness; and even when they failed, new medicines allowed people to live with diseases that previously would have been a death sentence, as in the case of HIV/Aids. The development of vaccines for covid-19 in under a year is a spectacular testament to this story of progress.

Similarly, macroeconomic management has improved over time, not least because of John Maynard Keynes’s insights in the 1930s. Nowadays, many would argue that central banks are better at monetary policy than in the past. Still, long-run economic growth remains mysterious. We know more about what impedes it than about what causes it.

Until recently, politics seemed better, too. For half a century, we witnessed the spread of democracy, supported by an unusually stable international order. Cooperation between sovereign countries permitted extensive globalization, economic growth, and poverty reduction.

But none of this progress is guaranteed to continue.

A thousand years from now, or perhaps much sooner, the last 250 years may be seen as a bygone golden age, a flash in history’s panorama, an exception to the normal state of misery and early death. Recent events present a depressing catalogue: slow or negative growth; rising global temperatures; resurgent infectious diseases; anti-democratic and right-wing populist politics; stalling globalization; stagnant life expectancy; and increased geopolitical tensions, particularly between the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China. Are we returning to a pre-Enlightenment world ruled by priests and warlords, or is today’s darker outlook just another temporary setback that will be overcome in time?

The single biggest threat to continued progress is climate change. Though we know what needs to be done, and though the required technologies are rapidly improving and becoming more affordable, national and international politics have not supported the necessary action. Opportunistic politicians can advance their own careers by opposing such a costly and sweeping adjustment, and there are vast war chests—especially in the fossil-fuel industries—committed to preserving the status quo. Even in the face of frightening weather patterns that are almost impossible to explain without reference to anthropogenic climate change, there is a real possibility that not enough will be done before it is too late.

Still, one promising change is the increased use of climate policies based on incentives rather than on penalties. This is crucial, because democracies will always struggle to implement policies that make substantial numbers of people worse off, even if only temporarily.

Yet tackling climate change also requires action by poorer countries, which in turn requires large transfers of resources from rich countries. While such transfers have a poor track record of stimulating democratization or economic growth, perhaps climate aid will prove more effective in achieving its intended objective.

Climate policies may be easier to implement in non-democratic societies, as has sometimes been the case with draconian public-health measures. It would be a shameful outcome if, after years of giving aid that undermined democratic governance in poor countries, the rich world provided aid to support the top-down imposition of climate policies that its own more democratic constituencies still resist.

Health threats also will remain central to the story of progress and its reversals. On one hand, the positive story to emerge from the pandemic is about resilience. After developing vaccines with incredible speed, we achieved a relatively rapid economic rebound. Beyond the death toll and the still unclear effects of “long covid", the most obvious lasting damage was confined to schoolchildren, many of whom lost out on years of education. That poorer children have been set back more than others is tragic, but not surprising. Widespread disasters very often produce such disequalizing effects.

On the other hand, the negative story of the pandemic is that it was merely a preview of what awaits us. Historically, plagues have spread along trade routes, and the situation today is no different. Since the 1990s, international trade has expanded at previously unseen rates, establishing not only global value chains but also global virus chains. During that period, there have been two other, much smaller pandemics involving novel respiratory diseases: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers). With a death toll below 1,000 in each case, it was easy to see these episodes as a vindication of the global public-health system’s efficacy, and of the limited threat posed by novel pathogens in a richer, better-run world.

But after covid-19, it now looks like we may have simply been lucky with those earlier outbreaks. The Sars and Mers viruses just so happened to have properties that made them easier to control. We might not be so fortunate in the future. Equally, rather than putting too much store in the rapid rollout of covid vaccines, we must remember that there is still no vaccine for HIV/Aids after more than 40 years. If there is one lesson to take from the pandemic, it is an old one: that hubris is the precursor to nemesis.

I do not know whether to believe the positive or the negative account. Instead, I would simply stress the possibility that the future may have more morbidity and mortality than we have grown accustomed to. Beyond pandemics, uncontrolled climate change is also a major threat to health, as is the pre-pandemic reversal of declining mortality among large segments of the population, particularly in the United States.

Over the past quarter-century, national and international political arrangements have undergone profound changes, with right-wing populism spreading in rich democracies and threatening domestic and international institutions. Globalization, especially, has become a source of discontent. The fact that it helped bring about an unprecedented reduction in poverty has not assuaged domestic discontent in the rich world; it has inflamed it.

To many working people in the US and Europe, the world population’s great escape from destitution is seen as having come at their expense, by eliminating their jobs and hollowing out their communities. Even if the world overall is better off, the beneficiaries cannot vote in rich countries, leaving only those who have been hurt to complain that they did not sign up for such involuntary foreign aid. Similarly, while immigration from poorer to richer countries has helped millions leave poverty, many domestic workers in rich countries see it as a threat to their own livelihoods and status.

Whether such perceptions are inaccurate or overblown is beside the point. What matters, politically, is that the current great escape is not particularly popular in rich countries. A significant share of voters regard immigration and globalization as favouring a minority of well-educated, cosmopolitan elites. Working people who believe they have been harmed by such policies thus are tempted to abandon democratic arrangements that seem to be working for international business and domestic elites, but not for them. The risk now is that these side-effects of the great escape will become so severe as to slow or reverse it.

In the US, a half-century of wage and income stagnation for the working class has been accompanied by a slow reversal of progress against mortality. Although Americans with a college education continue to enjoy reduced mortality, those without it have been losing years of life since 2010. In our 2020 book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and I document the increase in mortality among men and women without a college degree from suicides, alcoholic liver disease, and, most importantly, drug overdoses. Looking ahead, it is hard to see a reversal of these trends without improvement in the lives of working-class Americans. Beyond that, the rate of reduction in mortality from cardiovascular disease, which has driven much of the increase in life expectancy in the rich world since 1970, has slowed in many countries and reversed among Americans without a college degree.

On a more positive note, since drug epidemics have come and gone throughout history, it is reasonable to hope that the opioid crisis will eventually recede, too. Moreover, after two decades of stagnation from 1970 to 1990, cancer rates have been falling, owing to declines in the prevalence of smoking and various medical and scientific advances. This positive trend appears to have some room to run, not least because the new knowledge is transferable between countries, several of which have participated in creating the science that is driving it. My guess is that “normal" progress in life expectancy will eventually resume, probably at a slower rate, and with all the necessary caveats about pandemics and climate change.

As populism has risen in the US, China has gone from being a partner to an apparent threat. The growing hostility between the two countries has now reached a point that threatens international stability—and even international peace. Meanwhile, economic growth in China has weakened, partly because of covid-19, but more importantly because of domestic policies and demographic factors. In response, the Chinese leadership has become more authoritarian, cracking down hard on dissent and political freedom in Hong Kong.

The scope for serious miscalculation in the Sino-American rivalry has risen along with counter-productive sabre-rattling in both countries. America’s valid complaints against China have been exaggerated by politicians playing to populist sentiment.

Notwithstanding the cynical politics, we clearly cannot and should not seek a return to the era of hyper-globalization. We urgently need a new global economic order that can preserve and extend the great escape, but with greater care for domestic politics and for the well-being of non-wealthy, less-educated majorities in wealthy countries. To its credit, the current US administration’s policy agenda is directed toward this end, and much now depends on its long-term success.

In retrospect, the 2008 financial crisis has had much longer-lasting negative effects than I anticipated. In the US, much of the population has lost confidence in capitalism and the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. The financiers who caused that debacle sailed off in their yachts, untouched, while smaller craft were smashed into flotsam, their passengers reduced to homelessness, joblessness, and despair.

In Britain and much of Europe, the crisis was followed by austerity policies that devastated public services. With little to no economic growth ever since, it is little wonder that populism’s appeal has grown, and that democracy and capitalism have fallen out of favour. This development does not bode well for the future. Populists and autocrats have little respect for institutions, including not only democratic processes and protections for minorities, but also the centers of scientific knowledge associated with educated elites.

Finally, on an immediate and more parochial note, data collection is under threat as never before. While Chinese data have always required careful interpretation, the same is increasingly true for India, whose published growth rates are implausible and likely manipulated, and whose poverty-monitoring system has been suppressed. In the US, political polarization has led to divergent measures of poverty, some of which come close to denying its existence. Fifty years from now, if we are still living in an increasingly illiberal and non-democratic world, we may not even be able to tell, other than anecdotally, whether the great escape continued or was choked off.

Adapted from a preface to the Princeton Classics edition of The Great Escape, to be published in 2024.

Angus Deaton is a Nobel laureate in economics and professor emeritus of economics and international affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

©2023/Project Syndicate