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Open
The Story Of Human Progress
Johan Norberg
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Open
The Story Of Human Progress
Johan Norberg
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About This Book
AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR Humanity's embrace of openness is the key to our success. The freedom to explore and exchange - whether it's goods, ideas or people - has led to stunning achievements in science, technology and culture. As a result, we live at a time of unprecedented wealth and opportunity. So why are we so intent on ruining it?
From Stone Age hunter-gatherers to contemporary Chinese-American relations, Open explores how across time and cultures, we have struggled with a constant tension between our yearning for co-operation and our profound need for belonging. Providing a bold new framework for understanding human history, bestselling author and thinker Johan Norberg examines why we're often uncomfortable with openness - but also why it is essential for progress. Part sweeping history and part polemic, this urgent book makes a compelling case for why an open world with an open economy is worth fighting for more than ever.
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OPEN
1
OPEN EXCHANGE
‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny […] before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world.’
Martin Luther King, 1967
In July 2017, US president Donald Trump was editing an upcoming speech with his staff secretary. In the margin he scribbled three words indicating what he wanted to emphasize in the speech, and which also summed up his America First worldview: ‘TRADE IS BAD’.1
In the view of Trump, and many of the new populists of the Right and the Left in ascendance around the world, free trade is the worst foreign import of them all. It is something forced upon the innocent people of [insert country where you happen to live] by powerful foreigners who want to destroy our industry by drowning us in cheap goods. It’s a plot from the Chinese, the WTO, the EU to force shoddy and possibly hazardous imports on us. Ironically, in Europe, for a long time many critics talked of globalization as a US plot. Some called it ‘Americanization’.
Soon after I read about Trump’s scribbled words, a friend sent me a message from his children’s school about a problem with snack boxes. Apparently, the children had started trading food with one another. And rice cakes in the boxes created bigger problems than anything else because children at school had started using them to pay for other goods and even to buy help and services. The school wanted the parents’ help to stop the kids from being free traders. The children had realized that by bartering they could get something to eat that they preferred to what they already had, so after an exchange both thought they had a better snack box than before. They even developed a medium of exchange – rice cakes – that they realized they could use to extend the market.
Trade is not imposed on us from abroad. A market is not a place or even an economic system. It is what people do wherever they are, in all eras, even children, as long as they are not stopped from doing it by governments – or parents.
After having reviewed the historical evidence, the British journalist and science writer Matt Ridley concludes:
There is no known human tribe that does not trade. Western explorers, from Christopher Columbus to Captain Cook, ran into many confusions and misunderstandings when they made first contact with isolated peoples. But the principle of trading was not one of them, because the people they met in every case already had a notion of swapping things. Within hours or days of meeting a new tribe, every explorer is bartering.2
Why do we trade? The economist Charles Wheelan once asked us to imagine the best machine possible.3 It would turn soybeans into computers. That would be fantastic for farmers. They could do what they are good at, and still get the computers they needed to control their irrigation system. And even better, the same machine could turn books into clothing. I could pop in five copies of this book and out would come a new shirt. Amazingly, the machine could also be programmed to turn furniture into cars, medical assistance into electricity, aircraft into financial services, and sparkling water into wine. And it could transform these things the other way around as well. In fact, it could turn anything you already had into anything you wanted.
The machine would work in poor countries too, where people would put things they are able to produce even without lots of capital and education into the machine – beef or textiles, say – and out the other end they would get high-tech medicine and infrastructure. The best way of making poor countries rich would obviously be to give them access to such a machine.
It sounds like magic, but in fact, this machine already exists. It’s called trade. It can be set up anywhere, and it runs on nothing but human imagination and on keeping protectionists (or parents) away. It’s not a foreign plot, it is the fastest way to prosper more from what you produce yourself, and the only way for poor countries to get rich and for rich countries to get richer.
Mankind has, thought the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, ‘a disposition to truck, barter and exchange’.4 Wherever we look in history, people exchange – favours, ideas, goods and services. And the deeper archaeologists dig, the further back they push the evidence of human exchange. It goes thousands of years back in history and, according to some recent, astonishing findings, trade is as old as mankind itself.
Homo mercator
The first fossils of Homo sapiens are around 300,000 years old. So are the first, recently discovered, signs of long-distance trade.5 Olorgesailie, the now-dry basin of an ancient Kenyan lake, is a treasure trove for archaeologists. Over the years they have found much there, but nothing as fascinating as the carefully shaped and specialized tools, spear tips, scrapers and awls that are more than 300,000 years old. It’s not just their age that is remarkable, but the material they are made of: obsidian. This black volcanic glass has been much valued because it is easily fractured to produce razor-sharp cutting tools and weapons.
Obsidian is also much valued by archaeologists and historians because it is only produced in a few volcanic sites, so its presence elsewhere reveals patterns of mobility and exchange. Amazingly, none of these volcanic sites are close to Olorgesailie. In fact, the obsidian probably came from sources up to 88 kilometres away, if you take the shortcut over mountains. The researchers deem it highly unlikely that the people of Olorgesailie commuted there, and assume instead that they were part of long-distance trade networks, exchanging other goods and resources for the obsidian they wanted. This interpretation was supported by the fact that they also used colourful rocks for dyes, which had also been imported from far away.
Truck, barter and exchange – 300,000 years ago.
Humans have always cooperated. Early humans did not just exchange obsidian and tools, but also know-how, favours and loyalty. They cooperated in child-rearing, defence, hunting and gathering. Most importantly, this cooperation also extends to other humans who are not family, unrelated individuals in the tribe, and to owners of obsidian on the other side of the mountain, in constantly shifting relationships. It is not simple kin selection but reciprocity, exchange for the sake of mutual benefit. As one description of Inuit culture has it: ‘The best place for him to store his surplus is in someone else’s stomach, because sooner or later he will want his gift repaid.’6
We love to reciprocate, to the extent that we feel bad when we don’t get the chance to repay kindness with kindness (or malice with malice). Producers of free online goods have been surprised to find that people want to pay, even if they don’t have to, as soon as they create a smooth payment solution. This is why the bazaar salesman always gives you coffee, so that you will feel that at least you owe him a proper look at his goods. This is also why you have to think twice before you accept a very expensive gift from someone who is not your partner.7
Cooperation and exchange were so essential to human beings that it is hard to explain what came first: trade or Homo sapiens. And I mean that in a literal sense. Humans shaped trade but trade also shaped the humans we became. This is the key to understanding how humans managed to take over the world and to inhabit all sorts of climates even though we have few environment-specific genetic adaptations.
Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker thinks that Homo sapiens’ peculiarities can be explained by the knowledge-using and socially interdependent ‘cognitive niche’ we inhabit. A couple of hundred thousand years ago, we simultaneously developed three unique traits: intelligence, language and cooperation. These are mutually reinforcing: incremental improvements in one of them make the other two more valuable, and thus change the social and physical environment – and with it evolutionary pressures for additional adaptations.8
Intelligence makes it possible to learn and store information and skills. A grammatically advanced language allows us to communicate this to others so they can build on our experiences and don’t have to make the same mistakes or to reinvent the wheel. This gives us both the means and incentives to cooperate with others – and not just our kin. Open-ended communication allows us to share know-how at little cost to ourselves and to coordinate behaviour. Intelligence makes it possible to negotiate, sometimes implicitly, deals about favours and goods to be transferred at separate times. The moment humans started benefiting from mutually advantageous collaboration it enhanced the value of intelligence and language dramatically, and this made more advanced cooperation possible, and so on.
But what pushed our ancestors onto this particular evolutionary path from the beginning? There is a convincing hypothesis – to me at least – that explains it by taking us back to the moment when the first chimp-like creatures left the trees and became bipedal six or seven million years ago: ‘the throwing hypothesis’. Why we ever left the trees has been a matter of controversy since Darwin’s days. Chimps are well protected in their trees but, being slow and small, they are easy prey for lions, leopards and sabre-toothed tigers on the ground. Now we have learned that some pretty rough tectonic activity created the East River Rift Valley and changed the climate. This dried out the rainforests to the east of the valley and replaced it with savannah. ‘So it turns out we didn’t leave the trees after all,’ writes psychologist William von Hippel, outlining the hypothesis, ‘the trees left us’.9
Thrown into a hostile and confusing environment, these chimpish creatures had to find a new way to make a living in the midst of big predators. Over the next three million years, most of them certainly failed, but some of them came up with a way of using hands no longer needed for locomotion, which helped them to survive on the grasslands, changed them physically and mentally and turned them into our ancestors. The solution was stone-throwing.
In the remains of Lucy, the world’s most famous Australopithecus afarensis, we can observe that some important anatomical changes had taken place at least 3.2 million years ago. She had a more mobile hand and wrist than chimpanzees, more flexibility in her upper arm, a more horizontally oriented shoulder, and the hip and the bottom of her rib cage are further apart. All of them perfectly adapted for throwing stones with force and precision. Even with such excellent joints and muscles, Lucy would not stand much of a chance against a lion, but if she coordinated her defence with other Australopithecus, they could unleash a shower of stones that would cut the big cat into pieces. They must soon have realized that they could hunt in the same fashion. With the invention of cooperation, our ancestors who used to be easy prey took their place at the top of the food chain.
This was our ‘social leap’, as von Hippel calls it. Individuals who learned to cooperate in stone-throwing quickly outbred individuals who committed to the old strategy of ‘every chimpish chap for himself ’. This would have led evolution to favour changes that made us better at cooperating, for example a large brain to understand others and manage social challenges.
If you want evidence of mankind’s unique sociability, look in the mirror. Chimpanzees and the other apes have brown sclera (the part of the eye that surrounds the cornea), to hide their gaze from other chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are primarily rivals and don’t want other members of their group to know that they have spotted a potential partner or tasty snack because someone else might steal the idea and get there first. Humans, on the other hand, have developed white sclera so that we broadcast the direction of our gaze to our entire group, which suggests that we benefited more from sharing information than keeping it secret. When we notice a threat, we want others to know and help to strengthen our defence. If we spot a prey animal, we want others to know so they can help us catch it.
Humans can share intentions and understand that others have the same idea. Chimpanzees can’t and they don’t collaborate unless it suits them. They sometimes seem to hunt monkeys as a group, but as explained by an expert on chimpanzee cognition, Michael Tomasello, it is more like a wild scramble where every chimp is trying to do what is best for him at every stage in a chaotic scene. They don’t even try to communicate and the whole group does not join in. Some just sit by and wait for the others to do the work, and then fight with them over the spoils.10
Cultural evolution
Our social ability set the stage for a new form of evolution. ‘Cultural evolution,’ wrote philosopher Karl Popper, ‘continues genetic evolution by other means.’11 If one wolf is better at hunting because of a mutation that gives it better smell, say, the species has to wait for it and its descendants to procreate more successfully and for the other wolves to be pushed aside. If a human being comes up with a better way of hunting – for example, by making a better spear – others just imitate it. This is why genetic evolution works at glacia...