It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 years,   ISBN:9781882577965

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As a well-informed reader of Environment & Climate News, you likely exhibit considerable skepticism toward the drumbeat of fear-mongering anti-capitalists who believe the world is in a death spiral that can be stopped only by increasing the size of government programs and reducing human freedoms.

However, you may find it difficult to contradict the fear-mongers if you lack the hard data to dispute their pessimistic views.

As regular Environment & Climate News readers know, my normal book reviews read more like "Cliff Notes" for students, because I recognize only a small percentage of you will actually buy the books I review. Not this time. I will only surf across this compendium of positive human progress.

You must buy the book, absorb it carefully, and present its contents continually to those who don't recognize they live in the golden days of our nation.


Golden Age

The central premise of It's Getting Better All the Time, published in 2001 by the Cato Institute, is that there has been more improvement in the human condition in the past 100 years than in all of the previous centuries combined.

That is a difficult premise to accept for those who hear and read the daily news of school shootings, homelessness, AIDS, global warming, declining student test scores, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, by nearly every measure of the human condition, life has improved dramatically.

Be it health, wealth, nutrition, education, speed of transportation and communications, leisure time, the proliferation of computers and the Internet, or gains for women, minorities, and children--these all demonstrate an amazing improvement of the human condition.

While much of the rest of the world lags behind the United States, the same trends are nevertheless evident nearly everywhere. And of even greater importance is the fact that freedom is expanding across the globe and tyranny is on the defensive wherever it exists.


Woes of Yesteryear

If you are not convinced the human condition is improving, the authors call your attention to a picture of life but a century ago. It was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, horse manure, candles, Jim Crow laws, 12-hour work days, and premature death. One child in four perished before his or her 14th birthday.

While 100 years ago parents lived in very real fear of their children dying, today, the authors point out, middle-income suburban parents live in fear of their child not making the soccer all-star team.

A hundred years ago, industrial cities were enveloped in smoke, streets smelled of garbage, and the automobile was correctly hailed as a pro-environment invention that would lead to the reduction of the filth associated with horses. Cancer was not a primary cause of death then because most Americans were doomed by infectious diseases, not living long enough to develop degenerative cancers.

Perhaps no fact in this book is more impressive than this: Most Americans who are considered poor today have access to a quality of housing, food, heath care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the superrich Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers did not enjoy in their day.


Numerous Advances

Coauthors Julian Simon and Stephen Moore believe the three most important developments that made all this possible are electricity, modern drugs, and the microchip. The book chronicles the past 100 years through advances in 14 categories, offering charts and graphs to show every significant advance in these areas:

Health: Almost all the major killer diseases before 1900--tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, whooping cough, polio, and malaria--have been eradicated in the United States.

Nutrition: The price of food is now below 10 percent of family income. After spending thousands of years trying to satisfy man's caloric needs, we're now trying to eat less, for health reasons.

Children: Child labor has been eliminated in the developed world, and it is rare that children do not survive to adulthood.

Incomes: Real per-capita income in the United States has quadrupled in the past century.

Poverty: Poverty, by any measure, is declining rapidly in the United States.

Work: Before 1900 most work was physically demanding drudgery, low-paying, and monotonous. Such work is the exception today.

Recreation and leisure: Recreation, sports, dining out, and enjoying professional entertainment are central to American life today.

Housing: In 1900, less than one in five U.S. homes had running water, flushing toilets, a vacuum cleaner, and gas or electric heat.

Transportation, computers, education, environment, natural resources, and the status of women and minorities round out the book's evidence with similar dramatic advances.


Individualism vs. Statism

The authors note America got rich earlier and to a greater extent than all other nations because nowhere else has the entrepreneurial spirit been nurtured as it has been here. Government assistance has had little to do with our progress, they observe.

While we now have substantial prosperity and large government programs, the government has been a consequence of our economic growth rather than a cause of it.

In fact, almost every great tragedy of the twentieth century has been a result of too much government, not too little. Nazism, socialism, communism, Marxism, and apartheid were all simply fancy names for statism, the unreasonable government control over the lives and liberties of citizens. Over 100 million people perished as a result of these tyrannical governments in the twentieth century.

Reassuringly, the authors are as optimistic about the future as they are pleased with recent advances. They predict increases in wealth and health, declining prices for natural resources, improvements in agriculture, further reduction in disease, more abundant free markets--and the continuing embarrassment of doomsayers who routinely predict planetary catastrophe.

It is a shame Simon, who died in February 1998 just a few days short of his 66th birthday, did not live longer to see more of his optimism come true.


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Jay Lehr ([...]) is science director for The Heartland Institute.

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Negative and disturbing news sells, but is it the truth? Frequently, news is positive when you look a long-term trends but positive news don't "sell newspapers". In a world filled with negative and disturbing news and events it's nice to come across uplifting and factual news. I hope that more Americans, overcome this morbid curiosity and start realizing that the world has lots of good news which is just not being reported due to fact that a lot of news doesn't have enough "shock factor" or enough "guts and glory" or "entertaining enough".

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Great book. Very encouraging. Silences all the negative doom and gloom reports
people can tend to feed on. It's a real education to see how much we have changed
in such a short time and how our quality of life has been so blessed.

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Potential readers of this book have a right to know that this book was not authored by Julian Lincoln Simon, as the title indicates. Rather, the book was authorized, or commissioned, by the late Professor Simon shortly before his lamentable death. Although Professor Simon did agree to collaborate with Mr. Moore on a book, and fully intended to write a book along these lines, and prepared some material for a possible use in a manuscript (and we have no way of knowing if any of this material was indeed used, and in what form), the final text is most likely not what Mr. Simon had in mind. After receiving permission from the Simon estate to go ahead with the project, Mr. Moore freely chose to engage in a comical sort of economic, environmental and social axe-grinding, as opposed to a balanced, well-reasoned exposition on some of the more remarkable trends in human history. A comparison of this text to any other book written by Dr. Simon while he was alive would demonstrate a difference as clear as night and day.

Now, let me be clear on what this book really is. The book's introduction, written by Mrs. Simon, contains the greatest amount of useful and objective information in the book, and it is where the truth about the contents of the book are told. As for the rest of the book, the motivation for and the assummptions underlying the text are explicitly stated and are as follows: big (and thus bad) government is bad and unnecessary, America's founding fathers are right about everything and are Great Thinkers, (high) taxes should be lowered (even if they are already low by comparison), all government regulation interferes unnecessarily with free enterprise, and freedom and democracy are things that everyone can take for granted. Therefore, in the service of these assumptions and motivations, the book suffers from a glaringly selective presentation of the 'facts'.

The text has many problems from the standpoints of content, presentation and point of view, and these problems are too numerous to fully explore here. Although Mr. Moore talks much about exploring the improvement of humanity's lot, virtually every single example of 'improvement' or 'progress' is from the American context, and from this, Mr. Moore would like us to believe that, via extrapolation, the improvements seen in America have also occurred, at about the same level, everywhere else in the world. This alone reveals a level of myopia and intellectual naivete that quite frankly is very unhealthy and dangerous. Mr. Moore would like us to believe that everyone lives like Americans do (or at least yearns to), even when overwhelming evidence shows this clearly not to be the case.

The text also employs some very bad intellectual sleights of hand, making the information in the text fall below that of even the minimum academic ethical standard. For example, in each of his 100 trends, operational definitions are not clearly and specifically established, and in some rather disturbing cases, only the data which will establish a clear upward or downward trend is presented, but the full range of data somehow do not find its way into the graph. Undergraduate-level mistakes in statistical analysis, such as presenting data in terms of number of incidences as opposed to rates (per capita) of incidences, comparing one snapshot under one condition in time to another snapshot under completely different conditions, and most important, the failure to adequately disclose underlying causes of phenomena before jumping to conclusions, abound in the text. Finally, if one merely played with the definitions, or simply played with the calculations for the statistics cited, as Mr. Moore has done, one could make the very same conclusions that Mr. Moore makes.

In particular, one blurb on Page 2 of the book brings home the misguided message and deeply malicious intellectual trickery of the book. Here, the author notes that according to an article in the Associated Press, which noted that one of the hottest selling grocery items in the year 2000 was gourmet pet food, and that one of the most challenging nutritional problems in America is obesity- not in people but in pets. The author uses this to demonstrate how affluent we Americans have become, and as a proxy, albeit a comical one, of (American) socio-economic improvement. Yet it also hammers home two disturbing and depressing points- a greater concern, matched with an extensive outlay, for pet health in America (even as one in three Americans go without adequate health coverage), and the truly depressing fact that pets in America receive better health care as a group than most human inhabitants of the planet- especially those of the third world. Examples like this do not adequately show 'progress' or 'improvement', and the author uses these and other equally egregious socio-economic snapshots and trends to pooh-pooh the notion that the situation in the world is very bad. Perversely, they demonstrate how grossly out of touch the author and many Americans have become with the state of most non-American humanity.

I believe the real title of this book should be: It's Getting Better FOR AMERICANS All The Time, as the biased examples of this book clearly demonstrate. Furthermore, as long as no one asks thorny questions such as: Which Americans? or Is it getting better for Americans on an equal basis? or It Is Getting For Americans, But At Whose Expense?, I expect the author to encounter few if any problems. For those readers having little or no background in basic statistics and no prior knowledge of the various topics in the book, I recommend that they read Damned Lies and Statistics by Joel Best for both clarification and enlightenment. Otherwise, given Mr. Moore's clear intention to distort issues, I fear that many gullible but inquisitive readers will be harmfully misled.

In sum, this book will appeal to those who would greatly prefer to have others do their thinking for them, and who need reassurance of their belief that everything is just fine in their little corner of the world. Given that we live in what one man called a Global Village, and given the inter-connectedness of political, social and economic activity in the modern Global Village, that a book like this of such dubious intellectual merit can be taken literally and seriously by many Americans truly boggles the mind.

God Help America.

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A reader from Great Falls is off base on "family income" as a measure of prosperity. "Household income" is another dubious measure. Over the last several decades, the average size of a family, and of a household, has steadily decreased. Several factors contribute to this decline, more frequent divorce, more independent elderly and children, etc. This decline makes average "family income" and "household income" very misleading measures of changing wealth, because these statistics measure the income of fewer and fewer people as time passes. "Household income" rose little between the seventies and mid-nineties for example, according to the Census Bureau's annual household survey, but individual income (per capita income) rose steadily in the same period. Not surprisingly, as people become wealthier, they choose to live more independently, in smaller groups. If we accept "family income" or "household income" as a measure of wealth, rather than per capita income, we're assuming that six people living in one house with an income of $50k are richer than six people living in two houses, each with three people earning $40k. Of course, this assumption is absurd.