Karl Popper warned, to seek in history, according to laws with which we accept and which we must take under. The future is open. But we can look back and ask ourselves how the development of the last centuries is lost. Although we can not conclude that it will always go on like this, we can draw from the past, but some of the Lessons. What has worked, what has not worked?
You can see the time runs differently, of course, suggest. Various currents of pessimism for the Future played an important role. Because of the culture of pessimism, the diagnosed with each new Generation, a more progressive decay of morals and the individual’s abilities. Because of the environmental pessimism that sees us for decades on the way in the environmental dystopia is. And because of the growth pessimism that expects innovation potential and joy are drying up and we will enter instead, in a stagnant world.
In recent years, some authors have taken a position against this pessimistic view of things. To mention Steven Pinker’s plea for enlightenment and progress, or Hans Roslings approach are, for example, positive developments in many areas of society, by means of a large wealth of data to make his readers feel almost tangible.
The world is better, the view of pessimistic
the Swedish idea historian Johan Norberg has tackled this topic in his now by Clemens Schneider, a German translation of the book of “progress”. In ten chapters, the focus from the food to social freedoms, on different topics, documented in Norberg, the developments of the last centuries. He argues that the long-term lines of development resulted in this period almost entirely to improvements. This is reflected but, as Norberg, not in the perception of many citizens, whose views of the world in the course of time more and more pessimistic it was.
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Norberg, it is possible to make long-term changes in the lives of people, plastically, by presenting data and stories together. Well-documented anecdotes and reports of contemporary witnesses about the life in front of two, three or four centuries, would be sufficient in itself to make attentive readers will notice how much more enjoyable life has become since then. Norberg leads its readers a unique insight into how far the largest part of the world has, in the meantime, the risk of absolute poverty is removed.
Informative and surprisingly
We know, however, is even more. The development that we have experienced since then, is not only on the basis of data, but also provides important milestones, such as key innovations, be recalled. Here is the book for Economists, the main business of Innovation and growth deal is still informative and sometimes surprising; the information about the actual productivity effects of innovation, which we use today, as a matter of course, are often remarkable.
A durable power of technological innovations, the rapid productivity and prosperity development, but even back conditions. For this purpose, a change of formal and informal institutions belonging to paint in a direction that promoted efficient use of resources. Here, too, the book provides an interesting historical case examples. In particular, those that illustrate that efficient institutional change was often the result of decentralized political and social Innovation. Small groups break existing, inefficient rules, and find, if you are successful, imitators, and political support.
