Progress - Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Johan Norberg's message is simple: Things are much better than you think. So stop worrying and get back to making things even better still. This is a popularisation of the similar but more academic line that the (uncredited) economist Deirdre McCloskey has been promoting for the last decade. While Norberg's emphasis is on technology, and McCloskey's is on the generative ideas for technology, they are at one in a celebration of middle-class living and its prospects.

It had to come didn't it? A movement of factually based optimism. Journalists are paid to dig out things that alarm us. Economists and other social scientists are paid to solve the problems that journalists create. The more complex the problems, the more the further potential for journalistic investigation. It's the downside of the infinite interpretability of narrative. Norberg and McCloskey are making a bid to fill the market gap and stop the downward slide.

There's just room in this complex for a niche-marketing project to re-establish bourgeois calm and get them back to what they do best: running things for the rest of us. The sub-text of Progress is quite clear about that. The progress evident in every realm of human endeavour from sanitation to civil rights has been achieved quite independently of politics. The only things to be avoided like the plague, largely because it is a plague, is war; that and the Green fanatics who don't like GM crops. Restrain the war-lords and the neo-hippie enthusiasts and sane, well-tested liberal values will take care of the rest.

Scientists and entrepreneurs are the source of our well-being. They will continue to feed the world, to keep it clean, literate, and safe. We cannot be complacent however. The underlying enemy, aside from journalists, are "superstition and bureaucracy." These are the hidden forces behind anti-globalisation, the reduction in government-sponsored science, inadequate technical education and the bad-mouthing of hard-working scientists and entrepreneurs.

Sounds like Donald Trump has his international spokesman. Oh, I forgot, Trump's anti-globalisation, anti-science, and anti-education. And McCloskey's transgender status doesn't sit well with Republicans. But Trump does like entrepreneurial types and he's not afraid of a little contradictory policy-making. So he might just take these guys on.

Postscript: there is a very serious reason to question not just the statistics but the moral intention of people like Norberg and McCloskey. They both provide bourgeois propaganda which is meant to hide the existence of a permanent under-culture. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews