The Spectator podcast interviews Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomborg. At a mere 20 minutes, it might seem a bit of a missed opportunity, but it’s very focused and at the end it’s revealed that it’s only the first part in a series of Spectator podcasts with Lord Ridley and Lomborg.
Additions: part two and part three of this mini-series of podcasts.
Welcome. This is a late ‘lazy August’ edition of my newsletter. I offer the usual round-up of the past week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to insightful discussions of optimism and pessimism.
* With UK help, “Wild polio disease has officially been wiped out in Africa”.
* National Geographic magazine details how “The North Aral Sea Teems With Fish Thanks to Restoration Projects”. The Aral had been all but destroyed by socialism, something which also caused severe human health problems throughout its surrounding region.
* The authors of a new science paper “Hurricane trend detection” looked at over 167 years of available observation data for Atlantic and US landfall hurricanes, as well as cyclone energy across the USA. It’s getting worse, right? Er, no. They found that… “Atlantic basin all storms and major storms (1950–2018) did not exhibit any trend over the whole period or after 1990. … Storm energy data 1900–2018 over land were also analyzed. The trend was again zero.”
* Global wildfire, getting worse? Er, no. “Building a Long-Term Record of Fire at NASA’s Earth Observatory”… “One of the most interesting things researchers have discovered [is that global fire] has dropped by roughly 25 percent” between 2003-2019. And this is even better, when you consider that global greening has produced +30% more biomass that might potentially burn each year in dry seasons. Partly the global decline in wildfire is thought to be due to the conversion of lands to productive farmland, and partly because machines can now efficiently do the work of fire in cleaning land of invasive scrub and weeds.
* The Institute for the Future has a new near-future report on The Hyperconnected World said to be coming with ever faster connectivity. The latest edition of the leading PC Pro magazine is more pessimistic about the practicalities, with the editorial and articles throughout the magazine having a very strong tilt against the current crop of ‘Cloud software’ services as being simply unreliable and unfit for business use.
* Briefing for Britain suggests that… “The Covid Doomsters Are Wrong: the UK is heading for recovery”.
* Cato offers “Some Reasons for Optimism Regarding the “Hollowing Out” of America’s Middle Class”… “New research … calls this narrative into question [as it finds that] America’s middle class is indeed getting smaller, but it is primarily because Americans are moving up the economic ladder” and getting richer.
* Through January 2020, President Trump’s economy “had created 7.3 million jobs”, Admittedly he was elected just when things were already starting to improve a little, but his recent jobs growth was undeniably spectacular for month after month. It’s hard to imagine that would have happened without President Trump. Tax cuts are now planned to help with the current crisis, which appears to be hitting ‘bricks and mortar’ retail especially hard — a rescue package appears to have been stalled by Washington bickering, and the retail layoffs are now coming thick and fast.
* The Roots of Progress muses on “Why haven’t we celebrated any major achievements lately?”. The achievements are still happening, and many quite big ones are likely coming, but these are no longer being celebrated in a big public way.
* Malaysia appears to be having a serious crackdown on the wildlife trade, although there are doubts that it will touch the ‘kingpin’ crime-lords.
* In the USA, “Wolverines return to Mount Rainier National Park after more than 100 years”.
* And finally, in the UK seven more white-tailed eagles have been released into the wild. They join six such eagles released last year, part of a five-year project to re-introduce the birds to British skies.
Enjoyed this post? There’s more at the ‘Something for the Weekend’ newsletter archive.
Welcome. This is another edition of my newsletter offering a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to discussion of optimism and pessimism.
* A major new review of insect life has reported. Teams of researchers examined over 5,000 datasets on insect populations at National Science Foundation monitoring sites across North America. What did 40 years of data show? Essentially: no change in population sizes was found, and the “vast majority” of sites had stable populations.
* National Geographic report strong evidence that shark life is rebounding in the waters of New England, and that “Great white sharks are venturing to Maine and beyond”… ““It was eye-opening that we had a big, 14-foot white shark swimming in Massachusetts waters”.
* A new paper finds that “The incidence rate of dementia in Europe and North America has declined by 13% per decade over the past 25 years, consistently across studies. Incidence is similar for men and women, although declines were somewhat more profound in men.” As to causes, the papers suggests a range of health measures could have led to “cumulative substantial effects on brain health”, and that various forms of learning stimulation may also have contributed to keeping receptive brains ‘fresh’.
* In Forbes at the end of July, “Anyone Who Doesn’t Know The Following Facts About Capitalism Should Learn Them”, this being a rather mis-titled 2020 review of Johan Norberg’s book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016)… “Capitalism is not the problem, as anti-capitalists tell us. In fact, it is capitalism that has very successfully solved many of the world’s most serious problems over the last two centuries.”
* The lockdown is likely to have a positive effect on food supply resilience here in the UK. A new UK industry-approved consultancy report Fixing the Future of Food, suggests practical measures such as: i) improving some of the older and more cramped manufacturing facilities, so that workers can ‘social distance’; ii) better align and “re-localise” retail, hospitality and food-service chains, so that food can be re-directed more easily in emergencies; and iii) adapt food production for more direct-to-consumer and online retail.
* The Spectator succinctly debunks optimism for ‘bias training’, in an article this week titled “The dangers of unconscious bias training”… “Employers know it doesn’t work, so why do they insist on using it? … when it became clear that the [1998] IAT was being used for a purpose for which it was not designed, Tony Greenwald, one of the academics who co-created the test, spoke out against its use as a test for bias, saying that IAT is only ‘good for predicting individual behaviour in the aggregate, and the correlations are small’. But that didn’t stop a cottage industry of unconscious bias testing and training from springing up, and finding willing customers in corporations looking for a quick fix for accusations of racism. … The IAT is reliable about 50 per cent of the time, which is so far away from any degree of [scientific] reproducibility as to discredit it.” And that’s when it’s properly administered, in a calm non-accusatory environment where jobs are not at stake.
* There’s a long and perceptive article by Theodore Dalrymple in the latest New Criterion, on “The choleric outbreak” of inchoate fury loosed by alarmism and pessimism… “It sometimes seems as if we live in an atmosphere in which we inhale fury and exhale outrage … Why should this be? We are, in many respects, the most fortunate people who have ever existed — not that many people know this.”
* And finally, “Kenya’s Elephant Population Has Doubled Over Last Three Decades”. Ivory poaching for the Chinese market has been “tamed” in Kenya over these decades say ministers, and Kenya’s President has recently… “introduced longer jail terms and heftier fines for those caught engaging in poaching or trafficking animals.”
Enjoyed this post? There’s more at the ‘Something for the Weekend’ newsletter archive.
An optimistic suggestion in the The Wall Street Journal “It’s Time To Revive The Anglosphere” says the historian Andrew Roberts. It never went away, informally and in terms of “soft power”, but what he’s talking about is a far tighter, organised bloc working at a variety of integrated levels.
Nice idea, but awful name. He suggests we call a union of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand the “CANZUK Union”. Presumably thus would then be pronounced with great venom by other nations as “Can Suck”, with its unfortunate slang connotations and also its close similarity in pronunciation to the word “cancer”. “Union” also has ugly connotations under the surface, being a word long sullied by bolshy trades-unions and the EU.
The upbeat BRITZCAN would be best but would be rejected by those outside the UK as putting “Brit” first and thus implying superiority. ENGBLOC sounds too Stalinist, like something out of Orwell’s novel 1984. It probably needs something else. How about just the mellifluous… “Anglosphere”?
Johan Norberg fisks a “stunningly false and deceptive” New York Times review of his book.
20/20 : Tracking Optimism 