“The Good Ole Days” Is A Lie

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Speaker 1: This is Our American Stories, and up next, the story on the human story: how humanity has suffered and thrived over decades, centuries, and millennia. Here’s our own Alex Cortez to bring us this story.

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Speaker 2: I used to believe in the good old days. I used to believe that the world was kind of an awful place.

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Speaker 3: You’re listening to a guy named Johann Norberg, the author of a book titled “Progress.”

00:00:47
Speaker 2: Looking at big business, looking at polluting factories, thinking that there has to be another way. There has to be good old days, back in the past, where we lived more in harmony with one another and with nature. And when I began looking for that, when I began looking at history specifically, and the history of my own ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that that was all a lie. In the late 1870s, there was a major crop failure in northern Sweden, where my ancestors lived. My great great great great grandfather Eric Norberg and his family were there trying to deal with the problems. He tried to smuggle in bags of wheat flour from southern Sweden. The trade wasn’t open yet. There were still major difficulties in trying to

00:01:48
Speaker 4: supply for people with this.

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Speaker 2: But when people look at their family trees at that time, young Swedes will look at their family history, they see that it’s

00:01:56
Speaker 4: been cut off, many of the branches.

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Speaker 2: Around 1868, 1869, 1870, because of this major crop failure, it was; there were famine years. Crops had failed everywhere in the country, and obviously, it was worse in the coldest northern parts. Those who were short of flour had to mix bark into their bread to make it go longer. And one man in a neighboring parish recalled his personal experience when he was seven years old, of those hungry years, and he said that, “We often saw Mother weeping to herself, and was hard on a mother not having any food to put on the table for her hungry children.” Emaciated, starving children were often seen going from farm to farm begging for a few crumbs of bread. One day, three children came to us crying and begging for something to still the pangs of hunger. Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother was forced to tell them that we had nothing but few crumbs of bread, which we ourselves needed. And when we children saw the anguish in the unknown children’s eyes, we burst into tears and begged Mother to share with them what crumbs we had. Hesitantly, she acceded to our request, and the unknown children just ate everything before going on to the next farm immediately. And this was a good way off from our home, and the following day, all three children were found dead between our farm and the next.

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Speaker 4: It’s a pretty awful story.

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Speaker 2: Well, you know, where would I have been back in those good old days? Well, I wouldn’t have been anywhere, because life expectancy was shorter than 30 years and I’m older than that now.

00:03:46
Speaker 4: So it used to.

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Speaker 2: Be that we all suffered from chronic undernourishment. It was basically 100% except a tiny, tiny elite in even our part of the world. In Europe and America, most people live with famine as a universal phenomenon. The moment there was bad weather, there was a crop failure, and people stopped. Even in the richest countries of Europe, as late as the 17th and 18th and even the 19th century, there were widespread local famines. They didn’t have modern agricultural technology; they didn’t have trade, they didn’t have infrastructure, railways, trucks that could bring food into the areas that needed it. So, bad weather was a death sentence to a lot of people. Things were far worse in poorer countries in Asia: in China and India. Even in the 20th century, bad harvests resulted in major disasters. And this is something that, specifically, artificial fertilizer increased yields that dramatically. But more than that, just having modern infrastructure and trade makes it possible to bring

00:05:10
Speaker 4: food to places with food deficiency.

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Speaker 2: Nowadays, it’s come down so incredibly rapidly. In the 1940s, it has been estimated that every second person on the planet suffered from chronic undernourishment.

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Speaker 4: It’s not just that they

00:05:28
Speaker 2: suffered from a famine now and then, but constant chronic undernourishment forced me to reconsider many of the things that I took for granted, that many of the things that I used to complain about were really the things that saved the lives of my ancestors and made it possible for me to be here.

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Speaker 3: In fact, technological innovation was so impactful that some worried that it was too impactful, that it led to too many humans and more than this Earth could provide for.

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Speaker 2: If I were to mention someone, it is Julian Simon, the grand old man of development optimism, the economist who explained in the 1960s and 70s, when everybody was saying that overpopulation would lead to starvation even in the United States and in Europe in the longer run, he told people to have a little bit more of trust in people, in the average human being, because that’s the ultimate resource, not the resources that we have in the ground or in our mountains.

00:06:32
Speaker 4: It’s human ingenuity.

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Speaker 2: It’s humans who create progress by imagining new things, experimenting with new ideas, and experimenting then with technology and business models to produce more things. Look, the problem is not too many people, because human beings are the ultimate resource.

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Speaker 4: They are the most important ones.

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Speaker 2: The more people, the more eyeballs who look at our problems, and the greater the chance that one of them will come up with a great idea that we can all imitate and therefore continue to make progress. And that had a profound effect on me because I used to think that more people would mean more destruction, using more resources and taking it out of the ground and ruining the planet. Whereas no, they’ll come up with better ways of conserving resources as well and recycling them and using substitutes for it, and therefore, in the long run, reach a state where we create more wealth with fewer resources.

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Speaker 3: And on March 14, 1914, a little boy named Norman Borlaug was born, who was just another Iowan to most folks. But who would turn out to be this ultimate resource?

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Speaker 2: You know, if we had a contest and trying to come up with the greatest person in history, who saved the most lives in history, we would, Norman Borlaug would make the final list because he was, to many people, an unknown person, but he probably has saved the lives of perhaps a billion people around the world.

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Speaker 1: And when we come back, we’ll hear more of the story of the incredible Norman Borlaug. And it’s so true. Bad weather, bad harvest is throughout the centuries. Right up until the 19th century, the middle of it, and even the early 20th century were death sentences. And my goodness, what free trade, artificial fertilizer, and of course, energy itself—electricity—have done, and irrigation systems! These are things, but we have to be taught in schools as we contextualize all of our discussions about almost everything. And that’s what we try and do here on this show: tell these stories. You’ve been listening to Johann Norberg, a senior fellow at the Washington D.C. think, the Cato Institute, an author of the book “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,” which, by the way, you can pick up at Amazon.com or, heck, even a bookstore if you care to. And when we come back, we’ll continue with the story of Norman Borlaug, who saved possibly up to a billion people with his efforts and with his ideas. More of all this here on Our American Stories. And we continue here with Our American Stories, and with Johann Norberg telling the story of Norman Borlaug, an Iowan who was passionate about eradicating world hunger.

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Speaker 2: And rather than complaining about it, talking about it, he did something about it.

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Speaker 4: He had the idea that

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Speaker 2: the only thing that can deal with this is higher yields, more agricultural productivity. So he tried to come up with better high-yield crops, and he did thousands of crossings of wheat—that’s where he started—and he came up with a high-yielding new breed that resisted many pests and was not sensitive to the number of hours of light, so they could be grown in many more climates and, importantly, was also of a dwarf variety, since wheat with tall, thin stalks expend too much energy growing just inedible sections, and they also collapsed when they grew too quickly. So he had this new crop, and he wanted to expand this, taught farmers how to use it, and he also showed them how modern irrigation and artificial fertilizer could increase the yields, and this was the beginning of the Green Revolution that saved the lives of hundreds of millions. He introduced this quickly in Mexico in the 1960s, and amazingly, in a very short time, their harvest was six times larger because they used this new crop variety on the new agricultural methods. But my favorite part of the story was Norman Borlaug’s obsession with making sure that more people around the world got access to this Green Revolution. In the early 1960s, India and Pakistan faced an acute risk of massive starvation, and everybody thought that millions and millions of people would die. So he thought we had to go there immediately. So he sent 35 trucks with these high-yield seeds from Mexico to Los Angeles to ship them there. And he faced so many obstacles. His persistence was just amazing. The convoy was held up by Mexican police, and then it was blocked at the U.S. border because they had a ban on seeds. But then, when he managed to get through that, he was stopped by the National Guard because there were riots blocking the harbor. He managed to deal with it all, and in the end, the ship sailed away, and he got there to India and Pakistan. He tells the story about how he went to bed thinking the problem was at

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Speaker 4: last solved, but then Borlaug woke up

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Speaker 2: to the news that war had broken out between India and Pakistan. But not even that stopped him and his team. So instead, they worked tirelessly throughout the war, and they planted the seeds, sometimes within sight

00:12:41
Speaker 4: of artillery flashes.

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Speaker 2: And this is really how you have to decide where to look. If you look at the politics, the governments, the guns and the thunder, you become miserable. But if you look at the background, what goes on on the ground, lots of hard work by scientists and engineers and farmers.

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Speaker 4: And they managed to do this while war was going on.

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Speaker 2: And despite late planning and all these problems, yields rose 70%, enough to prevent a general wartime famine. They even had problems with finding bags and railcars just to store all the crops, all the harvest. And some school buildings even had to be closed temporarily so that they could be used for grain storage. So, in just a few years, India and Pakistan, that had been written off by others—environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich had said that we just have to forget about India and Pakistan. They will all die because it’s impossible to supply them with enough food. Well, in just a matter of a few years, Norman Borlaug and his team managed to help them to become self-sufficient in the production of cereals. And if that’s not a true hero, I don’t know who is. And one of the last things that he did was that he talked a lot about the problems in Africa, because the problem was that the Green Revolution wasn’t repeated in Africa. The big foundations who used to support his work—the Ford and Rockefeller Foundation—they began to be a bit more skeptical, and so was the World Bank. Because environmentalists, they weren’t that eager on artificial fertilizer and modern agricultural technologies. So the number of undernourished continued to grow. They kept destroying wild habitats with slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture, and this really made Borlaug angry.

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Speaker 3: And Johann now reads Borlaug’s intense response.

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Speaker 2: “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.” They might not be romantic, artificial fertilizers, but they save hundreds of millions of lives. So, could genetically modified crops that could increase yields even more? And Borlaug was very angry with Western lobbyists who tried to scare African countries away from doing that, and on his deathbed, he said that, “Look, his work is not done until these technologies could also be implemented in Africa.” You know, people have always been innovative and hard-working, and in every historical era and in every geographical area, they are. But that doesn’t help much. If the rulers can do anything. If someone who comes up with new solutions, new production creates wealth, if the ruler or his uncle or second cousin can just move in and take all of it away from them, and

00:16:34
Speaker 4: can change the rules immediately, nothing much happens.

00:16:40
Speaker 2: Then they have to work hard just to get around that kind of abuse of power and the kind of corruption that this entails. The thing that changed and made everything happen in basically the last 200 years, starting in the Western world,

00:16:57
Speaker 4: was the start of rule of law.

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Speaker 2: Because until then, why work hard? Why invest in the future? Why invest in, for example, better agricultural technologies, invest in a new irrigation system, or new high-yielding crops if someone else can just steal your land, if the rules suddenly changed so that you’re suddenly banned from using it? In this way, the rule of law means that we’re not governed by men. We’re not governed by individuals who can constantly change their minds. Governed by a system of laws, of principles. That makes the future a little bit more foreseeable.

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Speaker 4: It’s more predictable.

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Speaker 2: You know what kind of rules will be there in the longer term, and therefore, you also begin to think more long-term and you can do something about it.

00:17:53
Speaker 4: I remember a story

00:17:54
Speaker 2: from an African slum that I visited in, in Kenya, where the saying was that it’s not safe to carry cash around in the slums because there are too many policemen.

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Speaker 4: They can tell you that you don’t

00:18:21
Speaker 2: have a license for this, or that you’re not allowed to go here or there. They could make up rules on the fly, and in that case, nobody’s safe. The government is always a dangerous thing because it’s based on violence, and we constantly have to keep that under control. That hasn’t been the case historically. Rulers, empress kings, and princes. They decide whatever they like. The aristocrats could do anything to people, to the peasants, and to their subjects. And in that case, you only have to do whatever you can to survive in the short term, because the long term, you don’t know anything about it. Starting in Western Europe in the 18th century and onwards, and then in America, we began to subject the government to the rule of law, and that set off an explosion of long-term thinking, of imagination, of innovation.

00:19:23
Speaker 4: People suddenly devoting

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Speaker 2: their lives and investing everything they had in a longer-term prospect because they knew that if they managed to succeed, the chance might be small, but if they did, they would get rich and change the world.

00:19:41
Speaker 4: And that changed the world.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: That really saved our civilization, made it possible for us to live the kind of lives that we do now.

00:19:54
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Johann Norberg, a senior fellow at the Washington D.C. think, the Cato Institute, an author of the book “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,” which you can pick up at Amazon.com. Johann Norberg, his story about progress, here on Our American Stories.