Summary: Throughout history, golden ages have emerged when societies embraced openness, curiosity, and innovation. In his book Peak Human, Johan Norberg explores how civilizations from Song China to the Dutch Republic rose through trade, intellectual freedom, and cultural exchange—only to decline when fear and control replaced dynamism. He warns that our current prosperity hinges not on external threats but on whether we choose to uphold or abandon the openness that made it possible.

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“Every act of major technological innovation … is an act of rebellion not just against conventional wisdom but against existing practices and vested interests,” says economic historian Joel Mokyr. He could have said the same about artistic, business, scientific, intellectual, and other forms of innovation.

Swedish scholar Johan Norberg’s timely new book—Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages—surveys historical episodes in which such acts of rebellion produced outstanding civilizations. He highlights what he calls “golden ages” or historical peaks of humanity ranging from ancient Athens and China under the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD) to the Dutch Republic of the 16th and 17th centuries and the current Anglosphere.

What qualifies as a golden age? According to Norberg, societies that are open, especially to trade, people, and intellectual exchange produce these remarkable periods. They are characterized by optimism, economic growth, and achievements in numerous fields that distinguish them from other contemporary societies.

The civilizations that created golden ages imitated and innovated. Ancient Rome appropriated and adapted Greek architecture and philosophy, but it was also relatively inclusive of immigrants and outsiders: being Roman was a political identity, not an ethnic one. The Abbasid Caliphate that began more than a thousand years ago was the most prosperous place in the world. It located its capital, Baghdad, at the “center of the universe” and from there promoted intellectual tolerance, knowledge, and free trade to produce a flourishing of science, knowledge, and the arts that subsequent civilizations built upon.

China under the Song dynasty was especially impressive. “No classic civilization came as close to unleashing an industrial revolution and creating the modern world as Song China,” writes Norberg.

But that episode, like others in the past, did not last: “All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment,’” Norberg observes, “when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange and abandoned curiosity for control.”

The status quo is always threatening: the “Elites who have benefited enough from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them,” while “groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy.” Renaissance Italy, for example, came to an end when Protestants and Catholics of the Counter-Reformation clashed and allied themselves with their respective states, thus facilitating repression.

Today we are living in a golden age that has its origins in 17th-century England, which in turn drew from the golden age of the Dutch Republic. It was in 18th-century England that the Industrial Revolution began, producing an explosion of wealth and an escape from mass poverty in much of Western Europe and its offshoots like the United States.

And it was the United States that, since the last century, has served as the backbone of an international system based on openness and the principles that produced the Anglosphere’s success. As such, most of the world is participating in the current golden age, one of unprecedented global improvements in income and well-being.

Donald Trump says he wants to usher in a golden age and appeals to a supposedly better past in the United States. To achieve his goal, he says the United States does not need other countries and that the protectionism he is imposing on the world is necessary.

Trump has not learned the lessons of Norberg’s book. One of the most important is that the factors that determine the continuation of a golden age are not external, such as a pandemic or a supposed clash of civilizations. Rather, says Norberg, the critical factor is how each civilization deals with its own internal clashes, and the decision to remain or not at a historical peak.

A Spanish-language version of this article was published by El Comercio in Peru on 5/6/2025.

Summary: The belief that economic growth is unsustainable has long been challenged by the history of human ingenuity. From Malthus’s failed predictions of famine to Julian Simon’s wager demonstrating resource abundance, evidence consistently shows that technological progress allows us to produce more with less. While climate change presents a genuine challenge, continued growth remains the most effective means of addressing environmental concerns while improving global prosperity.

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“We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Or so claims Sir David Attenborough, a non-economist (or, as one of my friend’s economics professors refers to them, a muggle).

The madmen and economists, however, have economic history on their side—along with a litany of failed predictions of eco-catastrophe and a better understanding of what economic growth actually entails. 

The continued progress of humanity depends on these optimists winning the debate in the public square.

The Malthusian Fallacy

The idea that we live on a finite planet on the brink of collapse dates back to at least 1798. Thomas Malthus, an English preacher and economist, famously predicted an impending famine. The population was growing at an exponential or compounding rate; the food supply had historically grown at a linear or constant rate. One plus one equals starvation. The only solution, he argued, was moral restraint—people needed to suppress their natural urges and refrain from having children to save the planet. Sound familiar?

Malthus’s theory had two shortcomings: he failed to anticipate the sudden rise in health and material living standards enabled by factors such as the Agricultural Revolution, the mechanization and energy efficiencies of the Industrial Revolution, and major public health investments during the 19th century. He also didn’t foresee the advent of effective birth control in the latter half of the 20th century. While we can hardly blame Malthus for these oversights, his intellectual descendants would make similarly catastrophic predictions despite witnessing these very developments.

Perhaps the most striking example is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Its opening declaration was apocalyptic: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” This prediction proved dramatically wrong as agricultural productivity soared and population growth began to slow. In fact, the average population weighted food supply per person has increased from 2,196 in 1961 to 2,962 in 2017.

Ehrlich’s predictions faced an even more direct challenge in 1980 when economist Julian Simon wagered that any five metals of Ehrlich’s choosing would be cheaper in real terms a decade later. Simon won decisively as the average inflation-adjusted price of the metals fell 36 percent despite a nearly twenty percent increase in the global population.

The Simon Solution

In honor of the great economist, the Human Progress team at the Cato Institute has created the Simon Abundance Index, which measures the abundance of fifty commodities across food, energy, natural resources, and other categories. Their research reveals these commodities have become 509.4 percent more abundant. Meanwhile, their “time prices”—work hours needed for an average worker to afford them—have fallen by 70.4 percent.

This seeming paradox is explained by human ingenuity: each new person brings not just another mouth to feed but another mind to solve problems. Thus, attempts to limit population growth to save the planet are self-defeating—they reduce humanity’s capacity to innovate and develop solutions to environmental challenges.

No one better demonstrates this principle than Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. His development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties saved over a billion people from starvation. These innovations also limited the need for ever-increasing farmland, leaving more room for nature. Had Borlaug never been born, the world’s food and land supplies would have been less, not more, abundant.

Borlaug’s legacy points to a broader truth: geniuses like him are rare yet play an outsized role in humanity’s progress across a variety of domains, from health and science to freedom and prosperity. More people equals more geniuses and more progress. Fewer people mean the opposite. Increasing fertility rates is thus one of the defining issues of our time. A world with fewer people is one with fewer Borlaugs, fewer Einsteins, and fewer minds to tackle humanity’s most pressing challenges.

The Case for Growth

And economic growth isn’t a sign of reckless decadence—it’s a measure of our progress. Growth enlarges the pie and enables humanity to produce more with less.

The historical record powerfully vindicates this view. As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey documents, average living standards remained stagnant for most of human history until increasing sixteenfold over the past two hundred years. The rise of liberal institutions and ideas allowed humanity to become far more productive with the same natural resources and constraints faced by past generations.

Even more remarkably, as MIT economist Andrew McAfee highlights in “More From Less,” we’re now experiencing widespread “dematerialization”—achieving greater material prosperity while reducing resource consumption. Of the 72 resources tracked by the U.S. Geological Survey, 66 have peaked and are declining in use. We’re creating more wealth while leaving a lighter footprint on the planet.

Climate Change

Unlike fears of overpopulation and resource depletion, climate change presents a genuine threat that demands serious attention. The Industrial Revolution and the economic rise of developing nations have increased carbon emissions and global temperatures. This warming will lead to more frequent and severe natural disasters, rising sea levels, and disrupted ecosystems in the medium to long term.

Yet this same industrialization has achieved something remarkable: lifting billions out of grinding poverty. This historic triumph deserves celebration, even as we grapple with its environmental costs.

While the environmental movement rightly acknowledges the threats posed by climate change (though their predictions of imminent human extinction echo the discredited catastrophism of Malthus and Ehrlich), they often forget a crucial truth: growth is good.

Growth is also Green

Growth elevates humanity. Growth creates problems that need solving. Growth also provides the means to solve these problems through technology and innovation.

Green energy, adaptation, and potentially even bioengineering will all play roles in addressing climate change, but these solutions depend on growing wealth. As Maslow teaches, people have a hierarchy of needs. If people’s basic needs aren’t met, they can’t progress to addressing higher-level challenges.

We’ve already seen economic growth decouple from carbon emissions in 33 developed economies. This process validates economist Simon Kuznets’s insight about how countries initially increase pollution as they develop but then reduce emissions as they adopt greener technologies and take action to protect the environment. Our task now is to accelerate this environmental decoupling in wealthy nations while helping developing nations catch up economically.

Innovation Without Limits

Rather than viewing human progress and environmental stewardship as opposing forces, we should recognize them as complementary goals achievable through continued innovation and economic development.

The evidence is clear: human ingenuity, when coupled with economic freedom and technological advancement, has consistently overcome environmental constraints while improving living standards. Our challenge isn’t to limit growth or population but to foster conditions that allow human creativity and enterprise to flourish. 

Far from being madmen, those who believe in humanity’s capacity for infinite growth understand a fundamental truth: our greatest resource isn’t the finite materials beneath our feet, but the infinite potential of the human mind.

Summary: When facing climate change and other sources of environmental danger today, humans instinctively favor social restraint over technological ambition. Our evolutionary psychology, cognitive biases, and moral framing have led us to distrust the very tools most likely to secure a sustainable and prosperous future.

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The history of human flourishing is a story of technological progress. From the taming of fire to the Industrial Revolution, our species has found ways to reshape the world, turning scarcity into abundance and hardship into comfort. Yet, when it comes to some of today’s concerns—climate change, food security, deforestation—the instinctive response is rarely technological optimism. Instead, the prevailing narrative emphasises social change: reducing consumption, altering human behaviour, and enforcing collective restraint.

Why do so many people reflexively favour social solutions—carbon taxes, regulations, lifestyle changes—while discounting the promise of technological breakthroughs? The answer lies in our evolutionary past and in the way our minds have been shaped to solve problems. As psychologist William von Hippel has noted, humans evolved for social solutions rather than technological ones. That cognitive legacy continues to influence how we approach modern challenges, often leading us to dismiss the very innovations that could provide scalable, lasting solutions.

For most of our history, human survival depended less on technological ingenuity and more on cooperation and social cohesion. Our ancestors did not invent their way out of problems; they solved them through alliances, negotiations, and collective rulemaking. Food shortages, for instance, were addressed not by developing advanced agricultural techniques—those came much later—but by rationing resources, redistributing wealth within the tribe, and reinforcing norms against hoarding.

This survival strategy shaped our psychology. Over generations, humans became attuned to social fixes as the primary way to navigate crises. We evolved to seek consensus, enforce norms, and reward conformity—traits that helped small groups function efficiently in an unpredictable environment. As a result, when confronted with modern challenges, we instinctively default to social regulation over technological adaptation.

Today, this bias manifests in the way we talk about, for example, climate change. The dominant discourse does not emphasise nuclear fusion, carbon capture, or geoengineering, despite their potential to dramatically cut emissions. Instead, we hear calls for people to consume less, fly less, drive less, eat differently—as though the best way to tackle a global problem is through personal sacrifice. This isn’t a rational economic approach; it’s a deeply ingrained cognitive reflex.

Beyond evolutionary psychology, several well-documented cognitive biases reinforce our scepticism toward technological solutions. One of the most powerful is negativity bias, the tendency to focus more on potential downsides than on possible benefits. Innovations—especially large-scale ones like nuclear power or geoengineering—are often accompanied by uncertainties. A nuclear plant meltdown is a vivid disaster; the slow, cumulative benefits of abundant clean energy are far less emotionally gripping.

Similarly, the availability heuristic skews our perception of risk. When we think about environmental disasters, we can readily picture hurricanes, wildfires, and melting ice caps because they dominate the news cycle. But few can just as easily imagine the gradual improvement of solar efficiency, battery storage, or direct air capture technologies, even though these developments are advancing every year. The more available a mental image is, the more likely we are to see it as relevant. Since climate catastrophes are widely publicised while technological progress happens quietly, we develop a distorted sense of urgency and inevitability.

Then there’s linear thinking, the assumption that current trends will continue indefinitely. If emissions are rising and temperatures are increasing, many assume the trajectory will continue unchecked—unless human behaviour radically changes. What this ignores is the power of nonlinear technological breakthroughs to disrupt trends entirely. Few in 1970 predicted that agricultural innovation would allow us to feed four billion more people than seemed possible at the time. Similarly, few today can conceive of how energy revolutions might render current emissions concerns obsolete.

Another reason technological solutions struggle for mainstream acceptance is that moral frameworks dominate the climate debate. The prevailing rhetoric paints fossil fuel consumption as a sin, framing climate action as an ethical obligation rather than an engineering challenge. The underlying assumption is that suffering is virtuous—that real change requires sacrifice, restraint, and a return to a simpler way of living.

This moral framing naturally privileges social solutions over technological ones. Cutting emissions through sacrifice feels righteous; solving the problem through innovation seems like cheating. But history shows that progress has always come from overcoming limitations, not submitting to them. Fewer people today still argue that the solution to food insecurity is simply to eat less; yet many advocate that the best way to combat climate change is to consume less energy rather than produce it more cleanly.

This view is not only misguided but actively harmful. By demonising industry and technology, we risk stifling the very innovations that could ensure prosperity while reducing environmental impact. We should not ask, “How can we get people to use less energy?” but rather, “How can we produce abundant, clean energy?” We should focus not on curbing human ambition, but on directing it toward better outcomes.

The tendency to discount innovation is not new. Time and again, humanity has misjudged its own capacity for problem-solving. In the nineteenth century, urban planners feared cities would collapse under the burden of horse manure, failing to anticipate the automobile. In the 1960s, experts predicted mass starvation due to overpopulation, not foreseeing the Green Revolution, which vastly increased crop yields.

Even within the energy sector, past environmental concerns have been rendered irrelevant by technology. The deforestation crisis of the nineteenth century—caused by the need for wood as fuel—was solved not by conservation, but by the discovery of coal and oil. Today’s fear that renewables can never scale ignores the potential of next-generation batteries, advanced nuclear, and synthetic fuels to transform the landscape.

If history teaches us anything, it is that human ingenuity consistently outperforms doomsday predictions. That does not mean we should ignore environmental challenges. It means we should approach them with the mindset that has served us best—problem-solving through innovation, not retreat.

Climate change and other environmental concerns can be challenging, but they are not insurmountable. The solution is not to limit prosperity, but to decouple it from environmental harm through better technologies. Energy abundance, clean industry, and new materials are the future—not austerity, restriction, and economic regression.

Recognising the psychological roots of our bias against technological solutions is the first step toward overcoming it. The next step is to embrace a rational optimism—one that acknowledges risk while also investing in the solutions that history shows will prevail. The world has never been saved by fear, but it has been saved—again and again—by human ingenuity.

This article was published in Quillette on 4/8/2025.

“Indonesia is at a pivotal moment in its digital transformation. With over 280 million people spread across 17,504 islands and over 180 million smartphones, connectivity has never been higher.

Internet penetration approached 79% in 2024, reflecting the nation’s swift embrace of online platforms. Only a decade ago, nearly half of Indonesia’s adult population remained unbanked. Thanks to rapid advancements in financial technology, the financial inclusion index has climbed to almost 84%. Had AI been as pervasive 10 years ago, this transformation could have been even faster.

Though digital adoption is a global trend, Indonesia’s trajectory is distinct, shaped by supportive government policies, a vibrant fintech sector and a surging digital economy.

Over the past decade, these factors have converged to accelerate financial inclusion – from 49% in 2014 to around 83% in 2023. This remarkable leap is equivalent to adding the population of Switzerland seven times to Indonesia’s banking system.”

From World Economic Forum.