The New Year threatens most of humanity with increased prosperity, good health and benign weather.
The last half century has seen an improvement in human well-being unprecedented in the last 200 000 years (the life of Homo sapiens), and this looks likely to continue. Some rich people in the West are horrified. Their spokeswoman is Greta Thunberg, one of the most privileged teenagers in history, who cried out to world leaders at the United Nations, ‘You have stolen my dreams!’
Poor little rich Greta! Her dreams of apocalypse have been dashed by rising wealth and an improving environment. To be fair to her, her dreams of doom are usual among pampered Western teenagers who have never known hardship. During the 1960s, an era of then unprecedented prosperity, rich teenagers loved getting suicidal over songs like ‘Eve of Destruction’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. It is not just spoilt children who like impending doom. Many rich adults do, too, and take comfort in thinking there are bad times ahead. They are mortified when you tell them everything is going to be fine.
Matt Ridley, author of ‘The Rational Optimist’, has just written an article saying that the last ten years have been ‘Humanity’s Best Decade Yet’, with wealth increased worldwide, extreme poverty halved, infant mortality reduced, life expectancy increased and weather-related deaths decreased. He might have added the best food crops in history and a greening of the Earth, thanks to increased CO2 (which has had no observable effect on the climate).
The main reason for the benign weather seems to be solar activity, over which we have no control. (Unfortunately, the Sun has now gone quiet; let’s hope she resumes activity.) The reasons for increased prosperity are advancing technology and capitalism, which we can control. Today, a street vendor in Johannesburg has incomparably better communications than Julius Caesar had when he conquered the ancient world. Capitalism – free enterprise – is flourishing in unlikely places, notably China, where a totalitarian state allows perhaps the freest enterprise ever seen. This has lifted more people out of poverty than in all previous history. India, with her massive corruption and dangerous politicians, is somehow managing high growth rates and is also lifting millions out of poverty.
Prospects for the world are good but not everywhere. Polar bears might be thriving in the north but African wildlife is under deadly attack – mainly from human poverty. Many African countries, such as Zimbabwe, are being ruined by corrupt and murderous politicians – whom the African National Congress (ANC) applauds. Prospects for our beloved country do not look well.
The best that can be said for South African fortunes over the last two years under Cyril Ramaphosa is that they are not as bad as they were under Jacob Zuma. Corruption has been somewhat reduced, and some awful people have been removed from office (although, so far, not prosecuted). But awful policies remain and there are no indications that they will be removed. The fundamental problem is not Zuma and his gang of looters but the ANC itself, which has chosen a path to economic failure. The ANC knows that racial affirmative action and ‘employment equity’ lead to ruin; that is why its leaders never send their own children to schools with affirmative action teachers or schools where 92% of the teachers are black. It sees that restrictive labour laws are causing catastrophic unemployment. It knows BEE is nothing but legalised corruption, which is strangling the economy. It knows its onerous and uncertain mining regulations are killing mining in the country with the world’s greatest mineral treasure. But it chooses to persist with these destructive policies because it prefers to serve small but powerful vested interests rather than the people as a whole.
Zimbabwe and South Africa would now be thriving economies if their new black majority governments had done nothing except to remove the wretched racist laws of the white governments they succeeded. Instead both deliberately chose policies of failure.
Any foreign company would be mad to invest in South Africa or Zimbabwe. Everybody knows Emmerson Mnangagwa and Ramaphosa are lying when each says his country is ‘Open for business’. Of course it isn’t. The costs of doing business in either are appalling high, with BEE, indigenization, massive bureaucracy, the threat of seizure of the company’s property (under ‘land reform’ in Zimbabwe or ‘expropriation without compensation’ in South Africa) and a prevailing, loudly expressed hatred of capitalism and ‘imperialism’ by both governments. Capitalism, which has produced unprecedented prosperity around the world in the last half century and reduced poverty at a rate never seen before, is a swear word in both Zimbabwe and South Africa.
2020 looks very well for most of the world although not so well for South Africa. But, here in Cape Town, the Sun has come out after a rainy Christmas and our dams are healthy, and not even the ANC can spoil our magnificent scenery and lovely weather.
Happy New Year!
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
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