Andrew McAfee has a positive view of where we are going as humans. This he outlines in his 2020 book, More from Less. It is worth emphasizing that the positive tone isn’t because McAfee doesn’t see the problems in the world. Indeed, he finishes with a list of seven issues he thinks should be prioritized in tackling the problems he sees. Everyone won’t agree with all seven issues he suggests that we should focus on. (Indeed, I don’t agree with a number of his comments). Still, the relevant point here is that McAfee definitely sees the need for more progress. He also wants to fight against the assumption that being smart is the same as being negative and thinking the worst. Are only stupid people positive? McAfee would say no, and I agree with him on that.
Are Only Stupid People Positive?
McAfee suggests that being negative seems to be the quickest way to be taken seriously. (He also supports this with a useful John Stuart Mill quotation to the same effect). The challenge is that people seem to think that if you focus more on bad things, then you are simply being more observant.
In many elite circles and publications negativity seems to be a sign of seriousness and rigor, while optimism and positivity seem naive and underinformed.
McAfee, 2020, page 180
That seems like complete nonsense to me. Sure there are loads of bad things in the world, but merely remarking upon them isn’t helping anyone much. You need to have a plan to make the bad things better. Just shouting about failure generally isn’t much use on its own. Probably the most reliable way to develop the plan is to find out what worked in the past and do more of that. As such, to tackle problems you need to be able to recognize successes.
The Four Horsemen Of The Optimist
What does McAfee think is responsible for the things he sees as getting better? He calls them the four horsemen of the optimist — mirroring the riders bringing the apocalypse but these riders are bringing about a better world.
I call tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government the “four horsemen of the optimist”.
McAfee, 2020, page 3
These horsemen acting together, he says can lead to, and indeed are already leading to, a much more positive relationship between humans and the natural world. (McAfee’s thinking owes a significant debt to Jesse Ausubel who wrote about how technology can aid nature).
Dematerialization
A key horseman for McAfee is capitalism which, when combined with the tech progress it supports and is supported by, leads to a more efficient use of materials. This leads to dematerialization — using less materials to make things. He sees this as providing a partial solution to the problem that we have more and richer, people wanting more and more stuff.
He sees four paths to dematerialization: slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate. The argument is that if we can shift our economy towards less resource-intense items, including services, we can have more good things while having less of a negative environmental impact. There are some sound economic reasons underpining why this might happen. For example, as we use resources they become more rare and so more expensive. This in turn encourages firms to use less of them. Additionally, competition encourages cost cutting, and a great way to do that is to design out unnecessary material usage. Both of these phenomena clearly happen in the world. The questions are: when do they happen?, and will they happen enough? McAfee is optimistic partly because dematerialization is often in a company’s financial interest.
Seeing The Good And The Bad Of Markets
McAfee sees the good and bad of markets. He notes that “Econ 101′ suggests markets are effective and should sometimes be left alone by the government while also highlighting that markets don’t deal with negative externalities. An externality is where my decisions hurt you but you don’t have any say in my choices. (In an endnote, McAfee mentions that spillovers — a word for externalities — was the original term often used but spillover didn’t seem pompous enough so now economists generally prefer to use “externalities”).
His is a mixed view of markets. There is good, there is bad, and the precise mixture of good and bad will depend on the exact situation a society finds itself in. He is quite a fan of capitalism but also recognizes that there exist important market failures. Capitalism, to his mind, needs some guardrails, or else someone will poison their neighbors with pollution to save a few dollars while someone else will kill all the rhinos.
Defining Capitalism
Those who are skeptical of capitalism may find McAfee’s writing style a little off-putting. McAfee uses capitalism as shorthand for the good bits of market competition. The bad bits he either thinks can be solved by regulation, or he argues that they aren’t really capitalism. Instead, according to him the bad bits are market fundamentalism. Pretty much every rich country, even those with the most generous safety nets, he calls capitalist. This means most people I know have a preferred system that is likely included in his surprisingly broad term ‘capitalism’ despite being significant variance amongst their preferred systems. It seemed a little strange to me that he is so interested in using terminology that is in widespread use but doesn’t necessarily have the same implications to all readers. McAfee isn’t a market fundamentalist — he believes in responsive government putting in guardrails — but the way he writes at times might lose people who largely agree with him because they think they don’t agree.
Optimistic views are useful. Are only stupid people positive? I don’t think so.
For more optimistic views see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Read: Andrew McAfee (2020) More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next, Scribner