The Improving State of The World by Indur Goklany
Themes: feel-good, secular trends, prosperity
Available as an e-book (PDF) as well as a paperback from the Cato Institute. A fascinating book that describes how many quality-of-life indicators have seen significant and continuous progress over the last 200 years. Goklany marshals a lot of evidence for the “environmental transition hypothesis”. Here’s the dummy version: in the initial stages of development, people seek to get richer and trash the environment, so pollution gets worse, but as they get richer, they start taking positive steps to tackle pollution. Thus, the pollution curve often has an “inverted U-shape”.
Reviews: James Surowiecki in Foreign Affairs and Goklany’s reply to the review.
There is a Wikipedia article on the book and more of the author’s work is available at his website.
[...] while on the subject, take the time to check out Indur Goklany’s Improving State of the World and Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. Leave a [...]
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