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The State of Humanity | 
 enlarge | Creator: Julian Simon
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
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Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 878491
Media: Paperback
Pages: 704
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 6.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 155786585X
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.49
EAN: 9781557865854
ASIN: 155786585X
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
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Condition: Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers! Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product Description
This book provides a comprehensive and balanced assessment of the state of the Earth and its inhabitants at the close of the twentieth century. More than fifty scholars from all over the world present new, concise and accessible accounts of the present state of humanity and the prospects for its social and natural environment. The subjects range from deforestation, water pollution and ozone layer depletion to poverty, homelessness, mortality and murder. Each contributor considers the present situation, historical trends, likely future prospects, and the efficacy or otherwise of current activity and policy. The coverage is worldwide, with a particular emphasis on North America.
The State of Humanity is a magnificent and eye-opening synthesis of cultural, social, economic and environmental perspectives. It will interest all those - including geographers, economists, sociologists and policy makers - concerned to understand some of the most pressing problems of our time.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 A detailed and very dogmatic case that all's well February 24, 2005
Bill Godfrey (Mt Stuart, TAS Australia)
5 out of 14 found this review helpful
This is the other side of the coin to the attacks on contemporary government, finance and business contained in books like Korten: When Corporations Rule the Worldand the earlier Hawken: The Ecology of Commerce.
The purpose of Simon and his collaborators was to present a 'scorecard' on the progress of humanity against historical trends and to predict the level of our future health and prosperity (he specifically declines to become involved in predicting our happiness).
The basis of the book is that historical trends have always been the best guide to the long term future and, in the absence of any overwhelming evidence to the contrary (he doesn't find any) will continue to be the best guide to the future. It is crafted as a riposte to those who have seen storm waters ahead, who he refers to collectively (and unnecessarily derisively) as 'the doomsayers'.
The underlying message, which is only occasionally explicit, is that anywhere that there is a problem, we can rely on the market to fix it.
It contains five substantive Parts plus a Section on Thinking about the Future and a Conclusion - 58 chapters in all crammed with facts and figures. The substantive parts are:
* Life, Death and Health
* Standard of Living, Productivity and Poverty
* Natural Resources
* Agriculture, Food, Land and Water
* Pollution and the Environment.
I think it was Samuel Smiles who proposed the mantra 'Every day, in every way, I grow better and better' and Simon and his colleagues have taken it up with a vengeance. Some of the conclusions are, of course unquestionable. Infant mortality in the developed countries has fallen dramatically, average standards of living - at least as measured by GDP - have risen, and so on. The picture is nowhere near as rosy in the Third World, but the authors choose not to focus on that, nor on the extent to which developed countries may have contributed to the problems of the third world in order to achieve the trends with which the authors are so pleased.
Others of their conclusions fall into the 'so what' category; chapters on alcohol consumption and the rate of murder and suicide don't really add much to either the argument or the readability of the book.
Other chapters are much more tendentious and are written on the basis that 'if you can't prove absolutely that there is a problem, and that that problem directly and adversely affects humans, then its not a problem'. Their conclusions are, to say the least, surprising and there is more than a whiff of what has been rudely described as the advocate's arts of never telling an untruth but relying on suppression of the truth and suggestions that lead in a false direction (suppressio veri et suggestio falsi). For example:
species extinctions?: not happening, what's a species anyway and what does 'endangered' mean if anything
acid rain?: may actually be good for the crops
reserves of oil?: not a problem, never has been, never will be
nuclear waste?: a power station only produces a truck load of high level waste a year, in 100 years it will take 0.1 of an ounce to kill you and of course we can keep it safe. In any case, its better than coal, while solar or other renewal forms of energy are not economically viable (nothing about externalities, precious little about small matters like decommissioning, disasters touched on only for their direct cash cost)
ozone hole?: it may well have more to do with stratospheric temperature than with CFCs and there's no proof that it does any harm
The figures on which they rely would be more impressive if there were not a strong impression that they are selected to suit their case (something of which their opponents are of course also sometimes guilty). For example, dismissing the problem of pollution with a stack of figures about declining levels of pollution in US cities, there is no mention at all of the fact that part of this may be due to the wholesale export of polluting processes to other countries, such as Mexico.
On the basis of these, sometimes selective histories, they predict the long term future (with the saver that there may of course be short term variations). Based on Keynes' dictum that 'in the long term, we are all dead', this provides a reasonably safe platform for the contributors.
With a good deal of care and a bit of luck, we may prove the authors right. There is little doubt that we have the technology and the knowledge to be able to deal with the issues that face us globally - if we also have the wisdom and if we make a rapid enough start.
Whether the correct approach is, as the authors would suggest, one which focuses only on the direct verifiable and short term effects on humans and which relies totally on existing market mechanisms is a much more dubious question. Where we are dealing with large scale impacts on a global system, where cause and effect may be distant in time and space, a policy of sturdy denial until every last sceptic has finally admitted to have seen the 'smoking gun' seems an unnecessarily dangerous course to pursue.
It requires great dedication to read the whole of the book. On the other hand, because of the breadth of its range, it is a valuable source for scenario builders and others - provided that the facts and perspectives put forward in it are checked against other sources.
If you do believe that 'all is for the best' and that our current system of governance is ideal, this is unquestionably the book for you. It gives you a mountain of facts, figures, trend lines and assertions with which to confound your enemy.
 Simon say "can I take a baby step?" February 18, 2002
Eugene A Jewett (Alexandria, Va. United States)
19 out of 24 found this review helpful
Since this book was published in 1995 we have had several revelations which have added to its most virtuous verification that the state of humanity is indeed improving. The most recent and probably the best commentary on this subject can be found in Bjorn Lomborg's book, "the Skeptical Environmentalist". As anyone who follows this debate knows, Lomborg delved into a project to disprove Julian Simon after reading his summations on this subject. Indeed Lomborg is currently being smeared by the same detractors who have castigated Simon, the American and international Socialists on the political far Left. The simple reason for this is that both men have exposed the fraudulence of bad science, fomented on a naive public, as part of a political agenda ostensibly in favor of improving our environment. Simon amasses the work of 54 different scholars in his effort to point up the obvious; that the health of mankind is improving under a world increasingly devoted to free markets. The critics of this thesis are unfortunately subject to the dictum that Marxism exploits the economic ignorance of man. Unlike Simon, these environmental Marxist's are generally unacquainted with the works of Adam Smith or of Frederic Von Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises. Because of this gap in the intellectual development of Simon's critics his message is suppressed by a major media in America and Europe, which is more dedicated to the Socialist dogma. However, this suppression of good news on the environmental front is slowly lifting due to competing sources of information. Another contributor to scientific truth is Michael Fumento who's book, "Science Under Siege", recites how the environmental misinformation campaign of the critics of Simon, affects our laws, our taxes, and our daily life... This book offers useful references to the many topics assessed in this ruthlessly contended arena. The reason Simon has met with such hostility warrants increased scrutiny. It seems that mankinds need to feel virtuous and self-important, clashes with his need to champion ostensibly virtuous, but often factually invalid causes. When confronted with irrefutable proof of the invalidity of the cause, man has a way of engaging in a colossal self-deception, seemingly with few limitations. It isn't Simon or Lomborg who are wrong, it is the misguided notion of people who desire and need a continuation of a consistent worldview, one that assures their continuing validation as virtuous, caring souls. A study of religion offers a surfeit of anecdotal testament to this truth. I predict that the complete works of Julian Simon will soon be offered in the e-learning world of online universities. The continual thwarting of scientific fact and economic reality by the major media and the elite academy has heard its swan song; its time has come and gone. The disrupting technologies of the information revolution have sealed the fate of this exercise as just another aberrant chapter in the history of mankind's quest for a greater economic surplus for all of its citizens. Let's hear it for Julian Simon, a man whose greatness will unfortunately, only be realized posthumously.
 A comment October 21, 2001
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
I have a comment for the reviewer who seems to loathe everything about Simon. Life expectancy in the U.S. just reached its historic, all-time high. It could drop in any given year, but the trend is still up. In general, Simon's analyses are still correct today (October 2001).
Have we PROVEN anything? January 23, 2001
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
Simon states the world has trended positive in the past and will continue to do so in the future. If you read a review which states Simon has been proven wrong since the time of publication, then that reviewer totally misunderstands Simon's position OR really hasn't read the material. It would be impossible to say anything has been proven at this point, because Simon's analysis requires long periods of time for a trend to develop. Pointing to an increase in fuel prices or a decline in a region's life expectancy (due to a disaster, natural or economic) does not show a flaw in Simon's reasoning, only a bump in the road, to which humanity must develop a response. It is the RESPONSE which has made humans what they are, and has brought us to the modern state in which we now live.
Oh no! January 9, 2001
Carson F. (Vancouver, WA)
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
I find the reviews of this book interesting. The last few comments made on the book are on how Simon's "predictions" have been debunked. His predictions are in fact panning out quite nicley. The united states "fall" on the world life expectancy list does not mean things have gotten worse: it means more countries are improving, and some have surpassed us. This is a bad thing? Other readers point out how things just havn't panned out. Are you all on crack? In truth Simon makes no predictions in his books that aren't based of fact. Over the last 100 years things have gotten MUCH better for EVERYONE. You can argue about disparities among the races, but the TRENDS for ALL of humanity show great improvements (ie, for all races). Scoff at his claims if you will, but you are likley living proof of some miracle brought about within even the last 40 years. It matters not what race you are. If you don't like Simon, hit up the statistical abstract of the united states and verify his numbers - this is a claim simon makes. Lastly, seeing some blips in humanity, such as the adverse effects of the fall of the soviet union (again, you cannot simply say simon is wrong because the soviets dove into free market economies and are struggling, anymore than you could have said capitalism is wrong because of the recession in the 80's, or the depression before WW2; russia is an EXTREME example of how NOT to transition into democracy, hence the term use of the uncontrolled "fall" in "fall of the soviet union"). This is the essence of simons ENTIRE BOOK - that the overall TRENDS are improving. Readers who miss that miss the book. Life isn't easy every day or every year, sorry. Don't go blaming Simon for that.
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