stratification. In reality “development” has been making Third World nations
poorer, compared to the First World. Per capita income in the First World was
five times that in the Third World in 1850, ten times in 1960, and fourteen
times by 1970. It’s tricky to measure these ratios, partly because a dollar buys
more in the Third World than in the First, but per capita income in the First
World is now twenty to sixty times that in the Third World.^10 The vocabulary
of progress remains relentlessly hopeful, however, with regard to the
“undeveloped.” As economist E. J. Mishan put it, “Complacency is suffused
over the globe, by referring to these destitute and sometimes desperate
countries by the fatuous nomenclature of ‘developing nations.’”^11 In the
nineteenth century, progress provided an equally splendid rationale for
imperialism. Europeans and Americans saw themselves as performing
governmental services for and utilizing the natural resources of natives in
distant lands, who were too backward to do it themselves.
Gradually the archetype of progress has been losing its grip. In the last
quarter-century the intellectual community in the United States has largely
abandoned the idea. Opinion polls show that the general public, too, has been
losing its faith that the future is automatically getting better. Reporting this new
climate of opinion, the editors of a 1982 symposium entitled “Progress and Its
Discontents” put it this way: “Future historians will probably record that from
the mid-twentieth century on, it was difficult for anyone to retain faith in the
idea of inevitable and continuing progress.”^12
Probably not even textbook authors still believe that bigger is necessarilybetter. No one celebrates higher populations.^13 Today, rather than boast of our
consumption, we are more likely to lament our waste, as in this passage by
Donella H. Meadows, coauthor of The Limits to Growth: “In terms of spoiling
the environment and using world resources, we are the world’s most
irresponsible and dangerous citizens.” Each American born in the 1970s will
throw out ten thousand no-return bottles and almost twenty thousand cans while
generating 126 tons of garbage and 9.8 tons of particulate air pollution. And
that’s just the tip of the trashberg, because every ton of waste at the consumer
end has also required five tons at the manufacturing stage and even more at the
site of initial resource extraction.^14
In some ways, bigger still seems to equal better. When we compare
ourselves to others around us, having more seems to bring happiness, for