The End of Doom (15 page)

The modern combination of liberal trial-and-error institutions—limited democracy, free markets, and liberal science—emerged in Western Europe and North America and have been spreading around the globe. Wherever the institutions of liberalism have been embraced, prosperity has followed in their wake. Given all the benefits that modern scientific and technological enterprise has bestowed upon humanity, why would some people be against it? “Technological progress inevitably involves losers, and these losers … tend to be concentrated and usually find it easy to organize,” notes Mokyr. “Sooner or later in any society the progress of technology will grind to a halt because the forces that used to support innovation become vested interests,” he explains. “In a purely dialectical fashion, technological progress creates the very forces that eventually destroy it.”

As Jonathan Adler notes, “Economic interests also have reason to adopt precautionary appeals insofar as such appeals enable these groups to erect barriers to competing technologies or firms, close markets, or otherwise use environmental regulations as a tool for rent-seeking.” Candlemakers, after all, cannot be expected to hail the invention of the electric lightbulb, nor hostlers the advent of automobiles, nor canal-boat owners the building of railways, nor coal miners the development of nuclear power. Applying the precautionary approach, candlemakers will urge rejection of the competing technology, citing the dangers of electric shock; hostlers, of car crashes; canal-boat owners, of train engine smoke; and miners, of the risks of radiation. European governments eager to protect their farmers from competition have already cited the precautionary principle as justification for blocking the imports of meat from hormone-treated cows and genetically enhanced grains from the United States.

The great fear of many proponents of the precautionary principle is that if technological decisions are left to people voluntarily acting in markets, those who favor a new technology can vote yes by buying it or switching to it. They can purchase products using new synthetic materials, or foods grown using biotechnology, or energy produced by thorium reactors. Of course, those who oppose a new technology can refuse to buy or use it and its products; but, as Mokyr notes, they “have no control over what others do even if they feel it might affect them. In markets it is difficult to express a no vote.”

Thus it is no surprise that the foes of various new technologies embrace the precautionary principle and urge that decisions about them be moved from the voluntary realm of markets to the domain of political mandates. Of course, they benignly characterize this move as being more “democratic.” In reality, opponents of new technologies believe that they will have more luck in stopping technologies they abhor by lobbying their local congressperson or member of parliament to vote to prohibit their development.

“Activists, bureaucrats, and lawyers are hampering promising research and making it more costly,” writes Mokyr. “But the achievements made possible by new useful knowledge in terms of economic well-being and human capabilities have been unlike anything experienced before by the human race. The question remains, can this advance be sustained?” That is indeed the question for the twenty-first century.

Friedrich Hayek explained that “it is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.” This includes those who think that they can anticipate and prevent harms stemming from the process of technological innovation.

As the history of the last two centuries has shown, Hayek was surely right when he concluded: “Nowhere is freedom more important than where our ignorance is greatest—at the boundaries of knowledge, in other words, where nobody can predict what lies a step ahead.… The ultimate aim of freedom is the enlargement of those capacities in which man surpasses his ancestors and to which each generation must endeavor to add its share—its share in the growth of knowledge and the gradual advance of moral and aesthetic beliefs, where no superior must be allowed to enforce one set of views of what is right or good and where only further experience can decide what should prevail. It is wherever man reaches beyond his present self, where the new emerges and assessment lies in the future, that liberty ultimately shows its value.”

Unfortunately, the precautionary principle sounds sensible to many people, especially those who live in societies already replete with technology. These people have their centrally heated house in the woods; they already enjoy the freedom from want, disease, and ignorance that technology can provide. They may think they can afford the luxury of ultimate precaution. But there are billions of people who still yearn to have their lives transformed. For them, the precautionary principle is a warrant for continued poverty, not safety.

Should we look before we leap? Sure we should. But every utterance of proverbial wisdom has its counterpart, reflecting both the complexity and the variety of life's situations and the foolishness involved in applying a short list of hard rules to them. Given the manifold challenges of poverty and environmental renewal that technological progress can help us address in this century, the wiser maxim to heed is “He who hesitates is lost.”

 

4

What Cancer Epidemic?

IN MY THIRTIES, I GREATLY REDUCED MY RISK
of cancer when I visited a hypnotist in New York City. I started smoking cigarettes in college and quickly became a three- to four-pack-a-day smoker. Even when faced with the pain and sorrow of numerous lung cancer patients while working for a while as a hospital attendant in a radiation oncology department, I didn't quit. But eventually the data on just how dangerous tobacco smoking is sank in, so I tried stopping cold turkey, chewing packs of nicotine gum, and so forth. Nothing worked.

Thus early one morning in the mid-1980s, I found myself standing in front of an apartment building on New York's Upper East Side waiting for my appointment with a hypnotist who promised to end my tobacco habit. Although I had little faith in that sort of hocus-pocus, I was so afraid that it might work, I anxiously stood outside the building chain-puffing on what I feared would be my last cigarettes. It turned out that they were. The hypnotism worked, but I suspect that the embarrassment I would have suffered had I continued to smoke after I had told all my friends that I was spending $400 on the hypnosis session might have helped, too. The largest known percentage (30 percent) of US cancer deaths is due to tobacco. Epidemiology suggests that because I stopped smoking in my thirties, my chances of dying of lung cancer before age seventy-five are about double those of someone who never smoked, but they are considerably below the twentyfold higher risk of smokers who never quit.

Activists such as the folks at the Pesticide Action Network frequently claim that Americans are in the midst of a “cancer epidemic” and vaguely assert that there is a “growing scientific consensus that environmental contaminants are causing cancer in humans.” What contaminants? In 2009,
Wall Street Journal
MarketWatch columnist Paul Farrell pronounced the litany: “Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics … the list is endless.”

In 2010, the prestigious President's Cancer Panel furthered promoted alarm in
Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now
. The press release heralding the report noted “the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer in recent years” and asserted that “the true burden of environmentally-induced cancer is greatly underestimated.” By environmental exposures, the two-member panel, consisting of Howard University surgeon Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall Jr. and MD Anderson Cancer Center immunologist Margaret Kripke, largely meant man-made chemicals like plastics and pesticides.

The panel's report additionally asserted, “With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread.” In a statement Leffall also declared, “The increasing number of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even though we may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm.” Leffall was doing nothing less than invoking the precautionary principle. In other words, we don't know, but let's ban something anyway.

The panelists are not alone in their alarm. In the prominent journal
The Proceedings of the Royal Society B
in 2013, Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned, “Another possible threat to the continuation of civilization is global toxification. Adverse symptoms of exposure to synthetic chemicals are making some scientists increasingly nervous about effects on the human population.” The Ehrlichs added that the danger of global toxification “has been clear since the days of Carson, exposing the human population to myriad subtle poisons.”

Given advocacy and reports like these, is it any wonder that a 2007 American Cancer Society poll found that seven out ten Americans believed that the risk of dying of cancer is going up?

No Growing Cancer Epidemic

There's only one problem—there is no growing cancer epidemic. As the number of man-made chemicals has proliferated, your chances of dying of the disease have been dropping for more than four decades. In fact, not only have cancer death rates been declining significantly, age-adjusted cancer
incidence
rates have been falling for nearly two decades. That is, of the number of Americans in nearly any age group, fewer are actually coming down with cancer. It is good news that modern medicine has increased the five-year survival rates of cancer patients from 50 percent in the 1970s to 68 percent today. What is more remarkable is that the incidence of cancer has been falling about 0.6 percent per year since 1994. That may not sound like much, but as Dr. John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society, explains, “Because the rate continues to drop, it means that in recent years, about 100,000 people each year who would have died had cancer rates not declined are living to celebrate another birthday.” Director of the National Cancer Institute Harold Varmus also noted, “It is gratifying to see the continued steady decline in overall cancer incidence and death rates in the United States—the result of improved methods for preventing, detecting, and treating several types of cancer.”

How did it come to be the conventional wisdom that man-made chemicals are especially toxic and the chief sources of a modern cancer epidemic? It all began with the Carson mentioned by the Ehrlichs in 2013—that is, Rachel Carson, the author of
Silent Spring
.

Rachel Carson Launches Modern Political Environmentalism

The modern environmentalist movement was launched at the beginning of June 1962 when
The
New Yorker
published excerpts from what would become Carson's all-out attack on synthetic chemicals, especially the pesticide DDT. “Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,” declared then Vice President Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. The foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition accurately declared that this book “led to environmental legislation at every level of government.”

In 1999
Time
named Carson one of the 100 People of the Century. Seven years earlier, a panel of distinguished Americans had selected
Silent Spring
as the most influential book of the previous fifty years. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off of modernity,” asserted environmentalist Bill McKibben in a
New York Times Magazine
article celebrating the book's fiftieth anniversary.

In
Silent Spring,
Carson crafted an ardent denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil. Rachel Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for the politicization of science that afflicts our public policy debates today.

Carson worked for years at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually becoming the chief editor of that agency's publications. She achieved financial independence in the 1950s with the publication of her popular celebrations of marine ecosystems,
The Sea Around Us
and
The Edge of the Sea
. Rereading
Silent Spring
reminds one that the book's effectiveness was due mainly to Carson's passionate, poetic language describing the alleged horrors that modern synthetic chemicals visit upon defenseless nature and hapless humanity. Carson was moved to write
Silent Spring
by her increasing concern about the effects of pesticides on wildlife. Her chief villain was the pesticide DDT.

Today, the Pesticide Action Network explains, “Carson used DDT to tell the broader story of the disastrous consequences of the overuse of insecticides, and raised enough concern from her testimony before Congress to trigger the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).” As noted previously, fifty years later Carson has many modern disciples who continue to preach that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals are responsible for an epidemic of cancer.

The 1950s saw the advent of an array of synthetic pesticides that were hailed as modern miracles in the war against pests and weeds. First and foremost of these pest control chemicals was DDT. DDT's insecticidal properties were discovered in the late 1930s by Paul M
ü
ller, a chemist at the Swiss chemical firm J. R. Geigy. The American military started testing it in 1942, and soon the insecticide was being sprayed in war zones to protect American troops against insect-borne diseases such as typhus and malaria. In 1943 DDT famously stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples in its tracks shortly after the Allies invaded Italy. DDT was hailed as the “wonder insecticide of World War II.”