Industrial Development Promotes Human Life

For years, environmentalists have warned us that economic progress under capitalism paves the way for future devastation. Smoking coal stacks blacken our lungs. Growing populations set the stage for widespread famine. Gas-guzzling SUVs warm the planet and lead to frequent hurricanes and droughts.

Ayn Rand held a radically different view of the impact of industrial development on human survival. In 1971, she wrote in the essay “The Anti-Industrial Revolution”:

In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man’s life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s population grew by 300 percent—which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great masses of people a chance to survive.

If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company):

1900—47.3 years

1920—53 years

1940—60 years

1968—70.2 years (the latest figures compiled)

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “Thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.

Rand viewed industrial development as an enormous positive that greatly improved the quality of life for everyone. Far from it being an impediment to human survival, she argued that industrialization dramatically changed for the better how people dealt with their environment. For example, she noted in the same essay:

Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.)

ARC fellow Dr. Keith Lockitch expands on this point:

Consider the poster child of global warming alarm: Hurricane Katrina. In 1970, a severe tropical cyclone struck the coast of the Bay of Bengal, in what is today Bangladesh. It is estimated that the storm was a category 3 cyclone, and the death toll it left in its wake was estimated to have been as high as three hundred thousand people. Compare this with Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005. By the time it made landfall Katrina was also a category 3 storm and the directly affected population was comparable to that in Bangladesh. Yet the number of people dead or missing was far, far less—estimates put it at around two thousand

Without denying the tragedy of the lives lost to Katrina, two thousand versus three hundred thousand is an incredible difference. In assessing what accounts for that difference, one can debate the relative roles of social, political, geographic and climatologic factors, but there can be no question of the fundamental and decisive importance of the technology and infrastructure made possible by industrial capitalism. Unlike the helpless victims of the Bangladesh storm, the citizens of New Orleans could rely on advanced early warning systems and a functioning communications infrastructure, modern vehicles and paved roads to facilitate evacuation and transport relief supplies, sturdier homes and structures and advanced flood control systems, etc. Indeed, much of this even failed in New Orleans: the levees were breached, many people couldn’t or wouldn’t evacuate, the relief effort was delayed, and so on. Yet, even in spite of these failures, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved by the products of industrial technology and industrial-scale energy.

This is the real lesson of today’s climate-related tragedies: the immeasurable degree to which industrial development under capitalism has reduced our vulnerability to climate threats.

Read the rest of Dr. Lockitch’s paper here. Read more of Ayn Rand’s view on environmentalism here.

If you have questions about how industrial development has made us far less vulnerable to climate disasters or want to know about how it has kept us safer from other environmental dangers, like pollution, disease, resource shortages and more, be sure to submit your questions here and watch the live Q&A on Earth Day (Friday, April 22) at 9 a.m. PST to hear your questions answered by Alex Epstein and Dr. Keith Lockitch!

Read more at The Ayn Rand Center