11.

CREATIVITY
AND CULTURE

It is frequently assumed in economic models that people are all the same. They are all, to put it in techno-speak, “rational agents”, who make logical choices like Adams Smith’s rational butcher, brewer and baker. It is then assumed that if you stuff that into a computer, it can spit out decent predictions for prices, production and more. Of course, you also have enter assumptions about capital input, savings and other variables, but if it’s all there, the models should tell you what will happen.

The problem is this that people’s cultures are incredibly different, and what might work in one culture, say South Korea, may work completely differently in another, say, Bolivia. We shall now look at some reasons why such differences have developed, and as we will discover, creativity changes people’s culture in many and often rather surprising ways, apart from making them more peaceful, as we saw in the previous chapter.

A good starting point for anyone studying cultural differences is World Values Surveys. This is a recurring, global study based on the sociologist Gert Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions. It involves approximately 250 questions, given to close to 100,000 respondents in 60-70 countries at regular intervals, which means about 25 million questions asked each time. As scientists have studied the responses given, they have found very clear statistic clusters that show what different mindsets people actually have. Within this they have identified two particularly important dimensions that distinguish different cultures:

Traditional values versus rational values

Survival values versus self-realization values

How so? Well, people with “traditional” values are often nationalists and very religious, and they usually have clear ideas about what is good (“us”), and evil (“others”) and they do not believe that other people can be trusted, for which reason they favour strong authorities to enforce displine; even if these authorities might also be dishonest. They are not very tolerant; homosexuality, divorce are rarely tolerated and are often prohibited, having divergent religious views is frowned upon or even illegal and women should not have too much responsibility, but they must produce many children. For this reason, and because of low mutual trust, they have a limited social network and are not good at co-operating with people in their bigger social space or with women. The limitations to social networking and voluntary win-win transactions mean that their creative design space doesn’t grow much, if at all.

Conversely, the people deemed “rational” according to World Values Surveys are more guided by data, logics, objectivity and science, and they are more trusting and tolerant. This mindset is most widespread in Protestant Europe and parts of Eastern Europe as well as China, Japan and Korea.

The other aforementioned important dimension is “survival” versus “self-realization”. Survival here relates to obtaining basic material goods like food, shelter and safety, and in countries where this is difficult, people often cheat each other a lot. Conversely, high degree of self-realization means that people take survival for given and give priority to democracy, freedom, adventure and an emotionally-rich life. These typically live in Western countries and, in particular, in Protestant Europe. These are areas with lower corruption, higher inter-cultural trust and solid democracies.

This also has a clear economic correlation, because in rich societies people are more rational and prioritize self-realization higher. They have much more confidence in each other, exhibit more positive interest in other cultures and show higher respect for women and tolerance for minorities such as homosexuals. They are good at utilizing their social space and developing their creative design space.

The high degree of self-realization here also means prioritizing environmental protection and having a personal influence within the workplace and society in general. Freedom to choose a personal lifestyle (punk, banker, nerd, yuppie) is high here, and orthodoxy is low.

The map overleaf illustrates where different cultures are placed on the cultural map, where we see maximum rates of rationality and self-realization in Protestant Europe and minimal rates in some African and/or Muslim countries. People in Confucian areas are equally rational, but have self-realization as a lower priority.

How can we explain this? The high rationality in northern European countries can perhaps be explained by the ancient Anglo-Saxon valuesets plus the fact that Protestantism, from its inception, has tended to accept science and often pioneered it. It should be noted here that the top-scoring countries on rationality and self-expression correlate very well with Charles Murray’s aforementioned European creativity maps.

As for the people in the most rational Asian countries, these are typically not religious in the sense that they believe in a creator and a strict body of dogma. Buddhism is arguably just as much a philosophy and set of ethical norms as it is a religion and Confucinism is definitely a philosophy.

GRADING OF DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTURES IN A SO-CALLED INGLEHART-WELZEL WORLD VALUES SURVEY VALUE MAP. IT IS SEEN THAT THE PROTESTANT NATIONS ARE AT THE UPPER RIGHT END OF THE SPECTRUM, AND AFRICAN AND MUSLIM ONES ARE PREDOMINANTLY IN THE OPPOSITE END.¹⁴⁷

When it comes to self-realization, this is lower in Europe’s Catholic community and in former communist states than in Protestant northern Europe, which may be largely because the economies in many of these countries are struggling. Furthermore, because they have age-old tradition of authoritarian government rather than decentralized self-rule, they have far lower mutual trust between people, more corruption and weaker democracies. In former East Germany the mutual trust between people is lower than in former West Germany, which suggests that something fundamental in society’s culture was damaged under communism.

Harward economics Professor Benjamin Friedmann has analyzed correlations between GDP per capita, human rights and freedom and found that the richer a society is the greater freedom and the more human rights its inhabitants have. He then examined whether there was a similar correlation in terms of the economic growth rate, and indeed there was.¹⁴⁸ Similarly, in 1966, a group of scientists found a clear correlation between income and democracy: “A democracy can expect to last an average of about 8.5 years in a country with per capita income below $1,000 per annum, 16 years in one with income between $1,000 and $2,000, 33 years between $2,000 and $4,000, and 100 years between $ 4,000 and $ 6,000.”¹⁴⁹ Because of these correlations, it is not surprising that, as nations get richer, they will initially see a particularly high increase in rationality World Values Survey value map, but that at some point, further riches start to have a bigger effect on self-realization.

So as people in creative nations get richer they tend to become rational and to give higher priority to freedom, human rights, democracy, the environment and other non-material objectives. But does it also make them happier?

It does, and quite lot, in fact. The world’s most famous happiness research source is arguably Ruut Veenhoven, who in 1984 founded the so-called World Database of Happiness which summarizes the results of thousands of happiness studies and has become an ever-evolving meta-study of the subject. The database uses a happiness scale that goes from 0 to 10, with 10 meaning most happiness. So here is what it shows: pretty much all the happiest countries in the world are Western and wealthy. If we go to the opposite end of the scale and study the least happy nations, these are predominantly African and extremely poor - there is not a single wealthy country among those with a very low degree of happiness and not a single poor one among the happiest nations.

The database also shows whether a nation’s happiness changes over time. In the 14 nations for which there is enough data to track the progress of happiness, it is seen that during 1973-2008 happiness increased in nine countries, was largely unchanged for three, and had only declined in two. So Western happiness is highest and has been growing, albeit slowly.

The relationship between income and happiness is also confirmed by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), which calculates the correlation between its Better Life Index and a number of other variables. This statement shows a clear correlation between income and the perception of having a good life, and this is without any known income-related ceiling. Perhaps we like to say that money can’t buy you happiness but, on average, it clearly can.¹⁵⁰ In 2003, Veenhoven published an article with Michael Hagerty called Wealth and Happiness Revisited which showed that happiness increases significantly up to an income level of approximately $15,000 a year, while income beyond that level has declining marginal benefit. However, once you passed the $15,000 barrier (the number should be higher today due to inflation), what most influenced your happiness was freedom – the more free people were, the happier they became, without any apparent upper limit. If you feel very free to choose your line of work, sexual orientation, lifestyle, spouse, faith and residence, you will be much happier than otherwise.

The most important freedom-related driver of happiness is the sub-category called economic freedom, which includes variables such as living in a society which guarantees property rights and fights corruption, where you can dispose freely of most of your money, where there is business and labour freedom, free trade and freedom to invest or move around your money, as you like. Western nations generally score high on these variables even though property rights and corruption is a significant problem in many Latin nations and over-taxation a problem in some Protestant countries.

The previous chapter was about how and why the Western population has become much more peaceful. In this chapter, we have further seen that the development of Western civilization has made people much more rational, trusting, tolerant, freedom-seeking, individualistic, democratic and, yes, happy.

That’s not bad! However, we have not finished examining the human consequences of our creative development until we have studied broader aspects of culture– the sum of all our memes and its effects on human cooperation.

Cultures are vastly different and this is hugely important, so let’s look at some concrete examples of what it may mean, starting with the Chinese. In Malaysia in 1960, 400 young people from the Chinese minority completed an engineering degree, while the corresponding figure for the Malaysian majority was only four.¹⁵¹ So the Chinese are very efficient in Malaysia, and the same has seen for the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, the US and elsewhere.

Another example of efficient people are Christian Lebanese emigrants and their children and grandchildren who include a former holder of the “world’s richest man” title (Carlos Slim), the founder of Swatch (Nicolas Hayek), the musician Shakira, the actress Salma Hayek, an impressive number of Latin American presidents and vice presidents and the director of Renault and Nissan (Carlos Ghosn) .

The Japanese make a third classic example of effective emigrants. In the early 1900s there was great poverty in rural Japan and to give people a chance to escape this, in 1907 the government forged an emigration agreement with Brazil. Since then, a quarter of a million mostly pennyless Japanese people have emigrated there. Initially, the natives perceived these small, skinny Japanese people as relatively spineless and slow-witted, and they were subjected to discrimination. But today, the children and grandchildren of these poverty-stricken Japanese emigrants constitute approximately 1% of Brazil’s population, but are now clearly over-represented in management positions, and account for 17% of students at the elite University of São Paulo. Combined, they now own about as much land in Brazil as all the land there is in Japan.

The US offers, in its own way, many interesting demonstrations of the effects of cultural disparity; perhaps the most interesting of these stories concern the roles of Celts versus Anglo-Saxons. The US. was originally predominantly colonized by Great Britain, but the way it happened is interesting. Today, it is hard to detect big very big differences between people with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon roots in Britain (except in voting preferences), but the differences were still very pronounced when the British began to settle in America from the year 1607.

As we have already seen, Anglo-Saxons had, over many generations, dominated the Celts in the UK.¹⁵² This divergence had an effect on America, because, as is often the case with mass migrations, the inhabitants of a given region would typically emigrate to roughly the same place in America, which made entire areas cultural copies of local areas in Britain, and they frequently even named them after the places they came from, but perhaps starting with “New”, as in “New Hampshire”. Hampshire was an Anglo-Saxon area in Britain, and New Hampshire is in the American northern states, which is symptomatic, because the British Anglo-Saxons overwhelmingly went to the northern states, whereas the British Celts (mainly from Ireland, Scotland and Wales), predominantly went to the southern states (the Confederacy). This created a clear cultural divide in USA, where southerners often called northern state people “yankees” whereas these would refer to southerners as “rednecks” and “hillbillies”. “Redneck” was a native English phrase to describe Scottish bulkheads in the 1640s who refused to be ruled by bishops, because they often wrote protest letters with their own blood, and sometimes wore red neckerchiefs in protest – thus the red necks. Hillbillies were people in the South who marched down from the hills and mountains every year on July 12th to celebrate the Scottish King William III, also known as “King Billy”. The reason they celebrated him of all royals was because he had conquered Anglo-Saxon England. There was no love lost between them.

Many past visitors to the US would describe the culture of rednecks and hillbillies as being very different from that of the yankee people in the north states. For example, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville travelled in the early 1800s around in US and described afterwards his experiences in his book Democracy in America, where he explained that even the poorest of the southern whites had slaves which had the effect that:

“The first notion he acquires in life is that he is born to command, and the first habit which he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man, — irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”

Torqueville described further the rednecks as relatively ignorant, easy to irritate, violent and without much initiative or enterprise.”¹⁵³ Others made similar descriptions, and the combined impression of the southerners was of a people who were often comparatively lazy, violent, drunken, lacking initiative, irresponsible, boastful and loud; they often had excessive personal pride and were very easily offended, after which they regularly sought violent revenge. Southerners were later known to lynch criminals and eventually black people.

In addition, southerners were notorious for being reckless and irresponsible; boatmen on the Mississippi River would sometimes, for fun, compete in races with their paddle steamers, where they blocked relief valves for extra speed, which at times led to boiler explosions and killed passengers – in fact, it happened so often that it was said that it was more dangerous to take a paddle steamer on the Mississippi than to cross the Atlantic.

Another difference between the southern and northern state people lay in their work discipline. Northerners, who cleared a forest to make fields, would typically remove the roots of the felled trees, so you could plough the soil more easily. Southerners, however, would often let the roots stay in and just plough around them forever after.

The common lack of initiative in Confederate nations was also reflected in the limited innovation and creativity. A study of the US citizens who have contributed most to the country’s scientific and cultural development in the first half of the 1800s showed, for instance, that the Confederacy, with the exception of Virginia, had very large areas from which not a single leading innovator or artist had come. Almost all the innovation, creativity and inspiration came from the north, and even though a third of the population lived in the Confederacy, they only took out 8% of the patents.¹⁵⁴

All this, plus different attitudes to slavery, contributed to the American Civil War, which seemed like a repetition of the countless battles between the Celts and Anglo-Saxons in the British Isles over the preceeding 1,200 years. This is an example of how the civilizing process can have roots that stretch centuries if not millennia back in time. Just think about it: The Anglo-Saxons arrived on the British Isles approximately 1,600 years ago but, if you study the typical results of British elections, it is clear that Anglo-Saxons vote differently than Celts: The original Anglo-Saxon areas have, in recent elections, had large majority of Conservative voters (right-wing), and the Celtic areas have had majority of Labour (left-wing) or Liberal Democrats (centre) voters.

Stanford Professor Thomas Sowell describes in his two books Intellectuals and Society and Black Rednecks, White Liberals what the confederate redneck culture did to the US black population. First, as he points out, due to slavery in the southern states, 90% of the country’s black population lived there rather than in the northern states and, as they were freed after the civil war, many had adopted the redneck culture. In schools, it is still quite common among black children to mock those who do well, on the grounds that they are “acting white”. Thus, studies have shown that among black students there is a negative correlation between academic achievement and their popularity among classmates - the brightest are the least popular. The opposite is true among white and Asian students. Sowell’s point is that the effect of the redneck culture in the southern states penalizes blacks, who come from there.¹⁵⁵

Actually, cultural differences among otherwise quite similar people may even be reflected in measured intelligence. This was revealed, for instance, during World War I, when army recruits had to undergo mandatory intelligence tests, and it turned out, that black people from the northern states had, on average, higher IQs than whites (and blacks) from the southern states.¹⁵⁶

This brings us to the whole discussion of intelligence. In 1984, James Flynn of the University of Otago studied the results of some Dutch intelligence tests, which were performed on 18-year-olds in the early 1950s and later in the 1980s. Something in these numbers surprised him: The measured levels of intelligence from the 1980s showed higher IQ numbers (intelligence quotient) than those from the 1950s.¹⁵⁷

To examine whether this could really be true, he now gathered new and old intelligence tests from 30 civilized countries worldwide, and he found the same pattern here: people had become smarter and this seemed to have happened in a fairly linearly manner over many decades. Furthermore, they had actually become much smarter - average intelligence had increased by 0.3% per year, equivalent to 3% per decade.¹⁵⁸ An increase of 3% per decade corresponds, in pure arithmetical terms, to more than 30 points in 100 years, and that is a lot. Such an increase can - as seen below - move a person from the category called “definite feeble-mindedness“ to the more comfortable “normal” or even superior category on a standard scale for intelligence:¹⁵⁹

This discovery of an increase in people’s intelligence - now known as “the Flynn effect” - was followed by an emotional, and often aggressive, discussion, since intelligence is always a hot potato (so hot that Jared Diamond has claimed that we are all equally intelligent except for people in New Guinea, who are smarter).

In 1995, the American Psychological Association instituted a working group led by the psychologist Ulric Neisser to conduct a meta-study of intelligence studies. We shall look a quite a number of meta-studies in this book, and what it means is a process during which scientists examine all previous scientific studies of the subject and essentially turn each of their conclusions into a single data point. They can thereby reach an overall conclusion from all these studies. Regarding the aforementioned study of intelligence, 11 scientists nominated by various organizations participated in this work, and their conclusions were clear and radical. For instance, if US children born in 1932 were to take a standard, modern day intelligence test at that time, their average IQ would only be around 80 (dull and bordering on outright deficiency; the global scale is always calibrated so that the average becomes 100). That’s how (un)intelligent average Americans were in 1932!

There are a number of possible explanations for the rapid increase in intelligence since then. One is this: Norbert’s civilizing process creates greater tolerance and human interaction across borders as well as through migration, and this stimulates more outbreeding and less inbreeding which, over many generations, will raise intelligence.¹⁶⁰ Conversely, systematic inbreeding such as cousin marriages reduces intelligence.

Another likely contributor is the known fact that first-born children are, on average, slightly more intelligent than their siblings - perhaps partly because they spend more time with very enthusiastic parents, and partly because they will be held responsible for looking after their younger siblings.¹⁶¹ The latter is indicated by the fact that only-children are less intelligent than first-born siblings.

However, a much more important contributing factor is probably that people in civilized societies have far better nutrition and contract less serious illnesses, which is especially important for the brain during the first year of life. Malaria, for instance, can lead to anaemia in children’s brains just at the time where it is supposed to grow quickly, which hampers development.¹⁶² Many who visit poor countries may be annoyed that some people seem lethargic, apathetic and perhaps stupid, but they may not consider that many of these individuals may be sick or weakened from malnutrition and diseases such as malaria. This is also relevant to the recent history of Western average intelligence, as malaria was widespread in Europe, the US, and even as far north as Siberia up until and including World War II. Actually, in the years just before World War II, between one and six million Americans were infected with malaria each year. Then they began to spraying with the insecticide DDT against it and, in 1952, they only identified two cases. Not two million. Two.

The massive decrease in the number of serious infectious diseases in the West must have contributed to increased intelligence, which also applies to the Netherlands, where Flynn first discovered his indication of increasing intelligence. The Netherlands was plagued by malaria until its last major outbreak in 1947 – only three years before the date of Lynn’s first Dutch IQ tests.

Flynn himself has suggested that cultural diferences could be important. Intelligence tests are designed to be independent of specific knowledge.¹⁶³ However, they are not entirely neutral in terms of whether people have a grasp of basic concepts such as logical, abstract and hypothetical thinking, reasoned assumption, statistics and separation of ideas from the authorities or impartial search for truth. Some people are brought up with these memes and others not, and this might make big differences in measured intelligence, even if their brains were physically identical.¹⁶⁴

Let’s finish the discussion of the effects of creativity and culture (and intelligence) with one last example: the Ashkenazi Jews. The Jewish religion evolved among Arabs in the Middle East approximately 3,000 years ago, which goes to say that Jews at that time were simply Arabs with a special faith. Because of increasing strife (a very long story) these Arabs turned Jews began emigrating, and some settled among the Anglo-Saxons in Western Europe, (which means within what became the world’s creative centre). Some of these emigrants are called Ashkenazi Jews, and these were the ones who settled within modern day Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Eastern France and Holland, which means smack in the middle of Europe’s creative centre. There, they developed a hybrid language combining German, Hebrew and Slavic called Yiddish. Unlike other Jews, the descendents of the Ashkenazi Jews now have average IQ of approximately 112-115 (overall US and European averages are both in the region of 100).

Why are they so effective? Recent studies have explained that, due to persecution they were unable to own land and possibly also too scared to be tied to any specific area. So, instead, they lived primarily from trade and finance, where intelligence and creativity was more important than brute strength and power. Furthermore, records have shown that the richest Jews, on average, had most surviving children, and here we have our explanation: they grew intelligent because they needed to be creative.¹⁶⁵ This must obviously mean they contributed greatly to the success of Europe’s creative core, but it doesn’t mean that this core became creative because of them alone, as we should recall that their intelligence increased relative to that of other Jews because only the Ashkenazi Jews lived in a creative area.

The story continues; because many of these emigrated to the US due largely to further persecution, and while their descendants there now only constitute approximately 3% of the US population,¹⁶⁶ they constitute 27% of US Nobel prize winners in the 20th century and 25% of ACM Turing Award winners, 32% of chess champions and a quarter of Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners¹⁶⁷. Furthermore, Jews constitute a completely disproportionate percentage of chief executive officers (CEOs) in large companies in Europe and especially the US and, according to Forbes Magazine, in 2013 Jews constituted 11.6% of the world’s billionaires, even though only approx. 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish (there are approximately 14 million Jews). In the US, no less than 48% of all billionaires in 2013 were Jews and these included Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Michael Bloomberg (founder of Bloomberg), George Soros (Founder of Quantum Fund), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders of Google), Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) and Michael Dell (Founder of Dell).

What does all this mean? First, it basically means this: people in the West did not get richer because they were smarter, but over a period they actually did get a good deal smarter, because they grew richer.

And second: culture matters a lot. People with a productive culture can arrive empty-handed almost anywhere and will, on average, be successful within a few generations or less. Creating incentives for hard work, personal responsibility and innovation does pay off.

Many scientists downplay culture and ideas when they try to describe what shaped the world. Instead, they focus on a resource-based approach, such as was promoted by Marxist thinker Friedrich Engels. Just listen to what he wrote in 1884: “Now the Eastern continent, the so-called Old World, contained almost all the animals suitable for domestication and all the cultivable cereals with one exception, while America contained only one domesticable mammal, the llama, and this only in a part of the South; and only one cereal fit for cultivation, but that the best, maize.”¹⁶⁸ The basic idea is thus that Stone Age Europe overtook America due to the natural distribution of fauna and flora.

The scientist Jared Diamond popularized and expanded this idea in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, published in 1997, in which he elaborated that the European head-start enabled Europeans to make powerful weapons before others. When Europeans acclimatised to living with animals via farming they also developed a much stronger genetic immune system than the Indians and, when they arrived in America, European diseases killed many Indians. Diamond’s starting point was therefore largely based on the availability of natural resources and, throughout the book, which is more than 500 pages long, he only mentions “ideas” 31 times and does not refer to memes at all.

He was correct in saying that the Europeans had a better immune system than the Indians because of farming, but otherwise the story makes little sense. It is, for instance, difficult to argue that Scandinavia, northern Germany or the British Isles offered especially attractive natural resources to a Neolithic or Bronze Age man. It was often bitterly cold and windy, and winter was long, dark and barren. And how do you explain the economic differences between Albania and Switzerland, North-and-South Korea or Zimbabwe and Botswana? Why was Australia among the poorest nations on Earth when the Aboriginal peoples ruled there but became one of the richest, after Anglo-Saxons arrived? If natural resources are more important than ideas, why was China initially ahead of Europe and later way behind? Why did Venezuela which, like Argentina, was neck-to- neck with Germany between 1900 and 1950, drop down the ranks to 93 in terms of GDP per capita in 2013, even though it was sitting on some of the world’s largest energy reserves?

Engels, Diamond and many others were looking for their explanations in the wrong place. While resources have certainly helped or hindered here and there (as they helped people in the UAE and hindered those in the North Pole), the main explanation for differences come from how well people make transactions with one another, and this translates into cultural characteristics that can either be highly conducive to the development of dynamic societies or a massive hindrence. For example, well-situated harbours, decentralization, free markets and open minds have been far more influential than weather, indigenous grains, rich soil or mineral resources. So here is an important distinction to consider, and it may sound harsh: if your grandparents, or even far more distant ancestors were active traders in an open society, the statistical (yes, statistical!) likelihood increases, that you are a fairly honest, trustworthy, trusting, meticulous, tolerant, and creative person. However, if you come from a closed tyranny, you are statistically less likely to be trusting of others, less trustworthy yourself, less tolerant and less creative.

What happened to our ancestors also contributes to our cultural attitudes to change. To traditional sailors like the Anglo-Saxons and, before them, the Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians, foreigners would primarily have offered opportunity. The antithesis of such a dynamic mentality is peoples who shielded themselves behind fortresses and believed in self-sufficiency and isolation. Such people would predominantly see limits and set limits.

While Western history has included a constant battle between these two mindsets since medieval times, and especially from 1450, it has mostly been those who embraced change and openness who had the upper-hand in the debate. However, the opposite has, nevertheless,never been very far from the surface - just think of the huge bestselling book Limits to Growth (we shall return to that) or, even worse, the communists, fascists and Nazis, who actually ruled almost all of Europe a couple of generations ago. There has always been, and there will surely also in the future remain, lots of people who are far more inclined to see limits and suggest limitations than to see opportunities and promote creativity.

People wishing for a static society may not know, or may not want to know, that Western civilisation has made people far better and happier, and that it has shaped people and cultures that are far more creative and co-operative than before. Or they may lack imagination to see how creativity can solve our problems. Or perhaps they are simply, psychologically, afraid of change.

The next section is largely written for these people (and about them), because it will address their four main specific objections; namely that 1) we are approaching the end of what is possible or desirable, so we must prepare ourself for a more static society; 2) free and creative societies will automatically concentrate power and money in fewer and fewer hands, so we should rein them in; 3) economic growth will consume all the world’s resources, so it should be halted; and 4) modern technologies and increased wealth will destroy our environment, so we should hit the brakes.