The Human Advantage

Bestselling author and economist Jay W. Richards makes the definitive case for how the free market and individual responsibility can save the American Dream in an age of automation and mass disruption. For two and a half centuries, America has been held together by the belief that if you work hard and conduct yourself responsibly in this country, you will be able to prosper and leave a better life for your children. But over the past decade, that idea has come into crisis. A recession, the mass outsourcing of stable jobs, and a coming wave of automation that will replace millions of blue- and white-collar jobs alike have left many people worried that the game is rigged and that our best days are behind us. In this story-driven manifesto on the future of American work, Jay Richards argues that such thinking is counterproductive--making us more fragile, more dependent, and less equipped to succeed in a rapidly changing economy. If we're going to survive, we need a new model for how ordinary people can thrive in this age of mass disruption. Richards pulls back the curtain on what's really happening in our economy, dispatching myths about capitalism, greed, and upward mobility. And he tells the stories of how real individuals have begun to rebuild a culture of virtue, capitalizing on the skills that are most uniquely human: creativity, resilience, and empathy for the needs of others. Destined to take its place alongside classics like Economics in One Lesson , The Human Advantage is the essential book for understanding the future of American work, and how each of us can make this era of staggering change work on our behalf.

"The blistering pace of technological change has left many Americans uncertain about their place in the 21st-century economy. But as Jay Richards wisely reminds us, no machine will ever be able to replicate what makes us truly human: Our creativity, and our virtue. The Human Advantage masterfully demonstrates that we need not fear the future, and that a life of happiness still awaits those with the courage to pursue it."
 -Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute
 
"Boldly upends what Richards calls 'the greatest delusion of our age...the paradoxical penchant to deny our own agency while attributing agency to the machines we create.' Richards commands all the wisdom of Michael Novak and transcends it with a Renaissance range of mastery of the sciences and an infectious genius for storytelling."
-George Gilder, bestselling author of Wealth and Poverty
 
“Jay Richards brings an agile pen and a synthetical mind to the task of outlining and defending the basis of human flourishing in this new age of Smart Machines. In The Human Advantage, Richards gives us a concise history of revolutions in human work, from prehistory to the present, and how they have changed our world and our lives. He addresses the latest economic and moral challenges and opportunities presented to us by the rise of thinking machines. The way forward he charts is firmly grounded in the unique dignity, strength, and destiny that make us truly human.”
-Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute

Auteur

JAY W. RICHARDS, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Business and Economics at The Catholic University of America, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, the executive editor of The Stream, and the host of EWTN's upcoming TV show A Force for Good. He is the author of many books including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and, with coauthor James Robison, Indivisible (2012). He is also the author of Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award. He has a Ph.D., with honors, in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Échantillon de lecture
1

From Hunter-­Gatherers to Homeowners

The Evolution of the American Dream

Tanzania’s Kalahari Bushmen are persistence hunters who track antelope until they wear them out. This might seem inefficient, but Bushmen are well designed for extreme long-­distance running in the desert heat. They can also carry water. A large-­horned kudu antelope can run fast for many miles. After eight hours of being tracked through the desert, though, the animal can reach such a point of thirst and fatigue that one small man can kill it with a simple wooden spear.1

Halfway across the world, the Dani people of the Indonesian province of Papua, Western New Guinea, are subject to the heavy rains of a large tropical island, so they get by on Stone Age farming methods. The Dani plant tubers such as sweet potatoes and cassava, grow banana trees, and cook pork in earthen ovens. Bedecked with ornate feathered headdresses but little more than waist straps to cover their nakedness, the Dani were first discovered by the outside world in the early twentieth century.

The Kalahari Bushmen and Dani give us two glimpses of what the long prehistory of humanity must have looked like: hunter-­gatherers and primitive farmers who subsisted on whatever the land provided and accumulated no wealth over the course of their lives.

Civilization began with the domestication of animals and the advent of larger-­scale farming. Still, for thousands of years, most people were desperately poor by modern standards. They lived at or just above subsistence, always at risk from disease, climate, and predation.

Only in the last few hundred years have large numbers of people created more wealth than they consumed, and lived much longer and healthier lives. Graphs that chart economic growth from about 8000 BC to the present show a nearly horizontal line for most of that history, which quickly curves upward in hockey-­stick fashion in the last three centuries, with most of the spike coming in the last century.2

Before the sharp “elbow” of this line, life for most people was brutally hard by today’s standards. Thomas Hobbes surely missed some of the joys and beauties of life in primitive societies. But his famous description of the imagined state of nature might just as well have applied to the past. “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” Hobbes observed.3

Hobbes wrote from his ascendant perch in England—­in 1651. In other words, he wrote just before the elbow of the curve had turned sharply upward. How much harsher and harder must the lives of our distant ancestors appear to us now, on the other side of Scottish inventor James Watt. Watt’s work tripled the power of steam engines in the decade before 1776.4 His miracle gave rise to massive factories, cities, railways, and everything else we associate with the Industrial Revolution.5

People moved from using wood to coal, oil, and natural gas. They learned to harness electricity, purify water, refrigerate food, and build indoor plumbing.6 With such advances came new forms of industry, transportation, and cities, as well as prosperity that previous generations could not have imagined. On average, the global population today is “about twenty times richer than it was during the long Agrarian age” before 1500 AD.7

There are now far more people living better, longer lives than ever before. This is especially true in the developed world, but even much of the developing world is catching up. Since 1990—­as more countries have embraced trade and economic freedom—­extreme poverty has been cut in half worldwide and continues to plummet.8 The Brookings Institution projects that such poverty could disappear by 2030.9

Also, “life expectancy in the past 150 years has more than doubled,” …