This month, a paralyzed man is walking with the aid of a brain-controlled exoskeleton.
This month, a vaccine is in production that will prevent — not cure, but prevent — certain types of cancer.
This month, scientists in London have invented an “artificial leaf” that sucks in carbon dioxide and turns it into fuel. Lab-grown-meat is now in commercial production on every continent.
Think, for a moment, of how quite miraculous these developments are. We are acquiring powers that previous generations attributed to gods and wizards, and we no longer even put it on the front page. The artificial leaf, for example, would achieve the two chief aims of the green movement — sucking CO2 from the atmosphere while giving us a clean source of energy. True, it is not yet commercially viable, but who can doubt that some such device will soon be on the market? (When it is, environmentalists, instead of cheering, will switch to complaining about something else — but that’s another story.)
Or take the lab-grown meat (perhaps we should instead call it factory-produced meat as it is no longer being developed in research facilities). Think of the utterly revolutionary effect it will have on our planet. At present, most of our land surface area is used directly or indirectly to sustain livestock — either as pastureland or through feed grain. Remove that need, and we suddenly have all the room we like to share with other species.
It is not just that the rate of technological advance is accelerating; it’s that the acceleration is accelerating. We use the word “revolution” to mean an event that changes everything, a moment after which nothing is quite the same again. The French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions altered the terms of trade in international politics. In truth, though, we are now experiencing a “revolution” every few years — arguably even every few months.
Consider this astonishing statistic: A child born today is likely to live for five-and-a-half years longer than one born in the year 2000. When I look at people born in the millennium year, they don’t seem especially old. Yet the gap between Generation Z children and today’s babies will be far greater than between them and their parents’ generation.
It is easy to be blasé about these wonders. Modern medicine has given us something like an extra six hours per day of life. I wish I could tell you that, every day at 6 p.m., I stopped to marvel at that little miracle, but, like most people, I have pocketed the gain and moved on.
Still, it is worth breaking down what made these gains happen in the first place. Progress depends on free contracts and, specifically, on intellectual property rights.
What was it that enabled the industrial revolution — the precursor of all these miracles, the decisive shift from modernity and, thus, the central fact of your life and mine? How did it suddenly come about that lots of men in the English Midlands all started inventing things at the same moment in the 18th century? Was it coincidence? Was there a cluster of geniuses?
Of course not. Many equally brilliant men had lived and died as field hands in preceding centuries. What changed was that there was now an enforceable system of property rights that made it worthwhile to develop new machines and new techniques. Most of those early inventors were practical men. They typically left school in their mid-teens, eager to tinker in the workshop. But their letters show a lively interest in patenting. They weren’t just doing it for fun.
It has become fashionable, these days, to rail at Big Business, and in particular at Big Pharma. Why have patents at all, ask many on the radical Left and a few on the libertarian Right. The short answer is that intellectual property rights have given us cures to leukemia and Ebola and drugs that make HIV a manageable condition. Since we can’t yet cure 9,500 of the 10,000 diseases we have identified, it seems prudent to continue to incentivize research.
Last year, a woman named Irina Tsukerman died in Moscow. When she was 9, Tsukerman contracted tuberculous meningitis. Because the USSR did not have intellectual property rights, her condition would have been a death sentence — except that her father, a physicist, was able to use his contacts to secure the drugs she needed from the West. He was sentenced to death for collaborating with a foreign power, though the sentence was later commuted.
Tsukerman was a product of a state that disdained private property — precisely the sort of state, in fact, that the Sanderses and Corbyns want to replicate. She could have told them that there is nothing compassionate about it.
