Introduction By John A. Baden, PhD

Jane Shaw Stroup was a writer and editor at Business Week Magazine when we met.    The occasion was a seminar series on environmental quality and natural resources produced by my MSU institute in the Economics Department, the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources.  The M. J. Murdock Trust and other foundations funded this and other programs of this MSU “Center of Excellence”.  (MSU’s name for such academic and extension experiments.)

I designed the series for editorial page editors of major publications.  Over the years, participants came from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L A Times, Denver Post, and similarly respected publications. It was a highly successful program on multiple dimensions.  One happy result was quite unexpected.*   

Jane Shaw met my colleague and co-author, Prof. Richard Stroup at an early seminar for editors and journalists.  (Rick was later Chairman of the Agricultural Economics and Economics Department at MSU.)  Each was attracted to the other, Jane returned to Bozeman on several occasions, they were married, and lived in Bozeman until Rick retired from MSU.  

They then moved to Raleigh, NC where Jane became the president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and currently is chairman of its board of directors.   She was the higher education editor of School Reform News.  History is her hobby and she enjoys graduate work in history at NC State University.

FREE is pleased to post Jane’s most recent publication, “How Grim the Reaper”.   This article explains why such a high proportion of “intellectuals” seem to hate, and surely deny, the world-wide progress in health, wealth, and general well-being.   Jane writes: “It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s….”

* f.n.  One sorry result.  This program met its demise when the president of Montana State University, Bill Tietz, demanded that I invite Montana Gov. Ted Schwinden to make a presentation at my journalist seminar.   Schwinden surely had no scholarly credentials but asking him to give an after-dinner talk seemed a safe strategy.  It wasn’t.  The governor became too drunk to read his speech, threw the pages across the room, and began a diatribe against President Reagan and the market system in general.  

I can’t repeat his language here but Frank Adams, Helena Bureau Chief of the Great Falls Tribute, described the governor’s talk in their “Weekend Edition” as “…a slurred presentation laced with profanity….”   The governor told Pres. Tietz that I had “set him up” and wanted me purged from MSU.  I admitted offering Gov. Schwinden alcohol under the presumption he was a responsible adult. How wrong.

In response to purge pressure I requested an academic "peer review" of my institute.  The MSU administration agreed, thinking the review would be critical of our "conservative", that is free market, bias.  Three nationally distinguished economists reviewed my MSU center's work.  (These economists were: B Delworth Gardner, UC Berkeley; M. Bruce Johnson, UC Santa Barbara and Pres. Western Economic Assoc.; and Vernon Ruttan, Distinguish Fellow, U of Minnesota.)  You can find a 1982 peer review of the Center’s work by Professors M. Bruce Johnson and Vernon W. Ruttan here. http://www.free-eco.org/sites/default/files/MSU%20peer%20review.pdf

Their review was highly positive.  The MSU administration denied its existence and attempted to bury it.  They failed. I distributed it, and in retribution was forced out of MSU.  Fortunately, PERC, FREE and Gallatin Writers are successful descendants of my MSU institute, and I live happily ever after.

Here is her article.  I hope it brightens your day.  

APRIL 9, 2019 BY JANE SHAW STROUP

How Grim the Reaper?

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured Steven Pinker, a well-known philosopher and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. What interested the Chronicle most was Pinker’s optimism. As interviewer Tom Bartlett said, ”Pinker writes that intellectuals hate ‘the idea of progress’ while happily enjoying its multitudinous comforts (‘they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia’).”[1] Pinker, in contrast, believes that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” as he wrote in the New Republic in 2007.

It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s. (When I started working, prominent magazines like Time didn’t hire women reporters, just researchers who worked with male reporters). But Laurie Penny, a London writer, recently disparaged the positive story of “empowerment” she was taught to believe in. She can’t get beyond the fact that “behind every one of the brave and brilliant women I sketched in my schoolbooks were a great many men who tried to destroy her.” [2]

Robert J. Norell wrote a devastating book about the experience of Jim Crow (the racial segregation following Reconstruction and continuing until the civil rights movement). The book, The House I Live In, was written partly to show how much race relations have improved in the United States. But (unlike his more recent Up from Slavery, about Booker T. Washington) it received a cold shoulder, especially from academics. The story of progress is not all that attractive, it seems.

This pessimism—or perhaps it is negativism—turns up often. For more than twenty years I worked with an organization that promoted environmental protection through free markets and individual initiative (the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC). We were optimistic, and we had to combat recurring fears of upcoming environmental disasters.

Environmentalists have been predicting catastrophes for decades (some predictions go back to the late 1800s—such as the fear of a “timber famine” as forests were being cut down). In my lifetime, I have seen these predictions: a population “bomb” in the 1960s; running out of energy in the 1970s; the perils of acid rain in the 1980s; global warming in the 1990s; the dangers of fracking in the 2000s, and now “climate change” (a newly minted label for global warming).

None of these has proven to be a serious problem. And these are just the big ones—there were the Alar scare, the garbage crisis, and more. Such issues constantly fade away. The only environmental prediction that had some validity was the claim that chlorofluorocarbons were creating an “ozone hole.” The impact was far less than the alarmists thought, but there was a measurable reduction in ozone in parts of the stratosphere.

Many authors other than Pinker have pointed out that human beings are much better off today than they used to be and the environment is much better protected than it has been for centuries. Among those writers are Wallace Kaufman, Julian Simon, Stephen Moore, and others. Even I have written about it, with Michael Sanera.

My recent interest in history stemmed from my enthusiasm for the great changes that have occurred since the Industrial Revolution. And I don’t mean just more machines and factories and high tech. Friedrich A. Hayek labeled the fundamental change that occurred slowly over time as the “extended order of human cooperation,” the relationships, built largely through trade, that have led to the increasing prosperity and elimination of deep poverty that we have seen around the globe.

Wallace Kaufman, the occasional co-blogger who inspired this post, listed four “hypotheses” to explain why historians and other academics might be pessimistic. I quote:

•First, Americans are still idealists and tend to measure the present by the polar star of absolute perfection.

•Second, history is largely taught as a record of conflict and human disasters.

•Third, few Americans know much history of any kind.

•Fourth, evolution has programmed the human mind to search for and react to threats.

These may be correct. Surely historians should lead the way in countering these dismal views. But, by and large, they don’t.

[1] Tom Bartlett, “Why Do People Love to Hate Steven Pinker?” Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education 2019 (n.d.), https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/hating-pinker?cid=wcontentgrid_40_2. (Subscription probably required.)

[2] Washington Post, March 8, 2019.