CYAN

WSJ.COM * * * * THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. SATURDAY/SUNDAY • NOVEMBER 20-21, 2010 | C1

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An email legacy:Stieg Larsson on hischaracters and hisplans for up-endingthe crime genre C3

Anya Hindmarchhas handbagdreams, then makesthem into veryreal successes C11

[ INSIDE ]

ESSAY

Minding our meat,skipping some soda: Mario Batali

ponders the future of food.C3

BOOKS

Feted by Fitzgerald and Warhol,created by a woman who dated aNazi—the tale of Chanel No. 5.

C10

WORD CRAFT

Radio host Krista Tippett offerssome rules for how to talk about

The Meaning of It All.C12

BOOKS

Take my book—please! In newvolumes, Judd Apatow collects andPaul Johnson celebrates humor.

C6

COMMERCE & CULTURE

Sleek wind turbines and fast trainslook good—too good. VirginiaPostrel on high-tech escapism.

C12

After 500 years of Western predominance,Niall Ferguson argues,the world is tilting back to the East.

“WE ARE THE MASTERS NOW.” I won-der if President Barack Obama saw thosewords in the thought bubble over thehead of his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jin-tao, at the G20 summit in Seoul last week.If the president was hoping for change hecould believe in—in China’s currency pol-icy, that is—all he got was small change.Maybe Treasury Secretary Timothy Geith-ner also heard “We are the masters now”as the Chinese shot down his proposal forcapping imbalances in global current ac-counts. Federal Reserve Chairman BenBernanke got the same treatment when heannounced a new round of “quantitativeeasing” to try to jump start the U.S. econ-omy, a move described by one leadingChinese commentator as “uncontrolled”and “irresponsible.”

“We are the masters now.” That wascertainly the refrain that I kept hearing inmy head when I was in China two weeksago. It wasn’t so much the glitzy, Olym-pic-quality party I attended in the TaiMiao Temple, next to the Forbidden City,that made this impression. The displaysof bell ringing, martial arts and all-girldrumming are the kind of thing thatWestern visitors expect. It was the under-stated but unmistakable self-confidenceof the economists I met that told mesomething had changed in relations be-tween China and the West.

One of them, Cheng Siwei, explainedover dinner China’s plan to become aleader in green energy technology. Be-tween swigs of rice wine, Xia Bin, an ad-viser to the People’s Bank of China, out-lined the need for a thorough

privatization program, “including eventhe Great Hall of the People.” And infaultless English, David Li of TsinghuaUniversity confessed his dissatisfactionwith the quality of Chinese Ph.D.s.

You could not ask for smarter peoplewith whom to discuss the two most inter-esting questions in economic history to-day: Why did the West come to dominatenot only China but the rest of the worldin the five centuries after the ForbiddenCity was built? And is that period ofWestern dominance now finally coming toan end?

In a brilliant paper that has yet to bepublished in English, Mr. Li and his co-au-thor Guan Hanhui demolish the fashion-able view that China was economicallyneck-and-neck with the West until as re-cently as 1800. Per capita gross domesticproduct, they show, stagnated in the Mingera (1402-1626) and was significantlylower than that of pre-industrial Britain.China still had an overwhelmingly agri-cultural economy, with low-productivitycultivation accounting for 90% of GDP.And for a century after 1520, the Chinesenational savings rate was actually nega-tive. There was no capital accumulationin late Ming China; rather the opposite.

The story of what Kenneth Pomeranz,a history professor at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine, has called “the GreatDivergence” between East and West be-gan much earlier. Even the late economistAngus Maddison may have been over-op-timistic when he argued that in 1700 theaverage inhabitant of China was probablyslightly better off than the average inhab-

itant of the future United States. Mr.Maddison was closer to the mark when heestimated that, in 1600, per capita GDP inBritain was already 60% higher than inChina.

For the next several hundred years,China continued to stagnate and, in the20th century, even to retreat, while theEnglish-speaking world, closely followedby northwestern Europe, surged ahead.By 1820 U.S. per capita GDP was twice

that of China; by 1870 it was nearly fivetimes greater; by 1913 the ratio wasnearly 10 to one.

Despite the painful interruption of theGreat Depression, the U.S. suffered noth-ing so devastating as China’s wretchedmid-20th century ordeal of revolution,civil war, Japanese invasion, more revolu-tion, man-made famine and yet more(“cultural”) revolution. In 1968 the aver-age American was 33 times richer thanthe average Chinese, using figures calcu-lated on the basis of purchasing powerparity (allowing for the different costs ofliving in the two countries). Calculated incurrent dollar terms, the differential atits peak was more like 70 to 1.

This was the ultimate global imbal-ance, the result of centuries of economicand political divergence. How did it comeabout? And is it over?

As I’ve researched my forthcomingbook over the past two years, I’ve con-cluded that the West developed six “killerapplications” that “the Rest” lacked.These were:

• Competition: Europe was politicallyfragmented, and within each monarchy orrepublic there were multiple competingcorporate entities.

• The Scientific Revolution: All the ma-jor 17th-century breakthroughs in mathe-matics, astronomy, physics, chemistry andbiology happened in Western Europe.

• The rule of law and representativegovernment: This optimal system of so-cial and political order emerged in theEnglish-speaking world, based on prop-erty rights and the representation ofproperty owners in elected legislatures.

• Modern medicine: All the major 19th-and 20th-century advances in health care,including the control of tropical diseases,were made by Western Europeans andNorth Americans.

• The consumer society: The IndustrialRevolution took place where there wasboth a supply of productivity-enhancingtechnologies and a demand for more, bet-ter and cheaper goods, beginning withcotton garments.

• The work ethic: Westerners were thefirst people in the world to combine moreextensive and intensive labor with highersavings rates, permitting sustained capi-

Pleaseturntothenextpage

TheWest developed a rangeof ‘killer apps,’ from scienceto the work ethic. But nowothers have figured outhow to download them.

Illustration by Harry Campbell

Ann Marsden (Tippett); Getty Images (turbines); Scanpix/Sipa Press (Larsson); Linda Brownlee for The Wall Street Journal (Hindmarch)

In China’s Orbit

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REVIEWBOOKS • CULTURE • SCIENCE • COMMERCE • HUMOR • POLITICS • LANGUAGE • TECHNOLOGY • ART • IDEAS

Oprah choosesthe best of Dickensand the worstof Dickens for herbook club C3

Alvin Ailey’sextraordinarycalling card, thedance ‘Revelations,’turns 50 C13

[ INSIDE ]

MOVING TARGETS

Joe Queenan knows everything thereis to know about Taylor Swift.

He just wishes he didn’t.C11

BOOKS

He wrote the granddaddy ofdrug-addiction memoirs: The life of

Thomas De Quincey.C8

CREATING

With sneaker designer Eric Avar inNike’s ‘innovation kitchen,’ andkicking around ideas with Kobe.

C11

VISUALIZER

They went to see the elephant butgot piffled and bought the farm:

a look at the world of euphemisms.C12

ESSAY

Our kids aren’t such innocentsanymore, says Roger Ebert, so let’s

get real about movie ratings.C3

ASSEMBLINGTHEGLOBAL BABY

With an international network of surrogate mothers and egg and sperm donors, a new industryis emerging to produce children on the cheap and outside the reach of restrictive laws.

IN A HOSPITAL ROOM on the Greek is-land of Crete with views of a sapphiresea lapping at ancient fortress walls, aBulgarian woman plans to deliver ababy whose biological mother is ananonymous European egg donor, whosefather is Italian, and whose birth is be-ing orchestrated from Los Angeles.

She won’t be keeping the child. Theparents-to-be—an infertile Italianwoman and her husband (who providedthe sperm)—will take custody of thebaby this summer, on the day of birth.

The birth mother is Katia Antonova,a surrogate. She emigrated to Greecefrom Bulgaria and is a waitress with ahusband and three children of her own.She will use the money from her sur-rogacy to send at least one of her ownchildren to university.

The man bringing together this dis-parate group is Rudy Rupak, chief exec-utive of PlanetHospital.com LLC, a Cali-fornia company that searches the globeto find the components for its businessline. The business, in this case, is creat-ing babies.

Mr. Rupak is a pioneer in a contro-versial field at the crossroads of repro-ductive technology and internationaladoption. Prospective parents put offby the rigor of traditional adoptionsare bypassing that system by producingbabies of their own—often using an eggdonor from one country, a sperm donorfrom another, and a surrogate who willdeliver in a third country to make whatsome industry participants call “aworld baby.”

They turn to PlanetHospital and ahandful of other companies. “We takecare of all aspects of the process, like aconcierge service,” says Mr. Rupak, a41-year-old Canadian.

Clients tend to be people who wantchildren but can’t do it themselves:families suffering from infertility; gaymale couples. They may also have trou-ble adopting because of age or otherobstacles.

And they’re price sensitive. Plan-etHospital’s services run from $32,000to around $68,000, versus up to$200,000 for a U.S. surrogate.

Overseas surrogacy has other advan-tages. Surrogates in some poorer coun-tries have little or no legal right to thebaby. In Greece, a surrogate can beprosecuted for trying to keep a child.By contrast, some U.S. surrogates havetried to legally claim the childrenthey’ve carried.

The process can bring profound di-lemmas. In some cases, clinics end upcreating more fetuses than a coupleneeds, forcing a decision over whetherto abort one or more pregnancies. Ba-bies carried to term occasionally findthemselves temporarily unable to get apassport.

Mr. Rupak is learning to navigate theuncharted nature of his field—thestateless babies, the ethical complexi-ties. His expansion to Greece, a Euro-pean Union member nation, is specifi-cally intended to lessen the likelihoodof the passport problem for Europeanparents-to-be.

Some of his own clients have facedthe abortion decision, Mr. Rupak says.“Sometimes they find the money” topay for more children than they ex-pected, he says. After all, they went tosuch lengths. And if they decide other-wise, Mr. Rupak says, “We don’t judge.”

PlanetHospital’s most affordablepackage, the “India bundle,” buys anegg donor, four embryo transfers intofour separate surrogate mothers, roomand board for the surrogate, and a carand driver for the parents-to-be whenthey travel to India to pick up the baby.

Pricier packages add services likesplitting eggs from the same donor tofertilize with different sperm, so chil-dren of gay couples can share a geneticmother. In Panama, twins cost an extra$5,000; for another $6,500 you canchoose a child’s gender.

Nobody accurately tallies surrogatebirths abroad, but critics and industryinsiders agree the numbers are grow-ing. Since it started offering fertilityservices abroad in 2007, PlanetHospitalhas orchestrated 459 births, Mr. Rupaksays. Last year, 280 clients hired thecompany for reproductive services, andthat year 210 babies were born—168 ofthem twins. This year, 200 clientssigned contracts, and 75 surrogates arecurrently pregnant.

Critics say the business is strewnwith pitfalls. “The potential for abuseon many levels is big,” says Arthur Ca-plan, director of the Center for Bioeth-ics at the University of Pennsylvania inPhiladelphia, discussing the industry ingeneral terms. “You’re straddling allthese [international] boundaries to buythe ingredients and the equipment.”Mr. Caplan calls it the “wild, wild westof medicine.”

Laws are vague and can conflict

from country to country. In 2008, babyManji was born to an Indian surrogatejust weeks after the divorce of her Jap-anese parents-to-be. (The family wasn’ta PlanetHospital client.) According to aDuke University case study in legal eth-ics, it led to a tangle of Indian and Jap-anese law that first prevented the littlegirl from being issued a birth certifi-cate, and later made it difficult for herfather bring her home to Japan.Months went by. To fix the problem,Japan issued a special humanitarianvisa.

“This area of law is very unsettled,”says Evgenia Terehova, PlanetHospital’slawyer. “There can be all sorts of un-foreseen circumstances.”

Ms. Terehova says PlanetHospitalclients agree to settle disputes usingarbitration under California law. Thecompany says it hasn’t been sued andhasn’t been taken to arbitration.

Greek surrogacy is regulated by a2005 law, but the business takes advan-tage of a legal loophole. Surrogatemothers are not supposed to act forprofit. However, they can accept moneyfor pregnancy-related expenses. Typi-cally, the expenses are set at up to$50,000.

“The judge never asks” about themoney, says Maria Kouloumprakis, asurrogacy lawyer in Greece. Ms. Kou-loumprakis calls the situation “an emp-tiness in the law.”

Egg donors often come from the U.S.or Eastern European countries sincewhite parents tend to prefer fair-skinned children. Those countries allowdonor anonymity. Parents on tighterbudgets might opt for a donor from In-dia or Latin America. Sperm is oftenprovided by the fathers-to-be, thoughit’s also available from a network ofsperm banks in the U.S. and Europe.

Unlike traditional adoption, there isrelatively little vetting of would-be par-ents either by agencies like PlanetHos-pital, regulators or clinics. There arealso fewer restrictions, such as strictage limits, on who can participate.

Mr. Rupak says individual clinics usetheir own standards to make some ofthese decisions. He sometimes adviseshis clients to get a lawyer to be surethey’re in compliance with the laws oftheir home country.

“Our ethics are agnostic,” Mr. Rupaksays. “How do you prevent a pedophilefrom having a baby? If they’re a pedo-phile then I will leave that to the U.S.government to decide, not me.”

Mr. Rupak says he has rejected cli-ents. In one case, he suspected awoman wanted to use her own eggsand her son’s sperm. “Whatever thecase was, these people weren’t honest.It worried us, so we said ‘no.’”

Mr. Rupak, a former screenwriterand movie producer (his credits include“Snowboard Academy,” starring CoreyHaim and Brigitte Neilsen), ran a soft-ware business before opening Plan-etHospital in 2002. Its first business,and still its biggest money-maker, is“medical tourism,” arranging travel toless expensive countries for knee sur-geries, cosmetic dentistry and the like.Mr. Rupak says he got into the repro-duction business after clients startedasking about it.

Conversations between Mr. Rupakand his customers can be an odd mix offrank talk about sperm counts andmenstrual cycles and good old-fash-ioned salesmanship. During one clientmeeting over tea in Chicago, Mr. Rupakfirst answers a question about the pos-sibility of breast-feeding if you’re notthe birth mother. Then, as the conver-sation wraps up, he says: “I have somegood news for you. We’ll be offeringyou and your husband complimentaryteeth-cleaning while you’re in Hydera-bad.”

His client, Caroline Lu, smiles.“That’s great,” she says. Ms. Lu latersays she and her husband passed onthe teeth-cleaning.

Many factors drive surrogacy’s glo-bal spread. China and other big adop-tion destinations have toughened theirrules in recent years. Some developedcountries, including Japan, Spain, Ger-many, Italy and France, outlaw or se-verely restrict surrogacy at home. TheUnited Kingdom prohibits surrogacy forpay, and in 2005 banned donor ano-nymity. Some U.S. states prohibit sur-rogacy for pay, and in recent yearssome have outlawed gay adoption.

PlanetHospital recently launched awebsite touting “surrogaycy” aimed atgay couples. “In some states you cannotmarry, let alone adopt; but not a law inthe land can take away a child that isbiologically yours,” the site says.

“We are so excited, we are justgleaming,” says Marc Loeb, a 33-year-old sales director for a women’s ap-parel company in New York, whosebaby girl, Eden, was born in India a fewdays ago.

Mr. Loeb and his spouse, Wolf Ehrb-latt, (the two were legally married inMassachusetts two years ago) hiredPlanetHospital in 2009. For a gay cou-ple, domestic or international adoptionis tough, says Mr. Loeb. And the ex-pense of U.S. surrogacy made it feel

Pleaseturntothenextpage

BY TAMARA AUDIAND ARLENE CHANG

The ‘India bundle’ buys an egg donor, four embryotransfers into four separate surrogate mothers, room

and board for the surrogate and a car and driverfor the parents-to-be when they travel to India

to pick up the baby.

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for The Wall Street Journal

Getty Images (Oprah, Swift); Andrew Eccles (dance); Nike; Graham Roumieu for The Wall Street Journal; Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection

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REVIEWBOOKS • CULTURE • SCIENCE • COMMERCE • HUMOR • POLITICS • LANGUAGE • TECHNOLOGY • ART • IDEAS

An ounce ofvermouth, a dash ofscience. Inside themind of an acemixologist C11

How Julia Childmastered the art ofbeing Julia Child:her revealing lettersto a friend C5

[ INSIDE ]

MIND & MATTER

Matt Ridley on an Indian innovator’ssuccess in helping kidsto teach themselves.

C4

ICONS

A Norman Rockwell auctionshows that it’s still cool

to be square.C14

BOOKS

Obama’s apartment, a mayonnaisemecca and all the ticker-tape parades:

An encyclopedia for New York.C7

COMMERCE & CULTURE

Virginia Postrel looks atChina’s effort to find a new past

for itself on Kenya’s coast.C12

VISUALIZER

Goodbye, Lawrence of Arabia. Hello,Don Draper. Why grownup

entertainment has gone small screen.C12

No TeeTime forZubaid

John Wells is a man caught betweentwo worlds—a CIA operative who has con-verted to Islam and speaks Arabic but re-mains loyal to the United States. In recentyears, he has stopped a dirty bomb attackin Times Square and chased a killer target-ing a team of agency interrogators whoran a secret prison in Poland. Now, thanksto WikiLeaks, he faces an unexpected crisisin Cairo.

JOHN WELLS HAD LANDED IN Cairo witha day to save General Omar Zubaid’s life.He was down to six hours.

Zubaid was a squat, heavy man with apack-a-day Marlboro habit and a trimblack mustache that served only to empha-size his yellow teeth. For seven years, hehad been administrative director of theEgyptian General Intelligence Service,more popularly known as the mukhaba-rat—the secret police.

The title hardly sounded formidable,but Egypt’s bureaucracy was legendary.Even the muk followed its rules. Zubaidsigned off on every new hire, every pris-oner transfer, every request for a pinholecamera or a false identity card or over-time. What he didn’t know officially helearned playing golf twice a week withSaeed Assad, the service’s chief.

So for the last seven years, he had beenthe CIA’s most valuable agent, helping theagency track not just Egypt but Saudi Ara-bia and the Palestinians and even Israel.He was reliable and prolific and was paidaccordingly, receiving $125,000 a month atan account in Luxembourg. He turneddown flat the CIA’s offer to keep his pay-ments on its ledgers at Langley—despitethe agency’s promise to pay 6% interest onthe phantom account.

“I prefer the Credit Suisse,” he’d toldthe CIA’s station chief in Cairo, a formerMarine with the unlikely alias of “Tiny.”

“Who doesn’t?” Tiny said.Then Julian Assange came along. He

had the pale white skin of a software engi-neer, the shining fanatic eyes of a suicidebomber, and absolute certainty in his ownrighteousness. He invented WikiLeaks. Andeverything went south.

Of course, Zubaid’s name wasn’t in theState Department cables that WikiLeakshad smeared over the Internet like a ram-bunctious five-year-old with a new box ofCrayolas. Nor his alias. Zubaid worked forthe agency, not State. Anyway, his informa-tion was usually classified as TOPSECRET/SCI, “special compartmentalized informa-tion”—a universe away from the merelySECRET cables that WikiLeaks had stolen.

But over time, inevitably, Foggy Bottomand Langley pooled what they knew. Soburied in the WikiLeaks cables from theembassy in Cairo were oblique referencesto Egypt’s deepest secrets: “Mubarak dis-closed to us last year’s incident at Te-neida” (an uprising at a secret prison inthe Sahara); “Saeed described the Augustraid” (a disastrous attempt on a terroristcell in Luxor); “Finally, they acknowledgedthe Hamas meeting.” Collectively, the ca-bles gave Egypt’s counter-espionage offic-ers reason to believe that the muk hadbeen penetrated at its highest level.

The Egyptian investigators had movedcarefully, since the goal was to accuse oneof their bosses of treason. Slowly, steadily,after a few weeks, they shrank the pool ofpotential suspects. Until only Zubaid re-mained.

But Zubaid too was on alert. As men hePleaseturntothenextpage

RICHARD BURTON in the 1965 thriller ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.’

EverettCo

llection

Waiting for the Train to MinskNick Heller, ex-Special Forces and a former

intelligence operative for the Pentagon, is a “pri-vate spy” hired by wealthy individuals, politi-cians, corporations and even countries. His lat-est assignment is a high-stakes meeting inAmsterdam with an employee of WikiLeaks whois threatening to publish classified photos of atop-secret new weapon.

THE WIKILEAKS GUY seemed awfully secretivefor someone whose job was exposing secrets.

He’d agreed to meet me in Amsterdam, buthe refused to give a location. After I landed atSchiphol airport, a text message arrived on myBlackBerry from a blocked sender. I was to takea taxi to Centraal Station. Then another text in-structed me to take the Number 17 tram to Os-dorp. And on it went. Until they were sure Iwasn’t part of a snatch team.

The man I was meeting, a Swede who workedfor WikiLeaks, had reason to be paranoid. Hisboss, Julian Assange, was on the lam. Interpolhad a red notice out on him for sex crimecharges. The Swede didn’t want to get set up.

I was in Amsterdam because WikiLeaks hadphotos of the XF322 weapons system and wasabout to run them. As a matter of policy, theU.S. government refused to meet with anyone atWikiLeaks. But I’m a private intelligence opera-

tive, not a government employee, so the Secre-tary of Defense had asked me to act as interme-diary.

Finally, the instructions led me to a dimly litcafé in the Jordaan district. Linoleum floor, uglywallpaper, a lot of old music posters. The stenchof stale beer almost masked by pine-scentedcleaning solution. I walked in with De Telegraafunder my arm.

“Third floor,” the bartender muttered.The Swede was waiting for me in a small,

bare room, seated in a chair by a window. Hewas short and pigeon-chested, long blond haircurling under his ears. He had the pale blotchyskin of someone who spends all his time at acomputer monitor.

“Please, Mr. Heller,” he said, pointing to theonly other chair in the room.

I took a seat. “Are all you guys so paranoid?”I asked.

“If paranoid is the opposite of gullible.” Aslow, reptilian blink.

“You know the old story about the two rivalbusinessmen who meet at a Warsaw train sta-tion?”

He shook his head warily.“The first man says, ‘Where are you going?’

and the second one says, ‘To Minsk.’ And thenthe first one says, ‘You’re telling me you’re go-ing to Minsk, so I’ll think you’re going to Pinsk.But I happen to know you really are going to

Minsk. So why are you lying to me?’”“Your point?”“Paranoids have a problem dealing with ac-

tual candor.” I leaned back. “Listen, you cannotpost those photographs.”

“Your policy opinions don’t interest me, Mr.Heller. I told your Secretary of Defense that weare offering you the opportunity to confirm ordeny the authenticity of these photographs.That is all.”

He shoved a thick manila envelope at me. Ipulled out the photos and gave them a casualglance. I’d seen them before, of course.

“Looks to me like props from some big-bud-get Hollywood movie.”

“Nice try,” he said.“If you post these on the Internet,” I said,

“you’ll be making a huge mistake.”“Oh?”“It will just blow up in your face, I promise

you. You will do an enormous amount of dam-age.”

“Thank you for your concern,” he said acidly.“Even if you don’t care about having the

blood of American soldiers on your hands, youought to care about your reputation in the

Pleaseturntothenextpage

How will the era of WikiLeaks change the world of spying? We turned to a trio of spy novelists

and asked them to imagine what the new rules would mean for their fictional heroes.

Alex Berenson’s fifth John Wells novel,“The Secret Soldier,” will be published inFebruary.

“Buried Secrets,” the next installment in Jo-seph Finder’s Nick Heller series, will be pub-lished in June.

Getty Images (Mind & Matter, Commerce & Culture); Everett Collection (Visualizer)

By Alex Berenson

By Joseph Finder

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Novelist AyeletWaldman’s dailybattle againstboring, gorgeouswriting C12

Ryan Reynolds,the sexiest manalive? Say itisn’t so, saysJoe Queenan C11

[ INSIDE ]

CREATING

She brought Abstract Expressionismdown to earth: landscape painter

Jane Wilson at 86.C11

HEAD CASE

Jonah Lehrer knows you had extrahelpings of stuffing and pumpkin pie.

And he knows why.C12

BOOKS

How fossil-hunters setevolutionary theory in stone—

two new volumes.C8

ESSAY

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely onthe question of the season:What makes a good gift?

C4

VISUALIZER

You have 105 friends...make that104. A statistical analysisof Facebook breakups.

C12

Africa Needs Aid,Not Flawed Theories

THE SCIENCE WRITER Matt Ridleymade his reputation with books like“The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolutionof Human Nature” and “Genome: TheAutobiography of a Species in 23 Chap-ters.” His latest book, “The RationalOptimist: How Prosperity Evolves” ismuch broader, as its title suggests. Itssubject is the history of humanity, fo-cusing on why our species has suc-ceeded and how we should think aboutthe future.

Although I strongly disagree withwhat Mr. Ridley says in these pagesabout some of the critical issues facingthe world today, his wider narrative isbased on two ideas that are very im-portant and powerful.

The first is that the key to risingprosperity over the course of humanhistory has been the exchange of goods.This may not seem like a very originalpoint, but Mr. Ridley takes the conceptmuch further than previous writers. Heargues that our success as a species, asopposed to earlier hominids, resultedfrom innate characteristics that allowedus to trade. Not long after Homo sapi-ens emerged, we were using rare ob-jects, like obsidian blades, far awayfrom the source materials needed toproduce them. This suggests that largenumbers of commercial links were es-tablished even at the hunter-gathererstage of our development.

Mr. Ridley gives many examples ofhow exchange allowed groups to thrive,by enabling them, for example, to ac-quire fish hooks or sewing needles. He

also points out that even the mostprimitive human groups today are opento exchange. I’ve always thought thisopenness was surprising, consideringthe risks involved, but Mr. Ridley con-vincingly describes its adaptive value.

Exchange has improved the humancondition through the movement notonly of goods but also of ideas. Unsur-prisingly, given his background in ge-netics, Mr. Ridley compares this inter-mingling of ideas with theintermingling of genes in reproduction.In both cases, he sees the process asleading, ultimately, to the selection anddevelopment of the best offspring.

The second key idea in the book is,of course, “rational optimism.” As Mr.Ridley shows, there have been constantpredictions of a bleak future through-out human history, but they haven’tcome true. Our lives have improveddramatically—in terms of lifespan, nu-trition, literacy, wealth and other mea-sures—and he believes that the trendwill continue. Too often this over-whelming success has been ignored infavor of dire predictions about threatslike overpopulation or cancer, and Mr.Ridley deserves credit for confrontingthis pessimistic outlook.

Having shown that many past fearswere ultimately unjustified, Mr. Ridleyfinally turns his “rational optimism” totwo current problems whose serious-ness, in his view, is greatly overblown:development in Africa and climatechange. Here, in discussing complexmatters where his expertise is not verydeep, he gets into trouble.

Mr. Ridley spends 14 pages sayingthat everything will be just fine in Af-

rica without our worrying about nega-tive possibilities. This is unfortunateand misguided. Is his optimism justi-fied because things always just happento work out? Or do good results dependpartly on our caring and taking actionto prevent and solve problems? Theseare important questions, and he doesn’tanswer them.

In discussing Africa, Mr. Ridley relieson critics who say, essentially, “Aiddoesn’t work, hasn’t worked and won’twork.” He cites studies, for instance,that show a lack of short-term eco-nomic benefit from aid, but he ignoresthe fact that health improvements,driven by aid, have been a major factorin slowing population growth, whichhas proven, in turn, to be critical tolong-term economic growth. I may bebiased toward aid because I spend mymoney on it and meet with lots of peo-ple who are alive because of it, buteven if that were not the case, I wouldnot be persuaded by such incompleteanalysis.

Development in Africa is difficult toachieve, but I am optimistic that it willaccelerate. Science will come up withvaccines for AIDS and malaria, and the“top-down” approach to aid criticizedby Mr. Ridley (and by the economistWilliam Easterly) will fund the delivery

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BY BILL GATES

GATESRIDLEY

VS

Africa Needs Growth,Not Pity and Big Plans

BILL GATES LIKES my book “The Ra-tional Optimist.” Really, he does. Eventhough he dislikes my points about Af-rica and climate change, these take up,as he notes, just one chapter. The resthe summarizes fairly and intelligently,and I appreciate that. It’s great for anauthor when anybody reviews a book“well” in both senses of the word.

It is worth explaining why I choseAfrica and climate change as the “twogreat pessimisms of today.” The an-swer is simple: Whenever I speakabout optimism and someone in theaudience protests, “But surely you can-not think that we can ever solve...” thesubjects that most frequently crosstheir lips next are African poverty andglobal warming. Mr. Gates also men-tions potential threats from super-in-telligent computers and pandemics.Maybe he is right to worry aboutthem, but I have yet to be persuadedthat either is more than a small risk.

Mr. Gates dislikes my comments onclimate change, which I think will beless damaging than official forecastspredict, while the policies designed tocombat climate change will be moredamaging than their supporters recog-nize. I argue that if we rush into low-carbon technologies too soon, becausewe think the problem is more urgentthan it is, we risk doing real harm toecosystems as well as human livingstandards—as the biofuel fiasco all toographically illustrates. The rush to turnAmerican corn into ethanol instead offood has contributed to spikes in world

food prices and real hunger, while therush to grow biodiesel for Europe hasencouraged the destruction of orangu-tan habitat in Borneo.

I also argue, however, that it ishighly unlikely, given the rate at whichhuman technology changes, that wewill fail to solve the problem of man-made climate change even if it doesprove more severe than I expect. Forexample, the world is on a surprisinglysteady trajectory toward decarboniza-tion. The number of carbon atoms weburn per unit of energy we generate isfalling as we gradually switch from car-bon-rich fuels like wood and coal to hy-drogen-rich fuels like oil and especiallygas. At current rates, we would beburning almost no carbon by about2070, though I suspect that point willnever actually be reached.

The question that I pose in the bookis whether optimism is likely to beright. In essence, neither Mr. Gates norI think that the problem of man-madeclimate change is going to prove insolu-ble or fatal to civilization. We disagreeonly on how urgent it is to devote mas-sive expenditures to dealing with it,which would put poverty reduction atrisk. I think that direct spending to al-leviate malaria, which now kills a mil-lion people a year and whose incidenceis likely to increase as a result of globalwarming by less than 0.03% per year, isa far higher priority. So does Mr. Gates,judging by his foundation’s spending.

It is on Africa that Mr. Gates throwshis sharpest barbs. Yet, once again, Ithink that we agree on the most impor-tant point, namely, that Africa can have

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BY MATT RIDLEY

Where DoesProgress

Come From?

Illustration by John S. Dykes (top); Elliot Erwitt for The Wall Street Journal (Wilson); Everett Collection (Visualizer); Getty Images (4)

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Tuesday, November 15th

6:30 pm Cocktails + Canapés7:30 pm Conversation

Sofitel New YorkBallroom45 West 44th Street (between 5th & 6th Avenues)New York, NY

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