Progress reporting

After a decade, my last Rapport column

When this arrives in your mailbox, I’m very likely building sand castles on the beach. Thank you for following Our Long Walk, my blog about South Africa’s economic past, present, and future, over the last year. (If you’re a recent subscriber, welcome!) This will be the last post for the year. I’ll be back in the new year with many more posts. If you want to support my writing – or perhaps left it late to find that perfect Christmas gift – please consider a paid subscription.

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This is my 120th consecutive column for Rapport. It’s also my last. Indulge me, then, as I reflect.

My trade is economic history – the study of how and why our living standards change over time. I count cattle and brandy casks in tax censuses, unearth data from attestation forms, estate inventories, and marriage records, and diagnose trends in thousands of death certificates – all to document the well-being of those who lived long before us.

I do this because I am convinced that we live better lives today than our ancestors did. For many, this is hard to believe. Debt consumes us. Prices spiral upward. We check and recheck the front door two, three, four times. We worry about our children’s future. Just leaf through this Rapport, or any other newspaper, and you’ll find stories of misery – in South Africa and beyond: war, crime, loss, chaos. Things seem so dire that even this newspaper is closing down!

But then I look at a graph like the one below. The first thing to notice is the two lines, one in orange and one in green. These are child mortality rates from the early 20th century in Paarl, the town where I grew up. Look at how staggeringly high the mortality rates were around the turn of the century – about 200 per 1,000 for white residents and 300 per 1,000 for coloured residents. In essence, one in every three coloured children and one in every five white children died before their fifth birthday. It’s a heart-wrenching statistic.

But, as I’ve often explained in this column many times, we struggle to make sense of such abstract statistics. Stories are what move us, what we remember. That’s why the dots on this graph also show every child under five who died on the street we moved to in the 1980s: Bosch Street. A few names are included, too – Clara, Isaac, Johannes Jacobus, Lenie. Look closely, and you’ll see the suffering our ancestors endured. In some years around 1900, seven or eight young children died in the same street.

Today, thankfully, things are much better. In South Africa, the average child mortality rate is now one in thirty. In wealthy countries, it’s one in 300. Life might not always be easy, but on average, we are far better off today.

The graph above, of course, tells many more stories. You can clearly see the decline in the white child mortality rate, with almost no change for coloured children. Why this happened is a question my students and I are currently exploring. Possible explanations include rising income inequality, better water and sanitation, lower population density, and improved medical knowledge. There are many other hypotheses to test.

Another story: notice the colour of the dots. They all represent coloured children. By the time my parents and I moved into Bosch Street in the 1980s, there were no longer any coloured residents. The Group Areas Act of the 1960s had turned this, like many other streets in Paarl, into one reserved for white residents.

This, I believe, is how history should be told. It’s a way to highlight the progress of the past few decades and centuries while recognizing that this progress was not universally shared. What we must learn from this is that we can aspire to higher living standards for everyone, provided we correctly identify the ingredients of our success. That is the purpose of economic history.

But, often, telling this story feels like a lonely battle. Take, for example, the progress report from November 19 on making history a compulsory high school subject in South Africa, replacing life orientation as a required course. There’s much to be said about this. My opinion, for what it’s worth: I don’t think it’s a good idea to force history down everyone’s throat, simply because not many teachers have the ability to present it in an engaging way. But that’s a conversation for another day.

What concerns me, however, is the near-total absence of economic history in the curriculum. Language, gender, and cultural history are emphasised, as well as archaeology. The closest we come to economic history is labour history, which I suspect will mostly focus on trade unions (likely through a strongly Marxist lens).

It’s all well and good to place greater emphasis on Africa’s precolonial history, as the report highlights, but it would be a shame if this is limited to a political and cultural history relying heavily on (often one-sided) oral sources. As I write in the second edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom, available in January, there is a rich pre-colonial economic history that can instil pride in children (and adults) for their continent. Questions such as: Why did the agricultural revolution occur first in the Northern Hemisphere rather than the Southern? (Hint: It has to do with oscillations in the Earth’s orbit!) Why did the domestication of tubers rather than grains in West Africa lead to more fragmented ethnic groups? And why were Central African potters responsible for the discovery of iron – before any other region in the world?

And that’s without even touching on the great global transformations of the last millennium! In short, nowhere in the curriculum will high school history students be exposed to the extraordinary progress humanity has made over the past two centuries—the Great Enrichment, as Deirdre McCloskey, the economist who received an honorary doctorate at Stellenbosch last week, calls it. More importantly, nowhere will they learn why it happened: that we live today with the expectation that our children will survive their first five years not because of exploitation, but because of the freedom to experiment with new ideas.

This is why I write: because the lack of understanding about why we are better off than our ancestors matters. If we don’t know how it happened, or why it happened, we’ll grope in the dark when thinking about economic policy today. That’s why populism, on both the left and the right, is so seductive.

It has been a privilege to share these lessons for a decade with the readers of the largest Afrikaans newspaper. A heartfelt thanks to my editor, Pieter Malan, who, with his Sederberg serenity, shaped my words with wisdom. And to you, the reader – especially those who occasionally reached out with a question or, sometimes to my embarrassment, a correction. And, of course, to the online commentators, who were mostly good-natured but also often made me laugh out loud with their spirited resistance.

I’m not done writing, though. The story of how we became wealthy still has countless side roads to explore. And the world isn’t standing still; new technologies like artificial intelligence bring enormous opportunities for economic progress, but they also present new risks.

The lessons of this enrichment are particularly relevant for the continent we call home. It’s not far-fetched to believe that what happens in Africa over the next half-century will shape the future of our world. By 2100, two out of every five people will live in Africa (compared to less than one in five today), and more than half of all babies will be African. Here in South Africa, we will experience this tremendous transformation firsthand, whether we like it or not. I hope to witness it and report on it: so do follow my weekly columns on Our Long Walk. Better yet, to support more such writing, become a paid subscriber.

The goal, though, is not just to report, but also to guide – to steer us toward an even better future. Hou koers!

An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 7 December 2024. The images were created using Midjourney v6.