Your initial research for the book – Slowing Down: The End of the Great Acceleration – and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives – was to explore what aspects of our economy and lives were speeding up and slowing down. You found, rather counterintuitively, that “almost everything” was slowing down. Can you explain the history of the “great acceleration” and where we are up to now?

I only have any faith in things when I find things I don’t expect, otherwise I think I’m very good at reinforcing my own prejudices. For the book I was looking for the things that were speeding up and getting bigger. American student debt, there’s a great example. If you remember the Occupy posters of student debt, it looks like an exploding balloon. The problem was that every time I discovered the data for something it wasn’t as dramatic as when I looked at it, not as dramatic as the story that had been initially written. Student debt in the US is growing, but for over a decade even the growth of US student debt has stopped accelerating. 

I only found four things that were speeding up: flights, university graduates, our overall pollution in terms of carbon, and the rise in temperatures on the planet. There will be others I’ve missed, but I’ve actually produced a thousand of these diagrams (they are on the Slowdown website) and then I thought, so does it always slow down? Is it always the case that most things are slowing and only speed up for a short time? However, when you look back at the population of the planet, for example, going back to the early 1960s, it was accelerating and had been for 150 years before then. For GDP, the growth was probably accelerating up until the 1950s, and also had been for a long time. 

Our grandparents and great-grandparents did live through times of incredible acceleration, and I think there’s been a huge lag, an entire generational lag, in the way in which we talk about it. They did go from pocket watch to digital watch, they saw changes that we haven’t seen, and our children are currently seeing far fewer changes. Our children, for instance, will never know a time without the internet. And we’re programmed to think there will be a new kind of internet in twenty or thirty years’ time. But as soon as we begin to measure it, that doesn’t seem to be the case, there’s a kind of settling down going on – not an end-of-history settling down, but a settling down in those things that we measure and (currently) value the most.

In the book I look very briefly at previous great accelerations. A thousand years ago there was proto-industrialisation in China, a huge increase in the production of iron and steel that ended because of floods and invasion. There were various times in human history where you have accelerations, but there was not an agricultural ‘revolution’, instead there were hundreds of generations of hunter-gatherers having to farm a little more or less, go back to gathering and then perhaps farm again, which was not a speed-up of our recent proportion or speed. The great acceleration occurred in a matter of just a dozen and a half generations (or less depending on how you measure it). 

1492 is probably the beginning of the age of accelerations, with ships coming back with silver from the Americas. There have only been 18 human generations between then and now (see page 195 of Slowdown). Many people have identified 1492 as a starting point, but in terms of population and everything else, the great acceleration is from 1800 onwards (around seven human generations ago). From the many things involved, it's probably British imperialism, more than anything else. To give an idea of scale, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that British troops invaded or walked into 171 of the 193 current members of the UN. Without being invited, the British empire disrupted more stable social systems of the planet than any other group. Admittedly, if it hadn’t been us it would have been someone else. 

The most extreme example of disruption is Australia, which was demographically stable before the arrival of the British. When you disrupt social systems, you disrupt the mechanisms that civilisations had created for population control, and other kinds of controls. We unleashed a population boom on the world and other European industries were now able to make huge profits, not only because we had captive markets, and literally shipped captives from Africa to the Americas, but because unleashing population growth meant that the market grew every year. So that’s the acceleration, the question is why did it begin to slow down when it slowed down?

What’s your chronology for the start of the slowdown? 

1968. If you’re going to pick one cause, for me, it would be agitation, the rise of trade unions, and the changing position of women, accelerating these incredible changes from (mostly) 1900 onwards. And you see it silently everywhere. It’s actually one of my favourite silent statistics. It is the fall in the number of children due mainly to women wanting fewer children. You know that the only way that this could have occurred in, say, Mali, is a million conversations, which were different to the woman’s mother’s conversation with her father. 

Also the slowing down was inevitable. You run out of space, you run out of gullibility of those who will continue to accept a Ponzi scheme over a number of generations. At first you could sell it on Amsterdam’s dockside while the ships were still coming back laden with riches. But there comes a point where you can’t carry on selling a Ponzi scheme because of everything that has occurred from the changing position of women and then the limits being reached, through to there being nowhere new to exploit; and then, as soon as you do have that drop in population growth and fewer people, your basic model of profit becomes harder and harder to sustain. 

We have an obsession with crises – particularly strong among those who read Karl Marx – and we’re really good at looking at the short term, because the short term transfixes us. We’re a short-term animal. This particular pandemic – covid-19 – transfixes us, even though in two years time, even without a cure, it will be over, unless it’s totally different to the pandemics of this type that have occurred over the last three hundred years. But we’re obsessed by the short term; we nail things down to particular events like a recession, rather than step back and actually say the rate of change has been slowing and slowing. If you go into detail in any particular year, it may have been due to a tsunami and another year due to a different event, but it would have been due to something.

There’s a significant mismatch between the cultural assumption that everything is speeding up and the actual economic and social reality. Why do you think this popular narrative has been so effectively maintained – on all sides – since most aspects of the economy and society have been slowing down for quite a long period, e.g. 30-40 years? 

The belief that technology will save us is a belief in forms of so-called automated luxury communism, the idea that technology will create protein in labs in Helsinki that could feed the entire planet. Technology is always exciting but alone it is never enough and although some would be welcome, we can do very well without new innovations. 

Tech enthusiasm doesn’t often have a malevolent force behind it; it’s not that there are a set of people who are ‘tech liars’. More often there are a set of people who tell you that they’re wealth creators and other people who are lying, but tech advocates are not an inherently nasty group of folk, as far as we see – they are just not aware that it is politics which outlaws hunger, not technology. We also live in a time of the religion of science. Human beings always have to have religion, and the religion that they live with currently they don’t see as religion, they just see it as the truth, that’s just it, that’s true – if you really believe in a religion you believe that it’s not an option, it’s just a truth. And in our current religion, our temples are universities, our priests are scientists; we’re living in a time of the religion of science, and science is about invention, and the rate of speed of invention. 

In certain periods, the rate of invention was incredible, with new experiments around the use of electricity, particularly in the 1930s, during the Second World War, and into the 1950s. But in the 1960s we had computers, they were in the banks, and by the very late 70s I had access to one as a child. The speed of computer innovation produced our last most recent spurt of great change. Now we’re looking for new developments, and we keep talking about nano technologies, or the fourth or fifth AI revolution. The first three AI revolutions, of course, didn’t do that much, and the human genome project that was supposed to offer such great promise, but it largely tells us that individual luck and chance matters most to our health.

Do you make the assumption that slower is better, faster is worse, for most aspects?

We don’t like boring things, we don’t like boring messages, and, of course, a real crisis is an acceleration, so something is not accelerating if it is not a crisis. The acceleration of the number of nuclear warheads was a crisis, we got up to 65,000 worldwide in 1986. And the acceleration in carbon pollution is an absolute crisis and even more of a crisis when you work out how many other things are not accelerating, but the crisis becomes a crisis or the most acute form of itself, just at the point when it’s turned. 

So the population stopped growing in relative terms in 1968 (that year again), at that point, population growth on the planet was two percent per year. There were speculations that within three hundred years the planet would have been a mass of human bodies, even though it was possible mathematically to see that just couldn’t happen. There was a moment ten or fifteen years ago when life expectancy in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea was rising by more than one year a year. Now, either that stops or people become like the gods on mount Olympus in Kensington and Chelsea. When you get these impossible statistics, they tell you you’re living through a remarkable time. Kensington was already becoming the home of the world’s super-rich by that point but it doesn’t happen again, and it may well change in terms of Kensington. Who wants to own a flat in the middle of a pandemic zone that you can’t sell?