Have we reached the end of ‘The Great Acceleration’?

Ah well. It was a nice try.

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Great Acceleration, arguing that the world around us is speeding up and that this is on balance a good thing. Enter Danny Dorling with a new book called Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration and Why it’s Good for the Planet, the Economy and Our Lives. Cue a mischievous commission from The Spectator’s literary editor, doubtless hoping for a good old-fashioned nerdfight. The problem with this cunning plan is that Dorling, an Oxford geography professor and demographer, has written a very strange book indeed — and one that shows the extent to which the modern left has driven itself into an intellectual cul-de-sac.

Let’s start with the part that’s relatively uncontroversial. Dorling uses the term ‘great acceleration’ to refer primarily to the huge expansion of humanity’s numbers over the past few decades. This, he argues persuasively, is coming to an end much faster than we think: China’s population will top out at 1.5 billion but fall back to one billion by the century’s end. India will not get past two billion. Africa is the only place where numbers are still mushrooming, with the population set roughly to quadruple by 2100. This is not a new thesis. Fred Pearce’s Peoplequake said much the same thing a decade ago, rather more elegantly. But what is startling is the scaffolding that Dorling erects on this foundation.

Using a vast array of time series graphs, he argues that all sorts of things are fitting this pattern of slowdown, including technological progress, the number of books published and GDP growth. But this, he insists, is welcome news, because it means we are all slowly waking from the capitalist delusion. The society he envisages will be older, wiser, more eco-friendly — and massively more socialist.