10 Global Trends Every Person Should Know | Marian Tupy | EP 165
Hello! If you have found the ideas I discussed interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore.
This new book, Beyond Order, provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 Rules for Life and before that, Maps of Meaning. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.
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Hello everyone! I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Marion L. Toopy, who is the editor of humanprogress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and co-author of the Simon Project. He specializes in globalization and the study of global well-being, as well as the politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. His work has been published or featured in major print and non-print media outlets all throughout the English-speaking world.
Dr. Toopy received his BA in International Relations and Classics from the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in International Relations from the University of Saint Andrews in Great Britain. He is the co-author of a recent book, 10 Global Trends That Every Smart Person Needs to Know, and many other trends you will find interesting. It's a beautiful book, and so that's an accomplishment in and of itself. It's also an extremely interesting book, wide-ranging and necessary, in my estimation, partly because most of what we consume in relationship to global occurrences, economic and otherwise, is negative.
And that's part of the reason that I wanted to talk to Dr. Toopy today because his work is in the same vein as Bjorn Lomborg's work and Matt Ridley's work, among other people, putting forward a narrative of continued and rapid progress that seems at odds, in terms of content and psychologically, with virtually everything that seems to make up the major media trend story zeitgeist.
So, welcome Dr. Toopy. Marion, it's really good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. I'm delighted to be with you and welcome back! It's great to have you back in the fight, so to speak.
Thank you! I was really struck to begin with by your introduction. You talked about why you and Ronald Bailey wrote this book. So, let's start with that. What were your motivations? What did you want to accomplish with this book? And what do you think it does accomplish?
Well, fundamentally, the reality of the world, the reality of human existence, is much better than people understand, let alone appreciate. Most people assume that the world is in a much worse shape than it really is, but the data points in a different direction. It points in the opposite direction. When you look at long-term trends—and we will talk about some of them—most of them are pointing to gradual incremental long-term improvement.
Now, on top of that, we live in a world where a lot of people find meaning and excitement in embracing a lot of movements to "improve the world." But you cannot improve the world if you don't know what the real reality of the world is. So, if you think the reality of human existence is different from what really is, then your improvement can actually detract from human flourishing rather than contribute to it.
So, the idea behind the book was to inform, and it is not really an attempt to produce a Pollyannaish, all-optimistic view on the world. Clearly, there are problems that remain, and there will be new problems that will arise. But we believe there is some value in people knowing the facts—factfulness that Hans Rosling used to talk about. The book is largely free of theory; it is only facts that we have gotten from third parties, with one exception of a trend on natural resources that we will discuss. Everything else comes from third sources, which are the World Bank, the IMF, Eurostat, OECD, or well-established, independent, and creditable academics. And of course, there are footnotes so that people can check that we are not trying to deceive them into anything.
The reason why we structured the book the way we did, the reason why we introduced a lot of nice illustrations is because we wanted it to be a coffee table book of facts. So, in addition to all the architecture books and books about dogs and cooking that people put on their dining room tables or living room tables, we are hoping that they will include this book. While people are fixing food or drinks, maybe their guests are going to open the book and look at something interesting or counterintuitive, and maybe that will lead to a conversation.
Well, it's a book you can sit and read, which is what I did, but it's also clearly a book that you can leaf through, and it is, as I mentioned earlier, beautiful. So that's an additional advantage. It's a very high-quality book, and that's a nice accompaniment to its essentially optimistic message. I found it interesting overall and also bit by bit.
You said ten global trends. It's laid out in sort of increasing resolution, so you start with a narrative that there are reasons to be radically optimistic about the future, especially when you compare that future to the past rather than some hypothetical ideal globe.
At the lowest possible level of resolution, the most general level of resolution, there are reasons to be optimistic. You lay out ten reasons that are really profound, but then you differentiate into a more detailed analysis, and I found that the details as interesting as the global trends.
It's really something to be confronted by something like an unending stream of positive information. One thing that I guess two questions sort of naturally arise out of that is: why should people believe this positive narrative that you're putting forward, given the undeniable negativity that seems to be part of our current view of the world? Speaking broadly—and also, it seems to be something that's constantly pushed in front of us or consumed by us or demanded by us—why should we believe that that's wrong?
Well, partly because I think that the most obvious reason is that people shouldn't believe lies, and they shouldn't believe wrong stuff. People should be well-informed about all sorts of things. They should be aware of risks and benefits of individual actions, of what different politicians are offering. In other words, people should seek facts, regardless of the negativity biases which we have in our brains.
You know, as you well know, being a psychologist, a lot of research has been done on these negativity biases. Why do people prefer to believe the bad news? One of the reasons is that the bad is stronger than good; it has more emotional impact, it's more memorable. As well, precisely the way I like to think about it is that when I have my annual review with my boss, you know, he can spend ninety percent of the time telling me about the things that I've done right, which is always appreciated, and then also mention some of the things that I have done wrong—and there are always many. When I walk out of the interview or the review, the only thing that's in my mind is always the criticism and never the praise.
I think that this applies to a lot of people. They focus on the slights, the criticisms, rather than the praise. I think you see that with people's use of social media too. If I scan comments on any given YouTube discussion like this one, it's definitely the case that the negative comments stick out and are memorable compared to the positive comments.
I mean, I think there is an impact of proportion. So, if I see that the vast majority are positive and a small minority is negative, I can discount the negative to some degree, but it still has a disproportionate impact. I've thought often that's because you can be in extreme pain and dead, which is pretty damn final, and so negative news carries this walloping potential impact given our susceptibility to threat. But you can only be so happy; there's not like there's an infinite amount of happiness that you can be, but there's certainly a finite amount of death and pain that you can experience.
Is there any other reasons you think that it is easy rationale for cynicism and nihilism—for throwing your hands up in the air and giving up? I mean, are there other reasons that we seem so hungry to believe the worst?
Yes. Before going there, let me just confirm what you said about social media. People who like something that you have posted tend to simply click on the love button or the heart button. It's people who disagree with you that usually leave the comments saying what a horrible person you are and how bad your ideas are, so that exacerbates the feeling that the feedback is negative.
Yeah, there could be places like Twitter, too, and we don't know this: is that people who are having a bad day and who are angry are much more likely to actually leave a comment or use Twitter for that matter than the same person even who's having a good day? We just don't know anything about how these communication technologies—how our emotions affect our use of these communication technologies and how that's going to play out in the future. We usually have a certain time that we need in order to accumulate to new technologies, and you know, we'll see how this one plays out. But we certainly discovered in the use of other technologies that it took some time before we got mastery of them. Cars are a typical example; people used to have many more accidents. They used to speed much more, they used to drink before driving, and it took a while before the safety culture set in.
Who knows, maybe over time people will leave Facebook or Twitter and switch to something else. I'm proud to be Facebook-free since 2012, and I don't have a personal Twitter, for process reasons.
Well, you do see the emotional tenor of different social media platforms does differ. I mean, I found that Instagram seems to be a much more positive place, all things considered, than Twitter. It's a little more complex to use, but it seems to be less corrosive. I'm not exactly sure why—maybe it's because it's more image-heavy, I don't know exactly.
Possibly. The other negativity bias is that psychologists have identified, is, for example, the availability heuristic. As you all know, more dramatic and traumatic events tend to be revisited in our memory with greater frequency than the positive memories, and so we get a sense that they are much more numerous and much more frequent than they really are.
Also, positive things happen over much longer periods of time than negative things. You know, it takes years to build a skyscraper, but it takes hours to pull it down in a terrorist attack. It takes years to acquire a lot of human capital through education, but it takes only a second for you to die in a car crash.
So a typical example, when it comes to global well-being would be something like poverty reduction. As Max Rosa from Oxford University pointed out, every day over the last goodness knows how many decades, 175,000 people have been raised out of poverty—every day—out of absolute poverty. But those are not the kinds of headlines that will make it into the newspapers.
Yeah, well, right. That's actually a threshold issue too. I think they defined absolute poverty as a dollar ninety a day in 2000 eleven dollars, is that correct?
Dollar ninety, two dollars, two oh five. People have different...
Yeah, but around two dollars per person, people slide by that threshold. It's also not a dramatic decrease in their poverty per person, right? Because they just move over that threshold.
Nonetheless, the numbers are very impressive, and actually the speed is also really impressive. I mean, we've decreased, our poverty has decreased, absolute poverty has decreased in the world at an ever-increasing rate—that's accelerated dramatically over the last 15 years.
And so it also might be that we just don't know this yet. It's slow compared to how fast things can go bad, but it's still really quite rapid on a historical scale.
Yeah, I know that you want to talk about the different trends, and one of them is absolute poverty. So maybe we can return to it in a moment?
Sure. Well, let's do this then. Let's go, tell me just one thing before we get into this, the specific ten trends. Tell me about humanprogress.org and how it is that you come to specialize in global well-being. I can't imagine that there are many people in the world who have that as a specialization.
So tell me about humanprogress.org and about your specialization and how that came about.
Well, my personal story sort of will explain that. I'm much more interested in Westerners who have lived a life of relative abundance, good education, safety—that they are interested in recognizing these trends. But in my personal case, the path to being interested in well-being is much more straightforward. I was born behind the Iron Curtain in what was what used to be Communist Czechoslovakia, and whilst life wasn't horrible, it was pretty dreadful. We can talk about it some other time then because my parents are medical doctors; so we moved to South Africa in the early 1990s, where they started practicing, and so I got to travel through a lot of Africa, and there I saw a much worse poverty and deprivation.
I was educated in Britain, and I've worked in the United States, so obviously when you live in four different cultures, if you are at all curious, you have to start asking yourself how come some countries are prosperous and some countries are poor? What are the institutional settings for the production of riches? After all, at some point in time, everybody was dirt poor, but now we have large sections of the world which are escaping from poverty at a very fast click, whilst others are not doing so well. So that is obviously something that I was wondering about as I was moving from one culture to another, from one country to another.
And then in 2010 I read a wonderful book, which is still worth reading, by one of your previous guests, Matt Ridley. It's called The Rational Optimist, and Matt Ridley's book was filled with some very interesting statistics that I didn't know about. I should have known about it, but I didn't. And I thought to myself, "Well, if I don't know about them, and it is my job to know them, what about the larger public?" I mean, the general public is surely to be as ignorant, if not more than I am. And so I thought, let me put it up on the website. And since then we have grown to about 1,200 different datasets, and that's really the story.
So that's humanprogress.org.
That's humanprogress.org. And so is that something you started yourself?
Yeah, I am an employee of a think tank called the Cato Institute, but Human Progress is an autonomous part of Cato, but it runs pretty much autonomously. I have a lot of freedom to do with it what I want. Most crucially, the information that we provide, the data itself, comes from third parties. We write articles, we write exclusive articles where we try to frame the data in the historical context. We try to get into the reasons why some countries are rich and why some countries are poor. We can talk about it as well, but we don’t... so we do have an editorial position when writing articles and studies. We do not play around with the data, and anyone who comes to the website will see the original data taken from third sources, footnoted, sourced, and so on.
Okay, so let me hassle you for a couple of minutes because I've talked to Matt Ridley and to Bjorn, and so there's a group of people that are... and Stephen Pinker for that matter, who are rational optimists, let's say. They're intelligent optimists or informed optimists. I got interested in this. I worked for the UN, for a UN committee for a couple of years, and I was reviewing books by the dozen on ecology and economics, and I was shocked.
What shocked me was things were way better than I thought they were, and they were getting better at a rate that was stunning, and I didn't know any of that. It was overwhelming pouring through the data because I had been so wrong in my implicit presumptions, and so that’s what got me interested in all of this. Of course, I was also extremely happy about it to see what was actually happening, how many good things were happening.
But here's the criticism that—so I posted these talks with Bjorn, for example, and people have responded, often young people, and they say, "Well, that's all very well and good for you, Dr. Peterson, or for Bjorn. You're 50 years old. You have a secure position. You grew up when the job market was stellar. It's much, much harder for young people to make their way in the Western world now than it was 20 years ago." That sort of security, long-term security, isn't there.
And so you can look at these global trends and extract out some positive information from them, but that just gives you license to ignore the on-the-ground problems that so many people, so many young people, are either facing or feel that they're facing in the West. What do you think about that? What's the right response to that?
I think that young people have had terrible 20 years in Western countries. We have gone through the 9/11 crisis, then followed by the financial meltdown, we had the Iraq war, then we had the COVID pandemic, and data shows that young people specifically seem to be disproportionately affected and very unhappy and anxious and so forth.
So I would divide my answer into two parts. The first part is that it is always good to—there's an economist, Richard Layard, I think his name is—who said "Always compare yourself downwards, not upwards." In other words, that's the cause or rather, let's say, the way to happiness is to compare yourself downward rather than upward. By that, what I gather he meant is that even though things are very tough for young people, young people still have access to the best healthcare in the history of the world. They have access to more security than any other people who have come before them. They have access to education that, in many cases, is free and plentiful.
And so it's important to realize that while some things have not been doing well, there is a lot in terms of life in Western advanced societies which is still worth appreciating and being aware of.
The second part of my answer would be to say that it is all the more important for young people to understand the economic and political reasons why the West grew at faster rates before, why it had more political and social stability before than it has today. Young people are very blasé, on average, about politics. They don't generally vote, they tend to embrace all sorts of causes that are inimical to progress and growth, such as, for example, socialism. They tend to be much more open to it than people who are older and tend to turn more conservative.
So delving deeper into why the 1980s and the 1990s had higher rates of economic growth is not a bad idea from the perspective of young people.
Well, it's also not exactly clear what baseline is being used when the claim is made that things aren't as good or as easy as they once were. I mean, they're certainly a lot better now than they were in 1820. They're certainly a lot better than they were in 1930 or 1940, probably 1950. Then there was a period of incredible growth in the '60s, in particular the post-war period, where employment was a relatively straightforward matter for many people. People were plentiful, long-term secure jobs.
Now, how difficult it was in the '60s to obtain one of those is still an open question. Many people were much less educated than they are now. It isn't clear to me that things were any easier at any time in the past, and it's certainly the case that for most of the past, things were immeasurably worse.
Yeah, when I said that they had terrible 20 years, what I meant is that the last 20 years almost seemed like a state of constant crisis. But let's disaggregate this experience that young people have. If you are a black person in the United States, for example, you have never lived in a safer, more tolerant, and more accepting society. If you are a gay person in the world, again, in Western societies, you have never lived in a more tolerant or a more accepting society. If you are a woman, the same goes for you.
So that's already well over 50% of the population. Also, let's not forget that whilst the wages of certain people in the United States, certain sections of the labor force have been stagnating, overall, the median household income in the United States prior to COVID was at a record high, which is to say that compared to the earnings of a median household in the 1970s or 1980s, American earning power prior to COVID was at an all-time high.
So it's not true that people were poorer.
Now, let me make one last point about this. When it comes to cost of living in America, which is what a lot of people are talking about, it very much depends on what you are looking at. Cars are cheaper by 70% than what—and relative to wages—than what they were 20 years ago. Toys, TVs, food—all of those are much cheaper than what they were 20 years ago relative to wages. Even housing—most people don't know this, but it happens to be true. Housing in the United States is 10% cheaper than it was 20 years ago relative to wages.
Now, that would exclude high-demand cities, I would imagine, right? That, because more and more people want to go to more and more exclusive, wealthy places, or fewer and fewer exclusive and wealthy places. So that's a complicating—I can see that too. In Toronto, the real estate market, housing prices are just skyrocketing constantly.
My sense of that—and a lot—my sense of that is that there are 20 cities in the world that are optimal places to live, so they're scarce, and this is one of them. People are quite mobile, and there's quite a lot of money, and so that drives real estate prices here continually upward, and you see that in New York, you see that in the major European cities that are highly desirable, you see that in San Francisco. But there aren't many places like that, so that's part of the reason for that.
That's absolutely right. Both things happen to be true at the same time. The 10% decline in the prices of housing is average across the United States, whereas in the high-demand areas, it has skyrocketed. Now, in some places like, for example, Manhattan, where a lot of young people want to live, there is only so much that you can do in order to provide additional housing because it's an island.
However, in many other places in the United States, housing is artificially restricted. The building of new housing is artificially restricted through NIMBYism, through zoning rules, and so forth.
Yeah, I see it. We don't allow you to be poor here. You can't afford it. It's against the law because of the zoning laws, and that's a real problem in places like San Francisco.
The two areas which have seen a massive appreciation in price, well above inflation, well above wages, is healthcare and education.
So, right now, right.
And education is a particular burden for young people, right?
Now, would it be crazy of me to suggest that young people, instead of blaming the market or asking for free education, looked at the reasons why education is so expensive? Could it be that because governments push so much money out of the door through Pell grants and other heavily subsidized loans, the universities know they can charge much more money than would otherwise be the case?
Could that be the reason why education is increasing the price?
Could it be, though? I also think universities, in some sense, have conspired to rob their students of their future income.
Well, look, imagine that you come to a car store and there's just one car left, and you say to the salesman, "I really, really, really have to have this particular car. This would be Yale, Harvard, whatever." And by the way, "I have a million dollars in my pocket." How much is the car salesman going to ask you? The million dollars.
And it's a very similar situation when it comes to higher education. The universities know exactly how much the parents are making. They know exactly how much money you can get out of government in loans, so of course, they're going to jack up the prices.
And in healthcare, what's happening, of course, is that only 10 out of every 90 cents spent on healthcare in the United States is spent by people themselves, by the patients themselves. The rest is spent by governments at different levels of governance—it's spent by third parties, by insurance companies.
So when you walk into a doctor's office and he asks you, you know, "Do you want to have 10 or 20 blood tests?" You said 20. "I'm not paying for it anyway." And that's part of the reason again why healthcare has exploded in price.
But between those two, I can see why Americans would be quite dissatisfied with their standards of living. And I'm afraid that a third reason why Americans are going to be dissatisfied with their standards of living is coming down the pipeline, and I think that is going to be a massive increase in energy costs in the United States, just as it happened in Europe.
In Europe, now they have a term called energy poverty. So even in places which are the height of economic development, like Britain and Germany, people are not heating their homes in the middle of winter. People are washing themselves in lukewarm water because prices of energy have been artificially by governmental mandate jacked up to prices where even the richest people in the world— I mean, as a population, not as a share of population—cannot afford things which are the essence of what life should be like in a Western civilization.
What worries me is that some of those proposals that have been taken on in Europe and which are making Europeans so miserable are going to come down to the United States and perhaps even to Canada.
Okay, so let's draw some quick conclusions and then we'll go talk about the ten major trends. Correct me if I've got any of this wrong.
It's very difficult to make an informed case that things are worse now in almost every way than they were at any other time in the past. At any time in the past—including the last two decades—but certainly going back before that, things are better on almost every possible measure. People don't know that, partly because we have a negativity bias. We are attracted by negative information, and that's what is put forth by a media hell-bent on attracting our attention at any cost.
We're also deluded to some degree by our historical ignorance, and also by anomalies in the economic scheme—exceptionally high prices of housing in high-demand, high-quality areas. And the same thing happening, say, with university education, despite the fact that maybe state university education is still quite cheap or community college, that kind of thing.
And then there's also this—because of this pervasive negative message that's being put forward constantly—that also encourages us to exaggerate the degree to which the current condition is bad and getting worse.
We don't know, and we assume that, and that makes us more miserable than we have any reason to be. The danger in that is that we're going to fail to appreciate and work to undermine all sorts of things that are actually working very well if we only could see the facts on the ground.
That's exactly right. If there is one message that I would like to pass on to your young followers who are having a tougher time than would be expected for young people to have, things could get much worse if the basic underpinnings of what made Western society rich and prosperous—which is to say, liberal democracy and some form of free market capitalism and free enterprise—if those two are eroded or destroyed, we are in for a much tougher time.
If you want to see how young people—how a society can deteriorate, go to Venezuela. You know, it's not that far away—it's a couple of hours from Miami—and see how young people live there now. Venezuela was a country where in the early 1950s, GDP per capita was higher than in the United States—higher than in the United States!
Today, people are eating cats and dogs and slaughtering animals in zoos for meat. Young women have no other option but to prostitute themselves to have something to eat. Men have gone into crime—it is basically a failed society. Not long ago, some of the leading lights of American progressivism, such as AOC, have been in Canada, have been singing the praises of 21st-century Venezuelan socialism.
So things could get much worse, and they will if we forget the lessons of history, and if we don't understand that the political stability, to the extent we still have it, is a result of liberal democracy, limited government. And the reason for economic growth and the reason why we have all the nice things that people in Venezuela don't is because we have free markets, free enterprise, and free trade.
Okay, okay. Let's go. You'd also think it's kind of strange that, given our proclivity, let's say, to devour bad news, you'd think that the story of Venezuela would get a lot more coverage than it actually gets. So that's kind of weak.
Maybe we can return to that. Let's go through the trends here. So the first one. So the book is structured so that on the right-hand page, there's a graphic graph showing progress across time—time or change across time—a variety of different trends.
Let's say the first one: the great enrichment. Tell us what that means and what it signifies.
So the chart, which you may be able to show at some point in the future, looks like a hockey stick. Which is to say that for all of our recorded history—let's say going back 4,000 BC, but we can estimate it even further back in time—there it is: the hockey stick of human prosperity. The line has flatlined.
It is estimated that prior to the Industrial Revolution in the late 17th and early 1800s, the global economy grew by about 0.1% per year, which is to say that to double your prosperity would have taken thousands of years. As late as 1900, which is to say the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt—Queen Victoria was on the throne—the globe produced roughly $3 trillion in output.
This is all inflation-adjusted, so $3 trillion in output. The entire globe in 2018, it was $121 trillion. So from $3 trillion to $121 trillion in a scope of 100 years, adjusted for inflation. If the growth that we have experienced—the growth rate that we have experienced over the last 100 years continues into 2100, the world will produce $600 trillion in output—real inflation-adjusted output.
Over the next 80 years, the globe could produce six times more value than it is currently producing if we maintain the current economic growth rate.
Do you think that's an optimistic projection or a conservative projection?
That's what leads us back to the original point that we discussed. It very much depends on economic policies and political stability. If you don't have civil wars around the world, then—and government changes hands in a peaceful and predictable way—then we should be okay when it comes to political stability. When it comes to economics, we are seeing a surprising and—to be quite frank, well, to be frank—surprising and almost inexplicable renewed interest in more restrictive economic policies from socialism on the left to hardcore protectionism on the right.
And if our economic growth rate falls from 1.82% that we have experienced over the last year to 0.1%, which we have experienced over the previous ten thousand years, then it will take us 6,000 years to get from one hundred trillion dollars to 200 trillion dollars.
So, the most remarkable thing about this is exactly the hockey stick shape. As you pointed out, nothing at all happened until the mid-1800s, essentially—then all of a sudden things improved so rapidly that it's virtually incomprehensible.
It's a miracle!
It is the most important question in economics: what happens in the late 1700s, early 1800s that produces that hockey stick effect? And just to clarify, there have been in human history periods of economic affluence, flourishing, but they were usually restricted to small parts of the world, and they usually petered out.
So, for example, Song China produced some remarkable technological discoveries, and it appeared to be at a time of relative plenty compared to other countries in the world, but that petered out when the Song Dynasty was replaced by the Ming Dynasty. Similarly, the Roman Empire appears to have been a place that was largely at peace internally and quite prosperous, but that came to an end in 467 or whenever that happened, when Rome fell.
So there are these periods that you can have prosperity. Also, let's stay with Europe. I mean, Europe has experienced the greatest century of peace and prosperity between 1814, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and 1914, the breakout of the First World War, which slaughtered tens of millions and destroyed a lot of wealth. So, you know, economic progress can certainly take a knock, and it can take a time to recover. But in order for it to recover, you have to rediscover the reasons why you had high economic growth rates in the first place.
So, okay. So the first lesson is that something happened in the last 150 years that propelled human productive capacity and distribution globally into the stratosphere, and there's no sign that that's slowing.
Although we could disrupt it.
And we could disrupt it because we don't exactly understand why it happened, and we're not appreciative enough of its miraculous nature and the perhaps fragile preconditions for its continued existence.
Well, when I said that it's the biggest question in economics, I'm not suggesting that there aren't theories of why it happened. The theory that I espoused and the theory that has convinced me is that over hundreds of years in Western Europe and in North America, and then later in other parts of the world, our economic and political institutions have grown more inclusive, open—or to use a political word—liberal.
Now, I'm using "liberal" in its European sense, not liberal in the current American sense. And what that meant was that you no longer needed permission from the king in order to open a shop or import a bag of wool from another country.
So there's an autonomy. There's an element of autonomy, but there's also an element of generosity, that that autonomy leads to increased productivity, but the consequences of the production are also being shared rather than hoarded.
Yes, but the key here was I think that monarchies, governments have become more responsible to their people, more accountable to their people, and they started allowing a much greater level of economic freedom.
Now, the reason why that happened is a very interesting one. Once again, I'm going to tell you a theory that I espouse, and a theory that convinced me. Other people may have other ideas. But basically what has happened is that, unlike in other parts of the world, such as the Ottoman Empire and such as China, Europe never had an internal empire. One dynasty was never able to conquer different European states into the creation of one European mega-empire.
Because governing elites of different states—France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, whatever—because they wanted to survive, because they didn't want to be vassals of another monarch, because they wanted to remain independent, they realized that they needed to generate a lot of economic growth internally.
They realized that the only way that they could generate economic growth was through technological innovation. And technological innovation you can only get in societies which allow people a greater degree—a relatively great degree—of intellectual freedom.
Countries which felt at most threatened, such as Holland because the French were always trying to take them over, would welcome into their cities and into their country thinkers from all over the world, free thinkers from all over Europe who established themselves there, produced new ideas, produced new technologies. Holland could defend itself against the predation of other countries—England was another example of how this happened.
So it is through geopolitical competition—in other words, the dismemberment of European countries—that you get greater appreciation of the need for freedom, which then leads to innovation, which then leads to the generation of more money, which then can keep your country independent and from being swallowed by a foreign conqueror.
But if you want to reduce it to one sentence, it would be political and economic institutions became more open, inclusive, and liberal, whether you were a Jew or whether you were a Muslim or a Christian or a Catholic, you could function within the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and nobody—you were free from prosecution.
Alright, let's go to the next trend: the end of poverty. And that's this graph.
So let's remember that, green, orange, and blue line because I will describe them one by one. So this is the only datum or set of data which I produced myself, together with a co-author, Gyle Pulley from Hawaii.
What it shows is the average price of 50 most important natural resources between 1980 and 2018. And what we found, as you would expect, is they increased in nominal price. Nominal price is unadjusted for inflation, as everybody knows or should know—currency becomes less valuable every year because more of it is printed.
So in terms of nominal dollars, the 50 commodities have become more expensive over the last 40 years. Once you adjust the cost of commodities—and I'm talking about oil, gas, chicken, beef, lumber, shrimp, oranges, whatever—once you account for inflation, that was the orange line. What you see is actually that natural resources are much cheaper today than they were in 1980.
The final line is the blue line. The blue line is what I call the time price. Time price is really—it’s a better price than real or inflation-adjusted price because it also takes into account wages. As you know, wages tend to increase above inflation because people become more productive. So if inflation in the United States is 2%, a typical increase will be maybe about 3% because people have become more productive over the course of the year.
So once you start comparing prices of resources relative to wages, what you see is that they have fallen even more. And why is this counterintuitive? They fell by about 70% in terms of—time prices, all the while, and that’s from 1980 to 2016 or 16 or 18.
Okay, so despite more people, despite more urbanization, despite the hypothetically decreasing prevalence of resources, despite all of those hypothetical problems, there's been a 70% decline in basic global commodity prices adjusted for wages from 1980 to 2018. Stunning, right?
Not what anyone was predicting in the 1960s by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, that's absolutely correct! So even though the population of the world has increased by something like 70%, the prices of natural resources have declined by 70%, which means that every additional person born on the planet has made things cheaper for us by about 1%. And nobody saw that coming.
Right, that should be said 50 times, right? Because it's so not what anyone thinks: more people means more wealth.
That's exactly right! And, you know, I’ve also seen that more people means more ecological preservation, and so does more wealth because richer people care more about the environment. So you see that perverse occurrence too, that as GDP gets to the point where people aren't scrabbling around trying to stay alive, so maybe $5,000 per capita, all of a sudden environmental concerns start to manifest themselves.
And so it looks like we could have more people and make them richer faster, and that would be better for the planet.
No, that's absolutely right. The cleanest environment in the world is in advanced countries—in Western capitalist societies. When you see a tremendous attack on the environment, it’s in poor countries. You know, when the Venezuelan economy collapsed, they started eating animals in the zoo. In Zimbabwe, when their economy collapsed, they started slaughtering the wildlife.
If it's a choice between killing a giraffe or having my baby die, I know what I have to do.
Right. But so for the longest time, people thought that if population grows, we are going to run out of resources and this is not what has happened. We have more resources; resources are cheaper. But that in itself is an indication that they are more abundant than before because, of course, human beings are not just consumers of resources—we're not just destroyers of resources; we’re also creators of resources.
Human beings are producers of ideas!
Yes, and on average, we produce more than we consume. Otherwise, we would die.
Well, that's exactly right, and that's what people like Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University were worried about. They freaked out two generations of people. Ehrlich's population bomb comes out in 1968, and right about that time, into the early '70s, you have Borlaug introducing these new varieties of wheat in Bangladesh and India and China and elsewhere, and of course, food production rockets skyrockets.
India today is a major exporter of food!
Now, these people who were starving by tens of millions, when I was growing up in the 1980s, I remember being terrified by the images of starving people—starving children in East Africa, in the Horn of Africa. And now you see this is so unbelievable!
The world's poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa, now enjoys access to food in volumes that are equivalent to Portugal in the 1960s.
So now it’s—in that very small amount of time from the 1960s to now, well within living memory of many people.
The one of the richest countries in the world had the same amount of food per capita as the poorest part of the world does now. Stunning!
Stunning! Absolutely remarkable and so positive! So good!
Yeah, so today, access to calories in Africa is roughly 2,400 calories per person per day. Now, obviously not everybody gets it; there are serious problems in Africa still. You do still have conflict and so forth, and people do get to starve, but the widespread starvation because you couldn't produce enough food—that doesn't happen anymore.
And that's obviously a tremendously positive step forward. In fact, many African problems—many African countries are beginning to experience the problem of obesity, especially in urban centers.
Now, if somebody told you that 50 years ago, you would have said, “You’re high!” Right?
So the problem in 100 years is that we're going to have nothing but fat people, and there will be far too few of them!
[Laughter]
Yeah, okay, next one. This is also stunning, shocking, completely unexpected: more land for nature! Who would have possibly guessed that?
I read something the other day too, and we could comment on this—the Sahara Desert has shrunk by 8% since the millennium. We’ve greened an additional 10% of the Earth’s surface as a consequence—over the last 20 years!
And that’s only over the last 20 years!
20 years! And it looks like it's a consequence of increased carbon dioxide, perversely enough. The Sahara has actually shrunk.
So I don't want to get into the carbon dioxide argument, but this is a whole different issue here: tree cover loss gain from 1982 to 2016.
So comment on that!
Yes, I mean, one of the things is that one of the benefits of getting a little bit older, perhaps only one benefit of getting older, is that one gets wiser and one remembers all the stuff that we used to believe and take for granted, which have never happened and which were false.
One of them was the expansion of the Sahara in the 1980s. I remember being absolutely terrified that the Sahara was going to expand and swallow the globe. You know, as kids, we were taught that as gospel.
But Sahara is shrinking! It is also true that there is more foliage, which is more greenery—plants are producing more foliage because of the CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is—for another discussion, but the fact is that it’s the basic fact of living on Earth—that plants like more CO2 in the atmosphere; it’s their food!
Which is why Norway grows tomatoes in hot houses that are filled with CO2—precisely because they want them to grow.
And so, plants like CO2, and foliage is increasing. But also, the tree coverage of the world is increasing. Between... I wrote these statistics down, thinking that we might talk about it—between 1982 and 2016, we have added trees—tree area—the size of Alaska and Montana combined to the world.
Now, that’s a pretty big chunk of the world! The United States has 35% more trees than when Ronald Reagan became president of the United States.
China 35—or is it China 15?
Yeah, China is 15.
Okay, so now I've read critiques of this too. When I've tweeted this, for example, people say, "Yes, but we've lost a tremendous amount of biodiversity," that many of the new growth is monoculture in contrast to the previous growth.
And I suspect that’s not true in some situations, and is true in others. I don't think that's true of the reforestation of the United States, but I don't know. Do you know?
First of all, compared to what? At the time when the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain, which was responsible for many of the great things that happened since then, at that time, one of the reasons why they had to switch to coal is because there was no tree left in Britain.
I'm exaggerating, but I'm not far off. The tree coverage in Britain was just completely depleted of forests over millennia of forest destruction. Remember, trees were not only needed to keep you warm but to cook your food, to make your furniture, to make your carriages, to make your weaponry—everything prior to the modern era was based on trees.
I'm exaggerating, but not too much.
Now, compared to what we have destroyed—a lot! We have destroyed a lot of the natural forest with its original biomass a long time before the Industrial Revolution, which, by the way, used up coal—not trees.
But today, most of our tree usage comes from the new forests—the forests that are planted for the specific purpose of being cut down for lumber—which then build American and Canadian houses.
It is very rare that the sort of wood that you see in the shops or that goes into productive activity actually has originated in the Brazilian rainforest.
Right, so I guess the objection would be: “Those aren't forests; they’re crops.”
They just happen to be crops of trees, and I suppose—and, you know, biodiversity loss is obviously problematic and even potentially catastrophic. But I don't think that means that you can't take heart about the fact that much more of the planet is green, and there's a certain amount of reversion to a more natural habitat.
Certainly, there's an indicator that we're much more efficient users of resources. We don't have to take up so much space, and the agricultural revolution also contributed to that to a great degree.
That’s human-engineered again because we can grow more on less land, and I don’t see that stopping. I think we're going to get more and more and more efficient at food production.
Why would that stop? The market certainly drives us in that direction, and there’s no indication of that slowing as far as I can tell.
So, three points I hope I can remember them: one is yes, because of increased agricultural productivity, we are already returning land to nature, and we can do so in the future at an increased pace—which means that we are returning land not just to the animals, but we are returning it to nature where the biomass can grow again and where it can reconstitute itself.
The second point is that we are also living in a world that has record acreage and square mileage of the globe's territory which is protected from any kind of interference from humankind. So we have record square mileage of oceans which are now protected and which cannot be fished in, and we have square mileage of land which is protected in national parks or is otherwise excluded from economic activity.
The third point that I want—and that comes with wealth, the wealthier countries they are, and stability, and political stability. Because you don't need much catastrophe and social breakdown before those national parks and all those animals are going to have everything eaten out of them.
A typical example would be Zimbabwe.
Yes.
And the last point I want to make is that we have a problem in Brazil. Brazil has obviously vast rainforests and very ancient forests which are filled with all sorts of things that we may discover are helpful to us in the future—some of them are, as well as dangerous.
But nonetheless, very few people would say that it's a good thing to get rid of the Brazilian rainforest. My understanding is—and I’m willing to be proven wrong on this—is that most of it has to do with farming, especially of poor people in Brazil, who burn forests in order to clear the land for agricultural activity.
Now, I realize that this point may not necessarily be appreciated by wealthy people in the West, but poverty in developing countries can be very, very bad. In Brazil, there are some pockets of real wealth, but there are also pockets of tremendous poverty.
And the more inland you get, and the more into the Amazon you get, the poorer the people become. These people, from their perspective and the perspective of their government, should be allowed to earn a living. The way you protect the Amazon is to have higher grades of economic growth in Brazil so that those people start moving away from the Amazon.
They start moving to cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and others, and they start working there in the factories in the service industry, and they no longer have to burn forests in order to plant food so they don't starve.
Number seven: trend seven: planet city—urbanization—which you also regard and describe as a net positive.
Well, you certainly get the synergistic effect of bringing people together, right? I mean, look at San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, the urbanization of a genius population that produces an incredible amount of innovation.
So urbanization—everyone's moving to the cities—yeah, I think right now we have about 55% of humanity living in the cities already. So again, all those people are obviously not living on land—which is a good thing. You remember Paul Potts, right? Cities are parasites on the countryside and should be eradicated.
Well, that turned out to be spectacularly wrong in every possible way, as well as murderous.
So it's a good thing for people to leave their rural environments and move to the city.
Good thing, all things considered.
So sorry, continue!
At least—no, no, I think we have bashed the French enough here. Maybe not enough, but anyway, the—yes, there are the network and synergetic effects of people living close together and exchanging ideas—and similar companies existing next to each other, communicating and so forth—generates more economic growth.
And look, the historical record is absolutely clear. Cities have been the drivers of progress, whether it is Amsterdam in the 17th century, or London, sorry, 18th century, or London in the 19th century, or New York in the 20th century—that's where stuff happened.
Not just in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of culture and things like that. So, and the final point—cities also consume less energy than rural areas per capita because we have public transport.
People don't have to drive their jeeps and four-by-fours wherever they go with long distances, so people consume less energy in cities per capita.
And that’s a good thing, I think!
And is that controlling for agricultural productivity even, do you know?
I don't know. I think CO2 emissions and energy consumption are smaller in the cities than it is in the rural areas, but that’s all I remember from that particular passage.
Okay, okay, trend eight: democracy on the march. That’s a graph of autocracies versus democracies.
So this particular chart is a controversial one. You know, partly because it keeps on changing in directions which we may not necessarily appreciate. It is undeniable that the world is more democratic than the last decade. The world has been most democratic than any time before in the last few years.
We have seen weakening of democracy, we have seen some countries which have turned away from democracy to dictatorship, such as for example Russia. You know, there are some authoritarian tendencies even in Europe, in places like Hungary. Nonetheless, greater share of humanity lives under a democratic regime than say 30 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago.
And the big wave of democratization really happens after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and of course the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After that, you see basically, before then, there were more autocracies than democracies in the world, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, you had all of these newly independent countries turn democratic.
There was some slight back in some of them, but by and large, democracy has held in Central Europe, in Eastern Europe, even in some parts of Southern Europe.
So there is more democracy around, and you know the future of democracy is by no means assured. We are seeing some very troubling signs on the horizon, but democracies are not in full flight just because, you know, Russia stopped being a moderate democracy, I would say.
You know, and even the Russians know this! Despite their autocratic system, there isn’t an intellectual or moral contender of any import. I mean, democracies might degenerate into dictatorships, but there isn’t a ethos of authoritarianism.
There isn’t an ethos that's well-developed intellectually, philosophically, or practically to compete with democracy.
So, I mean, the Chinese can claim that their system is more efficient, it's like "Well, maybe for short periods of time now and then," but seems highly unlikely when, as China became more free economically, it became richer.
They say, "Well, we can get along. We can get away with not being free across the board," but I suspect that that's probably just wrong. Is it?
We're going to see that as a comparatively fatal flaw over the next 30 or 40 years.
So, but I mean, what do you argue if you're not a liberal democrat, you know, in the whole broad sense, ranging from democratic socialist to ultra-conservative, let's say, within the democratic spectrum?
Well, what's outside of that that's credible, intellectually, an alternative system? I don't see anything.
Russia has a peculiar combination of nationalism and Russian orthodoxy now that cannot be obviously exported to other countries in the world. It has no purchase on Africa, for example, Latin America. China is an interesting example.
They certainly do argue that their system is superior, but I think that the shine has been coming off the Chinese model recently with the—
Well, it got a lot more superior when it got a lot more capitalist.
It got a lot more superior; they obviously are able to generate a lot of wealth. They also have a lot more people.
But they are still, on average, an average Chinese is much poorer than an average American. It's just that they are dealing with 1.4 billion people.
But by letting them be freer—not perhaps politically, but economically—the Chinese economic institutions stopped being super-extractive and they became more inclusive.
People could function within them, produce wealth, and keep it. Nobody was coming to take it away from them, at least not with the typical regularity of a totalitarian regime.
They were able to build a very prosperous country.
But the shine is coming off, not only because of the way that the Chinese have lied about corona, but also because the Chinese are involved in tremendous human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and places like that.
It's very difficult for any aspiring dictator, in Africa, Latin America, or Europe for that matter, to say "You know, China is the model." If the immediate retort is "Aside from those concentration camps, how about that? Explain that, you!"
Well, there is their support for North Korea too, which we should never forget. That regime is so rotten that it beggars the imagination—so appalling, inexcusable in every possible way.
And the final point I want to make about China is that really it is now that China will have to show the merit of its own system because it is one thing to replicate, to replicate, say, railroads, or the building of railroads and bridges and things like that.
It is one thing when you have the benefit of the technology that’s already developed and what you're doing is picking low-hanging fruit.
That's exactly right.
Whereas now, China has to prove that it can not only mimic, but it can actually produce new ideas, that it can innovate. And you don't have innovation in a country which doesn't have freedom of speech, which doesn't have free exchange of ideas and the ability to criticize.
Now, there are specific sectors where freedom of speech can be allowed. For example, the Soviet nuclear and rocket sciences were allowed a great deal of experimentation and internal discussions because obviously the Soviet Union was trying to build as many nuclear rockets as it possibly could.
But if you want to produce better products—better production processes—new innovations on a mass sort of societal scale, you have to have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of communication.
And China doesn't have it because, of course, the colorady of the freedom of innovation is that people would be talking about ideas that the Chinese government doesn't want them to talk about.
Yeah, well, and if you're going to have a bunch of people who are talking about ideas and they're going to be really good at it, they're pretty much—nothing can be off limits if you get a bunch of creative people together and they're really being creative.
They have to be able to talk about anything. Otherwise, their creativity gets squelched.
And it’s easy to squelch the creativity in some sense.
So, and also I think that creative types are usually people who are on a broad spectrum of autism and disagreeability. And you very often see it in Silicon Valley, but some research seems to be showing that, and these are the sorts of people who are going to not hold back—these are the sorts of people who are going to tell whatever springs to their mind.
Now, if you're going to put people who are disagreeable and who speak their minds because of the particular traits of their psychology, if you're going to put all of them to jail because they call chairman Xi an idiot, then you’re going to run out of innovative people very soon.
Yeah, I'm not so much sure that the disagreeable element there is useful for creativity. There's not a lot of evidence for that, but it might be useful for implementation of creative ideas.
So when I mention this, this is very interesting!
I would love to hear your view on that! When I mean disagreeability, isn't it the ability to say "Screw you all! I know I'm right in my ideas, and I'm going to pursue my research wherever it's going to lead me!"
Well, isn't that important?
Well, that's what I mean by implementation, though—like if you look at it from a personality perspective, openness, the trait is the one that governs creativity, and it isn't associated with agreeableness to any great degree. They’re pretty orthogonal.
But the issue of to what degree you need to be disagreeable to implement effectively—that’s a different story, and I don't think that data are in on that yet.
Anyways, let's go on. Let's go on to the next one.
Let’s go on to the long peace because that's also extraordinarily important.
So long peace basically means that there are fewer conflicts. Since the end of the Second World War, the long-term trends seem to be toward greater peace. We certainly no longer have countries declaring war on each other, sending armies across borders to slaughter; that seems to have almost disappeared completely.
If I remember correctly, the last country to declare war was the United States on North Korea. I could be wrong on that, but I think—I would love for that to be checked and maybe you can put a disclaimer on your video that I got it completely wrong.
I think that happened. Anyway, the—so that no longer happens. Now countries still invade other countries. Like, for example, Russia invaded Ukraine—the little green men who took Crimea.
But I think it says something that even governments that still do this sort of thing do not declare war publicly because they are afraid of how humanity would react to that kind of activity.
And so most of the conflicts today—in fact, all conflicts—usually tend to be ethnic and civil wars, but they are not really conflicts between countries. Wars have become smaller and less deadly, but please remember this doesn't mean that past performance suggests future success.
I mean, the world is still filled with nuclear weapons, and so—but it also seems even on that front, like it seems like certainly people are much less convinced that nuclear weapons will be used purposefully, especially in a mass annihilation, than throughout the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
So the nuclear weapons are still there. There are far fewer of them—but imminent war between Russia and the United States certainly doesn't seem probable in the same manner that it did for that entire Cold War period up till the demise of the Soviet Union.
That's right. I mean, we are down from 40,000 nuclear warheads per superpower down to about 3,000.
I'm more worried about nuclear—in terms of nuclear terrorism and that sort of thing.
That's what really worries me much more, but that's a better worry in some sense than all-out mass annihilation. I mean, I hope—ideally, I mean, you have a lot of smart people who are watching your podcast, and ideally, it could be calculated how many nukes would have to go off of what strength in order for there not to be the end of humanity.
In other words, what is the maximum, and if we could convince the international powers to bring the total maximum number of warheads and their strength below that level while still being distributed amongst nuclear powers, you know, then we could decrease that danger even more.
I wonder if that would decrease the—I mean, one of the things I've thought reasonably frequently, although I'm not convinced of it, is that nuclear war is so terrifying that it's actually made us more peaceful.
Like that terrible threat, like the fist of God—there are some places we just can't go anymore, and people, so far, thank God, have seemed unwilling to go there.
So the terrible threat may have had benefits!
Yeah, there’s a whole branch of international relations, a study of international relations, which argues precisely for that you’re not alone. There are other people supporting your view.
But unfortunately, nuclear power—nuclear weapons cannot be unlearned, and so I'm afraid we are stuck with them. The best that we can do is to bring the number down to a minimal level where superpowers will feel safe without destroying the world.
But that's just for another day.
The last one: trend 10—a safer world. And this is death from natural disasters.
Right, so this particular subject can be looked at from a number of angles. One is that we are in this time of panic about existential threats to humanity from climate change and from the environment.
And yet, in the last 100 years, the number of people who have died due to natural disasters has shrunk by 99%. The two are incompatible! If we are moving to a world where millions of people are going to be destroyed by, you know, oceans rising or crop failure or whatever—or tsunamis or earthquakes or whatever—why is it that due to natural disasters, that natural disasters have seen a 99% decrease in human mortality?
And the answer seems to be that partly we are richer, and therefore we are able to build more sturdy dwellings. But we are also more technologically savvy so that we can predict where a hurricane is going to strike and exactly when, so that people can escape from the path of destruction.
We can also detect earthquakes underneath the ocean floor, giving people on land more time to move to higher ground from a tsunami wave and things like that.
So, and we're going to get better and better at all!
And we are going to get better and better at it.
Yeah, so we’re richer by far in terms of productivity and quality of products, and absolute poverty has declined precipitously. Commodity prices have fallen; we're not going to overpopulate the world in any cataclysmic sense. Everyone has increasingly more than enough to eat.
There's more land for nature, and that trend seems upward. More people are moving to urban areas, and that's advantageous rather than disadvantageous. There are more democracies, and so we're better governed, we're more peaceful, and we’re less likely to die from catastrophes.
And I should point out to everyone who's listening that really only scrapes the surface of the topics that are covered in this remarkable book. As I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, the authors delve into comparatively micro trends in detail, discussing such things—
Which I would love to discuss, and perhaps we should continue this at some point in the not too distant future—such things as the precipitous decline in computational power in its infancy, access to electricity—you mean, the computational price of computation?
Yeah, yes, yes!
Well, and pure power and accessibility and mobile technology and lighting costs and decline in the cost of renewable resources and clean drinking water and better sanitation—and I’m just leafing through the book—internet access and education—
And that will get better and better!
But other than that—yeah, so let’s close out with this.
[Music]
I've done two or three podcasts, I think, in the last couple of months that were aimed at bringing this information to a broader audience. There seems to be some degree of a saleability issue, or maybe it's just too soon. Like all this good news, in some sense, is relatively recent, and the word may just not have spread.
Any ideas about what could be done to counter the pessimistic and apocalyptic narratives that seem to dominate the public landscape?
Well, you are doing it right now by interviewing me! I am doing it by having this website, which is made all the more useful by the fact that we didn't come up with this data. It's freely available on many different platforms around the world.
If you think that I'm full of it, go to Our World in Data, go to the World Bank, go to the IMF, go to Eurostat. If you are interested in the state of the world, there's plenty of data out there that can show you that the state of the world is much better than it is.
Secondly, and I'm wondering if this is even possible, but secondly, what if people start understanding more about their biases about how they perceive the world? You know, this is obviously done in colleges and universities in psychology courses as well as in biology courses and things like that.
But it's not as though human beings are incapable of changing their worldview based on evidence. We no longer believe that a sacrifice of a little child will produce better harvests, so we've learned that lesson.
We no longer believe that throwing a virgin into a volcano is going to give us military success.
[Music]
We no longer believe in all sorts of things that we have taken for granted. In other words, we have shown that we are capable of learning and learning from evidence.
We have internalized that focusing on irrigation and fertilization is a better way to produce food than prayer, and that gives me hope that as we move forward, we'll be able to learn more about the rest of the world—internalize not just that information, but also why we are being pessimistic and negative.
What do you think about that?
Well, I'm listening and I'm thinking it through. I'm also wondering—I would say that learning this material has lifted some of the existential weight from me.
Things aren't as bad as they're trumpeted to be; in fact, they're quite a bit better, and they're getting better. So, we're doing a better job than we thought. There's more to us than we thought.
We're adopting our responsibilities as stewards of the planet rapidly. We are moving towards improving everyone's life. I lived under an apocalyptic shadow my whole life—I mean, I don't want to complain about that too much because I lived in a very rich place and I had all sorts of advantages and all of that, but the apocalyptic narrative was still extraordinarily powerful and demoralizing.
And it looks to me that there are reasons to doubt its validity on all sorts of dimensions. And I'm not sure what that will do to people, but hopefully, it'll make us more optimistic and positive, and less paranoid and afraid, and happier with who we are—but still willing to participate in improving the future.
And to lift some of the weight off young people who are constantly being told that the planet is going to burn to a cinder in the next 20 years.
Well, that's not happening!
That's not happening! And people who push that agenda in the newspapers and elsewhere are completely irresponsible and cruel. But that leads to that leads to perhaps the final point from my end: like you, I have become much more optimistic—not much more happy in my own personal life—once I realized that so much around me I didn't have a right to complain about.
And I should be grateful for—I should be grateful for that I'm not that I'm not a peasant in 17th century or, you know.
Or, and appreciative of what's brought us here, and that's the key: is that people who do not understand the crucial role that political and economic liberalization, opening inclusion, has played in launching the Industrial Revolution, showing us the path, the rest of the world, a path to prosperity—if they don't understand that everything we have is underpinned by a certain economic and political system.
Both of them terribly imperfect, terribly imperfect, but look at the alternative!
Look at the difference between Chile—the extraordinary success of that country after it embraced free markets—and the collapse of Venezuela, where people eat cats and dogs.
Look at the difference between Botswana, which is a relatively free economy, and its neighbor Zimbabwe, where people have experienced hyperinflation of 96 trillion percent.
Look at the difference between East and West Germany, between the United States and the USSR; look at the difference between North and South Korea!
If you really—
You just called it the worst possible regime in the world.
I think you’re right on that. I’m pretty sure you’re right on that.
And that regime is still out there! If you have a problem with liberal democracy and competitive enterprise, fix those problems incrementally one by one; don't burn down the system because the alternatives, as you can see in the world, are much worse.
That is a great place to end. Thank you very much!
And I'm—there are so many more things we could talk about, and hopefully we'll get an opportunity to do exactly that—some of the micro-analysis because there’s comparative micro-analysis, because there's so much data in this book that’s fascinating!
It's an endless source of optimistic revelation that’s also realistic, and so I hope many people buy it and put it on their coffee table and share it with their friends and lift some of the unnecessary burden of human shame and guilt from their shoulders.
Well, I'm grateful for those kind words about my book. I'm deeply grateful to you for having me on your show, and I'm delighted that you're doing well and hopefully we'll be doing even better in the future.
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