Rational Optimism | Matt Ridley | EP 153

[Music] I have the good fortune today of speaking with author Matt Ridley, who's written a number of books. We'll list them in the description of the video. The ones I reviewed this week in preparation for this interview include this one published in 1996, The Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely investigation into the biological origins of morality—essentially a very thought-provoking book and a very straightforward read for such a complex subject.

The Rational Optimist, which was published, I believe, in 2010 and which I think probably serves as a pretty good description of Matt Ridley himself—that was my impression after going through his work. And then more recent work, How Innovation Works and Why It Requires Freedom to Flourish—sorry, and why it flourishes in freedom. So, I wanted to talk to Matt primarily because I've been struck in my career as a university professor and also on my tours talking to thousands of people, many of whom are desperate, especially young people, because they're fed a never-ending diet of gloom and doom.

It seems to be an Armageddon-like cultural predisposition to assume without—to only look at evidence that suggests that the future is going to be much worse than the past despite the fact that the present is much better than the past, and that's been the case for many decades, I would say. And Matt's books are a lovely read during the COVID crisis, I would say, because, of course, it's a very rough time for everyone, I would say, with the lockdowns and the uncertainty that reigns as a consequence of that.

And he very carefully documents the improvements that have been made in all around the world, especially over the last 400 years—this incredible explosion of technological intelligence that's produced an unparalleled increase in human living standards by virtually any measure, across virtually all dimensions. And so, well, that's my rationale for talking to Matt. He's a very straightforward author, and despite the complexity of the ideas, I'm really happy to be speaking with him today.

"Well, Jordan, thank you very much! It's a real honor to be speaking with you and I—I’m someone who enormously admires your courage and intellectual gravitas that you bring to discussions. And I think it's just fantastic to be able to meet you, albeit online. Just on that question of optimism, it's a bit of an evangelical cause for me because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man, as a boy in school and at university.

I believed that the population explosion was unstoppable—that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life untenable, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse, during my life—dramatically so.

And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility, as opposed to the extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody—not just the education system but the media and their parents, you know, the grown-ups. I think it's quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we're to expect nothing but deterioration before us? That's a great quote, and it's not me; it's Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the doomsters saying, 'It can't get better. It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse in the future.'

And that's what every generation says, and I think so far they've been wrong. And I think there's a good chance they're wrong now."

"Well, it might be a consequence of our human tendency to overweight negative information, right? We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that's because you can be 100 percent dead, but you can only be so happy. And so it's better—in some sense—to err on the side of caution.

And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better. I mean, it's a real mystery, right? Because the news tilts itself very hard towards the catastrophic. And I can't think of any explanation for that, given that news purveyors seek attention. I can't come up with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity for negative emotion. But we do have to overcome that to some degree if it's not in accordance with the facts."

"Yeah, this is an interesting angle that I think might be a clue to what's going on. Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units. We're not very pessimistic about our village; we're not very pessimistic about our town.

But we're very pessimistic about our country, and we're extremely pessimistic about the planet. The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are. And, of course, people on the whole think their own life's going to work out—it's going to be fine; they're going to stay married; they're going to earn a lot of money—you know, they're okay when they talk about themselves.

And I think what that's telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience; your information about the planet comes from the media. And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this—that there is a top-down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us."

"Do you have any sense of the motivation for that? I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes. And you'd expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention-grabbing form, right? And so apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the sales item of the day from the perspective of the news companies?"

"Exactly, and this is where my argument breaks down a bit because it becomes circular. Because I say, yeah, you're right, the reason they're telling us bad news is because they know—we know we're interested in bad news—that on the whole, we don't look at good news stories to anything like the same degree. So we're avid consumers of pessimism, and they play to that.

But there's another phenomenon too, which is that good news tends to be gradual, and bad news tends to be sudden. That's not always true, of course, but it surprisingly often is true. You know, 168,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday —and the day before and the day before. It’s never newsworthy, whereas 3,000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper—that is newsworthy because it's so sudden, so unexpected, so new."

"Well, it's funny. When I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted—which I think is worth repeating over and over—170,000 people lifted out of poverty today could be three-inch headlines every day because it's an unparalleled event in human history, although it's occurring every day right now. But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best.

You know, if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you're doing. But if there's a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason why we're prone to seek out negative information. And does that explain why we're loss averse to the extent we are?"

"Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon. So anyways, the point is that, or one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive to negative information, it can really get out of hand, right? Because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future or depression, or high levels of anxiety or resentment, or even hatred of humanity for that matter—if we're the destructive species that we're always made out to be.

And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward. And there's a deeper element of optimism in your work as well, which is in a sense a kind of non-naive Russoianism. I mean Rousseau, of course, famously believed that people were good and that human institutions made them as malevolent and evil as they might become. So we're naturally good and corrupted by culture.

And I think that's half the story, because we're also naturally bad and ennobled by culture. But despite that, you make a really good case in The Origins of Virtue that virtue itself, that morality itself, has a biological basis and that it's grounded in our evolutionary history. And I'll let you, if you would, I'd ask you to expound on that a little bit. You talk about the discovery of the future and the necessity of reciprocity as driving agents in that evolution.

And that's a wonderful idea and it's a profound idea because it does hint at a non-arbitrary base for moral thinking. And that's been something I've been pursuing my entire life, I would say. But [Music] ... well, what I set out to do in that book—and it is admittedly 26 years ago or something that I finished writing it—so I may have changed my mind on one or two things—but what I set out to do was to persuade the reader that our good instincts are as animal as our bad instincts or our good behavior is as natural, is as instinctive, if you like, as our bad behavior.

We tend to get, I think from Christianity mainly, a view that there’s a deep sort of animal side of us which is bad, but we can teach each other to be good. And I don't think that's right. I think there's just as much of an animal instinct to be good in us as there is bad. Because if you look at— you know, we are a social species. Lots of species are very social, and what they tend to do is they express various forms of kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice towards other members of their species.

The most obvious example is that we're nice to our children, as are most creatures. And the reason we're nice to our children is obviously because we share their genes. People who were nice to their children tended to leave more children behind than people who weren't nice to their children. And so the genes for being nice to children thrived at the expense of genes that did the opposite. But obviously, it goes further than that. There are social species that collaborate with other ones, and they do so often with a form of reciprocity. You know, you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. I'll be nice to you today; you'll be nice to me tomorrow. You know, when a fish visits a cleaner station on the reef and allows small fish to clean the parasites off it, it's resisting the temptation to eat the cleaner fish.

And so there’s a mutual gain from trade."

"Yeah, that's a remarkable example that these cleaning stations are set up on coral reefs where small fish congregate—the brightly colored and large fish line up like cars at a gas station to have their scales and even their teeth denuded of parasites and dying tissue. And some of those cleaning stations are apparently tens of thousands of years old."

"Yes, that's what—and because that's a cross-species collaboration—this is—you know, this is, you know, two different species collaborating. But I don't know whether it's in that book or later. In the end, I come down on the view that that kind of reciprocity, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, is surprisingly rare, actually—that actually you can't find that many examples. There's a wonderful example of vampire bats doing it: vampire bats that didn't get a blood meal beg for one from their neighbor. The neighbor then returns the favor to the neighbor next time that he doesn't get a blood meal, and that way you're both better off.

Actually, it turned out that they were closely related. This was to some degree a family thing as well. So actually—and in human beings, it isn't very common for me to say, 'Look, you did me a favor yesterday, so I'm going to do you the same favor today.' What are the circumstances under which that's going to happen? You know, I mean, I'm going to have too much food today, and you're going to have too much food tomorrow. It kind of doesn't happen very often. But we human beings have developed another form of exchange which is far more powerful, which is I've got more food than I need, you've got more water than you need. I'm thirsty, you're hungry. We'll come to a deal. We'll swap.

So we'll swap different things at the same time rather than the same things at different times, and for me, that's the real insight into how human sociality and cooperation evolved. Now, I'm only here repeating what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations about the, you know, the butcher and the baker are not giving you bread and beer because they want to be kind to you. They're doing it to make a living, but they end up being kind to you, and you end up being kind to them by giving them money, which is what they want."

"Well, I also thought that in some sense you made a deeper case than that too, talking about the human capacity to understand and envision the future. I mean, reciprocity requires the ability to view transactions across time. And so as soon as the creature becomes aware of the future like we have, we can even engage in reciprocal behavior with our future selves. And that makes our self-interest a much more complex phenomenon. So I might define self-interest as the impulsive pursuit of pleasure. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable definition, perhaps when you're talking about animals.

But the question immediately arises: pleasure over what time span and at what cost? And I'm compelled by my knowledge of the future to act in a way that doesn't betray my future self. And that's very much like acting in a—I’m a collective that stretches across time as an individual. And I have to act in the best interests of that collective. And I don’t think that's very different than acting in the best interests of other people. You know, in my last book, I wrote about the morality that emerges from games. There's a neuroscientist you might be familiar with, Jaak Panksepp, who studied rat behavior in games, and he showed that if you pair two male juvenile rats together, the one with a 10 percent body weight advantage will pin the other almost 100 percent of the time.

And you might say, well, what that demonstrates is that might makes right—the stronger animal wins. But if you pair them together repeatedly after the first bout, the defeated rat juvenile has to be the inviter of play in the next match. So he'll invite the bigger rat to play. But over paired—over repeated pairings, unless the big rat lets the little rat win about 30 percent of the time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. Right? So what happens is that you get an emergent morality, which is not the ability to win any given game, but the ability to repeatedly play a multitude of games. And there's something in that that's very much like what you wrote about in The Origins of Virtue and something very much like a complex reciprocity, right? So where you store your good behavior in your reputation essentially, and that that's of great advantage."

"Yeah, and there is this, you know, a very, very simple thing that was happening in the 1990s when I wrote that book, which was the people were playing the prisoner’s dilemma game on computers and finding out which strategy worked. And the prisoner’s dilemma game is simply a game in which if you both players agree to remain silent, then they benefit each other. But you can make a bigger gain by betraying the other one. But then if he betrays you as well, you both end up with nothing. So you've got to find a way of trusting each other enough to cooperate.

You're being held in separate cells and interrogated separately is the sort of story that's being told. And it turned out that the best strategy in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game is tit for tat. That is to say, be nice first time around, cooperate on the first play, and then simply do whatever the other guy did on the previous play so as to punish or reward the other guy for behaving badly or well, right? So you're not a sucker using that strategy. You're cooperative, but you're not a sucker.

Yeah, and in a sense we are engaged in iterative repeated prisoner’s dilemma games all the time. You don’t say, well, I’m not gonna bother paying for this loaf of bread. I’m just gonna grab it and run, because then I’m better off! Because then you can’t go back to the shop the next day. Yeah, you’ll be recognized by the police! If...yeah, so it's morality as the shadow of the future in some sense, right? And again, this all comes back to Adam Smith, I think, because his previous book—his book in 1759—not The Wealth of Nations but The Theory of Moral Sentiments seems to me to have a very profound insight in me, and it’s taken a long time for me to understand it, and that is that morality isn't as it were taught to us by priests and other people, it's essentially a calculation by us as to what works in the society we're in.

And you kind of calibrate your behavior to find out what is moral, what is ethical, and so on. And, you know, 500 years ago the right ethical thing to do when somebody snubbed you was to, you know, challenge them to a duel and run them through with a sword. Well, that doesn't get you very far today. We've learned that actually we've evolved a higher form of morality, sort of gradually by standing back and saying, in this society, what's going to get me the best rewards given how other people are behaving? Because, of course, everything's a moving target.

It seems to me too that that's deep enough now, so imagine that the landscape that human beings occupy is a social landscape, but it's a social landscape that extends across time, and we've been conscious of that for a long time—at least 150,000 years. So you can imagine that, given the utility of perceiving the future and the clear benefits of reciprocal action, that that's altered us enough neurologically so that even conscience speaks to us internally in terms of reciprocity.

So—and then that goes along with the idea that this isn't something taught by priests. It might be something that priests and other ethicists remind us of, yes. So we can have an inbuilt moral sense that's got a biological basis that still requires cultural activation and modification, and the analog to that would be our instinct for language. You can't teach chimpanzees language because they don't have the biological capacity for it—or not to the degree that we do, although some parrots can perform remarkable stunts in that regard. But we still have to be taught language, or we have to be at least put in an environment where it's happening."

"Exactly, and yeah, it just —because you know, there’s a language instinct, but that doesn't mean that every child is born speaking Hebrew, as James the Second King of England supposed to have—James the First is supposed to have thought was going to be the case. So, you know, I would say that I've studied archetypal representations of moral behavior because I think that dramatic stories represent various pathways through life—like pathways writ large, right? Just drama is life with all the boring bits edited out.

And what drama is trying to present to us are different modes of behavior—some of them unsatisfactory, and those would be the bad guys, and some of them highly satisfactory. And I would say the central hero in dramatic representations is someone who's as fully reciprocal as possible. That's what the drama is aiming at. And I think that's also what you're doing with your children when you teach them to be good sports when they're playing a game—you basically say to them something like, although you don't know this, you say something like, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it matters how you play the game.

And the reason that matters—and this is the part you don't say because you don't know it—is that life is a never-ending series of diverse games, and your goal, if you want to be a winner, is to be invited to play as many games as possible. And what that means is that you have to have a morality that works across the set of all possible games. And it has to trump the morality that drives you to win a single game."

"Yeah, and the phrase for that is enlightened self-interest as opposed to short-term self-interest. And I think it's a very important insight for me. The interesting one is that that connects with economic optimism—that connects with how we got to be so much better off because it brought us the division of labor.

It essentially enabled us to say, look, I'll make the spears; you make the axes, and we’ll both be better off because we’ll both be good at what we're doing. And even if I'm better at making both spears and axes than you are, it still pays me because I'm slightly better at making spears than axes for me to make the spears and get you to make the axes. That's the basis of trade; that's David Ricardo's theory in one stone-age story."

"So when we started to be intelligent enough and sophisticated enough so that a debt could be repaid in currency other than that in which it was accrued. And what that meant must have meant was that we developed the abstract representation of a reciprocal debt. Not only did we reciprocate like chimpanzees do—for example, with grooming—but we could conceptualize the fact that we owed or were owed and were able to be repaid in all sorts of different manners.

And by the way, it wasn't in this book, but it was in The Rational Optimist that I did quite a diversion into the history of trade, and it's very persuasive that trade is far, far older than agriculture, that pre-agricultural people were trading probably 100,000 years ago. The oldest evidence we've got is seashells moving long distances inland from the coast of North Africa around 100,000 years ago, and they're moving these long distances not because somebody's walking hundreds of miles to the seashore picking up some seashells and walking back, but because they're going hand to hand from tribes.

And we can find—I think I do tell the story in The Origins of Virtue of the Euront, who were an aboriginal tribe living in northern Australia who were getting stingray barbs—as many stingray barbs as they wanted on the coast by catching stingrays—but what they really wanted was stone axes. And several hundred miles inland, there was a quarry that produced stone axes. And the tribe that owned that traded with the Euront via several other tribes, and you can actually see the exchange rate of stingray barbs for stone axes along that trail.

So that's when I think that's people being nice to each other when they could be fighting each other."

"Right, well, I think it was in The Origins of Virtue too that you chased the idea of trade down into the past even further, relating it to the strange human propensity to share food, and associated that as well with hunting. And I believe you use the example of mammoths, which is also an example that I found fascinating because obviously, you can't store a whole mammoth, but you can store it in the form of your reputation by sharing it.

And if you store it in the form of your reputation as a generous hunter, then you can be repaid back indefinitely in a currency that doesn't spoil. So, maybe it's—and then you do outline it in this manner—human beings share food in a very egalitarian manner within families. So men and women share food, men mostly meat historically speaking and women mostly what they gather. And that makes for a balanced diet, and that ability to exchange food seems to me to be perhaps the biological platform on which the idea of trade per se was able to evolve.

So, once you can share food and trade and enter into a reciprocal arrangement with regards to food, then it isn’t that much of a leap to start doing that with other commodities, especially those that might be related to the provision of food, like stone axes or arrows or any implement of that sort."

"I'm rather fascinated by the fact that a sexual division of labor over food is very universal and ancient—that men hunt and women gather, essentially in hunter-gatherer societies. Now, in some societies, gathering is much more important than hunting, and in some societies, hunting is much more important than gathering, like the Inuit, for example, is the latter case.

And there are sort of odd types of foraging that are neither gathering nor hunting. So honey tends to be something that men get because it tends to be that you get it from hunting, it's like hunting, as it were. And digging up reptiles and rats tends to be something that women do because it's like digging up roots. Now, some people think this is a sexist view, you know, that I'm saying a woman's place is digging, a man's place is out hunting. But I think it's just that, unlike other species, we really did invent this really useful distinction whereby you got the best of both worlds—you got the protein from hunting, but you've got the reliability of food from gathering.

So, on the whole, you didn't go hungry, but on the whole, you did get access to protein, which was a difficult thing for women to do when they had small dependent kids and things like that. And you can sort of see an echo in it today that far more vegetarians are women—or rather far more women are vegetarians, if you like that. Men just like meat more than women do.

So I think there is a deep thing going on here, but I've got to be very careful talking about it because people are quick to get upset and think that you're in some sense saying something very prejudicial. People get upset now if you accept that there are sex differences, and if you deny that there are sex differences, so they're going to get upset no matter what you think, so you might as well just think what you think."

"You know the advantage to that sexual division of labor in part is that it provides additional utility for long-term relationships because they're actually more—because of the union of specialization there—the gathering and the hunting. You're deriving your food from more than one source; it means it's more reliable across time, and that’s a prerequisite for the origin of long-term pair bonds. So it's a really good thing and no one loses in that trade, and that's, well, that's Adam Smith's point and the point of optimism."

"It's funny because economists tend to be optimistic, and biologists tend to be pessimistic when discussing questions like this, but if you make—well, we're on that. This is perhaps a digression, but I've also been fascinated. But it's quite nice to challenge people and say, 'How about the reproductive division of labor?' We're happy with all sorts of divisions of labor, you know, you hunt, I gather, you work one kind of job, I work another kind of job. We're prepared to share out absolutely everything, but the one we never do is the reproductive division of labor.

Ants and bees do. They say, 'Right, we're going to leave the queen to do the reproducing, and we're all going to be the workers.' Imagine, you know, not even in England with the queen do we expect to do that. It's the one thing we try and do for ourselves. It just drives home the message of just how universal this division of labor concept is otherwise in our life because—because it's so shocking to try to think of a reproductive division of labor.

It's just something we don't aspire to."

"Okay, so your optimism—it manifested itself at least in part in your writing career with this notion that there's a biological origin of virtue, and so it's a fundamental instinct, and there's a universality about it, which I think is very optimistic, because if there is a universal basis for morality despite its obvious cultural differences, it means that we can potentially understand each other well enough to engage in reciprocal action across even tribal boundaries, which we're obviously capable of doing.

And it implies that we might understand each other enough so that we could establish something like a long-term peace; that would be the hope. But, so that's a very fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. And then when you move into analysis of innovation and trade, you start doing that with The Rational Optimist, you're documenting transformations that have made life better, and I could list a couple of those, and maybe we can talk about them."

"So, in The Rational Optimist, for example, you talk about the fact—well, you start by talking about ideas having sex, and so that's a form of reciprocity, I would say that's the exchange of information rather than goods. But information is exchangeable for goods, and so in some sense it's the abstract equivalent of the exchange of goods."

"Yeah, but I'm in a sense I'm being much more literal even than that, because sex is the process by which genes get shuffled, and you recombine genes with new combinations. So you've got a gene for fur in one reptile, and you've got a gene for milk in another reptile, and you bring them together, and you've got a mammal that has both fur and milk—and that couldn't happen without sex because they'd stay in separate lineages.

So sex is the process that enables genetic novelties to find each other and combine. It's what makes evolution cumulative in effect, and I'm saying that exchange has exactly the same role in innovation—that one tribe can invent, you know, one gadget, and another tribe can invent another gadget, and you can't bring them together unless they're trading. And the trading is what enables you to make culture cumulative—to start to say, well, hang on, I'll have that, I'll have that invention that was made in California, and I'll have that invention that was made in China, and I’ll actually be able to benefit from both of them."

"So it's a very explicit metaphor. I mean, it's a flippant attention-grabbing phrase 'ideas having sex,' and I used it for the title of a TED talk, and it rather caught on. And the next TED meeting I went to, they were giving out badges saying, 'Whose ideas have you had sex with recently?' or something—it’s a bit weird! Who have your—anyway, whatever you get."

"Well, we do talk about a fertile—we do, and we talk about cross-fertilization, yes, yes. And well, you hope that someone who's specialized in one area can talk to someone who's specialized in another, and that at the border where there aren't specialists, new ideas can be generated.

And, I mean, I've seen that over and over when talking to—well, when looking for scientific innovation. It's one of the things that's happened in the field of psychology over the last hundred years is that a lot of our radical innovations, especially on the methodological front, have been a consequence of engineers being trained as psychologists, and bringing what they knew as engineers into the field. So a lot of fertile intellectual activity happens where two fields rub together, so to speak."

"That's right, and some of the great breakthroughs in biology came from physicists moving into biology. You move from When Ideas Have Sex to the idea of a better today. And I was actually going to read something, if you don't mind from your book from page 12, which I liked quite a bit. It's—I suppose it's funny in a black-hearted sort of way."

"So there are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability, and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax allegorical for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long drop toilet.

Imagine that it is 1800 somewhere in western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house; father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters, and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable outside. There is no noise of traffic; there are no drug dealers, and neither dioxins nor radioactive fallout have been found in the cow's milk. All is tranquil—a bird sings outside the window."

"I'm going to read the next section too, but this is a very interesting paragraph because it speaks to something that I think has a dramatic origin too—a mythological or archetypal origin, which is the idea of the simple life where everyone is living in harmony with nature and the depredations of culture have not yet manifested themselves. And it's Russoian, but it's deeper than that as well because it actually reflects the truth—that there is a purity about individuals that can be corrupted by society."

"But you have to take the reverse position as well if you're going to get things balanced. Well, then you add a corrective to this, which is quite comical. Oh please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village. Father's scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53—not helped by the wood smoke of the fire, right?

Indoor pollution is still a leading cause of mortality worldwide, often from the romantic hearth. He is lucky; life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry. His sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook—and that would be if the water was good. I would say toothache tortures the mother. The neighbor's larger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hay shed even now, and her child will be sent to an orphanage.

The stew is gray and grisly, yet meat is a rare change from gruel. There is no fruit or salad this season—it's eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so fire light is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture, or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week's wages, and the others have never traveled more than 15 miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts, and one pair of shoes. Father's jacket cost him a month's wages but is now infested by lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it would be trapped and eaten by the boy."

"Well, that—I love that section. It's quite comical in a dark and tongue-in-cheek sort of way, but it's a great corrective to the foolish romanticism that characterizes people's longing for even the near past, you know?"

"It's not unreasonable to say that the typical middle-class person—I'd say in North America or Europe, but increasingly anywhere in the world—is wealthier by almost every measure than a billionaire was in 1920."

"Right, absolutely! And, you know, particularly—I can't remember who it was who said just—you know, just take dentistry. It doesn't matter how rich you were in 1800; it was no fun having a rotten tooth. And you know, and that's a relatively basic thing that we all can have access to today. So there's no question that in material ways our lives are so much better than those of our ancestors.

And we tend to read Jane Austen and think, well, wouldn’t that have been fun? You know, but actually those are books about an incredibly small elite who were rich enough to have candles and go to dances."

"Yes, and even in those circumstances, their social lives were restricted enough so that a single dance could be the social event of an entire year."

"Exactly! And if you didn't, you know, fall in love with the chinless officer who took your arm, you might be a widow for the rest of your—I mean, not a widow, a spinster for the rest of your life. So, you know, it was not much fun compared with today. We are so lucky. Everything is so good.

And for me—and I think I make this—well, actually there's an interesting story about this point. I like to talk about how the big theme of human history is becoming more and more specialized in the things we produce and more and more diversified in the things we consume. So you actually, but your jobs get narrower and narrower, more and more specialized, but your life gets richer and richer, you know, because you can consume, you know, movies and exotic foods and all these different things."

"That's a great antithesis to the Marxist notion of alienation in labor, right? Because one of the things that's attractive about Marxism—and it's understandably attractive—there are two things, I think. One is the emphasis on the unpleasantness of inequality, but the other is the idea of alienation from the created product.

But if you make the case that, well, you might be alienated from the created product with regards to the workplace because of specialization, but in the two-thirds of the hours that you're spending of your life when you're not working, your life is much more diverse than it would otherwise be. And I think that COVID has probably taught everyone that again, because we're so isolated now and stuck at home and facing the restriction of all these things that we took for granted—the wonderful restaurants.

By the way, we do sort of go backwards with respect to specialization and exchange during bad recessions. So in the Depression, a lot of American families, you know, found they were keeping a chicken and growing their own vegetables again. You know? You start to do more for yourself and have less to consume overall, because if you only could consume what you produce, it would be a pretty miserable life. You had to make your own food, your own lighting, your own heat, you know, everything like that.

But by the way, there's a really nice story about this concept, because I read it in a book called Second Nature by Haime Ofek. It's a beautiful book that I read around 20 years ago, and it laid out this point very nicely—that we've become more and more specialized in how we produce, but more and more diversified in how we consume.

And I wrote to him and said, look, this is a fantastic idea. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea and where you got it from, and how it developed? And he wrote back and said, I got it from your book—the original!

Well, that's a good compliment! The best form of question! I said, but I don't think it's in my book. And he said, really, I guess maybe it's not. I just, you know, but I thought I got it from you. But so that's a lovely example of the division of labor in the production of ideas, if you like."

"Well, and ideas can be implicit as well as explicit, so it's not always obvious what ideas are in your book, you know. And it isn’t all—you can't put a boundary around the ideas even the ideas that you write because they have tendrils that reach beyond your understanding. And so you never know—which is why I'm something of a skeptic about intellectual property, by the way. I think copyright is vastly overdone.

I think we should be much more prepared to share—I do share the stuff that we produced, but there we go; that's another..."

"Well, I wonder if that—that anecdote that you just related is an indication of the sexual behavior of ideas? I don’t know if the metaphor works, but you know, every book—each book is different for every reader, and the meaning of the book is actually a complex consequence of the knowledge that's held by the reader and the knowledge that's implicit in the book."

"Absolutely! So what that means is no book is the same for any two readers. Now, postmodernists figured that out a while back, and they seemed to read it to indicate that there was no canonical meaning whatsoever in a text as a consequence, and then slipped into the idea that perhaps there was no meaning at all, which I think was a major mistake.

But is that a sexual—is that process akin to sexuality as well? The fact that you have a reader on one part and something to be read on the other part, and a third thing emerges as a consequence? It seems like it. You need two things to produce something new."

"Yes, I think that is equivalent. I mean, we're talking books here, but if we were talking gadgets it would be much more explicit. I love telling the story about how the pill camera was invented—it's something you swallow and it takes a picture, a film of your insides as it goes through—and it came about after a conversation over a garden fence in Boston between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer."

"That's a very good example of the generation of ideas at the border between two specializations, and you wouldn't necessarily expect—and if you wonder too if there's a—if particularly robust ideas emerge as a consequence of people from very disparate disciplines talking, you know, that would be..."

"There's a—I—in my latest book, I talk about a website called Innocentive, where you can post your problems. If you're a company that's got a technological problem you can't solve, you can post the problem and say look, 'Does anyone have a solution to this?' And you—there are ways of rewarding people who answer, 'Yes, I've got the answer for you.'

It's quite well set up, and a study of the successful solutions that have been provided on this website found that most of them had come from people completely outside the field. So it really was a case that you needed a fresh mind with a fresh— with a different training to look at the problem from a different direction.

So I think all this goes to show that, you know, we are more than the sum of our parts. We operate in the cloud. Our ideas are—again, that lovely thing that Leonard Reed said that, you know, if you take a pencil, there are millions of people who contributed to making it because somebody had to cut down a tree and somebody had to grow coffee for the man who was cutting down the tree.

And the wood had to go to the factory and so on. There’s an incredible number of people involved in making the pencil, and not one of them knows how to make a pencil. There isn’t a human being on the planet who knows how to make a pencil, because the person who knows how to work in a factory doesn't know how to cut down a tree, and so on.

So the knowledge— the knowledge of how to run the human world sits in a cloud and has done since long before the internet cloud was invented. It sits between brains, not within brains."

"Why do you think then, look, I mean we’ve been talking, we’ve been batting back and forth the idea that virtue itself is tightly associated with trade, and then in some sense, they may not be distinguishable from one another. Fair trade in some manner is virtue, especially fair trade across long spans of time and maybe fair trade across long spans of time with diverse communities, right?

So why is it that—why do you think that the idea of trade itself has also become contaminated with this terrible pessimism? I mean, one of the things that characterizes—if trade constitutes virtue and if it's trade as well that's lifted people out of poverty, then why is it that people who engage in novel trade—entrepreneurs say, or even capitalists for that matter—why is it that that form of trade has become so easily associated with, um, with so easily despised and so frequently met with contempt? I find it baffling because you know Voltaire made the point that commerce tends to make people nicer."

"And you know if two people are trading, then they suddenly stop fighting, well they’re worth more to each other if they’re alive than—well exactly! Then that seems to be a good thing. Like, it’s a good thing to have everyone worth more dead than alive! Right? And actually, Steve Pinker talks about this too, but the peace that breaks out at various times in human history tends to be more associated with whether countries are trading with each other than whether they happen to be democracies or any other relationship with their political systems.

So it’s—you know, the degree of trade really does make a difference to how peaceful things are. I mean, it doesn’t stop war breaking out between countries that are trading with each other, but it’s now accident in the 20th century that you get a period of huge protectionism that precedes the Second World War, I mean, and to some extent sparks it, you know? Japan says, well, if you're not going to trade with me, I'm going to bloody well invade Asia and take stuff for myself."

"Well, you know, I was—I thought it was of dubious entry into trade with Communist China that was a big risk on the part of the West. When that first started to happen, it was something that, well, I was interested in and also concerned about, but mostly curious about, because on the one hand you could say, well, it's—why would you trade with a totalitarian state, a cruel totalitarian state, a murderous totalitarian state for that matter?

But on the other hand, you could say, well, maybe it would be better off for everyone if the Chinese weren't dirt poor and starving and if they depended on us in a mutually beneficial manner. And I would have to say that despite the fact that the Chinese Communist Party still rules with an iron fist, that it's probably been better for everyone, all concerned, that extensive trade with China has taken place.

I know the North American and European working class has taken a major hit because of that, although they've benefited from cheap manufactured items for sure. But you've got to think a Chinese population where no one is starving and that's completely engaged in trade with the West is a more reliable long-term partner than one that's isolated and pursuing its own destiny."

"Yeah, I certainly thought that until recently. I thought that our best chance of turning them into a liberal democracy was to trade with them. And after all, it was a great deal for us. We gave them, as Don Boudreaux once put it, we gave them pictures of presidents, and they gave us goods and services—in other words, money!"

"Yes, yes, yes, absolutely! But I have to say in the last couple of years under Xi Jinping China has become something very different from what it was five or ten years ago, I think.

And I think we are reaching the point where it is a problem that we are buying goods off a regime that is doing terrible things to Hong Kong, to the Uyghurs and there's a moral quandary there. But it still seems to me, even that a China that holds a substantial amount of Western debt is much less likely to upset the apple cart than a China that doesn’t, you know?

It’s not such an exact thing to have a—a—they have an interest in the dollar not collapsing, for example. But go back to your original question though: why are people so cynical and unhappy about trade? And I think in the end it's that we are zero-sum thinkers.

Yeah, we find it hard to believe that somebody isn’t winning in a relationship, and I suppose that's because crooked people, crooked foolish people do try to win. But for 99 percent of our four billion years of history, it was true that if someone won, it was at the expense of someone losing.

And so you can see very clearly in the rhetoric of Donald Trump the view that trade is a zero-sum game—a win-lose equation. And it's quite hard even for you and me to get our head around the idea that actually, I—you know? Yes, I've driven a good bargain in buying a car or a house, but maybe I've been ripped off—who knows, you know?"

"Well, I guess part of the problem is that fair trade can revert to a crooked zero-sum game quite rapidly. And so we're on edge because of that. But I mean, people still pursue long-term relationships, and they still pursue friendships. They still make the assumption that reciprocal interactions are not only possible but also part of what makes life worth living—a really important part.

And it doesn't seem that complicated to ex—I guess you—it's the difficulty of extending that outward towards non-kin or even strangers. But it's a remarkable thing that that's possible, and it would be nice if we were more grateful for it than we are."

"Right! The remarkable thing about human beings is that we do treat complete strangers as honorary brothers and sisters. And how do we do that? Partly by building up these levels of trust through reciprocity over long, long periods. eBay is a great example of that because when eBay first emerged, the cynics said, well, you know, I'll put something up for sale that's junk and send it to you, and it won't work, and you'll send me a check that bounces, and that'll be the end of eBay.

And that's not what happened. It’s that right off the bat, almost all the trades were fair and equitable. And then it evolved a reputation tracking system. But even before the reputation tracking system, the default transaction was precisely what it claimed to be on face value. Our reputations are very precarious; it's very easy to lose your reputation."

"Yes. Even in quite a mobile society, it will track you down. Well, that's even maybe more true in society now because you can lose your reputation very easily with one misstep on Twitter. That's certainly true. Well, it's also interesting to see how sensitive people are to reputation maintenance. Because I've watched this intently over the last four or five years, you see people who post something, for example, on Twitter.

And then a small mob generates itself around them and might be—it might not be more than 20 people who are complaining about this particular post. And almost inevitably, the person will back down with profuse apologies and show every sign of severe emotional distress. And I suppose I've thought about it a lot. I suppose it's akin, in some sense, it's the electronic equivalent to having 20 neighbors show up on your doorstep.

You know, you'd assume if you were a reasonable person that you might have done something wrong, even though the analogy doesn't really hold true if you're communicating with 150,000 people. And you upset 15 of them, it's really difficult to—it's really difficult to say exactly what that means."

"This is back to the loss of version point because we all—we know this very well as authors. You read 10 good reviews of your books and you think, well, I’m, you know, I’m embarrassed about that, I don’t really deserve it. Or, you know, it’s a nice good review. And then one bad review, and it prays on your mind, and you get furious, and you get upset, and you write a letter to the editor saying the review is unfair and things that we’ve all done.

Well, the same thing happens with regards to comments on social media. You know, like I’m fortunate with regards to what I’ve produced on YouTube, for example, because most of it garners far more positive commentary than negative commentary. You know, and the ratios are usually something like 50 to 1. But it’s not the case that when I read through the comments that my mood is reliably buoyed, and that is because the outlier, the negative comment strikes a pang into my heart.

You know, and I don’t want to make too much of that because overall, I think this is like the bad news story being more salient."

"Yes, it is the same thing. Well, I cannot see how people who are accumulating more negative comments in a social media platform than positive comments—I don't see how they can survive it. I couldn't survive it. So, and then that sensitivity to reputation, I took a decision some years ago to stop looking at the replies to my tweets altogether, and I've never done it since. And it’s been very good for my—so I'm sure I'm missing out on some interesting feedback.

And every now and then, you know, I will look at something specific where I've asked someone a question or something like that. But actually—and I talked to a British politician who's a friend who was a Conservative Party leader and was hugely criticized at the time. He never became prime minister, and I said, you know, how do you develop a thick skin, Ian? Because you're still in politics 20 years later, and you're still—you know, you've been a successful cabinet minister, but you've been the subject of vitriolic cartoons and all sorts of stuff.

And he says, nobody develops a thick skin; you just learn to ignore the stuff. And the politicians who decide not to ignore it—but to answer back just drive themselves nuts."

"Well, to be blessed with a favorable nervous system too, and to be low in trait neuroticism so you’re not as sensitive to negative information as you might be. So I suspect that public figures who manage to maintain themselves over long periods of time in the face of criticism are relatively robust when it comes to their physiological response to threat."

"Well, something I greatly admire about you is your ability to remain cool under pressure. You know, when Kathy Newman is trying to rile you on Channel Four News or something, you remain logical. I would get my heart rate would go up; I would start to bluster; I would stop thinking; and I would say sort of stupid things that I would regret."

"Is that something you learned or…?"

"Well, it’s very funny because I just hate it. I find that so unbelievably stressful. But fortunately, I think it’s probably a consequence of being trained as a clinical psychologist, right? Is that I can detach myself and watch; but that doesn't mean the physiology isn't racing. Like, it’s racing! And it’s definitely the case that it’s a very strange thing because the negative interviews that I’ve conducted, the interviews where people were attacking me, let’s say, have garnered far more views than the positive interviews.

So in terms of impact on my reputation, the negative interviews have been more beneficial than the positive ones. But that’s partly because you’ve performed well in them. Anyone can perform well when they’re being interviewed nicely, as you are interviewing me nicely now. It’s the sheep from the goats; the people who can remain cool under pressure as you do, I think it is a consequence of clinical training.

I mean, because I can snap into an observer mode and detach myself in some sense from what’s going on, partly because I know as well that it isn’t clear what’s happening. Like it might be a battle, but it’s not necessarily the war. And so being under attack doesn't necessarily mean you’re being defeated; it’s something like that."

"But that’s associated—that’s a rationalization of the ability to detach. But I do think it’s—it’s the clinician in me that allows for that."

"Well, the old bomber pilot's remark that if you're taking flak, you know you're over the target is some comfort in this."

"Yeah, well, I said it. Yes, at least there's a possibility that that's true. So, I want to ask you some more specific questions, or not precisely that. I would like you to discuss more specifically, if you wouldn't mind, some of the things that you've outlined as so intensely positive.

And I can throw out some reminders; these are chapter titles from The Rational Optimist, and then maybe we'll move to how innovation works. You talk about feeding nine billion, for example, which is that—that's a remarkable story. And I've read it in various sources, but we have biologists in particular in the 1960s who were absolutely certain—Paul Ehrlich, for example— that we were all going to perish of starvation if starvation combined with an absolute dearth of raw materials by the year 2000.

And that hasn't happened; it's dec now. The biologists might say, 'Yeah, yeah, well, we got the timeframe wrong by a couple of decades, but you know, the other shoe is still going to drop.' But nonetheless, when you make a prediction, you have to include a time frame or it's not a prediction."

"Well, no, but they can’t even really make that claim because during that period not only have we—I mean since the early 60s we've doubled the human population, but we've slightly shrunk the amount of land we put under the plow every year. There’s been a 68 percent reduction over 50 years in the amount of land needed to produce a given quantity of food.

That's the most extraordinary phenomenon. It's basically the story of the Green Revolution. You make the case there too that without that occurring—and that is a concept we should go into—the Green Revolution, to some degree, because lots of viewers won't know about that. Unbelievably, even though it might, it’s arguably the biggest story of the last 50 years in some sense, you know?

You make the case that had the Green Revolution not taken place—and so that was partly a consequence of careful breeding of new foodstuffs like dwarf wheat and the manufacture of nitrogen fixing fertilizers—we would have already used up land space equivalent to more than the entire Amazonian rainforest. We would have converted virtually all arable land on earth into food production, well, into food production, and we haven't done that.

And in fact, I believe now there are more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were 100 years ago."

"Oh yes, definitely! I mean, the whole world is now reforesting fairly rapidly. When I say the whole world, the world is net reforesting. Some places are still losing forest, but on the whole, places like China are gaining woodland at an extraordinary rate."

"Yeah, well, China has more woodland now than it did 30 years ago despite the fact that, well, they just declared this week or last week the Chinese government just declared the eradication of extreme poverty in China; and you know, you can be cynical about that and claim it's totalitarian posturing.

But it's certainly the case that even by UN standards we’re almost—we're on track to eradicate extreme poverty by, according to the UN definition of extreme poverty, by 2030. And we've halved it since—from the year 2000, I believe, to the year 2010 it was cut in half, which is —it's absolutely phenomenal! 60 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty when I was born; today it's less than 10 percent.

That's the greatest achievement of any human generation ever! Nobody’s lived through anything like that in the past!"

"Yes and that despite the fact that the population tripled!"

"Yes, well yes—and nobody saw it coming, and it wasn't planned either. Most of it came about because of relatively local innovation to make farming more efficient and things like that. And the amount of calories available per head have gone up on every continent, including Africa.

There is still extreme poverty, extreme hunger, and malnutrition, and nutrient shortages and so on. But the thing I always say to environmentalists is: why do you think it would motivate people to tell them that this problem is insoluble? Why not say, look how well we've done in the past; why don't we try and do just as well in the future?"

"It's especially the case—this is something that really confuses me too because I worked—I generated, partly generated a UN report, contributed to a UN report about six or seven years ago on sustainable development, and I had the same sort of realization that you described, was that on all these dimensions where we were supposed to be, you know, careening towards catastrophe, we were in fact doing better and better—with the possible exception, I think of oceanic management, but we don't have to get into that."

"I agree with that, yeah. It’s like the oceanic management is a catastrophe, but it could still be rectified. And it seems to be a tragedy of the commons catastrophe. And in any case, everywhere I looked at the actual statistics, the evidence was that things were getting better fast, and like really fast—fast in an unparalleled manner.

But what really got me was that the evidence, as far as I can tell, is clear that as soon as you make people rich enough so that they're not living hand to mouth, then they start to become concerned with environmental degradation. And so the biggest contributor to pollution you could make a case—a strong case—the biggest contributor to pollution isn't wealth but poverty.

And then if you raise people out of poverty, then they start to manage their environments properly because they can afford to look at the long run. And so, you'd think that for the radical types who are hyper-concerned, according to their own self-description, with poverty and oppression as well as environmental degradation, that they would look at the facts and say, 'Oh my God! We can have our cake and eat it too.'

The faster we make people rich, the better off the planet is going to be!"

"Completely! This is so clear to me, and it’s so hard to get across to a lot of the environmentalists. And by the way, there’s a word I want to introduce the conversation at this point, which is panglossian. People sometimes accuse me of being panglossian—Dr. Panglos as you remember in Candide in Voltaire's novel is someone who says, he's a caricature of Leibniz, and he says, 'All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,' and yes, Lisbon has been destroyed by an earthquake! But that must have been because they were evil people, because God wouldn't do a bad thing!

And it's a very silly argument and it's being lampooned by Voltaire. But actually, the people who say that now are not you and me. We're saying good as this world is compared with what it was. It's a veil of tears compared with what it could be if we press on. We're not saying we've got to the best possible world. We're saying let's keep going. But the people who are saying that—who are saying, oh we mustn't do any more development; we must make sure that people still live in mud huts... you outline data indicating that one of the responses by the catastrophists, let's say, of the 1960s was to write off places like India and proclaim that even aid was futile because all you were doing was encouraging increasing starvation in the future."

"When I was writing The Rational Optimist in 2010, it was quite fashionable still to write off Africa—to say, yes, Asia has seen extraordinary improvements in living standards, but it is very unrealistic to assume that that could ever happen in Africa! People would say that kind of thing quite often.

And in my book I said, look, even in Africa we are seeing incredible improvements! Well, the fastest—and so I got criticized by a reviewer in The New York Times for using the phrase even in Africa—that showed I was a racist apparently. You know, you can't win, can you? I'm saying the opposite!

But now, 10 years on, Africa's had an incredible decade—actually much better than the West, which has had a rather grim decade of low productivity and the overhang of the Great Recession and so on. But you know, countries like Ethiopia have doubled their income per capita in real terms in a decade. You've seen malaria mortality collapse; you've seen HIV mortality falling fast; you've seen warfare disappearing from much of the continent; you've seen an emerging middle class; you've seen far less hunger and malnutrition.

Actually, Africa is just doing roughly what Asia did a generation ago, and it will soon be where Asia is now, which is a middle-class middle-income continent. That's an incredible thing!"

"And it’s really quite remarkable if, if an emergent problem for the latter half of the 20th century was that there were too many goods and not enough people, and that could easily be the case— that could easily be the case, especially not enough young people.

But, Bray, so maybe the answer to Malthus is sort of hidden in some sense inside the presumptions you made in your book. So maybe we could posit it as a general biological rule as if the rate of sexual reproduction of ideas exceeds the rate of sexual reproduction of human beings, then there's no Malthusian catastrophe.

That's a very nice way of putting it! I think that is exactly—it's exactly the point I like to make!"

"Well, it's possible! It certainly seems to me to be possible, given that we are clearly able to make more and more using less and less. And you know, there are lots of things that we're not doing that we could do that you also touch on.

One of the things that strikes me as somewhat catastrophic is the tragic underdevelopment of nuclear power. I've spoken with a number of people about the possibilities of nuclear power, and you point out in your—I think it's in How Innovation Works, actually—that there are no shortage of plans for much smaller nuclear reactors that don't use water as the primary coolant—that use salt or some other substance like certain salts.

And that if they fail, they actually shut down rather than melting down. And so that's another example I think of where the environmentalists—it's a broad brush, but the environmentalists got things seriously wrong and are still doing so, because as far as I can tell, if you wanted—the question is, what do you want?

Like, if you want cheap power of the sort that would make people rich enough to start caring about the environment, it seems to me that you would be a nuclear power supporter rather than a supporter of solar or wind power, which I think only accounts for about three percent of total energy needs."

"That's true. People say, oh no, no, that's wrong; it's more than 10. You find they’re referring to electricity. But electricity is only about 25 percent of energy at the moment. So it’s around three percent comes from solar and wind. But the real problem with solar and wind versus nuclear is still horribly expensive because of the way we've regulated it and driven up its price, so our problem is how to get the price down.

But the real problem is the amount of land that solar and wind use, because they're very low-density sources of energy, so you have to have a lot of land—and you need more land than there is. You know, I mean, even Canada has hardly got enough land to produce renewable energy for its population.

And frankly, that's going back to a medieval economy where you had to use the landscape to produce energy—you had to damn the rivers and grow the crops that you then—and cut down the forests, you know, to burn. It's not obvious either that wind farms aren't a blight on the landscape, I'm afraid they are. I'm a keen bird watcher; I don’t like the idea of these birds being devastated by onshore and offshore wind.

And you know a wind farm spends the first seven, eight years of its life earning back the energy that went into building the wind turbine, you know, and only after that is it net positive. And even then, it’s a huge investment of capital that could be doing something else. You know, the point about energy is it's the master resource; it's the thing that everybody else needs to use. So you want to make it as cheap and as reliable as possible."

"Yes, exactly! And that should be said over and over—that if you were—it seems to me that if you were truly concerned about the planetary fate, let’s say, or even more precisely the fate of the people on the planet, that you would do everything you could to drive the cost of energy, including the externalized costs, to something as low as possible.

Because it's the prerequisite for everything else, and starving people aren't—we already talked about this—but starving people aren't good planetary stewards. So even if you— you’ll notice, Jordan, you and I have now slipped into a slightly pessimistic mood in that we’re finding the energy policies of our countries rather stupid."

"Yeah, it’s probably because we're old enough so that a 90-minute discussion starts to become tiring."

"Well, there's that, but also, you know, the identity politics stuff, the anti-enlightenment mood of our times. I can make a case that we might just be about to kill the goose that has been laying these golden eggs."

"Well, I think, look, I think we should—I truly think we should avoid going there. And I've thought about this a lot, watching people respond, for example, to some of the things that I've been talking about over the last few years. You know, there's a huge population of young and not so young people out there who are literally starving—no, they're metaphorically starving—they're psychologically starving for a positive but believable story.

And I think that, like, as you pointed out, we could decry the state of modern politics and concern ourselves with the fact that counterproductive economic and social policies might be put in place for all sorts of ideological reasons. But I actually think a much better use of our time is in the kind of enterprise that you've already pursued, which is to produce a robust counter-narrative that’s thoroughly grounded in—as much as that's possible—thoroughly grounded in the facts.

We can say, look, forget it, forget about that, forget about the pessimism, forget about the policies that that pessimism would drive. We could make the assumption that we can have our cake and eat it too; we can eradicate poverty, we can constrain relative inequality to the point where societies are stable, and we can produce a massive increment in environmental quality.

And all that’s within our grasp, if that's what we want, within the next hundred years."

"Ah, absolutely! And didn’t mean—you’ve devoted your—the last 30 years of your life at least to exactly that message, and I think that's a much more powerful solution than being pessimistic about the counter positions. You’ve got it! People need a better story; you're dead right! Thank you for reminding me that—that's what I think!"

"Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly! Well, it's easy; it's easy to get tangled up because you did. And politics, especially moment-to-moment politics, can tangle you up badly and knock you off your central axis. And your work—this is probably a good place to end too; your work is refreshing in that regard.

There are other people who are doing this sort of thing too, like Bjorn Lomborg, for example, and Hans Rosling who are—and Mary—Mayer N. Tupy—who are informed optimists. Yeah, both Bjorn and Hans were influences on me, and very sadly, Hans Rosling's no longer with us, but, you know, it was a true—Bjorn's book was a true eye-opener to me.

It was about the same time I was starting to think along the same lines and an eye-opener to him too, exactly. So let’s—I think that would be a good place to leave it and we could say, look, you know, to the people who are listening to this, there's no reason for a counterproductive and anti-human pessimism—we could have a planet where there was enough for everyone and where there was enough for the non-human inhabitants too that contribute to making life rich.

And there's no reason not to aim for that, and there's absolutely no reason not to assume that it's within our grasp. So we want to aim properly, and we can have what everyone seems to want, whether they're on the right or the left when they're thinking properly, which is an eradication of absolute poverty so no one is forced into penury and starvation and no children fail to develop.

We can reduce the impact of relative poverty, which is an entrenched intransigent problem but not unaddressable, and we could restore to a large degree or maintain a sustainable ecology around us, and we don’t want to forget that and drown in our threat sensitivity.

Yeah, but once—but we do it by development, not by anti-development! Yeah, we do that by faith in you—in human by faith in human beings fundamentally, and I think that faith—I don't think there's any reason for that faith to be unwarranted. We're not a plague on the planet; there’s no reason to assume that."

"So, anyways, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and for talking to me, and also for your books, which they're uplifting in the proper manner. You can read them and you can think, 'Good for us, man! We're incrementally making the proper sacrifices to lift everyone's standard of living everywhere!'

And more power to us, and hopefully, we'll continue! Well, look, thank you very, very much, Jordan. It's been an honor and a pleasure, and something I've always wanted to do to meet you and have a conversation with you. And let’s hope we can have a drink in the real world when the pandemic’s over."

"Yes, God willing! Wouldn't that be nice? All right, so I was speaking with Matt Ridley today, the author of a variety of books we discussed today. We discussed The Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely description, at least in part, of the biological origins of morality and an optimistic book, The Rational Optimist, which contains an extended argument for why we could—why reasonable people could sustain an optimistic and positive view of a future in which everyone has more of what they need and want.

And finally, How Innovation Works, which is Matt's most recent book, which is also a book I would really recommend during COVID times, because it's a sequence of narratives about the triumph of human ingenuity in small ways and in great ways. And it's a reminder, I would say, it’s a reminder for gratitude—there are all these people who came before us, worked diligently, and with no shortage of self-sacrifice frequently to produce all these improvements that we now take for granted.

And it’ll improve your view of humanity to read the book, and since you're a human being, it's quite good for you psychologically to improve your view of humanity. So thank you all for listening."

"Thanks, Matt. It was a pleasure!"

"Thanks, Jordan!"