Do Natural Laws Define Human Life? (Saleem Ali)

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was gonna mention the artwork behind me is always rotating this is the original artwork for the cover of my very first book why people believe we're things you can see the kind of the matching artwork there uh with a forward by Stephen J Gould who I'm going to bring up in just a moment after I introduce my guest today is Saleem Hali Ali who was born in New Bedford Massachusetts but he grew up in Lahore Pakistan until his college Years receiving his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Tufts University and his Masters in PhD degrees and environmental policy and planning at Yale and MIT respectively he holds the blue and gold distinguished professorship in geography and spatial Sciences so we'll have to ask him about that at the University of Delaware in his honorary professor at the University of Queensland in Australia Dr Ali's Laurels include being a National Geographic Explorer having traveled for research to over 150 countries that's cool being chosen as a young Global Leader by the world economic forum and serving on the seven member science panel of the global environment facility the world's largest multilateral trust fund for the environment held in trusteeship by the World Bank his earlier books include Treasures of the earth need greed in a sustainable future and he's a fellow of the Royal Society of arts and Royal geographical Society in the UK and also serves on the boards of Adventure scientists and mediators Beyond borders International along with his wife Maria and Sons Shamir and Shah Rose the family are citizens of Australia Pakistan and the United States he is truly an international Man of Mystery hi Celine nice to see you thanks for coming on thank you so much Michael it's a real honor I've followed your work and you are in the acknowledgments of the book because your show goes into great depth on topics which often others cover in a very cursory way and I I often refer to some of your interviews uh to gain okay you gotta lean forward a little bit more to the mic or speak up a little louder because it's a little quiet yum yup sure okay is that better okay that's perfect okay I'm gonna read uh one of your opening passages here you'll uh your your intro is a little autobiographical so I want to get into that before we get into the meat of your theory you write during my doctoral days at MIT in the late 1990s I would frequently visit the Peabody Museum at Harvard the brooding brick building full of enigmatic skeletons and precious mineral archives was my secret happy place in the cold New England winter months on one such visit to the museum I had the Good Fortune of encountering the late doing of Natural History Stephen J Gould this was a man Whom The New York Times would later call in his obituary the best known evolutionary biologist since Charles Darwin I can think of a few biologists who kind of objected to that but I won't name any names gold was all bundled up in a Woolen coat and wearing a peculiar cap ready to exit the building on a Brisk Thursday night he was running to catch a train to South Station and on to New York City from where he commuted back and forth to Boston I followed him persistently with a Cavalcade of compliments which did not stir his attention he was known to be prickly and dismissive yet despite an initial rebuff to my civility we were able to stripe strike up a conversation on the fabled redline tea train into the city during the 20-minute train ride I learned that Gould learned from ghoul that the culminating book he was working on was to consider the structure of evolutionary theory he reminisced on how his work as a public intellectual had forced him to look for structure and order to convey complex ideas to the general public in return this quest for structure had motivated him to reconsider his lifelong study of darwinian evolution to seek patterns this magnum opus was to be Gould's last book a 1400 page beautifully Illustrated Tome published just two months before his death okay here it is I have it right here now that that is a tone that is a doorstop of a book and here he is the great one uh Stephen J Gould yep so that's great so tell us uh you know that to a certain extent was kind of an inspiration for you for your work finding structure and order in the apparent chaos of nature that's what gold tries to do here that's what you try to do in your book which I did not give a proper introduction it's called Earthly order how natural laws Define human life so let's start there yes thank you Michael um so Stephen J Gould was indeed quite inspirational uh and sort of led me towards this book although it took me 20 years to really get to the point where I could write it in a coherent way and along the way of course you know I had to go through the usual writing of papers and other things to go through the academic ladder um and so you know with gold um what I've found really remarkable was how um he was able to uh also make his work very relevant to some of the most pressing conversations of our times and people often accused him of of being contrived because of that like for his book The mismeasure of man you know he he tried to take on some of the ways in which social Darwinism could be misused and uh and I think you know one of the things that became really important for me was like what what I call functional order um you know sometimes you have to look at different scales of analysis and uh what may not be true at one scale is functionally fine at another scale and uh for me that has been sort of the way in which I have charted my own work I I'm an environmental planner by training my PhD is in environmental planning and you know planning is a very practical field it's it's essentially applied geography it's very much about like solving problems for the future so so that's how I've approached this and I've tried to bring in Nuance in the book and make sure that I always look for exceptions and you know some of the kinds of critiques that have been put forward in terms of Google's work also I try to address those but ultimately I'm trying to see you know how can we have a functional society which considers uh all these different sort of foundational elements of the laws of nature and how well can they be applied to social and political systems yes nice nicely put a couple comments on Gould and his work there first I uh there's kind of an idea going around that his book The mismeasure of man in which he re-measured Martin's skulls from the 19th century that purported to show racial differences in brain size was later debunked like in the 2010s OR 2000s I guess but that was then redone Itself by Massimo pigalucci and his colleagues showing that in fact Google probably did get it right uh in his analysis and so you know this is a nice indication of how science works right you you try to you know access something or replicate it and you try to replicate it again and you go back and forth and I think he's pretty much been Vindicated on that point the second point I was going to make about punctuate equilibrium which gets to your work uh that is in in which you're trying to impose some kind of order or structure on nature you know people often took punctuated equilibrium to be like a different another Force like natural selection whereas really the more modest version of it was just a description of what the fossil record would look like if allopetric speciation were the process by which new organisms arise in evolutionary history so for example allopatric speciation is this is Ernst Mayer's idea that you have a Founder population that breaks off from the huge gene pool maybe there's a mountain range or a river they're separated from an island from the mainland whatever the geographically isolating mechanism is that breaks off a portion of this small gene pool from the bigger one and then you can get rapid evolutionary change because the gene pool is not very big for the little founder population in some cases like in the Galapagos it may just be a pregnant female or just one couple of birds or a pregnant tortoise or whatever that gets out there and starts a whole new population so you can get kind of Rapid evolutionary change so what Gould and Eldridge said was that if you look at the fossil record you're going to see a long period of stasis where there's not a lot of change and then all of a sudden a break in the fossil record where it looks like it happens really fast but it's not happening fast in some like it happened in a week or something like that and it's not like a mutant you know some genetic freak that all of a sudden arises and you have a new species that that isn't really what it meant at all but I remember in X-Files episode you mentioned you like The X-Files where I think it was Scully who was explaining to Mulder might have no that's right that this mutant that they had found was due to punctuated equilibrium I thought oh that's such a crazy way to use that theory because it's not at all what it is absolutely you know you've summed it up so well in terms of the specific example of Island biogeography and uh you know one of the things also that the book attempts to do is uh bring in some of that kind of natural science uh conversation within social and political discourse because we can learn a lot from that in terms of even just heuristically how we think about how different kinds of populations are going to be developed we're looking at migration flows and so on um and certainly with reference to the way in which islands and you know order develops in different Islands societies whether we get equilibrium or we get some kind of um functionality between species uh it's also one of the things that I talk about is not just discovering that sense of order but you can invent that order you know in the case of Darwin a very interesting example which I mentioned in the book is around Ascension Island which is in the the South Atlantic and I had a chance to be very clear close by to that in Saint Helena Island where a Napoleon was exiled and a little known fact around what Darwin tried to do in Ascension was he wanted to actually create a a viable environment for humans to have it basically and so the limiting factor was there was no water the fresh water and so he basically tried to create an an ecosystem whereby you could have enough of this sort of evapotranspiration process and then you could develop a little Pond and it actually happened and now there are people living there you know so uh yeah it's it's great when biology and sociology connect like that yeah your background if we could go back to that for just a moment to what extent do you attribute your as I said International flavor of uh you know growing up in different environments and an international travel and so on aided you or kind of nudged you into being interdisciplinary in your studies I mean your book ranges from you know quantum physics all the way to economics I mean that's really quite a range uh you owe some of that just to your personal history and background yes you know I think that uh the tradition in the East is generally what we call in the orient one might say uh is one of you know trying to find comprehensive rationality you know sometimes the Orient has gone astray with that because they go into very sort of superstitious uh approaches to knowledge Gathering and uh you know growing up in Pakistan I was tempted into those kinds of domains because I I grew up in a very you know traditional family in Pakistan the reason why my mother took me back from Massachusetts to Pakistan was that she wanted me to have more of a traditional upbringing in Pakistan in an Islamic society and culture um and so there was a kind of holistic approach often it was a bit misguided but it did make me think about Connections like you know in in Islamic uh tradition you you have like Islamic economics they're they're like huge uh you know treaties written on Islamic economics and then you have you you know all this kind of tension around like how do we reconcile uh the Quran with science and so on so I always kind of was made to try and build connections between these fields often they were going in errant directions from a you know from a genuinely scientific perspective but that I think did guide me ultimately towards trying to be more of a systems thinker and you know now if people ask me like how do you define yourself yes I'm the chair of the Department of geography because geography is a very all-embracing discipline and you know in many universities and tendency for reductionism they've done away with geography as a field but the reason why National Geographic is so captivating to the public is because it does bring together everything from you know the mummies in Egypt to uh the big bang you know so it's um so geography is is very much in that sense a synthetic arena for for system scientists but if people ask me what are you I would say I'm an environmental system scientists because I I try to bring together those linkages what is spatial spatial size spatial science yeah yeah so you know the the way geographers often describe themselves as geography is the the study of uh why things happen where they happen and how they happen and it's the where they happen which is the most significant in terms of the methods geography uses and that's spatial analysis basically trying to figure out you know geographic information systems for example and how now we're using computational techniques to understand that so um when we were kind of thinking about how can we make our department more attractive for uh kids coming into college uh we thought we should focus on that aspect of geography which is where things happen because that's what is often most alluring and so we decided to add spatial Sciences within the term because our most popular courses are geographic information systems and uh trying to look at now for example we're using our GPS positioning stones and you know Google Earth and all that I mean that's where a lot of our graduates are going is into spatial sciences and using big data analytics so that's where spatial Sciences comes from and is it related to Big history as it's sometimes called a big history uh can have some aspects of it you know big history tends to be much more temporarily determined of course because it's his history itself and certainly in geography we do bring in the temporal Dimension um but we often tend to be very much focused on the uh the the geospatial side of things uh and increasingly there is much more I know longitudinal analysis and so on as well that's done and so big history can come into that I think big history kind of is uh is much more in the uh in the tradition of kind of uh uh sort of grand visioning and uh it's more almost philosophical in some ways and suddenly I'm in your training in in that Arena comes through um so yes but I I have followed big history conferences every now and then they're they're great I mean definitely give you I think you discussed if I recall Jeffrey West's work on cities and the power law Like You can predict how many gas stations there'll be and how many banks and so on in the city depending on the population size in a very predictable way that's a kind of imposing some structure not opposing really discovering the structure that is there in the in the real world yes I mean Jeffrey West's book uh scale is uh fantastic in terms of looking at uh the the way in which power laws can be used to understand the linkages between different kinds of systems uh he he does talk about cities in a similar way like I've also tried to make the connection between natural order and social order particularly um I think where I try to go into um more of a kind of Applied sustainability lens you know he gets to that right in his final chapter but my my Approach is much more kind of like the purpose of the book is so that we have that foundational knowledge to move towards sustainability uh but yes I think Jeffrey West's book is is very important in uh trying to understand how complex systems can be applied now he he some in some areas I feel he doesn't provide like enough information on why exceptions happen like you know in many cases he he gives this kind of correlation graph there are many correlation graphs in the book but there are always these outliers and he doesn't really explain why the outliers happen and I've I've tried to bring in that analysis also in one of my chapters I talk about errors and how you know it as a as one of the endorsements in the book notes by Lucas Joppa who's the chief environment officer of Microsoft he says you know it's the study of water is a very messy process even though you're actually trying to understand order the reality is there always going to be these exceptions you're going to have these kinds of deviations and understanding those is just as important because there is the Allure of patterns which can sometimes lead us a stray also uh and and that especially in the case of uh social systems where if you if you study patterns to a certain point they can lead to Prejudice as well right because that's where stereotypes come from stereotypes come from thinking about patterns and having too much of a thinking of pattern and you in your own work you know conspiracy theories come from the same way where you you start to see patterns too much and then you don't try to see the exceptions and so on yeah for sure and and it's good it's actually good to do that the world would just be this buzzing chaotic place if we weren't able to sift out of the noise some patterns so patterns are real it's just the question is signal detection problem right which of the real patterns which are not you know you can make the type one error you know you think the pattern is real and it's not or you can make a type 2 error where the pattern is not real and you think it is right but you also Imagine a typo yeah that's right yeah the type 3 error is where you have the the the right uh answer basically but you are looking at the uh the wrong problem itself and so uh yeah you know so there you can have a situation where you are using the wrong sample size of the population and you can end up with that kind of type 3 error yeah yeah so you mentioned Islamic economics what is that I've never heard that term yeah I mean you know this is where you when when you try to force paradigms and try to also have you know normative impulses which are dictating what uh ends up being in the analysis so I mean Islamic economics is basically trying to uh uh apply some of the fundamental tenets and beliefs of Islam to developing economic systems so you try to impose a structure based on certain Norms so in the case of Islam one of the most fundamental Norms is uh a version to interest so how do you develop Market systems uh where you do not have interest and in the same way you know for in terms of credit markets how do you develop that and so um Islamic economics has developed as a field around that kind of notion of uh having interest-free Banking and uh uh and and sometimes it becomes a bit of smoke and mirrors because you still need you know if you want people want to get a mortgage but they're not necessarily they're not borrowing from a bank with interest but there there's an investment fund which is then giving returns in a certain way so um so that's basically Islamic economics and there is you know there's plenty of now applied work around that kind of of of banking system particularly interesting is that because the Quran prohibits the charging of Interest yes yeah exactly I mean and it goes back to a sense that interest leads to exploitation you know and of course we see that with the credit card debt in the US that yes it can lead to exploitation especially in that regard but I mean in traditional economic system usually was also frowned upon and we do have usury laws but uh Islam is a bit even more strict Beyond just this conventional notion of usually that you're actually focusing on any form of interest because it leads to exploitation of by the the Creditor right and this also biblical injunctions against that which led to some forms of anti-Semitism and pogroms against Jews whose who being cut out of a lot of Industries migrated toward being the middlemen in financial transactions in the middleman in a financial transaction can't do it for free right they have to pay their own bills they have to you know they they got to get paid too and interest is the way you get paid and you can't just lend somebody money now in hopes that they pay it back sometime in the future without putting a price on the value of that money in the future had you kept it and that's what interest rates are right I I could not live in a house that I own well I don't really own this house I guess the bank does I own some of it the bank owns the rest of it and and if I don't send them that check every uh month for and if I miss a couple months then you know they're going to come and and take this house back but without the interest that I pay on the mortgage they wouldn't lend me the money so you have to have that so here's what I'm getting at you know I understand the injunctions because it can lead to abuse right like there used to be uh debtors prison right where they would imprison people who were in debt and then you know we passed laws against that and so forth and and yet a modern economy could never operate without interest it just it can't it would never get off the ground right you couldn't have these major corporations like Apple Computers they would never do that without being able to carry huge loads of debt uh and and in which case we wouldn't have iPhones and electric cars and whatever you like about the modern world totally here it seems like a reasonable religious um Norm or injunction is not doesn't fit with the modern world therefore something has to go and then I guess I would ask is that different from say Islamic physics is there Islamic physics or where it's really more in the social yeah I mean you know there are plenty of uh uh Muslim scientists who try to find uh scriptural examples of how the laws of physics are described in the Quran so that's kind of where the Islamic physics comes in but sometimes that's a bit specious because there are plenty of things if you take literally that are completely not congruent with the Contemporary Empirical research so uh but going back to a point about interest rates you know and this is something I Do cover in the book is that you know interest rates and any form of of um risk um uh delivery uh needs to be considered in terms of how we develop social order so if you like you when you talked about the the point about Facebook and all these companies they developed because of uh someone was willing to take a risk and you had some Venture Capital people or whoever was able to give them that money similarly you can have social Mobility which comes from people willing to lend someone money to have a house or you know so you you improve quality of life through that risk but how we actually measure risk and how we make decisions on risk that's a fascinating area of research and inquiry and what impact does risk have in terms of the resilience of systems over the long run and this is where you know the work of the Black Swan or the Nasim Talib I mean he's his five book series is quite amazing in that regard you know when he he comes up with the notion of anti-fragility which is that ultimately you want systems which actually become toughened by uh adversity and so you know even if you are taking a risk in some form and there isn't a negative outcome the system actually becomes stronger and the human body is an example our muscles are like that like when you're cycling out there you know you were exhibiting anti-fragility because you were increasing a certain level of resilience in your body in the long run so I mean that's where we need to start thinking about risk in a much more useful way so if we are going going to charge interest rates and if we're going to have Credit Systems those risk systems should be aligned towards some kind of long-term uh constructive outcome right so here the government has laws and regulations that prevent fraud and so forth but they do get pretty loose around venture capital and Investments they want people to take risks because this is how we end up with the internet and in smartphones and electric cars and so on we want to reward the handful of winners and the the kind of resentment of wealth that you often see of you know it's so unfair Steve Jobs Bill Gates Warren Buffett you know Jeff bezel take your pick it's unfair that they have that much money but in fact what we're forgetting is the for every jobs there's you know a thousand guys that started companies in their parents Garage in the 70s and they went out of business right and you know my venture capitalist friends tell me you know that they fund with significant money about one out of every 100 pitches that they hear right so the other 99 they just weren't particularly interesting then of let's say the hundred that they fund you know maybe one makes it to a huge payout an IPO or they get bought up by Google or Apple or whatever and the entrepreneurs who started it you know make a billion dollars and overnight and we only see that we don't see the the two other cuts the 99 and then the 99 who got nothing they either went out of business or they're just kind of still struggling along barely making a living and so in a way I I guess as a society we're willing to say okay we we will put up with the Jeff Bezos buying their 50-foot Yachts or 150 foot yacht or whatever it is and in his rocket ships and all the crazy stuff that wealthy people do because we want to have our those products and services because the rest of us benefit from it and and we just don't even see the losers yeah not exactly and you know this is where also some of the lessons in the book in terms of linking um the way in which natural systems function what we can learn from them with reference to these kinds of social systems so um with reference to for example these um uh companies that are not heard of uh why is it they're not heard of anymore is because we tend to also have this um you know kind of just like we have a herd mentality in natural systems uh we tend to get a herd mentality with reference to uh the way in which markets function and how investors are going to see a certain areas of interest and then you lose out on a lot of other opportunities because you are following that kind of herd mentality and this happened of course during the.com bust because at that time you had the e-commerce uh Mania and you had all of this massive investment but if you were to look at it from the point of view structure like there is such a thing as a natural monopoly right so you will get to a certain level of order around natural monopolies like Amazon or Ebay or uh because people will just see the convenience of having that One-Stop opportunity and so now now then the next question to ask is okay if you get these kind of natural monopolies where that can happen then how are you going to govern them so that they are not going to be exploitative and how are you going to figure out mechanisms for distribution of the wealth that is going to accumulate and so so for example some of my own research has been in mining and minerals and you know my empirical work is on environmental and social impact of Mining and Mining is a high risk High reward industry so you get people who are going to be able to take very high risks and they are the ones who go to get the most rewards now why they take the risk is for the high reward uh and you do get natural monopolies that can happen with mining because of the way in which it's structured so my next book actually is going to be on aluminum because it's a fascinating element and it's got a really remarkable story in terms of how uh you know it's the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust but we didn't actually isolate in the late 19th century and now we have the most products of any metal on Earth from it uh but it started off with as a monopoly situation because you had you know the Alcoa became a natural monopoly and and still dominates in many ways and and then it was like how do you get those people who make all this wealth so you had like the guy who started Alcoa was Charles Hall he was an undergrad at Oberlin College when he started you know discovered this process along with the French guy independently and then they uh but then you know the company was established and you had people like with the CEO of Alco I was Arthur winding Davis which of in his time was the Bezos of the time you know and we still have the Arthur winding Davis Foundation uh now how do you like when you get that level of wealth how can you figure out like a way then socially to develop it in a sense that's going to be functional for the rest of society and there is a role for government there but it needs to be calibrated so that you don't disincentivize the high risk High reward approach right I wrote about I wrote about that in the mind of the market because um I was writing about the chairman Antitrust Act and its precedenting setting cases that have been decided in courts in the century since it was passed allowed the government to indict an individual or a company on one of four one or more of four crimes one price gouging charging more than the competition two Cutthroat competition charging less than the competition three price collusion charging the same as the competition and four Monopoly having no competition well you can bust somebody for anything then yeah and there there has been an abuse of those kinds of laws for sure uh but uh ultimately you know we have to think about then uh what is what's the kind of best public-private relationship that's going to give us social order that's most uh instructive and you do have people like uh you know uh some of the economists who are uh Mariano matsukato and others who have looked at the role of government in fostering Innovation you know and what is that sort of Sweet Spot between public and private engagement and I believe there is just like we have the Goldilocks zone and the laws of nature you know I think there is that sweet spot between public and private because it's between the collective good and the individual agency that you can find that and unfortunately people just don't want to struggle with finding that sweet spot you know so you get polarized politics between the free marketeers and the complete sort of Bernie Sanders uh brand of you know government intervention and there is a lot of opportunity in the middle and not just in a trite way I mean I'm talking about figuring it out dealing with the tough data analysis and saying This Is How We Do It But ultimately that would be decided politically right uh that you know we push for our guy to be in office or our Senators and congressmen who would take control of the House and Senate and so on and then pass legislation that nudges the system in the direction we think it should go and then four years or six years later the other team does the other thing and it kind of goes back and forth in a window something like that let me let me just read you know more about this than I do obviously so we'll have to talk about when your next book comes up but here's what I wrote in 1886 Charles Martin Hall solved the problem of how to commercially produce aluminum by a process of passing an electric current through a bath of cryolite and aluminum oxide that left a semi-rare metal byproduct aluminum with financial backing Hall founded the Pittsburgh reduction company which in 1907 changed its name to the Aluminum Company of America or Alcoa shortly after Hall introduced his revolutionary new smelting system he managed to reduce the price of aluminum from 545 dollars a pound to eight dollars a pound a 98.5 percent cut initially producing 10 pounds a day for a gross take of 80 a day by the 1930s the company was generating a million dollars a day but instead of raising the price as monopolies are alleged to do following the folk intuitions that rule our economic understanding Alcoa cut the price of aluminum to a mere 20 cents a pound ninety seven and a half percent off the existing price as a reward for this remarkable contribution to the wealth of the nation and its millions of consumers the Department of Justice sued Alcoa 1937 charging the company's directors on 140 criminal counts including excessive prices okay I'm sure you know more about this than I do maybe there was some shenanigans yeah I know it's great you covered that and uh you know this is where the in the third part of the book on political order the book has three parts there's a natural order social economic or in political order I talk about the challenge of democratic systems dealing with these kinds of complex problems and uh whether it's the way in which Alcoa was cracked down upon um or generally as you were referring to you know there's this kind of cyclicality in political systems that we tend to find that people um after a while in their psychological research on this also there's kind of this grass is greener on the other side and then people get tired of the the incumbents and I mean the data is quite Stark you know in the midterm elections and what happens each time and so then you have to think about like for overall for societal good is that is is that the best outcome in terms of long-term planning for sustainability and it's a really tough question and I and this is where the notion of technocracy comes in you know like what what should be the role of Science in a Democratic Society and how can we calibrate that sort of individual agency versus the importance of actually more science-based decision making and we had I mean Kenneth Arrow told us about this with the voters Paradox uh uh amartya sen you know great Nobel Laureate as well he he came up with this he called it the impossibility of a paretian liberal basically he said that you can never have if you want a liberal Society you can never have Pareto optimality right which is which is a bit troubling you know because for those of us we want efficiency and so on but where where do we get that so um but the counter argument to that and that's what people like critics of of China for example would say uh is that um uh the the there is a self-correction mechanism in Democratic societies which you do not have in autocratic societies and so uh even though from a technocratic point of view it's much less efficient to be in a democracy if you get things wrong you can correct them whereas in a place like China you can't necessarily correct them but that that has been tested now and actually it's not always true because they are able to correct in many cases so then it becomes a normative issue it's like much more about like you know individual agency and and and rights uh are important even and and inefficiency is is a is a price we are willing to pay for that yeah right let me just know parenthetically here since I pound on Trump all the time on this show and on social media that you know before he lost his mind over the election 2020 election uh you know he was doing pretty much what Republicans always do you know lower taxes deregulate business give a big boost to the economy the stock market just goes crazy and so on and people are you know outraged by this but that's what all Republicans do that's why they are there that's their job right and uh so you know there was nothing really particularly surprising about that you mentioned a couple things I think maybe our listeners won't be familiar with and I can't even remember what Kenneth arrows uh voter's Paradox is so let's get that in Pareto optimality so hit those two what's the voters yeah yeah no so you know with voters Paradox basically is that you're in a voting system you're trying to get the best outcome uh out of the individual voting but you will get an outcome which will probably please nobody you know so that's the Paradox essentially in a Democratic Society and um and and so he you know sort of mathematically presented that as well and uh Kenneth Harrow for your listeners in a Nobel Laureate and economics so um and then Pareto optimality you know if you go to sort of Economics 101 you you have this notion uh and this goes the naming is after the Italian economist Pareto around um uh what what is the best kind of a most efficient outcome so usually we use the example of guns and butter so if you have limited resources in a society and you draw a a little graph about you know how much with those limited sources can you buy either guns or budget so you can either put all your money into guns or you can put it all into butter and then there's a production possibility Frontier in terms of what can be the best optimal outcome of sharing the resource in terms of how much you put towards one versus the other but inside that graph there are lots of decisions you could make which are inefficient and you are not getting the best investment and you're wasting resources somewhere so Pareto optimality is like where you are using your resources most effectively and it's up to you how much you choose between the various different Commodities that you want to invest in in that regard so that's the notion of Pareto optimality so basically what Sam is saying that in a in a liberal Society because of the way in which preferences get um aligned through uh individual choice and how people make decisions uh you will never get Pareto optimality and he's he sort of showed it mathematically that it's not going to happen Beyond like a population size of two so um is that because of human irrationality or you know we're not rational voters we're not economic rationals yeah maximize utility maximizers that sort of thing that's right yep to a large degree it is because of that and you know if we if we get to the point where people are becoming much more uh into sort of rational decision making and so on uh we may potentially but even then but you know it uh the rational decision making is going to be based on still some level of individual preference and individual preference for human beings is inherently it's uh subjective you know whether you like something it's more about Choice than even rationality about right what do you like you know someone likes uh Chinese food and someone likes Indian food and you know that kind of thing so and then the more choice in terms of the different offerings yeah actually future discounting you know it would be good if I saved up money for my future retirement uh that's hard to do but you know I I can do that with some discipline but on the other hand I I don't want to save up for the greatest 90th birthday party anyone ever had and Keel over dead at 89 and and I can't take it with me right so you know I want to spend some of it now but how much should I spend now you know what's the optimum maybe there is not a correct answer but maybe there's a window you know it's sort of like I was reading about all the military bases the United States has around the world you know people complaining well these countries must hate it that we have their these bases there no actually they like it because we spend a lot of money in those the towns and cities surrounding the military bases it's good for their economy you know it's good if you're a NATO country to have American boots on the ground over there plus our uh War material and so forth with somebody like Putin rattling saber and so on so it when you say well wouldn't it be more efficient if we provided every Public School child with a laptop computer and quit spending the money instead on a military basis but that that that's not the kind of calculation you as a scientist could make right that's a political decision well we we want the National Defense and we want education but you can't have both 100 percent yeah but you see the problem is that you you do not have a sort of in in complex systems you have feedback loops on what is going through what is working and what is not working in some form right so the problem with the security Investments is often those feedback loops get cut you do not get so you know we do not have very good accountability in terms of our military investment and that's why President Eisenhower and his famous you know last address he warned even though he was a military General himself he famously warned us of the military-industrial complex because it can take on this kind of uh self-perpetuating and self-prophizing you know outcome where you basically create a mechanism just of the military trying to sustain itself and um then the other question is like what are the other alternate Parts which could be followed for development so these countries which have so I for example I visited the small island country called nauru it's very difficult to visit because they don't usually give you visas only got 10 000 people small country but very resilient people I mean they survived so many different invasions and so on and the economy of that country right now is largely dependent on the Australians having an asylum Center where the Australians didn't want to have these refugees coming on their Mainland and so they basically set up this Center they're like okay if you're an asylum seeker and you come by boat we're not going to resettle you where you're sending you there now their economy has become so dependent on this that you know they for a long time they were just not thinking outside the box it's like okay we've got the money coming in and they now they've started to because the Australians are planning to shut things down you know they're thinking of what can be alternative trajectories for their economy and so on and so that's the other thing you have to think about sort of multiple futures of what could be possible especially when you have so much uh opportunity in terms of these development parts and creating different kinds of order in that way you know and this goes back to the sense of emergence also you know like you you can have emergence in many different Avenues and I know you had one of your previous guests who was talking about uh convergence the gentleman who wrote I think the romance of reality and you know saying that ultimately for Life there would be that but that's not true when you're talking about social and political systems in the long run there's so many different trajectories where you can get yeah so when you make that transition from talking about physical systems chemical systems biological systems social economic political systems are they different in terms of what we accept as like being true like quantum physics you know I don't understand it pretty weird but it's true so that you that's just the way it goes right chemical bonds are very predictable this is how it's going to operate you know laws of nature are really just descriptions of stuff that's happening right as soon as the star gets to a certain size and then it reaches a certain temperature and then at a given temperature helium fuses and hydrogen fuses into helium and you get this release of of nuclear energy and now it's a star and so on you know that's just kind of following the laws of nature right there's there's not a lot of degrees of freedom there uh for start at gyms right but as you scale up out of those degrees of freedom and choice uh you know widen to the extent where you get to politics and economics and and it are is there no real truth to be found in there like what's the right number for taxation what's the right number for immigration or what are the rules you know like Australia says well you have to if you're coming to live here you have to have a trade or some kind of job how are you going to help our country that's what we want to know now you say that in America you know people lose their minds like you know that's not right that's not what we stand you know so you see what I'm getting it yeah yeah no absolutely and so I mean in in the natural systems I'm going back to Quantum order and so on I mean there are some Notions of you know Heisenberg uncertainty principle you have you know girls uh impossibility Theory and there are certain areas where you even get there there wasn't a sense of like okay there is there is really this unpredictability in certain uh sense um but you're absolutely right that you know we need to know the limits of where that transnation the translational process uh is plausible and where it is not because when you increase the scale of the system you are introducing so many other variables that you cannot have uh the same kind of neatness to uh uh to the analysis and that's something which I try to do very carefully in the book is that I try to make clear that um we need to know the difference between metaphor in terms of this translation and actual translation of those kinds of knowledge systems and it's very tempting to to take a metaphor and run with it you know and uh and and we we see that happening time and again and that goes back to some of the concerns I was saying about you know in some of scriptural analysis people do that and they take the metaphor and run with it uh but when it when I'm when I'm thinking about like um you know uh social systems uh overall and uh considering the ways in which we can learn lessons from a natural order one of the things I am interested in is sort of planetary processes and understandings so part of the book looks as sort of like uh you know planetary boundaries literature and looking at ways in which and that that for me that's the most important I mean I'm not as concerned about you know these kinds of uh long-term uh what's going to happen to the future of the universe and you know uh in the very very long term I'm much more focused on sustainability yeah exactly so so in that regard um there are some ways in which we have been thinking about you know uh planetary uh boundaries the work of uh will Stefan and Johan rockstrom in terms of looking at like eight or nine categories of planetary boundaries in terms of the you know acidification of the ocean or certain other processes and this ties in also with you know like the work of James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis do I I critique that in the book because the guy hypothesis also took the metaphor and you know people ran with it because made like okay the Earth is a super organism no I don't I don't think Lovelock even thought it was a super organism you know he was basically talking about processes like synchronicity you know that kind of process of what can happen in those systems um and then on the other hand there is this notion of in a in a functional Human Society we also have certain social foundations and so those social foundations are you know the the level of well-being which we would want so you have the planetary boundaries with the natural system and the social Foundation then there's a very famous diagram which is now used a lot by environmental science researchers uh that that looks at both the planetary boundary and the social foundation and it was it came about through the work of Kate Robert who was a a researcher at Oxfam in an NGO but then you know it really took on and now she teaches at Oxford University as well and she came up with what she called donut economic you know which is that you've got the outside of this the planetary boundary and you have the social foundation and there's the safe operating space for Humanity within the donut and so what I try to do is then unpack that at a foundational level trying to understand what those um sort of the laws of nature are which provide us with that so I think that's more helpful for people like policy makers and all as they move forward yeah I just had to record a podcast with Marion tupi and Gail Pooley from the Cato Institute their book is called super abundance but they argue that there's an additional element here which is human creativity and action that other animals don't so the malthusian model works on Petri dishes and rabbits and and you know whatever your organism is that are under malthusian pressures populations increase geometrically Food Supplies increase arithmetically at some point you hit a a collapse in the in the system you know just collapses they hit a Tipping Point you talk about tipping points in your book so yeah um but but their point is that humans don't do that we actually respond we solve problems like uh oh we have we have way more people we got to figure out a way to increase Food Supplies also geometrically right so you end up with you know the Green Revolution and and uh Norman Borlaug and all that that happened when Paul Ehrlich was predicting the demise of humanity in the in the late 60s early 70s by the 80s it would be all over and that didn't happen right and it didn't happen because not because we found some new resources right or found a new planet to to exploit or anything like that we've we created solutions to problems and you know as they said you know we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones we just found better ways to process food and and products and services and so on and and you know they actually make what it counterintuitive point that we will never run out of fossil fuels because of supply and demand at some point the last barrel of oil in the ground is going to be you know a trillion dollars so No One's Gonna bother right we'll just find some other source of energy you know electric electric cars rather than internal combustion engines and nuclear power to generate the electricity for the electric car or whatever the solution will be you know so there I think when you talk about emergent systems and making these metaphors between physical systems biological systems and human systems the human systems have an additional element humans that are creative at solving problems yeah I think that there is this um exceptionalism with reference to human intelligence uh but at the same time uh we are seeing increasingly that there there are also constraints from the laws of nature which apply on that even like with computational systems you know we know that now there are limits to Computing processing power um and with humans I mean we are seeing actually a plateauing of innovation I mean we even look at the iPhone you know the next model you put the three cameras then they're doing like after a certain point like what else are they going to do right and uh you know the touch screen technology was a phenomenal Innovation actually part of it was invented here at the University of Delaware and we have a plaque in terms of the company finger works that started here and then eventually got sold to Apple yeah but uh but then I mean now that has in some ways like that's the ultimate because we've got fingers and we've got the screen and like you know they're they're fine limits to what can happen there so I I'm totally with I'm I consider myself very much an optimist uh and I you know I really do believe that uh optimism ultimately triumphs over pessimism because uh all the pessimists can have is the satisfaction of being right occasionally and the optimists I think actually have much more going for them um and so but at the same time I do worry about some of the complacents which can come from the extreme techno optimism where you know with any of these um if you go back to air Lake you know his famous equation which he used to give him credit where it's due I mean some of his work was really off the wall but some of it he did like he lost his bet the famously to Julian Simon about copper reserves being depleted and they clearly were not but um but he came the simple heuristic equation he had was impact equals population times affluence times technology it's called the iPad equation right it's the heuristic equation I can't really calculated but the technology variable he did put in there now that technology can have both sides the technology can solve the problem but the technology also can create more problems so for uh decision making and large systems and now we do have you know multiple criteria decision analysis you know civil engineering has developed all those tools and one of the people who's given the endorsement on the book was one of my mentors when I was at Yale Jared Cohen who later became the president of Carnegie Mellon and you know Jared Cohen worked on these kinds of multiple objective criteria decision models and a lot of that so we do have people who try to figure out like what's the best optimal way in which we can use technology to come up with these Solutions and there there can be some wiggle room in there so I think your colleagues from Cato at at one level have it right that we should consider Humanity differently from the petri dish bacteria definitely but at the same time we also need to consider that the amount of negative feedbacks that can happen are also areas where where other organisms might not have had to deal with those so and we have had and now that doesn't mean human beings are going to become extinct just for that reason and that's where I disagree completely with the the sensationalist environmentalists we may have alternative Futures which are not necessarily the ones we want but we'll figure it out but do we really want those I mean do we want a Blade Runner word you know if you go to science fiction I don't know you know people survive there and they're you know they're doing their thing uh but if we can avoid that why not you know so I mean that's the the danger we have with the complete techno optimism because you then don't see the quality of life in the Star Trek future where everyone has a replicator in their house and he just walks over and go Earl Gray hot and not only does the tea come out hot you get the glass too yeah yeah yeah I know you're a Star Trek that yeah well of course you know some of the Techno optimists I have to say they they are pretty far out there right um you know they're concerned a little bit too concerned about the far future and let's not forget that we have serious problems right now you know there are some non-trivial percentage of the world's population even U.S population living below the poverty line you know if if Prosperity is so great and so many people have it and it used to be you know 90 of the population lived under the poverty line 150 years ago now it's 10 but 10 still a lot especially if they're in a country like the United States so let's not forget solving those problems okay let's talk about sustainability for a minute um or for more than a minute because to me this is the a really hard problem to solve so this is what you study so here's the problem is I understand it like for example you know what there's we're about to hit eight billion people could you feed eight billion people without factory farming you know and if you look at the hidden videos of factory farming it's just awful it's just terrible morally ethically we really should get rid of factory farming but you know we got eight billion people so you know you can't feed them all on Happy Farms where the little chicken runs around free as a bird and until it well it's time you know to turn them into food and the happy cow and so on right as I understand it we're not even remotely close to being able to feed that many people so I guess the question you have to solve is uh you know when you say how many people can the Earth hold sustainably at what level of quality of life or what standard of living or you know how do you think about that yeah you know there in terms of how we measure well-being and I have in one part of the book I talk about the correlation between like the there is a a happiness index that the United Nations has uh and then I look at environmental performance and you do see that there's a correlation between uh environmental performance and happiness globally in societies and usually they measure it at the country level which is always tricky because countries are large places but sometimes it makes sense because you're looking at policies and how the policies are at the national level um so uh I would say that with reference to global inequality uh we have a huge challenge in terms of developing systems of order which can deal with global inequality and uh that's why those of us who are living in the developed world so to speak with a higher I mean it's a strange kind of dynamic we have we have half of the world which is overnourished and has to go to gyms with multi-billion dollar Industries to get rid of calories and half of the world is undernourished I mean you know if you really look it as a simple distributional problem and you know people like Jeff sacks have agonized over it like why can't we it it we can create systems of order which can actually deal with it and if we were if we actually think about it in a natural system there would be some kind of diffusion you know where there would be some process but we have prevented that system of diffusion of how that could happen you know for example whether it's with migration you know migration of countries like Italy clearly need uh human capital because their population is going down but they don't want immigrants and so uh from us from those places where there's excess population so you you have prevented systems of uh functionality in a natural process where you would have sort of a gravitational flow uh from actually taking shape because of prejudice or other factors so that's why it's become increasingly important for us to think about ways of effective uh distribution of resources and I talk about resource distribution both from the point of your material resources because I work a lot with minerals and so on and I have a section there on resource nationalism for example but also in terms of resources at the the individual level and how we can think about um you know if one of the things that there's another book that has recently come out on effective altruism this Oxford Professor is talking about like how individuals can make a difference and create that system and that's why in my case in this book I'm donating all the royalties for Environmental Education programs because I mean even though I am by no means some Tycoon academic you know I I feel as though I'm in a very privileged position I mean I I've got an endowed professorship I've got you know a very comfortable life a lot of flexibility and if this can actually make a difference in some form if whether I'm donating books for Environmental Education in Pakistan or somewhere you know that's going to be rewarding and and what we see is clearly now the problem with that is of course how you develop effective mechanisms of distribution and there's been a lot of critique about how philanthropy has gone astray for example because philanthropy doesn't necessarily Follow That kind of sense of you know diffusional uh order of resources where they're most needed it often follows idiosyncrasies of the philanthropist which can be very strange you know you could have the sacklers giving 100 million for paintings and you know you have someone who's willing to pay 400 million for a da Vinci painting which may not even be a da Vinci painting you know so you do have these kinds of bizarre human idiosyncrasies which prevent philanthropy from being effective and so that's the other key aspect of what we need to develop as a society I think much more effort needs to go into the risk Source distribution without stigmatizing it I wish our friends on the conservative side of the political Spectrum many of times I agree with them would not stigmatize redistribution because it's something that it's a strong tradition in American um you know history especially in American history whether it's the Rockefellers or others in terms of how they they manage their wealth um here I'll give you the standard conservative talking line on that they do believe in redistribution but it should be private right so Rockefeller Carnegie they volunteered to give their money that they earned through the capitalism system in case of Carnegie building libraries and Rockefeller is foundation to support many organizations and so on and that by having the government do it rather than you privately or through your foundation or through church religious uh charity or whatever you're taking the moral element out of it so I give to you something because I want to support your environmental efforts and and I feel good about myself doing that the money goes directly to your foundation there's no middleman that takes a cut but if the government decides they're going to support your environmental program and they tax me now first of all I'm not volunteering to give you the money I just have to get give it or else and then they take it they take a cut because they gotta pay their employees and then they give you some percentage of what's left you know that so this is the conservative talking point that you know and I had to agree with that to some degree you know I like that guy the there's this Dutch historian who became a best-selling author about you know some of his idea was that just tax everyone and he got like Tucker Carlson invited him and then he just threw him out of the show because he thought he was really being uh obnoxious about it but basically uh you know there are people I don't think that we should go the absolutist route on taxation as the solution but I think we need some professional management of resource allocation so if you go back to the Rockefellers and you know actually I should mention this book was supported partly by the Rockefeller foundation's writer's Fellowship in Bellagio where I was able to spend time with some wonderful writers I mean Rockefeller professionalized philanthropy soon after and so even so did Henry Ford even though Henry Ford was a very weird character in terms of his individual Behavior where you know he set up the city in the middle of the rainforest of Orlando and other things but when it came to the Ford Foundation he actually professionalized it and then his children also uh same as true of the macarthurs and I mean if you professionalize philanthropy through these foundations you you usually end up getting much better outcomes the problem we have with the new money is that it is not professionalized and it is extremely idiosyncratic in terms of how the money is being allocated and like in India you know you had one guy the the founder of a mining company vedanta uh Agarwal he gave a billion dollars to establish a university on Vedic philosophy and like you know vedanta University because that was his thing you know now and one they can't even always say that this is because oh it's our money we earned it well he you know it was because of the privatization of State Enterprises in India where he was able to suddenly make a fortune so it's not like a lot of it is luck a lot of it is and you know one of the things I say to my friends on the right of the political Spectrum you know I'm very much an independent politically and middle of the road guy I try to be uh in terms of letting science dictate my decision making but I say to them look capitalism one of the fundamental rules of capitalism is people respond to incentives right that's Golden Rule of capitalism and it's very much aligned with the laws of nature right but we have created a corrupted system where people are they're not going to if you are getting a severance package of 200 million dollars as a corporate executive which is not uncommon if you look at all the different benefits they get what incentive do you have to perform I mean you tell me you are going to be given a firing pay which is more than most people will earn in their lifetimes and you think that is capitalism I mean you know so that's the thing which I find bizarre is that they are actually not even following many times their own sort of ground rules of capitalism yeah I don't know if you've read John Mackey's book conscious capitalism John is the CEO of Whole Foods and you know he sold it to Jeff Bezos and he's still the CEO or I think he's about to step down anyway he was on the show here he's just a super interesting super smart guy but his argument was that you got a cap the the CEO salary at a certain number a multiple of the average salaries the average worker salary which was in this case 19 times 19 times sounds like a lot until you look at what Fortune 500 CEOs get which is like hundreds of times more than the average workers it does seem outrageous although I I I met a guy high up in Intel who explained to me I was complaining about this sort of and just throwing those numbers out and he said look for a company like Intel that makes so much money you know if we don't pay this guy a hundred million a year with that package or whatever somebody else will that's just the market that's what it costs to get a CEO at that level and we make so much money it doesn't matter if we gave him 50 million 100 million we wouldn't even notice it in our books right so it's like oh wow okay but why don't you increase the salary of the lower Echelon people you know that's the thing where they don't even advert to them like I I do training for a mining company I would mention which one and I said to them uh you know so they're they're doing this training in Johannesburg and I said okay we took them on a field visit we went to some of these people had never been to a Township in South Africa they've lived their whole lives in Johannesburg they've never been to those areas so I took them there you know part of this and then they were like okay um so what should we be doing in terms of Social and so their corporate office they have free food at the corporate office it's like typical you know with a lot of these companies they say oh that's to keep the people happy and all this I said why don't you give free food to the miners they were complained the guy was complaining that we have food truck problem outside the mine it's like For Heaven's Sake those people people were making 200 000 a year you know but it just doesn't it work to them it's that I find it really confounding and these are like simple things it's not even some bleeding heart liberal thing you know it's like just following common sense many times John's a he's a Libertarian he's kind of a big Iron ran fan but he thinks that you know that was kind of a wrong turn to make for capitalism that you know to forget that all of the shareholders stakeholders in the company is not just the board of directors and the CEO all the employees and the environment the local neighborhood in which the store is located that they are also stakeholders right in the local River the air you know you should invest in all of that and that's good for business you'll make more money in the long run by you know kind of dispersing the things you care about other than the orderly report and that's your point yeah no absolutely and then the other area which is interesting is you know and this goes back to sort of complex systems and how we think about it is when we do independent public offerings and I'm thinking like in the long term I might write about this I have and maybe collaborate with an economist around it maybe one some of your listeners may want to reach out to me about it you know the IPO process is the main reason these people become hyper wealthy right uh a large percentage of them is either inherited wealth or it's because of the IPOs now why does that you know the process by which the IPO generates that much money because of these people holding shares it it is but Devils me yes to some degree you can have those inside but we have just created a structure where there is entitlement that people are going to work in these startups are going to get this you know so that has created this huge monstrous situation where when like Facebook had the IPO um and you had these people who gave up their American citizenship because you didn't want to pay taxes and move to Singapore because they suddenly became billionaires overnight did they really deserve it I mean give me a break oh yeah let's let's use that as an example in your comparative method are there other countries that are able to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity and and so forth and yet not have that problem I don't know some of these northern European countries Maybe yeah I mean you know I think that you can have uh very I mean you you I think there is some um importance which needs to be given to some you know what we we may call some level of uh acceptable inequality because that's based on what people either are willing to invest or what time they are so I am all for underlined I don't think we can have a completely flat Society by any means uh but it's the differential which is the problem and I think you can create incentives for people to do very well and I don't think you I mean if you if you were to give me one million dollars there's a hundred million dollars I think I would still work just as well for the one million versus 100 million to be honest you've just created a system of entitlement that people say you need to get the 100 million and so I mean and there's been research in Europe around you know and not just Europe even Japan I mean people don't like to compare Europe because immediately gets branded as socialist but uh Japan I mean other parts of East Asia where you you have a much less differential but people are performing very well you have quality of life indicators which are very high you have life expectancy which is very high and this also goes to also subjective sense of well-being you know the Japanese CEO does not necessarily want to have a yacht and a you know a mansion in five countries and all that and they there's still the quality of life is pretty good so I mean that's part of also in terms of city and that's a larger question around how we you know it's more anthropological question around how we think about culture and Society uh and and how we have created expectations particularly in the US around some of these areas okay in terms of sustainability um we're gonna hit about to hit 8 billion we'll probably hit nine or ten billion by the mid middle of the century Maybe by 2100 will be back down about where we are now 8 billion um and hopefully no one will be impoverished no one will be living below the un's definition of poverty which is what two dollars and ninety cents a day whatever the equivalent that would be in 2100 something like that how do you see the sustainability going on indefinitely through renewable energy sources and is nuclear in your equation for those renewable energy sources where do you get enough food can you do it without the factory farms and it just kind of walk us through what your model is yeah I mean you know in the book I I go through many different and I I tend to be a little bit skeptical of this kind of sense that we will definitely stabilize at a certain population because the big wild card is aging research and also you know and and there is a section in the book around aging and how we think about or demographic order with reference to aging research and you know MIT famously had that competition and Technology review where they tried to give a prize for anyone who could say that we cannot reverse aging and no one won the prize there's one team which won a partial prize but uh because you know there there are the the their scientific uh processes and opportunities whereby we could do that so that being said that's a caveat around this but if we think about um the uh the overall uh demand needs if we want a certain level of quality of life so for example we we still have about 900 million people who don't have access to Grid electricity in the world people would say that access to electricity is a fundamental human right now because at some levels now our quality of life is defined by it yeah similarly we've got also with now increasingly with the internet and communication rights about like what kind of communication infrastructure do we need and covet made this very apparent around what kind of infrastructure is needed to have resilience in a society where you could have a pandemic so where do we get that wherewithal to provide internet to all of the population I think for that if we if we no one has really done a massive energy planning exercise but if you just look at the thermodynamics again going back to sort of the laws of nature we have to go back to Notions of energy density and you know this is where work of vac love smell is very effective and he's done a great job in communicating that to the public and certainly nuclear power is the most energy dense uh resource that we have for supplying electricity particularly and uh it it is part of it it must be part of the conversation uh and in fact we just saw last month that Europe had to change their um their their law basically the European Parliament had to reclassify European taxonomy they call it the the the nuclear power was reclassified as clean energy because if you look at the basic fundamentals of energy delivery it's you need base load power and we are limited for with base load power either you're going to use fossil fuels or you have nuclear or you need storage of electricity and batteries or pumped Hydro or some other mechanism for storage and uh without that Europe was going to have a tough winter so they had to reclassify because of the Russian gas embargoes so you know there is definitely an important and the you know Richard Smalley the Nobel Laureate he did he was asked at one point to do a hierarchy of the world's problem solving and he put energy right at the top you know and he said energy if we can solve energy then all the other things cascading down um so I think that's absolutely essential we need to think about a long-term energy plan but how are we going to provide this delivery with eight eight billion people whatever this population is and how we're going to be adaptive as a result now we also have opportunities for Energy Efficiency which is where I agree with our environmentalist friends they're absolutely correct that we have lost so much opportunity for Energy Efficiency whether it's transmission losses or uh or or the way in which we've installed infrastructure or building infrastructure uh we have opportunities in a shared economy and efficiency I mean one of the things I serve on the un's international resource panel and one of the most fascinating aspects we found uh one of my colleagues who's on the panel who was at the Norwegian uh University of Technology he was looking at in covet like what was the single biggest thing that reduced our carbon footprint during covert and what it was was you know kids returning and living with their parents and having less distributed housing of people living away from each other you know and it was quite remarkable that that was one of the most significant areas in certain areas it wasn't in every Community but in many communities that was the single biggest way and now that's a social issue right like how how we encourage kids to move out of the house after a certain stage but we're creating efficiency in terms of energy delivery by having more people living together and you know my my son you know he was doing his PhD at NYU he came back after covert has been for two years he's been living back in Delaware he just takes the train back and forth if he needs to go to New York and it saved him rent but it saved a lot of carbon you know because of you know all of the heating and so on so um you know this is where we do need to think outside the box there is the Energy Efficiency but we will need to probably think about energy delivery for all those people in developing countries that's not going to solve the problem we need to provide energy infrastructure for them nuclear will need to probably be part of the solution but we also have I think many opportunities for hydropower uh in different areas different kinds of we have geothermal we have energy differentials uh in which can be utilized um you know in kinetics of people like who are walking on sidewalks and other things people are finding ways in which you can harness energy and have receptors to do it but so all across the board right it's like that book the Case for fossil fuels you know you you can't exactly be as a developed Nation tell developing nations who are just making the transition from burning wood and cow pies to fossil fuels well you shouldn't do that it's bad for the environment well thanks a lot but we want to be a developed Nation right we want that energy and you know unless you're going to come here and build nuclear power plants for us or or plant you know trees Seas of of solar panels or whatever you know come on they gotta they want that too and and fossil fuels are very uh very efficient in delivery you know we have to recognize that from a thermodynamic perspective and again that's again connecting the laws of nature to this you know reason why fossil fuels are so prevalent especially for transport uh and mobile fuels they're very efficient because they're unable to generate that energy we are not able to do that as effectively with that infrastructure now we could find hydrogen other sources maybe which could compete but even now that's not true because hydrogen production is very inefficient so you know even especially green hydrogen production which is what we want to get at um so so we have to think uh in those terms at the full life cycle of the impacts uh and that's where there are Fields like industrial ecology which have developed that are really promising because they make people think in systems around life cycle analysis imagine resource nationalism I've never heard that phrase what is it yeah that's the situation where you know if you have certain mineral resources because part of the challenge of looking at Earthly order as the book suggests is that resources themselves geological resources are not evenly distributed so the fact that uh you know Guinea like a country I just visited two weeks ago uh in West Africa it has among the world's largest bauxite reserves for aluminum that's a you know accident of geography that it does and so now you know you've got this sense of okay we have the the resources and we we are going to keep them and this is our resource and there's this sort of resource nationalism which comes around it so that can also happen at the sub-national level one of the reasons why for example South Sudan one of the factors for it becoming independent was that they did have a lot of oil and they said why should we be giving our oil to the full Sudanese State and we're ethnically different and so they had their resource nationalism around oil and they created a new country eventually right so you will see this time and again there are a lot of these movements for creating new political order based on natural resource endowments Alaska is another one there have been calls for people saying Alaska should become independent because they've got all this oil and wire you know why shouldn't we we go on our own um Texas has said that Texas has had resource nationalism for the same reason so that's kind of what resource nationalism is where you use natural resource endowments to develop a sense of political order uh which can sometimes be exclusionary uh now what we need is good trade eventually for efficient usage of resources so that you know you you want to get the minerals where it's least energy and cost effective to extract them rather than saying we're going to find our own minerals completely and it may be very inefficient to get them this is one concern I have currently with the the new uh you know inflation reduction act which is a good effort overall and supportive of it but it's focused so much also on like we're going to develop our own U.S national resource base well first ask yourself the question is it economically and ecologically efficient to do it in the U.S because the natural resource endowments are not following America's borders you know if South Africa has most of the world's Platinum America will not have most of the world's platinum and if you need catalytic converters you better rely on South African platinum and hopefully recycle it eventually but that's the way it is so I think that has to be and unfortunately we get this kind of you know chest beating uh around well we can do it on our own and that's not helpful within the laws of nature overall but those arguments would be made if there were political problems with the country that has the stuff we want right so China has all these you know rare earth metals that we need for our iPhones and whatnot and and so we want to be on good trading around with them Germany famously you know cut back on its nuclear power just as you know Russia was deciding they were going to invade Ukraine and so on like whoops uh maybe we shouldn't rely on Russia for our natural gas because look what's happened so I can see the argument for resource naturalism that way but ultimately you'd want to just it'd be cheaper to just trade for it rather than having to develop your whole exactly infant Industries and fund it through the government and that's why we need I mean the last chapter of the book talks about you know Earth Systems governance and what we we need to do I mean I don't think we can have Gene roddenberry's Star Trek vision of a global government in the foreseeable future without any countries but what we could have and we do have international treaties what we could have is Earth Systems governance around certain key things you know we there could be mechanisms whereby we say look Energy Delivery resources for energy delivery those are something that we all agree to that they should be harnessed at the level of uh what is most efficient for the planet because we don't want to create a situation where we're getting resources in in a way that's going to be both damaging and also not economically efficient we could have treaties around that I mean we do have keep in mind we have the World Trade Organization and even on the rare earth issue which you mentioned in 2012 they United States Japan and the European Union took China to the wto's arbitration mechanism they said China is fixing Rare Earth prices and we are going to dispute this they disputed it and they won and China made changes so we do actually have like with the WTO we actually have a mechanism we could do the same around mineral exploration mineral production Energy Delivery um and I think those are areas where there can be opportunities for science diplomacy one of the other areas of work that I do is on and what what they call environmental peace building you know how to use environmental issues for resolving conflicts and a lot of that comes from my own personal background to some degree growing up in Pakistan constantly under the shadow of you know nuclear war with India where I always felt like why can't we have environmental issues at least getting both countries to cooperate with each other um and so uh I think there there is a very practice this is not pie in the sky I mean there are organizations like Irina the international renewable energy agency which could develop a protocol around energy delivery I think like right now our the U.S China tension is very problematic because the amount of Head Start China has in terms of both its mineral resources I mean in physically it's a big country you know it's got a big geological endowment same with Russia it's the world's largest country by area obviously they're going to have a lot of minerals you know so like how do you deal with that kind of dynamic when and and then you figure figuring that out in terms of okay we can have differences on other things but this is an area where we should be cooperating and I think both China and Russia would pragmatically agree to that I mean during the Cold War we were you know having communication when situation was much worse uh I think we could very much have that but it requires a certain level of um nuanced diplomacy which unfortunately we have not been very good at because on either side of the uh you know when this is the there's enough blame to go go around not just the us we have not been willing to engage on that in a way which is important for bringing scientists to the table uh you know we we I was hopeful that President Biden for the first time we were going to have a scientist in the cabinet with uh and uh then we had that situation with Eric Lander where he was you know let go because of accusations of bullying and so on now we do have have a new science advisor who's a Cabinet member and she's very capable I'm hoping that her role and she used to be head of DARPA and you know very accomplished I think she could play an important role where we get more you know science-based decision making around these Global issues and what we call science diplomacy especially dealing with and especially Russia and China so these would be not a world government but supranational organizations like the World Trade Organization the European pull and steel whatever it's called Confederation or conglomerate or whatever anything like that that brings countries who otherwise might be in political tension together to solve a common problem we both want to use these resources we want to solve this environmental problem you'll benefit all benefits so in Game Theory it's a you know a win-win you know it's a non-zero-sum game um and in your in your opinion since you mentioned uh Pakistan and India I'm long interested in nuclear strategy why have they not gone to war and used their nukes yeah I mean you know this goes back to the sort of mutually assured destruction kind of uh Thomas shelling and others who worked on that during the Cold War at the Rand corporation uh approach I think that is one of the reasons they have clearly not gone to war but it's been a terribly uh damaging uh investment uh for countries which have abject poverty uh and you have generations of people living and dying on Street sidewalks and they're investing in nuclear Arsenal I find that really obscene uh but um but yes this is the way it is unfortunately where I mean it goes down to a fundamental question of trust you know how and interest is a very illusory concept and Game Theory has helped us to try and understand trust but um I think um we we need to invest much more in building institutions which can create trust between countries uh so that you do not end up in these kinds of arms races which are extremely damaging from the point of view of resource investment and taking away from poverty alleviation efforts uh and and Pakistan and India are particularly appalling cases because both have such high levels of poverty uh and I wish there had been Mutual trust created so that they would not have had this escalation which led to both becoming nuclear Powers but now that you know now they are now that they are um they they use it as a Vindication when you have situations where other countries also invade because there is I mean like Pakistan right now says well um you know if we had didn't have a nuclear weapon America would have invaded us and maybe they are right you know so the other problem we have not only that we have the mutually assured destruction issue we don't have Norms of Intervention which are effectively enforced and so Pakistan is now will argue they say look what happened to Libya Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons and look what happened to him if America if Pakistan had given up we would have ended up the same way and because we don't have very good Norms of intervention they are probably right you know it could have happened uh I you know so this is the challenge we need those institutions which have better Norms of Engagement intervention as well as also um a much more sort of sensible investment of resources in developing countries and that would probably explain the Kim family developing nuclear weapons in North Korea who otherwise is probably the poorest country in the world or at least in the top five poorest countries um because if you have that you get a chair at the table with the big boys that the United States doesn't invade you and uh you know same thing with Ukraine Russian Ukraine there's only so much we could do because we know you know if if Putin loses his mind decides to to you know uh push the red button on his desk even if we have a bigger red button it doesn't matter you know it's you don't get that cascading consequences from that yeah no absolutely and uh but what I find really perplexing is how much uh of the quantity of nuclear weapons that were developed during the Cold War because the the mutually assured destruction uh could have been handled with much fewer weapons and I find the only explanation I have is the Eisenhower explanation where really you know it it was the military industrial complex which kept on perpetuating it because the if the the just the deterrent aspect could have been handled with far less or less was that his name Fred Barnes the journalist that studies nuclear weapons he is a whole chapter on the cut the arms race in the United States between the Armed Forces of you know the Navy the Air Force and the Army each wanting its own nuclear weapons and the way it works in terms of how funds are distributed by Congress around the country in the same way we have you know Houston we have a problem why do we have a you know the headquarters in Houston and the launching pad in Florida well because when you know those funds were distributed back in the early 60s you know everybody wanted a piece of the pie so same thing there where um they had to find Targets for these nuclear weapons so that they could keep building them and then find more targets because they had so many more weapons and it was just a runaway arms race within the United States just so they could keep the the budget up right so you have these uh I think it was Barnes again talking about these like some Airfield in Siberia that's only open one month of the year because it's frozen otherwise and we had like six nuclear weapons targeted for this nothing in the middle of nowhere you know it's airstrip and it's like well we got that covered right so you end up with 80 000 nuclear weapons or whatever it was in the late 80s now it's down to less than ten thousand but for Mutual assured destruction you really only need a couple hundred total really but even that is risk in terms of the environmental consequences access and and plus this is I mean it links also to the way in which we invested in the kind of nuclear power Technologies you know there's a good research to suggest that we we didn't go into other kinds of Technology because the arm um uh the military industrial complex wanted plutonium from the nuclear reactors from power generation so I mean you know you see all of the other spillover effects of how that also derailed our symptoms of potentially better energy sources right so and then one final point on that is how do you get around the security dilemma the habesian Trap the other guy problem I'd give up my nukes but the other guy might not or even if he says he does he may hold one back just in case I hold one back so I better hold one back I better hold two back case he holds one back right and you end up where we are now hey uh I don't know how to get around it that's a trust problem right it is I mean that's where you need to develop those institutions like unfortunately the United Nations you know it has not reached that level of trust if it had because there are structural problems with it if we could develop that level of trust I think we could use the U.N in in that spirit in which it was intended uh and uh but unfortunately we have the security Council being you know very much a Vestige of the the post-world War II era with the permanent members having so much power uh and um then uh the the inability for decision making to really have teeth so we're not able to get to that level of trust but I am hopeful that you know in in within the next 50 to 100 years we will eventually develop um the UN into that kind of system now if you go with the Star Trek mythology then you would need first Contact to get that right because then people would all unite and you'll get you know as soon as the Vulcans landed all the countries said okay we need to have a global government but but I think hopefully we can get I think even environmental scarcity can lead to the same outcome that first Contact might have led to wasn't that Reagan's uh thought experiment you know if we got invaded by aliens all the countries of the world would come together of all people yeah yeah that's what happens in Star Trek 4 I think is one of the movies that's right before yeah yes Star Trek uh two and four rocky one and three if that's how you remember yeah it's the good movies or because the other the other numbered ones were not so good yeah okay a couple other things um the curse of resources here you know say developing countries say in Africa that have plenty of resources but in fact the corruption in the political system is so rampant that it just is a curse to have so many resources because it leads to this kind of runaway trying to capture it and there's no central government that regulates that that gives mining uh permits or whatever the term is uh uh and so then then you have a problem so it's really a political problem not a resource problem political and distribution problem yeah no absolutely and I covered this more in my other book Treasures of the earth which focuses on minerals and uh some aspects of the resource curse but essentially I mean they're structural aspects of minerals which uh which lead to what we call windfall development you know certain amount of cash coming in and then the inability to absorb it effectively and so it leads to kleptocracy and and uh incentives for theft and so on so what we need for that is some mechanisms of transparency of resource flows now Tony Blair one of the good things he did was he is helped to establish this thing called the extractive industries transparency initiative which is an effort by governments to create a certification system of how when you have oil or mineral revenues coming in how do you get transparency so you know that the money is not going into you know foreign bank accounts and so on uh the problem with the this system is that it hasn't still been if effective and then monitoring whether the money is used for development it might be transparently put into account but the government still might misuse it not for necessarily kleptocracy but for inefficient Investments you know so you had like in the case of nauru at one time they had you know they were misled by advisors and they invested in you know Broadway musicals which went bust and you know they've got all this money they didn't want to do they they you know they invested in a hotel in Fiji which was you know built in a wetland and it collapsed or you know things like that so you can have those Dynamics and you need like much more stringency in terms of how the Investments are managed but we do have good examples I mean you have Norway is an example of a country which it used to be you know there's sort of the the poor a partner to Sweden it was colonized by Sweden some would say it was a you know relatively poorer part of Scandinavia but now it's it's got a trillion dollar Sovereign wealth fund and it's been managing I mean essentially Norwegians are all millionaires because you know they have enough uh in that trust fund that they did nothing they would have enough research sources but that has happened through effective use of resource wealth management even in the US we have a few good examples the Navajo Nation the Nava who had a lot of mineral wealth and there was a very Visionary Navajo leader at one time who set up a sovereign wealth fund and the Navajo trust fund you know is now uh in the billions you know and that has been effective in in shielding them in many cases now there's still a lot of poverty because there are other issues but at least it shielded them from some of the worst aspects of what could have been the resource curse uh and so you know you can get those kinds of Alaska has also the Alaska Permanent Fund which was established partly as a way to deal with the resource curse now they use it in a different way alaskans get a check every year in the mail like if you're an Alaskan citizen it's actually very hard to become Alaskan resident because you get this re this check from the revenues from the fund so you know that kind of sense I think that can be a solution to some of these challenges of the resource that's from the oil from the oil pipeline yeah exactly yeah does it does some of that go to the native populations of Alaska it goes to all Alaskan residents uh there are some of the Native corporations that Alaska is a bit unusual because unlike the rest of the US they didn't have uh treaties in the same way with the indigenous people uh and so uh and even the treaties were very unfair but at least in some the mainland U.S had the treaties in Alaska they didn't have that so they formed corporations record there was a separate law pass called the Alaska native claim Settlement Act and they par they established native corporations those native corporations can invest in Mineral projects for example one of the largest mines in Alaska uh it's called the Red Dog Mine it's partially owned by the Nana corporation which is a Native Alaskan Corporation so then they get additional funds from that uh so yeah there are efforts to look into those ways of indigenous empowerment can you explain to us how Mining rights work this is something I know nothing about I mean somebody finds silver on their land or turns out it's government land and then x-corporation says well we want to go in there and mine it and then some other corporations no we want to mine it how does the government decide who gets to do that and who gets those rights so the US is very uh different than other countries in that way most countries minerals are with what they call the crown so what where even if you have private property and minerals are found under your property the the minerals belong to the state uh now the state may give you compensation or other means to get access but they so in Canada for example they belong to the state the U.S because of our history is being you know entrepreneurial and all this uh unfortunately um or fortunately depending on how you think of it uh the individual has the rights and so subsurface rights to minerals are with the individual and uh so um the the argument is that here it Fosters entrepreneurship in the U.S the other argument is that minerals are a common Heritage of the nation and uh the that they should be with the state for that reason and so for example in the international realm if you look at uh the um international waters deep sea mineral resources uh there is the law of the sea convention which governs those and uh those are what we call this is the technical terms common Heritage of mankind you know so those mineral resources are then governed there's an international seabed Authority which governs those resources we have not started mining in the deep sea but if we ever do there is an international body which was set up to try and manage it it's based in Jamaica and they're formulating regulations on how we would manage that and how far out from the coast does the national border go uh so yeah there there there's a continental shelf essentially is how it's defined and depending on where that is and there are different uh definitions there's a continental shelf commission which handles or disputes around that but uh there are some numbers but it depends on the Continental itself interesting so if if we found some huge supply of whatever silver aluminum rare earth metals halfway between here and Hawaii I'm in California uh who would get to do that just whoever gets there first or you have to apply to this organization well if you are if you were a party to the law of the sea convention you have to go through this organization now U.S has not ratified the law of the convention the law of the City Convention so technically U.S could say you know we can just go and do it so but that's that's the problem with internationalism is this an issue at the North Pole you know the the who whoever kind of gets their shipping lanes going up there and find resources Russia wants some of that action we want some of that action maybe Canada does who owns that yeah no I mean right now because the the you know once the Arctic becomes an ocean as uh you know it is uh it is an ocean and it's uh when it's unfrozen uh it would fall and uh uh you know the law of the sea convention in terms of international waters but there are claims to the Arctic the challenge there is that there are a lot of countries which have contested claims and so there is then an organization called the Arctic Council which is which was established to try and improve um governance of the Arctic uh it was meant to be eventually leading to some kind of a treaty whereby there could be some um you know shared governance or but we haven't gotten there yet especially now because of the tensions with us and Russia you know when that would happen but Antarctica we do have a treaty there are a lot of claims on Antarctica too right the Norwegians claim that because they said we were there first Australia claims it because they're very close by but there that the country said look this place is so important for science we are just going to put our claims in advance and we're going to cooperate for the basis of science Antarctica is actually a great example of science diplomacy at work where even at the height of the Cold War the Soviet Union and the U.S agreed to the Antarctic treaty so interesting that can happen it's doable yep isn't there something like that for the moon Arthur space treaties yes there is a lunar treaty also yes yes my colleague here at the University of Delaware Julie Klinger she works on Space resources and yes the lunar treaty if they were ever going to mine the moon you know that's going to be very relevant in terms of what new protocols develop for that yes and so some portion of whatever money was gained from mining the moon would go toward Humanity yeah everybody I mean that would be the vision that there would be some kind of sharing of resources that hasn't been developed to the level the the treaty is quite ambiguous on those matters right at this point but they could develop protocols I think that's where it would potentially there could be some kind of um agreement crafted and that's certainly within the it it would follow the law of the sea convention because in that also the common Heritage of mankind principles suggests that go to everyone I mean some people have argued the Moon is different because not like our planet and that you know whoever is willing to invest in it should be able to to have that others have said no it is you know it is part of our planet in fact it came out of the you know the Thea collision and it became a separate satellite it's actually part 4.2 billion years ago as part of Earth right yeah yeah wasn't there something like that with the Titanic you know because there's these diving companies that go down there and try to get some stuff and then sell it but it still belongs to the white line or whoever owned it yeah yep there has been contestation around that like when you have these shipwrecks uh um if if there is uh an existing uh entity that's viable should they still maintain especially becomes a tourist attraction or some you know those are things which definitely then get litigated so yeah that is so interesting okay so I've also been reading about um the whole subject of reparations for Native Americans for slavery and all that you know arguments are made about the wealth that was generated that African-American community did not benefit from and whites at the time and generations after it did okay but once you start doing those calculations what about Native Americans you know I mean Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase bot Louisiana which isn't Louisiana it's you know like a third of the United States from Napoleon but Nepal it wasn't napoleons to sell in the first place I mean he never even came here right so how would you calculate that I mean it seems like the amount of mineral value alone extracted from the land you know that the Native Americans were here you know thousands of years before Europeans surely they have some claim on that if you're going to go down that road yeah I mean those kinds of um conversations around indigenous sovereignty and um you know whether you Define sovereignty in terms of who was there first or whether you define it in terms of who invests first and whether there is a certain Primacy uh to one versus the other they are raging uh on um in the case of Australia where which is one of my countries of citizenship one of the other things I mean they did not have any they they use this doctrine of Terra nalis which was that the land was essentially there were no property rights on the land and so we could do what we wanted this was not what happened in the US where there was some recognition that there was Prior copyrights but then um you know the clearly there was the treaties were terribly unfair and uh uh and so uh I think um you know this is where also terms of when we think about Earthly order you know you have to also think about like where where do we draw the line in terms of temporal Injustice and things that happened in the past versus the present and what is functionally most important for us now moving forward uh and uh the the argument can be made that for a sense of healing uh you need to you you need to do away with some of those past claims in order to move forward and that has been done in the case of like in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was the approach that was followed there um these are very difficult questions and you know I've worked with indigenous people many of them face severe Trauma from some of those injustices certainly like we had the issue with the schools in Canada recently uh and so I think it's important to recognize those I mean uh and figure out ways of compensating them uh in ways which which are realistic I mean where it considers the the changing Norms of the time and what happened accordingly now yeah I can see something like a government program like the equivalent of the GI bill after World War II okay you served your country we're going to give you a free college education in exchange to thank you for this something like that you know we know we screwed you over we didn't but our ancestors did okay and there's generational effects so you know you get an extra tax break on your mortgage if you want to buy a house you get a tax break for your college tuition you know whatever sort of incentives like that because you don't want current people who didn't have anything to do with the the crimes of the past to feel like well why should I have to pay reparations I didn't do anything and my ancestors came here just last year so they had nothing to do with it there you know whatever um you know so there yeah that would be a tricky one but I could see how it something like that could be done to because what's the goal here what's the goal is to solve these is it massive inequality problems right how come homeownership income the family wealth is so hugely different and so that would be how do we solve it yeah and again you know if you go back to sort of complex systems analysis approach to it you you see that in fact that the temporal dimension of wealth uh and how it spills over how it gets distributed uh what impact that has I mean it's profound and you can actually see that I mean in Delaware we have the DuPont so the you know the the major um family who created Delaware in terms of its economic uh influence uh and uh now you know the old money of the duponts it's now diffused over so many trust funds of the kids and so on but the impact it has had it's remarkable you know in terms of that and so you can see like what happened what created that and what events eventually if you trace back and see what impacts that I mean the guy who started Dupont he came because of the French Revolution and you know he had to seek Refuge here and then he started a dynamite company and then you know they Diversified and then they started making everything from nylon to CFCs you know so but that that wealth creation what who benefited from it where I I mean I think it's very fair to do some kind of a complex systems analysis and say look this is the you these people benefited from that and whether it is slavery or other things I think that analysis is worthwhile so at least even if we don't do the compensation I think it gives people a sense of how these kinds of effects go through generations and it's not it's not simple enough to say well I had nothing to do with it because there is that level of linkage and if we do that I think it would make people feel better if actually there is psychological research in terms of reconciliation and peace building that a lot of people you know when they're aggrieved they don't even want the physical compensation amount as much as the recognition of being wronged you know there's very good psychological research on that and I think if we even come to that and that's what the South Africans try to do with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was having that sense of okay they were wronged and coming to that and that I think can help right also um some economists like Robert Frank make the point that you know Dupont okay well your company was in a country that protected your company from foreign Invasion and we provided roads and you know a sound economy and currency that you didn't have to worry about like if you were in some other third world country where the currency is not trustworthy at all we kept inflation and check and all those kinds of things that you kind of invisible infrastructure you don't even see Phil uh so somebody has to pay for that and that's what taxes are about yeah absolutely I mean they're they're that kind of I mean ultimately it's about making sure that we are transparent about the ways in which these kinds of underlying processes uh have what one can say you know kind of a chance or luck uh and Randomness which happens in certain systems and what is earned uh and and I think that's the other aspect of this which is very important understanding those distinctions right all right Saleem we are right at two hours let me ask you one last question here maybe this will be a future book for you so let's say Pakistan government prime minister whoever it is comes to you and says all right we want to be like whoever America or Sweden or Denmark or Germany or we want to be a rich industrialized what do we got to do just tell me the 10 things I got to do and I will Implement them tomorrow what do I do yes so I think my Guiding Light in that is generally speaking I'd say first look at what uh David Ricardo called comparative advantage you know Percy what is your comparative advantage compared to others and what are your resources that give you that edge those could be natural resources there could be human capital it could have a lot to do with the kind of Labor Training that you have had I mean one of the example of the only country which has gone from being least developed to highly developed within a span of a generation is South Korea you know in the 1950s South Korea's human development indicators were lower than North Korea North Korea was far more developed than South Korea but now what were those core competencies and one of my former professors at MIT the late Alice hampstein she wrote a wonderful book about you know why South Korea became an Asian giant and it was a really complex mixture of uh having the human capital which had the kind of skill set to do Manufacturing in certain areas linking that with organizational structures which were very efficient in South Korea they have these they're called chebols the you know industrial houses which are the Samsung's debut or LG all these you know um and then uh some foreign direct investment which was very efficiently targeted uh but also the um the you know when they had security problems this is one example of a very successful U.S Intervention which was able to Shield it just like you have you know like when they say in order for life to flourish you need a good membrane to protect you for the life to develop the U.S provided that protective membrane for South Korea to really develop and so you were able to get that so I think what I would suggest then is that you follow that's one storyline which has been very effective in being able to follow a development path and I'd say that if South Korea can do that with a very nasty nuclear neighbor to the north I think many other countries can do it too yeah in the moral Arc I have this chart here showing North Korea versus South Korea in 1950 the per capita GDP was 854 dollars for both when they split off and then you see in the 19 what is this uh mid 70s there's this huge takeoff for South Korea and North Korea still you know down in the trough there at this was 2015 1122 dollars per capita in North Korea nineteen thousand six hundred dollars in South Korea you know basically 20 times the average income you can see the difference in uh in uh from space right North Korea and South Korea it's such a dramatic shocking and also North Koreans are like three inches taller than South Koreans on average just you know better die but it was a nutrition so yeah that's such a great test case indeed yep absolutely and I think that's um and we should be willing to look at multiple Pathways of hybridity also I mean I think and South Korea's development was not during all Democratic times some of it was during military rule as well uh and so you know we have to be also careful ultimately we should Aspire for democracy for normative reasons but we should not also completely disavow certain stages where countries may be in where they are going through some political turmoil where they are in this you know and we should be careful and not celebrating autocracy but we should also be willing to work with countries in those Dynamics yeah I like this quote you have in your book from William James uh the problem of thinking that the structure over the entire system is one thing right if we just have democracy that's all you need well no there's more to it than that here's what James writes all the great single word answers to the world's riddle such as God the one reason law Spirit matter nature polarity the dialectic process the idea the self the oversoul draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role by amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified Sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining Powers the truth but a perfect Idol of the rationalistic mind okay so there's a theme to your book it's that it's not one thing it's a multiple complex interactive system that takes a lot of work to figure out what's the right combination and read indeed what you're doing is really important for the future of humanity so I I definitely support that thank you for coming on to tell us about it and thank you Ben and honor really Michael I've admired your work for many years well thank you yeah you're super interesting I I love hearing all this International stuff very good

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 5,567

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, economics, globalism, holism, internationalism, nuclear energy, randomness, reductionism, Science Salon, sustainability, The Michael Shermer Show

Id: VWMZMqnhKXU

Length: 130min 36sec (7836 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2022