How Did We End Up with the Idea of a Growing Economy? ‘The Journey of Humanity’ with Oded Galor

[Music] from the road centre for international finance and economics at brown university this is the road centre podcast i'm mark blyth the director of the rhodes centre oded gaylor is a professor of economics here at brown university and he's the author of the new book the journey of humanity the origins of wealth and inequality in this book he synthesizes 200 000 years worth of human history to create a theory for why societies and economies grew so slowly for so long and why starting about 200 years ago everything started to speed up it's a sweeping history that puts the work of many influential economists into a new light from adam smith to karl marx to paul romer [Music] but odd's story is actually about much more than the economics it's about technology geography psychology colonialism and politics in short it's about the nature of humanity on this episode i talked with him about all of this and about how as we stumble through a global pandemic and potentially catastrophic climate change we can grow in a way that benefits us all welcome oh that got out to the podcast i'm delighted to be here so we've got a lot to talk about a lot of people who listen to this podcast are generally interested in what we sort of say big econ ideas and there's probably none bigger than growth so if you don't mind what i'd like to do is try and put your book in context by just asking you to talk about how for example adam smith thought about growth if he did it all and then you know what's your read of that and then and let's go forward from there so let's start with the most famous economist of them all my fellow scotsman adam smith um he didn't use the word growth but he really kind of understood the idea right how should we think about smith and growth so let me divert for for a moment and let me set the stage for a sort of more powerful discussion of the writing of adam smith and his followers so naturally modern human is emerging in africa 300 000 years ago and what we see in the course of human history is that to a large extent economies are in a state of stagnation and living standards over nearly 99.8 of human existence and then in the past two centuries we see this incredible metamorphosis we see this incredible spike in living standards that can be defined as the mystery of growth namely what is the origin of this dramatic transformation in living standards that occurred in the past two centuries after literally three hundred thousand years of stagnation the second important mystery is the mystery of inequality namely what is the origin of this vast inequality in the wealth of nations why some countries are rich and others are poor and why do we see this enormous divergence in living standards across the globe in the past 200 years now naturally adam smith is not well positioned to tackle this mystery because in fact much of the divergence is occurring after his writing so let's focus on the writing of adam smith so what is intriguing about adam smith there are two fundamental ideas that he is advancing the first one is the role of the invisible hand in generating economic efficiency and the second one is the role of the division of labor in generating learning by doing and ultimately some technological progress now he's not applying them directly for the understanding of the growth process but naturally he is aware of the fact that economic efficiency and specialization in production can generate a surplus that can ultimately lead into accumulation and accumulation naturally is part of the growth process so to a large extent we can trace the foundations of modern growth to the writing of adam smith in the sense that it is this efficiency and it is this specialization in production and its impact potentially on technology that is the seed of the process that will be ultimately generated so i've always thought that smith is a very optimistic version of the future that surplus regardless of how it's divided is going to grow and that's what's important but shortly after smith in the long term shall we say along comes someone who features in the beginning of your own book which is malthus and malthus says no i'm sorry that 99.9 of the time is normal so give us your read of malthus and his story maldives is really fundamental in understanding much of the development in human history but ironically his writing appears precisely at the time where what one may define as the maltujin epoch the maltujin regime is dissipating so malton has a very simple idea but very powerful one is certainly aware of technological progress and he's aware of the fact that technological progress will generate food surplus over time or at least larger food production but at the same time is aware of the fact that individuals are not very different than other species and when resources are expanding individuals tend to multiply very rapidly and the way that you describe it is that food production is growing arithmetically population is growing exponentially these are incompatible and therefore humanity is doomed to be in poverty regardless of the rate of technological progress population growth will ultimately counter balance the progress and we will revert to the same equilibrium position and in this respect i mean his predictions are quite dismal about the the fate of humanity and fortunately enough his predictions were inaccurate as i said looking backwards to 99.9 of human existence his description of human development is quite accurate but moving forward it is in fact entirely mistaken and the temptation in that juncture where he is suddenly wrong after being right for a very long time is to look for causes there but you go much further back to find those causes and how they accumulate over time we could talk about other 19th century theorists like ricardo or mars let's jump forward to the 20th century many people listening will have done college economics and will have come across growth in the textbook somewhere and the name's robert solo and if you did a bit more paul romer also come up how do they fit into your version of growth before we finally get to it because that's what most people think of as modern growth theory indrid so the founder of modern growth theory is bob solo and his monumental papers in the middle of the 20th century and in this paper he tried to develop a growth model largely known as the solar model that is designed to understand the process of accumulation and the process of economic growth and the way that he describes the world is in very simple terms think about a world in which what drives the gross process is capital accumulation we have some people around they're growing perhaps at a certain rate but we have at the same time a process of capital accumulation and the increase in the ratio of capital to labor is an important part of the growth process and economies are gradually increasing their capital labor ratio and moving into a longer and steady state at the same time he realized that this will not allow him to understand why societies may continue to grow once they reach the steady state so he invoked another term which is basically technological progress and he realized that technological progress will determine the growth rates of economies in the long run but for him technological progress at least the way that he modeled it was an exogenous force so he didn't try to understand how technology is coming about he's simply assuming that there is a certain rate of technological progress and this will ultimately determine the growth rate of economies in the long run now they have two fundamental features of the solar model that are very important to understand in the context of the growth process and in the context of my book the journey of humanity one element that is very important is that the solar model is generating very rosy predictions about the growth process namely it suggests that those societies that are starting from behind those societies that have lower capital labor ratio lower capital accumulation will grow much faster than those that are ahead due to the fact that they're diminishing marginal productivities of capital so if you start behind you grow much faster than if you're ahead and this implies of course that among economies that are similar in their structural characteristics convergence will occur across the globe so his worthy prediction is that initial conditions do not matter at all regardless of where you started you will find yourself in the same equilibrium in the longer and naturally this is entirely counterfactual because as i said much of the inequality that we see across the globe today is originated in the past 200 years due to the differential timing of the transition across the globe and the second one is basically ignoring the transition to modern growth the solar model is predicated in being in the modern growth regime namely he takes the transition from stagnation to growth as given but as i said first one of the most fundamental mysteries is how in fact growth was originated in the first place and second resolving this mystery is leading us into the second mystery namely why some societies are taking off earlier than others and as a result of it a huge inequality is emerging in the world economy so to a large extent solo in the context of the understanding of humanity as a whole is is committing two sins it's an important vehicle for the understanding of the macroeconomy nevertheless in the context of economic growth it is entirely misleading and in fact it generates predictions that are entirely inconsistent with with the world in which we live so i really like that point that it presumes to a certain extent what it seeks to explain by being the modern growth regime and taking it as a starting point again we're going to get to what you say human capital formation is hugely important for you in this massive part of the story but in a very different way from the way which romer thinks about human capital and knowledge so just to segue us out into this does romer solve that problem or does he open up more problems that you're seeking to solve in a sense so roma is devoting his energy to the resolution of a single problem in the solo model which is how do we explain growth in the steady state in the steady state in the in the solar model the growth is determined by an exogenous parameter i mean we assume that technology is advancing it at a certain rate and this is the growth rate of the economy enrollment is basically trying to understand how knowledge how research and development can affect growth in the study state namely how policy potentially can affect economies that are already in their study state and he developed this elegant model that allows him to see how investment in research and development and knowledge formation can explain or can shed light on the determinants of growth in the study state but again both the solar model and the roma model are entirely orthogonal to the main two mysteries of the growth process the mystery of growth and the mystery of inequality so let's get right into that juncture we're going along the steady state of stagnation we're just about to get to the inflection point the bifurcation as you like to call it take us back to that point and tell us about the singular importance of human capital and why we don't appreciate this story enough so when we think about the process of development in its entirety and if we think about the process that is leading us into this bifurcation point into this tipping point in which basically the world is taking off what we see in the course of human history is the operation of what i will define as the wheels of change namely we see a gradual movement of certain elements that are operating perhaps beneath the surface or above the surface and are basically moving the economy gradually so when we think about the maltrusion epoch namely this epoch of stagnation in fact the maltose network is characterized by very important dualism on the one hand we see stagnation in living standards as measured by income per capita life expectancy but on the other hand we see this great dynamism we see the technology is evolving population is growing and human humans are adapting to their environments now at any point in time technological progress is minuscule actually if we think about the world 300 thousand years ago it takes thousands of years from one stone tool to replace another stone tool but over 300 thousand year period we see the movement from stone tool technology to steam engine technology due to this technological progress people have more resources and this more resource allows them to support more people more of their children survive and more children are born and consequently we see larger population but ultimately the advancement in technology is not changing their material well-being because the resources that are being created are divided over more people but something important happen which is during this iteration the size of the human population is larger than otherwise and this larger population have larger number of potential innovators and consequently the next wave of technological progress occurs even earlier and this will support more people more adaptable people and more technological progress so over this 300 thousand year period we see that these wheels of change technological progress population size and human adaptation are reinforcing in one another till we reach at critical point okay that occurs in the eve of industrialization in which the pace of technological progress progresses so rapidly so in order to adapt and in order to cope with this rapidly changing technological environment people must start to invest in the education of their children but people are poor they have limited budget you know to invest in the education of their children they must economize on another item in their budget constraint they cannot starve themselves because then their children will not survive and as a result of it they economize on the number of children in fact we reach a stage in which human capital becomes so important education becomes so important that parents responsible parents start to invest in the education of their children this forces them to reduce fertility and the reduction in fertility is monumental in the sense that it frees the growth process from the counter-balancing effect of population so isn't that a risk you've got stagnation and stagnation gives you certainty they wouldn't call it stagnation they would just call it life and certain populations at a given moment in time decide no we're going to take we're going to take a chance we're going to invest in education uh we can talk about what form that takes but you know primarily i guess literacy through religious texts and other such things a higher percentage of that population is literate that allows the transmission of ideas and and the consequence of that is that you have less kids but if you have less kids then you have less soldiers if you're attacked what type of populations take the risk who are the early trailblazers that take us down this path right so this is not as decentralized decision as it appears to be so when we get into the stage where industrialization is taking place and the technological landscape is changing very rapidly it is the industrialists that in fact seeing the light they realize that in order to be competitive in order to prevent a decline in their profit rates they need a labor force that is more educated they realize at the same time that people are too poor perhaps too myopic to take the decisions upon themselves and consequently they lobby aggressively in the british parliament in the course of the 19th century and basically requesting the implementation of education acts that will permit education of the masses people realize that this is important but nevertheless they do not have the mean to support it and consequently it is the industrialists that are lobbying for this and consequently we see the increase in education and ultimately the fertility decline in the post-1870 period in england so what you're doing is you're giving a kind of human capital refutation of both ricardo and marx because in both of those you have a story whereby profits fall to either a common rate or a diminishing rate and the result is either stagnation to quote ricardo one of my favorite ricardo quotes the condition of the poor is wretched and is likely to remain so and you're saying oh no you got that one wrong man if you want your profits to go back up it's not about more and more machines and admiserating the workers it's about educating them is that right absolutely so that's completely right so particularly if we think about marx and we think about the teasers of mercs and marx is making an argument that appears plausible at a time which is that accumulation of capital by the capitalists will cause a decline in profit rates in the sense that the capital labor ratio will increase and as a result of it the rate of return to capital will decline and this will bring about competition across capitalists exploitation up to a point in which workers will have nothing to lose but their chain this will bring this class struggle and ultimately the demise of the capitalist workers class society but what he failed to realize is that in fact the capitalists will soon enough realize that in order to sustain their profit rates there is a different way to do it rather than exploitation invest in new workers generate human capital that will complement your physical capital and consequently will prevent the decline in the in the return to physical capital so yes when capital is accumulating and the amount of labor is fixed and there is a decline in in the profit rates on the return to capital but if you can boost labor by boosting human capital information in fact you can sustain your profit rates so the way that we normally think about productivity is then also wrong because we tend to think of labor as relatively fixed and then you kind of chuck technology at it or capital in whatever shape or form it takes and you get more output but what you're suggesting is again what really makes the difference is the complement to the capital which has to have that irreducible social element is based on knowledge yes the complementarity capital skill complementarity is essential for the growth process is essential for maintaining the return to physical capital and is ultimately essential even in the context of technological adoption and growth in the long run we mentioned people having fewer kids this is a macro phenomena as well as a micro phenomena because as the book progresses the demographic transition as you call it becomes incredibly important to getting to where we are today tell us what the demographic transition is and why it's so important to what you want to argue so as i said so we look at the world as a whole around 1870 we see that western nations are experiencing massive decline in fertility during what is defined as the demographic transition we see that fertility declines 30 to 50 percent in many western european societies and in the united states within a scope of about 40 to 50 years and as i said this is instrumental and fundamental because it is in fact the first time in human history the technological progress can be converted into prosperous people rather than into more people so this is really monumental and instrumental for the understanding of the transition from stagnation to growth and in fact if we look at the empirical regularities those societies that experience the demographic transition earlier on average are more prosperous today so let's flip to the second half of the book and talk about inequality there's been a lot of talk about inequality but it tends to be inequality within countries that's the piketty school there's certainly work by milanovich and others on inequality between countries but again to stick with this core thesis you attack this at a very different angle as well and you've implicitly just said it the reason these countries are poor are a combination of different starting points initial conditions and then also the timing of the demographic transition which is intimately related to the differential in those initial conditions unpack that for us so when we think about the rules of inequality i think that the best strategy to understand these roots is to start at the present and then peel gradually different layers of influence and find the deep rooted factors that affect inequality across the globe when we think about inequality across the globe today it is tempting to suggest that this inequality is originated in differences in education level in physical capital information and technological level across the globe and that's completely right these are correlates of this inequality but the question is of course why some societies fail to invest properly in education why some societies fail to invest properly in the accumulation of physical capital why some societies fail to adopt properly technological advancements and the argument is that there are certain buyers to this process of accumulation and technological adoption and these barriers have roots in the distant past so we can think about different layers of influence we can start with say colonialism and ask how colonialism is generating some of the inequality that we see across the globe we can move deeper into institutional factors or the fingerprints of institutions and how it affects comparative development we can move even deeper than that and look at the cultural factor but ultimately what we will realize is that many of these elements colonialism institutions and culture are not manner from heaven they're not emerging out of the blue and generating divergence across societies they're predicated on the existence of initial geographical conditions or otherwise that are basically leading into these differential institutions so there are some instances in human history for instance perhaps the glorious revolution and the emergence of constitutional monarchy in in england and its effect on property rights in industrialization that can explain some divergence or we can think about the division of the korea peninsula between the north and the south along the 38th parallel but these are rare events typically what we see is that as economies are developing there is a demand for institutions that will permit individuals to coordinate their actions to secure their property rights etc for instance the transition into agriculture 12 000 years ago is associated with an enormous increase in population density this increase in population density is generating the demand for institutions that will protect property rights that will coordinate action across individuals will will that will permit the implementation of of public goods that are essential for the prosperity of nations and there are other instances of this sort in which basically the suitability of land for large plantation is generating the emergence of a large land owning class that is lobbying for extractive institutions and ultimately even slavery so there are many instances in which economic development is in fact the engine behind technological development so this suggests that we have to step one more step back in the course of human history to understand the roots of institutional divergence now we can think about culture and again when we think about cultural traits we see the implementation of growth enhancing cultural traits in some regions of the world and growth retarding cultural traits in others for instance in the context of the italian divide we see the emergence of social capital in the north we see the emergence of family ties in the south and the italian divide is largely explained by this divergence of cultural norms but again why do we see social capital emerging in the north and family ties in the south again this is predicated on deeper historical routes that one needs to explore so to a large extent when we think about cultural traits we can see their origins in the context of the suitability of land for agriculture that affects the ability of individuals to plan for the future why is it so because if the land is suitable for agriculture then we are engaged in the process of planting and then with some delayed harvesting and it trains us it teaches us how to delay gratification and how to be future oriented and this is ultimately a very valuable trait in the context of economic growth because it affects education decisions saving decisions life cycle decisions technological adoption etc and if you're a viking you don't play that game consequently you don't get the payoffs indeed so we can think about geographical elements in the distant past that are affecting the evolution of culture and consequently again if we would like to understand the deep roots of inequality we have to step an additional step backward and ask ourselves how in fact gross enhancing cultural traits and growth enhancing institutions emerge in some places and not in others and this leads us into the shadow of geography there are two ways of thinking about geography the simple one is to think about the current characteristics of of geography soil quality the disease environment geographical isolation and their impact on development this is associated with the work of jeff zucks so he suggests that if we observe some societies that are residing say in an area of the world in which the disease environment is very harsh this will affect human capital formation labor productivity and development in the short run so this is one element but this is not part of the long shadow of geography if we think about the long shadow of geography we have to consider how geographical characteristics as i mentioned before suitability of land for agriculture suitability of land for the use of the plow climatic volatility etc may affect the emergence of certain type of institutions and not others certain type of cultural traits and not others so this causes us to realize that factors that were determined very much in the distant past are very important for the development of societies and this takes us even further back in human history when we think about geography the first geographical element that we can consider is the onset of agriculture so jared diamond famously argued that the variation in the timing of the transition to agriculture is associated with much of the variations in economic prosperity that we see across the globe so as we know some societies moved into agriculture nearly 12 000 years ago other societies more recently and jerry diamond suggested convincingly that in fact this transition generated a surplus generated a clust that was not associated with food production and this class was associated with knowledge creation in the form of science technology in written languages and generated the technological head start that persisted in the course of human history was reinforced by the formation of city-states states empires and then colonialism and according to diamond much of the variations that we see across the globe can be traced to this element so the diamond hypothesis is ingenious undoubtedly but nevertheless it holds only till about the year 1500. okay so this technological headstart is very powerful and you can see it in fact if you look at prosperity across the globe in the year 1500 it can be mapped to a large extent to variations in the timing of the analytical revolution it's not a single factor but it's an important factor so what happens next yes so that's that's an important question so what happens in the past 1500 period is that we see a process of globalization gradually societies start to trade and having comparative advantage in agriculture becomes liability so the technological head start that he has in mind remains in place throughout but nevertheless the fact that you have comparative advantage in agriculture and you can trade with far away countries implies that you are investing less in the urban sector where much of the technological spillovers are generating and this lack of technological spillover is offsetting the technological headstart that diamond had in mind and ultimately in the present day in fact the explanatory power of the time since the analytic is virtually zero so we end up in a world whereby if we look at latin america it's absolutely true that it was incorporated in the global economy as a colonial project but because it has a comparative advantage in agriculture it's not going to move up the ladder in a sense and it's not going to make the investments that would get you to that transformation which would explain a convergence to go back to solo rather explains the divergence do you actually see across the world precisely so that's that's a completely accurate uh uh assessment of of the situation in latin america and it suggests that one has to be much more careful in the context of trade liberalizations in the sense that naturally the virtues for i mean the gains from trade and and trade liberalization to a large extent is a virtue for many societies certainly in the context of nursing or straight but in the context of north-south trade it can be detrimental because it can trap societies in in the specialization in goods in which the limited spillover limited demand for education and as a result of it we don't see knowledge formation we don't see the demographic transition as pronounces otherwise and therefore we do not see the engines of growth operating as extensive and it empowers exactly those types of extractive rather than inclusive institutions which would perpetuate that type of production one more thing on this before we get to our closing segment i could continue for a long time but we must keep this just a reasonable size of episode you you say something very interesting towards the end and focus on it a bit it's almost like a coda but it is also a core part of the thesis how is diversity related to prosperity so when when i'm searching for the deepest roots of comparative development and after discovering that the analytical revolution is very important as i said till the middle ages i'm moving even further back in human history and taking us back to africa where we are all originated from and why is it so important it is so important because during this exodus of an atomically modern human from africa 60 to 90 000 years ago the degree of diversity across the globe was affected in a very fundamental fashion and and why is it so so there was a certain level of diversity that existed in africa but departing populations were relatively small the african population was relatively small and as a result of it the departing population was not a representative sample of the population that existed in africa namely they contained only a subset of the diversity that existed in the african population so this population migrated initially to the area of the fertile crescent they resided there and actually the carrying capacity of the environment was enormous and they could they could multiply very rapidly till they basically occupied all possible geographical niches and they ventured again outward some 45 000 years ago into europe and others into asia and ultimately into the america and since this migration was sequential each departing population carried only a subset of the diversity that existed in the new location and this implied gradually the diversity declined further and further and further now why is it so important well when you think about diversity and you can measure it in different ways culturally phenotypically behaviorally linguistically it has two conflicting effects on economic development on the positive side diversity is associated with cross-fertilization of ideas and as a result of it greater productivity and greater innovativeness but on the other hand diversity is associated with social non-cohesiveness it is associated with mistrust disagreement about the desirable public goods and consequently conflicts so we have these two conflicting effects and if in fact it is the case that diversity has a positive and diminishing effect on innovations and homogeneity has a positive and diminishing effects on social cohesiveness it implies that at any point in time an intermediate level of diversity will be conducive for development and this is what we see historically but importantly the same time it suggests to us that since we move into a more demanding world technologically the virtues of diversity are increasing over time and societies that are increasingly more diverse will have the upper hand in terms of economic prosperity is that because that greater diversity leads to the possibility of the greater creation of differential knowledge precisely so it generates the cultural fluidity that is basically making the society more adaptable and and consequently but to a point because to go to your other side you need a certain degree of homogeneity otherwise it comes out it comes on stock indeed so so there are clearly trade-offs and we should be aware of the trade-offs but what we see in the course of human history is that over the past 500 years there is a gradual increase in the optimal level of diversity more diverse societies are prospering more than otherwise and in addition we know that the education system that we have in place is designed in such a way so as to mitigate the cause of diversity we teach our children to be tolerant to be respectful for other ethnic groups so the cost of diversity is mitigated by the education system the benefits of diversity are enhanced by uh technological acceleration and as a result of it we can comfortably say that more diverse societies will have the upper hand so in some you internalize the externalities of diversity and you externalize the positive externalities of diversity so the negative goes in and the positive goes out i like that it's very simple and clean um something that's let's do this for closing something that's not so clean an obvious point that comes up is this is a great story but it seems to assume in the background is somewhat symmetrical or even normal distribution of the benefits of growth and we've been in a world increasingly over the past 30 to 40 years where that simply hasn't been the case you could even argue that large parts of the united states have been going through d growth rather than benefiting from growth even if the gdp numbers keep going up how would you given your theory think about this as a problem and what should be done about it right so indeed the journey of humanity is focusing on inequality across nations between nations and you are alluding to the fact that there is an important problem that is emerging in this process particularly in the past four decades or so perhaps even longer which is the rise in inequality within a societies and the fact that the growth process is in fact not shared universally and perhaps some people are deprived from this process entirely and that's a unfortunate consequence of a growth process in general because the growth process naturally is associated with technological acceleration and technological acceleration implies that there is greater and greater demand for education and talents and since not all individuals are participating in the process of human capital formation this is bound to generate inequality and i think that the the responsibility of societies in this type of period is precisely to assure at least that equality of opportunities is present but at least we can operate on this margin and allocate resources to assure that every child can educate herself to her full potential sense that resource constraint financial constraints and otherwise will not prevent individuals from investing properly so then at least we will be sure that in this lottery of technological acceleration the participation is entirely random and people that would like to participate are able to participate to their full extent now this doesn't of course resolve the entire problem because there is an additional moral problem which is if this technological progress is not complementing all members of society what do we do with those segments of society that are unable to uh to participate fully and there it implies that we have to consider more seriously the importance of of the wealth of welfare state without distorting incentives as much as possible because naturally if we do get into a position where the location of talents across occupations is perfect we can be generous enough and create some sort of a welfare state that will uh will give a safety net for those that are not participating in the growth process and not because of their responsibility without distorting incentives that story may have been true but now we live in a world where there are planetary boundaries and there are many voices not just on the left i will say that we need to degrow in order to survive what would be your response to those d growth arguments that this is no longer the solution this is the problem how do you see us working through the decarbonization window that we have to work through right so that's that's a very important uh element that is associated with the growth process so when we think about the technological acceleration that i alluded to in the context of the of the 18th century and later this is leading into industrialization industrialization is leading into industrial pollution and ultimately to carbon emission and the current trend in climate change and this is a real and huge threat for humanity but i'm more optimistic and more hopeful based on on my understanding of the course of human history and for the following reason so the same process that brought about carbon emission and climate change brought about three additional forces it brought about human capital formation educated people that are on average more responsible in terms of their concern to the environment it brought about the power of innovation namely the ability of scientists to be ingenious enough to resolve catastrophic changes and we saw it in the context of covid19 and the development of mrna technologies in a very short period of time if copied 19 would have occurred centuries ago it could have devastated humanities for decades and perhaps longer than that so this is the power of innovation and the third element it is very important is the decline in fertility and remember the people are the ones that are polluting planet earth and if we will see gradual decline in the size of the population human population or planet earth we will be in a better position to mitigate the current trend so why these forces are so important because the the movement into environmentally friendly technologies the movement into uh regulations that are restricting carbon emission and decline in fertility are three forces that are mitigating the current trend of climate change they're not resolving it but allowing us to have perhaps three or four decades to resolve this problem more fundamentally using technology namely it buys scientists time to perhaps resolve this and as i said based on human ingenuity in the past i'm confident that again given the pressure that we that we're facing and given the incentives that will emerge ultimately scientists will be ready at the critical moment with the proper solution to this problem too i think like many people i can do with an optimistic and hopeful story thank you for that it's been a pleasure talking to you about this book thank you very much [Music] this episode was produced by dan richards and kate dario i'm mark blythe you can listen to more conversations like this by subscribing to the road center podcast wherever you listen to podcasts we'll be back soon with another episode of the road center podcast thanks [Music] you

Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Views: 27,736

Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, Oded, Oded Galor, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality., Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Paul Romer, technology, geography, psychology, politics, Mark Blyth

Id: Zu-zmaP3C_4

Length: 45min 40sec (2740 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022