Superabundance: The Age of Plenty | Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley | EP 284

it's very difficult I think for modern young people in particular to really understand how poor people were absolutely yeah absolutely the best the best example I like to use is the sugar example and it's like well the time it took you to earn the money to buy one pound of sugar in 1850 how many pounds do you think you could get today I'd love to serve my students on this and they'll say oh like two pounds or four pounds you get 227 pounds it might explain why we're also fat is because sugar has become just tremendously abundant [Music] hello everyone I have with me today a guest I've had on before Dr Marion tupian a new guest his co-author at the moment of a new book called Super abundance the story of population growth Innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely Bountiful Planet 2022 it's the most complete opposite of any apocalyptic title you might ever Envision Marion has talked to me before particularly about his book 10 Global Trends every smart person should know and many others you will find interesting that was published in 2020 Marion is the editor of human progress.org which is a very good site and I retweet them quite consistently he's a senior fellow at the center for Global liberty and prosperity and the co-author of that Simon abundance index which we will talk about to some degree today he specializes in globalization study of globalization um and Global well-being and politics and the economics of Europe and southern Africa Dr Gail pulley is associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University at Hawaii he's taught economics and statistics at alfazo University in Riyadh Saudi Arabia Brigham Young in Idaho Boise State University in the College of Idaho he earned his BBA and economics and Boise State in The Graduate work at Montana State completed his PhD at the University of Idaho he's been part of the development of the Simon abundance index as well and as I said is the co-author of this new book super abundance which is a lot different than apocalyptic Doom as I pointed out um both of doctors tupi and Gail have published widely in the public domain as well as professionally in Outlets like Financial Times the National Review the uh particularly evil Journal quilette Forbes the American spectator The Washington Post Etc any of your what would you call them traditional suspects or Usual Suspects so anyways we're going to talk about this new book today super abundance a three-part 10 chapter analysis of why strangely enough things seem to be a lot better than we think and perhaps better than they ever were and uh although we're more concerned about it than we ever seem to have been before so welcome gentlemen thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me and congratulations on your new book thank you very much I'm delighted to be with you yeah so let's uh let's start with super abundance um I don't know whether to start with with Julian Simon's famous bet that's not a it's kind of a nice narrative entry point eh um I think that's uh that's right yeah all right well so why don't you why do you outline for for our listeners and viewers the nature of this famous bat why it was made and what it what its broader cultural significance was because it was really a watershed bat I think in many ways well so in the post-second World War era uh Global populations started to grow at a much faster rate than before uh partly because of a tremendous amount of medical and scientific knowledge that started to spread around the world uh babies started to um you know if your babies started to die young people started to grow long um grow older and so forth and um some people started to freak out about it they thought that there was going to be too many people in the world and consequently we were going to run out of resources prices of resources were going to go Sky High and there would be Mass starvation now the man who brought this particular Obsession or potential problem into the public sphere was Paul Ehrlich who still is alive he's a biologist at Stanford University and in 1968 still causing trouble still causing trouble still to uh yeah and uh in 1968 he wrote an extremely popular books book which sold millions of copies uh called the population bomb and the population bomb started in a sort of very terrifying language that we have become accustomed to from extreme environmentalists over the decades and he basically said no matter what policy changes we are going to make now uh in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people are going to die due to starvation in fact none of that happened nonetheless um Paul early's book the population bomb scared and scarred psychologically generations of people um movies had been made about how the world was going to run out of resources and and in a catastrophe the one of the more famous ones was with Charlton Heston uh it was called Soylent Green and uh uh the reason why it's important is because Soylent Green whilst it was filmed in 1974 was supposed to come to fruition in 2022 which is this year and the basic premise of the book was that the world was completely empty of food and so every time a person died that person would be converted into biscuits called soil and green which would be then fed to the people who stayed behind so uh on the other side right so so a lot of this just to give some background to that too a lot of this was based on hypothetical biological thinking uh predicated on the work of Malthus and it's sort of a yeast or rat model of human existence so if you have a colony of yeast and you and they have a finite uh medium that they're growing in so a finite source of food and you let the yeast multiply or let them know provide them with the preconditions for their multiplication their population will expand until they consume all the available resources and then it will precipitate precipitously collapse in Starvation and people tried similar although less simple experiments with rats showing similar behavior and then I would say documented similar phenomena in the field I mean animals will over graze for example if their herbivores will overgraze available crop land if they're not kept in check so to speak by predators and biologists extrapolated from this and said that under all other things being equal populations will expand until they consume more available resources than will sustain them and then they will tend to precipitously collapse and then that was applied to the human condition but the as we see from the rest of your story The economists objected to this yes so the view that just you just described is particularly popular amongst amongst biologists economists don't think like that because they recognize that human beings are fundamentally different from rats or deer or rabbits or whatever else or Yeast or Yeast we have this thing called intelligence and the ability to apply these little gray cells in order to come up with Innovations which can get around the problem of scarcity so on the other side of the country early as I said was in Stanford in California on the other side of the country in in the University of Maryland uh there was an economist called Julian Simon uh a a very uh very intelligent and very interesting man who looked at the data actually and started noticing that things were becoming cheaper which means that they were becoming less scarce even though population of the world continued to increase therefore in 1980 he made a bet with Paul Ehrlich and the BET was on the price of five Commodities let me see if I can remember them the the the BET was on the price of chromium copper nickel tin and tungsten and the deal was as this as such if over the next 10 years between 1980 and 1990 the price of these five Metals became more expensive they became scarcer Simon would pay Ehrlich but if they became cheaper then erlig would pay Simon well the BET came to an end in 1919 September 29 1990 and the inflation adjusted price of these five Metals dropped by 36 percent in spite of the fact that the population of the world arose by almost a billion and in spite of the fact that they both agreed that that would be the basket they would bet on actually Ehrlich picked the the basket yes Simon was uh Simon was uh generous enough he said Paul Ehrlich pick any five Commodities or any any five Commodities you want and those were the ones that early picked well what's so interesting about that I think well there's many many things that are interesting about it but one of the things that's so interesting is that you might infer from that that in order to put your notion forward as a scientific hypothesis you actually have to bind it with a time frame you can't just say well at some point in the future the population is going to expand to the point where we consume all our resources it's like well what do you mean you mean a year 10 years a hundred a thousand ten thousand a hundred and fifty thousand a million you mean you get to have the whole time frame for you to be right or no are you accurate enough in your knowledge so that you can actually pin it down let's say within a decade or something some reasonable fraction of a human life at least and so because I mean the biologists who when they responded to that bet because it was quite the cultural what moment in some sense that Simon won the rejoinder from the environmentalist Doom types was well we were off by a few decades and that's why we lost it isn't that we're wrong it's just that these things are complex and our time frame was wrong it's like yeah if your time frame is wrong then your theory is wrong and if you can't place the time frame around it then your theory is so weak that you should just be quiet about it and I think the same thing applies to all this climate Doom as well it's like specify it well we can't it's too complex well then quit terrifying everyone you know another thing that was interesting about it is uh you know as professors we get to say all kinds of things and never be really held accountable for it and so putting money on the table you know also added this really interesting Dimension to it is not only is it framed in time it's framed with with a bet so got to hold this guy accountable for his uh for his claim some skin in the game well and then there's a reputational issue too right because it was a very public bet and it was it wasn't so famous when they first made it but by the time it came around for the BET to be settled and I would say this is particularly true of Julian Simon who we should talk about for a moment um Paul Air like's a pretty smart biologist but Julian Simon was a genius and so that's useful for people to know too I mean he was a truly outstanding mind and for him to be optimistic in the face of what was almost a universal pessimism in the late 60s and early 70s around well the possibility of nuclear war and certainly the possibility of overpopulation and it might mean it just and and environmental degradation and all of that was that that apocalyptic Vision was what everyone who paraded themselves as informed and you know properly skeptically pessimistic they're all parading that as moral virtue and for Simon to come out and say no you guys just it's like Elon Musk now coming out and talking about how uh you know one of the biggest problems is to be sad as in the next hundred years is depopulation which I happen to believe is true I also think he's dead on with his criticisms about the un's population uh predictions I think the U.N predictions are there there's no evidence they're accurate at all and even if they are we can handle the 9 to 10 billion people that will probably peek out at um the united nation has been historically uh quite uh that their numbers uh have have have not stood the time the test of time uh there are other uh demographic demographers in the world who have done a better job at predicting uh where the world population is going to be and the latest uh bit on this is uh in Lancet uh which predicts that uh by the year 2100 we are either going to have 9 billion people in the world we are currently on eight or uh seven billion um people in the world so you know it's perfectly possible at the end of this Century there will be as many people in the world as there are now uh obviously the further out in the future you you go uh the the less clear those predictions are but there is another thing that I want to mention about Jillian Simon because you expressed an interest in learning a little more about him it wasn't just that he was right but he was facing a lot of personal invective uh from from the Great and the good uh he was regularly called an idiot and a fool who didn't know what a early famously said that to explain a biology to Simon was like trying to explain um the oil Market to a cranberry um all sorts of other things um early continue to receive throughout his life a variety of very prestigious academic prizes um only recently he was invited to Vatican Vatican of all places to get a talk on the danger of overpopulation that was like three years ago so um in spite of being well you know you don't want to have too many souls to save so so in spite of being wrong all the time he just keeps on being highly highly revered there's one more thing I do want to say and then I think I will hand it to Gail because Gail will uh do a good job of explaining why we thought that we could improve on the BET um uh but uh the key that I wanted to talk about is that in spite of the fact that Ehrlich lost this very uh visible and very humiliating wager with with Simon the idea of overpopulation never went anywhere yes environmental movement is incredibly complex there are people who are extremely smart and and and well-intentioned like for example um uh lombork uh or Stephen Pinker they mean well they are interested in in technological solutions to climate problems and uh and I I count myself in in that kind of sort of universe but there is an extremist environmentally subtext or or subgroup in environmentalism who who uh who have these apocalyptic obsessions uh so for example and and this gets translated into the movies which billions of people see around the world in our in our book we talk about how um with every decade since the 1950s the number of apocalyptic movies has been actually increasing which is which is the exact opposite of what is happening on earth the earth is getting richer healthier uh in some ways there's even environmental Improvement but there are more and more movies about how the world is going to end uh in a some sort of a catastrophic catastrophic apocalypse and one of them is a very very famous one and that was the um uh infinity War which was seen by something like every fifth American and that and that movie plot is about a a a villain who who has these malthusian or erlikian ideas you have to kill half of population of the universe in order so that the other half can survive and so this is not an academic debate people around the world are being fed the diet of malthusianism almost on daily basis you know what was interesting one of the things that was interesting about that Marvel movie and interesting about the Marvel Pantheon in general is that well Thanos is a is a derivation of Thanatos so he's a figure of death and in the Marvel movie and you might have expected this given our pop culture um in the Marvel movie Thanos is clearly a villain and that's interesting because even though there is this apocalyptic tone to the movie he is a villain his job his his theory that half of everything has to die in order for the other half to thrive is put forward and even in a devil's advocate sort of way but it's clear that he's an enemy and I and it one of the things that was so interesting about the Marvel Pantheon is that if you look at it quite carefully it's not politically correct and it's not apocalyptic um the the movie for example Scarlett Johansson's last movie the uh I think it's the Black Widow she she is an unbelievably Politically Incorrect character she's the real antithesis of this apocalyptic Doom saying hyper-agreeable culture that that has produced the sort of movies that you described like Soylent Green and I thought that was extremely interesting because I think there is a Dawning recognition at the level of public fantasy that these um purveyors of Doom are not only wrong but perhaps murderously wrong and that we've been LED down the Garden Path in an approp in an inappropriate way for about four decades or five decades and then I have one more thing to say about that you guys can tell me what you think of this is that I think part of the reason too that we see this apocalyptic Vision popping up so much now isn't so much because the apocalypse is nigh in in a sense in that we're doomed to it is that things are changing so fast that in some sense the destruction of everything we know is always upon us because like are you willing to make a prediction about what your life is going to be like 10 years in the future in in in in many regards I mean technology has changed our lives so much and that's that's happening so quickly that it's unparalleled and so I think we all feel like well we're on the edge of precipitous change and it it might be terrible but while your point is it might also be extremely good and and that we could direct it that way yeah I would just add to that that we're we're on this cusp of exponential creative destruction because right we're having this this destruction but we're also having this creativity that's actually on a steeper curve than the destructive curve well that's what I'm hoping too you know when I go out in my lectures I'm trying to tell people is look we've got we've got everything we could possibly want in front of us if we are smart enough to reach out and take it if we want it someone much of this environmentalism that you've described that and I think your work is such a good antidote too doesn't seem to me to be pro-flourishing it's there's an anti-human element to it a hatred of humanity that that I think is deeply pathological and resentful and I think the fact that Eric's ideas about population excess are still so popularly trumpeted forward as uh as as the only ethical attitude towards the problem of humanity is an indication of the depth of that well some of its malevolence as far as I'm concerned like I've heard environmentalists say many of them say you know there are too many people on the planet the planet would be better off if there's only a billion people um human beings are a cancer on the face of the Earth you know we're like a virus that multiplies unchecked I mean Jesus guys seriously man watch your language you know yeah interesting that you bring that up because it was really this 1973 erlich comes out with his book in 68 73 they come out with limits to growth this club of Rome does and interesting that 73 was also the year that Thanos was introduced in the comic book so the culture was kind of doing this thing and um but clubber Rome they come out with this argument that says look population's gonna do this and we're all going to collapse well population didn't do this and then so they shifted and said well we seem to be okay it's pollution that's going to do this and we're going to collapse and then pollution goes the other way and they say well we're going to redefine our model now to um it's not pollution we're going to Define CO2 as pollution so they keep redefining the model to be able to predict this collapse and it's like well well what are you guys going to do here we can human population continues to do this and we life expectancy and abundance continues to grow and in spite of your modeling oh you know we got a psychological problem on our hands here I think to some degree it might be that you know human beings are unique and we we could speak biologically here I suppose in that we really do we're the only creatures that really do apprehend our own finitude you know and so in some sense we are obsessed and possessed by the apocalyptic Vision because we all know that we're going to die each of us and that all the all the people we know are going to die and that everything we know is going to come to an end and so that's there as a reality and then the question is well that's a fundamental reality and we try to Stave it off we try to stabilize things and we try to make our our economies productive and sustainable and so that we don't die but we know that we're fighting a losing battle and it isn't we don't understand how that fundamental knowledge of finitude is an endless source of degeneration of apocalyptic fantasies or how to manage that in any real sense you know because it is the case that we while we certainly do face limits personally limits of mortality limits of time limits of time limits of time which is the one resource which is actually getting scarcer right right right well as as we leave I mean we obviously live longer but it is the the one scale resource we know that that it will it will come to an end yeah right and and there's only a live there's a real limit to what we can do to Stave that off even if we generate a tremendous amount of money while we expend our time right so each each second becomes more valuable in some sense as you age and that and and the concept of time is really fundamental to uh to our work because uh well I'll hand it over to to Gail but essentially we were dissatisfied with the uh with the wager between uh uh between Ehrlich and Simon we thought we could do something uh a little more interesting and a little different and um I think Gail uh will be able to explain it better than I can so in Simon's first book he talks about or one of his first books he talks about looking at the price of thing the money price of things and the problem with money is money uh loses its value over time typically so you have to make this adjustment back to real dollars versus nominal dollars but he also mentioned this interesting thing he said uh you know we can compare it to time and he said well how much money can you earn in an hour of time and then take that and compare it to the price of things so he talked about the idea of time prices so that kind of piqued our interest a little bit and then there was also a Nobel uh prize-winning Economist William nordhaus who did this really interesting study about the price of light and he said let's look at what it costs you to earn the money to buy one hour's worth of light and you can measure light in lumens and so he does this studying this light is just doing this yeah well you said in your book that that it's so amazing to think of this is that one electric 100 watt electric light bulb is the equivalent in terms of light generation of 17 000 candles I mean that's a lot of candles and then you made some comment too about how much labor in terms of time it took to earn that many candles and you can imagine even now a 17 000 candles especially if they're made of beeswax or something like that that that's not inexpensive yeah so I mean if you go back to 18 you know we go back to 1800 and it took three I had to work three hours to earn the money to buy one hour worth of light and so the time price was three hours for one hour today it's like one 0.166 seconds of time yeah same light so well we think we well we want to point out what this means too because prior to the dawn of inexpensive light and also this obtains in many places in the world now the fact that there was no light seriously delimited the number of hours you could spend working and so when you're buying light you're not just buying light you're buying time to be productive you can't read without light you can't write without light you can't well it's it's hard for people to imagine this because we're never we're never plagued by Darkness ever anymore ever and you know maybe we suffered from the absence of the night sky and I think we do but light is light is basically free and that means that we have many more hours per day the you know the other thing I that really struck me in that regard it wasn't your work though but other many people have commented on this is the absolutely revolutionary consequence of inventing eyeglasses for people because many people in medieval Europe on obviously across the world had to do close work like Tailors and when they're when they lost their ability to see close like you do when you need reading glasses they couldn't work anymore and so this simple technological innovation of glasses you know it added 15 years of productivity to people's lives and then light well that adds what four hours of productivity per day and it's free we see we one of the things I really like about your your work is that you help me understand and communicate to people just how rich we are we're so rich we don't even know how rich we are well that's right um I I think uh you know you talked about light and productivity which is of course very important but if you didn't have light you didn't have anything else I mean there was no entertainment uh obviously there was nothing on TV there were no TVs as you said you couldn't you couldn't uh read um uh most people lived in absolute poverty so they really couldn't afford a candle and therefore once the sun set uh you just went to bed in the yeah in the cold and so and so um Gail mentioned uh the the concept of time price and I think it's very important that we explain it in Greater depth so here's the deal uh you know we we buy things with money but we really pay for them with our time so there are money prices and there are time prices and it's pretty it's pretty easy to convert a money price to a Time price you just take the money pricing you divide it by hourly income so for example if something costs 20 and you're earning twenty dollars an hour the price of that is one hour so money prices are expressed in dollars and cents time prices are expressed in hours and minutes and this offers you know a number of features first of all uh we go to this Universal standard of time and it's not it's not you can't counterfeit it you can't inflate it it's this constant flow so everybody recognizes what an hour is we have this kind of perfect equality of time we get 24 hours a day yeah and that's independent of any real socio-cultural differences it's because well we all suffer from the same degree of finitude in some sense so yeah yeah and I'm amazed well I can't believe this I know that it's a very tricky business for any academic Enterprise to get its fundamental units of measurement correct it's it's it's of absolutely crucial importance that that be done like the periodic table of the elements for chemists for example and maybe the five Factor personality model for for psychologists um or and IQ as well these fundamental measurements and so but it is kind of surprising to me that you Economist types didn't figure this out until recently like what what was in the way well Julian Simon had kind of figured it out and actually Adam Smith talked about this in his his wealth and uh Wealth of Nations he talked about the fact that we have to buy things with our labor which is really our time and you know the other feature of time I think we've got what seven uh Universal standards of measurements six of those seven all go back to time so we're trying to move we're trying to move the thinking back to this Universal standard of time so once you've established a Time price then it's it's the comparison of that time price over time you know it cost me one hour a year ago today it only cost me 45 minutes you know so the the percentage change in that time price is really what what we should look at and then it's the ratio of the ratios that we we look at um you know uh if something is um goes 75 off for example it's like okay 75 off that's that's interesting that means for the for the time that it used to take to earn one unit now I get four so going from it's a 75 decrease but you think about it the other way it's actually a 300 percent increase in your abundance because I I used to get one now I get four right right and there's a moral claim there's a moral claim here too that we should be very careful to make explicit I would say which is if we've accepted the proposition that something is worth having it's worth it's useful and uh justifiable to assume that if we can produce that more efficiently that's good right those two things seem to go right together so because we I think when you're trying to nail down something like fundamental measurement you have to nail it down all the way to the ground if we agree that there are good things to have so we have good and have as agreements then we're also going to agree that if we can get good things to have with less expenditure of the most fundamental resource that also constitutes a good and that would part be partly because well there are lots of good things we like and need to have and so if we have more time we can get more of them too so there's there's really no way of subverting this claim I would say if you accept the initial proposition that there are good things that you know we can and should have yeah exactly so once we once we kind of got this time price figured out and said you know we should take all of these uh prices that we have and convert them to time prices and then see what happens so we go back to Simon's original bet we're kind of inspired by that and one of the critiques of Simon's work was you know you were just lucky Simon because it was only for 10 years and it was only for five Commodities and so we said well why don't we expand it from 5 to 50. so we went beyond just these medals and we went to energy we looked at food we looked at materials we looked at other metals so we developed this data set of 50 Commodities that are tracked by the World Bank tracks these prices so we and the the we could go back in time and look at all other data okay so I gotta I got to ask you a political question real quick about that so you know I'm obsessed with measurement because I was a psychometrician when I used to be a university Professor when that was still possible and uh I've always been skeptical of the measures that politicians use to assess the economy both unemployment that I'm skeptical that measure I'm very skeptical of inflation measures not in and of themselves but I'm not convinced that those are sufficiently valid measures reliable and valid measures to base our entire economic analysis on and so I'm wondering is if if you convert um the cost to cost in time and standardize it in that manner can you then rank order countries if you take a let's say a 50 commodity random sample of fundamental Goods can you then chart a progress graph of of countries relative move towards prosperity and you do that year by year can you derive yearly indexes and are those is that a good replacement for something like inflation if the inflation rate assessments take a look at page 142. we've got uh we've got 42 countries that we've done that with so we we go from Argentina to United States and look at all these different countries and measure what their uh income is doing their hourly income is doing with these commodity prices I would go back to great man yeah the World Bank commodity prices you know those are public prices so everybody there's no disagreement that these were the prices of those Commodities and then the next question is what do you use for the denominator below uh you can use a country's local reported average hourly income uh in this case we we're trying to get a number that we could use as a proxy for the whole planet and what we finally came up with is let's look at GDP per capita per hour so how much do you have generated on the planet per hour worked and let's use that as an index or a proxy for how productive people are getting because we also note that when Innovation occurs it shows up both in lower prices and higher incomes so it's important that the time prices are actually capturing both of those values because it's the ratio of those two numbers so time prices actually contain more information than just a money price so this graph or this graph these data this data that you talked about on page 142 you show for example that change in resource time price in China it was not point it's negative 97.5 percent and China's at the top of the list and so there's tremendous number of developing countries that are leaping forward so but but it's I would also suspect maybe this is wrong but tell me if it tell me if it's right or wrong uh there must be low hanging fruit to some degree when a country does emerge from its agrarian past let's say a non-industrial past into an industrial present and free up its markets and move into the modern capitalist age free market age and so China South Korea Sri Lanka Ireland does extraordinarily well is there any way of adjusting that for Baseline Prosperity I mean the Americans have done as well as the Chinese but they started off a lot better let's say in the last century right and you can make those comparisons you can put them side by side I think that the interesting thing for us is what are the slopes doing in these different countries I mean yeah the United States has got this this lower rate of growth but all of these other countries are catching up at such a rapid rate that that there's none of these countries that are actually going the other direction and yeah something eh yeah it really is so um now now the now the key with China uh is to remember that uh China and India China has done spectacularly well over the last uh 40 years um uh and and uh so has India it's very important to remember that those two countries were actually the most populous countries at the time when they were super super poor in other words if you're right China if you looked at China in 1960 or India in 1960 they already had Mass populations but they were super poor so what happens super abundance is not simply an outcome of adding more people to the world although that's important it's people times Freedom will give you very high rates of economic growth now I'm not suggesting for a second that I'm not suggesting for a second that China is a free Society but what I am saying well it's comparatively free compared to what it was it is much Freer than what it was when Mao killed 45 million of his uh fellow citizens another thing um another reason why this research is kind of important is because Gail mentioned the Club for Growth report Club for Growth was read by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s and between delightful how delightful between 1980 and 2015 they had this one China policy in place the Chinese government is very boastful and very proud that they have prevented or extinguished 400 million birds in China between 1980 and 2018. China as well as world would be much more prosperous societies if uh if uh if if that hadn't happened but it was a spectacular spectacular shot in the foot as you would expect from a Communist Regime because what they are left with now is a very unstable population uh pyramid yeah whereby the the population is getting old and there are not enough workers to support the economy of the size that they currently have so yeah they also have a plethora of men which they're going to pay for too that's a that's a recipe for social and stability in like 2016 it was maybe it was 2008 um the the the the the the the um uh the the sex ratio uh peaked at 120 Chinese men per hundred women which means that 20 of men in China could not hope to find a Chinese wife and there is very good evidence suggesting that men who do not uh have a partner are much more likely to engage in criminal activities yes there's very good evidence for that so one of the really killer things about this graph on page 142 is you have a column there entitled years to double personal resource abundance and so then by your criteria it's how ra how many years does it take for you to have to work half as long to get the same resource whatever that is and this is stunning this is 1980 to 2018 so basically a 40-year period over a 40-year period China's average years to double personal resource abundance was seven unbelievable but even countries like you list India it's 15 New Zealand 19 Finland 20. so that's really certainly within the confines of well that that's four dabblings in the average life man it's deadly and this is even among developed countries yeah it's really and the average was the average was 20 years now some people may say that uh doubling of personal abundance now we are not talking about you know we are talking about resources resources include things like beef rice coffee tea uh milk uh oranges bananas whatever now some people may say that doubling of abundance every 20 years is too slow but this is where at least at least a cursory understanding of history is very important people need to understand that homo sapiens has been around for 300 000 years and our standard of living was stagnant for tens or even hundreds of thousands of obvious nothing has changed exactly the same amount of food and resources that your your parents could buy you would be able to buy your children would buy so by historical standards the kind of appreciation in in abundance the kind of doubling of abundance of 20 years uh is actually well it's close to a miracle it's a it is a miracle it's unparalleled and it is really important to drive that point home I mean people think that they tend to think of human of change in human societies as the norm and that is in some sense true compared to animal societies which just don't change at all I mean a Grizzly now is exactly the same as a Grizzly was 60 000 years ago for all intents and purposes but you know even in very technologically advanced cultures like ancient Egypt uh which was a much faster developing country let's say uh Society than the typical Stone Age Society there were there were periods of time in the Egyptian archaeological record that exceeded A Thousand Years where there's zero evidence of any technological change whatsoever and so there are there are and then if you go back let's say to so-called Stone Age civilizations there's good anthropological evidence for the Persistence of some rituals which left a certain uh uh archaeological Mark Persistence of those rituals unchanged over twenty thousand a year period so the rule in biological systems is lack of change at the cultural level and even among human societies generally speaking rates of change are unbelievably slow and so for people to say well you know doubling every 20 years isn't fast enough it's like well a compared to what and the other thing to think about is how fast and doubling do you think we can stand you know because some of that is I know you think well oh no we're getting prosperous too fast isn't that a problem if that's a problem you need to have if you have to have a problem but it is challenging you know I mean because our society is changing so rapidly now it's actually hard for people to keep up with it you know they get superannuated in some sense so in any case it's a remarkable it's a remarkable set of observations and it's very difficult to to look at this without being being really sad I would say in some sense that we had to swallow so much apocalyptic nonsense for so many decades to the detriment of so many when the evidence is starkly clear that more people in Freer markets solves all the problems that everybody wants to solve faster than anything we've ever produced by a large margin I should like to point out of course that um whilst I'm cautiously or perhaps rationally optimistic about the future nothing in what Gail and i writes should be understood as a guarantee that things will go on improving in the future at the rates that we have seen before um you know in our conclusion of the book we identify three critical problems to maintaining uh super abundant growth by the way we should we should probably at some point uh Define what we mean by super abundance but but the three very important uh components of how we can ensure that super abundance continues well first of all um we we cannot have a population collapse uh which is something that Elon Musk uh continues to warn against now in the book we don't say that uh you know we don't take a we don't take a position on what is the optimal size of the world's population uh but what we do say is that parents when they are making decisions about having babies that those decisions are not made in a vacuum um when when parents are being told that bringing an additional child into the society is a crime that you are hurting the planet and the rest of your species uh if if if if that's what parents think then of course that will have an impact on their fecundity and in fact we now have studies uh that have been conducted or rather opinion polls that have been conducted over the last four years um and they show that people do take environmental apocalyptic uh warnings into account when making decisions about where to have babies or not um the the second the the second problem that we need to avoid if we are going to remain super abundant is of course freedom of speech freedom of speech is absolutely fundamental it is not only fundamental on a on a personal level uh if you cannot uh speak freely you cannot think freely you cannot express yourself freely but on a societal level um if you are following an idea of the cliff like Lemmings do um you know it could be a bad idea um it it if it's a bad idea then you are going to end up like going off the cliff right um that was the problem in communist societies I grew up under communism part of my life and uh because we didn't have freedom of speech people couldn't point out that the society was actually stagnating and in some ways retrogressing and we couldn't come up with a way of resolving our problems and get on on a on a better path and that is why uh Speech codes and banning of expression of ideas no matter how uh no matter how offensive we may find them after all heliocentrism was offensive at one point in the past but but if we prevent these ideas from being aired then we don't know really some of them may be very good and we should we should we should remember them and the third um we should learn from them and the third uh potential problem for super abundance is of course if the market uh gets uh destroyed through over regulation or socialization and the reason for that is very simple markets uh provide us with signals about what's valuable and what's not markets allow us to see which Innovations uh are going to be useful and which Innovations are going to be useless this is what's called the price mechanism in a free market economy prices tell you exactly what you need more of like baby formula in the United States or um you know oil and gas when it goes up that you need to produce more of that but uh if Government right then that's a that's a signal we should point out because it's so important for people to understand you know you you drew a connection between free speech and free thought and people often think of free speech as a hedonistic right in some sense I I and every other Yahoo could say exactly what we want whenever we want and maybe that's for our own you know enjoyment but that's not it exactly because there isn't any difference between speech and thought in a technical sense much of the thought that we undertake we undertaken discussions like this where we're exchanging ideas and modifying them and communicating and that free speech is thought and then the question is well what's thought and the answer that is well that's how we abstractly adapt to the Horizon of the future before we actually adapt to it so we try out new ideas that might match what's coming at us that's unpredictable in this virtual space that's characterized by the exchange of thought so that we don't have to die by making the wrong decisions when when we're actually forced to act and I would say we can make that a biological claim because the prefrontal cortex which is the home of abstract thought grew out of the motor cortex and its purpose is to run simulations of the world and simulations of potential action patterns in the world before you implement them so that you can weed out the Deadly Ones and not Implement them and so we actually evolved in the entire part of our brain which we use socially to kill bad ideas before they kill us and so then if you interfere with free speech you don't get to do that and free speech is associated with free markets in this crucial way that you describe because it is very difficult to know what's going to be valuable next as things change and the way we do that is we subject that computation to a massive cognitive instrument which is the free market hundreds of millions of people are making decisions all the time right on the edge of change and if we know the price of something we're we're as caught up with the future as we can possibly be and so if we we interfere with that on our great Peril because that is the cognitive mechanism that keeps us updated I would simply add to that and then I will hand it over to Gail is that free speech and free markets are learning mechanisms when you say something which is stupid somebody else can say well that actually doesn't work and if you are smart you're going to internalize that comment and you are never going to you know express that to you again you are going to internalize the the truth uh and and the market is a learning mechanism as well provided that it's free so it can indicate what works and what doesn't and it's free so it can vary right so I think that uh you know making this connection between free speech and and the market is it really it's this idea that wealth is fundamentally knowledge um it's the growth and knowledge that distinguishes us from the Stone Age it's entirely due to the growth of knowledge and this is a point that uh one of our friends George Gilder makes he says wealth is knowledge growth is learning and money is time and from those three propositions we can derive this theorem that you can measure the growth of knowledge with time so it's really you know how do we grow knowledge well there's also there's also a definition of knowledge that's rooted in there to some degree because you might say well if you can do the same amount in half the time you're now twice as smart you have twice as much knowledge that's like a definition right because the no the knowledge you'd have to Define knowledge as useful in relationship to something which might be the production of something of value and so if you could do that twice as fast or with half as many resources especially time well then your knowledge is doubled that's by definition in some real sense right so we Define abundance is this a measurement of time prices as they relate to your adding you must be adding more knowledge either making the price the money price is lower or you're increasing income or doing the combination of both because it takes you less and less time to earn the money to buy that thing and it's a consequence of this growth and knowledge and that growth and knowledge it comes from all over the place it's not just researchers in the lab it's it's just not professors it's everybody on the planet is contributing these little bits and pieces of knowledge all the time well look you can tell I'm always I always find it a miracle to go to Home Depot especially the tool aisles you know and you you walk down into aisle and there's like 5 000 kinds of fasteners and you think well what does that mean it means that some somebody generally male has found some little problem when he was hanging up pictures on a wall or trying to get a bolt off of a particularly recalcitrant piece of Machinery some little practical problem and then spent Untold hours figuring out how that could just be made better and then you just have shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and rows and rows and rows of that and like I learned because I've done a lot of house renovations and that sort of thing I learned that if it if a construction job is difficult that means you didn't find the right tool because someone out there has figured out how to do that well and you can certainly see that with com obviously with computer software as well so it is miraculous that this is the case that's another definition what a market is the market is a place where you go to find people that can solve your problem better than you can solve it right right right right right okay so let's walk through your book again a little bit in more detail shall we um the first chapter so part one is thanos's deadly idea from Antiquity to the present and Beyond and so that's this idea of this intrinsic limit of growth and the fundamental pathology of human population and so we've we've kind of dispensed with that fairly effectively are we in the midst of progress are we facing the apocalypse it well probably both but certainly we're in the midst of progress um and we covered Thanos is the intellectual and practical progenitors and Julian Simon and the bet that made him famous and in part two measuring abundance new methodology empirical evidence and in-depth analysis and so let's go over the Simon abundance framework because you've both done specific work on that and I mean is there anything that we've started to cover it have we covered it enough or are there more things you want people to know about it Marion you want to talk I think I'll leave that to um uh I think I'll leave that to Gail yeah sure absolutely so we go back to this idea of time prices let's convert everything to a Time price and what that allows us to do in addition is we can apply a Time price to any product any place at any time so I can go back to France in 1800 and figure out what the time price was for a loaf of bread and I can compare it to the time price of an orange in New York City or Toronto today so once we've created these time prices for everything then let's see what they're doing over time and that's the empirical so we've got this framework this analytical framework that says use these uh convert things to time prices and then look at the change in time price over time and that will tell you what's happening to individuals what's what's happening in their life in terms of their personal resource abundance and that is just this measurement of well it cost you this much time uh yesterday it cost you this much time today your abundance is increasing by that ratio is the percentage change in that ratio you know if once again drops by 75 percent it means I get four for the price of one my personal abundance is increasing by 300 percent so take the framework go and apply it to all of these commodity whatever Commodities finished goods bicycles drills and see what's happened to these uh time prices and yeah so so let me ask you about that these these Commodities that you've looked at so let's first of all Define that so so we're assuming that people acquire and work for things they both need and want and we're going to not take an a priori a stance of a priority judgment about that we're going to assume there's all sorts of things that people need and want and that there's no externally reliable way of determining what those should be and so we'll let people make those decisions themselves and and people will vary and be similar in some ways in relationship to those decisions how do you ensure that when you look at the Improvement in taught in efficiency in relationship to production that you've properly sampled the domain of commodities okay good question so we started with this idea of let's just look at these basic fundamental Commodities that have not changed over time a bushel of wheat a ton of iron ore uh let's start with those because if we were going to go someplace uh uh you know some island off in the Pacific what would you want to take with you well you want to have these basic Commodities that's where we came up with this basic 50. and let's subject that basic 50 to this okay I want to dig in I want to dig into that more because it's really important right because this is in some sense the issue of are you randomly sampling the environment right so like because you're trying to take a snapshot of human progress and and economic efficiency and we want to we might want to say we might want to say well do you have the thing you're taking a snapshot of properly sample so you pick 50 why 50 and which 50 and how did you Define basic well we kind of go back to we start with ehrlix and Simon's bet and says let's look at those five because they both kind of Ehrlich said well these are five non-renewables that you know they should run out right because they're non-renewable let's put those let's let's expand that then let's jump out to energy let's look at crude oil what's the price of a barrel of oil you know for the last we've got really good data on the barrel of oil it represents this fundamental unit of measurement in terms of of the price of energy and then let's add food to it let's add other materials to it so what's the price of a two by four what is the price of a ton of cotton what are these basic fundamental Commodities and we were also kind of limited to what we could find out there that had good price data on it and what we found is you know you go back to 1980 and you kind of have about 50 of these things that that we have good data on that we can we can use and okay so you found you found that you found that that that that with 50 that was well that's a fairly large number of resources but it's also you could get reliable data on 50. could you get reliable data on a hundred do you know or or did it sort of top out for you at 50. yeah no the further back in time you get you go uh the the the less data you have on nominal prices so for example by the time we get to um uh 1960 we have we have 37 but we look at that too we look at from 1960 to 2018 and then from 1980 to 2018 just to satisfy those who may be saying that 40-year period is not substantial enough and uh to to really do time prices for that data you need the global GDP divided by the number of hours of work which which we do in part of the book but then and this is critical then we go back to 1850 and we look at uh prices of Commodities and food uh in the United States from the perspective of blue collar workers and unskilled laborers now this is very important for a number of reasons uh very often people will say oh well you're using average data and that's skewed by the rich okay so we'll take those out we'll just look at people at the very bottom of the income strata and that's the blue color workers working in the manufacturing and then unskilled workers like for example uh people who clean the hallways janitors okay now we have wage data going back to 1770s and we have commodity and food data going back to 1850. so here's what we found uh I'm just going to give a few examples so a blue collar worker between 1850 and 2018 that's page 157. uh rice drops in time price by 99 which means you now have 111 units for the price of one unit uh pork drops by 98.7 which means that now you have 75 pounds of pork rather than one pound of pork um that your ancestors could buy in 1850 uh coffee drop of 98 relative to wages which means you now get 49 pounds of coffee for the same amount of work that would take you to buy one pound of coffee beef dropped by 85 percent you now get seven for the price of one so that's the blue collar worker and we can also look at the least fortunate uh in uh well least fortunate employed people in the United States and that's the unskilled again an example a sugar dropped by 99 means you now get 107 pounds of sugar instead of one pound of sugar in 1850 um rice once again you get 53 the pork 35 36 pounds instead of one corn 26 pounds for the price of one lamb four instead of one so you know you go over these um uh stats and what you're finding is that so long as you have the nominal price of a commodity in 1850 and a nominal wage hourly wage in 1850 and then you come to compare it to 2020 or 2018 or whatever you can see these Trends and they are the same whether you're looking globally or in the United States yeah you said you say when you're looking at uh Jack's 26 Commodities here between 1850 and 2018 the average pra increased by 57 basically 5 800 percent so yes that's personal resource abundance correct right right and the numeric equivalent of that the dollar equivalent of that is the the hourly compensation rate Rose from six cents an hour to 32 dollars an hour so but they but the pra personal Resorts abundance uh index would be a more accurate gauge of that Improvement so the Improvement is it's very difficult I think for modern young people in particular to really understand how poor people were absolutely yeah absolutely the best the best example I like to use is the sugar example and it's like well the time it took you to earn the money to buy one pound of sugar in 1850 how many pounds do you think you could get today I'd love to serve my students on this and they'll say oh like two pounds or four pounds you get 227 pounds it might explain why we're also fat is because sugar has become just tremendously abundant and uh you know but but it's not just sugar it's all these other ones uh you know the the average the price has fallen by 98 which means you know for the time it took you to get one unit you get 50 units right right right right right so and so okay and so well let's continue with this so um why why super abundance why why that title well I I well should I take it okay I feel like I'm talking too much you should tell me to shut up but look um it's very simple um if if early was right which he wasn't uh abundance of resources would be declining Simon was right abundance is increasing but abundance can increase at two different speeds if abundance of resources what we call personal resource abundance is increasing at a lower rate than population so if population increases by five percent but personal resource abundance is only increasing by two percent we call that increasing abundance but if population is increasing at five percent but your resource abundance is increasing by 10 we call that super abundance in the book we looked at hundreds of Commodities goods and even Services going back all the way to 1850 18 different data sets that we got from third parties mostly uh so that we are not accused of cherry picking not all of them but most of them all 18 data sets have been growing at a super abundant speed which means that our wealth this this abundance is increasing faster than population and what that tells us is that on average every human being's contributes contributes more than they consume we are destroyers but we are also creators and it and it turns out that we are more of a Creator than we are a consumer or a destroyer we create wealth and also also that the rate at which that is true is increasing rather than decreasing it is so our data suggests that the early data sets going back to 1850 and so on there we have these increases in in abundance of resources uh at about two and a half percent per year um uh compounded growth rate but by the time you get to the 1980s and Beyond you get to about three and a half percent so so on okay so so now we can tell parents that means we can tell parents that not only is your child not going to be on average a net terrain or the world's resources not only are you not going to make other people poorer and the planet more Barren by bringing another child into the world that you're actually doing a positive good is that if you have 10 children everyone will be somewhat richer because of that the chances that they will be richer and the chances that one of those 10 babies is actually uh going to be able to contribute something uh substantial to the welfare of human beings is higher than if you just have a one child right right wouldn't that be lovely and I do believe that it's the case you know so it's really that's really something to be able to tell people you know I'm I I watched in my own life people react certainly not positively to pregnant women talking about their babies their babies they're going to bring into the world it's so awful to see you know it's well how you know and and parents themselves they have this this discussion they have with themselves I suppose particular moral conundrum for young women is like well do I really want to bring a baby into a world like this and the answer is well it's it's a world that's getting better and your baby will probably have a better time of it than you did or there's a reasonable probability that but your baby will also be a net good for everyone else really like not not in some naive idiot Hallmark greeting card simplistic way but really actually solidly and and in spite of all the Dooms saying of the malthusians and the apocalypse and uh and the anti-capitalists and so forth so that's a lovely thing to be able to tell people and that brings us really to the importance of innovation where I think uh Gail uh really contributed heavily to that particular chapter so I think that I I wouldn't mind if he wanted to talk a little bit about uh Innovation if you don't mind yeah so so here's the idea as we begin our model thinking about you know it begins with human beings and we focus on that because the only source of new ideas are human beings and those those ideas really entail how do we create new knowledge with these capitals that we have we Define Capital as anything we can use to create something of value so you have physical capital human capital intellectual Capital Financial Capital cultural capital and so I I begin with this idea when I can actually manifest that idea and convert the idea into to Something Real it becomes this thing we call an invention but in order for a taxi move into this Innovation level it has to go through the market and the market is really where you take these things and they're tested to see if you've truly created value and if it creates value then this invention becomes an innovation and it's it's in our progress is entirely due to our ability ability to innovate okay so Lumber glomberg has showed this I think is dovetails with your work uh so when Lombard's done his return on investment rank ordering of solutions to the problems that beset us he showed that the highest return his economists calculated for investment in the future was investment really into Early Childhood care some of that was early childhood nutrition and part of the reason for that as far as I can tell is that well if a child's growth is stunted in early life because of malnutrition one of the things that happens is they don't develop their intelligence their intrinsic intelligence to the degree that that's possible so there's been a walloping increase in the average IQ of the human population over the last century and a huge part especially at the lower end which has been brought up and a huge part of that is that well there's just so many fewer people suffering from absolute privation and so if the most valuable resource that we have is the capacity to innovate then the most the most logical problem to Target is that which might interfere with the development of say General cognitive ability in childhood and it turns out that that's actually quite inexpensive to Foster and so that that that fostering of innovation there's lots of things that have to do that but one of them is definitely a concentration on Early Childhood nutrition let's say and it really goes back to this ability can we get people to be able to uh learn more or discover and create new knowledge and if they're if they're healthy if they have light if they if they have these fundamental physical needs met then they get on these learning curves and the interesting thing about a learning curve is whenever you double the output of something cost per unit fall between 20 and 30 percent and so you're really seeing the more we make the the cheaper that we can make them so we we we think about how do we actually grow an economy Moore's Law we refer to that all the time but it's really a function of quantity it's not a function of time it's because we're making these chips at such high quantities every time we double production that cost drops by 20 percent we're just making trillions and trillions of these chips well this is okay tell me what you think of this guys so I've been thinking about justifications for inequality economic inequality because you have absolute privation as a problem and and the free market is really good at ameliorating Absolute privation there's no doubt about that but there's still a fair bit of relative economic inequality and so you might say well those rich people like do we really need to people who have billions of dollars and I think well we might need Elon Musk like you know that's that's something we could all think about but in any case here's a reason we need some people to be extremely rich I mean when cell phones first came out I think they were like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a piece when when they were hooked directly to a satellite Network and you know they're big and bulky and only the most uh wealthy could clearly afford them and use them productively given that given their great expense but what was what was what like five years later everybody had one and now they're not just cell phones there's these stunning technological Miracles that are well they're they're they're just beyond comprehension what those things can do but it isn't obvious to me at all that everyone could have ever got one if only a few people you know if we weren't willing to put up with the fact that only a few hyper wealthy people could have them to begin with and maybe we can't get really Innovative technological uh we can't really get make Innovative technological progress at the commodity level unless we have pools of people at every level of wealth so that we can produce a market for something new among the hyper rich before we can produce enough of it so that everybody can have it and so is would that mean that inequality does that imply that economic inequality is actually a prerequisite for the mass production of Highly complex technological um gadgetry let's say for for everyone yeah you know yeah here's what I'd say Miriam is uh look these new Innovations come out and you have typically these these significant fixed costs up front to make the first year yeah yeah yeah and who pays for that the rich pay for that and then the marginal cost the not the cost to the next one that falls dramatically think about software think about some of these uh apps that cost you a million dollars to create the app but the cost for the next copy is a few cents the first one cost the first one costs you know yeah 100 million dollars and the millions one costs 15 cents but you have to get you have to ratchet your way down that price uh uh ladder yeah who's gonna do that for you it's the rich that are willing to put up those costs of pay those prices up front well and then well you think too and then if if it wasn't you could say well maybe government pools of capital could manage that but it's not the case because like government isn't going to buy enough massive flat screen TVs when they first become available because the government doesn't consume like an individual whereas a rich person in some sense does right because they'll go after consumer products and so I don't think we can replace the benevolent utility of some people with massive pools of capital with any communal replacement see I I think yeah the difference between rich and poor is five years right yes yes you know I get it today Well everybody's going to get this in five years yeah and maybe in 10 years it'll be two years I I remember very distinctly a conversation I had with a very close friend of mine about 20 years ago we were driving and he said how long before um access to Internet becomes a basic human right and of course today in the United States government pays people who uh cannot afford access to broadband internet out of the government pocket it has basically become a basic human right as far as Americans are concerned um let me say one thing about uh by the way by that I don't mean that I buy into Universe into these things as human rights what I'm saying is that people perceive it as as a human rights but I think that the the importance of the the discussion between equality and inequality is actually much deeper than that equality I'll be very Frank equality is stasis it's another word for stasis inequality inequality is in my view uh the Midwife of progress well certainly the Midwife of of trade because if we're completely equal we have nothing to trade uh well yes but but in in so many different ways uh inequality is the Midwife of of human progress uh by that I mean uh primarily material but maybe maybe some other as well let's say that you have a society which is completely static I'm just going to come up with with an example of everybody living in a cave and then somebody decides well I have this great idea of actually building a a Hut on a hill with a better View and and so forth there is an inequality of housing there going on for a little while whilst whilst other people realize that they they can improve how they live their lives um in production in uh in in even in personal Behavior if you have a society which which which is static and and doesn't change and somebody realizes that hey maybe this form of behavior like learning reading books can read can lead to a better life that in itself is a way of inequality when when a company uh decides that instead of relying on human labor creating pins we are going to buy a machine that is going to create an inequality or production process but that is in itself going to move the society forward so right so you're kind of so you're basically pointing out that as a as a positive change begins to manifest itself in a society it first manifests itself as a marked inequality it has to because it can't appear everywhere at once yes because so and the equality basis it it means that everything is the same and an inequality is the disrupter it tells people that things can be done differently now some people make stupid choices and they suffer the consequences but if those choices are good uh you can become fabulously rich or important in your community because you have figured out a better way of living and then and then other people are going to have that five years down the road if you're a reasonable market player yeah yeah definitely so the other thing I would add to this is we go back to Something Real basic and and I think you have income inequality but you also have time inequality and when we look at that from that perspective it looks much different so go back to 1960 go to India uh typical Indian would take about seven or eight hours a day to just earn the money to buy their daily rice and um in the United States in 1960 would take an hour to buy uh the a wheat and so both of these Commodities have fallen by 90 percent their time price so who's better off well the guy in the in in India he used to spend uh eight hours now he spends only uh one hour so he picks up seven hours the guy in the U.S spent an hour and now I only spent six minutes he only picks up 55 minutes so the difference in time right time inequality gets really compressed when you have this Innovation on these prices especially when you're dealing with these basic fundamental food items the poor or the the primary beneficiaries of that because now they have so much more time relative to where they were 20 or 30 years ago to now go learn and pursue and be creative and that's the beauty of time prices not only is it immune from governments fiddling around with inflation numbers but also you can make international comparisons you no longer have to figure out what is the exchange rate between the American dollar and the Indian rupee um look at the minutes that the people work there look at the minutes people work here and that will give you a sense whether inequality is increasing or decreasing right right right okay well let's let's try to cover two more things before we before we finish um we haven't got to part three of your book so that's human flourishing and its enemies so I want to talk about that and then um the other thing I'd like you to discuss is well how are you how is your work being received both publicly and by other economists so let's start with the the close off the the walk through your book we'll go through part three human flourishing in its enemies you have four chapters there one is Humanity's seven million year Journey from the rainforest to the Industrial Revolution chapter 8 is the age of innovation and the great enrichment chapter nine is where do Innovations come from population growth and freedom and then the enemies of progress from The Romantics to the extreme environmentalists so I'll let you guys comment on part three first and then let's go to reception of your work and and your hope for these ideas as well can I back up to part two real quick absolutely take another piece of the story that we want to tell all right so we're going to go back to a bit of section two Gail's gonna take us on a uh on a journey through the remainder of section two okay so if you're on page 222 you'll see this box that we developed and the idea is if we can take and measure let's put population on the horizontal axis and let's put personal resource abundance on the vertical axis and then let's look at 1980 in say 1980 and let's just index uh the personal resource abundance and population to a value of one so that red that red box represents the size of the global resource pie in 1980. so two things happen first of all your personal resource abundance is increased by 252 percent so we go up on the vertical axis but population also increased by 71 percent so you go out on the horizontal axis so that's a stunning graph it is a stunning grass it really makes me realize that it's not 1980 anymore not 1980 at all so when you come you combine those two the red box is the 1980 Global resource pie the 2018 green box is is 2018 and you look at the difference and and you can you can measure those two in our our total abundance that green area that's 500 percent larger than it was in 1980. so the compound annual growth rate of this uh population level resource abundance is is almost five percent a year and what's interesting about that um is you look at the elasticity in other words if I increase population by one percent what happens to personal resource abundance and we see there that for every one percent increase in population your personal resource abundance increased by three and a half percent and the biologists must just hate you guys eh well here's the deal is once again the biologists would have been right if they would have considered knowledge as the key unit of measurement instead of atoms if you measure knowledge so information information rather than just pure matter right it's it's it's this knowledge that can grow not only can It Grow it can be shared with another person that's not rivalrous in other words you and I can share the same knowledge so we get this ability to create this substance that we can share with each other that it doesn't you know if I have a Snickers bar and I give it to you I lose it but knowledge there is no reason for that there was no reason for the biologists to presume except that they used bad bad animal analogies let's say that the same units of biological activity would necessarily require the same units of cost I mean so so we're not well modeled by yeast and we're not perhaps well modeled by rats because we have this capacity to abstract a good biologist would say hey that's a fundamental transformation in the nature of biological reality it's not something that can just be hand waved away and and Malthus did not take that into account and that means he was wrong biologically not just economically and I think as I said before the evolution of the prefrontal cortex is a good Exemplar of that a perfect example of the difference between atoms which are final or finite and knowledge which is potentially infinite is the most expensive car in the world called Bugatti Veyron it costs 18 million dollars when you drive it out of the the dealership when you then smash it into a wall it is a heap of plastic and metal worth maybe tens of thousands of dollars the amount of atoms is the same but they've been rearranged in a Less Pleasant way which makes the difference between an 18 million dollar car and a scrap of Heap that's the difference between talking about atoms and their finite nature and knowledge which can then recreate and which can which can arrange and rearrange them yeah sure sure and what you're doing there too is offering a real criticism of the even the notion or certainly the overuse of the notion of zero-sum game it's like no no things aren't finite the way that you've been conceptualizing finite because it doesn't matter it matters how much stuff there is but it matters even more how the stuff is organized and I mean you can certainly see that when we're you just think about it for a few seconds about our ability to store information and never decreasing spaces and that we haven't hit a limit to by any stretch of the imagination I mean hard drive technology just gets stunningly better faster and faster and what's the limit to that the plank length or some unbelievably infinitesimal uh tiny tiny space you know that would that would constitute the absolute physical limit of our ability to pack information into a given unit of of say time and space we're not even we're nowhere near that yet well that actually leads me to a very interesting observation made by Nobel prize winning Economist Paul Romer who talked about the combinatorial revolution do I have time to talk about it very briefly yeah yeah so the uh the periodic table has about 100 uh elements uh in it right and um if you take a simple compound like uh like a bronze it is constituted only of two elements which is copper and Tin right um and it took us thousands of years to get to a point where we realized that by combining copper and Tin we could actually come up with bronze which was actually useful for all sorts of things but now once you start but the the the the the the the the number of calculations then the number of Two element calculations are of course 100 times 99 right it takes a lot of time to go through all of that once you get to four elements that means hundred times 99 times 98 times 97 you get to 94 million possible combinations and here is the astonishing thing when you start thinking about combinations of 10 elements the number of combinations is greater than the number of seconds since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago right so we literally we are we are very smart compared to our ancestors but I think that when people look upon us in 100 or 200 years time they will think we are very very stupid indeed because they will come up with all sorts of things by having more people more freedom and more computing power that we couldn't even imagine so so in some sense you're making the case that the idea that we will run out of resources giving combinatorial given combinatorial possibility is absurd is the idea that will run out of music oh Gail and I have this wonderful uh Gail take it over because this is this is one of those things that we are very proud of right so I always curse my students how many keys on a piano well there's 88 keys right well then how many songs are in a piano well there's really no songs in the piano it's a trick question the songs are in the minds of human beings and what is that number well it's really infinite and so if you go back and ask Thanos or Malthus how many keys on a piano they say 88 well how many songs uh Thanos would say well you got 88 keys you must only have 88 songs right let's go into this crazy thing so but but kind of back to the your rule number four uh about your perspective and when you say uh you know do we compare ourselves to who other people are or do we compare who we were yesterday this little chart that we discussed allows us to go back and look back in time and and it's really the proper perspective if we look at not who we compare ourselves against today or who the who we compare ourselves to out in the future but look back in time you'll see that that perspective is going wow it is just I'm just I'm just I'm just scrolling through these these graphs that as you go farther and farther back in time it's stunning it's absolutely stunning yeah and and and so I think the proper perspective come up with the proper way to measure and then use the proper perspective will give you this completely different picture about where we where we've come to and the potential going forward yeah you guys must be pretty damn thrilled about this book okay we are very thrilled but I think that uh playing for something that Gail said uh about your rule number four is that um you see I think that if you compare yourself to other people today or you know sort of utopian future where everything is working optimally for everyone everywhere at all times um then that can only lead to envy and resentment whereas if you compare your life today in a civilized society to life before you end up with a different emotion which is one of gratitude and I think that what is so fundamentally um what is very problematic is that so many people in the world are either resentful or envious rather than grateful for the extraordinary uh achievement that Humanity has made um already well let's that brings us perhaps if we're ready to go past part two to part three which was well you you one of the chapters there I think it's chapter 10 let me just get back to the table of contents here you said uh these are the enemies of progress from The Romantics to the extreme environmentalists well first of all so do you guys do you have any thoughts on why people would be I mean are people opposed to these ideas do they think you're wrong about what you're saying do they what kind of criticisms are you attracting and and why are you attracting them we're here to ask you that question Dr Peterson psychologist that Marion reasonable job just in in the in the conversation fragments a few seconds earlier um misplaced Envy is a really big problem resentment's a really big problem historical ignorance is a really big problem you know I mean people don't know how bad it was they don't know how far we've come they're never taught that they're not taught how Terrible Things Have Become in many places in the 20th century like my students in my personality class these are smart kids at the University of Toronto they were well educated by by comparative standards none of them knew anything about what happened in Stalin's Soviet Union or in Mao's China or in Cambodia no one had ever taught them and so so I I think you know young people they they see inequality in the world and they see some of the painful consequences of inequality because there are painful consequences and then they're enticed into finding a quick source of blame that requires no thought and also enticed into manifesting a moral virtue that is neither moral nor virtuous and so and then and so here we are and instead of uh you know I've thought for many years decades that whenever I walk out on the street and things aren't on fire I'm pretty damn thrilled at how stable and peaceful things are I don't take electricity for granted I don't take the Integrity of the supply chain for granted I truly think these are Miracles I don't think the fact that the default interaction between human beings in in this in the Western World broadly speaking the default economic transaction is based on trust I don't take that for granted that's a bloody Miracle it took us hardly any societies have ever managed that and it took us thousands and tens of thousands of years to produce that but I think children our children are so badly educated by people who have no idea they have no idea about economics they have no idea about history they have no idea about privation or suffering they're looking for easy answers and and uh and and people to blame for the remaining you know catastrophes of the world and I think your work is an unbelievably good antidote to that and and something to offer young people that's so bloody positive without and and that it's you know miraculous and not naive at the same time like what a good combination that is well here's here's the question I love to ask my students is what would I have to pay you for you to never use your your your iPhone and the internet again for the remainder of your life and I've never get I've never been able to get a student to to do it for less than five million dollars it's like we have this five million dollar thing that you own you're all you're all five millionaires because you get to walk around with these devices uh oh yeah definitely you were you were so prosperous so rich compared to to anybody that's come before you how could you not be anything other than than just just hyper grateful for the life that we have well you know I think that one of the things we need to do about this is we need to start training young people to think about themselves as possessed of more possibility than they know what to do with and then encouraged to harness that in in so say well look you you have all the food that you could have and you have all the information that there is you've got it all in front of you now that you have it all in front of you what's the most noble Vision you can bring forth to make use of that possibility you know and and I know some of the research I've done on helping people make vision for the future future authoring program we show them pretty clearly that you can motivate students we drop the dropout rate of boys in in Community College 50 by just having them sit down for 90 minutes and develop a vision so you say look you look at what's in front of you way more than anyone's ever had in history and some people might have a little more in front of them than you like certainly but when you have more than you can ever use how much do you need and and and then who should you be to live up to that well that's you know our Collective problem at the moment trying to solve that and hopefully solving it before we let bitterness and resentment and historical ignorance get the upper hand because it's kind of a battle at the moment yes in our book we do point to um a number of people who have made a tremendous difference in the history of our species we talk about uh Gutenberg for example and his printing press uh we talk about uh what and his uh steam engine uh we talk about summer wise the the guy who realized that when doctors wash their hands they weren't killing their patients and things like that and so he had a fun time with that didn't he didn't he end up like persecuted in an insane asylum and died a miserable death for all his advances advancing Humanity that's right uh that's right uh it certainly wasn't accepted um at the time just like Galileo's observations and whatever but um but I think that if if this book could um imbue young people with the understanding that they have worse that they have something to contribute that it is more noble to apply yourself to changing Society for the better rather than constantly bitching about problems in society that you don't intend to do anything about except to complain and and go on marches you know do something something proactive if you if you see uh that there are children in in Africa dying from a uh from a curable disease go and join uh the group of people who are going to discover a cure to it or whatever um yeah or figure out how the bloody faculties of Education I've been thinking about this for like 10 years you know with our computer technology every single child I would say on the planet but certainly in the in the states where everyone has access to computational equipment every single child should be an expert speed reader because computers could train children to automate letter phoneme and word recognition perfectly rapidly because computers are great at math practice and if the faculties of Education had an ounce of Integrity they would have been working diligently on the problem of getting children over that hump because there's a hump in reading comprehension a because to begin with like there is when you're learning how to play music you have to automate letter recognition and syllable recognition and word recognition and then phrase recognition so you get a phrase and it go at a glance as soon as you've got that you can start to read for meaning it's no longer effortful and then as soon as you can read for meaning of course it's it's just as engaging as watching a movie which people obviously don't have to be taught to do and so there are all these problems that are laying out there in the world and people have a set of problems that bug them that they could be working on fixing and they have all this technology to fix it it's like that's that's what you want to do is figure out what what you think needs to be fixed and then take all this wealth that you've had put at your disposal and fix it man and then you got something to do with your life and we could start with the proposition that it's good that you're around how's that you're not a cancer on the face of the planet and you don't have to hang your head in shame because you're ruining everything quite the contrary that's actually wrong and I don't just mean wrong morally I mean wrong in the sense you guys have pointed out it's wrong technically no that's wrong those biologists got it wrong uh our Innovation uh our Innovation framework um is of course uh embedded in a national culture and let me say a few words about that um the cultures go through periods of tremendous openness to change technological change um and Technology of course manifests itself in great advances in biotechnology industry whatever even education but they can also ossify close themselves off and Destroy themselves from within a perfect example of that would be the difference between song China and Ming China and the succeeding dynasties some China in the 12th Century A.D was a tremendous place of openness and Innovation and uh and and and relative Freedom it was during that period that the Chinese have come up with paper money the compass gunpowder and then the dynasty collapse and it was replaced by particularly tyrannical one um Ming and successor and China went into a technological um downward spiral in which it remained for the next uh 800 years so the analogy to the United States I think would be that in the 1950s and the 1960s uh there certainly was a tremendously forward-looking um uh forward-looking mentality which talked about flying cars and um uh travel to the Moon travel to travel well not just travel to the to the moon but Interstellar travel and all sorts of things and uh I I think that especially in the last couple of decades uh maybe since the end of the.com bubble um um and and of course the postmodern Triumph in in universities I think that that sort of optimism has been replaced by a sense that um a personal agency is no longer that important that uh oh it's worse it's worse than that Marion it's I've watched this with young men and you know it's they're being taught that personal agency first of all perhaps doesn't exist that that's just a cover story for the use of compulsion and power because that's in some sense the post-modern claim but that even if it does exist that all that agency and this isn't keeping with this malthusian Doctrine is that well you shouldn't be exercising your agency because you're just part of the world destroying forests and so it'd be better it'd be better for the planet it'd be better for the planet if you didn't exist but if you have to go to all the goddamn trouble of existing and imposing yourself on existence itself then you should at least have the good sense not to do anything and I I do believe that that's the message especially that young men are getting that they're a burden on the planet that and and if they you know if they if they don't just shut up about their Good Fortune about being here they certainly shouldn't go around you know trying to do anything because God only knows what will come out of that and it's so demoralizing it's so awful to watch but I think the pendulum is swinging uh back at least a little bit I mean you have uh your podcast and your reach uh our book um had been endorsed by Nobel Prize and economists a former um higher level government officials uh by uh best-selling authors um and I think that uh especially when you show people the data and you explain what they are what they're looking at and that that it is objective that world is really getting better not in spite of population growth but at least in large part because of population growth uh they start uh sinking uh thinking very differently um and and uh and hopefully this this particular book will be a bit of an antidote to that kind of anti-humanism and anti-natalism that is destroying generations of of people we didn't talk about it very much but in the third part of the book I talk about um I talk about these new studies on the rise in so-called Eco anxiety amongst children throughout the Western World children are being scared to death that every sandwich they eat every holiday they take is somehow destroying the planet psychologists are now seeing families who find it very difficult to cope with living in the modern world because they feel that their activity is destroying the planet this antenatalist anti-humanist um view is deeply damaging not just to the um General future of our species but to individual lives of of men women and children in the world today yeah it does nothing well the other it's also it's also it also is counterproductive in relationship to the stated goals of the people producing the anxiety because what happens to men who are demoralized young men who are demoralized is that because they lose hope and then don't put in effort and become cynical that they their relationships get fractured and they have no productive activity and so their lives get more and more difficult and and and cynicism inducing as they withdraw into this sort of nihilistic negative Buddhism in some sense and then they get bitter and then they get resentful and then they get angry and then look the hell out and so because if you push people into a corner by demoralizing them bubble like the very nature of their existence itself or about existence itself it isn't that they're just gonna wander away quietly and disappear into the woodwork like like mice some of them will do that but others will turn into unbelievable monsters and we always threw up our hands and wave around when we see something happen like happened in Buffalo it's like well why did that happen it's like well if you wanted to know you could know but you don't want to know it's interesting you should mention it is because in the last chapter on enemies of progress we actually discuss some of the mass Shooters in the United States over the last five years or so and many uh have been uh have been driven by malthusian concerns uh one of the one of the shooters in in Walmart I believe it was in El Paso left behind him a memorandum saying that there are too many people in the world and if you want to be good for the planet we have to start culling culling uh our fellow human beings well look man if there are too many if there are too many people on the planet and we're facing an apocalypse because of it well why isn't that the moral thing to do you know and people people keep asking why do these shooters there's lots of reasons these shooters do what they do and a lot of it's a real pathological narcissism but they don't leave behind manifestos because they haven't been thinking they are and they are often possessed by these these antenatalist and malthusian ideas there's no doubt about that and that's part of what they do to justify their destructive narcissism you say well I'm look at me I'm you know I'm a moral Paragon because I'm getting rid of some of the excess population it's like well I'm I'm going to view that with a bit of skepticism thank you very much but it's not like they're not being handled handled the handed the ammunition by the right thinking biologists in prestigious universities who Proclaim so self-righteously that there are too many people on the planet yeah you go back you go back Jordan to the Unabomber if you remember him and his Manifesto and you look at who he was trying to blow up he actually targeted research centers that were trying to come up with uh cures for uh natalist uh diseases and problems like you could attack the very source of of new life because your ideology says there's too many people yeah so one of the things we could conclude with is for everyone watching and listening if you are possessed by a set of ideas that's predicated on the claim that in some fundamental ontological manner there are too many people for you then you should take a serious look at what you believe because there's nothing in that that's good and your claim that that belief is what everyone's sensible would believe if they only cared about the planet is like first of all just exactly what sort of Saint are you and second of all where the hell's your evidence for that claim and so yeah I'm appalled at how frequently those claims are put forward in universities under the guise of some Transcendent morality and some what is worship of the abstract planet in some sense that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and to sacrifice actual people to that it's just beyond comprehension so maybe your book is a blow in the other direction I know your work has been so far and like this book looks to me like something that's really gonna give those who think differently from this something really difficult to contend with so wouldn't that be lovely it would we are very grateful for the opportunity to talk about it on your podcast today yeah well hey I'm so happy about your work it's so it's so lovely to see these arguments be made in such a level-headed manner and so in such a deep-rooted empirical manner what are the economists let's are you being criticized by the occult by Economist as well like what sort of reception are your suggestions for the retooling of measurement metrics what sort of response are you receiving from economists for example well when we present when we present this perspective the first response is just kind of this little bit of a surprise it's like no response and then okay go go in and look at the data and then come back and tell us where what we're missing here what do we what are we missing is there a problem with the data is there a problem with our logic uh follow us through on this and let us know where we've made a mistake in our thinking yeah yeah yeah yeah well that's good that's good so that means that while what that seems to imply is that well a you haven't made any obvious mistakes but B your approach is sufficiently unexpected which which I think is pretty clear from a cultural perspective that it's actually going to take people a while to digest it and come back with the appropriate suggestions for improvement you know real criticism of the of the positive and useful sort yeah I would say that so far the book has been circulating uh for long enough it's early drafts amongst well-known economists uh that if there was any serious uh problem with the methodology we would have been told and we haven't so the big test of the book and of the ideas in it is going to be the market test is it going to is it going to succeed or not and if it sells and if people are talking about it then we'll know that we are on to something well how how is your previous book uh the trends book doing and how many has it sold well by standards of of a think tank uh book um meaning uh you know full of Statistics it it sold about I think it's about over 40 000 copies uh which uh still makes it one of the one of the best or best selling thing Time Books uh you know in in this town but this new book uh is intended for a general audience as well the reason why we spent so much time talking about the history um about um you know Thanos for example um is precisely because we want people to start understanding how these pernicious ideas that have been around for a very long time have found their way into popular culture and maybe lodged in the back of their brains um um and and and and and that there is no reason why they should be the real estate in the brain is precious don't fill it with uh with stuff which is not true yeah yeah yeah well okay well today all right so everyone listening um we were talking about Marion two piece and uh Gail Pooley's new book super abundance and their re-analysis of the role of human population and human freedom in producing flourishing in all Dimensions environmental economic conceptual all these things we can be positive about and so I I think it's great I think the work's great and it's as I said earlier it's so lovely to see something so profoundly optimistic and it's such an effective blow against this dismal and vindictive anti-humanism that seems to masquerade as current day moral virtue and so good for you guys I hope you sell 5 million copies and that people dispense with this malthusian catastrophe that's been plaguing us for like a hundred years so that'd be lovely man thank you very much thank you to see you guys yeah Batman yep nice talking to you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 578,821

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 6iC_hY4qhyk

Length: 113min 9sec (6789 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022