The World is Not Ending | Bjørn Lomborg | EP 315

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world illiteracy was the norm the pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion probably 80 percent of Scripps memorization today exists only because of what is sung this is amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johann gubern science and religion are opposing forces in the world but historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that around 1900 almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested you had uh horse carriages and they left an enormous amount of manure so there were lots of people who were really worried about the fact that by you know by extrapolation by 1920 1930 uh all of New York all of London would be covered by feet and feet horsemenure how are you going to solve that and Along Came the automobile the again the point here is not to say that a technology that we then innovate a hundred and twenty years ago is the right one for today eventually that will go you know the way of the dinosaur we'll find other ways but we should not be kidding ourselves and believing that just wishing it wasn't so makes it go away the way you do this is through technology my concern is that if you get people adjudicating the what would you call it the comparative validity of need you turn the whole world over to people who say well you don't really need that well exactly who are you telling here that they don't get to have what they need because you don't mean that for yourself you're not going to go live in a damn Hut in the middle of us of Africa and burn done you're not proposing that you're proposing that these damn poor people in the third world country and maybe in your own country and there's too many of those blighters anyways that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they've got what they have now and they shouldn't in in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the West [Music] hello everyone watching and listening on the on YouTube or Associated podcasts I have the great privilege today of speaking once again to Dr Bjorn lomberg we've talked several times on my podcast before it's always good to talk to them uh Dr lomberg researches the smartest ways to do good with his Think Tank the Copenhagen consensus he's worked with hundreds of the world's top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world's greatest challenges from disease and hunger to climate and education for his work Lombard was named one of Time magazine's hundred most influential people of the world he's a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover institution and a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media for Outlets including the New York Times Wall Street Journal the guardian CNN Fox and the BBC his monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents he's also a best-selling author whose books include false alarm how climate change Panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet the skeptical environmentalists cool it how to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place the Nobel laureates Guide to the smartest targets for the world and prioritizing development a cost-benefit analysis of the un's sustainable development goals all right hello Mr lawnberg very nice to have the opportunity to speak with you again I thought I thought today we would start our discussion by talking about what young people are being told and I want to lay out a few ideas for you and we can delve into this and and and we'll move on from there so I've just been reading Alex Epstein's book uh fossil future and in that book he details out first of all his belief that in the foreseeable future that not only should we not only will we have to use fossil fuels but we should use them and he explains why I would say on on ethical and practical grounds but he also says something that struck me as very interesting which is that the view that's being put forward to young people of the role of human beings on the planet in relationship to the environment is essentially predicated on an implicit religious metaphor and I want to lay out the metaphor and I want to lay out why I think his claim that it's a religious metaphor is technically correct so the story is something like this the the planet is fragile and virginal and continually pillaged the pillaging forces are the patriarchy essentially the social structure it's a masculine metaphor the social structure is viewed as a force that's nothing but uh devouring and negative and so you have nature you have culture Nature's all positive culture is all negative then you have the individual also part of the story and the individual is basically characterized as some combination of Predator uh and parasite and so the reason that's a religious story as far as I can tell is this is complicated but I'd like to be able to lay it out when I wrote my book in 1999 called maps of meaning it struck me that the basic cognitive and perceptual categories where something like chaos order and the process that mediates between them I looked at a lot of mythological work a lot of religion religious writing across multiple cultures and tried to look at the correspondence between that certain neuropsychological models that were being built including models of hemispheric processing so our hemispheres are set up in some real sense so that the right hemisphere processes novelty and chaos and possibility and the left hemisphere imposes order and the fact that the hemispheres have this structure indicates because they're adapted to the natural world let's say indicates that the most fundamental way of perceiving the world is something like a place of possibility and chaos and potential on the one hand and a place of habitable order and culture and predictability on the other so you have those two domains and then Consciousness looks like it's the process that mediates between the two and and Epstein now I learned in 1999 that these domains chaos order and the process we're always represented metaphorically or symbolically it's like an a Priory Axiom of cognitive uh function and perception itself the chaotic domain potential and so forth tends to be represented with female symbols feminine symbols and the orderly domain tends to be represented with masculine symbols and so you can see how this plays out in the modern world because you have Mother Nature who's virginal and fragile being raped by the catastrophic patriarchy and you can see those metaphors lurking underneath right there's the positive female the negative male on the cultural front and then you have to lay the individual on top of that and the individual in that story positive feminine negative masculine is also represented negatively now that's a very compelling story because it does cover all the domains of existence and there is a beautiful and plentiful and positive element of untrammeled nature let's say and there is a tyrannical and predatory aspect of culture and the individual can be a destructive parasitical and predatory Force but that's only half the story and that's the problem and so the point I'm trying to make is that we can't structure our perceptions without using something like an a priori category system and the a Priory category system whatever your a priority category system is your religion it functions in exactly the same way and we have a religion now that's focused on nature worship the derogation of culture and the damnation of the individual and that's the story that's being told to young people right the planet's fragile culture is nothing but a destroying force and individual effort is to be construed as predatory see in the patriarchal sense and parasitic on parasitic in relationship to the natural world so so I'm wondering what you think about that uh yeah no I I think it's I know it's a lot of it's a great metaphor uh so so again uh if if we go along with this and and if we all have religion I would tend to say that my religion is data uh you know there's a famous statisticians that say if you uh without data you're just another guy with an opinion right we have a lot of knowledge about the world and the reality is that much of this is built on you know stories and metaphors and things that we've heard and it's probably not very conducive to understanding what the world is actually like and I totally agree with you that everybody not really just young people but especially perhaps young people are told this is the end of times you know this idea of should you really have children yeah put them into this world this terrible world uh the world is going to end in you know whatever the number is right now but you know eight years or 12 years or whatever the feeling is that this is sort of end of times and that's very much as you point out a sense of we have this beautiful world that we somehow this natural world that we've somehow despoiled and made terrible in so many different ways and I would argue that certainly if you look back in time this very clearly is a very modern way of thinking about the world uh you know two three hundred years ago we were terrified of nature because we really worried about you know the Wolves Out There we were terrified about nature in the sense that it would kill us in all kinds of ways just you know think about one of the things I'll talk about a little later uh smallpox uh a disease that we've eradicated uh in 1978 uh but even in the 20th century it killed about 300 million people so you know it killed what a couple of you know somewhere up to five million people every year this is a terrible disease it was not the only disease that you were that you were struck with this killed you know royalty and everybody else nature used to be terrible what has happened is that we have actually found a way to live such that we can now say we like nature we love nature we want to set aside lots of nature remember uh you know most of European nations can cut down most of their Forest uh to build navies to you know fight each other but the fundamental point is you get reforestation when you're rich when you're well off when you can actually deal with the issues and so again that tells you something that I think is incredibly important if we're actually going to have a good conversation it is that you need to understand overall things are moving in the right direction and that we're much better off you know with just one statistic if you look at the number of people that die from climate related disasters so these are the disasters that we hear about all the time you know floods droughts storms wildfires extreme temperatures those kinds of things we have pretty good data for that we certainly have good data for the last 100 years how many people die every year well it turns out that in the 1920s about half a million people died each year from those disasters that's a terrible outcome of the world how many people die today if you ask most young people if you ask most people in the world they'll probably think that number has gone up and up and it's just worse and worse nothing could be further from truth last year it's the last full year that we have 2021 less than 7 000 people die we've seen a decline of more than 99 why it's got nothing to do with climate it's not because climate has gotten better or indeed really worse we can't really tell in most of these impacts there's a few of them we can't but mostly we can't what has changed is our ability to handle it that's why we don't die from smallpox that's why we can afford to actually make sure we have forests that's why most rich nations are reforesting and that's why fewer and fewer people are dying from these disasters so I think we need to tell that alternative story if you will that yes you hear all these terrible things and it doesn't mean that there are no problems there's still lots of people that are uh you know terribly troubled from floods there's still lots of people that are terribly troubled by droughts and all these other things there's still a lot of info infectious disease from both tuberculosis malare the world is not fine but the world is much better and that's important because that put us in a very different frame of mind it means we are not in looking at the world being dispoil and hence we need to make some sacrificial offerings to you know please this this uh deity that we're worried about it's instead to say look we're actually dealing with this in the right direction we're actually making things better but we can do even more that's a very different message and of course one that's much more optimistic and I I would hope well it's also more balanced okay so so you started talking about the relationship you know your your concentration on data and so I wanted to I wanted to delve into that a little bit so there there's data of course and data would be something like a representation of the patterns in the world not not merely the subjective patterns not merely the psychological patterns but the patterns in the well let's say the objective world of the patterns that exist in somehow the transcend mere subjectivity and so those are patterns that we're going to test our presumptions against but part of the reason I wanted to delve into the underlying metaphorical substructures because a lot of your work and the work of the more non-naive optimists that I've encountered in the last 10 years has this counter narrative element that structures it I mean because you're a Priory axioms they're the reverse of the environmentalist axioms in some sense and in this way is is what I mean is that you started your description by pointing out that we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that nature is only benevolent it's only been a very short period of time in historically speaking that any of us at all anywhere on the planet had the luxury of ever assuming that nature was a benevolent Force for more than a few seconds right and so because nature is conspiring in all of its benevolence to destroy us as rapidly as it possibly can all the time as well with cold and heat and floods and disease and and acts of God and volcanoes and and earthquakes etc etc and so you have to be extremely naive if you don't also see nature as a threatening Force so now you shouldn't see it as only a threatening Force because we're also dependent on it all right so and that so you you flesh out the malevolent nature side of the story but then you also say well look everyone who's listening don't be so pessimistic about our culture our Western culture let's say but the global culture even more broadly because in many ways we've been moving in the right direction things are a hell of a lot better by almost every metric you can imagine than they were 100 years ago they're better by most metrics than they were 50 or 20 years ago and not just a little bit better A lot better so and then so then you can flesh out the positive side of the culture and then on the individual side you can say well you know there are people who are predatory and there are people who are parasitical and and everyone is subject to Temptation and and failure to hit the mark let's say but by and large people are striving in the right direction and you can view human beings as a positive force even though there's some ambivalence about that and so that flesh is out the story you know you can also think about it as Rousseau versus Hobbes and strangely enough you come down more on the side of the harbesians even though I don't think that's your temperamental proclivity because for Rousseau right the nature was all positive we were turned into negative creatures because we were perverted by our socialization and human beings well for Rousseau human beings were innately good assuming that they weren't warped and Twisted by culture but Hobbes had the alternative Viewpoint Hobbs said well the Nate the state of nature is chaos and War and we need a strong socializing force in order to integrate and organize us so that peace can obtain and I've thought for a long time that the a comprehensive worldview melds Russo and Hobbes it's the same comprehensive religious idea in some sense is you need a representation of nature that's positive and negative you need a representation of culture that's positive and negative and a representation of the individual that's positive and negative and we've we've offered a crippled religious view to young people it's also got this apocalyptic end right this apocalyptic undertone which is not only is nature virginal and fragile and culture rapacious and predate predatory and the individual corrupt but this is a bloody emergency and the apocalypse is upon us like if it isn't tomorrow it's 10 years from now all of that's religious Force I would say operating at the metaphorical and mythological level and a lot of what you've been doing and I want to go I want to get at the foundations of this a lot of what you've been doing is saying well look let's just hold on on the apocalyptic Vision side it isn't obvious that the bloody catastrophe is upon us now in any manner that would make in cautious emergency action anything other than destructive there's no reason to assume that as a social Force we're only predatory and parasitical and we could we could give ourselves some credit for striving in the right direction and also being able to master this because one of the things that I really liked about your work and about many of the people who are working in the optimistic front this is mostly economists do this is the idea that well we don't have an apocalyptic Challenge on our hands but we have some challenges but we're the sort of creatures that can actually Master those challenges if we don't panic and do something too stupid yeah no and look that's exactly the right point I I actually think I love your uh your uh Hops and uh Russo i i in some ways uh you're probably right that I would argue of course the world originally was like hops not Russo but what we've actually managed with a hundred you know three or four hundred years of hard work is that we have turned the world into something that's much closer to Russo I'm not sure I'm there I'm going to go down in history with this philosophy lesson uh but yeah the fundamental point is what we achieve is by making the world safer for us by actually achieving to make sure that people don't die from smallpox and that they don't die from all these other things that we can actually produce a lot of the things that we need for our world in a much more uh uh sustainable way remember you know if you look at the uh at the history of for instance fire of the last 10 000 years typically whenever uh you know uh humans come around they just burn the whole stuff because it's in their way right you know if you're Indian uh we have lots of evidence to show that Indians just burned large tracts of of of land because it brings out the animals you know it makes them defenseless and you can kill them and you eat them it makes a lot of sense but that's really destroying nature what we're doing now of course is to a very large extent that we grow very efficient food so that in rich countries at least in countries that have sufficient resources to actually care about other things than just surviving they set aside more and more nature that's why you know just in Denmark where I am right now um you know we we used to have about a third of the country covered in in Forest then we caught about all of it down so we're down to about two percent now we're back up to 14 why because we're rich we actually like like and we plant for us so that we have places to take our kids out and watch it and so again the point here is there is it's not just optimism it's actually realism to recognize that you're only going to fix the problem by looking at the data finding out what are the challenges fix many of these challenges and realizing you can't fix everything or at least not everything at once so you fix the most important challenges that takes the least resources to get the most impact so you know fundamentally uh and and again this is what the economists love to say the ones that have the biggest bang for the buck but in reality it's much more about making sure that if you can only do some things sometimes you do the smartest stuff first and that's what's brought us to here and that's why we should stop saying it's the end of the world but still recognize that there are plenty of of troubles around and and again also just let's remember you know we're sitting in two developed countries where we're very well off where we're not worried about you know neither smallpox because we've eradicated that but we're not worried about tuberculosis either we're not worried about not having enough food we're not worried malaria all these yes all these different things that most people in this world so you know by far far over four billions or probably more like six six and a half billion uh of the eight billion we are on the planet are worried about every day and and and that's why I'm also really frustrated with this way that we're very often so focused on saying you know for instance on climate change which is a real problem we're saying it's the only problem and then we forget about all these other things where we could help much more make sure that people are saved much better and that they could also then eventually get to a point where they would want to you know preserve nature and think about other things and just simply uh making sure they survive the night okay so we talked about some of the reasons that this new quasi-religious view of the world and our place and it might have Arisen your your point was that well because of technological progress we've been able to begin to view nature as a much more benevolent Force than we ever had the luxury to before but there's some other yeah there's some other social pressures let's say that are pushing this narrative forward that I think are worth delving into you mentioned one when we just had a bit of a preliminary conversation is that there's a huge competition for people's attention online and that competition has intensified dramatically um in the last 20 years because there are so many voices clamoring for everyone's attention all the time and one of the advantages to an apocalyptic vision is that it is attention grabbing and so we have so any narrative that tilts towards the apocalyptic is likely to get magnified in online communication because uh things are good and slowly getting better isn't much of a headline and it right and there's no there's nothing novel about it okay so that's one that's another possible contributing fact can I just another give you one one so please do uh uh so uh the world our world and data It's a Wonderful website uh and and they point out I love the statistic uh you know we have no sense of how many people we've lifted out of poverty so over the last 25 years since yeah and the order almost a billion people so every year for the last 25 years we could have had a headline in every paper in the world everywhere around telling us last yesterday a hundred and thirty eight thousand people were lifted out of poverty how come you never I hear that that is that's just an astoundingly amazing thing and and yes there are still many problems yes there's so many poor people but the fact is we you know 200 years ago we used to be almost all extremely poor yeah there was a few royalty on that and then you know it was 90 95 of all of us had what would you know typically known as a dollar a day but it's really to 2.15 now but the fundamental point is we were incredibly poor now we have less than 10 percent that are extremely poor that's still a problem we should still help them and there's a lot of ways we could do that but that is one of those many stories that you don't hear because yeah it doesn't generate clicks we'll be right back with Bjorn lomberg in just a moment but first there's no better way to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life than with hallow hallow is the number one Christian Prayer app in the U.S and the number one Catholic app in the world it's filled with studies meditations and Reflections including the number one Christian podcast the Bible in a year download Hollow today and try their Advent prey 25 challenge a 25-day journey through Bible stories from both the Old and New Testament leading up to the birth of Jesus these meditations are led by cast members from the largest Christian streaming Series in history The Chosen Advent pray 25 will help grow your understanding of mankind and develop a disciplined prayer habit during a season when our discipline is put to the test download Halo for three months completely free at hollow.com shorten that's hallow.com Jordan give yourself the gift of Peace calm and discipline this Christmas go to hallow.com Jordan today [Music] yeah well part of it part of it and it's a deep psychological problem too is that we are structured psychologically so that the negative has more impact than the positive does and so and that's a very difficult bias to work against when you're in a situation where you might be making the case that the positive should be what's predominating it's like well fair enough but that isn't exactly how we're wired and I suppose that's why because we can be a hundred percent dead but only so happy and so it right it's conservative in some sense and I don't mean politically to be a little more hyper alert to the negative than to the positive but that's a tough thing to fight against when the negative can grab attention especially when it's blown up to apocalyptic proportions okay so there's a couple of other things I wanted to delve into there too so there's this psychologist Jean Piaget and Piaget is very interested in ethical development and cognitive development he developed a stage theory of of human cognitive and moral development across time and the last stage in his sequence of cognitive slash ethical Transformations was the Messianic stage and not everyone hits that but more philosophically sophisticated young people pass through something approximating a mess ionic stage and it occurs somewhere between the ages of 16 and 21 which by the way is the right stage of life to bring young men into the military if you're going to do it effectively like there's there's a whole uh radical process of neuronal pruning that takes place between age 16 and 21 that's analogous to what happens between the ages of two and four it's almost as if at that point you die into your adult configuration right so because you're pared down to what is only going to work for your environment okay so now one of the psychological consequences of that is that when when young people are in this stage of development and they're looking for how to separate themselves from their parents and to maybe even move beyond the narrow confines of their immediate friendship group they're trying to catalyze their identity with a broader social mission and in archaic societies that step would be catalyzed by something like an initiation ritual where the old personality is symbolically destroyed put to death that's that accounts for some of the torturous elements of the initiation ceremonies and then the new man because the initiation ceremonies tend to be more intense for boys the new man is brought into being as a as a cultural entity and then he's aligned with the mission and purpose let's say of the tribal unit it's something like that well right now I think the radical leftists on the environmental side have been very good at capitalizing on those urges because what they offer to young people is this but it's pathological in some real sense because it's a shortcut to mess ionic to mess ionic moral virtue so the idea would be well there is an apocalypse we need to save the virginal Planet so there's a bit of a Saint George thing going on there to protect the Virgin let's say and the way to do this is to become something approximating an activist who's dead set against the evil patriarchy and the predatory and parasitical individual and you can understand why that's attractive because it does offer young people a Grand Vision they're now Protectors of the planet they're participating in something that's beyond themselves but the problem with it is is that it's it's an invitation to a very one-side story and it's got this terribly destructive anti-human element and so so well I'm curious about what you think about that I I think it's a very good metaphor for you know how how the world uh and in many ways have come to work I I think you're you're absolutely right it's a very sort of uh stimulating and very uh easy message to fall into the world is terrible but here is how we can help and and the story very easily become I'm going to help by cutting tons of CO2 now again I bring my data points yes yeah and and so I think there's two parts of it I mean first of all I think we should recognize it's wonderful that young people and really everyone wants to do good we should encourage that we should that's wonderful and yeah again it's part of the fact that we're now well off that we can stop worrying where's our next meal coming from and then we can start thinking about so how are we going to help the world but the reality is that when we're being told this it's the end of the world and hence this is this the only thing that matters we're very likely to make very poor decisions I mean if it was true you know if there was a meteor hurtling towards Earth the only thing that mattered I was gonna you know sort of Wipe Out the whole world the only thing that matters was to get this you know the space shuttle the uh whatever the Starship or whatever up there and deflect it that's what we should be focused on but that's not the right metaphor for climate climate change it's a problem right and it's a problem that we in many ways as we can as we saw with that statistic I told you on before yeah the fact that we've seen dramatically declining levels of people dying from climate related disasters because we can actually adapt to much of this and because we can predict it we can make sure that the people become more safe from these things it's not the end of the world it is a problem and saying this is the only problem makes us very likely to make really poor decisions because we only we focus on this can't forget all the other let me just one other thing so so I think there's two point points to one is that thinking it's the end of the world and thinking this is the only problem make you forget all the other problems but also when you look at then what are the solutions that are typically offered they're terribly inefficient so they'll typically involve something along the lines of saying you know I'm gonna forgo driving my car which will at best have virtually no impact it's not that you know please do it if you if if it makes you feel good especially if it works into your plans but it's not how you solve the world and you know people will talk about going vegetarian again great thing I'm I'm vegetarian yeah but but yeah it's not going to save the world you need to get a sense of proportion most of the things that people talk about are small fractions of what it'll actually take and what they're really suggesting and what everybody's now talking about is this Net Zero idea that we need to cut all carbon emissions from all economy economies uh by 2050 this would be enormously costly and also so terribly terribly fatal for many countries especially the poorer countries who basically keep alive by having lots and lots of access to fossil fuels one way of of just seeing that is right now half the world's population survive on nitrogen that comes from fertilizer that comes from natural gas we have no way of knowing how we could possibly get enough nitrogen to feed most of the world if we went to Net Zero we saw a small example of that was a very badly performed example in Sri Lanka but still it's worthwhile to point out you cannot actually feed most of the people on the planet if you want to go organic and go NetZero right now and that tells you a story because as as uh Norman Bullard love to point out one of the Nobel alerts that actually helped saved you know a billion people or so he said I look around the world and I don't see four billion people willing to give up their lives right so there's no 4 billion volunteers to say all right I'm not going to be here we need to be realistic about this and say the current Solutions often very counterproductive so stop believing it's the only problem and stop arcing for bad Solutions okay so so so let's talk a little bit about that too from a motivational perspective so we have this appeal to the Messianic urge of young people but now here's how the appeal gets warped because it is the case that each young person should take their place as a responsible productive and generous member of the broader social order but that's really difficult that's genuine moral effort and that would require growing the hell up being willing to make sacrifices including the future in your deliberation so you're not impulsively hedonistic serving other people starting a family starting a business like all these things that you have to do in the micro world that require real effort well here's the shortcut that's being dangled in front of young people it's like forget about all that all that activity that difficult painstaking conscientious local activity that's all just part of the predatory parasitical patriarchy so you can just dispense with all of that instead you can put yourself forward as an ally of virginal nature and instantly as an ad as an anti-apocalyptic advocate of that sort you're elevated to the highest possible moral stature which is something like well it's something like a mess ionic figure I'm saving the planet it's like well I don't think you are I don't think you're doing any of the work necessary to save the planet I mean one of the things I really liked about your work when I came across it and that's probably it's got to be 15 years ago or more now was that you had done the detailed data-driven work that was necessary to differentiate the landscape of problems so first of all you'd admit to the complexity of the problems that were in front of us you weren't falling prey to the idea that there was only one problem there was one solution and you were the person merely by advocating for that solution who was now God emperor of the world there was none of that in your work and and I think part of the reason it's had a hard time getting traction to some degree is that you're insisting to people that they actually pay some attention to the complexity of the of the of of the challenges that confront us right and the problem with that is that that runs contrary to this narcissistically attractive metanarrative which is no no you can just oppose the patriarchy and everything that goes along with it all that responsibility which maybe you don't want to shoulder anyway and you can instantly become morally Superior by being a climate change activist and some of that's attractive to the Messianic Drive in young people but also some of that's attractive to just straight bloody what would you say hypersimplified narcissism because people one of the dark motivations of people is to obtain unearned moral virtue because we need reputation and if you can put yourself that's why we worship allies now you know if you can put yourself forward as an ally of the noble cause then all of a sudden you have as much moral stature as anybody could hope to gain but you haven't done any of the real work and the real work is the devil's in the details and the data in relationship to the real work so so one more thing to add on top of that so there's this this enticement that we're offering to young people it's like well here's a world view we can identify the villains the villains are a culture and the predatory individual you can be an ally now you have overblown moral virtue merely because you're on the right side and then you don't have to think through any of this because you've already got the story right even though it's a one pixel story so that's a very bad moral trap but then there's something darker going on too you know in Epstein's book fossil future he cites some of these the more radical environmentalist types who say things like I think it was McKibben he quoted who said something like as far as I'm concerned the Vista of an unspoiled River so any natural environment that's completely Untouched by human beings is so valuable that it would that one person or a billion isn't worth that it's something very close to that and so there's a there's a malevolent anti-humanism that's at the bottom of this too which is also it's part of this metaphor it's part of the idea that intrinsically human beings are something like a cancer on the face of the planet or a virus or a biological Force that's gone wrong a malthusian nightmare and that only that which is completely unsullied by human beings Untouched by human hands is intrinsically valuable and you can put that forward as a moral claim and say that you're on the side of nature but the flip side of that is like yeah like if there's too many people on the planet their mate which of them do you think should go and exactly how are you going to bring that about and so that's the dark side of this of this like apocalyptic environmentalist utopian narrative is that human beings are categorized as evil in and of themselves and all human activity as evil and you know one of the things that we've discussed is that not only is that a pathological Viewpoint and extremely dangerous but interestingly enough it's probably also counterproductive from the hypothetical perspective of the environmentalist utopians because if the goal is to produce a Greener more biodiverse planet let's say then it seems to me there's something we can discuss that the evidence suggests very strongly that if you make people richer we can talk about what that means if you make people richer in in a in a benevolent manner or at least you get the hell out of their way then they start caring about the environment in a distributed Manner and you get a positive relationship between the remediation of absolute poverty and environmental awareness so not only does this narrative not solve the climate problem and destroy the economy it actually makes I think it makes the climate problem a lot worse and we're seeing that play out in Europe right now Shopify is the all-in-one Commerce platform trusted by millions of entrepreneurs to create their online store and so much more Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere whether you're selling succulents or stilettos start selling with Shopify and join the platform simplifying Commerce for millions of businesses worldwide with Shopify you'll customize your online store to your brand discover new customers and build the relationships that will keep them coming back Shopify covers all the sales channels to successfully grow your business from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform even across social media platforms like Tick Tock Facebook and Instagram thanks to 24 7 support and free on-demand business courses Shopify is here to help you succeed every step of the way it's how every minute new sellers around the world make their first sale with Shopify and you can too sign up for a free trial at shopify.com jbp go to shopify.com jbp to start selling online today that shop fi.com slash jbp I I think there's there's a number of things to unpack here so I I think you're absolutely right that we have very good evidence to saying if people are better off they're much more likely to be environmentally concerned environment problems are poverty problems that's really what that is you know right poor yes you just cut down forest in order to feed your kids you'll basically litter around everything because honestly you have other things on your mind right now whereas once you're well off and most of your future is secure you can care a lot more about the environment and I also think yes you're absolutely right there's a lot of people who seemingly get a lot of sort of instant credit uh by just throwing paintings or whatever uh you know painting it whatever famous painting they're in and and a museum with uh or or just you know get some sort of you know glue themselves to highways or whatever that's not how you solve this problem because it is very very complicated and and as you also point out if you actually want to make part be part of the solution help bring the world onwards it's actually going to take a lot of painstaking work and I think you you nailed it on on why why are my Solutions much harder to sell well fundamentally because it's more boring it is not as flashy and exciting as being able to you know uh get on a tick tock video and show your virtue but it's actually about a lot of hard work I I mentioned uh Norman Bullock uh uh he's he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. he was the originator there's a lot of other people along with him for the Green Revolution that basically worked through the 60s and 70s uh and and most of uh uh most people today probably don't even remember it but if you go back and read what people were worried about we were incredibly worried about the fact that most Nations just would not have enough food uh and and and so you know there is literally people considering maybe we should do triage and say Well India is just a gone goner you know they'll just have to sort of die out uh and and what Norman Bullock said was we actually have the technology to make much more food on every hectare every acre of land we do that by making genetic modifications so he just did it with you know normal uh uh genetics he simply constructed together with lots and lots of other researchers constructed seeds of both rice and wheat that were shorter and that meant they were shorter and so they could put more energy into their uh kernels and that meant there are many more kernels much less straw and we got much more food that is you know in a very short uh uh hand that's basically what fed the world that's what brought India from being a basket case to now being the world's leading race exporter it doesn't mean they're not problems in the media it doesn't mean that we've fixed everything but what that tells you is this is the way you actually walk towards a solution so a lot of environmentalists a lot of you know very very smart thinkers Back Then basically said lots and lots of people are going to die literally yeah right millions of people are going to die and I'm okay with that because you know it had to happen yeah whereas the right way is to sit down and actually use science and spend you know your entire life working and making these rice grains more effective it's not nearly as sexy and of course I'm only telling the big story because he got the Nobel Prize you know there were lots and lots of other researchers whom I don't even know and none of us really remember anymore but those are the people that actually made it work and so I'm often struck as you also pointed out I'm often struck when people say there are too many people on the planet because when you yeah when you drill into it it means you know just enough of me but too many of you it's never yeah you're actually going to have you or your family leave but you think someone else should go now I get the idea of saying that maybe in some sort of very detached way we would like to see a world that had fewer people I I think that's probably wrong but you can have that argument but if you actually look at it in you know in the philosophical implications of that is that you're telling lots and lots of people to Die the reality should be I think and that's what our history shows us is when you have rich and wealthy countries you can actually get both you both get fewer fewer kids because yeah once once you grow up once you get rich enough kids actually start to be really expensive so you have few of them and that's one of the reasons why we no longer see this population explosion as people talked about in most of the ritual actually were likely to see that you know spread over the whole world in the next 40 years or so so we are over most of the problem and what we have managed to do is we can now grow food much more effectively and we should be moving towards growing it even more effective more effectively so that we can have all the people well fed on less and less land so there's more space for nature we're doing that in the ritual we can also do that in the poor the thing that's interesting here or one of the things that's interesting you talked about Norman borlag and about the sexiness of of say your vision and the thing is when I started to delve into the research on the economy and environment front I actually found the work that you were doing so to speak highly sexy because I thought oh my God here's a better story we could make everybody in the planet rich and I want to go into what Rich means and at the same time make the planet much more sustainable on the biological front we could do both of those why isn't that just way better than the malthusian zero-sum game Let's delve into those issues a little bit so so we're we're offering young people a cheap way out of their privilege induced guilt so now they've had they have this rusoian landscape set in front of them they're pretty secure they're they're pretty comfortable they're not going to die of malaria or smallpox they have enough to eat they have the educational opportunity but now they're scrounging around trying to figure out what to do with their life because they need to justify their miserable existences to themselves they need something meaningful and so the radicals come along and say well just be an ally of the virginal planet and that is simple so it has that appeal but it's also simple in an underhanded way because it it isn't the message look why don't you be like Norman borluck and develop something like a noble Vision which is well maybe we don't have to starve four billion people to death maybe we can feed them okay what do people eat oh they eat food yeah so how about if we make food more efficient we make agriculture more efficient let's see if we can feed all those people and that's a pretty hard problem so how about I devote my whole life to this and then you might say to young people well that's a hell of a price to pay to devote your whole life to something but we could be saying forthrightly well don't you want an identity I don't you want to devote your life to the solution of some genuinely difficult problem I mean that's where you're going to find meaning I mean how meaningful has your work been to you very meaningful and and I think uh so I I just wanted to slightly flippantly but not only flippantly say I'm very very pleased and gratified that you thought this was this was uh very exciting uh I I think it's also a little bit because you're a nerd uh so you know it is a more nerdy solution yeah and and it is less immediately satisfying but I think that's exactly the point we need to get out we we need to tell people this will ultimately be a much much more rewarding understanding look we should also have people that work on climate because again climate is a real problem but you're not going to solve it by throwing paint at something you're not going to solve it by telling people you can't you shouldn't you should freeze you should not have a nice life the way you're going to solve this of course this by being the guy that comes up with the technology that actually delivers clean energy or cleaner energy at much lower cost this is how we've solved pretty much all problems we haven't solved them by wishful thinking or telling people I'm sorry could you not do stuff that you like to do that never works what does work is you come along with a better solution you know this is a slightly trite uh uh metaphor but back in the 1860s uh the world was basically fishing up all whale or whales why because whales have this wonderful opportunity of whale oil turns out the whale oil just burns much much cleaner and much brighter than any other oil remember that was pretty much the only lighting that you had back in the 1860s so pretty much all Western European and North American Rich homes were were lit up with Whaler and and so everyone just went out and you know to the ends of the world to catch whales you could not have stopped the slaughter of Wales by telling everyone I'm sorry could you could you Dim your lights a little bit could you go back and have that [ __ ] light that you didn't like that's not gonna work what did work was ironically that we found oil in Pennsylvania right that we actually found ground oil the oil that we just used today mineral oil and you could substitute that for whale oil turned out it was much cheaper it burnt better and it was much easier to get hold of and so we pretty much stopped hunting whales after that there are still some because you know they also give meat but the fundamental point is technology solves this problem not good intentions right well so that means that we can thank the fossil fuel industry for saving the whales and you can you know if if you think about well we can thank the fossil fuel industry for a lot of things if you think about uh in around 1900 almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested you had uh horse carriages and they left an enormous amount of manure so there are lots of people who are really worried about the fact that by you know by extrapolation by 1920 1930 uh all of New York all of London would be covered by feet and feet of horse manure how are you going to solve that and Along Came the automobile the again the point here is not to say that a technology that we then innovate 120 years ago is the right one for today eventually that will go you know the way of the dinosaur we'll find other ways but we should not be kidding ourselves and believing that just wishing it wasn't so makes it go away the way you do this is through technology well especially okay so let's talk about wealth a bit because in the west it's easy for people like I I saw yesterday I think it was Extinction Rebellion or one of these damn groups put out this message saying that well you know people should just stop Flying because flying produces water vapor and carbon dioxide and you know really we don't need to fly and so I I'm reading that I'm thinking well because there's Marxism of a terrible uh type lurking under death it's like well who the hell determines what we need exactly I mean needs are first of all needs aren't self-evident really what you need to do is you need to breathe you need to drink water and you need to eat after that what constitutes a need gets pretty damn dubious and my concern is that if you get people adjudicating the what would you call it the comparative validity of need you turn the whole world over to people who say well you don't really need that and you don't really need shelter you don't really need well you don't need you can have bugs you don't really need food you can you can eat a minimal protein Source well you don't really need children because they're they're kind of hard on the planet anyways you certainly don't need pets because they add to the carbon dioxide load you don't need your fireplace you don't need a gas stove you don't need a heater and so and then what you have is this insistence that the way the planetary salvation is to tell other people what they don't get to have and what's interesting about that too and this is the hypocritical element and I certainly see this at the elite Davis Global level it's like well exactly who are you telling here that they don't get to have what they need because you don't mean that for yourself you're not going to go live in a damn Hut in the middle of us of Africa and burn down you're not proposing that you're proposing that these damn poor people in the third world country and maybe in your own country and there's too many of those blighters anyways that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they've got what they have now and they shouldn't in in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the west then we could talk about wealth because people in the west are guilty about wealth well we have all these things we don't need it's like well yeah that's actually the definition of wealth you got a choice of toothbrushes maybe you don't need it but it's not a bad side effect but we should get down to Brass tax here people when we're talking about wealth for the typical person here's what we're talking about your house isn't too cold or too hot so you have Heating and maybe you have air conditioning that'd be kind of nice you have running water you have good sanitation so you have a toilet and you have clean water you have a plentiful supply of high quality food that you don't have to spend all your time scrounging around to deliver and it's reliably sourced and your children have the opportunity to live to live healthily and to be educated that's like 90 percent of wealth and so when we're talking about wealth that we want to provide the rest of the world we're not talking about 1920s spats wearing capitalist depredations champagne hooker and cocaine we're talking about the basics of life right temperature regulation provision of water provision of food health and opportunity for children and we still haven't provided that to everyone in the world and we could that's one of the things that's so optimistic about your work not only could we do that we should do it and we could and should do it in a way that would benefit the long-term sustainability of the planet no and and Lord again uh you you rightly point out that people will want to manipulate your choices and and not only does that have a dubious and uh sort of moral uh impact but it's also you know just from an economist point of view if you tell people you can't fly it's not like they're going to say oh I was actually gonna I was planning on spending five percent of my income on flights so I'm just gonna burn these money I'm just gonna spend it on all their stuff which also produce carbon emissions and so you know we've no sense of saying the only real way and I've some respect sort of intellectual respect for these people who are actually saying the only way to solve global warming is by making everyone poor what's called degrowth first we make the rich world uh poor and then once the poor world has gotten slightly richer we also say stop to them uh at least it's intellectually honest it's also terribly terrible it's not a human and it's not going to happen there's no constituency no politician would ever get voted into office or if if he or she actually delivered on it would get re-elected on on that sort of platform and what that tells you is this is this is just simply you know again wishful thinking and I keep getting back to saying if you're actually serious about problems are you gonna you know are you going to suggest something that'll actually work are you just going to suggest something that makes you feel good or you know that you know have no chance on on Earth to get uh carried through again there is an argument and I think there's a legitimate argument for putting a carbon tax on things that's a simple way that we make regulation that says there's a global bad here we tax it and then you put that Global bat into your considerations but that's how you solve it efficiently and of course the reality of that is that in any realistic formulation of this people will fly slightly less and that's no good for many of these moral uh Crusaders because they want to completely get rid of it it's not going to happen what needs to happen truly want to solve this problem again is to get Innovation you know we already know how to for instance decarbonize most of the electricity system it's just through nuclear we know that's worked for 50 years the reason why we're not doing it and the reason why I'm a little skeptical about it is that it's too costly right now we can have a whole conversation about why that's the case but there's a lot of innovation going on about fourth generation nuclear that could become much cheaper we just saw the Breakthrough maybe uh Fusion as well but but the point is that there's lots of Technologies those are the ones that we're going to focus on because again you're not going to tell people you can't have your whale you have to dim your light what you can say is oh here's a better alternative oh it also happens to be cheaper and it doesn't kill whales Black Rifle coffee company is helping you knock out your holiday shopping with a ton of awesome new products this year shop the best Brewing gear thermosis 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coffee [Music] no one do you so the degrowth model is predicated on the idea that well let's lay out the ideas that really there there are too many people on the planet and the people who are there now especially the rich ones are consuming far too many resources per capita and so the only way forward to a sustainable planet is through D growth okay so let's take that apart first of all who's going to impose that D growth like can you imagine the totalitarian state that would have to be built in order for every single one of your purchase to be monitored which is really what the plan is in some real sense I mean that's just a terrible nightmarish vision of petty tyranny everywhere where every single move you make is analyzed in terms of its overall planetary consequence and only calculated by people who do not have your best interests in mind by the way but but worse than that is that there isn't any evidence whatsoever that if you use this strategy of degrowth and you make people poor that you're going to get anything approximating the beneficial the fact that you propose I mean let's look at how this is already playing out so what has Germany managed with an approximate degrowth strategy I mean so part of the deep growth as well we certainly don't need fossil fuels or new or nuclear on the energy front Okay so from what I've been able to gather now energy is about five times more expensive per unit cost in Germany than it is in the United States a huge number of industrial Endeavors are fleeing Germany for U.S which isn't so bad or China which is really not good because it's too expensive even to do such things as build batteries for electric cars in Germany now but also you might say well that's all worth it because now we have all these Renewables and that the place is much cleaner and if we have to pay a price in terms of loss of industrial productivity C'est La Vie but I read the other day too and I hope this is accurate that Germany has fallen to something underneath the 100th position in the world in terms of emissions per unit of energy produced because as we've moved foolishly and precipitously towards unreliable renewals especially on the wind and solar front the Germans have had to especially because they killed their nuclear plants they've had to turn back to coal and so now they're burning way more coal than they used to for five times the electricity price and unreliable power to boot and so this degrowth philosophy which which violates the presuppositions of economic motivation let's say on a psychological and economic front is not only going to demolish the industrial structure make the poor much poorer and more desperate but it's going to bring about worsening of the conditions for environmental sustainability and very very rapidly now we're also seeing in in Europe and you can comment on this a bit is that because we're now in an energy crisis foolish energy crisis that people are starting to Deforest Europe and they're starting to burn peat in Ireland again because they have to heat their damn homes so even by the standards of the environmentalists themselves perverse though those standards may be the degrowth philosophy is completely unsustainable politically and psychologically because you're just not going to tell people you know you can let Grandma freeze in the dark I think you're absolutely that it's not going to happen uh you know people are just not going to allow that and they won't accept that sort of uh of uh tyrannius you're talking about you would need much much more than anyone would be willing to to offer up just to give you one sense of it uh for the average American uh some estimates indicate that going Net Zero would actually cost you in the order of 12 000 per person per year by 2050. yeah that's just impossible to imagine than anyone uh would would ever accept and also I think we need to separate there there has been this tendency in almost all conversation to totally model climate and environment now environment is a lot of other thing things and it's for instance air pollution and all these other things that are fairly you know local uh to you so D growth would actually solve climate change because we would stop producing it wouldn't solve a lot of the other environmental problems because now we would start you know burning everything else and we would be terribly poor and you know life would be horrible in so many other ways I I think fundamentally we just need to get back to realizing that when you're saying and you know these protesters will glue themselves to the roads and say we don't want you to use any fossil fuels but of course when they come back in their lives they're crucially dependent mostly on lots and lots of energy produced by fossil fuels and they would probably most of them not be willing to give that up and if they're not even willing to do that of course they're not going to get anyone else to do that just by gluing themselves in on on highways sorry sorry what they're going to do is they if they could come up with a new innovation that was cleaner than anything else if they instead of you know gluing themselves to the road would actually take up the university go and and you know figure out and it need not be as solution to climate change but one of those Solutions but one that was actually effective then of course they would have done really good in the world and so again that I think that's the sort of purpose of our whole conversation to say you know stop believing this is the end of the world because it's not but also stop believing that the solution to the end of the world is to glue yourself or to just be gloomy or tell everyone we should just stop with everything the solution is Smart Technologies that the solution to the end of the world is not to become a frightened Tyrant that says oh my God this guy is falling I need all the power now I need to make these centralized decisions these centralized decisions are going to affect every single element of your life and your children's life assuming you get to have children at all and that's going to bring us towards a more benevolent Planet it's like none of that's true there's not an apocalypse you don't get to be afraid and Tyrant we don't need centralized top-down control of absolutely everything we do and even if we did have all of that what we would get wouldn't be the positive outcome that everyone who's on that side is touting what we get is the same kind of centralized planning disasters that we've seen play out time and time again over the last hundred years all over the world this is every single way you cut this this is a bad set of solutions now I want to still manage a little bit so you know the the the idea that there are too many people on the planet is actually predicated on you might say you might say data which is one of the weird things about data is that if you put if you take a petri dish that's full of uh a nutritive medium and you put a mold on it the mold will grow until it eats all the available nutrients and then it will all die and so that's a kind of limits to growth model but the world in that model is a encapsulated petri dish and the biological agents are Mindless single-celled organisms so you might say well that's not a great metaphor for human beings because first of all human beings aren't mold or viruses or cancers we're we're a very strange breed of creature because we can we can think and we can react and we can modify the environment and we can modify ourselves and so it isn't obvious at all people say follow the science the science is malthusian we're all you know microorganisms in the petri dish or rats in a colony we're going to overpopulate till we devour everything it's like I don't think so if you first of all why would you use single-celled organisms as the Cardinal metaphor for human for for human populations it's a Preposterous biological metaphor and one of the things the economists have pointed out as opposed to the biologists who tend to be more malenthusian repeatedly is look you can you can create your linear models of what's going to happen if but what you're failing to take into account is the the proclivity of people to revolutionarily transform the way they interact with the world and to continually figure out how to do more with less and there's no indication whatsoever that we've run to the end of that process quite the contrary we'd seem to be getting faster at it all the time and there's no reason to assume that the limits to growth petri dish model of human catastrophe is the appropriate biological metaphor that's not justified by science and 99 of scientists don't believe it and one of the things that's so interesting you know this perfectly well is that economists and biologists have been betting against each other really formally since the mid 60s and the biologists like uh what's his name at Stanford Paul Ehrlich who's been screeching since the mid 60s about the fact that we're malthusian organisms doomed to Extinction he's been wrong in every single one of his predictions and publicly and massively and I would say even murderously wrong in some fundamental sense so he predicted that there would be way too many people on the planet by the year 2000 that was seriously wrong he predicted that all of the prices of our Commodities were going to spike through the roof as everything became more and more scarce as there became more and more of us that was 100 percent wrong he had a famous bet with Julian Simon and Simon collected I think just after the turn of the Millennia because Simon The Economist claimed that no no quite the contrary as there are more people there'll be more Commodities there'll be more resources and the prices will fall he even offered Ehrlich the opportunity to pick the basket of Commodities they would bet on an early Ehrlich got stopped and what we've seen continually time and time again is the economists have been right which is that human there's no limit to human Ingenuity and that also means that if we got Food Water Sanitation opportunity to the billions of people that don't have it we would produce a few more spectacular hyper Geniuses like Elon Musk let's say or Norman borlag and God only knows what sort of efficiency they can produce for us so the idea that we could convert natural resources into human cognitive ability that seems like a pretty damn good trade from the perspective of economic flourishing and environmental sustainability yeah so just two points in that I I think it's incredibly important to remember that it's not just the Elon musks and the uh Norman Bullocks that make up the world also because you know it is you you very early on uh said that you've done all this great work and thank you very much uh but yeah this is the work of literally many hundreds of the world's top economists that I've helped sort of Shepherd together uh but there are lots and lots of people involved and likewise with Norman Bullock I'm sure that's also true with Elon Musk and and so the fundamental point is this is about getting everybody on board through this and and that's also why I'm so excited we have this conversation because I think this is about telling you don't need to be Elon Musk to be on this positive side of History you need to make sure that you're pitching into this very long battle in order to make the world better uh and again also sorry I'm just being the nerd here right but of course nobody's a hundred percent wrong you know the I I get that this is a sort of metaphorical hundred percent but it's more the argument here is to recognize that a lot of biologists and Julian Simon actually wrote about that the guy you mentioned that the uh the bet with Paul early and he said it is very curious how uh most of the people who think the world is going to end are typically natural scientists they're typically biologists or biologists inspired and I think that is because the models that cover those and it's not just mold but it's also you know Fox uh uh uh what is it rapid populations that they will they will sort of interact and then there are too many Rapids and then there's too many foxes and so on those are all model of individual without foresight and it makes sense that's how you know yes of nature is but we're not that we actually not only know how to think ahead of ourselves that's of course why we're having this conversation that's why we're worried about things like climate change and again uh you mentioned very early in the program you know that there's sort of evolutionary reasons why we tend to uh to be uh worried about stuff uh I I heard this one guy saying you know we're the descendants of the guys who worried about the saber-toothed tigers you know the guys who said oh they'll be fine are the ones who you know didn't get to pass on their genes so in in that sense it makes perfect sense and we should be happy that there's a lot of people out there pointing out this might be a problem Oh my good this could actually be a problem we just shouldn't believe that all of those problems are then all of the ends of the world because if our evidence or they're all the same problems yes if our evidence told us anything sorry that is that overall we have enormously succeeded I just want to give you one of the data point uh you know in 1900 the average life expectancy on the planet Earth was 32. a is like 74. we have more than doubled our lifetime each each one of us has twice amount of Life on this planet that that's astounding chili it hasn't stopped because of technology and because medical advancement but also because we get better you know sanitation and everything else we actually continuously see life expectancies that go up it hasn't done so in the US and we could talk about that but oh globally it absolutely does and it still does in the sense of every year you live you add about three months to your life expectancy how amazing about a stunning statistic yep that's true okay so so let's so let's let's go back to the biological metaphor here okay so we've already established I hope for everyone listening that we are not mold in a patriot dish that's a bad metaphor so now you said well maybe we're foxes and rabbits and there is this nature red in tooth and Claw that's going to mod modulate our population by necessity and that's sort of the biological argument that even though we're not mold let's say we're going we're more like Foxes or rabbits and we're going to multiply until the predators take us out or something like that but I would say here's why biologically that's not true so Alfred North Whitehead I believe it was said the reason we think is so that our ideas can die instead of us so here's the the human cognitive transformation so imagine that you go do something stupid and you get killed well that's not so good now you're dead but your pattern even your DNA is no longer around that's a dead end it's an evolutionary dead end you did something stupid and now you don't exist and neither do your descendants okay so that's how animals work but that's not how human beings work because we've taken this new leap I know our leap is well let's make a virtualized self let's make an let's make a uh an avatar in imagination let's play out a few different scenarios of what might be let's allow the stupid scenarios to die before we Implement them and then let's do that broad scale that's why we have free speech so what you and I are doing in this conversation to the degree that it's successful and this is what everyone who's listening is doing too is that we're undergoing a sequence of micro deaths and micro rejuvenations and so you'll offer an idea and then all criticize it or add to it and kill some of it and shape it and then you'll take that and you'll kill some of it and shape it and we'll toss it back and forth with the hopes that by the time we finally implement it we actually won't have to die and so human beings have substituted the ability to think abstractly which is partly to die abstractly for the process of real death and in principle if we are capable of maintaining open dialogue and engaging in critical thinking we can make most of the death that would otherwise be necessary to control our populations virtual we don't actually have to act it out we can act it out in simulation and then we can only implement the ideas that seem to be productive and we're actually really good at that the whole human Enterprise is precisely that so that's another reason why the biological model is just not tenable we are not of the same kind even as foxes and rabbits certainly not of mold and certainly not of cancer or viruses and so the biologists who were thinking seriously they have to take this into account and I don't think they are you know to paint with a broad brush no and I I I I think I I think that is why you have all these economists telling us actually in many ways we have moved on and we're much better at fixing problems and I again I think it gives a better way of thinking about problems that you say yes it's great that there are people out there pointing out problems I'm happy that organizations like Greenpeace are there because they point out and nip at the heels of you know corrupt officials or governments that don't do their job and simply tell us these are potential problems but it shouldn't be taken as oh my God that means we're all gonna die no it means here is another of the many many problems that have set us from all you know time and Memorial and that we've also fixed and typically fixed in a way that actually left the world better not worse off the environment is not purchased at the expense of the economy and the economy is not purchased at the expense of the environment necessarily they can work in harmony and we know that well how do we know that we know that because as you accelerate people up the GDP production curve so every individual is making more money you get to a point where people as we already pointed out start to take a longer term vision and that Vision includes environmental maintenance so let's say we want a vision for the planet on the environmental sustainability side so let how do we do that well why don't we produce as many people as we possibly can who are as concerned as they can be that they're relatively local environment the one they can actually control is as green productive and sustainable as possible we want billions of people working on this not just a few well how do we get billions of people working on it well we help them with cheap energy and the provision of plentiful food we help them provide security for their family and opportunity for their children and then we enable them to take a longer term View and they'll automatically start attending to the sorts of concerns that are hypothetically that hypothetically predominate among the environmentalists and the data that that's going to happen is very clear yeah so just uh are very clear so just to take a step back the economists typically call this uh the inverse could snaps curve so basically what you see with most environmental problems as you get richer first problems increase you know you get more air pollution as you industrialize in China or in India and then once you get sufficiently rich that this is actually meant now your kids are not dying you have enough food they then you start to worry and say I'd actually like to cough less and so you get the other side of this so there is a a sort of intermediate disconnect so once you start getting people out of poverty they actually get more pollution now if you lived in that situation you would undoubtedly make the same decision you'd say I'd like to have more food and more opportunity for my kids and then I'll cough a little bit that's remember what we also did back in the 1800s when pretty much all cities here in Europe and the US were terribly terribly polluted but we were getting richer and richer so there is this disconnect for a short time but it's very hard to imagine that the right way is to say well then let's not at all start down the route of getting much better off and actually living in a world yeah well we both like and that where we'll actually be worried about the environment in the long run we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question while it's not like the developing countries are going to go along with this noise they're just going to tell us Colonials to go take a flying leap which is exactly what they should do and because basically what we're telling them is well you know we got pretty rich and we're pretty happy to fly in our private jets to Davos and and think about the globalist Utopia but uh we don't think you guys should have any of that and you know the faster you get at being poorer the better and let's just absolutely no reason no no likelihood at all that places like India and China are going to do anything but lift a middle finger to us when we do that and rightly so and so and then on the pollution front we we should we should differentiate that a little bit it is true that as the world got more industrialized and that will happen in places like China and India that air pollution increased for example particulate production increased but it increased it you could argue that it decreased inside houses as it increased outside houses and so even that wasn't a clearer like downside on the pollution front because while your work has indicated this quite clearly or at least you brought it to people's attention in the developing world because people burn dung and wood very low low quality fuel with high particular content many many young people around the world are dying every year and elderly people as well because of indoor air pollution we have no sense of this so you know three and a half billion uh people in households mostly in the very poor South uh they basically as you say cook and keep warm with dirty fuels like dung and cardboard and the impact of that is equivalent according to the World Health Organization to if you look inside Huts if you've ever been in one in Africa the terribly polluted inside uh and it's like smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for three and a half billion people it's not surprising this kills millions of people every year and again it's not to say you know if if anything this just simply makes us realize that there are a lot of different problems and some of them you solve very simply by getting people out of absolute poverty not only did they stop dying from uh not having enough food and getting easily curable infectious diseases but also they stop dying from indoor air pollution one of the first things they do is they get a stove that actually runs in natural gas uh remember that's why we're not you know afraid of going into our kitchens in the rich world and so it should be in the poor world and we need to have that conversation we need to understand and that's of course why overall getting to develop country status is is something that almost everyone aspires to and certainly something that's worth having okay so let's let's uh let's talk about some of the so people who are who are listening we've we spend a lot of time in the philosophical realm and in the relatively low resolution realm trying to lay out the underlying conceptual landscape and to what would you say delineate something like a metaphysics of optimism that might be a good way of thinking about it but but one of the things that's admirable about your work is that you also concentrate on the the d The Devil in the details and so we we wrote an op-ed recently that got a fair bit of of distribution on a couple of problems that we could solve globally let's say we could address at a relatively low cost billions of dollars instead of trillions and so that's like one thousandth the cost for people who want to do the mathematics so what do you see what what could people think about in terms of low-hanging fruit what are things we could address in the next 10 years to speed the process of improvement and to address both economic and environmental issues simultaneously yeah you know it's a it's a great question and that's really what I've been spending uh the last couple years on and really a very large part of my career uh is basically engaging people and saying there are lots of problems and and we should be honest about that the world still has lots and lots of problems some of them are very hard to solve some of them are very easy to solve if that's true why wouldn't we want to solve the easy ones first some of them are incredibly expensive to solve some of them are very very cheap to sell why wouldn't we solve the cheap ones first so what we try to go for is simply as you said the low-hanging fruit saying of all the different problems in the world where are some really smart Solutions and it typically ends up being such that you can't solve all of the problem remember we rarely solve all of any problem we don't you know you don't you don't go to university to learn everything you go to learn University to learn enough uh you don't you know well I could go on without metaphor I don't think I will but the but the point here is to say you need to find out when is enough enough what are the really smart things so take one thing that we that we actually wrote about in the in the op-ed um everyone needs education one of the reasons why countries have gotten rich is that people will have learned Reading Writing communicating understanding and becoming much more productive citizens so if you look back in 1800 almost the entire world accepts her very slight tiny sliver of the aristocracy were basically illiterate we are now in a world where more than 90 are at least technically literate we've moved an enormous amount of way and that's why a lot of rich countries are rich that's why we're well off that's why we have the human flourishing that we have so this is incredibly important to understand we believe that almost half of the difference between being poor and being rich is whether you have an educated population now nobody disagrees yes we should all have educated people but the truth is it's really really hard we know that in rich countries because we have that conversation constantly how do we make our schools better but it's much much clearer in the rest of the world so we look a lot on what's uh what the World Bank calls the low income and lower middle income countries so that's about half the world population is 4 billion out of the 8 billion we're on the planet so you could say it's a it's the poor half of the world in that part of the world when you do studies you you probably heard about the Pisa studies you know we try to find out how good our people how good our students around the world to do different things so there's similar kind of studies done across pretty much all of the world it turns out and this is terrible so there's 650 million kids in school so kids and adolescents in school and the lower uh 4 billion uh of of the world so in the low and Low Middle income countries of these kids 80 percent cannot read and do math in any reasonable way and let me just give you an example of what that means it's not you know rocket science it's for instance you let them read a statement like this Vijay has a red hat a blue shirt and yellow socks what color is the Hat eighty percent of the kids can't answer this when they're 10 years old uh likewise a 10 year olds to a a math question would be we have six pieces of cheese what is the way to divide this to two people so each get the same amount and again about eighty percent can't the right answer is three by the way but yeah this is really depressing and and the truth is we don't know how to fix this we know a lot of ways that don't work so for instance in Indonesia in uh 2001 the parliament decided they spent about ten percent of public expenditure on education so a lot of money on education but they decided we're going to do more so they decided we're going to put in Constitution that we need to spend 20 on education that's you know potentially a great thing you really want to help the country so what they did was they built a lot of new schools they got many more teachers that they went up from 2.7 to 3.8 million teachers they now have one of the lowest class sizes in the world they have great teachers they have lots of teachers and they're really well paid unfortunately you couldn't tell the difference in the outcome on students they were still just as bad and of course what that tells you is and so there's there's wonderful study it was called double for nothing uh you know we basically in Indonesia paid twice as much and got nothing out of it that's the worst kind of way to try to help the world now a lot of people will make these arguments we need to pay teachers more it turns out that if you pay teachers more they become really really happy which is not surprising but it doesn't actually increase uh uh learning by students likewise if you make class sizes smaller it has virtually no impact what is the main problem here the main problem is it's really hard to teach a lot of kids so you know say there's perhaps 60 kids in a in a class in typical global South to teach them they're all 12 year olds but they're wildly different abilities you know some of them are incredibly bored because they know all the stuff and they want to go on to the next class many of them have no clue what's going on no matter what the teacher tries to do it's always going to be wrong for most of the students this is why you know a lot of people have then tried to say are there ways to solve this and the answer is yes these are the Norman Bulldogs if you will of the world who've come up in new and interesting and Amazing Ideas I'll tell you about one of them so this one is about getting basically a t teaching Aid on a tablet so it could be an iPad but it'll probably be a cheaper you know knockoff Android kind of thing and then it teaches you at your level so what it does is it starts asking some questions and you you can pretty quickly find out what what is actually your level and then it'll teach you through that school year so one hour a day this is partly because then you can actually still have most of the school running as it usually do then it also means you can share the iPad with or the tablet with many many other students over the day one hour a day for a year the amazing thing is we now know that you can triple the learning you can actually make kids learn three times as much as this as if they'd gone to school three years now remember it's a low quality school so it's not as amazing as it sounds but it's still much much better yeah but it's an improvement well what it means Bjorn is that you know you're now putting children for an hour a day into the only place that learning actually takes place so we've known this psychologists have known this for a hundred years so this psychologist named vygotsky Russian psychologist came up with this notion called the zone of proximal development and what he noted was that parents spontane one of the things he noticed was that his parents spontaneously speak to their infants and their toddlers at a level that slightly exceeds their current comprehension level and they do this automatically and so you can imagine that there's a horizon of learning and the Horizon of learning is the place that's optimally challenging for you that's the only place that's also by the way on the border between Order and Chaos uh technically speaking that's the only place that learning ever takes place and so if you have a classroom full of 12 year olds say 60 of them some of them have an IQ of 70 which means no matter how you how hard you try no matter how much effort you expend you'll never get them beyond the basics of rudimentary literacy and some of them have IQs of 145 which means those are kids who could learn to read at 12 to 1500 words a minute and who'd be capable of operating at the highest end of cognitive development they're all in the same class well obviously you can't pitch to the middle of that because as you said you'll make a shambles of it but the data that you're laying out in terms of the effectiveness of this technology is an indication of the utility of finding that zone of prox maximal development that's what people talk about by the way when they talk about the Zone being in the zone and we can and I like the particularity of your solution too because you're saying well look we need to educate people we need to educate them because educated people generate more of the wealth that provide security and opportunity literacy is core to that and say basic numeracy you can't even operate a computer without that and then we have some very efficient technological strategies that are also cost effective where we can Target and solve that particular problem it's very particularized and so and that's also a lovely Vision it's like well why not make education cheap and useful it's incredibly simple and also remember there are lots of other Solutions don't first focus on those focus on these incredibly effective ways so you know we talk about and there's lots of of different data that shows how do you make sure these tablets don't get stolen you so you need a place that you lock them up for the night how do you treat recharge them you need the solar panel you need all that cost you also need some people to operate right you but all of this has actually been proven so one of the things that we've helped do uh and this is by no means just us uh is now uh Malawi one of the poorest countries in the world is actually uh aiming at over the next four years to spread this out to all of their schools so that's more than you know 3 000 schools and they get this out to all one to four year four graders fourth graders that's an amazing achievement again this is the kind of thing they'll make Malawi richer because they'll become more productive in the long run so we do the whole for cost and benefit calculation so this will have real costs yeah we're talking about several billion dollars if you're going to do this globally the billion is a very low number when you're thinking about how much we're spending on some of these other problems is as you mentioned there's not a trillion and secondly it's going to dramatically improve all of these countries to become better so that they will both be better off to have human flourishing but in the long run also a better environment we actually then try to say well so for every dollar you spend how much good do you end up doing turns out that you make so much good that it's equivalent to fifty four dollars of social good in the long run so every dollar in fifty four dollars out and this is based on which is 54. that's 54 more dollars that you could go off and do some more good with too yes so although you know much of this is somewhat out in the future because that's what it is all about yeah of course but you know we we have this reflexively anti-capitalist notion in the west often that lurks at the bottom of some of the metaphorical Realms that we've been discussing that there's something suspect about wealth but the thing about wealth is that if you use it ethically it's life more abundant if you use that ethically then part of the utility in gathering wealth is that hypothetically you can go well first of all make more wealth with it but you can do good things with it and so it isn't it isn't like Scrooge McDuck luxury in the money bin that we're talking about here it's the opportunity to make things better for people now the other thing we wrote about not all bad you just talked about the education front maybe we can close with this next uh with this next proposition and by the way for those of you listening and watching this is just one of many although Bjorn's done a very good job of trying to rank order these in terms of well let's do the cheap and easy things first we might as well hit the ball out of the park at least in the places we can and maybe we can save some of the problems we don't know how to solve for the future which is perfectly reasonable way of going about it you also talked about we also talked about the provision of of nutritional Aid to to pregnant women and and women who have infants and so do you want to just walk through that briefly just very briefly again uh we've gone from a world over the last hundred years in 1928 we estimate about two-thirds of the whole world was deficient in food so basically we were starving uh two-thirds of us were starving today that number is down below 10 but that's still very high that's still about 800 million people so there's still a big problem again we can have diminishing problems to still want to do something about how do you fix this well in the long run you actually need to get much better productivity in agriculture and we have some other solutions for that but it turns out just giving out lots and lots of food is not only very expensive because you actually have to distribute it it also typically destroys local agriculture you know if you give out all the food then they don't have any incentive to produce it next year and you actually end up very easily make more problems here is there we have a few small a few really good Solutions one of them is this and that's the one for pregnant women so one of the things with pregnant women is they basically start off their next baby right in their bodies and they typically have very low levels of vitamins and minerals and nutrients now again if we gave them all the nutrients I'd probably be better but that turns out to be really hard but we can give them all the nests nutrients vitamins and a pill we already do that in a simple sense because we give them what's known as vitamin A and uh oh I'm sorry I'm just blanking that uh uh um yeah some other thing that's sort of in the standard package from World Health Organization but if we expand that the pill will be a little more expensive but remember we already have the whole infrastructure in place to hand out this pill it's one pill every day for every pregnant woman that's about 50 million uh uh uh uh pregnant women we're talking about every year so it's not a small operation but it'll actually be fantastically cheap because we just need to exchange that pill it's already been there uh being done there we just need to get many more produced and get them distributed and get some more information out and if you do that it means that the child will be born with a better possibility of developing its own mind we know that because if you're not born early or if you're not low birth weight you have better chances in your life so we can basically make about 50 million kids better chances next year if we did this it'll cost in the order of 140 million dollars so it's you know literally peanuts that we're talking about yeah if we did that these kids would grow up it would basically mean that somewhere between two and three million more kids would be better at school they would go longer they would learn more they'd become more productive they would help their countries become richer again this is a simple thing right very well well document a thing and we know that if you spend one dollar here you can do about 38 dollars of social good and again this is not just you know making up more uh value or mixed Scrooge as you were talking about this is actually making sure that it really poor women can make the life for the Next Generation much better the point here is not the daily matters has huge impact rather than just go with oh my God the world is terrible and then I'm just gonna give up or I'm I'm just gonna go for these uh cheap easy virtue signaling this is about there are a lot of Technologies there are a lot of Innovations where we can actually make a lot of good at very low cost very effectively isn't that what we should be doing for 2023 okay so let's sum let's sum up this conversation I'll I'll sum it up briefly and then let's see what you you have to add or subtract from that so we started by talking about the underlying metaphysic or even Theology of the current world view and laid out the proposition that we tend to see we tend to insist that young people see the planet as a fragile virgin and culture as a rapacious predator and the individual as a parasitic predator and that that has its echoes in the a Priory religious landscape but that it's a very one-sided story and the corrective to that story is while nature can be pretty damn hard on us and needs to be tamed and controlled in in a manner that's sustainable we should be extremely grateful for what our culture has provided us with not least the ability to look at nature as though it was benevolent and we shouldn't be so damn hard on individual people because for all their flaws they can be Norman borlag for example or the people who worked along with them who are genuinely contributing not only to a much more productive and generous economy but also doing that in a manner that beneficial on the environmental front and so we need to balance our Viewpoint and we need to stop terrifying young people into apocalyptic Nightmares by insisting that the world is going to collapse and that all the power should be given to like terrified centralized tyrants so that's the first part then we talked a little bit about the motivational landscape for that world view is that people are being enticed into these apocalyptic views partly by being offered an easy Pathway to moral virtue when they're susceptible to that need and so it's all about climate it's all about carbon dioxide there's only one problem if you're just concerned about it that means you're morally virtuous you've identified the enemy and now you have nothing else to do that's a bad model the proper model is for people to develop a sophisticated ethereum of the world and of their own action that's as sophisticated as the actual problem set and to be willing to devote mature time and energy to the solution of a set of real problems which we could solve and then we sort of closed the conversation mostly you did that by delineating a couple of the areas that are that are basically constitute low-hanging fruit we could educate poor people for relatively um low outlay economically certainly one that would produce a tremendously High return on investment we already know how to do that the infrastructure is already in place and we could do the same thing on the nutritional front and then we'd have fewer starving and stunted children and they'd all be more well educated and why wouldn't and they then we also pointed out being wealthier and being more intelligent they'd also be more likely to take a long-term view of of let's say ecosystem sustainability and they'd start to work in a distributed manner to serve the environment locally and so like why the hell is that a bad idea that seems to me like a really good idea so I so anyways that's my summary of the conversation do you have anything that you want to add or subtract to that I think it's a great summary uh I I think it really just summarizes into you've got to stop believing that this is the end of the world that's not what the data shows us and we've you know talked about that for a number of different things so we live much longer we're much less less poor so there are many fewer poor people air pollution for instance indoor has gone down dramatically we know how to solve many of these problems and we are smart species so we will keep on learning how to fix this yes this is not about moral virtue uh and and just showing up and saying I want to do good this is about the long hard grind of the Norman borlags and all these other guys that actually helped us think out what are smart ideas that's what this third idea was then or this third part of the conversation was really about there are a lot of smart things do you want to be part of that all right for for all of us uh to be part of that and I I think that was part of why we also wrote this all bet it's sort of uh you know the the new year is a place when you start talking about so you know what do you want to do what what do you want to do for next year how do you want to look at the world stop being scared start thinking about how can I help and wouldn't that be amazing if we actually had a lot of more people saying I want to help I want to be one of the guys who helped get you know these tablets out in a developing country somewhere I want to be the the gal who focuses on making sure that we get these cheap tablets out uh to pregnant women I want to help push forward these very simple ideas and of course come up with new ideas this is the way we solve problems this is the way we actually make the world even better right well that was the other stream that I didn't summarize is that we'd also talked about the fact that the mold in a Petri dish model biological model of human existence is not appropriate neither is the fox or rabbit model is that we have the capacity to generate and kill new ideas constantly and we're very good at testing them in those countries where there's freedom of expression and freedom of thought we're very good at testing those ideas we're very good at implementing them we've learned continually how to make more with less we're getting better and better at that in every part possible way especially as our computational power increases and so what that would mean is that if we could shed maybe if we could shed the apocalyptic pessimism and encourage young people to work diligently towards a mature and integrated vision of the economy and the environment invite them to participate as people who whose basic Destiny is to make the world a better place for people and for nature itself that that's a much that's a Viewpoint that's much better that's much more likely to lift people out of abject poverty and also to produce a Greener and more sustainable world well said all right Dr lomberg hey for everybody who's watching and listening I mean first of all thank you for for participating in this conversation and you know and and more power to you by the way on the upward and onward front there's no reason to be destroying your your motivation by engaging in apocalyptic Dooms saying when there's many things that need to be done and could be done that are productive and useful and many things that are positive that are beckoning and that have already made themselves manifest but Bjorn noted for example that we've lifted a tremendous number of people out of poverty in the last 15 years and we could do an even better job at that in the meantime I'm going to talk to Dr Lombard for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform I'm interested in with all my guests who are generally very successful and interesting people I'm always interested in the matter in which their responsible Destiny made itself manifest right so one of the things that all young people contend with is the issue of where to find the Central purpose the meaning in their life and you know it's easy to get nihilistic and cynical about that and think that life has no purpose in the final analysis but I think that's a pretty gloomy and unwarranted uh supposition and one of the things I have seen among the people I've met whose lives are together and who are doing productive and generous things is they do find engagement in something that's truly meaningful and it does get them out of bed in the morning and help motivate them to be productive and and not only for themselves and not only for their own gain if in case that has to be said but so that they're working in a manner that's extremely socially responsible and meaningful in a reciprocal Manner and so I'm going to talk to Bjorn about how his interests made themselves manifest in the early part of his life in my attempt to trace how such things come about and so we'll see you in January and Merry Christmas to you by the way hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 465,512

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: OOkRJb4UbPM

Length: 112min 58sec (6778 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2022