210. Progress of the Human Race, Part 2

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, Season 4, Episode 67.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson.

[2] Brief update.

[3] We just finished filming two courses with Dad in Nashville for Peterson Academy, a new project that will be unveiled soon.

[4] It's going to be big.

[5] Also, kind of exciting news.

[6] I have a solo show in Nashville on January 20th, if any of you guys are around Nashville and have any interest in coming to see me. It's a Q &A.

[7] Thought I'd throw it on here.

[8] Just type in Michaela Peterson and Zanies, Z -A -N -I -E -S, and it'll pop up on Google.

[9] There are still some tickets left.

[10] There are also tickets left to Dad's Show in a bunch of cities.

[11] Most of them are sold out, which is crazy.

[12] Next year is going to be amazingly fun.

[13] This episode is part two of our investigation into the progress of the human race.

[14] The mainstream media really only talks about how the world is in, our straits, how we're going in an irreversible direction, and how it's all our fault.

[15] We explored this narrative in depth in season four of the podcast, and we'd like to promote an alternative narrative, one where in almost every direction you look, you find progress at a rate that, for most of history, would sound like sci -fi.

[16] This episode, Part 2, once again heavily features Marion Tooby, Dad's guest on episode 14 of the current podcast season.

[17] Marianne is a senior fellow at Cato's Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co -authored The Incredible Book, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know.

[18] Also featured in this episode are Michael Schellenberger, Dr. Safedine Amos, Matt Ridley, Stephen Pinker, and Bjorn Lomborg.

[19] Once again, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned.

[20] There's still plenty of room for improvements in society, democracy, etc. But overall, the data are undeniable in nearly every single.

[21] dimension of our lives, the rate of progress is unheard of.

[22] I hope you enjoy this episode.

[23] Before we dive in, I want to talk about investment portfolios.

[24] I recently learned that top earners allocate around 20 % of their wealth into just one asset class.

[25] With inflation at an alarming 39 -year high and with no signs of stopping, on top of COVID variants affecting the stock market, or people's fear of COVID variance affecting the stock market, it's a pretty good time to rethink what you invest in.

[26] One of the smartest ways to do that is to diversify your portfolio.

[27] And one of the ways to do that is by investing in fine art. This is a really, really cool idea.

[28] I think most people can get behind.

[29] I'm all for it.

[30] Maybe you've never thought about it, but the 1 % have been doing it for centuries.

[31] Just to give some statistics on what the Wall Street Journal called one of the hottest markets today, art outpaced the S &P by 174 % from 1995 to 2020.

[32] and it's projected to be worth $2 .7 trillion by 2026.

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[40] Again, that's masterworks.

[41] dot art slash jbp see important disclaimers at masterworks .io slash disclaimer I generated partly generated a UN report contributed to a UN report about six or seven years ago on sustainable development and I had the same sort of realization that you described was that on all these dimensions where we were supposed to be you know careening towards catastrophe we were in fact doing better and better with the possible exception I think of oceanic management, but we don't have to get into that.

[42] I agree with that.

[43] Yeah, it's like the oceanic management is a catastrophe, but it could still be rectified.

[44] And it seems to be a tragedy of the commons catastrophe.

[45] And in any case, everywhere I looked at the actual statistics, the, the evidence was that things were getting better fast and like really fast, fast in an unparalleled manner.

[46] But what really got me was that the evidence as far as I can tell.

[47] is clear that as soon as you make people rich enough so that they're not living hand to mouth, then they start to become concerned with environmental degradation.

[48] And so the biggest contributor to pollution, you could make a case, a strong case.

[49] The biggest contributor to pollution isn't wealth, but poverty.

[50] And that if you raise people out of poverty, then they start to manage their environment's property because they can afford to look at the long run.

[51] And so you'd think that for the radical, who are hyper -concerned, according to their own self -description, with poverty and oppression as well as environmental degradation, that they would look at the facts and say, oh, my God, we can have our cake and eat it too.

[52] The faster we make people rich, the better off the planet is going to be.

[53] For all of our recorded history, let's say, going back 4 ,000 BC, but we can estimate even further back in time, there it is, the hockey stick, human prosperity.

[54] The line has flatlined.

[55] It is estimated that prior to the industrial revolution in the late 17 and early 1800s, global economy grew by about 0 .1 % per year, which is to say that to double your prosperity would have taken thousands of years.

[56] As late as 1900, which is to say the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who in Victoria was on the throne, the globe produced roughly $3 trillion in output.

[57] This is all inflation adjusted.

[58] So, three trillion dollars in output, the entire globe.

[59] In 2018, it was $121 trillion.

[60] dollars.

[61] So from three trillion to 121 trillion dollars in a scope of 100 years adjusted for inflation.

[62] And if the growth that we have experienced, the growth rate that we have experienced over the last 100 years continues into 2100, the world will produce 600 trillion dollars in output, real inflation adjusted output.

[63] Over the next 80 years, the globe, the globe, could produce six times more value than it is currently producing if we maintain the current economic growth rate.

[64] And do you think that's an optimistic projection or a conservative projection?

[65] That's what leads us back to the original point that we discuss.

[66] It very much depends on economic policies and political stability.

[67] If you don't have civil wars around the world, and government change hands in a peaceful and predictable way, then we should be okay when it comes to political stability.

[68] When it comes to economics, we are seeing as surprising and, to be quite frank, well, to be frank, surprising and almost inexplicable renewed interest in more restrictive economic policies from socialism on the left to hardcore protectionism on the right.

[69] And if our economic growth rate falls from 1 .8, 2 % that we have experienced over the last year to 0 .1%, which we have experienced over the previous 10 ,000 years, then it will take us 6 ,000 years to get from $100 trillion to $200 trillion.

[70] So the most remarkable thing about this is exactly the hockey stick shape.

[71] It's, as you pointed out, nothing at all happened until the mid -1800s, essentially.

[72] And then all of a sudden, things improved so rapidly that it's virtually incomprehensible.

[73] It's a miracle.

[74] It is the most important question in economics.

[75] What happens in the late 1700s, early 1800s, that produces.

[76] that hockey stick effect.

[77] And just to clarify, there have been in human history periods of economic efflorescence, flourishing, but they were usually restricted to small parts of the world, and they were usually, they usually petered out.

[78] So, for example, Song China has produced some remarkable technological discoveries, and it appeared to be a time of relative plenty compared to other countries in the world.

[79] world, but that petered out when Song Dynasty was replaced by the Ming Dynasty.

[80] Similarly, the Roman Empire appears to have been a place that was largely at peace internally and quite prosperous, but that came to an end in 467 or whenever that happened when Rome fell.

[81] So there are these periods that you can have prosperity.

[82] Also, let's stay with Europe.

[83] I mean, Europe has experienced the greatest century of peace and prosperity between 1814, the end of Napoleonic Wars and 1914, the breakout of the First World War, which slaughtered tens of millions and destroyed a lot of wealth.

[84] So, you know, economic progress can certainly take a knock and it can take a time to recover.

[85] But in order for it to recover, you have to rediscover the reasons why you had high economic growth rates in the first place.

[86] So, okay, so the first lesson is that something happened in the last 150 years that propelled human productive capacity and distribution globally into the stratosphere.

[87] And there's no sign that that's slowing, although we could disrupt it.

[88] And we could disrupt it because we don't exactly understand why it happened.

[89] and we're not appreciative enough of its miraculous nature and the perhaps fragile preconditions for its continued existence.

[90] Well, when I said that it's the biggest question in economics, I'm not suggesting that there aren't theories of why it happened.

[91] The theory that I espoused and the theory that has convinced me is that over hundreds of years in Western Europe and in North America and then later in other parts of the world, our economic and political institutions have grown more inclusive, open, or to use a political word, liberal.

[92] Now, I'm using liberal in its European sense, not liberal in the current American sense.

[93] And what that meant was that you no longer needed a permission from the king in order to open a shop or import a bag of wool from another country.

[94] So there's an autonomy, there's an element of autonomy, But there's also an element of generosity that autonomy leads to increased productivity, but the consequences of the production are also being shared and rather than hoarded.

[95] They're being distributed reasonably well.

[96] Yes, but the key here was, I think, that monarchies, governments have become more responsible to their people, more accountable to their people, and they started allowing a much greater level of economic freedom.

[97] Now, the reason why that happened is a very interesting one.

[98] Once again, I'm going to tell you a theory that I espouse and theory that convinced me, other people may have other ideas.

[99] But basically what has happened is that unlike in other parts of the world, such as the Ottoman Empire and such as China, Europe never had an internal empire.

[100] One dynasty was never able to conquer different European states into the creation of one European mega empire.

[101] And because governing elites of different states, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, whatever, because they wanted to survive, because they didn't want to be vassals of another monarch, because they wanted to remain independent.

[102] They realized that they needed to generate a lot of economic growth internally, and they realized that the only way that they could generate economic growth was through technological innovation.

[103] And technological innovation, you can only get in societies which allow people a greater degree, a relatively great degree, of intellectual freedom.

[104] And so countries which felt at most threatened, such as Holland, because the French were always trying to take them over, would welcome into their cities and into their, into the country.

[105] Thinkers from all over the world, free thinkers from all over Europe, who established themselves there, produced new ideas, produce new technologies, and Holland could defend itself against the predation of other countries.

[106] England was another example of how this happened.

[107] It is through geopolitical competition, in other words, the dismemberment of European countries that you get greater appreciation of the need for freedom, which then leads to innovation, which then leads to generation of more money, which then can keep your country independent and from being swallowed by a foreign conqueror.

[108] But if you want to reduce it to one sentence, it would be political and economic institutions became more open, inclusive, and liberal.

[109] Whether you were a Jew or whether you were a Muslim or a Christian or a Catholic, you could function within the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and nobody, and you were free from prosecution.

[110] All right, let's go to the next trend, the end of poverty, and that's this graph.

[111] Before the Industrial Revolution, or rather, let's start 12 ,000 years ago when humanity discovers agriculture, between 12 ,000 years ago and roughly 200 years ago, pretty much everybody in the world was a farmer or a farmer laborer.

[112] As late as 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 people around the world were involved in agriculture.

[113] They were farmers, and they were very poor.

[114] And then the other 10 % were basically the nobility, the clergy, and the military.

[115] But 90 % of humanity were either remained hunter -gatherers or there were farmers or farm laborers.

[116] And then with the Industrial Revolution, you start factoring, opening up all over the Western world.

[117] And people realize that they can make more money in the cities working in factories.

[118] So they start leaving the rural areas and moving into urban areas.

[119] earning more money.

[120] And eventually the agricultural population in the United States, for example, declines from 40 % in 1900, well, from 90 % in 1800 to 40 % in 1900 to 2 % today.

[121] Today, only 2 % of American workers work in agriculture.

[122] The rest of them works in in, you know, services industry, tourism, computing and whatever.

[123] But this is a process through which Americans stopped being very poor and became very rich.

[124] And this process is repeating all around the world.

[125] The world is industrializing.

[126] The world is becoming more service -oriented.

[127] And fewer and fewer people around the world work in agriculture, even though our agricultural output is higher than ever before.

[128] And we'll get to that trend, too.

[129] Just to highlight the meaning of this graph.

[130] So in 1830, 95 % of the global population was an absolute poverty.

[131] That was a much smaller number of people as well.

[132] And by the year 2015, roughly speaking, we're down to 10%.

[133] It's stunning.

[134] And the change from 1990 to 2010 is approximately 40 % to approximately 10.

[135] And you see what partly, I think what happened, you tell me if you think this is right or wrong, but there's been a real acceleration in the decline of absolute poverty, let's say, since 1990, and not coincidentally, it was at approximately that time that the Soviet Union collapsed, and so one of the major competitive systems whose advantages were touted in the developing countries, for example, was no longer a major player, and it was a little bit after that that China started to liberalize, at least economically, even though it really hasn't done it politically.

[136] And so I think that's at least partly responsible for the acceleration in the reduction of absolute poverty.

[137] The decline in socialism, communism, basically the disappearance of socialism, at least for a little bit of time, as an alternative and widely accepted way to riches, meant that developing countries changed their developing strategies beginning in the 1980s.

[138] They started opening up more.

[139] Instead of seeing multinational corporations as parasites and enemies, they started welcoming them into their own countries.

[140] Instead of rejecting foreign direct investment, they started opening up to foreign direct investment.

[141] So at a time when globalization starts really in 1980 or so, at the time of when Ron Reagan becomes president of the United States, 40 % of the world live in absolute poverty.

[142] That declines to about 30 % by the new millennium.

[143] And from the new millennium to today, 20 years, it declines from 30 % to less than 10%.

[144] So you're absolutely right.

[145] The decline in poverty has accelerated over the last 20 years from 30 % to less than 10%.

[146] It's stunning.

[147] It's absolutely unbelievable that that can be the case.

[148] It is the fastest reduction.

[149] It is the fastest in global poverty, primarily because many poor and previously socialist countries have changed their understanding of economics and way to prosperity.

[150] I want to harass you again about something.

[151] So you were talking about socialism and its decline.

[152] So Canada has many democratic socialist policies, Norway, which in your book ranks highest in terms of the Human Development Index, I believe, that's the case.

[153] The Scandinavian countries, of course, are famous for functional democratic socialism.

[154] And so what do you have to say about that?

[155] Forget about communism and the hardcore communist, Soviet -pushed Maoist doctrines, that anyone with any sense is going to regard, in the light of what happened historically, as absolutely counterproductive.

[156] Anyone who supports Maoist doctrines or Soviet doctrines is reprehensible in my, they're so ignorant or malevolent in some sense that it's reprehensible.

[157] It gets more complicated, I would say, when you're talking about the range of redistributive policies that characterize Northern Europe and Central Europe and Canada and the United States.

[158] is a wide range of theories, preferences for government intervention and for socialist, democratic socialist policies.

[159] And so how much of a range do you think there is where the left and the right are equally functional but emphasize different things?

[160] That might be the way of thinking about it.

[161] Right.

[162] You are certainly correct on China, which is abandoned hardcore communism in the late 1970s.

[163] But India was never communist, but even they reformed in the early 1990s and embraced a much freer economic model.

[164] And that's 1 .2 billion people.

[165] So that also explains why the global poverty rate has declined.

[166] Now, you're raising a very important point and that there is a difference between socialism, which is government ownership of the means of production, factories and whatever, and social democracy in Europe, in places like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and even perhaps Canada.

[167] But here's the interesting thing.

[168] All of these countries come at the very top of the Economic Freedom of the World Report, which is published by the Fraser Institute in Canada.

[169] You may be familiar with them.

[170] So it is actually possible to measure economic freedom in different countries.

[171] and Frazier has been doing so since the early 1970s.

[172] And all of these countries, all these social democratic countries actually score very well.

[173] Here is the reason why.

[174] First of all, they have very flexible labor markets.

[175] Second, they have very...

[176] Describe that, define that, so everyone understands.

[177] Meaning the ability of firing and hiring people is lightly regulated so that people can move from industries and occupations which are maybe unproductive or which are unproductive into wherever there is a new company that's opening.

[178] You don't suffer consequences.

[179] Right.

[180] So things are allowed to die and be born?

[181] Precisely.

[182] The second reason why they are scoring very high on the economic freedom of the world report is because they are open to foreign trade.

[183] They are actually more open to foreign trade than the United States.

[184] which is supposed to be a paragon of capitals, although obviously the United States isn't, but they are very free trade -oriented.

[185] And also, if you look at their tax structure, what you realize, that they actually have very low corporate tax rates.

[186] So, as opposed to, say, the United States, which is one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

[187] So what does Scandinavians and the Social Democrats have discovered is, roughly speaking, the following.

[188] let's keep the economy free.

[189] Let's try to generate as much revenue through economic growth and then tax that.

[190] Do not tax the productivity of the worker and of the company in terms of corporate tax rates.

[191] Or rather, let's try to have an open economy and generate economic growth by producing and by being a welcoming area for new businesses to open.

[192] Making poor people richer is an extremely intelligent environmental move for a variety of reasons.

[193] I mean, the first is perhaps that once you get people above a certain level of income, they can start buying fuels that are cleaner than the fuels they use now, dung and wood and that kind of thing.

[194] but also that as people move up the economic hierarchy they have time to be concerned about things that are more abstract like what the environment is going to be like for their children which they're not going to be or when they go on holiday for example or even where they live as they have some options to choose where to live and so it could be you know we often construe the relationship between the economy and the environment as a zero -sum game, right?

[195] And the biologists in particular, broadly speaking, have the political biologists have a proclivity to do that, that as the economy grows, we sacrifice the environment to it.

[196] But it could be the case that we get the best environmental bang for the buck by making the poor rich as fast as we possibly can around the world.

[197] And if we make poor economic decisions, because we're catastrophized.

[198] a certain kind of environmental calamity, we're inviting, we're actually increasing the risk of environmental degradation in the medium and the long term.

[199] Do you think that's reasonable?

[200] Yes, absolutely so, and in a number of different ways.

[201] So I think it's funny how we don't recognize how terrible it is to be poor.

[202] If you're poor, you're vulnerable in all kinds of ways.

[203] You're very clearly, incredibly vulnerable to global warming.

[204] So, you know, if you remember, there was a big hurricane hitting high on the Philippines back in 2013.

[205] It was made a big deal out of as global warming.

[206] It hit this very, very poor city, you know, where most of their citizens live under corrugated roof.

[207] Not surprisingly, having a hurricane five is terrible when you live under corrugated roof.

[208] The best way to help these people, obviously, would be to lift them out of poverty.

[209] what actually is we can see back in in the early part of last century, a similar hurricane hit and eradicate about half the city.

[210] This time it was only about a 20th of the city.

[211] So much, much better because the city was much richer.

[212] But if we focused on making them even richer, they would be much better off just simply from the point of view of being more protected from hurricanes.

[213] So fundamentally there's something weird about us saying, oh, those poor people in the Philippines, we should help them by not driving our car today.

[214] What?

[215] No, you should help them by becoming rich, becoming part of the integrated global economy, making sure that their kids would be better educated, not die from easily curable infectious diseases and so on.

[216] So not only would it be better environmentally, but it would obviously also be better for them educationally, for them health -wise, and all these other things.

[217] It would simply generate much, much better lives in the Philippines.

[218] But as you also pointed out, as you get richer, you're actually cleaner in almost all ways.

[219] You don't use dung and cardboard and wood to cook inside, but also you stop cutting down forest.

[220] You move to the city instead.

[221] You become a web designer or something else that's very, very little related to actually clearing out forest land.

[222] you do a lot of things in cities that are much more ecologically sustainable.

[223] And of course, in the long run, you will actually also say, I would like to make sure that we have better regulations, so we have less air pollution, so we have many of the other things that drive environmental benefits.

[224] So absolutely, by getting people out of poverty, we fix most environmental problems.

[225] To swallow what you just said and to believe it, there's a set of beliefs that you have to have already in place.

[226] You have to believe that the current economic system isn't fatally flawed and basically works, or at least works better than any hypothetical alternatives that have been tried or that we can dream up.

[227] So it basically works.

[228] And works means as it runs, it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty.

[229] There's still a maintenance of relative poverty, but absolute poverty tends to disappear.

[230] And there seems to be really good evidence for that, especially across, well, since the Industrial Revolution.

[231] but it's really taken off in the last 30 years, maybe non -coincidentally with the demise of communism, which was a competing, you know, a competing economic theory and produced all sorts of bad economic decisions.

[232] In any case, you have to buy the hypothesis that the current system works and that extending it is going to be better.

[233] And so you don't get to adopt revolutionary, a stance of revolutionary criticism of the Western capital, list hierarchy.

[234] So that's a big sacrifice if you're if you're if your thinking is oriented in that direction.

[235] Now, I don't know really what to make of that because you'd think the evidence that the poor has been lifted out of poverty at an unbelievable, like an astonishing rate since the year 2000, not just in China, but but all over the world, would be essentially irrefutable evidence that current system and works.

[236] And then if you look at China after they adopted free market policies compared to before they adopted free market policies, there's absolutely no comparison with regard to growth.

[237] And so it isn't obvious to me how if you were truly concerned with the poor, you'd be able to deny the sorts of propositions that you put forward.

[238] I don't understand that.

[239] maybe it's partly because people just don't know how much better things have got in the last 20 years and why, you know, because it has been difficult news to bring forward and it's difficult to market.

[240] If I can just, yes, yes, so one of the things I think people don't recognize, if you look at it at a graph over the last 200 years, 200 years ago, almost everyone in the world were absolutely poor in the sense of less than a dollar day.

[241] for a day.

[242] Yeah, 95 % of humanity was below that level.

[243] And we've just seen a dramatic decline.

[244] As you mentioned, we're now down below 10%.

[245] Even despite of COVID, which a lot of people have pointed out, have actually made more poor people.

[246] We've gone from seven up to about 9%.

[247] And so we've delayed the benefit for a couple of years.

[248] That's terrible.

[249] And I would rather not have had that happen.

[250] But it doesn't change the long -term trajectory that's amazingly downwards in the sense that we have many, many fewer people that are poor.

[251] One of my favorite guys who runs the World and Data website, he points out that every year for the last 25 years, the headline of every newspaper around the world could have been over the last 24 hours, 138 ,000 people have been lifted out of poverty.

[252] a hundred and thirty -eight thousand people every day for the last 25 years but of course it's not news because it happened every day it was not you know some oh this day it happened we don't get these good news and i think we need to get them in order to be able to understand the magnitude of what we're talking about well you know the problem with accepting that good news or a problem with it is that it pretty much eradicates the romantic rebel you know Because it all of a sudden makes it very difficult for you to be cool, to find something cool to stand up against and to resist.

[253] You know, you have a benevolent, relatively benevolent society that's getting incrementally better.

[254] It's not a villain that you can heroically resist.

[255] And that is, and I'm not being cynical about that.

[256] That is actually a problem because resisting arbitrary authority.

[257] is a good story.

[258] And it served people well for a very long time.

[259] And if you don't have that to catalyze your identity, you have to search for something perhaps equally grand.

[260] And that's difficult, especially when you also don't have to go out and contend with the brute force of mother nature to anywhere near the degree that you once had to.

[261] But if you look at it, there's plenty of other things you could stand up to.

[262] And that was what we were talking to.

[263] Instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society?

[264] Why aren't you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis or the one that stand up against maternal death or the one that stands up for a free trade or the ones that stand up for all these other things where we know for very little money we can make a tremendous benefit?

[265] So, so again, I get why it's not a very hard question, man. I mean, I think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment.

[266] You know, if you're resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state, you can easily identify an enemy.

[267] But if you stand up against tuberculosis, like obviously tuberculosis is bad.

[268] It doesn't make you look good by comparison.

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[299] That's air dash doctor, d .com slash peterson for the air doctor app.

[300] Last week, the Chinese government just declared the eradication of extreme poverty in China.

[301] And, you know, you can be cynical about that and claim that it's a totalitarian, it's totalitarian, what would you call, a posturing.

[302] But it's certainly the case that even by UN standards, we've almost we were on track to eradicate extreme poverty by according to the UN definition of extreme poverty by 2030 and we've halved it since from the year 2000 I believe to the year 2010 it was cut in half but it's absolutely phenomenal 60 % of the world was lived in extreme poverty when I was born today it's less than 10 % that's the greatest achievement of any human generation ever.

[303] Nobody's lived through anything like that in the past.

[304] Yes, and that despite the fact that the population, what, tripled?

[305] Yes.

[306] Well, yes, it's two and a half times.

[307] And nobody saw it coming.

[308] And it wasn't planned even.

[309] Most of it came about because of, you know, relatively local innovation to make farming more efficient and things like that.

[310] And the amount of calories available per head have gone up.

[311] on every continent, including Africa, there is still extreme poverty and extreme hunger and malnutrition and nutrient shortages and so on.

[312] But the thing I always say to environmentalists is why do you think it would motivate people to tell them that this problem is insoluble?

[313] Why not say, look how well we've done in the past, why don't we try and do just as well in the future?

[314] Well, it's especially the case.

[315] This chapter, Sweatshop Save the Planet, that subchapter, actually.

[316] I figured that would make you a lot of friends.

[317] So how do sweatshops save the planet exactly?

[318] How do you justify a statement like that?

[319] Well, I wrote this because in the late 1990s, I was working on an activist campaign to criticize Nike for its factory conditions in Indonesia.

[320] And I, as I, 20 years later, I went back to Indonesia to see how things were, just to see what the impacts were.

[321] And my views totally changed.

[322] Factories, and this has been going on for 200 years, 250 years, women move from the farms where they are basically servants to their parents, you know, the servant class of their parents.

[323] They move to the cities and it's just liberation.

[324] Yes, the life and working in the factory is really hard.

[325] I mean, it's terrible.

[326] Not compared to subsistence living on a farm.

[327] But not compared to subsistence living on a farm.

[328] And Suparti, who's the factory worker who I profile here, you know, she has her own scooter.

[329] She has her own home.

[330] She's like in her early 20s.

[331] She can marry whoever she wants.

[332] I mean, amazing, right?

[333] She's a Muslim, still Muslim, but she's left behind by coming to the city, the traditional practice of arranged marriage.

[334] Yeah, well, that's part of that unconscious worship of those sort of Ewok villages that you described.

[335] and the only person who would think that subsistence farming is somehow like a utopian goal is only someone who's so far removed from a farm that all they have in their head are images from children's books about like fairy tale villages something like that because it's just so go ahead it's like elizabeth and i always joke that it's always the utopias are always like elizabeth in england you know there's always like a renaissance fair going on at the same time and and everyone's you know and they're Now, you know, there's a kernel of truth in it in that when you go to Africa, when you go to really poor parts of sub -Saharan Africa, as I did, the day before I saw incredible endangered monkeys, you know, you're walking through villages that don't have any electricity and there was a church service going on and they started singing and it was, I was just like, oh, it is as romantic and beautiful.

[336] And, you know, when there's not electronic radios blaring and whatever, now in that same village, infant mortality is really high.

[337] In that same village, the opportunities for women are very low.

[338] Not to mention if you're gay, I mean, you can't, there's nobody, you can't be gay in those villages.

[339] You know, you can be killed.

[340] So, you know, there is something that does get lost with modernity, but absolutely the stuff that you gain has been completely forgotten and nobody remembers it.

[341] I wouldn't have known it had I not been a radical socialist in my teenage years and went to Nicaragua to help the San Anistas.

[342] I worked in Brazil.

[343] to help the anarchist, landless workers movement.

[344] And, you know, you would meet young people and you'd start talking to them and they'd be like, hey, how do I get to the city?

[345] Yeah.

[346] And it would be like, you'd be like, we're trying to create a workers cooperative here and be like, yeah, man, I just want to get to the university in the city.

[347] Can you figure out how I can do that?

[348] And that changed me. And I, and working alongside folks as they're clearing rainforest.

[349] Oh, yeah, that's fun.

[350] I picked rocks when I was a kid.

[351] I've tried to take stumps out of the ground.

[352] you do that for a week or two and just see how far you get picking rocks out of a field that's quite the entertaining work so yeah it makes you much more grateful for not just your own life but also for this incredible process uh that we call development and of which is really just urbanization and industrialization so i wanted apocalypse never to sort of remind people introduce that reality to people and also to see that it's not at the case where the picture people have is that you industrialize and then you destroy nature.

[353] No, no. It's subsistence at culture at the forest frontier, which is driving the destruction of critical habitat.

[354] And that means poverty.

[355] Isn't that so cool?

[356] Isn't that so cool when you step back and look at it?

[357] It's like, oh, poverty is causing a tremendous amount of environmental damage.

[358] So if we could make people rich and make things better biologically, let's say, more sustainable, and actually the way to do the latter is to do the former, make people rich as fast as you possibly can.

[359] Then they start to care.

[360] And then you say that to people.

[361] It's like resistance.

[362] It's like, oh, I see.

[363] You don't want people to be rich on a healthy planet.

[364] So what's up with you exactly, if that's bugging you?

[365] What's going on?

[366] Because that's a good goal.

[367] And all the smart environmentalists I've talked to, Lomberg is like at the pinnacle of that in many ways.

[368] They all come to that conclusion.

[369] And Marion Tupy as well, It's like, well, no, no, if you look at what happens, you educate women, birth rate plummets, and that'll actually be a problem in 100 years because there won't be enough people rather than too many.

[370] But that happens instantly, even in one generation.

[371] And so that's the solution to population control, assuming we needed that.

[372] And so that's in alignment with every feminist school.

[373] And then as you get people out of this slash and burn agricultural cycle, well, they start to be more efficient in their use of resources, and they're not living hand to mouth.

[374] And so you make people rich and they become environmentalists.

[375] It's like, okay, that isn't what we've been told.

[376] But that's how it works.

[377] Despite more people, despite more urbanization, despite the hypothetically decreasing prevalence of resources, despite all of those hypothetical problems, there's been a 70 % decline in basic global commodity prices adjusted for wages from 1980 till 2018.

[378] stunning, right?

[379] Not what anyone was predicting in the 1960s by any stretch of the imagination.

[380] Yes, that's absolutely correct.

[381] So even though the population of the world has increased by something like 70%, the prices of natural resources have declined by 70%, which means that every additional person born on the planet has made things cheaper for us by about 1%.

[382] And nobody saw that coming.

[383] Right, that should be said 50 times.

[384] Right, because it's so, it's so, it's.

[385] so not what anyone thinks.

[386] More people means more wealth.

[387] That's exactly right.

[388] You know, I've also seen that more people means more ecological preservation, and so does more wealth, because richer people care more about the environment.

[389] And so you see that perverse occurrence too, that once GDP gets to the point where people aren't scrabbling around trying to stay alive, so maybe $5 ,000 per capita, all of a sudden environmental concerns start to manifest themselves.

[390] And so it looks like we could have more people and make them richer faster, and that would be better for the planet.

[391] No, that's absolutely right.

[392] The cleanest environment in the world is in advanced countries in Western capital societies.

[393] When you see tremendous attack on the environment is in poor countries, you know, when the Venezuelan economy collapsed, they started eating animals in zoo.

[394] in Zimbabwe, when their economy collapsed, they started slaughtering the wildlife.

[395] You know, if it's a choice between killing a giraffe or having my baby die, I know what I have to do, right?

[396] But so for the longest time, people thought that if population grows, we are going to run out of resources.

[397] And this is not what has happened.

[398] We have more resources.

[399] Resources are cheaper, but that in itself is an individual.

[400] that they are more abundant than before, because, of course, human beings are not just consumers of resources, we're not just destroys of resources, we also creators of resources.

[401] Human beings are producers of ideas.

[402] Yes, and on average, we produce more than we consume, otherwise we would die.

[403] Well, that's exactly right.

[404] And that's what people like Thomas Maltax or Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University were worried about, they freaked out two generations of people, O 'Rleck's population.

[405] And we still haven't, we still haven't recovered from that.

[406] No, we still haven't recovered from that.

[407] It's part of an apocalyptic narrative.

[408] No one believes, if I tell my students, we're going to peak at $9 billion and we can handle that and then the population is going to decline, no one believes that.

[409] If you say that, well, we've got richer as more people have been born rather than poor because brainpower exceeds consumption, essentially, especially as people have got healthier and their IQ has increased, which is something we could talk about as well.

[410] None of this is part of the general apocalyptic narrative.

[411] No, not only can we get access to new resources, but also we can replace resources which are becoming scarce.

[412] So, for example, humans used to make candles out of spermaceti, which is this weird sort of stuff in the brains of the oils.

[413] oils, oil, or fat in the brains of the whales.

[414] So we used to murder them by the thousands, and we used to scrape out that spermachete and build it into nice candles.

[415] And then we realized that we didn't have to do that, that it was actually quite expensive and quite stupid, because we could produce electricity by burning coal.

[416] And then we decided that we can switch from coal to gas, and maybe eventually to nuclear and whatever.

[417] And so that's how humanity manages to constantly produce more.

[418] It's through innovation.

[419] And in fact, in Western countries today, we have reached peak stuff.

[420] This is a book, very important book, which I recommend to your readers by Andrew McAfee, and that is making more from less, or more from less.

[421] Now, what it means, really, is that even though the, I American economy and the British economy continue to grow and produce more GDP per capita in absolute terms, the amount of resources that go into it, be it aluminum or whatever, that has actually peaked off about 10 or 20 years ago and it's now declining.

[422] So we have become so incredibly productive that we can now use much less resources in order to produce more wealth, more GDP.

[423] It doesn't look like we're going to overpopulate the planet to the point where we're going to destroy all our natural resources, the planet, and everyone's going to starve.

[424] That doesn't seem to be in the cards.

[425] So unless we make catastrophic and likely avoidable errors.

[426] Right now there are 7 .8 billion people in the world.

[427] It looks like we are going to peak at 9 .8 in the 2060s, So the 80s, and then it will decline to about 8 .8 by the end of this century.

[428] Lancet had a study a couple of months ago, which showed, again, remember, 7 .8 billion people in the world today, Lancet thinks that there will be either 6 .8 or 8 .8 billion people in the world in 2100, but every demographer that I know of expects that human population will peak, and then it will start declining.

[429] That's because a total fertility rate, which is to say the number of babies born to a woman, have been on a downward trajectory.

[430] Currently in the United States, in much of Western Europe, women are having fewer than two babies per woman per lifetime, and in order to have a replacement rate, you need 2 .1 babies because some of them die.

[431] So, population without immigration in Western Europe, Europe will continue to decline.

[432] Our numbers are still going up because obviously we have huge immigration but but women are not having that many babies.

[433] Now is this going to be a blessing or is it going to be a potential problem?

[434] Well it could be a potential problem because human beings are the producers of ideas and ideas lead to innovation and if a genius is one out of a billion or one out of a million, then the fewer millions of people you have born, the fewer geniuses are going to be born.

[435] And that in itself, and that to me is a major concern.

[436] But of course, in Western countries, we have promised so much to the future generations that are supposed to be paid for by children who are born in the future, that if those children are not being born, who is going to pay off that debt in the future?

[437] Who's going to pay for all those retirees?

[438] those questions should also be answered.

[439] Yes, it's quite surprising to note that one of the more pressing social problems in 100 years might be that there aren't enough people rather than too many.

[440] Could easily be the case.

[441] Africa's had an incredible decade, actually, much better than the West, which has had a rather grim decade of low productivity and the overhang of the Great Recession and so on.

[442] But, you know, countries like Ethiopia have doubled their income per capita in real terms in a decade.

[443] You've seen malaria mortality collapse.

[444] You've seen HIV mortality falling fast.

[445] You've seen warfare disappearing from much of the continent.

[446] You've seen an emerging middle class.

[447] You've seen far less hunger and malnutrition.

[448] Actually, Africa is just doing roughly what Asia did a generation ago, and it will soon be where Asia is now, which is a middle -class, middle -income continent.

[449] That's an incredible thing.

[450] And it...

[451] Well, in Africa, Africa has unparalleled potential.

[452] I read an analysis probably 15 years ago.

[453] I believe it was by the former CEO of Elkoa, the aluminum company, who was working for a Republican government as a cabinet member at that point.

[454] I'm afraid I can't remember his name.

[455] but he visited Uganda and was very curious about its potential with regards to agriculture and calculated first of all Uganda apparently sits on a water table that's only about 200 feet down and it's very fertile he calculated and maybe this wasn't his calculation but he reported that Uganda alone could feed all of Africa yeah and so there's there's no reason to assume that despite the fact for example I think it's Nigeria is on course to be the world's most populous country by the year 2100.

[456] I think the demographic projections are that it will surpass China by that point.

[457] Yes, I believe that's true.

[458] And that's quite an interesting thought, isn't it?

[459] But, I mean, just to cast your mind forward to the year 2100, I think we will be producing food an awful lot of it from factories by then.

[460] By factories, I mean vertical farms, you know, indoor, LED, lit.

[461] multi -story operations that...

[462] Why LED lit?

[463] Why LED lit?

[464] Because LEDs are so cheap.

[465] They use so little electricity and produce so little heat that you can actually start to make indoor farming makes sense because light was the big problem for farming.

[466] You had to be outdoors for the light because the plants don't grow except in sunlight.

[467] But the LED revolution has made a big difference there.

[468] And I can imagine us having, you know, basically some indoor farms the size of Uganda that feed the world.

[469] And the rest of the planet, yes, we'll have hobby farming and we'll have grass -fed beef in here and there and so on, but an awful lot of the rest of it will be one giant national park in which we will allow nature to thrive.

[470] And by the way, I think...

[471] And allow people to operate as tourists.

[472] I mean, increasingly ecologically pristine areas pay for themselves with tourism.

[473] And so that brings them into the economy.

[474] which is an almost certain way of preserving them.

[475] Yeah.

[476] And I suspect we'll bring back some extinct species by then as well.

[477] Famine was quite widespread in Europe in the 20th century, far more than people generally remember, realize.

[478] I mean, Holland went through terrible famines, the Scandinavian countries.

[479] And of course, in Great Britain, in the late 1800s, the Irish famine haunted, was a specter that haunted the entire world's population until extraordinarily recently.

[480] And the news on that front is astoundingly positive.

[481] No one starves anymore except for political reasons, essentially.

[482] So forced starvation, planned starvation, but not accidental.

[483] That's correct.

[484] So in the late 1800s, we started understanding agriculture and agricultural productivity much more than before.

[485] Not only did we introduce new technology.

[486] better plows and so forth, but we also discovered that guano, which is just bird pooping, bird poop from South America, contain so many nutrients, especially phosphorus, that when it was sprinkled all over the late 19th century agricultural land, it could actually increase yields tremendously.

[487] And then when we started running out of guano, yet another example of human ingenuity, we started producing synthetic fertilizers full of, I believe it's nitrogen and phosphorus and so forth.

[488] Now, that wasn't the last when it came to human ingenuity.

[489] We started also toying with the genes of different plants, which led to a new, sturdier and more.

[490] more productive wheat varieties in the 70s by a man called John Burlaug, John Burlop.

[491] Right, who saved more people than any other person who ever lived in all likelihood.

[492] That's exactly right.

[493] So instead, it's quite interesting.

[494] Just as people were starting to be really worried about this population growth, especially in China and India, people immediately started working on the ways to reduce, to solve the problem.

[495] And so, you know, the population bond comes out in 1968.

[496] And right about that time, into the early 70s, you have Borlaug introducing these new varieties, wheat varieties into Bangladesh and India and China and elsewhere.

[497] And of course, food production rockets, skyrockets.

[498] India today is a major exporter of food.

[499] Now, these were people who were starving by tens of millions.

[500] When I was growing up in the 1980s, I remember being terrified by the images of starving people, starving children in East Africa, in the Horn of Africa.

[501] And now you say this is so unbelievable.

[502] The world's poorest region, sub -Saharan Africa, now enjoys access to food in volumes that are equivalent to Portugal in the 1960s.

[503] so now it's and that's a very very small amount of time from the 1960s to now well within living memory of many people the one of the richest countries in the world had the same amount of food per capita as the poorest part of the world does now stunning stunning absolutely remarkable that's so positive so good yeah so today um access to calories in africa is roughly 2400 calories per person per day.

[504] Now, obviously, not everybody gets it.

[505] There are serious problems in Africa still.

[506] You do still have conflict and so forth.

[507] And people do get to starve.

[508] But the widespread starvation, because you couldn't produce enough food, that doesn't happen anymore.

[509] And that's obviously a tremendously positive step forward.

[510] In fact, many African problems, many African countries are beginning to experience the problem of obesity, especially in urban centers.

[511] Now, if somebody told you that 50 years ago, you would have, you would have said, you know, you're high.

[512] Right.

[513] So the problem in 100 years is that we're going to have nothing but fat people, and there'll be far too few of them.

[514] How is it that becoming rich saves the environment?

[515] Well, it's because Bernadette in the Congo gets to move to the city.

[516] And when you ask Bernadette, hey, would you like to live in the city and have a job at a factory?

[517] She's like, hell yes, is there one?

[518] No, that's the problem in Congo.

[519] But it's not like the picture that people have, which comes in part from Marx, you know, it's in capital, the tragedy, or not the tragedy of the commons.

[520] The dark satanic mills.

[521] Yes, exactly.

[522] It's a picture that like these, these happy subsistence farmers have been forced into slave -like conditions in the factories.

[523] When nine times out of ten, it's the opposite they would like to go to the cities.

[524] They're wanting to go to the cities to get those opportunities.

[525] And then when they leave their, they're frankly low productive, crappy little farm behind, much of the time it just reverts to grassland and forests.

[526] So they're like, so stop crying about the loss of the family farm.

[527] I say to this because I'm going to break my mom's heart because, you know, we lost the family farm in our generation.

[528] But for many people, losing the family farm is fine.

[529] Like, like they're just like, it was terrible, you know, for much of the world.

[530] And then it reverts to grasslands and forests.

[531] Just like it has in North America.

[532] I mean, so much marginally.

[533] farmland, I don't remember how many more percentage -wise trees there are in the northern hemisphere since 100 years ago, but it's like 40%.

[534] And then that's another thing that's really interesting is that you don't hear much about is that a huge chunk of the planet has greened over the last 20 years too.

[535] I think it's an area the size of the U .S. It's some staggering, staggering amount of land anyways.

[536] And that just never comes up.

[537] It's like, and the idea, I, didn't know as well until about six or seven years ago that we're in all likelihood going to peak at about nine billion people and then it's like that's going to plummet real fast like really fast by all appearances and so and we can we can certainly sustain a population of nine billion as far as I can tell without wreaking environmental havoc especially as we get smarter technologically and that's happening so fast that we can't even keep up with it you talk about fish farming in relationship to that for example yeah I mean look first we produce so much food.

[538] I mean, Jordan, it's crazy, right?

[539] We have 25 % food surpluses.

[540] I mean, we've produced 25 % more food than we need.

[541] We've never had surpluses that large of share of total food production or the total size and during the same period when we're using less and less land.

[542] So we're producing more and more food on less and less land.

[543] This is like one of the greatest human success stories of all times.

[544] We struggle with overweight.

[545] We struggle with obesity.

[546] We struggle with having too much food.

[547] In the future, we're going to struggle with not having enough people in some countries we already are.

[548] I mean, that gives me some hope is that, you know, the New York Times had a front page story a few weeks ago about how, you know, the problems related to not having to negative population growth, right, to population declines.

[549] You know, we knew really in the late 60s, at the time when hysteria overpopulation was the highest, we knew that the rate of increase was had peaked and declined.

[550] So we really had to put up with another 20 years of just this apocalyptic nonsense around too many people.

[551] My hope is that the same thing will have them with climate change.

[552] I mean, it's already happening.

[553] Carbon emissions, as you pointed out, have declined in the United States by 22 % since 2005.

[554] And why is that?

[555] We should have a little chat about that.

[556] Why is that?

[557] Because no one predicted this.

[558] So.

[559] Yeah, I mean, natural gas in the short version.

[560] Right.

[561] Fracking.

[562] I was very familiar with that because fracking was everywhere in Northern Alberta, which is saturated with hydrocarbons everywhere, you know.

[563] So it was a big part of the economy and fracking was part of the course there 40 years ago.

[564] But it's so, and this is so interesting too from an economic perspective when you're thinking about environmental policy.

[565] It's like these environmental breakthroughs did not come where we expected them to come.

[566] And you cite an MIT scientist on page 105.

[567] I wanted to read this because it's so it's so unlikely.

[568] I think that's, I hope I've got it in the right place here.

[569] Oh, I won't read it.

[570] I'll just say it.

[571] He says, if you really wanted to decrease carbon in the atmosphere, you might want to accelerate the rate at which coal is being burned in India.

[572] So let's unpack that because you think coal and India and lower carbon?

[573] What's that about?

[574] That's Kerry Emmanuel from MIT.

[575] And he points out that rising prosperity.

[576] Coal -powered prosperity now will result in people choosing to have fewer kids, and therefore you'll have fewer people in the future producing more pollution.

[577] The specifics of how that works, I mean, that's basically the whole story, is that prosperity, we should view prosperity as essential to protecting the natural environment, in part because of declines of population, but also because we end up moving towards cleaner sources of energy.

[578] Right.

[579] Once you get away from wood, hey, so.

[580] Woods really bad.

[581] Then coal, well, coal's got a lot cleaner, way cleaner, as you point out in your book.

[582] And so that's a really good thing.

[583] But coal isn't as good, let's say, as natural gas.

[584] And maybe natural gas isn't as good as nuclear.

[585] Now, who knows?

[586] Because that's complicated.

[587] But it's a possibility.

[588] And so you want to get people away from wood as fast as possible.

[589] That's part of that getting away from zero too, right, in terms of economic growth is when you're at a subsistence level, You don't have enough time to be making the future better.

[590] You're just trying to survive today.

[591] You can't get off the ground.

[592] And for the first time in human history, we could get everyone off the ground.

[593] No one would have to be at zero.

[594] Absolutely.

[595] And to give the radical leftist types credit, at least hypothetically, they're concerned with all those people that are stuck at zero.

[596] Well, but the unexamined environmentalism is interfering with that in very complicated ways.

[597] And so, well, it's hard to sort this all out, obviously.

[598] No, part of what I wanted to do to go beyond, I think, some of the, you know, the traditional criticisms of apocalyptic environmentalism was to sort of say, look, there's a truly benevolent process of energy progress from wood and dung to coal and hydroelectric dams to oil and natural gas to nuclear.

[599] So we can talk about nuclear, but basically what you're doing is you're shrinking the footprint, the land footprint required to produce those fuels, to basically.

[600] basically zero.

[601] You know, so to give you a sense of it, you know, like coal has at least twice as much energy as a lump of wood.

[602] You go to oil and gas.

[603] You get a significant increases plus it's coming from underground rather than above ground or having to destroy a whole mountains as you do for coal.

[604] You get to nuclear uranium mining.

[605] I mean, you know, this amount, less than this amount of uranium, that amount of uranium provides me with all the power I need for my entire life.

[606] A whole high energy life is completely available to you.

[607] Yeah, well, and we should have a bit of a chat about energy.

[608] It's like, okay, what's wealth that you want to deliver to poor people?

[609] Okay, what's wealth?

[610] Energy.

[611] Make energy cheap.

[612] There's no poor people.

[613] Why?

[614] Well, because work requires energy and work produces everything.

[615] And so if energy is dirt cheap, there aren't poor people.

[616] And so do you not want to have no poor people?

[617] It's like cheap energy, man. That's your savior.

[618] And as you said, if we do this halfway intelligently, it's always is also extremely good for the planet.

[619] So, so, well, but the whole system has to come down because I'm depressed.

[620] So well, that's not a very good argument.