#170 — The Great Uncoupling
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of The Making Sense Podcast, host Sam Harris sits down with Kathleen Ballou to discuss her new documentary, White Privilege, a documentary that examines white privilege and white supremacy in relation to the history of white supremacy and white privilege, and the role of the white supremacist white power movement in perpetuating white privilege. In this episode, we discuss what it means to be a "woke" white person, and why it's important to be woken in the 21st century, especially when it comes to dealing with racism, white supremacy, and other forms of racism. Sam also talks about why he decided to record the podcast in the first place and why he felt it was better not to record it at all. And he explains why he didn't want to get distracted by a larger conversation on the topic of white privilege in general, even if it's one of the most important things we should be talking about in the modern world. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation that will be released to subscribers on the Waking Up App, a new podcast hosted by Sam Harris. Subscribe to the Wakening Up App and get access to the rest of the full episodes of the show. You can expect weekly episodes every available as Video, Podcast, and blogposts throughout the week. Make Sense wherever you get your news and information. Thanks for listening! and Happy Listening! Sam Harris - Sam Harris Music: "Good Morning America" by Skynet by Ian Dorsch (featuring John Singleton ( ) , "Blame It On Me" by Fountains of Rockwell ( ) and "The Good Morning America by The Good Morning Thing by John Doe ( ), by , & "The Real Thing" by is available on SoundCloud, and "Blindspotting on Soundcloud, . , and , which is also available on Apple Podcasts, and is available in Kindle, iBook, Podcharts, Tune in, and Stitcher, and Podcoin, and also on Podcoin in paperback, and Download MP3 and Audible, and You Tube, and All Previous Podcasts. , download it on Stravings, and so much more! and Subscribe & Share it on iTunes, and we'll be listening to it on the App Store, too!
Transcript
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Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
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In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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Okay, once again, reminding subscribers to go to my website, log in, and get our private
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As I've now said a few times in housekeeping here, there's some changes coming, and I don't
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But, if you're on mobile, and go to the subscriber content page on my site, if you're using one
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of the supported podcatchers, just one click and you'll have the right feed.
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And again, the right feed comes through with a red Making Sense icon, not a black one.
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And one of the things that'll be coming through on the subscriber feed soon are the conversations
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Many of you have asked that I release those jointly on the subscriber feed, and we will
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Also new, as of the last podcast, I will be adding an afterword to these conversations,
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in many cases talking about the effect that the guest had on me.
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And I did that for the first time with Kathleen Ballou in my last podcast on the white power
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I said at one point that I detected a level of wokeness in her that I didn't want to engage
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with because I thought it would be a distraction.
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And a few of you objected that I was landing a blow on my guest when she wasn't there to
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And others found the other side of the coin there and took me to task for not tackling
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her obvious wokeness and abdicating my responsibility to tackle crazy social justice ideas wherever
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I don't think I was saying anything she would have disagreed with.
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It was quite obvious that she viewed things like the history of Western colonialism and resource
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extraction and nuclear proliferation as part of this picture of white privilege and white
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Anyway, I really wanted to get her best case for how worried we should be about the white
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And I really didn't want to get wrapped around the axle of talking about racism in general
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And just to be clear, the afterword is not a place where I will land blows on my guests
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It's simply the new place in the show where I will sometimes tell you what I was thinking
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and perhaps what I didn't say during the conversation, either because I forgot or because I thought
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And in the case of that interview, I really think it was better not to get distracted by
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And I can assure you there will be more coming on that topic, for better or worse.
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In fact, there's a podcast I recorded about a year ago with Chelsea Handler that I'll soon
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Chelsea just released a documentary on white privilege for Netflix, and she interviewed me
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And I decided to record our whole conversation as a podcast at the time.
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This was in part due to my instincts for self-preservation.
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I knew that if she used any of the interview, it would just be about five minutes or so.
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And I couldn't release the podcast until her documentary came out.
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Now, as it happens, I didn't make the cut in her film at all, which, having seen it,
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I thought we had a great conversation, but it wasn't one that could easily fit with the
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You're doing a documentary on white privilege, and I'm the white guy?
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It's really about my privilege, starting there.
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How many edibles have you taken now to weather this conversation?
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I think the disparity is true because it's everywhere.
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There aren't an equal amount of women represented in any industry.
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From talking to people who claim to not be racist, the first thing out of everyone's
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mouth is, I'm married to a black woman, or I'm friends with a black person, or I'm not
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And right there and then, that says to me, yeah, you are.
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I want to find the genius who invented this meme.
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But the idea that some of my best friends are black defense is not only a bad defense,
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You know, it's what people have used to, like, oppress them for years.
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But it's what it, what should elicit the pain is clearly the intention to elicit the
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I hate you, and here's how I'm going to say it.
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I think political correctness is something that just makes people stupid, where they just
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But I think when the injury is so deep, there needs to be reform on the subject of virtue
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Do you think that me doing a documentary on white privilege is virtue signaling?
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I will release that to subscribers very soon, along with the conversations I've been having
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Andrew is a research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School
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of Management, and he was previously a professor at Harvard Business School.
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He's co-authored the books The Second Machine Age and Machine Platform Crowd.
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But today we speak about his new book, More From Less, the surprising story of how we learn
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to prosper using fewer resources and what happens next.
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And as you'll hear, this is a very optimistic conversation, unlike many I have here.
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We talk about the history of human progress and the modern uncoupling of our prosperity from
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We talk about the pitfalls of capitalism, but also its hidden virtues and technological progress
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generally, environmental policy, the future of the developing world, and many other topics.
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Anyway, this is fascinating material, and as you'll hear, all too consequential, and on
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So now, without further delay, I bring you Andrew McAfee.
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So I was trying to remember, I think you and I have met at least once at the AI conference
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I just went to the first one, and then I went to the Asilomar one, but I didn't go to
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Okay, so you and I are in exactly the same boat.
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I went to Puerto Rico one, and then Asilomar as well.
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And then you and I run into the hallways, run into each other at the hallways of places like
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So, listen, it's great to get you on the podcast.
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The title is More From Less, and you're in an unusual spot, along with Steve Pinker, whose
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recent books have been very positive and against the grain of many people's expectations.
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I can imagine, you haven't really started your book tour yet, but let me predict that
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when you get in front of audiences, you will, with some regularity, encounter the sour face
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of incredulity from many people who, upon reflecting on your thesis, just don't want
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First, tell people who you are and your potted intellectual history.
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How have you come to have an opinion on any of these matters we're going to talk about?
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And you know that opinions are not in short supply anywhere in academia.
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My name is Andy McAfee, and I am a scientist at MIT.
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I used to be at Harvard, and I moved down the river in Cambridge, Massachusetts about a decade
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And I just try to study and understand where all of this technology, all this tech progress
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So, Sam, like you know, with my co-author and my friend, Eric Brynjolfsson, he and I have
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written a couple of books together about this main topic.
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The second one was called Machine Platform Crowd, about, you know, the job, the wage,
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the labor force impacts, and then the business model impacts of all this crazy new technology.
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And then this new book that I've got out called More From Less is a little bit of a pivot, but
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It's trying to convey the story of how our relationship with the planet that we all live
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on has changed in some pretty fundamental ways, in large part because of technology.
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And your background, if I recall, is in somewhere in engineering, and then you kind of went through
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I got my MBA from MIT about, you know, 63 years ago.
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And then I did my doctorate at Harvard at the business school, taught at the business school
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at Harvard for about a decade, and then came back to my roots, came back home to MIT about
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So your basic thesis, as I understand it in this book, is that finally our prosperity has
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become decoupled from our consumption of resources.
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So, you know, as you put it, we've essentially exchanged bits for atoms or atoms for bits.
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I mean, you certainly acknowledge many of the bad things we've done and are continuing to
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do, but you cite the, what you call the four horsemen of the optimist.
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And these, I just want to run through these because this is a great way to structure the
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You talk about tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government.
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And each of those two, the first two and the latter two are kind of dyads of a sort.
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I mean, tech progress and capitalism go hand in hand, and public awareness and responsive
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government seem to also be joined at the hip in some way.
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So let's just start with the progress we've made.
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Yeah, Sammy, you just did a beautiful job of delivering both the what and the why of this
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The what, like you just said, is that we have finally learned how to decouple growing our
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prosperity, increasing the size of our economies, having people lead longer and healthier and
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Another really important thing to do is take better care of the planet Earth.
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And there used to be a pretty sharp trade-off between those two things.
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And in the industrial era, we massively increased human prosperity, but we massively increased our
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It's just this unignorable story about the industrial era that got kicked off with the
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And so before I started working on this book, I kind of had this fundamental assumption in
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the back of my head that that's how the world worked.
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We had to take more from the Earth in order to have more human prosperity, bigger human
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And what I learned and what I've come to firmly believe is that's just not the case anymore.
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So you use the word decouple, which is exactly right.
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We have decoupled increasing our human prosperity from taking more from the Earth year after year.
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Data from America shows we've got a large, technically sophisticated economy that's responsible
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And in just about all the ways that I can think of that matter, we are leaving a lighter
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And I kind of thought that was a big deal, this transition from taking more from the
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It's a huge transition because so you can tell the story of our technological progress
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And it is a story of progress nonetheless, but of a fairly rapacious extraction of resources
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and a soiling of our own nest to a degree that is scarcely sustainable.
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But your book, like my friend Steve Pinker's book, is filled with some very happy graphs where
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you see the lines of extraction and resource use diverge from the line of increase in prosperity.
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But before we get to the happy moment, maybe let's just spend a few minutes on just what
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progress we made, even in the days when the progress was wasteful and polluting.
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And you mentioned Steve Pinker, and I'm very, very proud to join his tribe of evidence-driven
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And Pinker makes the case that the Enlightenment did a great deal of really wonderful things
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I just want to add to that chorus with this book by saying something that people have said
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before, which was the Industrial Revolution, which was this point in time where we learned
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how to access the crazy amounts of energy stored in fossil fuels all around the world.
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That's kind of, for me, that's the heart of the Industrial Revolution.
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And this put us onto just a categorically different trajectory.
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And my favorite way to show that, and I show this in the book, is by looking at kind of one
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graph that shows population versus prosperity in England for hundreds of years.
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And you and I probably use the word Malthusian as an insult to somebody these days, because
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what Malthus said in the late 18th century was essentially, we're all going to starve because
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One of the weirdest things I learned when writing this book was that Malthus was right
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And the great way to show that is to chart population versus prosperity in England from
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We can reconstruct what that looks like, and you just see a pendulum swinging back and forth.
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The only times that the English were relatively prosperous was when there were relatively few of
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And when there were a lot of English people, they were all kind of poor.
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And the only decent explanation for that phenomenon is there was kind of a hard ceiling
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on the amount of stuff you could take from the earth, primarily food.
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And when there are too many people and not enough to go around, everybody's kind of poor.
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When population goes down, everybody can be a bit richer until they bump up against that
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So from 1200 to 1800, Malthus looks like a genius.
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And now we use his name as an adjective for dead flat wrong because of the industrial revolution
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When we got out of that trade-off because of the steam engine and a bunch of other inventions
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and then internal combustion, we just harnessed the world's energy.
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And you can watch human population and human prosperity increase together for the very first
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time ever in human history and increase at rates that we've never, ever seen before.
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And it almost doesn't matter what kind of evidence you look at, whether it's global population,
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You see the same story, which is this almost horizontal line of nothing really interesting
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happening, and then an almost vertical line of, oh my God, we've never seen prosperity
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That's, you know, and I say in the book, the industrial era was not fantastic for everybody
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We can talk about some of the dark side there, but it was this unprecedented chapter in human
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The trade-off that we made kind of, you know, implicitly without thinking a lot about it
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is that, as you point out, we took more from the planet to generate that prosperity year
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And we beat up the planet in all kinds of fundamental ways year after year.
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And we did it almost in lockstep with our prosperity growth.
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You can just graph the size of the economy versus how much we took from the earth.
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And in the years leading up to call it the first Earth Day in 1970, you can graph things like
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how polluted the skies over American cities were, again, versus the economic growth.
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It's just incredibly clear that we took more from the earth and we fouled it.
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We befouled it more year after year to generate this prosperity.
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So just looking back, you have some arresting images and phrases in the book here, which,
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you know, I think this kind of thinking is commonplace among engineers and perhaps physicists.
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But for most of us who don't spend a lot of time in those fields, a very simple statement
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like, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the only way for a human being to move anything
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on earth was with muscle power, either human or animal, for literally tens of thousands
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of years, generation after generation, you know, before wind and water came online, all
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we had was just digging by hand to do anything.
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And maybe we domesticated the ox and the horse to drag our plows.
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Again, it is an obvious point, but when you think of what it was like to live year after
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year, life after life, I mean, generation after generation, where nobody had ever met
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anyone who ever imagined things could be different.
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You know, it's just this notion that a better future was ahead of us.
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I don't think that's really part of the historical record.
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And you could drop someone into any 10,000 year interval and nothing would be different.
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They would have recognized all the same tools and, you know, cultural practices.
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Everyone's dying from the same diseases that are, you know, as yet not even dimly understood.
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It clearly didn't have to be that way because it is now not that way.
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And whatever progress we make from here is likewise also not guaranteed.
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I mean, we're just, you know, we're functioning within the horizon of the known and struggling
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to push that back with all of our scientific pursuits.
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And to look back on the history of the species is to be amazed at just how long it took to make
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And to look back and be incredibly grateful that you don't live in that period, or at least
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Sam, I'm sure you come across people who kind of long for the good old days before industrialization
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and urbanization and technology, and they want to go back to a simpler time.
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Wow, do I not want to go back to that simpler time?
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One of the striking statistics that I put in the book is, as far as we can tell, prior to
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1800, global life expectancy was about 28 and a half years, and no region on the planet
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had a global life expectancy greater than, I think, 35 years.
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So I put a quote from Hobbes, from Leviathan, in the book, our lives really were nasty, solitary,
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brutish, and short, the number of kids that died in infancy, the percentage of mothers
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that died in childbirth, the disease burden, skeletons that we've unearthed from that time
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I literally can't understand people who want to go back to that time.
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Yeah, I mean, just to correct the usual association with those stats, it's not that more or less
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Obviously, people lived longer than that, although they didn't live to the biblical ages that
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are advertised, but that really is a story of just how many children died before the
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I mean, that was just absolutely commonplace, even within 150 years ago.
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I mean, it was really, as you detail in your book, the advent of indoor plumbing is probably
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The number of lives saved by getting access to clean water, once we also got some notion
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that we should be washing our hands with it before we eat or perform surgery or deliver
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And it's one of the neat things that I learned researching the book is my list of the important
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technologies of the Industrial Revolution certainly would have included steam power and
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electrification and the internal combustion engine.
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And Bob Gordon, a really, really good economist at Northwestern, would add indoor plumbing to
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And at first, I was like, Bob, come on, that's at an entirely different level of importance
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It's probably at the top of that list of important things to do because being able to
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get clean water and take your waste away was so unbelievably important for human health,
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for longevity, for maternal and child mortality, you know, thank heaven we have indoor plumbing.
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I found this amazing quote from a Tennessee farmer in the 1930s who said, the best thing
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in the world is to have the love of God in your heart.
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The second best thing in the world is to have electricity in your home.
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And there's also the question of what you're eating in that home.
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And as you discuss, the advent of nitrogen-based fertilizers and the Haber-Bosch process that
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delivered those, I mean, that's, you know, that accounts for the sustainable growth of
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I think that the statistic was something like 45% of people alive owe their existence to our
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And also just the growth in human population is a very surprising curve.
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I mean, it took something like 200,000 years to get us to our first billion people in 1928.
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And then it was like 31 years to the next billion and then 15 and then I think it was 12 and 11
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I had forgotten that the company BASF was involved in the fertilizer chemistry or is derived from
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And I remember those ads from probably the 80s or 90s where BASF would come on television
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or, you know, it would be a trailer at a movie and they would say, you know, we don't make
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But they could have well have said, there are 3 billion of you poor bastards who wouldn't
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There's an excellent chance you're here because of us.
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OK, so this has been tech progress up to the point of the decoupling.
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How has that, or should we talk about capitalism before you get into that?
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Let me try to bring in capitalism here because, you know, BASF was out to make a buck.
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And maybe it's nice marketing to say that they were interested in improving our lives.
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This was a profit-seeking company, as was the company that James Watt founded to commercialize
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the steam engine, as was Daimler-Benz, founded by one of the main people behind the internal
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And one other thing that the Industrial Revolution gave us or that came along very closely in time
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to the invention of the steam engine were things like robust patents and joint stock
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companies and limited liability corporations and all of these elements of what you and I would
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And so the point I make in the book was that capitalism and tech progress are a very, very
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They're just a one-two punch and they feed off each other.
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And what we saw for the first 170 plus years of the industrial era was they fed off each other.
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They increased our prosperity and our population.
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This is why I think Marx was just so dead flat wrong.
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However, this one-two punch absolutely enabled us and caused us to tread more heavily on the
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planet, to increase the human footprint on the planet.
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As we went around trying to make a buck and trying to grow our markets, we used very powerful
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We definitely went looking for fossil fuel all over the planet.
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So any way that you'd want to measure the human footprint or the human impact on the planet,
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it was going up because of this one-two punch of industrial capitalism and tech progress.
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And then a couple of the really unpleasant side effects were also going up over time.
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And then exhibit A prime, probably at least as important, was we exploited our fellow creatures
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We made the passenger pigeon extinct in America.
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This was a bird that existed in such huge numbers that James Audubon saw a flock that blotted
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By 1914, the very last passenger pigeon died in a zoo in Cincinnati.
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So this notion that we took good care of the animals we share the planet with, this is just
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We damn near made many species of whale extinct.
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And then something else I learned that I didn't know, we came in North America, we came really
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close to wiping out the beaver, the Canada goose, the white-tailed deer, the black bear, these
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iconic species, and they're very much part of our landscape today, thank heaven.
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Man, we came quite close to wiping these things out because our appetites were voracious, kind
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of indiscriminate, and growing year after year.
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And again, I just think of this one-two punch of industrial turbocharged capitalism and more
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And you use the adjective voracious to describe economic growth then.
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I keep on thinking of it's kind of the cookie monster economy, where it just went om-nom-nom-nom-nom
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and ate up everything that all these inputs that it could think of.
00:28:54.600
And it caused us to kind of, you know, take more from the earth, dump whatever we didn't
00:29:00.040
And you can point to these environmental dark sides of the industrial era, and you'd be
00:29:07.500
And for me, that helps me understand the dawn of the environmental movement and the amazing
00:29:13.300
amount of energy behind the first Earth Day in April of 1970.
00:29:19.000
So let's linger on the convergence of tech progress and capitalism and the synergy there.
00:29:27.040
And I think we should say more about the problems, because I mean, certainly capitalism
00:29:35.940
And it's despite the happy trend you've discussed in your book, which is the decoupling.
00:29:41.040
And it takes as its object, and the criticism of capitalism takes as its object, wealth inequality,
00:29:47.740
which seems to be growing, even though, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's not growing globally,
00:29:59.680
First, let's talk about how these lines diverge, you know, resource extraction and waste and
00:30:14.020
But then why is this not yet a perfectly happy picture of sane environmental policy-aligned incentives
00:30:22.060
and, you know, a rising tide that lifts all boats?
00:30:27.500
So you've asked a couple different times already, what changed?
00:30:31.260
How is it that we're now getting more from less, if the title of my book is at all accurate?
00:30:36.500
And my super short, but I think not too short explanation of what changed, how we move from this
00:30:43.900
voracious, rapacious, cookie monster, industrial era economy to what I'm going to call the second
00:30:50.800
machine age, because that's what Eric and I called our earlier book, where I am asserting
00:30:55.600
we continue to grow our economy and our population and our prosperity, but we're now trading more
00:31:01.720
Okay, so your $64,000 question is, what changed?
00:31:05.620
My very short answer to that is we invented the computer, and we finally invented this technology
00:31:12.300
that lets us find all of these different ways, all of these overlapping complementary ways
00:31:19.120
to get more from less, to get more prosperity from less metal, less fertilizer, less water,
00:31:28.220
less cropland, less of all of these material inputs to the economy.
00:31:33.160
And let me give you a couple different point examples of that.
00:31:36.860
When we first introduced aluminum cans, they were a big deal, because they were probably
00:31:41.880
healthier and lighter and cheaper than the tin-lined steel cans that they replaced.
00:31:48.760
And all of us now take aluminum cans for granted.
00:31:51.240
You know, all the beer, all the soda that we drink, or a lot of it comes in an aluminum
00:31:55.240
That can now is about one-fifth the weight of the first generation of aluminum cans.
00:32:02.260
And I would have thought you'd make a couple tweaks to the first generation aluminum can,
00:32:09.320
You can get down to about a fifth of the initial weight.
00:32:12.020
And the only way that I can understand that you do that is you have engineers in front of
00:32:17.200
their CAD terminals, in front of their computer-aided design terminals, just doing simulation
00:32:22.460
after simulation, if we make it this way, can it bear all the weight?
00:32:27.640
And can we save a couple tenths of a penny, you know, per 100 cans on the aluminum that
00:32:34.700
we've got to spend money on to deliver our beer to some consumer out there?
00:32:41.300
That consumer doesn't get any value from the aluminum.
00:32:46.420
And the beverage company would really prefer to spend absolutely no money on that aluminum.
00:32:52.620
They want to get that down as close to zero as possible.
00:32:55.460
So capitalism, like we've already discussed, is this voracious thing.
00:33:00.920
The flip side of that, and where the news starts to turn good, is that it's also a voracious
00:33:10.160
So companies are really eager to hire a couple engineers to sit in front of CAD terminals and figure
00:33:19.560
So that's a pretty direct way to see how digital tech progress will help us save on resources.
00:33:25.240
I have a friend who's had a really long career.
00:33:27.700
And a couple of years ago, I was discussing the early stages of this book with him.
00:33:31.400
And he said, oh, I've got a great example for you.
00:33:33.740
He said, when I started my career, I worked for a conglomerate that owned a railroad.
00:33:41.800
And my very first task as a bright young guy working in this company was to figure out where
00:33:50.540
And I looked at him, I said, what are you talking about?
00:33:52.880
He said, look, in 1968, Chicago Northwest Railway, CNW, had no way to know where its rolling
00:34:00.040
stock, its locomotives and its boxcars were around the country.
00:34:04.560
There was no such thing as an RFID tag or a sensor network or any of that stuff.
00:34:13.380
And he said the lore inside the company at that point was that 5% of our boxcars moved
00:34:21.360
And it's not that the other 95% needed to rest.
00:34:26.280
We couldn't move them around the country deliberately.
00:34:28.740
And he said, look, it was abundantly clear to all of us that if we could increase that 5%
00:34:34.440
just to 10%, we would only need half as many boxcars to do all of our business.
00:34:39.440
That is a massive, massive savings on these 30-ton steel behemoths sitting out there.
00:34:46.460
So he said it was well worth our time to invest in getting that percentage up.
00:34:50.720
And the way you got that percentage up in 1968 was you hired people to stand at railroad
00:34:55.820
crossings and watch trains go by and see if they could spot any CNW cars.
00:35:01.320
Then they'd telephone or telegraph back to headquarters what they saw.
00:35:05.520
And you'd hire people to do audits of freight yards and things like that.
00:35:09.240
And then he said, my team started to hear about this thing called the computer.
00:35:16.700
I'm pretty sure that every single boxcar in America has at least one RFID sensor on it.
00:35:22.380
There are all these trackside sensors everywhere that keep track of which cars.
00:35:27.180
I'd be amazed if every railroad in the country today didn't know where its stock was with
00:35:35.360
Because of that, you just don't need as many boxcars.
00:35:38.460
So you start to see these examples triangulating and coming together.
00:35:42.060
I think the single most vivid one was a story that I read about a retired newspaper man in
00:35:49.040
Buffalo, whose idea of a good time was to go around to garage sales and buy stuff that
00:35:54.140
might tell him something about Buffalo's history.
00:35:57.600
So he bought a stack of Buffalo News newspapers from 1991 for, I don't know, less than five bucks.
00:36:09.360
And this guy made a really interesting observation.
00:36:14.580
He said there were 15 gizmos on this Radio Shack ad from 1991.
00:36:20.800
He said 13 of them have vanished into the phone that I carry in my pocket all the time.
00:36:26.060
And he was talking about a camcorder and a camera and a cordless phone and an answering
00:36:31.320
machine and a Walkman and all these different things.
00:36:35.620
They've just kind of vanished down into this very small, very light thing that we carry
00:36:43.800
And so mentally, if I weigh those 13 different devices, and I think about how many resources
00:36:48.160
of different kinds went into those 13, and I swap it out for the one smartphone, I start
00:36:53.980
to understand the graphs that appear in the book and why America is now year by year using
00:37:01.120
And I don't mean less per capita, less per American, I mean less an aggregate of really
00:37:06.540
important materials like gold, nickel, steel, fertilizer, water for agriculture, timber, paper,
00:37:16.200
cropland, you know, kind of the material who's who of how you make an economy.
00:37:22.260
And they're now going in general down year after year and lurking in the back of all these
00:37:29.760
I see tech progress coupled with capitalism, which is a desire, not only is it a desire
00:37:36.360
to increase profits and a great, very straightforward one to way one to one way to increase a profit
00:37:45.960
So let me see if I can channel some of the concerns of people who will hear what you just
00:37:52.360
said as yet more techno happy talk, and they don't want to get on the ride towards utopia
00:38:01.940
So even in what you just said, there are echoes of problems that people are now worried about.
00:38:08.540
So we doubt anyone is especially sentimental about the job of walking the nation's train
00:38:17.440
But you did just cite one job that has been irrevocably ceded to the power of automation
00:38:25.620
So this is a trend that many people, I think, are rightly worried about, that there's no guarantee
00:38:31.020
that the jobs we automate away will be replaced by new ones that people will prefer or that
00:38:38.360
they can be readily trained for or retrained for.
00:38:42.200
So there's still a dynamic that is something like a, at least in certain sectors, it's disconcertingly
00:38:52.880
like a winner-take-all phenomenon where it's just you're seeing fantastic accretions of wealth
00:39:00.140
wealth and wages either not growing or declining for the better part of humanity or at least
00:39:07.200
the better part of the middle class and lower middle class in the U.S. and who knows what's
00:39:15.320
So there's that concern that this invisible hand that is working to our benefit in many
00:39:26.320
They're not operating by, they haven't had new ethical modules installed.
00:39:30.600
They're just trying to make a buck and save a buck.
00:39:33.720
And yet the breakthroughs in technology are allowing them to do this in a way that is actually
00:39:41.100
But there's still this fact that there's the haves and have-nots in this system.
00:39:47.260
And then there are the negative externalities that the market just can't correct for.
00:39:53.640
Like, you know, and these are things you discuss in your book, like pollution.
00:39:57.080
How do we acknowledge the problems yet to be solved and how do we solve them?
00:40:02.720
And I do try to spend a decent chunk of the book not just cheerleading for capitalism and
00:40:08.560
I think it's important to do that because they're getting a bad rap in some ways.
00:40:11.860
But there's a difference between being an optimist and being a utopian or a Pollyanna.
00:40:17.280
And I'm trying very hard not to be a utopian or a Pollyanna.
00:40:21.220
And you just rattled off a number of really important cautions and really important challenges
00:40:27.380
that we are confronting today and that I think are going to get more pointed as we go forward.
00:40:32.860
One of the most good news, bad news graphs that I put in the book is a reproduction of the
00:40:39.480
famous elephant graph that Christopher Lasker and Bronko Milanovic wrote about in a World
00:40:49.840
And then people started looking and they're like, wait a minute, this is a big deal.
00:40:53.960
And all kinds of controversy has emerged about how you calculate it, how you draw it correctly.
00:41:00.860
But let me try to visually describe the elephant graph.
00:41:03.700
And the version that I rely on the most looks like the head of an elephant with an upraised
00:41:11.080
And what I mean by that is, you know, this thing's got a back.
00:41:14.180
It's got kind of a hump that looks like the forehead of an elephant.
00:41:20.060
And then it rises super sharply toward the end.
00:41:24.120
And that's for me, that's, you know, where the head drops off and the upraised trunk starts.
00:41:29.180
And what that is a graph of is essentially if you took all the people in the world in 1988
00:41:36.260
and you lined them up from lowest income to highest income, and then you looked at how
00:41:42.940
much their real incomes changed over the next 20 years, over the next generation, and then
00:41:48.720
you plotted that increase or decrease on a graph, the elephant is what you would wind up
00:41:56.420
And what that shows is that for almost all of humanity, almost all of humanity is either
00:42:02.500
that flat back of the elephant, which is right about at 50-ish percent real growth in income.
00:42:08.540
Then there's kind of the elephant's head where you're doing even better.
00:42:12.540
The big divot and then the upraised trunk, the end of the trunk, are the wealthiest people
00:42:17.460
in the world in 1988, who, to the surprise of nobody, were doing much better in 2008.
00:42:23.820
And the really, the key part of the graph is obviously that divot, the divot between the
00:42:30.620
head of the elephant and the upraised trunk of the elephant.
00:42:33.900
And that divot represents the middle, essentially the lower middle class to middle class in the
00:42:40.660
And that is a really important group to focus on for two main reasons.
00:42:47.420
Number one, they are the low point on that graph.
00:42:50.020
And in every version of the graph that I've seen, that group is right there at the bottom.
00:42:54.900
And we can debate exactly how good or bad their increase in income was, but they are the globally
00:43:01.640
least big gainers in income over that generation.
00:43:07.020
And by some measures, they didn't gain very much at all.
00:43:09.340
So when we hear about wage stagnation, that's really the group that we're talking about,
00:43:16.480
Who, when they look anywhere else on that graph, they can look down and they see everyone from,
00:43:22.540
you know, peasant farmers in India to urbanized Chinese assembly line workers.
00:43:28.240
They're all doing a lot better, a lot better than they were 20 years ago.
00:43:31.560
If they look up at the upraised trunk of the elephant, those are Wall Street people, Silicon
00:43:36.760
Valley venture capitalists, you know, the global elite.
00:43:42.840
And then that person in the middle class in the rich world says, wait a minute, I'm lagging
00:43:46.960
way behind this global tide that's lifting other boats here.
00:43:53.660
The other important thing about the middle class in the rich world, they are a very, very
00:43:58.280
important demographic group, not just because there are so many of them.
00:44:03.160
And Sam, not just because you and I happen to come from that demographic group, but they
00:44:07.880
are really important for electing the leaders of the rich world.
00:44:10.980
And the leaders of the rich world have a huge influence on the course of things all across
00:44:16.220
And so that graph really helps me understand the rise in, you know, populism, demagoguery,
00:44:23.120
authoritarianism around lots of rich world countries.
00:44:27.900
Okay, you've got that demographic group that is making an accurate assessment about how they've
00:44:31.820
been doing vis-a-vis a lot of other people around the world.
00:44:34.460
And there's some real discontent there going on.
00:44:37.880
And as much as I'm sitting here cheerleading for global markets and for tech progress,
00:44:42.640
those things are part of the reason why that middle class has not seen incomes go up as
00:44:47.800
It turns out that the middle class in the rich world has been doing routine work.
00:44:55.880
That's an assembly line worker or payroll clerk or somebody like that.
00:44:59.780
Those jobs are vanishing quite quickly to both globalization and automation.
00:45:04.400
And those old-fashioned jobs are not coming back.
00:45:08.940
So one of the challenges that, like you know, Eric and I have written extensively about it
00:45:13.060
was a subject, big subject in our book, The Second Machine Age.
00:45:15.820
And I bring it up again here, is that there are people and there are communities getting
00:45:20.840
left behind as tech progress and capitalism race ahead.
00:45:25.120
And figuring out what to do about that is really urgent homework.
00:45:30.880
It's one of the toughest challenges ahead of us because the toolkit for dealing with communities
00:45:35.980
and people who are getting left behind, it's not a very full toolkit.
00:45:39.800
And the track record of trying to help communities that have fallen on hard times,
00:45:46.460
So we've got some real homework ahead of us there.
00:45:49.900
And there's just the psychological fact that a person or group's sense of whether they're
00:45:56.120
doing well or badly is going to be, as you say, comparative.
00:46:00.140
Even if all boats were rising with the same tide, if some are rising much, much faster, you
00:46:05.960
would still have many unhappy people in whatever class is lagging.
00:46:11.440
And to add on to that, if people start to believe that the bargain that they signed up for is
00:46:17.600
not the bargain that they're getting, again, the perceptions can turn negative really, really
00:46:23.240
And I put in the book this wonderful research from different sociologists that came out way
00:46:28.760
before the 2016 election, way before the Trump phenomenon happened, where they spent time
00:46:34.160
with some of these communities that were on the bubble.
00:46:36.440
And they kept reporting back that the perceptions, the resentment, the anger at how they feel
00:46:45.400
like their bargains are not getting honored and that everybody else is kind of skipping
00:46:57.300
So I want to talk about the other two horsemen of the optimist, public awareness and responsive
00:47:02.940
But before we get there, and I think we should say something about climate change, which is
00:47:08.100
the big negative externality that many of us can't seem to admit even exists.
00:47:14.460
So we have a problem there that's intellectual and political and especially attractive.
00:47:22.080
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