The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 165. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know

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00:00:54.040 Welcome to the JBP Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:00:57.420 This is season four, episode 18. This episode features Marion Tupi and Jordan Peterson and was recorded on March 24th, 2021.

00:01:07.000 Marion Tupi is a senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co-author of 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know.

00:01:17.360 An excellent book, if I do say so myself.

00:01:19.860 Marion and Dad discuss a variety of information critical to the direction of the world as outlined in his book, 10 Global Trends.

00:01:27.420 They discuss each of the 10 positive trends over the last century, leading to a better, richer world overall for most of humanity.

00:01:35.280 They explore how impactful these trends are and why the trajectory of societies is looking less apocalyptic than most people may believe.

00:01:43.320 Hello.

00:01:44.580 If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House, in print or audio format.

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00:02:25.340 Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 Rules for Life, and before that, Maps of Meaning.

00:02:40.300 Thanks for listening, and enjoy the podcast.

00:02:43.380 Hello, everyone.

00:03:04.980 I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Marion L. Tupi, who is the editor of humanprogress.org.

00:03:12.640 A senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and co-author of the Simon Project.

00:03:20.980 He specializes in globalization and the study of global well-being, as well as the politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa.

00:03:30.660 His work has been published or featured in major print and non-print media outlets all throughout the English-speaking world.

00:03:37.160 Dr. Tupi received his B.A. in international relations and classics from the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa,

00:03:46.540 and his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.

00:03:53.100 He is the co-author of a recent book, Ten Global Trends That Every Smart Person Needs to Know,

00:04:00.140 and many other trends you will find interesting.

00:04:03.600 It's a beautiful book, and so that's an accomplishment in and of itself.

00:04:09.160 It's also an extremely interesting book, wide-ranging and necessary, in my estimation,

00:04:18.040 partly because most of what we consume in relationship to global occurrences, economic and otherwise, is negative.

00:04:32.760 And that's part of the reason that I wanted to talk to Dr. Tupi today,

00:04:38.480 because his work is in the same vein as Bjorn Lomberg's work and Matt Ridley's work, among other people,

00:04:47.900 putting forward Stephen Pinker, putting forward a narrative of continued and rapid progress

00:04:52.840 that seems at odds in terms of content and psychologically with virtually everything

00:04:59.120 that seems to make up the major media trend, story, zeitgeist.

00:05:07.240 So, welcome, Dr. Tupi.

00:05:10.000 Marion, it's really good to see you.

00:05:11.560 Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.

00:05:13.880 I'm delighted to be with you, and welcome back.

00:05:17.560 It's great to have you back in the fight, so to speak.

00:05:21.080 Thank you.

00:05:21.580 I was really struck, to begin with, by your introduction.

00:05:25.960 You talked about why you and Ronald Bailey wrote this book.

00:05:31.320 And so, let's start with that.

00:05:33.060 What were your motivation?

00:05:33.880 What did you want to accomplish with this book, and what do you think it does accomplish?

00:05:38.740 Well, fundamentally, the reality of the world, the reality of human existence,

00:05:44.620 is much better than people understand, let alone appreciate.

00:05:51.580 Most people assume that the world is in a much worse shape than it really is.

00:05:58.120 But the data points in a different direction.

00:06:01.320 It points in the opposite direction.

00:06:03.100 When you look at long-term trends, and we will talk about some of them, most of them are pointing to gradual, incremental, long-term improvement.

00:06:14.580 Now, on top of that, we live in a world where a lot of people find meaning and excitement in embracing a lot of movements to, quote, unquote, improve the world.

00:06:28.680 But you cannot improve the world if you don't know what the reality of the world is.

00:06:36.000 And so, if you think the reality of human existence is different from what it really is,

00:06:42.820 then your improvement can actually detract from human flourishing rather than contribute to it.

00:06:52.900 So, the idea behind the book was to inform, and it is not really an attempt to produce a Pollyannish, all-optimistic view on the world.

00:07:09.400 Clearly, there are problems that remain, and there will be new problems that will arise.

00:07:13.120 But we believe there is some value in people knowing the facts, factfulness, that Hans Rosling used to talk about.

00:07:25.140 And the book is largely free of theory.

00:07:30.400 It is only facts that we have gotten from third parties, with one exception of a trend on natural resources that we will discuss.

00:07:38.880 Everything else comes from third sources, which are the World Bank, the IMF, Eurostat, OECD, or well-established, independent, and creditable academics.

00:07:51.240 So, and of course, there are footnotes so that people can check that we are not trying to deceive them into anything.

00:07:58.900 And the reason why we structured the book we did, the reason why we introduced a lot of nice illustrations,

00:08:04.720 is because we want it to be a coffee table book of facts.

00:08:07.720 So, in addition to all the architecture books and books about dogs and cooking that people put on their dining room tables or living room tables,

00:08:19.480 we are hoping that they will include this book.

00:08:22.460 And so, whilst people are fixing food or drinks, maybe their guests are going to open the book

00:08:29.020 and look at something interesting or counterintuitive, and maybe that will lead to a conversation.

00:08:34.520 Well, it's a book you can sit and read, which is what I did, but it's also clearly a book that you can leaf through.

00:08:42.780 And it is, as I mentioned earlier, beautiful.

00:08:47.780 So, that's an additional advantage.

00:08:49.680 It's a very high-quality book, and that's a nice accompaniment to its essentially optimistic message.

00:08:56.520 I found it interesting overall, and also, bit by bit, you said it's laid out in sort of increasing resolution.

00:09:08.220 So, you start with the narrative that there are reasons to be radically optimistic about the future,

00:09:14.140 especially when you compare that future to the past, rather than some hypothetical ideal.

00:09:19.860 Well, at the lowest possible level of resolution, the most general level of resolution, there's reasons to be optimistic.

00:09:28.340 You lay out 10 reasons that are really profound, but then you differentiate into a more detailed analysis.

00:09:34.560 And I found the details as interesting as the global trends.

00:09:38.840 And it's really something to be confronted by something like an unending stream of positive information.

00:09:47.040 And one thing that's, I guess, two questions sort of naturally arise out of that is,

00:09:53.380 why should people believe this positive narrative that you're putting forward,

00:09:59.880 given the undeniable negativity that seems to be part of our current view of the world,

00:10:08.260 our speaking broadly, and also seems to be something that's constantly pushed in front of us,

00:10:15.200 or consumed by us, or demanded by us?

00:10:17.280 Why should we believe that that's wrong?

00:10:21.940 Well, partly because I think that the most obvious reason is that people shouldn't believe lies,

00:10:28.180 and they shouldn't believe wrong stuff.

00:10:30.880 People should be well-informed about all sorts of things.

00:10:34.180 They should be aware of risks and benefits of individual actions,

00:10:39.640 of what different politicians are offering.

00:10:44.600 In other words, people should seek facts,

00:10:47.720 regardless of the negativity biases which we have in our brains.

00:10:53.780 So, you know, as you well know, being a psychologist,

00:10:56.920 a lot of research has been done on these negativity biases.

00:11:00.560 Why do people prefer to believe the bad news?

00:11:05.120 And one of the reasons is that the bad is stronger than good.

00:11:10.500 It has more emotional impact.

00:11:12.600 It's more memorable as well.

00:11:15.040 Precisely.

00:11:15.500 The way I like to think about it is that when I have my annual review with my boss,

00:11:20.020 you know, he can spend 90% of the time telling me about the things that I've done right,

00:11:25.040 which is always appreciated,

00:11:26.920 and then also mention some of the things that I have done wrong,

00:11:30.640 and there are always many.

00:11:31.660 And when I walk out of the interview or the review,

00:11:35.920 the only thing that's in my mind is always the criticism and never the praise.

00:11:40.860 And I think that this is sort of, this applies to a lot of people,

00:11:45.000 is that they focus on the slights, the criticisms, rather than the praise.

00:11:48.660 I think you see that with people's use of social media, too.

00:11:51.860 If I scan comments on any given YouTube discussion like this one,

00:11:56.440 it's definitely the case that the negative comments stick out

00:12:00.800 and are memorable compared to the positive comments.

00:12:04.620 I mean, I think there is an impact of proportion.

00:12:09.020 So if I see that the vast majority are positive and a small minority are negative,

00:12:13.700 I can discount the negative to some degree,

00:12:16.260 but it still has a disproportionate impact.

00:12:19.580 I've thought often that's because you can be in extreme pain and dead,

00:12:24.400 which is pretty damn final.

00:12:25.860 And so negative news carries this walloping potential impact,

00:12:30.420 given our susceptibility to threat.

00:12:32.440 But you can only be so happy.

00:12:34.960 You know, it's not like there's an infinite amount of happiness that you can be,

00:12:38.140 but there's certainly a final amount of death and pain that you can experience.

00:12:45.560 And so that, is there any other reasons you think that,

00:12:50.920 like, is it easy rationale for cynicism and nihilism,

00:12:57.800 for throwing your hands up in the air and giving up?

00:12:59.940 I mean, are there other reasons that we seem so hungry to believe the worst?

00:13:07.760 Yes.

00:13:08.560 Before going there, let me just confirm what you said about social media.

00:13:12.580 People who like something that you have posted tend to simply click on the love button or the heart button.

00:13:20.960 It's people who disagree with you that usually leave the comments saying what a horrible person you are

00:13:27.060 and how bad your ideas are.

00:13:28.640 So that exacerbates the feeling that the feedback is negative.

00:13:35.140 Yeah, but it could be on places like Twitter, too.

00:13:37.720 And we don't know this, is that people who are having a bad day and who are angry

00:13:41.980 are much more likely to actually leave a comment or use Twitter, for that matter,

00:13:47.120 than the same person even who's having a good day.

00:13:50.200 We just don't know anything about how these communication technologies,

00:13:55.100 how our emotions affect our use of these communication technologies.

00:13:58.820 And how that's going to play out in the future.

00:14:01.000 We usually have a certain time that we need in order to accumulate to new technologies.

00:14:08.360 And, you know, we'll see how this one plays out.

00:14:11.480 But we certainly discovered in use of other technologies that it took some time before we got mastery of them.

00:14:19.100 Cars are a typical example.

00:14:21.760 People used to have many more accidents, used to speed much more.

00:14:26.000 They used to drink before driving, and it took a while before the safety culture set in.

00:14:32.680 And who knows, maybe over time people will leave Facebook or Twitter and switch to something else.

00:14:39.000 I'm proud to be Facebook-free since 2012, and I don't have a personal Twitter for precisely that reason.

00:14:46.980 Well, you do see that the emotional tenor of different social media platforms does differ.

00:14:53.060 I mean, I found that Instagram seems to be a much more positive place, all things considered, than Twitter.

00:14:58.940 It's a little more complex to use, but it seems to be less corrosive.

00:15:05.660 I'm not exactly sure why.

00:15:07.340 Maybe it's because it's more image-heavy.

00:15:09.640 I don't know exactly.

00:15:12.680 Possibly.

00:15:13.100 The other negativity biases that psychologists have identified is, for example, the availability heuristic.

00:15:24.200 As you well know, more dramatic and traumatic events tend to be revisited in our memory with greater frequency than the positive memories.

00:15:38.100 And so we get a sense that they are much more numerous and much more frequent than they really are.

00:15:46.560 Also, positive things happen over much longer periods of time than negative things.

00:15:54.700 You know, it takes years to build a skyscraper, but it takes hours to pull it down in a terrorist attack.

00:16:01.800 It takes years to acquire a lot of human capital through education, but it takes only a second for you to die in a car crash.

00:16:10.940 So a typical example when it comes to global well-being would be something like poverty reduction.

00:16:16.760 As Max Roser from Oxford University pointed out, every day over the last goodness knows how many decades,

00:16:24.640 175,000 people have been raised out of poverty every day, out of absolute poverty.

00:16:29.420 But those are not the kinds of headlines that will make it into the newspapers.

00:16:36.700 Yeah, well, right.

00:16:37.620 That's actually, it's a threshold issue, too.

00:16:39.660 I think they defined absolute poverty as $1.90 a day in 2011 dollars.

00:16:44.060 Is that correct?

00:16:45.640 $1.90, $2.205.

00:16:48.240 People have different ones.

00:16:49.480 Yeah, but around $2 per person per day.

00:16:51.880 Right, so people slide by that threshold.

00:16:53.820 It's also not a dramatic decrease in their poverty per person, right, because they just move over that threshold.

00:17:00.680 Nonetheless, the numbers are very impressive.

00:17:02.740 And actually, the speed is also really impressive.

00:17:06.180 I mean, we've decreased, or poverty has decreased, absolute poverty has decreased in the world at an ever-increasing rate that's accelerated dramatically over the last 15 years.

00:17:17.480 And so it also might be that we just don't know this yet.

00:17:22.080 It's slow compared to how fast things can go bad, but it's still really quite rapid on an historical scale.

00:17:33.400 Yeah, I know that you want to talk about the different trends, and one of them is absolute poverty.

00:17:38.140 So maybe we can return to it in a moment.

00:17:40.600 Sure, well, let's do this, then let's go.

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00:21:46.120 Tell me just one thing before we get into the specific 10 trends.

00:21:49.780 Tell me about humanprogress.org and how it is that you come to specialize in global well-being.

00:21:57.320 I can't imagine that there are many people in the world who have that as a specialization.

00:22:03.260 So tell me about humanprogress.org and about your specialization and how that came about.

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00:23:16.040 Tell me about humanprogress.org and about your specialization and how that came about.

00:23:21.060 Well, my personal story sort of will explain that.

00:23:25.640 I'm much more interested in Westerners who have lived a life of relative abundance, good education, safety,

00:23:36.240 that they are interested in recognizing these trends.

00:23:40.080 But in my personal case, the path to being interested in well-being is much more straightforward.

00:23:47.940 I was born behind the Iron Curtain in what used to be communist Czechoslovakia.

00:23:54.460 And whilst life wasn't horrible, it was pretty dreadful.

00:23:59.940 We can talk about that some other time.

00:24:01.640 Then, because my parents are medical doctors, we moved to South Africa in the early 1990s,

00:24:08.520 where they started practicing.

00:24:10.080 And so I got to travel through a lot of Africa.

00:24:12.980 And there I saw much worse poverty and deprivation.

00:24:19.260 And I was educated in Britain, and I've worked in the United States.

00:24:23.100 So, obviously, when you live in four different cultures, if you are at all curious, you have

00:24:31.020 to start asking yourself, how come some countries are prosperous and some countries are poor?

00:24:36.640 What are the institutional settings for the production of riches?

00:24:41.800 After all, at some point in time, everybody was dirt poor.

00:24:47.320 But now we have large sections of the world which are escaping from poverty at a very fast click.

00:24:53.100 Whilst others are not doing so well.

00:24:55.660 So, that is obviously something that I was wondering about as I was moving from one culture to another,

00:25:02.680 from one country to another.

00:25:04.620 And then, in 2010, I read a wonderful book, which is still worth reading,

00:25:10.820 by one of your previous guests, Matt Ridley.

00:25:14.100 It's called Rational Optimist.

00:25:16.300 And Matt Ridley's book was filled with some very interesting statistics that I didn't know about.

00:25:22.240 I should have known about, but I didn't.

00:25:24.700 And I thought to myself, well, if I don't know about them, and it is my job to know them,

00:25:30.640 what about the larger public?

00:25:32.160 I mean, the general public is surely to be as ignorant, if not more, than I am.

00:25:37.300 And so, I thought, let me put it up on the website.

00:25:39.080 And since then, we have grown to about 1,200 different data sets.

00:25:43.380 And that's really the story.

00:25:46.060 So, that's humanprogress.org.

00:25:48.040 That's humanprogress.org, yes.

00:25:49.840 And so, that's something you started yourself?

00:25:53.300 Yes.

00:25:54.720 I am an employee of a think tank called the Cato Institute, but the human progress is an autonomous part of Cato,

00:26:06.880 but it runs pretty much autonomously.

00:26:09.460 I have a lot of freedom to do with it what I want.

00:26:11.940 But most crucially, the information that we provide, the data itself is completely, it comes from third parties.

00:26:22.700 We write articles.

00:26:24.240 We write exclusive articles where we try to frame the data in the historical context.

00:26:29.600 We try to get into the reasons why some countries are rich and why some countries are poor.

00:26:34.460 We can talk about it as well.

00:26:36.020 But we don't – so, we do have an editorial position when writing articles and studies.

00:26:43.900 We do not play around with the data.

00:26:47.820 And anyone who comes to the website will see the original data taken from third sources, footnoted, sourced, and so on.

00:26:55.900 Okay.

00:26:56.220 So, let me hassle you for a couple of minutes because I've been – you know, I've talked to Matt and Ridley and to Bjorn.

00:27:02.720 And so, there's a group of people that are – and Steven Pinker, for that matter, who are rational optimists, let's say, or intelligent optimists or informed optimists.

00:27:12.080 I got interested in this – I worked for the UN, for UN Committee for a couple of years, and I was reviewing books by the dozen on ecology and economics.

00:27:24.640 And I was shocked, and what shocked me was things were way better than I thought they were, and they were getting better at a rate that was stunning, and I didn't know any of that.

00:27:35.600 And it was overwhelming pouring through the data because I had been so wrong in my implicit presumptions.

00:27:42.920 And so, that's what got me interested in all of this.

00:27:45.680 And, of course, I was also extremely happy about it to see what was actually happening, how many good things were happening.

00:27:50.960 So, but here's the criticism that – so, I posted these talks with Bjorn, for example, and, you know, people have responded, often young people, and they say, well, that's – they say something like this.

00:28:04.880 That's all very well and good for you, Dr. Peterson or Bjorn.

00:28:09.420 You're 50 years old.

00:28:11.080 You have a secure position.

00:28:14.540 You grew up when the job market was stellar.

00:28:17.180 However, it's much, much harder for young people to make their way in the Western world now than it was 20 years ago.

00:28:25.680 That sort of security, long-term security, isn't there.

00:28:30.480 And so, you can look at these global trends and extract out some positive information from them,

00:28:36.260 but that just gives you license to ignore the on-the-ground problems that so many people, so many young people are either facing or feel that they're facing in the West.

00:28:48.480 And so, what do you think about that?

00:28:50.420 What's the right response to that?

00:28:53.340 I think that young people have had terrible 20 years in Western countries.

00:28:58.240 We have gone through the 9-11 crisis, then followed by the financial meltdown.

00:29:05.140 We had the Iraq War.

00:29:06.640 Then we had the COVID pandemic.

00:29:09.520 And data shows that young people specifically seem to be disproportionately affected and very unhappy and anxious and so forth.

00:29:19.220 So, I would divide my answer into two parts.

00:29:24.280 The first part is that it is always good to – there's an economist, Richard Lyman, I think his name is, who said,

00:29:35.640 always compare yourself downwards, not upwards.

00:29:39.400 In other words, that's the cost.

00:29:43.200 Or rather, let's say, the way to happiness is to compare yourself downwards rather than upwards.

00:29:47.060 By that, what I gather he meant is that even though things are very tough for young people,

00:29:54.540 young people still have access to the best healthcare in the history of the world.

00:30:00.420 They have access to more security than any other people who have come before them.

00:30:07.820 They have access to education that, in many cases, is free.

00:30:17.060 And plentiful.

00:30:22.040 And so, it's important to realize that while some things have not been doing well,

00:30:30.280 there is a lot in terms of life in Western advanced societies, which is still worth appreciating and being aware of.

00:30:40.080 The second part of my answer would be to say that it is all the more important for young people to understand

00:30:53.300 the economic and political reasons why the West grew at faster rates before,

00:31:04.280 why it had more political and social stability before than it has today.

00:31:12.520 Young people are very blasé, on average, about politics.

00:31:16.520 About politics, they don't generally vote.

00:31:18.780 They tend to embrace all sorts of causes which are inimical to progress and to growth, such as, for example, socialism.

00:31:28.740 They tend to be much more open to it than people who are older and turn more conservative.

00:31:34.140 And so, delving deeper into why the 1980s and the 1990s had higher rates of economic growth is not a bad idea from the perspective of young people.

00:31:51.740 Well, it's also not exactly clear what baseline is being used when the claim is made that things aren't as good or as easy as they once were.

00:32:06.320 I mean, they're certainly a lot better now than they were in 1820.

00:32:10.120 They're certainly a lot better than they were in 1930 or 1940, probably 1950.

00:32:16.220 Then there was a period of incredible growth in the 60s, in particular, the post-war period,

00:32:21.740 where employment was a relatively straightforward matter for many people.

00:32:27.200 And there was plentiful, long-term, secure jobs.

00:32:33.360 Now, how difficult it was in the 60s to obtain one of those is still an open question.

00:32:38.920 Many people were much less educated than they are now.

00:32:41.460 Now, it isn't clear, it isn't absolutely clear to me that things were any easier any time in the past.

00:32:49.500 And it's certainly the case that for most of the past, things were immeasurably worse.

00:32:55.840 Yeah.

00:32:56.120 When I said that they had terrible 20 years, what I meant is that the last 20 years almost seemed like a state of constant crisis.

00:33:05.200 But let's disaggregate this experience that young people have.

00:33:11.420 If you are a black person in the United States, for example, you have never lived in a safer, more tolerant and more accepting society.

00:33:21.740 If you are a gay person in the world, again, sorry, in Western societies, you have never lived in a more tolerant or a more accepting society.

00:33:30.520 If you are a woman, the same goes for you.

00:33:33.240 So that's already well over 50% of the population.

00:33:38.580 Also, let's not forget that whilst the wages of certain people in the United States, certain sections of the labor force have been stagnating,

00:33:49.000 overall, the median household income in the United States prior to COVID was at a record high,

00:33:58.020 which is to say that compared to the earnings of a median household in the 1970s or 1980s,

00:34:07.280 American earning power prior to COVID was at an all-time high.

00:34:14.000 So it's not true that people were poorer.

00:34:17.000 Now, let me make one last point about this.

00:34:22.440 When it comes to cost of living in America, which is what a lot of people are talking about,

00:34:26.860 very much depends on what you are looking at.

00:34:30.060 Cars are cheaper by 70% relative to wages than what they were 20 years ago.

00:34:37.700 Toys, TVs, food, all of those are much cheaper than what they were 20 years ago relative to wages.

00:34:46.120 Even housing, most people don't know this, but it happens to be true.

00:34:50.380 Housing in the United States is 10% cheaper than it was 20 years ago relative to wages.

00:34:57.740 Now, that would exclude high-demand cities, I would imagine, right?

00:35:01.840 This is an every...

00:35:03.120 Because, well, more and more people want to go to more and more exclusive and wealthy places,

00:35:09.140 or fewer and fewer exclusive and wealthy places.

00:35:11.440 So that's a complicating...

00:35:12.540 Like in Toronto, the real estate market, housing prices are just skyrocketing constantly.

00:35:17.300 And my sense of...

00:35:18.740 And a lot.

00:35:20.280 And my sense of that is that there's 20 cities in the world that are optimal places to live.

00:35:25.500 So they're scarce, and this is one of them.

00:35:28.740 And people are quite mobile, and there's quite a lot of money.

00:35:32.020 And so that drives real estate prices here continually upward.

00:35:35.280 And you see that in New York.

00:35:36.600 You see that in the major European cities that are highly desirable.

00:35:40.260 You see that in San Francisco.

00:35:42.520 But there aren't many places like that.

00:35:44.480 So that's part of the reason for that.

00:35:46.320 That's absolutely right.

00:35:47.460 But both things happen to be true at the same time.

00:35:51.540 The 10% decline in the prices of housing is average across the United States.

00:35:56.420 Whereas in the high demand areas, it has also skyrocketed.

00:36:02.400 Now, in some places, like, for example, Manhattan, where a lot of young people want to live,

00:36:09.160 there is only so much that you can do in order to provide additional housing, because it's an island.

00:36:14.900 However, in many other places in the United States, housing is artificially restricted.

00:36:22.080 The building of new housing is artificially restricted through NIMBYism, through zoning rules, and so forth.

00:36:28.860 Yeah, it's part of the fiat.

00:36:31.040 We don't allow you to be poor here.

00:36:33.400 You can't afford it.

00:36:34.240 It's against the law because of the zoning laws.

00:36:36.580 And that's a real problem in places like San Francisco.

00:36:38.820 And the two areas which have seen a massive appreciation in price, well above inflation, well above wages, is health care and education.

00:36:56.220 Right.

00:36:57.960 And education is a particular burden for young people.

00:37:00.600 Right.

00:37:02.560 And now, would it be crazy of me to suggest that young people, instead of blaming the market or asking for, you know, free education,

00:37:12.880 looked at the reasons why education is so expensive?

00:37:16.440 Could it be that because governments push so much money out of the door through Pell Grants and other heavily subsidized loans,

00:37:27.100 the universities know they can charge much more money than would otherwise be the case?

00:37:31.520 Could that be the reason why education is increasing in price?

00:37:37.200 Could it be the reason for-

00:37:38.160 I also think the universities, in some sense, have conspired to rob their students of their future income?

00:37:48.460 Well, look, imagine that you come to a car store and there's just one car left.

00:37:58.940 And you say to the salesman, I really, really, really have to have this particular car.

00:38:06.560 This would be Yale, Harvard, whatever.

00:38:10.900 And by the way, I have a million dollars in my pocket.

00:38:15.940 How much is the car salesman going to ask you?

00:38:19.260 The million dollars.

00:38:20.860 And it's a very similar situation when it comes to higher education.

00:38:25.060 The universities know exactly how much the parents are making.

00:38:27.660 They know exactly how much money you can get out of government in loans.

00:38:32.400 So, of course, they are going to check up the prices.

00:38:34.840 And in health care, what's happening, of course, is that only 10 out of every 90 cents spent on health care in the United States

00:38:43.040 is spent by people themselves, by the patients themselves.

00:38:47.460 The rest is spent by governments at different levels of governance.

00:38:52.620 It's spent by third parties, by insurance companies.

00:38:56.840 So, when you walk into a doctor's office and he asks you, do you want to have 10 or 20 blood tests?

00:39:06.780 You said 20.

00:39:07.540 I'm not paying for it anyway.

00:39:09.060 And that's part of the reason, again, why health care has exploded.

00:39:12.740 But between those two, I can see why Americans would be quite dissatisfied with their standards of living.

00:39:21.940 And I'm afraid that a third reason why Americans are going to be dissatisfied with their standards of living is coming down the pipeline.

00:39:29.160 And I think that is going to be a massive increase in energy costs in the United States, just as it happened in Europe.

00:39:36.040 In Europe now, they have a term called energy poverty.

00:39:41.720 So, even in places which are at the height of economic development, like Britain and Germany,

00:39:47.300 people are not heating their homes in the middle of winter.

00:39:50.800 People are washing themselves in lukewarm water because prices of energy have been artificially, by government fiat, jacked up to prices where even the richest people in the world,

00:40:00.560 I mean, as a population, not as a share of population, cannot afford things which are the essence of what life should be like in a Western civilization.

00:40:11.420 And what worries me is that some of those proposals that have taken on in Europe and which are making Europeans so miserable are going to come down to the United States and perhaps even to Canada.

00:40:22.300 Okay.

00:40:22.540 So, let's draw some quick conclusions and then we'll go talk about the 10 major trends.

00:40:27.300 And so, correct me if I've got any of this wrong.

00:40:32.020 It's very difficult to make an informed case that things are worse now in almost every way than they were at any other time in the past,

00:40:40.660 at any time in the past, including the last two decades, but certainly going back before that.

00:40:45.440 Things are better on almost every possible measure.

00:40:48.780 People don't know that, partly because we have a negativity bias.

00:40:52.940 Yes, we're attracted by negative information and that's what is put forth by a media hell-bent on attracting our attention at any cost.

00:41:01.160 We're also deluded to some degree by our historical ignorance and also by anomalies in the economic scheme.

00:41:09.780 And exceptionally high prices of housing in high, high-demand, high-quality areas, high, and the same thing happening, say, with university education,

00:41:18.540 despite the fact that maybe state university education is still quite cheap or community college, that kind of thing.

00:41:24.180 Hey, it's Michaela again.

00:41:26.120 Hope you're enjoying this episode.

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00:42:27.800 Enjoy the episode.

00:42:28.780 Because of this pervasive negative message that's being put forward constantly, that also encourages us to exaggerate the degree to which the current condition is bad and getting worse.

00:42:44.840 We don't know, and we assume that, and that makes us more miserable than we have any reason to be.

00:42:50.820 The danger in that is that we're going to fail to appreciate and work to undermine all sorts of things that are actually working very well, if we only could see the facts on the ground.

00:43:04.180 That's exactly right, and if there's one message that I would like to pass on to your young followers who are having a tougher time than would be expected for young people to have,

00:43:16.060 things could get much worse if the basic underpinnings of what made Western society rich and prosperous, which is to say liberal democracy and some form of free market capitals and free enterprise.

00:43:35.820 If those two are eroded or destroyed, we are in for a much tougher time.

00:43:43.220 If you want to see how young people, how a society can deteriorate, go to Venezuela.

00:43:50.100 You know, it's not that far away.

00:43:51.800 It's a couple of hours from Miami and see how young people live there.

00:43:57.400 Now, Venezuela was a country where in the early 1950s, GDP per capita was higher than in the United States, higher than in the United States.

00:44:07.120 Today, people are eating cats and dogs and slaughtering animals in zoo for meat.

00:44:14.060 Young women have no other option but to prostitute themselves, to prostitute themselves.

00:44:19.820 Men have gone into crime.

00:44:22.800 It is basically a failed society.

00:44:25.460 Not long ago, some of the leading lights of American progressivism, such as AOC, have been singing the praises of 21st century Venezuela socialism.

00:44:43.400 So things could get much worse, and they will if we forget the lessons of history and if we don't understand that the political stability, to the extent we still have it, is a result of liberal democracy, limited government.

00:45:03.260 And the outcome and the reason for economic growth and the reason why we have all the nice things that people in Venezuela don't is because we have free markets, free enterprise, and free trade.

00:45:18.140 Okay, okay, let's, well, you'd also think it's kind of strange that given our proclivity, let's say, to devour bad news, you'd think that the story of Venezuela would get a lot more coverage than it actually gets.

00:45:32.580 So that's kind of, maybe we can return to that.

00:45:35.640 Let's go through the trends here.

00:45:37.680 So the first one, so the book is structured so that on the right-hand page, there's a graphic graph showing progress across time, time or change across time, a variety of different trends, let's say.

00:45:52.100 The first one, the first trend is the great enrichment, and tell us what that means and what it signifies.

00:46:02.460 So the chart, which you may be able to show at some point in the future, looks like a hockey stick, which is to say that for all of our recorded history, let's say going back 4,000 BC, but we can estimate even further back in time.

00:46:19.540 There it is, the hockey stick of human prosperity.

00:46:24.340 The line has flatlined.

00:46:26.740 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.

00:46:44.960 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.

00:47:00.640 This is all inflation adjusted.

00:47:05.440 So $3 trillion in output, the entire globe.

00:47:08.380 In 2018, it was $121 trillion.

00:47:13.220 So from $3 trillion to $121 trillion in a scope of 100 years adjusted for inflation.

00:47:20.460 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 in output, real inflation adjusted output.

00:47:39.600 Over the next 80 years, the globe could produce six times more value than it is currently producing if we maintain the current economic growth rate.

00:47:49.700 And do you think that's an optimistic projection or a conservative projection?

00:47:55.120 That's what leads us back to the original point that we discussed.

00:47:58.100 It very much depends on economic policies and political stability.

00:48:02.240 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.

00:48:15.400 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.

00:48:38.260 And if our economic growth rate falls from 1.82% 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.

00:49:02.260 So the most remarkable thing about this is exactly the hockey stick shape.

00:49:09.480 As you pointed out, nothing at all happened until the mid-1800s, essentially.

00:49:15.740 And then all of a sudden, things improved so rapidly that it's virtually incomprehensible.

00:49:20.700 It's a miracle.

00:49:21.920 It is the most important question in economics, what happens in the late 1700s, early 1800s, that produces that hockey stick effect.

00:49:33.440 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 usually petered out.

00:49:49.880 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.

00:50:02.900 But that petered out when Song dynasty was replaced by the Ming dynasty.

00:50:08.400 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.

00:50:19.880 When Rome fell.

00:50:22.060 So, there are these periods that you can have prosperity.

00:50:26.560 Also, let's stay with Europe.

00:50:28.660 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.

00:50:45.640 So, you know, economic progress can certainly take a knock, and it can take a time to recover.

00:50:54.680 But in order for it to recover, you have to rediscover the reasons why you had high economic growth rates in the first place.

00:51:00.920 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.

00:51:16.400 And there's no sign that that's slowing, although we could disrupt it, because we don't exactly understand why it happened, and we're not appreciative enough of its miraculous nature and the perhaps fragile preconditions for its continued existence.

00:51:35.500 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.

00:51:44.420 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.

00:52:05.800 Now, I'm using liberal in its European sense, not liberal in the current American sense.

00:52:11.260 And what that meant was that you no longer needed permission from the king in order to open a shop or import a bag of wool from another country.

00:52:22.320 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, rather than hoarded.

00:52:36.640 They're being distributed reasonably well.

00:52:38.300 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.

00:53:00.700 Now, the reason why that happened is a very interesting one.

00:53:04.300 Once again, I'm going to tell you a theory that I espouse and a theory that convinced me, other people may have other ideas.

00:53:12.900 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.

00:53:24.880 One dynasty was never able to conquer different European states into the creation of one European mega empire.

00:53:34.980 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.

00:53:53.740 They realized that they needed to generate a lot of economic growth internally.

00:54:00.160 And they realized that the only way that they could generate economic growth was through technological innovation.

00:54:07.120 And technological innovation, you can only get in societies which allow people a greater degree, a relatively great degree of intellectual freedom.

00:54:17.940 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 the country thinkers from all over the world, free thinkers from all over Europe, who established themselves there, produced new ideas, produced new technologies, and Holland could defend itself against the predation of other countries.

00:54:46.360 England was another example of how this happened.

00:54:51.040 So it is through geopolitical competition, in other words, the dismemberment of European countries, that you get greater appreciation of the need for freedom,

00:55:05.940 which then leads to innovation, 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.

00:55:18.820 But if you want to reduce it to one sentence, it would be political and economic institutions became more open, inclusive, and liberal, 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.

00:55:40.860 All right, let's go to the next trend, the end of poverty.

00:55:50.040 And that's this graph.

00:55:51.620 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 farm laborer.

00:56:15.020 As late as 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 people around the world were involved in agriculture, they were farmers, and they were very poor.

00:56:25.100 And then the other 10% were basically the nobility, the clergy, and the military.

00:56:31.540 But 90% of humanity were either remained hunter-gatherers, or they were farmers or farm laborers.

00:56:38.060 And then with the Industrial Revolution, you start factoring opening up all over the Western world, and people realize that they can make more money in the cities working in factories.

00:56:47.920 So they start leaving the rural areas and moving into urban areas, earning more money.

00:56:55.220 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.

00:57:10.380 Today, only 2% of American workers work in agriculture.

00:57:13.060 The rest of them works in services industry, tourism, computing, and whatever.

00:57:23.500 But this is a process through which Americans stopped being very poor and became very rich.

00:57:29.820 And this process is repeating all around the world.

00:57:33.140 The world is industrializing, the world is becoming more service-oriented, and fewer and fewer people around the world work in agriculture,

00:57:39.920 even though our agricultural output is higher than ever before, and we'll get to that trend too.

00:57:46.360 Just to highlight the meaning of this graph.

00:57:50.880 So in 1830, 95% of the global population was in absolute poverty.

00:57:57.560 That was a much smaller number of people as well.

00:58:01.120 And by the year 2015, roughly speaking, we're down to 10%.

00:58:06.500 It's stunning.

00:58:07.760 And the change from 1990 to 2010 is approximately 40% to approximately 10%.

00:58:18.360 That's right.

00:58:19.280 And you see, partly, I think what happened, you tell me if you think this is right or wrong,

00:58:23.340 but there's been a real acceleration in the decline of absolute poverty, let's say, since 1990.

00:58:28.460 And not coincidentally, it was at approximately that time that the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:58:33.720 And so one of the major competitive systems whose advantages were touted in the developing countries, for example,

00:58:41.200 was no longer a major player.

00:58:42.740 And it was a little bit after that that China started to liberalize, at least economically,

00:58:48.200 even though it really hasn't done it politically.

00:58:50.640 And so I think that's at least partly responsible for the acceleration in the reduction of absolute poverty.

00:58:58.460 The decline in socialism, communism, basically the disappearance of socialism,

00:59:06.340 at least for a little bit of time, as an alternative and widely accepted way to riches,

00:59:12.740 meant that developing countries changed their developing strategies beginning in the 1980s.

00:59:18.640 They started opening up more.

00:59:21.080 Instead of seeing multinational corporations as parasites and enemies,

00:59:25.180 they started welcoming them into their own countries.

00:59:27.460 Instead of rejecting foreign direct investment, they started opening up to foreign direct investment.

00:59:33.400 So at a time when globalization starts, really, in 1980 or so,

00:59:38.280 at the time of when Ronald Reagan becomes president of the United States,

00:59:41.740 40% of the world live in absolute poverty.

00:59:44.620 That declines to about 30% by the new millennium.

00:59:48.840 And from the new millennium to today, 20 years, it declines from 30% to less than 10%.

00:59:55.480 So you're absolutely right.

00:59:56.640 The decline in poverty has accelerated over the last 20 years from 30% to less than 10%.

01:00:05.620 It's stunning.

01:00:07.500 It's absolutely stunning.

01:00:08.760 It's absolutely unbelievable that that can be the case.

01:00:11.440 It is the fastest reduction in global poverty, primarily because many poor and previously socialist countries have changed their understanding of economics and way to prosperity.

01:00:24.720 I want to harass you again about something.

01:00:27.620 So you were talking about socialism and its decline.

01:00:29.660 So Canada has many democratic socialist policies.

01:00:39.040 Norway, which in your book ranks highest in terms of the human development index, I believe that's the case.

01:00:46.720 The Scandinavian countries, of course, are famous for functional democratic socialism.

01:00:51.060 And so what do you have to say about that?

01:00:56.000 Forget about communism and the hardcore communist, Soviet-pushed Maoist doctrines that anyone with any sense is going to regard,

01:01:04.980 in the light of what happened historically, as absolutely counterproductive.

01:01:08.440 Anyone who supports Maoist doctrines or Soviet doctrines is reprehensible.

01:01:13.700 They're so ignorant or malevolent in some sense that it's reprehensible.

01:01:17.780 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.

01:01:33.360 There's a wide range of theories, preferences for government intervention and for democratic socialist policies.

01:01:44.260 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?

01:01:59.780 That might be the way of thinking about it.

01:02:02.100 Right.

01:02:02.760 You are certainly correct on China, which has abandoned hardcore communism in the late 1970s.

01:02:09.120 But India was never communist, but even they reformed in the early 1990s and embraced a much freer economic model.

01:02:17.200 And that's 1.2 billion people.

01:02:18.780 So that also explains why the global poverty rate has declined.

01:02:23.760 Now, you're raising a very important point in that there is a difference between socialism,

01:02:29.880 which is government ownership of the means of production, factories and whatever,

01:02:34.320 and social democracy in Europe, in places like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and even perhaps Canada.

01:02:45.080 But here's the interesting thing.

01:02:47.140 All of these countries come at the very top of the Economic Freedom of the World Report,

01:02:51.500 which is published by the Fraser Institute in Canada.

01:02:54.280 You may be familiar with them.

01:02:55.820 So it is actually possible to measure economic freedom in different countries.

01:03:00.140 And Fraser has been doing so since the early 1970s.

01:03:04.500 And all of these countries, all these social democratic countries, actually score very well.

01:03:10.400 Here is the reason why.

01:03:11.880 First of all, they have very flexible labor markets.

01:03:17.760 Second, they have very...

01:03:19.140 Describe, define that, define that so everyone understands.

01:03:21.900 Meaning the ability of firing and hiring people is lightly regulated so that people can move from industries and occupations

01:03:31.560 which are maybe unproductive or which are unproductive into wherever there is a new company that's opening.

01:03:43.480 You don't suffer consequences.

01:03:44.900 Right.

01:03:45.120 So things are allowed to die and be born.

01:03:47.760 Precisely.

01:03:48.240 Secondly, the second reason why they are scoring very high on the Economic Freedom of the World Report

01:03:53.400 is because they are open to foreign trade.

01:03:56.320 They are actually more open to foreign trade than the United States,

01:03:59.640 which is supposed to be a paragon of capitalism, although obviously the United States isn't.

01:04:03.740 But they are very free trade oriented.

01:04:06.120 And also, if you look at their tax structure, what you realize is that they actually have very low corporate tax rates.

01:04:12.920 So, as opposed to, say, the United States, which is one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

01:04:19.460 So what the Scandinavians and the Social Democrats have discovered is, roughly speaking, the following.

01:04:26.280 Let's keep the economy free.

01:04:29.480 Let's try to generate as much revenue through economic growth and then tax that.

01:04:35.320 Do not tax the productivity of the worker and of the company in terms of corporate tax rates.

01:04:43.840 Or rather, let's try to have an open economy and generate economic growth by producing

01:04:53.860 and by being a welcoming area for new businesses to open.

01:04:59.260 Okay, okay.

01:05:04.040 Well, we'll return to that.

01:05:06.020 Are we running out of resources?

01:05:07.860 Trend three.

01:05:09.360 That's this graph.

01:05:11.960 So just remember that green, orange, and blue line, because I will describe them one by one.

01:05:18.660 So this is the only datum or set of data which I produced myself, together with a co-author,

01:05:25.620 Gail Pooley from Hawaii.

01:05:26.960 And what it shows is the average price of 50 most important natural resources between 1980 and 2018.

01:05:38.360 And what we found, as you would expect, is they increased in nominal price.

01:05:42.980 Nominal price is unadjusted for inflation.

01:05:45.000 As everybody know or should know, currency becomes less valuable every year because more of it is printed.

01:05:51.660 So in terms of nominal dollars, the 50 commodities have become more expensive over the last 40 years.

01:06:00.380 Once you adjust the cost of commodities, and I'm talking about oil, gas, chicken, beef, lumber, shrimp, oranges, whatever.

01:06:13.720 However, once you account for inflation, that was the orange line, what you see is actually the natural resources are much cheaper today than they were in 1980.

01:06:25.940 The final line is the blue line.

01:06:29.400 The blue line is what I call the time price.

01:06:32.360 Time price is really – it's a better price than real or inflation-adjusted price because it also takes into account wages.

01:06:42.600 As you know, wages tend to increase above inflation because people become more productive.

01:06:49.340 So if inflation in the United States is 2%, a typical increase will be maybe about 3% because people have become more productive over the course of the year.

01:06:58.500 So once you start comparing prices of resources relative to wages, what you see is that they have fallen even more.

01:07:08.460 And why is this counterintuitive?

01:07:10.840 They fell by about 70% in terms of time prices.

01:07:16.860 All the while –

01:07:18.160 And that's from 1980 to 2016.

01:07:21.860 Or 16 or 18.

01:07:23.340 18, okay, so 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.

01:07:46.000 Stunning, right?

01:07:46.820 Not what anyone was predicting in the 1960s by any stretch of the imagination.

01:07:51.660 Yes, that's absolutely correct.

01:07:53.340 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%.

01:08:08.380 And nobody saw that coming.

01:08:11.180 Right, that should be said 50 times, right, because it's so not what anyone thinks.

01:08:17.760 More people means more wealth.

01:08:20.680 That's exactly right.

01:08:21.620 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.

01:08:29.620 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.

01:08:45.420 And so it looks like we could have more people.

01:08:46.420 And so it looks like we could have more people and make them richer faster, and that would be better for the planet.

01:08:53.020 No, that's absolutely right.

01:08:54.420 The cleanest environment in the world is in advanced countries, in Western capital societies.

01:09:02.660 When you see tremendous attack on the environment is in poor countries.

01:09:11.660 You know, when the Venezuelan economy collapsed, they started eating animals in the zoo.

01:09:15.940 In Zimbabwe, when their economy collapsed, they started slaughtering the wildlife.

01:09:20.200 You know, if it's a choice between killing a giraffe or having my baby die, I know what I have to do, right?

01:09:26.520 But so for the longest time, people thought that if population grows, we are going to run out of resources.

01:09:38.520 And this is not what has happened.

01:09:40.800 We have more resources.

01:09:42.960 Resources are cheaper, but that in itself is an indication that they are more abundant than before.

01:09:50.720 Because, of course, human beings are not just consumers of resources.

01:09:54.400 We're not just destroyers of resources.

01:09:56.020 We're also creators of resources.

01:09:58.200 Human beings are producers of ideas.

01:10:00.520 Yes, and on average, we produce more than we consume.

01:10:03.240 Otherwise, we would die.

01:10:05.660 Well, that's exactly right.

01:10:06.880 And that's what people like Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University were worried about.

01:10:14.060 They freaked out two generations of people.

01:10:17.900 Ehrlich's population.

01:10:18.700 And we still haven't recovered from that.

01:10:21.460 No, we still haven't recovered from that.

01:10:22.980 It's part of an autocalyptic narrative.

01:10:24.000 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.

01:10:32.220 If you say that, well, we've got richer as more people have been born rather than poorer because brain power exceeds consumption, essentially, especially as people have got healthier and their IQ has increased, which is something we could talk about as well.

01:10:46.300 Well, none of this is part of the general apocalyptic narrative.

01:10:51.460 No, not only can we get access to new resources, but also we can replace resources which are becoming scarce.

01:10:57.400 So, for example, humans used to make candles out of spermaceti, which is this weird sort of stuff in the brains of the whales.

01:11:10.920 Oil.

01:11:12.360 Or fat in the brains of the whales.

01:11:15.180 So we used to murder them by the thousands.

01:11:18.700 And we used to scrape out that spermaceti and build it into nice candles.

01:11:23.440 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.

01:11:33.420 And then we decided that we can switch from coal to gas and maybe eventually to nuclear and whatever.

01:11:41.140 And so that's how humanity manages to constantly produce more.

01:11:48.200 It's through innovation.

01:11:49.440 And, in fact, in Western countries today, we have reached peak stuff.

01:11:55.320 This is a book, a very important book, which I recommend to your readers by Andrew McAfee, and that is making more from less or more from less.

01:12:03.760 Now, what it means, really, is that even though the American economy and the British economy continue to grow and produce more GDP per capita in absolute terms,

01:12:17.020 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.

01:12:31.580 So we have become so incredibly productive that we can now use much less resources in order to produce more wealth, more GDP.

01:12:44.420 Trend four, peak population.

01:12:51.120 Peak population.

01:12:52.400 So right now, there are 7.8 billion people in the world.

01:12:57.620 It looks like we are going to peak at 9.8 in the 2060s or the 80s, and then it will decline to about 8.8 by the end of this century.

01:13:09.760 Lancet had a study a couple of months ago which showed, again, remember, 7.8 billion people in the world today.

01:13:17.100 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.

01:13:33.380 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.

01:13:43.740 Currently, in the United States, in much of Western Europe, women are having fewer than two babies per woman per lifetime.

01:13:53.820 And in order to have a replacement rate, you need 2.1 babies because some of them die.

01:13:58.540 So population without immigration in Western Europe will continue to decline.

01:14:06.420 Our numbers are still going up because, obviously, we have huge immigration, but women are not having that many babies.

01:14:15.080 Now, is this going to be a blessing or is it going to be a potential problem?

01:14:19.500 Well, it could be a potential problem because human beings are the producers of ideas, and ideas lead to innovation.

01:14:28.540 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.

01:14:38.020 And that in itself, and that to me is a major concern.

01:14:44.400 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.

01:14:56.920 But if those children are not being born, who is going to pay off that debt in the future?

01:15:00.840 Who is going to pay for all those retirees?

01:15:02.900 Those questions should also be answered.

01:15:05.360 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 there are too many.

01:15:16.460 Could easily be the case.

01:15:18.420 Right.

01:15:18.800 So by then, perhaps, we'll have robotics to help us a lot.

01:15:25.940 Yes, and who knows, right?

01:15:27.000 We can't even think about problems 100 years in the future, because it's going to be so different 100 years from now that nothing we could possibly talk about right now is going to be relevant.

01:15:35.780 God only knows.

01:15:36.880 We don't have a five-year horizon or a 10-year horizon, given the rate of technological change, let alone 100 years.

01:15:43.840 So, but the moral of this story is, 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.

01:15:57.020 That doesn't seem to be in the cards.

01:15:59.760 So, unless we make catastrophic and likely avoidable errors.

01:16:04.340 That's correct.

01:16:04.980 All right, next.

01:16:05.720 This is a great headline.

01:16:09.360 The End of Famine.

01:16:11.860 So, I think it was in Ridley's book I found, his last one, or maybe in The Rational Optimist.

01:16:18.980 Famine was quite widespread in Europe in the 20th century, far more than people generally remember or realize.

01:16:25.580 I mean, Holland went through terrible famines, the Scandinavian countries, and, of course, in Great Britain in the late 1800s,

01:16:33.000 the Irish famine haunted, was a specter that haunted the entire world's population until extraordinarily recently.

01:16:41.540 And the news on that front is astoundingly positive.

01:16:45.680 No one starves anymore except for political reasons, essentially.

01:16:50.940 So, forced starvation, planned starvation, but not accidental.

01:16:55.560 That's correct.

01:16:56.600 So, in the late 1800s, we started understanding agricultural productivity much more than before.

01:17:06.480 Not only did we introduce new technologies, better plows, and so forth, but we also discovered that guano,

01:17:15.140 which is just bird pooping, bird poop from South America, contained so many nutrients,

01:17:23.900 especially phosphorus, that when it was sprinkled all over the late 19th century agricultural land,

01:17:34.420 it could actually increase yield tremendously.

01:17:37.680 And then when we started running out of guano, yet another example of human ingenuity,

01:17:42.320 we started producing synthetic fertilizers full of, I believe it's nitrogen and phosphorus and so forth.

01:17:50.540 Now, that wasn't the last when it came to human ingenuity.

01:17:57.220 We started also toying with the genes of different plants,

01:18:01.260 which led to a new, sturdier, and more productive wheat varieties in the 70s by a man called John Borlaug.

01:18:14.320 John Borlaug.

01:18:15.680 Right, who saved more people than any other person who ever lived, in all likelihood.

01:18:21.180 That's exactly right.

01:18:22.240 So, instead, it's quite interesting.

01:18:24.060 Just as people were starting to be really worried about this population growth,

01:18:28.020 especially in China and India,

01:18:30.060 people immediately started working on the ways to...

01:18:35.000 To solve it.

01:18:35.620 ...reduce, to solve the problem.

01:18:37.080 And so, you know, the population bond comes out in 1968.

01:18:41.960 And right about that time, into the early 70s,

01:18:45.000 you have Borlaug introducing these new varieties, wheat varieties,

01:18:48.760 into Bangladesh and India and China and elsewhere.

01:18:52.460 And, of course, food production rockets, skyrockets.

01:18:56.020 India today is a major exporter of food.

01:18:59.800 Now, these were people who were starving by tens of millions.

01:19:02.960 When I was growing up in the 1980s, I remember being terrified by the images of starving people,

01:19:10.100 starving children in East Africa, in the whole of Africa.

01:19:15.680 And now you see, this is so unbelievable.

01:19:19.180 The world's poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa,

01:19:22.960 now enjoys access to food in volumes that are equivalent to Portugal in the 1960s.

01:19:30.820 So now, and that's a very, very small amount of time from the 1960s to now,

01:19:37.520 well within living memory of many people.

01:19:40.160 One of the richest countries in the world had the same amount of food per capita

01:19:45.000 as the poorest part of the world does now.

01:19:47.940 Stunning, stunning, absolutely remarkable.

01:19:51.300 And so positive, so good.

01:19:53.080 Yeah, so today, access to calories in Africa is roughly 2,400 calories per person per day.

01:20:01.580 Now, obviously, not everybody gets it.

01:20:03.600 There are serious problems in Africa still.

01:20:05.520 You do still have conflict and so forth, and people do get to starve.

01:20:08.800 But the widespread starvation because you couldn't produce enough food,

01:20:11.860 that doesn't happen anymore.

01:20:15.080 And that's obviously a tremendously positive step forward.

01:20:18.520 In fact, many African problems, many African countries are beginning to experience

01:20:23.700 the problem of obesity, especially in urban centers.

01:20:26.720 Now, if somebody told you that 50 years ago, you would have said, you know, you're high.

01:20:32.000 Right.

01:20:32.400 So the problem in 100 years is that we're going to have nothing but fat people,

01:20:38.300 and there'll be far too few of them.

01:20:41.140 Yeah.

01:20:41.360 Okay, next one.

01:20:44.520 This is also stunning, shocking, completely unexpected.

01:20:48.540 More land for nature.

01:20:52.100 Who would have possibly guessed that?

01:20:54.740 I read something the other day, too, and we could comment on this.

01:20:58.680 The Sahara Desert has shrunk by 8% since the turn of the millennium.

01:21:04.160 We've greened an additional 10% of the Earth's surface.

01:21:07.920 As a consequence, that's part of the same development,

01:21:13.360 and that's only over the last 20 years, 20 years.

01:21:15.880 And it looks like it's a consequence of increased carbon dioxide.

01:21:19.340 Perversely enough, the Sahara has actually shrunk.

01:21:22.240 So I don't want to get into the carbon dioxide argument,

01:21:24.780 but this is, and this is a whole different issue here,

01:21:28.240 tree cover loss gain from 1982 to 2016.

01:21:32.140 So comment on that.

01:21:33.620 Yes, I mean, one of the things is that one of the benefits

01:21:37.840 of getting a little bit older, perhaps the only benefit

01:21:41.460 of getting a little bit older, is that one gets wiser

01:21:43.940 and one remembers all the stuff that we used to believe

01:21:48.140 and take for granted, which have never happened

01:21:51.640 and which were false.

01:21:53.560 One of them was the expansion of Sahara.

01:21:57.580 In the 1980s, I remember being absolutely terrified

01:22:00.680 that Sahara was going to expand and swallow the globe.

01:22:04.420 We, you know, as kids, we were taught that as gospel.

01:22:07.400 But Sahara is shrinking.

01:22:09.380 It is also true that there is more foliage,

01:22:13.460 which is more greenery.

01:22:15.340 Plants are producing more foliage

01:22:18.100 because of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

01:22:21.520 CO2 is for another discussion.

01:22:22.940 But the fact is that it's the basic fact of living on Earth

01:22:28.020 that plants like more CO2 in the atmosphere.

01:22:31.660 It's their food, which is why Norway grows, you know,

01:22:35.920 tomatoes in hothouses that are filled with CO2,

01:22:38.940 precisely because they want them to grow.

01:22:42.360 And so plants like CO2 and foliage is increasing,

01:22:47.420 but also the tree coverage of the world is increasing.

01:22:52.380 Between, I wrote this statistic down,

01:22:55.020 thinking that we might talk about it,

01:22:57.100 between 1982 and 2016,

01:23:02.920 we have added trees, tree area,

01:23:08.200 the size of Alaska and Montana combined to the world.

01:23:11.980 Now, that's a pretty big chunk of the world.

01:23:14.100 The United States has 35% more trees

01:23:18.640 than when Ronald Reagan became president of the United States.

01:23:22.480 China, 35%.

01:23:24.280 No, China is 15%, yeah.

01:23:26.820 Okay, so now I've read critiques of this, too.

01:23:29.100 When I've tweeted this, for example,

01:23:30.740 people say, yes,

01:23:31.540 but we've lost a tremendous amount of biodiversity,

01:23:34.840 that much of the new growth is monoculture

01:23:39.540 in contrast to the previous growth.

01:23:41.480 And I suspect that's not true in some situations

01:23:45.480 and is true in others.

01:23:46.540 I don't think that's true of the reforestation

01:23:48.440 of the United States, but I don't know.

01:23:51.700 Do you know?

01:23:53.420 Well, first of all, compared to what?

01:23:56.340 At the time when Industrial Revolution started

01:23:59.160 in Great Britain,

01:24:00.920 which was responsible for many of the great things

01:24:03.880 that happened since then,

01:24:05.360 at that time,

01:24:06.680 one of the reasons why they had to switch to coal

01:24:08.840 is because there was no tree left in Britain.

01:24:11.060 I'm exaggerating, but I am not far off.

01:24:15.580 The tree coverage in Britain

01:24:16.920 was just completely diluted of forests

01:24:21.300 over millennia of forest destruction.

01:24:25.280 Remember, trees were not only needed to keep you warm,

01:24:29.460 but to cook your food, to make your furniture,

01:24:31.420 to make your carriages, to make your weaponry.

01:24:34.000 Everything prior to the modern era was based on trees.

01:24:38.020 I'm exaggerating, but not too much.

01:24:40.880 Trees.

01:24:42.060 Now, so compared to what?

01:24:45.340 We have destroyed a lot of,

01:24:47.240 we have destroyed a lot of the natural forest

01:24:49.520 with its original biomass

01:24:51.020 long time before the Industrial Revolution,

01:24:53.940 which, by the way, used up coal, not trees.

01:24:56.320 But today, most of our tree usage

01:25:03.600 comes from the new forests,

01:25:05.980 the forests that are planted

01:25:07.740 for the specific purpose of being cut down for lumber,

01:25:11.860 which then builds American and Canadian houses.

01:25:15.300 It is very rare that the sort of wood

01:25:19.300 that you see in the shops

01:25:20.520 or that goes into productive activity

01:25:22.400 actually has originated in the Brazilian rainforest.

01:25:25.000 Right. So I guess the objection would be

01:25:27.620 those aren't forests, they're crops.

01:25:29.940 They just happen to be crops of trees.

01:25:32.120 And I suppose, and, you know,

01:25:33.880 biodiversity loss is obviously problematic

01:25:38.860 and even potentially catastrophic.

01:25:41.420 But I don't think that means that

01:25:43.560 you can't take heart about the fact

01:25:46.700 that much more of the planet is green

01:25:49.020 and there's a certain amount of reversion

01:25:51.020 to a more natural habitat,

01:25:52.360 certainly indicated that we're much more efficient,

01:25:54.340 efficient users of resources.

01:25:55.860 We don't have to take up so much space.

01:25:57.660 And the Agricultural Revolution

01:25:59.300 also contributed to that to a great degree.

01:26:02.120 That's human ingenuity again

01:26:03.280 because we can grow more on less land.

01:26:05.860 And I don't see that stopping.

01:26:07.560 I think we're going to get more and more

01:26:08.760 and more efficient at food production.

01:26:10.720 Why would that stop?

01:26:12.280 The market certainly drives us in that direction.

01:26:15.700 And there's no indication of that slowing

01:26:18.360 as far as I can tell.

01:26:19.500 So three points.

01:26:22.460 I hope I can remember them.

01:26:23.740 One is, yes, because of increased

01:26:27.300 agricultural productivity,

01:26:28.180 we are already returning land to nature

01:26:30.320 and we can do so in the future

01:26:32.620 at an increased pace,

01:26:35.460 which means that we are returning land,

01:26:38.560 not just to the animals,

01:26:39.800 but we are returning it to nature

01:26:41.220 where the biomass can grow again

01:26:44.320 and where it can reconstitute itself.

01:26:46.080 So the second point is that

01:26:49.080 we are also living in a world

01:26:52.840 that has record acreage and mileage

01:26:58.060 and square mileage of globe's territory,

01:27:01.360 which is protected

01:27:03.760 from any kind of interference from humankind.

01:27:07.580 So we have record square mileage of oceans,

01:27:12.440 which are now protected

01:27:14.100 and which cannot be fished in.

01:27:16.080 And we have record square mileage of land,

01:27:21.120 which is protected in national parks

01:27:25.200 or is otherwise excluded

01:27:28.520 from economic activity.

01:27:31.580 The third point that I want,

01:27:32.920 and that comes with wealth,

01:27:35.020 the wealthy countries they are.

01:27:36.820 And stability and political stability,

01:27:38.480 because you don't need much catastrophe

01:27:41.580 and social breakdown

01:27:43.740 before those national parks

01:27:45.120 and all their animals

01:27:45.880 are going to have everything eaten out of them.

01:27:49.120 Typical example would be Zimbabwe, yes.

01:27:51.480 And the last point I want to make

01:27:52.640 is that we have a problem in Brazil.

01:27:56.780 Brazil has obviously vast rainforests

01:27:59.980 and very ancient forests,

01:28:01.240 which are filled with all sorts of things

01:28:04.480 that we may discover

01:28:06.120 are helpful to us in the future.

01:28:09.220 as well as dangerous.

01:28:12.740 But nonetheless,

01:28:14.040 very few people would say

01:28:16.040 that it's a good thing

01:28:17.940 to get rid of the Brazilian rainforest.

01:28:20.100 My understanding is,

01:28:22.040 and I'm willing to be proven wrong on this,

01:28:25.560 is that most of it has to do with farming,

01:28:28.880 especially of poor people in Brazil,

01:28:31.720 who burn forests

01:28:33.880 in order to clear the land

01:28:35.180 for agricultural activity.

01:28:37.020 Now, I realize that this point

01:28:40.220 may not necessarily be appreciated

01:28:42.360 by wealthy people in the West,

01:28:45.320 but poverty in developing countries

01:28:48.980 can be very, very bad.

01:28:52.180 In Brazil,

01:28:53.600 there are some pockets of real wealth,

01:28:56.420 but there are also pockets

01:28:58.420 of tremendous poverty.

01:28:59.640 And the more inland you get

01:29:01.260 and the more into the Amazon you get,

01:29:03.460 the poorer the people become.

01:29:05.780 These people,

01:29:07.240 from their perspective

01:29:08.120 and the perspective of their government,

01:29:09.840 should be allowed to earn a living.

01:29:12.160 The way you protect Amazon

01:29:13.480 is to have higher rates

01:29:16.720 of economic growth in Brazil

01:29:18.260 so that those people

01:29:19.520 start moving away from the Amazon.

01:29:22.260 They start moving to cities

01:29:23.420 like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro

01:29:25.260 and others,

01:29:26.100 and they start working there

01:29:27.520 in the factories,

01:29:28.940 in the service industry,

01:29:30.440 and they no longer have to burn forests

01:29:32.620 in order to plant food

01:29:34.200 so they don't starve.

01:29:37.880 Number seven,

01:29:39.840 trend seven,

01:29:40.900 planet city.

01:29:43.520 Urbanization,

01:29:45.020 which you also regard

01:29:46.420 and describe as a net positive.

01:29:49.400 Well, you certainly get

01:29:50.260 the synergistic effect

01:29:51.420 of bringing it together, right?

01:29:53.020 I mean, look at San Francisco,

01:29:54.500 the Silicon Valley.

01:29:55.380 The urbanization of a genius population

01:29:58.460 produces an incredible amount

01:30:00.280 of innovation.

01:30:01.660 So urbanization,

01:30:03.040 everyone's moving to the cities.

01:30:05.160 Yeah, I think that right now

01:30:06.640 we have about 55% of humanity

01:30:08.720 living in the cities already.

01:30:10.140 So again,

01:30:11.040 all those people are obviously

01:30:12.680 not living on land,

01:30:13.860 which is a good thing.

01:30:15.600 You remember Paul Pot, right?

01:30:17.260 Cities are parasites

01:30:18.200 on the countryside

01:30:19.120 and should be eradicated.

01:30:21.220 Well, that turned out

01:30:22.160 to be spectacularly wrong

01:30:24.100 in every possible way

01:30:25.360 as well as murderous.

01:30:26.960 So it's a good thing

01:30:27.940 for people to leave

01:30:29.080 their rural environments

01:30:29.960 and move to the city.

01:30:31.120 Good thing all things concerned.

01:30:33.380 So, sorry, continue, please.

01:30:34.980 No, no, no.

01:30:35.540 I think Paul Pot, yeah.

01:30:37.360 I mean, didn't he also shoot

01:30:38.580 old people with spectacles

01:30:39.960 because they were intellectuals?

01:30:41.920 Oh, yeah.

01:30:42.840 He was trained at the Sorbonne.

01:30:45.400 Well, okay.

01:30:47.180 Right.

01:30:47.840 Say no more.

01:30:49.000 Right.

01:30:49.380 I think he still holds the record

01:30:51.640 for most people killed

01:30:54.400 as a share of the population.

01:30:55.780 I think he managed to kill, what,

01:30:57.060 one third or one quarter

01:30:58.380 of the population in four years?

01:31:00.420 I don't think anybody has done that,

01:31:02.060 even Mao.

01:31:04.300 It's a hell of a record to hold.

01:31:07.360 And it's quite appalling

01:31:08.700 that he was trained in the West.

01:31:09.980 It's stunningly appalling.

01:31:12.840 So, okay, back to urbanization.

01:31:15.440 I feel that we have bashed

01:31:18.120 the French enough here.

01:31:19.380 Maybe not enough.

01:31:22.320 But anyway,

01:31:22.900 so, yes,

01:31:26.460 there are the network

01:31:27.220 and synergetic effects

01:31:28.320 that people living close together

01:31:30.120 and exchanging ideas

01:31:32.260 and similar companies

01:31:34.040 existing next to each other,

01:31:35.500 communicating and so forth,

01:31:37.180 generates more economic growth.

01:31:39.320 And look,

01:31:39.680 the historical record

01:31:40.460 is absolutely clear.

01:31:42.560 Cities have been

01:31:43.420 the drivers of progress,

01:31:44.560 whether it's Amsterdam

01:31:45.340 in the 17th century

01:31:46.480 or London,

01:31:47.280 sorry,

01:31:47.600 18th century

01:31:48.140 or London in 19th century,

01:31:50.000 New York in the 20th century.

01:31:52.940 That's where stuff happened,

01:31:54.360 not just in terms of economic growth,

01:31:56.500 but also in terms of culture

01:31:57.960 and things like that.

01:32:03.380 And the final point,

01:32:06.660 cities also consume less energy

01:32:10.720 than urban areas per capita

01:32:12.600 because we have public transport.

01:32:14.540 People don't have to drive their Jeeps

01:32:15.980 and 4x4s wherever they go

01:32:18.040 with long distances.

01:32:20.160 So,

01:32:21.000 people consume less energy

01:32:23.440 in cities per capita.

01:32:25.440 And that said,

01:32:25.980 that's again a good thing,

01:32:28.240 I think.

01:32:28.600 And is that controlling

01:32:30.220 for agricultural productivity even?

01:32:32.440 Do you know?

01:32:34.640 I don't know.

01:32:36.120 I think

01:32:37.080 CO2,

01:32:40.820 I think CO2 emissions

01:32:42.040 and energy consumption

01:32:42.940 is smaller in the cities

01:32:43.920 than it is in the rural areas.

01:32:45.300 But that's all I remember

01:32:47.220 from that particular passage.

01:32:48.500 Okay.

01:32:49.020 Okay.

01:32:49.940 Trend 8,

01:32:51.100 democracy on the march.

01:32:54.300 Now,

01:32:54.600 it's a graph of autocracies

01:32:55.860 versus democracies.

01:32:58.600 So,

01:32:59.320 this particular chart

01:33:01.680 is controversial one,

01:33:05.300 partly because

01:33:06.200 it keeps on changing

01:33:07.240 in directions

01:33:08.640 which we may not necessarily appreciate.

01:33:12.600 It is undeniable

01:33:14.140 that the world

01:33:15.800 is most democratic

01:33:18.440 than,

01:33:19.500 the last decade

01:33:20.700 in the world

01:33:21.160 has been most democratic

01:33:22.180 than at any time before.

01:33:25.180 In the last few years,

01:33:26.240 we have seen weakening

01:33:27.880 of democracy.

01:33:29.340 We have seen

01:33:29.860 some countries

01:33:30.520 which have turned away

01:33:31.680 from democracy

01:33:32.780 to dictatorship

01:33:33.420 such as,

01:33:34.020 for example,

01:33:35.060 Russia.

01:33:38.560 You know,

01:33:38.860 there are some

01:33:39.380 authoritarian tendencies

01:33:40.680 even in Europe

01:33:41.740 in places like

01:33:42.940 Hungary.

01:33:44.020 nonetheless,

01:33:47.020 nonetheless,

01:33:49.060 greater share

01:33:50.120 of humanity

01:33:51.840 lives

01:33:52.380 under a democratic regime

01:33:54.240 than, say,

01:33:54.960 in 30 years ago,

01:33:57.480 60 years ago,

01:33:58.220 100 years ago,

01:33:58.800 and so forth.

01:33:59.420 And the big

01:34:00.240 wave of democratization

01:34:02.340 really happens

01:34:03.420 after the collapse

01:34:04.300 of the Soviet Union

01:34:05.200 in 1991

01:34:05.920 and, of course,

01:34:07.340 the collapse

01:34:07.760 of the Berlin Wall

01:34:08.580 in 1989.

01:34:11.160 After that,

01:34:11.900 you see,

01:34:12.940 basically,

01:34:13.320 before then,

01:34:14.280 there were more autocracies

01:34:15.500 than democracies

01:34:16.260 in the world

01:34:16.800 and after the fall

01:34:18.160 of the Soviet Union,

01:34:19.020 you had all of these

01:34:19.740 newly independent countries

01:34:21.020 turned democratic.

01:34:22.860 There was some

01:34:23.340 slight back

01:34:24.040 in some of them,

01:34:26.060 but by and large,

01:34:27.600 democracy has held

01:34:28.700 in Central Europe,

01:34:29.680 in Eastern Europe,

01:34:30.820 even in parts

01:34:31.660 of Southern Europe.

01:34:32.900 So,

01:34:33.400 there is more democracy

01:34:35.020 around.

01:34:36.000 And, you know,

01:34:37.920 the future of democracy

01:34:38.800 is by no means assured.

01:34:40.740 We are seeing

01:34:41.360 some very troubling signs

01:34:42.820 on the horizon,

01:34:44.200 but democracy

01:34:47.040 is not in full flight

01:34:48.340 just because, you know,

01:34:49.520 Russia stopped being

01:34:50.540 a moderate democracy.

01:34:52.540 Well, I would say,

01:34:53.880 you know,

01:34:54.220 and even the Russians

01:34:55.020 know this,

01:34:56.360 despite their autocratic

01:34:58.320 system,

01:35:01.000 there isn't an

01:35:02.260 intellectual or moral

01:35:03.660 contender

01:35:04.400 of any import.

01:35:07.700 I mean,

01:35:08.020 democracies might

01:35:08.960 degenerate into

01:35:09.780 dictatorships,

01:35:10.620 but there isn't

01:35:11.640 an ethos

01:35:12.840 of authoritarianism.

01:35:14.500 There isn't an ethos

01:35:15.460 that's well-developed

01:35:16.420 intellectually,

01:35:17.200 philosophically,

01:35:17.860 or practically

01:35:18.520 to,

01:35:19.780 what,

01:35:21.700 to compete

01:35:22.700 with democracy.

01:35:24.840 So, I mean,

01:35:25.640 the Chinese can claim

01:35:26.680 that their system

01:35:27.400 is more efficient.

01:35:28.400 It's like,

01:35:28.860 well,

01:35:29.080 maybe for short

01:35:29.780 periods of time

01:35:30.480 now and then,

01:35:31.140 but seems highly

01:35:32.300 unlikely.

01:35:33.560 As China became

01:35:35.360 more free,

01:35:36.140 economically,

01:35:36.820 it became richer.

01:35:37.740 They say,

01:35:38.080 well,

01:35:38.200 we can get along,

01:35:39.080 we can get away

01:35:39.720 with not being free

01:35:40.900 across the board,

01:35:42.220 but I suspect

01:35:43.300 that that's probably

01:35:44.240 just wrong,

01:35:45.260 is that we're going

01:35:46.420 to see that as a

01:35:48.440 comparatively fatal

01:35:49.440 flaw over the next

01:35:50.360 30 or 40 years.

01:35:52.440 So, but,

01:35:52.880 I mean,

01:35:53.380 what do you argue

01:35:54.220 if you're not a liberal

01:35:55.620 Democrat,

01:35:56.840 you know,

01:35:57.120 in the whole broad

01:35:58.120 sense,

01:35:58.620 ranging from

01:35:59.140 Democratic Socialist

01:36:00.280 to ultra-conservative,

01:36:01.660 let's say,

01:36:01.980 but within the

01:36:02.480 Democratic spectrum,

01:36:03.820 well,

01:36:05.000 what's outside of that

01:36:06.120 that's credible

01:36:06.740 intellectually?

01:36:07.980 An alternative system.

01:36:09.400 I don't see anything.

01:36:11.060 Russia has

01:36:12.180 a peculiar

01:36:13.280 combination

01:36:13.940 of nationalism

01:36:15.220 and Russian

01:36:16.180 orthodoxy.

01:36:17.040 Now,

01:36:17.200 that cannot be

01:36:17.860 obviously

01:36:18.280 exported

01:36:19.880 to other countries

01:36:21.260 in the world.

01:36:21.860 It has no purchase

01:36:22.640 on Africa,

01:36:23.340 for example,

01:36:24.120 or Latin America.

01:36:25.700 China

01:36:26.020 is an interesting

01:36:27.500 example.

01:36:29.060 They certainly

01:36:30.020 do argue

01:36:31.620 that their system

01:36:32.580 is superior,

01:36:33.540 but I think

01:36:34.600 that the shine

01:36:35.380 has been coming

01:36:36.140 off the Chinese

01:36:37.220 model recently

01:36:38.900 with the...

01:36:39.840 Well,

01:36:40.040 it got a lot

01:36:40.720 more superior

01:36:41.480 when it got

01:36:42.200 a lot more

01:36:42.920 capitalist.

01:36:44.160 It got a lot

01:36:44.920 more superior.

01:36:45.520 They obviously

01:36:45.880 are able to

01:36:46.540 generate a lot

01:36:47.120 of wealth.

01:36:48.260 They also have

01:36:48.920 a lot more

01:36:49.280 people,

01:36:50.300 but they are

01:36:51.400 still on average.

01:36:52.600 An average

01:36:52.940 Chinese is much

01:36:54.300 poorer than an

01:36:54.960 average American.

01:36:55.500 It's just that

01:36:56.020 they are

01:36:56.260 dealing with

01:36:56.700 1.4 billion

01:36:57.660 people.

01:36:59.560 But by

01:37:00.720 letting them

01:37:01.800 be freer,

01:37:03.220 not perhaps

01:37:04.040 politically,

01:37:04.880 but economically,

01:37:05.940 the Chinese

01:37:07.980 economic institutions

01:37:09.040 stopped being

01:37:09.760 super extractive

01:37:10.840 and they became

01:37:11.680 more inclusive

01:37:12.540 and people

01:37:13.500 could function

01:37:14.100 within them

01:37:14.740 and produce

01:37:15.180 wealth

01:37:15.460 and keep it

01:37:16.040 and nobody

01:37:16.420 was coming

01:37:16.840 to take it

01:37:17.300 away from them,

01:37:18.140 at least not

01:37:18.720 with the typical

01:37:19.420 regularity

01:37:20.160 of a totalitarian

01:37:20.980 regime.

01:37:21.480 They were able

01:37:21.880 to build

01:37:23.040 a very

01:37:23.980 prosperous

01:37:24.280 country.

01:37:25.380 But the

01:37:25.840 Chinese

01:37:26.100 coming off

01:37:26.860 not only

01:37:27.640 because of

01:37:28.160 the way

01:37:28.440 that the

01:37:28.760 Chinese

01:37:29.020 have lied

01:37:29.580 about Corona,

01:37:30.800 but also

01:37:31.340 because the

01:37:31.860 Chinese are

01:37:32.380 involved in

01:37:33.300 tremendous

01:37:34.100 human rights

01:37:34.760 abuses

01:37:35.340 against the

01:37:38.260 Uyghurs

01:37:38.660 and places

01:37:40.340 like that.

01:37:40.760 It's very

01:37:41.100 difficult for

01:37:42.140 any aspiring

01:37:43.040 dictator in

01:37:45.200 Africa,

01:37:45.700 Latin America

01:37:46.160 or Europe

01:37:46.840 for that

01:37:47.220 measure,

01:37:47.500 to say

01:37:47.920 China is

01:37:49.880 the model

01:37:50.380 if the

01:37:52.020 immediate

01:37:52.480 retort is

01:37:54.400 aside from

01:37:55.620 those concentration

01:37:56.480 camps,

01:37:57.140 how about

01:37:57.580 that?

01:37:58.020 Explain that.

01:37:59.140 Well,

01:37:59.740 there is

01:38:00.120 their support

01:38:00.780 for North

01:38:01.320 Korea too,

01:38:02.160 which we

01:38:02.480 should never

01:38:02.980 forget.

01:38:03.900 And that.

01:38:05.080 Which is a

01:38:05.820 regime so

01:38:06.620 rotten that

01:38:07.340 it beggars

01:38:07.920 the imagination.

01:38:09.660 So appalling,

01:38:10.840 inexcusable in

01:38:11.760 every possible

01:38:12.560 way.

01:38:14.600 And the

01:38:15.580 final point

01:38:16.640 I want to

01:38:16.940 make about

01:38:17.300 China is

01:38:18.000 that really

01:38:19.340 it is now

01:38:20.400 that China

01:38:21.040 will have

01:38:21.480 to show

01:38:22.060 the merit

01:38:23.320 of its

01:38:23.740 own system

01:38:24.460 because it

01:38:26.600 is one

01:38:27.060 thing to

01:38:27.720 replicate

01:38:28.540 say railways,

01:38:36.960 the building

01:38:37.280 of railways

01:38:38.060 and bridges

01:38:38.740 and things

01:38:39.940 like that.

01:38:40.660 It is one

01:38:41.100 thing.

01:38:41.620 When you

01:38:41.700 have the

01:38:42.080 benefit of

01:38:42.600 the technology

01:38:43.320 that's already

01:38:44.000 developed and

01:38:44.720 what you're

01:38:45.060 doing is

01:38:45.520 picking

01:38:45.900 low-hanging

01:38:46.760 fruit.

01:38:48.220 That's

01:38:48.400 exactly

01:38:48.720 right.

01:38:49.200 Whereas

01:38:49.780 now China

01:38:51.680 has to

01:38:52.060 prove that

01:38:52.840 it can

01:38:53.160 not only

01:38:53.880 mimic,

01:38:56.840 but it

01:38:57.160 can actually

01:38:57.800 produce

01:38:58.560 new ideas

01:39:00.160 that it

01:39:00.500 can innovate.

01:39:01.400 And you

01:39:01.960 don't have

01:39:02.860 innovation

01:39:03.520 in a

01:39:04.140 country which

01:39:04.840 doesn't

01:39:05.320 have freedom

01:39:06.700 of speech,

01:39:07.880 which doesn't

01:39:08.500 have free

01:39:09.540 exchange of

01:39:11.360 ideas and

01:39:12.300 the ability

01:39:13.140 to criticize.

01:39:13.640 now there

01:39:15.640 are specific

01:39:16.240 sectors where

01:39:17.800 freedom of

01:39:18.440 speech can

01:39:18.900 be allowed.

01:39:19.540 So for

01:39:19.800 example,

01:39:20.220 the Soviet

01:39:20.640 nuclear and

01:39:21.480 rocket

01:39:21.900 sciences

01:39:23.100 were allowed

01:39:25.400 a great deal

01:39:26.140 of experimentation

01:39:27.040 and internal

01:39:28.100 discussions because

01:39:29.100 obviously the

01:39:29.620 Soviet Union was

01:39:30.240 trying to build

01:39:30.800 as many

01:39:31.160 nuclear rockets

01:39:32.840 as it

01:39:33.240 possibly could.

01:39:33.940 but if you

01:39:35.580 want to

01:39:35.880 produce

01:39:36.420 better

01:39:36.980 products,

01:39:39.100 better

01:39:39.680 production

01:39:41.420 processes,

01:39:42.520 new innovations

01:39:43.980 on a mass

01:39:46.000 sort of

01:39:46.420 societal scale,

01:39:47.480 you have to

01:39:48.200 have freedom

01:39:49.220 of speech,

01:39:49.920 freedom of

01:39:50.240 expression,

01:39:50.820 freedom of

01:39:51.180 communication.

01:39:52.340 And China

01:39:52.900 doesn't have

01:39:53.620 it because

01:39:54.540 of course the

01:39:55.100 colliery of

01:39:56.720 the freedom

01:39:58.220 of innovation

01:39:58.840 is that people

01:39:59.940 would be

01:40:00.940 talking about

01:40:01.980 ideas that the

01:40:02.840 Chinese government

01:40:03.400 doesn't want

01:40:03.900 them to talk

01:40:04.340 about.

01:40:04.960 Yeah,

01:40:05.220 well,

01:40:05.440 and if you're

01:40:06.240 going to have

01:40:06.640 a bunch of

01:40:07.040 people who

01:40:07.520 are talking

01:40:08.320 about ideas

01:40:08.960 and they're

01:40:09.300 going to be

01:40:09.560 really good

01:40:10.000 at it,

01:40:11.380 pretty much

01:40:12.480 nothing can

01:40:13.160 be off

01:40:13.620 limits.

01:40:14.440 If you get

01:40:14.880 a bunch of

01:40:15.260 creative people

01:40:15.840 together and

01:40:16.460 they're really

01:40:16.840 being creative,

01:40:17.580 they have to

01:40:18.180 be able to

01:40:18.680 talk about

01:40:19.240 anything.

01:40:20.460 Otherwise,

01:40:21.040 their creativity

01:40:21.820 gets squelched

01:40:22.780 and it's easy

01:40:23.400 to squelch the

01:40:24.160 creativity in

01:40:25.240 some sense.

01:40:27.380 And also,

01:40:28.260 I think that

01:40:28.740 creative types

01:40:29.740 are usually

01:40:30.500 people who

01:40:31.420 are

01:40:32.580 on a

01:40:35.220 broad spectrum

01:40:35.880 of autism

01:40:36.760 and

01:40:37.380 disagreeability

01:40:38.280 and

01:40:39.120 you very

01:40:42.200 often see it

01:40:43.420 in Silicon

01:40:44.020 Valley,

01:40:44.420 but some

01:40:44.720 research seems

01:40:45.420 to be showing

01:40:45.880 that.

01:40:46.260 And these

01:40:46.520 are the

01:40:46.740 sorts of

01:40:47.040 people who

01:40:48.200 are going

01:40:48.620 to not

01:40:49.940 hold back.

01:40:50.700 These are

01:40:51.000 the sorts

01:40:51.260 of people

01:40:51.660 who are

01:40:51.960 going to

01:40:52.320 tell whatever

01:40:53.680 springs to

01:40:54.280 their mind.

01:40:55.860 Now,

01:40:56.300 if you're

01:40:56.920 going to

01:40:57.280 put people

01:40:58.180 who are

01:40:59.860 disagreeable

01:41:00.480 and who

01:41:00.760 speak their

01:41:01.500 minds because

01:41:03.200 of the

01:41:03.480 particular

01:41:03.920 traits of

01:41:04.900 their psychology,

01:41:06.740 if you're

01:41:07.040 going to

01:41:07.320 put all

01:41:07.700 of them

01:41:07.920 to jail

01:41:08.420 because they

01:41:09.040 call chairman

01:41:10.320 she an

01:41:11.460 idiot,

01:41:12.260 then you're

01:41:13.200 going to

01:41:13.500 run out

01:41:14.100 of innovative

01:41:15.480 people very

01:41:17.000 soon.

01:41:18.440 Yeah,

01:41:18.600 I'm not so

01:41:19.280 much sure

01:41:19.720 that the

01:41:20.140 disagreeable

01:41:20.760 element there

01:41:21.400 is useful

01:41:22.560 for creativity.

01:41:23.640 There's not

01:41:24.100 a lot of

01:41:24.400 evidence for

01:41:24.860 that,

01:41:25.060 but it

01:41:25.240 might be

01:41:25.540 useful for

01:41:26.040 implementation

01:41:26.580 of creative

01:41:27.400 ideas.

01:41:29.080 When I

01:41:29.760 mention

01:41:30.040 disagreeability,

01:41:31.000 this is very

01:41:31.720 interesting.

01:41:32.180 I would like

01:41:32.440 to hear your

01:41:32.840 view on that.

01:41:33.460 When I mean

01:41:34.120 disagreeability,

01:41:35.420 isn't it the

01:41:36.060 ability to

01:41:37.040 say,

01:41:37.960 screw you

01:41:39.600 all,

01:41:40.160 I know

01:41:40.640 I'm right

01:41:41.900 in my

01:41:42.400 ideas,

01:41:43.920 and I'm

01:41:44.380 going to

01:41:44.680 pursue my

01:41:45.360 research

01:41:45.820 wherever it's

01:41:46.320 going to

01:41:46.720 lead me?

01:41:47.660 Isn't that

01:41:48.300 important?

01:41:49.000 Well,

01:41:49.140 that's what I

01:41:49.640 mean by

01:41:50.000 implementation.

01:41:50.900 If you look

01:41:51.520 at it from

01:41:51.880 a personality

01:41:52.480 perspective,

01:41:53.260 openness,

01:41:53.960 the trait,

01:41:54.600 is the one

01:41:55.140 that governs

01:41:55.660 creativity.

01:41:56.580 And it

01:41:56.880 isn't

01:41:57.160 associated

01:41:57.700 with

01:41:57.980 agreeableness

01:41:58.540 to any

01:41:58.900 great degree.

01:41:59.600 They're pretty

01:42:00.080 orthogonal.

01:42:01.600 But the

01:42:02.280 issue of

01:42:02.820 to what

01:42:04.140 degree you

01:42:05.540 need to be

01:42:06.080 disagreeable to

01:42:06.920 implement

01:42:07.620 effectively,

01:42:08.700 that's a

01:42:09.360 different story.

01:42:10.300 And I don't

01:42:10.780 think that data

01:42:11.580 are in on

01:42:12.080 that yet.

01:42:13.000 Anyways,

01:42:13.400 let's go on.

01:42:14.020 Let's go on to

01:42:14.620 the next one.

01:42:15.220 Let's go on to

01:42:15.700 the long

01:42:16.100 piece, because

01:42:16.880 that's also

01:42:17.620 extraordinarily

01:42:18.420 important.

01:42:20.460 So long

01:42:21.100 piece basically

01:42:21.900 means that there

01:42:23.300 are fewer

01:42:23.660 conflicts since

01:42:25.800 the end of

01:42:26.560 the Second

01:42:26.900 World War.

01:42:27.540 The long

01:42:27.840 term trends

01:42:28.480 seem to be

01:42:29.720 toward greater

01:42:31.060 peace.

01:42:31.700 We certainly

01:42:32.360 no longer have

01:42:33.960 countries declaring

01:42:35.040 war on each

01:42:35.740 other, sending

01:42:36.320 armies across

01:42:37.240 borders to

01:42:38.460 slaughter.

01:42:38.900 That seems to

01:42:39.520 have almost

01:42:39.920 disappeared

01:42:40.420 completely, that

01:42:41.400 idea.

01:42:41.780 If I remember

01:42:43.740 correctly, the

01:42:44.380 last country to

01:42:45.160 declare war was

01:42:47.020 the United

01:42:47.860 States on

01:42:48.820 North Korea.

01:42:50.760 I could be

01:42:51.520 wrong on that,

01:42:52.440 but I think I

01:42:53.820 would love for

01:42:54.620 that to be

01:42:55.020 checked.

01:42:55.720 And maybe you

01:42:56.120 can put a

01:42:56.520 disclaimer on

01:42:57.880 your video that

01:42:58.840 I got it

01:42:59.240 completely wrong,

01:42:59.960 but I actually

01:43:00.360 think that

01:43:00.780 happened.

01:43:01.240 Anyway, so

01:43:02.500 that no longer

01:43:03.080 happens.

01:43:03.580 Now, countries

01:43:04.120 still invade other

01:43:05.220 countries, like

01:43:06.140 for example,

01:43:07.020 Russia invaded

01:43:07.780 Ukraine, the

01:43:09.220 little green

01:43:09.680 men who

01:43:10.920 took Crimea.

01:43:14.060 But I think it

01:43:14.940 says something

01:43:15.640 that even

01:43:16.220 governments that

01:43:17.740 still do

01:43:20.320 these sorts of

01:43:21.620 things do

01:43:23.360 not declare war

01:43:24.480 publicly because

01:43:25.540 they are afraid

01:43:26.220 of how humanity

01:43:27.400 would react to

01:43:28.120 that kind of

01:43:29.360 activity.

01:43:32.300 And so most

01:43:33.040 of the conflicts

01:43:33.900 today, in fact,

01:43:34.740 all conflicts

01:43:35.420 usually tend to

01:43:36.140 be ethnic and

01:43:36.960 civil wars, but

01:43:38.040 they are not

01:43:38.540 really conflicts

01:43:39.280 between countries.

01:43:42.300 Wars have

01:43:42.880 become less

01:43:44.080 deadly.

01:43:45.020 They are smaller

01:43:46.260 and less

01:43:46.740 deadly.

01:43:47.860 But please

01:43:48.700 remember, this

01:43:49.540 doesn't mean

01:43:50.120 that the

01:43:51.700 past performance

01:43:52.960 suggests future

01:43:54.080 success.

01:43:55.020 I mean, the

01:43:55.260 world is still

01:43:55.800 filled with

01:43:56.280 nuclear weapons.

01:43:57.700 And so...

01:43:58.520 But it also

01:43:58.980 seems, even on

01:43:59.780 that front, it

01:44:01.240 seems like

01:44:02.000 certainly people

01:44:04.520 are much less

01:44:05.460 convinced that

01:44:06.740 nuclear weapons

01:44:07.580 will be used

01:44:08.180 purposefully,

01:44:10.140 especially in a

01:44:11.280 mass annihilation,

01:44:12.380 than throughout

01:44:13.680 the 60s, 70s,

01:44:15.040 and 80s.

01:44:16.220 So the nuclear

01:44:16.940 weapons are still

01:44:17.640 there.

01:44:17.960 There's far

01:44:19.920 fewer of them,

01:44:21.120 but imminent war

01:44:22.620 between Russia

01:44:23.880 and the United

01:44:25.000 States certainly

01:44:26.040 doesn't seem

01:44:26.720 probable in the

01:44:28.200 same manner that

01:44:28.880 it did for that

01:44:30.540 entire Cold War

01:44:31.500 period up till the

01:44:32.380 demise of the

01:44:32.960 Soviet Union.

01:44:34.440 That's right.

01:44:34.900 I mean, we are

01:44:35.300 down from 40,000

01:44:37.220 nuclear warheads

01:44:38.300 per superpower

01:44:39.080 down to about

01:44:39.660 3,000.

01:44:40.700 I'm more worried

01:44:41.460 about nuclear,

01:44:42.860 about, sorry,

01:44:43.880 about accidental.

01:44:45.720 Yes, terrorism.

01:44:46.500 That sort of

01:44:47.840 thing.

01:44:48.420 So that's what

01:44:49.720 really worries me

01:44:51.360 much more.

01:44:53.380 But that's a

01:44:53.900 better worry in

01:44:54.760 some sense than

01:44:55.560 all-out mass

01:44:56.640 annihilation.

01:44:57.380 Well, ideally,

01:44:59.520 I mean, you have

01:45:00.000 a lot of smart

01:45:00.580 people who are

01:45:01.080 watching your

01:45:01.740 podcast, and

01:45:03.120 ideally, you

01:45:05.160 know, it could

01:45:06.180 be calculated

01:45:06.920 how many nukes

01:45:07.880 would have to

01:45:08.340 go off, of

01:45:09.400 what strength,

01:45:11.100 in order for

01:45:12.120 there not to

01:45:13.500 be the end of

01:45:14.200 humanity.

01:45:15.080 In other words,

01:45:15.420 what is the

01:45:15.840 maximum?

01:45:16.440 And if we

01:45:16.800 could convince

01:45:17.420 the international

01:45:19.000 powers to

01:45:20.220 bring the

01:45:20.740 total maximum

01:45:22.140 number of

01:45:22.720 warheads and

01:45:23.300 their strength

01:45:23.940 below that level

01:45:25.940 while still

01:45:26.820 being distributed

01:45:28.120 amongst nuclear

01:45:29.300 powers, you

01:45:30.800 know, then we

01:45:31.560 could decrease

01:45:32.340 that danger

01:45:33.500 even more.

01:45:36.900 I wonder if

01:45:37.920 that would

01:45:38.320 decrease the,

01:45:39.840 I mean, one

01:45:40.340 of the things

01:45:40.780 I've thought

01:45:41.260 reasonably frequently,

01:45:43.040 although I'm not

01:45:43.720 convinced of it,

01:45:44.380 is that nuclear

01:45:45.540 war is so

01:45:46.400 terrifying that

01:45:47.260 it's actually

01:45:47.740 made us more

01:45:48.360 peaceful.

01:45:49.420 Like that terrible

01:45:50.260 threat, like the

01:45:51.060 fist of God,

01:45:52.100 there's some

01:45:52.600 places we just

01:45:53.300 can't go anymore

01:45:54.240 and more, and

01:45:55.480 people so

01:45:56.400 far, thank

01:45:56.980 God, have

01:45:57.440 been, seemed

01:45:58.900 unwilling to

01:45:59.920 go there.

01:46:01.340 So, the

01:46:02.760 terrible threat

01:46:03.460 may have had

01:46:04.180 benefits.

01:46:05.420 Yeah, there's a

01:46:05.900 whole branch of

01:46:06.980 international relations,

01:46:08.220 study of international

01:46:09.360 relations, which

01:46:09.960 argues precisely for

01:46:11.020 that.

01:46:11.600 You're not alone.

01:46:13.400 There are people

01:46:13.980 supporting your

01:46:15.000 view.

01:46:16.360 But unfortunately,

01:46:18.220 nuclear power,

01:46:20.220 nuclear weapons

01:46:21.140 cannot be unlearned.

01:46:22.540 And so, I'm

01:46:23.940 afraid we are

01:46:24.420 stuck with

01:46:25.160 them.

01:46:26.180 And the best

01:46:27.060 that we can

01:46:27.400 do is to

01:46:27.740 bring the

01:46:28.040 number down

01:46:28.720 to a minimal

01:46:29.240 level where

01:46:29.980 superpowers will

01:46:30.840 feel safe

01:46:31.500 without destroying

01:46:32.660 the world.

01:46:33.380 That's just for

01:46:34.580 another day.

01:46:35.620 The last one,

01:46:37.220 trend 10, a

01:46:39.480 safer world, and

01:46:40.920 this is death

01:46:41.720 from natural

01:46:43.000 disasters.

01:46:44.180 Right.

01:46:45.460 So, this

01:46:47.480 particular subject

01:46:48.240 can be looked

01:46:48.800 at from a

01:46:51.200 number of

01:46:51.480 angles.

01:46:51.940 One is that

01:46:52.680 we are in

01:46:55.020 this time of

01:46:56.060 panic about

01:46:58.080 existential threat

01:46:59.160 to humanity

01:46:59.980 from climate

01:47:00.620 change and from

01:47:01.620 the environment.

01:47:02.220 And yet, in

01:47:03.540 the last 100

01:47:04.340 years, the

01:47:06.200 number of

01:47:07.160 people who

01:47:07.700 have died due

01:47:08.680 to natural

01:47:09.200 disasters has

01:47:10.140 shrunk by

01:47:10.800 99%.

01:47:12.180 The two are

01:47:14.020 incompatible.

01:47:15.120 If we are

01:47:15.800 moving to a

01:47:16.360 world where

01:47:16.940 millions of

01:47:18.000 people are

01:47:18.440 going to be

01:47:18.920 destroyed by

01:47:20.120 oceans rising

01:47:24.220 or crop

01:47:26.060 failure or

01:47:26.560 whatever, or

01:47:27.960 tsunamis or

01:47:29.020 earthquakes and

01:47:29.660 whatever, why

01:47:30.740 is it that

01:47:31.480 due to natural

01:47:32.040 disasters have

01:47:35.260 seen 99%

01:47:37.040 decrease in

01:47:38.120 human mortality?

01:47:40.280 And the

01:47:42.540 answer seems

01:47:43.880 to be that

01:47:44.500 partly we are

01:47:45.320 richer and

01:47:45.980 therefore we

01:47:46.460 are able to

01:47:47.200 build more

01:47:49.260 sturdy dwellings,

01:47:50.980 but we are

01:47:52.140 also more

01:47:53.120 technologically

01:47:53.660 savvy so that

01:47:54.780 we can predict

01:47:56.980 where a

01:47:58.000 hurricane is

01:47:58.500 going to

01:47:58.820 strike and

01:47:59.500 exactly when

01:48:00.320 so that people

01:48:00.920 can escape

01:48:01.500 from the

01:48:01.900 path of

01:48:02.300 destruction.

01:48:03.480 And we

01:48:04.340 can also

01:48:05.040 detect

01:48:05.820 earthquakes

01:48:07.040 underneath the

01:48:08.120 ocean floor,

01:48:09.440 giving people

01:48:10.640 on land more

01:48:11.540 time to move

01:48:12.420 to higher

01:48:12.820 ground from a

01:48:13.880 tsunami wave

01:48:14.680 and things like

01:48:15.260 that.

01:48:16.540 And we're going

01:48:18.200 to get better

01:48:18.700 and better at

01:48:19.260 all of that.

01:48:19.700 And we are

01:48:19.860 going to get

01:48:20.260 better and

01:48:20.640 better at it.

01:48:21.260 Yeah.

01:48:21.940 So we're

01:48:24.200 richer by

01:48:25.980 far in terms

01:48:31.280 of productivity

01:48:32.360 and quality of

01:48:33.280 products and

01:48:33.960 absolute poverty

01:48:35.700 has declined

01:48:36.400 precipitously.

01:48:38.700 Commodity prices

01:48:39.540 have fallen.

01:48:41.200 We're not going

01:48:42.320 to overpopulate

01:48:43.860 the world in any

01:48:44.820 cataclysmic

01:48:45.500 sense.

01:48:46.480 Everyone has

01:48:47.320 increasingly more

01:48:48.820 than enough to

01:48:49.520 eat.

01:48:51.460 There's more

01:48:52.240 land for nature

01:48:53.120 and that trend

01:48:53.840 seems upward.

01:48:55.380 More people are

01:48:56.260 moving to urban

01:48:57.220 areas and that's

01:48:58.540 advantageous rather

01:48:59.580 than disadvantageous.

01:49:01.340 There are more

01:49:02.180 democracies and so

01:49:03.260 we're better

01:49:03.700 governed.

01:49:04.440 We're more

01:49:05.180 peaceful and we're

01:49:06.900 less likely to die

01:49:07.880 from catastrophes.

01:49:09.020 And I should

01:49:09.780 point out to

01:49:10.480 everyone who's

01:49:11.040 listening, that

01:49:11.880 really only

01:49:12.560 scrapes the

01:49:14.500 surface of the

01:49:16.260 topics that are

01:49:16.860 covered in this

01:49:17.600 remarkable book.

01:49:19.080 As I mentioned

01:49:19.980 at the beginning

01:49:20.500 of this podcast,

01:49:22.080 the authors

01:49:22.800 delve into

01:49:25.360 comparatively

01:49:27.200 microtrends in

01:49:28.220 detail, discussing

01:49:29.540 such things which

01:49:30.480 I would love to

01:49:31.080 discuss and perhaps

01:49:31.960 we should continue

01:49:32.880 this at some

01:49:34.380 point in the not

01:49:35.000 too distant future.

01:49:37.640 Such things as

01:49:38.840 the precipitous

01:49:40.760 decline in

01:49:41.380 computational

01:49:41.920 power and

01:49:42.540 that's in its

01:49:43.080 infancy, access

01:49:45.200 to electricity.

01:49:47.140 You mean

01:49:47.600 computational

01:49:48.280 price or

01:49:48.780 computation?

01:49:49.420 Yes, and

01:49:50.660 pure power and

01:49:52.380 accessibility and

01:49:53.800 mobile technology

01:49:54.920 and lighting

01:49:55.960 costs and

01:49:57.000 decline in the

01:49:59.400 cost of

01:49:59.860 renewable resources

01:50:00.800 and clean

01:50:01.440 drinking water

01:50:02.220 and better

01:50:02.700 sanitation.

01:50:04.840 I'm just

01:50:05.700 leafing through

01:50:06.260 the book,

01:50:07.660 internet access

01:50:08.600 and so that's

01:50:09.280 education and

01:50:10.500 that will get

01:50:11.180 better and

01:50:11.640 better.

01:50:19.040 But other

01:50:19.840 than that...

01:50:21.300 Yeah, so

01:50:22.080 let's close out

01:50:23.220 with this.

01:50:26.280 I've done

01:50:26.980 three podcasts

01:50:27.920 I think in the

01:50:28.460 last couple of

01:50:29.000 months that

01:50:29.840 were aimed at

01:50:30.620 bringing this

01:50:31.480 information to

01:50:32.540 a broader

01:50:33.700 audience.

01:50:34.280 there seems

01:50:36.660 to some

01:50:37.080 degree to

01:50:37.460 be a

01:50:37.740 saleability

01:50:38.340 issue or

01:50:39.180 maybe it's

01:50:39.720 just too

01:50:40.460 soon.

01:50:41.340 Like all

01:50:42.040 this good

01:50:42.420 news in

01:50:42.820 some sense

01:50:43.260 is relatively

01:50:43.780 recent and

01:50:44.400 the word

01:50:44.740 may just

01:50:45.240 not have

01:50:46.280 spread.

01:50:46.760 any ideas

01:50:49.100 about what

01:50:50.700 could be

01:50:51.120 done to

01:50:54.060 counter

01:50:58.600 the

01:51:00.220 pessimistic

01:51:01.720 and apocalyptic

01:51:02.440 narratives that

01:51:03.220 seem to

01:51:03.740 dominate the

01:51:04.380 public

01:51:04.660 landscape?

01:51:07.020 Well, you

01:51:08.420 are doing it

01:51:09.000 right now by

01:51:09.820 interviewing me.

01:51:10.940 I am doing it

01:51:12.000 by having this

01:51:13.240 website which is

01:51:14.220 made all the

01:51:14.960 more useful by

01:51:15.640 the fact that

01:51:16.180 we didn't

01:51:17.020 come up with

01:51:18.260 this data.

01:51:18.920 It's freely

01:51:19.440 available on

01:51:20.540 many different

01:51:21.200 platforms around

01:51:23.060 the world.

01:51:23.720 If you think

01:51:24.880 that I'm full

01:51:25.720 of it, go to

01:51:26.700 Our World in

01:51:27.380 Data, go to

01:51:28.060 the World Bank,

01:51:28.800 go to the

01:51:29.140 IMF, go to

01:51:29.800 Eurostat.

01:51:30.720 If you are

01:51:32.680 interested in the

01:51:33.860 state of the

01:51:34.340 world, there's

01:51:35.360 plenty of data

01:51:36.220 out there that

01:51:36.880 can show you

01:51:37.600 that the

01:51:38.880 state of the

01:51:39.340 world is much

01:51:39.860 better than

01:51:40.340 it is.

01:51:41.080 Secondly,

01:51:43.320 and I'm

01:51:43.900 wondering if

01:51:45.640 this is even

01:51:48.380 possible, but

01:51:49.060 secondly, what

01:51:50.600 if people start

01:51:51.520 understanding more

01:51:53.240 about their

01:51:54.760 biases, about

01:51:55.520 how they

01:51:56.200 perceive the

01:51:56.860 world?

01:51:57.520 This is

01:51:58.440 obviously done

01:51:58.940 in colleges

01:51:59.560 and universities,

01:52:01.040 in psychology

01:52:01.940 courses, as

01:52:02.920 well as in

01:52:03.300 biology courses

01:52:04.220 and things

01:52:05.340 like that, but

01:52:06.400 it's not as

01:52:08.620 though human

01:52:10.680 beings are

01:52:11.800 incapable of

01:52:14.280 changing their

01:52:15.100 worldview based

01:52:16.880 on evidence.

01:52:18.280 We no longer

01:52:19.480 believe that a

01:52:21.500 sacrifice of a

01:52:22.500 little child will

01:52:23.460 produce better

01:52:24.980 harvest.

01:52:26.220 So we've

01:52:27.240 learned that

01:52:27.640 lesson.

01:52:28.420 We no longer

01:52:29.420 believe that

01:52:30.300 throwing a

01:52:31.140 virgin into a

01:52:32.400 volcano is

01:52:34.020 going to give

01:52:36.340 us military

01:52:36.960 success.

01:52:37.720 we no longer

01:52:41.000 believe in

01:52:42.060 all sorts of

01:52:43.200 things that we

01:52:44.000 have taken for

01:52:44.540 granted.

01:52:44.880 In other words,

01:52:45.420 we have shown

01:52:46.380 that we are

01:52:47.240 capable of

01:52:48.060 learning and

01:52:49.340 learning from

01:52:49.960 evidence.

01:52:50.460 We have

01:52:50.700 internalized that

01:52:53.840 focusing on

01:52:54.940 irrigation and

01:52:56.320 fertilization is

01:52:58.060 a better way to

01:52:58.900 produce food than

01:53:00.320 prayer.

01:53:00.660 that gives

01:53:04.460 me hope that

01:53:05.440 as we move

01:53:06.680 forward, we'll

01:53:07.420 be able to

01:53:07.900 learn more

01:53:08.600 about the

01:53:11.680 rest of the

01:53:12.140 world,

01:53:12.560 internalize not

01:53:13.660 just that

01:53:14.220 information, but

01:53:14.920 also why we

01:53:15.880 are being

01:53:16.400 pessimistic and

01:53:18.680 negative.

01:53:19.500 What do you

01:53:19.840 think about

01:53:20.140 that?

01:53:21.520 Well, I'm

01:53:22.780 listening and I'm

01:53:23.960 thinking it

01:53:24.420 through.

01:53:24.880 I'm also

01:53:25.540 wondering,

01:53:26.080 I would

01:53:29.620 say that

01:53:30.160 learning this

01:53:32.300 material has

01:53:33.060 made me, has

01:53:34.080 lifted some of

01:53:34.860 the existential

01:53:35.820 weight from

01:53:38.060 me.

01:53:39.760 Things aren't

01:53:40.520 as bad as

01:53:41.200 they're trumpeted

01:53:43.240 to be.

01:53:44.000 In fact, they're

01:53:44.500 quite a bit

01:53:44.920 better and

01:53:45.820 they're getting

01:53:46.260 better.

01:53:46.700 And so we're

01:53:48.100 doing a better

01:53:48.560 job than we

01:53:49.320 thought.

01:53:49.920 There's more to

01:53:50.740 us than we

01:53:51.220 thought.

01:53:51.600 We're adopting

01:53:52.080 our responsibilities

01:53:53.020 as stewards of

01:53:54.000 the planet

01:53:54.480 rapidly.

01:53:55.100 We are

01:53:56.100 moving towards

01:53:57.040 improving

01:53:57.680 everyone's

01:53:58.240 life.

01:54:00.920 I lived

01:54:01.860 under an

01:54:03.160 apocalyptic

01:54:03.720 shadow my

01:54:05.780 whole life.

01:54:06.860 I mean, I

01:54:07.380 don't want to

01:54:07.720 complain about

01:54:08.220 that too much

01:54:08.740 because I

01:54:09.580 lived in a

01:54:10.020 very rich

01:54:10.460 place and I

01:54:11.220 had all sorts

01:54:11.740 of advantages

01:54:12.320 and all of

01:54:12.780 that.

01:54:13.020 But the

01:54:13.660 apocalyptic

01:54:14.080 narrative was

01:54:14.840 still extraordinarily

01:54:16.260 powerful and

01:54:17.080 demoralizing.

01:54:18.080 And it

01:54:19.220 looks to me

01:54:20.800 that there are

01:54:21.280 reasons to

01:54:21.800 doubt its

01:54:22.260 validity on

01:54:23.340 all sorts of

01:54:23.940 dimensions.

01:54:24.400 And I'm

01:54:24.860 not sure

01:54:25.260 what that

01:54:25.700 will do

01:54:26.160 to people,

01:54:26.640 but hopefully

01:54:27.060 it'll make

01:54:27.460 us more

01:54:27.940 optimistic and

01:54:29.620 positive and

01:54:31.140 less paranoid

01:54:32.300 and afraid and

01:54:33.860 happier with

01:54:35.260 who we are

01:54:35.980 but still

01:54:37.000 willing to

01:54:37.540 participate in

01:54:38.340 improving the

01:54:38.940 future.

01:54:40.400 To lift some

01:54:41.120 of the weight

01:54:41.480 off young

01:54:41.920 people who are

01:54:42.660 constantly being

01:54:43.320 told that the

01:54:44.040 planet is going

01:54:44.720 to burn to a

01:54:45.400 cinder in the

01:54:45.960 next 20 years.

01:54:46.820 newspapers and

01:54:47.820 and...

01:54:48.620 Well, that's

01:54:49.340 not happening.

01:54:50.060 That's not

01:54:50.480 happening and

01:54:51.220 people who

01:54:51.940 push that

01:54:52.440 agenda in the

01:54:53.180 newspapers and

01:54:53.800 elsewhere are

01:54:54.280 completely

01:54:54.680 irresponsible and

01:54:56.300 cruel.

01:54:58.240 But that

01:54:58.980 leads to

01:54:59.580 perhaps the

01:55:01.640 final point

01:55:02.420 from my end.

01:55:04.000 Like you, I

01:55:04.900 have become

01:55:05.520 much more

01:55:07.020 optimistic,

01:55:08.560 much more

01:55:09.140 happy in my

01:55:10.260 own personal

01:55:10.820 life once I

01:55:12.100 realized that

01:55:13.000 so much

01:55:14.220 around me I

01:55:16.220 didn't have a

01:55:16.700 right to

01:55:16.980 complain about

01:55:17.520 and I should

01:55:17.900 be grateful

01:55:18.340 for.

01:55:18.680 I should be

01:55:19.020 grateful for

01:55:19.560 that I'm not

01:55:20.020 a peasant in

01:55:21.460 17th century

01:55:22.260 or, you

01:55:23.500 know, or a...

01:55:25.080 And appreciative

01:55:25.880 of what's

01:55:27.060 brought us here.

01:55:28.620 And that's the

01:55:29.340 key, is that

01:55:30.460 people who do

01:55:31.720 not understand

01:55:32.640 the crucial

01:55:33.280 role that

01:55:34.740 political and

01:55:35.920 economic

01:55:36.480 liberalization,

01:55:37.860 opening,

01:55:39.080 inclusion,

01:55:40.200 has played

01:55:41.380 in launching

01:55:42.920 the

01:55:43.920 industrial

01:55:45.340 revolution,

01:55:46.940 showing us

01:55:48.020 the path,

01:55:48.860 the rest of

01:55:49.220 the world,

01:55:49.640 a path to

01:55:50.640 prosperity.

01:55:51.820 If they don't

01:55:52.220 understand that

01:55:53.660 everything we

01:55:54.300 have is

01:55:55.380 underpinned by

01:55:56.640 a certain

01:55:57.120 economic and

01:55:57.800 political system,

01:55:59.120 both of them

01:55:59.900 terribly imperfect,

01:56:01.860 terribly imperfect,

01:56:03.340 but look at

01:56:03.820 the alternative.

01:56:05.400 Look at the

01:56:05.960 difference between

01:56:06.680 Chile, the

01:56:07.760 extraordinary

01:56:08.380 success of

01:56:09.800 that country

01:56:10.380 after it

01:56:10.840 embraced free

01:56:11.540 markets and

01:56:12.260 the collapse

01:56:12.720 of Venezuela

01:56:13.300 where people

01:56:13.920 eat cats

01:56:15.340 and dogs.

01:56:16.280 Look at the

01:56:17.180 difference between

01:56:17.840 Botswana, which

01:56:19.120 is a relatively

01:56:19.700 free economy,

01:56:20.580 and its

01:56:20.980 neighbor,

01:56:21.760 Zimbabwe,

01:56:22.920 where people

01:56:23.760 have experienced

01:56:25.460 hyperinflation of

01:56:26.600 96 trillion

01:56:27.940 percent.

01:56:29.300 Look at the

01:56:29.740 difference between

01:56:30.400 East and West

01:56:31.280 Germany,

01:56:32.080 between the

01:56:34.340 United States

01:56:35.000 and the

01:56:35.300 USSR.

01:56:35.900 Look at the

01:56:36.300 difference between

01:56:37.040 North and South

01:56:37.840 Korea.

01:56:38.220 Korea.

01:56:38.700 If you

01:56:39.100 really, you

01:56:41.540 just called it

01:56:42.140 the worst

01:56:42.560 possible regime

01:56:43.360 in the world,

01:56:44.040 I think you

01:56:44.920 are right on

01:56:45.740 that.

01:56:46.100 I'm pretty sure

01:56:46.640 you are right

01:56:47.060 on that.

01:56:47.720 And that

01:56:49.180 regime is

01:56:49.740 still out

01:56:50.300 there.

01:56:51.780 If you have

01:56:52.500 a problem

01:56:53.020 with liberal

01:56:53.720 democracy and

01:56:54.880 competitive

01:56:56.020 enterprise,

01:56:58.060 fix those

01:56:58.960 problems

01:56:59.480 incrementally,

01:57:00.620 one by one.

01:57:01.800 Don't burn

01:57:02.680 down the

01:57:03.200 system, because

01:57:04.000 the alternatives,

01:57:05.320 as you can see

01:57:05.960 in the world,

01:57:06.600 are much worse.

01:57:07.360 That is a

01:57:08.440 great place to

01:57:09.100 end.

01:57:11.000 Thank you very

01:57:11.760 much.

01:57:13.000 There's so many

01:57:13.840 more things we

01:57:14.460 could talk about,

01:57:15.160 and hopefully we'll

01:57:15.880 get an opportunity

01:57:16.520 to do exactly

01:57:17.340 that.

01:57:17.680 Some of the

01:57:18.020 microanalysis,

01:57:18.920 or comparative

01:57:20.060 microanalysis,

01:57:20.900 because there's so

01:57:21.760 much data in this

01:57:22.880 book that's

01:57:23.440 fascinating.

01:57:24.220 It's an endless

01:57:24.800 source of

01:57:25.560 optimistic

01:57:26.800 revelation that's

01:57:28.780 also realistic.

01:57:30.580 And so I

01:57:31.880 hope many

01:57:32.960 people buy it

01:57:33.940 and put it on

01:57:34.620 their coffee

01:57:35.060 table and share

01:57:35.760 it with their

01:57:36.160 friends.

01:57:36.500 and lift

01:57:39.000 some of the

01:57:39.740 unnecessary

01:57:40.340 burden of

01:57:42.200 human shame

01:57:42.940 and guilt

01:57:43.500 from their

01:57:44.820 shoulders.

01:57:46.360 Well, I'm

01:57:47.220 grateful for

01:57:48.700 those kind

01:57:50.180 words about my

01:57:50.960 book.

01:57:51.320 I'm deeply

01:57:51.880 grateful to

01:57:52.400 you for having

01:57:52.900 me on your

01:57:53.320 show, and I'm

01:57:54.620 delighted that

01:57:55.400 you're doing

01:57:56.200 well, and

01:57:57.360 hopefully we'll

01:57:58.120 be doing even

01:57:58.860 better in the

01:57:59.340 future.

01:57:59.560 in today's

01:58:20.020 chaotic world,

01:58:21.000 many of us are

01:58:21.620 searching for a

01:58:22.220 way to aim

01:58:22.760 higher and find

01:58:23.660 spiritual peace.

01:58:25.000 But here's the

01:58:25.640 thing.

01:58:26.260 Prayer, the most

01:58:27.000 common tool we

01:58:27.740 have isn't just

01:58:28.580 about saying

01:58:29.080 whatever comes to

01:58:29.840 mind.

01:58:30.440 It's a skill that

01:58:31.340 needs to be

01:58:31.900 developed.

01:58:32.840 That's where

01:58:33.300 Hallow comes in.

01:58:34.520 As the number

01:58:34.960 one prayer and

01:58:35.600 meditation app,

01:58:36.560 Hallow is

01:58:36.960 launching an

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01:58:39.040 How to Pray.

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01:58:43.140 profound conversations

01:58:44.340 with God, how

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01:58:46.520 into imaginative

01:58:47.460 prayer, and how

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01:58:49.260 prayers reaching

01:58:50.180 far back in

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01:58:54.100 It's a

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01:59:03.880 Father Mike

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 03, 2021

165. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know ｜ Marian Tupy

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