The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 208. The Progress of the Human Race, Part 1

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00:00:57.540 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:01:02.640 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

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00:01:31.520 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.

00:01:34.680 There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:01:37.960 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:01:43.640 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:01:47.140 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, season 4, episode 65.

00:01:54.740 I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:01:56.180 If you haven't heard, Dad is going on tour.

00:02:00.040 Check tickets out at jordanbpeterson.com slash events,

00:02:03.680 and keep in mind there will be more dates added next week,

00:02:07.140 like Canadian dates, which haven't been announced quite yet.

00:02:10.300 For this episode, this is our first compilation highlighting the progress of the human race.

00:02:17.080 Worth a listen. Very positive.

00:02:19.300 All we ever hear about on the mainstream news is that the world is in dire straits,

00:02:23.360 that we are going in an irreversible direction, and that it's all our fault.

00:02:27.880 Throughout many conversations in season 4 of this podcast,

00:02:30.980 we've explored these narratives in depth.

00:02:33.420 We would like to promote an alternative narrative.

00:02:35.280 Did you know that in 1981, 42% of the world's population was living in what is called absolute poverty?

00:02:42.460 And by 2018, that number had fallen to 8.1%.

00:02:46.040 By 2030, we're on a pace to have less than 5% of the world's population living in poverty.

00:02:52.160 Are you aware that alongside nearly eradicating poverty, we've also nearly ended world hunger?

00:02:57.680 Over the last 50 years, we've added nearly 1,000 calories per day to the world food supply average.

00:03:03.200 We've also drastically increased the supply of tree coverage across the globe.

00:03:08.880 Resources are being used more efficiently than ever before,

00:03:11.480 and the global economy has grown by over 100 times over the last 200 years.

00:03:16.320 There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about certain specific issues that we still need to improve,

00:03:21.120 but overall, the data is undeniable.

00:03:24.080 We are living in an age of seemingly impossible progress in nearly every sector imaginable.

00:03:29.460 Enjoy this episode.

00:03:33.200 I mean, since the early 60s, we've doubled the human population,

00:03:48.840 but we've slightly shrunk the amount of land we put under the plow every year.

00:03:55.520 There's been a 68% reduction over 50 years in the amount of land needed to produce a given quantity of food.

00:04:04.820 That's the most extraordinary phenomenon.

00:04:07.180 It's basically the story of the Green Revolution.

00:04:09.500 You make the case there, too, that without that occurring,

00:04:14.160 and that is a concept, we should go into the Green Revolution to some degree,

00:04:17.020 because lots of viewers won't know about that, unbelievably,

00:04:22.600 even though it's arguably the biggest story of the last 50 years in some sense.

00:04:28.300 You know, you make the case that had the Green Revolution not taken place,

00:04:31.860 and so that was partly a consequence of careful breeding of new foodstuffs like dwarf wheat

00:04:38.200 and the manufacture of nitrogen-fixing fertilizers.

00:04:44.660 We would have already used up land space equivalent to more than the entire Amazonian rainforest.

00:04:51.340 We would have converted virtually all arable land on Earth into food producing,

00:04:56.500 well, into food production, and we haven't done that.

00:04:58.740 And in fact, I believe now there are more trees in the Northern Hemisphere than there were 100 years ago.

00:05:04.600 Oh, yes, definitely.

00:05:06.860 I mean, the whole world is now reforesting fairly rapidly.

00:05:10.380 When I say the whole world, the world is net reforesting.

00:05:13.720 Some places are still losing forest, but on the whole,

00:05:16.540 places like China are gaining woodland at an extraordinary rate.

00:05:21.600 Yeah, well, China has more woodland now than it did 30 years ago.

00:05:25.200 Okay, next one.

00:05:26.200 This is also stunning, shocking, completely unexpected.

00:05:30.220 More land for nature.

00:05:32.680 Who would have possibly guessed that?

00:05:36.640 I read something the other day, too, and we could comment on this.

00:05:40.460 The Sahara Desert has shrunk by 8% since the turn of the millennium.

00:05:45.860 We've greened an additional 10% of the Earth's surface as a consequence.

00:05:53.280 That's part of the same development, and that's only over the last 20 years, 20 years.

00:05:57.600 And it looks like it's a consequence of increased carbon dioxide, perversely enough.

00:06:01.820 The Sahara's actually shrunk.

00:06:03.980 So I don't want to get into the carbon dioxide argument, but this is a whole different issue here.

00:06:09.940 Tree cover loss gain from 1982 to 2016.

00:06:14.120 So comment on that.

00:06:16.460 Yes.

00:06:16.780 I mean, one of the things is that one of the benefits of getting a little bit older,

00:06:21.840 perhaps the only benefit of getting a little bit older,

00:06:24.200 is that one gets wiser and one remembers all the stuff that we used to believe and take for granted,

00:06:30.780 which have never happened and which were false.

00:06:35.260 One of them was the expansion of Sahara.

00:06:39.660 In the 1980s, I remember being absolutely terrified that Sahara was going to expand and swallow the globe.

00:06:45.860 We, you know, as kids, we were taught that as gospel.

00:06:49.080 But Sahara is shrinking.

00:06:51.080 It is also true that there is more foliage, which is more greenery.

00:06:57.060 Plants are producing more foliage because of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

00:07:03.240 CO2 is for another discussion.

00:07:04.860 But the fact is that it's the basic fact of living on Earth that plants like more CO2 in the atmosphere.

00:07:13.020 It's their food, which is why Norway grows, you know, tomatoes in hothouses that are filled with CO2,

00:07:20.660 precisely because they want them to grow.

00:07:24.060 And so plants like CO2 and foliage is increasing.

00:07:29.120 But also the tree coverage of the world is increasing.

00:07:34.080 Between, I wrote this statistic down, thinking that we might talk about it,

00:07:38.800 between 1982 and 2016, we have added trees, tree area, the size of Alaska and Montana combined to the world.

00:07:53.700 Now, that's a pretty big chunk of the world.

00:07:55.800 The United States has 35% more trees than when Ronald Reagan became president of the United States.

00:08:04.180 China, 35%. 0.95

00:08:05.980 No, China is 15%, yeah.

00:08:08.520 Okay, so now I've read critiques of this, too.

00:08:10.820 When I've tweeted this, for example, people say, yes, but we've lost a tremendous amount of biodiversity,

00:08:16.540 that much of the new growth is monoculture in contrast to the previous growth.

00:08:23.220 And I suspect that's not true in some situations and is true in others.

00:08:28.240 I don't think that's true of the reforestation of the United States, but I don't know.

00:08:33.400 Do you know?

00:08:35.220 Well, first of all, compared to what?

00:08:38.040 At the time when Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain,

00:08:42.620 which was responsible for many of the great things that happened since then,

00:08:46.520 at that time, one of the reasons why they had to switch to coal is because there was no tree left in Britain.

00:08:52.980 I'm exaggerating, but I am not far off.

00:08:57.280 The tree coverage in Britain was just completely diluted of forests over millennia of forest destruction.

00:09:06.580 Remember, trees were not only needed to keep you warm, but to cook your food, to make your furniture,

00:09:13.140 to make your carriages, to make your weaponry.

00:09:15.700 Everything prior to the modern era was based on trees.

00:09:20.300 I'm exaggerating, but not too much.

00:09:22.580 Trees.

00:09:23.800 Now, so compared to what?

00:09:26.720 We have destroyed a lot of the natural forest with its original biomass a long time before the Industrial Revolution,

00:09:35.640 which, by the way, used up coal, not trees.

00:09:39.660 But today, most of our tree usage comes from the new forests,

00:09:47.460 the forests that are planted for the specific purpose of being cut down for lumber,

00:09:53.580 which then builds American and Canadian houses.

00:09:56.720 It is very rare that the sort of wood that you see in the shops

00:10:02.240 or that goes into productive activity actually has originated in the Brazilian rainforest.

00:10:07.220 Right.

00:10:07.520 So I guess the objection would be those aren't forests, they're crops.

00:10:11.620 They just happen to be crops of trees.

00:10:13.380 Fair point.

00:10:15.060 And, you know, biodiversity loss is obviously problematic and even potentially catastrophic,

00:10:22.960 but I don't think that means that you can't take heart about the fact that much more of the planet is green

00:10:30.720 and there's a certain amount of reversion to a more natural habitat.

00:10:34.060 Certainly indicated that we're much more efficient users of resources.

00:10:37.560 We don't have to take up so much space.

00:10:39.280 And the agricultural revolution also contributed to that to a great degree.

00:10:43.860 That's human ingenuity again, because we can grow more on less land.

00:10:47.580 And I don't see that stopping.

00:10:49.260 I think we're going to get more and more and more efficient at food production.

00:10:52.380 Why would that stop?

00:10:54.300 The market certainly drives us in that direction.

00:10:57.400 And there's no indication of that slowing, as far as I can tell.

00:11:02.860 So three points.

00:11:04.160 I hope I can remember them.

00:11:05.440 One is, yes, because of increased agricultural productivity, we are already returning land to nature

00:11:12.020 and we can do so in the future at an increased pace, which means that we are returning land,

00:11:20.260 not just to the animals, but we are returning it to nature,

00:11:22.940 where the biomass can grow again and where it can reconstitute itself.

00:11:28.620 The second point is that we are also living in a world that has record acreage and mileage

00:11:39.780 and square mileage of globe's territory, which is protected from any kind of interference from humankind.

00:11:48.380 So we have record square mileage of oceans, which are now protected and which cannot be fished in.

00:11:57.700 And we have record square mileage of land, which is protected in national parks

00:12:06.900 or is otherwise excluded from economic activity.

00:12:13.280 The third point that I want to say, and that comes with wealth.

00:12:16.400 The wealthier countries they are.

00:12:18.240 And stability, and political stability, because you don't need much catastrophe and social breakdown

00:12:25.460 before those national parks and all their animals are going to have everything eaten out of them.

00:12:30.760 Typical example would be Zimbabwe, yes. 0.99

00:12:33.180 And the last point I want to make is that we have a problem in Brazil.

00:12:37.860 Brazil has obviously vast rainforests and very ancient forests, which are filled with all sorts of things

00:12:46.180 that we may discover are helpful to us in the future, as well as dangerous.

00:12:54.120 But nonetheless, very few people would say that it's a good thing to get rid of the Brazilian rainforest.

00:13:01.200 My understanding is, and I'm willing to be proven wrong on this, is that most of it has to do with farming,

00:13:10.580 especially of poor people in Brazil, who burn forests in order to clear the land for agricultural activity.

00:13:18.120 Now, I realize that this point may not necessarily be appreciated by wealthy people in the West.

00:13:27.120 But poverty in developing countries can be very, very bad.

00:13:33.880 In Brazil, there are some pockets of real wealth, but there are also pockets of tremendous poverty.

00:13:41.340 And the more inland you get and the more into the Amazon you get, the poorer the people become.

00:13:46.800 These people, from their perspective and the perspective of their government, should be allowed to earn a living.

00:13:53.900 The way you protect Amazon is to have higher rates of economic growth in Brazil,

00:14:00.140 so that those people start moving away from the Amazon.

00:14:03.960 They start moving to cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and others,

00:14:07.820 and they start working there in the factories, in the service industry,

00:14:11.700 and they no longer have to burn forests in order to plant food so they don't starve.

00:14:17.240 Well, here you have maybe the biggest piece of good news is that the amount of land that humans use for meat production

00:14:24.320 has declined by an area 80% the size of Brazil.

00:14:28.820 Well, that's a huge land mass.

00:14:30.560 Over what period of time?

00:14:32.380 Sorry, since the year 2000.

00:14:34.280 Since 2000?

00:14:35.500 Yes.

00:14:35.760 In 20 years?

00:14:36.480 Yeah, and people say, how have we done that?

00:14:38.760 Well, it's pretty darn easy.

00:14:40.400 You can produce 100 cows on an acre of land or one cow.

00:14:48.800 So you just concentrate your animal production.

00:14:51.860 There's some ethical issues that you have to deal with,

00:14:54.020 but mostly in terms of at least cattle production, which is the big use of pasture.

00:14:58.360 There's a win-win for treating cows humanely, as I document, thanks to Temple Grandin.

00:15:07.100 Temple Grandin, yeah, she's really something, that woman.

00:15:09.700 She's an incredible person and shows what neuroatypical people are able to contribute to this world

00:15:16.000 in a really lovely way, that they don't need to become the negative side of that often.

00:15:22.720 Yeah, she says she thinks like an animal.

00:15:25.060 She really believes she thinks like an animal.

00:15:26.700 I heard her speak at a conference on consciousness.

00:15:29.540 It was a great talk, a great talk.

00:15:31.120 And she's so pragmatic, and she's done a tremendous amount for animal welfare.

00:15:36.080 And in this practical sense of actually fixing something, right?

00:15:39.900 Yeah, absolutely.

00:15:41.300 Good for her.

00:15:42.400 It turns out that cows, what they want to live a happy life is not the same thing as what we think we want cows to have.

00:15:48.700 We think cows need to have a whole acre of land for him or herself. 1.00

00:15:53.120 Cows just need to not be terrified before they die.

00:15:56.360 And they need to be in clean stalls and stuff like that. 0.99

00:15:58.580 So there's a win-win on humane animal treatment, land use, which is essential to protecting species, and human prosperity and development.

00:16:10.600 And this is an incredible story.

00:16:12.660 So the whole sixth extinction narrative is just false, and I debunk it.

00:16:18.320 The other way it's false, as you alluded to earlier, we have seen biodiversity in many parts of the world increase, but with the rise of invasive species.

00:16:27.660 And you may not want that.

00:16:29.820 So diversity is the wrong metric.

00:16:31.940 So in Hawaii, you know, if you agree with, look, this is a non-scientific issue.

00:16:38.760 It's just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii?

00:16:42.520 Do you want the native species, meaning the species that were there?

00:16:45.600 Yeah, well, underneath that is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders.

00:16:51.860 It's like, well, that was nature before the invasive species, and that nature is somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity.

00:16:59.320 And these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and inappropriate.

00:17:07.700 And there's an ethical element to that.

00:17:09.880 And you haven't sorted any of that out in your thinking, because, like, do the islands care?

00:17:15.060 Life moves around, and that's how it is.

00:17:17.640 And so there's a weird, unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what's hypothetically a scientific issue and mucky thinking.

00:17:26.760 What was defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European.

00:17:32.400 So the purity is pre- so Europeans are the contaminators, right, as opposed to, like, the indigenous people who are manipulating ecosystems at continent-wide levels, right, through fire mostly, but also through hunting and extinctions, certainly in the Americas, but also really around the world. 0.98

00:17:51.460 You have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous, pure indigenous people. 1.00

00:17:55.500 So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500 or 1700, that's fine.

00:18:03.760 But you can make a case for that not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds just because you're worried that you like those species.

00:18:10.620 You know, there's some cool bird species that could go extinct, you know, on the islands of Hawaii if you don't remove some of the invasives.

00:18:18.500 Fine. You're just manipulating that environment. You're doing it not out of science. There's no scientific basis for it. You're doing it because we like those species.

00:18:28.320 And that's it. And that's where I get to at the end of the book where I kind of go, I can't, if I show you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo, and I'm like, I want to save that gorilla.

00:18:39.960 And if you're like, I don't care about that gorilla, that's a clash of values. There's no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas.

00:18:47.400 I think they're really beautiful and amazing, and they remind us of our common ancestors or whatever it may be, but there's no like, that's not going to be solved by some scientific analysis.

00:18:57.060 No, and we still have to, even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by hypothetically well-meaning, ignorant Westerners who think in a low-resolution manner and whose thoughts are contaminated by unaddressed ethical concerns, asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice their lives often to protect animals. 0.99

00:19:23.460 It's like, well, first of all, that isn't going to work in the long run, because they're just going to kill the damn animals. 0.98

00:19:28.220 And that's exactly what you would do if you were there as well. 0.99

00:19:31.780 And, and they're not, you can't just ignore them.

00:19:35.000 And that kind of gets shunted into the, well, you know, they're human beings contaminating the planet anyways.

00:19:40.060 And so the animals should come first or something like that.

00:19:42.980 And not helpful.

00:19:46.220 Urbanization, which you also regard and describe as a net positive.

00:19:51.220 Well, you certainly get the synergistic effect of bringing them together, right?

00:19:55.600 I mean, look at San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, the urbanization of a genius population produces an incredible amount of innovation.

00:20:04.220 So urbanization, everyone's moving to the cities.

00:20:07.720 Yeah, I think that right now we have about 55% of humanity living in the cities already.

00:20:12.720 So again, all those people are obviously not living on land, which is, which is a good thing.

00:20:17.640 You remember Paul Pott, right? Cities are parasites on the countryside and should be eradicated. 0.98

00:20:23.980 Well, that turned out to be spectacularly wrong in every possible way, as well as murderous. 0.98

00:20:29.220 So it's a good thing for people to leave their rural environments and move to the city.

00:20:33.680 Good thing, all things concerned.

00:20:35.880 Yes, there are the network and synergetic effects that people living close together and exchanging ideas and, and similar companies existing next to each other, communicating and so forth.

00:20:46.420 Generates more economic growth.

00:20:49.060 And look, the historical record is absolutely clear.

00:20:52.380 Cities have been the drivers of progress, whether it's Amsterdam in the 17th century or London, sorry, 18th century or London in 19th century, New York in the 20th century.

00:21:02.700 That's where stuff happened, not just in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of culture and, and, and, and things like that.

00:21:13.140 So, and the final point, cities also consume less energy than urban areas per capita, because we have public transport, people don't have to drive their Jeeps and four by fours wherever they go with long distances.

00:21:28.760 So, uh, people consume less energy in, in, in, in cities per capita.

00:21:35.020 And that said, that's a, that's again, a good thing.

00:21:38.100 I think people are moving into cities, uh, cities are where innovation happens on the whole.

00:21:42.880 They're disproportionately innovative.

00:21:45.100 They're, the bigger they are, the, the more efficient they are in some sense.

00:21:49.680 They, they have fewer gas stations, fewer miles of road per person in bigger cities.

00:21:55.280 If you see what I mean, you know, they become more concentrated, um, uh, more than half the world now lives in cities that leaves the rest of the landscape on trampled, um, cities only occupy about 3% of the world's land surface, uh, I believe.

00:22:11.340 Um, uh, so, uh, actually it's a good thing because, and, and, you know, uh, it, yes, you, you know, some of us like to live in rural areas rather than in, in cities.

00:22:23.080 Um, uh, but those of us who want to can do that cities are where people come together and they mix and they have ideas and they, and they produce baby ideas, you know?

00:22:33.200 So it was the city states of ancient Greece or the city states of, of Renaissance Italy that really drove the world economy in their day.

00:22:41.080 Likewise in Britain and Victorian times or California today, you know, California is two great big city states, Los Angeles and San Francisco effectively.

00:22:49.460 Um, uh, uh, and, um, so I think, uh, I think the fact that the world is becoming more urbanized or was until the last year, I mean, it'll be interesting to see whether city centers really do lose their allure after the pandemic, because a lot of businesses have discovered that they don't need to pay for expensive real estate.

00:23:12.900 They can let people work from home, um, um, I suspect it'll lead to a lot more hot desking, you know, people, uh, coming into the office two or three days a week, working from home two or three days a week, um, uh, which will cut down on commuting, make some of the city's problems less bad, um, uh, and cut the cost of real estate in the middle of cities.

00:23:35.780 Uh, so I suspect we're in, that we could have quite a soft landing for some of the problems that cities have, um, these days, but it won't all be plain sailing.

00:23:44.580 I mean, things are going to go wrong in that respect.

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00:26:30.520 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:26:32.840 Escape from Malthus. 0.72

00:26:39.280 Well, the Malthusian trap was Robert Malthus's notion was that if you kept people alive,

00:26:51.860 they would simply, you know, if you gave them more food, then they would simply have more babies.

00:26:56.920 So they'd end up just as poor and just as hungry.

00:27:00.660 Yeah, well, something like that happened in Ireland when potatoes became the dominant crop

00:27:05.380 and then failed, right?

00:27:06.560 So the Irish pop, you outline this in your book.

00:27:08.860 It's not an idea that originates with me.

00:27:10.800 When the Irish started to farm potatoes, their population exploded.

00:27:14.580 And then a blight came in and wiped out the potato crop and blew out the Irish population.

00:27:19.540 And that's a classic Malthusian example.

00:27:22.580 Yeah.

00:27:22.780 He's sort of the ultimate pessimistic biologists.

00:27:26.060 Yeah.

00:27:26.400 And he wasn't entirely wrong in that respect.

00:27:28.540 But the thing he did get wrong is that technology might change it.

00:27:32.640 And we then moved to a world in which food became more and more productive.

00:27:40.400 Babies stopped dying.

00:27:42.680 We got better at keeping them alive.

00:27:44.840 And weirdly, once they stopped dying, people started having fewer of them.

00:27:50.760 And this is a phenomenon called the demographic transition that took us really by surprise.

00:27:56.060 You know, if you stop baby rabbits dying, they have more babies.

00:28:00.240 But if you stop baby human beings dying, people say, right, I'm not going to try and have as 0.97

00:28:05.180 many kids as possible in the hope that a few survive.

00:28:08.040 I'm going to have two and try and get them through college.

00:28:11.920 That's another thing that's occurred very, very rapidly in the last few generations that

00:28:16.080 no one predicted is that the rate of reproduction has plummeted and increasingly across the world.

00:28:24.320 It looks like as soon as you educate women, open up the marketplace to them and provide

00:28:29.040 a modicum of birth control, as well as these other improvements in living standard that

00:28:33.340 you described, that the birth rate plummets to below replacement.

00:28:38.960 Yeah.

00:28:39.420 No, and an awful lot of countries are going to have problems with below replacement fertility 0.93

00:28:43.240 in this coming century, which means that you've got a very aging workforce, which won't be

00:28:51.160 able to afford retirement because there's not enough working people and so on.

00:28:53.880 You know, so that's another problem you've got.

00:28:55.540 But it's better than a population explosion continuing to the point where there's 20 billion

00:29:01.320 people trying to live on a planet, which is what we were worried about 40 years ago.

00:29:05.540 I think the projections now are that we're in a peak out at about 11 billion, something like

00:29:09.440 that.

00:29:10.140 That's the UN median projection.

00:29:12.140 But a lot of people think it's overblown, actually, that the numbers, if you run the

00:29:16.380 numbers with sensible, you know, it a lot depends on how fast the Nigerian birth rate comes down,

00:29:22.240 as you said earlier.

00:29:23.660 Right.

00:29:24.100 But with a sensible assumption, we might not even get much past 10 billion.

00:29:28.460 Well, it'd be really quite remarkable if an emergent problem for the latter half of the

00:29:33.100 20th century was that there was too many goods and not enough people.

00:29:36.920 And that that could easily be the case, that could easily be the case, especially not enough

00:29:41.960 young people.

00:29:44.260 So maybe the answer to Malthus is sort of hidden in some sense inside the presumptions

00:29:49.900 you made in your book.

00:29:50.860 So maybe we could pause it as a general biological rule is if the rate of sexual reproduction of 0.83

00:29:56.780 ideas exceeds the rate of sexual reproduction of human beings, then there's no Malthusian

00:30:01.100 catastrophe.

00:30:01.740 That's a very nice way of putting it.

00:30:04.560 I think that is exactly the point I'd like to make.

00:30:07.860 Well, it's possible.

00:30:11.040 It certainly seems to me to be possible, given that we are clearly able to make more and more

00:30:16.140 using less and less.

00:30:18.020 So long peace basically means is that there are fewer conflicts since the end of the Second

00:30:24.460 World War.

00:30:25.000 The long term trends seems to be toward greater peace.

00:30:29.300 We certainly no longer have countries declaring war on each other, sending armies across borders

00:30:35.220 to slaughter.

00:30:36.460 That seems to have almost disappeared completely, that idea.

00:30:39.340 If I remember correctly, the last country to declare war was the United States on North Korea.

00:30:48.320 I could be wrong on that, but I think I would love for that to be checked.

00:30:53.280 And maybe you can put a disclaimer on your video that I got it completely wrong, but I

00:30:57.720 actually think that happened.

00:30:58.800 Anyway, so that no longer happens.

00:31:01.140 Now, countries still invade other countries.

00:31:03.260 Like, for example, Russia invaded Ukraine, the little green men who took Crimea. 1.00

00:31:11.640 But I think it says something that even governments that still do these sorts of things do not

00:31:21.160 declare war publicly because they are afraid of how humanity would react to that kind of

00:31:27.900 activity.

00:31:29.340 And so most of the conflicts today, in fact, all conflicts usually tend to be ethnic and

00:31:34.520 civil wars, but they are not really conflicts between countries.

00:31:39.840 Wars have become less deadly.

00:31:42.540 Less deadly.

00:31:43.200 They are smaller and less deadly.

00:31:45.420 But please remember, this doesn't mean that, you know, the past performance suggests future

00:31:51.620 success.

00:31:52.520 I mean, the world is still filled with nuclear weapons.

00:31:54.580 And so it also seems even on that front, like, it seems like certainly people are much

00:32:02.680 less convinced that nuclear weapons will be used purposefully, especially in a mass annihilation

00:32:09.920 than throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.

00:32:13.540 So the nuclear weapons are still there.

00:32:15.400 There's far fewer of them, but imminent war between Russia and the United States certainly

00:32:23.600 doesn't seem probable in the same manner that it did for that entire Cold War period up

00:32:29.620 till the demise of the Soviet Union.

00:32:31.660 That's right.

00:32:32.480 I mean, we are down from 40,000 nuclear warheads per superpower down to about 3,000.

00:32:38.020 I'm more worried about nuclear, about, sorry, about accidental launch and that sort of thing.

00:32:46.000 So that's what really worries me much more.

00:32:50.740 But that's a better worry in some sense than all out mass annihilation.

00:32:55.720 Well, ideally, I mean, you have a lot of smart people who are watching your podcast and ideally,

00:33:01.660 you know, it could be calculated how many nukes would have to go off of what strength.

00:33:08.020 In order for there not to be the end of humanity, in other words, what is the maximum?

00:33:14.000 And if we could convince the international powers to bring the total maximum number of warheads

00:33:20.640 and their strength below that level while still being distributed amongst nuclear powers,

00:33:28.280 you know, then we could decrease that danger even more.

00:33:33.480 I wonder if that would decrease the, I mean, one of the things I've thought reasonably frequently,

00:33:40.600 although I'm not convinced of it, is that nuclear war is so terrifying that it's actually made us more peaceful.

00:33:46.880 Like that terrible threats, like the fist of God, there's some places we just can't go anymore and more.

00:33:52.580 And people so far, thank God, have been, seemed unwilling to go there.

00:33:58.900 So the terrible threat may have had benefits.

00:34:02.680 Yeah, there's a whole branch of international relations, study of international relations, which argues precisely for that.

00:34:09.180 You're not alone.

00:34:10.640 There are people supporting your view.

00:34:12.860 But unfortunately, nuclear power, nuclear weapons cannot be unlearned.

00:34:20.880 And so I'm afraid we are stuck with them.

00:34:23.740 And the best that we can do is to bring the number down to a minimal level where superpowers will feel safe without destroying the world.

00:34:30.940 But that's just for another day.

00:34:33.180 The last one, trend 10, a safer world.

00:34:38.400 And this is death from natural disasters.

00:34:41.880 Right.

00:34:42.960 So this particular subject can be looked at from a number of angles.

00:34:49.480 One is that we are in this time of panic about existential threats to humanity from climate change and from the environment.

00:34:59.780 And yet in the last 100 years, the number of people who have died due to natural disasters has shrunk by 99%.

00:35:09.740 The two are incompatible.

00:35:12.320 If we are moving to a world where millions of people are going to be destroyed by, you know, oceans rising or crop failure or whatever, or tsunamis or earthquakes and whatever, why is it that due to natural disasters, that natural disasters have seen 99% decrease in human mortality?

00:35:36.620 And the answer seems to be that partly we are richer and therefore we are able to build more sturdy dwellings.

00:35:48.840 But we are also more technologically savvy so that we can predict where a hurricane going to strike and exactly when so that people can escape from the path of destruction.

00:36:00.300 And we can also detect earthquakes underneath the ocean floor, giving people on land more time to move to higher ground from a tsunami wave and things like that.

00:36:13.660 So.

00:36:14.940 And we're going to get better and better at all of that.

00:36:17.300 And we are going to get better and better at it.

00:36:18.820 Yeah.

00:36:18.940 So, we're richer by far in terms of productivity and quality of products and absolute poverty has declined precipitously.

00:36:36.260 Commodity prices have fallen.

00:36:38.780 We're not going to overpopulate the world in any cataclysmic sense.

00:36:44.040 Everyone has increasingly more than enough to eat.

00:36:48.940 There's more land for nature and that trend seems upward.

00:36:52.940 More people are moving to urban areas and that's advantageous rather than disadvantageous.

00:36:58.820 There are more democracies and so we're better governed.

00:37:02.100 We're more peaceful and we're less likely to die from catastrophes.

00:37:06.500 Yeah, I tend to try to squirm out of the optimist pigeonhole because I'm not arguing for looking on the bright side and seeing the glass is half full.

00:37:16.920 But rather just basing your understanding of the world on data rather than journalism.

00:37:22.640 The problem with journalism being that it is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period.

00:37:28.560 It is an availability machine in the sense of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's availability heuristic, namely our sense of risk and danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes and images and narratives that are available in memory.

00:37:43.600 Whereas the, since a lot of good things are either things that don't happen, like a country at peace or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news.

00:37:55.940 Or are things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year and then compound, like the decline of extreme poverty.

00:38:04.040 We can be unaware, we can be out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news.

00:38:10.440 If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many, although not all things, have gotten better.

00:38:17.780 Not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general, a lot better.

00:38:24.540 And it also, paradoxically, because as I've also cheaply put it, progressives hate progress.

00:38:31.500 But the best possible case for progress, that is for striding for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive, is again, not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past.

00:38:44.900 And that means, why should it stop now?

00:38:47.040 We know that it's possible.

00:38:49.340 So that's the...

00:38:50.260 Do you think that it's a reasonable thing to do from a rational perspective to compare the present to the past rather than to...

00:38:58.300 I mean, there is a tendency to compare the present to a utopian future.

00:39:02.340 And I mean, that's kind of a cognitive heuristic because we're always looking for ways to make things better.

00:39:08.360 And I suppose that's that tendency taken to its extreme.

00:39:11.120 But it does seem to me that some of the decrying of the current situation is a consequence of comparing it to hypothetical utopia instead of actual other countries or other times.

00:39:23.300 Yeah, utopia is a deeply dangerous concept because people imagine a world without any problems.

00:39:30.180 And since people disagree with each other, that means that in order to have complete harmony and agreement, you've got to get rid of all those nuisances, those people who are not on board with your plans for utopia.

00:39:42.620 Which is, of course, why it's been the utopians that have been the most genocidal regimes in history. 1.00

00:39:49.640 What if people start understanding more about their biases, about how they perceive the world?

00:39:56.620 You know, this is obviously done in colleges and universities, in psychology courses, as well as in biology courses and things like that.

00:40:05.260 But, you know, it's not as though human beings are incapable of changing their worldview based on evidence.

00:40:17.820 We no longer believe that a sacrifice of a little child will produce better harvest.

00:40:24.980 So, we've learned that lesson.

00:40:28.160 We no longer believe that throwing a virgin into a volcano is going to give us military success.

00:40:39.580 We no longer believe in all sorts of things that we have taken for granted.

00:40:44.200 In other words, we have shown that we are capable of learning and learning from evidence.

00:40:49.780 We have internalized that focusing on irrigation and fertilization is a better way to produce food than prayer.

00:41:00.080 And that gives me hope that as we move forward, we'll be able to learn more about the rest of the world, internalize not just that information, but also why we are being pessimistic and negative.

00:41:18.940 What do you think about that?

00:41:19.860 Well, I'm listening and I'm thinking it through.

00:41:24.320 I'm also wondering, I would say that learning this material has made me, has lifted some of the existential weight from me.

00:41:37.780 Things aren't as bad as they're trumpeted to be.

00:41:43.420 In fact, they're quite a bit better and they're getting better.

00:41:46.120 And so, we're doing a better job than we thought.

00:41:49.380 There's more to us than we thought.

00:41:51.040 We're adopting our responsibilities as stewards of the planet rapidly.

00:41:55.000 We are moving towards improving everyone's life.

00:41:58.080 I lived under an apocalyptic shadow my whole life.

00:42:06.280 I mean, I don't want to complain about that too much because I lived in a very rich place and I had all sorts of advantages and all of that.

00:42:12.380 But the apocalyptic narrative was still extraordinarily powerful and demoralizing.

00:42:17.520 And it looks to me that there are reasons to doubt its validity on all sorts of dimensions.

00:42:23.820 And I'm not sure what that will do to people, but hopefully it'll make us more optimistic and positive and less paranoid and afraid and happier with who we are, but still willing to participate in improving the future.

00:42:39.400 And to lift some of the weight off young people who are constantly being told that the planet is going to burn to a cinder in the next 20 years.

00:42:46.380 And there's no reason for a counterproductive and anti-human pessimism.

00:42:51.680 We could have a planet where there was enough for everyone and where there was enough for the non-human inhabitants too that contribute to making life rich. 0.95

00:43:03.180 And there's no reason not to aim for that.

00:43:05.560 And there's absolutely no reason not to assume that it's within our grasp.

00:43:08.940 So we want to aim properly and we can have what everyone seems to want, whether they're on the right or the left, when they're thinking properly, which is an eradication of absolute poverty.

00:43:20.440 So no one is forced into penury and starvation and no children fail to develop.

00:43:25.540 We can reduce the impact of relative poverty, which is an intransigent problem, but not unaddressable.

00:43:32.120 And we could restore to a large degree or maintain a sustainable ecology around us.

00:43:39.700 And we don't want to forget that and drown in our threat sensitivity.

00:43:46.860 Yeah.

00:43:47.300 But we do it by development, not by anti-development.

00:43:52.300 Yeah, we do that by faith in human beings, fundamentally.

00:43:59.140 And I think that faith, I don't think there's any reason for that faith to be unwarranted.

00:44:05.380 We're not a plague on the planet.

00:44:07.740 There's no reason to assume that.

00:44:11.120 And just on that question of optimism, it's a bit of an evangelical cause for me, this, because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man, as a boy in school, at university.

00:44:25.660 I believed that the population explosion was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life unlivable, you know, all that kind of stuff.

00:44:40.220 And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse, during my life, dramatically so.

00:44:47.220 And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody, not just the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups.

00:45:05.060 I think it's quite important to have some optimism.

00:45:08.300 Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we're to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

00:45:14.300 That's a great quote.

00:45:15.520 And it's not me.

00:45:16.480 It's Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, writing in 1830.

00:45:21.480 So already then he was fed up with the doomsters saying it can't get better.

00:45:25.420 It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse in the future.

00:45:28.420 And that's what every generation says.

00:45:30.060 And I think so far they've been wrong.

00:45:31.460 And I think there's a good chance they're wrong now.

00:45:33.000 Well, it might be a consequence of the human tendency to overweight negative information, right?

00:45:39.480 We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure.

00:45:45.840 And I suppose that's because you can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy.

00:45:50.980 And so it's better in some sense to err on the side of caution.

00:45:54.220 And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better.

00:46:07.360 I mean, it's a real mystery, right?

00:46:08.640 Because the news tilts itself very hard towards the catastrophic.

00:46:11.780 And I can't think of any explanation for that, given that news purveyors seek attention.

00:46:18.720 I can't come up with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity for negative emotion.

00:46:23.680 But we do have to overcome that to some degree if it's not in accordance with the facts.

00:46:27.580 Yeah, there's an interesting angle there that I think might be a clue to what's going on.

00:46:35.900 Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units.

00:46:43.740 So we're not very pessimistic about our village.

00:46:46.760 We're not very pessimistic about our town.

00:46:49.120 But we're very pessimistic about our country.

00:46:51.200 And we're extremely pessimistic about the planet.

00:46:53.720 The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are.

00:46:57.580 And of course, you know, so people on the whole think their own life's going to work out.

00:47:02.220 It's going to be fine.

00:47:02.920 They're going to stay married.

00:47:03.860 They're going to earn a lot of money.

00:47:05.520 You know, they're okay when they talk about themselves.

00:47:09.020 And I think what that's telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience.

00:47:13.920 Your information about the planet comes from the media.

00:47:16.240 And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this.

00:47:21.860 That there is a top-down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us.

00:47:29.760 Do you have any sense of the motivation for that?

00:47:32.600 I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes.

00:47:42.040 And you'd expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention-grabbing form, right?

00:47:49.740 And so apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the sales item of the day from the perspective of the news companies?

00:48:05.840 Exactly. And this is where my argument breaks down a bit because it becomes circular.

00:48:10.580 Because I say, yeah, you're right.

00:48:12.120 The reason they're telling us bad news is because they know we're interested in bad news.

00:48:17.420 And on the whole, we don't look at good news stories to anything like the same degree.

00:48:21.400 So we're avid consumers of pessimism.

00:48:25.020 And they play to that.

00:48:28.240 But there's another phenomenon, too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden.

00:48:37.360 That's not always true, of course, but it surprisingly often is true. 0.99

00:48:42.720 You know, 168,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before.

00:48:50.580 It's never newsworthy, whereas 3,000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper.

00:49:00.140 That is newsworthy because it's so sudden, so unexpected, so new.

00:49:05.820 Well, it's funny, when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted, which I think is worth repeating over and over,

00:49:13.900 170,000 people lifted out of poverty today could be three-inch headlines every day because it's an unparalleled event in human history,

00:49:21.620 although it's occurring every day right now.

00:49:23.720 But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best.

00:49:30.560 You know, if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you're doing.

00:49:36.220 But if there's a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior,

00:49:41.200 and that might be another reason why we're prone to seek out negative information.

00:49:48.280 And does that explain why we're loss-averse to the extent we are?

00:49:51.860 Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon.

00:49:54.400 So, anyways, the point is, or one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive to negative information,

00:50:04.900 it can really get out of hand, right, because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future,

00:50:11.860 or depression, or high levels of anxiety, or resentment, or even hatred of humanity, for that matter,

00:50:18.980 if we're the destructive species that we're always made out to be.

00:50:21.940 And so, it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective

00:50:28.820 how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward.

00:50:33.360 There's a word I want to introduce to the conversation at this point, which is Panglossian.

00:50:37.500 People sometimes accuse me of being Panglossian.

00:50:40.240 Dr. Pangloss, as you remember in Candide, in Voltaire's novel, is someone who says, he's a caricature of Leibniz,

00:50:48.260 and he says that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

00:50:54.020 And yes, Lisbon has been destroyed by an earthquake, but that must have been because they were evil people,

00:50:58.520 because God wouldn't do a bad thing. 0.88

00:51:01.160 And it's a very silly argument, and it's being lampooned by Voltaire.

00:51:05.240 But actually, the people who say that now are not you and me.

00:51:10.240 We're saying, good as this world is compared with what it was, it's a veil of tears compared with what it could be.

00:51:16.860 If we press on, we're not saying we've got to the best possible world.

00:51:20.920 We're saying, let's keep going.

00:51:23.120 Forget about the pessimism.

00:51:24.440 Forget about the policies that that pessimism would drive.

00:51:27.460 We could make the assumption that we can have our cake and eat it too.

00:51:30.940 We can eradicate poverty, we can constrain relative inequality to the point where societies are stable,

00:51:36.920 and we can produce a massive increment in environmental quality.

00:51:40.480 And all that's within our grasp, if that's what we want within the next hundred years.

00:51:45.180 We're right now talking about how the West or the rich part of the world thinks about this problem.

00:51:50.760 Most people in the rich world actually think the future is going to be a lot worse off,

00:51:55.460 which is one of the reasons why global warming fits into that whole pattern.

00:51:58.820 I think it's wrong.

00:52:00.040 That's also what the model said.

00:52:01.320 It's even what the UN Climate Panel says, but that's how people feel.

00:52:04.780 The other three quarters of the world, which are China, India, Latin America, Africa, 0.90

00:52:10.920 they actually believe that their world is going to be much better in 10, 20, 30 years.

00:52:17.100 They have this future belief that you were just talking about from out of the Second World War.

00:52:22.820 They are not going to say, yeah, we're going to do strong climate policy and become poor.

00:52:30.260 They want to mostly become middle-income countries and maybe even rich countries eventually.

00:52:35.940 They will want to do this.

00:52:37.560 So what will happen is both that we're leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well-off than we otherwise would be,

00:52:46.060 and that we're actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running possibly even ahead of us,

00:52:53.020 but certainly running ahead without looking at the same kind of problem.

00:52:57.980 So it does go down to basic principles.

00:53:00.340 It's like, do you believe this is a problem that can be solved by intelligent, well-meaning people who are doing central planning?

00:53:06.020 And I've toyed with those ideas and worked on UN committees that are devoted to what are the UN millennium goals.

00:53:14.000 And I looked at how that central planning was done, and that's an interesting story in and of itself because it isn't even cabals of experts.

00:53:21.380 So this committee I was on was composed of, you know, ex-presidents and prime ministers and people like that from all over the world.

00:53:28.200 And so you think, well, they have some political and economic expertise.

00:53:31.280 These, they're putting together these, the new vision of the UN for the new millennium, let's say,

00:53:36.080 but those aren't the people who are actually making the decisions because they're completely occupied.

00:53:40.280 They already have lives that are absolutely full.

00:53:42.320 So then the decision-making power falls down the bureaucracy until it lands on the shoulders of someone who has spare time for one reason or another.

00:53:50.960 And they make the decisions in the name of that person.

00:53:53.900 And then all those decisions are aggregated, and there isn't anybody who's, in some sense, taking central responsibility for that.

00:54:01.940 So the document that I worked on, to begin with, looked like it was written by people who were stuck in the 1980s.

00:54:07.780 It was all Cold War ideology, essentially, the Northern Hemisphere against the Southern Hemisphere.

00:54:13.920 And so we just stripped all that out.

00:54:15.860 We just took it out.

00:54:16.960 And the reason we were able to get away with that was that we rewrote it.

00:54:22.240 And no one else wanted to re-rewrite our rewrite.

00:54:25.800 And so it just stuck.

00:54:27.400 And then there was these 200 millennial goals, essentially.

00:54:30.540 And I looked at that, and I thought, well, why those goals?

00:54:33.780 And the answer was, well, there was constituencies of interest for each of those goals.

00:54:37.820 And then I thought, well, we need to rank order these because there's no bloody way we're going to do all 200.

00:54:41.920 And there was no rank ordering.

00:54:45.480 And the reason for that was it would upset all the constituencies.

00:54:48.420 And I thought, well, you get this weird aggregation of things we need to do.

00:54:53.460 And then the impossibility of rank ordering, that means you don't have a priority.

00:54:57.940 Like, what's the most important, and how do you decide that?

00:55:00.760 Well, that problem just wasn't addressed at all.

00:55:05.020 And so this, well, it was an object lesson in how these sorts of things work.

00:55:08.380 It was central planning, but it was so dysfunctional in some way.

00:55:15.340 It's not like, it's partly because there wasn't anyone in the world who had enough intelligence,

00:55:21.520 enough knowledge to make those sorts of decisions.

00:55:25.300 No one, no one exists like that.

00:55:28.220 One of the things you drive home continually is that there are real costs to getting this wrong.

00:55:36.580 The costs are the money spent and what that money could have been spent on instead.

00:55:44.100 So maybe you could make a case for everyone who's watching.

00:55:49.320 What do you see as the proper set of priorities?

00:55:52.320 Where do we as a species get the most bang for the buck with regards to these international problems?

00:55:58.400 What are the top 10 things we should be concentrating on?

00:56:01.740 Yeah, so absolutely, just to give you a sense of the $24 you were just talking about before,

00:56:10.780 that people are not willing to spend very much.

00:56:13.100 I think that's one of the reasons why, for instance, a carbon tax is so hard to do.

00:56:17.800 Carbon tax is one of the smart solutions for climate change.

00:56:20.900 But it also makes it very explicit that you're spending lots of money.

00:56:24.620 So instead, what most people support is that we should be subsidizing green energy,

00:56:30.520 that we should be subsidizing electric cars,

00:56:33.360 that we should be doing a lot of other things that make you feel virtuous.

00:56:36.820 It doesn't feel like it costs all that much,

00:56:38.940 but it actually ends up costing huge amounts of resources.

00:56:42.860 So while people saying they're not willing to spend very much,

00:56:46.660 their sentiment actually allows politics to end up spending huge amounts of money.

00:56:52.320 So this really matters.

00:56:53.320 So, sorry, you asked me, what are the things we should be spending our resources on?

00:56:57.700 Yeah, and so that also means, what are we sacrificing if we concentrate too much on

00:57:02.000 the moral virtue of driving a Tesla, for example, which is a clear status symbol of very expensive

00:57:08.620 and not obviously related to ameliorating climate change?

00:57:12.380 What are we sacrificing?

00:57:14.680 So as long as we are driving this Tesla, because the government,

00:57:19.780 and that's typically almost everywhere in the world, because the government has spent five or

00:57:23.720 $10,000 on subsidizing us in order to make us afford to drive this Tesla.

00:57:29.340 That's $10,000 that couldn't go to other things, either in our own states, our own nations,

00:57:34.880 where we obviously could have spent, according to what the political decision making process would

00:57:41.540 decide, you know, on better education and better care for our elderly, on better COVID care.

00:57:48.540 Right now, there are lots of other things that are demanding attention.

00:57:52.120 But what we tried to look at was, where could you spend this globally?

00:57:56.840 And I'm going to talk about a few things because I, you know, I'm sure we can get back to more of them.

00:58:02.020 So one of the things that we talked about was free trade.

00:58:06.220 So free trade, we know, is one of the reasons why almost everyone has gotten rich.

00:58:12.240 The basic point is that instead of me trying to do everything, I specialize, I do one thing,

00:58:19.040 and then I have a baker bake my bread, I have a butcher do my meat, if I'm not vegetarian.

00:58:25.940 And, you know, you do all these other things, and you have all these specialists doing it.

00:58:30.240 Having it on an international scale means even more opportunity to have smarter people do what

00:58:37.700 they do best for everyone else. And that's why we've gotten rich. That's why China has lifted

00:58:43.080 about, what, 700 million people out of absolute poverty over the last 30 years, which is one of

00:58:48.320 the biggest achievements in the world. It's impossible not to be very, very impressive,

00:58:53.820 just simply on the humanity of that project. And of course, we should be doing more of that.

00:58:59.140 But unfortunately, we have, you know, for a variety of reasons, Trump is obviously a big

00:59:05.520 part of this. But it's also it started way before Trump, the resentment towards free trade,

00:59:11.200 the sense that this was wrong, has not only meant that many people in the rich world has become less

00:59:18.580 better off than they otherwise could have been. But it's also meant that we have left a lot of

00:59:22.880 people, especially in Africa and South South Asia, much less well off, we should be spending some of 0.98

00:59:29.720 our resources on making sure that we get more free trade, not less free trade.

00:59:34.640 How do we do that? How do we do that effectively?

00:59:38.200 And the simple way that we do that, unfortunately, is by subsidizing

00:59:42.940 agriculture. So one of the best, most vested interests against free trade has turned out to be

00:59:51.000 agriculture, it's agriculture in the EU, and the US, Japan, many other places, because they don't

00:59:57.060 want to have that competition. Look, from a private part of view, I understand that if I was a farmer,

01:00:02.440 I wouldn't want, you know, cheap, cheap agricultural produce come in, and essentially eradicate my

01:00:09.000 business model. So we need to recognize that we need to subsidize these people, we probably also need

01:00:14.500 to subsidize other people, the people who would otherwise have lost their jobs. So there's an enormous

01:00:19.920 amount of money that needs to be spent. Okay, so I got confused. I got confused. Are you speaking

01:00:26.900 about eradicating agricultural subsidies in the West? Or are you speaking about subsidizing

01:00:32.020 agricultural productivity in third world countries? Or? I missed the mechanics there.

01:00:41.880 So sorry, I'm talking about subsidizing the people who would otherwise block more free trade. So this is

01:00:48.880 basically subsidizing rich Western farmers to make sure that they're okay with more free trade.

01:00:54.660 Right. So if their livelihood is endangered by the necessity of allowing for competition on the

01:01:00.540 agricultural market, you just buy them out, like you might do with fishermen who are overfishing the

01:01:05.300 ocean. Yes, exactly. And this is not a potential, this is not perfect by any means, but it's a way to

01:01:12.400 actually solve the problem of getting more of the stuff that will help humanity.

01:01:16.880 Any idea what the benefit is of that compared to the cost? And is that calculable?

01:01:22.920 Yes. So we made the estimate that for every dollar you spend on these subsidies, you will help the world

01:01:29.720 about $2,000. Basically, because you can generate an enormous amount of internal growth. So we estimate that

01:01:38.880 you could actually make every person in the developing world about $1,000 richer per person

01:01:44.600 per year in 15 years. That's it. Okay, so wait, you got it. We're going to slow down there because

01:01:49.880 those are unbelievable claims. Those are unbelievably massive claims. Okay, so you said

01:01:56.560 to subsidize rich agricultural producers in the West to the tune of a dollar a year

01:02:02.940 buys you $1,000 in increased revenue globally. $2,000. It's a $2,000 to one return.

01:02:11.280 Yes. And this is basically because this is the World Bank's dynamic trade models that show that

01:02:18.760 once you get a society that's able to trade internationally and openly, you also get enhanced

01:02:26.000 growth within those countries. So that means they by themselves get to be better so that,

01:02:31.660 and these would mostly be poor countries, there would also be a lot of rich countries,

01:02:36.280 but these would mostly actually help the world's poor because they have the most catching up to do.

01:02:41.020 And they will then be much better off. Not only will that be better for them, because if you're poor,

01:02:46.540 $1,000 is a lot better than if you're rich, getting another $1,000. But also because it will help them

01:02:53.320 generate all the other things they would like to have education, health, resilience to global warming.

01:02:59.580 So the whole point here is to recognize that this is one of the things that are hard to have a

01:03:05.560 discussion about. There are very few people advocating global free trade. There are lots

01:03:10.760 of people advocating against it. But we need to recognize that this is one of the things that

01:03:15.860 have helped pull out most people of poverty that we know could do even more in the future,

01:03:20.820 and that we have a real opportunity to achieve. So that's... Well, you don't have ice flow,

01:03:26.620 abandoned, cuddly polar bears as portraits of the farmers that you're going to help abstractly in

01:03:33.400 third world countries. So you have a sales and marketing problem there. And that's a real problem,

01:03:38.640 right? You know, it's interesting that the economic models don't take into account the

01:03:46.080 difficulty of propagating the message. You know, you know what I mean is that because there is a

01:03:51.860 sales and marketing problem there, and it's not trivial. And it might be that a dollar spent in

01:03:57.360 agricultural subsidies to rich farmers in the West would produce that $2,000 return. But the question

01:04:03.440 might be how much money would you have to spend advertising that before people would believe it.

01:04:08.560 And that's a crucial question. You know, with a standard entrepreneurial product, I don't think

01:04:15.300 it's unreasonable to estimate that 65% to 95% of the cost is in sales and marketing. You know,

01:04:24.400 5% is production. And that's a great argument. So in some sense, you could argue what we try to do with

01:04:29.980 the Copenhagen consensus where we make these priority lists is just simply give you the raw data for what

01:04:37.180 would academically be the smartest things to invest in. But you're absolutely right. There's no cute

01:04:42.100 and cuddly, you know, selling points to free trade. And actually, to most of our top outcomes. So let me

01:04:49.520 just give you a few of the other ones. So the second best is family planning, and probably also basic

01:04:57.000 emergency care to women. This will deliver about $100 back for every dollar spent. 0.57

01:05:02.760 That would also be extremely attractive to people on the left.

01:05:06.680 It should be attracted to everyone. Yeah. Because look, remember, right now, about 400,000 mothers die

01:05:14.060 in childbirth. And about 2 million kids die in the first 28 days of their life here on earth. And we

01:05:23.120 know we could save many of these, not all of them, but many of these by simple measures. You know,

01:05:29.700 for instance, making sure that you don't get that the pregnant women don't get high blood pressure,

01:05:36.180 preeclampsia and eclampsia, which kills more than 100,000 women every year. By simple emergency

01:05:44.180 measures, when you come into a facility, give birth, and you have a problem. If you have simple

01:05:50.560 procedures to make sure that that problem can be dealt with, often with fairly cheap, you don't need

01:05:56.700 more doctors, you just need nurses or even assistant helpers, you can do a lot of these

01:06:01.980 things. We know that you can do this for very low cost. And then again, if you have, there's about

01:06:07.580 215 million people, women who don't have access to prevention. So family planning, if you could get

01:06:15.620 them family planning, not all of them would use family planning all of the time, but it would mean

01:06:19.980 that they would space their kids better, they would be able to give more investment into each one of

01:06:24.300 their kids, that would get them better educated, there would be a lot of knock on effects. But

01:06:32.120 mostly, this would mean that a lot of moms wouldn't die in childbirth, and their children that they do 0.91

01:06:38.100 give birth to would have better lives. And again, we estimate this would cost about $3 billion a year,

01:06:44.940 but it would pay dividends, both in terms of saving moms, saving kids, but also growing the economy

01:06:52.240 because what's known as the demographic dividend. If you have slightly fewer kids, you have more

01:06:57.840 productivity, because you have the same amount of capital, but for fewer kids, that means you get to

01:07:03.180 be faster, richer, that's essentially what China has done in a sort of boosted way by their one, 0.54

01:07:09.740 one child policy. I'm not advocating that at all. But it's, it's, it gives you a good sort of insight.

01:07:15.520 Then there are lots of health things. We talked about tuberculosis, we could probably spend a dollar

01:07:21.620 on tuberculosis, and help people not die, help people being better off, help families not dealing

01:07:28.720 with tragedies of losing their mom and dad. It's typically, you know, people in their middle ages

01:07:33.480 that die from tuberculosis, every dollar spent would avoid about $43 of social benefits. Sorry,

01:07:41.460 would generate $43 of social benefits. If you look at childhood immunization, we've stopped a lot of

01:07:50.900 the really damaging childhood diseases. So we've gone from a world where about 12 million children

01:07:58.500 died just in 1980, to now only about 5 million children die every year below the age of five. But

01:08:09.140 clearly, that's still way too many, we could probably save a million children for a billion

01:08:14.780 dollars a year. Just think about that. We estimate that for for every dollar spent there, you do about

01:08:20.760 $60 worth of good. So again, the whole point here is to recognize there are lots of lots of amazing

01:08:27.220 things that you can do. And I was letting my internal cynic respond to your arguments and trying to adopt

01:08:35.460 the position of someone who might be critical of them. I know that arguments for ameliorating the

01:08:44.100 lot of the poor that were put forth in the 60s were often countermanded by the claims often of

01:08:50.760 environmentalists that you don't want to help the poor because they'll breed more and that will just 0.99

01:08:55.940 lead to more of the kind of problems that you're trying to solve. And so, you know, what the question

01:09:02.960 might be, why would someone object to saving a million children a year through immunization,

01:09:07.460 or I think you said 2 million children as a consequence of enhanced maternal care.

01:09:12.720 And I can imagine similar arguments like that being raised, you know, whether consciously or

01:09:18.220 implicitly. But those things should be made implicit. So let, I would encourage people who are watching

01:09:28.100 this or listening to this, you know, a lot of you have chopped up my YouTube videos into small videos,

01:09:35.800 and sometimes animated sections of them and otherwise distributed them. Bjorn just outlined

01:09:41.480 four, the four, the top four investment strategies for a better planet. And

01:09:47.800 it might be useful to consider ways that that can be that that information can be distributed as widely as possible.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 09, 2021

208. The Progress of the Human Race, Part 1

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