Marion Toopey and Gail Pooley talk about their new book, Super Abundance, The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, 2022. It's the most complete opposite of any apocalyptic title you might ever envision. Marion has talked to me before, particularly about his book, 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, and many others you will find interesting. Gail is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University at Hawaii, and has taught economics and statistics at Al-Faisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the University of Idaho in Idaho. Both of them have published widely in the public domain as well as professionally in outlets like the Financial Times, the National Review, The National Post, The New York Times, The Financial Times and the National Post. They have also been published widely and professionally in publications like the NY Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. And they are the co-author of the Simon-Abundance Index, which is a three-part, ten-part analysis of why, strangely enough, things seem to be a lot better than we think, and perhaps better than they ever were before. And although we're more concerned about it than we ever seem to have been before, and although we are more concerned than we've ever been before. Julian Simon's famous bet. And some freak out about it. In 1968, he wrote an extremely popular book, which sold millions of copies of a book called The Population Bomb . And some people thought that was going to go to the moon. and become a very terrifying monster. The man who brought this particular obsession or problem into the public sphere was Paul Ehrlich. That s still causing a terrifying language. We have become accustomed to a very scary word, and we have become very accustomed to the concept of a "Still causing Trouble, Still causing Trouble. by Julian Simon s "The Population Bomb." in 1968, which was a sort of "somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. in which he wrote a book about how the population is still alive. . and some people are still causing trouble, and still is still causing Trouble . in a way that we can still be a problem, even though we ve become more worried than we used to be by the word "populous.
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00:00:57.420Hello everyone. I have with me today a guest I've had on before, Dr. Marion Toopey, and a new guest, his co-author at the moment of a new book called Super Abundance,
00:01:19.900The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, 2022.
00:01:27.900It's the most complete opposite of any apocalyptic title you might ever envision.
00:01:33.080Marion has talked to me before, particularly about his book, 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know,
00:01:39.680and many others you will find interesting. That was published in 2020.
00:01:42.600Marion is the editor of humanprogress.org, which is a very good site, and I retweet them quite consistently.
00:01:50.340He's a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and the co-author of the Simon Abundance Index,
00:01:57.580which we will talk about to some degree today. He specializes in globalization, study of globalization,
00:02:04.840and global well-being, and politics, and the economics of Europe and Southern Africa.
00:02:10.380Dr. Gail Pooley is associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University at Hawaii.
00:02:17.600He's taught economics and statistics at Al-Faisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
00:02:23.100Brigham Young in Idaho, a Boise State University in the College of Idaho.
00:02:27.560He earned his BBA in economics of Boise State, did graduate work at Montana State, completed his PhD at the University of Idaho.
00:02:34.960He's been part of the development of the Simon Abundance Index as well, and as I said, is the co-author of this new book,
00:02:45.660Super Abundance, which is a lot different than Apocalyptic Doom, as I pointed out.
00:02:50.960Both of doctors, Tupi and Gail, have published widely in the public domain as well as professionally in outlets like the Financial Times,
00:03:00.100the National Review, the particularly evil journal Quillette, Forbes, the American Spectator, the Washington Post, etc.
00:03:08.360Any of your, what would you call them, traditional suspects or usual suspects.
00:03:13.580So, anyways, we're going to talk about this new book today, Super Abundance, a three-part, ten-chapter analysis of why, strangely enough,
00:03:23.740things seem to be a lot better than we think, and perhaps better than they ever were,
00:03:28.500and although we're more concerned about it than we ever seem to have been before.
00:03:33.400So, welcome, gentlemen. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me, and congratulations on your new book.
00:03:38.720Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be with you.
00:03:40.380Yeah, so let's start with Super Abundance.
00:03:45.740I don't know whether to start with Julian Simon's famous bet.
00:03:50.080That's not a, it's kind of a nice narrative entry point, eh?
00:05:09.480And in 1968, he wrote an extremely popular book, which sold millions of copies, called The Population Bomb.
00:05:18.140And The Population Bomb started in a sort of very terrifying language that we have become accustomed to from extreme environmentalists over the decades.
00:05:26.940And he basically said, no matter what policy changes we are going to make now, in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people are going to die due to starvation.
00:06:02.620And the reason why it's important is because Soylent Green, whilst it was filmed in 1974, was supposed to come to fruition in 2022, which is this year.
00:06:14.580And the basic premise of the book was that the world was completely empty of food.
00:06:19.940And so every time a person died, that person would be converted into biscuits called Soylent Green, which would be then fed to the people who stayed behind.
00:06:34.200So a lot of this, just to give some background to that, too, a lot of this was based on hypothetical biological thinking predicated on the work of Malthus.
00:06:43.540And it's sort of a yeast or rat model of human existence.
00:06:46.940So, if you have a colony of yeast and they have a finite medium that they're growing in, so a finite source of food, and you let the yeast multiply or let them, they provide them with the preconditions for the multiplication.
00:07:05.740Their population will expand until they consume all the available resources, and then it will precipitously collapse in starvation.
00:07:14.000And people tried similar, although less simple, experiments with rats showing similar behavior.
00:07:24.660And then I would say documented similar phenomena in the field.
00:07:27.560I mean, animals will overgraze, for example, if their herbivores will overgraze available cropland, if they're not kept in check, so to speak, by predators.
00:07:39.540And biologists extrapolated from this and said that under all other things being equal, populations will expand until they consume more available resources than will sustain them.
00:07:52.420And then they will tend to precipitously collapse.
00:07:54.740And then that was applied to the human condition.
00:07:57.540But the, as we see from the rest of your story, the economists objected to this.
00:08:03.280So, the view that you just described is particularly popular amongst biologists.
00:08:10.780Economists don't think like that because they recognize that human beings are fundamentally different from rats or deer or rabbits or whatever else.
00:08:20.080We have this thing called intelligence and the ability to apply these little gray cells in order to come up with innovations which can get around the problem of scarcity.
00:08:30.600So, on the other side of the country, early, as I said, was in Stanford in California.
00:08:34.780On the other side of the country at the University of Maryland, there was an economist called Julian Simon, a very, very intelligent and very interesting man who looked at the data, actually, and started noticing that things were becoming cheaper, which means that they were becoming less scarce, even though population of the world continued to increase.
00:08:57.800Therefore, in 1980, he made a bet with Paul Orlick.
00:09:04.560And the bet was on the price of five commodities.
00:09:16.920If over the next 10 years, between 1980 and 1990, the price of these five metals became more expensive, they became scarcer, Simon would pay Ehrlich.
00:09:30.900But if they became cheaper, then Ehrlich would pay Simon.
00:09:34.940Well, the bet came to an end in 1990, September 29th, 1990.
00:09:41.440And the inflation-adjusted price of these five metals dropped by 36%, in spite of the fact that the population of the world rose by almost a billion.
00:09:53.220And in spite of the fact that they both agreed that that would be the basket they would bet on.
00:10:14.520Well, what's so interesting about that, I think?
00:10:16.660Well, there's many, many things that are interesting about it.
00:10:18.520But one of the things that's so interesting is that you might infer from that that in order to put your notion forward as a scientific hypothesis, you actually have to bind it with a time frame.
00:10:31.320You can't just say, well, at some point in the future, the population is going to expand to the point where we consume all our resources.
00:10:39.280You mean a year, 10 years, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 150,000, a million?
00:10:45.300You mean you get to have the whole time frame for you to be right?
00:10:48.780Or no, are you accurate enough in your knowledge so that you can actually pin it down, let's say, within a decade or something, some reasonable fraction of a human life, at least?
00:10:59.060And so, because, I mean, the biologists who, when they responded to that bet, because it was quite the cultural moment in some sense that Simon won, the rejoinder from the environmentalist doom types was, well, we were off by a few decades, and that's why we lost.
00:11:40.600You know, another thing that was interesting about it is, you know, as professors, we get to say all kinds of things and never be really held accountable for it.
00:11:49.560And so, putting money on the table, you know, also added this really interesting dimension to it.
00:11:55.120It's not only is it framed in time, it's framed with a bet.
00:11:59.160So, got to hold this guy accountable for his claim.
00:12:10.020And it wasn't so famous when they first made it.
00:12:13.980But by the time it came around for the bet to be settled, and I would say this is particularly true of Julian Simon, who we should talk about for a moment.
00:12:23.720Paul Ehrlich is a pretty smart biologist.
00:12:28.960And so, that's useful for people to know, too.
00:12:31.200I mean, he was a truly outstanding mind.
00:12:33.200And for him to be optimistic in the face of what was almost a universal pessimism in the late 60s and early 70s around, well, the possibility of nuclear war and certainly the possibility of overpopulation and environmental degradation.
00:12:49.660And all of that was, that apocalyptic vision was what everyone who paraded themselves as informed and, you know, properly skeptically pessimistic, they're all parading that as a moral virtue.
00:13:04.600And for Simon to come out and say, no, you guys just, it's like Elon Musk now coming out and talking about how, you know, one of the biggest problems is going to beset us in the next 100 years is depopulation, which I happen to believe is true.
00:13:17.680I also think he's dead on with his criticisms about the UN's population predictions.
00:13:23.860I think the UN predictions are, there's no evidence they're accurate at all.
00:13:27.200And even if they are, we can handle the 9 to 10 billion people that we'll probably peek out at.
00:13:33.940United Nations has been historically quite, their numbers have not stood the test of time.
00:13:44.620There are other demographers in the world who have done a better job at predicting where the world population is going to be.
00:13:51.640And the latest bit on this is in Lancet, which predicts that by the year 2100, we are either going to have 9 billion people in the world, we are currently on 8, or 7 billion people in the world.
00:14:07.720So, you know, it's perfectly possible at the end of this century, there will be as many people in the world as there are now.
00:14:13.060So, obviously, the further out in the future you go, the less clear those predictions are.
00:14:19.640But there is another thing that I wanted to mention about Julian Simon, because you expressed an interest in learning a little more about him.
00:14:24.980It wasn't just that he was right, but he was facing a lot of personal invective from the great and the good.
00:14:31.520But he was regularly called an idiot and a fool who didn't know what Ehrlich famously said that to explain biology to Simon was like trying to explain the oil market to a cranberry, all sorts of other things.
00:14:48.540Ehrlich continued to receive throughout his life a variety of very prestigious academic prizes.
00:14:53.780Only recently, he was invited to Vatican, Vatican of all places, to give a talk on the danger of overpopulation.
00:15:04.460Well, you know, you don't want to have too many souls to save.
00:15:07.480So, in spite of being wrong all the time, he just keeps on being highly, highly revered.
00:15:13.680But there's one more thing I do want to say, and then I think I will hand it to Gail, because Gail will do a good job of explaining why we thought that we could improve on the bet.
00:15:26.220But the key that I want to talk about is that in spite of the fact that Ehrlich lost this very visible and very humiliating wager with Simon, the idea of overpopulation never went anywhere.
00:15:45.160Yes, environmental movement is incredibly complex.
00:15:47.220There are people who are extremely smart and well-intentioned, like, for example, Lomborg or Steven Pinker.
00:15:58.020They are interested in technological solutions to climate problems, and I count myself in that kind of sort of universe.
00:16:06.520But there is an extremist environmentalist subtext or subgroup in environmentalism who have these apocalyptic obsessions.
00:16:18.480So, for example, and this gets translated into the movies which billions of people see around the world.
00:16:24.840In our book, we talk about how with every decade since the 1950s, the number of apocalyptic movies has been actually increasing, which is the exact opposite of what is happening on Earth.
00:16:37.340The Earth is getting richer, healthier.
00:16:39.880In some ways, there is even environmental improvement, but there are more and more movies about how the world is going to end in some sort of a catastrophic, catastrophic apocalypse.
00:16:50.140And one of them is a very, very famous one, and that was the Infinity War, which was seen by something like Every Fifth American.
00:16:58.020And that movie plot is about a villain who has these Malthusian or Ehrlichian ideas.
00:17:08.340You have to kill half a population of the universe in order so that the other half can survive.
00:17:15.160And so, this is not an academic debate.
00:17:17.680People around the world are being fed the diet of Malthusianism almost on a daily basis.
00:17:24.260You know, what was interesting, one of the things that was interesting about that Marvel movie, and interesting about the Marvel pantheon in general, is that, well, Thanos is a derivation of Thanatos, so he's a figure of death.
00:17:36.300And in the Marvel movie, and you might have expected this, given our pop culture, in the Marvel movie, Thanos is clearly a villain.
00:17:45.960And that's interesting, because even though there is this apocalyptic tone to the movie, he is a villain.
00:17:51.320His theory that half of everything has to die in order for the other half to thrive is put forward.
00:17:58.220And even in a devil's advocate sort of way, but it's clear that he's an enemy.
00:18:02.920And one of the things that was so interesting about the Marvel pantheon is that, if you look at it quite carefully, it's not politically correct, and it's not apocalyptic.
00:18:12.460The movie, for example, Scarlett Johansson's last movie, I think it's The Black Widow, she is an unbelievably politically incorrect character.
00:18:23.080She's the real antithesis of this apocalyptic, doomsaying, hyper-agreeable culture that has produced the sort of movies that you described, like Soylent Green.
00:18:32.940And I thought that was extremely interesting, because I think there is a dawning recognition at the level of public fantasy that these purveyors of doom are not only wrong, but perhaps murderously wrong.
00:18:46.820And that we've been led down the garden path in an inappropriate way for about four decades or five decades.
00:18:52.940And then one more thing to say about that, you guys can tell me what you think of this, is that I think part of the reason, too, that we see this apocalyptic vision popping up so much now, isn't so much because the apocalypse is nigh, in a sense, in that we're doomed to it, is that things are changing so fast, that in some sense, the destruction of everything we know is always upon us.
00:19:19.500Because, like, are you willing to make a prediction about what your life is going to be like 10 years in the future?
00:19:25.680In many regards, I mean, technology has changed our lives so much, and that's happening so quickly that it's unparalleled.
00:19:33.760And so I think we all feel like, well, we're on the edge of precipitous change, and it might be terrible, but, well, your point is, it might also be extremely good, and that we could direct it that way.
00:19:44.120Yeah, I would just add to that, that we're on this cusp of exponential creative destruction.
00:19:51.360Because we're having this destruction, but we're also having this creativity that's actually on a steeper curve than the destructive curve.
00:20:01.480You know, when I go out of my lectures, I'm trying to tell people is, look, we've got everything we could possibly want in front of us if we are smart enough to reach out and take it.
00:20:09.480If we want it, so much of this environmentalism that you've described, and I think your work is such a good antidote to, doesn't seem to me to be pro-flourishing.
00:20:21.140There's an anti-human element to it, a hatred of humanity that I think is deeply pathological and resentful.
00:20:29.260And I think the fact that Ehrlich's ideas about population excess are still so popularly trumpeted forward as the only ethical attitude towards the problem of humanity is an indication of the depth of that.
00:20:47.840Well, some of it's malevolence, as far as I'm concerned.
00:20:50.260Like, I've heard environmentalists say, many of them say, you know, there are too many people on the planet.
00:20:54.980The planet would be better off if there's only a billion people.
00:20:59.440Human beings are a cancer on the face of the Earth.
00:21:02.080You know, we're like a virus that multiplies unchecked.
00:22:06.040Human population continues to do this.
00:22:08.320And we life expectancy and abundance continues to grow.
00:22:12.240And in spite of your modeling, well, you know, we've got a psychological problem on our hands here, I think, to some degree.
00:22:18.400It might be that, you know, human beings are unique.
00:22:22.340And we could speak biologically here, I suppose, in that we really do.
00:22:26.300We're the only creatures that really do apprehend our own finitude.
00:22:29.520You know, and so in some sense, we are obsessed and possessed by the apocalyptic vision because we all know that we're going to die, each of us, and that all the people we know are going to die and that everything we know is going to come to an end.
00:22:51.920We try to stabilize things and we try to make our economies productive and sustainable so that we don't die.
00:22:58.520But we know that we're fighting a losing battle.
00:23:01.740And it isn't, we don't understand how that fundamental knowledge of finitude is an endless source of the generation of apocalyptic fantasies or how to manage that in any real sense.
00:23:14.820You know, because it is the case that we, well, we certainly do face limits personally, limits of mortality.
00:23:31.120Well, as we live, I mean, we obviously live longer, but it is the one scare resource.
00:23:35.920We know that it will come to an end, yeah.
00:23:38.820Right, and there's only a limit, there's a real limit to what we can do to stave that off.
00:23:43.120Even if we generate a tremendous amount of money while we expend our time, right?
00:23:48.920So each second becomes more valuable in some sense as you age.
00:23:53.360And that, and the concept of time is really fundamental to our work because, well, I'll hand it over to,
00:24:01.120to Gail, but essentially we were dissatisfied with the, with, with the wager between, between Ehrlich and Simon.
00:24:10.340We thought we could do something a little more interesting and a little different.
00:24:16.020And I think Gail will be able to explain it better than I can.
00:24:20.820So in Simon's first book, he talks about, or one of his first books, he talks about looking at the price of things, the money price of things.
00:24:29.340And the problem with money is money loses its value over time, typically.
00:24:34.300So you have to make this adjustment back to real dollars versus nominal dollars.
00:24:39.820But he also mentioned this interesting thing.
00:24:42.060He said, you know, we can compare it to time.
00:24:44.900And he said, well, how much money can you earn in an hour of time and then take that and compare it to the price of things?
00:24:51.560So he talked about the idea of time prices.
00:24:53.820So that kind of piqued our interest a little bit.
00:24:56.740And then there was also a Nobel prize winning economist, William Nordhaus, who did this really interesting study about the price of light.
00:25:05.520And he said, let's look at what it costs you to earn the money to buy one hour's worth of light.
00:25:13.980And so he does this study and this light is just doing this.
00:25:17.920Yeah, well, you said in your book that that it's so amazing to think of this is that one electric 100 watt electric light bulb is the equivalent in terms of light generation of 17,000 candles.
00:25:52.880So, I mean, if you go back to 18, you know, we go back to 1800 and it took three, you had to work three hours to earn the money to buy one hour worth of light.
00:26:03.120And so the time price was three hours for one hour.
00:26:05.940Today, it's like 0.16 seconds of time to earn that same light.
00:26:12.840Well, we want to point out what this means, too, because prior to the dawn of inexpensive light, and also this obtains in many places in the world now, the fact that there was no light seriously delimited the number of hours you could spend working.
00:26:29.140And so when you're buying light, you're not just buying light, you're buying time to be productive.
00:26:34.920You can't read without light, you can't write without light, you can't, well, it's hard for people to imagine this because we're never plagued by darkness ever anymore, ever.
00:26:47.360And, you know, maybe we suffer from the absence of the night sky, and I think we do, but light is, light is basically free.
00:26:55.520And that means that we have many more hours per day.
00:26:58.860You know, the other thing I, that really struck me in that regard, it wasn't your work, though, but many people have commented on this, is the absolutely revolutionary consequence of inventing eyeglasses for people.
00:27:12.640Because many people in medieval Europe, obviously across the world, had to do close work, like tailors, and when they're, when they lost their ability to see close, like you do when you need reading glasses, they couldn't work anymore.
00:27:27.320And so this simple, simple technological innovation of glasses, you know, it added 15 years of productivity to people's lives.
00:27:35.620And then light, well, that adds, what, four hours of productivity per day, and it's free.
00:27:41.480We see, we, we, one of the things I really like about your, your work is that you help me understand and communicate to people just how rich we are.
00:27:50.520We're so rich, we don't even know how rich we are.
00:34:53.820So, there's no disagreement that these were the prices of those commodities.
00:34:58.300And then the next question is, what do you use for the denominator below?
00:35:02.680You can use a country's local reported average hourly income.
00:35:07.780In this case, we're trying to get a number that we could use as a proxy for the whole planet.
00:35:14.020And what we finally came up with is, let's look at GDP per capita per hour.
00:35:20.600So, how much GDP is generated on the planet per hour worked?
00:35:25.740And let's use that as an index or a proxy for how productive people are getting.
00:35:30.620Because we also note that when innovation occurs, it shows up both in lower prices and higher incomes.
00:35:37.420So, it's important that time prices are actually capturing both of those values because it's the ratio of those two numbers.
00:35:46.800So, time prices actually contain more information than just a money price.
00:35:51.360So, this graph or this graph, these data, this data that you talked about on page 142, you show, for example, that change in resource time price in China, it's negative 97.5%.
00:36:37.600Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:36:47.080And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:36:50.280With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:36:57.660Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:37:54.580There must be low-hanging fruit to some degree when a country does emerge from its agrarian past, let's say, a non-industrial past, into an industrial present, and free up its markets and move into the modern capitalist age, free market age.
00:38:16.440And so, China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Ireland does extraordinarily well.
00:38:22.400Is there any way of adjusting that for baseline prosperity?
00:38:25.560I mean, the Americans have done as well as the Chinese, but they started off a lot better, let's say, in the last century.
00:38:35.140I think that the interesting thing for us is, what are the slopes doing in these different countries?
00:38:39.380I mean, yeah, the United States has got this lower rate of growth, but all of these other countries are catching up at such a rapid rate that there's none of these countries that are actually going the other direction.
00:38:56.840Now, the key with China is to remember that China and India, China has done spectacularly well over the last 40 years, and so has India.
00:39:12.120It's very important to remember that those two countries were actually the most populous countries at the time when they were super, super poor.
00:39:20.800In other words, if you looked at China in 1960 or India in 1960, they already had mass populations, but they were super poor.
00:40:13.520Between 1980 and 2015, they had this one China policy in place.
00:40:19.360The Chinese government is very boastful and very proud that they have prevented or extinguished 400 million birds in China between 1980 and 2018.
00:40:31.800China, as well as world, would be much more prosperous societies if that hadn't happened.
00:40:38.980But it was a spectacular, spectacular shot in the foot, as you would expect from a communist regime.
00:40:45.540Because what they are left with now is a very unstable population pyramid, whereby the population is getting old and there are not enough workers to support the economy of the size that they currently have.
00:41:01.320And they also have a plethora of men, which they're going to pay for, too.
00:41:05.440That's a recipe for social instability.
00:41:07.680In like 2016 it was, maybe it was 2008, the sex ratio peaked at 120 Chinese men per 100 women, which means that 20% of men in China could not hope to find a Chinese wife.
00:41:29.160And there is very good evidence suggesting that men who do not have a partner are much more likely to engage in criminal activities.
00:41:38.080Yes, there's very good evidence for that.
00:41:40.720So one of the really killer things about this graph on page 142 is you have a column there entitled years to double personal resource abundance.
00:41:50.900And so then by your criteria, it's how many years does it take for you to have to work half as long to get the same resource, whatever that is.
00:43:15.280Exactly the same amount of food and resources that your parents could buy, you would be able to buy, your children would buy.
00:43:22.280So, by historical standards, the kind of appreciation in abundance, the kind of doubling of abundance of 20 years is actually, well, it's close to a miracle.
00:43:42.940Of change in human societies as the norm.
00:43:45.380And that is in some sense true compared to animal societies, which just don't change at all.
00:43:50.960I mean, a grizzly now is exactly the same as a grizzly was 60,000 years ago for all intents and purposes.
00:43:56.640But, you know, even in very technologically advanced cultures like ancient Egypt, which was a much faster developing country, let's say, society than the typical Stone Age society,
00:44:13.700there were periods of time in the Egyptian archaeological record that exceed 1,000 years where there is zero evidence of any technological change whatsoever.
00:44:26.820And then if you go back, let's say, to so-called Stone Age civilizations, there's good anthropological evidence for the persistence of some rituals,
00:44:37.960which left a certain archaeological mark, persistence of those rituals unchanged over a 20,000-year period.
00:44:47.200So, the rule in biological systems is lack of change at the cultural level.
00:44:52.400And even among human societies, generally speaking, rates of change are unbelievably slow.
00:44:58.820And so, for people to say, well, you know, doubling every 20 years isn't fast enough, it's like, well, A, compared to what?
00:45:04.400And the other thing to think about is, well, how fast a doubling do you think we can stand?
00:45:17.020If that's a problem you need to have, if you have to have a problem.
00:45:20.000But it is challenging, you know, I mean, because our society is changing so rapidly now, it's actually hard for people to keep up with it.
00:45:28.060You know, they get superannuated in some sense.
00:45:30.560So, in any case, it's a remarkable, it's a remarkable set of observations.
00:45:34.740And it's very difficult to look at this without being really sad, I would say, in some sense, that we had to swallow so much apocalyptic nonsense for so many decades to the detriment of so many.
00:45:54.460When the evidence is starkly clear that more people in freer markets solves all the problems that everybody wants to solve faster than anything we've ever produced by a large margin.
00:46:06.920I should like to point out, of course, that whilst I'm cautiously or perhaps rationally optimistic about the future, nothing in what Gail and I write should be understood as a guarantee that things will go on improving in the future at the rates that we have seen before.
00:46:26.460You know, in our conclusion of the book, we identify three critical problems to maintaining superabundant growth.
00:46:33.100By the way, we should probably at some point define what we mean by superabundance.
00:46:38.700But the three very important components of how we can ensure that superabundance continues.
00:46:44.940Well, first of all, we cannot have the population collapse, which is something that Elon Musk continues to warn against.
00:46:54.140Now, in the book, we don't say that, you know, we don't take a position on what is the optimal size of the world's population.
00:47:01.920But what we do say is that parents, when they are making decisions about having babies, that those decisions are not made in a vacuum.
00:47:11.620When parents are being told that bringing an additional child into the society is a crime, that you are hurting the planet and the rest of your species.
00:47:20.700If that's what parents think, then, of course, that will have an impact on their fecundity.
00:47:28.140And in fact, we now have studies that have been conducted or other opinion polls that have been conducted over the last four years.
00:47:35.000And they show that people do take environmental apocalyptic warnings into account when making decisions about where to have babies or not.
00:47:45.300The second problem that we need to avoid if we are going to remain superabundant is, of course, freedom of speech.
00:47:52.980Freedom of speech is absolutely fundamental.
00:47:55.000It is not only fundamental on a personal level.
00:47:59.040If you cannot speak freely, you cannot think freely, you cannot express yourself freely, but on a societal level.
00:48:06.500If you are following an idea of the cliff like lemmings do, you know, it could be a bad idea.
00:48:14.240If it's a bad idea, then you are going to end up like going off the cliff, right?
00:48:18.680That was the problem in communist societies.
00:48:21.860I grew up under communism, part of my life.
00:48:24.340And because we didn't have freedom of speech, people couldn't point out that the society was actually stagnating and in some ways retrogressing.
00:48:32.360And we couldn't come up with a way of resolving our problems and get on a better path.
00:48:39.400And that is why speech codes and banning of expression of ideas, no matter how offensive we may find them, after all, heliocentrism was offensive at one point in the past.
00:48:52.500But if we prevent these ideas from being aired, then we don't know really.
00:48:56.800Some of them may be very good and we should remember them.
00:49:00.000And the third, we should learn from them.
00:49:02.220And the third potential problem for superabundance is, of course, if the market gets destroyed through overregulation or socialization.
00:49:11.920And the reason for that is very simple.
00:49:14.040Markets provide us with signals about what's valuable and what's not.
00:49:20.440Markets allow us to see which innovations are going to be useful and which innovations are going to be useless.
00:49:26.460This is what's called the price mechanism.
00:49:28.240In a free market economy, prices tell you exactly what you need more of, like baby formula in the United States or, you know, oil and gas when it goes up, that you need to produce more of that.
00:50:04.360Because there isn't any difference between speech and thought in a technical sense.
00:50:09.100Much of the thought that we undertake, we undertake in discussions like this, where we're exchanging ideas and modifying them and communicating.
00:50:19.040And then the question is, well, what's thought?
00:50:22.980And the answer to that is, well, that's how we abstractly adapt to the horizon of the future before we actually adapt to it.
00:50:30.500So we try out new ideas that might match what's coming at us that's unpredictable in this virtual space that's characterized by the exchange of thought.
00:50:40.800So that we don't have to die by making the wrong decisions when we're actually forced to act.
00:50:46.640And I would say we can make that a biological claim.
00:50:50.400Because the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of abstract thought, grew out of the motor cortex.
00:50:56.640And its purpose is to run simulations of the world and simulations of potential action patterns in the world before you implement them.
00:51:05.620So that you can weed out the deadly ones and not implement them.
00:51:09.180And so we actually evolved an entire part of our brain, which we use socially, to kill bad ideas before they kill us.
00:51:17.380And so then if you interfere with free speech, you don't get to do that.
00:51:21.060And free speech is associated with free markets in this crucial way that you described.
00:51:26.980Because it is very difficult to know what's going to be valuable next as things change.
00:51:33.140And the way we do that is we subject that computation to a massive cognitive instrument, which is the free market.
00:51:41.760Hundreds of millions of people are making decisions all the time, right on the edge of change.
00:51:47.240And if we know the price of something, we're as caught up with the future as we can possibly be.
00:51:53.180And so if we interfere with that at our great peril, because that is the cognitive mechanism that keeps us updated.
00:51:59.460I would simply add to that, and then I will hand it over to Gail,
00:52:02.520is that free speech and free markets are learning mechanisms.
00:52:07.260When you say something which is stupid, somebody else can say, well, that actually doesn't work.
00:52:11.820And if you are smart, you are going to internalize that comment.
00:52:15.760And you are never going to express that view again.
00:52:18.720You are going to internalize the truth.
00:52:21.260And the market is a learning mechanism as well, provided that it's free, so it can indicate what works and what doesn't.
00:52:32.900So I think that, you know, making this connection between free speech and the market is really it's this idea that wealth is fundamentally knowledge.
00:52:43.280It's the growth and knowledge that distinguishes us from the Stone Age.
00:52:48.860It's entirely due to the growth of knowledge.
00:52:51.180And this is a point that one of our friends, George Gilder, makes.
00:52:54.920He says wealth is knowledge, growth is learning, and money is time.
00:52:59.280And from those three propositions, we can derive this theorem that you can measure the growth of knowledge with time.
00:53:06.060So it's really, you know, how do we grow knowledge?
00:53:09.860Well, there's also a definition of knowledge that's rooted in there to some degree.
00:53:14.540Because you might say, well, if you can do the same amount in half the time, you're now twice as smart.
00:53:25.020Because the knowledge, you'd have to define knowledge as useful in relationship to something, which might be the production of something of value.
00:53:33.240And so if you could do that twice as fast or with half as many resources, especially time, well, then your knowledge is doubled.
00:53:39.740That's by definition in some real sense.
00:53:42.100Right. So we define abundance as this measurement of time prices as they relate to you're adding.
00:53:50.800You must be adding more knowledge, either making the money prices lower or you're increasing income or doing the combination of both because it takes you less and less time to earn the money to buy that thing.
00:54:02.200And it's a consequence of this growth in knowledge.
00:54:04.820And that growth in knowledge, it comes from all over the place.
00:54:34.520Generally, generally male has found some little problem when he was hanging up pictures on a wall or trying to get a bolt off of a particularly recalcitrant piece of machinery or some little practical problem and then spent untold hours figuring out how that could just be made better.
00:54:53.920And then you just have shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and rows and rows and rows of that.
00:54:59.320And like I learned because I've done a lot of house renovations and that sort of thing.
00:55:03.240I learned that if a if a construction job is difficult, that means you didn't find the right tool because someone out there has figured out how to do that.
00:55:11.480Well, you can certainly see that with obviously with computer software as well.
00:55:15.000So it is miraculous that this is the case.
00:55:18.360That's another definition of what a market is.
00:55:20.520The market is a place where you go to find people that can solve your problem better than you can solve it.
00:56:59.740So we've got this framework, this analytical framework that says use these convert things to time prices and then look at the change in time price over time.
00:57:08.420And that will tell you what's happening to individuals, what's happening in their life in terms of their personal resource abundance.
00:57:16.720And that is just this measurement of, well, it cost you this much time yesterday.
00:57:25.360Your abundance is increasing by that ratio.
00:57:28.060It's the percentage change in that ratio.
00:57:30.880You know, if once again drops by 75%, it means I get four for the price of one.
00:57:35.640My personal abundance is increasing by 300%.
00:57:38.780So take the framework, go and apply it to all of these commodities, whatever, commodities, finished goods, bicycles, drills, and see what's happened to these time prices.
00:58:00.040And so we're assuming that people acquire and work for things they both need and want.
00:58:08.900And we're going to not take an a priori, a stance of a priori judgment about that.
00:58:15.600We're going to assume there's all sorts of things that people need and want.
00:58:18.520And that there's no externally reliable way of determining what those should be.
00:58:24.560And so we'll let people make those decisions themselves and people will vary and be similar in some ways in relationship to those decisions.
00:58:33.540How do you ensure that when you look at the improvement in efficiency in relationship to production, that you've properly sampled the domain of commodities?
00:58:58.300Let's start with those because if we were going to go someplace, you know, some island off in the Pacific, what would you want to take with you?
00:59:06.860Well, you want to have these basic commodities.
00:59:09.000That's where we came up with this basic 50.
00:59:11.580And let's subject that basic 50 to this framework.
00:59:14.820Okay, I want to dig into that more because it's really important, right?
00:59:18.080Because this is, in some sense, the issue of are you randomly sampling the environment, right?
00:59:24.540So, like, because you're trying to take a snapshot of human progress and economic efficiency.
00:59:30.560And we might want to say, well, do you have the thing you're taking a snapshot of properly sampled?
00:59:37.240So you picked 50, why 50, and which 50, and how did you define basic?
00:59:43.120Well, we kind of go back to we started with Ehrlich's and Simon's Bet and says, let's look at those five because they both kind of, Ehrlich said, well, these are five non-renewables that, you know, they should run out, right?
01:00:02.280What's the price of a barrel of oil, you know, for the last, we've got really good data on the barrel of oil that represents this fundamental unit of measurement in terms of the price of energy.
01:00:22.600What are these basic fundamental commodities?
01:00:24.780And we were also kind of limited to what we could find out there that had good price data on it.
01:00:30.520And what we found is, you know, you go back to 1980 and you kind of have about 50 of these things that, that we have good data on that we can, we can use.
01:00:41.540So you found, you found that you found that, that, that, that with 50, that was, well, that's a fairly large number of resources, but it's also, you could get reliable data on 50.
01:00:51.820Could you get reliable data on a hundred?
01:00:54.080Do you know, or, or did it sort of top out for you at 50?
01:00:56.860The further back is, yeah, no, the further back in time you get, you go, uh, the, the, the, the less data you have on nominal prices.
01:01:04.880So for example, by the time we get to, um, uh, 1960, we have, we have 37, but we look at that too.
01:01:11.000We look at, we look at from 1960 to 2018 and then from 1980 to 2018, just to satisfy those who may be saying that 40 year period is not substantial enough.
01:01:20.720And, uh, to, to really do time prices for that data, you need the global GDP divided by the number of hours of work, which, which we do in part of the book.
01:01:29.360But then, and this is critical, then we go back to 1850 and we look at, uh, prices of commodities and food, uh, in the United States from the perspective of blue collar workers and unskilled laborers.
01:01:45.060Now, this is very important for a number of reasons.
01:01:47.360Uh, very often people will say, oh, well, you're using average data and that's skewed by the rich.
01:01:52.660Okay. So we'll take those out. We'll just look at people at the very bottom of the income strata and that's the blue collar workers working in the manufacturing and then unskilled workers.
01:02:01.120Like for example, uh, uh, people who cleaned the hallways janitors.
01:02:06.760Okay. Now we have wage data going back to 1770s and we have commodity and food data going back to 1850.
01:02:15.760So here's what we found. Uh, I'm just going to give a few examples.
01:02:20.620So a blue collar worker between 1850 and 2018, that's page 157, uh, rice drops in time price by 99%, which means you now have 111 units for the price of one unit.
01:02:37.720Uh, pork drops by 98.7%, which means that now you have 75 pounds of pork rather than one pound of pork, um, that your ancestors could buy in, uh, 1850.
01:02:50.160Uh, coffee drop of 98% relative to wages, which means you now get 49 pounds of coffee for the same amount of work that would take you to buy one pound of coffee beef drop by 85%.
01:03:03.300You now get seven for the price of one. So that's the blue collar worker.
01:03:07.200Uh, and we can also look at the least fortunate, uh, in, uh, well, least fortunate employed people in the United States.
01:03:13.520And that's the unskilled, uh, again, an example, a sugar dropped by 99% means you now get 107 pounds of sugar instead of one pound of sugar in 1850.
01:03:24.480Um, rice, once again, you get 53, uh, pork, uh, 35, 36 pounds, uh, instead of one, uh, corn, 26 pounds for the price of one lamb for instead of one.
01:03:40.140So, you know, you go over these, um, uh, stats and what you're finding is that so long as you have the nominal price of a commodity in 1850 and a nominal wage hourly wage in 1850, and then you can compare it to 2020 or 2018 or whatever, you can see these trends.
01:03:57.460And they are the same, whether you're looking globally or in the United States.
01:04:02.420Yeah. You said, you say, when you're looking at, uh, Jack's 26 commodities here between 1850 and 2018, the average PRA increased by 57, basically 5,800%.
01:04:18.440So yes, that's personal resource abundance. Correct.
01:04:21.140Right. Right. And the numeric equivalent of that, the dollar equivalent of that is the, the hourly compensation rate rose from six cents an hour to $32 an hour.
01:04:31.440So, but they, but the PRA personal resource abundance, uh, index would be a more accurate gauge of that improvement.
01:04:39.180So the improvement is, it's very difficult, I think for modern young people in particular to really understand how poor people were.
01:04:52.360The best, the best example I like to use is the sugar example.
01:04:55.580And it's like, well, the time it took you to earn the money to buy one pound of sugar in 1850, how many pounds do you think you could get today?
01:05:02.800I'd love to survey my students on this and they'll say, oh, like two pounds or four pounds, you get 227 pounds.
01:05:10.620And it might explain why we're all so fat is because sugars becomes just tremendously abundant.
01:05:17.580And, uh, you know, but, but it's not just sugar.
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01:07:53.360All 18 data sets have been growing at a super abundant speed, which means that our wealth, this abundance, is increasing faster than population.
01:08:04.380And what that tells us is that, on average, every human being contributes more than they consume.
01:08:12.900We are destroyers, but we are also creators.
01:08:15.940And it turns out that we are more of a creator than we are a consumer or a destroyer.
01:08:30.060So, our data suggests that the early data sets, going back to 1850 and so on, there we have these increases in abundance of resources at about 2.5% per year, compounded growth rate.
01:08:44.720But by the time you get to the 1980s and beyond, you get to about 3.5%.
01:08:48.660Okay, so now we can tell parents, that means we can tell parents that not only is your child not going to be, on average, a net drain on the world's resources,
01:08:58.320not only are you not going to make other people poorer and the planet more barren by bringing another child into the world,
01:09:05.580that you're actually doing a positive good, is that if you have 10 children, everyone will be somewhat richer because of that.
01:09:12.380The chances that they will be richer and the chances that one of those 10 babies is actually going to be able to contribute something substantial to the welfare of human beings is higher than if you just have a one child.
01:09:29.060And I do believe that it's the case, you know.
01:09:31.440So, it's really, that's really something to be able to tell people.
01:09:34.120You know, I've watched in my own life, people react, certainly not positively, to pregnant women talking about their babies, the babies they're going to bring into the world.
01:09:48.560It's, well, you know, and parents themselves, they have this discussion they have with themselves, I suppose, particular moral conundrum for young women is like,
01:09:59.120well, do I really want to bring a baby into a world like this?
01:10:03.000And the answer is, well, it's a world that's getting better, and your baby will probably have a better time of it than you did, or there's a reasonable probability of that,
01:10:12.860but your baby will also be a net good for everyone else.
01:10:16.780Like, not in some naive, idiot, hallmark, greeting card, simplistic way, but really, actually, solidly.
01:10:25.440And in spite of all the doomsaying of the Malthusians, and the apocalypses, and the anti-capitalists, and so forth.
01:10:34.140So, that's a lovely thing to be able to tell people.
01:10:37.120And that brings us, really, to the importance of innovation, where I think Gale really contributed heavily to that particular chapter.
01:10:45.140So, I think that I wouldn't mind if he wanted to talk a little bit about innovation, if you don't mind.
01:10:51.080Yeah. So, here's the idea, as we begin our model thinking about, you know, it begins with human beings,
01:10:58.160and we focus on that because the only source of new ideas are human beings.
01:11:02.640And those ideas really entail, how do we create new knowledge with these capitals that we have?
01:11:09.280We define capital as anything we can use to create something of value.
01:11:13.460So, you have physical capital, human capital, intellectual capital, financial capital, cultural capital.
01:11:21.320And so, I begin with this idea, when I can actually manifest that idea and convert the idea into something real,
01:11:29.040it becomes this thing that we call an invention.
01:11:32.040But in order for it to actually move into this innovation level, it has to go through the market.
01:11:36.360And the market is really where you take these things, and they're tested to see if you've truly created value.
01:11:42.900And if it creates value, then this invention becomes an innovation.
01:11:48.200And our progress is entirely due to our ability to innovate.
01:11:53.320Okay. So, Lomborg has showed, this I think dovetails with your work.
01:11:58.460So, when Lomborg's done his return on investment rank ordering of solutions to the problems that beset us,
01:12:07.580he showed that the highest return his economists calculated for investment in the future was investment really into early childhood care.
01:12:18.140Some of that was early childhood nutrition.
01:12:20.440And part of the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that, well, if a child's growth is stunted in early life because of malnutrition,
01:12:28.460one of the things that happens is they don't develop their intelligence, their intrinsic intelligence, to the degree that that's possible.
01:12:35.180So, there's been a walloping increase in the average IQ of the human population over the last century.
01:12:42.080And a huge part, especially at the lower end, which has been brought up,
01:12:45.820and a huge part of that is that, well, there's just so many fewer people suffering from absolute privation.
01:12:51.240And so, if the most valuable resource that we have is the capacity to innovate,
01:12:57.160then the most logical problem to target is that which might interfere with the development of, say, general cognitive ability in childhood.
01:13:07.800And it turns out that that's actually quite inexpensive to foster.
01:13:11.760And so, that fostering of innovation, there's lots of things that have to do that,
01:13:16.700but one of them is definitely a concentration on early childhood nutrition, let's say.
01:13:21.240And it really goes back to this ability, can we get people to be able to learn more or discover and create new knowledge?
01:13:29.020And if they're healthy, if they have light, if they have these fundamental physical needs met,
01:13:37.040then they get on these learning curves.
01:13:38.940And the interesting thing about a learning curve is whenever you double the output of something,
01:13:44.600costs per unit fall between 20% and 30%.
01:13:47.240And so, you're really seeing the more we make, the cheaper that we can make them.
01:13:54.260So, we think about how do we actually grow an economy?
01:13:58.920Moore's Law, we refer to that all the time, but it's really a function of quantity.
01:24:40.460And you look at the difference and you can measure those two.
01:24:45.500And our total abundance, that green area, that's 500% larger than it was in 1980.
01:24:51.600So the compound annual growth rate of this population level resource abundance is almost 5% a year.
01:24:59.260And what's interesting about that is you look at the elasticity.
01:25:05.000In other words, if I increase population by 1%, what happens to personal resource abundance?
01:25:10.600And we see there that for every 1% increase in population, your personal resource abundance increased by 3.5%.
01:25:19.080Man, the biologists must just hate you guys, eh?
01:25:22.000Well, here's the deal is once again, the biologists would have been right if they would have considered knowledge as the key unit of measurement instead of atoms.
01:25:45.080Not only can it grow, it can be shared with another person that's not rivalrous.
01:25:49.240In other words, you and I can share the same knowledge.
01:25:51.500So we get this ability to create this substance that we can share with each other that it doesn't, you know, if I have a Snickers bar and I give it to you, I lose it.
01:26:00.160But knowledge doesn't have that feature.
01:26:00.820There was no reason for the biologists to presume, except that they use bad animal analogies, let's say, that the same units of biological activity would necessarily require the same units of cost.
01:26:14.500I mean, so we're not well modeled by yeast and we're not perhaps well modeled by rats because we have this capacity to abstract.
01:26:23.760A good biologist would say, hey, that's a fundamental transformation in the nature of biological reality.
01:26:29.640It's not something that can just be hand waved away.
01:26:32.120And Malthus did not take that into account.
01:26:35.300And that means he was wrong biologically, not just economically.
01:26:39.240And I think, as I said before, the evolution of the prefrontal cortex is a good exemplar of that.
01:26:44.640A perfect example of the difference between atoms, which are finite, and knowledge, which is potentially infinite, is the most expensive car in the world called Bugatti Veyron.
01:26:58.480It costs $18 million when you drive it out of the dealership.
01:27:04.120When you then smash it into a wall, it is a heap of plastic and metal worth maybe tens of thousands of dollars.
01:27:15.320The amount of atoms is the same, but they've been rearranged in a less pleasant way, which makes the difference between an $18 million car and a scrap of heap.
01:27:29.020That's the difference between talking about atoms and their finite nature and knowledge, which can then recreate and which can arrange and rearrange them.
01:27:42.020And what you're doing there, too, is offering a real criticism of even the notion, certainly the overuse of the notion of zero-sum game.
01:27:51.460It's like, no, no, things aren't finite the way that you've been conceptualizing finite, because it doesn't matter, it matters how much stuff there is, but it matters even more how the stuff is organized.
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01:33:29.340And so I think the proper perspective, come up with the proper way to measure,
01:33:34.460and then use the proper perspective will give you this completely different picture about where we've come to and the potential going forward.
01:33:43.500Yeah, you guys must be pretty damn thrilled about this book, eh?
01:33:48.740But I think that playing off of something that Gail said about your rule number four is that,
01:33:56.160you see, I think that if you compare yourself to other people today or, you know, sort of utopian future where everything is working optimally for everyone,
01:34:06.760everywhere at all times, then that can only lead to envy and resentment.
01:34:12.760Whereas if you compare your life today in a civilized society to life before, you end up with a different emotion, which is one of gratitude.
01:34:23.220And I think that what is so fundamentally, what is very problematic is that so many people in the world are either resentful or envious rather than grateful for the extraordinary achievement that humanity has made already.
01:34:42.760Well, let's, that brings us, perhaps, if we're ready to go past part two to part three, which was, well, you, you, one of the chapters there, I think it's chapter 10.
01:34:51.640Let me just get back to the table of contents here.
01:34:54.060Well, first of all, so, do you guys, do you have any thoughts on why people would be, I mean, are people opposed to these ideas?
01:35:15.220Do they think you're wrong about what you're saying?
01:35:18.180Do they, what kind of criticisms are you attracting?
01:35:24.320We're here to ask you that question, Dr. Peterson, psychologist.
01:35:28.740Yeah, well, I think, yeah, well, I think, I think, I think that Marion did a reasonable job just in, in the, in the conversation fragments a few seconds earlier.
01:35:40.580Um, misplaced envy is a really big problem.