https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XUPBSRs067w
We have no sense of how many people we’ve lifted out of poverty. So over the last 25 years, it’s in the order of almost a billion people. So every year for the last 25 years, we could have had a headline in every paper in the world, everywhere around telling us yesterday, 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty. How come you never hear that? That’s just an astoundingly amazing thing. And yes, there are still many problems. Yes, there are still many poor people. But the fact is, 200 years ago, we used to be almost all extremely poor. There was a few royalty on that. And then it was 90, 95% of all of us had what is typically known as a dollar a day, but it’s really 2.50 now. But the fundamental point is we were incredibly poor. Now we have less than 10% that are extremely poor. That’s still a problem. We should still help them. And there’s a lot of ways we can do that. But that is one of those many stories that you don’t hear because yeah, it doesn’t generate clicks. Yeah, well, part of it, part of it, and it’s a deep psychological problem too, is that we are structured psychologically so that the negative has more impact than the positive does. And so, and that’s a very difficult bias to work against when you’re in a situation where you might be making the case that the positive should be what’s predominating. It’s like, well, fair enough, but that isn’t exactly how we’re wired. And I suppose that’s why, because we can be 100% dead, but only so happy. And so it, right, it’s conservative in some sense, and I don’t mean politically, to be a little more hyper alert to the negative than to the positive. But that’s a tough thing to fight against when the negative can grab attention, especially when it’s blown up to apocalyptic proportions. Okay, so there’s a couple of other things I wanted to delve into there too. So there’s this psychologist, Jean Piaget, and Piaget is very interested in ethical development and cognitive development. He developed a stage theory of human cognitive and moral development across time. And the last stage in his sequence of cognitive slash ethical transformations was the messianic stage. And not everyone hits that, but more philosophically sophisticated young people pass through something approximating a messianic stage. And it occurs somewhere between the ages of 16 and 21, which by the way is the right stage of life to bring young men into the military if you’re gonna do it effectively. Like there’s a whole radical process of neuronal pruning that takes place between age 16 and 21. That’s analogous to what happens between the ages of two and four. It’s almost as if at that point, you die into your adult configuration, right? So because you’re paired down to what is only gonna work for your environment. Okay, so now one of the psychological consequences of that is that when young people are in this stage of development and they’re looking for how to separate themselves from their parents and to maybe even move beyond the narrow confines of their immediate friendship group, they’re trying to catalyze their identity with a broader social mission. And in archaic societies, that step would be catalyzed by something like an initiation ritual where the old personality is symbolically destroyed, put to death, that accounts for some of the torturous elements of the initiation ceremonies. And then the new man, because the initiation ceremonies tend to be more intense for boys, the new man is brought into being as a cultural entity. And then he’s aligned with the mission and purpose, let’s say of the tribal unit. It’s something like that. Well, right now, I think the radical leftists on the environmental side have been very good at capitalizing on those urges because what they offer to young people is this, but it’s pathological in some real sense because it’s a shortcut to messianic moral virtue. So the idea would be, well, there is an apocalypse. We need to save the virginal planet. So there’s a bit of a St. George thing going on there to protect the virgin, let’s say. And the way to do this is to become something approximating an activist who’s dead set against the evil patriarchy and the predatory and parasitical individual. And you can understand why that’s attractive because it does offer young people a grand vision. They’re now protectors of the planet. They’re participating in something that’s beyond themselves. But the problem with it is that it’s an invitation to a very one-side story, and it’s got this terribly destructive anti-human element. And so, well, I’m curious about what you think about that. I think it’s a very good metaphor for how the world and in many ways have come to work. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a very sort of stimulating and very easy message to fall into. The world is terrible, but here’s how we can help. And the story very easily become, I’m gonna help by cutting tons of CO2. Now, again, I bring my data points to this. And so I think there’s two parts of it. I mean, first of all, I think we should recognize it’s wonderful that young people, and really everyone wants to do good. We should encourage that. That’s wonderful. And again, it’s part of the fact that we’re now well off, that we can stop worrying where’s our next meal coming from, and then we can start thinking about, so how are we gonna help the world? But the reality is that when we’re being told this, it’s the end of the world, and hence this is the only thing that matters, we’re very likely to make very poor decisions. If it was true, if there was a meteor hurtling towards earth, the only thing that mattered, and it was gonna sort of wipe out the whole world, the only thing that matters was to get this, the space shuttle, the whatever, the starship or whatever, up there and deflect it. That’s what we should be focused on. But that’s not the right metaphor for climate change. It’s a problem. And it’s a problem that we, in many ways, as we saw with that statistic I told you on before, the fact that we’ve seen dramatically declining levels of people dying from climate related disasters, because we can actually adapt to much of this and because we can predict it, we can make sure that people become more safe from these things, it’s not the end of the world, it is a problem. And saying this is the only problem makes us very likely to make really poor decisions because we only focus on this and forget all the other. Let me just, one other thing. So I think there’s two points to it. One is that thinking it’s the end of the world and thinking this is the only problem make you forget all the other problems. But also when you look at them, what are the solutions that are typically offered? They’re terribly inefficient. So they will typically involve something along the lines of saying, I’m gonna forego driving my car, which will at best have virtually no impact. It’s not that, please do it if it makes you feel good especially if it works into your plans, but it’s not how you solve the world. And people will talk about going vegetarian. Again, great thing, I’m vegetarian, but it’s not going to save the world. You need to get a sense of proportion. Most of the things that people talk about are small fractions of what it’ll actually take. And what they’re really suggesting and what everybody’s now talking about is this net zero idea that we need to cut all carbon emissions from all economies by 2050, this would be enormously costly and also terribly, terribly fatal for many countries, especially the poorer countries, who basically keep alive by having lots and lots of access to fossil fuels. One way of just seeing that is right now, half the world’s population survive on nitrogen that comes from fertilizer, that comes from natural gas. We have no way of knowing how we could possibly get enough nitrogen to feed most of the world if we went to net zero. We saw a small example of that, it was a very badly performed example in Sri Lanka, but still it’s worthwhile to point out. You cannot actually feed most of the people on the planet if you want to go organic and go net zero right now. And that tells you a story because as Norman Bollock loved to point out one of the Nobel laureates that actually helped save a billion people. So he said, I look around the world and I don’t see four billion people willing to give up their lives. So there’s no four billion volunteers to say, all right, I’m not gonna be here. We need to be realistic about this and say, the current solution is often very counterproductive. So stop believing it’s the only problem.