https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VIANLddo-ec
Hello. If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore. This new book, Beyond Order, provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 Rules for Life and before that Maps of Meaning. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased to have with me today Dr. Marion L. Tupi, who is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co-author of the Simon Project. He specializes in globalization and the study of global well-being, as well as the politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. His work has been published or featured in major print and non-print media outlets all throughout world. Dr. Tupi received his BA in International Relations and Classics from the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain. He is the co-author of a recent book, Ten Global Trends that Every Smart Person Needs to Know and Many Other Trends You Will Find Interesting. It’s a beautiful book, and so that’s an accomplishment in and of itself. It’s also an extremely interesting book, wide ranging and necessary in my estimation, partly because most of what we consume in relationship to global occurrences, economic and otherwise, is negative. That’s part of the reason that I wanted to talk to Dr. Tupi today, because his work is in the same vein as Bjorn Lomborg’s work and Matt Ridley’s work, among other people. Putting forward, Steven Pinker, putting forward a narrative of continued and rapid progress that seems at odds in terms of content and psychologically with virtually everything that seems to make up the major media trend, story, zeitgeist. So, welcome, Dr. Tupi. Marion, it’s really good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. I’m delighted to be with you and welcome back. It’s great to have you back in the fight, so to speak. Thank you. I was really struck to begin with by your introduction. You talked about why you and Ronald Bailey wrote this book. And so let’s start with that. What were your motivations? What did you want to accomplish with this book? And what do you think it does accomplish? Well, fundamentally, the reality of the world, the reality of human existence, is much better than people understand, let alone appreciate. Most people assume that the world is in a much worse shape than it really is. But the data points in a different direction. It points in the opposite direction. When you look at long-term trends, and we will talk about some of them, most of them are pointing to gradual incremental long-term improvement. Now, on top of that, we live in a world where a lot of people find meaning and excitement in embracing a lot of movements to quote unquote improve the world. But you cannot improve the world if you don’t know what the reality of the world is. And so if you think the reality of human existence is different from what it really is, then your improvement can actually detract from human flourishing rather than contribute to it. So the idea behind the book was to inform, and it is not really an attempt to produce a polyanish, all-optimistic view on the world. Clearly, there are problems that remain, and there will be new problems that will arise. But we believe there is some value in people knowing the facts, factfulness that Hans Rosling used to talk about. And the book is largely free of theory. It is only facts that we have gotten from third parties, with one exception of a trend on natural resources that we will discuss. Everything else comes from third sources, which are the World Bank, the IMF, Eurostat, OECD, or well-established independent and creditable academics. And of course, there are footnotes so that people can check that we are not trying to deceive them into anything. And the reason why we structured the book we did, the reason why we introduced a lot of nice illustrations, is because we wanted to be a coffee table book of facts. So in addition to all the architecture books and books about dogs and cooking that people put on their dining room tables or living room tables, we are hoping that they will include this book. And so whilst people are fixing food or drinks, maybe their guests are going to open the book and look at something interesting or counterintuitive, and maybe that will lead to a conversation. Well, it’s a book you can sit and read, which is what I did, but it’s also clearly a book that you can leaf through. And it is, as I mentioned earlier, beautiful. So that’s an additional advantage. It’s a very high quality book, and that’s a nice accompaniment to its essentially optimistic message. I found it interesting overall, and also bit by bit. You said 10Glo, it’s laid out in sort of increasing resolution. So you start with the narrative that there are reasons to be radically optimistic about the future, especially when you compare that future to the past, rather than some hypothetical ideal. At the lowest possible level of resolution, the most general level of resolution, there’s reasons to be optimistic. You lay out 10 reasons that are really profound, but then you differentiate into a more detailed analysis. And I found that the details as interesting as the global trends. And it’s really something to be confronted by something like an unending stream of positive information. And one thing that I guess two questions sort of naturally arise out of that is why should people believe this positive narrative that you’re putting forward, given the undeniable negativity that seems to be part of our current view of the world are speaking broadly, and also seems to be something that’s constantly pushed in front of us or consumed by us or demanded by us? Why should we believe that that’s wrong? Well, partly because I think that the most obvious reason is that people shouldn’t believe lies and they shouldn’t believe wrong stuff. People should be well informed about all sorts of things. They should be aware of risks and benefits of individual actions, of what different politicians are offering. In other words, people should seek facts regardless of the negativity biases which we have in our brains. So, you know, as you well know, being a psychologist, a lot of research has been done on these negativity biases. Why do people prefer to believe the bad news? And one of the reasons is that the bad is stronger than good. It has more emotional impact. It’s more memorable as well. Precisely. The way I like to think about it is that when I have my annual review with my boss, you know, he can spend 90% of the time telling me about the things that I’ve done right, which is always appreciated, and then also mention some of the things that I have done wrong and there are always many. And when I walk out of the interview or the review, the only thing that’s in my mind is always the criticism and never the praise. And I think that this is sort of, this applies to a lot of people, is that they focus on the slights, the criticisms, rather than the praise. I think you see that with people’s use of social media too. If I scan comments on any given YouTube discussion like this one, it’s definitely the case that the negative comments stick out and are memorable compared to the positive comments. I mean, I think there is an impact of proportion. So if I see that the vast majority are positive and a small minority are negative, I can discount the negative to some degree, but it still has a disproportionate impact. I’ve thought often that’s because you can be in extreme pain and dead, which is pretty damn final. And so negative news carries this walloping potential impact given our susceptibility to threat, but you can only be so happy. You know, it’s not like there’s an infinite amount of happiness that you can be, but there’s certainly a final amount of death and pain that you can experience. Is there any other reasons you think that, like, is it easy rationale for cynicism and nihilism, for throwing your hands up in the air and giving up? I mean, are there other reasons that we’re we seem so hungry to believe the worst? Yes. Before going there, let me just confirm what you said about social media. People who like something that you have posted tend to simply click on the love button or the heart button. It’s people who disagree with you that usually leave the comments saying what a horrible person you are and how bad your ideas are. So that exacerbates the feeling that the feedback is negative. Yeah, it could be on places like Twitter too. And we don’t know this, is that people who are having a bad day and who are angry are much more likely to actually leave a comment or use Twitter for that matter than the same person even who’s having a good day. We just don’t know anything about how these communication technologies, how our emotions affect our use of these communication technologies. And how that’s going to play out in the future. We usually have a certain time that we need in order to accumulate to new technologies. And, you know, we’ll see how this one plays out. But we certainly discovered in use of other technologies that it took some time before we got mastery of them. Cars are a typical example. People used to have many more accidents, used to speed much more, they used to drink before driving. And it took a while before the safety culture set in. And who knows, maybe over time people will leave Facebook or Twitter and switch to something else. I’m proud to be Facebook free since 2012 and I don’t have a personal Twitter for precisely that reason. Well, you do see the emotional tenor of different social media platforms does differ. I mean, I found that Instagram seems to be a much more positive place, all things considered, than Twitter. It’s a little more complex to use, but it seems to be less corrosive. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s more image heavy. I don’t know exactly. Possibly. The other negativity biases that psychologists have identified is, for example, the availability heuristic. As you well know, more dramatic and traumatic events tend to be revisited in our memory with greater frequency than the positive memories. And so we get a sense that they are much more numerous and much more frequent than they really are. Also, positive things happen over much longer periods of time than negative things. It takes years to build a skyscraper, but it takes hours to pull it down in a terrorist attack. It takes years to acquire a lot of human capital through education, but it takes only a second for you to die in a car crash. So a typical example when it comes to global well-being would be something like poverty reduction. As Max Roser from Oxford University pointed out, every day over the last, goodness knows how many decades, 175,000 people have been raised out of poverty every day, out of absolute poverty. But those are not the kinds of headlines that will make it into the newspapers. It’s a threshold issue too. I think they defined absolute poverty as 1.90, 2.05, people have different ones. But around 3 trillion in output. This is all inflation adjusted, so 121 trillion. So from 121 trillion in a scope of 100 years adjusted for inflation. And if the growth that we have experienced, the growth rate that we have experienced over the last 100 years continues into 2100, the world will produce 100 trillion to 5,000 per capita, all of a sudden environmental concerns start to manifest themselves. And so it looks like we could have more people and make them richer faster, and that would be better for the planet. No, that’s absolutely right. The cleanest environment in the world is in advanced countries, in Western capital societies. When you see tremendous attack on the environment is in poor countries. When the Venezuelan economy collapsed, they started eating animals in zoo. In Zimbabwe, when their economy collapsed, they started slaughtering the wildlife. If it’s a choice between killing a giraffe or having my baby die, I know what I have to do, right? But so for the longest time, people thought that if population grows, we are going to run out of resources. And this is not what has happened. We have more resources. Resources are cheaper, but that in itself is an indication that they are more abundant than before. Because of course, human beings are not just consumers of resources, we’re not just destroyers of resources, we’re also creators of resources. Human beings are producers of ideas. Yes, and on average, we produce more than we consume, otherwise we would die. Well, that’s exactly right. And that’s what people like Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University were worried about. They freaked out two generations of people. And we still haven’t recovered from that. It’s still part of our basic apocalyptic narrative. No one believes if I tell my students, we’re going to peak at 9 billion and we can handle that and then the population is going to decline. No one believes that. If you say that, well, we’ve got richer as more people have been born rather than poor because brain power exceeds consumption, essentially, especially as people have got healthier and their IQ has increased, which is something we could talk about as well. None of this is part of the general apocalyptic narrative. No, not only can we get access to new resources, but also we can replace resources which are becoming scarce. So for example, humans used to make candles out of spermaceti, which is this weird sort of stuff in the brains of… Boils. …the oil of fat in the brains of the whales. So we used to murder them by the thousands and we used to scrape out that spermaceti and build it into nice candles. And then we realized that we didn’t have to do that, that it was actually quite expensive and quite stupid because we could produce electricity by burning coal. And then we decided that we can switch from coal to gas and maybe eventually to nuclear and whatever. And so that’s how humanity manages to constantly produce more. It’s through innovation. And in fact, in Western countries today, we have reached peak stuff. This is a book, very important book, which I recommend to your readers by Andrew McAfee, and that is making more from less or more from less. Now, what it means really is that even though the American economy and the British economy continue to grow and produce more GDP per capita in absolute terms, the amount of resources that go into it, be it aluminum or whatever, that has actually peaked off about 10 or 20 years ago and it’s now declining. So we have become so incredibly productive that we can now use much less resources in order to produce more wealth, more GDP. Trend four. Peak population. Peak population. So right now there are 7.8 billion people in the world. It looks like we are going to peak at 9.8 in the 2060s or the 80s, and then it will decline to about 8.8 by the end of this century. Lancet had a study a couple of months ago which showed, again, remember 7.8 billion people in the world today, Lancet thinks that there will be either 6.8 or 8.8 billion people in the world in 2100, but every demographer that I know of expects that human population will peak and then it will start declining. That’s because a total fertility rate, which is to say the number of babies born to a woman, have been on a downward trajectory. So it’s not a very good thing. A lot of women are on a downward trajectory. Currently in the United States, in much of Western Europe, women are having fewer than two babies per woman per lifetime, and in order to have a replacement rate, you need 2.1 babies because some of them die. So population without immigration in Western Europe will continue to decline. Our numbers are still going up because obviously we have huge immigration, but women are not having that many babies. Now is this going to be a blessing or is it going to be a potential problem? Well, it could be a potential problem because human beings are the producers of ideas, and ideas lead to innovation. And if a genius is one out of a billion or one out of a million, then the fewer millions of people you have born, the fewer geniuses are going to be born. And that to me is a major concern, but of course in Western countries, we have promised so much to the future generations that are supposed to be paid for by children who are born in the future, that if those children are not being born, who is going to pay off that debt in the future? Who’s going to pay for all those retirees? Those questions should also be answered. Yes, it’s quite surprising to note that one of the more pressing social problems in 100 years might be that there aren’t enough people rather than there are too many. Could easily be the case. Right, so by then perhaps we’ll have robotics to help us a lot. Yes, and who knows, right? We can’t even think about problems 100 years in the future because it’s going to be so different 100 years from now that nothing we could possibly talk about right now is going to be relevant. God only knows, we don’t have a five-year horizon or a 10-year horizon given the rate of technological change, let alone 100 years. But the moral of this story is it doesn’t look like we’re going to overpopulate the planet to the point where we’re going to destroy all our natural resources, the planet, and everyone’s going to starve. That doesn’t seem to be in the cards, so unless we make catastrophic and likely avoidable errors. That’s correct. All right, next. This is a great headline. The end of famine. So I think it was in Ridley’s book I found his last one, or maybe in The Rational Optimist. Famine was quite widespread in Europe in the 20th century, far more than people generally remember, realize. I mean, Holland went through terrible famines, the Scandinavian countries, and of course in Great Britain in the late 1800s the Irish famine was a spectre that haunted the entire world’s population until extraordinarily recently. And the news on that front is astoundingly positive. No one starves anymore except for political reasons, essentially. So forced starvation, planned starvation, but not accidental. So that’s correct. So in the late 1800s we started understanding agriculture and agricultural productivity much more than before. Not only did we introduce new technologies, better plows and so forth, but we also discovered that guano, which is just bird pooping, bird poop from South America, contained so many nutrients, especially phosphorus, that when it was sprinkled all over the late 19th century agricultural land it could actually increase yield tremendously. And then when we started running out of guano, yet another example of human ingenuity, we started producing synthetic fertilizers full of, I believe, it’s nitrogen and phosphorus and so forth. Now, that wasn’t the last when it came to human ingenuity. We started also toying with the genes of different plants, which led to a new, sturdier, and more productive wheat varieties in the 70s by a man called John Burlough. John Burlough, who saved more people than any other person who ever lived in all likelihood. That’s exactly right. So instead, it’s quite interesting that just as people were starting to be really worried about this population growth, especially in China and India, people immediately started working on the ways to solve the problem. And so, the population bond comes out in 1968, and right about that time, into the early 70s, you had Burlough introducing these new varieties, wheat varieties, into Bangladesh and India and China and elsewhere, and of course food production, skyrockets. India today is a major exporter of food Now these were people who were starving by tens of millions when I was growing up in the 1980s. I remember being terrified by the images of starving people, starving children in East Africa, in the whole of Africa. And now you say this is so unbelievable. The world’s poorest region, sub-Saharan Africa, now enjoys access to food in volumes that are equivalent to Portugal in the 1960s. So now, and that’s a very small amount of time from the 1960s to now, well within living memory of many people. One of the richest countries in the world had the same amount of food per capita as the poorest part of the world does now. Stunning, stunning, absolutely remarkable. That’s right. And so positive, so good. Yeah, so today, access to calories in Africa is roughly 2400 calories per person per day. Now obviously not everybody gets it. There are serious problems in Africa still. You do still have conflict and so forth, and people do get to starve. But the widespread starvation because you couldn’t produce enough food, that doesn’t happen anymore. And that’s obviously a tremendously positive step forward. In fact, many African problems, many African countries are beginning to experience the problem of obesity, especially in urban centers. Now, if somebody told you that 50 years ago, you would have said, you know, you’re high. Great. So the problem in 100 years is that we’re going to have nothing but fat people and there’ll be far too few of them. Yeah. Okay, next one. This is also stunning, shocking, completely unexpected. More, more land for nature. Who would have possibly guessed that? I read something the other day too, when we could comment on this. The Sahara Desert has shrunk by 8% since the turn of the millennium. We’ve greened an additional 10% of the earth’s surface as a consequence. That’s part of the same development and that’s only over the last 20 years, 20 years. And it looks like it’s a consequence of increased carbon dioxide, perversely enough. The Sahara has actually shrunk. So I don’t want to get into the carbon dioxide argument, but this is a whole different issue here. Tree cover loss gain from 1982 to 2016. So comment on that. Yes. I mean, one of the things is that one of the benefits of getting a little bit older, perhaps the only benefit of getting a little bit older is that one gets wiser and one remembers all the stuff that we used to believe and take for granted, which have never happened and which were false. One of them was the expansion of Sahara. In the 1980s, I remember being absolutely terrified that Sahara was going to expand and swallow the globe. As kids, we were taught that as gospel. But Sahara is shrinking. It is also true that there is more foliage, which is more greenery. Plants are producing more foliage because of the CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is for another discussion. But the fact is that it’s the basic fact of living on earth that plants like more CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s their food, which is why Norway grows tomatoes in hot houses that are filled with CO2, precisely because they want them to grow. And so plants like CO2, and foliage is increasing, but also the tree coverage of the world is increasing. I wrote this statistic down, thinking that we might talk about it. Between 1982 and 2016, we have added trees, tree area, the size of Alaska and Montana combined to the world. Now, that’s a pretty big chunk of the world. The United States has 35% more trees than when Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. China, 35%. No, China is 15%. Yeah. Okay. So now I’ve read critiques of this too. When I’ve tweeted this, for example, people say, yes, but we’ve lost a tremendous amount of biodiversity. Much of the new growth is monoculture in contrast to the previous growth. And I suspect that’s not true in some situations and is true in others. I don’t think that’s true of the reforestation of the United States, but I don’t know. Do you know? Well, first of all, compared to what? At the time when industrial revolution started in Great Britain, which was responsible for many of the great things that happened since then, at that time, one of the reasons why they had to switch to coal is because there was no tree left in Britain. I’m exaggerating, but I am not far off. The tree coverage in Britain was just completely diluted of forests over millennia of forest destruction. Remember, trees were not only needed to keep you warm, but to cook your food, to make your furniture, to make your carriages, to make your weaponry. Everything prior to the modern era was based on trees. I’m exaggerating, but not too much. Trees. Now, so compared to what? We have destroyed a lot of, we have destroyed a lot of the natural forest with its original biomass, long time before the industrial revolution, which, by the way, used up coal, not trees. But today, most of our tree usage comes from the new forests, the forests that are planted for the specific purpose of being cut down for lumber, which then builds American and Canadian houses. It is very rare that the sort of wood that you see in the shops or that goes into productive activity actually has originated in the Brazilian rainforest. Right. So I guess the objection would be those aren’t forests, they’re crops. They just happen to be crops of trees. Biodiversity loss is obviously problematic and even potentially catastrophic, but I don’t think that means that you can’t take heart about the fact that much more of the planet is green and there’s a certain amount of reversion to a more natural habitat. Certainly indicated that we’re much more efficient users of resources. We don’t have to take up so much space. And the agricultural revolution also contributed to that to a great degree. That’s human ingenuity again, because we can grow more on less land. And I don’t see that stopping. I think we’re going to get more and more and more efficient at food production. Why would that stop? The market certainly drives us in that direction. And there’s no indication of that slowing as far as I can tell. So three points, I hope I can remember them. One is yes, because of increased agricultural productivity, we are already returning land to nature and we can do so in the future at an increased pace, which means that we are returning land not just to the animals, but we are returning it to nature where the biomass can grow again and where it can reconstitute itself. The second point is that we are also living in a world that has record acreage and square mileage of global territory, which is protected from any kind of interference from humankind. So we have record square mileage of oceans, which are now protected and which cannot be fished in. And we have record square mileage of land, which is protected in national parks or is otherwise excluded from economic activity. The third point that I want, and that comes with wealth, the wealthy countries they are. And stability and political stability, because you don’t need much catastrophe and social breakdown before those national parks and all their animals are going to have everything eaten out of them. A typical example would be Zimbabwe, yes. And the last point I want to make is that we have a problem in Brazil. Brazil has obviously vast rainforests and very ancient forests, which are filled with all sorts of things that we may discover are helpful to us in the future, as well as dangerous. But nonetheless, very few people would say that it’s a good thing to get rid of the Brazilian rainforest. My understanding is, and I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, is that most of it has to do with farming, especially of poor people in Brazil, who burn forests in order to clear the land for agricultural activity. Now, I realize that this point may not necessarily be appreciated by wealthy people in the West, but poverty in developing countries can be very, very bad. In Brazil, there are some pockets of real wealth, but there are also pockets of tremendous poverty. And the more inland you get and the more into the Amazon you get, the poorer the people become. These people, from their perspective and the perspective of their government, should be allowed to earn a living. The way you protect Amazon is to have higher rates of economic growth in Brazil, so that those people start moving away from the Amazon. They start moving to cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and others, and they start working there, in the factories, in the service industry, and they no longer have to burn forests in order to plant food so they don’t starve. Number seven, trend seven, planet city. Urbanization, which you also regard and describe as a net positive. Well, you certainly get the synergistic effect of bringing them together, right? I mean, look at San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, the urbanization of a genius population produces an incredible amount of innovation. So urbanization, everyone’s moving to the cities. Yeah, I think that right now we have about 55% of humanity living in the cities already. So again, all those people are obviously not living on land, which is a good thing. You remember Paul Pot, right? Cities are parasites on the countryside and should be eradicated. Well, that turned out to be spectacularly wrong in every possible way, as well as murderous. So it’s a good thing for people to leave their rural environments and move to the city. Good thing, all things concerned. So sorry, continue. No, no, no, I think Paul Pot, yeah. I mean, didn’t he also shoot all people with spectacles because they were intellectuals? Oh, yeah. He was trained at the Sorbonne. Okay, right. Say no more. But I think it still holds the record for most people killed as a share of the population. I think he managed to kill what, one third or one quarter of the population in four years? I don’t think anybody has done that, even even Mao. It’s a hell of a record to hold. And it’s quite appalling that he was trained in the West. It’s stunningly appalling. So, okay, back to urbanization. I feel that we have bashed the French enough here. Maybe not enough. But anyway, the, so, yes, there are the network and synergetic effects that people living close together and exchanging ideas and similar companies existing next to each other, communicating and so forth, generates more economic growth. And look, the historical record is absolutely clear. Cities have been the drivers of progress, whether it is Amsterdam in the 17th century or London, sorry, 18th century or London in 19th century, New York in the 20th century. That’s where stuff happened, not just in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of culture and things like that. 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, long distances. So, people consume less energy in cities per capita. And that’s again a good thing, I think. And is that controlling for agricultural productivity even? Do you know? I don’t know. I think CO2, I think CO2 emissions and energy consumption is smaller in the cities than it is in the rural areas. But that’s all I remember from that particular passage. Okay. Okay. Trend eight, democracy on the march. Now to the graph of autocracies versus democracies. So, this particular chart is controversial one, partly because it keeps on the same pattern. You know, partly because it keeps on changing in directions which we may not necessarily appreciate. It is undeniable that the world is most democratic than—the last decade in the world has been most democratic than at any time before. In the last few years, we have seen weakening of democracy. We have seen some countries which have turned away from democracy to dictatorship, such as, for example, Russia. You know, there are some authoritarian tendencies, even in Europe, in places like Hungary. Nonetheless, greater share of humanity lives under a democratic regime than, say, in 30 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago, and so forth. And the big wave of democratization really happens after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and, of course, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After that, you see, basically, before then, there were more autocracies than democracies in the world. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, you had all of these newly independent countries turn democratic. There was some slight back in in some of them, but by and large, democracy has held in Central Europe, in Eastern Europe, even in parts of Southern Europe. So there is more democracy around. And, you know, the future of democracy is by no means assured. We are seeing some very troubling signs on the horizon, but democracy is not in full flight just because, you know, Russia stopped being a moderate democracy. Well, I would say, you know, and even the Russians know this, despite their autocratic system, there isn’t an intellectual or moral contender of any import. I mean, democracies might degenerate into dictatorships, but there isn’t an ethos of authoritarianism. There isn’t an ethos that’s well developed intellectually, philosophically, or practically to what to compete with democracy. So I mean, the Chinese can claim that their system is more efficient. It’s like, well, maybe for short periods of time now and then, but seems highly unlikely. When as the as China became more free, economically, it became richer, they say, well, we can get along, we can get away with not being free across the board. But I suspect that that’s probably just wrong is that we’re going to see that as a as a comparatively fatal flaw over the next 30 or 40 years. So but I mean, what do you argue if you’re if you’re not a liberal Democrat, you know, in the whole broad sense, ranging from democratic socialist to ultra conservative, let’s say, but within the democratic spectrum? Well, what’s outside of that that’s credible intellectually, an alternative system? I don’t see anything. Russia has a peculiar combination of nationalism and Russian orthodoxy. Now that cannot be obviously exported to other countries in the world. It has no purchase on Africa, for example, or Latin America. China is an interesting example. They certainly do argue that their system is superior. But I think that the shine has been coming off the Chinese model recently with the well, it got a lot more superior when it got a lot more capitalist, it got a lot more superior, they obviously are able to generate a lot of wealth. They also have a lot more people. But they’re still on average, an average Chinese is much poorer than an average American is just that they are dealing with 1.4 billion people. But but by letting them be freer, not perhaps politically, but economically, the the the Chinese economic institutions stopped being super extractive, and they became more inclusive. And people could function within them and produce wealth and keep it and nobody was coming to take it away from them, at least not with the typical regularity of a totalitarian regime, they were able to build a very prosperous country. But the shine is coming off not only because of the way that the Chinese have lied about Corona, but also because the Chinese are involved in tremendous human rights abuses in in against the Uyghurs, Uyghurs and places like that. It’s very difficult for any aspiring dictator in Africa, Latin America or Europe, for that matter to say, you know, China is the model. If the immediate retort is aside from those concentration camps, how about that? Explain that you? Well, there is their support for North Korea too, which we should never forget. And that which is a regime so rotten that it beggars the imagination. So appalling, inexcusable in every possible way. And the final point I want to make about China is that really, it is now that China will have to show the merit of its own system. Because it is one thing to replicate, to replicate, say, railways, the building of railways and bridges and things like that. It is one thing. When you have the benefit of the technology that’s already developed and what you’re doing is picking low hanging fruit. That’s exactly right. Whereas now China has to prove that it can not only mimic, but it can actually produce new ideas that it can innovate. And you don’t have innovation in country which doesn’t have freedom of speech, which doesn’t have free exchange of ideas and the ability to criticize. Now, there are specific sectors where freedom of speech can be allowed. So, for example, the Soviet nuclear and rocket sciences were allowed a great deal of experimentation and internal discussions because obviously the Soviet Union was trying to build as many nuclear rockets as it possibly could. But if you want to produce better products, better production processes, new innovations on a mass sort of societal scale, you have to have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of communication. And China doesn’t have it. Because of course, the color of the freedom of innovation is that people would be talking about ideas that the Chinese government doesn’t want them to talk about. Yeah. Well, and if you’re going to have a bunch of people who are talking about ideas and they’re going to be really good at it, they’re pretty much nothing can be off limits. If you get a bunch of creative people together and they’re really being creative, they have to be able to talk about anything. Otherwise, their creativity gets squelched and it’s easy to squelch the creativity in some sense. And also, I think that creative types are usually people who are on a broad spectrum of autism and disagreeability. And you very often see it in Silicon Valley, but some research seems to be showing that. And these are the sorts of people who are going to not hold back. These are the sorts of people who are going to tell whatever springs to their mind. Now, if you’re going to put people who are disagreeable and who speak their minds because of the particular traits of their psychology, if you’re going to put all of them to jail because they call chairman she an idiot, then you’re going to run out of innovative people very soon. Yeah, I’m not so much sure that the disagreeable element there is useful for creativity. There’s not a lot of evidence for that, but it might be useful for implementation of creative ideas. So when I mentioned this, this is very interesting. I would like to hear your view on that. When I mean disagreeability, isn’t it the ability to say, screw you all, I know I’m right in my ideas and I’m going to pursue my research wherever it’s going to lead me? Isn’t that important? Well, that’s what I mean by implementation. No, like if you look at it from a personality perspective, openness, the trait is the one that governs creativity and it isn’t associated with agreeableness to any great degree there. They’re pretty orthogonal. But the issue of to what degree you need to be disagreeable to implement effectively, that’s a different story. And I don’t think that data are in on that yet. Anyways, let’s go on. Let’s go on to the next one. Let’s go on to the long piece, because that’s also extraordinarily important. So long piece basically means is that there are fewer conflicts in since the end of the Second World War, the long term trends seems to be toward greater peace. We certainly no longer have countries declaring war on each other, sending armies across borders to slaughter. That seems to have almost disappeared completely. If I remember correctly, the last country to declare war was the United States on North Korea. I could be wrong on that. But I think I would love for that to be checked. And maybe you can put a disclaimer on your video that I got it completely wrong. But I actually think that happened anyway. The so that no longer happens now. Countries still invade other countries. Like for example, Russia invaded Ukraine, the little green men who took Crimea. But I think it says something that even governments that still do these sorts of things do not declare war publicly, because they are afraid of how humanity would react to that kind of activity. And so most of the conflicts today, in fact, all conflicts usually tend to be ethnic and civil wars, but they are not really conflicts between countries. Wars have become less deadly. They are smaller and less deadly. But please remember, this doesn’t mean that the past performance suggests future success. The world is still filled with nuclear weapons. And so- But it also seems even on that front, it seems like certainly people are much less convinced that nuclear weapons will be used purposefully, especially in a mass annihilation, then throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. So the nuclear weapons are still there. There’s far fewer of them. But imminent war between Russia and the United States certainly doesn’t seem probable in the same manner that it did for that entire Cold War period up till the demise of the Soviet Union. That’s right. I mean, we are down from 40,000 nuclear warheads per super power down to about 3000. I’m more worried about nuclear, about, sorry, about accidental- Yes, terrorism. That sort of thing. So that’s what really worries me much more. But that’s a better worry in some sense than all out mass annihilation. Well, ideally, I mean, you have a lot of smart people who are watching your podcast and ideally, it could be calculated how many nukes would have to go off of what strength in order for there not to be the end of humanity. In other words, what is the maximum? And if we could convince the international powers to bring the total maximum number of warheads and their strength below that level while still being distributed amongst nuclear powers, then we could decrease that danger even more. I wonder if that would decrease the… I mean, one of the things I’ve thought reasonably frequently, although I’m not convinced of it, is that nuclear war is so terrifying that it’s actually made us more peaceful, like that terrible threats like the fist of God, there’s some places we just can’t go anywhere and more and people so far, thank God, have been, seemed unwilling to go there. So the terrible threat may have had benefits. Yeah, there’s a whole branch of international relations, study of international relations, which argues precisely for that. You’re not alone. There are people supporting your view. There are people supporting your view. But unfortunately, nuclear power, nuclear weapons cannot be unlearned. And so I’m afraid we are stuck with them. 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. That’s just for another day. The last one, trend 10, a safer world. And this is death from natural disasters. Right. So this particular subject can be looked at from a number of angles. One is that we are in this time of panic about existential threats to humanity from climate change and from the environment. And yet in the last 100 years, the number of people who have died due to natural disasters has shrunk by 99%. The two are incompatible. If we are moving to a world where millions of people are going to be destroyed by, you know, oceans rising or crop failure, 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? And the answer seems to be that partly we are richer and therefore we are able to build more sturdy dwellings. But we are also more technologically savvy so that we can predict where a hurricane is going to strike and exactly when so that people can escape from the path of destruction. 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. And we’re going to get better and better at all of that. And we are going to get better and better at it. Yeah. So we’re richer by far in terms of productivity and quality of products and absolute poverty has declined precipitously. Commodity prices have fallen. We’re not going to overpopulate the world in any cataclysmic sense. Everyone has increasingly more than enough to eat. There’s more land for nature and that trend seems upward. More people are moving to urban areas and that’s advantageous rather than disadvantageous. There are more democracies and so we’re better governed. We’re more peaceful and we’re less likely to die from catastrophes. And I should point out to everyone who’s listening, that really only scrapes the surface of the topics that are covered in this remarkable book. As I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, the authors delve into comparatively micro trends in detail, discussing such things which I would love to discuss and perhaps we should continue this at some point in the not too distant future. Such things as the precipitous decline in computational power and that’s in its infancy, access to electricity. You mean computational price of computation? Yeah. Yes, yes. Well and pure power and accessibility and mobile technology and lighting costs and decline in the cost of renewable resources and clean drinking water and better sanitation. And I’m just leafing through the book internet access and so that’s education and that will get better and better. But other than that. Yeah so let’s close out with this. I’ve done three podcasts I think in the last couple of months that were aimed at bringing this information to a broader audience. There seems to some degree to be a salability issue or maybe it’s just too soon. Like all this good news in some sense is relatively recent and the word may just not have spread. Any ideas about what could be done to counter the pessimistic and apocalyptic narratives that seem to dominate the public landscape? Well you’re doing it right now by interviewing me. I’m doing it by having this website which is made all the more useful by the fact that we didn’t come up with this data. It’s freely available on many different platforms around the world. If you think that I’m full of it, go to our world in data, go to the world bank, go to the IMF, go to Eurostat. If you are interested in the state of the world there is plenty of data out there that can show you that the state of the world is much better than it is. Secondly, and I’m wondering if this is even possible, but secondly what if people start understanding more about their biases, about how they perceive the world? This is obviously done in colleges and universities, in psychology courses as well as in biology courses and things like that, but it’s not as though human beings are incapable of changing their worldview based on evidence. We no longer believe that a sacrifice of a little child will produce better harvest. So we’ve learned that lesson. We no longer believe that throwing a virgin into a volcano is going to give us a military success. We no longer believe in all sorts of things that we have taken for granted. In other words, we have shown that we are capable of learning and learning from evidence. We have internalized that focusing on irrigation and fertilization is a better way to produce food than prayer. 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. What do you think about that? Well, I’m listening and I’m thinking it through. I’m also wondering, I would say that learning this material has lifted some of the existential weight from me. Things aren’t as bad as they’re trumpeted to be. In fact, they’re quite a bit better and they’re getting better. We’re doing a better job than we thought. There’s more to us than we thought. We’re adopting our responsibilities as stewards of the planet rapidly. We are moving towards improving everyone’s life. I lived under an apocalyptic shadow my whole life. 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. But the apocalyptic narrative was still extraordinarily powerful and demoralizing. It looks to me that there are reasons to doubt its validity on all sorts of dimensions. 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 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. Well, that’s not happening. That’s not happening and people who push that agenda in the newspapers and elsewhere are completely irresponsible and cruel. But that leads to perhaps the final point from my end. Like you, I have become much more optimistic, much more happy in my own personal life once I realized that so much around me I didn’t have a right to complain about and I should be grateful for. I should be grateful for that I’m not a peasant in the 17th century. And appreciative of what’s brought us here. And that’s the key. People who do not understand the crucial role that political and economic liberalization, opening, inclusion has played in launching the industrial revolution, showing us the path, the rest of the world, a path to prosperity. If they don’t understand that everything we have is underpinned by a certain economic and political system, both of them terribly imperfect, terribly imperfect. But look at the alternative. Look at the difference between Chile, the extraordinary success of that country after it embraced free markets and the collapse of Venezuela where people eat cats and dogs. Look at the difference between Botswana, which is a relatively free economy, and its neighbor, Zimbabwe, where people have experienced hyperinflation of 96 trillion percent. Look at the difference between East and West Germany, between the United States and the USSR. Look at the difference between North and South Korea. If you, really, you just called it the worst possible regime in the world, I think you’re right on that. I’m pretty sure you’re right on that. And that regime is still out there. If you have a problem with liberal democracy and competitive enterprise, fix those problems incrementally, one by one. Don’t burn down the system because the alternatives, as you can see in the world, are much worse. That is a great place to end. Thank you very much. And I’m, there’s so many more things we could talk about, and hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to do exactly that. Some of the micro analysis because there are comparative micro analysis because there’s so much data in this book that’s fascinating. It’s an endless source of optimistic revelation that’s also realistic. And so I hope many people buy it and put it on their coffee table and share it with their friends and lift some of the unnecessary burden of human shame and guilt from their shoulders. Well, I’m grateful for that, for those kind words about my book. I’m deeply grateful to you for having me on your show, and I’m delighted that you’re doing well, and hopefully we’ll be doing even better in the future.