Superabundance： The Age of Plenty ｜ Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley ｜ EP 284 (6iC_hY4qhyk)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6iC_hY4qhyk

It’s very difficult, I think, for modern young people in particular to really understand how poor people were. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The best example I like to use is the sugar example. And 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? I’d love to survey my students on this. And they’ll say, oh, like, two pounds or four pounds, you get 227 pounds. It might explain why we’re all so fat is because sugars become just tremendously abundant. Hello, everyone, I have with me today. A guest I’ve had on before Dr. Marian Tupi and a new guest, his co-author at the moment of a new book called 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. Marian has talked to me before, particularly about his book, 10 global trends every smart person should know, and many others you will find interesting. That was published in 2020. Marian is the editor of humanprogress.org, which is a very good site. And I retweet them quite consistently. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and the co-author of the Simon Abundance Index, which we will talk about to some degree today. He specializes in globalization, study of globalization and global well-being and politics and the economics of Europe and southern Africa. Dr. Gail Pooley is associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. He’s taught economics and statistics at Al-Faisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Brigham Young in Idaho, a Boise State University in the College of Idaho. He earned his BBA in economics and Boise State, did graduate work at Montana State, completed his PhD at the University of Idaho. He’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, Super Abundance, which is a lot different than Apocalyptic Doom, as I pointed out. Both of doctors, Tupi and Gail, have published widely in the public domain as well as professionally in outlets like Financial Times, the National Review, the particularly evil journal, Quillette, Forbes, the American Spectator, the Washington Post, etc. Many of your, what would you call them, traditional suspects or usual suspects. So anyways, we’re going to talk about this new book today, Super Abundance, a three part, 10 chapter analysis of why, strangely enough, things seem to be a lot better than we think and perhaps better than they ever were. And although we’re more concerned about it than we ever seem to have been before. So welcome, gentlemen. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me and congratulations on your new book. Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be with you. Yeah, so let’s let’s start with Super Abundance. I don’t know whether to start with with Julian Simon’s famous bet. That’s not a it’s kind of a nice narrative entry point. I think that’s that’s right. Yeah. All right. Well, so why don’t you why don’t you outline for our listeners and viewers the nature of this famous bet, why it was made and what it what its broader cultural significance was? Because it was really a watershed bet, I think, in many ways. Well, so in the post Second World War era, global populations started to grow at a much faster rate than before, partly because of tremendous amount of medical and scientific knowledge that started to spread around the world. Babies started to, you know, fewer babies started to die, young people started to grow along, grow older and so forth. And some people started to freak out about it. They thought that there was going to be too many people in the world. And consequently, we were going to run out of resources. Prices of resources were going to go sky high and there would be mass starvation. Now, the man who brought this particular obsession or potential problem into the public sphere was Paul Ehrlich, who still is alive. He’s a biologist at Stanford University and in 1968 still causing trouble, still causing trouble. Still to. Yeah. And in 1968, he wrote an extremely popular books book which sold millions of copies called The Population Bomb. And The Population Bomb started in a sort of very terrifying language that we have become accustomed to from extreme environmentalists over the decades. And 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. In fact, none of that happened. Nonetheless, Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, scared and scarred psychologically generations of people. Movies had been made about how the world was going to run out of resources and end in a catastrophe. One of the more famous ones was with Charlton Heston. It was called Soylent Green. And 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. And the basic premise of the book was that the world was completely empty of food. And 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. So on the other side. So 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. And it’s sort of a yeast or rat model of human existence. So if you have a colony of yeast and you 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, provide them with the preconditions for the multiplication, their population will expand until they consume all the available resources and then it will precipitate, precipitously collapse in starvation. And people tried similar, although less simple experiments with rats showing similar behavior. And then I would say documented similar phenomena in the field. I 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. And 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. And then they will tend to precipitously collapse. And then that was applied to the human condition. But the as we see from the rest of your story, the economists objected to this. Yes. So the view that you just described is particularly popular amongst biologists. Economists don’t think like that because they recognize that human beings are fundamentally different from rats or deer or rabbits or whatever else. Or yeast. Or yeast. We 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. So on the other side of the country, early, as I said, was in Stanford in California. On the other side of the country in 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. Therefore, in 1980, he made a bet with Paul Ehrlich and the bet was on the price of five commodities. Let me see if I can remember them. The bet was on the price of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. And the deal was as such. If 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. But if they became cheaper, then Ehrlich would pay Simon. Well, the bet came to an end in 1990, September 29, 1990, and 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. And in spite of the fact that they both agreed that that would be the basket they would bet on. Actually Ehrlich picked the basket. Yes, Simon was Simon was generous enough. He said, Paul Ehrlich, pick any five commodities or any any five commodities you want. And those were the ones that Ehrlich picked. Well, what’s so interesting about that, I think, well, there’s many, many things that are interesting about it. But 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. You 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. It’s like, well, what do you mean? You mean a year, 10 years, 100, 1000, 10,000, 150,000, a million. You mean you get to have the whole time frame for you to be right or 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. And 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. It isn’t that we’re wrong. It’s just that these things are complex and our time frame was wrong. It’s like, yeah, if your time frame is wrong, then your theory is wrong. And if you can’t place a time frame around it, then your theory is so weak that you should just be quiet about it. And I think the same thing applies to all this climate doom as well. It’s like specify it. Well, we can’t. It’s too complex. Well, then quit terrifying everyone. You 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. And so putting money on the table, you know, also added this really interesting dimension to it is not only is it framed in time, it’s framed with with a bet. So got to hold this guy accountable for his for his claim, some skin in the game. Well, and then there is a reputational issue, too, right, because it was a very public bet. And it was it wasn’t so famous when they first made it. But 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. Paul Ehrlich’s pretty smart biologist, but Julian Simon was a genius. And so that’s useful for people to know, too. I mean, he was a truly outstanding mind. And 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 it might mean it just and environmental degradation. And all of that was that 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. And 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 be set as in the next hundred years is depopulation, which I happen to believe is true. I also think he’s dead on with his criticisms about the UN’s population predictions. I think the UN predictions are there. There’s no evidence they’re accurate at all. And even if they are, we can handle the nine to 10 billion people that will probably peek out at United Nations has been historically quite the numbers have have have not stood the time. The test of time. There are other demographers demographers in the world who have done a better job at predicting where the world population is going to be. And the latest bit on this is in Lancet, which predicts that by the year 2100, we are either going to have nine billion people in the world. We are currently on eight or seven billion people in the world. So, 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. Obviously, the further out in the future you go, the less clear those predictions are. But there is another thing that I want to mention about Julian Simon, because you expressed an interest in learning a little more about him. It wasn’t just that he was right, but he was facing a lot of personal invective from from the great and the good. 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. Ehrlich continued to receive throughout his life a variety of very prestigious academic prizes. Only recently he was invited to Vatican, Vatican of all places to give a talk on the danger of overpopulation. That was like three years ago. So in spite of being well, you know, you don’t want to have too many souls to save. So in spite of being wrong all the time, he just keeps on being highly, highly revered. 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. But the key that I wanted 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. Yes, environmental movement is incredibly complex. There are people who are extremely smart and well-intentioned, like, for example, Lomborg or Steven Pinker. They mean well. They are interested in technological solutions to climate problems. And I count myself in that kind of sort of universe. But there is an extremist environmentalist subtext or subgroup in environmentalism who have these apocalyptic obsessions. So, for example, and this gets translated into the movies, which billions of people see around the world. In 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. The Earth is getting richer, healthier. In 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. And one of them is a very, very famous one, and that was the Infinity War, which was seen by something like every fifth American. And that movie plot is about a villain who has these Malthusian or Ehrlichian ideas. You have to kill half of the population of the universe in order so that the other half can survive. And so this is not an academic debate. People around the world are being fed the diet of Malthusianism almost on a daily basis. You 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. And in the Marvel movie, and you might have expected this given our pop culture, in the Marvel movie, Thanos is clearly a villain. And that’s interesting because even though there is this apocalyptic tone to the movie, he is a villain. His theory that half of everything has to die in order for the other half to thrive is put forward and even in a devil’s advocate sort of way. But it’s clear that he’s an enemy. And 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. The movie, for example, Scarlett Johansson’s last movie, I think it’s The Black Widow. She is an unbelievably politically incorrect character. She’s the real antithesis of this apocalyptic, doom saying, hyper agreeable culture that has produced the sort of movies that you described like Soylent Green. And 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. And that we’ve been led down the garden path in an inappropriate way for about four decades or five decades. And 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. Because, like, are you willing to make a prediction about what your life is going to be like 10 years in the future? In many regards, we technology has changed our lives so much. And that’s that’s happening so quickly that it’s unparalleled. And so I think we all feel like, well, we’re on the edge of precipitous change and it might be terrible. But while your point is, it might also be extremely good and that we could direct it that way. Yeah, I would just add to that that we’re we’re on this cusp of exponential creative destruction. We’re having this this destruction, but we’re also having this creativity. It’s actually on a steeper curve than the destructive curve. Well, that’s what I’m hoping to, you know, when I go out of my lectures, I’m trying to tell people is, look, we’ve got we’ve got everything we could possibly want in front of us. If we are smart enough to reach out and take it, if we if we want it. So much of this environmentalism that you’ve described that and I think your work is such a good antidote to doesn’t seem to me to be pro flourishing. It’s there’s an anti-human element to it, a hatred of humanity that that I think is deeply pathological and resentful. And I think the fact that. Erlich ideas about population excess are still so popularly. Trumpeted forward as as as the only ethical attitude towards the problem of humanity is an indication of the depth of that. Well, some of its malevolence, as far as I’m concerned, like I’ve heard environmentalists say, many of them say, you know, there are too many people on the planet. The planet would be better off if there’s only a billion people. Human beings are a cancer on the face of the earth. You know, we’re like a virus that multiplies unchecked. I mean, this guy’s seriously man. Watch your language, you know. Yeah, interesting that you bring that up, because it was really this 1973 comes out with his book in 68 73. They come out with limits to growth. This Club of Rome does. And interesting that 73 was also the year that Thanos was introduced in the comic book. So the culture was kind of doing this thing. And that Club of Rome, they come out with this argument that says, look, population is going to do this and we’re all going to collapse. Well, population didn’t do this. And then so they shifted and said, well, we seem to be OK. It’s pollution that’s going to do this and we’re going to collapse. And then pollution goes the other way. And they say, well, we’re going to redefine our model now to it’s not pollution. We’re going to define CO2 as pollution. So they keep redefining the model to be able to predict this collapse. And it’s like, well, what are you guys going to do here? We can’t we can’t. Human population continues to do this. And we life expectancy and abundance continues to grow. And in spite of your modeling. Oh, you know, we’ve got a psychological problem on our hands here. I think to some degree it might be that, you know, human beings are unique and we could speak biologically here, I suppose, in that we really do. We’re the only creatures that really do apprehend our own finitude. 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 all the people we know are going to die and that everything we know is going to come to an end. And so that’s there as a reality. And then the question is, well, that’s a fundamental reality. And we try to stave it off. We try to stabilize things and we try to make our our economies productive and sustainable and so that we don’t die. But we know that we’re fighting a losing battle. And it isn’t we don’t understand how that fundamental knowledge of finitude is that endless source of the generation of apocalyptic fantasies or how to manage that in any real sense. You know, because it is the case that we well, we certainly do face limits. Personally, limits of mortality, limits of time, limits of time, limits of time, which is exactly which is the one resource which is actually getting scarcer. Right, right, right. As we live. I mean, we obviously live longer, but it is the one scare resource. We know that that it will it will come to an end. Yeah, right. Right. And there’s only a limit. There’s a real limit to what we can do to stave that off, even if we generate a tremendous amount of money while we expend our time. Right. So each each second becomes more valuable in some sense as you age. And that’s and the concept of time is really fundamental to to our work because well, I’ll hand it over to Gail. But essentially we were dissatisfied with the with the wager between between Ehrlich and Simon. We thought we could do something a little more interesting and a little different. And I think Gail will be able to explain it better than I can. So 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. And the problem with money is money loses its value over time, typically. So you have to make this adjustment back to real dollars versus nominal dollars. But he also mentioned this interesting thing. He said, you know, we can compare it to time. And 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. So he talked about the idea of time prices. So that kind of piqued our interest a little bit. And then there was also a Nobel Prize winning economist, William Nordhaus, who did this really interesting study about the price of light. And he said, let’s look at what it costs you to earn the money to buy one hour’s worth of light. And you can measure light in lumens. And so he does this study and this light is just doing this. You know, 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 17000 candles. I mean, that’s a lot of candles. And then you made some comment, too, about how much labor in terms of time it took to burn that many candles. And you can imagine even now, 17000 candles, especially if they’re made of beeswax or something like that, that that’s not inexpensive. Yeah. So, I mean, if you go back to 18, you know, we go back to 1800 and it took three, I had to work three hours to earn the money to buy one hour worth of light. And so the time price was three hours for one hour. Today, it’s like one zero point one six, six seconds of time. Yeah, it’s stunning. So, well, we think we well 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. And so when you’re buying light, you’re not just buying light, you’re buying time to be productive. You 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 we’re never plagued by darkness ever anymore. Ever. And, you know, maybe we suffer from the absence of the night sky. And I think we do. But light is light is basically free. And that means that we have many more hours per day. You know, the other thing I that really struck me in that regard, it wasn’t your work, though, but other many people have commented on this is the absolutely revolutionary consequence of inventing eyeglasses for people because many people in medieval Europe on 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. And so this simple, simple technological innovation of glasses, you know, added 15 years of productivity to people’s lives and then light. Well, that adds what four hours of productivity per day. And it’s free. And it’s free. We see we one of the things I really like about your work is that you help me understand and communicate to people just how rich we are. We’re so rich, we don’t even know how rich we are. Well, that’s right. I think, you know, you talked about light and productivity, which is of course very important. But if you didn’t have light, you didn’t have anything else. I mean, there was no entertainment. There was nothing on TV. There were no TVs. As you said, you couldn’t you couldn’t read. Most people live in absolute poverty, so they really couldn’t afford a candle. And therefore, once the sun set, you just went to bed. Yeah, in the cold. And so and so Gail mentioned the concept of time price. And I think it’s very important that we explain it in greater depth. So here’s the deal. You know, we we we buy things with money, but we really pay for them with our time. So there are money prices and their time prices. And it’s pretty it’s pretty easy to convert a money price to a time price. You just take the money price and you divide it by hourly income. So, for example, if something costs twenty dollars and you’re earning twenty dollars an hour, the price of that is one hour. So money prices are expressed in dollars and cents. Time prices are expressed in hours and minutes. And this offers a number of features. First of all, we go to this universal standard of time. And it’s not it’s not you can’t counterfeit it. You can’t inflate it. It’s this constant flow. So everybody recognizes what an hour is. We have this kind of perfect equality of time. We get twenty four hours a day. Yeah. And that’s independent of any real socio-cultural differences. It’s because, well, we all suffer from the same degree of finitude in some sense. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m amazed. Well, I can’t believe this. I know that it’s a very tricky business for any academic enterprise to get its fundamental units of measurement correct. It’s it’s it’s of absolutely crucial importance that that be done, like the periodic table of the elements for chemists, for example, and maybe the five factor personality model for for psychologists or an IQ as well. These fundamental measurements. And so but it is kind of surprising to me that you economist types didn’t figure this out until recently. Like what was in the way? Well, Julie and Simon had kind of figured it out. And actually, Adam Smith talked about this in his his wealth and wealth of nations. He talked about the fact that we have to buy things with our labor, which is really our time. And, you know, the other feature of time, I think we’ve got what seven universal standards of measurements, six of those seven all go back to time. So we’re trying to move. We’re trying to move the thinking back to this universal standard of time. So once you’ve established a time price, then it’s the comparison of that time price over time. You know, it cost me one hour a year ago. Today, it only cost me forty five minutes. You know, so the percentage change in that time price is really what what we should look at. And then it’s the ratio of the ratios that we we look at, you know, if something is goes seventy five percent off, for example, it’s like, OK, seventy five percent off. That’s that’s interesting. That means for the for the time that it used to take to earn one unit. Now I get four. So going from it’s a seventy five percent decrease. But you think about it the other way, it’s actually a three hundred percent increase in your abundance because I used to get one. I used to get one. Now I get four. Right. Right. And there’s a moral claim. There’s a moral claim here, too, that we should be very careful to make explicit, I would say, which is if we’ve accepted the proposition that something is worth having, it’s worth it’s useful and justifiable to assume that if we can produce that more efficiently, that’s good. Right. Those two things seem to go right together. So because we I think when you’re trying to nail down something like fundamental measurement, you have to nail it down all the way to the ground. If we agree that there are good things to have. So we have good and have as agreements, then we’re also going to agree that if we can get good things to have with less expenditure of the most fundamental resource, that also constitutes a good. And that would part be partly because, well, there are lots of good things we like and need to have. And so if we have more time, we can get more of them, too. So there’s there’s really no way of subverting this claim, I would say, if you accept the initial proposition that there are good things that, you know, we can and should have. Yeah, exactly. So once we once we kind of got this time price figured out and said, you know, we should take all of these prices that we have and convert them to time prices and then see what happens. So we go back to Simon’s original bet. We’re kind of inspired by that. And one of the critiques of Simon’s work was, you know, you were just lucky, Simon, because it was only for 10 years and it was only for five commodities. And so we said, well, why don’t we expand it from five to 50? So we went beyond just these metals and we went to energy. We looked at food, we looked at materials, we looked at other metals. So we developed this data set of 50 commodities that are tracked by the World Bank tracks these prices. So we and the we could go back in time and look at all other data. So I got to I got to ask you a political question real quick about that. So, you know, I’m obsessed with measurement because I was a psychometrician when I used to be a university professor when that was still possible. And I’ve always been skeptical of the measures that politicians use to assess the economy, both unemployment. I’m skeptical of that measure. I’m very skeptical of inflation measures, not in and of themselves. I’m not convinced that those are sufficiently valid measures, reliable and valid measures to base our entire economic analysis on. And so I’m wondering is if if you convert the cost to cost in time and standardize it in that manner, can you then rank order countries? So if you take, let’s say, a 50 commodity random sample of fundamental goods, can you then chart a progress graph of of countries relative move towards prosperity? And you do that year by year. Can you derive yearly indexes? And is that a good replacement for something like inflation, the inflation rate assessments? Take a look at page 142. We’ve got we got 42 countries that we’ve done that with. So we go from Argentina to the United States and look at all these different countries and measure what their income is doing, their hourly income is doing with these commodity prices. I would go back to the right man. Yeah, the World Bank commodity prices. You know, those are public prices. So everybody there’s no disagreement that these were the prices of those commodities. And then the next question is, what do you use for the denominator below? You can use a country’s local reported average hourly income. In this case, we were trying to get a number that we could use as a proxy for the whole planet. And what we finally came up with is let’s look at GDP per capita per hour. So how much is generated on the planet per hour worked? And let’s use that as an index or a proxy for how productive people are getting, because we also note that when innovation occurs, it shows up both in lower prices and higher incomes. So it’s important that the time prices are actually capturing both of those values because it’s the ratio of those two numbers. So time prices actually contain more information than just a money price. So 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 was not point. It’s negative ninety seven point five percent. And China’s at the top of the list. And so there’s tremendous number of developing countries that are leaping forward. So but but it’s I would also suspect maybe this is wrong. But tell me if it tell me if it’s right or wrong. There 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. And so China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Ireland does extraordinarily well. Is there any way of adjusting that for baseline prosperity? I mean, the Americans have done as well as the Chinese, but they started off a lot better, let’s say, in the last century. Right. And you can make those comparisons. You can put them side by side. I think that the interesting thing for us is what are the slopes doing in these different countries? I mean, yeah, the United States has got this this lower rate of growth, but all of these other countries are catching up at such a rapid rate that that there’s none of these countries that are actually going the other direction. And yeah, something. Yeah, it really is. So now, now the now the key with China is to remember that China and India, China has done spectacularly well over the last 40 years. And and so has India. It’s very important to remember that those two countries were actually the most populous countries at the time when they were super, super poor. In other words, if you write China, if you look at China in 1960 or India in 1960, they already had mass populations, but they were super poor. So what happens? Superabundance is not simply an outcome of adding more people to the world, although that’s important. It’s people times freedom will give you very high rates of economic growth. Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that I’m not suggesting for a second that China is a free society. But what I am saying, well, it’s comparatively free compared to what it was. It is much freer than what it was when Mao killed 45 million of his fellow citizens. Another thing, another reason why this research is kind of important is because Gail mentioned the Club for Growth report. Club for Growth was read by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s. Yeah, how delightful. How delightful. Between 1980 and 2015, they had this one China policy in place. The Chinese government is very boastful and very proud that they have prevented or extinguished 400 million birds in China between 1980 and 2018. China, as well as the world, would be much more prosperous societies if that hadn’t happened. But it was a spectacular, spectacular shot in the foot, as you would expect from a communist regime, because 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. So they also have a plethora of men, which they’re going to pay for, too. That’s a recipe for social instability. In like 2016, it was maybe it was 2008. The sex ratio peaked at 120 Chinese men per 100 women, which means that 20 percent of men in China could not hope to find a Chinese wife. And there is very good evidence suggesting that men who do not have a partner are much more likely to engage in criminal activities. Yes, there’s very good evidence for that. So 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. And so then by your criteria, it’s how how many years does it take for you to have to work half as long to get the same resource, whatever that is. And this is stunning. This is 1980 to 2018. So basically a 40 year period over a 40 year period. China’s average years to double personal resource abundance was seven. Unbelievable. But even countries like you list India, it’s 15. New Zealand, 19, Finland, 20. So that’s really certainly within the confines of. Well, that’s four doublings in the average life, man. It’s deadly. And this is even among developed countries. Yeah, it’s really. And the average was the average was 20 years. Now, some people may say that doubling of personal abundance. Now, we are not talking about, you know, we are talking about resources. Resources include things like beef, rice, coffee, tea, milk, oranges, bananas, whatever. Now, some people may say that doubling of abundance every 20 years is too slow. But this is where at least at least a cursory understanding of history is very important. People need to understand that Homo sapiens has been around for 300000 years. And our standard of living was stagnant for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, nothing has changed. Exactly the same amount of food and resources that your your parents could buy. You would be able to buy. Your children would buy. So 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. It is a miracle. It’s unparalleled. And it is really important to drive that point home. I mean, people think that they tend to think of human of change in human societies as the norm. And that is in some sense true compared to animal societies, which just don’t change at all. I mean, a grizzly now is exactly the same as a grizzly was 60000 years ago for all intents and purposes. But, you know, even in. Very technologically advanced cultures like ancient Egypt, which was a much faster developing country, let’s say society, then the typical Stone Age society, there were there are periods of time in the Egyptian archaeological record that exceed 1000 years where there is zero evidence of any technological change whatsoever. And so there are there are. And 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, which left a certain archaeological mark persistence of those rituals unchanged over 20000 year period. So the rule in biological systems is lack of change at the cultural level. And even among human societies, generally speaking, rates of change are unbelievably slow. And so for people to say, well, you know, doubling every 20 years isn’t fast enough. It’s like, well, a compared to what? And the other thing to think about is how fast a doubling do you think we can stand? You know, because some of that is. I know you think, well, oh, no, we’re getting prosperous too fast. Isn’t that a problem? If that’s a problem you need to have, if you have to have a problem. But 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. You know, they get superannuated in some sense. So in any case, it’s a remarkable it’s a remarkable set of observations. And it’s very difficult to to look at this without. Being 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 when the evidence is starkly clear that more people in freer markets solves all the problems that everybody wants to solve faster than anyone else. And that’s not to say that we’re going to be able to do anything we’ve ever produced by a large margin. I 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. In the introduction of the book, we identify three critical problems to maintaining superabundant growth. By the way, we should we should probably at some point define what we mean by superabundance. But but the three very important components of how we can ensure that superabundance continues. Well, first of all, we cannot have the population collapse, which is something that Elon Musk continues to warn against. Now, in the book, we don’t say that, you know, we don’t take a we don’t take a position on what is the optimal size of the world’s population. But what we do say is that parents, when they are making decisions about having babies, that those decisions are not made in a vacuum. When when 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. If if if that’s what parents think, then of course, that will have an impact on their fecundity. And in fact, we now have studies that have been conducted or other opinion polls that have been conducted over the last four years. And they show that people do take environmental apocalyptic warnings into account when making decisions about where to have babies or not. The second the second problem that we need to avoid if we are going to remain superabundant is, of course, freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is absolutely fundamental. It is not only fundamental on a on a personal level. If you cannot speak freely, you cannot think freely, you cannot express yourself freely, but on a societal level. If you are following an idea of the cliff like lemmings do, you know, it could be a bad idea. If it’s a bad idea, then you are going to end up like going off the cliff. Right. That was the problem in communist societies. I grew up under communism part of my life. And because we didn’t have freedom of speech, people couldn’t point out that the society was actually stagnating and in some ways, And we couldn’t come up with a way of resolving our problems and get on on a on a on a better path. And that is why speech codes and banning of expression of ideas, no matter how no matter how offensive we may find them. After all, heliocentrism was offensive at one point in the past. But but if we prevent these ideas from being aired, then we don’t know. We don’t know really. Some of them may be very good and we should we should we should remember them. And the third we should learn from them. And the third potential problem for superabundance is, of course, if the market gets destroyed through overregulation or socialization. And the reason for that is very simple. Markets provide us with signals about what’s valuable and what’s not. Markets allow us to see which innovations are going to be useful and which innovations are going to be useless. This is what’s called the price mechanism in a free market economy. Prices tell you exactly what you need more of like baby formula in the United States or oil and gas when it goes up that you need to produce more of that. But if government. Right. And that’s a that’s a signal we should point out. We should point out this is so important for people to understand. You know, you drew a connection between free speech and free thought. And people often think of free speech as a hedonistic right in some sense. I I and every other. Yeah. Who gets exactly what we want whenever we want. And maybe that’s for our own enjoyment. But that’s not it exactly, because there isn’t any difference between speech and thought in a technical sense. Much of the thought that we undertake, we undertake in discussions like this, where we’re exchanging ideas and modifying them and communicating and that free speech is thought. And then the question is, well, what’s thought? And the answer that is, well, that’s how we abstractly adapt to the horizon of the future before we actually adapt to it. So 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 so that we don’t have to die by making the wrong decisions when when we’re actually forced to act. And I would say we can make that a biological claim. Because the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of abstract thought, grew out of the motor cortex and its purpose is to run simulations of the world and simulations of potential action patterns in the world before you implement them so that you can weed out the deadly ones and not implement them. And so we actually evolved an entire part of our brain, which we use socially to kill bad ideas before they kill us. And so then if you interfere with free speech, you don’t get to do that. And free speech is associated with free markets in this crucial way that you described, because it is very difficult to know what’s going to be valuable next as things change. And the way we do that is we subject that computation to a massive cognitive instrument, which is the free market. Hundreds of millions of people are making decisions all the time, right on the edge of change. And if we know the price of something, we’re we’re as caught up with the future as we can possibly be. And so if we interfere with that, it are great peril because that is the cognitive mechanism that keeps us updated. I would simply add to that. And then I will hand it over to Gail is that free speech and free markets are learning mechanisms. When you say something which is stupid, somebody else can say, well, that actually doesn’t work. And if you are smart, you’re going to internalize that comment and you are never going to express that view again. You are going to internalize the truth. And the market is a learning mechanism as well, provided that it’s free so it can indicate what works and what doesn’t. And it’s free so it can vary. Right. So I think that, you know, making this connection between free speech and and the market is it really it’s this idea that wealth is fundamentally knowledge. It’s the growth and knowledge that distinguishes us from the Stone Age. It’s entirely due to the growth of knowledge. And this is a point that one of our friends, George Gilder, makes. He says wealth is knowledge. Growth is learning and money is time. And from those three propositions, we can derive this theorem that you can measure the growth of knowledge with time. So it’s really, you know, how do we grow knowledge? Well, there’s also there’s also a definition of knowledge that’s rooted in there to some degree, because you might say, well, if you can do the same amount in half the time, you’re now twice as smart. You have twice as much knowledge. That’s like a definition. Right. Because the knowledge, you’d have to define knowledge as useful in relationship to something which might be the production of something of value. And so if you could do that twice as fast or with half as many resources, especially time, well, then your knowledge is doubled. That’s by definition in some real sense. Right. So we define abundance is this measurement of time prices as they relate to your adding. You must be adding more knowledge, either making the price, 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. And it’s a consequence of this growth in knowledge and that growth in knowledge. It comes from all over the place. It’s not just researchers in a lab. It’s it’s just not professors. It’s everybody on the planet is contributing these little bits and pieces of knowledge all the time. Well, look, you can tell I’m always I always find it a miracle to go to Home Depot, especially the tool files. You know, you walk down a tool aisle and there’s like five thousand kinds of fasteners and you think, well, what does that mean? It means that some somebody. Generally, mail 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 something. Machine where some little practical problem and then spend untold hours figuring out how that could just be made better. And then you just have shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and rows and rows and rows of that. And like I learned, because I’ve done a lot of house renovations and that sort of thing, I learned that if 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. Well, you can certainly see that with obviously with computer software as well. So it is miraculous that this is the case. That’s another definition of what a market is. The market is a place where you go to find people that can solve your problem better than you can solve it. Right, right, right, right, right. OK, so let’s walk through your book a little bit in more detail, shall we? The first chapter. So part one is Thanos’s deadly idea from antiquity to the present and beyond. And so that’s the idea of this intrinsic limit of growth and the fundamental pathology of human population. And so we’ve we’ve kind of dispensed with that fairly effectively. Are we in the midst of progress or are we facing the apocalypse? Well, probably both, but certainly we’re in the midst of progress. And we’ve covered Thanos’s intellectual and practical progenitors and Julian Simon and the bet that made him famous. And then in part two, measuring abundance, new methodology, empirical evidence and in-depth analysis. And so let’s go over the Simon abundance framework because you’ve both done specific work on that. Is there anything that we started to cover? Have we covered enough or are there more things you want people to know about it? Marion, you want to talk? I think we’ve covered it. So we go back to this idea of time prices. Let’s convert everything to a time price. And what that allows us to do in addition is we can apply a time price to any product, any place at any time. So I can go back to France in 1800 and figure out what the time price was for a loaf of bread. And I can compare it to the time price of an orange in New York City or Toronto today. So once we’ve created a time price for a loaf of bread, we can apply that to any product. So let’s go back to France in 1800 and figure out what the time price was for a loaf of bread. And what that allows us to do in addition is we can apply a time price to any product, any place at any time. And what that allows us to do in addition is we can compare it to the time price of an orange in New York City or Toronto today. So once we’ve created these time prices for everything, then let’s see what they’re doing over time. And that’s the empirical. And that is just this measurement of, well, it cost you this much time yesterday. It cost you this much time today. Your abundance is increasing by that ratio is the percentage change in that ratio. You know, once again drops by 75 percent. It means I get four for the price of one. My personal abundance is increasing by 300 percent. So 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. Yeah. So let me ask you about that. These these commodities that you’ve looked at. So let’s first of all define that. So so we’re assuming that people acquire and work for things they both need and want. And we’re going to not take an a priori stance of a priori judgment about that. We’re going to assume there’s all sorts of things that people need and want and that there’s no externally reliable way of determining what those should be. And so we’ll let people make those decisions themselves. And and people will vary and be similar in some ways in relationship to those decisions. How do you ensure that when you look at? Look at the improvement in efficiency in relationship to production that you’ve properly sampled the domain of commodities. OK, good question. So we started with this idea of let’s just look at these basic fundamental commodities that have not changed over time. A bushel of wheat, a ton of iron ore. Let’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? Well, you want to have these basic commodities. That’s where we came up with this basic 50. And let’s subject that basic 50 to this. I want to dig in. I want to dig into that more because it’s really important, right? Because this is in some sense the issue of are you randomly sampling the environment? Right. So like because you’re trying to take a snapshot of human progress and economic efficiency. And we want it. We might want to say we might want to say, well, do you have the thing you’re taking a snapshot of properly sample? So you pick 50. Why 50 and which 50 and how did you define basic? Well, 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, because they’re non renewable. Let’s put those. Let’s let’s expand that. Then let’s jump out to energy. Let’s look at crude oil. What’s the price of a barrel of oil? You know, for the last we’ve got really good data on the barrel of oil represents this fundamental unit of measurement in terms of the price of energy. And then let’s add food to it. Let’s add other materials to it. So what’s the price of a two by four? What is the price of a ton of cotton? What are these basic fundamental commodities? And we were also kind of limited to what we could find out there that had good price data on it. And 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. OK, so you found you found that you found 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. Could you get reliable data on 100? Do you know or did it sort of top out for you at 50? The further back in time you get, you go, the less data you have on nominal prices. So, for example, by the time we get to 1960, we have we have 37. But we look at that to 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. And 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. But then and this is critical, then we go back to 1850 and we look at prices of commodities and food in the United States from the perspective of blue collar workers and unskilled laborers. Now, this is very important for a number of reasons. Very often people will say, oh, well, you’re using average data and that’s skewed by the rich. OK, 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, like, for example, people who clean the hallways, janitors. OK, now we have wage data going back to 1770s and we have commodity and food data going back to 1850. So here is what we found. I’m just going to give a few examples. So a blue collar worker between 1850 and 2018, that’s page 157. Rice drops in time price by 99 percent, which means you now have 111 units for the price of one unit. Pork drops by 98.7 percent, which means that now you have 75 pounds of pork rather than one pound of pork that your ancestors could buy in 1850. Coffee drop of 98 percent relative to wages, which means you 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 percent. You now get seven for the price of one. So that’s the blue collar worker. And we can also look at the least fortunate in well, least fortunate employed people in the United States. And that’s the unskilled. Again, an example, sugar dropped by 99 percent means you now get 107 pounds of sugar instead of one pound of sugar in 1850. Rice, once again, you get 53. Pork, 35, 36 pounds instead of one. Corn, 26 pounds for the price of one. Lamb, four instead of one. So, you know, you go over these 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 and they are the same whether you’re looking globally or in the United States. Yeah, you said you say when you’re looking at Jack’s 26 commodities here between 1850 and 2018, the average PRA increased by 57, basically 5800 percent. So yes, that’s personal resource abundance. Correct. Right, right. And the numeric equivalent of that, the dollar equivalent of that is the hourly compensation rate rose from six cents an hour to thirty two dollars an hour. So but they but the PRA personal resource abundance index would be a more accurate gauge of that improvement. So the improvement is it’s very difficult, I think, for modern young people in particular to really understand how poor people were. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The best the best example I like to use is the sugar example. And 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? I’d love to survey my students on this and they’ll say, oh, like, two pounds or four pounds, you get 227 pounds. It might explain why we’re also fat is because sugars becomes just tremendously abundant. And, you know, but it’s not just sugar. It’s all these other ones. You know, the average price is fallen by 98 percent, which means, you know, for the time it took you to get one unit, you get 50 units. Right, right, right. Right. Well, so I’m so OK. And so, well, let’s continue with this. So why why super abundance? Why that title? Well, I should I take it OK. I feel like I’m talking too much. You should tell me to shut up. But look, it’s very simple. If if Ehrlich was right, which he wasn’t, abundance of resources would be declining. Simon was right. Abundance is increasing. But abundance can increase at two different speeds. If abundance of resources, what we call personal resource abundance, is increasing at a lower rate than population. So population increases by five percent, but personal resource abundance is only increasing by two percent. We call that increasing abundance. But if population is increasing at five percent, but your resource abundance is increasing by 10 percent, we call that super abundance. In the book, we looked at hundreds of commodities, goods and even services going back all the way to 1850, 18 different data sets that we got from third parties mostly so that we are not accused of cherry picking. Not all of them, but most of them. All 18 data sets have been growing at a super abundance speed, which means that our wealth, this this abundance is increasing faster than population. And what that tells us is that on average, every human being contributes contributes more than they consume. We are destroyers, but we are also creators. And it turns out that we are more of a creator than we are a consumer or a destroyer. We create wealth. And also also that the rate at which that is true is increasing rather than decreasing. It is. So 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 two and a half percent per year, compounded growth rate. But by the time you get to the 1980s and beyond, you get to about three and a half percent. OK, 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 all the world’s resources, not only are you not going to make other people poorer and the planet more barren by bringing another child into the world, that you’re actually doing a positive good. Is it if you have 10 children, everyone will be somewhat richer because of that. The 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. Right, right. Ha ha ha. Wouldn’t that be lovely? And I do believe that it’s the case. You know, so it’s really that’s really something to be able to tell people. You know, I’m I I watched in my own life, people react certainly not positively to pregnant women talking about their babies, their babies they’re going to bring into the world. It’s so awful to see, you know, it’s well, you know, and parents themselves, they have this this discussion they have with themselves. I suppose particular moral conundrum for young women is like, well, do I really want to bring a baby into a world like this? And the answer is, well, it’s 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 that but your baby will also be a net good for everyone else. Really, like not not in some naive, idiot, hallmark greeting card, simplistic way, but really, actually solidly. And and in spite of all the doom saying of the Malthusians and the apocalypse and and the anti capitalists and so forth. So that’s a lovely thing to be able to tell people. And that brings us really to the importance of innovation, where I think Gail really contributed heavily to that particular chapter. So I think that I wouldn’t mind if he wanted to talk a little bit about innovation, if you don’t mind. Yeah. So so here’s the idea is we begin our model thinking about, you know, it begins with human beings and we focus on that because the only source of new ideas are human beings. And those those ideas really entail how do we create new knowledge with these capitals that we have? We define capital is anything we can use to create something of value. So you have physical capital, human capital, intellectual capital, financial capital, cultural capital. And so I begin with this idea when I can actually manifest that idea and convert the idea into to something real. It becomes this thing we call an invention. But in order for it to actually move into this innovation level, it has to go through the market. And the market is really where you take these things and they’re tested to see if you’ve truly created value. And if it creates value, then this invention becomes an innovation. And it’s it’s our progress is entirely due to our ability to innovate. OK, so Lombard Lombard is showed this, I think, is dovetails with your work. So when Lombard’s done his return on investment rank ordering of solutions to the problems that beset us, he showed that the highest return his economists calculated for investment in the future was investment really into early childhood care. Some of that was early childhood nutrition. And 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, one of the things that happens is they don’t develop their intelligence, their intrinsic intelligence to the degree that that’s possible. So there’s been a walloping increase in the average IQ of the human population over the last century and a huge part of especially at the lower end, which has been brought up and a huge part of that is that, well, there’s just so many fewer people suffering from absolute privation. And so if the most valuable resource that we have is the capacity to innovate, then the most the most logical problem to target is that which might interfere with the development of, say, general cognitive ability in childhood. And it turns out that that’s actually quite inexpensive to foster. And so that that that fostering of innovation, there’s lots of things that have to do that. But one of them is definitely a concentration on early childhood nutrition, let’s say. And it really goes back to this ability. Can we get people to be able to learn more or discover and create new knowledge? And if they’re if they’re healthy, if they have light, if they if they have these fundamental physical needs met, then they get on these learning curves. And the interesting thing about a learning curve is whenever you double the output of something, costs per unit fall between 20 and 30 percent. And so you’re really seeing the more we make the cheaper that we can make them. So we we we think about how do we actually grow an economy? Moore’s law. We refer to that all the time, but it’s really a function of quantity. It’s not a function of time. It’s because we’re making these chips at such high quantities. Every time we double production, that cost drops by 20 percent. We’re just making trillions and trillions of these chips. Well, this is OK. Tell me what you think of this, guys. So I’ve been thinking about justifications for inequality, economic inequality, because you have absolute privation as a problem and and the free market is really good at ameliorating absolute privation. There’s no doubt about that, but there’s still a fair bit of relative economic inequality. And so you might say, well, those rich people like, do we really need people who have billions of dollars? And I think, well, we might need Elon Musk. Like, you know, that’s that’s something we could all think about. But in any case, here’s the reason we need some people to be extremely rich. I mean, when cell phones first came out, I think they were like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a piece when when they were hooked directly to a satellite network. And, you know, they’re big and bulky and only the most wealthy could clearly afford them and use them productively, given that given their great expense. But what was what was what? Like five years later, everybody had one. And now they’re not just cell phones. There’s these stunning technological miracles that are well, they’re they’re they’re just beyond comprehension what those things can do. But it isn’t obvious to me at all that everyone could have ever got one if only a few people. You know, if we weren’t willing to put up with the fact that only a few hyper wealthy people could have them to begin with, and maybe we can’t get really innovative technological, we can’t really get make innovative technological progress at the commodity level. Unless we have pools of people at every level of wealth so that we can produce a market for something new among the hyper rich before we can produce enough of it so that everybody can have it. And so what is would that mean that inequality does that imply that economic inequality is actually a prerequisite for the mass production of highly complex technological gadgetry, let’s say for everyone? Yeah, here’s what I’d say, Mary is, look, these new innovations come out and you have typically these these significant fixed costs up front to make the first yeah yeah yeah and who pays for that? The rich pay for that. And then the marginal cost and the cost of the next one that falls dramatically. Think about software, think about some of these apps that cost you a million dollars to create the app, but the cost for the next copy is a few cents. Well, right, the price. The first one costs the first one costs you know, yeah, $100 million and the millionth one costs 15 cents, but you have to get you have to ratchet your way down that price ladder. Yeah, who’s going to do that for you? It’s the rich that are willing to put up those costs of pay those prices up front. Well, and then, well, you think too, and if it wasn’t, you could say well maybe government pools of capital could manage that but it’s not the case because, like, government isn’t going to buy enough massive flat screen TVs when they first become available, because the government doesn’t consume like an individual whereas a rich person in some sense does right because they’ll go after consumer products. And so I don’t think we can replace the benevolent utility of some people with massive pools of capital with any communal replacement. See, I think yeah, the difference between rich and poor is five years. Right, yes, yes, you know I get it today. Well, everybody’s going to get this in five years. Yeah, maybe in 10 years, it’ll be two years. I remember very distinctly a conversation I had with a very close friend of mine about 20 years ago we were driving. And he said how long before access to internet becomes a basic human right. And of course today in the United States government pays people who cannot afford access to broadband internet out of the government pocket it has basically become a basic human right as far as Americans are concerned. Let me say one thing about, by the way, by that I don’t mean that I buy into universe into these things as human rights what I’m saying is that people perceive it as, as human rights, but I think that the the importance of the discussion between equality and inequality is actually much deeper than that. I’ll be very frank, equality is stasis. It’s another word for stasis. Inequality inequality is, in my view, the midwife of progress. Well, certainly the midwife of trade, because if we’re completely equal, we have nothing to trade. Well, yes, but, but in so many different ways, inequality is the midwife of human progress. By that I mean, primarily material but maybe, maybe some other as well. Let’s say that you have a society which is completely static. I’m just going to come up with an example of everybody living in a cave. And then somebody decides, well, I have this great idea of actually building a hut on a hill with a better view and so forth. There is an inequality of housing there going on for a little while, while other people realize that they can improve how they live their lives in production, in even in personal behavior. If you have a society which is static and doesn’t change, and somebody realizes that, hey, maybe this form of behavior, like learning, reading books, can lead to a better life. That in itself is a way of inequality. When a company decides that instead of relying on human labor creating pins, we are going to buy a machine that is going to create an inequality or production process, but that is in itself going to move the society forward. So I so you’re basically pointing out that as a as a positive change begins to manifest itself in a society, it first manifests itself as a marked inequality. It has to because it can’t appear everywhere at once. Yes, because equality is stasis. It means that everything is the same and inequality is the disruptor. It tells people that things can be done differently. Now, some people make stupid choices and they suffer the consequences. But if those choices are good, you can become fabulously rich or important in your community because you have figured out a better way of living. And then then then other people are going to have that five years down the road if you’re a reasonable market player. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the other thing I would add to this is we go back to something real basic. And I think you have income inequality, but you also have time inequality. And when we look at that from that perspective, it looks much different. So go back to 1960, go to India. A typical Indian would take about seven or eight hours a day to just earn the money to buy their daily rice. And in the United States in 1960 would take an hour to buy a wheat. And so both of these commodities have fallen by 90% in their time price. So who’s better off? Well, the guy in India, he used to spend eight hours now he spends only one hour. So he picks up seven hours. The guy in the US spent an hour and now he only spends six minutes. He only picks up 55 minutes. So the difference in time, right, right. Time inequality gets really compressed when you have this innovation on these prices, especially when you’re dealing with these basic fundamental food items. The poor are the primary beneficiaries of that because now they have so much more time relative to where they were 20 or 30 years ago to now go learn and pursue and be creative. And that’s the beauty of time prices. Not only is it immune from governments fiddling around with inflation numbers, but also you can make international comparisons. You no longer have to figure out what is the exchange rate between the American dollar and the Indian rupee. Look at the minutes that the people work there. Look at the minutes people work here and that will give you a sense whether inequality is increasing or decreasing. Right, right, right. Okay, well, let’s let’s try to cover two more things. Before we before we finish. We haven’t got to part three of your book. So that’s human flourishing and its enemies. So I want to talk about that. And then the other thing I’d like you to discuss is, well, how are you? How is your work being received? Both publicly and by other economists. So let’s start with the close off the walk through your book. Go through part three human flourishing and its enemies. You have four chapters there. One is humanity seven million year journey from the rainforest to the Industrial Revolution. Chapter eight is the age of innovation and the great enrichment. Chapter nine is where do innovations come from population growth and freedom and then the enemies of progress from the romantics to the extreme environmentalists. So let you guys comment on part three first and then let’s go to reception of your work and and your hope for these ideas as well. Can I back up to part two real quick? Absolutely take another piece of the story that we want to tell. All right, so we’re going to go back to a bit of section two. Gail’s going to take us on a on a journey through the remainder of section two. Okay, so if you’re on page 222, you’ll see this box that we developed. And the idea is if we can take and measure, let’s put population on the horizontal axis and let’s put personal resource abundance on the vertical axis. And then let’s look at 1980 and say 1980 and let’s just index the personal resource abundance and population to a value of one. So that red that red box represents the size of the global resource pie in 1980. So two things happen. First of all, your personal resource abundance is increased by 252 percent. So we go up on the vertical axis, but population also increased by 71 percent. So you go out on the horizontal axis. That’s a stunning graph. It is a stunning graph. It really makes me realize that it’s not 1980 anymore. Not 1980 at all. So when you combine those two, the red box is the 1980 global resource pie. The 2018 green box is is 2018. And you look at the difference and you can you can measure those two and our our total abundance, that green area, that’s 500 percent larger than it was in 1980. So the compound annual growth rate of this population level resource abundance is almost five percent a year. And what’s interesting about that is you look at the elasticity. In other words, if I increase population by one percent, what happens to personal resource abundance? And we see there that for every one percent increase in population, your personal resource abundance increased by three and a half percent. And the biologist must just hate you guys. Well, 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. If you measure knowledge to information information rather than just pure matter. Right. It’s it’s it’s knowledge that can grow. Not only can it grow, it can be shared with another person that’s not rivalrous. In other words, you and I can share the same knowledge. So 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. But knowledge, there is no reason for that. There is no reason for the biologists to presume except that they use bad, bad animal analogies. Let’s say that the same units of biological activity would necessarily require the same units of cost. I mean, so so we’re not well modeled by yeast and we’re not perhaps well modeled by rats because we have this capacity to abstract. A good biologist would say, hey, that’s a fundamental transformation in the nature of biological reality. It’s not something that can just be hand waved away. And and Malthus did not take that into account. And that means he was wrong biologically, not just economically. And I think, as I said before, the evolution of the prefrontal cortex is a good exemplar of that. A perfect example of the difference between atoms, which are final or finite and knowledge, which is potentially infinite, is the most expensive car in the world called Bugatti Veyron. It costs 18 million dollars when you drive it out of the dealership. When you then smash it into a wall, it is a heap of plastic and metal worth maybe tens of thousands of dollars. The amount of atoms is the same, but they’ve been rearranged in a less pleasant way, which makes the difference between an 18 million dollar car and a scrap of heap. That’s the difference between talking about atoms and their finite nature and knowledge, which can then recreate and which can which can arrange and rearrange them. Sure. Sure. And what you’re doing there, too, is offering a real criticism of the even the notion. Certainly the overuse of the notion of zero sum game. No, 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. And I mean, you can certainly see that when we’re you just think about it for a few seconds about our ability to store information and never decreasing spaces and that we haven’t hit a limit to by any stretch of the imagination. And I mean, hard drive technology just gets stunningly better, faster and faster. And what’s the limit to that? The plank length or some unbelievably infinitesimal tiny, tiny space, you know, that would that would constitute the absolute physical limit of our ability to pack information into a given unit of, say, time and space. We’re not even we’re nowhere near that yet. Well, that actually leads me to a very interesting observation made by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer, who talked about the combinatorial revolution. Do I have time to talk about it very briefly? Yeah, yeah. So the the periodic table has about 100 elements in it, right. And if you take a simple compound like like bronze, it is constituted only of two elements, which is copper and tin, right. And it took us thousands of years to get to a point where we realized that by combining copper and tin, we could actually come up with bronze, which was actually useful for all sorts of things. But now, once you start, but the the the the the the number of calculations, the number of two element calculations are of course 100 times 99. Right. And it takes a lot of time to go through all of that. Once you get to four elements, that means hundreds times 99 times 98 times 97, you get to 94 million possible combinations. And here is the astonishing thing. When you start thinking about combinations of 10 elements, the number of combinations is greater than the number of seconds since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Right. So we literally we are we are very smart compared to our ancestors. But I think that when people look upon us in 100 or 200 years time, they will think we are very, very stupid indeed, because they will come up with all sorts of things by having more people, more freedom and more computing power that we couldn’t even imagine. So so in some sense, you’re making the case that the idea that we will run out of resources, giving common editorial given common editorial possibility is absurd is the idea that will run out of music. Oh, Gail, and I have this wonderful Gail take it over because this is this is one of those things that we are very proud of. Right. So I always because my students how many keys on a piano? Well, there’s 88 keys, right? Well, then how many songs are in a piano? Well, there’s really no songs in a piano. It’s a trick question. The songs are in the minds of human beings. And what is that number? Well, it’s really infinite. And so if you go back and ask Thanos or Malthus, how many keys on a piano, they say 88. Well, how many songs Thanos would say, well, you got 88 keys, you must only have 88 songs. Right. It’s kind of this crazy thing. So the kind of back to the your rule number four about your perspective. And when you say, you know, do we compare ourselves to who other people are or do we compare who we were yesterday? This little chart that we discussed allows us to go back and look back in time. And it’s really the proper perspective. If we look at not who we compare ourselves against today or who we compare ourselves to out in the future, but look back in time, you’ll see that that perspective is going, wow. It is. I’m just scrolling through these graphs that as you go farther and farther back in time, it’s stunning. It’s absolutely stunning. Yeah. And so I think the proper perspective, come up with the proper way to measure and then use the proper perspective will give you this completely different picture about where we where we’ve come to and the potential going forward. Yeah, you guys must be pretty damn thrilled about this book. We are very thrilled. But I think that playing off of something that Gail said about your rule number four is that you 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 everywhere at all times, then that can only lead to envy and resentment. Whereas 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. And 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. Well, 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. Let me just get back to the table of contents here. You said. These are. The enemies of progress from the romantics to the extreme environmentalists. Well, first of all, so do you guys have any thoughts on why people would be? I mean, are people opposed to these ideas? Do they think you’re wrong about what you’re saying? Do they? What kind of criticisms are you attracting and why are you attracting them? We’re here to ask you that question, Dr. Peterson, psychologist. It’s a logical question. Well, I think I think I think I think that Marion did a reasonable job just in in the conversation fragments a few seconds earlier. Misplaced envy is a really big problem. Resentments are really big problem. Historical ignorance is a really big problem. You know, I mean, people don’t know how bad it was. They don’t know how far we’ve come. They’re never taught that they’re not taught how terrible things had become in many places in the 20th century. Look, my students in my personality class, these are smart kids at the University of Toronto. They were well educated by by comparative standards. None of them knew anything about what happened in Stalinist Soviet Union or in Maoist China or in Cambodia. No one had ever taught them. And so so I think, you know, young people, they they see inequality in the world and they see some of the painful consequences of inequality because there are painful consequences. And then they’re enticed into finding a quick source of blame that requires no thought and also enticed into manifesting a moral virtue that is neither moral nor virtuous. And so and then and so here we are. And instead of you know, I’ve thought for many years, decades that whenever I walk out on the street and things aren’t on fire, I’m pretty damn thrilled at how stable and peaceful things are. I don’t take electricity for granted. I don’t take the integrity of the supply chain for granted. I truly think these are miracles. I don’t think the fact that the default interaction between human beings in in this in the Western world, broadly speaking, the default economic transaction is based on trust. I don’t take that for granted. That’s a bloody miracle. It took us hardly any societies have ever managed that and it took us thousands and tens of thousands of years to produce that. But I think children, our children are so badly educated by people who have no idea. They have no idea about economics. They have no idea about history and no idea about privation or suffering. They’re looking for easy answers and and and people to blame for the remaining. You know, catastrophes of the world, and I think your work is an unbelievably good antidote to that and something to offer young people that’s so bloody positive with that and that it’s, you know, miraculous and not naive at the same time. Like what a good combination that is. Well, here’s here’s the question. I love to ask my students is what would I have to pay you for you to never use your your your iPhone and the Internet again for the remainder of your life? And I’ve never get it. I’ve never been able to get a student to do it for less than five million dollars. It’s like we have this five million dollar thing that you own. You’re all you’re all five millionaires because you get to walk around with these devices. Oh, yeah, definitely. You are. You are so prosperous, so rich compared to to anybody that’s come before you. How could you not be anything other than than just just hyper grateful for the life that we have? Well, you know, I think that one of the things we need to do about this is we need to start training young people to think about themselves as. Possessed of more possibility than they know what to do with and then encouraged to harness that in it. So it’s a well, look, you you have all the food that you could have and you have all the information that there is. You’ve got it all in front of you now that you have it all in front of you. What’s the most noble vision you can bring forth to make use of that possibility? No, and I know some of the research I’ve done on helping people make vision for the future future authoring program. We showed pretty clearly that you can motivate students. We dropped the dropout rate of boys in in community college 50 percent by just having them sit down for 90 minutes and develop a vision. So you say, look, you look at what’s in front of you. Way more than anyone has ever had in history. And some people might have a little more in front of them than you. Like, certainly. But when you have more than you could ever use, how much do you need? And and and then who should you be to live up to that? Well, that’s, you know, our collective problem at the moment, trying to solve that and hopefully solving it before we let bitterness and resentment and historical ignorance get the upper hand, because it’s kind of a battle at the moment. Yes, in our book, we do point to a number of people who have made a tremendous difference in the history of our species. We talk about Gutenberg, for example, and his printing press. We talk about what and his steam engine. We talk about some wise, the guy who realized that when doctors washed their hands, they weren’t killing their patients and things like that. And so he had a fun time with that, didn’t he? Didn’t he end up like persecuted in an insane asylum and died a miserable death for all his advances, advancing humanity? That’s right. That’s right. It certainly wasn’t accepted at the time, just like Galileo’s observations and whatever. But but I think that if this book could imbue young people with the understanding that they have worth, that they have something to contribute, that it is more noble to apply yourself to changing society for the better, rather than constantly bitching about problems in society that you don’t intend to do anything about except to complain and go on marches. You know, do something, something proactive. If you if you see that there are children in Africa dying from a from a curable disease, go and join the group of people who are going to discover a cure to it or whatever. Yeah, or figure out how to the bloody faculties of education. I’ve been thinking about this for like 10 years. You know, with our computer technology, every single child, I would say on the planet, but certainly in the in the states where everyone has access to computational equipment, every single child should be an expert speed reader because computers could train children to automate letter phoneme and word recognition perfectly rapidly because computers are great at mass practice. And if the faculties of education had an ounce of integrity, they would have been working diligently on the problem of getting children over that hump because there’s a hump in reading comprehension a because to begin with, like there is when you’re learning how to play music, you have to automate letter recognition and syllable recognition and word recognition and then phrase recognition. So you get a phrase in a go at a glance. As soon as you’ve got that you can start to read for meaning. It’s no longer effortful. And then as soon as you can read for meaning, of course, it’s, it’s just as engaging as watching a movie, which people obviously don’t have to be taught to do. And so there are all these problems that are laying out there in the world and people have a set of problems that bug them that they could be working on fixing, and they have all this technology to fix it. It’s like, that’s, that’s what you want to do is figure out what you what you think needs to be fixed, and then take all this wealth that you had put at your disposal and fix it, man. And then you got something to do with your life and we could start with the proposition that it’s good that you’re around. How’s that you’re not a cancer on the face of the planet and you have to hang your head in shame because you’re ruining everything. Quite the contrary. That’s actually wrong. And I don’t just mean wrong morally I mean wrong in the sense you guys have pointed out is wrong, technically, no, that’s wrong. Those biologists got it wrong. Our innovation, our innovation framework is, of course, embedded in a national culture, and let me say a few words about that. The cultures go through periods of tremendous openness to change technological change and technology of course manifest itself in great advances in biotechnology industry, whatever even education, but they can also ossify close themselves off and destroy themselves from within a perfect example of that would be the difference between song China and Ming China and the succeeding dynasties song China in the 12th century AD was a tremendous place of openness and innovation and and relative freedom. It was during that period that the Chinese have come up with paper money, the compass gunpowder, and then the dynasty collapse and it was replaced by particularly tyrannical one Ming and successor and China went into a technological downward spiral in which it remained for the next 800 years. So, the analogy to the United States, I think, would be that in the 1950s and the 1960s. There certainly was a tremendously forward looking forward looking mentality which talked about flying cars and travel to the moon travel to travel but not just travel to the mean to the moon but interstellar travel and all sorts of things. And I think that especially in the last couple of decades, maybe since the end of the dot com bubble. And of course the postmodern triumph in universities. I think that that sort of optimism has been replaced by a sense that personal agency is no longer that important that Oh, it’s worse. It’s worse than that. Marian, it’s, I’ve watched this with young men, you know, it’s they’re being taught that personal agency. First of all, perhaps doesn’t exist that that’s just a cover story for the use of compulsion and power, because that’s in some sense, the postmodern claim, but that even if it does exist that all that agency, and this is in keeping with this Malthusian doctrine is that, well, you shouldn’t be exercising your agency because you’re just part of the world destroying force and so it’d be better, it’d be better for the planet, it’d be better for the planet if you didn’t exist. But if you have to go to all the goddamn trouble of existing and imposing yourself on existence itself, then you should at least have the good sense not to do anything. And I do believe that that’s the message, especially that young men are getting that they’re a burden on the planet that and and if they you know, if they if they don’t just shut up about their good fortune about being here, they certainly shouldn’t go around, you know, trying to do anything, because God only knows what will come out of that and it’s so demoralizing it’s so awful to watch. But I think the pendulum is swinging back at least a little bit. I mean, you have your podcast and your reach. Our book had been endorsed by Nobel Prize in economists, former higher level government officials, by bestselling authors. And I think that especially when you show people the data, and you explain what they are, what they are looking at and that that it is objective that world is really getting better, not in spite of population growth, but at least in large part because of population growth, they start thinking thinking very differently. And and and hopefully this this particular book will be a bit of an antidote to that kind of anti humanism and anti natalism that is destroying generations of people. We didn’t talk about it very much. But in the third part of the book, I talk about I talk about these new studies on the rise in so called eco anxiety amongst children throughout the Western world. Children are being scared to death that every sandwich they eat, every holiday they take is somehow destroying the planet. Psychologists are now seeing families who find it very difficult to cope with living in the modern world because they feel that their activity is destroying the planet. This anti natalist anti humanist view is deeply damaging not just to the general future of our species, but to individual lives of men, women and children in the world today. Yeah, it does nothing. Well, the other it’s also it’s also it also is counterproductive in relationship to the fact that the human race is not as much as the human race is. Also, it’s also it also is counterproductive in relationship to the stated goals of the people producing the anxiety because what happens to men who are demoralized young men who are demoralized is that because they lose hope and then don’t put in effort and become cynical that they their relationships get fractured and they have no productive activity and so their lives get more and more difficult and and and cynicism inducing as they withdraw into this sort of nihilistic negative Buddhism in some sense. And then they get bitter and then they get resentful and then they get angry and then look the hell out. And so because if you push people into a corner by demoralizing them about like the very nature of their existence itself or about existence itself, it isn’t that they’re just going to wander away quietly and disappear into the woodwork like like mice. Some of them will do that, but others will turn into unbelievable monsters. And we always throw up our hands and wave around when we see something happen like happened in Buffalo’s like, well, why did that happen? It’s like, well, if you wanted to know you could know, but you don’t want to know. It’s interesting you should mention it is because in the last chapter on enemies of progress, we actually discuss some of the mass shooters in the United States over the last five years or so, and many have been have been driven by Malthusian concerns. One of the one of the shooters in in Walmart, I believe it was in El Paso left behind him a memorandum saying that there are too many people in the world. And if you want to be good for the planet, we have to start calling calling our fellow human beings. Well, man, if there are too many if there are too many people on the planet, and we’re facing an apocalypse because of it. Well, why isn’t that the moral thing to do? You know, and people people keep asking, what are these shooters, there’s lots of reasons these shooters do what they do. And a lot of it’s a real pathological narcissism. But they don’t leave behind manifestos because they haven’t been thinking. They are and they are often possessed by these, these anti natalist and Malthusian ideas, there’s no doubt about that. And that’s part of what they do to justify their destructive narcissism is say, well, I’m look at me, I’m, you know, I’m a moral paragon, because I’m getting rid of some of the excess population. It’s like, well, I’m, I’m going to view that with a bit of skepticism. Thank you very much. But it’s not like they’re not being handled, handled the handed the ammunition by the right thinking biologists in prestigious universities who proclaim so self righteously that there are too many people on the planet. Yeah, you go back, you go back Jordan to the Unabomber. If you remember him and his manifesto, and you look at who he was trying to blow up, he actually targeted research centers that were trying to come up with cures for natalist diseases and problems like you could attack the very source of new life, because your ideology says there’s too many people. Yeah, so one of the things we can conclude with is for everyone watching and listening, if you are possessed by a set of ideas, that’s predicated on the claim that in some fundamental ontological manner, there are too many people for you, then you should take a serious look at what you believe, because there’s nothing in that that’s good. And your claim that that belief is what everyone sensible would believe if they only cared about the planet is like, first of all, just exactly what sort of saint are you? And second of all, where the hell’s your evidence for that claim? And so, yeah, I’m appalled at how frequently those claims are put forward in universities under the guise of some transcendent morality and some what is worship of the abstract planet in some sense that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And to sacrifice actual people to that, it’s just beyond comprehension. So maybe your book is a blow in the other direction. I know your work has been so far and like this book looks to me like something that’s really gonna give those who think differently from this, something really difficult to contend with. So wouldn’t that be lovely? It would. We are very grateful for the opportunity to talk about it on your podcast today. Yeah, well, hey, I’m so happy about your work. It’s so it’s so lovely to see these arguments be made in such a level headed manner. And so in such a deep rooted, empirical manner, what are the economists? Let’s are you being criticized by the by economists as well? Like what sort of reception are your suggestions for the retooling of measurement metrics? What sort of response are you receiving from economists, for example? Well, when we present when we present this perspective, the first response is just kind of this little bit of a surprise, just like no response. And then it’s okay, go go in and look at the data and then come back and tell us where what we’re missing here. What are we? What are we missing? Is there a problem with the data? Is there a problem with our logic? Follow us through on this and let us know where we’ve made a mistake in our thinking? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s good. That’s good. So that means that while what that seems to imply is that, well, a you haven’t made any obvious mistakes, but be your approach is sufficiently unexpected, which which I think is pretty clear from a cultural perspective, that it’s actually going to take people a while to digest it and come back with the appropriate suggestions for improvement, no real criticism of the of the positive and useful set sort. Yeah, I would say that so far, the book has been circulating for long enough. It’s early drafts amongst the well known economists, that if there was any serious problem with the methodology, we would have been told and we haven’t. So the big test of the book and of the ideas in it is going to be the market test. Is it going to is it going to succeed or not? And if it sells and if people are talking about it, then we’ll know that we are onto something. Well, how how how is your previous book, the trends book doing and how many has it sold? Well, by standards of of a think tank book, meaning, you know, full of statistics, it it sold about I think it’s about over 40000 copies, which still makes it one of the one of the best or best selling think tank books, you know, in this town. But this new book is intended for a general audience as well. The reason why we spend so much time talking about the history about, you know, Thanos, for example, is precisely because we want people to start understanding how these pernicious ideas that have been around for a very long time have found their way into popular culture and maybe lodged in the back of their brains. And and and and that there is no reason why they should be the real estate in the brain is precious. Don’t fill it with with stuff which is not true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay. Well, today. All right. So everyone listening, we were talking about Marion Toopies and Gail Pooley’s new book, Super Abundance and their reanalysis of the role of human population in the world. The role of human population and human freedom in producing flourishing in all dimensions, environmental, economic, conceptual, all these things we can be positive about. And so I think it’s great. I think the work’s great. And it’s as I said earlier, it’s so lovely to see something so profoundly optimistic. And it’s such an effective blow against this dismal and vindictive anti humanism that seems to masquerade as current day moral virtue. And so good for you guys, I hope you sell 5 million copies and people dispense with this Malthusian catastrophe that’s been plaguing us for like 100 years. So that’d be lovely, man. Thank you very much. Thank you guys. Yeah, man. Yeah, nice talking to you.