Dec. 7, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the editor of humanprogress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Marion Toopey. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am very excited to have you on. | ||
| We've met once before for a dinner. | ||
| But what you're doing with Human Progress, I think, is just spectacular. | ||
| You guys are actually promoting good news. | ||
| There is actual good news and good things happening in the world. | ||
| It seemingly is something that people don't often talk about. | ||
| So I think you're doing great work and we're going to spend an hour talking about a lot of the good stuff that is happening. | ||
| But I always like to start with a little bio on people. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about yourself. | ||
| How do you end up working for Human Progress? | ||
| Well, I was born behind the Iron Curtain in what was then communist Czechoslovakia. | ||
| And so from an early age I started to understand the importance of political and economic freedom. | ||
| We had neither in Czechoslovakia. | ||
| That'll make you learn it pretty quick, huh? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then when the wall came down in 1989, me and my parents went for Christmas in Vienna. | ||
| That was the first time that you could actually leave your country and you could travel abroad as a family. | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
| I was 13. | ||
| Because before then, people still could travel to the West, but they would keep the children behind as hostages. | ||
| But now that the wall came down and communism collapsed, You could travel anywhere you wanted. | ||
| So we decided to go to Vienna. | ||
| And the moment that we crossed the border into a Western capitalist liberal democracy, it was like stepping out of a black and white movie into a color film. | ||
| Everything was just so much beautiful, so much more beautiful. | ||
| The shops were full. | ||
| People were smiling. | ||
| There was color everywhere. | ||
| And so I think that even at that early stage of my life, I started to think about what makes countries rich, what makes countries poor. | ||
| And that's, I think, where my interest in all of that started, really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about your education. | ||
| Well, I went to high school and undergraduate in Johannesburg, South Africa, of all places, because when the wall came down, my parents emigrated to South Africa. | ||
| They are medical doctors and so their expertise was needed. | ||
| So, as a kid, I got to see both the fall of communism and also the fall of apartheid, which is kind of a unique experience. | ||
| And I'm very glad I had the kind of childhood upbringing I had. | ||
| And so I finished my undergraduate at the University of Edvardusrand. | ||
| What's it like being in these places when something is falling like communism or apartheid? | ||
| Because we seem to live in a time right now where a lot of people think that we're watching parts of the West. | ||
| Yes, I think that for the vast majority of the population in Czechoslovakia, clearly the fall of communism was a tremendous blessing. | ||
| There was an immense amount of optimism about the future. | ||
| And also unavoidable disappointment with some aspects of the utopian future that people have imagined. | ||
| Nonetheless, just about anybody who analyzes economics and politics in Central and Eastern Europe over the last 25 years concludes that people are much, much better off than they used to be. | ||
| And I think the similar thing was happening for a vast majority of South Africans, especially black South Africans. | ||
| who never had a vote, who never had political rights or most political rights under apartheid. | ||
| And of course, in 1994, South Africa held its first multiracial democratic elections. | ||
| And as a consequence, there was also a tremendous amount of optimism, again, followed by the inevitable disappointments as reality set in. | ||
| Nonetheless, it's an extraordinary time of of enthusiasm and optimism, and tremendous, I think, sense of brotherhood between people. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that's necessary, that sort of utopian vision of when things are changing, that everything is gonna be magically fixed and better, and then, as you're saying, then there's that period where you go, oh, it didn't, everything didn't magically get fixed at once, but you sort of need that vision to get there, you sort of need that to kind of see in the distance? | ||
| I think you appeal to a utopian vision of the future as you consolidate democracy in the case of Eastern Europe and as you consolidate multiracial democracy in the case of South Africa. | ||
| But ultimately, utopianism is the great enemy of human progress, because I think that human progress needs to be measured in terms of the past rather than some sort of a utopian future. | ||
| Human progress is an incremental process where you are trying to decide, OK, is today better than yesterday? | ||
| And if so, that is progress. | ||
| Problems are going to be with us forever. | ||
| The question is, are we actually improving incrementally in important areas of human well-being on a daily basis? | ||
| Is that one of the problems with how we ingest news? | ||
| Because I was telling you before we started, I went on Human Progress this morning and it Feels good to me. | ||
| The layout of the site is great, and the images and the colors and all that, but seeing so many consistently good things trending that you don't see anywhere else, and we're gonna get into many of them, is that just... | ||
| Is it hard to get clicks because people don't like the, oh, things are a little better than yesterday and the long trends, when they just want the day-to-day craziness and headlines and all that? | ||
| Yes, I wouldn't be the first one to point to the nature of news, the fact that news is about things that happen. | ||
| As Steven Pinker always likes to say, you know, there is no journalist standing in the middle of a city that is at peace saying, you know, I'm here in Luanda, the capital of whatever it is, of Angola, I think. | ||
| And there is no civil war. | ||
| You know, journalists go to places where terrible things happen and they report on those things. | ||
| And so that gives a skewed image of what is happening in the world. | ||
| If it bleeds, it leads. | ||
| I mean, that is a well-known phenomenon. | ||
| Combined with the nature of the social media, certainly I think that Twitter and smartphones make terrible things immediate and intimate. | ||
| So, you know, we were able to watch tsunami in Japan in real time. | ||
| We saw destruction and death of thousands of people. | ||
| In real time. | ||
| Whereas, you know, a couple of decades, a few decades ago, and certainly a few centuries ago, you would never have known that a terrible thing has happened on the other side of the world. | ||
| Does that complicate your work, do you think? | ||
| That people get information so quickly that then maybe are making misjudgments because they're not looking at the sort of long view of history? | ||
| I'm not sure if it complicates things, because pessimism is part of human nature. | ||
| It also enables us to respond to these stories in a quicker time, to be able to say, on our website at least, look, it is true that there was, in this particular case, tsunami and people have died, but look at the long-term trends in terms of People dying and property being damaged due to extreme weather events or natural catastrophes and the trend is declining. | ||
| So we are also able to use the social media to respond to it. | ||
| The problem is that the good news doesn't get picked up as often as the bad news, because the bad news leads, the good news doesn't. | ||
| Yeah, and there's just a psychological component. | ||
| There might be an evolutionary reason we focus on the bad things, maybe for survival or something to that effect. | ||
| Yes, John Tooby and Leda Cosimides from University of, is it Southern California? | ||
| At Santa Barbara? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They are the pioneers of evolutionary biology. | ||
| They believe that our brains have evolved at a time in tens of thousands of years ago, | ||
| when the world was just a much more inhospitable place than what it is today. | ||
| The world where there was omnipresent danger from other tribes, from wild animals, from poisonings. | ||
| And at a time when life expectancy was very low, and they like to say that our modern skulls house, | ||
| ancient minds and the kind of psychological responses that we have evolved for tens of thousands of years ago are difficult to apply to modernity, which is just so fundamentally different than what it was until relatively recently. | ||
| The key period here in time history is the last 200 to 250 years, when the world really has changed beyond all recognition. | ||
| Yeah, so in a weird way, we as humans, are we almost victims of our own success? | ||
| I mean, that's sort of what it sounds like. | ||
| We've done so much good, we have advanced so far, that now we nitpick about little things constantly and think they're massive when, yeah, we're not. | ||
| Dying of massive we're doing a lot with disease which we're gonna get to and a whole bunch of other things We've made our lives way safer and extended our lives and all of these things. | ||
| So we're almost a victim of all of that goodness Yes, so from an evolutionary perspective again a research of others not my own overreaction to a potentially bad thing happening and had a lower cost to the organism, in this case a human being, than underreaction. | ||
| If you overreacted, saw something that may have been potentially harmful, you overreacted to it, but you survived. | ||
| Whereas if you underreacted to something that was potentially harmful, then your gene pool ended right there and then. | ||
| Right, it ends pretty quick, yeah. | ||
| And so those genes didn't get passed on. | ||
| So yes, The complexity of the modern economy, the complexity of the social interactions, global trading system, for example, is certainly much greater than what our ancestors were exposed to. | ||
| And so it is perhaps not surprising that a lot of people are a little bit uneasy or continue to be uneasy. | ||
| Then again, the website is there to show people precisely how bad things were before and how good things are now. | ||
| So don't get depressed too much. | ||
| There is a good story to be told about humanity. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting, when I go speak at colleges, one of the lines that I think does actually work with young people who are, you know, if they're protesting and they're screaming about the patriarchy and evils of capitalism and all of this stuff, I'll always say to them, you know, does anyone in this room not have it better than their grandparents? | ||
| And certainly in the United States, but if you live in the Western world, basically everybody does, pretty much. | ||
| I have yet to find someone that doesn't. | ||
| And I always think that's a really effective way of getting people who are so focused on the negative to go, oh, something good must have happened because... | ||
| You know, even though I like to scream about my victimhood, it's a lot better than what my grandparents had. | ||
| Yes, I mean, take something like women's equality, or gay equality, or even caring about the environment. | ||
| and animal rights, or animal welfare, I should say. | ||
| Jonathan Haidt from New York University says that capitalism actually fundamentally transforms our sense of values because, or priorities, I should maybe say. | ||
| Because when we are extremely poor, which is to say the first 99.9% of homo sapiens on earth, | ||
| the primary objective of any individual human being was to survive. | ||
| You had to somehow get hold of enough calories to make it to the next day. | ||
| You had to somehow avoid being murdered by somebody who wanted your stuff. | ||
| You had to somehow protect your family. | ||
| You had to keep away from cold, from heat, etc. | ||
| But in the last 200 years or so, our incomes have skyrocketed. | ||
| The world is, roughly speaking, adjusted for inflation. | ||
| I can't say this often enough because people always attack, oh, but you're not adjusting for inflation. | ||
| Of course we are adjusting for inflation. | ||
| Adjusted for inflation, the world average is roughly 12 times better off than what it was in 1820. | ||
| So we have become much richer and when you no longer have to worry about things like survival, you start caring about things like the nature of the society that you live in, the fairness of treatment of your fellow human beings, you start caring about women equality, as I said, you start caring about gay rights, you start caring about animal protection and environmental protection. | ||
| So in that sense, the tremendous increase in incomes and general wealth of the society has also contributed to creating a much fairer and much more egalitarian society. | ||
| So capitalism isn't all evil? | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| People who think capitalism is evil, I highly recommend that they visit Cuba, they visit Venezuela, they visit North Korean countries which have taken deliberately a step in the opposite direction. | ||
| Capitalism has its problems, liberal democracy has its problems, and it is our task to try to fix these problems on the margins. | ||
| But to throw out the economic and social underpinnings of modernity, of this extraordinary age of abundance, would be a mistake. | ||
| Are you shocked at the amount of people in the West that seemingly want to do just that? | ||
| No, I'm not even shocked by the fact that in Eastern Europe, where I'm from, people who are in their early teens and into the late teens, people who have never experienced communism, people who were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, are now embracing socialist ideas, or at least those socialist ideas are now increasingly popular amongst young people, which they certainly aren't amongst people of my generation. | ||
| What do you chalk that up to? | ||
| Because I don't think it's just that they didn't experience it. | ||
| Is it just that utopian dream that we all have, or is it just that it all sounds good? | ||
| The endless cry of equality, which of course never turns out to be equality. | ||
| It all is just, if you don't want to really deeply think about a system, well then communism or socialism is pretty good. | ||
| Well, Milton Friedman liked to say that every generation needs to be educated in the benefits of freedom. | ||
| And I think that even Founding Fathers were talking about something about, you know, we are always one generation away from tyranny. | ||
| Now, what that meant was to say that There is something perhaps in human nature that drags us back into that tribal socialistic mindset. | ||
| Now, there are a lot of different theories about that. | ||
| One possible theory is that actually as we grow up, we grow up in the only functioning communist society or communist institution, which is the family. | ||
| In a family, especially a nuclear family, people share wildly. | ||
| Children are not expected to earn their breakfast by I don't know, bringing home the bacon or whatever. | ||
| Things get shared very equally and so forth. | ||
| And that can work on a sort of nuclear family level. | ||
| The further you go, the less it works. | ||
| I mean, what you are prepared to do for your children is not the same what you are prepared to do for your cousins. | ||
| It's not the same what you are prepared to do for your second cousins, for your fellow citizens, and for that matter, for people on the opposite side of the world. | ||
| so the fact that we are able to conduct our affairs along these socialist lines in nuclear | ||
| family doesn't then translate into the society as a whole. | ||
| So that may be one reason. Another reason may be that there is within human beings, within | ||
| human psychology, a tendency to want to to bring down people who have gotten too far up. | ||
| If you are thinking about tribal society or these roaming groups of hunter-gatherers of, say, between 50 and 150 people, where everybody You didn't want all the women and all the food to be monopolized by the one alpha male. | ||
| So usually there was some sort of a combination of an alliance made by other males to bring this alpha male down so there would be a greater sharing. | ||
| And that was good for the alpha male too, right? | ||
| I mean, he wanted to survive himself. | ||
| If he survived, if he survived. | ||
| I mean, amongst the chimps and so forth, the alpha male does usually end very poorly. | ||
| So that may be another reason. | ||
| Another reason may be that in the hunter-gathering society, some of the food would be shared equally. | ||
| For example, if you killed an animal, there was no refrigeration, you couldn't store it. | ||
| There was no accumulation of wealth in that sense. | ||
| And so things did get shared amongst the members of the group. | ||
| Plus there was no accumulation of wealth because you were constantly moving. | ||
| So whatever you acquired was limited to whatever you were able to carry on your back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yes, differences between people, at least to the extent that we are experiencing now, is something that is probably quite new from an evolutionary standpoint. | ||
| So all of these reasons ensure that, and many more, ensure that young people, or rather every generation, needs to be explicitly educated in why the economy that we have today, which is so different from what our ancestors have experienced, is actually good for us. | ||
| Free trade is a very good example. | ||
| Free trade contributes to economic growth, and yet Every generation, you have a new push for protectionism. | ||
| Again, the complexity of the economy has outpaced our ability to understand it without explicit learning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let's talk about a whole bunch of these trends that are happening right in front of our eyes. | ||
| But as you said, they're happening incrementally, so people don't necessarily focus on them enough. | ||
| Well, I'll let you kick off the first one. | ||
| What do you think is the most encouraging worldwide trend at the moment? | ||
| or what's exciting you the most perhaps? | ||
| Well, so the human progress is unabashedly about, it's human-centric, which is to say that we consider | ||
| the welfare and the flourishing of a human being, all human beings, to be really important, | ||
| of primary importance. | ||
| That's an interesting distinction 'cause you didn't call it earthprogress.org, right? | ||
| I mean, the idea was that this is so that humans can figure out the best place, the best way to live here | ||
| and hopefully that's good for the earth too, but that humans actually are number one here. | ||
| Yes, we can certainly talk later in the show about is it possible for humans to coexist with the Earth and the animals, and what can we do to make sure that that actually happens. | ||
| But Human Progress is a humanistic project. | ||
| And clearly there is no more fundamental aspect to human flourishing than staying alive. | ||
| And here we have seen tremendous improvement. | ||
| Prior to 1800s, life expectancy around the world was anywhere between 25 and 30 years, since time immemorial. | ||
| As late as 1950, sorry, as late as 1900, In the richest countries of the world, life expectancy was only 50 years. | ||
| Today, globally, it's 70 years. | ||
| In the United States, it's 78 years. | ||
| And in places like Japan, it's 88 years. | ||
| So wait, let's not gloss over that, because those were some powerful numbers. | ||
| So in 1900, the average life expectancy was 50 years. | ||
| In rich countries. | ||
| In rich countries. | ||
| In rich countries! | ||
| So that's even more impressive, so to speak, how we've advanced it. | ||
| So you're saying basically in the 120 years since then or so, we've extended it by 20 years. | ||
| We've extended it by 30 years in the West, in rich countries, and an average person today, say somebody living in Malaysia, lives 20 years longer than rich people did in 1900. | ||
| Yeah, that's incredible. | ||
| So in 120 years in rich Western countries, we extended life 30 years in 120 years. | ||
| I mean, that's almost unfathomable, actually. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| And so that's the first thing is that, you know, people want to stay alive because They enjoy it. | ||
| Can you give me some of the markers of how we actually did that? | ||
| Well, one thing is decline in violence, which, again, Steven Pinker has written a whole book about. | ||
| Rates of people dying in wars have declined, certainly since the end of the Second World War. | ||
| today for the first time in human history, there is no hot conflict between two states | ||
| that have declared war on each other. | ||
| So we still have a frozen conflict between North Korea and the United States. | ||
| We have the Russian invasion of the Eastern Ukraine, but even then, Russia and Ukraine | ||
| are not officially at war. | ||
| So this old concept of two countries, you know, declaring war on each other | ||
| and then going to wars has actually, well, at this stage, it has disappeared. | ||
| It would almost be unfathomable these days where two warring countries with full-on wars were invading each other in the traditional sense. | ||
| It would almost be hard to imagine what that would look like now. | ||
| Or what could cause that. | ||
| Hopefully it stays that way. | ||
| One thing to remember about human progress is that there is nothing predetermined about it. | ||
| It is not linear. | ||
| There are obviously things which can go terribly wrong. | ||
| In the 20th century you have the First World War, possibly the most unnecessary major conflict in recent centuries. | ||
| followed by the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and what have you. | ||
| But the remarkable thing about human progress and humanity as a whole is that it is quite robust. | ||
| At the end of the 20th century, life expectancy was still longer than what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. | ||
| We are still consuming more calories, more people went to school and so on and so forth, in spite of the 20th century being actually quite violent. | ||
| Anyhow, since the end of the Second World War, the world has gotten progressively more peaceful. | ||
| Then of course you have medical breakthroughs. | ||
| Let's pause on the violence part for just a sec because I think it's one of those things where you can say that to people and you can talk all about the wars that don't exist anymore and that there aren't, you know, genocides the way there were and all of those things, though admitting that some bad things are still happening. | ||
| I think people just don't They see school shootings or they see, you know, a riot here or something happening all over the place and they just automatically believe things are getting worse. | ||
| That sort of gets us to where we started about how technology is a part of this. | ||
| But how difficult is that for you just to get the truth across to people and have them actually accept it while at the same time they're looking at, you know, a shooting or this or that that they can just quickly see online? | ||
| Yeah, you've got to look at the long-term trends and try to figure out whether things, in fact, are getting worse or whether this is a blip. | ||
| You know, the line of progress, again, is not linear, it is jagged. | ||
| And there is no, once again, there is no guarantee that things will continue to improve. | ||
| So you have to look at long-term trends. | ||
| I think the Atlantic ran a story A few months ago, after the latest school shooting, showing that actually the number of kids dying at schools, horrible as it is, have been on a decline. | ||
| So yes, so long-term trends and then having journalists to actually report those long-term trends, that would be key. | ||
| So, violence is one thing. | ||
| We live in less violent times. | ||
| The second thing is that the medical breakthroughs were absolutely fundamental. | ||
| And here I would point simply to two things. | ||
| One was vaccination. | ||
| A guy called Jenner, in mid-18th century England, noticed that milkmaids didn't get smallpox. Now, smallpox | ||
| was absolutely a horrifying disease. I mean, your body would be covered with these... With these... | ||
|
unidentified
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Lesions. | |
| Postules, yeah. And, you know, 80% of kids who got it died, up to 60% of adults who got it, you know, died in... | ||
| In 18th century France, it was estimated 95% of the population got smallpox at one point of their lives or another. | ||
| And Jenna noticed that milkmaids didn't get smallpox. | ||
| That's because they got a milder version of the pox from cows. | ||
| And so he started inoculating people with the pox from the cow. | ||
| And because the Latin word for cow is vacca, our word vaccination comes from that. | ||
| And that was a major improvement. | ||
| The other thing that happened was was that humanity discovered the germ theory of disease. | ||
| We didn't know that disease was spread via germs. | ||
| People had all sorts of weird ideas about humors in the body and miasmatic theories and what have you, and it was all nonsense. | ||
| But the upshot of us being so ignorant about how disease spreads was that people, for example, didn't wash their hands. | ||
| And you can imagine, right? | ||
| If you're a farmer who is using human excrement in order to fertilize his fields and comes home and sits down to dinner. | ||
| You can imagine what sort of diseases that leads to. | ||
| Jews, funny enough, who washed their hands as part of their religious rituals, tended to fall less sick and die at a lower rate than the rest of the European population. | ||
| But once again, because people were so ignorant about how diseases spread, they assumed it was magic, which again led to pogroms and discrimination against the Jews. | ||
| Even doctors didn't. | ||
| Doctors also didn't change their clothes. | ||
| Because the more blood and gore you had on your clothes, the more it signified to the potential patient that you were a doctor in great demand, right? | ||
| So doctors were actually a massive reason or one of the major reasons why disease spread. | ||
| They went from dissecting corpses to delivering babies, introducing pathogen into the body of a mother. | ||
| And all that stopped basically after discovery of the germ theory of disease and child mortality, maternal mortality started to decline and life expectancy showed up as a result. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else is going on with the diseases of today that we're getting close to eradicating some things that still exist, right? | ||
| Well, we are very close to eradicating polio. | ||
| There are some what's called wild cases of polio in places like the Congo. | ||
| Of course, we have made HIV/AIDS, or rather we have created drugs that no longer make HIV/AIDS | ||
| a death sentence, which, you know, considering it only took from 1980 when we first started | ||
| talking about HIV/AIDS to about 1994, 1995, when the first antiretroviral drugs came along. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| only 14 or 15 years, that's a remarkable accomplishment. I mean, people have lived with smallpox for | ||
| millennia. So we have, we have, we were able to do that. | ||
| Now, the other thing which is quite extraordinary is that cancer rates are declining. Now, | ||
| the reason why that's so interesting is that incidences of cancer increase with age. | ||
| So as people grow older, and on average we continue to increase our life expectancy, the chances of you contracting or developing cancer, not contracting but developing cancer, get much higher. | ||
| Cancer is basically just cells dividing during a normal process of human body. | ||
| existing, but the more subdivision of cells you get, the more likely it is that one of them is going to go crazy and start subdividing without control and cause cancer and you're going to die. | ||
| And the fact that cancer rates for men and women are declining, certainly in rich countries, even though life expectancy is shooting up, that's again an extraordinary achievement because of early detection, because of better drugs, Now with CRISPR-Cas9, the gene editing system, we are probably going to be able to focus on personalized medicine, so we are going to be able to create drugs specifically for one individual or group of individuals who share | ||
| Can you explain CRISPR a little bit just for those that are, you know, you don't have to give me a major explanation, but like the sort of the most simple explanation of it. | ||
| I was reading something on the site today about CRISPR. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a gene editing technique, which is to say that hypothetically, and hopefully we're not very far from that time, you'll be able to splice out of the genome, to cut out from the genome, genes which are responsible for congenital diseases, which would be a very nice... It would be very nice to know that if a child gets born, it won't develop multiple sclerosis 20 years down the line and die in terrible pain. | ||
| So these are the sorts of things that we could do with CRISPR. | ||
| Yeah, I want to move on to the environment, but is there anything else on the medical side? | ||
| I think that education is the obvious example. | ||
| Obviously 80% of the world is literate, whereas most of the time people were not literate. | ||
| There's now a gender parity between boys and girls pretty much on average in the world. | ||
| Again, Something to be happy about, because historically girls were kept from education at a higher rate than boys. | ||
| I mean even in Afghanistan now girls are allowed to go to school, which again is a wonderful thing. | ||
| And nutrition, I would really like to end with nutrition, which is to say that Famine has disappeared from the world outside of war zones. | ||
| We all remember those images of starving children with inflated bellies in Ethiopia in the early 1980s. | ||
| And that's pretty much disappeared. | ||
| Hunger was basically a normal human condition throughout our history. | ||
| And today, an average African consumes as many calories as the Portuguese did in the early 1960s. | ||
| Just about everywhere in the world, people are consuming more calories than what the USDA recommends should be the average intake. | ||
| And in Africa, they are certainly reaching that And Africa is important because that's really where absolute poverty continues to be a major problem. | ||
| I think it's fair to say that absolute poverty is ending as a global problem. | ||
| It's ending as a global problem. It is now going to remain as an African problem | ||
| that is concentrated in a couple of African countries, in a few African countries, including places like the Congo. | ||
| All right, so let's shift to the environment. | ||
| If you listen to the news, it's getting hotter, everybody's freaking out about everything, we don't have clean water, all of these things. | ||
| Calm me down. | ||
| Well, I don't want to get into a debate over the science of global warming. | ||
| I'll leave it to the specialists. | ||
| Certainly, I do acknowledge that there is a consensus that the world is warming, whether it is warming at a too high rate or a lukewarming rate and where it's heading. | ||
| Obviously, prediction of the future, that's the most difficult thing. | ||
| I'm going to leave that to specialists and to scientists. | ||
| Just very quickly on that though, is it possible that in some of the places that it's warming, it's actually good that it's warming? | ||
| Well, certainly this one scientist from Holland called Professor Toll has calculated the likely costs and benefits of global warming until 2080 or so. | ||
| And he thought that because of the growing Because of the longer growing season, we'll be able to actually bring in more food, grow more food. | ||
| He also thought that there's also some evidence that the world is greening as a result of more CO2 in the atmosphere. | ||
| But I do acknowledge, I want to make it very clear, I don't want any hate mail to you or to me. | ||
| You're going to get hate mail either way, but acknowledge away. | ||
| I want to acknowledge that There are serious concerns and I'm basically a guy who is a techno-optimist. | ||
| I want to look for solutions to these problems. | ||
| What I don't want to do is to stop economic development. | ||
| I don't want to stop economic development in developing countries because it's extremely important that people who are very, very poor should not be very, very poor. | ||
| It's very important that if a woman in Angola or in Zambia has a premature birth, she should be able to have access to an incubator. | ||
| That is run on an electricity grid that is not going to collapse, for example. | ||
| That people can air-condition their homes, let's say in Africa, or they can keep themselves warm in Argentina. | ||
| Basically, that is my goal, not to stop economic development. | ||
| That is particularly true of Of poor countries, but I also think that it applies to rich countries. | ||
| If we can make life more comfortable for people, I think it would be very difficult, especially within the democratic context, to stop that. | ||
| Now look at what's happening in Macron's Paris. | ||
| We've seen Riots that that country hasn't seen since the 1960s. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| That's because the environmental concerns of the French elite, Macron included, are bumping against the living standards and limitations on the living standards of ordinary French men and women. | ||
| If you increase the price of electricity dramatically in order to make people cut down on electricity, it's also going to reduce both their comfort but also their standard of living. | ||
| If you're going to put additional taxes on this, that and the other, cars, gasoline, what have you, eventually people are going to get upset and are going to start voting for some very unpleasant people. | ||
| And this is something that we see happening throughout Europe. | ||
| Now, there are many different reasons why people vote for unpleasant political parties, but a fundamental feeling that standards of living in Europe are stagnating and that they are being taxed to a point where they actually have to go out and protest in the streets, burn hundreds of cars and basically vandalize the Arc de Triomphe. | ||
| So these things are happening. | ||
| So what I want to do is to sort of navigate a middle course between between concerns of the environment and continued economic development and continued prosperity. | ||
| And I think that the answer could potentially be found in techno-optimism, as I would call it. | ||
| So I would consider fracking to be a good example of techno-optimism. | ||
| Burning of one unit of natural gas produces half as much CO2 emissions as burning of coal. | ||
| So I think it would make a lot of sense to burn more natural gas than coal, but Our friends on the environmental side hate that, because it's still fossil fuels. | ||
| Okay, so let's forget about fossil fuels. | ||
| Let's have nuclear energy. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Last time anybody has died from a nuclear accident was in Chernobyl, because the communist leadership cut corners when it came to safety, and there was a breakdown of Chain of command and whatever and there wasn't this this accident where where dozens of people died But since then not a single person has died as a result of nuclear accidents including in Fukushima, which is the most recent one So nuclear energy is a perfect example of producing a lot of energy without any co2 emissions | ||
| Are our friends in the environmentalist movement pleased? | ||
| No, they are not. | ||
| Let's take another example. | ||
| Say, fertilizer. | ||
| Let's say that we can genetically engineer crops to need less fertilizer and less pesticides. | ||
| Why do we want Less fertilizer and less pesticides, because when those flow into rivers and then into oceans, they can have a negative consequence for wildlife. | ||
| So ideally, we would like to use less fertilizer, less pesticide. | ||
| So imagine that through GMOs, through genetic engineering, we could produce crops that don't require pesticides and fertilizer. | ||
| Are our friends in the environmental lobby happy? | ||
| No. | ||
| They hate those three letters. | ||
| So every single time that we offer, as techno-optimists, we offer a gradual move in the right direction, which cumulatively could have a massive impact on quality of life, on environmental protection and so forth. | ||
| The answer is always no. | ||
| So it's interesting because when you started talking about this, there's this immediate hesitancy because I think everyone, if you talk about climate at all, people think you're going to get slammed. | ||
| And I can tell you the most hate that I ever got on this show was when I had Alex Epstein on who wrote a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. | ||
| He wasn't denying climate science. | ||
| He was just saying that fossil fuels, in his estimation, are still the best way to advance human prosperity going forward. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| You immediately said you didn't want to go too far down that road because it just opens up the hate and all that. | ||
| But in essence what you're saying is that we're having to fight the environmentalists on what you would prescribe as the best ways to to move the environment forward. | ||
| That's pretty fascinating. | ||
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So how do you get through to these people then? | |
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I'm trying. | ||
| One of the things I'm trying to explain to a lot of my friends is that actually prosperity and economic development can be a friend of the environment. | ||
| That's because of this concept of environmental Kuznets curve. | ||
| Now that's just a fancy way of saying that when people grow richer, they are willing to spend more money on clean environment and protection of animals. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| Because it's not just stats which show it, but also look at the real-life examples. | ||
| When the economy collapsed in Zimbabwe, the first thing the people did in order to survive was to start slaughtering animals in the wild. | ||
| shooting zebras for meat, shooting elephants for tusks, and the environment took a huge knock. | ||
| In Venezuela, when the economy collapsed, both socialist countries by the way, but never mind, | ||
| in Venezuela, when the economy collapsed, people started slaughtering animals in the zoo. | ||
| The only way you can survive, if it's a choice between the life of an antelope and the survival | ||
| of a child, you know exactly what to do. And so economic development, making people richer, | ||
| is actually a very good way of accomplishing this environmental Kuznets curve. | ||
| When people grow rich, they start caring about the air they breathe, they start caring about welfare of animals, and so on and so forth, because those are, from the perspective of the survival of the human being, luxury goods. | ||
| And we're already seeing some very interesting things happening around the world. | ||
| For example, The forest coverage of the Earth is still declining by about 0.08% per year, but it is declining primarily, if not exclusively, | ||
| in poor countries and especially in Africa and also Latin America. But it is increasing in | ||
| rich countries, afforestation is taking place, there are more forests being grown, and in China | ||
| we are seeing a huge amount of afforestation because the country is now richer than what it | ||
| used to be. | ||
| So through economic development we can do that. | ||
| Through economic development we can also start protecting more of our marine life. | ||
| By creating exclusion zones against fishing and so forth. | ||
| How can we do that? | ||
| Why is that connected to economic development? | ||
| Well, because if you, for example, you can, well, not only do you have more technological ways of monitoring who is breaking the rules, but also you can still get access to the food you want through aquaculture. | ||
| Okay, so countries which are richer are able to get their food from aquaculture rather than from ordinary shore fishing. | ||
| So when it comes to these solutions, which by the way, I mean, what you just said there, it's pretty mind blowing that in much of the world, it's getting greener. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's people just don't think about that. | ||
| We just sort of just don't accept that that's real. | ||
| Most of this, do you see that we have to have a sort of public and private partnership on how we move forward on these things? | ||
| Should most of this come from governments? | ||
| Should it come from private corporations? | ||
| Should it come from individual people? | ||
| I mean, that seems to be what a lot of the debate is also about. | ||
| Well, I think that the evidence for the efficacy of government spending when it comes to science When it comes to scientific research, for example, it's not all that persuasive. | ||
| I don't think that governments are particularly good at spending money on scientific research. | ||
| Meaning that the research is shoddy, or just that they throw money at things and then just nothing comes of it? | ||
| Yeah, that would be part of the reason. | ||
| I am a believer in private companies doing their own research. | ||
| driven by the profit motive. | ||
| For example, energy inputs into production of anything from a can of coke to a bottle of water cost money. | ||
| Companies actually do have a profit incentive to try to limit the amount of resources they use in order to produce any type of good. | ||
| in the 1970s, between 1970s and today, the number of cans of coke that you could get from a pound of | ||
| aluminum has actually increased by something like 40 percent. | ||
| That's because companies don't want to spend money they don't have to spend on electricity, on spending money on natural resources and raw materials and what have you. | ||
| And so what we are actually seeing is that the number of dollars per what the amount of energy | ||
| we need in order to produce a dollar of output is actually declining and that's happening naturally | ||
| through the process of profit maximization on the parts of corporations. | ||
| Now that doesn't mean that there is absolutely no need for any kind of regulations. | ||
| We don't want corporations to be dumping toxic materials in our pristine rivers and what have you. | ||
| But what I am saying is that corporations in search for profit are actually very good at coming up with innovative solutions to environmental problems. | ||
| Yeah, it's part of the problem here also that different countries that are at different stages of their evolution of their economies and everything else need different things, need wildly different things. | ||
| What's happening in China now with growth is very different than what's happening in the United States or India or any of these countries that now have to, that are often putting out more CO2 and emissions and things like that. | ||
| They're going through their industrial revolutions. | ||
| We already did it so that we have an unequal playing field when it comes to some of this. | ||
| Yes, so that is a well-known notion within economic development that as a country starts on a path to industrialization, its damage to the environment increases, but once again it reaches that inflection point and then it starts to decrease as people become rich enough to start to appreciate a nice environment. | ||
| 90% of the plastics that are entering our oceans come from eight rivers. | ||
| They are all in the developing world, in Africa and in Asia. | ||
| The contribution of Western advanced economies to plastic pollution of the oceans is negligible, precisely because we are able to spend more money and effort and thought on how not to do it. | ||
| What would you say to the people that would say, our time is up here, or the evolution of humanity is that we've got to go to the stars, that eventually we'll have to get off this mortal coil and do it again somewhere else? | ||
| Well, first of all, it is very important to remember that pessimism about humanity's future has been with us since the dawn of writing. | ||
| From antiquity and ancient poems and epics, you know, after all, the flood, what is it about the flood? | ||
| about cleansing the world from a population that went awry. | ||
| Cato the Elder, writing in the second century BC, thought that Rome was finished because | ||
| the young were corrupted and women had loose morals and men were too effeminate to fight wars. | ||
| And this is when Rome was just a small town in you know with fewer with a few provinces in | ||
| Italy Rome continued to expand for the next three to four hundred | ||
| years But he was just very early. He was just very early, but but | ||
| you can see every generation thinks that that's that we are Especially as we grow older we think that the world is | ||
| entering a period of decline whereas in fact what we are doing | ||
| We are projecting our own physical decline onto the world | ||
| But so far those warnings about the imminent collapse of humanity have always been proven wrong, as Thomas Babington Macaulay, a 19th century British politician and writer, has written on what basis is it that having seen all this progress that we have made behind us, we see nothing but misery in front of us. | ||
| I'm paraphrasing, but that's the essence of what he said, and I think he's absolutely right. | ||
| Yeah, so we've done the diseases we're eradicating, we're doing a lot of good on the environment, or at least have some options now. | ||
| We do have options, yes. | ||
| What else should we be hitting on to give people some positivity to think about? | ||
| Well, I think my pet peeve is that I think that people don't read enough history, aren't enough versed in history, how life really used to be like before. | ||
| And I wish that people would spend more time thinking about what they are doing on a daily basis and asking themselves, | ||
| "Would I be able to do this in the past? | ||
| I just had a crown put in or a root canal operation with anesthetic and it was not something | ||
| and it wasn't particularly pleasant." | ||
| But it was better than it would have been a hundred years ago. | ||
| A hundred or two hundred years ago you would have it, you know, somebody would have to pull it out of your mouth. | ||
| So that's one thing. | ||
| I think that people And I think that if people understand history better and how life truly was quite horrific until very recent times. | ||
| Again, we are 300,000 years old, but the time of abundance is roughly 200 years old, 250 years old. | ||
| Maybe they will be more grateful for the things that we have. | ||
| And hopefully they will be more appreciative and more supporting of the institutions which underpin modernity. | ||
| Liberal democracy, with all of its warts, with all of its imperfections, it is still functioning better than Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey. | ||
| Free market capitalism, does it have its problems? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We shouldn't socialize costs of banking, for example, and privatize gains from Wall Street banking. | ||
| But again, it is the best creator of wealth known to humankind. | ||
| And so throwing it out, because there are imperfections on the margins that we should be working on to improve, would be a great mistake. | ||
| So, yes, appreciation of the past, gratitude for the present, hopefulness for the future. | ||
| Those are the steps, I think, in the right direction. | ||
| That, my friend, is an A-plus ending to an interview. |
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