Nov. 1, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| The United States right now, I don't believe, I haven't looked at those figures in a while, but I don't think that the United States is the largest polluter in the world. | ||
| I think that China and India are above us. | ||
| Now here you have four and a half billion people who are trying to get rich quick and who are spewing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and who are also very competitive with us because they have very low wages. | ||
| So to tie ourselves to the Paris Climate Accord, was the wrong way to go about it. | ||
| And you know what else happened? | ||
| Was that the United States has decreased its emissions of CO2 per capita at a faster pace than most places in the world. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we started getting rid of our coal-powered plants and we started introducing more and more natural gas into our electricity production. | ||
| And natural gas burns or rather emits much less CO2 than coal. | ||
| And so by simply by innovating, by basically changing the source of fuel from coal to natural gas, | ||
| we were able to decrease our CO2 emissions at a faster click | ||
| than we would have been obliged to do under Paris. | ||
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I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | |
| Joining me today is the editor of humanprogress.org and the co-author of the new book, 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, and many others that you will find interesting. | ||
| Marian Toupie, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me. | ||
| All right, Marian, it is a week before the election. | ||
| Everyone is going completely insane, and I thought, all right, we're gonna talk about some good news, and that is exactly what this book is all about. | ||
| And I absolutely loved it because you've got graphs, and you've got charts, and you've got pictures, and it's a pleasant way of getting some information. | ||
| But I thought the best way to kick this off with you would be, why do you think People are so hesitant to believe that good things are happening. | ||
| When I quote this book, just in private conversations, or when I have talks with people that things aren't getting so bad, there's a real resistance to it. | ||
| Like they can't believe it. | ||
| Have you guys thought about that at all? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Look, human beings have evolved to be pessimistic. | ||
| Essentially, our species is about 300,000 years old, and for most of that time, life was extremely difficult. | ||
| The world was much less hospitable to human beings. | ||
| And so it paid to be pessimistic, to expect bad things happen. | ||
| Any organism that understates the threats may then be destroyed, eaten, killed by predators. | ||
| But if you overstate the threat, nothing bad happens to you, except you may lose a little bit of time or a little bit of energy. | ||
| You know, if you are going around a bush and you hear some noise there and you think, well, everything is going to be fine, but in fact, there is a tiger or lion behind the bush, then that underreaction is going to cost you your life and you are not going to become an ancestor to anybody. | ||
| Whereas if you hear a noise and you think, well, there may be a lion or a tiger behind that bush and you run away, then of course you're going to pass those genes onto your, onto your progeny. | ||
| And over millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, those genes which are pessimistic are probably going to, are going to survive and they're going to, they're going to promote themselves. | ||
| Whereas, whereas the more pessimistic ones presumably would be weeded out of the gene pool. | ||
| So that's part of the reason. | ||
| And that's the hard wiring of the human brain. | ||
| But you also have the soft wiring of human brain. | ||
| Things like, for example, people fear losses more than they look forward to gains. | ||
| This is called a negativity bias, which is called bad is stronger than good. | ||
| We always remember the money that we have lost, but we forget the money that we have won. | ||
| We remember the criticism from the boss, but we don't remember all the good things they said about our work. | ||
| And there are a lot of these negativity biases which have developed over millennia in our brains, and they make us into a very pessimistic species. | ||
| Yeah, it's also interesting because, you know, people always complain, oh, well, if you watch the local news, it's so depressing because it's just, oh, you know, car accident, guy got shot, you know, baby fell off the roof, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And yet people watch. | ||
| And if they just showed good news, in essence, people just wouldn't watch. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So we have evolved to look for bad things, to be on the lookout for bad things. | ||
| That's what grabs our attention. | ||
| There was a psychological experiment a few years ago where the psychologist asked the cohort of people whom they were testing, the testing cohort, are you interested more in the bad news or the good news? | ||
| And the cohort said we are interested in the good news, absolutely, for sure. | ||
| And then on a split screen these psychologists started showing people bad news and good news and immediately people's eyes tended towards the bad news. | ||
| We are always on the lookout for the bad things. | ||
| If it bleeds, it leads. | ||
| That's why the media leads with bad news, because that's what we are programmed to consume with vigor. | ||
| All right, so with that as the backdrop for our conversation one week before the big presidential election, I wanna go into the top 10 that you talk about here, but the book has 78. | ||
| Trends that are going well. | ||
| So we're gonna plow through the top 10, and then I'm just gonna, I'm gonna quiz you on a couple of random ones as well, but I'm gonna go through them right here. | ||
| So the first trend that you guys have is the Great Enrichment, and this is basically about the economy. | ||
| So can you lay this out? | ||
| Because a lot of people think we're poor, the divide is worse than ever, and we seem to be getting poorer, but it's actually not true. | ||
| Since the historical record begun, people lived on about $2 per person per day. | ||
| 2000 years ago at the time of Christ or Caesar Augustus, people in America, in Europe, in Africa, anywhere in the world lived on $2 a day or so. | ||
| That is why today when we talk about absolute poverty, about living at a subsistence level, we talk about that $2 level because that's how people used to live since the dawn of time really. | ||
| Um, now, Bringing it forward all the way to 1800s, at the time of Thomas Jefferson's presidency, global income per capita per day is only $2.80. | ||
| So it's still very, very low. | ||
| But today, 200 years later, it is $44 per person per day globally. | ||
| In the United States, it's roughly $160 per person per day. | ||
| If the current trends continue, if we are able to repeat the growth that we had over the last hundred years and project it to 2100, then average global income will be $144 per person per day. | ||
| $44 per person per day. So from $2 since the dawn of time | ||
| to $44 today to about 150 in 2100. | ||
| That's the extent of the tremendous economic growth that we have experienced in the last 200 years and that we can | ||
| still experience in So I think one of the things that confuses people, at least when we hear this through the mainstream media, is there's this idea that the rich keep getting richer and that the poor are getting poorer. | ||
| But the argument that you're laying out, in essence, is not that the rich aren't getting richer. | ||
| Many rich people are getting richer. | ||
| But that the entire pool is actually being raised at the same time so that the lowest person is in far better shape now than they were, say, 200 years ago. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| The data which I just presented are data based on global average, which is to say a person living maybe somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia, right in the middle of the pack. | ||
| The data is not distorted by looking at just very rich people and high income inequality or what have you. | ||
| Globally, we are much better off than we used to be. | ||
| Of course, in well advanced countries, rich countries, people are much richer. | ||
| But the world as a whole is getting richer, which is why poverty has declined. | ||
| Absolute poverty has declined for about 90% of humanity in 1800 to less than 8% today. | ||
| I just want to repeat that. | ||
| In 1800, just 200 years ago, 90% of people lived on $2 per person per day. | ||
| I just want to repeat that in 1800, just 200 years ago, 90% of people lived on $2 per person | ||
| per day. | ||
| Today, roughly 8% of people live on $2 per person per day. | ||
| So yes, the great increase in riches has resulted in a substantial reduction in absolute poverty. | ||
| We have seen a billion people rise from absolute poverty in China in the last 40 or 50 years. | ||
| We are seeing India coming up. | ||
| We are seeing a number of African countries growing at 5% per year. | ||
| There's a lot of good news that's happening in the world, or at least there was before COVID. | ||
| And since this election is a week away, we should talk about the forces that make all of that happen. | ||
| It has a little something to do with free markets, right? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| The greatest decline in absolute poverty in the world is coterminous with the opening of the global economy after 1980. | ||
| This is called the period of globalization. | ||
| Now, I realize that a lot of people, including a lot of people in the United States, are ambivalent about globalization, but there is no doubt that once these formerly poor countries dropped socialism and central planning, embraced free markets, embraced multinational corporations and inward foreign investment, once that happened, These countries started to grow at a much faster pace, which is why today, places like China are middle-income countries. | ||
| They are no longer dirt poor. | ||
| I mean, at the time of Mao, these people literally ate dirt. | ||
| Today, they are sending people to the moon, well, at least to space. | ||
| So my point is that the last 40 years have been exceptionally good, especially for poor countries. | ||
| Yeah, all right, let's go to number two here, which is really an offshoot of this, that in many ways, we're at the end of poverty. | ||
| Absolute poverty, yes. | ||
| As you well know, in the United States, we no longer have absolute poverty. | ||
| Nobody lives on $2 per day. | ||
| Even people who don't have a job can access food and all sorts of facilities which are provided by the taxpayer. | ||
| But globally, absolute poverty had been or was before COVID at its lowest it has ever been, which is to say less than 8%. | ||
| Now, of course, as countries become richer, they start to redefine poverty in a different way, which is why in the United States we don't talk about absolute poverty. | ||
| When we talk about poverty, it's a relative poverty. | ||
| It's a certain percentage of the mean national income that we consider, if people live under that, they are in poverty. | ||
| But we don't have absolute poverty in the United States. | ||
| So, from someone sitting where I am in Los Angeles, I'm seeing many more homeless people than there were a couple of years ago. | ||
| We know this is happening in a lot of the big cities in Portland, in Seattle, certainly in San Francisco. | ||
| I think people see that. | ||
| You see tent cities, you see more homeless people, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And the inclination is, oh, well, I'm seeing something, so it must be significantly worse than it was. | ||
| But is it just that that's happening in just some cities, or is it just that your anecdotal evidence doesn't really prove anything? | ||
| Well, whether you look at poverty as a relative measure, relative poverty as a percentage of national income, or whether you look at consumption poverty, in other words, how much do people actually spend on a monthly basis or weekly basis, poverty is an all-time low. | ||
| I suspect that what's happening in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, is that new policies have been implemented by local governments which make it more attractive for people who may not be necessarily interested in jobs, may not necessarily be interested in normal lifestyles, people who may, for whatever reason, prefer the freedom, essentially, of not being tied to anything concrete | ||
| And want to live in these 10 cities and who may have been living in those 10 cities throughout the United States. | ||
| But for whatever reason, because the policies of local governments have now changed, these people are being pulled like a magnet towards certain jurisdictions. | ||
| And that's why you see many more of them. | ||
| That would be, I think, one reason why you see it anecdotally. | ||
| Yeah, and we do know, by the way, that they're putting in policies in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles that are attracting more homeless people. | ||
| It's not something that you're just making up. | ||
| At one point, there was a policy, I'm not sure if we still have it in Los Angeles, where if you build a structure on public land, they can't remove it. | ||
| You got an awful lot of people paying mortgages on land that they bought. | ||
| I don't know what we're doing over here. | ||
| I would simply add, just to clarify one comment I made in my last contribution, and that is that when I say that people don't necessarily want to have a home and work for a living, etc., I'm not making a value judgment. | ||
| I'm saying that there are a lot of people who have very different conceptions about what a good life is. | ||
| And also in addition to that, there are a lot of people who may be mentally unstable, who have all sorts of mental problems that prevents them from keeping a job and remaining in one place at the same time. | ||
| Right, and naturally you're saying there are things potentially that government or private citizens can do for those people, but that overall this is working and getting better. | ||
| Well, there are two sides of that ledger. | ||
| On the one hand, you want to do something for people who are at the very bottom of society. | ||
| On the other hand, that shouldn't mean that you make life unlivable for people who live in these cities and who actually pay taxes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| All right, trend number three, this is interesting. | ||
| Are we running out of resources? | ||
| Everyone seems to think we're running out of water, we're running out of air, we're running out of green space. | ||
| Are we actually running out of resources? | ||
| No, we are not. | ||
| Contrary to what people have been worried about since really the 1960s, we are not running out of resources. | ||
| In fact, resources are becoming cheaper. | ||
| At Human Progress, I have an autonomous section of Human Progress called the Simon Project. | ||
| And in the Simon Project, we have actually calculated that for every 1% increase in human population, the price of natural resources declined by 1%. | ||
| What's happening here is that more people Also produce more ideas and more ideas can be put toward not just Exploring and exploiting greater part of the earth more ideas can be used in order to In order to make us more efficient in the use of resources You know 50 60 years ago The can of coke was much much heavier than what it is today because we used so many so much more aluminum in order to produce | ||
| But then smart people realized, hey, why should we spend so much money on aluminum because every time you increase the price of an input, you increase the price of an output? | ||
| Why don't we save that money by making the cans of coke thinner? | ||
| We are becoming more efficient. | ||
| Also what we are doing, we are replacing some resources with others. | ||
| For example, we no longer kill whales in order to scoop out their spermaceti, their brain mass, in order to create candles. | ||
| Today we use We use fossil fuels to power our lamps and our cars and our cell phones and whatever. | ||
| And maybe in the future, 20, 40 or 50 years from now, we will have fusion reactors, which will basically mean that electricity will become essentially free. | ||
| We'll no longer have to use fossil fuels. | ||
| And therefore, any worry that people might have about us running out of oil or natural gas will disappear. | ||
| Yeah, one of the interesting things about this trend, I thought, was that your answer basically said, sort of, trust that human ideas can solve problems. | ||
| And that, in many ways, is so counter to what we hear coming out of the left now. | ||
| You know, we hear about the Green New Deal And that this centralized planning thing can somehow magically just sort of solve all of these problems if we just gave it enough power. | ||
| But in many ways you're, well power and money of course, but in many ways what you're saying is you decentralize things, you let people come up with new ideas and suddenly we'll have a thinner can and less resources will be taken and it'll actually be cheaper and they'll be more readily available. | ||
| The answer to climate change is not going to come from central planning and from restrictions for two reasons. | ||
| Let's divide the world into two halves. | ||
| In one half, you have rich people like you and I, relatively rich, obviously, living in democracies. | ||
| Now, we are prepared to pay a little more for the protection of the environment. | ||
| We are willing to put up with taxes which are a little bit higher, but not Much higher. | ||
| In fact, all the opinion polls and surveys suggest that people are willing to put up a little more toward cleaning of the climate. | ||
| What they are not prepared to do is to end the first world lifestyles as they know it. | ||
| for the benefit of environment or climate change. | ||
| Isn't that, in essence, what was happening in France, that they kept raising taxes on gas to do climate initiatives, and that basically started riots? | ||
| And then you got the riots, the Gilles Hermet. | ||
| And so there is this one half. | ||
| Rich people in democracies will not vote to end civilization, full stop. | ||
| Then you have the second half of the world, let's say very poor people or relatively poor people who live in countries which are not democracies. | ||
| Places like that, places like China and places like India, the governments there are not going to forego the possibility of rapid economic growth and becoming rich just because people in rich countries demand that. | ||
| We should demand it of them because it is immoral and those governments are not going to do it because they are not suicidal. | ||
| Even China, which is a totalitarian and awful regime, And which keeps saying we are going to go carbon-free by this date and other day. | ||
| They are building a record number of coal-powered power plants as we speak. | ||
| In other words, they understand that there is nothing surer to destroy the Communist Party's hold on power than denying the Chinese people a better life. | ||
| Yeah, is that sort of an offshoot of the rationale that got us out of the Paris Accords? | ||
| That in essence, these countries were going to keep doing these things because they had to do them as they go through their industrial revolutions, talking, say, about China and India, while we were going to put regulations on ourselves and pay for the brunt of it, and there was no enforcement mechanism and everything else? | ||
| I think that was a part of it is that there is the United States right now. | ||
| I don't believe I haven't looked at those figures in a while, but I don't think that the United States is the largest polluter in the world. | ||
| I think that China and India are above us. | ||
| Now here you have four and a half billion people who are trying to get rich quick and who are spewing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and who are also very competitive with us because they have very low wages. | ||
| So to tie ourselves to the Paris climate accord, was the wrong way to go about it. | ||
| And you know what else happened? | ||
| Was that the United States has decreased its emissions of CO2 per capita at a faster pace than most places in the world. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we started getting rid of our coal-powered plants and we started introducing more and more natural gas into our electricity production. | ||
| And natural gas burns, or rather emits much less CO2 than coal. | ||
| And so by simply, by innovating, by basically changing the source of fuel from coal to natural gas, we were able to decrease our CO2 emissions at a faster click than we would have been obliged to do under Paris. | ||
| All right, so let's move on to trend number four. | ||
| I thought this was interesting, because I see a lot of talk of this kind of thing online related to... | ||
| peak population and that we're putting too many people on this earth. | ||
| Is it true? | ||
| It is not true. | ||
| Right now, there are 7.8 billion of us. | ||
| The global population will peak in about 2060, 2070 at roughly nine, nine and a half billion. | ||
| And then it will start declining. | ||
| There are a number of studies done on this. | ||
| The latest one came from Lancet, which is a very highly regarded British medical paper. | ||
| And what they have concluded is that by 2100, there will be anywhere between 6.8 and 8.8 billion people in the world. | ||
| So roughly 1 billion less than we have today or 1 billion more. | ||
| I'm very ambivalent about this trend because I think that because humans are the only entities in the world capable of actually producing ideas. | ||
| If you're going to come up with a cure for cancer, if you're going to come up for a solution to climate change | ||
| and fusion reactor, you need the human brain to do that. | ||
| Artificial intelligence is simply not there yet. | ||
| So fewer human beings we have, the harder it will be to produce enough geniuses | ||
| to come up with ideas to solve our problems. | ||
| Nonetheless, the reality is that the total fertility rate, which is to say the number of babies that a woman can expect to have in her life, is now roughly around 2.4. | ||
| Replacement level is 2.1. | ||
| Replacement level basically means that if you have fewer babies than that, the global population starts declining. | ||
| In Europe, in places like Czech Republic, where my ancestors are from, | ||
| or Slovakia, the total fertility rate is 1.3, 1.4 rather than 2.1, which is needed just to keep | ||
| the population steady. And the only place really which is above 2.1, 2.4 is Africa. | ||
| Population of Africa is still going to increase for a while, but globally, we have fewer and fewer babies being born per woman. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's because women are getting education and they are getting work. | ||
| What happens when a woman gets work is that the opportunity cost of staying at home and taking care of children increases. | ||
| She can do with her life other things. | ||
| She can earn a lot of money in the marketplace. | ||
| And so she has fewer and fewer babies. | ||
| This relationship is, we are seeing it no matter which continent you are looking at. | ||
| We see it everywhere. | ||
| And we expect that as Africa becomes richer, African women will start having fewer and fewer babies | ||
| below the replacement level. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some of this stuff feels like it must be, it must be hard to track because if you were to say, okay, let's look a hundred years in the future and with the trends of how people are reproducing right now, well, all sorts of other trends change and food changes and migration patterns change and everything else. | ||
| So that, that explains why it could be 1 billion over or under, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It is also based on assumptions about economic growth and access to education. | ||
| We expect that the economy will continue to grow. | ||
| I mean, if the economy stops growing or if there is a degrowth in certain parts of the world. | ||
| then the relationship between increased wealth and fewer babies obviously ends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you guys are tracking stuff like this, you've referenced COVID a couple of times. | ||
| How do you plan for, in the models, things like COVID? | ||
| I mean, if we just took this back, you know, eight months ago, nobody expected this. | ||
| Sort of a worldwide shutdown of an economy. | ||
| And the health stuff. | ||
| Right, I mean, we don't model anything in the book. | ||
| I do modeling on natural resources, but the book itself is a compilation of data from third-party sources, from intergovernmental organizations, from the United Nations, from the U.S. | ||
| government, from Eurostat. | ||
| We don't come up with any data. | ||
| By you guys, I meant the modelers, not you guys specifically writing the book. | ||
| Well, Almost nobody saw this coming. | ||
| I mean, there were a few people who were saying this was a serious possibility, such as Bill Gates, and kudos to him for predicting five years ago that this was the most serious problem that humanity was going to face in the short to medium term. | ||
| But most people were worried about climate change and things which could become serious if we don't do anything. | ||
| If we sit on our hands, it could become serious in 50, 60, 70 years. | ||
| But we weren't looking close Closer to home. | ||
| We weren't looking at our own bodies and inside of our own bodies We weren't looking at the natural evolution that's going on with viruses and bacteria which are happening at a much faster click in the body of every human being and every animal and I think that it's it's a rude awakening. | ||
| It tells us something about complacency it tells us something about Appreciating modern life, appreciating also human contact, being deprived of all of those things, I would hope would make us more grateful for the world that we had before COVID. | ||
| Speaking of grateful, trend number five, the end of famine. | ||
| I mean, I remember growing up in the 80s and what was happening in Ethiopia and that this was something that you talked about, that there were places in the world where people simply were starving to death. | ||
| This is being eradicated. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| I mean, we are of roughly the same age. | ||
| And in the 1980s, I remember very distinctly those horrific pictures from the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, you know, children with swollen bellies from famine, their eyes covered by flies and that sort of thing. | ||
| And we really thought that this was going to be the future of humanity. | ||
| A couple of things have happened. | ||
| One, the world has become much more peaceful, which is to say that the kinds of conflicts that we saw in Africa, partly as a result of the Cold War in the 1980s, have pretty much disappeared. | ||
| I mean, we still have civil wars, but countries no longer really go into wars against one another. | ||
| The other thing that's happened was that socialism and communism ended, and these countries have opted for free market And, and, and greater production or better production, greater production in agriculture. | ||
| Once you don't have communism, once you don't have socialism, once farmers have a stake in their own farms and in their own productivity, they tend to produce more food. | ||
| And so globally, we have seen tremendous gains in food productivity per acre of earth People, no matter where they are in the United States, or in India, or China, or Africa, are producing more food. | ||
| As a result of which, in Sub-Saharan Africa today, people have, on average, access to as many calories as the Portuguese did in the early 1960s. | ||
| I just want to repeat that. | ||
| Today in Sub-Saharan Africa, we no longer are looking at famines. | ||
| In fact, obesity is becoming a problem, especially in urban areas. | ||
| Instead, what we have is food productivity and access to calories equivalent to where Portugal was in the early 1960s. | ||
| Nobody saw this coming. | ||
| It's a marvelous development. | ||
| Today, global production of calories is about 3,000 per person per day, and United States Department of Agriculture recommends that people should be eating about 2,000 calories per person per day. | ||
| So there's plenty of food to go around. | ||
| It doesn't mean that everybody is well nourished because, of course, there are always people in remote areas or people beset by civil wars who don't have access to food. | ||
| But we are already producing one third more calories than we hypothetically need in the world today. | ||
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Right. | |
| I mean, that's more calories than I'm trying to eat on an average day. | ||
| Which also means that if the world's population, by some miracle, increased from 8 billion to 11 or 12 billion, which won't happen. | ||
| But today we are producing enough calories to feed the world in 2100 and beyond. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible. | ||
| So trend number six, I thought this was interesting because I feel like no matter what you're about to say, people just are not going to believe this, a certain set of people. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| We'll actually throw up the image on this one when we talk about it for trend six. | ||
| This is, there's more land for nature. | ||
| I feel like people just simply won't believe this, but take it away. | ||
| Well, what happens as an increase of agricultural productivity, first, and urbanization, second, is that there is more land left for nature. | ||
| So, today, roughly 55% of humanity lives in the cities. | ||
| By 2100, it will be 80%. | ||
| Sorry, by 2050, 80% of humanity will be living in cities. | ||
| What that means is that 80% of people don't live on land. | ||
| And what that means is that all that land can now be returned to nature. | ||
| Nature will reconquer it, it doesn't need to be told. | ||
| Animals will spread, forests will grow. | ||
| And of course, so that's the result of urbanization. | ||
| Also as a result of agricultural productivity, we can produce more food per acre. | ||
| And that means that we can feed more people on an ever-shrinking amount of land. | ||
| As a result of which, the land sparing, as it is called, is growing. | ||
| I think the statistic that we have in the book is that in the last 20 years or so, we have saved the land the size of Alaska for nature or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's just incredible. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the ones where something like COVID does seem like it changes the calculation a little bit because right now, at least, we're seeing people move out of the cities. | ||
| But you think the overall trends will be that eventually they will move back? | ||
| Well, we'll see what happens. | ||
| I mean, after 9-11, people were predicting the death of New York and New York had, of course, incredible two decades ahead of it. | ||
| You know, some people like to live in like the idea of living off land and on land. | ||
| And the moment they start farming and tending to horses and cows, et cetera, suddenly they start missing the Met or, you know, the restaurants in the city and the company of their friends. | ||
| And so I don't think that we are going to see the death of a city. | ||
| And moving forward, I think that urbanization will continue, especially in developing countries where the need for nature sparing is the greatest. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the perfect segue to trend seven, which is Planet City. | ||
| Talk to me about that. | ||
| Well, Planet City is good for the environmental reasons that I outlined. | ||
| One other environmental reason I would want to bring up why cities are good is that, on average, a city dweller uses less energy and emits less CO2 than a farmer. | ||
| And just give it one example. | ||
| I mean, a farmer needs to drive much greater distances in order to tend to his stock or to his fields, whereas your typical urbanite may have to walk a few meters to his, or a few feet to his bedroom. | ||
| Well, in essence, now in his bedroom, right. | ||
| Or alternatively, your typical urbanite will use public transport, which is not obviously available to a typical farmer. | ||
| So that's another reason why urbanization is good. | ||
| However, urbanization is vital for another reason, and that is that urban centers are the drivers of social and economic progress. | ||
| Since the dawn of time, really, since the dawn of the city, It was in the cities that economic progress took place. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because when you have a large number of people who live together in close proximity, who trade together, who communicate together and so forth, you also have a greater intermingling of ideas. | ||
| And once you have that exchange of ideas, those network effects of a lot of people communicating, Together, you are going to also have more ideas that lead to economic growth, technological, medical, and scientific changes, and so forth. | ||
| And finally, cities are good because they tend to be more liberal. | ||
| Not in American sense, although to some extent, but certainly in the classical liberal sense. | ||
| When you look at Amsterdam in the 18th and 17th centuries being very tolerant of Jews, Or whether you look at Florence in 15th, 16th centuries, being very tolerant or comparatively tolerant of sexual minorities, such as homosexuality. | ||
| Or whether you look at New York in the 1950s, being much more progressive when it came to racial issues and the treatment of black Americans. | ||
| Cities are socially much more tolerant than urban, sorry, than rural areas. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating. | ||
| So we need cities, which sort of brings us to trend eight. | ||
| We're told, and now we've got an election in just about a week, we're told that fascism is spreading all over the world, but actually democracy is on the march. | ||
| There's good things happening. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Everything depends on your time frame. | ||
| Certainly democracy has been on the back foot in the 70s and the 80s, but with the fall of communism in 1989 and the destruction of the Soviet Union, the self implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Democracy has spread around the world and it is true that the process of democratization has slowed, but it is not true that democracy is in retreat. | ||
| We are not seeing some sort of a wholesale acceptance of dictatorship and totalitarianism That's spreading like wildfire. | ||
| Yes, it is true that Turkey is no longer democratic, but it is also true that Sudan, of all places, overthrew its dictator, and it's going to have elections in, I believe, next year. | ||
| It is true that Russia has abandoned its experiment with democracy under the regime of Putin, but it's also true that Nigeria which is going to be probably the third most populous country by 2050. | ||
| They're going to be, it's going to be twice the size of the United States. | ||
| Um, well by 2100, um, Nigeria has overthrown, uh, or rather has democratically transitioned from one form of government to another. | ||
| That's Nigeria transitioning peacefully from opposition to, um, or from government to the opposition and back again. | ||
| So there are a lot of places where, Democracy is improving, or alternatively, where fascistic or autocratic regimes are under tremendous pressure, and we are not seeing a wholesale abandonment of democracy, no. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting that the backdrop of that is you're saying that Russia has sort of gone the other way, Turkey has sort of gone the other way, where 10 years ago they were heading in the right direction, but despite all that, Democracy flourishes elsewhere, and most likely, well, hopefully, Turkey will have a comeback, you know, and Russia will have a comeback, and this will continue spreading all over the place. | ||
| I bet that that will happen. | ||
| It's very difficult to envisage a sort of a peaceful, normal power transition from Putin to somebody like him. | ||
| There will be a lot of tensions there. | ||
| But more importantly, I don't think that authoritarian countries are presenting an attractive option for people who are dissatisfied with democracy. | ||
| Look, yes, we have problems. | ||
| I mean, look at our candidates. | ||
| There are problems in other countries with democratic inefficiency, places like Britain and elsewhere. | ||
| However, what does Russia have to offer? | ||
| It has a cartoonish autocrat who is presiding over what is essentially a glorified petrol station and every young person who can gets out of Russia because it offers no future for them. | ||
| It's some sort of a combination of fascism and religious conservatism that is not really appealing to a lot of people in the world. | ||
| Not to mention that it's a Russian orthodox authoritarianship, not really something that sells well in, say, Nigeria or in Peru. | ||
| Then you have China. | ||
| Now, China for a long time seemed like a very interesting alternative for a lot of people who were not really keen on democracy. | ||
| What do we know about China now under Xi? | ||
| We know that they are putting millions of people in concentration camps, that they are implementing a genocide against an ethnically distinct group of people. | ||
| We know that because of their ineptitude and secrecy, they have made the COVID pandemic worse than it would have had to be. | ||
| So I think that there is a lot of shine that has come off China in recent years. | ||
| Hmm, interesting. | ||
| Trend nine, I think people will be able to believe this is real, the long peace that we're actually, the wars of the last hundred years are winding down in reality. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right now, it's actually quite strange to talk about it now because we do actually, right now, have a conflict between two countries and that's Azerbaijan. | ||
| But what's so interesting about that conflict is that the two countries didn't declare war on each other. | ||
| And in fact, I think that the last time that a country declared war on another was the Korean War between the United States and North Korea. | ||
| And in fact, international conflicts, which is to say, Two countries that declare war on each other and then send armies across borders to slaughter each other's citizens, that has pretty much disappeared from the world. | ||
| What we do have, we've had an uptick in recent years in civil wars. | ||
| So pretty much all the conflicts that are happening in the world today are civil wars. | ||
| They're no longer international conflicts, they're civil wars. | ||
| And there has definitely been an uptick in civil wars, but nowhere close to the number of civil wars that were taking place in 1970s and the 80s. | ||
| So even though, yes, we are not at a historically low level of conflict, we are certainly at a much lower level of conflict than we were in the 70s and the 80s. | ||
| And that's why you need the long-term data. | ||
| Because just when you think that things are being bad and that we've lived through some, I don't know, five years of negative news, look what was happening in the world in the 70s and 80s, compare it and you'll be happy. | ||
| Yeah, and that brings us to trend number 10, which is that we are living in a safer world than we have in a very, very long time. | ||
| Yes, well, this particular trend goes contrary to the wisdom being espoused by people like Thunberg and AOC. | ||
| and the apocalyptic sect within the environmentalist movement. | ||
| There are a lot of smart environmentalists who are making very reasonable points, but the apocalypse within the environmentalist movement are saying that we are going to lose millions of people to climate change. | ||
| The last trend shows the number of people who die as a result of natural disasters. | ||
| These are not things that humanity has any control over. | ||
| We are talking about earthquakes and tsunamis. | ||
| And what we have seen, and I kid you not, and I urge people to go to trend 10, is that the number of fatalities due to environmental disasters or environmental disasters has declined by 99% over the last hundred years. | ||
| Why would that be? | ||
| One reason is that as we grow richer, we are able to build more sturdy dwellings. | ||
| So as, Architecture becomes more resistant to earthquakes, flooding, and so forth. | ||
| Obviously, fewer people die. | ||
| Another thing that's improved is science. | ||
| We have satellites which are able to track the formation of a storm in the Caribbean. | ||
| We can project its trajectory along the coast of the United States. | ||
| We can predict its landfall within, you know, a few dozens of miles. | ||
| And all of that means is that we gain time to prepare for storms and hurricanes and tsunamis. | ||
| Well, I'll get to tsunamis in a second. | ||
| And therefore fewer people die. | ||
| Even when it comes to tsunamis, what we have now, we are able to monitor the ocean floor for earthquakes, which then send information via sensors to the mainland of Japan saying, for example, saying that 200 kilometers to the east of, I don't know, Tokyo. | ||
| Let's go with Tokyo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can expect a tsunami in 36 minutes. | ||
| And that means that a lot of people can move to higher ground or can prepare or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So those were the top 10 that you guys focus on in the book. | ||
| Now I'm gonna really challenge you as an author because I am going to randomly flip to three more. | ||
| We will finish with three more of the 78. | ||
| And let's see if you know what you're really talking about here. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Trend 52, rising natural gas reserves. | ||
| We've actually got extra gas? | ||
| I know we've got a lot of windbags out there, but we've got extra gas? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So before I go there, actually, let me say that I don't actually know if Tokyo is on the seacoast or not, but nevermind. | ||
| I'm gonna get a lot of hate mail for that. | ||
| But when it comes to natural gas, what happened was extraordinary. | ||
| And that is that in the last 10 to 15 years, last 10 years, Shale fracking has become much more efficient than people ever assumed. | ||
| And so a lot of natural gas that was trapped in rocks and you couldn't get to it, we can now get to because of superior technology that people decades ago didn't have. | ||
| And so the known reserves of natural gas are now at a record level. | ||
| So in spite of the fact that we've been using natural gas for decades, We now know of more reserves than ever before. | ||
| That has the positive effect, of course, of driving down the price of natural gas. | ||
| When you have natural gas that is very cheap, you can then use it instead of coal, generating electricity. | ||
| When you use it instead of coal generating electricity, you are emitting fewer CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. | ||
| That is shale. | ||
| That is shale fracking. | ||
| And we are very lucky that in the United States, we are the center for some of the most innovative mines, because this is very much an American success story. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I'm randomly select in here. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Oh, 41. | ||
| This will be an interesting one. | ||
| Nuclear arsenals are actually going down. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So at the height of the Cold War in the mid 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union had something on the order of 20,000 nuclear warheads each aimed at one another. | ||
| If those exploded at the same time, it would be over for civilization. | ||
| The planet would have been uninhabitable. | ||
| The end. | ||
| What has happened since then is that I believe we are down to about 3,000 nuclear warheads per Soviet Union, per Russia. | ||
| And per United States. | ||
| So we have decreased the amount, the number of warheads dramatically. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, in recent years, there has been some backsliding on these international treaties, which are regulating how many nuclear weapons a country can possess. | ||
| And it's possible that in the future, the number of nuclear weapons possessed by China, India, United States, Russia, and so forth will start climbing. | ||
| And we should be on top of this. | ||
| It is a serious problem. | ||
| It is a serious problem because the knowledge that we have in terms of producing nuclear weapons that cannot be unlearned. | ||
| You cannot put it on a shelf somewhere and hope that people will forget about it. | ||
| I think that what we should be aiming for is having the scientific community tell us what would be the minimal number of warheads that could go off on Earth whilst at the same time preserving civilization, some semblance of civilization, preserving humanity, and then distribute that number of warheads or access to those numbers of warheads amongst nuclear powers. | ||
| So I think we should be going in the opposite direction. | ||
| We should try to get nukes as low as possible and then have some sort of a proportional distribution amongst great powers. | ||
| That would be a hell of a meeting, trying to get proportional distribution. | ||
| We've done that before. | ||
| We've done that before. | ||
| In the 1920s, the United States presided over the naval disarmament between the United States, | ||
| France, Britain, and Japan, where there was a key according to which naval warships, juggernauts, | ||
| were, sorry, not juggernauts, dreadnoughts, were distributed amongst different great powers. | ||
| And I think it was something like 10, 10, 7, 7, 4, 4, depending on the power of, the | ||
| relative power of that great power. | ||
| But my point is we have done this before with what was then the equivalent of a nuclear | ||
| weapon, which was the dreadnought ship. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| All right, which way should I go? | ||
| You want me to go to a lower number than 41 or a higher number than 41? | ||
| This is really gonna test you now. | ||
| Feeling more confident with lower numbers. | ||
| All right, here we go, random, random, here we, ah, tuberculosis, let's skip that. | ||
| Oh, here's a good one to end on. | ||
| We can talk about COVID later, but nevermind, go with your choice. | ||
| Yeah, here we go, number 24, the last one from the book, and then we'll end on that. | ||
| Life expectancy is actually rising, which is sort of consistent with a lot of the other stuff that we're talking about here. | ||
| Yeah, so obviously, we can look at, We can look at the skeletons of people who lived 10,000 years ago and then create some sort of a picture as to what was the life expectancy back at the dawn of time. | ||
| And it seems likely that life expectancy was between 25 and 30 years. | ||
| Now that doesn't mean that everybody lived to about 30 and then they suddenly died. | ||
| There were some people who lived into their 60s and perhaps into their 70s. | ||
| The reason why People's life expectancy was 25 to 30 was because so many babies died at childbirth, along with their mothers. | ||
| But child mortality was huge. | ||
| Anywhere between one third and one half of children born. | ||
| Now, once you made it past the age of five, you had a decent chance of living into comparatively old age, say 60s. | ||
| Obviously, as a result of medical and technological breakthroughs, as a result of wealth, as a result of this great enrichment which humanity has experienced in the last 200 years, and as a result of access to better food, better nutrition and better sanitation, life expectancy rose to about 50 by 1900 in rich countries. | ||
| Today, it is 72 globally and 79 or 80 in rich countries. | ||
| Today, it is 72 globally and 79 or 80 in rich countries. | ||
| So let me just repeat that. | ||
| Life expectancy in the richest places in the world, such as Britain and the United States | ||
| in 1900, was 50. | ||
| Today it is 80, and globally it is about 72, 73. | ||
| So, we are already living much longer lives and, you know, depending on which way the biomedical industry goes and tremendous improvements in healthcare and genetic coding, we could expect to extend our lives, our life expectancies in mine and your lifetime beyond 100 years very easily. | ||
| We're gonna have to stock up on multivitamins. | ||
| I think that's the answer right there. | ||
| All right, so to end this, although it is not in the book, can you give us some good news COVID-related, or just what you're seeing the research saying relative to us just getting past the pandemic, past the lockdowns, what does a decent future look like? | ||
| So there is a, I actually think that trend 34 is devoted to it, but let me just take you through- Trend 34? | ||
| You're good. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| It's been one that I've been using a lot because obviously a lot of people are asking about COVID. | ||
| Right, so 34 is accelerating vaccine discoveries. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So let's take what was probably the biggest killer of humanity in history, and that's smallpox. | ||
| I mean, in 20th century alone, it killed between 300 and 500 million people. | ||
| That's an extraordinary thing. | ||
| And obviously we don't know how many people it killed prior to that. | ||
| What we do know that in 18th century, 80 to 90% of people in Europe could expect to develop, to catch and develop symptoms of smallpox. | ||
| So smallpox was a terrible killer of humanity. | ||
| And we can trace smallpox going all the way back to ancient Egypt and ancient India, about three and a half thousand years ago. | ||
| And for those three and a half thousand years, People had no idea what they were dealing with. | ||
| They didn't know what was this terrible disease. | ||
| They didn't know why they were dying. | ||
| They didn't know why some people survived and others have died. | ||
| And they could do nothing about it. | ||
| They couldn't name it, let alone do anything about it. | ||
| It will have been one year from the identification of pneumonia in China in late December to the time when humanity produces a workable vaccine for for COVID. | ||
| Now, am I 100% sure that we are going to get a vaccine? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is it very likely? | ||
| Yes, it is very likely that by the end of this year we are going to have a vaccine for COVID. | ||
| Never before in human history have we been able to produce a vaccine within that time frame and the reason why we are able to produce that vaccine in that time frame is manifold. | ||
| One, again, It's the riches. | ||
| The fact that we have thousands of doctors and researchers who are dedicated to doing nothing else but fiddle with these very exotic viruses. | ||
| Only a rich society can employ people in that kind of profession. | ||
| Secondly, we are rich, but also we are technologically savvy. | ||
| We have access to supercomputers which can match the weaknesses in the genetic code of COVID to molecular structure of different drugs that are already in the marketplace. | ||
| In other words, the supercomputers can tell us which of the drugs which are currently already approved by FDA and are in use, which of these drugs are the best candidate as a treatment for COVID. | ||
| So that's another reason why we are ahead of the game. | ||
| Communication. | ||
| Within 24 hours after the Chinese decoded COVID-19 genetic code, that information was known | ||
| to people across the world. | ||
| In the past, first of all, we didn't know what genetic code was, | ||
| but even then, maybe you would have to publish your findings | ||
| in some sort of a medical journal and then wait for weeks and months | ||
| until people have read about it. | ||
| Now we can do it with an email. | ||
| So for all of these reasons, we are exceptionally fast in coming up with a solution to COVID. | ||
| Yes, it is true that COVID took us by surprise. | ||
| Yes, it is true that there was a lot of suffering, but we are the best positioned humans in human history to address this problem and do it fast. | ||
| That, my friend, is how you end a show on a positive note. | ||
| I hope people will check out the book. | ||
| I'm telling you, it's really like, it's just a perfect coffee table book. | ||
| It really is, because people can flip through it and actually learn something, and it's not too painful. | ||
| And I hope to see you in person one of these days once again. | ||
| Oh, and people should always check out humanprogress.org. | ||
| I try to jump on there at least once a day just to see a couple stories that don't make you think the world is coming to an end, because it probably isn't. | ||
| Marian Tupi, thanks for joining us. | ||
| And thank you very much for those kind words and good luck to us all. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversation about the environment instead of non-stop yelling, check out our environment playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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