All Episodes
Previous Next
April 4, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:13:21
Freedom, Innovation, Superabundance with Marian Tupy | The TRUTH Podcast #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We're
seeing an emerging debate in the Republican presidential field where some, like Nikki Haley are on the side of spending cuts as a way to address the growing national debt problem.
Others like Donald Trump are opposed to making any cuts to Social Security or Medicare.
And that's part of a bigger battle on how to address the deficit, how to address national debt between Republicans and Democrats, where, you know, the classical conservative view is focusing on spending cuts.
The classical liberal view amongst Democrats is to cover it via tax increases.
I think there's a third way.
I think there's a better way.
It's more obvious.
No one's talking about it.
It was once an obvious topic in both parties, but it somehow disappeared from the debate.
And that's GDP growth itself.
And as you know, one of my core objectives here is to be a pro-growth candidate.
To actually deliver not only American cultural self-confidence, It's a big part of what the heart of this campaign was all about, reviving a missing national identity as Americans.
But that's also the foundation for an economic vision, an economic revival, unleashing the American economy, restoring GDP growth to a level that, frankly, we've enjoyed in most of our nation's history until most of our national history, until the early 1970s.
We were growing at over four plus percent per year.
That has since tapered off dramatically.
There are deep-seated reasons why we're going to talk about some of those today.
But the question is why it is that no one is actually addressing GDP growth.
And it's not just because they're not thinking about it.
That would be too easy to address, actually.
It's because there's quietly a new philosophy in America that That says that actually we should not focus on growth.
Not on economic grounds, but on philosophical grounds.
That the anti-growth agenda is itself the morally sound one.
That somehow we should learn to live less.
Learn to live in a more harmonious lifestyle with the planet.
This is actually, it's a world view.
It's worth understanding.
I think that's actually what accounts for the disappearance of GDP growth from the economic policy debates that we otherwise were having even as recently as a couple decades ago where growth was an objective.
I personally think that, you know what, if Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon and we accomplished that, I think it's a much more achievable goal to say we're going to restore 4 plus percent GDP growth in this country.
I have a vision for how to do it, but today I'm actually joined by the author, one of the co-authors certainly, of a book that's caught my attention.
His voice really speaks to some of these issues in a way that's truly unafraid.
I hope I'm saying it correctly.
Marian Tupi?
Correct.
Thank you.
Marian Tupi.
And the book is Super Abundance.
Good book that I've had an opportunity to begin to sink my teeth into, but I'll be going deeper soon.
But Marian, welcome to the podcast.
And we're going to have a deep conversation about not only the themes in your book, but what's behind the anti-growth agenda in this country.
Welcome.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
Delighted to be here.
Glad to be here.
So tell us just a bit.
I know you just published the book.
It was only a matter of months ago, late last year.
Tell me what the thesis of the book is.
And I've had a chance to page through it, but I haven't had a chance to hear it in your own voice yet.
Give me your core motivation for what brought you to this project, what you hope to accomplish with it, what its core thesis is, and then we'll get right into how that relates to some of the areas I'm focused on, which is restoring a pro-growth agenda in this country.
Well, I think that people have been wondering about the relationship between population and resources and population and a livable planet for a very long time, right?
And for most of that time, people thought that if you have population increasing, you're going to run out of resources.
You know, Malthus famously publishes his paper in 1798 claiming that population is increasing at a much faster rate than resources.
Therefore, we are all going to starve to death.
Same with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford University biologist.
He's still alive, still publishing, still appearing on 60 Minutes.
This is sort of the climate scaremonger.
Correct.
The guy who said we were going to have global cooling in an ice age 40 years ago and then now says we're going to heat ourselves to death.
That guy.
Right.
And he published a book, The Population Bomb, in 1968. And obviously, none of those prognostications came true.
But more recently, people are still concerned about the planet running out of resources.
But people are also very concerned about the overall impact of humans on the planet.
So I think that the book is really intended for all those people out there, especially potential parents who are freaking out about having children because they are somehow going to damage the planet and everything is going to end up in tears.
And so when we were publishing this book, we suddenly started realizing over the last four or five years In mainstream media, or maybe you can say left-wing progressive media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, you have a constant stream of articles about how humans are bad for the planet, how bringing a child into the world is an act of selfishness, how humanity is a cancer upon the planet.
And so, I think that what we are doing is scaring ourselves, and especially scaring the children, the young people, to death.
They are depressed, they are anxious, they don't want to have babies, and basically the book shows That population growth is not only is it not bad for the planet, it is good for the planet.
What we show by looking at data over the course of last 170 years is that every 1% increase in population has reduced prices of commodities by about 1% relative to wages.
So we have this extraordinary situation.
That's interesting.
It's a little counterintuitive, right?
I guess it's production maybe outstrips the demand or something like this.
Well, it's even better than that.
You see, what happens is that biologists and the doommongers, they sort of think about the human being, a newborn, as coming to the world only with an empty stomach.
But a newborn comes into the world with an empty stomach but also a pair of hands and most importantly a brain capable of creating new ideas which then can be turned into inventions, innovations, productivity gains and higher standards of living.
A perfect example of that would be two German chemists in the early 20th century who discovered synthetic fertilizer.
Before then, humanity, in order to grow food, We would use animal dung or even human excrement in order to grow food.
And then later we discovered guano.
But that started running short in the middle of the 19th century.
And these two Germans basically discovered how to make synthetic fertilizer from natural gas.
And so now we are able to feed 8 billion people.
And many, many more on fewer acres of land because our agricultural productivity is simply increasing.
And behind agricultural productivity is simply new inventions which come from the human brain.
So that's really the principal driver, you would say, of making for what you would call a better planet.
Correct.
It's actually just ingenuity itself and that the more people you have, it's a probabilistic game that the more likely it is that you are to have a breakthrough innovation.
That's right.
Economists like to distinguish between Smithian growth and Schumpeterian growth.
Smithian growth, named after Adam Smith, is all about division of labor, more trade, division of labor, that sort of thing.
But Schumpeterian growth, named after Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, is all about innovation.
The reality is that over the last 200 years, the main driver of human prosperity, the fact that today the world is so much more prosperous than what it was even 200 years ago, is just new inventions and innovations, new ideas.
So a typical example would be, you know, in a Smithian growth economy, you just add more workers with shovels in order to build a canal.
In a Schumpeterian economy, you invent a giant digging machine, right?
So instead of having to use thousands of workers, you just use a machine, giant excavator that uses fossil fuels.
And so this is how you create prosperity, through technological innovation.
And nobody knows how to come up with new technologies and new inventions.
For that, you need more people.
You need new ideas.
I am, you've got my attention here.
This is actually, this gets to the heart of what I think of as what I call small ball economics and big ball economics even within the Republican Party.
It's just the thing I was talking about a moment ago where I think that there is this captivation with the Smithian view, as you put it.
It's not just that it would be—I mean, in fairness to that view, and I'm much more moved by the Schumpeter vision, but to get the best alternative on the table, I think it's not just a matter of more shovels.
It's a matter of, you know, they would argue, you know, different kinds of shovels in different places because you have different regions that may have different areas of expertise.
You then sort yourself to your best expertise, then you open up trade— Then there's gains from trade to allow an efficient trading equilibrium.
That's the fullest extension of the Adam Smith or the Smithian view.
I think that's been the neoliberal consensus for the last 40 years of growth in the global economy, 50 years.
That's how we actually achieve growth in the economic pie, but without enough of an emphasis on Human ingenuity and innovation as a game changer in its own right.
And so you would say the Schumpeter view is that's actually the real driver of longer-run prosperity, not assuming how you optimize an existing fixed pie through gains from trade and human productive capacity.
Is that a fair assessment?
Ideally, you would have both, right?
I mean, there are certain activities which it simply doesn't make any sense for the United States to participate.
Undertake, yep.
Maybe, I don't know, certain agricultural produce which doesn't have to be produced here because it can be imported from South America or whatever.
Or maybe we don't have the weather for it.
So you still want free trade.
Yeah, of course.
But that's not an end-all be-all, right?
But the ultimate driver of growth, really, the high rates of growth that we've been accustomed to and certainly the high increase in GDP was new technology.
And that is something that you are right that we have sort of stopped talking about, about how the administrative state, how the D.C. bureaucracy, how different mandates from the government, how taxation performs in order to undermine innovation in this country.
So talk to me about what you think is behind this, not only loss of growth from the conversation, but the fact that we enjoyed, as I noted, 4 plus percent GDP growth in this country through about 1971. And it's been, it's tapered off and declined considerably.
I think we're well under 2%.
Well, I wish there was a consensus on this.
I mean, there's a lot of debate.
I'm sure there's no consensus.
I want your view.
Well, my view is that it really starts with people.
The more people you have, the better you are at producing new ideas and new inventions.
And part of the problem that we...
Can I just put pressure on that for a second?
Why would that be the case?
I mean, is it like just like a probabilistic game?
It is a probabilistic game, but also only a small fraction of humans invent or innovate anything, right?
Exactly.
It's low digits, low single digits, so maybe 5%, right?
And so in a population of 300 million people, which is what the population of the world was at the time of Christ or Caesar Augustus, that 5% will amount to many fewer people than a population of 8 billion people.
The 5% will be obviously much larger.
So the bigger the population, the more likely it is that you are going to come up with somebody like Vivek or Elon Musk or somebody else.
So that's a probabilistic game is your point there.
And this is just a...
I'm nitpicking at like an early normative assumption here just because it has consequences for where we go.
That versus not a numbers game, but focusing on how we cultivate...
Higher likelihood of ingenuity itself, even amongst a fixed population.
Why one route rather than the other?
I don't know whether governments are very good at stimulating the number of inventors or innovators.
I know there was an OECD study done about 10 years ago looking at different governments around the world trying to stimulate invention and innovation, and that didn't prove to be successful.
So we don't actually know where inventors or innovators come from.
What we do know is that a lot of inventors or innovators are actually quite quirky individuals.
They tend to be a little bit on the spectrum.
They have very different personality traits than the mainstream of humanity.
But what I think you want to do is to create an environment Where if the innovator does exist, he or she can succeed.
One aspect of promoting innovation is, of course, having the maximum potential amount of freedom.
In large chunks of the world, people are not free.
They're not free to think, to publish, to communicate, to invest, to profit.
If Steve Jobs' father didn't emigrate from Syria to the United States but remained in Syria, if Steve Jobs was born in Syria, he could never have accomplished what he accomplished in the United States.
The guys behind Google, or for the matter, Elon Musk, had they remained in their home countries, they would probably not be able to build the kinds of enterprises which they have.
So freedom is also a huge component of it.
How do we know that?
We know that because If you look at China, for example, China has been the most populous country in the world for 2,000 years, but it was dirt poor until about 40 years ago because they only had that one component, which is a huge population, but they didn't have freedom.
It was only after they started liberalizing in the late 1970s that they started growing.
But freedom is not just about you not having to live in a crappy country where you cannot do anything.
Freedom is also about regulation.
Freedom is also about taxation.
Whether you're disincentivized because the paperwork can go on for months or years.
The precautionary principle which has been embraced by the European Union and which a lot of people would like to import into the United States.
The precautionary principle basically says That you cannot bring a good into the market unless you prove that it will not do any harm to anyone.
So no innovation can be marketed until you can be absolutely 100% sure that it's not going to harm anyone.
Well, you know, if those were the conditions for marketing innovation 100 years ago, we wouldn't have cars, we wouldn't have planes, we wouldn't have anything.
So all of these things, I think, work in combination to suppress the natural innovativeness of the people who might otherwise be innovators and inventors.
You know, that's a lot of the—it's very first personal to me.
I mean, I think I've seen that firsthand.
So the first major company I started was a biotech company, Roivant.
And we developed medicines.
But I will tell you from firsthand experience, I mean, the level of constraint applied by FDA to this industry— The biotech and pharmaceutical industry is absolutely the number one impediment to innovation in that industry.
And you would sort of, you'd run the math beforehand.
Okay, here's what the cost is to develop that drug.
Here's the benefit on the other side.
The number one variable isn't the benefit on the other side, which is always unknown anyway, but you model what you think it is.
But you do know what the cost is.
And the number of times you're required to do two or three phase three studies instead of just one or two.
Might increase your increment in confidence by 1%, 2%, adding that second 2,000-patient study on top of a 2,000-patient study you already did, big diminishing returns and what you learned from that.
And yet, that is the precautionary principle in action here in America.
I think a big part of that is what holds the nuclear energy revolution back, too.
So there's a lot to that story.
A couple of comments on that.
One having to do with FDA. Here's a thing that an American government could do tomorrow, and that is to conclude an agreement with the European Union of mutual recognition of drugs or food items.
Easy.
Easy.
That can be done.
That can really be done.
Right now, if you are a European company, and Europe is not third world, if anything, their health and safety standards are higher than ours.
So the thing is, if something is approved for consumption in the European Union, it should by default be approved for consumption in the United States.
I think the European Union also...
I think the essence of what happens here, at least in the biotech and pharma world, is actually...
It's almost the other way around.
The FDA is applying such high and exacting standards.
Now, that's a kind way of putting it.
Some of these are nonsensical, burdensome goalposts that most companies actually end up marketing their drugs in the U.S. long before they go to Europe, just because Europe is not paying nearly as much for prescription medications as the U.S. is.
So companies then focus on the U.S., And then in Europe, okay, if they've already met the U.S., you're actually seeing a little bit of, good for the Europeans, I guess, but free-riding in the other direction where all the cost is borne in the U.S. There's definitely free-riding on the part of the Europeans.
But mutual recognition, if you go through the trouble of developing something in the EU, it doesn't have to be a drug.
It could be a food item.
You should be able to sell it.
I mean, my gut instinct.
When the child formula, infant formula...
When we ran out of it in the United States, we had to import it from the EU. I mean, infants are not dying in streets in Europe.
We can do this.
So it goes for food items.
And then the big chunk that you have mentioned, of course, is energy.
Again, the regulatory state.
On the one hand, the government is creating reams of regulations which make it almost impossible to build a nuclear power plant in the United States.
Oh, it is basically economically near impossible.
Right.
And on the other hand, so the left hand is doing that, the right hand of the government.
It's actually subsidizing and giving all sorts of subsidized loans to nuclear power stations in order to make up for the costs of overregulation.
So this is a typical D.C. craziness that you encounter.
But, of course, I'm a huge fan of nuclear fission and fusion, and I think that we should be building much more of that.
And I think that part of the reason why we stopped growing in the 1970s, to go back to the original point that you were making, is that our energy costs are much higher than they would have to be if we truly had a free market in energy, if we allowed for different forms of energy to be built and supplied to the American people.
In the short to medium run, I would say that the greatest thing that the American government could do in order to stimulate growth would be to get out of the energy situation and allow the market to take care of it, allow us to drill for natural gas, which produces much less CO2 into the atmosphere than burning of coal, more nuclear energy.
We can do this if the government just gets out of the way.
You know, I fully agree with you on that.
I'll just go one step further on this.
I agree with you that unshackling ourselves from the constraints on U.S. energy is probably the lowest hanging fruit, easiest way to unlock innovative power in America.
I'm curious for your perspective, just to know what our respective priors are on this.
I don't even think that reducing CO2 is a worthy public policy goal in and of itself.
We can go into the details of the climate debate.
Is climate change real?
Is it man-made?
Yes, yes, probably.
It seems to be so.
Whether or not that's an existential threat for the planet or whether or not—actually, this is a theme that probably resonates, I think, with your argument.
The best way to handle climate change is through human innovation that allows for not only adaptation, but as my friend Alex Epstein says, mastery of that change in climate.
And so that goes back to the innovation argument that, ironically, your best way to deal with the supposed threats that you're addressing with an anti-innovation agenda, like the climate cult, and I do think it has a religiosity to it, It's actually through doing more of the very thing that they don't want you to do, which is use of energy to innovate.
Do you follow what I'm saying?
Yeah, no, I do.
I read both of his books.
I'm a huge fan.
I think they're extremely well written, full of good ideas.
First of all, even assuming that CO2 is a problem, and I'm perfectly willing to To acknowledge that because, you know, I'm not a climate scientist.
I do not believe at the same time that we are facing some sort of a climate apocalypse.
If you are looking, I mean, if this is an existential crisis, then you have to be able to measure it.
How would you measure it?
Well, who is it existential crisis for?
It's existential crisis supposedly for the human beings.
That's what existential crisis means.
But if you look at the number of people who are dying due to extreme weather, and this has to do with hurricanes, floods, heatwaves.
Way down.
98% down.
98 or 99% down.
So in fact, through this climate mastery, We are managing to survive better than ever before.
And so that convinces me that we are not facing a climate apocalypse or rather existential crisis.
Now, of course, The problem that we are facing is that the same people who are saying we need to get away as quickly as possible from energy sources which emit CO2 into the atmosphere are the same people who are saying that we cannot use the energy sources which would enable us to do that.
Like nuclear or hydroelectric.
Like nuclear.
Well, hydroelectric is great, provided that you live in countries where it makes sense, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm saying the opposition is still telling.
Oh, absolutely.
But nuclear is the biggest example.
Nuclear, maybe thermal energy.
I bet you that the moment that thermal energy becomes commercially...
It's plausible.
The same people will be out in the streets saying...
And I have my views on this.
Why do you think that is?
So I think it is because they are not actually looking for a solution.
Of course.
Yep, you're over the flame.
Keep going.
You're right over the flame on this.
To me...
G.K. Chesterton, I'm not a religious person myself, but I do believe what G.K. Chesterton said, is that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
Oh, I like that.
Who said that one?
Because Blaise Pascal is the one who I often cite having said something...
Blaise Pascal says if you have a hole in your heart the size of God and God doesn't fill it, something else will fill it instead.
Right.
That's the Pascal version.
Who's this guy?
Chesterton?
I should know him.
G.K. Chesterton.
Who is he?
I think he was an English writer, philosopher, back in the 19th century.
If you stop believing in God, you don't...
You don't believe in nothing.
You believe in anything.
I like that.
And sort of my view is that...
There is that God-shaped hole in human hearts, and it will be filled by something.
People simply need to believe in something transcendental.
It's very difficult for humans to cope with the idea of a directionless universe where things happen ad hoc, etc.
I happen to believe that, but regardless, the point is that most people are looking for some transcendental meaning in their lives.
And I think that the green religion, well, environmentalism has become a green religion.
And it's very interesting how it maps onto the main features of Christianity.
These people will be the first ones to say, I don't believe in Christianity.
But when you think about the structure of the two religions, there is the Garden of Eden, which is, of course, a planet before industrialization.
You have your devils, and that's the fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel CEOs.
Look at how people talk about fossil fuel CEOs.
They are the devils, right?
You have your priesthood, which is the IPCC. You know, you cannot converse with them.
You cannot criticize them.
If IPCC says something, you know, it's that written in stone.
You have your saints, Greta Thunberg.
I mean, talk about the secularists.
Totally.
She's a modern Joan of Arc.
Yep, yep.
And as I like to say, you even have indulgences.
So before the Reformation, the Catholic Church, if you committed a crime, you could give some money to the Church and your crimes would be forgotten and they would be forgiven.
And how else are we to interpret the behavior of people like John Kerry?
Was that true in the Catholic Church?
I wasn't familiar with that.
That's called an indulgence?
Indulgences, that's right.
And so how else are we to interpret the behavior of people like Al Gore or John Kerry or Leonardo DiCaprio and countless other Celebrities, Meghan and Harry, they fly around the world on private jets.
They burn a lot of fossil fuel.
They contribute a lot to CO2 emissions.
But they perform a few incantations.
They say the right things.
It's almost like magic.
They give a little bit of money or free speeches to green causes, and suddenly all of these sins are forgiven.
And so what I'm saying is that I'm absolutely convinced that modern environmentalism fills that God-shaped hole in people's hearts.
What was the one right before Saints?
You said IPCC? What was the church?
Priesthood.
I like that.
It's a priesthood.
Yeah, I like that.
So, you know, here's a debate that I've had.
I'm probably not supposed to say this out loud, but I'm just going to be very honest.
As I think about delivering...
You know, a solution to these problems.
I kind of find myself at a personal crossroads.
I'm at the early stage of this presidential campaign.
But there's one of two roads to go with this.
And I'm torn about it, frankly.
So I agree with everything you just said.
I'm really liking the way you're thinking.
Because you're articulating some of the things that I agree with better than I have even to date.
And so I'm appreciative of that.
So it leaves me at a crossroads, right?
If you have this God-sized hole in your heart, to borrow the Blaise Pascal framing of it, there's two ways to play the game.
The way I've been playing this so far is open people's eyes to that reality.
And allow reason and rationality to kick in.
Okay, I actually am very supportive of a faith-based revival in America for time-tested religions.
The difference between a religion and a cult is a religion at least, at least has been time-tested.
Okay, a cult has not.
These are cults, not religions.
Because the climate religion is young enough that we can call it exactly what it is.
It's a cult.
But that's one road.
I wonder whether the more successful approach will be to create a sort of religiosity, zealotry around a pro-growth agenda itself, right?
I mean, there's two ways to play this game.
One is make people aware of that vacuum.
And then hope that the awareness, the power of reason, etc., to see that fact gives them liberation from the fact to say that either they're going to adopt a true religion grounded in truth, a true God, or they're going to recognize that, hey, I thought I was being a secularist, but I'm not even being secular.
I'm just being a religious fanatic again without even recognizing it.
That's the road I've been taking.
I hope it's successful.
The different approach would be to spawn, you know, a religion around the pro-growth agenda itself.
And at least then we have tangible human prosperity rather than human demise, which is where I think the climate cult leads us.
It's the goal of the climate cult, actually, to lead us to human demise.
It's actually a form of self-flogging, a sort of wearing a hair shirt, apologizing for human existence.
And even if you listen to the Saints, Greta Thunberg or whatever, this is directly what they're saying, right?
It's actually about apologizing for the injustices of capitalism.
Climate justice is actually more the emphasis on the justice than the climate, which involves mostly the West.
Countries like the U.S. in particular apologizing for their success.
Why not compete with that with actually a new belief system in the importance of economic growth, productivity, innovation, prosperity in itself, I wonder whether that might actually just be more effective than the approach that, you know, folks like I, maybe folks like you and I, if I may say, have been taking so far on this did.
Do you follow, and what's your reaction to that?
I do.
Well, first of all, I think that you've zeroed in on something very important, and that is the excessive use of the word justice in anything like climate justice.
And I think the reason why they're doing it is because once you start using things like climate justice, whenever you put justice in it, You can stop thinking in terms of trade-offs.
Yes.
Right?
Justice is not about trade-offs.
Justice is uncompromising.
Justice is uncompromising.
So that snail or whatever it is that you need to save...
If that's justice, then the welfare of the human species and the future of humanity doesn't really matter because the goal is to preserve whatever it is that you are trying to do.
Whereas what I'm talking about is the constant need for trade-offs.
The more you regulate the energy industry, for example, the energy output, the more you micromanage it and you choose between winners and losers, The more of an impact you have on economic growth and therefore future prosperity of the American people.
Now, with regard to what you are asking, I mean, it is not for me to suggest campaign points, but I do think that there must be a market for this kind of pro-growth optimistic vision of America.
Certainly, whenever I leave D.C., And go, for example, to the West Coast and meet with people in the Silicon Valley or LA and San Francisco.
There's a lot of sort of future techno-optimistic attitude that we are going to fix this country by simply innovating our way out of scarcity and out of problems.
Because the difference between 2% economic growth rate And a 3% in economic growth.
It's huge!
It's 50%.
Trillions of dollars, right?
It's not one percentage point difference.
It's 50%.
Over what time horizon?
Well, any year, right?
Or literally.
Any year, any year.
Well, it's 50% in growth rate itself, but it's more than 50% in the destination.
And then, of course, incremental growth over time.
So there must be for it.
And we also know from American history That there were times when Americans were much more optimistic about the future.
I mean, the 1950s and 1960s were all about, you know, creating new technologies, famously what Peter Cheel talks about, about flying cars, etc.
People used to be much more optimistic.
And maybe it was after the 1970s energy crisis that people became much more pessimistic.
And then more recently, I think what happened was that both political parties started embracing victimhood.
I mean, you have your own book, The Nation of Victims, right?
Nation of Victims, yep.
Exactly.
And whereas Democrats have for a very long time been a party of victims, Republicans also started embracing victimhood.
I agree with you.
And so now for the first time in a very long time, we don't really have a political party or a candidate who is putting across the positive vision, is that if we just do certain things differently, we can actually be much more prosperous in the future.
And I would like to see that kind of candidate emerge and embrace that sort of Yeah, much of what you say describes my candidacy.
I don't like to use the word techno-optimism because the mistake that some of those folks in Silicon Valley make, in my opinion, is that they use this as a cop-out from addressing fundamental moral issues that don't have a technical is that they use this as a cop-out from addressing fundamental moral issues
And I think those deserve to be addressed by free speech, an open debate, and an exchange of ideas, kind of what you could, in a reduced sense, call the culture war issues or whatever.
And so I don't think we're going to resolve the question of how to address historical racial injustice in the United States whatsoever.
well, we can debate that, but maybe abortion or something like this, by a techno-optimistic view of the future.
And that's okay, because not every question needs to be settled through this.
And this is, I guess, gets to the heart of my criticism of that Silicon Valley crowd that you're talking about.
Some of them are, I think, afraid of wading into the waters of moral and normative debate and sort of sublimate that into technology will solve everything AI will help us.
And I'm kind of a candidate who...
Bluntly, we'll take on those, be a participant, staking out my position in a fundamental normative debate, moral debate.
But still believes that 90% of our problems can be addressed through actually just embracing growth again.
Fair point.
I mean, one problem with, of course, the cultural issues is that if we forego freedom of speech, if we forego certain areas of research that we cannot go into because God knows what monsters are hiding there.
Then we may also forego on a lot of different life-saving technologies.
A perfect example of that would be drugs.
Should we know about genetic differences between people on a molecular level or genetic level?
Well, yes, if it means that our drugs, for example, can be tailored to different people depending on the need.
But once you say that we cannot research in that particular area because it is politically incorrect, then there is a lot of human suffering down the line of people who are not going to be given life-saving medicines and things like that.
And there may be other areas.
Where we might be prevented from going from a purely research standpoint because they become politically radioactive.
So, research, freedom of speech, freedom of research, freedom of publishing, this is all incredibly important and I fear that we are using it because of these red guards on American campuses.
So in the interest of maybe not just violently agreeing with one another, I'm going to maybe just press on a couple places on your thesis.
I wouldn't say these are areas of disagreement, but areas of curiosity, just put pressure on it a little bit.
One relates to the US, one relates to China.
Let's start with the China example, and then we'll come to the US question I had for you.
So in China, I like your thesis about freedom.
Resonates with me, of course.
Now, China is not in any sense under the last 10 to 15 to 20 years free in the sense we would think of it here.
How would you characterize their pace of innovation?
Certainly their pace of GDP growth has on absolute percentage numbers been multiples higher than what it is in the United States.
Now they're growing off of a smaller base and there's all kinds of confounding factors there.
But how do you square what many would describe as an innovative set of results in China?
With the abject absence of true human freedom.
Sure.
Well, I would distinguish between copying and innovating.
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of copying going on, that's for sure.
So China was a deeply totalitarian society before 1978. After that, there was a process of liberalization, meant in the best possible way, until about 2012. The country was still a dictatorship, authoritarian dictatorship, but it was becoming more free.
It used freedom as a tool to achieve economically.
They used freedom as a tool to catch up with America and the West.
And then after Xi takes over, we are now once again seeing a switch from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism.
The two are quite distinct, right?
So you would predict a decline in the innovativeness of Chinese culture if Xi continues to do?
I would predict a decline in GDP growth.
In GDP growth itself, yeah.
Because the Chinese were able to generate a lot of economic growth between 1978 and, say, 2012. By simply copying the things that we have done well in the West.
And even today, the West continues to provide a disproportionate amount of innovation around the world, precisely because innovation and freedom, freedom to think, freedom to speak, are deeply connected.
So China was approaching a point where You can achieve only that much with copying, right?
Be it borrowing or buying or even stealing intellectual property of others.
But then the question was, was China going to become a member of that small club of countries that actually does original innovation or not?
And my hypothesis is that China cannot become a member of that small group of countries which produce innovation because freedom has been on a downward trajectory over the last decade or so.
So it would be much more difficult for China to...
So China has been catching up...
I agree with you to share our premise.
I'm just saying if somebody's looking at this for the outside in who doesn't necessarily share our premise here, would they look at the results?
And say that the results are consistent with that?
Or would they say, no, no, no, there actually is enough original non-copycat innovation here that it puts pressure on the thesis that freedom actually matters for innovation?
I would say that China cannot overtake the United States, cannot continue to grow at its current pace if it doesn't become freer.
In other words, they've reached a limit.
And in fact, Xi made a deliberate decision, which has been known throughout history, including the history of China, was that he was presiding over a country where economic dynamism, which was introduced in the 1970s, was beginning to create alternative which was introduced in the 1970s, was beginning to create alternative centers of
Wealth was beginning to disseminate into the pockets of billionaires, corporations, party chiefs in different provinces, etc.
That's very dangerous for an authoritarian slash totalitarian society.
And what tends to happen in instances like that is that either the totalitarian folds and innovation bursts out or the totalitarian, in order to maintain his position, his lock on power, destroys economic innovativeness.
Puts Jack Ma in jail.
Precisely.
This is what happened in China with the collapse of the Song Dynasty in the 12th century and its replacement by first the Mongols and then the Ming Dynasty.
They basically decided not to innovate anymore.
But this was a top-down decision.
The Ming Dynasty.
So the Song Dynasty saw a lot of innovation.
It was very innovative.
They produced Paper currency, whether you like it or not, they produce gunpowder, a compass, and many other innovations, I think printing press.
But then the Ming come in, and they basically say, we don't want to innovate anymore because it's internally destabilizing, right?
And so this is exactly what China did under Xi, or rather what Xi did with China.
He basically decided instead of innovating, instead of decentralization and instead of all this dynamism that we had, I'm going to reconstitute the Communist Party.
I'm going to put it back firmly in charge of the country.
But that will come at the cost of dynamism.
There is just one thing that I want to say about China and the United States.
I know that right now the relationship between China and the United States is very bad.
And, you know, there are many good reasons for that.
But what I would encourage Americans to think about is that whatever China is doing, we have a lot of power on our side to make it easier for America to grow.
We cannot help the fact that China is poaching a lot of intellectual property from the United States.
Don't engage in victimhood culture vis-a-vis China.
Precisely.
What worries me so much, especially in the last 10 years or so, is that we constantly say, well, we need to punish China for X, Y, and Z. And God knows China is doing a lot of bad things.
I'm not here to defend China.
It's a totalitarian communist regime.
I'm one of those people who believes we should punish China for any of those things.
But...
I think another question that we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that we are doing to ourselves in order to keep us from innovating, from growing?
Can we have a different regulatory environment where anybody can succeed?
And that way we don't have to worry about how much China is stealing because we are growing like crazy.
What about taxation regime?
Is our corporate tax rate really that great?
My understanding is that taxation in this country, the code, is as long as King James Bible times 11. Oh, longer, yeah.
Times 11, right?
Yeah.
What if we simplified it, right?
What if we had an immigration system that actually was smart enough to bring in the best people from around the world to create value here rather than elsewhere?
All of those things could be combined.
Didn't pay people not to work.
Didn't pay people not to work.
And all of these things that we could do in order to generate growth.
But fundamentally, somebody has to come in and stop saying to the American people, you are victims.
Rather, Victims of foreigners.
Rather, what you should be saying to the American people, you are victims of a horrible, vile, wicked force in the world, and it's called Washington, D.C. I'm just making a note here.
What are the obstacles and impediments to growth in the United States itself?
You've got regulation.
You've got taxation.
You've got non-meritocratic immigration.
You have unintentional immigration policies, effectively.
We have a workforce shortage.
We're paying people, effectively, not to work, have created that.
I think culture is a big part of it.
The rise of a victimhood mentality itself makes for a less productive population.
I think anti-meritocratic hiring practices are on the list.
I don't think affirmative action is particularly conducive to allowing the best people To actually innovate, if you tell people it has to be based on quotas of race, sex, or sexual orientation that they're hiring, engineers or scientists or innovators, you're probably going to get less ingenuity and scientific innovation on the back of it.
I don't think there is...
I think the climate cult is on that list.
I mean, what else is on that list for you?
Well, I don't think that there is...
There are two very dangerous philosophies that are emerging from academia and entering American public life.
And we cannot be blasé about it because we know that just because something has been secluded in that mad lab, which is American tertiary education for a few years, we cannot count that it won't spill out like from the Wuhan lab and then enter America as a whole.
The first one is degrowth theory.
This is pushed by a number of academics which claim that not only do we have to stop growing, we should do with less in the future.
In other words, that the American people should reduce their standards of living because Mother Gaia.
So that's number one.
Who are some of the leading proponents of this?
You know what?
I can get you the names.
We were involved with them in an online discussion, but these are mostly not economists, by the way.
These are mostly environmentalists, and very often biologists, because biologists See human beings as deer or yeast or rabbits.
You know, when we overpopulate, we consume everything and then we die.
But economists see human beings not as a very special animal.
As the main subject of concern.
Yeah, we are a very different type of animal.
We are intelligent beings who are capable of innovation.
Animals cannot innovate.
That's the difference between the biological viewpoint of degrowth and the economic point of growth.
So degrowth is one area of concern to me.
The other one is equity.
Equity means proportional representation of different groups, be they sexual orientation, be they gender, be they race, be they age, nationality, whatever, in the positions of socioeconomic influence.
And my argument is That the beauty of the Enlightenment, what the Enlightenment gives the world is the notion that your birth doesn't matter.
It's what's in your mind that matters.
The great advance of the Enlightenment was to say that the nobility in Europe in the 18th century, who were entitled to all sorts of perks and all sorts of jobs, Should be deprived of those perks and those jobs because they didn't earn it through their intellect or through their hard work.
They were there by the accident of their birth.
And so what enlightenment insists on is merit, is meritocracy.
And we had that for 200 years.
And over those 200 years, the world has changed beyond all comprehension.
We are much richer.
Fewer babies are dying in infancy.
We are more educated, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think that meritocracy played a huge part in it.
And when we get away from it, when we start appointing people into positions of power because of irrelevant characteristics, this must by necessity reduce our growth and destroy us.
Not to mention that it's of course a zero-sum game.
So this gets to a pretty interesting place.
So I agree with everything you just said.
I don't know how much you've been following what I've been saying in the last six to 24 months, but maps onto identifying exactly these two obstacles.
But let's focus on the second, right?
Equity.
The equity agenda.
I think that that presents some interesting challenges for your thesis, for your policy prescription on population growth, actually, versus the question I asked in the beginning, which was, let's just decide early on.
Is it about creating the conditions for an existing population to be more innovative, productive, successful, prosperous as a consequence of that innovation?
Or should it be playing the passive probabilistic game of just assuming more is better?
And against the backdrop of these cultural obstacles, degrowth and equity, it's like I feel like we get more juice out of the existing squeeze if we tackle those things head on, versus focusing on just more people holding versus focusing on just more people holding those conditions constant.
Of course, you would say don't hold those conditions constant, but...
What I worry about is to the extent we're not making much progress on addressing those conditions, actually populating into those conditions, you know, through immigration or whatever, we could decide what the mechanism is.
May risk making that problem worse because you're actually ossifying the very conditions of degrowth and equity in the first place, just perpetuating the very thing that you...
I'm with you.
I think that, you know, production, reproduction rates rising and, you know, catching up to, you know, exceeding death rates by a wider margin is a good thing, all else equal for the planet.
But I just wonder whether as a matter of prioritization, tackling these cultural obstacles To innovation and growth is just we live in a moment where that's more important than wishing population growth into existence for a probabilistic game,
believing that a small number, the 1% of that population bell curve that ends up innovating is shouldering a much greater burden against the backdrop of a rest of population who actually has embraced degrowth and equity as their agenda.
Do you follow what I'm saying?
Yes, I do.
I need to clarify my position on population growth.
The book was written in order to defend the idea that more people is better for the planet.
Which I agree with.
It is not there to create government programs in order to enhance procreation.
It has a purely negative defense.
It's a defense against people who are saying that humans are a cancer on the planet and the best thing that could happen for the planet is for all of humanity to die out.
Under no circumstances would I want to be misunderstood as saying that we should force people to have more children.
Rather, what I'm saying is...
I understand that, and that's fine.
There are huge chunks of young people around the world, including the United States, who are saying to us in public opinion polls, We cannot bring children into the world because it's going to end.
And this is nutty, and this is counterproductive.
So you and I agree on that, and I don't misunderstand you to be saying that at all.
I think you've been very clear about it.
But I'm asking a different question about prioritization.
I think that they are part of the same thing, which is zeitgeist.
It's an intellectual zeitgeist.
Within it, you have both the anti-population, humans are a cancer type of people, whilst at the same time you have...
The same kinds of people tend to also be people who favor equity, who are against meritocracy, who are against capitalism.
It's a part and parcel of the same mindset, right?
So, trust me, once you start attacking people or criticizing people on equity, you will hear from the environmentalists and whoever else because it's the same group of people, essentially.
I agree with you.
I just, it's a very first personal thing for me right now, right?
I'm running for U.S. president.
I've got to decide what I'm prioritizing.
And it's the difference between getting out there and having an agenda.
We talk about the pro-growth agenda and some of the stuff's easy, right?
Anti-regulation, you know, tax liberation.
That stuff almost goes without saying.
Stop paying people not to work.
But the difference between being a little bit of the techno-futurist and talks about, let's reproduce, let's repopulate the stuff that Elon Musk will say a lot of the stuff on a given day, because it conveniently elides the more controversial questions of whether we need to get rid of affirmative action in America, right?
Versus leading first with that degrowth and equity agenda and dismantle that.
I mean, the top two things I said on day one when I rolled out this campaign about four weeks ago, five weeks or whatever it was.
Pledges, right, as a candidate.
End affirmative action in America.
We can do that with the stroke of a pen, race-based affirmative action, which is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, and something that's anti-meritocratic is anti-innovative.
And abandon the demands of the climate cult in the United States, which is a great obstacle to the energy industry, which in turn is a great obstacle to growth itself in our country.
Those are culturally fraught things to say.
Those are things that even most other, forget Democratic candidates, Republican candidates are willing to say.
I don't think there's been a U.S. presidential candidate, even on the Republican side in modern history, that has said those things out loud.
Now, you know, I think as we expand, one of the things I've been doing is expanding the Overton window and running a truck through it.
And so maybe others will jump on that train later this year.
I kind of expect they will.
But it seems to me that hitting that head on is almost more important right now than in an abstract sense talking about Birth rates and death rates right now.
I think they're part of the same thing.
I think they're part of the same, but it's emphasis.
I'm open-minded.
I think that you have the same umbrella.
The pro-growth umbrella can cover all of these aspects together.
Okay.
If you want more growth, you have to have best people in charge of companies, in charge of government agencies, Because only the most talented people are going to get you there, right?
So it cannot be an accident of birth.
It doesn't matter what your color is, what your gender is, what your sexual orientation is.
You want the best person for the job because that creates most value, that creates most growth.
So that's the equity part of it.
Then by embracing growth, you're of course immediately, explicitly denying the degrowth agenda.
And you are saying that we are going to grow our way out of these environmental concerns that people have.
We are going to use a lot more gas, which is going to lower CO2, and we are going to go full on building more fission reactors and hopefully one day fusion reactors on the planet in the United States.
So that tackles, by unleashing the energy potential of the United States, you are taking care of the degrowth agenda.
And of course, once you embrace the pro-growth agenda and you're saying that the future is going to be bright, then you are also addressing the problem of low population rates.
Right now, native-born American women have 1.7 children per woman.
We need 2.1.
I mean, it's almost a pro-life agenda.
So it's a pro-life agenda.
I mean, there is a reason why...
It's kind of interesting, actually.
It's quite possible that one of the reasons why our growth begins to taper off in the 70s and why population rates...
I'm beginning to slow down after the Great Recession is because people see a dark, more scarce future ahead of them.
But by embracing growth, by embracing merit, you are essentially creating a positive vision of the future where children born into the world Can be better off, so parents can start having more children.
If they want to.
I gotta admit, this is quite persuasive, actually.
Because it is an affirmative vision into which the, you know, equity and degrowth are obstacles, but it's actually kind of a new dream, focused, is what we say is the premise of the campaign, new dream, new American dream, focused on Growth itself, prosperity itself as an objective, and the anti-merit agenda, the climate cult, these are all obstacles to that, but actually there's more to it than just taking down the obstacles.
I think repopulation is part of it.
I think that's actually a justification for the pro-life movement that is often forgotten in this country, actually.
Nick Eberstadt from American Enterprise Institute recently pointed out to me that optimism has a lot to do with population growth rates.
In most of the Western world, by which I include Japan, South Korea, most of the advanced economies, population rates are collapsing.
There is one exception.
And that's Israel.
In Israel, population, rather, the total fertility rate is well above 2, which is the replacement level.
And not just amongst Orthodox Jews, but also amongst secular Jews.
Oh, really?
What he suggests, and having spoken to Israelis, I think it's possible, is that they have a fundamentally optimistic vision of the future for their country because they've been growing like crazy for the last 20 years or so.
What's the GDP growth rates over there?
Oh, I don't...
Well, it was much...
I don't remember right now, but it's much higher than what it was in the 1970s and 1980s when Israel was fundamentally a socialist country.
But actually, it was Netanyahu who started liberalizing the country as a finance minister in the 1990s and then maintained that deliberization or rather deregulation type of governance.
So, you know, I think it's possible.
And...
If we can return that optimism to America, then it's perfectly possible that people are going to have more children, willingly, without any government need to spend more money or regulate or persuade anyone.
And one of the topics you'll hear, I did not want to end this without covering this topic as well as, it's a bit of an offshoot, but it's, I think, important in our discussion about your thesis is that The kind of innovation sort of matters, too.
So you could say that GDP growth has tapered off.
We face a lot of cultural travails now.
But some people will say, no, no, no, we've had the Silicon Valley boom.
We had the Internet age, for God's sake, in the post-1970 period.
Some of the greatest innovation known to mankind, especially in tech, is of a kind that we hadn't seen in the pre-digital, pre-internet era.
We're now in the third wave internet, right?
Web 1.0, Web 2.0, now we're moving to Web 3.0.
And yet, we're still having the conversation that we're having about the absence of innovation driving prosperity.
Maybe We're not talking enough, the argument would go, about the right kind of innovation and that creating a social media app.
Think about multi-trillion dollar companies like Facebook.
I mean, the entire social media industry is based on picking at certain insecurities.
What will you click on faster As a consequence of what I present you, and then what does that let me know about your inner soul and your preferences than you know about your own so that I can advertise to you to buy things more effectively?
I think persuasively, I think a lot of people would say, I think I'm even very open to saying that That's not the kind of innovation that necessarily has and drags us forward in terms of human prosperity, but that is what the market will deliver if it's against the backdrop of Human psychological insecurities that lend to that being the most profitable incremental business opportunity to pursue, which is what led to the birth of the modern social media industries.
Tell me if you're following what I'm saying, and what's your response to that?
I follow what you're saying.
I would say that Silicon Valley was born and succeeded within the regulatory and taxation environment which has been created by the federal government and by states' governments.
It was a regulatory environment which basically allowed them to do whatever they pleased and they flourished as a result.
I am fundamentally opposed to government choosing winners or losers in the market system.
I agree with you.
We're not talking about government action.
I'm talking about cultural points.
What I want is for us to have a fundamentally deregulatory and tax simplification agenda, which will basically extend the same kind of most favored treatment that the Silicon Valley enjoyed to all the other different industries of which which will basically extend the same kind of most favored treatment that the Silicon Valley enjoyed to all Remember when Barack Obama ran on creating 8 million jobs in the green industry?
Sure.
Well, I'd be surprised if he created 8 jobs, let alone 8 million jobs, right?
His presidency was saved by fracking and the massive decline in the prices of gas and prices of energy because of fracking and fossil fuels.
But the point is that he could not have known Where innovation was going to come from.
He thought it would come from green energy.
It came from fracking, right?
And the same goes for any presidential candidate or for that matter any politician.
You simply don't know where the innovation is going to come from, which industry is going to flourish.
And therefore, I think the goal of American decision makers should be to make the whole business environment in the country as easy to navigate as possible and then let a thousand different flowers bloom.
That would be my suggestion.
It's wishful.
But I think grounded in first principles, which I respect, I just wonder whether...
And we're not going to resolve this today, but I think it's something I struggle with, think about deeply, is even if we get that policy prescription right, low regulation, debt, taxation, get the state out of it.
I think that there is this reality of a third variable of culture.
Like if you have the people regulated by the state, the state, I think there's this creation.
People come together to create a government.
People also come together to create a culture.
And I think that so long as we have that apologist streak in our culture, call it woke, call it what you want, That apologist streak is, I think, independently an impediment to prosperity, flourishing, excellence, and growth.
It's partially mediated through government, yes.
But even in, we live, I think, in a moment today where government is not the only threat and impediment.
And I think part of what I worry about is not only is there an independent impediment in the culture, but that culture creates certain psychic insecurities that even allow a free market capitalist economy to To almost create the kinds of innovation that innovate against the backdrop of a culturally insecure populace that lends themselves to produce more Snapchats and Facebooks rather than
nuclear fusion.
And I know one obstacle to nuclear fusion is the regulatory apparatus.
I'm a dead set opponent to it.
But I think that we would be not completely honest if we said that was the only impediment, because it's just more profitable to create an app in the near term that exploits the insecurities of a teen girl who grew up in a culture that didn't instill in her the psychic fortitude that she needed.
And I think this goes back to Adam Smith.
I mean, Adam Smith, I think, said, I don't know if it's so many words, but, you know, the cultivation of virtue is a precondition for capitalism to achieve its optimal results, right?
Because if virtue is the delta between what we want and what we need, and those are the backdrop demand conditions, then...
The profitable opportunity will be to still give people what they want rather than what they need.
And I think we can't wish ourselves into a first principles reality when there's this third variable of culture that is an equally an impediment to.
Does any of that make sense to you?
No, it does make sense.
I mean, I think that capitalism is a moral system because in order to succeed in capitalism, you have to provide your fellow human beings with something they want.
That much we agree on.
But it's not a sufficiently, it's not a sufficient morality.
Because if somebody wants child pornography, for example, you should be able to say, well, I'm not going to provide it to you.
In other words, capitalism has a moral component in it, but it also needs to be buttressed by other ethics, such as there may be a market for child pornography.
It would make some people better off.
Because that's what they want, but I cannot provide it because it's abhorrent, immoral, etc.
And so there is scope for that.
I just think that the mental anguish, the anxiety, the cultural weltschmerz that we are going through right now, Is an outcome of ideas, of bad ideas that have been poisoning the public discourse for very many decades.
Identity politics that you have identified poisons that aspect, the meritocracy.
Then you have the degrowth theory, poisoning pro-growth agenda.
Then you have the apocalyptic vision of the world, which is poisoning America's willingness to have children to the future.
So all of them are connected to a set of bad ideas, which can only be combated with other bad ideas.
And that is what we are trying to do, both you and me.
Love it.
Love it.
And I think that, as I think about the framing of what I'm trying to accomplish here, presidential race, whatever, that's just a means to an end, to a national cultural revival.
I think I will be both the pro-growth candidate, but not at the expense of also taking on the cultivation of this word that we've sort of lost in our culture.
We've lost growth in our lexicon, but we've also lost this concept of virtue.
And I think the cultivation of virtue in a way that takes on the cancerous ideologies, what you call the bad, what charitably call the bad ideas, I think is equally important as a frontier to push in a way that makes me a little bit different than just the techno-futurist I think is equally important as a frontier to push in a way that makes me a little bit different
Taking on an important optimistic outlook that I share that we'll bring to the table in this pro-growth, pro-innovation agenda, but it has to be against the backdrop of cultivating virtue as an alternative to the cultural poison that fills the wake of the vacuum of virtue that we've since created.
I think I agree.
I think that fundamentally a liberal democracy that we cherish and want I use liberal in the classical European sense.
I understand.
And free market capitalism, they both require an ethical, well-informed, well-educated population, and we are losing that.
I think that's something that both, to wrap our conversation from where we began, that Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter would both agree on.
Yes.
After all, Smith's other great work was his take on ethics and morals.
Actually, yep, people forget that.
It may have been his greater contribution of the two, but they go together.
Wealth of Nations could not have existed without the backdrop of his ethical foundation against which that Wealth of Nations was built, and maybe we channel a bit of the two of them into the conversation we're having today.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
Thank you, man.
It was a great conversation.
Well, thank you for having me and very good luck to you.
Yeah, I'll take it.
I'll take it.
I appreciate it.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
▲
Export Selection