Making Sense with Sam Harris - #170 — The Great Uncoupling

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Andrew McAfee about the history of human progress and the modern uncoupling of our prosperity from resource consumption. They discuss the pitfalls and hidden virtues of capitalism, technological progress, environmental policy, the future of the developing world, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, once again reminding subscribers to go to my website, log in, and get our private RSS feed.

As I've now said a few times in housekeeping here, there's some changes coming and I don't want you to miss any subscriber-only content. So just takes a minute. Sorry for the inconvenience, but if you're on mobile and go to the subscriber content page on my site, if you're using one of the supported podcatchers, just one click and you will have the right feed. And again, the right feed comes through with a red Making Sense icon, not a black one. And one of the things that will be coming through on the subscriber feed soon are the conversations that I've been having on the Waking Up app. Many of you have asked that I release those jointly on the subscriber feed, and we will be doing that. Also new, as of the last podcast,

I will be adding an afterword to these conversations, in many cases talking about the effect that the guest had on me. And I did that for the first time with Kathleen Ballou in my last podcast on the white power movement. And some of you objected to what I said there. I said at one point that I detected a level of wokeness in her that I didn't want to engage with because I thought it would be a distraction. And a few of you objected that I was landing a blow on my guest when she wasn't there to defend herself. And others found the other side of the coin there and took me to task for not tackling her obvious wokeness and abdicating my responsibility to tackle crazy social justice ideas wherever they surface. I must say I reject both of those opinions. I

certainly wasn't landing a blow on her. I don't think I was saying anything she would have disagreed with. It was quite obvious that she viewed things like the history of Western colonialism and resource extraction and nuclear proliferation as part of this picture of white privilege and white supremacy. She said as much. Anyway, I really wanted to get her best case for how worried we should be about the white power movement, and I really didn't want to get wrapped around the axle of talking about racism in general and the sins of Western civilization. And just to be clear, the afterword is not a place where I will land blows on my guests when they can not defend themselves. I would consider that bad form as well. It's simply the new place in the show where I will sometimes tell you what I was thinking, and perhaps what I didn't say during the conversation, either because I forgot or because

I thought it better not to. And in the case of that interview, I really think it was better not to get distracted by a larger conversation on white privilege. And I can assure you there will be more coming on that topic, for better or worse. In fact, there's a podcast I recorded about a year ago with Chelsea Handler that I'll soon be releasing to subscribers. Chelsea just released a documentary on white privilege for Netflix, and she interviewed me for it, again, nearly a year ago. And I decided to record our whole conversation as a podcast at the time. This was in part due to my instincts for self-preservation. I knew that if she used any of the interview, it would just be about five minutes or so. And I couldn't release the podcast until her documentary came out. Now, as it happens,

And I couldn't release the podcast until her documentary came out. Now, as it happens, I didn't make the cut in her film at all, which, having seen it, was totally understandable. I thought we had a great conversation, but it wasn't one that could easily fit with the story she was wanting to tell there. And here's a two-minute glimpse of it. So let me get this straight. You're doing a documentary on white privilege, and I'm the white guy?

Is that the situation we're in? Well, I'm the white girl. It's really about my privilege starting there. You seem very well-versed on the matter and opinionated. Yes. And I need opinions. Okay, good. Well, what could go wrong?

How many edibles have you taken now to weather this conversation? No, I haven't taken any today. I wanted to stay sharp for you. Okay. I think the disparity is true because it's everywhere. There aren't an equal amount of women represented in any industry. But that's not true. From talking to people who claim to not be racist, the first thing out of everyone's mouth is,

I'm married to a black woman, or I'm friends with a black person, or I'm not a racist. And right there and then, that says to me, yeah, you are. No, no, you've been sold this meme. I don't know who invented this. I want to find the genius who invented this meme. But the idea that some of my best friends are black defense

is not only a bad defense, but a sign of racism. That's bullshit. I think the N word is just not allowed. We're just not allowed to use it. No white person should be able to use it. It just elicits too much hate. It's like calling a gay person the F word. It's, it elicits too much pain. You know, it's what you're using, what people have used used to oppress them for years. But what should elicit the pain is clearly the intention to elicit the pain, right? I hate you, and here's how I'm going to say it. I think political correctness is something that just makes people stupid, where they just can't see obvious points, right? I agree with you on that. But I think when the injury is so deep, there needs to be reform. On the subject of virtue signaling, do you think that me doing

a documentary on white privilege is virtue signaling? Well, you'll definitely be accused of it. Yeah. Anyway, it was a fun conversation. I will release that to subscribers very soon, Anyway, it was a fun conversation. I will release that to subscribers very soon, along with the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Andrew McAfee. Andrew is a research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and he was previously a professor at Harvard Business School. He's co-authored the books The Second Machine Age and Machine Platform Crowd, but today we speak about his new book, More from Less, the surprising story of how we learn to prosper using fewer resources and what happens next. And as you'll hear, this is a very optimistic

conversation, unlike many I have here. We talk about the history of human progress and the modern uncoupling of our prosperity from resource consumption. We talk about the pitfalls of capitalism, but also its hidden virtues, and technological progress generally, environmental policy, the future of the developing world, and many other topics. Anyway, this is fascinating material, and as you'll hear, all too consequential, and on balance, quite encouraging. So now, without further delay, I bring you Andrew McAfee. I am here with Andrew McAfee. Andrew, thanks for joining me. Sam, thanks for having me on.

So I was trying to remember, I think you and I have met at least once at the AI conference in Puerto Rico. Is that correct? Yeah. How many times did you go to that? I just went to the first one, and then I went to the Asilomar one, but I didn't go to the second one in Puerto Rico. Okay. So you and I are in exactly the same boat. I went to Puerto Rico one and then Asilomar as well. And then you and I run into each other at the hallways of places like TED. Right. Okay. We're in similar circles. So listen, it's great to get you on the podcast. You've written a very interesting book. The title is More From Less. And you're in an unusual spot, along with Steve Pinker, whose recent books have been very positive and against the grain of many people's expectations. I can imagine

you haven't really started your book tour yet, but let me predict that when you get in front of audiences, you will with some regularity encounter the sour face of incredulity from many people who upon reflecting on your thesis just don't want to buy it. First, tell people who you are and your potted intellectual history. How have you come to have an opinion on any of these matters we're going to talk about? And you know that opinions are not in short supply anywhere in academia. My name is Andy McAfee, and I am a scientist at MIT. I used to be at Harvard, and I moved down the river in Cambridge, Massachusetts about a decade ago. And I just try to study and understand where all of this technology, all this tech progress is taking it. So Sam, like you know,

with my co-author and my friend, Eric Brynjolfsson, he and I have written a couple of books together about this main topic. One was called The Second Machine Age. The second one was called Machine Platform Crowd about the job, the wage, the labor force impacts, and then the business model impacts of all this crazy new technology. And then this new book that I've got out called More From Less is a little bit of a pivot, but it's still a technology book. It's trying to convey the story of how our relationship with the planet that we all live on has changed in some pretty fundamental ways, in large part because of technology. Right, right. And your background, if I recall, is in somewhere in engineering, and then you kind of went through business school. And give me the

academic version of yourself. Yeah, I am a mechanical engineer from MIT. I got my MBA from MIT about 63 years ago. And then I did my doctorate at Harvard at the business school, taught at the business school at Harvard for about a decade, and then came back to my roots, came back home to MIT about a decade ago. Right. So your basic thesis, as I understand it in this book, is that finally, our prosperity has become decoupled from our consumption of resources. So as you put it, we've essentially exchanged bits for atoms or atoms for bits. And this is an incredibly hopeful thesis. I mean, you certainly acknowledge many of the bad things we've done and are continuing to do, but you cite what you call the four horsemen of the optimist. And I just want to run through

these because this is a great way to structure the unfolding of your thesis. Yeah. You talk about tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government. And each of those two, the first two and the latter two are kind of dyads of a sort. I mean, tech progress and capitalism go hand in hand, and public awareness and responsive government seem to also be joined at the hip in some way. So let's just start with the progress we've made. How have we gotten here? Yeah, Sammy, you just did a beautiful job of delivering both the what and the why of this book that I've written. The what, like you just said, is that we have finally learned how to decouple growing our prosperity, increasing the size

of our economies, having people lead longer and healthier and more prosperous lives. That's a really important thing to do. Another really important thing to do is take better care of the planet Earth. And there used to be a pretty sharp trade-off between those two things. And in the industrial era, we massively increased human prosperity, but we massively increased our footprint on our planet as well. It's just this unignorable story about the industrial era that got kicked off with the Industrial Revolution in about 1776. And so before I started working on this book, I kind of had this fundamental assumption in the back of my head that that's how the world worked. We had to take more from the earth in order to have more human prosperity, bigger human populations, bigger human economies.

And what I learned and what I've come to firmly believe is that's just not the case anymore. So you use the word decouple, which is exactly right. We have decoupled increasing our human prosperity from taking more from the earth year after year. Data from America shows we've got a large, technically sophisticated economy that's responsible for about 25% of the world economy. We're increasing our prosperity. And in just about all the ways that I can think of that matter, we are leaving a lighter footprint on the planet earth. And I kind of thought that was a big deal, this transition from taking more from the Earth to taking less. It's kind of an important transition, so I thought it merited a book. It's a huge transition. So you can tell the story of our

technological progress prior to this transition, and it is a story of progress nonetheless, but of a fairly rapacious extraction of resources and a soiling of our own nest to a degree that is scarcely sustainable. But your book, like my friend Steve Pinker's book, is filled with some very happy graphs where you see the lines of extraction and resource use diverge from the line of increase in prosperity. But before we get to the happy moment, maybe let's just spend a few minutes on just what progress we made, even in the days when the progress was wasteful and polluting. Yeah, and you mentioned Steve Pinker, and I'm very, very proud to join his tribe of evidence-driven optimists about the state of the world. And Pinker makes the case that the Enlightenment did a great deal of really wonderful things for the course of human progress.

I just want to add to that chorus with this book by saying something that people have said before, which was the industrial revolution, which was this point in time where we learned how to access the crazy amounts of energy stored in fossil fuels all around the world. For me, that's the heart of the industrial revolution. This put us onto just a categorically different trajectory. And my favorite way to show that, and I show this in the book, is by looking at kind of one graph that shows population versus prosperity in England for hundreds of years. And you and I probably use the word Malthusian as an insult to somebody these days, because what Malthus said in the late 18th century was essentially, we're all going to starve because we can't grow enough food to feed everybody. And he was just unbelievably wrong about that. One of the weirdest things I learned when writing this book was that Malthus was right as a historian. And the great way to show that is to chart population versus prosperity in England from about 1200 to about 1800. We have pretty good data. We can reconstruct what that looks like. And you just see a pendulum swinging back and forth. The only times that the

English were relatively prosperous was when there were relatively few of them. And when there were a lot of English people, they were all kind of poor. And the only decent explanation for that phenomenon is there was kind of a hard ceiling on the amount of stuff you could take from the earth, primarily food. And when there are too many people and not enough to go around, everybody's kind of poor. When population goes down, everybody can be a bit richer until they bump up against that ceiling. So from 1200 to 1800, Malthus looks like a genius.

And now we use his name as an adjective for dead flat wrong, because of the industrial revolution and the industrial era. When we got out of that trade-off, because of the steam engine and a bunch of other inventions, and then internal combustion, we just harnessed the world's energy. And you can watch human population and human prosperity increase together for the very first time ever in human history and increase at rates that we've never, ever seen before. And it almost doesn't matter what kind of evidence you look at, whether it's global population, GDP per capita, income growth, it kind of doesn't matter. You see the same story, which is this almost horizontal line of nothing really interesting

happening. And then an almost vertical line of, oh my God, we've never seen prosperity increase like this before. And that's the story of the industrial era. And I say in the book, the industrial era was not fantastic for everybody at every point in time. Amen to that. We can talk about some of the dark side there, but it was this unprecedented chapter in human history. The trade-off that we made, kind of implicitly without thinking a lot about it, is that as you point out, we took more from the planet to generate that prosperity year after year, and we beat up the planet in all kinds of fundamental ways year after year, and we did it almost in lockstep with our prosperity growth. You can just graph the size of the economy versus how much we took from the earth.

And it's kind of a one-to-one relationship. And in the years leading up to, call it the first Earth Day in 1970, you can graph things like how polluted the skies over American cities were, again, versus the economic growth. And that relationship is way too tight. It's just incredibly clear that we took more from the earth and we fouled it. We befouled it more year after year to generate this prosperity. Yeah. So just looking back, you have some arresting images and phrases in the book here, which I think this kind of thinking is commonplace among engineers and perhaps physicists, but for most of us who don't spend a lot of time in those fields,

a very simple statement like, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the only way for a human being to move anything on Earth was with muscle power, either human or animal, for literally tens of thousands of years, generation after generation, before wind and water came online. All we had was just digging by hand to do anything. We could dig trenches, and maybe we domesticated the ox and the horse to drag our plows. And that was it. Again, it is an obvious point, but when you think of what it was like to live year after year, life after life,

I mean, generation after generation, where nobody had ever met anyone who ever imagined things could be different. Exactly. This notion that a better future was ahead of us, I don't think that's really part of the historical record. No, no. And you could drop someone into any 10,000-year interval and nothing would be different. They would have recognized all the same tools and cultural practices. Everyone's dying from the same tools and cultural practices. Everyone's dying from the same diseases that are, as yet, not even dimly understood.

It clearly didn't have to be that way because it is now not that way. And whatever progress we make from here is likewise also not guaranteed. I mean, we're functioning within the horizon of the known and struggling to push that back with all of our scientific pursuits. But we can't take anything for granted. And to look back on the history of the species is to be amazed at just how long it took to make progress of any kind. Exactly right. And to look back and be incredibly grateful that you don't live in that period, or at least I am. Sam, I'm sure you come across people who kind of long for the good old days before industrialization and urbanization and technology, and they want to go back to a simpler time. Wow, do I not want to go back to that simpler time?

One of the striking statistics that I put in the book is as far as we can tell, prior to 1800, global life expectancy was about 28 and a half years. And no region on the planet had a global life expectancy greater than I think 35 years. So I put a quote from Hobbes, from Leviathan in the book. Our lives really were nasty, solitary, brutish, and short. The number of kids that died in infancy, the percentage of mothers that died in childbirth, the disease burden, skeletons that we've unearthed from that time were just a lot shorter and more stunted. I literally can't understand people who want to go back to that time. Yeah. I mean, just to correct the usual association with those stats, it's not that more or less everyone died at 30. Obviously, the people lived longer than that, although they

didn't live to the biblical ages that are advertised. But that really is a story of just how many children died before the age of five. I mean, that was just absolutely commonplace, even within 150 years ago. I mean, it was really, as you detail in your book, the advent of indoor plumbing is probably the biggest gain there. I mean, just the number of lives saved by getting access to clean water. And once we also got some notion that we should be washing our hands with it before we eat or perform surgery or deliver babies, that was also helpful. Yeah. And it's one of the neat things that I learned researching the book is my list of the important technologies of the industrial revolution certainly would have included steam power and

electrification and the internal combustion engine. And Bob Gordon, a really, really good economist at Northwestern, would add indoor plumbing to that list. And at first, I was like, Bob, come on. That's at an entirely different level of importance here. And Sam, you're absolutely right. It's probably at the top of that list of important things to do because being able to get clean water and take your waste away was so unbelievably important for human health, for longevity, for maternal and child mortality. Thank heaven we have indoor plumbing. I found this amazing quote from a Tennessee farmer in the 1930s who said, the best thing in the world is to have the love of God in your heart. The second best thing in the world is to have electricity in your home.

And there's also the question of what you're eating in that home. And as you discuss the advent of nitrogen-based fertilizers and the Haber-Bosch process that delivered those, I mean, that accounts for the sustainable growth of human population to an amazing degree. I think that the statistic was something like 45% of people alive owe their existence to our ability to manufacture fertilizer. And also just the growth in human population is a very surprising curve. I mean, it took something like 200,000 years to get us to our first billion people in 1928. And then it was like 31 years to the next billion, and then 15,

and then I think it was 12 and 11 after that. I had forgotten that the company BASF was involved in the fertilizer chemistry, or is derived from the Haber-Bosch guys. And I remember those ads from probably the 80s or 90s where BASF would come on television or it would be a trailer at a movie and they would say, we don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.

But they could have well have said, there are 3 billion of you poor bastards who wouldn't exist without us. There's an excellent chance you're here because of us. Okay. So this has been tech progress up to the point of the decoupling. Explain the decoupling. How has that... Or should we talk about capitalism before you get into that? Let me try to bring in capitalism here because BASF was out to make a buck. And maybe it's nice marketing to say that they were interested in improving our lives. This was a profit-seeking company, as was the company that James Watt founded to commercialize the steam engine, as was Daimler-Benz, founded by one of the main people behind the internal combustion engine. And one other thing that

the industrial revolution gave us that came along very closely in time to the invention of the steam engine were things like robust patents and joint stock companies and limited liability corporations and all of these elements of what you and I would now call the capitalist system, right? And so the point I make in the book was that capitalism and tech progress are a very, very natural pair. They're just a one-two punch and they feed off each other. And what we saw for the first 170 plus years of the industrial era was they fed off each other, they increased our prosperity and our population. This is why I think Marx was just so dead flat wrong. However, this one-two punch absolutely enabled us and caused us to tread more heavily on the planet,

to increase the human footprint on the planet. As we went around trying to make a buck and trying to grow our markets, we used very powerful technologies to make more fertilizer. That means planting more acres of cropland. That means taking more water for agriculture. We dug more mines. We chopped down more forests. We took more resources out of the earth. We definitely went looking for fossil fuel all over the planet. So any way that you'd want to measure the human footprint or the human impact on the planet, it was going up because of this one-two punch of industrial capitalism and tech progress. And then a couple of the really unpleasant side effects were also going up over time. And pollution is exhibit A for me.

And then exhibit A prime, probably at least as important, was we exploited our fellow creatures to a huge extent. We made the passenger pigeon extinct in America. This was a bird that existed in such huge numbers that James Audubon saw a flock that blotted out the sun. He said it took days to pass overhead. That was early in the 19th century. By 1914, the very last passenger pigeon died in a zoo in Cincinnati. So this notion that we took good care of the animals we share the planet with, this is just wrong for the industrial era. We damn near made many species of whale extinct. And then something else I learned that I didn't know, we came in North America, we came really close to wiping out the beaver, the Canada goose, the white-tailed deer, the black bear,

these iconic species, and they're very much part of our landscape today, thank heaven. Man, we came quite close to wiping these things out because our appetites were voracious, kind of indiscriminate, and growing year after year. And again, I just think of this one-two punch of industrial turbocharged capitalism and more and more powerful technology all the time. And you use the adjective voracious to describe economic growth then. I keep on thinking of, it's kind of the cookie monster economy where it just went om-nom-nom-nom-nom and ate up everything that all these inputs that it could think of. I think I used rapacious. That's even better. Yeah. Cause it's true. Like let's be super honest. Capitalism is a greedy

process. There's just no other way to say it. And it caused us to kind of, you know, take more from the earth, dump whatever we didn't want off to the side. And you can point to these environmental dark sides of the industrial era and you'd be exactly accurate about it. And for me, that helps me understand the dawn of the environmental movement and the amazing amount of energy behind the first Earth Day in April of 1970. Yeah. Yeah. So let's linger on the convergence of tech progress and capitalism and the synergy there. And I think we should say more about the problems, because certainly capitalism has a very bad rap in many circles these days.

And it's despite the happy trend you've discussed in your book, which is the decoupling. And it takes as its object, and the criticism of capitalism takes as its object, wealth inequality, which seems to be growing even though, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's not growing globally, but within countries it is growing. That's exactly right. That's the right way to think about it. First, let's talk about how these lines diverge, resource extraction and waste and pollution from increasing prosperity. But then why is this not yet a perfectly happy picture of sane environmental policy, aligned incentives, and a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Yeah. So you've asked a couple different times already, what changed? How is it that we're now getting more from less, if the title of my book is at all accurate? And my super short, but I think not too short explanation of what changed, how we moved from this voracious, rapacious, cookie monster, industrial era economy to what I'm going to call the second machine age, because that's what Eric and I called our earlier book, where I am asserting we continue to grow our economy and our population and our prosperity, but we're now trading more lightly on the planet. Okay, so your $64,000 question is what changed? My very short answer to that is we invented the computer. And we finally invented this technology

that lets us find all of these different ways, all of these overlapping complementary ways to get more from less, to get more prosperity from less metal, less fertilizer, less water, less cropland, less of all of these material inputs to the economy. And let me give you a couple different point examples of that. When we first introduced aluminum cans, they were a big deal because they were probably healthier and lighter and cheaper than the tin-lined steel cans that they replaced. And all of us now take aluminum cans for granted. All the beer, all the soda that we drink, or a lot of it comes in an aluminum can. That can now is about one-fifth the weight of the first generation of aluminum cans. And I would have thought you'd make a couple tweaks to

the first generation aluminum can, and that's about as light as you could get. It turns out that's dead flat wrong. You can get down to about a fifth of the initial weight. And the only way that I can understand that you do that is you have engineers in front of their CAD terminals, in front of their computer-aided design terminals, just doing simulation after simulation. If we make it this way, can it bear all the weight? Will it satisfy all the requirements? And can we save a couple of tenths of a penny per 100 cans on the aluminum that we've got to spend money on to deliver our beer to some consumer out there? The thing to keep in mind is twofold. That consumer doesn't get any value from the aluminum.

is twofold. That consumer doesn't get any value from the aluminum. All that guy wants is to drink a beer. And the beverage company would really prefer to spend absolutely no money on that aluminum. They want to get that down as close to zero as possible. So capitalism, like we've already discussed, is this voracious thing. It's a relentless quest for profits. The flip side of that and where the news starts to turn good is that it's also a voracious quest to save a buck. A penny saved is a penny earned. So companies are really eager to hire a couple of engineers to sit in front of CAD terminals and figure out how to make an aluminum can lighter. So that's a pretty direct way to see how digital tech progress will help us save on resources.

I have a friend who's had a really long career. And a couple of years ago, I was discussing the early stages of this book with him. And he said, oh, I've got a great example for you. He said, when I started my career, I worked for a conglomerate that owned a railroad. And he said, I started my career in 1968. And my very first task as a bright young guy working in this company was to figure out where more of our boxcars were across the country. And I looked at him, I said, what are you talking about? He said, look, in 1968, Chicago Northwest Railway, CNW, had no way to know where its rolling stock, its locomotives and its boxcars were around the country. There was no such thing as an RFID tag or a sensor network or any of that stuff. This was the pre-digital era by and large.

And he said the lore inside the company at that point was that 5% of our boxcars moved on any given day. And it's not that the other 95% needed to rest. We didn't know where they were. We couldn't move them around the country deliberately. And he said, look, it was abundantly clear to all of us that if we could increase that 5% just to 10%, we would only need half as many boxcars to do all of our business. That is a massive, massive savings on these 30-ton steel behemoths sitting out there. So he said it was well worth our time to invest in getting that percentage up. And the way you got that percentage up in 1968 was you hired people to stand at railroad crossings and watch trains go by and

see if they could spot any CNW cars. Then they'd telephone or telegraph back to headquarters what they saw. And you'd hire people to do audits of freight yards and things like that. And then he said, my team started to hear about this thing called the computer. We started to think that might be useful. We can fast forward to today. I'm pretty sure that every single box car in America has at least one RFID sensor on it. There are all these trackside sensors everywhere that keep track of which cars. I'd be amazed if every railroad in the country today didn't know where its stock was with great precision at every point in time.

Because of that, you just don't need as many box cars. So you start to see these examples triangulating and coming together. I think the single most vivid one was a story that I read about a retired newspaper man in Buffalo whose idea of a good time was to go around to garage sales and buy stuff that might tell him something about Buffalo's history. So he bought a stack of Buffalo News newspapers from 1991 for, I don't know, less than five bucks. And he was flipping through them and he came across a RadioShack ad from 1991. And this guy made a really interesting observation. His name was Steve Sashon. He said there were 15 gizmos on this RadioShack ad from 1991. He said

13 of them have vanished into the phone that I carry in my pocket all the time. And he was talking about a camcorder and a camera and a cordless phone and an answering machine and a Walkman and all these different things. And he's absolutely right. They've just kind of vanished down into this very small, very light thing that we carry around with us all the time. And so mentally, if I weigh those 13 different devices, and I think about how many resources of different kinds went into those 13, and I swap it out for the one smartphone, I start to understand the graphs that appear in the book and why America is now year by year using less, and I don't mean less per capita, less per American, I mean less in aggregate of really important materials like gold, nickel, steel, fertilizer, water for agriculture, timber,

paper, cropland, kind of the material who's who of how you make an economy, the trend line has changed. And they're now going in in general, down year after year. And lurking in the back of all these material savings, I see tech progress coupled with capitalism, which is a desire, not only is it a desire to increase profits, and a great, very straightforward one-to-one way to increase a profit is to cut a cost. Right. And materials cost money. Okay. So let me see if I can channel some of the concerns of people who will hear what you just

said as yet more techno happy talk, and they don't want to get on the ride toward utopia that you seem to be beckoning them towards. So even in what you just said, there are echoes of problems that people are now worried about. So I doubt anyone is especially sentimental about the job of walking the nation's train tracks looking for boxcars, but you did just cite one job that has been irrevocably ceded

to the power of automation and computation, right? So this is a trend that many people, I think, are rightly worried about, that there's no guarantee that the jobs we automate away will be replaced by new ones that people will prefer or that they can be readily trained for or retrained for. So there's still a dynamic that is something like a, at least in certain sectors, it's disconcertingly like a winner-take-all phenomenon where it's just you're seeing fantastic accretions of wealth and wages either not growing or declining for the better part of humanity, or at least the better part of the middle class and lower middle class in the U.S., and who knows what's happening in other countries. So there's that concern that this invisible hand that is working to our benefit in

many ways with capitalism, people are not becoming saints. They're not operating by, they haven't had new ethical modules installed. They're just trying to make a buck and save a buck. And yet the breakthroughs in technology are allowing them to do this in a way that is actually better for everyone. But there's still this fact that there's the haves and have-nots in this system. And then there are the negative externalities that the market just can't correct for. And these are things you discuss in your book, like pollution. How do we acknowledge the problems yet to be solved, and how do we solve them? Yeah. And I do try to spend a decent chunk of the book,

not just cheerleading for capitalism and tech progress. I think it's important to do that because they're getting a bad rap in some ways. But there's a difference between being an optimist and being a utopian or a Pollyanna. And I'm trying very hard not to be a utopian or a Pollyanna. And you just rattled off a number of really important cautions and really important challenges that we are confronting today and that I think are going to get more pointed as we go forward. One of the most good news, bad news graphs that I put in the book is a reproduction of the famous elephant graph that Christopher Lasker and Branko Milanovic wrote about in a World Bank report that

came out in 2012. And it kind of went unnoticed at first. And then people started looking and they're like, wait a minute, this is a big deal. And all kinds of controversy has emerged about how you calculate it, how you draw it correctly. And so there have been revisions to it. But let me try to visually describe the elephant graph. And the version that I rely on the most looks like the head of an elephant with an upraised trunk. And what I mean by that is, you know, this thing's got a back, it's got kind of a hump that looks like the forehead of an elephant, and then it drops down super sharply, and then it rises super sharply toward the end. And that's, for me, that's where the head drops off and the upraised trunk starts. And what that is a graph of is essentially if you took all the

people in the world in 1988 and you lined them up from lowest income to highest income, and then you looked at how much their real incomes changed over the next 20 years, over the next generation. And then you plotted that increase or decrease on a graph. The elephant is what you would wind up with. The elephant graph is what you would get. And what that shows is that for almost all of humanity, almost all of humanity is either that flat back of the elephant, which is right about at 50-ish percent real growth in income. either that flat back of the elephant, which is right about at 50-ish percent real growth in income. Then there's kind of the elephant's head where you're doing even better. The increase is even bigger. The big divot and then the upraised trunk,

the end of the trunk, are the wealthiest people in the world in 1988, who, to the surprise of nobody, were doing much better in 2008. And the key part of the graph is obviously that divot, the divot between the head of the elephant and the upraised trunk of the elephant. And that divot represents essentially the lower middle class to middle class in the rich world. And that is a really important group to focus on for two main reasons. Number one, they are the low point on that graph. And in every version of the graph that I've seen, that group is right there at the bottom. And we can debate exactly how good or bad their increase in income was, but they are the globally least big gainers in income over that generation. And by some measures,

they didn't gain very much at all. So when we hear about wage stagnation, that's really the group that we're talking about, is that middle class in the wealthy world, who when they look anywhere else on that graph, they can look down and they see everyone from peasant farmers in India to urbanized Chinese assembly line workers, they're all doing a lot better, a lot better than they were 20 years ago. If they look up at the upraised trunk of the elephant, those are Wall Street people, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the global elite. They're doing much better as well. And then that person in the middle class in the rich world says, wait a minute, I'm lagging way behind this global tide that's lifting other boats here. And they're saying that accurately. The other important thing about the middle class in the

rich world, they are a very, very important demographic group, not just because there are so many of them. And Sam, not just because you and I happen to come from that demographic group, but they are really important for electing the leaders of the rich world. And the leaders of the rich world have a huge influence on the course of things all across the globe. And so that graph really helps me understand the rise in populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism around lots of rich world countries, okay, you've got that demographic group that is making an accurate assessment about how they've been doing vis-a-vis a lot of other people around the world, and there's some real discontent there going on.

And as much as I'm sitting here cheerleading for global markets and for tech progress, those things are part of the reason why that middle class has not seen incomes go up as much. It turns out that the middle class in the rich world has been doing routine work. That's the backbone of the middle class. That's an assembly line worker or payroll clerk or somebody like that. Those jobs are vanishing quite quickly to both globalization and automation, and those old-fashioned jobs are vanishing quite quickly to both globalization and automation. And those old-fashioned jobs are not coming back. So one of the challenges that, like you know, Eric and I have written extensively about,

it was a big subject in our book, The Second Machine Age, and I bring it up again here, is that there are people and there are communities getting left behind as tech progress and capitalism race ahead. And figuring out what to do about that is really urgent homework. And it's one of the toughest challenges ahead of us because the toolkit for dealing with communities and people who are getting left behind, it's not a very full toolkit. And the track record of trying to help communities that have fallen on hard times, the track record is not super impressive. So we've got some real homework ahead of us there. Right, right. And there's just the psychological fact that a person or group's sense of whether they're doing well or badly is going to be, as you say, comparative. Even if all boats were rising with the same tide, if some are rising much, much faster, you would still have many unhappy people in whatever class is lagging. And to add on to that, if people start to believe that the bargain that they signed up for

is not the bargain that they're getting, again, the perceptions can turn negative really, really quickly. And I put in the book this wonderful research from different sociologists that came out way before the 2016 election, way before the Trump phenomenon how they feel like their bargains are not getting honored and that everybody else is kind of skipping ahead of them in line. People were reporting on this in 2007, 2008. I think we didn't listen carefully enough. So I want to talk about the other two horsemen of the optimist, public awareness and responsive government. But before we get there, and I think we should say something about climate change, which is the big negative externality that many of us can't seem to admit even exists. So we have a problem there that's intellectual and political and seems especially detractive.

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