The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen Why society’s expectation of economic growth is no longer realistic Economic growth--and the hope of better things to come—is the religion of the modern world. Yet its prospects have become bleak, with crashes following booms in an endless cycle. In the United States, eighty percent of the population has seen no increase in purchasing power over the last thirty years and the situation is not much better elsewhere. The Infinite Desire for Growth spotlights the obsession with wanting more, and the global tensions that have arisen as a result. Amid finite resources, increasing populations, environmental degradation, and political unrest, the quest for new social and individual goals has never been so critical. Leading economist Daniel Cohen provides a whirlwind tour of the history of economic growth, from the early days of civilization to modern times, underscoring what is so unsettling today. The new digital economy is establishing a "zero-cost" production model, inexpensive software is taking over basic tasks, and years of exploiting the natural world have begun to backfire with deadly consequences. Working hard no longer guarantees social inclusion or income. Drawing on economics, anthropology, and psychology, and thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Keynes and Easterlin, Cohen examines how a future less dependent on material gain might be considered and, how, in a culture of competition, individual desires might be better attuned to the greater needs of society. At a time when wanting what we haven't got has become an obsession, The Infinite Desire for Growth explores the ways we might reinvent, for the twenty-first century, the old ideal of social progress.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in we've got an excellent author today of course we always have excellent authors all the best people,

the smartest minds, and the best books. But what you should do is refer the show to your friends, your neighbors, relatives. You can tell them to go to thecvpn.com, Chris Voss Podcast Network. You can see all nine podcasts there. So you can subscribe to the podcast you want. Of course, our flagship is The Chris Voss Show. You can see the video version of this

conversation at youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss and hit that bell notification so you can get all the notifications there that you want. We've had so many great authors on the Chris Voss Show. We've actually put them onto an Amazon shop, so you can easily go there and peruse all the great authors and be like, yeah, I like that one. I like that one, and order their books. You can easily go there and peruse all the great authors and be like, yeah, I like that one, I like that one, and order their books. You can go to Amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. Today, we have the brilliant author, Daniel Cohen, and he's written this book called The Infinite Desire for Growth. And this thing is pretty important. He is the director of the economics department at Ecole Normale

Supérieure in Paris. That's my best French I can do there. And a founding member of the Paris School of Economics. He's a former advisor to the World Bank. Cohen was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2001. His many books include Globalization and Its Enemies and The Prosperity of Vice. Welcome to the show. How are you, Daniel? I'm very well, thank you. Thank you, Chris, for having me, Jason.

Awesome sauce. It's good to talk to someone outside of America for a change. We've had a lot of American authors, and it's good to talk to someone in France because our country is kind of a little weird right now. Give us a rundown on your book, why you decided to write it, and kind of a brief overview, if you would,

of what the book is about. Well, thank you for this opportunity. Well, as the title says, this is a book about this desire that we have to grow, to get richer all the time. And of course, this question is all the more important that we know that we have a climate change, that perhaps we need to change course with respect to perpetual growth. So I was really interested in trying to understand where is this eagerness to grow coming from,

if only because we need to understand why is it that we are so obsessive about growing all the time. There is a parallel in the history of humanity, and the book starts with that, between two periods of time, which are usually opposed, and I'm trying to explain that they are more similar than it seems. For a very long time, people were working in the fields, they were peasants or agriculture working in agriculture and and there was a sort of curse on humanity which was that people or wherever they would till the ground would always be you know in search for more food if if only for a simple reason which is that population growth was always extending the need to get further.

We had something which was called a Malthusian trap, by which if you had some opportunity to get fed better because you discover new lands, immediately a process would be set in motion with more children coming, and in the end you would starve as much at the end as you would starve at the beginning. So the history of humanity since the beginning of, let's say, the agricultural age 10,000 years ago, has been a perpetual march towards famine.

You would never get enough food. And the reason which was not understood is because when things were getting better, less children would die, you would have more children. And in the end, it would always be overpopulation. We've moved away from this world in the 18th, 19th century, and we entered into a world where economic growth really started. But something of the same kind started, which is called in the economic literature the easterly paradox which is the more you had and the more you want something of the same ilk as the old world which is that you're never happy and there is a famous thing in the economic literature

which is you can be as rich as you want the of frustration, the desire to be richer is never saturated. In fact, it is exactly the same as before. So the same way the old societies would not understand this Malthusian trap, the same way our modern societies fail to understand why is it that being richer does not seem to saturate our eagerness to get richer so i think the book is about trying to put this question on the table offer some suggestions if only because we need to understand what is driving our you know desire for growth because again the climate change makes it important that we understand what it is that we always want to get richer in the face of fine a finite world as simple as that awesome so does the book basically deal with uh food famine and uh

you know this desire for growth population or does it encompass all different things like here in america we have what I would call, and a lot of books call, rampant, out-of-control consumerism and capitalism, where everything is so for profit. It's just we don't care who dies, who gets left behind. If you're familiar with America's broken health care system, it's all about money. Like, oh, you're going to die.

You've got health problems in countries like yours and others in Europe. You know, you guys have a different attitude towards people that are sick and feel free to care for them. But here in America, it's like, unless you've got money, screw you. No, exactly. Before, it was the only thing that you care is food. Today, the only thing that you care is money. So the book is really about the never saturates the need to a good life. And, of course, drawing on the big literature that the economists have developed,

I tried to set up a few explanations as to why we always want more. There's one explanation which is simply, I would say, the human species, which is that we are brainwired in order to be always alerted to changes. That is the reason why we survive among, you know, competing species,

is because we have a way of adapting ourselves to our environment, which is extraordinary. If you take, you know, an elephant from the way you know from from africa and you bring it to france in our eyes and we've moved we've traveled and always adapted ourselves so we have an ability to adapt ourselves which makes that if you become richer this become very rapidly you know a starting point you forget where you from. So this ability of adaptation means that we are very sensitive to changes, which is why this is one of the topics of the book. It is not wealth in itself that matters to make us happy, but it is the increase in wealth, the change in wealth,

in other words, economic growth. So it's not wealth that we want. It's not money that we want. It is, in effect, more money, more wealth. We want economic growth. And when growth disappears, when growth goes down, we become very unhappy. And this is what happened for a lot of people in the U.S. over the past 30 years. The ability to get richer has been lost, and this creates a lot of despair now the other reason is that humanity is is always is made in such a way that we never exist by ourselves we are always comparing ourselves to other people we live among other people we drive our desire from what other people desire. You know, the old philosopher, Hegel in Germany, would say what we really want is a desire of the desire of the other people. We want to be desired by other people.

And that's what's driving a lot of comparison. So the fact that you are rich doesn't mean anything. What you want is to be richer, richer than your neighbor. So if your neighbor starts being rich and you are beyond, you are very unhappy, even though you may increase yourself. So these two facets, I think, explain why the modern world appease the social tension by the promise given to everyone that they will get richer. If this promise is broken, as it is in the Western world for many people, then the fabric of society breaks down. And there is an interpretation along the line of the rise of populism

as the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy with the political system because they feel betrayed by the fact that this promise has been broken. And so that creates, you know, I mean, we saw that in the rise of Germany and different places with fascism and authoritarianism. The more poor people are, the more broken things there are, the more they turn to extreme politicians, and then you know down the rabbit hole we go of hell um so it it's uh uh i know that i know that there was uh

it's interesting you talk about the fear of missing out like in in america i don't know if you have a saying like this in france but america we have a saying called keeping up with the Joneses. Exactly that. Okay. So, yeah. And, uh, I, I remember there was a time where I was, when I got my first house and I was filling it with crap and, you know, our business was successful, we had lots of money. Uh, and, but I was, you know, I was filling it, you know, I was like, I gotta put something over there and something over here. And I started getting really insecure if I didn't go to the mall every weekend to buy something. Like I would have this weird feeling like I'd be like, hey, I want to stay home this weekend and just chill.

And there would be this insecurity in me that would be like, you got to go buy some stuff. And I almost sought help over it because I'm like like why the hell is this such an issue for me um did you ever see the movie fight club with brad pitt i don't see what has been the translation in france no i okay uh there was a movie uh a cinema called fight club and it it starred Brad Pitt and Ed Norton. And one of the lines from the movie is, and let me see if I can remember correctly, the line from the movie is, we buy stuff to impress people who don't give a shit. Like, you know, like I buy a really nice BMW car to impress everyone, and they don't really care because they're like, well, screw you.

That's your car. I don't care. And so that's what you're talking about in the book is this fear of missing out, this fear of whatever that drives this consumerism where, you know, we strip the rainforest, we strip resources and materials, and then we wonder why our fish are polluted, there's high mercury, you know, our skies are polluted, and everything else, right? Exactly. It's exactly the perfect summary of what's going on.

And, you know, for a long time, it didn't really matter. After all, that was a what's going on and you know for a long time it didn't really matter after all that was a way of going on collectively and even though we fail to understand exactly what you said about this movie which is that we're doing things which are useless to a large extent you know if I'm happy you know driving a car because

I like that and you know I would be alone in the desert and I would still want the car because that's what I like. Speed, you know, go for it, of course. But if this is simply because we try to get the attention of the other guy without seeing that in reality we are antagonizing the other guy because he feels like it's a war declaration. And if we simply we could talk to the guy and say, you know, if I have a car, what do you do? He'd say, I'll buy a bigger car. So, and if you could simply talk and say,

why don't we agree not to buy this car? And, you know, you would appease. This is really, you're keeping up with the Jones, you know, phenomena. Maybe we would understand things which would not derail the envy of doing more things to go in certain direction. But perhaps there would be a lot of useless stuff that we do

that would give us time for doing more interesting things. But I started with this Malthusian trap of world population. I think people, at least this is one interpretation that many people would say, fail to understand that by having children, other people also have children, and that in the end, the earth would always be overcrowded. And if simply you could say, why don't we move from 10 children,

which was the norm at the time, to two or three, and it is today, people would have seen that they can live better. So it's terrible to say that less children may mean you know a happier life which is eventually what we did we have much fewer children but in those days someone coming and say why don't we try the less children game that would have changed a lot of things in those days so i think we are there today with material wealth you know i i i don't know how familiar you are with the state of Utah in America.

I don't know if you're in France, so you're enjoying a wonderful country and wonderful baguettes and food, I should add. But they have a church cult here called the Mormons, and they believe in the biggest families you can have. They across America, they have one to two more children per family than most people in America. So they, these guys are breeding it in.

One thing I've always joked with my friends about, cause I didn't have children. I kind of wanted to skip the whole thing. I got a vasectomy at 22. And so I was like, when I decide to have children, I'll have children. I'm not going to have someone else decide it for me. And so I just never had children. I reached an age where everybody I dated had been divorced and had children.

And I'm like, okay, well, I already have children. I can be stepped on. But what was funny to me was I'll see these friends on social media, and they have like, you know, sometimes three, four, five kids. And I don't mean to shame. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I think, you know, part of it, you know, they need to contemplate what you discussed in your book.

But I don't sit around and go, you have three kids or bad. But what's funny is you'll see them talking about how we need to do more recycling and we need to do more, uh, you know, we need to get rid of the straws at the coffee shop because the straws are getting in the thing. We need to use less plastic. And by the way, I'm having my fourth kid. And you're like, hmm. And so I actually looked up at what each child gives America in contributions to our landfill and the cubic tonnage that if you have a child, you increase the amount of landfill space by a certain cubic tonnage, basically. I figured out the economy of it all.

And so what I figured out is that basically if you have – there's two people that mate and have a child. So that is a 50% increase to those two people's quotient footprint of cubic tonnage of pollution they put into the environment. If you have two kids, now those two people have created 100% of their output and doubled it. And then those two kids will have at least probably two more kids and two more kids. And you start doing the thing and pretty much you're breeding your own landfill at that point. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that,

but if you're running around telling me that maybe I should use less straws and maybe not have paper plates, but you're having another kid, maybe I'm not the problem. Am I wrong there? You told me because you said it. No, no, no. You put it very, very nicely. No, I have a kid.

We have two kids. In fact, my wife had another one. So it's a great pleasure to talk about it. But I'm not against the kid. But I'm against overpopulation, definitely. I mean, I'm not against kids either. But don't run around and tell me what I should be doing. Don't give me a picture of you.

No, I agree. You know the famous thing. If you don't have a kid, you live like a dog. If you have kids, you live like a dog. If you don't have kids, you die like a dog. That's probably where I'm going, bud. I've got two dogs. I'm covered in air.

Yeah, I'm going to probably die like a dog, but I'll still be happy. I don't want to be in the rank of, but over-preparation is a problem. I'm sorry. It's just that one of those things, like if you run around preaching to me about how

don't have sex with whores like, you know, reverends do and preachers do in America, and then we catch them having sex with whores, you're reverends do and preachers do in america and then we catch them having sex with whores you're like wait you're not on message so it's just it's just kind of that hypocrisy if you will yeah i see no i agree it's uh uh um yeah no there's a balance there there's a balance there somewhere there's a balance there somewhere. There's a balance. The thing about the world today is that the poor countries, the poor continents, are those where this Malthusian trap lasted longer because they failed to move out of this Malthusian trap, as I call it,

that is this trap of an ever-growing population, even when you're very poor. And so all these groups of countries which are very poor are also the most populated now the great promise of the last 20 30 years is that these very poor countries are getting richer not just china asia in general there's some spots in africa hopefully so these very poor countries are getting richer and they are the most populated because they are the one who stay the longest with this Malthusian loop somehow so this is why for the next 50 years we have a problem collectively which is that we want these people of course these populations these continents to get richer to poverty. But we certainly do not want them

to become like Americans. We don't want them to have the same way of life as the American, because if there were to do that, then the planet would simply explode. So it's very urgent for us, Western countries, the US, France, and Europe in general, to find an alternative way to be happy without having to spend all this wealth in things that pollute. Because we have all these group of countries who are looking at us, and it's just the same thing as keeping up with the drones. We are the drones, and these poor countries want to keep up with us. So there is a massive problem here, which makes it very important and urgent to find an alternative way in the rich world, if only because if there is this competition with the poorest countries, at least we go in the proper line.

What about the problem of, like, religion? Because I know one of the problems that we had was Catholics, and I'm not bashing Catholics, but, you know, they did run around the world and tell, you know, tell countries, especially developing countries, you know, don't use birth control, you know, having as many kids for God is important. And unfortunately, like you mentioned, that does contribute to the wealth and stuff. You know, I've seen that here as i mentioned in utah where uh as a realtor i would go into homes that had five to ten children in them and the quality of

life there was was not good uh i used to want to put up a billboard that said uh maybe less quantity of kids and more quality of kids yeah and and And I can tell you from what I saw and what I went, I grew up with a family of four kids. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I would have liked to have had less siblings. I love my siblings, but, you know, I would have liked to have just been me, but that's just me. Are they listening to your show your brother but but you see about the church

this is very important because in effect it is in the bible somehow you should multiply and have children so it's it comes from a higher authority but but the thing is that we we now have a lot of you know knowledge on what what is happening in countries where this demographic transition, as it is called, happens. And there is, in effect, in Latin America, for instance, a sort of fight between the religious way of looking at things and the more mundane things. We have a lot of tests now which shows what it is that is driving, and you will like that, what it is that is driving children, women and men to have less children. And it's very interesting. So you have a lot of tests as to whether the women work, when women work, of course, they have less time to have children. Is that a factor? Yes, it is a factor. it is a factor is education

a factor yes it is education obviously if only because you can aspire to working in the marketplace and earn more so there's a lot of thing here but the driving force as i see is is not that the driving force is television television when television comes, and you can see before and after, there's an image coming from TV, which is the American way of life, which persuades these couples and these women in particular, that women can do other things than having children, that they can drive cars, that they can work. And so this projection of, which is ironically new of what we just said about Utah, but this projection of women in L.A. or New York, you know, being self-sufficient, autonomous, and basically doing other things than simply taking care of the children.

It has been shown econometrically with many ways that this is the way it works. For instance, Brazil, if you compare Brazil and Mexico, Brazil was the first one with the telenovelas, was the first one with a lot of TV expansion. And you could see in Brazil, everywhere TV would set in,

in the 50s or in the 60s, you would see the thing happening. In Mexico, they tried a more direct way, which is to teach the many ways by which you could not have children, like contraception or whatever. And it worked much less well. In fact, the winner of the race was television.

So that means that it is also, it's not just an economic phenomenon, it's a cultural phenomenon. It's for women, even when they live in the countryside, when they don't work, where you have all the reason to believe that they will keep making children, the sheer fact that those images speak to them as an alternative change entirely. And so Brazil, which is a country where population has been multiplied

by a huge factor, is very suddenly in two or three decades, stopped making children. And it's interesting to see that you spoke about religion. This happens everywhere independently of religion. For instance, in Iran, which is a Muslim world, in Indonesia, which is a Muslim country, it went very fast as well, exactly subject to the same thing. So this is, for me, a message of hope. It means that, you know, mentality can evolve and things which, you know, happened for 10,000 years can change rapidly. So this is what I'm hoping for the relationship that we have with money and material growth.

So is it advertising and our media that is teaching people or it's giving them kind of a peer pressure of here's the Joneses, you need to keep up with them? It gives them that image of, in America, we'll call it the nuclear family, where it's the perfect family that takes trips every two weeks on vacation. They have the picket fence and the beautiful house in the suburbs. And a lot of our advertising portrays this image to people of this perfect nuclear life where everything is perfect. Is that what the driver is then?

That is one driver. But if you go beyond that and you see in the U.S. itself, you know, what has been going on, there's a nuclear family, there's a nice suburban family where everybody, you know, would meet, stay together, would go to church perhaps on Sundays. This is something that also has collapsed with the rise of divorce, where every other couple in fact divorced.

And this started in the 60s. And again, another study by a great sociological philosopher, professor of sociology at Harvard, Robert Putnam, demonstrated, I think very clearly, that the culprit is also television. That is, in the 60s, he claimed with the advent of television, the American family would choose to have a lot of community relationships. He wrote a book called Bowling Alone, which is that before you would go for bowling,

but with friends, you would take appointments, there would be club, you would cherish this community. Now you go on Saturday night bowling alone because it's been the collapse of this community. And it's very mechanical explanation is with television, you don't have to go out. Before you had to go out or you would get bored, you would have to organize a bridge club, a chess club.

You would have to go to church to meet with people to do something with television in the 60s 50s but really it's a 60s phenomena you don't have to go out you open up your television and you know you have a lot of things to do and this is the end the beginning of the end of the way the american society which was very tightly knit before, started to see a collapse of its comminuteral sense. So that's something also which shows that in philosophy, you say that television is a pharmacon. It's a solution, it cures you,

but it's also a disease, it's also a poison. And it saves you by killing you somehow. And that's something which is all the more interesting, that we are moving into a different world today, which is post-television, which is a world of the social network and the Internet, and that's creating new things that we have to understand as well. The new what we call in America, we call it FOMO, which stands for fear of missing out.

And so you'll see people that are on vacation. And one of the problems with social media that we have is it's almost more insidious than television and advertising because you'll see people, they'll be like, they're on vacation, they're in another country, or they're, you know, and you're like, what am I doing wrong? Somehow they're doing, but I didn't know they were doing good. You know, and for, you know, and you're like, what am I doing wrong? Somehow they're doing, but I didn't know they were doing good.

You know, and for all you know, they're just visiting their family and their parents paid for them to fly over and see them. You know, we, there's somebody who wrote that 10,000 years from now when they extract our society and this era of the human race in archaeology, that they'll come across all of our pictures. And, like, everyone's smiling and happy in all of our pictures, right? You know, every picture we have on social media is like, I'm happy. Things are great. And you'll be like, wow, this is a really weird society. They're really happy.

Turns out we were really unhappy, and maybe that's why we're smiling more but yeah i i agree with you i and we we've talked about that a lot across the last 10 years of social media the fear of missing out and you see people having a good time you get you know your girlfriend or wife comes to you or probably boyfriend and says hey you know I saw Joni and Joni's out boating. We need to be boating. And you're like, wait, why? Um, cause you know, we got to keep up with the Joneses. And, uh, and so, uh, I think that's there. And like, we've seen, uh, Los Angeles, if you're familiar with Los Angeles,

Los Angeles is a town where everything is about show and presence. Like I remember reading years ago, there were people that would own a broken down Ferrari that would be parked somewhere. And they would take people to it and show them and be like, here's my Ferrari. Or like one of the things they would do is they would rent a Ferrari for the day they had some sort of meeting. And they would rent a suit, you know, and they'd show up looking like a million bucks in their Ferrari and they've just rented it for the day. But you know, it's all about projecting that image and everything else.

I was saying this, that is the thing about the social media which is that they're taking us you know one step further beyond in the wrong direction that's exact for all the reasons that you described that is keeping up with the truth has been exploding by the fact that you always want to look good you create an extraordinary pressure on the others to look as good and beautiful as you are which is is why in fact the media, you have two things really. You have Facebook where you really are Instagram, where you really have to look good.

And you have Twitter where you can be dirty. And you have somehow, you know, the world in which you have to look super beautiful and somehow in the anonymous content, you're really very dirty. So there is something, you know, in the theory of psychoanalysts of Freud, you have the ego, the super ego, which is, you know, the way you should look, and the id, which is, you know,

the infamous desire that you hide, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde somehow. And you see in the modern world, you have both of them. You have the super ego, which a facebook the instagram where you get exhausted by trying to look as beautiful as you can but you are also the fake news you have the hidden content when you people do not know that you are the one behind and this is really dirty there is something which i think i quote in the book which i remember i quote in the book which is an analysis of a Japanese social network

in which you are completely anonymous so you enter with a fake name and you have a relationship with others and of course I don't speak Japanese but the study that I read said that you would not recognize Japan in this world because it is so violent so dirty so aggressive to people,

like the opposite of what we are describing. You're dirty, you're not good, you're awful. And we see that this social network are really creating, you know, two opposite worlds and we move from one to the other. And this is, we're losing the sense of the intermediate step which is you know the ego who am i and i'm not i'm nothing more than on on the one hand the super ego and and the other hand this vicious commentator and and that's you know is another you know a step towards the fragility of ourselves and of our modern

society. So I'm not at all against progress. I don't want your viewers to believe that. I believe in technological progress. I like the internet. I like being able to speak with you x thousand miles away from my home. So I like that.

But I see that it's creating a lot of problems and that we have to to control that we have to be able simply to talk about it and what you speak to um one of the things that we've seen in social media is the anxiety from that fomo like they're constantly checking their phones like every five minutes what's going on what's going on am i keeping up am i with the thing and and what's you know what's janie doing what's bob doing and what's mark doing and and uh we see it a lot in social media um when i when i started out in social media i was i was early on to it and i understood business and marketing so

i became one of these social media kind of leaders quote unquote i was in the forbes top 50 and different things and some people would write me and they'd, and there would be this bit of jealousy and like, well, how did I get to be like you? And I'm like, well, I worked really hard, and I did this. And, you know, there was a lot of work that went into it. And people would be like, well, I just want to be like you. And we see that all the time now, especially in America, where people won't put in the work.

They just want it. You know, people will see you drive a nice car or have some sort of level of success they go i want that how do i get that and i'm like well uh work for 80 hours a week and uh you know slave and save and get it get it done and then maybe after a year or two you might get it they're like no i want it now and so we see this consumerism like you've talked about, but also this demand for getting it now. And you're just like, it seems to be, there's this loss of earning things or developing things.

I don't know if you, I don't know if you speak to that in your book. Well, of course, you know, it's, it's, it's very much in the center of what I said to describe the world in which we

are, because all this tension, all this race, which was positive to the extent that it created a lot of invention and we live in a world which is completely different from the world of 50 years ago of 100 and not to mention 200 years ago so a lot of thing has been going on and there is progress in that again it's ridiculous to deny it the problem today is that we live in the midst of something that the economy is called another paradox. I had the Easterlin paradox, which is why is it that you can get happier by getting richer. And there is another one which is called the solo paradox,

and the solo by the name of a professor at MIT who got the Nobel Prize for his work on economic growth. And the solo paradox is that you see a lot of stuff, a lot of new techniques, and the purchasing power of people is not rising, and certainly not for the middle class, the rich first, but then the middle class. And that's a paradox. Why is it electricity a century ago brought a lot of wealth and a lot of purchasing power? People started to do many more things and get paid consequently. And here you have, you know, no wealth coming out for the middle class and the lower class, in part because there's been a huge increase in inequality that is the top one person made

it, but the other 90% didn't make it. But it goes beyond that. There's something which is disappointing with technological progress as of today. And so there are many explanations as to why this is happening, but one of them is exactly what we are describing, which is that all these techniques, which allows us

to enjoy communication and what have you, in practice, in the workplace, simply build on to putting more competitive pressure on the people. That is, all these techniques, in fact, is a reduction in the cost of communication, and it brought a lot of competition across people.

In the old world of the 50s and 60s, you would work in a factory, you would produce a car. 90% of the car would be produced by that factory with little import, little outsourcing, little, you know, things coming from outside. And it would be like a big family. That is, you know, the CEO would be paid in a way which is aligned on the performances of the firm,

just like the blue collar worker. In the new world where we are, the CEOs, the engineers, they live in their own world with very little employees. The Facebook, the Google do not hire many people. In fact, per amount of dollar produced,

they have very few employees. And the blue collar leave they work for companies which are very often the subcontractor of the subcontractor of a subcontractor to another firm so that means when you are a subcontractor it means that if you don't get the right price i'll move to another one which is not the way things were thought of before. So there's an immense amount of competitive pressure. And this pressure that you were describing on I want to look as good to keep up with the Jones, in fact, has been also a way of producing good. You need to be as competitive as your neighbor.

Otherwise, I will subcontract my task to the other guy. So one of the reasons why the middle class didn't make it is because a lot of competitive pressure was put on the middle class, resulting into a huge increase of inequalities. And so that's the other, you know, facet of the world in which we are. We have this perpetual thirst for growth, and it's not delivered anymore. And instead, the price is always more expensive in terms of effort to get one extra dollar so there's something completely broken not just in the u.s in the western world at large which we need to fix yeah we've seen a lot of that

in america i watched that that's one of the reasons i didn't have kids is because i watched uh the the dissolving of the middle class that started in the 80s and a lot of it started in the ivan bielski era of greed is good um and that's when wall street really started ruling main street america and business in america and teaching people that hey if you get rid of 40,000 employees, your stock price goes up. And, hey, you can put all these different rules as a board of directors or management team that if you get bought out, you can leave with these golden parachutes. And that's where we saw the equation of like what you talked about prior to the 80s where the percentage of what the CEO was paid

was a healthy percentage compared to his frontline workers. Now there's just this vast chasm of, like, difference between what employees are paid. And, I mean, you'll see companies that will run, like recently we saw a few large companies that were running the ground by their management. They filed bankruptcy. They laid off tens of thousands of employees.

And somehow the bankruptcy court, they go to the bankruptcy court and go, hey, we need like $5 million for each of us as bonus pay. And you're like, seriously? You ran this thing in the ground. There shouldn't be any reward for you, actually. And so we've seen a lot of this go on. And like you mentioned, this contracting thing, I mean, the American workers have been more and more thrown to the wolves. What about debt?

Because one of the things that people are doing with the economy that we're describing here is they take on more debt to keep up with the Joneses. And so thereby, they're even more poor and enslaved to a system of Wall Street that keeps you buying stuff to impress people that don't care about you. Yeah, so the subprime crisis was really engineered exactly by this phenomenon, which is that people, in order to keep up with the Jones, had to borrow more and more. In fact, it's an interesting phenomena that the economists also noticed, which is that the huge gap in equalities of income

is not quite translated into inequalities of consumption because people lived on debt. You don't make as much as you could, but you borrow so as to keep up on consumption. So this discrepancy between inequalities of income debt. You don't make as much as you could, but you borrow, so as to keep up on consumption. So this discrepancy between inequalities of income and inequalities of consumption is a sign of the role played by debt. And of course, all this collapsed with the subprime crisis and the rise of populism, the fact that people were really against the system, wanted to break it down. You had Trump in the US.

You had the Brexit. You have the Italian government for some time. The Salvini, which were really, you know, presented themselves as anti-system, anti-the political party, against the media, against science somehow. All these people resulted from this hatred that resulted from everything that we said and of the financial crisis. It was something that people really protested against, which was the

banking system, the amount of money that was put to save the bank, all this creating a huge protest in Europe as much as in the US. Of course, the funny thing is today we are living into new and very dangerous times, but for something completely different, which is this COVID disease. And it's very interesting because what this COVID disease, very surprisingly, is amplifying the trend that we discussed with this media thing. That is, almost by accident, but not quite,

but almost by accident, what the COVID is doing is leading us to use even more of those media, to use this web, to use these Zoom meetings, to use Amazon to deliver the goods. And in fact, this new society which is emerging, this digital society, somehow may be accelerated by this COVID. And one of the reasons why I see it is the following, is that everything has been

done over the past 20 and 30 years to reduce the cost of functioning. and one of the costs which has been reduced is the cost it takes to meet in person you you know you you meet you go to see a theater you go there you use space and you meet with other people this is costly from the point of view of of economics and if you could not go there as we do i don't take a plane to meet with you or we just do that over this is this zoom meeting if instead of going to a shop you know you could dispense the shop from existing and you have the amazon phenomena which they directly deliver the thing.

If instead of going to see a doctor, you could be cured at a distance from the doctor, all this would result into tremendous cost saving. And all this society over the past 20 or 30 years has been designed to reduce cost of interacting face to face. and this disease is accelerating that that is with this disease a lot of way of doing thing at a distance which for certain example is good again you're sick it's not very you know serious you may not have to go and see the doctor because you can see you know what with whatever You may not have to go and see the doctor because he can see, you know, whatever you will give on the laptop

that, you know, take an aspirin and come back in two days if we'll be done. But the end result will be that there will be less and less face-to-face relationship. And so the TV thing, which we described, will be amplified. That is, our relationship to the other people will be more and more on the screen.

With our doctor tomorrow, with our educators, and the day after with the people who send us this or that. So we shall be more and more trapped into a world where the fiction of ourselves will take over whom we really are. Now, the last chapter in your book, chapter 17, talks about social endogamy. Does that give us a roadmap on how to get out of this or ways to resolve this? So social endogamy is exactly the disease of the modern world and of these network things. Because basically, social endogamy means you only meet people who think like you.

Going in a website where people will disagree. Now, there is something again that the economists call the confirmation bias. I want to meet with people who think like me. I'm tired of disagreeing with people so so i will go with sites who think like me and we'll be in sort of a bubble and and we we we you know we are completely severing the link with the rest of the world because we think that if people believe that september 11 was you know a fake news then we meet together and you will find a million people, which is peanuts compared

to the 7 billion people. But you will find a million people thinking that September 11 was a fake event created by the Mossad or the CIA. I don't care. And they will be happy together and bringing things

that nobody will contradict because they are among themselves. And so this world in which you sort of stay together, but in a way which is not healthy because you stay together, you think the same, but there's a lot of tension here because you lose track with the rest of the world. This is unfortunately the acceleration of the thing

that the social media are doing and the covid i'm sure you know will result in people you know being among themselves on the net even more than before if you don't have to go to the workplace because you can work at a distance it means that you may meet nobody you know you may meet nobody who thinks differently from you. You deal with your kids, your friends on the social network, and who will contradict you? So we live in bubbles, which will be explosive in the end. Because again, we need to interact with other people.

We need to contradict our arguments, to be contradicted, and to contradict other people. This is democracy. This is the essence of the enlightenment. If we lose that, we lose a lot of things. And we see that with when people are miserable, when they're suffering, like you've talked about in the book, where they're suffering economically or they're stuck at home.

We've seen a complete rise during COVID of conspiracy theories, of nutball stuff. I mean, it's getting really out of control here in america if you're watching the tv um and and just this complete rise of conspiracy fields because people are just miserable and they're broke you know a lot of people lost their jobs so they're starting to subscribe to that they're starting to subscribe to more populism and supportive, you know, our crazy Trump dude. And the more, it's like the more broke and desolate they are, both internally and financially, the more they want to hug these leaders who promised that they'll save them when really

these leaders are behind their destruction, as we recently found out through Bob Wobord's thing. Great book and great discussion you've had here. Is there anything more we need to know about what's in your book? Well, I think we've covered more or less. Well, there is a whole chapter on climate change, because, again, I think we must take that very seriously. This is the problem of the 21st century. And all this discussion, in fact, is a way of addressing differently

the problem of climate change by thinking deeply about ourselves and the way we construct this society. But thank you so much for all the support you have in this discussion. Yeah, and it's a great book. You can take and get it. Daniel Cohen, The Infinite Desire for Growth, and it talks about great book you can take and get it uh daniel cohen the infinite desire for growth and it talks about all these different issues i think this is real important because like i said i went through a consumer uh kind of insecurity like there was some sort of emotional flaw in me

where i was like i gotta go buy something this weekend i know what this is about um and i've seen it i've seen the collapse of our thing. I've talked about it. This is one of the reasons I actually didn't have kids because I predicted that we were going to go into this storm that we are in. And I really didn't want to have kids in this thing. Anybody else is a better person than I am that has kids because, you know, have fun on that trooper scale. But I'm going to sit and watch, which is what I've been doing, and I've been seeing a lot of these things.

And so I think it's important for people to discuss the FOMO of the Internet, et cetera, et cetera. Give us your plugs once again, Daniel, or people will look you up on the interwebs. Sorry. Your website, websites, people you may want to go to for you. Well, I think you just type my name and you put it, the Paris School of Economics, and you get to it.

I don't have it in my – There you go. There you go. So order the book up. You can also find it on shop – or I'm sorry, amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. there's a listing of all the books of all the people who've been on the show we'll be adding it today uh and you can order the book up there you can of course search for uh daniel cohen the infinite desire for growth on

amazon you can see the video version of this on youtube.com forward slash chris voss hit that bell notification and uh refer your friends neighbors relatives to the cvpn.com. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.