The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Jon Erickson: "Illusions, Power and the Political Economy"

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

On this episode, Nate is joined by Sustainability Science and Policy Professor Jon Erickson. He and Nate dive into Jon's new book The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming our Future from the Fairytale of Economics, which covers the economic myths that have shaped our modern reality. How can we reshape the narrative and shift the paradigm towards different economic systems that promote human and ecological well-being over material consumption?  About Jon Erickson: Jon Erickson is the David Blittersdorf Professor of Sustainability Science & Policy at the University of Vermont. He has published widely on energy and climate change policy, land conservation, watershed planning, environmental public health, and the theory and practice of ecological economics.  He advised presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on economics and energy issues.

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. John Erickson is the David Blittersdorf professor of sustainability science and policy at the University of Vermont. John is published widely on energy and climate change, land conservation, watershed planning, public health, and the theory and practice of ecological economics. He advised presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on economic and energy policy and John also happens to be my PhD advisor. When I record these podcasts, I get an immediate gut feel on how good the episode was.

And this conversation with John was great. We talked about his new book, The Progress Illusion, reclaiming our future from the fairy tale of economics, where we plumbed the depths of the human predicament and outlined what a reality-based economic structure and future might look like. please welcome my friend, colleague, and PhD advisor, John Erickson. Hey, John. Nathan John Higgins, how are you? I am well. Good to see you. You too.

Although we're very old friends, I do feel some small psychological trepidation on seeing your face that I didn't turn in a paper or I didn't pass some... You had an assignment, though, an important one. To read your new book? Yeah. And you told me two days ago that you only had skimmed it. Yeah. So I've got a quiz. Well, I could probably, without reading it, answer a lot of the questions. But I am guilty of a Japanese word called Sundanku, which is those people who buy far more many books than they're able to read. So I'm in that camp. So we have a lot to cover. Let's just get this question. I've always wanted to ask you out of the way right out of the bat. How much of a pain in the ass was I as a PhD student? Oh, boy.

That could take up the whole podcast. All right, a real short answer then. You were the good kind of pain in the ass, not the kind that needs, what's it called, Preparation H. You were more like a constant kick in the ass. A kick in the ass to me to be a better teacher, a better scholar, a better person. So I was very thankful for your kicks in the ass. Well, that was, I was there in 2004. is when I started.

I was there until 2010. And that was kind of the heart of my curiosity about the world. Now I kind of understand. I mean, of course, I'm still learning. I don't understand everything. You came to us like after this epic journey, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I quit Wall Street because I was like,

what the hell this is happening during my lifetime? And then I went hiking for six months with all these books from Hermann Daly and neuroscientists and everything. But I think when I met you and you agreed to be my PhD advisor, other than Jay Hansen, who tragically died a few years ago in a scuba accident, you were the first human that I ever met that had integrated all of it. Energy, ecology, human behavior, you know, social hierarchy, the whole anthropological story of humans. Trying, trying to integrate. Trying. Of course, none of us have all of it.

And I discovered things every day that I knew nothing about before. I mean, one of my favorite science fiction authors is Ursula LeGwen. And I always use this quote from her to her own students. She always said, there are no right answers to wrong questions. And to me, you are always someone asking the right questions. And that's a damn good starting point. Well, thank you for that. So I've known you almost 20 years.

Let me just start with this then. How has your view of the world or the human, ecosystem or our economy and how everything fits together. And in turn, your work changed since I met you 18 years ago. It's been that long, huh? Yeah. You know, I don't know that my basic worldview has changed all that much. You know, this kind of belief system that I have of an embedded human in a society, an embedded society, in an ecosystem, you know, that these systems are all interdependent and that the kind of dangers of isolation is isolationism, especially in my field of economics, it's kind of what has caused most of our problems.

What is isolationism? You mean reductionism? I mean more from distancing the field of economics from other ways of thinking, other ways of knowing other cultural experiences, you know, being that kind of isolated discipline, often a very powerful building somewhere on a campus like ours. Yeah, I've elated from other worldviews. So I don't know that my basic worldview has changed all the much, but I think since we met,

I've become more expansionary, maybe, is the right word? When you're young, you don't think you have biases, right? And so I think trying to come to terms with my own biases, escape the constraints of my culture and my gender and my own dogma, not just coming to terms with the failings and illusions of economics, but really come into terms with the whole kind of colonial point of view that economics and many other social science disciplines tell. So I think I've been on that journey.

And I think I'm spending more time than ever on communicating ideas rather than kind of puzzling out the ideas themselves. Good. So you've learned or you've embraced more humility, and the long-term arc of humans and cultures that brought us to this moment? I think so. It's tough to kind of get out of your own way, right? It's tough to step out of your own comfort zone.

And I've prided myself in a career where I've stepped out of the comfort zone of my own training as an economist. But it's more challenging to step out of my comfort zone as a white male, you know, cisgender individual and Western society. And that's the harder journey. How much of that impetus that you just mentioned is self-realization and reflection and how much of it is because of the current trends in universities in North America are headed toward that direction and you're surrounded by people with that same kind of attitude? Yeah, probably both, probably a little of each. Like you, I read a lot and like being out of my comfort zone, like being on that kind of. of learning edge or the steep part of the learning curve. I love it, right?

In fact, I'm much more of a generalist than a specialist. I like kind of being in that danger zone of knowing a little bit about a lot of things. But yeah, boy, the students that we have nowadays have raised the ante right. They really are demanding much more from us, really questioning where that idea came from or that assumption was built on and really challenging us to embrace, thankfully, a kind of richer, more respectful, deeper sense of humanity than just, you know, quoting the other white males that, you know, built the disciplines that our PhDs were founded on. Well, speaking of a white male who was also recently passed, I remember the first couple years that I was at University

of Vermont under your guidance. You carried around this dog-eared, tattered version of E.O. Wilson book, Consilience. I actually have a mental picture of it in my mind. It had a black cover with white labeling and it was just beat to heck. And you referred to this as the Bible as it explains so many things about the human condition. Can you give a summary of the main aspects of that book and why you felt that way? And I guess more importantly, do you still feel that way? Yeah, the book Consilience by Ed Wilson, 1998, I still think today it was a masterpiece. It is a masterpiece. I mean, this is somebody who, like we were talking about earlier, has had multiple careers in a way and multiple times where he had stepped out of his own zone. As a biologist,

as a entomologist, as a scientific writer, this is, to me, the kind of, you know, Charles Darwin or Rachel Carson or Adam Smith, for that matter, of our time, you know, someone who's kind of breaking from the mold. And in the case of Wilson, someone who was willing to apply widely accepted concepts from science to ourselves, to the human animal, right? And to study us as if we were, you know, another one of the ant species that he was tinkering with or thinking about. He really kind of broke open some huge doors on the study of human nature, coming to terms with our both our biological constraints, our moral instincts, founding a field called Sociobiology, which was very controversial at the time, is as much today, but still ruffles the feathers of

my fellow social scientists. Yeah, I mean, in Consilience, this idea of jumping together of knowledge is, you know, he's certainly not the first person who tried to do that, to try to tell a story that weaves together insights from many disciplines, many ways of knowing, many life experiences to this ultimate prize, right, of kind of one integrated way of thinking about the universe. I don't know that we'll ever get there, but I think the journey that he has charted in consilience is well worth, well worth the time and effort. And at a field like ours of economics, I mean, we are probably one of the least conciliant disciplines out there. We're one of the most disconnected, the most isolated us we were talking earlier in the academy.

And so conciliance to me was just this breath of fresh air to say, here's the test, here's the test for your field. Do this do the theories in your field hold up against the theories of all others? Well, we're going to get to that and we're going to talk about energy and the environment and the biophysical side of things. But the way that you and I really intellectually and in a friendship way bonded, in 2005, six, seven is our fascination with human behavior and the evolutionary trajectory that finds us here in 2022 trying to replicate the emotional states of our ancestors. And this is still

not widely understood. So why do you think that understanding human behavior from an evolutionary perspective is so important to society steering towards the most benign human and planetary future outcomes. Yeah, I mean, evolutionary biology is one of the bridges from which we can build a more conciliate worldview. Evolutionary biology is the study, is the field that has tied together physics and chemistry and biology. It is the way that we've been able to link together things from the atomic scale up to

the continental scale, you know, from DNA to play tectonics. And to make that bridge from the natural sciences and their relative conciliance to the social sciences and humanities is this frontier. It's a really exciting frontier. And to do that, you just have to include culture in your definition of environment, right? Environment is, in an evolutionary biology point of view, puts selective pressure on the species. on groups within social species like ours that then push the evolution of new traits, new characteristics,

new ways to survive. Culture, that's the same thing in social species, right? So if you think of our cultural environment, putting selective pressure on the individual and on the group, all of a sudden you've got a bridge between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. You've got a way of explaining the taste for art or architectural preferences, right, or commonalities of language across cultures, or all of the hundreds of things that we find that are consistent across human cultures, weighed against the very few things that are inconsistent across human cultures, opposite ends of the spectrum of weighing of thinking of the human condition. So would a standard neoclassically trained economist just categorize all those preferences under one umbrella term of utility?

Or how does conventional economics treat evolutionary psychology and the things you were just talking about? Yeah, I think economists, when they're pressed to think about our evolutionary history or press to think about other ways of human choice set. making instead of just very narrowly conceived fractional actor model. They used the word you just said utility, right? They said, yeah, it's all utility maximization, right? Just you want to account for unselfish behavior. That's because it gives you more utility. You want to account for humans cooperating out of interest of the group and not the person

sounds like utility to me. They've taken this kind of narrow view of utility maximization and tried to wrap everything into it. So a book like mine or concepts from evolutionary economics or ecological economics mainstream says, yeah, yeah, we know that. But then they continue to kind of practice and preach a very, very narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow version, a very small slice of the human persona and then try to fit their policy advice and management ideas and all of their kind of influential foundations of field.

like business and economics and political science and anthropology and psychology into this box of narrow self-interest. That's when they start to believe the model is the reality and when the rubber really meets the road in terms of creating huge problems. So we're going to get to your book, of course, but let me ask a few background questions. So you are one of the better known ecological economists. What is ecological economics? And in contrast, what is heterodox or orthodox economics? Let's start there. Sure. Heterodox versus orthodox.

Heterodox implies that there's more than one story, right? There's more than one perspective. There's more than one framing of the purpose of the economy. So there's feminist economics and social economics and institutional economics and degrowth economics. And there's ecological economics. Ecological economics fits comfortably within this kind of heterodendonics. view, right? That there's not

only one way of thinking of the economy, one orthodoxy, but there's lots of ways. Ecological economics happens to be, I believe, sort of one of the bigger umbrellas, which is strength, but can also be problematic, with a particular

concern on the kind of 21st century problem of the size of the economy relative to the supporting ecosystem, the fairness of distributing the benefits and burdens of economic cooperation, and yes, also the efficiency of the economic system, which is the kind of obsession of orthodox economics. So ecological economics is a more holistic, a more systems-oriented

version of economics that really pays attention to this relationship between the economy and its supporting social and ecological systems. It doesn't treat the economy as this isolated thing that has its own rules, but is interdependent on healthy societies and healthy ecosystems. So is economics and economic theory akin to a religion in that it's a belief and there are many different flavors of belief? Or can some economic theories be more true than others? So said differently, shouldn't there ultimately be just one field of economics, one economic theory that's kind of true because it's made it through all the gauntlets of the various testing periods? Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, Wilson accuses economics of being Newtonian, right?

Of trying to become that one master theory that is true for all cultural contexts, all peoples, all places, all experiences. And I do think that we are striving to have a kind of more uniform, integrated, conciliate study of the economy, especially in the means of the economy, the biophysical basis of the economy, I think we can get closer to agreement on what makes a system any system, right? If the economy is just another ecosystem, what makes any system run? That's where we can get a lot of agreement. But then on the kind of purpose and trajectory

and ultimate ends or goals of the economy, that's where we get a lot of disagreement. To some extent, healthy disagreement, right? What is the economy for? This is where kind of different bands of economists and different flavors of heterodox economics come to fruition. John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, wrote that economic ideas are always and intimately a product of their own time and place. They cannot be seen apart

from the world they interpret. So in that sense, economics is, you know, shapes shifts according to the kind of issues of the time. But as a system, the economy is a biophysical system. Well, in that sense, most of the core econometric formulas and explanations in orthodox economics were a product of the carbon pulse, which is this one-time anomalous firework-like period for our society that is non-repeatable. And yet we're writing rules and laws at that moment that we're extrapolating forward in time that are not going to be valid. Yeah, I remember you talking to a class of mine, I think showing William Stanton's graphic, right?

Breaking up like billion years to million years to tens of thousands of years. And the tens of thousands of years scale the kind of human population doing the hockey stick thing. And then you're making the point that's kind of on the rise, you know, the blade of a hockey stick is when we've kind of invented economics. Yet this whole course of history and the whole kind of sense of who the human animals, is was created in a very different time, in a very different context, and a very different sense of scarcity. So yes, we've created the field of economics in a time of huge pulse of energy, in a time of high, high, high energy return on investment, in a time of huge energy surpluses where things like university professors become possible, right? Because I can live off the energy

surplus of the energy industry. All of that, right, is part of the kind of life and times of the economists who created it, and now we're moving into kind of a new reality, right? A reality of

not just kind of local overshoot and collapse, but potentially global overshoot and collapse. So therefore, we need a new economics. We need an economics that's not so growth oriented, but that is more maintenance, resilience-oriented. And economy, that's

solve every problem that growth creates by growing more, but starts to really think about less growing the system and distributing the burdens and benefits of the system, an economy that might ultimately need to contract in a way that hopefully is by design instead of disaster. So I'm going to get to your new book, but let me ask you one more background question. So when you were a young man, you chose to get a PhD in economics in orthodox economics. But now you are a ecological economist. What happened in your life, in your brain, in your recognition, in your experience to shift directions? Well, it's probably a similar story to yours in a sense.

You know, I was a product of the Go Go 80s, and I tell the story actually the first chapter of my book, the kind of greed is good generation, right? The famous Michael Douglas speech in the Wall Street movie that all my economics professors showed like in the first week of class to justify the kind of utility maximization framing. I wanted to grow up and be a ski bomb. That was kind of my aspirations. And my father was like, well, if you go to college along the way, why don't you study business, study economics?

Because at least you can get a job someday. Acon class is not during the middle of the day when I was trying to eat. The irony is now that you're so busy teaching ecological economics that you don't even have time to ski and you live in Vermont. I know. It's terrible. But yeah, I mean, I was studying economics just because it fit what my father said to do. You know, I thought I'd known a ski shop someday. But yeah, I mean, science was my first love. The outdoors was my first love.

Connecting to nature was my first love. And so coming back to that in grad school, taking college classes in ethics, taking college classes in ethics, taking classics in ecology, raising my hand in the back of the room in my econ class is the same, but, but, but, right? And sort of trying to find this kind of conciliant, the word I didn't know at the time, but more conciliant brand of economics led me quite by accident to ecological economics. I mean, I quite literally found a book in a free book pile in Warren Hall at Cornell University called Ecology Ethics Economics by Herman Daly.

I was like, in the same sentence, ecology, ethics, economics, what is this thing? What is this heresy, right? And started to read that and went to my advisor's door and started talking to him about ecological economics. He at the time was writing a textbook in environmental economics, that kind of neoclassical version of how to deal with the economy. And in fact, this is a long story. Sorry, Nate. He challenged me. He was like, why don't you write the concluding chapter to my new textbook and environmental

economics and tell me why the whole thing's wrong. I was like challenged to accept it. Let's do it. Who was your PhD advisor? I forget. Dwayne Chapman, a natural resource environmental economists at Cornell. Yeah, we studied at Berkeley. So he kind of had this sort of, you know, inter hippie in him from his time at Berkeley in the 1960s. I think deep down all of us have an inner hippie. It's just sometimes it's, there's too many layers covering it. Okay, John, you have recently written a book. Yes, sir. Written a book called The Progress Illusion, Reclaiming Our Future from a Fairy Tale of Economics. Tell us about the book and the main themes. Well, I mean, in essence, this is sort of what I have to say, right?

I feel like I'm retired now. The book is a reflection on a career in ecological economics. You know, I mean, it's the discovery in ecological economics in the early 90s. I mean, the field was only formalized with a journal and a society and all that kind of stuff in the late 80s, early 90s. people like me were supposed to be created, right? I mean, folks like Herman Daly and Bob Costanza and Dana Meadows and others were trying to create a field of economics that pushed back against the orthodoxy, pushed back against the mainstream. So I'm from a kind of, you know, generation of folks who were brought up under these new ideas.

We had to discover them ourselves and we're in any department called ecological economics. So this book is a reflection on that. It's a reflection on, you know, my generation, on my training, on my journey, my discovery of ecological economics, in essence, kind of why my father's advice was misplaced. Greed is good, go study business, make lots of money, and everything else will take care of itself. So I kind of get into all these different illusions that I had to kind of unpack myself, you know, the illusion of history. I mean, economics is taught very ahistorical, as if, you know, the current version is the best. And we don't need to learn from all the philosophical debates from the past. The illusion of the individual, right?

This isolated individual at a point in time, what one of the early critics of the model, Thorsten Vellin called a homogeneous globule of desire back in 1890. The illusion of choice, right, that all choice should be framed at the margin. We don't have to worry about the accumulation of the choice. choices. We just need to know is the next choice give you more benefits than costs. And when they all sum up to something that we never would have voted for, oops, sorry about that. And the illusion of growth, you know, that the solution to all problems that growth creates is more growth. You know, so kind of unpacking those kinds of illusions, holding them up against

kind of current scientific consensus like the international, intergovernmental panel on climate change, which assumes 3% growth in all of their scenarios, right, 2 to 3% growth. And we're going to somehow green growth and figure this out. That kind of come full circle in the book to arguing for a new story, a new economics, and a new economy where we can kind of thread the current needle and create a more balanced approach to how we think about the relationship between humanity and the environment. Okay. I'm going to get to that. Let me just ask you. Did you get all that from your skim? Yes, I got all that from my skim.

All stuff you already knew. I mean, lots of the book I learned from you. Well, it's, you know, that's one of our challenges as educators and communicators is there's a tradeoff between being accurate and being helpful. And we could lay out all the facts that are perfect from a scientific standpoint, but if they don't reach people's hearts and minds, they're not good enough. So I like the way that you framed these things as illusions. I often talk about them as myths.

But, you know, what if a large number of people actually recognized that conventional economic broad concepts are fairy tales? Would that be enough? Because the conventional economics are so embedded in the power structures that move society forward, both at high political levels at influential institutions and lobbying. So if people recognize that it was the emperor with no clothes from a scientific conciliant standpoint, would that matter? How would you answer that question? I mean, this is this journey you've been on, right, of gathering knowledge and lots of facts and good arguments and has it made the difference it needs to make? I would argue that it wouldn't, it would matter, but it wouldn't change the power structures and the momentum of the system. but the way it would matter is that you would plant seeds in everyday people and in leaders of

various fields that we have to do things differently and we're going to have a phase shift at some point in the future when we have to meet the future halfway. And so you and I and our colleagues are trying to change the initial conditions of the future. I think this isn't going to happen by these tenured economics in the, ivory towers around the world saying, you know what, I've spent my whole life on this. I'm 65 and I think John and Nate are right that this whole thing I've built my career on is a fairy tale. That ain't going to happen, my friend. I'm with you.

I'm with you. Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's, you know, just sort of, you know, showering people with more knowledge, the kind of the myth of the fire hose, right? And more knowledge, more facts, more fact-based arguments is going to do the trick. I mean, that's what we do when we write books, right? sort of lay out our argument. But, you know, when I come full circle in the book is towards social movement building,

towards collective action, towards moving beyond the myth of the individual. Because, yeah, I was taught in economics, just incentivize the individual and everything will be fine. Or in my social science classes, right, just, you know, use persuasion and use facts and use, you know, or from my religious studies, use good old-fashioned guilt. And people will sort of come on board. but always at an individual level, right, where the actor and the model was the individual

instead of the group or the group to the community or the community to the state. So, you know, part of my own evolution has been to kind of pull myself away from my American mindset of, like, acting on more knowledge, more incentives, more ideas, focused on the individual, and move towards what are the ingredients to build a social movement?

What are the ingredients to react when the inevitable collapses and disasters happen so that were prepared. What are the ways to bring people together to design a future instead of just sort of haphazardly crash into it? So let's address those questions. So I assume you've read my superorganism paper. I have. I just cited it in a class, a graduate class in Iceland. So when people put together those pieces, it can be a little daunting because it feels like we don't have agency that this

giant metabolic structure is beyond the control of billionaires and politicians. But you just talked about in your book that you like to go up a scale and empower people to be part of a collective movement. How does that happen? How do we move beyond individual choice at the margin to a collective social movement? I mean, that's how change has always happened. That's how the current economic ideology is in power by funding. and blotting and carefully designing what we call the conservative movement

or the neoliberal turn or neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, that was a social movement. So all of these kinds of big, long wave changes happen from collective action social movements. You know, they often start kind of one neighborhood

at a time or one watershed at a time or, you know, one community at a time, and then it gets to a tipping point where the kind of aggregation of these ideas and action gets to where you change policy, change governance, change, change the rules of the system. I mean, all of this is about getting lower and lower and lower down on, you know, Donella Meadows' systems leverage point wish list, right? Moving from just changing the numbers, accepting the system assets, that's akin to like increasing taxes or decreasing taxes, right?

To changing the kind of guts of the system, the feedback loops, the positive negative feedback loops, to changing the rules of the system, the goals of the system, and getting all the way down to the paradigm of the system, right? And this sort of field of ecological economics and the career that I'm reflecting on is a bunch of us trying to shift the mindset, trying to shift the paradigm. And that goes way beyond the individual. And I think she said in a later interview that shifting the paradigm wasn't actually the number one thing. It was shifting how you think about the paradigm. Transcending paradigms. That was her highest our highest leverage point is to sort of always be open to other points of view, right? Don't get so dogmatic with your own paradigm.

Yeah, shifting the paradigm isn't enough. You always need to kind of be curious. Did you ever meet her? I mean, she had passed away before I came to Vermont. No, she died too young. No, I never did get a chance to meet her. So getting back to the tradeoff between being accurate and being helpful and getting back to the concept of consilience,

when you build a social movement, and there are a lot of them that are, have been around for a while, there's a big climate movement and other social movements, but I'm frustrated with some of the social movements that philosophically and their end result is something that I would completely get on board with. But the logic of what they're trying to do is divorced from the system's perspective that you and I have been spending, you know, the last couple decades, putting together. For instance, a lot of people in the climate movement don't look at our problem as ecological overshoot. They look at it as climate change, and they blame fossil fuels and fossil fuel companies, and we don't go beyond that. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, it's always a challenge to get to root causes. And that's one of the luxuries we have of being in the ivory tower, right? I mean, no one's going to hire me, pay me to do group cause analysis, right, out in the private sector and even in government because everyone's just running around putting out short-term fires. Yeah, I remember a meeting that Peter Brown, a colleague at McGill University and I had with Rockefeller Foundation. And we were making the case for, you know, investment in graduate programs and leadership training and kind of long-wave change and how do we change the paradigms of our new department heads and deans and college presidents. And like, clearly from an education strategy point of view, right? Because,

We're both educators. And the folks from Rockefeller were like, yes, right on. This is what we need. This is what I'm talking about. We're like, great. Will you fund it? No. Because all our money goes towards putting out fires, right?

We're in a state of emergency. We're putting out fires. We can't keep the eye on the prize of long-term systems change. That's a challenge right now, especially. and social movement building. But isn't the academy one of the few places or education more broadly where we can affect that long wave change? It is.

It's why the conservative movement funded so intently and so focused the academy from the 50s, 60, 70s, and onward. They had a long-term strategy, right? They had professors. They funded business programs. They created mining and oil schools in Wyoming, right? They built bridges between the University of Chicago, your alma mater, with Latin American governments, right? None of these things were short-term solutions for what they wanted to get across.

They were all long-term investments. The challenge now is we are in crisis mode, right? I mean, do we really have the luxury of planting seeds and having podcasts and building momentum for the shift the system someday maybe in the future? Yeah, I hear you on that. I mean, we do need to fight fire with fire. We need our own movement building. We need to stop kind of splintering off to little groups. We need to stop doing the, what is Josh Farley,

call it the circular firing squad, right? This is going to take some really creative movement building. I mean, it's why I've been so attracted to the work of Senator Bernie Sanders, because he has been saying the same damn thing for decades, right? and he's persistent. You know, he's like a dog with a bone. And he has seen some of the changes that he's been arguing for in his lifetime, right? But it's been slow going.

And it's been his persistence and his determinism. And he's got some kind of record amongst all senators who ever lived of amendments, right? He's behind the scenes making hundreds of amendments to bills to make the kinds of tinkering shifts along the way. He's a radical pragmatist, right? He knows there's pragmatic things that we need to do now, but he never keeps his eye off the prize of radical change, right, of wrestling power from the status quo. That's what I'm talking about. And you work with him, right?

You advise him from time to time? I've worked a lot with his staff. Him and I have done some projects together on youth climate action. Again, a kind of long-term strategy. I advised him on his Green New Deal bill. We did kind of job numbers for that, did some economic modeling. Yeah, he's been both an inspiration, but also someone that's been fun with him and his staff, mostly his staff, to bad ideas around. And we did a film.

We did this whole film called Waking the Sleep and Giant that followed the arc of his first run for president and told the story of progressive movement building around the country. So I can't remember when it was, but I think I once told you, John, if we write that, paragraph, the financial and tech people are going to label us or label you as a Marxist. And you replied to me and you said yes and I would wear that as a badge of honor or a badge of pride or something like that. Let me unpack this. I mean, I do see a continuum of political organizations, right, if you want to be a pink to extremes, from capitalism to socialism.

On the positive side, the reason I said it takes one to no one is that the U.S. economy is firmly built on the tradition of democratic socialism. It is everywhere. Our colleague, Goal Uppervitz talks about this. Marist professor of University of Maryland talks about the quiet democratization of wealth that's all around us. You know, from employee-owned companies to community-run commons to cooperatives, He points out that something like 40% of the U.S. population are members of some form of cooperative agriculture, banking, electricity, insurance, art, food, retail, health care. So much of our economic system, right, is run on democratic socialist principles, right?

Where you're not voting with your dollar, you're voting with your vote. Where the person's opinion matters, it's not what they can and cannot afford. and where we sort of organize and plan for outcomes rather than just let the market do it for us. So that's the sort of one side of the financial and tech people who would label us as socialist because they have benefited from huge investments in a sort of socialist foundations to our so-called capitalistic system. But on the negative side, I would say it takes one or no one, is that they are firmly entrenched, not in a kind of democratic socialist world,

speaking more specific about corporate America, but in kind of autocratic socialism. That is everywhere, I mean, Martin Luther King said socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. And the most successful in financial terms, parts of the economy, are hugely supported by our social system, right?

Including the market itself around the world right now by central banks. Including the market itself. From the court system to the road system, right? From the internet to transportation or air traffic control to all the things that the tax, to security, all the things that the tax base creates makes the market possible. And it makes the creation of and sequestering of extreme wealth possible. this is the system that they benefit from and there's been many many many many warnings along the way throughout the history of economic thought from henry george to carl marx to carl palani to donella metals talking about these kind of built-in feedbacks that are inside the kind of private capitalistic system that lead to greater and greater and greater social support for a smaller and smaller and smaller group of people so i would say they've benefited the most from socialism in a very contorted perverse way. Well, if I had to describe it in one sentence, our system has privatized the profits and

socialized the losses, not only to people, but to ecosystems and future generations. Absolutely. I mean, and this was all predicted by the kind of early critics of a purely capitalistic system, right? I mean, capitalism, capital ownership, you know, capitalism, right is privately owning the means of production and then allocating those means through a free market. And what happens in a natural tendency of a capitalistic system is positive feedback loops, where the capital owners are able to buy more capital, create more opportunities, become richer, and the rich get richer and the poor get poor.

That's what Marx warned about. That's what Henry George warned about. That's where Carl Polani in the 1940s, 50s weren't about in his book. transformation, yeah. Yeah, this kind of reduction of all social relationships to market logic. And that's where I think we kind of live in this era that the ecological economist Dick Norgaard calls the econocene, right, where we've sort of reduced all social relations and now even environmental relations to market logic, right, the kind of most obscene version of what Polani

called the market society. So you have articulated some of the philosophy of your book, but it's a very much. if you could for the next little bit, choose three of the main fairy tales or illusions. The absolute core disconnects from standard economics that's taught in universities around the world versus the actual reality we face. Can you spend a minute or two on three different core fairy tales? Sure, sure. So I mentioned the illusion of history. You know, that kind of the modern orthodoxy is the best system that we've ever created,

and all the debates are solved, and this is what we do. And in fact, this illusion got probably the most attention out of Occupy Wall Street, where students from around the world were walking out of their econ class is the most famous one, being the walk out of Gregory Mankew's class at Harvard. We're creating these sort of post-autistic societies for economics. we're saying at the very least teach us the heterodoxy teach us about the debates

let us debate the kind of ethical and ecological dimensions of different forms of economic cooperation right all of that has happened throughout history and somehow economists have been successful in aligning themselves with the status quo and stripping away the history of thought

as you know I mean economics economists people like Adam Smith David Ricardo and Karl Marx didn't call themselves economists. They were moral philosophers, right? They were puzzling through the morality of different economic organizations. And so that's been a huge illusion that I try to unpack in this book. Then there's the illusion of choice. So, you know, all of economics is framed around marginal thinking.

And that kind of magic decision rule is marginal benefit equals marginal cost, right? You do something until the next benefit equals the next cost. I tell my students, raise your right hand, repeat after me, marginal benefit, equals marginal costs, and they all laugh and do it. I say, you now have a PhD from Cornell University, because that's all I learned every puzzle. So that would be like the oil barrel would be the one at the, that would be the futures price, would be the marginal barrel that was produced is $85 or whatever. Right. So in the context of economic decision making, if you're only thinking at the margin, right? Then that next consumption choice, that next house built, that next lane added to a

highway, that next strip mall, that next wetland mowed over and to build the next shopping mall, each choice at the margin, right? What are the benefits? What are the costs? Especially when they're framed just solely on human benefits and human costs. Makes sense, right? But I learned as a grad student that there was this other economist at Cornell called Alfred Kahn who wrote a paper way back in 1966 called the tyranny of small decisions and he made the very simple point

that that kind of decision framework thinking at the margin. All those marginal decision makers five years, ten years, twenty years out might never have voted on the future that we crashed into right? I mean who amongst us is going to say, you know, my dream is to build that house in the countryside with 10 acres and, you know,

quiet and blah, blah, blah. But then if we all do that, we get traffic, we get failing schools, we get climate change, we get wetland loss, we get our farms mowed into shopping malls, right? And the original decision makers say we never would have voted for this future. So this is the economic equivalent of the ocean ecological concept of shifting baselines? It's some sense it is. I mean, shifting baselines is more to do with your set point, right? So how do you think the world works?

Well, if you grew up in a world with all shopping malls and no forest, then you think that's your baseline, right? So these marginal decisions lead to a new baseline. And the original decision makers say, wait a minute, I never would have voted for this future had you told me that this is what we were in for, right? So if that's true then, how, what would be the mechanics of shifting to Mr. Kahn's theory of small choices, idea where we could embed the decisions of the past and make changes to them? Right. It's simple.

Well, it requires the ability to make collective choices, to do comprehensive planning, right, to have a little bit of foresight, which is what we do. very often in ecological economics, we use dynamic systems model, we use multi-cratory analysis, we use geographical information systems to say, if you make these string of choices, this is the likely future that will result.

Is that what you want? And if people are given the opportunity to think outside their own kind of individual consumptive choice or their own individual life or their own individual household, they say, no, that's not the future I want. So then what is the opportunity

to collectively design a future that you want? right, so that we all can live well, but within ecological and social constraints. So that kind of theory of choice, of collective choice, that constrains the individual is quite different than the Wild Wild West choice of, you know, do what's best for the individual. So that illusion of choice is one of the main illusions, very tales that I unpack. And you said three, so a third one is the illusion of growth, right, which is one that we've talked a lot about growth is great and growth is a stage of development right i mean if you think of any ecosystem you know if you start with a grassland that wants to go to a forest there's the early

stage pioneering species right and they are like lovers stabilize the soil bringing lots of nutrients and their sole purpose on earth is to grow as fast as they possibly can and then comes to are more mature for a species, right, that eventually shade out the pioneer species and bring stability to the system and are less concerned with growth and more concerned with resilience and stability and maintenance, right? The illusion of growth is that we're always in that pioneering stage, right? There's always more planet to exploit. And when we run out of this planet, we'll jump on, let's his face of spaceship and go to

Mars and get more. There's two faces, Musk or Bezos, but go on. What's his faces? Sorry. But yeah, so I mean, this illusion of growth, right? And then growth in a full world, to use daily's framing, we start to kind of create more cost than benefits that we get into an error of uneconomic growth. So even your marginal decision rule starts to become violated. Like what's the next unit of growth worth at the macro level? Does it create more benefits than costs? And a lot of evidence is to say that especially in wealthy countries, no. we're in an uneconomic growth error, right? That actually dialing back for the last 50 years. Yeah, resizing our economy, reallocating time, reallocating work, creating more leisure and less labor, right? Shifting our priorities actually leads to higher well-being and more happiness, not less. So we have to think about stages of development and that we don't get stuck in a mindset that growth is the one stage forever and forever.

Well, I do know that a lot of very high-level institutional government people still on the surface believe that we're going to grow for centuries. And I think that's you and I would agree that that's biophysically implausible. And if it does happen, we will cook the earth beyond making it habitable. Well, it's a belief system, right? A lot of that stems from technological optimism, right? That the human species is creative, we're adaptable, we can pull this off. And that's factly, in fact, as you know, baked into our climate-deak economic models, like perfect clairvoyance, perfect adaptation, perfect transition to a warmer world. And so no wonder these models say don't worry about current costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions when we're so damn smart.

Yeah, the field of orthodox economics has massively failed in a lot of areas. but in the climate arena, it's just outrageous. Who is the Nobel Prize winner, Norgaard, recently that said at through, Nordhaus, Nordhaus, that if we go to three and a half degrees Celsius, that GDP will drop six or seven percent in the year 2100, which is like, are you freaking? Yeah, but that's the perfect, it's the perfect illustration of thinking at the margin, right? I mean, he famously said in a National Academy Sciences report that climate change will largely affect agriculture. Agriculture is only 3% of the economy.

So even if you lose half of the agricultural sector, no big deal. I'm paraphrasing. Right. And we all need food to eat. And oh, by the way, we've got trading partners and we'll export to them stuff that we can't eat and import from them stuff that we can. So that's the story. Those are some of the illusion. And I think some of those illusions, especially the growth one, more and more people are starting to recognize that. But I don't think it's voiced as much as it's recognized because I think people are afraid that to go to the resilient, managed, more wholesome scale that we have, that there's a grim reaper standing between here and there.

Yeah. What do you have to say about that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the thing. We're part of the system. We're trying to change. right? That's a challenge. Like we're all on this treadmill. And when the economy contracts during a recession, there's a lot of pain, especially for the most vulnerable in society, right? And so the most vulnerable who would benefit the most from changing the system are often the most opposed to changing the system because they're very livelihood depends on the status quo, right? The very livelihood depends on, you know, the powers that be. I mean, there's a, There's a beautiful quote in my book from this economist from Oxford or Cambridge.

I forget where, but I should dig it up. I mean, he talks about kind of like, you know, you create an economic system where the poor get just enough not to cause any trouble. Do you think there are actually people on the world today that are saying that behind closed doors? I think that there are a lot of people who have convinced themselves that they're keeping the system in place. because that's what's best for them and for everybody else, right? I mean, the system depends on growth. This system depends on growth. This system depends on growth.

And when the system stops growing, there's a lot of pain that goes around. So changing the system and having it less dependent or not dependent at all on growth is a huge lift. And so most of us, I would dare to say all of us who live in the current system depend on growth. You know, prices go up. You got to keep your income going up. You know, you got to compete. You got to, you know, juggle your assets, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, only are the wealthiest amongst us are able to kind of disconnect and unplug.

And that's a challenge when we want to change the system, but we depend on the very system we're trying to change. So in all of these discussions, there's really two central questions, which is what would, to use Bob Costanza's phraseology, what would a sustainable and desirable end state look like for a new economic system. And then the second question of is the much harder one in my eyes, which is how do we get from here to there intact? Sure. So let's let's just assume that the fear of the, the bends versus break scenario, let's,

let's set that aside and look far enough in the future, 30, 40, 50 years in the future. What would a human society after this transition look like? What would our daily lives look like in an economic system that you think would be more tethered to a conciliant reality and some of the other issues you brought up? Sure. You don't have to imagine this future because it's all around us, right? There are communities around the world that have much larger informal economies than formal economies that are disconnected from the market, that trade with one or another, that have reciprocity that are built around. essentially the principles of a gift economy.

Those same economies are being told to join the market economy, right? Because that's progress. That's how they'll expand their material well-being. And when they do that, there's often a lot of regret because they realize they lost leisure, they lost time with family, they lost time with community. There's a group called the Next Systems Project that's documenting this right here in the United States, showing the models out there that are at community skills, whether they be farmers markets, whether they be work co-ops, right?

Whether they be various arrangements sharing in the assets instead of kind of this model where we all have to own our own truck or our own tractor. That's the kind of future that could be scaled to a livable planet. That's the kind of future that bring these same people joy through relationships with each other and the Earth. That's the kind of future that's all around us, and that's the kind of future that we're telling in our Econa 101 classes

to abandon, right? To become good consumers, not good citizens, right? To vote with our dollars, not with our votes. So I don't have to go out to the future to imagine that world. That world is all around us. And how do we build social movements or awareness and at least give people some choice, either at the margin or with some planning and volition

to live more like you just described? I mean, it all starts with power. we take power back from the 1%, or the 0.0.01%. That's where most of the environmental impact is. That's where most of the control over the social system is. That's where all the levers over our so-called democracy are. They're all concentrated in the hands of the very, very, very few. And so when you see disruptions like the Great Recession or like the COVID pandemic, right,

or the next one, or the next one, or the next one, that's when the current system doesn't work for all of us and where we have these small openings where we say we don't want to go back to normal. Normal sucked. Normal was already in crisis. Normal had too much power in the hands of too few. We want a different future.

And we always see these openings during times of crisis, right? And then they sort of quickly close again because the powers of B get us back to normal. And this was the quote I wanted to share. Cambridge economist, Hazu Chang, who describes this kind of treadmill, right? This dependence. He says, once poor people are persuaded that their poverty is their own fault, that whoever has made a lot of money must deserve it, and that they too could become rich if they just tried hard enough, life becomes easier for the rich.

Well, that's why a lot of people voted for Trump, because he was so rich that people thought that he deserved it or was smarter or whatever. It's in part, sure, but people voted for Trump because they thought he was going to blow the system up. They voted for Trump because he was anti-establishment. When we were making this film about the Sanders Revolution, you know, we were at these Sanders rallies all across the country interviewing people in line. And inevitably, we'd ask the question, okay, if Sanders doesn't get the nomination, what are you going to vote for? And surprisingly, many of those people at Sanders rallies would say, if Santer's, Sanders is not in, we're voting for Trump.

Because they were not voting on Democrat, Republican, red, blue, conservative, liberal. They were voting on establishment versus anti-establishment. That's an important sign that first came out to Occupy Wall Street, which was this sort of folks rising up and saying anti-establishment, right? We need to blow the system up in order to repair it. It'd be nice to not have to do that, right, that we could redesign the system thoughtfully with the most vulnerable amongst us at the center versus blow the system up and the most vulnerable will get hurt probably the most in the short term. But that's the choice we're at

right now. Yeah, I'm very worried about socially blowing the system up or with bombs blowing the system up because both are potentially on the horizon. Yeah, the nuclear threat, unfortunately, is always there. Yeah. And I think as we face the end of growth, it's going to, that threat is going to grow. Yeah. I mean, what's the fellow's name, the young de-growth economist you had on? He was fantastic. Timitimittimitt. Timothy. I say get old farce like me out of the way, and the sooner we can get people like him in charge, the better. Yeah. So do you think, and I assume that you wrote that book and are doing this podcast that you do think this way, that there is a chance that a broad swath of our culture can sufficiently understand and value nature and fair.

and the sacredness of life and the ecosystems of our one planet and living differently and incorporate those things ultimately into our choices, our behaviors, and our prices. And assuming you believe that, how might that come about or at least have higher chances of coming about? I mean, I am a hopeful person by my nature. I think most humans are. I think that ultimately it's going to probably be a little bit of both. preparing for the kind of future we'd like to see, but also having the alternatives in place

for when the crashes and collapses and pain happens, right? Whether that pain crash collapse happens, you know, one massive storm at a time, or one credit default at a time, or one toppling of a dictatorship at a time, I can't predict the future. In fact, you know, people who study paradigm shifts, you can't predict paradigm shifts, right? You never know when they're going to come. They kind of come out of left field, but the elements of paradigms are always in place. Well, I think we have to affect things in parallel at multiple scales, and there are no solutions to what we face, but there are responses.

So there's a global conversation. There's a national one. There's one in communities, and there's one in individuals listening to this podcast. podcasts and those things hopefully will all converge somewhere towards some more benign system in the not too distant future. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about, you know, in this book and in our conversation, we're not talking about economy or economics. We're talking about political economy. That's an important distinction, right? What's the difference?

Well, we're talking about the political economics system, right? Who's in charge, who has power, what kind of choices it make? What are the desirable ends of the system? and we don't teach political economy on university campuses by and large. We don't teach history of economic thought. We don't teach alternative economic paradigms, right, except for the few little courses in ecological economics or feminist economics that are squirled away in, like, I don't know, whatever, I'm a studies program,

like they are at the University of Vermont. You know, it's the political economy, the political change. We're working with the next systems project to sort of puzzle through the idea what would a nexus system's curriculum look like? And there's this great new nexus reader that's out there that I used in a class of mine last spring. And students were blown away that there were these alternatives to market-based capitalistic systems, right? What's the quote? People can more readily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right?

And that was my students, like, dead on. They were like, we can't imagine a different system. And we worked through this nexus reader and we talked about cooperative economies, sharing economies, caring economies, gift economies. And we showed them evidence that these aren't like wishes that they're all around us. And they were freaking floored, Nate. And they were like, why don't we learn this in our classes? Right. So that's the preparation.

That's the preparation. It's so true. I read a paper on altruism and how when people were shown an example of someone else being altruistic, they were like 300 times more, 300 percent. more likely to do altruistic acts themselves. And I think maybe in these alternative economic systems or alternative ways of interacting with others and commerce and trade and barter and gift economies, we lack imagination.

We don't see what's possible. So if we can see other people doing it, it's like Josh Farley says, just when you go to the health club, you lift weights to flex your muscles and tear down your muscles a little bit and they build back stronger. The same thing is with cooperation and community and sharing and interacting with others.

You have to flex those muscles. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I often ask in my classes like, what's the purpose of the university? And I get answers like, well, let's, you know, train us to get jobs and be, you know, successful people and economies. And I'm like, let's read the charter of our university together, right? It doesn't say anywhere about getting you a job, right? I mean, universities, higher education, educational systems are at the basis, or the kind of base of democracy, right?

The ability to think freely and to challenge each other and to kind of build scientific reasoning. And that's the purpose of the university. And our students have become so kind of indoctrinated the idea that universities are to train workers and consumers, not citizens. I know William Wallace is waiting for his hay. So I'm going to move to the closing. questions. And for those of you who don't know, which is probably everyone listening, William Wallace, is John's donkey. Yes, you still have. And E.O. Wilson's, my new black lab. Did you know that? I did not know that. Oh, my gosh. We were struggling to name him and, and, you call him Eo Wilson?

Yeah, yeah. He passed away when we were, Wilson, uh, Professor Wilson passed away when we were struggling to figure out a name and like Pat and I just both looked at each other. We're like, oh, our dog's name is Wilson. Oh, man. Yeah, I'm like you, a huge animal lover, and I remember staying at your house with your dogs back in the day, and dogs are a big part of my life. So, John, I'm going to ask you some closing questions that I commonly ask my guests. Given your lifetime of personal and community experience and all the work that you do, do you have any personal advice for the listeners of this program? at this time of global crisis between this bend and break moment. Personal advice. Yeah, I mean, I've listened to your podcast, New Year, you're going to ask me this question.

The best I could come up with is accept grief. Without going too deeply into this, I mean, psychologists generally speak of five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So we need to move through denial of the climate crisis, for example. or being angry about whose fault it is, or bargaining with left and right to kind of do things that are entirely insufficient or just not doing anything and being completely depressed.

If you accept that we're in a crisis, if you accept that the world is unraveling, I think that's the starting point, acceptance. But recognizing that acceptance is not defeat, it's kind of almost like a rebirth, shaking free of the system that led to the grief to begin with. It's a kind of starting point for restoration and renewal. So accept grief. Get to that sort of fifth stage of grief and be ready to start anew. That was very well said.

I never really thought about it until I heard you stating that. But that's kind of the role of this podcast is to get more people rapidly through those stages to acceptance so they can play a role in their communities or whatever issue they care most about. I'd never said that either. I just sort of came to me thinking about your podcast and these, what do you call the little soapbox things you do? Franklies. Yeah. Franklies, yeah. You're welcome to use the five stages of grief as a frankly because I think it'd make a good one.

Okay. I'll put it on the list. I have 19 of them written down that I have to get to. Tomorrow's is on spite. And I did do an evolutionary game theory matrix on the payoffs, altruism, spite, operation and selfishness. Yeah. Nice.

Speaking of that, you have been a teacher most of your adult life. And you, like me and our friend Josh Farley, teach these complicated and somewhat downer synthesis to young humans. So what specific recommendations do you have for students, young people who become aware of our energy, climate, biophysical, economic constraints to our human system? Yeah, we were kind of talking about this earlier. I think, you know, my recommendation is be in all of the majesty, the wonders of the universe. I mean, it sounds silly, but, I mean, it's just an extraordinary time and an extraordinary moment that we live in the course of the universe.

I teach big history in one of my undergraduate classes. It's a class in integrating science, society, and policy. So I start with big history, which is this frame of teaching history that comes through. from David Christian and others, which means I go all the way back to the Big Bang and march forward in what David Christian calls these kind of various moments or these Goldilocks conditions where the universe, which wants to go towards higher and higher disorder, lower and lower and higher and higher entropy, sort of creates order from nothingness, right? And sort of Goli Locks conditions of life on earth is one of those.

And when you place the human in the course of big history, not just sort of like since the Roman Empire kind of thing, which we do in a lot of our Western SIF classes, I think you have this opportunity to kind of connect with the mystery of the universe, right? Like when I first learned that I am made of stardust, it just freaking floored me, right? and connected me more towards a kind of sense of purpose than any sort of Sunday school class did when I was growing up Roman Catholic. So being all of the wonders of the universe.

Here, here. So what do you care most about in the world, John? Well, I mean, I was going to answer this like with your typical thing like family. And of course, family on top of my list, my wife, my kids, my granddaughter now. I know if you knew I was a grandpa. I did. I did. Congratulations.

What's her name? Zoe. Oh, excellent. Yeah, she's just awesome. The pictures I get every day are just amazing. So that's where my head goes right away. But let me say something a little more intellectual, right? What do you care most about in the world?

I go back to wonder. Wonder is what fuels our relationships, our connections with the Earth, are seeking it out puzzles of the mysteries of life. It's from wonder. where we get the desire to nourish, protect, build lives together. Wonders like this, I don't know, human superpower that can lead us to open-mindedness. And I was thinking about this today. I went down to fit in a cafe and think about this podcast.

And I remembered that there was a study by Dan Canaan at Yale University. And he found that there was kind of, well, he found one troubling thing from his survey work. work on climate science and sort of climate science acceptability, right? The troubling thing is he found that science knowledge or science literacy, like what we were talking about before, just tell people what's up and they'll change. It actually makes things more polarized, right? Like if you put science knowledge or climate science knowledge into a liberal camp and a conservative camp, and very scientifically literate conservatives actually move farther away,

from liberals and their belief in science because their belief in their connection to their tribe is way more important than climate literacy. Am I making any sense? Yeah, that's motivated reasoning, right? Exactly, exactly. But the one thing they found that made a difference was, and they tried to measure this, scientific curiosity. They found that those who are primed for scientific curiosity,

whether they're in one tribe or the other, it narrows the gap. it sort of puts them closer into agreement when they get new knowledge about, for example, the climate. Because it turns out, according to this research, science curiosity counteracts politically biased information processing. And I find that's just an amazing, hopeful thing. So do we all naturally have scientific curiosity, or can that be expanded or triggered? I think we are born with it. I think children are naturally curious, right? And then often depending on kind of which course of life you're in

or which tribes you join, it kind of gets beaten out of you. And so this is a really important kind of leverage point. And they did all this research related to media and science television shows, right? And some of the research is like what draws some people to science shows versus others. and this kind of characteristic or attribute of scientific curiosity promotes a sort of open-mindedness information that conflicts with your worldview

and that's the point, right? If you're curious, you're willing to sort of be open-minded and step out of your comfort zone and question your own worldview. And I can only speak from a sample of one. I was always a curious kid. I was a curious adult. I've been curious my whole life.

And I think that's what has enabled me to kind of question the dogma of myself and my worldview. I love that. I don't know if you remember, but when I was your PhD student, I wrote a paper called Curious George Discovers America. I forgot about that. I forgot about that. You loved it because it was all human behavior stuff. Yeah. That's beautiful. See, it was thinking about you today in the coffee shop that triggered all these things. Yeah. So we mentioned nuclear war earlier, but last three questions, John, what are you most concerned

out of all the issues we face? What are you most concerned about in the coming 10 years or so? I'm most concerned about the invisible gorilla. Do you know that? Do you know Daniel Simmons game? Oh, yeah, yeah. We're watching something and we're focusing on how many passes the ball will be, but there's something else going on that we don't see.

Exactly. Yeah, he's got this video with people with white shirts, people with black shirts, and you're meant to tell your audience, right? Really concentrate, really focus on the people with white shirts and count how many times they pass the ball, right? And I do this in class all the time, and the students are like, okay, I'm going to get it right. You know, they count, they count, they count, they're super focused, right? And then at the end of it, I said, did you see the gorilla? Right? And like three quarters of them say,

Guerrilla, what? And then you show the video again, and they're not so focused on counting the balls. And like in the middle of the skit, like this person in a gorilla suit comes out in the middle of the game pounds his chest or her chest and walks off the set, right? Like you couldn't miss them if you were at the 10,000 foot view

trying to keep track of it all. But because you're so hyper-focused, you have this kind of change blindness, right? You can't recognize change. and so that's what I'm most concerned about, right? And this relates to what you were talking about earlier of the shifting baseline syndrome, right? This is a concept that the fisheries biologist Daniel Polly popularized in fisheries management, right? That his example was you go on this big family fishing outing in Florida Keys,

and like you had no idea that the fishing outing in the 1950s had this incredible catch with this huge fish and a huge diversity of fish. And the fishing outing in the, you know, 20,000. 20s is like still lots of fish but they're all like this big and they're like of one species. And yet everyone is super happy because they caught. Because that's their baseline. They're like, I don't know. This was amazing. We call lots of fish.

And then you're like, go back and look at the picture at the same point with the same company with the same fishing tour 50 years ago and think about what their baseline was. That's what has the most word. And I think it's interesting that if you don't tell the students anything and you show the movie or with the gorilla and the passing. A lot more of them will notice the gorilla. I think it's the priming. Absolutely.

You win a prize. A lot of people get this wrong. Count the number of passes. And I think what is the economic equivalent of that right now, that we're focused on growth and marketing and distraction and supernormal stimuli? Right. And the invisible gorilla is the ongoing decimation of the natural world and the fact that we're one of the richest cultures in history.

and most of us are miserable. You got it. You got it. So turn on CNN, turn on Fox News, and ask yourself, what are they priming you about? Right? Are they teaching you to be a good citizen,

teaching to be a global environmental citizen, or are they teaching to be a well-behaved consumer? So in contrast to that, what are you most hopeful about in the coming 10 years or so? Well, it's the opposite of change blindness, shifting-based theorem. I'm most hopeful about the ability to remember, the ability to remember what it is.

to be human in community, to be in community with our branch of the life's family tree, but also in community with the whole majesty of the world. I think, like, we got a small taste of that, at least in privileged parts of society like mine, where I was a university professor, I was simply told to go home and teach and not come to work anymore during COVID, but, you know, I still got a paycheck. and all of a sudden I sort of discovered, you know, what I was missing in a kind of home life, family life. I started taking walks. I took up burning.

I discovered all these pocket parks within, you know, half a mile in my house. When we slow down and reconnect to who we are as human beings, our kind of long evolutionary history as humans in groups working together, we can remember a very different kind of experience with the world. And we need to be reminded of these old baselines. We need to kind of go back to the future, if you will. And yes, except the mess that we're in, but have this ability to tap into a new, but kind of oddly familiar human story of harmony. Excellent.

Last question. And I think a lot of people shy away from this question, but I have a feeling that you're not going to. If you were benevolent dictator, John, and there was no personal recourse to your decision, and what is one thing that you would implement or you would champion that would improve human and planetary futures? How about this? I would get rid of all the current benevolent dictators. I'd get rid of them all because there is a lot of them. There's a lot of them who think they're benevolent. It might start with the Pope.

Might start with just about every CEO who thinks that he or she's doing their job for their stakeholders out of their own benevolence. Might start with college presidents. who are some of the biggest benevolent dictators of all. It turns out that most organizations in Western societies are organized as dictatorships. Companies, colleges, businesses, anywhere where there's not an elected official who's in charge is a form of a dictatorship. And many of these dictators think they're benevolent. I'd get rid of them all and see what the alternative would be of a people-powered society. How about that?

Good answer. John, thank you so much. We ought to talk more often. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for the opportunity, and I'm really enjoying your podcast. I listen to them as I shovel horseship. What a compliment. What a compliment. Thank you so much, John. I will talk to you soon. All right, man. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the Great Simplification. for more information on future releases.