The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 208. The Progress of the Human Race, Part 1

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

All we ever hear about on the mainstream news is that the world is in dire straights, that we are going in an irreversible direction, and that it is all our fault. Throughout many conversations in Season 4 of this podcast, we have explored these narratives in depth. We would like to promote an alternative narrative...Did you know that in 1981, 42% of the world’s population was living in what is called “absolute poverty” and by 2018, that number had fallen to 8.1%? By 2030, we are on pace to have less than 5% of the world’s population living in poverty. Are you aware that alongside nearly eradicating poverty, we have also nearly ended world hunger? Over the last 50 years, we have added nearly 1,000 calories per day to the world food supply average. The world’s poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa, has roughly the same access to food as Portugal did in the 1960s. As of the last survey in 2017, only 2 out of 173 nations in the world have food access averages under 2,000 calories per day. We have also drastically increased the supply of tree coverage across the globe, resources are being used more efficiently than ever before, and the global economy has grown by over 100x over the last 200 hundred years.There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about certain specific issues that we still need to improve; but overall, the data is undeniable. We are living in an age of seemingly-impossible progress in nearly every sector imaginable.

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast season four episode 65, I'm Michaela Peterson. If you haven't heard, dad is going on tour. Check tickets out at JordanB Peterson.com slash events and keep in mind there will be more dates added next week like Canadian dates which haven't been announced quite yet. For this episode, this is our first compilation highlighting the progress of the human race, worth a listen, very positive. All we ever hear about on the mainstream news is that the world is in dire straits, that we are going in an irreversible direction and that it's all our fault. Throughout many conversations in season 4 of this podcast, we've explored these narratives

in depth. We would like to promote an alternative narrative. Did you know that in 1981 42% of the world's population was living in what is called absolute poverty and by 2018 that number had fallen to 8.1%. By 2030 we're on a pace to have less than 5% of the world's population living in poverty. Are you aware that alongside nearly eradicating poverty we've also nearly ended world hunger? Over the last 50 years, we've added nearly 1000 calories per day to the world food supply average.

We've also drastically increased the supply of tree coverage across the globe. Resources are being used more efficiently than ever before, and the global economy has grown by over 100 times over the last 200 years. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about certain specific issues that we still need to improve, but overall, the data is undeniable. We are living in an age of seemingly impossible progress in nearly every sector imaginable. Enjoy this episode. So.

I mean, since the early 60s, we've doubled the human population, but we've slightly shrunk the amount of land we put under the plow every year. There's been a 68% reduction over 50 years in the amount of land needed to produce a given quantity of food. That's the most extraordinary phenomenon. It's basically the story of the Green Revolution. You make the case there too that without that occurring and that is a concept, we should go into the green revolution to some degree, because lots of viewers won't know about that, unbelievably, even though it might, it's arguably the biggest story of the last 50 years, in some sense, you know, you make the case that had the green revolution not taken place, And so that was partly a consequence of careful breeding of new food stuff like dwarf wheat and the manufacture of nitrogen fixing fertilizers. We would have

already used up land space equivalent to more than the entire Amazonian rainforest. We would have converted virtually all arable land on earth into food producing, well, into food production, and we haven't done that. And in fact, I believe now there are more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago. Oh, yes, definitely. I mean, the whole world is now reforesting fairly rapidly, when I say the whole world, the world is net reforesting. Some places are still losing forests, but on the whole,

it is like China are gaining woodland at an extraordinary rate. Yeah, well, China has more woodland now than it did 30 years ago. Okay, next one. This is also stunning, shocking, completely unexpected, more land for nature. Who would have possibly guessed that? I read something the other day too, when we could comment on this. The Sahara Desert has shrunk by 8%

since the turn of the millennium. We've greened an additional 10% of the Earth's surface as a consequence. That's part of the same development and that's only over the last 20 years, 20 years. And it looks like it's a consequence, that's part of the same development and that's only over the last 20 years, 20 years. And it looks like it's a consequence of increased carbon dioxide perversely enough. The Sahara is actually shrunk. So I don't want to get into the carbon dioxide argument, but this is, and this is a whole different issue here, tree-covered-loss gain from 1982 to 2016. So comment on that.

Yes, I mean, one of the things is that one of one of the benefits of getting ultimate older, uh, perhaps on the only benefit of getting to be always that one gets wiser and one one remembers all the stuff that we used to believe and take for granted, which have never happened and which have falls. One of them was the expansion of Sahara. In the 1980s, I remember being absolutely terrified that Sahara was going to expand and swallow the globe. As kids, we were taught that as gospel. But Sahara is shrinking. It is also true that there is more foliage, which is more greenery. Plants are producing more foliage because of the CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is for another discussion, but the fact is that

it's the basic fact of living on Earth that plants like more CO2 in the atmosphere, it's their food, which is why Norway grows, you know, tomatoes in hot houses that are filled with CO2, precisely because they want them to grow. And so plants like CO2 and foliage is increasing, but also the tree coverage of the world is increasing. Between, I wrote this statistic down, thinking that we might talk about it, between 1982 and 2016, we have added trees, tree area, the size of Alaska and Montana combined to the world. Now, that's a pretty big chunk of the world. The United States has 35% more trees than when we're on Reagan become president of the United States. China, 35%, no, China is 15%.

Yeah. Okay, so now I've read critiques of this too. When I've tweeted this, for example, people say, yes, but we've lost a tremendous amount of biodiversity that many of the much of the much of the new growth is monoculture in contrast to the previous growth. And I suspect that's not true in some situations and is true in others. I don't think that's true of the reforestation of the United States, but I don't know. Do you know? of the United States, but I don't know. Do you know? Well, first of all, compared to what? At the time when industrial revolution started in

Great Britain, which was responsible for many of the great things that happened since then, at that time, one of the reasons why they had to switch to coal is because there was no tree left in Britain. I'm exaggerating, but I am not far off. The tree coverage in Britain was just completely deluded of forests over millennia of forest destruction. Remember, trees were not only needed to keep you warm, but to cook your food, to make your furniture, to make your carriages, to make your weaponry. Everything prior to the modern era was based on trees. I'm exaggerating, but not too much. Trees. Now, so compared to what? We have destroyed a lot of, we have destroyed a lot of the natural forest

with its original biomass, long time before the Industrial Revolution, which by the way used up, are called not trees. But today, most of our tree usage comes from the new forests. The forests that are planted for the specific purpose of being cut down for lumber, which then builds American and Canadian houses. It is very rare that the sort of wood that you see in the shops or that goes into productive activity actually has originated in the Brazilian rainforest. Right, so I guess the the objection would be those aren't forests, they're crops, they just happen to be crops of trees. And I suppose

They're crops. They just happen to be crops of trees. And I suppose, and you know biodiversity losses obviously Problematic and even potentially catastrophic, but I don't think that means that you can't take heart about the fact that Much more of the planet is green and there's a certain amount of reversion to a more natural habitat. Certainly indicator that we're much more efficient users of resources. We don't have to take up so much space. And the agriculture revolution also contributed to that to a great degree. That's human ingenuity again, because we can grow more on less land. And I don't see that stopping. I think we're going to get more and more and more efficient at food production.

I why would that stop? The market certainly drives us in that direction. And there's no indication of that slowing as far as I can tell. So three points, I hope I can remember them. One is, yes, because of increased agricultural productivity, we are already returning land to nature and way we can do so in the future at an increased pace, which means that we are returning land not just to the animals, but we are returning to nature where the biomass can grow again and where it can reconstitute itself. The second point is that we are also living in a world that has record, acreage and mileage and square mileage

of globe's territory, which is protected from any kind of interference from humankind. So we have record, square mileage of oceans oceans which are now protected and which cannot be fished in and we have record square mileage of land which Which is protected in national parks or is otherwise Excluded from economic activity the third point that I want, and that comes with wealth. The wealthy countries, they are. And stability and political stability because you don't need much catastrophe and social breakdown before those national parks and all their animals are going to have everything eaten out of them. Typical example would be Zimbabwe, yes. And the last one I want to make is that we have a problem in Brazil.

Brazil has obviously vast rainforests and very ancient forests, which are filled with all sorts of things that we may discover are helpful to us in the future. As well was dangerous. But nonetheless, very few people would say that it's a good thing to get rid of the Brazilian rainforest. My understanding is, and I'm willing to be proven wrong on this, is that most of it has to do with farming, especially of poor people in Brazil, who burn forests in order to clear the land for agricultural activity. Now, I realize that this point will may not necessarily be appreciated by wealthy people in the West, but poverty in developing countries can be very, very bad. In Brazil, there are some pockets of real wealth,

but there are also pockets of tremendous poverty. And the more inland you get and the more into the Amazon you get, the poorer the people become. These people from their perspective and the perspective of their government should be allowed to earn a living. The way you protect Amazon is to have higher rates of economic growth in Brazil so that those people start moving away from the Amazon.

They start moving to cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and others and they start working there in the factories, in the service industry and they no longer have to burn forests in order to plant food so they don't starve. Well, here you have maybe the biggest piece of good news is that the amount of land that humans use for meat production has declined by an area 80% the size of Brazil. Well, that's a huge land mass over what over what period of time? Sorry, since the year 2000. Since 2000. Since 2000? Yeah.

20 years. Yeah. And people say, how have we done that? Well, it's pretty darn easy. You can, you can, you can have, you can produce a hundred cows on an acre of land or one cow. Like so, so you just concentrate your animal production. There's an ethical issues that you have to deal with.

But mostly in terms of at least cattle production, which is the big use of pasture. It's been, there's a win-win for cow, the treating cows humanely as a document. Thanks to Temple Grand, and Temple Grand, and yeah, she's really something that woman. She's an incredible person and shows when neuroatpical people are able to contribute to this world in a really lovely way that they don't need to become the negative side of that often.

Yeah, she says she thinks like an animal. I believe she thinks like an animal. Yeah, I heard her speak at a conference on consciousness. It was a great talk, a great talk. And she's so pragmatic and she's done a tremendous amount for animal welfare. And in this practical sense of actually fixing something, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, good for her. It turns out that cows, what they want to live a happy life, because not the same thing is what we think we want cows to have. We think cows need to have a whole acre of land for him or herself. Cows just need to not be terrified before they die and they need to be in clean stalls and stuff like that. So there's a win-win on humane animal treatments, land use, which is essential to protecting species

and human prosperity and development. And this is an incredible story. So the whole six extinction narrative is just false. And I debunk it the other way it's false as you alluded to earlier, we have seen biodiversity in many parts of the world increase, but with the rise of invasive species. And you may not want that. So diversity is the wrong metric. So in Hawaii, you know, if you agree with, look, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a non scientific issue.

It's just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii? Do you want the native species, meaning the species that were there? Yeah, well, underneath that, underneath that is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders. It's like, well, that was nature before the invasive species. And

that nature somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity. And these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and inappropriate. And there's an ethical element to that. And you haven't sorted any of that out in your thinking because like, do the, do the island's care life moves around? And that's how it is. And so there's a weird unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what's hypothetically a scientific issue and a mucky thinking.

What was defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European. So the purity is pre, so Europeans are the contaminators. Right. But as opposed to like the like the like the indigenous people who were manipulating ecosystems at continent wide levels right through fire mostly. But also through hunting and extinctions certainly in the Americas, but also really around the world. You have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous, pure indigenous people. So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500 or 1700, that's fine, but you can make a case for that not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds,

because you're worried that you like those species. There's some cool bird species that could go extinct on the islands of Hawaii if you don't remove some of the invasives. Fine, you're just manipulating that environment. You're doing it not out of scientific, there's no scientific basis for it. You're doing it because we like those species. And that's it. And that's where I get to at the end of the book where I kind of go.

If I show you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo, and I'm like, I wanna save that gorilla, and if you're like, I don't care about that gorilla, that's a clash of values. There's no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas. I think they're really beautiful and amazing and they're reminders of our common ancestors

or whatever it may be, but there's no like, that's not gonna be solved by some scientific analysis. No, and we still have to, even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by hypothetically well-meaning ignorant Westerners who think in a low-resolution manner

and whose thoughts are contaminated by unaddressed ethical concerns, asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice their lives often to protect animals. It's like, well, first of all, that isn't going to work in the long run because they're just going to kill the damn animals. And that's exactly what you would do if you were there as well. And they're not, you can't just ignore them. And that kind of gets shunted into the well. And they're not, you can't just ignore them. And that kind of gets shunted into the well.

They're human beings contaminating the planet anyways. And so the animals should come first or something like that and not helpful. Urbanization, which you also regard and describe as a net positive. Well, you certainly get the synergistic effect of bringing together,, that right. I mean, look at San Francisco, the Silicon Valley,

the urbanization of a genius population produces an incredible amount of innovation. So urbanization, everyone's moving to the cities. Yeah, I think that right now we have about 55% of humanity living the cities already. So again, all those people are obviously not living on land, which is a good thing. You remember Paul Pot, right?

Cities are parasites on the countryside and should be eradicated. Well, that turned out to be spectacularly wrong in every possible way as well as murderous. So it's a good thing for people to leave their rural environments and move to the city. Good thing, all things concerned. Yes, there are the network and synergetic effects that people living close together

and exchanging ideas and similar companies existing next to each other, communicating and so forth generates more economic growth. And look, the historical record is absolutely clear. Cities have been the drivers of progress. What is this Amsterdam in the 17th century, London, sorry, 18th century, or London in 19th century, New York in the 20th century, that's where stuff happened, not just in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of culture

and things like that. So, and the final point, cities also consume less energy than urban areas per capita, because we have public transport. People don't have to drive their jeeps and four by fours, wherever they go, long distances. So, people consume less energy in cities per capita, and that's again a good thing, I think. So people consume less energy in cities per capita. And that's again a good thing, I think.

People are moving into cities. Cities are where innovation happens on the whole. They're disproportionately innovative. They're bigger, they are the more efficient they are, in some sense. They have fewer gas stations, fewer miles of road, per person, in bigger cities. if you see what I mean, they become more concentrated. More than half the world now lives in cities. That leaves the rest

of the landscape untrampled. Cities only occupy about 3% of the world's land surface, I believe. I believe. So actually, it's a good thing because, and, you know, yes, you know, some of us like to live in rural areas rather than in cities. But those of us who want to can do that. Cities are where people come together and they mix and they have ideas and they produce baby ideas, you know. So it was the city states of ancient Greece, or the city states of Renaissance Italy that really drove the world economy in their day, likewise in Britain and Victorian times, or California today.

California is two great big city states, Los Angeles and San Francisco effectively. So I think the fact that the world is becoming more urbanized or was until the last year, I mean, it'll be interesting to see whether city centers really do lose their allure after the pandemic, because a lot of businesses have discovered that they don't need to pay for expensive real estate. They can let people work from home. I suspect it'll lead to a lot more hot desking, you know, people coming into the office two or three days a week, working from home two or three days a week, which will cut down on commuting, make some of the city's problems less bad, and cut the cost of real estate in the middle of cities.

So I suspect we could have quite a soft landing for some of the problems that cities have these days. But it won't all be plain sailing. I mean, things are going to go wrong in that respect. Escape from Malthusian trap was Robert Malthus' notion was that if you kept people alive, they would simply, if you gave them more food, they would simply have more babies. So, they'd end up just as poor and just as hungry. There was something like that happened in Ireland when when when potatoes became the dominant

crop and then failed, right? So the Irish pop you outlined this in your book. It's not an idea of the originates with me. When the Irish started to farm potatoes, their population exploded and then a blight came in and wiped out the potato crop and and blew out the Irish population. And that's a classic Malthusian example. Yeah. He sort of has also pessimistic biologists. Yeah, and he wasn't entirely wrong in that respect, but the thing he did get wrong

is that technology might change it. And we then moved to a world in which food became more and more productive. Babies stopped dying. We got better at keeping them alive. And weirdly, once they stopped dying, people started having fewer of them. And this is a phenomenon called the demographic transition that took us really by surprise. You know, if you stop baby rabbits dying, they have more babies. But if you stop baby human beings dying, people say, right, I'm not going to try and have as many kids as possible in the hope that a few survive. I'm going to have two. I'm trying to get them through a conversation.

Another thing that's occurred very, very rapidly in the last few generations that no one predicted is that the rate of reproduction is plummeted and increasingly across the world. It looks like as soon as you educate women, open up the marketplace to them and provide a modicum of birth control, as well as these other improvements and living standards that you described, that the birth rate plummet to below replacement. Yeah, and in all of the other countries are going to have problems with below replacement fertility in this coming century, which means that you've got a very aging workforce, which won't be able to afford retirement because there's not enough working people and so on here.

So that's another problem you've got, but it's better than a population explosion continuing to the point where there's 20 billion people trying to live on a planet, which is what we were worried about 40 years ago. I think the projections now are there we're going to peak out at about 11 billion something like that. That's the UN median projection, but a lot of people think it's overblown actually that the numbers, if you run the numbers with sensible, you know, a lot depends on how fast the Nigerian birth rate comes down, as you said earlier. Right. But with a sensible assumption, we might not even get much past 10 billion. Well, it'd be really quite remarkable if an emergent problem for the latter half of the

20th century was that there was too many goods and not enough people. And that could easily be the case, that could easily be the case, especially not enough young people. But so maybe the answer to Malthus is sort of hidden in some sense inside the presumptions you made in your book. So maybe we could pause it as a general biological rule is if the rate of sexual reproduction of ideas exceeds the rate of sexual reproduction of human beings, then there's no Malthusian catastrophe. the rate of sexual reproduction of human beings, then there's no Malthusian catastrophe. That's a very nice way of putting it. I think that is exactly the point I like to make. Yeah. Well, it's possible. It certainly seems to me to be possible, given that we are

clearly able to make more and more using less and less. So long piece basically means that is that there are fewer conflicts since the end of the Second World War. The long-term trends seems to be two-ward, greater peace. We certainly no longer have countries declaring war on each other sending armies across borders to slaughter. That seems to have almost disappeared completely, that idea. If I remember correctly, the last country to declare war was the United States on North Korea. I hope you're wrong on that, but I think I would love for that to be checked.

And maybe you can put a disclaimer on your video that I got it completely wrong, but I actually think that happened. Anyway, so that no longer happens. Now, countries still invade other countries. Like, for example, Russia invaded Ukraine, the little green men who took Crimea. But I think it says something that even governments

that still do these sorts of things do not declare war publicly because they're afraid of how humanity would react to that kind of activity. And so most of the conflicts today, in fact, all conflicts usually tend to be ethnic and civil wars, but they are not really conflicts between countries.

Wars have become less deadly, less deadly, they are smaller and less deadly, but please remember, this doesn't mean that, you know, the past performance suggests future success. I mean, the world is still filled with nuclear weapons. And so- But it also seems even on that front, like, it seems like, certainly people are much less convinced that nuclear weapons will be used purposefully, especially in a mass annihilation than throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. So the nuclear weapons are still there. There's, there's far fewer of them, but imminent war between Russia and the United States certainly doesn't

seem probable in the same manner that it did for that entire Cold War period up till the demise of the Soviet Union. That's right. I mean, we are down from 40,000 nuclear warheads per superpower down to about 3,000. I'm more worried about nuclear, about, sorry, about accidental. Yes, terrorism, and that sort of thing. So that's what really worries me much more. But that's a better worry, in some sense, than all out mass annihilation.

Well, ideally, I mean, you have a lot of smart people who are watching your podcast, and ideally, you know, it could be calculated how many nukes would have to go off of what strength in order for there not to be the end of humanity. In other words, what is the maximum? And if we could convince the international powers to bring the total maximum number of warheads and their strength below that level while still being distributed amongst nuclear powers. You know, then we could decrease that danger even more. I wonder if that would decrease the...

I mean, one of the things I've thought reasonably frequently, although I'm not convinced of it, is that nuclear war is so terrifying that it's actually made us more peaceful. That terrible threat is the fist of God. There's some places we just can't go anymore. People so far, thank God, have been seemed unwilling to go there. May have had benefits. there. So, terrible. It may have had benefits. Yeah, there is a whole branch of international relations, study of international relations, which argues precisely for that. You are not alone. There are a lot of support, supporting you of you. But unfortunately, nuclear power,

nuclear nuclear weapons cannot be unlearned. And so I'm afraid we are stuck with them. And the best that we can do is to bring the number down to a minimal level where superpowers will feel safe without destroying the world. That's just for another day. The last one, trend 10, a safer world. And this is death from natural disasters. world. And this is death from natural disasters. Right. So this particular subject can be looked at from number of angles. One is that we are in this time of panic about existential threat to humanity, from climate change and from the environment. And yet in the last 100 years, the number of people

who have died due to natural disasters has shrunk by 99%. The two are incompatible. If we are moving to a world where millions of people are going to be destroyed by oceans rising or crop failure or whatever, or tsunamis or earthquakes and whatever, why is it that due to natural disasters, that natural disasters have seen 99% decrease in human mortality? And the answer seems to be that partly we are richer and therefore we are able to build more sturdy dwellings. But we are also more technologically savvy so that we can predict where a hurricane going to strike and exactly when so that people can escape from the path of destruction. And we can also detect earthquakes underneath the ocean floor,

giving people on land more time to move to high ground from its tsunami wave and things like that. So, and we're going to get better and better at all. And we're going to get better and better at it, yeah. So, we're richer by far in terms of productivity and quality of products. And absolute poverty is declined precipitously. Commodity prices have fallen.

We're not going to overpopulate the world in any cataclysmic sense. Everyone has increasingly more than enough to eat. There's more land for nature and that trend seems upward. More people are moving to urban areas and that's advantageous rather than disadvantageous. There are more democracies and so we're better governed. We're more peaceful and we're less likely to die from catastrophes. Yeah, I tend to try to squirm out of the optimist pigeonhole because I'm not arguing for looking on the bright side, seeing the glasses

have full. But rather just basing your understanding of the world on data rather than journalism. The problem with journalism being that it is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine in the sense of Amisturisky and Daniel Connovin's availability, heuristic, namely our sense of risk and danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes and images

and narratives that are available in memory. Whereas the, since a lot of good things are either things that don't happen like a country at peace or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news, or are things that build up incrementally a few percentage points a year and then compound, like the decline of extreme poverty.

We can be unaware, we can be out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. Instead, we base our view on data. Then not only do we see that many, although not all things have gotten better, not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general, a lot better. And it also paradoxically, because as I've also cheekily put it, progressives hate progress. But the best possible case for progress, that is for striding for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive,

is again, not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past. And that means why should it stop now? We know that it's possible. So that's the... Do you think that it's a reasonable thing to do from a rational perspective to compare the present to the past rather than to... I mean, there is a tendency to compare the present to a utopian future. And I mean, that's kind of a cognitive heuristic because we're always looking for ways to make things better. And I suppose that's that tendency taken to its extreme.

But it does seem to me that some of the decrying of the current situation is a consequence of comparing it to hypothetical utopia instead of actual, you know, other countries or other times. Yeah, utopia is a deeply dangerous concept because people imagine a world without any problems, and since people disagree with each other, that means that in order to have complete harmony and agreement, you've got to get rid of all those nuicances, those people who are not on board with your plans for utopia, which is of course why it's been the utopians that have been the most mergers, genocidal regimes of history.

What if people start understanding more about their biases, about how they perceive the world? You know, this is obviously done in colleges and universities in psychology courses, as well as in biology courses and things like that. But, you know, it's not as though human beings are incapable of changing their worldview based on evidence. We no longer believe that a sacrifice of a little child will produce better harvest.

So we've learned that lesson. We no longer believe that throwing a virgin into a volcano is going to give us a military success. We no longer believe in all sorts of things that we have taken for granted. In other words, we have shown that we are capable of learning and learning from evidence. We have internalized that focusing on irrigation and fertilization is a better way to produce food than prayer. And that gives me hope that as we move forward, we'll be able to learn more about the rest of the world,

internalize not just that information, but also why we are being pessimistic and negative. What do you think about that? Well, I'm listening and I'm thinking it through. I'm also wondering, I would say that learning this material has made me, has lifted some of the existential weight

from me. Things aren't as bad as they're trumpeted to be. In fact, they're quite a bit better, and they're getting better. And so we're doing a better job than we thought. There's more to us than we thought. We're adopting our responsibilities as stewards of the planet rapidly. We are moving towards improving everyone's life. I lived under an apocalyptic shadow my whole life. I mean, I don't want to complain about that too much because I lived in a very rich place and I had all sorts of advantages and all of that. But the apocalyptic narrative was still extraordinarily powerful and demoralizing. And it looks to me that

there are reasons to doubt its validity on all sorts of dimensions. And I'm not sure what that will do to people, but hopefully it'll make us more optimistic and positive and less paranoid and afraid and happier with who we are, but still willing to participate in improving the future. To lift some of the weight off young people who are constantly being told that the planet is going to burn to a cinder in the next 20 years. And there's no reason for a counterproductive and anti-human pessimism. We could have a planet where there was enough for everyone and where there was enough for the non-human inhabitants to contribute to making life rich. And there's

no reason not to aim for that. And there's absolutely no reason not to assume that it's within our grasp. So we want to aim properly. And we can have what everyone seems to want, whether they're on the right or the left when they're thinking properly, which is in a eradication of absolute poverty. So no one is forced into penery and starvation and no children fail to develop. We can reduce the impact of relative poverty, which is an intransigent problem, but not unaddressable. And we could restore to a large degree or maintain a sustainable ecology around us.

And we don't want to forget that and drown in in our threat sensitivity. Yeah, but we do it by development, not by anti-development. Yeah, we do that by faith in human, by faith in human beings, fundamentally. And I think that faith, I don't think there's any reason for that faith to be unwarranted. We're not a plague on the planet. There's no reason to assume that. And just on that question of optimism,

it's a bit of a evangelical cause for me this, because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man as a boy at school at university. I believed that the population was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life undividually. You know, all that kind of stuff. And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse during my life,

dramatically so. And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody, not just the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups. I think it's quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we're too expect nothing but deterioration before us? That's a great quote, and it's not me, it's Thomas Babington McCauley, Lord McCauley, writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the doomsters saying it can't get better. It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse

in the future. And that's what every generation says. And I think so far they've been wrong, and I think there's a good chance they're wrong now. Well, it might be a consequence of our of the human tendency to overweight negative information. We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that's because you can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy. And so it's better in some sense to err on the side of caution. And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better. I mean, it's a real mystery right, because the news tilts itself very hard towards the catastrophic. And I can't think of any

explanation for that given that news purveyors seek attention. I can't come up with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity for negative emotion. But we do have to overcome that to some degree if it's not in accordance with the facts. Yeah, there's an interesting angle there that I think might be a clue to what's going on. Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units. So we're not very pessimistic about our village. We're not very pessimistic about our town, but we're very pessimistic about our country

and we're extremely pessimistic about the planet. The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are. And of course, so people on the whole think their own life's gonna work out. It's gonna be fine. They're going to stay married. They're going to earn a lot of money.

They're okay when they talk about themselves. I think what that's telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience. Your information about the planet comes from the media. That implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this, that there is a top down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us. Do you have any sense of the motivation for that? I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes. And you'd expect

the news to evolve towards the maximally attention grabbing form, right? And so, apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the sales item of the day, from the perspective of the news companies. Exactly, and this is where my argument breaks down a bit because it becomes circular, because I say, yeah, you're right. The reason they're telling us bad news is because they know that they know we're interested in bad news, so that on the whole, we don't look at good news stories to anything like the same degree. So we're avid consumers of pessimism and that and they play to that. But there's another phenomenon too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden. That's not always true, of course, but it's surprisingly often is true.

You know, 168,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, and the day before. It's a, it's a, it's never newsworthy. Whereas 3,000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper. That is newsworthy because it's so sudden, so unexpected, so new. Well, it's funny when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted, which I think is worth repeating over and over 170,000 people lifted out of poverty today, could be three-inch headlines every day because it's an unparalleled event in human history,

although it's occurring every day right now. But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best. You know, if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you're doing. But if there's a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason why we're prone to seek out negative information. And does that explain why we're loss of verse to the extent we are? Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon. So anyways, the point is, or one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive

to negative information, it can really get out of hand, right, because it can precipitate say a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future or depression or high levels of anxiety or or resentment or even hatred of humanity for that matter if we're the destructive species that were always made out to be. And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward. There's a word I want to introduce to the conversation at this point, which is Panglossian. People sometimes accuse me of being Panglossian. Dr. Pangloss, as you remember, in Indeed,

in Voltaire's novel, is someone who says, he's a caricature of Leibniz, and he says that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And yes, Lisbon has been destroyed by an earthquake, but that must have been because they were evil people because God wouldn't do a bad thing. And it's a very silly argument

and it's being lampooned by a vulture. But actually, the people who say that now are not you and me. We're saying good as this world is compared with what it was, it's a veil of tears compared with what it could be if we press on. We're not saying we've got to the best possible world. We're saying let's keep going. Forget about the pessimism. Forget about the policies that that pessimism was drive. We could make the assumption that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can eradicate poverty.

We can constrain relative inequality to the point where societies are stable. And we can produce a massive increment in environmental quality. And all that's within our grasp if that's what we want within the next 100 years. We're right now talking about how the West or the rich part of the world thinks about this problem. Most people in the rich world actually think the future is going to be a lot worse off, which is one of the reasons why global warming fits into that whole pattern. I think it's wrong. That's also what the model said, that it's even what the UN climate panel says, but that's how people feel.

The other three quarters of the world, which are China, India, Latin America, Africa, they actually believe that their world is gonna be much better in 10, 20, 30 years. They have this future belief that you were just talking about from out of the second world war. They are not going to say, yeah, we're going to do strong climate policy and become poor. They want to mostly become middle income countries and maybe even rich countries eventually.

They will want to do this. So what will happen is both that we're leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well off than we otherwise would be, and that we're actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running, you know, possibly even ahead of us, but certainly running ahead without looking at the same kind of problem. So it does, it does go down to basic principles. It's like, do you believe this is a problem that can be solved by intelligent well meaning people who are doing central planning and I've toyed with those ideas and worked on you and committees that are devoted to What are the you and millennium goals and I looked at how that central planning was done and that's an interesting story in and of itself because it isn't even cabels of experts. So this committee I was on was composed of, you know, ex-presidents and prime ministers and people like that from all over the world. And so

you think, well, they have some political and economic expertise. They're putting together these, the new vision of the UN for the new millennium, let's say, but those aren't the people who are actually making the decisions because they're completely occupied. They already have lives that are absolutely full. So then the decision-making power falls down the bureaucracy until it lands on the shoulders of someone who has spare time for one reason or another. And they make the decisions in the name of that person. And then all those decisions are aggregated and there isn't anybody who's in some sense taking central responsibility for that. So the document that I worked on to begin with looked like it was written by people who were stuck in the 1980s.

It was all Cold War ideology, essentially, the northern hemisphere against the southern hemisphere. And so we just stripped all that out. We just took it out. And the reason we were able to get away with that was that we rewrote it. And no one else wanted to rewrite our rewrite. And so it just stuck. And then there was these 200 millennial goals, essentially. And I looked at that and I thought, well, why those goals? And the answer was, well, there was constituencies of interest for each of those goals.

And then I thought, well, we need to rank order these because there's no bloody way we're going to do all 200. And there was no rank ordering. And the reason for that was it would upset all the constituencies. And I thought, well, you get this weird aggregation of things we need to do. And then the impossibility of rank ordering means you don't have a priority. Like, what's the most important? And how do you decide that?

Well, that problem just wasn't addressed at all. And so this, well, it was an object lesson in how these sorts of things work. It was central planning, but it was so dysfunctional in some way. It's not like, it's partly because there wasn't anyone in the world who had enough intelligence, enough knowledge to make those sorts of decisions. No one, no one exists like that. One of the things you drive home continually is that there are real costs to getting this wrong.

The costs are the money spent and what that money could have been spent on instead. So maybe you could make a case for everyone who's watching. What do you see as the proper set of priorities? Where do we, where do we as a species get the most bang for the buck with regards to these international problems? What are the top 10 things we should be concentrating on? problems. One of the top 10 things we should be concentrating on. Yeah, so, so absolutely just to just to give you a sense of, of the, of the 24-odd dollars you were just talking about before, that people are not willing to spend very much, I think that's one of the reasons why, for instance, our carbon tax is so hard to do. Carbon tax is one of the smart solutions for climate change, but it also makes it very explicit

that you're spending lots of money. So instead, what most people support is that we should be subsidizing green energy, that we should be subsidizing electric cars, that we should be doing a lot of other things that make you feel virtuous. It doesn't feel like it costs all that much, but it actually ends up costing huge amounts of resources. So, so while people saying they're not willing to spend very much, their sentiment actually allows politics to end up spending huge amounts of money. So this really matters. So, sorry, you asked me, what are the things we should be spending our resources? Yeah, and so that also means what are we sacrificing if we concentrate too much on the moral virtue of driving a Tesla, for example, which is a clear status symbol of very expensive and not

obviously related to emeliorating climate change. What are we sacrificing? So as long as we are driving this Tesla, because the government, and that's typically almost everywhere in the world, because the government has spent $5,000 or $10,000 on subsidizing us in order to make us afford to drive this Tesla. That's $10,000 that couldn't go to other things either in our own states, our own nations, where we obviously could have spent, according to what the political decision-making process would decide, you decide, on better education and better care for our elderly, on better COVID care. Right now, there are lots of other things

that are demanding attention. But what we tried to look at was, where could you spend this globally? And I'm gonna talk about a few things because I'm sure we can get back to more of them. So one of the things that we talked about was free trade. So free trade, we know as one of the reasons why almost everyone has gotten rich. The basic point is that instead of me trying to do everything, I specialize, I do one thing and then I have a baker bread,

my bake my bread, I have a butcher do my meat if I'm not vegetarian and You know, you do all these other things and you have all these specialists doing it Having it on an international scale means even more opportunity to have smarter people do what they do best for everyone else and that's why we've gotten rich That's why China has lifted about what's 700 million people out of absolute poverty over the last 30 years, which is one of the biggest achievements in the world. And it's impossible not to be very, very impressive, just simply on the humanity of that project. And of course, we should be doing more of that. But unfortunately,

we have, you know, for a variety of reasons, Trump is obviously a big part of this, but it's also, it started way before Trump, the resentment towards free trade, the sense that this was wrong, has not only meant that many people in the rich world has become less better off than they otherwise could have been, but it's also meant that we have left a lot of people, especially in Africa and South Asia, much less well off. We should be spending some of our resources on making sure that we get more free trade, not less free trade.

How do we do that? How do we do that effectively? And the simple way that we do that, unfortunately, is by subsidizing agriculture. So one of the best, most vested interests against free trade has turned out to be agriculture. It's agriculture in the EU and the US,

Japan, many other places, because they don't want to have that competition. Look, from a private part of you, I understand that. If I was a farmer, I wouldn't want cheap, cheap agricultural produce come in and essentially eradicate my business model. So we need to recognize that we need to subsidize these people. We probably also need to subsidize other people,

the people who would otherwise have lost their jobs. So there's an enormous amount of money that needs to be spent. But it's a good, a good, good, good, good, good, good, money that needs to be spent. But I got confused. Are you speaking about eradicating agricultural subsidies in the West? Are you speaking about subsidizing agricultural productivity in third world countries?

Or I missed the mechanics there. So sorry, I'm talking about subsidizing the people who would otherwise block more free trade. So this is basically subsidizing rich Western farmers to make sure that they're okay with more. Right, so if their livelihood is endangered by the necessity of allowing for competition on the agricultural market, you just buy them out,

like you might do with fishermen who are overfishing the ocean. Yes, exactly. And this is not a potential, this is not perfect by any means, but it's a way to actually solve the problem of getting more of the stuff that will help humanity. Any idea what the benefit is of that compared to the cost and is that so? idea what the benefit is of that compared to the cost and is that calculated? Yes, so we made the estimate that for every dollar you spend on these subsidies, you will help the world about $2,000. Basically, because you can generate an enormous amount of

internal growth. So we estimate that you could actually make every person in the developing world about $ thousand dollar richer per person per year in 15 years. That's okay. So wait, you got it. We're going to slow down there because those are unbelievable. Those are unbelievably massive claims. to subsidize rich agricultural producers in the West to the tune of a dollar a year buys you a thousand dollars in increased revenue globally. Two thousand. It's a two thousand to one return. Yes. And this is basically because this is the World Bank's dynamic trade models

that show that once you get a society that's able to trade internationally and openly, you also get enhanced growth within those countries. So that means they, by themselves, get to be better so that, and these would mostly be poor countries, there would also be a lot of rich countries, but these would mostly actually help the world's poor because they have the most catching up to do. And they will then be much better off. Not only would that be better for them, because if you're poor, $1,000 is a lot better than if you're rich, getting another $1,000, but also because it will help them generate all the other things it would like to have, education, health, resilience to global warming. So the whole point here is to recognize that this is one of the things that are hard to have a discussion about.

There are very few people are advocating global free trade. There are lots of people advocating against it. But we need to recognize this is one of the things that have helped pull out most people of poverty that we know could do even more in the future and that we have a real opportunity to achieve. So that's- Well, you don't have ice flow abandoned cuddly polar bears as portraits of the farmers that you're going to help abstractly in third world countries. So you have a sales and marketing problem there and that's a real problem, right? Yeah. And you know, it's interesting that the economic models don't take into account the difficulty of propagating the message. You know, you know what I mean?

Is that because there is a sales and marketing problem there, and it's not trivial. And it might be that a dollar spent in agricultural subsidies to rich farmers in the West would produce that $2,000 return. But the question might be how much money would you have to spend advertising that before people would believe it? And that's a crucial question. You know, with a standard entrepreneurial product, I don't think it's unreasonable to estimate

that 65 to 95% of the cost is in sales and marketing. Five percent is production. And that's a great argument. So in some sense, you're good-occupied. What we try to do with the Copenhagen consensus where we make these priority lists is just simply give you the raw data for what would academically be the smartest things to invest in.

But you're absolutely right. There's no cut and cutuddly of, you know, selling points to free trade. And actually to most of our top outcomes, so let me just give you a few of the other ones. So the second best is family planning and probably also basic emergency character to women. This will deliver about $100 back for every dollar.

You think that would also be extremely attractive to people on the left. It should be attracted to everyone. Yeah. Yes. Because look, remember, right now, about 400,000 mothers die in childbirth. And about two million kids die in the first 28 days of their life here in earth. And we know we could save many of these, not all of them, but many of these by simple measures, you know,

for instance, making sure that you don't get that the the pregnant women don't get high blood pressure pre pre clamps, you know, and clamps, you know, which kills more than 100,000 women every year. By a simple emergency measures when you come into a facility, give birth and you have a problem. If you have simple procedures to make sure that that problem can be dealt with, often with fairly cheap. You don't need more doctors, you just need nurses or even assistant helpers.

You can do a lot of these things. We know that you can do a lot of these things. We know that you can do this for very low cost. And then again, if you have, there's about 215 million people, women who don't have access to prevention. So family planning, if you could get them family planning, not all of them would use family planning all of the time, but it would mean that they would space their kids better, they would be able to give more investment into each one of their kids. That would get them better educated. There would be a lot of knock on effects, but mostly this would mean that a lot of moms

wouldn't die in childbirth, and their children that they do give birth to would have better lives. And again, we estimate this would cost about $3 billion a year, but it would pay dividends both in terms of saving moms, saving kids, but also growing the economy because what's known as the demographic dividend, if you have slightly fewer kids, you have more productivity because you have the same amount of capital, but fewer kids, that means you get to be faster richer. That's essentially what China has done in a sort of boosted way

by their one child policy. I'm not advocating that at all. But it's a, it's, it gives you a good sort of insight. Then there are lots of health things we talked about tuberculosis. We could probably spend a dollar on tuberculosis and help people not die, help people being better off, help families not dealing with tragedies of losing their mom and dad. It's typically, you know, people in their middle ages that die from tuberculosis. Every dollar spent would avoid about $43 of social benefits. Sorry, would generate $43 of social benefits.

If you look at childhood immunization, we've stopped a lot of the really damaging childhood diseases. So we've gone from a world where about 12 million children died just in 1980 to now only about 5 million children died just in 1980, to now only about five million children die every year below the age of five. But clearly that's still way too many. We could probably save a million children for a billion dollars a year. Just think about that. We estimate that for every dollar spent there, you do about $60 worth of good.

So again, the whole point here is to recognize that lots of, lots of amazing things that you can do. And I was letting my internal cynic respond to your arguments and trying to adopt the position of someone who might be critical of them. I know that arguments for ameliorating the lot of the poor that were put forth in the 60s were often counter-manded by the claims often of environmentalists that you don't want to help the poor because they'll breed more and that will just lead to more of the kind of problems that you're trying to solve. And so, you know, the question might be why would someone object to saving a million children a year through immunization, or I think you said two million

children as a consequence of enhanced maternal care. And I can imagine similar arguments like that being raised, you know, whether consciously or implicitly. But those things should be made implicit. So let, I would encourage people who are watching this or listening to this. You know, a lot of you have chopped up my YouTube videos into small videos and sometimes animated sections of them and otherwise distributed them beyond just outlined for the top four investment strategies

for a better planet. And it might be useful to consider ways that that information can be distributed as widely as possible. widely as possible.