The Ricochet Podcast - Abundant Malthusiasm

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

We have a lot for you this week! Covering everything from atoms to commodities and precivilization to our indictmentpalooza. James, Rob and Steve discuss the latest from Mar-a-Lago; Hunter's crumbled plea deal; and the disengenous reaction to Florida's African American History curriculum. They enjoy some good news with guest Marian Tupy, whose latest book Superabundance reminds us of mankind's still-favorable prospects for grow and flourish in the years to come. The guys consider the difference between the environmentalists who've spent years predicting doom and the economists who bet on progress.

Oh, look at Mr. Rockefeller here with his diamond-tipped walking stick. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too. Read my lips. They want to replace history with lies. Like snakes who lay in the grass, they emerge to cast their sniper fire.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long. I'm James Lylex and Stephen Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson. And today we talk to Mari and Toofy about superabundance. We've got lots to bring you, so let's have ourselves a podcast. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I agree. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 652. I'm James Lollux in Minneapolis, where it is hot. Rob Long is in Gotham, which of course steams unendurably in the summertime.

Stephen Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson. And we don't know if Stephen is calling us from a pub in England or somewhere in California or wherever his peripatetic journeys may take him. Stephen, welcome. Where are you right now? Not that it matters. I'm out here in California, although I have to say I'm very suspicious that what's really going on here is that Peter, the whole reboot process of the Peter Robinson AI robot is not going well. No, it's not. This prolonged absence has to be. No, it's not. It's not.

Its questions are too short, frankly. It's too efficient. We have to work on those. So, gentlemen, of course, the heat is on everybody's mind since this is we are now told i think the hottest summer in 265 000 years yeah um they have found i i believe extremely accurate records from uh caveman era where they scrawled down in celsius interestingly enough on the cave walls uh records from from uh from the roman civilization indicate that they that this exceeds the temperature in pompeii at the height of the rain of pumice and

fire so we're in bad shape here and obviously as we're told the gulf stream is going to do something very bad in three years and disaster and dire things await us all i've been hearing this for a while now and i'm a bit inured to it. So perhaps we should find something that's even more pressing that people will be talking about in the eons to come, and that is the welter of indictments. I joke, of course, if you go and look at old papers, they're always full of indictments of this, that, or the other, which are never thought about six months or a year later. But this one seems to be important because it does sort of suggest, with the dismaying feeling that a lot of us have, that there's something of a two-tier justice system working.

Now, when we were talking before the show about matters etymological and weather and slavery and all sorts of interesting things, it would have made for a cracking good podcast, Rob said that there was another indictment besides the one that Hunter Biden is facing that he finds as fascinating if not more so yeah i mean i think the trump indictments are kind of interesting don't you think uh indeed so go on well i mean the uh you know i am not a lawyer i will start by saying i'm not i do not i've not i'll say instead i have not uh passed the bar in the state of new york but um no you've stopped and had an old-fashioned

at every damn exactly it's an old joke old joke sorry this this whether it's fair or not fair or whether i don't i'm whether the uh this is how they always get you right they get you on trying to squash evidence they get you on you know when, when there's a discovery process or there's a process and you're erasing voicemails or text mails or trying to go into a security camera and erase the tape. This is like, I mean, if you just took out the proper names and you inserted, you know, Gambino, Vito Gambino and Tony Two Cheeses Luchese or something like that um that's exactly how this is how it's done this is how how it always ends up being this um whether that's right or wrong i just think it's interesting that if you'd had to put money down on um whether you're going to find evidence that you know there was a donald trump is a stage villain twirling his mustache and saying i'm going to take these secret documents i'm going to take them down to my lair in mar-a-lago and i'm going

to keep them and sell them or whatever right the likelihood of finding that is probably like two percent right the likelihood of finding a person any person saying i'm under investigation wait a minute that looks incriminating that piece of evidence so destroy it that is like 99 likely that's how that's what these things all are so um the weird thing to me is that somebody who's as lawyered up as trump what he needed was he needed a lawyer who's going to tell him the truth probably and he needed to follow that advice um so that would that's my that's my quick fast take uh uh on it without really coming down on whether it's fair or not fair or whether it just just doesn't seem surprising that the reason that he's indicted is because of trying to destroy evidence well i think trump's problem is he didn't have rosemary woods still around to do an 18 minute

gas exactly exactly yeah but there is something odd about this which is a week ago we had the news came out very dramatically that trump had received his target letter from the special counsel jack smith and there were some charges talked about connected to january 6th and they looked a bit strange but unprecedented and so forth but everyone expected that what we were going to get this week were the indictments for his actions around January 6th. And we didn't get that. Instead, we got supplemental charges about the Mar-a-Lago document business. I don't know what to make of all that, unless they're still holding that back for a more dramatic moment. I don't know. But that was kind of the twist of this, was that it's not

January 6th being indicted yet. And I don't know know that seems odd to me well to me it seems like i mean the january 6th stuff six six stuff is complicated and nuanced and was he real i mean uh were the even the georgia post-election stuff was he threatening the secretary of state of georgia what was he saying really that that Those are questions. These seem to be like, we told you not to destroy the thing, and you destroyed the thing. Right? Like, you told your employee to get rid of that tape. That's like, I don't know, I mean, low-hanging fruit, maybe, or whatever that is, it just seems to be like, yeah, we're going to get that

no matter what that's just that's just what happens now um the other stuff unfortunately for us i think the other stuff is more interesting and probably is more meaningful and has more sort of historical value and more um just more i mean for me just just just more legally uh consequential. And I suspect that, like a lot of things, we're never going to get there. That the people who are after him just want to get him for something. It's Al Capone time for them. And if I can get him for, you know, trying to unplug a, you know, a camera, I'll get him for that. If I can get him for trying to un you know trying to strong arm the

secretary of state in georgia to lie about the election results that seems a little harder you know it's like so it's it's the essence of our it's the essence of our times yeah we'll never really know yeah no whatever lab or from a bat in the cave you know we'll never really know uh did trump do this did he not yeah we'll never really know. Did Trump do this? Did he not? Yeah, we'll never really know. We'll just have sort of a vague outcome at the end that is an anti-climax and then we all move along. If I were Trump, I would plead guilty immediately. But with a Hunter Biden codicil that gave me that gave me blanket immunity from anything that I should do in the future, anything that I might be prosecuted for in the future, which I think is. I mean, if you can imagine a Donald Trump who would go in back into the presidency with in his pocket legal immunity from anything that he did.

Wow. That would be a rather untrammeled, zesty set of four years. But of course, that's not going to happen. Briefly touching then on the hundred Biden thing, unless you still want to have something more to say about Trump. What did you make of this? What did you make of this? And were we one judge away from, from Hunter Biden, indeed getting, you know, absolute immunity from the future, from any foreign register foreign agent registration act stuff. If the judge hadn't noticed what was

in there we we we might have seen um the fellow right and and and um and suffer no kind well of course what cnn was reporting what everybody else was saying was that look fox news has mentioned hunter biden 104 times and it's not even noon today as if he's a private citizen what does this have to do with him alone as if this isn't really particularly consequential to the issue of his treatment and the big guy the big guy the 10 percenter guy i mean but that's what bugs me about it right what bugs me about it is that this is like again none of this is spectacularly unusual and nobody should be shocked by this this is influence peddling it's been illegal they talked about it in the constitutional convention i mean the idea that there was going to be influence peddling was something that the

founders worried about something that people worry about some something was sort of legal for a while and then illegal now we are i think you know since the 70s the influence peddling was something that the founders worried about, something that people worry about. Something that was kind of legal for a while and then illegal. Now we are, I think, you know, since the 70s, influence peddling is a big deal. This is what this is. That's what we would have called it if we didn't live in this bizarre hyper-partisan age where every single journalist works for the Democratic Party. influenced the but the only reason you give an influence peddler immunity is to get the person he was selling the influence of or by or however that works right the only reason you give somebody immunity is because you got a bigger fish or or right that's one that's one interpretation so who's the bigger fish right there's only one and one. And he's behind the Resolute desk.

I don't know if he knows he's behind that desk, but he's probably behind that desk right now. Or you do it so that it's all over. So you plead guilty to some weird thing, and then it's all over. And there's no influence peddling investigation because there's no influence peddling charges you can bring. Now, I am now channeling Andy McCarthy with this, but there are really only otherdling um that you can charges you can bring now i am now channeling andy mccarthy with this but they're really only other two reasons why you give some they're only two reasons you give somebody immunity right is there another one i'm missing well i think that they thought they could sneak one by the judge and it's pretty clear that that they try to see

and what you hear by the way from democrats and media, but I repeat myself as well, this is a Trump-appointed district judge. Well, it turns out the judge was approved in the Senate by a voice vote, which meant that to get to the arcana of these things, both Democratic senators in Delaware signed off the blue slip process, as it's called. And I think it's possible she might be a Democrat. That's what my writing partner, John Hinderocker, thinks. And I'll bet they thought, you know, she's part she might be a Democrat. That's what my writing partner, John Hinderocker, thinks. And I'll bet they thought, you know, she's part of the Delaware legal community. She's a good old gal, and she'll probably sign off on this. And I think they knew it was risky, and she decided not to have any part of it.

So good for her. Now, I think further that, what do you think of Hillary Clinton right now? I only got a hundred thousand dollars from my cattle futures and i could have gotten 15 million dollars from ukraine adjusted for inflation and of course there's the question of where the money comes from you know the uh the interesting thing of course is is the the chinese connections and the rest of it because you don't remember a little while ago we were all concerned and absolutely panicked about China taking over the world and the rest of it. And while there's still a threat, you have to admit that their own

Lumi demographic problems are something of a difficulty for them. And speaking of demographics, he said, grinding the gears to a segue to a shift, not to a commercial, but to a guest. We would like to welcome to the podcast, Marian Tupi, the editor of humanprogress.org, senior fellow of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and the co-author of Superabundance, the story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet.

Welcome. It's a delight to be with you. Well, here's the thing. There was a great tweet the other day where somebody was talking about the various paradigms in science fiction literature. In the 1950s, there was an assumption that there would be a nuclear war and there would be mutants roaming a radioactive world. In the 60s, as always, scary technology was going to do it, but we're going to get out there Heinlein style and we're going to colonize.

In the 70s, the reigning paradigm in science fiction was the collapse and constriction of the human prospect, of famine, of overpopulation, of books like Make Room, Make Room, which was Soylent Green, and the rest of it, and that we're facing this world in which people would be clawing over each other in a hot, sweaty mass, scrambling for the last little bit of resources. Didn't happen. But I grew up in that. That was what I was marinated in, because all of these

Malthusian ideas were coming back to us. Now, Malthus and the Acolytes predicted a lot of these catastrophes, and a lot of them have lived to see it not happen. Tell us about Malthus and Ehrlich and the rest of them, and why they didn't see what exactly a free, prosperous future would look like. Well, thanks for having me. Malthus, obviously, is an 18th century figure. He was an English-Anglican cleric who became fascinated with mathematics and especially two rates of growth. One, linear rate of growth, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and the other, exponential growth, 1, 2, 4, 16, 32, etc. And he believed that whereas resources only grew at a linear rate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, population would grow at an exponential rate and consequently the gap between the two rates would result in famine. Now, as we have documented in our book, actually during Malthus' own lifetime,

whilst the population of Britain increased by something like 50%, the price of flour, on which most people back then depended on their sustenance, has fallen by about 36%. So, even whilst Malthus was writing, food was already becoming cheaper, even though the population was expanding. And there's a very interesting parallel here with Marx, who dies in 1883. And of course, his theory predicts the immiseration of the proletariat. In fact, by the time he dies, it's evident to absolutely anyone that the English working class is becoming richer. At any rate, Malthus continued to feature in the background for a very long time, but then in the second half of the 20th century, the population of the third world specifically started to expand dramatically, and that was partly because Western medicines and best practices and

better agricultural techniques started to penetrate the developing countries and so suddenly you saw these massive increases in population of China and India Etc and that's what Paul Ehrlich enters our picture uh he famously 1968 wrote the population bomb in which he predicted hundreds of millions of people would die that didn't happen he predicted that England wouldn't exist by the year 2000 it would be swallowed up by waves That didn't happen. He predicted that England wouldn't exist by the year 2000. It would be swallowed up by waves. That didn't happen. And he advocated in favor of the government putting drugs in the water system in order to make men infertile and things like that. And I think that to our current audience, especially to young people, you may ask, what on earth does it have to do with us?

Well, Ehrlich, who is still alive, just turned 90, was on CBS 60 Minutes in January as an authority on human population and consumption. He's still around. And other Malthusian voices, famously AOC, asking her followers, is it still okay to have children? Bill Maher, I'm a huge fan. He's very funny and a very smart guy, but he's a Malthusian. He's a hardcore Malthusian. Almost every show, he talks about resources and how we are going to run out of water and God knows what else, and it's all nonsense. Well, first of all, I should just say that you you and i spoke on the phone about a month ago and you sent me a copy of your book which i read and to

warn people it looks like a big book it's like the size of a brick but about a third of it are tables and graphs which you can just gleefully ignore just to read because i ain't gonna read but to get to the narrative and the narrative is we're gonna be fine right there's a high presumption well i i think that rational optimism is justified because people are not just consumers they are also producers where ehrlich went wrong and and generations of scholars like him, is that they are fundamentally, most of them are biologists. They think of human beings in the way that they think about rats or rabbits, meaning

that you have a lot of rain, you have a lot of grass, rabbits have a lot of food, they eat a lot, they have sex a lot, they produce a lot of babies, then they consume everything, and then there's a catastrophe. What is the big difference between rabbits and humans? What is the big difference between biologists and economists? It's that we understand that humans are special. We are special because we innovate. Animals don't innovate, humans do. When we run against some sort of a problem, some sort of scarcity, we immediately search for ways to get around it, such as the Green Revolution in the 1970s, or, for example, looking for a vaccine to COVID. You know, our ancestors, and certainly animals, would never dream of solving a problem we immediately switch into a

solution solutionism kind of mindset which tells us let's look for a solution to this problem and your evidence for this just to be clear to everybody your evidence for this is the sum total of human history from the beginning of time to today for human progress and human flourishing and human problem solving and their evidence this sort of what we'll call them the rational pessimists right their evidence is yeah yeah yeah but that's all over now right isn't that essentially what they're saying they're not they're not disputing your view of all of human history from the beginning of time to today they're just saying yeah yeah, but you know,

that's, it's all different now, right? Is that basically their argument? I think that you are onto something. I mean, aside from, you know, you have to ask question. I mean, how many times do the predictors of imminent apocalypse have to be wrong before you sort of begin to discount their viewpoints. But another thing is that part of chapter one is devoted to what we call negativity biases. This is a very well trodden area in psychology. And one of the negativity biases that we have is so-called end of the point, sort of end of history titus. In other words, every generation thinks that they are somehow special. They are at the turning point of history and that it is in their time. I mean, it's basically, part of it is sort of like narcissism, is that you think that you are so special that every

problem, everything is going to get resolved in your own time. But this is how it happened throughout human history. Everybody thinks that they are standing on the precipice. Can I jump in on that point, Rob, because I think this is crucial. So, Mary and Steve Hayward out in California, a longtime fan, first-time caller, that's what they say. Very nice to see you. Yeah. So, you know, people have asked, I've been part of this game for a long time, talking about environmental progress before I went back into academia to be miserable. And people often ask me, why are environmentalists in particular so gloomy? And I finally came to the view because it makes them happy. And what I mean by that is an experience I've had where I presented your data, the data of people like Hans Rosling or Matt Ridley or Max Rose or other people

you know very well, Julian Simon. And I have this strange experience with students. They're either angry that there's good news or they're depressed. I've actually had students in class saying, I've never seen, I've never heard information like this before. And why are they depressed? Well, because I've just taken away their cause. I've just taken away this redemptive potential of their lives. And you mentioned, you know, I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but I follow your site all the time. I don't know how to explain that except from psychology. And once you're into that realm, we're out of the sort of transcendence.

Now, you don't have to be religious to believe in transcendence. Religious people obviously have a very strong concept of transcendental life after death. But even secular people have a sense of the transcendental. You want to have children to pass down your genes. You know, it's not the end. When you die, your children live on. Maybe if you don't have children, you devote yourself to writing books because you want something to live after you. You know, even us libertarians here at the Cato Institute, you know, we may be individualists, but we do derive some sort of utility, some sort of a psychological satisfaction of being part of something larger, the cause of liberty, right?

So I think that people in general aim for transcendence, and this is specifically important for young people who, on top of that, existential angst, also have a sense of the heroic. In other words, that when people are very young, you know, in their late teens and twenties, they develop this sense that they are empowered to, by boundless energy and optimism, to transform the world into utopia. And that's part of the reason why I think that environmentalism has such a purchase on on on human psyche but especially amongst the young the cosmology of this sort of depression is all-encompassing there's nothing that really doesn't fit into it um and you can i mean there's no structure that you can't find blame in from corporatism to you know the way the the country. I mean, it's an all-inclusive

explanatory mind view that has the satisfying aspect of misanthropy, which also appeals to the, you know, they're simultaneously idealistic and simultaneously misanthropic. But how do we get out of this? I mean, aside from letting everybody read your book, telling people, for example, that we're not, I mean, it was all assumed when I was growing up that we're going to run out of oil. Just the wells were going to be screeching and pumping and spewing dust within five, six years or so. And as it turns out now, that wasn't the case. Partially due to technology and partially, I think, I'm the nutcase who believes in the biogenic origin of oil, but that's another day.

They will believe that a finite planet simply cannot produce sufficient resources to provide prosperity for everybody else. But they're wrong, aren't they? Right. So, theoretically speaking, our planet has a finite number of atoms on it. Until the time when our knowledge progresses to such a level where we are able to drag atoms from outer space by, let's say, mining on the moon or alternatively capturing comets or simply draining the universe of hydrogen. Whatever we have on the planet, we have. Now, that being said, we have only explored a fraction of the planet, and we have absolutely no idea what's happening on the bottom of the oceans.

So we have thousands of years ahead of us in which we can explore our planet, get to resources that we don't know exist. One of the reasons why we don't know about many elements is because they are so cheap that there is no reason why we should go on exploring them. But if something gets very expensive, then we have an incentive to explore. The modern twist on this seems to be not that there's not enough stuff for us to get, but it is wrong for us to get it. That is a violation somehow of the ethos of the earth, of the Gaia, that it's exploitative to go down there and get it when it's actually necessary, but treating the earth as some sort of

permanent stasis system that cannot be disturbed by man, that it is unethical to do so. Am I right? Sure. No, that's absolutely right. I mean, I wouldn't be the first to draw attention to the similarities and parallels between Christianity and Judaism, for example, monotheistic religions overall, and environmentalism. Now, I don't say this as a religion hater or something like that. I simply point out that environmentalism, the structure of environmental movement is very similar to that of these monotheistic religions. You have the god, which is Gaia. You have Mother Earth. You have the Garden of Eden, which is Earth before industrialization. You have your priesthood, the IPCC, you know, if you disagree with them or if you criticize them, then you are a heretic.

You have your saints, Greta Thunberg. You even have your devils. Now, those are obvious. Those are the CEOs of fossil fuel companies and fossil fuels and whatever. You're probably in there, too, by the way. And so is Cato. Don't you excuse yourself from the devil pantheon. I'm sure. And finally, and most interestingly, we have, of course, indulgences.

Just like the Catholic Church before Reformation, you can be an utter hypocrite. You can fly around the world on a private jet. You can live in one of your six, 12-bedroom houses, but so long as you say the right things, so long as you go and march with the Green Movement, all of these are washed away. So, there are these parallels. Now, finally, to your point about it's sinful. Yes, there is a religious aspect to it, which is sinfulness, raping of Mother Gaia. But there is also a more, shall we say, materialistic concern, which is what do you do with the byproduct of human activity? In other words, even if you don't believe that we are going to run out of, let's say copper or zinc or whatever humans consume so much that at some point we are going to destroy the air air we are going to destroy the the earth and so on so and and this is tied to an environmental concept of natural things that at some point you

are going to cross a threshold at which point the the the the sphere, the biosphere on which you rely on sustenance is going to collapse. The only problem is that after 40 years of research, we have no idea how to measure these biological sinks and thresholds and what it would take in order to overcome or rather prevent those thresholds from being overcome. A perfect example of that would be something like what happened in Chernobyl. Chernobyl is now a refuge for wildlife, even though it's obviously a place that was heavily polluted by the nuclear explosion. The other place to look is the Bikini Atoll. The United States had dropped 25 nuclear weapons, nuclear bombs on the Bikini Atolls in the 1950s. The marine life has completely recovered, and even life on the islands, such as palm crops, seem to be doing just fine. Now, this doesn't mean that we should be going

out of our way in order to destroy the Earth. I feel I'm an environmentally conscious person. What I am saying is that it probably takes a lot in order to destroy and in order to cross these thresholds. And we need to, and there's nothing wrong in rebalancing the debate back to anthropocentric kind of approach, as opposed to Gaia-based approach. If I could jump in again. By the way, Marion, I've looked at in detail some of those ecological footprint models. And as you know, they're all heavily dependent on one thing to get their dire outcome, and that's CO2 emissions. Okay, leave that aside for another day.

Rob mentioned that the premise of your enterprise is the story of human creativity, which is co-evil with civilization itself, except I think there's an inflection point uh and i always like to say that maybe the two most important charts of all those that you produce show starting around roughly 1800 uh life expectancy starts to soar the number of people living in dire poverty goes from 98 and starts falling precipitously a lot of that's a 20th century story poverty a lot of that's the last 40 50 years on a global scale uh what explains that? What are your theories for that? I mean, I gather that there's still debate among economists and economic historians about what explains economic growth. Is it technology? Is it markets? Is it rule of law? Is it democracy? And I mean, I have my own opinions, but I'd like to hear yours. So, yes, you are drawing attention to a fundamental issue here. Human beings have

always innovated, but innovation was sporadic and it took a very long time. You know, the Alduan Stone Age technology appears three million years ago, but then it remains unchanged until Acheulean Stone Age emerges one and a half million years ago. So people were apparently perfectly willing to use Alderweirend technology for one and a half million years without innovating at all. So people have always innovated, but slowly and sporadically. 200 years ago begins the age of what economic historians refer to as the period of sustained innovation. In other words, that innovation happens every day. It happens constantly. And in some ways, certainly the way that we measure it, innovation is actually accelerating.

So what are the reasons for it? The key reason that I zeroed in, primarily because almost all economic historians give it some credibility, is inter-jurisdictional competition between European states. What does that mean? It means that after the rise of gunpowder, after the invention of gunpowder and the rise of the gunpowder empires, China, Ottoman Empire, Russia, etc., there was only one place in the world where there was civilization. By that, I mean cities and writing, which did not have an imperial structure,

and that was Europe. Yes, European powers did have external empires, but in Europe, there was no empire. Europeans were on each other's throats all the time, and they were threatening each other's independence all the time. And so in China, in the imperial China, China was so big that you were not really worried about being swallowed up by your competitors. What you were worried about was being destroyed from within by new ideas. In Europe, the problem was opposite. You were

constantly worried about somebody swallowing you up. And so what these European elites did, they permitted domestic innovation and disruptive ideas to emerge in order to create more wealth and more growth to protect themselves against being swallowed up by their geopolitical adversaries. Hey, Marian, have you just described capitalism? I've described how capitalism can survive, that it needs countries continuously innovating and showing to the rest of the world that things can be done in a better way. If you do have a global government, if you do have one tax tax system for the entire world then of course you will then then you could lose that innovative innovative spurt because because that is for innovation to happen and for growth to happen you have to have different countries trying different sets of freedoms and responsibilities

to move ahead just like we have to some extent in the United States. Part of the reason why I'm so excited about our, or why I like the federal system so much is because right now, look at what's happening in terms of competition when it comes to school vouchers and education. Look at what's happening in competition on state taxes. You know, competition is driving it down and that's basically in in a nutshell what happened in europe okay so um i mean people i guess what i'm trying to say is whose fault you know there's always that that people always complain about um uh after the world war ii the big american foreign policy question was who lost china right like who who blew it which american policymaker which american

policy lost china um who lost capitalism because i think you just described capitalism and i would say i would make a full-throated argument that it was capitalism human that led to human flourishing and human flourishing is what led to this incredibly golden age we live in now and yet um everywhere i you know if i read the new york times today i'm sure there's somebody saying it's late stage capitalism that capitalism is is there is there is responsible for more misery when in fact you know a third of your graphs in that book just show you that no actually capitalism has brought immense immense good to the world in by a factor it isn't even just you know some good some bad it's almost

entirely good news um why is that is it just do we need another word it's just capitalism's a bad word now um yes capitalism is a bad word it it was meant as a pejorative. My colleague, Deirdre McCluskey, emphasizes innovism. I've heard people talking about solutionism. Obviously, the mainstream within our world talks about free markets rather than capitalism. And why is that important is because capitalism is not built by accumulating capital. Sorry, modernity and economic growth was not built by accumulating capital. If all you needed and economic growth was not built by accumulating capital. If all you needed was to accumulate capital, then imperial Spain would have been the most prosperous country in the world because they had a lot of accumulated capital. In fact,

modernity and economic growth and prosperity emerges in Holland and Britain, which didn't have that much capital. So, capitalism doesn't matter. Capital matters much less than innovation, and innovation is dependent on human freedom. In other words, the human freedom to be able to apply disruptive ideas in order to be able to benefit from them. Now, who lost it? Now, who lost it? Good question.

I think that, well, first of all, capitalism never had a wholesale purchase on the parts of the elites or even common people. There has never been a successful political party, which was called a capitalist party. There were countless socialist parties and communist parties, which were even parts of government in Western democratic nations, but there has never been a capitalist country. We don't even have a name for that. I mean, a democrat is somebody who emphasizes democracy. You know, a socialist is somebody who advances socialism, but capitalist is somebody who manipulates capital rather than advances capitalist ideas. So we didn't even have a name for it.

Can I offer a possibility for that? Sure. One of the reasons why we don't have a name for it can i can i offer a possibility for that sure the reason why we don't have a name for it one of the reasons why we don't do that is because capitalism is inherently scary and that if you're in if you're an elite if you're on the top you don't really like capitalism so much because you want to keep things the way they are uh in terms of power in terms of wealth you don't really want that capitalism by definition is dynamic i mean you look at the the vast amount of wealth that was created in the 19th century in britain

or in this country for that matter and and how quickly how how many of those sort of newly minted lords and ladies and newly minted uh robber barons and industrialists in the united states were about one generation or half a generation or maybe zero generations from poverty. There is something about poor people getting rich that just bugs the crap out of rich people. We have a study out here at Cato showing that the attrition rate for super wealthy people in the Forbes 400 is 3% per annum. So within a generation of, let's say, 30 years, you have a brand new group of people within the Forbes 400, because people who are there simply, simply they atrophy and the wealth gets divided or lost and so on and so forth.

Another great thing about the United States is that most of the people who are super wealthy in America today are actually self-made. They are not descendants of kings and queens and nobility and whatever in Europe. Of course, you're right that elites always have a preference in the status quo. And it's only when they are fundamentally threatened that they take their foot off the neck of the ordinary people perfect example of it was is what happening what's happening in china right now uh the you know she thought that he was losing control over china so he uh doubled down on communist control of the country at the cost of massive economic uh losses and and declining economic growth.

And already there is a lot of talk about him making a U-turn and embracing market again because the Chinese Communist Party can remain in charge of the state only as long as it can say and show that it produces superior economic results, which is impossible if you have so much economic, if you have so much control, and if your interest is in the status quo. So, I mean, the current environmental movement, I mean, part of it, we have to say, is, I will stipulate, is in good faith, people who are in good faith and want to protect the earth, I understand that that but there's also this part of it that just feels like you know um poor people should just stay poor

that like maybe everyone should just stop inventing stuff and coming up with new stuff and i mean you in order to really be i mean, I want to talk a little bit about your phrase, infinitely bountiful, which I need, but in order to believe the sort of the current environmental movement, you have to believe that it's over. And I think there are some people who believe it's over, as you described the psychology, but I think there's also a bunch of people who just want it to be over. Because if it's not over, it means they still have to work. Can I add on to your question a little bit, Rob? Sorry. Well, Mary, we started with Malthus, and an awful lot of environmentalists, the smarter ones, have been trying to get away from Malthusianism for a while.

They'll actually say, yeah, Malthus was wrong. But then they're like, I always like to say, they're like people just out of a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and they go by a well-lit tavern, and they stumble in and go on a bender. And now we have, as you know, a degrowth movement. They openly call themselves a degrowth movement. So they're back to malt this under a different label. And so, yeah, I mean, Rob is asking the question, what do we make of, how do we think about these people who are determined to not be poor, we're against progress itself? I mean, that was the Unabomber's manifesto, right? Progress

itself is bad. What do we do about that? Well, look, in a way, yes, Rob asked the right question, but I don't think it's necessary to go into details trying to figure out their motivations, because their agenda has been clear since Rousseau. Rousseau is the first Enlightenment intellectual who objects to modernity. He agrees with Condorcet and others that modernity, this freedom which has led to more economic growth, has made us richer. But he thinks that as people become richer, they become less moral, that they begin to obsess about material goods, about fulfillment of their material needs, at the expense of, let's say, thinking deeply about universal questions and things like that. So, Rousseau is the first one.

And Rousseau birthed a bi-political movement called Romanticism. And what is the romantic objection to capitalism? It's exactly what Rousseau said and what Rob just pointed out, is that desires of the common people, of the ordinary people, are somehow less valuable of what the elites want. The elites want, you know, to spend their time thinking about deep questions. What Hoi Po want is a bigger house with a swimming pool and two cars in a garage. And that is crass. It is materialistic. But that's what the Romantic Movement was about. The Romantic Movement. So, Rousseau gives birth to the Romantic Movement. And the Romantic Movement then gives birth to whom? To the socialists and also to national socialists what the national socialists and

socialists have in common is rejection of capitalism and the expressed desires of the masses they shouldn't be in they shouldn't be indulged in their crass in their crass materialistic obsessions rather the state and society should function at the behest of the ruling elite. So there is nothing new under the sun. It's just that we have moved on from a socialist criticism, sorry, romantic criticism of Western world to socialist, to national socialist, and to postmodernist, and to environmentalist critique of Western life. But ultimately ultimately they are

all tied together by what i've just described when you mention the romanticist i'm thinking that the people who subscribe to that philosophy in the day always thought that they would be the casper david friedrich person standing at the top of the of the mountain looking down um at that beautiful thing but if if the mists in those paintings had lifted and they'd seen the dark satanic mills they would have opposed capitalism and progress and the rest of it simply on aesthetic grounds, which goes back to what you're saying about the hoi polloi having their crass pursuits. Anyway, that wasn't so much a question. It's just something that popped into my head for no particular reason. I give it to Rob before we leave.

Rob? Yeah, so I guess what I'd say is that I'm just sort of channeling the critics. You talk about the world could be infinitely bountiful, that we're actually entering a phase of superabundance. It's incredibly positive, this book. One of the reasons I like it is because I'm an optimist, and it seems to, like, you know, you've got a bunch of graphs and charts that like seem to suggest that my optimism is is well placed and that essentially is a full-throated endorsement of uh disruptive active free market innovation and progress um so what should we be worried about aside from the grim Greta Thunbergs and eco-warriors? What's going to stop this that will come under the guise of friend?

You know what I mean? Where are we going to make mistakes, those of us who are full-throated free marketeers? There are dangers on the horizon. There have always been dangers to modernity and to economic growth. One of the dangers moving forward will be what will happen to the human population. I very much believe that people should have as many babies as they want. But if they are brainwashed into not having children, and if they are brainwashed into not having children and if they are brainwashed into believing that bringing a child into the world is an act of selfishness

and that humans are a cancer on the planet then we could basically see a population collapse if we do that that is going to have its own negative consequences such as potentially much less economic growth because where does where do new ideas sorry where do innovations come from they come from ideas which are produced in the human brain. And until we get this much-promised AI and supercomputing, we still rely on human beings to come up with new ideas that can move humanity forward, such as, for example, how to make fusion reactors economical so that we can produce plentiful energy for everyone. The other thing that worries me is, of course, the values of the Enlightenment, which seem to be attacked everywhere.

It is incredibly important to understand that modernity, growth, capitalism can only function within more or less a rational world where we understand that math matters, that math is not racist, but math is very important

for, for example, figuring out how a bridge works or how airplanes take into the skies and land safely. Freedom of speech is incredibly important. If we decide that certain areas of inquiry shouldn't be spoken about, or we keep on canceling people with something important to contribute, think about somebody like Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA. I mean, imagine if he was cancelled because he's a deeply, deeply offensive and politically incorrect person and we never got DNA structure out of him. Humanity wouldn't be well served. Also, you cannot think freely if you cannot speak freely. In other words, my freedom to think freely very much depends on my

ability to be able to hear what people have to say, even if it's offensive or something I disagree with. And of course, any new idea has to be tested in the marketplace. People have all sorts of ideas. They have ideas all the time, but most of them are crappy, some of them are incredibly dangerous, and only a small fraction is very good. How do you differentiate between a good idea and But most of them are crappy. Some of them are incredibly dangerous. And only a small fraction is very good. How do you differentiate between a good idea and a bad idea? You have to have a functioning marketplace which decides between the Betamax and the VHS, which decides between Blockbuster and Netflix, which decides between green new jobs or alternatively fracking. Can I underline something very important you just said, which is you said enlightenment values are under attack.

I'm an old, now old, conventional conservative. I never thought that I'd arrive at a moment where it's conservatives who become the principal defenders of the Enlightenment era and its ideas. I'm stunned at this development, and this covers a lot of territory, and yet here we are. Thank you, Mary, for saying that. The book is Superabundance, the story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. Get it now before it sells out. I'm kidding, it's never going to sell out. It's infinitely bountiful. It's superabundant, yeah. It's superabundant. It'll be on PDF, and of course that means that no atoms, not too many atoms were used to... And you don't have to look at the

graphs or the charts. You can just skip right by them and read the book. I love graphs and charts, but that's just my bias. There's your blurb for the next edition, Rob Long. Skip all the graphs and charts that were so painstakingly chosen and inserted. But anyway, it's been a

fascinating discussion, and the next time you write something else or just want to come on the show it's been a fascinating discussion. And the next time you write something else or just want to come on the show, give us a holler. Finally, some good news. Absolutely so. We appreciate you being on the show today.

Thank you, gentlemen. It's been a great pleasure. All the best. Bye-bye. You can find a link to that book at Ricochet.com. And what is Ricochet.com? You might ask

if you have just stumbled on this podcast somehow by a search engine optimization little tweak thing we did, or because you were handed it or a link came your way. What is Ricochet? It's a fantastic website on the internet. Do I have to say more? The thing is, unlike all the rest of these sites, is that Ricochet members actually meet in person in rooms. They do.

Where they intake oxygen and food where they, where they do, where they intake oxygen and, and food. Yeah. Where they consume, they consume infinitely bountiful quantities of sorry. And here's Rob long to tell you where you can meet up with some Ricochet people. You are absolutely right,

James. The summer meetups are in full swing and there are two more left. There's one happening right this minute in milwaukee the german fest meetup is happening right now this weekend so if you're listening to this today or tomorrow um get on over there if you're in the milwaukee area uh and then on labor day weekend there's one in cookville tennessee and that's what we got for the summer and there's more coming up the autumn um if you want to have an autumn meetup and the autumn meetups that you see listed are not, you know, convenient or location or time, the thing you do is you join Ricochet and you just announce a meetup of your own. People will show up.

Uh, you don't really have to do any planning. People just want to show up and have some drinks and some food and talk and get to know each other. And, um, uh, they're always a good time. I, uh, I look forward to them every year fantastic i hate the fact that you mentioned autumn because that means that i suppose is something to think about we are here in the waning days of july with the inauguration of august which we always think is this big monolithic block of time that somehow stands between us and and and and the fall but oh it starts to gallop.

Oh, times winged chariot starts to be heard at an increasingly speed of the beats to the wings. But that's a while away. In the meantime, it's crazy season, right? Remember this at some point? It's like August is the crazy season where nothing really happens. And so weird stories surface. I think that's, I don't think that's true anymore.

I think in this 24, 7, 365 Twitter-driven news cycle that there's always something crazy and always something that it's not a news desert at all. Or maybe we just are so used to everything being hyped and amplified outside of its parameters. You would never have thought, however many years ago, that, for example, we'd have a national discussion about the educational curriculum in another state. Do you? But yet we do, because apparently it is important to prove that Florida is an anti-intellectual racist dystopia run over by a madman, a little Mussolini in heeled boots, that people are fleeing in terror because they are becoming aware that should they want to change the gender of their child it's going to be difficult to do so and what's more the textbooks are telling everybody that slavery was a zippity-doo-dah song of the south wonderful thing

that benefited everybody even the vice president of the united states went on to castigate the florida standards something which produced charles cw cook to do the most detailed evisceration of Veep Harris's points. 191, I think, points that there were. So, Stephen, you were talking about this earlier because you said you had a professorial connection with one of the people involved in the educational standards. Did I hear that correctly? Yeah, I mean, Bill Allen was one of my professors in graduate school 35 years ago or more, was one African-American, grew up in the segregated South, told me once that, you know, as a kid, he couldn't go into the public library, but the librarian, he was a bright kid, obviously, the librarian would bring him books out to read on the steps

of the library, right? And he was one of the collaborators on the curriculum, and what they're picking on is one sentence. It's actually not even part of it. It's a little guideline in a footnote that says, you know, I'm paraphrasing slightly, but slaves acquired skills that in some instances enabled them to be more self-sufficient once slavery ended. Now, the actual AP curriculum that Harris actually recommended that's used around the rest of the country, here's their sentence. I'm going to read it to you. It's not very long. In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free,

African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others. The point is, Harris would have said exactly the same thing if the Florida people adopted that same sentence from the AP curriculum that everyone else uses. This is just rank demagoguery. One more addition to all this. I think the real reason for the outburst, it's cynical and political. Democrats are panicked they might lose some of the black vote to Republicans. So you got to keep racism alive. This has been going on for a long time, of course. On page eight, that sentence that the object is on page six of the Florida curriculum.

I've read through the whole thing. Page eight, there's a line that says, we must teach the history of slavery before 1619. Aha! This takes aim, and if you read the whole curriculum, you can see it's a much broader and more rich curriculum that fully explores the violence against blacks, Jim Crow, segregation, the brutality of the slave trade, and so forth. There's no whitewashing of the history here, so to speak. But the point is that this curriculum does challenge the reigning orthodoxy of the left that's taken over the New York Times, that America was a slaveocracy, and in their mind, still is a slaveocracy. Right. The world began in 1619, and nothing changed between 1619 and

the summer of 2020. Right. Right. Right. And it's it's a unique institution although there are things that are unique about american chattel slavery but it certainly has its roots in um i mean in the birthplace of civilization the birthplace of humankind uh where's the slave come from it comes from slav however who are we talking about here right right right it was not but it was also it was it was not an institution brought to the continent of Africa. What I loved was that the college board said yesterday that it totally disagrees, the people who do the AP exam,

it totally disagrees with the idea that these are the same. They're completely different, it says. And then it stopped saying anything because if you read them side by side, you realize that they are in fact ai versions of each other they are almost identical um but i guess i mean just to go back into the into the politics of it for a minute um i mean i think the this should have been a great watershed moment for ron desantis right gotcha you guys gotcha. But instead, since he's mad about

everything and he's yelling about everything and he's setting bonfires on every major topic in American culture right now, there's no discernment, there's no organization, there's no coherent message from him except, I'm mad as hell, I'm going'm gonna yell and scream and that is not a great way to reach voters it's not a great way to tell them that to to to to express your political personality which is disciplined he's supposed to be he's the disciplined one he's the effective one he's the guy who's not emotional he's the one who's like he's he's the buttoned up one he's the one who read all of jay batachari's research and then came up with his own plan for how to florida should handle covid and made the president united states and a lot of other people like the governor california

look foolish he is both presidents by the way um uh this is a moment for him and he's fumbling it which is so too bad yeah i think i think rob that uh yeah he did fumble i think he was caught in by surprise so he's unprepared uh and uh i'll add that maybe he didn't read the right history when he was a yale student rob just to poke you a little bit look i made my last comment on this and then i'll shut up about it because i could go on too long uh we should not i think there's guilt and projection at work here with the democrats we should not be surprised that the party of calhoun, the party that said slavery was a positive good in the 1850s, is now trying to project that old legacy of the Democratic Party

onto the other party as a deflection and as a cynical political tactic. That's my last word for today. I think that presumes more history and savviness that might actually be there i think it's built into them the young folk that they are is that to be on the right is to necessarily be defending capitalism and slavery and and every other bad thing there are because the the right baked into the idea of less government less control over your individual lives baked into the idea of less government, less control over your individual lives. Baked into that, of course, is racism. Somehow. It's all intertwined, like a braid that they put together in grade school camp, and they've never been able or willing to unknot it. It's frustrating, as we all know, but there it is. What you want, though, Rob's right, is optimism. I mean, it's a way to fight back against something like this with a sense of amusement and incredulity and laugh and point and the rest of it and jeer and make fun and not be

angry about everything you know and that's you know a lot of people have looked at tim scott and thought well there's a fellow who projects a certain amount of cheer and tim scott has been blasting desantis for the florida black history standards as well so it's that just wonderful period of the year where everybody's consuming each other everybody's fun whatsoever reputations are sundered and donald trump rises above it all and the nation looks at the prospect of of of replaying that trump versus biden with this feeling in their stomach that if we if four years didn't give us something else to come up with then then then the whole notion of super abundance infinitely bountiful may apply to resources but certainly not to our political class superannuated as it is it also seems like

the problem is that he's a smart guy and you when you see a smart guy behaving like a fool yeah we're not getting basic politics right i mean the the diehard Trump voters are not going to vote for him. That's not who we should be going after. We should be going after the Trump voters who are like, yeah, you know, he makes me nervous. He's emotionally and mentally unstable. He's only got one topic. And this other guy here, DeSantis, is like a contrast. You don't want to be, hey, I'm just as bad and crazy as that guy.

That's not how you win you you win by drawing um meaningful and useful decisions in an era of institutional collapse where nobody trusts the institutions to be able to do what they do because they lied to us and they failed and the rest of it somebody projects a certain amount of competence and in and and competence in using the instruments of government and not being afraid to use them for reasons that some would they would strike some as you know ideological is kind of what we're looking for but it has to have a certain regonized character of optimistic and humor optimism and humor and the rest of it and has not been projecting that alas and playing around with uh you know footsie with rfk jr and

the rest i give up well we will see that's why ricochet is here where we can hash all these things out in the comments and and yell and then but hug at the end because we're all friends and you should go there you should also go to apple.com that's not what it's called no uh apple music itunes i don't know it's what i pay for that gives me all this and give us five star review we really like that and of course of course, flatter our advertisers with your patronage. Your life will be better and so will ours. And I don't know what more to say except that it's been

great fun and we're getting out in an hour. How about that? Yeah, the summer hour. That's what we need. There you go. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0, soon to be 5.0. Rob, Steve, next week. Next week, fellas. Ricochet 4.0, soon to be 5.0. Rob, Steve, next week. Next week, fellas. Ricochet.

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