TRIGGERnometry - Triggernometry - Ep. 5 David Pilling

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

Triggernometry - Ep. 5 David Pilling by TRIGGERnometry Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you. If you are bored of people on the internet arguing about subjects, they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Here at the world famous Angel Comedy Club, our amazing expert guest this week is the Africa editor of the Financial Times here in London and the author of The Growth Delusion, David Pilling, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks very much. I'm slightly nervous. Let's see what happens. Well, this is what we like to engender in our guests.

Good, it's worked. Yeah. It is a bit of a weird studio we have here. It's like a black curtain and pretty much nothing else. It could be a nicest video. That's pretty much where we are. So, David, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for coming on.

We really look forward to speaking to you about your book, The Growth Delusion. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about how you are where you are and how maybe you've formed the opinions that you have now. How has that happened? Sure, okay. I mean, look, I've been a journalist at the Financial Times for longer than I'd cared to mentioned, but you know, 25 years, let's say. Throughout that time, I've been posted abroad, I was posted in Latin America, I was in Japan, then I covered all of Asia, now I cover Africa,

and I've covered many other things in between. And one of the things that struck me or crept up on me is that we use this term GDP, gross domestic product, which really is synonymous with the economy. When we talk about the economy or when we talk about growth, that is what we're talking about, GDP. And as a journalist working for the Financial Times, are very serious, and I think actually an excellent newspaper, but one becomes used to using that as a kind of a metric. And you measure things against it, tax to GDP, debt to GDP, you know, this economy is growing by 3%, so it must be better than this one that's only growing at 2 and not nearly as good as that one that's growing at 10.

But it began to creep up on me. Well, what does this number really mean? What's in it? When I turned to Japan, I moved to Japan in late 2001. And Japan was supposedly an example of an economy that was in utter crisis. It had stagnated for 10 years and was to stagnate for another 10 practically while I was there. Its GDP, in nominal terms, just did not move at all. If it was a heart patient, Japan was dead.

And that is how people at the FT used to kind of, they, you know, when people talked about Japan, they'd talk in these kind of mournful, sort of sorrowful voices. like what happened there then? You know, why is it in such a mess? And so I began to kind of think, well, this is not reflecting the reality that I'm seeing around me, which was a society with lots of problems, for sure. But incredibly dynamic. Tokyo certainly looked to me far richer than London.

In many ways, quality of life was far better, I thought, than in Britain. And it certainly was not a society anyway that was stagnated. It was changing. It was moving. It was adapting. Maybe not always in the right ways. But GDP didn't seem to be telling me anything at all that was really worth knowing about Japan. And a politician came from London.

I was taking him through the streets of Tokyo, which can be kind of overawing really in the sort of the stuff that's going on and the lights and the people lining up for incredible restaurants and all this activity. And he said, David, if this is a recession, I want one. So basically, I mean, I could go on. But basically, I began to think, well, what is this number that we take so seriously? And yet, you know, I have found just in my reporting that it doesn't always tell you, sometimes tells you, but it doesn't always tell you everything you need to know at all. And so what is in this number and why have we come to take it so seriously?

So that's the genesis of my book. So if you were going to explain GDP to an absolute layman who's never encountered it, how would you describe it? Okay, well, GDP was invented in the 1930s, so it's man-made, which is important to know it's not a gift from God as we treat it now as we treat it now

you know you could say height you could say meters and feet are man made but you're measuring something real GDP is measuring a kind of an artificial construct I would say first of all so it measures all the goods and services

produced in a year at market prices it assigns a price to that so there's a rationality to it but it's a major measure of what economists call flow. It only measures income. It measures what you're producing in a particular period and actually a period that's already gone in the past. It doesn't tell you really

that much about what might come in the future. And for example, if you were looking at a company, if you were investing in a company, you wouldn't just look at its profits because maybe its profits were brilliant last year, but maybe it had sold off all its intellectual property, fired all its workers, you know, sold off all its machinery. And next year, you knew it was going to make zero. But someone investing in the company would never settle for that. They'd say, what's your balance sheet look like? What are your assets? And we don't do that with an economy. We only look at the flow. Now, there's much, much, much more that I can tell you about GDP. But that's your sort of starting definition. Well, that's really interesting. So I read a few interviews

of you, which were absolutely fascinating, in particular one with the Washington Post. And you were talking about things like theft being part of GDP? Well, theft can be part of GDP. GDP is meant to measure, and it varies from country to country, which is important. There's a sort of standardized measure, but it doesn't mean that it's an exact science. And when we talk about Britain's GDP and the US GDP and America's GDP, sorry, America is the US, isn't it? Well, it depends. My mother's Venezuela, Venezuela, and she says, America is not the word. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, America Latina. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So they're not entirely comparable, but they are more or less. Anyway, theft generally counts. If I steal your Porsche, you have one, I believe. I love the assumption that Francis has of course. I don't even have a driving line.

I saw it parked outside. Are you kidding? Anyway, if I steal your Porsche, that does not contribute to GDP. However, if I then sell your Porsche onto you, and then go out and spend all my ill-gotten gains on something, then I have absolutely contributed to GDP because GDP is actually a measure, another way of looking at it is kind of velocity.

It's the way that money moves through the system. If I sell you heroin, that absolutely counts as GDP because Britain counts hard drugs and prostitution. So we count heroin, amphetamines, cocaine, crack cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana. So if you don't take one of those, Francis, then you're really not doing your bit for GDP.

You're not doing your bit for the British economy. I'm going to tell my parents my university education wasn't it a waste after all? Exactly. You were really doing your bit. You're paying back your student grant before. Yeah. Contributing to the economy, like a regular citizen. So, I mean, we're laughing at it,

but one of the points you make in the book and elsewhere is that this way of looking at you, actually has serious consequences. Well, my book's meant to be, A, quite entertaining, but it is absolutely. It's meant to tell you, it's meant to be a window or a door or a truck door or whatever you want to call it into this, what appears to be an arcane subject. The economy, economics, GDP, GDP went up 2.1%, you know, but blah, blah, blah. And we kind of glaze over.

A lot of people glaze over. And yet, if you look at political manifestos, they always talk about the economy. This is quite new, actually, until 1950, the economy and making the economy better and all of that was not mentioned in political manifestos. I think in the last Tory party manifesto, it was mentioned about 80 times. We will not do anything bad to the economy. We must make policies that are good for the economy. So I feel that it is kind of incumbent on us to know what it is we're talking about when we're talking about the economy. And the way, the single way we measure our national economies, or the way that certainly is used in the sort of,

public discourse is this weird number, GDP. So I think that we ought to know more about it. I mean, just to finish off that story, Brexit. So just before the Brexit vote, there was a guy Anna Menon went up from University College, London, and he went to Newcastle. And he said, look, we cannot vote for Brexit. This would be nuts. You know, economists tell us this will be very damaging for our GDP.

And someone stood up in the audience and said, that's your bloody GDP. That's not our GDP. So this is something that's absolutely relevant to us. And just to finish, finish, finish, Nicholas Sarkozy, former French president who commissioned a whole study into how we measure our well-being and our lives. And he wrote a preface, which was extraordinarily good, actually.

And he said, look, when people look at their lives as measured by experts, and they're told that their lives look a certain way, but it just doesn't feel like that, then they become angry. And he said, and if there's that gap, nothing is more dangerous to democracy. And I think that's quite prescient in an age of Duterte and Trump and Brexit and all sorts of other things. I'm not saying that's the entire explanation, but I am saying that seems to touch a certain nerve of the world we're living in today.

Let's delve into that a little bit, but actually back to your point about the Geordie guy. I lived in Scotland just before the referendum that happened there. And one of the points that my Scottish friends were always making to me after I left in this discussion about the Scottish independence movement, they were always saying, well, the London elite are telling us that the economy is going to be better if we stay together. And one of my Scottish friends said, that's like saying that someone else should sleep with my wife because he'd be better at it. Do you know what I mean? And I think this idea that the economy is the overwhelming thing that matters to everybody. I don't think people actually find that that is their personal experience. It used to be it's the economy stupid.

That's what Bill Clinton said. And there may have been a time when it was true. I think it's not true now. I think people think about other things. And they also think that our definition of the economy doesn't match our lives. Isn't that it? Because, for example, in the time of the economy stupid, what they were really talking about is it's jobs, it's job security.

And these are things that are eroding now, particularly job security. And it may be things like that are more intangible than that, like sense of community or safety, things that, for example, were very strong in Japan that weren't being picked up at all. or, you know, I mean, look, our services are about 80% of our economies, but GDP is absolutely awful at measuring services. It's very good at measuring tables and chairs and mugs and things you can drop on your foot or put in a wheelbarrow.

But it's dreadful at measuring haircuts and psychoanalysis sessions and investment banking products and, you know, Boeing engine service contracts and computer contracts and all the things that are actually part of our modern life. GDP is very, very bad because it can't really figure out quality. So we're using a measure of quantity, I would argue, to measure what is increasingly a life that's defined by quality. And the other just sort of elephant in the room, sorry, he's that horrible cliche, but is distribution. And so you're talking about Scotland. So when we talk about the economy is doing well, the economy is grown by 2%.

That doesn't tell you anything about how that money is being distributed. So the American economy has been doing quite well with a few dips for a long, long time. But it's not doing quite well if you're a non-college graduate. And even there are some numbers that suggest that median household wages have stagnated since the 1970s. So in fact, the economy growing is kind of bad for you because all you're doing is seeing other people doing better and you being left behind. And that creates a huge anger or certainly can create a huge anger. and there's a time when that tips from the American dream, I too can make it to, no, I can't,

this has been going on too long, the system's rigged against me. So you'll keep telling me that things are good and things are getting better and we're growing and we're two times richer and three times rich and four times richer than we have been. Well, it bloody well doesn't feel like it to me. So, I mean, again, to use another question,

to use another cliche, the million dollar question is, how do we redress that balance? where, you know, it seems to be the rich are getting richer and people going, hey, you know what, the economy is getting better, then you're going, yeah, but my wages haven't increased.

Sure. What do we do? Well, there are two questions wrapped up in one there. You know, one is, how would we know? So my book is principally a book about, in a sense, measurement. That makes it sound boring.

But I think all these issues kind of stem from that. So, I mean, my, but that's kind of the orbit of my book. There are then policy descriptions, you know, how might you address this once you know it's actually happened? You know, what I would say in my book is that we

shouldn't make GDP, i.e. growing the entire economy, the be all and end all, we could look at median household income, which is something that I just mentioned. Just for anyone who's not familiar, sorry, David, for anyone who's not familiar with statistics, can you explain the difference between mean and median? Okay, yeah, it's a bit

tricky. So mean is you would you would add everything up and divide by the number of people. So if you had, so, you know, there's an economist joke being an economist joke, unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, it's not very funny. Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average, everyone in the room is a billionaire. That's the mean. You didn't laugh.

That's the mean. You divide the room of 100 people by Bill Gates' fortune, and everyone is a billionaire. You know, if you have four people and they have an average income of 25, that's not bad, so long as one person doesn't have 100, in which case your other three

have unfortunately starved to death. That's your mean. Median is slightly different. Median, you line everybody up, which I know sounds slightly... Fatalitarian. You line everybody up, and you pick the...

middle person. So then it's not skewed by the fact that you've got Bill Gates at this end and a few Bill Gates is kind of who have distorted the average and distorted what you might think is a typical existence because the typical in a very sort of economically skewed society is likely to be worse than the average would suggest. So that's what median is and that's why it's better than saying mean or average. So the median is like the most representative of the middle ground. Nothing's perfect, but yes.

And of course, you might have a lot of very poor people who are just kind of left out of that. But yes, it's the middle ground. So if you shifted your number so that people stood up and didn't say, I'm going to grow the economy by 3%, which Donald Trump said, but if you said, I'm going to grow median household incomes, catchy. You can see it's going to catch on. I'm fighting a winning battle here by 3%. Then that would skew your whole point.

policy agenda. Now, how you would get there is to be debated, you know, redistribution, you know, subsidies, training, you know, we can discuss the details and that's politics. Although one of the things I am arguing in my book actually is that numbers are politics. You know, they're not just dry because what we choose to measure actually sets our priorities for what we then try to create. And sometimes that will be explicit and sometimes it will be implicit. We won't even notice that we've set this agenda without really knowing it. So my starting point would be to slightly downgrade GDP. It's not a useless number at all. They called it the great invention of the 20th century, and that's not entirely unkind. It's not

entirely untrue, I mean. But you could downgrade it slightly. Don't take it as seriously as we do and elevate a few other numbers, numbers that might tell us about distribution, numbers that might tell us about sustainability, the wealth, what we're doing to an actual environment, what we're doing to our infrastructure. So the details of that. So median household income is number one. What else would you want to incorporate? Well, I think you should have a proxy of sustainability.

You know, look, Saudi Arabia could be, and in fact it is, you know, busily selling its oil, creates a very high standard of living. GDP is going fantastically well. But what happens when they all runs out? out. GDP, our standard measure of the economy tells you zero about that. Now, it doesn't mean Saudi Arabia they're stupid and they're not going to do anything about it. In fact, they have a whole political turmoil now, part of which may be that that's exactly what they're trying to do. They're trying to do and something about it. But some kind of measure of sustainability.

And there are measures. Some of them are very technical. And we can talk about those. The World Bank has just come out with one, which I think is really interesting. But you could also come up with a proxy. And some of these things are just proxies. You could say CO2, for example. It wouldn't be perfect. But you could say, you know, let's have a policy, you know, let's run a society where the aim is not merely to produce as much as we can and, you know, hang the environment. You could have a policy that said CO2 or some other proxy of how sustainable this growth is, which was kind of set a limit or would push you in different directions so that if you wanted to grow and we can discuss what grow might mean, you could grow in ways that don't necessarily mean chucking tons of plastic into the oceans,

for example, which has been a preferred method, you know, hitherto, or, you know, burning the ozone off, or destroying all our rainforests, or heating up the earth to such an extent that, you know, it is already almost indubitably and certainly will even more as we go forward, you know, change weather patterns in ways that are highly unpredictable. and that could be, and they're likely to be extremely damaging to lots of people. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality,

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If we could just go back, so you were talking about that gap, we were talking about the gap between rich and poor. How much do you think? I mean, because I think that's one of the major reasons why Trump got to power is because no politician addressed those people. How much do you think capitalism is to blame? How much is globalization to blame? And what can we do essentially to try and fix it, really?

Because it just seems that things are getting harder, harder. Yeah, well, there's a lot going on. So, you know, one of the themes of our age is that we're becoming more and more unequal. So a lot of people would nod their heads in that. Are we? Listening to your globally not. Tell us the facts about that. So globally not. So what is, what is happening is that especially in wealthy countries, that tends to be true. If you look at, you know, the top 10% versus the bottom 10%, you tend to see this. rising, the differential rising, and in some cases rising quite dramatically. I mean, I've noticed

that there are numbers in Britain that seem to dispute some of that, but, you know, numbers that I've looked at would show that inequality has risen quite substantially. It may have tailed off at certain points, but it's risen quite substantially over the last 20, 30 years. In the US, it's risen an awful lot. Even in egalitarian Japan, it rose, it's risen in egalitarian Scandinavia. So if you're in the top percent, college educated, do computer science. or whatever, you know, you're global, you're international, you've got skills, you're doing really well now. And if you're not, you're sort of falling behind. However, there is another story, and it's an important story that gets kind of lost in our debate, which is that whole other parts of the

world, China being a very, you know, a prime example, are actually beginning to close that gap. So if you look at the differential between, you know, Chinese income and US or British income, you know, they've been closing that gap since the 1990s and, you know, at increasing kind of speed. I used to know these numbers off by heart, but, you know, let's say in 1990, the differential was about 20. It might be about four now. I mean, this is like a freight train coming.

So in that sense, inequality is not increasing globally. And globalization has actually been good. But it's been good if you're Chinese. And it's been good if you're Indian. Now, I'm a globalist. So to me, that is great because I think that, you know, China in India had been exploited, chopped about by colonialism, pushed out of the global system. And, you know, they now have managed to incorporate themselves in.

And it's, you know, it's not perfect by any means. I mean, it's, you know, politically or economically or in terms of social justice. You know, but the tendency is definitely that those countries are catching up. But it does create all sorts of upheavals in our own countries. And we need to, you know, you don't necessarily need to ditch globalization to deal with that. Although you might do at some point, but you don't have to. But what you do need to do is have policies that smooth that ride, which, you know, may well involve, you know, training, technology, distribution, universal basic income,

higher inheritance tax to make things fairer when people die, they can't just kind of pass on privilege in a kind of pickety style fashion to the next generation. So a combination of all those, but it would need to be a much more kind of rigorous policy if you really think that that's important. I mean, I personally do think that's important. Of course, some people don't.

Some people think inequalities, you know, even in a place like America or Britain, some people argue it's good. I disagree with this entirely. They'd say it's motivational, you know. And why do you disagree with it? Because I think that people are often wealthy by fortune, a fortune of birth, fortune of the school they went to, fortune of their connections,

there's a lot of luck. They may have trampled over lots of people on their way to get wealthy. That if we just say, you know, he's ten times wealthier than I, so he must be ten times better. I absolutely reject that. So I don't like this idea of a meritocracy of wealth. In fact, one of the things you talk about is that inequality is bad for society. Well, yeah, I don't talk about that much.

There are whole books about this. But I absolutely think it is. I mean, look, I used to be an idealist. I'm probably less of an idealist than I used to be. It happens with age, doesn't it? It does. How old are you saying I am? But, you know, so I think some inequality is inevitable

because, you know, we could distribute the same amount of money to the four of us. And, you know, probably you'd end up really wealthy and he and I'd end up on the street, you'd have to sell your push. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, no matter how much you try, you know, you, you know, but what I am interested in is equality of opportunity. Look, there are whole studies and there's a whole chapter on happiness. And happiness, I think, has been in my book, I should say.

Happiness, I think, has been a little bit sort of undermined and ridiculed in a sense by this whole Bhutanese, you know, gross national happiness. where Bhutan put forward happiness instead of GDP or economic expansion. And while it may have been onto something, I think it's a sort of fairly flawed exercise. Again, we could talk about that if you'd like. But looking at this more rigorously, I actually found that when you measure happiness,

economists call it subjective well-being because it sounds posher and you might take it more seriously. How do you feel, how is your subjective well-being? Well, it's pretty good today. Better for that coffee. If we were filming at night and had a glass of wine, it would be better still. But look, so a lot of subjective well-being tests and studies

would show more or less the following that if you're very poor, you'll run happy. If you can't send your kids to school, if you can't put a roof over your head, if you worry about where the next meal is coming from or what happens if you get sick, you will be unhappy. And you will tell someone on a, they call it the Cantral Ladder scale. You will tell someone, I'm really feeling unhappy.

Now, once you begin to satisfy those, what you might call basic needs, human rights, whatever you want to call them, and you get to a certain level of wealth, or income, we could argue about what that is. Let's say it's $15,000 per capita, or $20,000 per capita. what the studies find is that you actually don't move much up. More money after that doesn't make much difference. It doesn't increase your subjective well-being. It doesn't increase, yeah, let's get it right.

Does not increase your subjective will-being, all this, you know, street-to-happiness. So if you've got your 15 grand a year, you're okay, right? Yes. That's what the studies. That's what the studies would suggest. Now, think of it in a different way. Let me tell you two kind of anecdotes that might sort of bring this to life.

So if you're in a football match and you're all sat down, and then one guy stands up, training his neck, and then someone else behind him stands up, and then someone else stands up. And before you know it, the whole stadium is stood up. Now, they have exactly the same view

of the match that they had before, but they now all have the inconvenience of having stood up, and having to stand up through the whole match. And that, you could argue, is the kind of rat race cycle that we've kind of got ourselves into. We're all stood up.

You know, next we'll have to be on tipitos just to get even better and then maybe get a step ladder, so that and none of us are going to get a better view of the match none of us are going to have better subjective well-being or feel more happy in fact we'll feel less happy because we're having to work harder for exactly the same view of the match now different what different um analogy there's a great experiment um where they put two cappuccine monkeys um and if you

haven't looked it up look it up on youtube i think i've seen this so there's two monkeys kind of everyone's seen it now um in these perspect cages and they're being they perform a simple task. They hand over little pebbles. And in return for a pebble, they get given a cucumber. And they're both happy as Larry or happiest cappuccine monkeys or happy as people watching a good football match or whatever. Then one of the trainers starts giving one of the monkeys grapes, which are better. They're sweeter, tastier. And the other monkey immediately, but immediately gets irate. It starts shaking the cage. It flings the cucumber back at the and it will not accept these cucumbers.

It is unhappy now because of relative reasons. The experiment is called monkeys rejects unequal pay. And that was meant to be a joke. That is actually what the experiment is called. You've got a perfect comedian move there because if you make a joke and it falls flat, that's what you do. You say that was meant to be a joke. It's the audience's fault.

Yeah. Always always. Always. Always. So that's a little bit about the kind of the happy. in a squandry. So, and I remember watching a TED talk, I think, and reading some stuff by a Swedish researcher who was talking about the fact that when you take pretty much every measure of subjective well-being, you're learning. Yeah, I'm picking this up quickly. And you plot that

against income inequality within a developed country, like Britain, like America, like Western. What you find is essentially every measure of ill-being goes up as inequality goes up. As inequality, it goes So people, there's more teenage pregnancy, there's more people in prison, there's more violence, there's more crime, there's more everything. There's something called, there's a book called The Spirit Level. There's been a few other books that absolutely tend to suggest this. And you can feel it, can't you? I mean, you know, you could be living perfectly content. The guy next door gets a Porsche.

I'll keep going back to your Porsche. And, you know, now I want a Porsche. And it's sort of, you know, you kind of hate yourself for it, but you sort of want it. And you sort of can feel this creep up on you. And that, I would suggest, I mean, that. That's the sort of depressing bit of my book in a sense, because although I kind of say growth is a delusion and we kind of need to wake up, kind of there's something that tells me that there's something in all of us, me included, that's just not going to, that there is this competitive need to stay ahead. Because look, if you go to a beach in the Bahamas or whatever,

and nobody on that beach is going to come and serve you cocktails because they're all paid twice what you get paid. You're not going to like that beach. To some extent, your experiences, are enjoyable because of the exclusivity of those experiences. So it's almost built in. You know, if you go to a restaurant and the chef says, well, sod this, I'm not cooking for you. You know, give me a thousand pounds and maybe I'll cook you a meal. Yeah.

You know, your enjoyment of a restaurant meal is that someone's prepared to work for 20 quid an hour or whatever it is. So there is this kind of thing that's built into humanity, maybe, impressingly, that means that we're on this kind of hamster wheel. That's very interesting. Number one, if anybody from Porsche is actually watching the show and would like to donate or sponsor, please do. We would be very, we'd be very grateful. It'd love to be three though, are you going to make us unhappy? Have you got a Porsche?

No, so you're not. I'm with him no driving license. Yeah, so yeah, I'll get my girlfriend to drive me around in my course. I don't even have a girlfriend, so you're one of them. Number two, Are you saying that capitalism makes us miserable? Possibly aspects of it. I mean, look, you'd have to define capitalism, wouldn't you? The acquirement of material possessions. I mean, I don't think socialism or communism made as much happier either. I'm from the Soviet, yeah, I know.

I know we'll all about that. So, you know, that's a term. So I'd be a bit uncomfortable with that. The pursuit of material goals. Certainly can. You know, but I mean, mine isn't a self-help book. It's not a, you know, I mean, look, if you want to live in an empty room and live on experiences.

I mean, look, but I think despite our kind of, you know, sort of collecting society and we are sort of almost, there's certainly a sub-trend of that. If you think what people collect now, actually, I mean, it's not very healthy in some senses, but they collect experiences that they can project, you know, onto social media. That's its kind of ethereal.

Or they collect music, the experience of music, but it just has to be, streamed, you don't need a record collection. So, you know, even in this uncluttered, technological, heavy, materialistic world we live in, you can kind of see something fighting to come out. And yeah, I mean, look, I used to not carry a camera around for 20 odd years. I've traveled all over the world. And I remember one time I was hitching through Africa as a 19 year old. And I had a sort of crappy little camera, but the camera was everything to me because I wanted to capture these experiences. And so, you know, I was,

I don't know why it's hard to analyze yourself, but so I could show people, impress people, so I could remember. I'm not quite sure. But I do remember thinking, like preserving this camera, keeping this camera and keeping these roles of film is so important to me.

To such an extent that it could even get in the way of your experience, of what you're actually experienced at the time. So after that, I took this kind of zen-like attitude, really until the, you know, modern mobile phones, of never carrying a camera. So I'd go to tons of places, and I'd see, you know, to my mind, astonishing things in the natural world, in the, you know, in the human world and the physical world.

And I would look at them and kind of try to commit them to memory and look at them unfiltered, not through a lens. You could say that's kind of Zen. You could say that's anti-collecting things. But I was collecting stuff. I was collecting memory. In the end, it's all going to go. You know, you can collect a Porsche. It's gone when you die or when it's stolen or when someone rams into it.

you can collect memories and they're gone when you die or if you, you know, your memory begins to go and if you get Alzheimer's or whatever. So everything is ethereal, but my book is not this kind of Zen. You've got me on to this. If you wanted some positivity in here you go, this is. Connect memories until your brain turns into mush and you die alone. We're all laughing because we know it's true. Yeah.

Absolutely. he's got all the comedian movies like he's explaining his own jokes this is great well since we're on the subject of happiness I didn't notice is there a way you think that I remember you talked about

the time but actually David Cameron I think in 2015 he proposed this measure of public happiness or whatever it was called he was broadly ridiculed by everybody he was yeah it's easy to ridicule David Cameron

and I was quite surprised by that because I've always thought actually you know happiness is quite an important measure of what's happening in society and I've just finished reading sapiens by an Israeli historian whose name I can neither know a Harari thank you perfect and one of the things he talks about is actually evolutionary success the fact that there's lots of certain kind of creatures is not in any way a reflection of their experience of life so for example domesticated cattle are hugely populous in the world right now and live absolutely horrible, horrible lives.

Even though from an evolutionary point, they're one of the most successful creatures in the world. Are we kind of at that point ourselves that we've enslaved ourselves in this way? Well, possibly, yeah. I mean, I've also read that book and his subsequent book. He has this wonderful

chapter on the Agricultural Revolution, which is meant to be the great leap of humanity when we stopped, you know, messing around in forests, hunted, gathering, and started agricultural communities that freed up some people to be poets and comedians and manufacturers and all of that

and off society went he has this really counterintuitive sort of explanation of this A he says people's diets completely collapsed and in fact apparently life expectancy collapsed at that time because people were wandering around the forest and they were eating a great variety of stuff

and then they became kind of mono dietary people, whatever the word is, they were just eating one thing. They were also doing backbreaking work. But even more interestingly, he said they'd become slaves to wheat. Because the wheat gene passed from being quite sort of narrowly confined and went all over the world. So humans from roaming around, happy as Larry, suddenly started working in this backbreaking toil for wheat.

Yeah, I mean, this is his. And so there we were, you know, praising ourselves, increasing our numbers so that we could work harder for wheat. Meanwhile, wheat is spreading all over the planet. So, you know, we think we've taken over. Maybe wheat's taken over. Well, it's absolutely fascinating this whole conversation. And just coming back to, we've talked a little bit about how we might measure well-being, measure growth, measure GDP, whatever it is. But what is the cost of what we're doing now?

Because one of the things you talk about in the book and in other places that I've seen you speak as well is the fact that, for example, when we measure GDP as basically something that gets sold or not sold, if say you have children, right, and you don't pay someone else to raise them, you raise them yourself. Yes. That is not a contribution to GDP, even though statistically it's very likely to be better for your children than having them brought up by a stranger. Yes. Breast milk is a good example. Tell us about that. Well, so breast milk contributes zero to GDP, but, you know, any dietitian nutrition will tell you that this is the best thing, you know, that a mother can do for her child. And yet, you know, in the developing world, you know, you might have ad campaigns and people trying to encourage people to go back to work, contribute to the economy, you know, and you can buy powder, you know, you can dilute it with water, you know, of questionable origin or, you know, good, bad or indifferent.

and health of children the next generations will suffer, but your contribution to the economy has gone up. Did you not even say that you can reduce child mortality by like 20% by breastfeeding or something? There are some staggering numbers, yes, and it's particularly strong in the developing world. And you can see if you're a politician and someone comes to you and says, we could have a breastfeeding campaign that will cost X, or I can build a great big factory down the road,

we can employ all these people, they'll pay, tax, you know, you might be able to take a bit of a backhander, you know, what sounds good to you? So the fact that we kind of monetize bits of the economy and call that the economy and the other bits of the economy, every bit is real, are not monetized and not counted, sets up these kind of weird invisible incentives, I think, and that by definition we may not be aware of or are not aware of, but it can kind of skew the direction that society's going and not always for the better. And what are the other examples, sorry, Francis, what are the other examples of how this way of measuring growth affects us and our life?

Well, pollution could be another good one. So, you know, if your goal is to maximize output, then not only do we measure pollution as a kind of byproduct of whatever it is we're making. So if you take China, you know, it's been growing 10% a year for years. And a lot of that growth is absolutely real. It's been transformative. I'm not knocking growth, especially in poor countries. But part of that growth has been just awful, you know, fowling up the air, fouling up the rivers,

destroying biodiversity, some of which will be irreversible. But if we try to reverse it, clean up the air, clean up the rivers, that will also contribute to GDP. So you double count stuff that is, you know, bad for us. And yet to our standard gauge of economics, standard gauge of what an economy is, you know, we don't differentiate. As long as it's bought, sold, the bought and sold, it's good no matter what it is. It could be armaments. So the more arms you produce, the more wars that go on, the more cities you destroy and have to rebuild. You know, all of that is good for the flow of income.

you've destroyed wealth in the process and not to mention lives but it's good for the economy this must be something wrong with the measure that that puts that on a pedestal and that finds it harder to look at these

what economists call externalities or side effects of our growth that's very very interesting we're going to be moving on a little bit now so you were talking so you were Africa correspondent I mean, that's a huge amount of land to be a corresponding to.

Editor, in fact, editor, yes. So, I mean, how does that work? So you're everywhere from Algeria right the way through to Zimbabwe? Well, actually, I don't cover North Africa. So I'm the sub-Saharan African. So it's a mere 50 countries. So, you know, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Look, yes, it's a very complicated, challenging job

because there are 50 countries with different histories, with different languages, with different cultures, with different cultures, different economies, with different presidents, with different visa requirements. And I suppose I'm expected to know about, if not all of them, then an awful lot of them, and to report news and trends and business opportunities and cultural changes and exciting technological developments

and just, you know, and human rights abuses and politics and economics, you know, and I tend to write a... the gamut. I occasionally sleep. I sleep on aircraft when I'm flying down to Africa. Look, I'm based in London, and part of me thinks I should be based somewhere in Africa. But of course, Africa is, I mean, the bit of Africa I cover is 50 countries. So if you're in South Africa, then by definition, you're not in Nigeria, or you're not in Malawi, or you're not in Kenya. And to some extent, it makes sense to cover it from here and to keep flying down and then fly back

up. And links, partly as a sort of hangover of colonialism, links between African countries are not that good. So it can be extraordinarily expensive, costly, cumbersome to move between countries that on a map look side by side. It can be easier, bizarrely, to fly back up to London and then down again. Really? So it's easier to fly from a country to go via London. It can be. I mean, this is now being eroded, thank God, slightly. But, you know, especially if you have a country that was colonised by the French and the country that colonised by the British and they're next door to each other, I mean, you know, it started off with telephone system. So you used to root the telephone call through the capital of one colonial power

to the capital of the other colonial power and back down to the other colonized power. And those kind of patterns become kind of structures. And this is, I mean, and it's important because, you know, this is very damaging to the way economies, cultures, all sorts of things work because they always tend to be in reference to the former colonial power. and the colonial power, A, were highly exploitative, and B, weren't around for that long. They came, they grabbed, they smashed, they left.

And now countries that weren't really, countries in the current form have to now get on with being nation states and, you know, maximizing potential for their own populations. And it's tricky. So it's tricky for them, and it's very tricky for me to grapple with all of this. But that's why it's a fascinating, wonderful job. Wow. So what country do you do most of your reporting? Is there ones that you particularly pay attention to? Yeah, there are some. So South Africa has been a big deal for us recently. I mean, it's the biggest or second biggest economy. It changes depending on exchange rate fluctuations.

Nigeria is the other very big one. And so South Africa is a big kind of motor of the African economy. There's a lot of investment goes into South Africa. There's obviously a lot of mining. But I think even more, important than all of those, really. I mean, so much was kind of, you know, the world's attention used to be on South Africa during the whole anti-apartheid stuff. You know, then you had the fall of the white government. You had, you know, the rise of the ANC, Nelson Mandela. There was great sort of hope. And we know the drama and the and the figures involved and kind of watching South Africa now, sometimes watching it go wrong, sometimes watching it go right. You know, he's just sort of fascinating in its own, in its own right. So, you know, Cyril Ramaphosa, who was a union leader. who was Mandela's choice to take over as president, but was ousted in the ANC, became a very, very wealthy businessman, then became vice president under Jacob Zuma, Jacob Zuma dragging the country down into kind of towards catastrophe, I would say. And then Ramaphosa strikes late last year, becomes the president, and I got an hour with him last week with my editor.

We interviewed him. That is an amazing arc. There's an amazing history there. There's an awful lot to talk about. And you can bring, you know, the drama of a country like South Africa alive through an interview like that. And so South Africa, there's a very long answer to a short question. South Africa has been one. But by no means all.

I mean, I've spent quite a lot of time in Nigeria, which is also really interesting. I've sort of picked on little countries for some reason. So I spent a bit of time in Liberia, which is somewhere I knew nothing about beforehand, but which I've become kind of, you know, interested in. I spend a fair bit of time in Kenya. DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, I write a fair bit about, you know, there's quite a lot of places. Mozambique, for some other reason, I found myself going to a few times. And what are the challenges do you think some of those countries face?

Because I'll be honest with you, I don't think in the UK, we know a lot about them. If you want to see average person, you know, maybe not, it's, well, for Londoner, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa. Yeah. I think everyone knows Liberia of our age because George Ware. Yeah. George Ware. Yeah. And he's now president.

Who I've met. Have you met George Ware? I haven't met George Ware. Have you played football with George Ware? I have not. No, no. I think you might beat me. I wouldn't be able to stop myself.

It is a one-on-one. Former World Football of the Year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the ballon d'or, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So, what was the question?

Well, actually, I mean, the thing is with Africa, like Francis is saying, I don't think he really knows anything. I think the way we think about Africa, we talk about Africa. It's very much like Donald Trump talks about Europe. It's like one homogenous bloom. Sure, absolutely. which obviously really annoys, you know, anyone in Africa. You know, Africa is a country, meaning Africa is not a country, is a kind of a meme.

So I'm very careful, you know. I mean, occasionally one can talk about Africa as a unit, and it makes sense just like you might talk about Europe or the Americas or Asia, you know, from Bangladesh to Japan. It might make sense to talk about those countries, you know, as a unit. But generally, it makes much more sense to talk about individual countries or individual regions. I mean, look, the first big challenge that African countries have is that they're not self-defined countries. You know, they were drawn on a map in Berlin by guys with moustaches, many of them had never been to the continent, that they were carving up among the colonial powers. And, you know, that has created enormous damage.

You know, you have people who speak the same language on different sides of borders. You know, you have people who have nothing really in common who are, you know, thrown into the same country. And they have to build a sense of nation-state, a sense of purpose, you know, a sense of project, which, you know, what I saw in Asia, for example, in China, in Japan, in Korea, had been, you know, sort of 2000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000-year-old cultures. And while, you know, African cultures are in a sense the oldest of the lot, but in their modern formation, in the state of Nigeria or the state of Kenya, their modern creations. And that's the first problem. And is that why you see the ethnic and religious conflicts all over the continent that we probably have heard of? Yes, although I think we also kind of exaggerate. I mean, for a start, there have been very few wars between African countries.

I mean, you know, you might, you know, that may be our view, but I would say it's a prejudice view. If you want war killing mayhem, look to Europe. That's where we've had more of it than anywhere else. These borders artificially drawn, there haven't been many wars between. between African states. But within there's been cleansing and religious, like in Nigeria, religious tension.

Or Rwanda. Absolutely. Rwanda, you know, was a genocide. I mean, you know, there's no two ways about that. You know, you can trace that back to the Belgians, kind of trying to distinguish between, you know, in a very kind of racist way, trying to say you are who,

who are Tutsis. And there is a strong argument that people didn't really think in that way beforehand. So some of this may be actually, you know, the colonialist power have kind of fermented this. But yeah, look, I mean, different people with different languages, different beliefs,

you know, unless they can find a way of getting on with each other, sometimes don't get on with each other. We've seen that throughout history. And, you know, and that's true in many African countries. But I would challenge the notion that, you know, that there's more violence, more turmoil, and more inter-ethnic rivalry.

I mean, look at Britain. you know we've been you know a country sort of self-determined country for hundreds and hundreds of years we're still arguing about the scots the Welsh the English we're still arguing about immigration we're still arguing about whether we're part of Europe or not and you know but if I called that you know tribal England tribal Britain you'd be right up there with a mainstream of public opinion right now you said that I think let's be honest but all I'm saying is one has to be one has to be careful and you shouldn't look through the, you know, the, it's easy to fall into sort of stereotypical. So give us an overview. What is happening on the continent right now? What should we think about?

What should we know about? What is it the people in the West who don't know anything about Africa? You know, think about it. Okay. Well, there are a few things and then by no means all good, but some of them are good. So I would say Africa is Africa. There go. Parts of Africa are becoming more democratic. and I've been actually really sort of impressed by people on the street, sort of idealism about what democracy means. This is a real contrast with, you know, the West where, you know, younger people, lots of surveys show are kind of more and more disenchanted with democracy. And in the United States, there are surveys that show, you know, should the military take over, you know.

It's like 25% as I'm. It's scary as fuck. You don't want a military dictatorship. I don't know the numbers. but 50 years ago it would have been nobody and it's just shock up. It's creeping up massively. Or do you think one strong man could sort out this country? It's going like this, man.

So what you're seeing is a disenchantment with democracy in large swathes of the West. And in Africa, it's actually going the other way. You get people doing extraordinarily moving things. You know, campaigning, lining up, walking to polling booths, voting once, voting twice, voting three times, taking pictures on their moments. mobile phones of ballot sheets and uploading them, having a whole kind of civil society thing, to make sure that the result of the election is fair. And so many people that I've heard, whether in Ghana or Nigeria or Kenya or Liberia, saying, we don't mind who wins, but we want

the election to be fair. And we want the person who loses to step down, go with grace. And this doesn't always happen. So in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you've got Joseph Cabilla who's refusing to go. But it's happening all over the place. So there was just an election in Sierra Leone, which I don't think made headline news here, but, you know, but it made a little bit of news. You had an election in Liberia, which actually did kind of briefly make headline news. So you'd had a woman who'd been in power, Ellen Johnson-Surlie,

actually the first elected female leader in Africa, who had been in for two terms, who her time was up, her party lost the election. She stepped down, her party, conceded defeat. And that is becoming much, much more the norm. So I was in Gambia, the beginning of 2000, I'm just trying to think, the beginning of 2017, when there had just been an election and there was a mad kind of dictator called Yahya Jame, who said he was going to be in power. I think it was for a billion years, which struck me as.

Sounds like Donald Trump. Ambitious character. Shrop years, you know, quite ambitious, let's say. You know, I've sometimes done the, because he's now out of power. So I've sometimes done the calculation. years he's missed his missed his target by he lost the election he originally

said he would go then he backtracks and said I'm not going to go then the regional powers sort of said you know you will be going thank you very much and I was there during all of this and they were pressuring him they were even kind of threatening perhaps to invade and then he went and there was a new guy down a Barrow

who had actually had worked in Britain I think he'd been at one point a security guard at Argos but he'd also been a property developer wherever you are in life You can always, always make it, guys. Dream big, dream big. And there he is president.

So you ask me what? So one thing I would say is that democracy is kind of in a weird sort of way, alive and kicking in parts of Africa in a way that it's not in parts of the West. It's fascinating to me as a Russian because in Russia, we still haven't had this. We've never had that transition of power without any interference. Russia has never had that. And what you're saying is Africa increasingly is having that. Yes.

And it's patchy. It can go two steps back, you know, whatever the phrase is. But there is something definitely happening. And it's interesting and moving and positive. I think that's incredible and that's really heartwarming. I come from a Latin America background where my mother is. And politics there is just riddled with corruption. And obviously the stereotype, and again, it's a stereotype of African politics is a corruption.

corruption has essentially pretty much destroyed Venezuela and its economy. How much of a challenge does Africa face with its corruption and politics? Yeah, huge. Look, you know, democracy is kind of war by other means. And the way that these countries have been kind of formed, you know, people's loyalties might not be to the state of Kenya. It might be to the Kikuyu. And we kind of think that Kikuyu is a tribe,

but that's a really silly way of looking at it. It's better to think of it as like the English. or something. You know, these are cultures with their own language, you know, with their own belief system, with their own kind of cultural traits and sort of sense of identity and unity. And so if you're in power, your loyalty may be more to, you know, the Kikuyu than to this kind of artificial nation called Kenya. And that can breed corruption.

I mean, also, if you don't have institutions, I mean, we've seen in the West how fragile institutions can be. You know, you get a president that comes up says, I don't believe in the FBI. They make up stuff. I don't believe in the fake New York Times, you know. I don't believe in the court system. You know, even when we've had sort of hundreds and hundreds of years of this, our kind of belief system can be quite shaky. If you've never really had that and there was no real intention by the colonial powers, Certainly Britain to build these things.

You know, they left the countries with, you know, handfuls of graduates. You know, they didn't really leave much behind in terms of, you know, functioning institutions. So to build those up from scratch, and those are the things that are checks and balances. Otherwise, who comes to power? Will people come to power that want to enrich themselves?

And not always, I should say. But, you know, but depressingly often. So what you need is you need the growth of civil society, which I definitely am seeing. You know, you need institutions. to put their foot down, to draw lines, which you do see sporadically. So when I was in Kenya and there was an election

and there was a claim that the election hadn't been entirely fair, the Supreme Court annulled the election. It was kind of a big shock. And lo and behold, people agreed and peacefully went back to the polls. They had another election. It was actually kind of the same result.

But, you know... That is democracy at work, isn't it? That's democracy at work. I mean, you know, if that happened in America, you'd say, well, it's amazing the functioning of democracy despite all the problems. Well, this happened in Kenya. So, you know, absolutely. You know, if people come to power and they steal lots of money and they enrich their own class

and they send their money offshore, that is awful, terrible. You know, you could say that's what's happened in oil-rich countries like Nigeria and Angola, you know, to a depressing degree. But that is certainly not the whole story. And the other thing we should remember, of course, is that it takes two to tango. It takes two to be corrupt. And on the other side of the table are often our own Western companies who want to extract minerals or oil or whatever. And, you know, if someone's taking a bribe, you can be sure that someone's paying a bribe too.

Makes sense. One of the other things, probably final thing that we'll talk about on Africa, you mentioned the population growth there. And one of the things you talked about now is that now about one billion of the world, seven billion people live in Africa. Africa and within, I think by the end of the century, you said it would be four out of 12 billion. Four out of 11. So more than, so we go from a seventh to more than a third. That's right. And tell us about that.

Okay. So there's a guy called Hans Rosling who died. That's the guy I was talking about. I wondered, actually. So Hans Rosling, who I think is a genius, I really love Hans Rosling. He has this easy way of remembering the world's population, which is he says the pin code of the world is one, 114. So that means there's 1 billion people. These are approximate numbers. One billion people live in the Americas, 1 billion live in Europe, 1 billion live in Africa, and 4 billion live in Asia. We tend to think of the world's population as exploding, but this is not true. Because if you fast forward to 2050, the pincode of the world becomes 1-1-25, i.e. 1 billion in the Americas, because the Americas has basically stopped growing. Another billion in Asia, Asia, another, what is that, 25%, because Asia is really slowing down and then it will sort of stop.

But Africa keeps growing. So it goes to $2 billion and then it may double again by the end of the century to $4 billion. So he said, I think jokingly, that, you know, his tip for, his investment tip is real estate in Somalia because he says that because he says that the whole kind of focus of the goal. global economy will tilt from the Pacific and the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, because then you will have 5 billion people in Africa and, sorry, 4 billion in Africa and 5 billion in Asia centered around the Indian Ocean, and that that will become the kind of the whole locus of world trade and business and, you know, this is Futurology, so you can't take it too seriously, and I certainly don't advise buying beachfront territory in Mogadishu right yet, but you never

know. The locus of the world is shifting there. And I think that's something that is important in very interesting ways, possibly in frightening ways. If those people don't have jobs, if their economies aren't functioning, then that's going to lead to, you know, huge amounts of turmoil, which will not be confined to Africa. And if they do have jobs and they are in functioning economies, is, then, you know, what we have tended to see as the kind of the problem continent could become a locus of, sort of, you know, opportunity and, you know, growth. There you go. Finally a positive note in this podcast.

Very good. So start saving up for property in Mogadish in 20 years from now. David Pilling, thank you very much for coming on. You're on Twitter at David Pilling. At David Pilling and the book is called The Growth Dillusion. It is indeed. Thank you so much. It's been fun.

And just before we go, Constantine, what's your Twitter handle? At Constantine Kissin. I still have the Russian bots following me, so join them. Yep, mine's Francis Foster. I'm at Failing Human. Give me a follow on that. And yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Thank you very much for coming on. That was brilliant. No, until, thank you. Follow us at TriggerPod on all the social media. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, very important, and we'll see you in the next episode. Thank you very much. And also, before we go,

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