 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Johann Norberg, lecturer, documentary filmmaker and senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He has a weekly column in Sweden's biggest daily Metro. His new book is Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Johann. Johann Norberg Thank you very much. Trevor Burrus Why write a book on progress or maybe now? Why write a book on progress now? Johann Norberg It seems like almost no one understands the kind of tremendous progress that has been done around the world in the last few decades. And if you look at the polls, it seems like in Britain, in the United States, some five to six percent of people say that the world on the whole is becoming a better place. In the era when we've almost eradicated poverty, almost eradicated hunger, seen in a dramatic reduction in war and violence around the world, people still think it's a worse place. And I think that, first of all, it's bad because progress is important. We've seen the biggest social and economic progress the world has ever seen. We should know about that in order to make even more of the things that led to that kind of progress. But also because I think that pessimism is a very potent political force. If people think that the world is falling apart, they tend to become more protective, more authoritarian, more statist. Now, interestingly, I think in the last chapter when you talk about the epilogue, when you talk about how people don't realize this, and you talk about that error rate of five to six percent, this is worse than a chimpanzee. If a random sampling, if they were randomly choosing answers, you'd get a higher number. So this means that they have a systematic bias in a different direction. Why do you think that is the case? Right. I think that people are informed by false or at least outdated data. And where do they get that? I think they get that. It's not that they read the wrong books with the wrong data. It's that they don't pay attention to data at all. They pay attention to news. They pay attention to breaking news and to what they see on Twitter and on Facebook. And bad news sells. That's the classic, that's the first thing you learn in journalism. If it bleeds, it leads. Definitely because we want to hear about the most shocking, dramatic story that has happened in the world while we were asleep, which is, it's a good thing. We need knowledge about that, but it tends to distort our perspective because there will always be a famine somewhere. There will always be a flood somewhere. But then in a global news world, that will always top the news cycle everywhere and we'll get the impression that this is becoming more dangerous and impoverished. That basically will see more regular occurrences of these things. Whereas the truth is that we see less war, we have reduced the risk of dying in a natural disaster by 99%. But that's a background story. Then you need history, then you need data and statistic to get that, you don't get that from the news. And backing that up too is you point out that people's beliefs about the quality of their localities, like do you feel safer in your own neighborhood, they're pretty accurate compared. They do feel safer, but they think the world at large with this global news cycle is what's actually dangerous. And of course, back in, for most of human history, we didn't have CNN and other types of things, so we get that. But let's actually get to the numbers of how good it is. And I've read a fair amount of books like yours. There's no actual book like yours. Your book is excellent and it's so succinct and very well-written. Did you write it in Swedish, by the way, or did you write it in English? No, I wrote it in English. Excellent, actually, even better, second language. But it's very succinct, but you have books like The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley who's been on the show before. In terms of how much data you put forth, and I was shocked by some of them, so we can just sort of get into the 10 kind of places that you discuss areas, food is the first one. How common were famines in previous centuries? Oh, that was a regular occurrence in previous centuries, even in the richest countries in France and England in the 17th and 18th century. There were lots of people living in what researchers call a nutritional trap. They didn't get enough food so that they could work. And if they couldn't work, they couldn't produce food. They couldn't afford food, so they could work even less. I mean, they actually didn't have the energy to work. That's right. That's kind of astounding for me to even think about. Right. And in the absence of trade, in the absence of modern transportation, a local crop failure resulted in starvation and famines in the richest countries. That was something that happened all the time. In my own country, Sweden, chronic undernourishment was in existence until the early 20th century. In the late 19th century, my forefathers in northern Sweden, they had to mix bark from the trees into the bread to make the bread go further. And we regularly had those occurrences of hundreds of thousands of people dying. We even have records of cannibalism in some of the richest countries on the planet. Well, we still hear about famines today. I mean, the one that when I was growing up is Ethiopia. Is it the same type of famines or have they gone down? They've gone down dramatically. First of all, the regular sort of chronic undernourishment has been reduced dramatically in the late 1940s. Around half of the world population suffered from chronic undernourishment. Now, around 10% do. So that's a dramatic shift partly because people have had more stronger protected property rights to their land. So they invest more in better crops, in irrigation systems and so on, but also trade so that you can produce where you can produce the best and sell it to other places. And all the technological development during the Green Revolution, artificial fertilizer, better irrigation systems, better crops, higher yields and so on. You write that fertilizer might be the most important invention in human history. It's sadly overlooked. The fact that we could get ammonia from the atmosphere, the fact that we could have artificial fertilizers, probably save the lives of a billion people or two billion people depending on how you count. And no one really thinks about it unless they think about the problems that comes with it as well because there's always some pushback. But that's chronic undernourishment. But we also have the famine disasters where it suddenly strikes over just a few months. And it used to be with much smaller populations around the world. We had decades regularly, in a decade, some five, 10, 15 million people dying in famines. Now in the last 10 years, we've seen half a million people doing that, far too many, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, far too many, but fewer than ever despite a bigger population than ever. And more of the famines that have been in the 20th century have been caused by governments. I mean governments were problematic before because you had mercantilist philosophies. So if you weren't trading your food, then yes, a single blight on your crops or just a cold summer could just cause a famine and then you weren't trading. But now governments have caused a lot of famines. Right. Now it almost takes a vicious despotic regime that almost wants to punish its people to create famines like that. It could be war-torn countries where no one is safe in producing anything or countries like North Korea where they've sort of consciously destroyed any kind of ability to produce and trade. Who was Norman Borlaug? He was perhaps the person who saved most lives in the world by being the man behind the Green Revolution around the world because he had that vision, that idea that you should be able to use the mankind's knowledge to make the yields go further. So he started to experiment with better crops in Mexico and producing dramatic results. And then he thought that we have to try to make this happen on a global scale. And he did so in India and in Pakistan in the 1970s. In the 1960s and 70s this really took off. And at that time people said that overpopulation was the big problem that we'll never be able to create enough food for these people. We'll see massive famines in, for example, the subcontinent in India and Pakistan. And they didn't believe that this was the way to go forth. Why should we invest money in strange new innovations when we have too little to sort of buy the crops that we need today? But he fought for this in a dramatic fashion and he went there and while war broke out between India and Pakistan, sometimes producing and working within, and he could hear the gunshots and he kept on working. And the result was tremendous. In the first season they produced more than they could store and then even further in the years afterwards. So he saved lives of hundreds of millions of people in those places. And then he wanted to do the same thing in Sub-Saharan Africa but a friend of him told him that think about the amazing accomplishments that you've done now because you'll never be able to do anything like this again because this was such a disaster that suddenly you had a free range. You could do it. Now governments, they're going to block you, special interests are going to block you. He was very much interested in using genetically modified organisms and the whole environmental movement and the United Nations system were opposed to that so he couldn't do the same thing in Africa. Before we leave food, there's one story too that I had not heard in your book about a village in China. I think it's pronounced Shaogong. Wouldn't that be correct? There's a story about how during the famines in China and China is particular where a lot of the people we brought out of poverty were previously. I mean, we used to tell children they're starving children in China eat your vegetables because they're starving children. I don't think children get told that anymore. We move that to a different place but in this one story in Shaogong village we had a little property rights revolution. Yeah, there were some 20 families who realized that for all their hard work they didn't get much. They couldn't put food on the table for their children so they thought about what could we do instead. So they had a secret town meeting where they decided to secretly privatize the land so that every family had its own plot and they could produce anything they'd like. They could work as much as they like and they would keep the rewards rather than working in the sort of communes, the collectives that were controlled by the government. And they had to do this in secret because obviously that was the worst thing you could do. They became small capitalists. So they agreed to do this. They agreed to keep it secret and they also agreed that if someone was exposed the others would bring up their children because they would go to the labor camp in that case. What happened was a dramatic surge in productivity because people now worked much harder when they could reap the rewards. They began to invest in that land so suddenly there was an explosion of productivity and it was difficult to keep it secret. The other villages began to notice that something had happened there and as some farmer put it, this is like the chicken pest. If one village has it everybody has it in just a few months. So this secret privatization took off everywhere in the late 1970s and then of course the communist party got noticed and understood something is wrong here. They produced much too much food. The children, they grow taller, they're better fed and they exposed what had happened. And then they had this painful decision whether they should reinforce their communist system which led to starvation or approve of this. And luckily this was a period when the leadership began to think anew partly because they were inspired by what had happened or threatened by what had happened in the neighboring countries in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, the kind of progress that they had seen. So in the early 1980s, the communist party said that this is acceptable. If villages want to do this, they can do it and in a few years there were no collectives like that left. And that was a huge part of China working itself to a liberalization regime. Sanitation which is probably the most disgusting chapter of the book. Yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize. We used to be pretty dirty. This is the problem. This is one of the most lethal things in world history. The fact that we didn't keep our waste faces and all those disgusting things separate from the water sources that we used for cooking and for drinking. So that killed off a lot of people. And this is something that affected everybody. The River Thames was disgusting and at one point dead of life too. It had no life in it. Right. It was declared biologically dead as late as the 1950s. But in the mid-19th century it was such a disgusting pool of that stank that the parliament had to be evacuated because they couldn't breathe there. And Queen Victoria's husband Albert died from typhoid fever because of these things. So it affected everybody. The Royal Castle of Versailles in Paris, which was sort of the prime of wealth in Europe in the 18th century. They had spent so much resources on everything, decoration, material clothes, but they didn't have a single flushing toilet. So visitors to the castle pointed out that, look, you notice where Versailles is because of the stench. Because the visitors noticed that there was excrement in the walls and in the stairs and everywhere. Why are the hedges so high? I didn't even know that the hedges are high because in Versailles. Yeah, exactly, because you had to relieve yourself behind something. So this really affected everybody and people died early because of this. We had a revolution in the mid and late 19th century where science began to understand that microorganisms could kill even though you couldn't see it. So they began to separate those sources and we began to filter and put various chemicals into the water to make sure that we don't die from water. So that, well, one side effect was that we could begin to drink water rather than beer and wine in the morning. The kids don't have to be drunk in the morning. But that has saved more lives than any other sort of health innovation. How much better is it now than, say, even the 50s around the world for people having access to clean water? There are basically two different things. Is it clean water? Improved water sources? Do they have sanitation? We've made the most progress when it comes to water and just sort of getting that from a better place or making sure that we treat the water in various ways. We've increased the number of people who have access to clean water by some 285,000 people every day. Every day. Every day. What is that equitude, several billion? Yeah, it's 2.5 or something like that. And that's everywhere where we've seen a rise in GDP per capita. Everywhere where people get richer they start doing this because people are smart and that's one of the lessons that I learned from this. It's not that they're stupid. They make the wrong decisions. They had to be sort of told what to do or control top down. The moment they have a chance, the moment they have the resources at their disposal, the moment they get the technology, they make the right decision because they don't want to see their children die. And this is with food and sanitation but then the next chapter is life expectancy which is a combination of a bunch of things. I think one thing that maybe people understand that there's been progress and is in medical science. We're not using leeches or amputations anymore but maybe they'll understand how much it has changed. Right. It used to be said that prayer was the most common medicine in the previous eras. Well, the data speaks for itself. In as late as 1900 the world average life expectancy was 31 years. 31 years. Is that a product of the high infant mortality? It's mostly infant and child mortality because the moment you take care of that you can lead a very long life but it's also something that has been we've dealt with a lot of the things that killed us in middle age and later stages even though that doesn't improve life expectancy as much because it only gives you another 10, 20 years. So mostly it's infant and child mortality. In some places sort of every second child died before five and now life expectancy is 71 years around the world. So it's such a tremendous increase and so if you're older than 31 years you should really sort of think about how lucky you should be to be living in this era. As late as 1800 not a single country on the planet not Britain, not France, the US had life expectancy longer than 40 years. Now not a single country has life expectancy shorter than 40 years and it tells you that we have done something right when it comes to health, nutrition, to lifestyle, to the economy. We've also done some amazing things with eradicating things like smallpox which has to be an unbelievable one of the unbelievable achievements of the human race but there are also diseases that we might eradicate pretty quickly you write about. Like malaria for example. How much better has that gotten? That is amazing because there are so many diseases that used to whoever you were you had people in your family who had died from it now we never think of it anymore. Measles and smallpox and colaran and the plague awful things like that. Now we pay all the attention to things like malaria because that's the thing that kills a lot of people today. Well, we've seen tremendous improvements in just the last 15 years partly because of the Gates Foundation how they've been instrumental in sending making sure that bed nets were used making sure that more drugs were being used here and it has saved probably in these last 10 years some 5 million kids from dying from malaria. Moving on to poverty which of course all these things just absolute poverty rates because food and sanitation they come in but then poverty rates themselves is sort of an overarching mechanism have dramatically improved. The numbers are quite astounding but first I would like to ask the question which is sort of the lead quote you have in that chapter why are nations poor? Why are there still poor nations or why is any nation poor? And that's really the wrong question why are some countries poor? Because every country was poor. The richest countries on the planet 200 years ago, Great Britain was poor then the poorest sub-Saharan African countries today and all their living standards were poor so the question is why did some countries get rich and we know this because it happened in every country that began to give their people more freedom to explore new ideas, to experiment with new solutions in business, in technology and to also exchange this with more trade domestically but also internationally. Every country on the planet that did that has eradicated poverty basically at least in the extreme poverty that we talk about in this context in the early 19th century some 90% of people around the world lived in extreme poverty what we now think about is being able to consume less than 1.9 or 2 dollars a day adjusted for local purchasing power and inflation about around 90% now it's 9% so we've really gone a long, long way over that period and this has happened in all those countries that began to integrate themselves into the global economy as well we've seen this tremendous progress in China and in India now in the recent decades after they did the same thing. How much progress of that has occurred in the lifetimes of even our listeners? I think that the last 25 years have been spectacular it's been 25 years while we've constantly been complaining about the world we've had leftist authors like Naomi Klein pointing out that since 1990 free market capitalism has ravaged the world and taken control everywhere and over those 25 years we've reduced extreme poverty from 37% to less than 10% in those 25 years so for the first time in world history it also means that the absolute number of extremely poor has been reduced because previously an increase in world population meant that the number of poor increased even though the proportion might not have so we've increased population by some 2 billion over this period and yet the number of people in extreme poverty has been reduced by 1.25 billion in just 25 years it's, it's those are shocking numbers it means that every minute we talk another 100 million people rise out of poverty and in places like India which relaxed its incredibly oppressive trade restrictions and sort of socialist kind of government to help create this but it also had a secondary effect which you write about which I think is an important thing to point out for the effects of wealth and capitalism markets it had a strong effect on the caste system and how people were treating each other in India how did that work out yeah I agree that is incredibly important because when the economy is controlled you control people's lives and then you also end up with discrimination and other things opening up markets creating competition means that you look for talents wherever it is and if you're good if you're talented you can compete with the others I met one young Dalit sort of the lowest rung of the caste system in India who traditionally would not have gotten education or been able to work with anything except the dirtiest the dirtiest occupations now what happened after India began to open up in 1991 was that people began to look for talent everywhere he moved into town and he actually he overheard a contractor who built trenches for the new telecom companies they had to create more cables and stuff and he complained that they didn't have enough workers so he just told him well look I can get you 25 able workers tonight because he had a lot of friends in the old town and traditionally they wouldn't have been able to work with anything like that but now okay let's do it he went there they trusted him and they worked hard they got paid and he made more money one day than he did throughout his life so he started a new company where he made sure that people got the right human resources and he moved into construction and became a rich man and now he's recently moved into a neighborhood that was traditionally reserved for the highest casts so the cast system is breaking down as a result of this basically competitive pressure a rising wealth but more important a rise of entrepreneurial opportunity and we can see that in all the data on everything from marriages between people of different casts to the kind of jobs that they get to things like separated seating at marriages which used to be 100% basically that they were separated now we see that in many cities that's a minority phenomenon it is rapidly disappearing so being able to participate in the economy also gives you social status and it gives you respect in the eyes of others and people it gives you respect as much about who you are and who your parents were but more what can you do moving on to violence if you've been listening to we're recording this in October, October 12th 2016 so this will actually come out after the election so the listeners will know the future and who gets elected if they're still hope they will know the debates we've listened to Trump's rhetoric in particular which I can only describe as apocalyptic and his rhetoric about kind of the threats that people are facing and saying this is very dangerous world, the inter-city ISIS, terrorists so it sounds like he's scaring or at least people are believing that they're highly under threat of violence and if you look at 9-11 in Syria and Paris attacks and all the stuff they've gone up but in fact you say it has not in fact it's much, much less than it used to be. Right. This is a shocking incident of where fear mongering and our perceptions are totally separated from reality and the facts you hear Trump and a lot of other people talking about violence spiraling out of control, homicide increasing, yes but you know the homicide rate is half of what it was in 1980 in the good old days and Trump talked a lot about the sort of police murders which were awful in every single way but when you look at the data you can see that even if this particularly awful year in many ways if those trends continue throughout the year you would still have to go back to the 1950s to find a year when so few policemen were murdered in service so it's an example of how violence is not increasing but global media and social media gives us the images and the stories immediately and we have a group of politicians who want to exploit that and it's easy to exploit that because it captures our attention immediately. When you look around the world there we've seen the same thing with war some in 2005 out of a population of 100,000 globally dying battles right now. It's a slight uptick this recent year because of Syria particularly but if you compare that to when I grew up in the 70s in the 80s it has been reduced by four fifths but we are all sort of suffering from what psychologists call availability heuristics. When we think about how frequent something is we do not think of the data. We think about how easy it is to remember an instance of this. So if you talk about violence you think about terrorist attacks recent ones you think about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and you think oh my god this is spiraling out of control. You do not think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 1980s which killed 10 times more people than this. You don't think of terrorist attacks in the 1970s that killed more people in Western Europe than these terrorist attacks have because we forget about that in a way we also know that we survive that as a society. Now we are not so sure. We do not know where it's going and that triggers our fear. Terrorism has increased in Western Europe and in the United States in the last few years but we have to keep in mind terrorists kill very few people. They want to terrorize us and that's the danger that we panic when we notice this and we make the wrong decisions. But they kill their risk to individual life is incredibly small. In Western Europe the risk that you would be killed by a normal murderer is 30 times bigger than being killed by a terrorist and that's a homicide rate that is being cut in half and I'm sure that the American numbers are even more dramatic. So basically the risk that you'll die when you fall off the stairs is bigger than being killed by a terrorist and that puts it into perspective and we need that kind of perspective in order not to panic. And it's not only the risk of you being put into a war and fighting yourself fighting, oh I mean a religious war in Europe and say you know 1625, 30 years war which was quite destructive it's your risk of being hurt by other people but there's also this I mean people in your society through crime but there's also this interesting just moral development that people in the olden days, middle ages, renaissance, going forward in the enlightenment were shockingly okay with brazen violence publicly to spread. That's right and that's what many historians say when they look at how people act and react to war that that it wasn't that different from everyday life because you died from an early age you knew that some of your kids would die before they turned 5 you had plague, you had awful disease that killed off thousands of people in months so war situations where that happens it's not that dramatic compared to everyday life and that sort of tells historians say that in a way it brutalized people as well because if violence is a regular occurrence and you know what happens in your life as well you become a bit less restrictive in imposing pain on other people so you notice that in how you treat criminals and how you treat people from minorities and so on that corporal punishments were incredibly common. Public displays of torture, executions were something that people noticed. Kids saw that on their way to the grocery store. I just saw a thief get hung drawn and quartered in the street so we might as well invade Belgium because you know that's just the way life is. It is pretty shocking even things like bear baiting which you know has tied up bears and having dogs attacked them that is pretty violent to us now because we now care more about animals which all seems to be a product of wealth. Like many things in the general thrust of this which includes the next chapter which is the environment. This is a big one for a lot of people when I do a lot of lecturing around it's one of the biggest hang ups about libertarianism and free markets this idea that it's obviously true that free markets lead to consumption. Consumption leads to environmental degradation therefore capitalism and the environment are completely at odds with each other in a fundamental way that is sort of unrectifiable which is why so many environmentalists are not just not capitalists they're virulently anti-capitalist but this is incorrect. Right. This is an interesting chapter. It was the one that impressed my editor the most because he thought that that's something that you cannot prove that we've made progress when it comes to the environment considering everything from biological diversity to global warming and so on but after having read it sort of this could be the most counter-intuitive and most convincing chapter in a way. And why is that? What is it that that's not happened? Well in a way the perception that people have is correct that when we begin to get richer in a poor country we do more things and we do more things with old dirty technologies so we produce more stuff and we transport more stuff and there's a lot of pollution we can see that in Beijing we can see that in New Delhi today as they get richer but there's something interesting about that. New Delhi and Beijing are the most polluted places. It's not New York, it's not London which it used to be when they those places got rapidly richer before because something happened after they got rich they began to change their preferences they began to think that perhaps we should deal with environmental problems as well. And they got the money, the resources to do that. In a poor country if you have the choice between making sure that you have food on the table for your kids that you can send them to school or try to protect the forest and the river that's not a choice, it's obvious what you'll do. But after a certain level you begin to think of that and you get the resources to do it, you get the technology to do this in a better way. So many researchers talk about an environmental Kusnetz curve, an inverted U, the letter U, where pollution and environmental degradation increases rapidly as countries get richer but after a certain point that begins to change. You begin to deal with waste problems, you reduce pollution in Britain, in the US, in Europe we've reduced the six leading pollutants, the ones that poisoned our lungs and our forests and so on by 60 to 70% in the last four decades. So we do see incredible progress when it comes to the environment in the richest countries. If you look at the data from things like the Environmental Sustainability Index you can see that the ones that are the most sustainable are often the richest countries whereas it's Haiti and Mozambique and Zimbabwe that are the worst polluters because they haven't gone through this transition yet. A lot of people would say that well yeah, this is stupid libertarians, this is government, they passed laws, said that cars had to have catalytic converters and put in emission standards and a bunch of other things, coal scrubbing and things like this. That seems to be part of it but that's not the whole story. It's not the whole story and often when you look at the data that began to change before the government began to step in partly because of better technologies that could produce more things with less resources and less pollution and the more modern sectors of the economy they had a rapid turnover of technology and equipment so that they could do that faster. But it's also the case that pollution in itself is kind of an intrusion in somebody else's property rights, somebody else's health. I think it was Karl Marx who pointed out that this is actually contrary to capitalism if you ruin somebody else's property, somebody else's land and so on and in a perfect market you'd be able to go to the court and get compensation. Now I think that would be a preferable situation but you can imitate that and that's often what the government has done. They try to impose fines then on polluters, they try to implement various systems to make sure that we reduce this. It's not perfect. There are some real problems when they do this but I think that something similar would have happened on the market because preferences change and as you see the problems you begin to implement property rights that really weren't there before. It takes in voters how to start demanding environmental goods as some things that they like which is a product of wealth to begin with as you said if the first question is where are we going to eat tomorrow but after you get through that question you can start saying well I want to eat in a clean air environment and that changes of course so wealth is a product of that but that brings up the question of global warming which is a concern of many many people but you write that it may not be just as simple as choosing the eradication of emissions or things like this it may actually be about wealth creation too to help solve this problem. Well I happen to think that global warming goes on and that human beings is partly responsible through greenhouse gases. I'm not an expert there but I listen to the experts and that's what they say. I agree. So that's why I have to So does Pat Michaels it is a man made thing but now the question is what do we do about it? Exactly and that does not mean that we know what will happen the kind of consequences that will result from this there's a wide difference between the various scenarios in here but I think the sort of stable mainstream scenario let's point that out first of all that the sort of the UN climate panel puts in their basic scenario is not apocalyptic. It creates problems marginally a higher sea level will see perhaps some tropical diseases will move a bit north will see perhaps an increase in floods in certain places and so on. In other words the kind of problems that we already see around the world and that we saw during the 20th century as well and then the lesson is where could we deal with that in a good way well in industrialized rich societies that had the technology and had the were prepared to deal with those things and that's exactly what every scenario says the countries that will suffer the most are the poorest countries so whatever we do now any kind of system put in place that would stifle and block their economic development would lead to human tragedy in those places they need more wealth to be able to deal with these things so that's the first thing that has to be pointed out if we have a stable rate of growth in the world some 2% per capita per year it means that in 100 years will be some seven times richer than we are today now what would that mean if we have seven times the wealth of today perhaps seven times the technology at our disposal the resources at our disposal it would probably mean that it would not be a piece of cake but it would be much easier to deal with those problems and any other kind of problems that will appear no matter what we do about global warming then if we didn't have that wealth we need that to go further but we can also do other things that would also make it possible for us to use these new technologies that are being implemented in certain places or at least are in the laboratories but are now much too expensive to roll out on a global level if it's too expensive what do we do well we need more purchasing power so we can afford it more technological development so that it comes down in price and that could be everything from better solar power I mean there are a lot of libertarians including me who complain about the subsidies or solar power but that's because they're totally reactionary in a way they only subsidize the kind of technology we have today so that we have these ineffective solar panels being produced on a larger scale that's not what we want we want the next generation of great solar panels from perhaps graphene this incredibly thin material that we could sort of have roads, our buildings everything sort of built in it's pretty exciting or it could be the next generation of nuclear power or it could be a better generation of biofuel not the old ethanol but get it from algae which would certainly take care of many of our environmental problems or it could even be taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere we know how to do that it's punishingly expensive to do that but what you do if something is punishingly expensive more technological development more wealth so in other words it's the opposite of what the sort of reactionary greens say that we have to dismantle industrial society no we need more progress to deal with this and we need more people coming out of poverty going to school becoming smarter so they can start thinking about how to solve these problems and use what Julian Simon called the ultimate resource which is human ingenuity that things are not resources until we figure out how to turn them into resources and one of the things that is literacy is just skyrocketed around the world and some of these people can start studying how to make the next nuclear reactor how much has literacy changed? Yeah, wow 200 years ago it was one in ten people could read and write around the world now it's the opposite it's one of ten cannot read and write in a population that has sort of exploded as well and dramatic population growth which means that and much of that progress has been made quite recently especially when it comes to girls and their ability to get an education which is important in other ways as well fertility comes down where as women get more access to education and knowledge. And then we don't have an overpopulation question if female literacy goes up. That's right, fertility rates has been halved basically in the last half century so and this is important because as you point out everything is connected here all those problems that we do not know how to deal with for example global warming what do you do when you cannot solve a problem? Well you need more eyeballs looking at it and you need more brains working on this and now this I mean I met young girls in the Saharan desert who goes to school for the first time and they get access connection to the internet. So for the first time they can compare notes, they get access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. Imagine what these hundreds of millions of people who are now coming online for the first time what they can do when they think about these problems they get access to this knowledge and they can use the resources at their disposal to begin to deal with those problems and literacy is one of the most important factors behind my optimism about the world. And then you have also discussed freedom slavery is down well it's down it used to be disturbingly common pretty much everywhere and also there are fewer walls in the world well until you know maybe they're listening to this Trump have already built the wall Mexico pay for but there are fewer walls around the world fewer places blocked off by they say the Eastern block and that seems to be a positive development too especially for trading and equality is another one you discussed which I think these are ones at the end which are very important but I think some that people might be a little bit more familiar with freedom is up equality is up, women's rights gay rights is racism down would you say there's actual sentiments of racism well the ways that we have in trying to measure this is you have to look first of all at things like the kind of political rules and regulations that are in place do they condone or condemn discrimination segregation and so on and then you can see that all over the world it's come down dramatically over the last half century it used the worst examples that we have today in the world used to be an everyday occurrence in a lot of developed countries I mean a bit more than half a century ago we had racial segregation instituted in the United States but you can also measure it by looking at people's attitudes to minorities to other groups and so on and then you can see that those attitudes have also shifted dramatically we notice it now when we hear things like Donald Trump's comments about Mexican immigrants and others but that we wouldn't have noticed that 50 years ago because that's something that almost everybody thought in those days if you look at the attitude to for example interracial marriage or what would you do if African Americans moved in next doors you had majorities of white people saying that they would leave that they would condemn interracial marriage and so on now that almost does not exist and in the youngest generation that's totally gone so we do see progress but now and then people exploit this now and then people try to stir up those emotions and I think that Trump's campaign is an example of that we see some of that when it comes to the nativist sort of right wing populism in Europe as well and I think that's bad I think that's scary there's always a risk of a downward spiral as well when you begin to set groups against each other in that way but in fact if you listen to what they say and what they are very clear on that they are not saying because they're also very sort of sensitive in saying no I absolutely do not think that I'm not a racist in that sense at least that's something entirely different from what you heard half a century ago and what's acceptable to the average Joe in the street so these trends are incredible they need to be known anyone should definitely read this book to just have a good idea of what's going on in the world in order to be able to formulate accurate opinions about what should be done and what should be done in the future there'll be a lot of people who criticize it to say that you're missing some things by sort of championing the capitalism element of this to bring about these great changes we're missing things like spiritual growth that we're a less connected society that we're more alienated from each other because of capitalists telling us to go bye bye bye and run the rat race and try and make as much money and we don't talk to our neighbors anymore and we have a lot of social problems that are also a product of this growth how would you respond to that yeah well first of all I think it's important to note that don't look we shouldn't look to an economic or political system to solve all our existential problems there's this sense that if you tell people that look we're eradicating poverty they tell you sort of so you think everything is fine no that's not what I'm saying we'll still have other problems and perhaps new problems as well as the old proverb goes if you don't have food you have one problem but if you have food you have a thousand problems because you're not constantly obsessed with putting food on the table and then obviously other things will be there when it comes to trying to measure what happens to society to the kind of communities that we live in it gets a little bit more complex because some of the traditional ways in which we used to interact have been reduced often in organized forms in groups you know the traditional bowling alone phenomena yeah we do not bowl in an organized way in an organization with in different championships and so on but people do bowl with their friends they go there and they interact socially and they do other things socially but not in those organizations but we also build new communities in those regards I'm bit sensitive to attempts to say that we're getting sort of alienated because everything is about the economy everything is about creating wealth I think that one of the major benefits from making more money is that you can care a little bit less about money and that's what we see when it comes to the values people hold if you are poor you have to use every interaction to try to get something immediately and you're sort of at least metaphorically speaking willing to sell your mother for a few bucks when we get richer we begin to think of other things we talked about the environment before but also for going attempts to get something materially because we already have a lot of things so there have been many interesting experiments with various groups around the world and to see how their values change if they have a lot of exposure to exchange to trade and so on and the strange and counter-intuitive fact is that people have more experience from trade and competition they are more generous in social interactions than others it seems that the very fact that they meet others regularly meet strangers regularly and negotiate and trade with them means that they have to take the other person's perspective into account and that begins to change your values as well whereas those who don't they use any interaction to try to get whatever they want thanks for listening if you enjoy free thoughts please take a moment to rate us on free thoughts is produced by Mark McDaniel and Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org