 Swedish historian Johan Norberg is the author of The Capitalist Manifesto, why the global free market will save the world. Which caught the eye of Elon Musk, who recently tweeted, This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right. Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to be ditched in favor of more centralized power and control over virtually all aspects of our lives. A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Norberg shows that life is actually getting better for all of us, especially the world's poor, and that economic globalization, political liberalization, and cultural freedom are the main drivers of improvement. Johan Norberg, thanks for talking to me. Pleasure is all mine. First off, let's start. What's the elevator pitch? Or do Swedes call it the lift in English? What do you go with? Is it a lift or an elevator? We call it a hiss. A hiss. Okay. What is the hiss pitch for The Capitalist Manifesto? The hiss pitch is that we have wide discontent with capitalism and free markets and free trade, it seems like. Politicians on all continents have all agreed that we need to repatriate production, redistribute resources that inequality and global warming shows us that free markets doesn't work. My point is that on each of, in every area, free markets, entrepreneurs, innovators have performed spectacularly well, and that most of these things have been misunderstood. And even in the 21st century, I mean the past 20 years or so have been pretty good, even though there's a lot of people that you and I have kind of been allies with ideologically over the years who are like, oh yeah, yeah, it was great up until 2000, and now it's all gone to shit. Let's start by talking about, it was like about 20 years ago that you and I, I think, first talked and you were pushing a book called Indefensive Global Capitalism. Kind of sketch out, what were the circumstances that that book needed to be manifested? Well they were the same as they are today. Politicians and interest groups blamed global capitalism and free trade for all the problems of the world. Like then a leftist current of anti-globalization and reducing free trade around the world. And I thought I had to gather the argument because I thought that was, I was seeing around the world was that the very countries that began to integrate into the global economy, they did better than they had ever done before. Technology was decreasing, opportunities were improving, and cutting them off from globalization would destroy that. Yeah, what were the big arguments emanating? And I mean it was, I guess it was center and the center, from the center going towards the left especially. The right wing seemed to be, at least in America, was broadly supportive of globalization and trade. George H.W. Bush had started NAFTA. Bill Clinton, who was a centrist Democrat, finished the job and everything, but we were high off of winning the Cold War. But by the end of the decade you had people dressing like sea turtles and smashing Starbucks and McDonald's in Seattle. What was the main complaint coming from the anti-globalizers then? Well it was portrayed as a justice movement. The very idea that yes, multinational companies and big brands and free trade, they might benefit us in the rich world, but it will come at a terrible cost in poor countries. Exploitation, widening inequalities, increasing poverty. So basically a zero sum idea about how the world works if we benefit they will lose. And ironically, I get the same thing today, but the positions have been reversed. Okay yeah, let's talk about that because yeah, I mean you flash forward 20 years or so and it seems like it's more right wingers are now saying, you know, what we need to nail down the borders, we need to build more walls, globalization benefits these global corporations, not the little guy. Quite right. And actually they sound very much like ATAC did 20 years ago, this French left wing protectionist organization, but now from a right wing nationalist perspective. And in a way they have the same idea that the world is a zero sum game, but this time around they think that we are losing because everybody has seen with their own eyes that capitalism is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the world's poor. We've reduced extreme poverty by 135,000 people every day since I wrote in defense of global capitalism. Now lots of people in the West and in the US, they see that and think that but they still have the idea that the world is a zero sum game so they must be thinking that somebody else has got to be losing out. So probably we are this time around losing good jobs, the industrialization and widening inequalities back home. And you know, let's you know part of the argument and I think what's really urgent about the capitalist manifesto besides you know the title and and a defense of it is like you actually work through a bunch of things around the globe but also in the United States and in Europe. You know, things are getting better. You know, let's talk about you know, general standards of living have increased. But you know, how do you how do you measure that and how do you how do you demonstrate that? Yeah. And I mean, I can see I wake up every morning thinking that the world is going to the dogs as well because we got all these disasters, shocks, financial crises, inflation, pandemics, wars and stuff like that. So I can sympathize why it looks bad. And but that's why we need something more than just looking at headlines and trying to feel our way to to a worldview. We have to look at indicators of living standards. And then we can see things like how extreme poverty every every day we complained about neoliberalism destroying the world. One hundred and thirty five thousand people were aced out of extreme poverty around a third of all the wealth that mankind has ever attained. If we measure it by GDP per capita was produced over these twenty years, which is pretty impressive, even though some of it might be coming from debt and other worrying circumstances, a third of all the wealth ever. It's it's impressive. Looking at indicators like child mortality, it's been reduced by almost half over twenty years, meaning four million fewer children died last year than in two thousand and two, despite all the headwinds, despite the pandemic and all the slippage that we had back then. You at one point you quote Bono from you to talking about how, you know, he was he was a big crusader for ending global poverty. And he was like, hey, you know what, we kind of won. And it was done through trade, not through aid. Can you talk a little bit about it's not just that these things were reduced, but it's it was done through globalization. Exactly. I mean, it doesn't didn't happen everywhere. Poverty has increased in certain places and hunger as well. But in the countries that have managed to reform, liberalize, integrate into specifically global supply chains, they've been able to raise their productivity dramatically. That's where we're seeing the the reduction in poverty, increasing living standards. Specifically, many Asian countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh, Indonesia, India and China, we've seen tremendous progress. They are doing what we did over 50 to 100 years in just 20 years. Well, how does that compare to at one point you talk about how in the early sixties and, you know, in the first kind of burst after decolonization, it looked like Africa was going to be, you know, the continent on the grow. And it was actually doing phenomenally well in Asia was doing terribly. And, you know, now those are I mean, it's not there are some parts of Africa that are doing well, but it's mostly reversed. What what happened there? Yeah, no, that's interesting when you go back and listen to development economists and leftist economists like Gunnar Mirdal in the 1960s who famously or notoriously and angrily shared the Nobel Prize with Hayek, right? He was like, I don't want to go if I'm sharing it with this insane right wing reactionary. Exactly, because Mirdal knew who understood the world. He saw African countries that they had strong governments, they had a strong natural resource base, and they would see tremendous growth in the future, whereas Asia would be wracked by problems. And yeah, all they had were people in rice, right? You know, whereas all the minerals in the world were in Africa. Exactly. And of course, that's what destroyed many African economies. It created a resource curse. It made a few people incredibly wealthy. So everybody fought over power instead. Whereas the places that didn't have much of natural resources, metals and minerals, well, they had to instead work harder and work smarter rather than harder and beginning to integrate first with Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, trying to understand how do we fit in an international division of labor and then attracting foreign investments and trading with the rest of the world and being the first of the new wave of poor countries really integrating into the developed world. And I mean, you show strong correlations between economic freedom and wealth. Is does anybody really challenge that anymore? No one who looks at the data challenges that I don't really think you can see. It's such a strong correlation. First country starting to reduce extreme poverty. It's Britain early in the 19th century. Then we have a next wave of Western European countries. We get Germany, America. Then eventually in the mid 19th century, Sweden and the Scandinavian countries. Late 19th century. It's Japan. And then in the next wave, the first countries in East Asia, the Tigers. And what happened at that precise moment? I mean, it's it's a matter of within minutes almost after having starting to liberalize markets, securing property rights, trading with the rest of the world, then it takes off. And, you know, on the theme of Tigers, there's the Celtic Tiger, right, Ireland, which my grandparents, my father's grandparents, my father's parents came from for a thousand years, partly because of colonialism, imperialism, mostly because of bad governance. I mean, what does the rise of Ireland in the late 20th century say? Like, do you need the right people to be living there in order to get stuff done or is it mostly a systems based approach that if you free up the economy, you know, anybody can become rich. Well, what I've learned from economic history is that it happens in the most unexpected places. And that's what we can tell from the old forecasts by all these mistaken economists who thought that it can only happen in certain places and at a certain time. Well, you know, that's what they say until unexpected places begin to to liberalize. You know, in Ireland, I remember reading a Swedish newspaper article about Ireland 10 years ago, and they had this little box with facts that they apparently took from an encyclopedia. And it said that even though it wasn't related to the article at all because the article was about sort of Ireland's success, right? But in that box, it said that, oh, it's a hopelessly poor country and everybody is leaving it. And this was such a sharp contrast because the people hadn't changed. It was the institution, suddenly the incentive to to work and take risks. And it also puts to mind or puts to rest the idea. I remember I started at reason 30 years ago. And there were a lot of people who were kind of chasing the dragon of Max Weber or something. They're saying, well, you know, Catholic countries in Europe were poor. They have to be poor because Catholics, whatever, you know, they take too many days off for holy days of obligation or whatever. You know, they don't need enough meat on Fridays. And then yeah, it's like, yeah, maybe religion doesn't explain it. You know, IQ doesn't explain it. I mean, it's kind of liberalism, right? That's right. And Max Weber famously had to write about why Asian economies doesn't develop and basically saying. Naming the precise factors that everybody is now mentioning to explain the success of Asia. He took that Confucianism and strong families rather than individualism. Those are the things that makes it impossible for them to thrive. But then after 1979 in China after 1991 in India, suddenly they just take off. And then everybody is talking about, oh, it's this Asian mentality and then giant, it's Confucianism and it's the strong families. That great trust and collectivism that we saw. What is the 2008 Beijing Olympic opening games where there seem to be a billion Chinese beating drums in the stadium? That is, yeah, in America, you know, a lot of people would say, well, you know what? Since, you know, China joined the World Trade Organization in the 21st century, we have just seen, you know, massive deindustrialization. The Midwest is, you know, is beyond the rust belt. You know, everything has gone to hell in the United States. That's not really true, right? I mean, among other things, you talk about how income ability, you know, income ability is either increasing or it has been constant since 1971. What's going on there? Yeah, the middle class is shrinking, but that's because it's moving up if you look at those indicators. And specifically, if you look at not just dollars and cents, we should do that too, because it's important to lay to rest the whole idea of wage stagnation, which was really a period in the 1970s and the 80s when many sectors had increased wages much faster than productivity. And they had to scale that back unless otherwise they would have been destroyed completely. But after 1990, we've seen rapid wage increases in the U.S. 30% to 60%, depending on whether you take in full compensation, including non-monetary like health insurance and stuff. But also, it's important to mention goods and services. It's not dollars and cents we want. We want to be able to buy something. And we can see how most amenities that were considered luxuries just decades ago are now getting close to 100% distribution in the U.S. People under the poverty threshold in the U.S. Now, more amenities like TV sets, washing machines, dryers, and of course, computers and cell phones, than the average American had in 1970. So it seems like not everything was destroyed. And why is that? Well, one reason is that we did deindustrialize in the meaning fewer people have to work in factories to create the goods we want. We haven't deindustrialized in an absolute sense. We produce more than probably at any other stage in America's history. But it's been a success story. It's the rise of productivity, which means that we can make the goods more automation, make the goods more competitive and affordable to most people. That's what successful countries do. That's what, I mean, even China is losing manufacturing jobs. Around five million manufacturing jobs a year in the past decade. Because they're moving up the value chain, they are getting better jobs with higher productivity. There is a great section in the capitalist manifesto where you talk about kind of the myth of, you know, working in Detroit in the 1950s. And the peak of industrial workers in the United States as a share of the labor force was actually in the 40s. So it was already declining in the 50s. But, you know, people would say, oh, it was great to be an auto worker in Detroit in the 50s. I think you had a stat in there where what was it? Like 10 percent of the GDP or something was coming out of Detroit. But it actually wasn't that good. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, it looked good compared to the rest of the economy because it was awful working in agriculture and in domestic traditional industry. So comparatively, it was better than in many other places. But now when we have this kind of nostalgic rose tinted image of what it was like, it's important to go back. And there are some historical projects interviewing the workers who really did the job. And they're telling us, first of all, I do this so that my son will not have to work in a factory like this because it is awful. It's dangerous. It's dirty. And you can lose an arm or two if you're not careful. And also very insecure jobs. A very rapid turnover. And when I look at different cohorts, it turns out that there's one cohort in Detroit the year of 1953, they had fairly secure jobs, got a good decent wage, unionized. And so the whole myth of sort of Western manufacturing. You talk about cradle, grave, you know, employment, generous benefits. All of this is based on one city in one year. And what did they get the ones who got those best jobs? Well, adjusted for inflation, they get what you would get as a starting wage in Amazon warehouse today. You yet, you know, in the United States, we see, and I'm not sure if this correlates throughout Europe or globally, but certainly among men of prime kind of work years, there's lower workforce participation rights than there used to be. There's also deaths of despair. Let's first talk about workforce participation rights. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that fewer men, you know, between the ages of 25 and 54 are actively in the labor force? Yeah, if people are able to work and want to work, that's it's a good thing. They should, they shouldn't be doing other things. That has been declining, but it has been declining for a very long time. That's important to point out. This is not something that happened when China into the World Trade Organization did not happen with NAFTA. It started after the Second World War, basically, and it was actually much faster. The increase in men outside of the labor force was much higher rate in the 1950s, 60s and 70s than in this era of globalization. So it tells you that there's something else going on than just competition. It seems like we are pretty bad at retraining and having the kind of mobility in the workforce that we would want. But most of these people are then counted as disabled and they're in various programs rather than standing in the workforce. You, for a project that you did, a video project as well as other things, you actually went around the United States and you talked to people who were on welfare, who were getting various kinds of, you know, supplemental income and things like that. What did you find in that? Because that also is, I mean, the stuff itself is great. And then in the capitalist manifesto, when you recap that, what was going on with that? How did they describe, you know, who they were and what they were up? Yeah. Well, I learned that you have to be very smart and hardworking to be poor and unemployed in the US because the systems are so incredibly complex and they come from a wide variety of sources and they're based on different metrics and they then are also discounted and lost at various points when you make more of an income than you used to. So what they told me is that it feels hopeless. It feels like there's nothing they can do to change their situation. One of them told me that doing the calculations from four different benefit systems, if she increases her wage from 29,000 to 30,000, so many of the benefits fall away so that she just makes 15,000, half of it. So it means that the, in a way, the marginal tax rate for the poor and unemployed is much higher than for the rich. And they're calculating this either implicitly or explicitly. They kind of understand. Yeah, they know that it's hopeless, basically, to go out there and sacrifice time, energy and transportation costs to get a job because they notice that they don't make money. Is there, you know, probably not. Is there an easy solution to that? You know, and this is, you know, I when we were talking about factories, I was like, God, you know, I worked in factories and anybody who worked in a factory never romances size as factory work. It's just it's definitely shitty compared to any non-factory job. But I remember, you know, in a privileged setting, when I moved from grad school in Buffalo to take a job at Reason, my wife and I, at the time, we realized after we had moved that we basically went our our grad students stipends in Buffalo, which had a low cost of living. We had free health care through the university. We were expecting our first child. We were doing so much better than when we went to one salary starting at Reason in LA that it was like, God, if we had thought about it economically, we never would have done it. But it was also we were playing the long game. Is there, you know, and you take a hit in earnings now in order to conceivably be doing the work you want down the road at better pay. Is there a policy solution to getting people who are, you know, say making twenty nine grand on welfare to say, you know what, you should take a hit, but, you know, so that in five years you're doing spectacularly well. Yeah. Well, I wish welfare is complicated. And it's there are no perfect social benefit system. The moment you start paying people when they are unemployed and disabled, you also subsidize it. You also buy more, more of it, and it's difficult to get out of it. But there are versions of kind of a negative income tax that would at least make sure that you always keep more of what you earn. So you don't you create suddenly a 50 percent marginal tax rate or something like that. Yes. And at least and, you know, so that you don't have to do all these calculations and feel like it seems impossible. Many of them I talk to, they have friends and relatives who are helping them to do the calculations and they're sitting there with with pen and paper and trying to find out is there any way to improve my life? Well, with just one simple system, it's never simple, but just one, at least you'd see, you'd understand, you know what you can do to improve your life. Is that an argument for a universal basic income or a negative income tax? Do you think that, you know, people know that there's this lower limit that they can't drop below, but that's also that's it. I don't you know, it doesn't seem like the UBI works out well when it's actually implemented. But but it is an argument in favor of an UBI. And then there might be bigger problems that makes us a little bit cautious when it comes to doing it. It seems like a UBI would be incredibly expensive if everybody is supposed to have it or it wouldn't help the poorest much. So perhaps some sort of negative income tax with which sort of insures or supports wages for the poorest seems like a better way to go about this. OK, but what now let's talk about deaths of despair, which are probably, you know, one of the main examples that people will say where, you know, Norberg, if you're saying life is getting better in America, you know, we have consecutive years, even, you know, the pandemic obviously helps us. But it doesn't explain all of it, you know, where lifespans are declining in America in the 21st century. Can you quickly define what deaths of despair are? And then what did you find when you start looking into what's going on with that? Yeah. Well, it's a famous and depressing concept coined by Angus Deaton, the Nobel Laureate and his wife, Ankees Deaton. Deaths of despair and they're including various sorts of self harm, broadly speaking, could be drug overdoses, alcoholism or suicide. I think when we look at it, this is kind of controversial among scholars, because when you look at it, it might be that we're just talking about a drug overdose epidemic, that that's the real thing that sets this apart. But what they're meaning and what many take away from it is that there's something related to how people live, a sense of despair that makes them live in this kind of self-destructive way. And this has increased dramatically. Why is that? Yes, many say that this is strange as society, as the society gets richer and more open. Some blame it then on ruthless capitalism and free markets. But as Angus Deaton points out himself, you can hear it in the very word of globalization. It's global. It happens everywhere. And so is automation. So all these forces, but it seems like it's specifically happening in the US rather than in other places. And economically, more economically free countries in the West have not had the same increase in deaths of despair to this extent. So and it's not equally distributed among the United States. That's you know, where California and New York seem to have lower rates than Ohio and Kentucky. That's right. And it's a traditional white, blue color working class that's out of the labor force. That it's mostly people who have ended up on, again, the disability benefits and the welfare benefit traps and fails like there's not much they can do to change their lives. And that's not specifically then related to anything that has happened with global globalization to automation, because this was a group that ended up quicker in that section of out of the workforce and stuff like that before. We even thought of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. We saw more jobs being lost in the rust belt in the 1960s and 70s than in the past few decades. If anything, we've seen more of a stagnation since then. And inequality, you know, is flat in the United States or declining globally. It's declining inequality among countries. So what do you do with deaths of despair? Is it is it a category, you know, that I mean, it commands attention, but is it ultimately, you know, is it something that is beyond the scope of of government or, you know, kind of a modern society to deal with? Or or is it, you know, a fundamental misreading of how people live? I don't. Well, I mean, one thing is this might be very much a drug overdose epidemic rather than anything else. So perhaps there are things related to drug laws and the unsafe drugs that are being used on the black market. Closely, you know, tracked with the rise of opioids, particularly oxycontin. And I know, you know, other people who deal with addiction and whatnot, they say, you know, it's not that people weren't taking drugs before. It's that drugs are more potent. They also there was a crackdown on oxycontin and other opioids. So then people turn to black markets for either versions of that or heroin, which is risky, particularly in a black market. So you get more deaths. Quite right. So this this is one angle. Don't think too much about lifestyles and stuff. Just make sure that people don't poison themselves with something that they don't know what it what it's about. But the other thing is that we know that it's bad for your health and you shorten your life if you feel like you're worthless. It's impossible to change your situation. You're not needed anywhere. And this is, I think, one of the greatest challenges to modern welfare states like America's, because it seems like economically, I mean, it's it's all right. We can probably afford to have a larger group of people outside of the workforce. We can pay for it all in hand and benefits and they stay at home. But can we afford what it buys this kind, this sense of being rejected, not needed anywhere and not being able to change your life circumstances? So I think there are both things to do with the benefit system, but also obviously making sure that the thresholds to getting new jobs once you once you've lost it. It's incredibly important that they're as low as possible and goes to occupational licensing stuff. It goes to the whole housing market. The fact that it's impossible to live where the jobs are nowadays because of a very much a regulatory issue, right? You know, another accelerator, supposedly in the decline of lifestyle and standards of living in the United States, you know, has to do with China. All you know, China. I was just watching Donald Trump a couple days ago was talking to people in Michigan directed at blue colors and he was saying China, China, China. You know, China has taken all the jobs. There's a version of that that Joe Biden says and Democrats everywhere in America. You have a chapter called China Paper Tiger. So are you saying or adventure argument that you know what? China is not going to eat the world. Right. There is one unifying narrative about China that I get a lot from both the left and the right and the center. And it's that they are so incredibly smart and they have a plan for everything, how to invade our markets and take our jobs with very clever industrial policy and picking certain companies, subsidizing them and dumping their goods here and by cheat, right? They steal intellectual property. Everybody follows the government, right? The orders come down and they're instantly executed. Yeah. And that's not true. And and I must say the worrying implication is that so many Americans say we have to imitate them. We have to be like that in order to beat them. And that's one reason why we get the support for protectionism and industrial policy right now. You know, they do have industrial policy. They are trying to pick winners. They are trying to get the heavy hand of the government back into the economy. But that's a fairly new phenomena. I mean, this happened started to happen around the global financial crisis. And especially after Xi Jinping took power. And this is not what's making China rich. This is what risks making it poor. It's a terrible destruction of resources that are going on. And you can see that that they're handing the subsidies, the cheap credits to the least productive companies, and they become less productive once they do this. It's very important, I think, to get the history of China's economic rise right. And it's showing lower than average growth of Asian countries, right, over the past several years and things like that. So it's like whatever. I mean, in the United States, I don't know how this played out in Sweden or in Europe in the 80s. But, you know, we did a version of this with Japan and the role of China, where I was told, you know, going to college in the 80s, like you better learn Japanese because we're all going to be working for a Japanese company. And, you know, within a couple of years, Japan, Japanese businessmen famously bought Rockefeller Center, you know, the great monument to American ingenuity and capitalism. And we're like, OK, game up. And then it was like a couple of years later, they unloaded it at a loss. Yeah. Do you think something similar is going or something similar as at work with our fears of China? Oh, I think so for sure. China had a good run. It was an impressive rise and it happened precisely in the areas where they began to liberalize and open up big time. So it was a success of market forces in China. Now that's over. They've begun to retreat. The government is back in business. And that's really undermining business. And it comes at a very bad time. China is still a very poor country. It's I mean, it's just that it's big, but it's as poor as the Dominican Republic or Gabon, so they wouldn't need if they wanted to go on the trajectory of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Japan under their good years then they would have to grow five to seven percent per capita for a couple more decades. That is not happening, partly also for demographic reasons. We we have fewer farmers to put into factories. So the catch up growth is over. Fewer farmers to put into newly built apartments to the real estate boom is over. They are they are in decline. So the question is, will this be a managed decline or will it be a will it end in tears? Yeah. What what what's your guess? I mean, one of the other things about China when after Mao died and China liberalized, it seemed again in the 80s, really, Milton Friedman's maximum that first you get economic liberty and then you demand political liberty was taking place. And then, you know, tanks rolled into the TMN square and it was like, oh, now they're going back to dictatorship, which seemed to be working because that was the way that people like Thomas Friedman and other kind of early kind of champions of of managed globalization. We're like, oh, now we maybe we should be more like China. Do you think, you know, now that China is facing certain kinds of decline, you know, is it going to actually be like, you know what, we're we're going to give up power or is it going to end in tears? Yeah, that's a good question. There was this very sad time when we had this dictator envy all over the U.S. and Europe. And Thomas Friedman famously said that he wanted to be China for a day and then he would fix environmental problems just like that because we yeah, it looked like it worked. But what was it that worked? It was really the entrepreneurs and the innovators who had created stuff. The moment Xi Jinping got back and got interested in various sectors, he began to destroy them. So I think we have to get that history right because then we also understand that they're in real trouble right now. And just like we think that if the dictator points everybody in the right direction, we must remember when he points them in the wrong direction, everything collapses at the same time. And I think we're seeing more of investigations like that now. One very interesting thing that is related to Thomas Friedman is that. Yeah, dictators and planned economies, they're able to fix things rapidly on paper, at least to get the get stuff done. But what is it that they get done? So one thing is that they have now twice as much wind power, wind generate, wind farms than the U.S. And this is what impressed Thomas Friedman and the rest of the world. Look, this is how you solve environmental problems. But now when scholars look at what's going on, those wind, that wind power doesn't generate as much as America's, even though on paper it's twice as much. Why not? It's less efficient. It doesn't always work. Sometimes they're not even connected to the grid because they didn't produce it to generate power or to make money. They did it to fulfill the command of Xi Jinping and the plans. And that's what we're beginning to realize about China right now. And I think they do too. And who knows why that might be a reason why we're seeing this new purges of the party, one Minister of Defense and one Minister of Foreign Affairs disappearing in the past few months. Let's talk a little bit about the environment because this is, you know, a big part of the large narrative of pessimism is that, you know, some people critics, you know, from wherever they are on the political spectrum or ideological spectrum will say, OK, yeah, maybe things are getting better, you know, overall, but the planet is about to, you know, dry up, you know, burn up and blow away. Is that accurate? Actually, what we've seen again over the past few decades is one of the greatest achievements when it comes to the environment ever. I mean, it's fairly recently as we started to care about the nature and about the future. Now in the past decades, we've reduced most of the pollutants emissions. We're beginning to see growth of forests again in rich countries, in most countries actually around the world. We're beginning to see rewilding going on, cleaner water in all those areas, tremendous achievements. And where does this happen? You know, if you go to the Environmental Performance Index, looking at 40 different indicators of environmental conditions around the world, they point out that GDP per capita is a pretty strong explainer for what's going on. The richer you are, the more you can also afford to care about the planet because you're not making the decision. So the forest or my children's education, you can do both and you can get better technology to deal with it as well. And that is not, I mean, that's an interesting question from a kind of libertarian or classical liberal perspective. Those, I mean, some of that is done through government mandates, right? So it's an odd thing. Like we get richer and then we demand more a cleaner environment. But that sometimes limits what goes on in the marketplace. Quite right. It does. It's not always the case. Some of this is driven by consumers and by businesses just wanting something better and cleaner. But quite often it's also some sort of mandates or taxes. Do you define yourself as maybe as neither, but as a libertarian or an anarchist or, you know, what is that a meaningful distinction for you? I'd call myself self libertarian because nowadays I think we we need some sort of minimal state to at least make sure that we have the. Right rules to rules for the road. One of the best sections of the book because in and in a way this is where people who say the world is getting worse, you know, on a profound level in the 21st century or, you know, since your book in defense of global capitalism, sometimes they'll say, oh, yeah, you can see it everywhere because people are dying sooner and, you know, everything is junk now. And, you know, people are not working and all of that. But they kind of grant that. No, actually, the problem is we have so much stuff now. Everybody's distracted from everything. And then there's this criticism that comes not exclusively but the resurgent part of the surging part of it is from a kind of anti liberal right, you know, who say and there was a vulgar version of this or a vox populi version of this articulated by Tucker Carlson, who was like, yeah, you know, we get a lot more plastic crap in our lives, but we don't, you know, have any meaningful community. You engage Patrick Dineen, an American academic who's an ill liberal right winger who says, you know, liberalism has been tried and it fails. And it fails partly because it it it generates loose connections and we don't know how to live our lives. Is he onto something? I don't think he is. He makes a very strong case rhetorically. He explains that we're becoming increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty. But insecure, powerless, afraid and alone. And of course, we can all understand what he's getting at because life is tough and it's we often feel like you hear this like, you know, you know, men, young men have no close personal friends, according to survey, nobody's having sex anymore. You know, the you know, the last time people had people over their house is like a thousand years ago. I mean, all of these indicators are are those not happening or are those just misinterpreted? You know, there is an epidemic of headlines saying that there's a loneliness epidemic. But when researchers look at it, it's very difficult to find something like that. Yes, we spend more time alone than we used to. There are more single households than before. But it seems like we enjoy that. It seems like actually single households and people who spend less time with others also often say that they're less lonely than others. So it might be that we're also choosing our relationships in ways that make them more fruitful and important to us. And we adapt them to to our individual and this is somebody anybody who grew up in a household where you had to share a bedroom like, you know, when you can afford it, you get your own bedroom, right? I mean, and that's kind of a banal level. And I'm also now I'm put in mind that I'm talking to a Swedish person and a Scandinavian and somebody who's watched a lot of Bergman movies. So you're like, no, the greatest world imaginable is one where I am alone in my own dark thoughts all the time, right? But you you do quote a meta study or a meta analysis you know, that shows like mental health issues which we're constantly told we're in this epidemic of loneliness and we're in deaths of despair and people are sadder and more apart than ever. But when you actually look at the social science on this, it it's not there, right? Yeah, quite right. We have to make the reservation that the pandemic might have have influenced this. We were probably seeing the rise of certain mental illness, conditions, more loneliness. But that's if anything, that's an argument to make gains the case that mobility and freedom results in us being alone and weak and and afraid. But overall, when it when you really look at the data, it doesn't seem like we're seeing a rise globally over the population when it comes to mental illness or loneliness or anything like that. What we have been seeing is that many conditions that we saw before we've started to use another terminology to describe them, often a mental illness terminology. Can you explain that? So you were you were sad and you had to lay down for two weeks. That's what we used to say about parents when mom was feeling bad. Now it's depression. Now it's a clinical condition and that's something else. And for good and ill, I think we're over diagnosing some of these things. We might have turned too often to to doctors when we should have talked to a friend. But I also think this is a way in which we take some of these problems seriously for the first time, you know, in my parents' generation, they would never talk about how they felt and their mental conditions. Yeah, you'd go to a doctor if you lost a leg, but you would never do it if you broke your heart or or anything like that. And in some ways that that stigma is gone, even though it might result in over diagnosis, it's also a sign that we're actually we care and we're trying to do something and if we get the right therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, it has excellent results. So doing that is not a sign of a sick society. I think it's a sign of healthy society. I guess, you know, when I would think everybody who reads the capitalist manifesto is going to walk away like, OK, here are the arguments that I keep hearing that are describing the reality I live in. It's a really powerful rebuttal to that. And then I'm left wondering, what are the, you know, how do how do you change someone's mind? Because a lot of people are invested in the idea that these are, if not the worst of all possible times, we're starting to get there. Like our orbit is is degrading and we're falling back into the earth and getting burned up on the reentry or something. I don't know what the right metaphor is. How, you know, I guess my question is like your book is part of an answer to that. It's like, no, like, let's start by talking about what's actually going on. And and it's filled with a lot of kind of stories of, you know, actual people and individuals to illustrate these larger principles. But what are, you know, what are the stories that should be told at a higher level to get people to be like, stop being so pessimistic, stop being so Swedish about this and, you know, get out and play in the sun. Yeah, that that is exactly the reason why I wrote this book, because it's an uphill battle right now. And I've noticed that you tend to ruin good dinner parties by explaining that that we're not going to die. And I understand what we should care about global warming. But look, 40 countries have been able to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in absolute terms while growing their economies in the past decade. So and people are often invested in their problems and in the problems of the world and it's part of their identity and the fact that they care about it, it's important to them. So telling them that, look, this it's actually better than you think might be threatening, ironically. But I don't really find that among. I find that when you go into single aspects, when you look at every single data point, if you're talking about extinction of mammals or if you're thinking, talking about carbon dioxide separately, if you're talking about poverty in Bangladesh, people pay attention to those things. So and they listen to the data and they're interested in the story. So perhaps we might not need the biggest, grandest narratives because they are also the most threatening. If I'm telling everybody that, it's a good way to get the tension to tell people that look, we've had the twenty best years in human history. But it's also it's a way of starting a conversation, but it's also threatening and it seems weird. But when I talk to them about their concerns in on various issues, then it's possible to break through. So I think we need a million small stories that relate to all of these things. And that's why I try to capture so many different areas of lived experience in the book. What how many kids do you have? Three. And how what's the age range? 12, 13, 16. OK. And what do you, you know, do they seem convinced? And obviously, you know, they may not be the right age to just disagree with you reflexively or not. But I mean, do they seem optimistic about the future? Or, you know, yeah, I mean, I guess let's start with that. Well, they do come home from school and tell me that we're going to die suffocating in plastics from the oceans as well. So there is that. And I noticed that among the generation. However, I don't know why if it's genetics or something else, but they tend to be on the more optimistic side than their classmates. And, you know, thinking about solutions to things. So, for example, my oldest son is sort of always trying to make school projects about nuclear power. And now we can make it cheap and safe. And this will give us unlimited energy for the future. Is there it just as a side note is, you know, does nuclear do you think nuclear power is going to make a resurgence? I think so, but we're going to need something better. And I think actually we ruined it the last time around by having the government picking nuclear power as the winner. That's what we thought in the 1960s. And let's just build them right now. Big expensive because the technology wasn't right there and less safe than it could have been if we had done it slowly, steadily, step by step. The way we do it in any other kind of innovation. The moment the government gets involved, it's sort of one big package. And it became too expensive and difficult to continue with it. Now we are seeing it in another way. Let's hope we don't repeat that mistake, because at least on the. On paper, there are some kind of promising, smaller scale, cheaper solutions. Do you for your kids, what, you know, say, in 10 years, what are their indicators where you would say, oh, my God, like, you know, indicators for their life and their well being where if they were going in the wrong direction to be like, holy cow, we really do need to change what we're doing. Right. Yeah. What would that be, which indicators? Well, obviously, as a parent, any kind of mental illness, loneliness thing. And I think that's the reason why we get so many headlines about this. That is worrying when we when we see that. And that's also reason why we shouldn't take those things too lightly and just talk about epidemics and the worry about cell phones and stuff like that, because it's kind of self-reinforcing in a way. It's it's interesting that, yes, we've seen a rise in mental illness among teenagers, especially girls in the U.S. But hey, we use cell phones in Sweden, too. And in Japan, too. Why haven't we seen the same thing? So there are always some problems in some areas, some places. We do have to look at broader sections of the world population if we're going to find some cause and effect. But sorry, I wonder away from your question. So but that's one indicator, obviously, any kind of self-harm, self-destructive behavior is worrying, definitely. And also, obviously, opportunities in the economy, getting jobs and being able to start start businesses, being able to afford to. Buy an apartment. Right. Yeah, that's always for the from the parents per se. I realize this long after my parents have died that the sign of success is that your kids don't live with you. Right. Yeah. And, you know, for a long time, that was not something civilization could afford, right? You know, multi-generational families are like, you know, that's nobody's first choice, I think, right? Right. To me, if there's anything that's important, it's that they get and have and keep the sense that they are able to affect their own lives and do something about it. Well, let me throw something at you. And it's, you know, I don't get to talk to Swedish intellectuals very often, not because there aren't a lot of them. It's just, you know, we travel in different circles. But I was thinking a lot lately of work by Par Lagervis, the Swedish Nobel Prize winner, who is best known, at least in the U.S. for his novel, Barabbas, which is a great Christian existentialist novel came out in 1950. And it's about the guy who gets freed in the place of Jesus. And then is, you know, so he's given a new life that he didn't earn, you know, and he doesn't really know what to do. I've been thinking a lot lately that that's kind of where we are as a society, certainly in the U.S., in Europe, I think increasingly in the world, where we have to be the masters of our own destinies. And I took for granted that that is incredible and liberating. I think it's also an unbelievably anxiety-inducing, particularly at the society-wide level. Is this the real crisis? It's not one of material or moral progress. It's that we are all, you know, Sisyphus, and we've got to choose what Boulder we're doing and why we're doing it and how do we get happy doing that? Yeah. Yeah, I'm fond of this Eastern European proverb. If you don't have food, you have one problem. But if you have food, you have a thousand problems. And obviously, you start to think about your life and every aspect of it and how you're going to make sure that things work out for the best. And obviously, that's anxiety-inducing, as Lagerquist or Kierkegaard would have pointed out, until you consider the alternative. Because every time you look at what do people say, what do the young say about their lives and whether they're happy, subjective well-being and so on, yes, this sense that there's so much choice and you don't know what to do with your life is, it feels in your stomach. But if you don't have those options, if you don't have those freedoms, those who say that they have the least chance to change their lives and decide what to do when it comes to education, career and so on, then it shows up in clinical diagnosis. It feels, then it turns into mental illness. So there are different versions of anxiety and some are better than others. But I do understand the temptation. We come from a long prehistory of living in bands and tribes and someone telling us what to do and sometimes it feels liberating just having that strong man telling you, I know the answer to the question. And it takes some novels and some research to really find out that the way in which we really create more decent societies and more fulfilled lives is not to just follow that one rule but to find the way within us. And this is, you're in your discussion of Patrick DeNene and other people like him. That's the refutation of it, right? That they think because there are multiple ways or people are finding their own paths that that comes at the cost of society or meaning or culture. But in fact, it's kind of the ultimate victory. It's so strange when you read them and their idea about what classical liberalism and free markets are all about because they think it's just these institutions and they say they can't give you meaning of life. It's just sort of property rights and free exchange. That's not enough. Of course it's not enough. I mean, we need something more, but what? That's the question. And I'm not sure DeNene knows what we need. He certainly doesn't know what you need, right? Exactly. I need love and friendship and I need good books by Mario Vargas Llosa and I need a System Mercy record at last after just having played live for three decades now. Those are things that give me meaning but it wouldn't give DeNene meaning. So it's important to point out that there are many different ways to many different versions of meaning. And I think we can pick that up by looking at polls because all these claims from DeNene and others, they're so very rarely backed up by any kind of empirical data. They just point out that this, you should all be miserable because how could you vulgar people ever find meaning in Taco Tuesday and bad TV shows? Yeah, I know he doesn't. That's why intellectuals shouldn't run our lives because they have another set of preferences than we do in another meaning of life. But we can pick up in polls how people are doing in individualist societies compared to collectivist ones, rich societies compared to poor ones. And no matter what intellectuals say, it shows up again and again, a very clear pattern. People say that they're happier, more subjective well-being, in rich, free societies, individualist societies, they feel less lonely than they do in poorer and less free societies. And they also think that they have more friends and they can rely upon. They also say that they're more willing to help others when they are in need. So all these indicators, once you stop being so, my hope we can just looking at one year in the US, but look around the world, compare different systems, different populations, then you see that we're actually not in the best of possible worlds, but the best one so far. All right, we're gonna leave it there. I've been talking with Johann Norberg, whose latest book is The Capitalist Manifesto. Johann, thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you very much for having me.