 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is Marion Tupi, editor of humanprogress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Marion. Thank you for having me. Why start humanprogress.org? Well, it had many causes, but let me focus on three. First was the greater recession, the financial crisis of 2008. And the newspapers were filled with stories like Washington Post carried a headline, is this the end of American capitalism? The New York Times had a very famous contribution from Tom Friedman. Should we be China for a day? In other words, liberal democracy itself was being questioned. And it seemed to me that part of the reason why people were so willing to talk about the demise of capitalism and liberal democracy was because they didn't quite appreciate the tremendous accomplishments of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, basically the spread of economic and political freedom over the last 200 years or so. I'm talking about political and economic freedom in its broadest sense. The second reason was that I read Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist. The book was filled with very interesting statistics that were new to me, such as the cost of light, which I later found out was based on the famous Nordhaus paper from 1998 that I didn't know about. And everybody should know about it. So it seemed to me, so why not put it online? Because we wanted to really democratize access to information. And the third and last point I would mention is that big data became, first of all, freely available for the first time. And the graphics revolution was advanced to a point where big data could now be readily made available. And the amazing thing is Matt Ridley's newest book, which was The Evolution of Everything, he mentions that when an idea is ripe, a lot of people will come up with it. And as it turns out, 2013 also marked the launch of Gapminder online by Hans Rosling and his team and also Max Rosers, our world in data. So three people in different parts of the world had a very similar idea. The first of the three that you mentioned, you talked about articles about, is this the end of capitalism? And then Tom Friedman's yearning for a totalitarian regime that could, I think it was institute green energy policies without worrying about this fussy democracy and what not. But in light of that, in light of that particular part of the motivation and that human progress is a project of the Cato Institute, does human progress have like a view or an ideological perspective or a policy goal? Like, is this a libertarian website trying to push libertarianism? Right. So we are very open about what we are doing on the about page. That's very important because so many times online, you find people saying, oh, well, you know, you are in the pocket of big corporations or the Koch brothers are paying your way and things like that. So we are very clear about what we are doing. And I'm going to get there in a second. What I wanted to start with is to say, what do we think is the value added of human progress? And the value added of human progress, as I see it, is to contextualize human progress within the broader framework of human freedom, right? So Max Roser and our world in data, he's a great scholar. But his website is primarily about the data. He doesn't really go into what has brought all of these tremendous advancements in human well being about. And I had a similar complaint about Hans Rosling, a great man who has accomplished much more than I could ever hope to accomplish. But again, if you're listening to him, good things happen, sort of they're like being pulled like like rabbits being pulled out of a hat. He doesn't contextualize it whatsoever. Now, I'm convinced that the spread of human freedom, political and economic played a very large part in what's been happening, essentially since the late 18th century. And so we are not, and I'm finally getting to your question. So we are not explicitly libertarian, but we do encourage people to think about the about the roles of economic and political freedom. The data itself, of course, is all produced by third parties. So we have nothing to do with with the data. When people interact with our data, it's the same way they would interact with the World Bank, the IMF, with Eurostat or what have you. But then we also producing our own original context, content, content. And that is precisely where we try to put a sort of freedom spin on it. But hopefully in a in a hopefully in a in a justifiable way. In other words, if there is a link between, say, increased intellectual freedom in Europe in late 18th century and greater scientific experimentation, which then leads to certain scientific improvements, such as discovery of the germ theory of disease, we think that there is a clear link between, for example, abandonment of of of religious dogma and embrace of science. But embrace of science itself is a result of greater freedom. In what way? Can we expand on that a little bit? Is it just greater freedom to read, greater freedom to, I guess, religious freedom, in the sense of not having heresy laws or blaspheming laws or things like this? That's exactly right. So in so far as we can identify Western Europe in 18th century as being crucial. Now, I'm not suggesting that there weren't technological scientific and cultural advancements in the Middle East in in Asia, especially in China. But but certainly the industrial revolution, which marks the the break with with the with the time of popery in human in human history, is a Western European, Western European phenomenon. And you can point to a lot of things which which happened before the industrial revolution, which increased freedom of conscience in Europe. Certainly, the discovery of of printing press, the spread of first the Bible, but also then other texts throughout Europe. Also, I would say that in addition to printing press, it would be the fragmentation of the European political scene and the fact that you had much more of a political and economic competition in Europe, which then led to different city states providing their citizens, their inhabitants with different sets of political rights and responsibilities. And people could choose where to live in order to experience greater freedom. So that's why you have so many thinkers of the Enlightenment ending up in Switzerland, for example, or in the low countries is because that's where they were permitted to say more than they would be in their home countries. So it also seems that you can connect it to economic growth in just personal wealth because in say the year 800, everyone basically except the ones living in the castles were farmers who were living lives of poverty and they had to they had to farm enough for them to eat in a day and it took a lot more work for them to do that. So if you were the best thinker of the time, if you were a possible scientist or some sort of possible innovator, but you were out there farming because no one could produce enough economic surplus for you to contribute without farming or if you were the best opera singer of the time or any of those professions that contribute to arts and science and culture, they don't seem wouldn't seem to arise if you're just doing subsistence level agriculture. Yes. So freeing of the labor from from the land and the move of European populace from the farm to the cities, which then has its own positive effects was was also important. But no doubt that political liberalization was and economic liberalization. Well, let me put it to you this way. The rise of the bourgeoisie in 18th century, perhaps even sooner, was kind of important because you had this previously unknown force being introduced into European politics. So between before then you what you have is the aristocracy on top. You have the peasants at the bottom between 80 and 90% of the population are peasants. And then you have a tiny sliver of people in the middle who are the traders. But then in 18th century, you do have the rise of the bourgeoisie. And as these people become wealthier, they start to resent the fact that they are being taxed without having any political representation. And so you could certainly say that economic empowerment of the bourgeoisie leads to political rights for the first time being being being given or are being obtained by by the people in the middle. Yeah, I think that's part of it. So that the broad takeaway when one goes and visits humanprogress.org and clicks through on all the graphs and reads the articles about the original content and you guys link to a lot of articles elsewhere that are kind of on brand is this progress is that the world is getting better. And but that's not the way most people feel. You know, most people if you ask them like, is the world getting better? They'd say, no. If you ask them in specific, you know, is the world getting safer? No. Are people getting healthier? No. Are we getting wealthier? No. Maybe some of the rich are, but everyone else is not. And so on the one hand, is it is it actually the case that the world like as a whole, things are getting better. This is the story of broad human progress. Or I mean, to ask me to sound unfair, are you just kind of cherry picking the handful of good things amidst all of this terrible trends? And if you're not, if the world actually is getting better, why are so many of us convinced that it's not? Well, let's start with the, is the whole world getting better? Unambiguously, yes. The list of things which are getting worse in the world is much shorter than the list of things in which the world is getting better. And that list, the second list, includes the most important elements of human well-being that I think most reasonable people would agree on. First of all, we are living longer. As late as 1950, sorry, as late as 1900, in the richest countries in the world, life expectancy was below 50 years. Now it is 70 years globally. In other words, your median global citizen living somewhere in Malaysia lives 20 years longer than a Western European did 120 years ago. And in the West, life expectancy is 78 years or so or 80. So life expectancy, we are living longer. And most people tend to sort of cling on to their life as long as possible. That gives us an indication that people prefer to live than than being dead. Famine and calorie intake. Today, in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest continent in the world, people have access to equal number of calories that the Portuguese did in the early 1960s. So you and I, well, certainly me, I am old enough to remember in the early 1980s, the images from Ethiopia and Eritrea and, you know, we thought this was the future of humanity. It's not. Famine is gone from the world outside of war zones. 20% of African women, recent Kenyan study showed are obese. Now I'm not saying that's a good thing. What I'm saying is that it's preferable to to to famine. We have 80% literacy. We have close to universal access to primary school. Women or other girls and boys attending primary school. We all we have a gender parity for the first time in in human history, something like 70% of girls in Afghanistan now attend primary school, which is remarkable by itself. What else? We have decline in variety of types of violence. Stephen Pinker of Harvard has a 800 page book devoted to showing how violence has decreased. And we don't need to get into numbers. You just have to think about things which used to be normal parts of human existence, such as breaking people on the wheel, quatering and beheading your your criminals in the middle of towns, towns squares. This is very unusual outside of Saudi Arabia. People used to engage in and delight in a variety of cruel sports, nailing cats to wooden poles and bear beating and lowering cats into into fires and things like that. People just didn't like cats much. And they really didn't medieval people did not like cats. This is true. So Oh, and for the first time in recorded history, we don't have a hot international war between two countries that have declared war on each other. We have frozen conflicts such as the US versus North Korea. We have clandestine or maybe not so clandestine invasion of Eastern Ukraine by Russia. But even that, what is it that vice paste to virtue? Hypocrisy is the compliment advice paste to virtue, even that Putin has not declare war on on on Ukraine. So those would be some of the most important aspects of human well being and it's all getting better. Now, your second question is about why don't people necessarily perceive that? And again, there is a massive amount of thinking and research on what what psychologists call negativity bias. And if you want, we can we can talk about the negative bias in greater detail. I it's also politically interesting. And one of the things I do here doing gun policy, everyone seems to think that it's worse now than it's ever been. And it's, you know, or and we have people who think it's less safe for kids to go out and in play in and on in the streets or in the park, you know, without supervision, that it's less safe that kidnappings are more common. And so then you get this idea where it becomes politically salient and you have a president who ran on the idea of make America great again, which seems to say that, you know, he's confirming that it was worse. It's getting worse. It's everyone thinks it's getting worse. He's confirming it. And he's going to come in and fix this stuff. So it actually has meaningful political implications if people don't realize that things are getting better. So given given all of that, I mean, yeah, let's follow up on this this negativity bias, which is what Trevor just described, but then described how people's negativity bias can be kind of operationalized or even weaponized in the political sphere. But what what is this bias and what drives it? It's there are there are a number of aspects to it. The first one, the most obvious one is that news is about stuff that happens. So shooting up a high school is stuff that happens. You never have a journalist again, as Pinker likes to say, who is in the middle of a city that is at peace, say, Luanda, the capital of of Angola, which had civil war for some like two or three decades, and you never have a journalist standing there. I'm reporting to you from a city that is not at war. They tend to go to places where terrible things happen. So and and, you know, it's in the nature of news that that what bleeds leads. Okay, so that's one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is that bad and good news tend to happen along two different time dimensions. Good stuff tends to happen in incremental step over a long period of time. Let's take something like HIV drugs, anti retroval drugs. I mean, we started talking about HIV AIDS in 1980. It was only 1994 that we have the first anti retroval drugs, they have terrible side effects and so on and so forth. Today in 2018. Things are much better. But again, it took, you know, 28 years to get to a point where HIV AIDS is no longer considered to be either a death sentence or a terrible impediment in terms of how people live their lives. So it's incremental. On the other hand, bad news or bad things tend to happen very quickly, you know, airplanes flying to skyscrapers. Second, thirdly, you've got a problem with bad being more powerful than good, which is to say that people tend to feel a loss much more than they tend to feel gain. I like to think of my annual reviews with my boss, where he can give me a 10 minute narration about all the successes that we have committed. But it's that one thing that I messed up that that he brings up that sticks with me for for the whole year until the next annual review, you know, and the reality is that people feel lost much more than much more than gain. So, you know, that's a problem. What are the other ones? The availability heuristic, terrible things have a greater imprint on our minds and we tend to pull them up from that from the memory folder with greater ease than good things. And, you know, because I like evolution because I think that so much of human human persona and humanity is really a result of how we have evolved. I think that there's probably a very good reason why we tend to be pessimistic and why we are on the lookout for bad things. And that's because that that's paid off in the in the in the years of your namely, that an overreaction to to a perceived danger was less costly than underreaction to perceive danger. If you overreacted to, I don't know, a noise and it turned out to be to turn out to be benign. Well, nothing happened. You just got you just got a little freaked out. But if there was a lion hiding behind that bush and made the noise and you didn't react, you underreacted and then you were dead. And so optimistic genes presumably would have been weeded out of the gene pool. So those those explanations tend to focus on the behavior of like we so we kind of notice like you said, we notice the bad stuff more the bad stuff sticks more in our memory. We have this incentive to if we're not quite sure to assume it's bad because it's a survival thing. But but there seems to be this other phenomenon that would that doesn't quite get explained by those but but seems very widespread and and somewhat troubling, which is that someone comes to say a site like human progress. So you you think things are bad. But you ought to then be really happy to find out that things aren't bad, right? Like you it ought to be great. Like, so someone tells you like, Oh, that noise was just the wind, it wasn't a lion, you ought to be, you know, just yay, that made my day. But it seems that people's reaction to being told it was just the wind and not a lion is to get mad at the person telling them or to get mad at you or to say that, you know, you're trying to push some agenda or things really are it's like people want to hold on to the badness to in light of all the evidence and, you know, against all the evidence to the contrary. When it seems like we all want to why wouldn't you want to like know that the world is better than you think it is that seems like the best possible thing that you could know. Well, let's spoil that a little because actually I could use your help in thinking through this. So what we were talking about right so far is what I call the software of negativity. The programs that are being run in our minds how to react to things. Then there's also hardware of negativity. And that's the amygdala. There's actually a part of our brain that is responsible for rage and fear and things like that. And that's part of it. Environment also plays a role. And don't worry, I'm going to get to the point that you were making but environment also plays a role. So for example, social media enables us to to to feel negative news much more immediately and much more intimately. You can watch tsunami kill 10,000 Japanese on your, you know, in real life, it of course, you makes you feel very unsafe. But now let's get to the last point. So I've talked about hardware amygdala. I was talking about software, the psychological process is the environment, but let's talk about something else. And that's philosophy or rather, maybe ideology. Okay, so let me give you an example of of what I mean. And maybe you to kind of pine. There's this man called Graeber, who started the whole we are the 99%. And the story was told to me by Charles Kenny of Central Global Development and basically this guy Graeber sent out a bunch of tweets about a year ago, asking people to provide him with basically evidence that the world is getting worse. And and his tweets when something like this, I keep seeing statistics, which are showing that the world is getting better. And and this seems to confirm the validity of what he called neoliberal order. Okay, which basically what I'm saying is that capitalism is not bad, right? Does anybody know any statistics to counter that? And can anybody supply me with those statistics? Okay, so here you have a person who did what you Aaron, what you were driving it? Okay, here you have a person who is who is philosophically committed to a certain vision of the world, which is that to the extent that the world is dominated by free market capitalism, everything must be going to hell, because we know that capitalism produces hellish outcomes, right? And and a person like Graeber will then actively ignore positive news and search for news to to confirm his opinions. And I have seen this happen before. I don't see it happen amongst normal people, ordinary people, I see it happening amongst smart people, intellectuals who who come to the table with a preconceived notion, capitalism bad, let's find the evidence for it. Do you think this is happening? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's you can certainly I mean, one reason you can see it happening among, say, intellectuals is that intellectuals have a public brand, so to speak, right? And so if you've built your public brand, it would be the same as like so a scientist who has built her career around advancing a particular theory. She'll say, you know, I my ultimate commitment as a scientist is to discovering the truth and discovering how things really are. But if people come along with evidence that the theory that she's built her career around is not maybe is not as good as she thought the inclination to fight that because you basically like if you're wrong, not only are you wrong and none of us like to be wrong, but you have been discredited. You know, you're no longer kind of the expert or the person that you've presented yourself as. And so in the ideological space, that certainly makes sense. Like, you know, I would naturally my inclination would be to push back against evidence that libertarianism is wrong or bad or makes the world worse in part because I, you know, we push back on stuff we don't immediately believe, but also because I have built a career at the Cato Institute and advancing a set of ideas. And if it turns out I was advancing the wrong ideas, that's going to hurt. And so hopefully, you know, you can do a good job of not letting those things. But that makes sense within that context. We also see environmentalists, I think, probably have a difficult time believing that many environmental indicators are getting better. If it's the case that runaway capitalism, if their belief that consumption is what's going to destroy the environment, that's a hard one to believe. I've seen it in debates about this up in Boulder, when Aaron and I were at Boulder, the campus rape question, where I remember specific and said, this occurred, you know, recently, but also years ago, like how many women are being raped on campuses. And many people on the quote unquote feminist side of that, but I don't like that characterization, but on the pushing that agenda, want that number almost, it seems like they want the number to be as high as it possibly can. I mean, I'm putting want and scared ones, they don't want women to be raped. But if you say, I think you know, I think you're one of four women is a little bit inflated, but one of four women confirms the patriarchy and how much women are oppressed by men, right? And so, what if it's like one in nine, which is still a huge problem, but they would get mad at like some other study that said it might be less. So I think Aaron's exactly correct. But I guess I would push back. So you said we see this among like kind of this intellectual class or the professionals or these certain people with expertise or whatever, but not among ordinary people. But I think we do see it among ordinary people. Oh, yeah. I mean, Trump's entire campaign. So Trump would fit, I mean, not the public intellectual side of things, but he'd fit the model of someone who's building, you know, a professional career around this, you know, everything's bad. But his voters were very convinced, remain convinced that America is going to hell and that everything's getting worse and they are ordinary people. And I wonder how much of it is, you know, so I remember a discussion on Twitter a while back. I think it was Robin Hansen asked why it was that science fiction was always about dystopias, that it wasn't about utopias. It makes me crazy. And to me, the answer is obvious is because if you're telling a story, you need conflict. A story without conflict is not a very interesting story and a world where everything is perfect doesn't have any conflict in it. And so it simply is more interesting to tell stories in a dystopia where there's conflict baked into everything than in a happy-go-lucky everyone is nice to each other world. So it's just bad storytelling is utopia equals bad storytelling. And I think that there's a, I want to say there's a sense of that in our own lives. Like we, you know, like to see ourselves as kind of part of a narrative, we have a narrative of our lives. And this, you know, we are the ones, like, it's always, it's always like things are bad, but like I can, I'm one of the few who can see how bad they are. And I'm one of the few, like I can do something about it. I can vote for that guy or I'm the one who's out changing the world. So you're kind of making yourself the central character in this dystopian fiction. Whereas like saying, well, things are good and I'm just kind of part of it doesn't make you feel as important. Or with that sense of purpose of like, I'm going to strive to overcome this awful stuff. And which on the one hand can be good, like we should, it's good that I think we're motivated to try to make the world better or want to overcome obstacles. But if we're kind of overcoming imaginary obstacles and especially if we're in the process of doing so, we're making things worse, then that's a pretty poor application of it. But I do think there's this kind of natural tendency to want to see some conflict or to like it. One last point on that. In the personal narrative you're telling, one thing that you see is an nostalgia bias. I mean, somebody people are like, man, the world was so much better when I was between 12 and 20 years old. I'm like, yeah, what a shock. Like, you know, you were being taken care of by other people. You didn't have a care in the world but that's a very common belief too. Yeah, nothing is as responsible for the good old days as bad memory, right? The one qualifier to human progress which ties to what you are saying, Aaron, is that human progress is not linear. It is not it is not universal in a sense that yes, the world on average is getting better, but that doesn't mean that everyone in the world is getting better. I keep on quoting Pinker just because I guess I was so heavily influenced by him and also because he's a member of my board, but he likes to say that if everything was getting better for everyone, everywhere, that wouldn't be progress. That would be a miracle, right? So we are not in a world of miracles and it may well be that the crucial aspect to Trump's victory was that we did have a very deep recession, that the economy was quite sluggish for a very long time, that a lot of people felt left behind, that you had the rise of the opioid crisis, which means that in America today for the second or the third year in a row, I think maybe third year in a row, we have liked this life expectancy which has declined by about a month. Okay, so we need to acknowledge that and I think we all would that countries can go through these dips, so to speak, and maybe Trump's election just came at a time when people were feeling in a bit of a funk. That does not detract from the fact that an American today is much better off than an average American was 20 years ago, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Life is improving along a lot of dimensions and those are quite impressive. It's just that the line of progress is a jagged one. You know, if you're going to compare your, let's say that you are comparing your stand of living in 2009 to your stand of living in 2007. Was there a dip? Yes, there was, but we bounced back. The issue is to step back and to look at the at the curve of human progress over a longer period of time. Don't, you know, it goes for just about everything. It goes for car accidents. It goes for school shootings. You really need to, out of crime, you really need to go back and look at a couple of decades and see which way things are heading. The curve of human progress is a jagged one. You've just released a new index called the Simon Abundance Index. What is that? Where did it come from? And what does it tell us? Thank you very much. So I guess we are shifting to the part of the debate which is also centering on criticism of economic development and how everything will, that we cannot sustain progress. Sustainability is a word that in the last 20 years is a part of every conversation. I'm not even sure exactly what it means, but yes sustainability. Yeah that, you know, there's certainly a part of the of the clarity that acknowledges that things have gotten better. But now the argument is that that cannot possibly, that cannot possibly last and everything is going to end up in tears anyway. And that leads us to the Simon Abundance Index. Now the Simon Abundance Index and the Simon Project, which we'll be launching soon, is based on the work and in memory of Julian Simon who was a senior fellow at Cato before he died in 1998 and he was the original optimist. He was the original optimist. I cannot stress this enough because in 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, when things really seem to be going very poorly, you have the quadrupling of the old price in 1974, I think it was, then you have the oil embargo in 1979. And 70s in general seemed like a very fertile ground for the opinions of people like Paul Ehrlich and his famous book The Population Bomb, which came out in 1968 and which seemed to confirm and then the subsequent events in the 1970s seemed to confirm his biggest worries, which is that rising population was going to result in depletion of natural resources and then widespread global famine and economic collapse. And Simon really opposed that. He was the central figure in opposing that during the 70s and the 80s and what Simon was saying was no, that's not going to happen for the following reason. With every hungry mouth comes a pair of hands and the mind, minds which are capable of innovating our way out of scarcity. So human beings are really quite different from all the other animals because we can innovate our way out of shortages. And in that sense Simon actually believed that the more people we have the better because and every additional billion of billion people will bring with it a certain number of Einstein's and Newton's and Lu-Pasters and things like that. And so what Simon argued was that we are not going to run out of resources. In fact resources are going to become cheaper. And he and Ehrlich had a famous bet which started in 1980 and ended in 1990. Ehrlich was asked to pick five commodities. He picked tin and I think he picked zinc and tungsten maybe copper. Nickel maybe. Nickel yes. And if the price went up in the succeeding decade Simon would pay him. If the price went down then Ehrlich would pay Simon. Well at the end of those 10 years the the real price of resources fell by some like 57 percent and Ehrlich sent Simon a check for some like $570 or something. Now Simon and Ehrlich only looked at real prices of resources. In other words they adjusted the price of nominal prices of resources by inflation. And that's valuable but we felt that it was insufficient for the following reason. And that is that incomes tend to increase at a faster pace than inflation. As individual people become more productive they earn more money and then humanity as a whole on average becomes more productive with time. And so wages tend to increase and income tends to increase at a faster pace than inflation. So what's really important is to see how expensive resources are relative to income. And so what we calculated was that between 1980 which was the starting date of the original wager in 2017 hourly income per average hourly income of a notional inhabitant of the world increased by something like 80 percent. So relative to the hourly income the price of resources which we call the time price of resources because we are trying to price resources in terms of time that you need to work in order to earn enough money to buy a resource. So we found that time prices of resources have fallen by 65 percent. So just to make it a little less verbose. In our basket of 50 commodities which includes chicken, zinc, uranium, oil, gold, platinum what have you. There are 50 of them. This basket of commodities became 65 percent cheaper which means that what took you 60 minutes of work to buy in 1980 took only 21 minutes of work to buy in 2017. Who's the you in that? Because what what I can buy in 21 minutes of my work is very different from what Jeff Bezos can buy in 21 minutes of his work. So is this was it 65 cheaper it can't be for everyone or was it 65 cheaper for a bunch of people who make a bunch and then not necessarily cheaper for the people who don't have as much income. So what we did was to use the world banks per capita incomes. The world bank traces per capita average per capita income in the world from I think it's 1980 or perhaps even go goes back to 1960. And we have adjusted it by number of hours worked because the numbers of worked by a typical laborer in the world is actually declining. It has declined by something like nine percent over the last thirty seven years. So we looked at that average per capita income as tracked by the world bank adjusted by the number of hours worked and that's what gave us the 80 percent increase in hourly income. So who would be who would be making that money it would be that that that notional person in the middle of global income distribution let's say somebody living in I don't know Indonesia. I think Brazil is like the average income for like the whole world I think it's a huge rejoice. And then I'm imagining someone who is not as optimistic about all these trends and maybe on the environmentalist side saying so like if isn't this isn't this bad if this stuff is getting cheaper because say we're not making more oil there's only so much oil and if oil has suddenly become 65 percent cheaper than it was doesn't that mean we're just going to burn through the oil that we have even quicker because people are just going to be buying even more of it. Oil is a bad example because the earth continues to produce oil but never mind. You can certainly make that case for say copper yeah you can certainly make that case for for copper or gold, platinum or whatever. And yes there are people who are arguing that the increasing abundance of resources is something to be worried about because that contributes to increasing consumption. So but that's a second objection that's a separate objection something that we will no doubt be working with in the future. And my my initial comment about that is two-fold. One is that let's look at the problem of consumption from the perspective from moral as well as practical perspective. The first is the moral perspective. Here in the west we have obviously reached a certain level of of abundance you know on average people are living historically speaking very prosperous lives and it would be a mistake or rather it would be quite immoral in my view at least to deny that sort of economic development to people in the developing countries in poor countries. I don't think it's a starting point to say to the prime minister of India I think that we should that you should cap your per capita income at two thousand dollars a year because you know it will bed for the planet so that's a non-starter. These countries are never going to put up with that. So let's then switch to developed countries or rich countries and here I think that the problem is one of democracy. Combining combining limits on consumption with democratic decision-making. What is Paris all about right now? The tremendous outpouring of animus toward the governing elites toward Macron etc. What broke the the proverbial back of the camel was an attempt by Macron since reversed to impose new taxes on on gasoline. That comes on on the heels of of an already stagnating economy with very high taxation and what we have seen in Europe not so much in the United States but what we have seen in Europe is this very difficult combination on the one hand you've got economic stagnation or or growth which is maybe at best half the rate of what we have in the United States but we do have increasing demands on the income of a typical European increased taxes for utilities for example. A friend of mine just came back from England. His parents lived near Oxford. They spent and they have the house modest house that's just two retirees living together. They have a they run it on gas. Most of their utilities are sort of gas oriented. They spent 15 pounds a day to to heat their house in the middle of winter. Now that amounts to 450 dollars sorry 450 pounds per month. What about 500 dollars a month? So what what there has emerged in Europe is the concept of energy poverty where people in the first world people who are driving fancy cars and are able to communicate with one another on you know sophisticated technology and so on cannot heat their homes because the the price of heating has become prohibitively expensive. But just because of taxes not because of taxes resources price going up. That's right my my energy bills come to about 50 dollars my my gas bill is about 50 dollars so that's one tenth of what it is in in in Europe. And so people are in revolt and so the question once again becomes how do you deal with consumption limits within democratic context and the answer is that if it's a question of limiting consumption and or or winning the election it's one or the other right. So then I think that really the fallback position has to be we are not realistically speaking we are not going to limit consumption what we have to figure out are ways in which we can produce energy more cheaply. Come up with technologies which use less energy sort of take the optimist answer to the question of consumption rather than a command answer to the command and obey answer to consumption. Well it also seems that with Erin's question about sustainability we might run out of copper. I remember there was a copper shortage about 10 years ago maybe and the price went up and people started using other things other than copper so the amazingness of conservation occurred. Also people would steal the copper wire out of the box behind where I was living. Yeah they would they or go to houses and steal pipes out of the okay but people would also go and buy copper from those houses say I'm going to switch over to steel rather than copper and then I haven't heard about the copper shortage since. So the price does indicate its scarcity or its perceived scarcity right now. Yeah so in this paper we don't look at the availability of resources from the point of view quantity that's what engineers do we look at it from perspective of price which is what economists do because at any given point in time the price reflects the totality of human knowledge as to the availability of that particular resource. Now in terms of copper or anything else you know let's take the most famous example and that's the rare metals rare earths sorry rare earths which China is a huge producer of so there was this diplomatic incident in 2011 and between Japan and China and China decided we are going to we are not going to export rare earths to the rest of the world you know as a punishment and the price has skyrocketed and since then it has collapsed and it has collapsed because the market forces have reacted to a very high price of the resource by looking at ways around it and partly what happened was that when the price went up people had more of a fiscal incentive or profit incentive to go and search for new deposits of rare earths and they found them actually that there's this patch of earth of just off the coast of Japan which is supposed to contain 800 years worth of rare earths and that was discovered only last year people have come up with substitutes people have become more judicious when using something or other and the reality is that as I said 50 foundational commodities all of them are cheaper than what they were in in 1980 I think that uranium was the biggest decline and that has declined in price by 95 percent which is quite extraordinary So you're an optimist about things probably many things humanprogress.org what are you pessimistic about? Well I don't discount the possibility of some sort of a existential threats they could be as as simple and commonsensical as a nuclear conflict between superpowers one thing which I would like to discover and I encourage all of your listeners to come back to me on that is if anybody has done a research on how many nuclear bombs or how many kiltons of nuclear stuff could go off for the world to survive because it would be quite an interesting quite an interesting research project for for physicists because for the following reason at the height of the Cold War the world had something like goodness what is it 45 maybe 70 no you're right it was over 70 000 nuclear warheads we are now down to roughly 5000 I think and it would be very interesting to see how far would we have to reduce the number of warheads possessed by individual countries in the world for them to still keep the deterrent but basically ensuring that if there is an accidental conflict all the nukes could go off and we would still survive as a species so this would be a very interesting sort of an intellectual exercise so nuclear war is a good example an asteroid I know it sounds like sci-fi but you know if the asteroid is big enough and we find about it but then we need the nuclear weapons at least if the farmer didn't taught me anything but if we spot it late enough you know all the nukes in the world will probably not help us I don't know if they would I'm not particularly worried about germs because I think that technology today enables us to break down the DNA of any kind of virus very rapidly and we'd be able to react to it very quickly so I'm not particularly worried about that but certainly an accidental war would be something that would greatly worry me What about political trends? Political trends so there is this debate between me and Andrei Ilarionov my esteemed colleague who thinks that democracy is in decline and certainly if you look at the data from the Freedom House it looks like the number of democracies has experienced a slight dip in the last decade or so but then if you look at data from the Center for Systemic what is it? the Systemic Peace Center for Systemic Peace they do something different instead of assigning free, unfree or partly free to individual countries they give each country a score from minus 10 to plus 10 and once you add up all the positive scores and once you add up all the negative scores you actually see that democracy is at an all-time high now to simplify that point you could certainly have a situation where one country gets a dictator let's say Erdogan in Turkey but two or three countries improve from scoring six to scoring eight and so on balance the people in those countries that have improved the quality of their democracy will be better off and that will offset the number of people in Turkey who have gone from living in a partially free society into a dictatorship put it differently in 1989 which was the last year of communism roughly half of humankind lived in democracies today it's two thirds of humankind so even though democracy is certainly not expanding in the way that it was during the 1990s it's still a much better situation than what it was in the 80s or for that met in the 70s I think in the 70s was really the nadir of democracies in the world now then the question becomes well can political freedom continue to expand indefinitely well it certainly can expand but not indefinitely I mean at some point you know diminishing returns will kick in and it will be very difficult to to scoop up the places that are not democratic but even last year as Turkey became became became a dictatorship Nigeria became a democracy for the first time this most populous of African countries has actually experienced a peaceful transition of power through democratic means from a party that was into opposition to become party of government now I didn't see that coming that was pretty cool because because Nigeria by 2050 there will be more Nigerians than Americans thanks for listening free thoughts is produced by test terrible if you enjoy free thoughts please rate and review us on iTunes to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org