 Good afternoon, welcome to the Cato Institute, and it's my pleasure to welcome you today to a book forum on a new book by Matt Ridley called The Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves. My name is Brink Lindsey, and I'm vice president for research here at Cato. Writing a book like The Rational Optimist was truly an audacious endeavor for, as the author well knows from writing this book, and as he will have confirmed for him again and again as he goes about trying to sell it. For every flickering flame of rational optimism there is in the world, there are enormous gales of irrational pessimism huffing and puffing and trying to blow it out. I know this from personal experience. A couple years ago I wrote an optimistic book called The Age of Abundance about how American society has become much richer, freer and fairer despite the best efforts of lots of very earnest and very serious people to screw everything up. And like the book that we're discussing today I argued that the driving force behind all this progress was our continued elaboration of the division of labor through specialization and exchange. I wish Matt all the best, but my sales figures attest to the fact that this is not a message that resonates very well in the current political environment. On the left you have true believers deeply committed to a story of economic decline since the 1970s according to this story. Basically nobody's better off except for a tiny few perched at the top of the income pyramid. Meanwhile true believers on the right are just as committed to a story of cultural decline. The world's been going to a hell in the handbasket since the 1960s, gay marriage is destroying the family, Mexican immigration is destroying our culture and so forth. Well Matt Ridley is painting on a much broader canvas not America over the past 50 years or so, but all of humanity over the past 200,000 years. So perhaps in that expanse of ambition of his thesis he can hide more from the angry types that confronted me. He documents in great and entertaining detail the astonishing progress made by our species. And I know that at least some people aren't going to like it one little bit. It's a strange thing how deeply attached people are to their fears. It's not that way in our personal lives. When it comes to thinking about our own lives we tend to be cockeyed irrational optimists. One study shows that 93% of Americans believe that they are above average drivers. And in one of the many amusing statistics from this book, 19% of Americans believe they're in the top 1% of income earners. In our own lives if we receive some scare, if we get a medical test that suggests the possibility of cancer, but then further tests come in and show that we're really okay, we're totally overjoyed. But it's not like that with regard to our opinions about the larger world, particularly about how the present stacks up against the past and how the future is likely to go. When we're thinking about the larger world pessimism reigns. Woody Allen pretty much nailed the prevailing outlook when he said, more than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Doomsaying, as Matt Ridley notes in his book, is taken as a sign of wisdom and profundity. Only shallow fools are optimistic. And if you try to convince anybody that their fears of the future are actually unfounded, you don't get the same reaction that the doc gets when he tells you that the follow-up tests show you're in perfect health. No tears of joy, no grateful hugs, just unabated fury. If you doubt me, try telling a right winger that Mexican immigrants are assimilating just fine and that crime rates actually go down when immigration goes up. Or try telling a left winger that climate change is unlikely to lead to catastrophe. So why are people so invested in their pessimism? Here's an optimistic take on pessimism. It's part of it, at least, is a quirky side effect of the wonderful creative dynamism of modern society. In a society geared towards incessant change along numberless dimensions, countless groups of people are constantly pushing for change. And there's no more effective way of arguing for change than to convince people that disaster lurks if you don't do what they want. So much of the bias towards doom and gloom then I think is just hype associated with incessant reformist salesmanship. And that's why people react so angrily when you tell them that a problem isn't as big as they fear. That means that the pet reform they're peddling isn't as urgently necessary as they suggest. Another reason for this prevailing pessimism lies in the fact that progress measurable over the course of a human life is relatively shockingly new in the scheme of things. Really just over the past 200 years of history. Let's call that seven generations. For the prior 7,000 generations of human existence, improvements in the lives of ordinary people were modest and few and spaced out over centuries in millennia. The idea of open-ended continuing progress then is still a breathtaking novelty. And it's not too surprising we really haven't wrapped our minds around it yet. Cultural habits of mind built up over millennia are still with us through the simple power of inertia. But maybe, I'm being too upbeat, maybe pessimism is deeply rooted in human psychology. Can the world really ever seem as magical and wonderful as it did when we were children? Or even better when we were hormonally besotted college kids? For the middle-aged and older pundits who pontificate about the state of the world, doesn't it feel obvious that the world has gone downhill? And when we contemplate the far future, the future that doesn't include us, doesn't it feel obvious that that prospect is nightmarish? Well, I'm an optimist, so I think rational optimism is a growth stock. The more we learn, the more we understand, the more optimistic we are likely to become. So I salute Matt Ridley for this wonderful book that improves our understanding and dares us to be upbeat. Let me introduce Matt. Matt is best known for a series of wonderful popular science books, starting with 1993's The Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, followed up by 1996, The Origins of Virtue, Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, 1999, Genome, The Autobiography of a Species in 23 chapters, in 2003 he came through with Nature via Nurture, Gene's Experience in What Makes Us Human in 2006, a biography of Francis Crick, and now The Rational Optimist. Matt was educated at Oxford where he received a doctorate in zoology. He worked for a time at my favorite magazine, The Economist, in the mid-80s to early 90s, variously as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor. And with that, I'm going to turn the podium over to Matt. Thank you, Brink, very much indeed for that. Well, I think it was a kind introduction. I was an optimist about how this book was going to go down, but maybe I need to reconsider. There's some frightening things coming my way by the sound of it, and you're absolutely right. It's wonderful to be here. It's wonderful to be back in Washington and at Cato, because when I was here in the late 80s, I caught a disease called free market economics, which I hadn't been exposed to in Europe. And Cato played a large part in that, so I'm very grateful for that. It's also wonderful to be here with Brink, whose incredible book was extraordinarily influential on me, and who really has, I think, got to the heart of the matter. And with Robin, who has had to read the book twice, not only for today's event, but in a very early draft about a year ago when he kindly joined a group of people to critique and comment on it. So I'm very honored that these two, and indeed some other names and faces in the audience, who I'm, many of whom I'm ruthlessly plagiarizing. I'm looking at Don Boudreau and in Doug O'Clanney and people like that who have had all these ideas before me. But then that's the point of my book, is that ideas come together and share and cooperate. So it's all right, really, if I steal their ideas. What I just wanted to do was just run through a few slides, just partly to give you something to look at other than me. And they're not so much about the sandwich parts of the book, the bits at the beginning and the end, which are about how life's getting better, and it's going to go on getting better. They're about the subtitle, if you like, How Prosperity Evolves. Because I suspect that a lot of the economic news is what you know, but some of the stuff about archaeology and anthropology and how this process of enrichment got going in our species and only in our species and why it happened when it did and where it did, is something that I think certainly surprised me and might surprise you. So essentially what I want to do is try and explain how we went from making things like this to making things like this. This is a real photograph. These are both objects that sit on my desk at home. And of course, one is one was made to the same design for half a million years with very little change between about one and a half million years ago and half a million years ago. These kind of Australian hand axes were made and the other is obsolete already after five years. And that, of course, is the problem. And it's more interesting than that. The fact that they're the same size and the same shape is not interesting, actually. That just tells you they were both designed for the human hand. The interesting thing is the difference that the one on the left was made by one person for himself. The one on the left was made by, I don't know, a million people for me. By kind people who were supplying me with the need for a computer mouse. But just before I get on to that, how much better is the world in my lifetime? I was born in 1958, but if you take 1955 as a starting point because it's a round number, life expectancy globally is up a third. Per capita income has traveled, allowing for inflation. Food per capita, calories per capita are up a third. Child mortality down two thirds. That's an extraordinary achievement, an extraordinary extinction of pain and misery. And, of course, population growth rate is halved in my lifetime. These are amazing achievements. And as Robin has pointed out, so, well, a lot of this is very recent. There is a huge inflection point in the graph around 1800, which is basically, I think, when we can amplify our efforts on behalf of each other with fossil fuels. Though there are other explanations, I know. But nonetheless, I want to track this progress of our species back a lot further than that because something odd happened 45,000 years ago or longer when we went from being just an ordinary predatory ape to experiencing this thing called progress and to changing our technology and changing our way of life and changing our population density in an ever-escalating way, even though, as Brink pointed out, the escalation was jolly slow for a very long time. This is my attempt to recalculate from William Nordhaus' study just an example of how much better life has got. If you want to read a book for an hour by the light of a compact fluorescent bulb, it roughly costs you a quarter, a half a second of work at the average wage today. If you did so in 1950, it would have cost you eight seconds of work by a kerosene lamp in 1880, 15 minutes of work, and a teller candle you would have had to work for six hours to earn enough money to buy an hour of reading light in 1800, which only tells you that the person on the average wage in 1800 couldn't even afford a candle. And of course, a lot of this stuff is not even captured in per capita GDP or per capita income numbers. Here's a rich chap, Louis Catois, son king, richest man in France probably of his day, and he was rich because he had people to do things for him. Somebody made that silly outfit that he's wearing for him. Somebody made his hair curly and he had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. Here's a modern tourist in the Palace of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors and she's not rich. She's an ordinary person. She's totally average in every way. And yet somebody made those jeans for her and somebody made that audio tourist thing she's holding and somebody made the electricity that lit the candelabra behind her. And in fact, she's got 498 people preparing her dinner tonight. They're in restaurants all over Paris, but they're ready to serve her at an hour's notice. And that, of course, is what wealth is. It's that we are, prosperity is, it's that we're working for each other in a way that enables us all to be like Louis Catois. When did this start? What was the very first time when we started working for each other? Well, it probably is something to do with the sexual division of labour. If you study hunter-gatherers, you find that there is a hard and fast rule that there's always a difference in the way the sex is foraged. Males forage differently from females. It's usually male hunting and female gathering, although it doesn't map quite onto that. And the effect is that one sex is working for the other. The males know that if they fail to catch a warthog one day, there will at least be something to eat because the females will have dug up some roots. The females know that they don't have to go out hunting to get protein. All they have to do is dig up a few extra roots to trade them for a bit of meat from the men and so on. So both sexes benefit obviously from the sexual division of labour. And there is a big question mark about how deeply rooted this is in human nature until very recently, most people assumed it went back several million years. But I think the burden of proof has now been thrown rather back on that by the work of Mary Steiner and Steve Kuhn, who say that they don't think there's any evidence that Neanderthals had this, that it must have been an African invention of the last couple of hundred thousand years or so. And if you think about it, the invention of farming is also about people working for each other, except in this case it's different species working for each other. Here are three species working for each other, the dog, the sheep, and the man. They're all working for each other and that's what makes the system work. Farming is a division of labour. Now there are other divisions of labour in other animals. A worker ant feeding a queen ant is working for the queen and the queen is working for the worker because she's producing the workers' nieces as babies. But in every case in other animals these kinds of patterns are actually within the family. An ant colony is just one big family and even in England we don't leave reproduction to the queen. It's the one division of labour that we simply don't do as human beings. So the great human trick has been to do this kind of ant colony thing, which is all based on a division of labour, but to generalise it beyond the kin group or the family, the mating pair, to actually be able to do it among strangers. And of course that is the story of human progress. The puzzle is the Neanderthals. We're now clear that they had big brains on average, slightly bigger than ours. They used plenty of tools. They cooked their food, which meant that they could free more calories from their food than if they hadn't. They clearly had imaginations, they buried their dead, and we now know from looking at the Fox P2 mutations in human beings and in the Neanderthal genome that they probably spoke. We can't of course prove that they had language, but these peculiar mutations that seem to have come into our genome in response to the origin of speech are present in them too. So it looks like language predates the divergence of Neanderthals and us. And yet Neanderthals never experienced progress. There was no change in their toolkit of any significance over the several hundred thousand years they were in Europe. And right up until the end, 30,000 years ago, they were making the same tools and they had not shifted their niche to eat different things or increase their population density or anything until we came along and brushed them aside. Although we now know that we, in brushing them aside, we got a few of their genes on board as well, which is an interesting discovery, but not many. The differences they didn't exchange. The fascinating thing about Neanderthal tools is they are never found more than a few hours walk from the site of manufacture. There is no evidence therefore of trade, of objects moving from one person to another. If you look at stone tools in relatively modern Australia, like this hand axe from a place called Mount Isa in northern Australia, you can show that these objects moved over very long distances because of trade, not because of migration, but because of trade. The Mount Isa quarry was owned by a tribe called the Kalkadoon who traded it. This is the trading network and you can actually work out exchange rates that we were in operation in the 19th century, how many stingray barbs it took to buy a stone axe at different places along a trading route and so on. And the stone axes of Mount Isa ended up distributed all over a large chunk of Australia. You simply don't get that in any Neanderthal society, but you do get it in our ancestors starting in Africa, starting around 120,000 years ago. This is the earliest evidence I've been able to find of trade. These are marine shells being used as beads found in Algeria up to 100 miles in land, up to 125 miles in land in some cases. That looks like they're passing from hand to hand and around the same time, but it's harder to date. There are some obsidian tools in Ethiopia that start moving long distances. So something's happened that enables us to exchange and therefore specialize and therefore work for each other around this time. There's a really nice control experiment for this in the case of Tasmania, which was colonized about 35,000 years ago when it was still a peninsula of Australia. And the Tasmanians who lived there went on making stone tools and using them in the same way as other Australians until 10,000 years ago when rising sea levels cut Tasmania off and made it into an island at the end of the Ice Age. And the 4,000 or so people who were marooned on the island for the next 10,000 years experienced something really rather remarkable, which was that their technology regressed rather than progressed. They actually gave up the ability to make stone tools, sorry, bone tools. They gave up the ability to make clothing. They gave up the ability to go fishing. And they gave up the ability to make boats, although they did later reinvent a boat which was made of brushwood sheaves. It sank after an hour. Men sat on it. Women propelled it by swimming. Apparently. Now, what's going on here is that the Tasmanians were not getting stupider. There was nothing wrong with their brains. What was happening was that their collective brain was too small to sustain these technologies. It's as if the people in this room were all marooned on a desert island together for a very long time. The number of technologies we could sustain that we have inherited like spectacles and mobile phones and things that we could manage to work out how to make among ourselves would be a lot smaller than the ones we'd inherited at the start. And there's a nice control for this, which is Tiridolf Uego, a very similar island, similarly cold and inhospitable, populated by a similar number of hunter-gatherers for the same length of time, 10,000 years. But no technological regress. Why not? Because the Magellan Strait is a lot narrower than the Bass Strait, and there was trading all the time across it among the Indians. So they had access to a continental-sized collective brain, whereas the Tasmanians had only a small collective brain. And the point, of course, is that what human beings did when they started exchanging was that they were no longer limited by the size of their own brains. They were capable of inventing many more things because they didn't have to store the knowledge within their own heads. They could store it between society. Because when you go back to this image, famously Leonard Reid and later Milton Friedman talked about nobody knowing how to make a pencil, and of course, nobody knows how to make that computer mouse. Literally nobody. The knowledge is stored among many different people. And therefore, the fact that a human being hasn't got a big enough brain to think about how to make a computer mouse doesn't matter because the knowledge can be stored in society. Now, there's a lesson from biology here which is that sexual reproduction had an enormous impact on the rate of biological evolution because it essentially made evolution cumulative. If you hadn't invented sex, then if you invent two different things, if you have two different mutations in the species, they're going to be in competition with each other. One is going to drive the other extinct. So imagine an early mammal that invents the placenta and that helps it be competitively superior. And another mammal that invents milk, say. And that's not quite such a good invention. And so it has to go extinct. Whereas if the species is sexual, then the two inventions can come together and join the same team. The mutations can actually end up within the same organisms. And it's exactly the same with trade. Once you start exchanging objects, you no longer have to decide whether or not the technology tribe A has invented is superior to the technology tribe B has invented. You can get the best of both worlds or coalition government as we call it in Britain. And surely this process must be happening extraordinarily more rapidly now than ever because of the ability for ideas to come together and as it were have sex on the internet. Because that's sort of what's happening. Ideas are combining and recombining all the time. And whereas it took several hundred years for the idea of gunpowder and the idea of steel cannons to get together, now it takes about a couple of minutes for things on different sides of the globe to get together and mate. So just to end on a positive note and taking my cue from Indogoclani here, I think one of the things that we've got to try and get across or I want to try and get across to people is that if this process of exchange and specialization continues and as a result innovation and as a result rising living standards, then we can really raise our sights. We don't have to say I want to stop the world getting worse. I've actually wanted to see if there are extraordinary things that we haven't even imagined we can do yet to make the world better. And here's just a simple and rather low tech example. We've approximately trebled the yield of cereal from agricultural land over 50 years and as Indogoclani has pointed out, this has come at the expense of plowing no more land. We've got three times as much food out of the same amount of land and if that hadn't happened then an extra area the size of South America would have had to be plowed to feed the modern population. And if we run that tape forward as population growth slows, which it will, then how not only can we plow no more land but we can start plowing less and less land. How much land do we need to feed each person? Well, hunter-gatherers need about three central parks per head to support themselves. Slash and burn farmers about 10 hectares. By the 1950s we were feeding people off roughly 4,000 square meters each and now we're down to about 1,200 square meters each. That, by the way, is quite a strong repost to the environmental argument that the human footprint is always increasing. I don't think it is. The human impact is in lots of ways, this is only one of them, getting better. Currently we crop about 15 million square kilometers of land, which is roughly the size of Russia. If we were trying to feed the same number of people from, with the technology of early farmers, we'd obviously struggle. We'd need far too much land and there isn't enough land available. If we were trying to feed them with the 1950s yield, we'd still need an awful lot more land. And with today's yields to feed 9 billion people, we would need more land than we currently plow. But if yields were to double, we would actually feed 9 billion people in 2050 with a smaller acreage than we are today. So when people say if we don't improve agriculture, we can't feed 9 billion people, it's more than that. If we improve agriculture, we can feed 9 billion people and give a huge amount of land back to nature. In theory, we could feed the world from a much smaller acreage still. The maximum practical yield that is achieved by farmers means that in theory you can feed 9 billion people from an area the size of Nigeria. Because of course, as I say, the world population increase has halved in my lifetime. So I really want to end by emphasizing that the invention of this extraordinary ability to truck barter and exchange to quote Adam Smith has been absolutely central to the human, the takeoff of human beings. It's not a story of imagination or language or big brains or all these kind of things. It's a simple and rather mundane story that this process of learning to exchange and specialize is what transformed our species. And of course, as Brink said, it's all no good because I'm a fool. As John Stuart Mill said a long time ago, I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope is admired by a large class of persons as a sage. Thank you very much. And of course, John Stuart Mill thought that material progress was going to be petering out relatively soon and we were going to enter the steady state of eternal stagnation. Commenting today is Robin Hansen, one of the most interesting and provocative minds I've had the pleasure of being exposed to. Robin is associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He's also a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and a chief scientist at consensus point. How he got to economics is an interesting story because he originally, back in 1984, got a master's in physics and a master's in philosophy of science from University of Chicago and spent the next several years researching artificial intelligence, but then decided to switch careers and got his PhD from Caltech in 1997. And since then has been widely published in a kind of mind numbingly broad array of fields. His bio says his research interests are diverse, I'll say. Just ending on the topics, the last few of the paper topics that he's written about recently include the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. Robin goes way out beyond where most people are thinking because he takes the lessons of Matt Ridley's books and runs with them. In particular, he takes seriously the notion of exponential growth and what that might mean if we project outward into the future. And the things he has to say seem so cock out optimistic that they make Matt Ridley look like Eeyore by comparison. So ladies and gentlemen, warm welcome for Robin Hansen. Apparently a good modern intellectual book must be of the sandwich short that he alluded to. There needs to be a basic idea that's about a paragraph long you can explain to your friends. And this basic idea has to have both a normative component that lets you take a position and be on some side of a controversy and it needs to have a positive component needs to have an intellectual contribution that makes a claim that you can defend with facts and that sort of thing. In addition to having these two parts of the bread of the sandwich, a modern successful intellectual book needs to have 300 pages of stuff in between. And that stuff in between can't depend, the main argument of the book can't have to depend on all those details because that would become a complicated intellectual book that you'd have to read through carefully into understanding you'd quickly get lost. So all that detail needs to be relevant for the main point but it can't be necessary for the main point. You need to be able to get the argument without following all that detail but you need to think the details relevant. I'm really impressed with Matt filling this book with 400 pages of fascinating, very broad, I mean he's broader than I am in terms of topics, very broad range of subjects. I learned an incredible amount reading all that detail in the book. I learned about asteroid not being a problem, about totalitarian Ming dynasty. I learned about fantastic things going on in Botswana, the noble Phoenicians, less climate variability when things are warmer. I just learned an incredible range of interesting stuff but of course that doesn't make a good discussion here. I should address the bread part of the sandwich, the outside, the main thing that's the topic of the book. Now, it turns out I agree pretty strongly with the main thesis of the book so I'm going to have to stretch pretty far to find something to disagree with. So apparently that is the contract for the commenters like that. You're supposed to find something to disagree with so I will achieve that. But the contract, you know, the key idea that humans sometime in the last few hundred thousand years ago developed a way to specialize outside of families and to then to trade their specialties to achieve larger gains and that this mechanism of trade allowed for innovation across whatever scale there was trade and the rate of innovation was scaled with the rate, the scale of that trading is a key powerful idea. I think it's absolutely right. I don't really know how many people disagree with that. If there's a lot, they're wrong. It's right. Basically that is a powerful main reason why we're beginning richer, why we're beginning powerful is this vast increase in our abilities through innovation that's channeled from trade and specialization. That's not only why we're rich now, it sets this grand story of what makes humans unique and people like grand stories about what makes us unique and we're more willing to support whatever it is that makes us unique and if you tell us that fingers made us unique then we think fingers were great so this is a way to make people think trade is great I guess because it's whatever it is that makes us unique and we know regardless of what it is that makes us unique that's a great thing because we're great right so there we go. Now there's the issue of the connection between this thesis of the cause of our being rich and optimism, optimism for the future. Now the strongest case is that innovation will continue that is if you've got this huge space of ideas that keep combining and developing good things then that should continue for a long time and so for a very long time we ought to see continued development of our capabilities. Our descendants whatever they are ought to continue to have a very increasing powerful range of capabilities so I've agreed with that too so what do I have left to disagree with I'll take my stand on two kinds of points one is and this takes a long view to really take seriously it can't go on forever forever is a really really long time you go back a million years and maybe you see a pattern for a million years and maybe you're willing to project that out I'm happy to project that out a hundred a thousand maybe a million years into the future but the stars around here should be productive for another 10 trillion years and forever is a lot longer than that so the claim that this will go on forever that there are no limits whatsoever from innovation and growth even I even I find that a little hard a bit much to swallow so optimism eventually there'll be a dark cloud out there eventually it can't go on this way it is and I'll elaborate that but I'm still say yes optimism for the foreseeable future for sure we've got a long long runway to go the other point on which I want to disagree is the issue of individual optimism related to global optimism or the species optimism so innovation assures us that for a long time at least the total capacity of all of us together will increase as long as that engine of innovation isn't shut off entirely it's just to continue to grow uh what whether that means individuals you your grandchildren your great great great grandchildren will should be optimistic depends on the relationship between our total capacity and individual capacity in particular between the number of individuals so um over this grand time period I think uh I think Matt somewhat downplayed the standard story which I think is basically right that in the transition from hunter gathering to farming uh individual wealth individual freedom individual range of of life and things like that went down that's uh nutrition was restrained slavery introduced vast amount more war uh marriage in terms of more constrained relationships between the genders uh those all appeared with farming and the standard story is that was worse and that's perfectly consistent with the grand increase in innovation because there were far more of them of course uh but the per capita wealth is a you know relative to the number amount of wealth and the number of people and uh that was in an area where the number of people could grow very rapidly and so uh the per capita wealth depended on details like the kind of life they lived whether there were kings and others stealing stuff etc and honestly it looked like that was not such a great thing for the individuals but if you think about if you think there being more individuals is good what like I do if you think it's better that there are hundreds of times more people living valuable lives then you still might think that overall this was a good thing even if individuals uh didn't do so well in terms of their individual lives weren't as good we um and he in the book he does talk about how dictators can make things go bad and if uh there's enough of totalitarian rule that uh their lives might not be as good because of that and that is a real risk in the future and he grants that um now there's a quote here I wanted to give he says why are we not spending large some stockpiling food caches in cities so that people can survive the risks from North Korean missiles robots alien invaders nuclear wars pandemics and super volcanoes the topic here is uh are there ways we could destroy ourselves all and how seriously should we take that and I agree that the risk is low in the sense that the most likely outcome is that we will do well and we will continue to grow but if there's any small chance that we will not do that those small chances are really important and they're really worth reducing any way we can not that we should just do random things that people say there's a problem but um it's like as the richer we are the more we take care of our children and the more protective we are of our children because we know they have a long future ahead of them and a small thing where to destroy their life that would be all the more of a loss and we this junior species with a great fast future in front of us all of that could be lost if somehow we destroyed ourselves so a true existential risk is clearly something we should put substantial effort in so I would say yes we should actually spend substantial sums to do exactly this if that would substantially reduce the chances that something that would actually destroy us all that's a way in which optimism for the future leads you to pay attention to scenarios that aren't optimistic and try to do as much as you can about them uh elsewhere he says the wonderful thing about knowledge is that it's genuinely limitless there is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas discoveries and inventions well in some literal sense there's an infinite set of possible software you could write things like that but in terms of useful innovations I expect that eventually they'll be diminishing returns eventually when a million or trillion years in the future when we've searched the vast spaces of possible software designs of other ways of arranging atoms we'll mostly be pretty close to the best ways of doing things it'll be very slow rate at which we improve that and we will for the most part have reached the frontiers of knowledge and what's possible that's a long glorious future away no doubt that's nothing like problems we should worry about now but I have a physics background if physics is the way we think it is and if people's values are the way they are now I mean uh physics could be different it could be that you know infinite possibilities exponentially growing are possible that's always logically possible but it's just not the way that physics seems now or it could be that we create creatures who get infinite value out of these subtle ways of rearranging atoms in which case they can have infinite value increasing but that's not what we are that's not what humans are like so uh I tend to think this is the dream time this era in these few thousand few hundred even few million years in all of human history in all of the history of the universe this is the great era where we grew where we discovered where we spread out where we uh innovated where we expanded into the space of all things you can think about and understand and a million or so years in the future we will begin the long slow trillions of years where we basically got most of that and if we're lucky trillions or trillions of trillions of descendants will go on living happy lives in a more steady stable world with a lot less innovation and perhaps a lot less per capita wealth so the other thing to be cautious about the future is to say recently wealth per capita wealth has been increasing because this rate of innovation is so fast so powerful that uh it's just outstrip the ability to make more people and that's why per capita wealth has increased obviously in the past we had powerful important innovation that over millions of years went a long way but because we could make people faster than that per capita wealth was limited uh in the distant future uh I think per capita wealth again has to be limited in the sense that the rate at which we could increase the population will just have to be larger than the rate at which we could increase the economic base in the sense of through innovation and that it will become a choice then how how we trade off the number of our descendants versus their per capita wealth and I don't necessarily see an economic externality there a reason for regulation each plan will choose for itself how to make that trade off whether to have many descendants who are each relatively poor or to have a few descendants who are each relatively rich but uh obviously numerically the numbers will be dominated by the people who make the second choice so that I expect that in the very distant future most of our descendants will be relatively poor out of their choice they think that's the better way to go but whether you think that's an optimistic outcome or not of course depends on whether you defer to their choices and accept that if they want it that way that's okay with you it's okay with me so I'm optimistic about that but uh I don't want to tie the concept of optimism to visions of increasing per capita wealth forever uh it could be that if our descendants prefer it lower per capita wealth will be the better future for them but anyway overall great sandwich lots of tasty meat and vegetables inside the sandwich all sorts of great details I learned a lot from a powerful idea on the outside of the basically right if people really disagree they're wrong he's right uh the future does at least for a long time have great optimism to in store we've got a lot of things we can do we mostly can do it well and pay attention to the problems uh the key intellectual insight that the humanities rise is primarily due to specialization and trade and the innovation that comes with that basically right as well and if they disagree with that they're wrong as well so hats off I imagine in the many events you do uh hints uh the book was just published uh was it this week right it's just the official release so you're at the very front end of uh of the barnstorming book promotion tour uh I'm guessing that uh the comments you receive are uh are just going to be very different from Robin's by and large you're going to get blasted for your opinions on global warming or acid rain and uh or your touting of the glories of promissuous sex amongst ideas uh but uh but being chided for not having thought through uh things a million years hence is uh is probably uh you've probably got your dose of it just now and I'll take his trillion years that's good enough for me um I saw you scribbling things down as Robin was writing do you want a couple of minutes to react to what he said before I open up the I would I would love that okay drink if if if it's not I'll try not to take too much time just just two or three small points first that um uh Robin made the point who disagrees with the basic theory well actually uh in terms of the sort of archaeology and anthropology I think there are still a lot of people who don't reckon that trade is of any significance at all in the story of humanity and and I do think that that's a one one we can can go on getting getting um getting right um uh I completely agree with you about forever and and I may have overstated in a few places um in fact my focus is really on the next hundred years and trying to persuade people that that isn't going to be a terrible time because certainly living in Europe you know nobody thinks their grandchildren's life is going to be better than theirs I just find that bizarre um and I do think that the the you know the when you look at that exponential graph and you say that can't go on forever yes I agree but once we enter a declining population you can imagine wealth going on forever without the impact on the planet going on forever upwards uh you know and that's the thing that changes halfway through this century and I take your point Robin about you know not under not not implying that everything's always going upward and that in terms of individual lives the invention of farming brought disadvantages and in particular I do make a lot of play of what I call chiefs priests and thieves who throw this process off course by plundering the product of it as it were and one thing on there that I would love to hear your reaction to and others is the the concern which has been crystallizing in my mind just really in the last few days which is that um although I think I do mention it right at the end of the book which is that um because of globalization ideas can spread around the world and that means bad ideas can spread around the world quicker too and just possibly we are now in a position where if someone tried to do a sort of Ming emperor job and shut down trade and population movements etc they could now do it on behalf of the whole planet rather than just one empire um is that a reason to be really quite worried or not I I don't know um just on limitless knowledge um I I'm not sure you physicists are right about this because um if uh if I mean I'm going back to the Stephen Pinkers old thing that if you somebody says he's found the longest sentence in the world you know he's wrong because you can always rewrite it with the words he said in front of it um that that's the sort of limitlessness I I think I'm talking about but is that a help just to start this discussion of her oh let's open up the floor to questions uh when I call on you a mic will come just identify yourself and make a question a question uh right up here in front swami at our institute and an old colleague of mad said the economist mad so if everything is going to get better are we terribly wrong in constantly worrying that high entitlements and fiscal deficits are going to make it difficult for guys I had to pay so do we just go ahead and run all kinds of fiscal deficit entitlements saying you know mad says things are going to get better we shouldn't really worry about this uh the second thing that strikes me I mean you have nissim talib that at the end of it all we can make all the rational analyses of what's going to go right or wrong but the thing that always hits you and makes a nonsense of you is the black swan the thing that you never considered and couldn't have considered so the other thing is in other words even if you are extremely optimistic on the fiscal side will we get slaughtered by a black swan very good and I mean on the entitlements point I think it's simply a matter of scale in other words there is nothing wrong with running a Ponzi scheme if humanity is getting richer and richer because the debts you take out now can be repaid by yourself in the future particularly if you spend that money on innovation that will make the future richer make your future self-rich but it depends how Ponzi your scheme is I mean how much your how much debt you're running up and I think there's absolutely no doubt that we in the UK and and the US have collectively not sort of going for public sector private sector distinctions at this point overdone it and borrowed too much from the future from our future selves luckily somewhere in the world someone hasn't and that's the chinese and the indians I would guess so yeah in the next 20 years I expect certainly my country and maybe this country to have a rocky couple of decades possibly Japanese possibly even Argentinian but the world will continue inexorably and what I mean I'm so struck by the way if you look at that graph of book after GDP globally you can't really even see the recessions you can sort of see little kinks in the curve but the bigger the picture the more it irons out so that's that's one point the second part was the black swan absolutely you know there's the sort of the black swans we can do nothing about like the volcanoes mega volcanoes and the asteroids that which are genuine existential risks and some of them we can stockpile caches of food for but some of them I suspect that wouldn't help and I think there are undoubtedly black swans that we cause ourselves that are going to come along you know or you know that are that are going to hit us in all sorts of ways I would just point out that there's been a hell of a lot of people over the last couple of hundred years saying look there's a black swan acid rain cancer epidemics from chemicals eugenic decline you know all these kind of things and they didn't turn out to be that black they were sort of grey swans that's one answer anyway and just the point that things are going to get better isn't assuming that we just all sit back and relax it's assuming people continue to stress out and work hard and solve problems and be ingenious and so overwhelming likelihood that your children are going to grow up to healthy adulthood but only because you're constantly chasing after them keeping them from sticking their tongues in the light socket and all the other crazy things the kids do right here question as the world because of trade we're getting more and more connected and we started out when I was born where you had local influence and if you know there was a local you know food shortage or something you you suffered but you could get it from somewhere else do you have any thoughts about the hyper connectedness that we're not even at yet but we will be in 10 20 years where everything's connected to everything and you won't have many failures but when you have a failure affect everyone yeah I mean in Britain we sometimes justify our sort of agricultural policies sort of protective agricultural policies or the need for you know homegrown food on the grounds that you know what if the you boats come back um which uh which which is sort of uh and and my answer to that is well if the you works come back we're in deep trouble anyway because we don't make any combine harvesters in this country so so we can't you know we're we're we're utterly um in trouble there um in terms of whether hyper connectedness makes you you're vulnerable I mean obviously if we get to the point where all the shoes are made in one factory in Vietnam and all the laptops are made in one factory in in Taiwan and something happened you know there's a revolution in Vietnam or Taiwan and so nobody can buy shoes um then yeah that that would be a a vulnerability I don't quite see it ever going that far because that's you know your immediate the monopolies are vulnerable into um free riders and I'm not to the to the opposite of free ride and and um so I I sort of feel that it'll never that the concentration of dependence on particular places will never get to that worrying point and meanwhile if you know if there was a famine in France in the 1690s which there was a lot of people died because um and a lot of people moved because it was cheaper to move people than food interestingly in the 1690s because people could move themselves food couldn't so you got these mass movements in France in during those famines in the 1690s and a lot of people died um now Australia can have a complete failure of its wheat harvest and nobody goes hungry there's a bit of a price spike um in Chicago or something but that's a pretty small price to pay so um I'm finding it hard to see a black side to interconnectedness but there may be a few you're right Robin anytime you feel like charming and feel free to do so well actually on that one having um more disaster contingent prices is the right economist thing to do about so for example electric companies you know are regulated and they get paid a certain amount of for delivering electricity but that price isn't contingent on there being a disaster so in fact they don't have a lot of profit incentive to set themselves up to deliver electricity in a disaster they have regulatory constraints but uh Andre Laryanov gate institute um I didn't read your books so just I apologize maybe you covered these issues already there but I have a feeling that you devote mostly your attention to the progress the one aspect of the progress sustainability of the progress and the role the trade and the exchange plays in sustainability of the progress if you can comment on three other very related issues to to this one is initiation of the progress uh even when you're talking about Neanderthal society this um some kind of invention of cooking food or language or down the road lower or property or whatever it was done not due to trade but due to something else so what is the same kind of the beginning of the progress second issue how to stop the progress one way is jet still stop exchange and trade as it was in the wistersmania society and the Ming dynasty but it's not only a number of civilizations and societies stopped to develop and to to have a progress even trading including for example number of Middle Eastern societies uh in Middle Ages at least in relative it was a relative decline very clearly uh and some civilization actually became extinct even some kind of having some relative trade so what could be an explanation to that and the third issue is relative speed in progress uh we have at least over the last my shorter period maybe decades it's incomparable with time horizons that you're dealing with but number of authoritarian societies that are trading and exchanging actively looks like in terms of material progress are developing faster than more democratic societies so what kind of challenge it poses for the syria and for the progress great questions thank you um just quickly on all three and again robin jump in on this if you want um on the initiation of progress um my argument would be that things like coking and language um and indeed making stone tools um are initiated by gene culture co-evolution now that's a mouthful of a phrase but what it means is that essentially you start individuals start doing something which then puts pressure on their genes to respond to to produce a genetic adaptation to help them do that so the classic example of this is milk drinking um was probably started before we were lactose tolerant because you can see that lactose tolerance genes evolve in people who had taken up daring as a way of so so that that kind of progress um has been happening in our species for millions of years and it's it's limited by the speed of genetic change and and if you look at what happens to hominids between one and a half million years ago and half a million years ago their genes change faster than their technologies that's a baffling thought but it's true um that those hand axes don't change shape but the skulls do um and that all changes 100,000 years ago when suddenly without I mean there's been trivial quantities of genetic change in human beings since 100,000 years ago but there's been spectacular quantities of of um cultural change now that for me the that's the initiation that I'm interested in and I think the key hurdle the the difficult bit the bit the Neanderthals never got across and the chimpanzees never got across is the ability to do something collaborative with a stranger until I mean if you if you ask chimpanzees from two different troops to to board an airplane together they'd kill each other in the aisle um and we were the same I'm sure and at some point we had to you know we might have been doing a lot of exchanging and specializing within the tribe but how the heck you ever thought um I know I'll offer them fruit if they offer me fish it's it's almost unimaginable how we got across that barrier but we did at some point um so that's an initiation point that I think is interesting um how to stop progress um I would like you to produce some evidence of that society's declined while still trading vigorously which date well hang on Genghis Kham had a he was a was a lubricator of trade because he he knocked out a lot of barriers to trade which were basically toll booths that were operated along the silk route by princelings so he he helped trade um yeah anyway we can get into details here but but my impression is that that I can't really find convincing examples of societies that kept trading well without piracy preventing it or dictators preventing it and so falling living living standards but we can maybe talk about that afterwards um the final point about relative speed of of of change in different parts of the world and this phenomenon of free market authoritarian governments or what I mean I imagine you're referring to Singapore or China or something like that um yeah I didn't really know enough about that and I think my my answer would be if you pull back the lens far enough and look with big enough perspective over a long enough period of time that doesn't work um that something has to give either on the political or on the economic side um but that yes for short periods authoritarian regimes can push through um well no there's a funny there's a funny thing about China which I don't not a subject I know well um which is that in a funny way if you've got a very authoritarian regime if it sort of stops working very well at the local level then you're almost freer than if you're if you're you're almost freer to get on with your life um once the once the local official is not being told to to come down and interfere with you do you see what I mean I don't know anyway those are just a few thoughts jason jason kuznicki you seem to be optimistic about two things that are potentially in conflict with each other I want to ask you about that the first thing you're optimistic about is specialization of labor gains from trade I think that's pretty uncontroversial yes I'm optimistic about that too the second thing you're optimistic about though is declining population you've said it several times a decline in population however is going to mean a declining upper limit on what you can get out of specialization and trade as as I think you yourself have noted and there will be a corresponding reduction in our capacity to to keep knowledge culturally uh so what gives there how can you be optimistic about both very good point and and um I guess what you're saying is that are we going to experience a Tasmanian phenomenon on behalf of the planet once we drop from nine billion to eight billion um one answer is that's quite a long way off still we've still got another 50 years of increasing numbers another answer is that I suspect that that that we haven't anything like bottomed out the quantity of exchange and specialization we can do among six billion let alone nine billion um yet and therefore you know there's a lot of slack in that system I thought you were going to go on to say surely declining populations are a bad idea because of um the number of elderly people who have to be supported by working age populations and that sort of thing and the degree to which elderly people are less interested in innovation than young people and so that might might um and I think that is an issue but my main feeling is just what an incredible stroke of luck it is that the demographic transition exists in other words had we had we had this huge increase in wealth in the 19th and 20th centuries and it had translated into more babies um as you know Robin alluded to um then and you know then all the doomsayers about population in the 60s would be right you know this can't go on you know we'd be now we'd now be at nine billion and we'd be talking about 12 billion in 15 years time you know um the extraordinary phenomenon whereby when people get rich enough they start to have fewer kids rather than more um I still think it's a bit of a stroke of luck I mean you can come up with explanations I'd try to in in in the book um uh you know it's all about being able to essentially put effort into quality of children rather than quantity and you don't have to worry about them dying and things like that um and it's to do with urbanization and female education and all these kind of things but it it's uh I'm optimistic in a backward-looking sense about this thank god that happened you're right it's not a completely free win there are going to be issues to do with it that we need to think about but I think the running out of innovative capacity in a population nine billion is one that I'll I'll throw into Robin's million year problem rather than anything imminent like Matt says the demographic transition is not something we fully understand and we're perhaps lucky that it happened I think uh expecting it to continue on a say a thousand year timescale is way too optimistic uh you know we've seen species for billions of years consistently increase their populations until they ran up against capacity limits and we have a very clear intellectual argument why that should happen and you know there are sub-populations in our world that have much higher fertility so over a longer timescale we're going to have to deal with it the army shouldn't the Mormons are going to take over yeah so just uh to follow up on this question and get somewhere in between the time frame that you focused on the next hundred years and and Robin's time frame but maybe maybe actually within your time frame what happens to your sunny picture of population stabilization if all this wonderful specialization in exchange churns up radical life extension uh right now uh people in rich countries can't be bothered to have much more than 2.1 children and many societies they're having much trouble getting to that uh because uh it's a big expenditure of time and energy over a good chunk of your healthy adult lifetime uh but if that child rearing period becomes a relatively trivial part of your lifetime aren't you going to be expected to have more than 2.1 kids because you'll do it again and again uh and so won't fertility rates go up and then you get your population explosion all over again i think no i think what'll happen is if you know you're going to live to 150 and you can have kids when you're 110 then you'll postpone the decision to have babies um all the evidence is that you that we rich westerners postpone the decision as long as we damn well can and uh so i suspect the birth rate will plummet if if we get radical life extension but probably who knows from most for some uh bill yeah right here then then you next okay bill and scan among other things increased trade will reduce the price of killing other people reduce the price of of involving yourself in their life controlling their life uh reduce the price of maybe ultimately breeding their mind now how is it that uh how is it that we're going to protect ourselves against that this is this is from somebody who thinks that that the past 65 years we we've just been pure dumb lucky to have avoided nuclear war um it's a very good point and uh and i personally don't think we were just lucky i think you know there was a there was a degree of uh deterrence in nuclear weapons that that that actually helped prevent wars but just i mean this may not be quite the best way of addressing your questions but it's it's it's just a reaction um i got a computer virus on my laptop earlier this week and um went into a sort of tales been a panic and called my wife who knows about these things much better than i do and and she went on a website where it was immediately possible to find the solution to this problem and there was a sort of crowdsourced forum of people saying yes but the virus designer has got around the problem so you need to do this extra additional patch to to sort it etc and within a couple of hours it was all sorted now my point there is that the the good guys can have an open forum anywhere on the net in which they can and they can draw on crowdsourcing to solve this problem the bad guys can't do that they've got to you know if you if if they started a website that anyone could contribute to about how to improve the computer virus so that it attacks people better um we'd be able to get at it now that's a very specific it doesn't answer any of your questions but it it it it it just gives me a feeling that there's a general point here which is that um uh yes um bad motives are going to enjoy the globalization as well as good ones but i think there's a slight asymmetry that good ones are going to benefit more than bad ones i'd have to think it through to answer some of your specific points but you know the the the groundswell of fury at google for straying from the path of uh open freedom uh or wikipedia or whatever is is strong enough to prevent us slipping down the slippery slope towards mass mind reading perhaps it's gentlemen my name's andrew kenney question for dr ridley i agreed with every word you every word you said and i think there's no doubts that's uh for the world things are getting better and better but the certain parts where there's no doubt the things are getting worse and worse and in those parts the people responsible for making things getting worse and worse are always famous and often regarded as heroic so i come from south africa north of the border zimbabwe robert mcgabi in 30 years has systematically wrecked the zimbabwe economy his reduced life expectancy from about 55 years to 35 he's made life far worse in every single measure for the people of zimbabwe and he's regarded his world famous and is regarded as an all-african hero the and see the ruling god just almost worships him same thing in cast in cuba fiddle castors wrecked the economy and regarded as a hero around the world same thing as lenin in in in in russia the people the people who make things better are boring and forgotten people make things worse become conquering heroes comment on that i think that's a very important insight and and my answer is um and i i'm very influenced by deardre mcclossy on this because i think um we we still have in in us a tendency to worship courage and honor and vert not honor courage and and and uh you know power and things like that which which is a sort of leftover of our sort of eight man past it's long before this stuff it's it's all about um how you know it's deep in human nature it goes back millions of years that you know you ally yourselves to power um it to the alpha male in the troop if you like um and it's a totally relevance and a distraction and a mistake in uh the modern world where prudence as she puts it or you know economic activity is is is what should be heroic and it isn't and the contempt for um uh traders that runs through the whole of history not just sort of victorian english but right back to homer and people like that who's snotty about the finitions um uh you know it is an extraordinary phenomenon and and yet we're still doing it to our kids you know in my we and i do it myself you know i mean i go and go to movies about napoleon and um you know who was clearly a most dreadful uh chap uh you know rather than movies about um merchants which wouldn't sell very well uh right up there gentlemen in the brown shirt uh i just wanted to to make a point that um oh first of all i loved your talk i thought it was great and i'm a biologist not an economist so um but so i wanted to make two points really one is that um you made a point of tracing trade back as far as you can and yet the inflection point in the economy economic growth is a century ago just merely to suggest that trade per se wasn't the the cause of the inflection point but something an emergent property of the scale of trade and and then to sort of as a biologist ask you if you were to take economics out of the picture and look back not a trillion years but you know increase the scale by a thousand years or a thousandfold and go back four point five billion years ago and trace the evolution of the diversity of life on earth and think about commerce now as a commerce in energy or something like that that you can actually see a metaphor in the evolution of life that actually parallels many of these things with haltson and and and some regression when there are things like asteroids and and other sort of major perturbations to the system so those two comments yeah on the second point first i i do agree with you i think i think uh and i think biology is coming around to the view that if that if you look at the progression of life you do see quotes progress in other words as it were more of the sunlight falling on earth is being captured by organisms or something like that or there's there are more species or something and then you get these terrific setbacks when an asteroid hits the end of the permean or the end of the cretaceous or whatever and then it starts again and so yeah the annex you know in the there's a there's a long period when there's plenty of life in the sea but there's nothing much going on on land you know now we've got a lot going on on land eventually something else you know there'll be more more there'll be i don't know plants flying through the air or something like that on your first point about the inflection point in in human progress um yes i mean in all exponential things the further back you go the slower things are as it were and i admit that the first um 80 000 years um after the invention of trade not a lot happens what does happen is you get you get flourishings of new technologies and then they disappear again and that's probably a population density point back to what we were talking about earlier that these uh for whatever reason you get a sort of Tasmanian effect this is all in Africa and then it comes out of Africa and around 45 000 years ago you get the upper paleolithic revolution which is a like the industrial revolution except played out much much more slowly and then you get the 10 000 year neolithic revolution which is farming which is when we can really increase our population density and that ramps up the rate of innovation and then the 1800 one is to me all about fossil fuels because of the amplification of each person's work um and it's no accident that that you know that's really when you start using steam and coal and and so on um uh so but i mean robin's the expert on these inflection points so i'll pass over to him well i actually disagree with matt in terms of the causes of these main inflection points uh but the overall story we agree with which is that it's about the scale of the interaction trade and so it's plausible that even though trade started out uh yeah 100 000 years ago that it's remained within small scale of 100 or 200 miles and that was the growth rate was limited by that small scale of the trade they had and that at some point uh these smaller trading regions intersected and overlapped to create long distance trade and then that would have greatly speeded up the rate of innovation because the innovations could have spread a lot further and in fact that would be my guess for the farming revolution is more about those sorts of overlapping trading regions and that the industrial revolution is more about overlapping or you know networks of experts communicating as uh rather than uh coal so economic historians mostly don't like the coal theory but it's not clear so but with uh with matt's uh comment and his utterly heretical uh decision to uh to uh say a kind word about fossil fuels uh i think uh i think we'll wrap it up here with the formal discussion i invite everyone to come upstairs and have lunch uh thank all of you for coming thanks matt ridley and robin hanson