 And, and I think that it's also, you know, economists have written everything there is to write about this, but actually, there's a lot of interesting stuff to say about economic growth. And there's a lot of new perspectives and new ways to think about it. And this particular, I think interest, for my sake, as a teacher, I think, is to express these ideas and ways that make them available to and make them open to and make them accessible to the non-economist. Right? The non-economist. So, so that's what, that's what we're going to do. You know, that's what we're going to do today. And, and, and talk about economic growth and you can assess how much of this is new, new to you, new, generally, and how much of this is already well known. Nicola, thank you. We will, we'll get to your question and prioritizing questions related to the economy, economic growth. This is a question about natural resources. We'll get to that. And thank you, Eric. I'm not sure how much 200 Norwegian, Norwegian is, but it's Norwegian oil money. So it's, it's happy to receive it. Alright, that's Nicola. That's great. 50 pounds is more than $50. I know that. So it's about a 10. So that's about $20. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. Yeah, the pound is gaining on the dollar. So is the euro. So it's actually a good day. It's a good period of time to take contributions in with euros and, and pounds because, because the pound and the euro and everything are greater value than they have been in the past. That is because the dollar is basically declining in value. You can see that vis-a-vis gold. Okay. What is economic growth? What is economic growth with that? How do we, how do we think about economic growth? I mean, people talk about economic growth in terms of a gross domestic product, the GDP or other kind of financial terms that try to measure the growth of the economy. But I want to, I want to step away a little bit and think about what is life like? What, what impact does economic growth have on human life? What sense does human life benefit human beings? And how do we, how do we, I guess, how does economic growth affect you as, as an individual? What impact does it have on your life? And because I'm not sure the financial way in which we measure economic growth is the best way to really think about economic growth from the perspective of the impact that has on your life. Right. And then I'll go back to how we measure it from an economics perspective, but really the impact of economic growth is on individuals and it's on productive individuals. So when an economy is growing and the more an economy grows, the more this is true, productive individuals are better off. Their life is better and will break down what that means and what dimensions is better. But their life is better. In other words, they have a rising standard of living, never rising quality of life. And I'll actually, it's important to note this because often the measures we use to capture economic growth, GDP or other measures like that, even wages, increases in wages. Don't actually capture the full impact, the full impact of the growth that is happening on our lives. There's so many things that go into transferring rising standard of living, rising quality of life into a monetary dimension that we often lose much of what is really important about the economic success, the economic growth, the economic prosperity that is around us. I mean, one simple thing, and I talk about this, I talk about this a lot in my inequality talks. One simple way to think about this is it's hard to capture the benefit an iPhone has to your life, the ways, the variety of ways in which the iPhone makes your life better in a GDP wealth wages number. And the iPhone gets better every year, even though its cost stays about the same. So even though your wages might stay the same, and yet you're buying a new iPhone every year, it's costing you about the same as a percentage of your income. Every year it benefits you more because it's better. It's more effective. It produces the values that make your life better, more effectively. So your standard of living is growing, your quality of life is growing, even though what we capture as economists, the dollar value of what you're getting is staying the same. There's a term in economics that considers this idea of consumer surplus, but we have no real way to measure consumer surplus. Consumer surplus is the value that the product provides to your life that is above what the product actually costs. All an economist can measure is what it costs. I used the example in my inequality stuff of Harry Potter. What we can tell with Harry Potter is how much I spent for the book. It cost me 20 bucks. But what I cannot measure is the value I got in my life from the consumption of that book. The value of spending time with my kids, the spiritual value of enjoying the story, of living the story, of having a hero in my life, and having a hero in my kids life, and doing shit. All the stuff that happens because you read a great book that impacts your life. We cannot measure that as an economist. So what you have is this massive gap between what we can measure in economics and what actually impacts a rising standard of living equality of life. Particularly, I would say this is hard to measure at a time when money is manipulated by a Federal Reserve and a central bank. And the economy generally, the relative prices of different things relative is manipulated, constrained to some extent dictated by government and not by the actual value choices individuals make. But the value of economic growth is that in real terms, in terms that actually affect our lives, is that it makes our life better. It raises our standard of living. It increases the quality of life. When people talk, so many economists talk today about the idea that we don't need more economic talk. We don't need more economic growth. Economic growth is overrated, you know, and we don't want more economic growth. What they're really saying is we don't want to improve human life. We don't want to increase standard of living. We don't want to increase quality of life. And I'll break down what increasing standard of living and quality of life actually means. That's what they're implying. Economic growth is that increase in standard of living and quality of life, even if we can't accurately measure it as economists would like to do. As modern or classical economists, most economists would like to do. Alright, so I want to talk about what it means to increase standard of living. I want to talk about what it means to increase the quality of life. I want to talk about these things and then I also want to talk about kind of the measures by which we quantify these things. And then I want to talk about the causes. What actually brings about these increases in standard of living, increases in quality of life. Where does that come from? In order to survive as human beings. Nature doesn't just provide manner from heaven, so that allows us to just live. So we have to work. Now work could be drudgery. It could be repetitive. It could be boring. It could be backbreaking. It could be physical. It could be, you know, just horrible. Or it could be fun, challenging, interesting, exciting, something where you can express your passions, your interests, and you can really, really challenge yourself and attain self-esteem. So you would think that if we're looking at quality of life, standard of living, the kind of work that we are doing as individuals would matter. Would matter a lot. The type of work we do. Is it interesting? Is it physical? Is it can we, I mean, one measure, one interesting measure of standard of living is how much time do we have to spend at work in order to provide for a basic, provide for basic needs, for like food, shelter. Now, granted, the food we eat today is much, much better, much tastier, much more interesting than it was a hundred years ago. The shelter is bigger, nicer, more protective from nature, right, than a hundred years ago. But how much do we have to work to provide a square foot of shelter? How much do we have to work in order to provide a calorie? How much do we have to work to provide 2,000 calories, which is what supposed to be adult needs, right? And you would see the exponential increase in standard of living quality of life that is in a sense more meaningful than just a GDP number, or wealth number, or dollar number. So the kind of work we do is great. And then of course, if our work is of greater productivity, if our work is a work that enables us to constantly create more, then our wages are going to rise constantly, which provides us with more and more excess above our basic needs, which allows us to spend that money on all other things that can enhance our life. And our values, our personal values, what we think is important to us, even if it happens to be like at the beginning of the show, religion. Alright, so work, obviously. What else? What else is a sign from a personal values perspective, from a personal life perspective? What is a sign that your life is better off, that your standard of living is increasing, that your quality of life is better, right? Time. Now notice all these are related and we'll get to that. But time, having time. Having time to choose what you want to do with it. Having time that is optional. You could choose to work more. You could choose to spend more time with your family. You can choose to go on vacation. You can choose to spend your time watching movies and listening to music. You can choose to pursue a hobby. But having free time that you can choose to use in pursuit of your values is so dramatically crucial to having a high standard of living and a high quality of life. So not having to work for every single thing that you have. Being able to say, I'm only going to work eight hours a day, six hours a day, twelve hours a day, whatever the number is that you choose. Because I can make enough for my basic needs in the first few hours of work and the rest I'm working for the extras and then I've got time that I can enjoy. So remember what life was like three hundred years ago. You woke up, you ate something, not very much by the way. You went out into the fields. You farmed all day. You came back when the sun set. You ate something, not very much and you went to sleep. It was no light, no reading. You probably didn't know how to read. And that's it. You worked all day. You had no time beyond working in the field. You had no time. So time is so crucial basically to a large extent. Rising standard of living quality of life means having the time to pursue your values, whatever they happen to be. Instead of pursue survival at the animal level, pursue survival on a day-to-day basis. What else? What else is going to involve a rising standard of living and a higher quality of life? Well, things like availability and access to art, recreation, hobbies, knowledge, availability and access to these things. How available are they? How easy is this for you to access it? Again, think about 300 years ago. Who had access to music? I mean, good music, deep music, meaningful music, emotional, satisfying music. Well, there was the cracks. There were religious leaders. That's it. Mozart worked for them. Common people, the average person, the overwhelming majority of people were lucky if they could go to a theater and listen to an opera by Mozart because Mozart also did some kind of theater productions that theaters were for the common people. But most of his time, and certainly before Mozart, this is true. Mozart's the beginning of capitalism. That's it. And nobody could read sheet music. You need a printing press for sheet music, but also you needed to have the leisure time to be able to learn how to read sheet music. You had to have the leisure time to learn how to play the piano, which only with the creation of middle class and the capitalism you had. Or to play an F1 game like Yasser is doing right now. He's playing F1 while he's listening to the show today. You need time for that. You need availability of it. You need to have those products. And note that only so many products can be made in certain environments. So pre-19th century, there was X amount of music available that mostly the aristocrats enjoyed. In the mid-19th century, there was X times 100 music available, maybe times a thousand, I don't know. And now it was available pretty much for everybody. You could go to concerts, you could pay to go to a concert, which was not really available in the past. A, you could afford it. B, you had the time to do it. C, the musicians. Because you could afford it, because you were willing to pay for it, they could now create a profession called musician, professional musicians. And hundreds, thousands of them did that. And now they could produce what you were going to consume. So availability requires a producer to make it available, which requires a producer to produce it. So you have to have production in order to see a rising standard of living. Somebody has to produce the stuff that makes your standard of living go up. The art, the recreation, the hobbies, the knowledge. All of that requires production. I mean, some other things that came up with ease of living. The effort required to get the basics. We've talked about that and to get everything you want, need. I mean, think about, I mean, one of the examples I always give is think about music, right? So I give an example under, you know, in Mozart's time in the 18th century, aristocrats had some of them, the wealthier ones, had access to some music. They had to have a court orchestra. They could play some stuff limited to the knowledge of the court musicians and limited to the knowledge that was, that was there, right? Then you had maybe in the 19th century, now you had a middle class who could now go to concerts and benefit from those concerts and enjoy. And now the scope of the music they had with traveling orchestras and traveling musicians and a variety expanded. And then at the beginning of the 20th century, you start having recordings and records. And now you could buy a little phonograph and some records. And now at a very low cost, at a very low cost, you could engage in listening to a massive variety of music. But you still had to get up. First of all, you had to go out. You had to buy the record. You had to clean it. You have to make sure it wasn't destroyed. You'd have to buy a record player. You have to be careful on how you played it. You'd have to store it well. Every time you wanted to play it, you'd have to find it, put it on the record player. Then we got CDs, which made it a little easier and things were more controlled and they were easier to manage. And now, now, through steaming services, you can access every piece of music that has ever been written, any performance of that music you happen to desire at a marginal cost of zero if you subscribe to one of the music services. And you can play it on your phone or on the most fancy audio file, stereo, multi-channel equipment that you want. And just think of the ease of accessing that same piece of music from only aristocrats have it to I have to go to a concert that happens very rarely to I can get it on a record, to I can just sit on the sofa and press some buttons and it just appears in front of me. Truly stunning. And that's a measure of our quality of life and standard of living. And yet, again, we can't capture that with a number. It's very hard to capture that in GDP. It's very hard to capture that even in wealth. Although wealth is highly correlated with it because the technology is made possible by deployment of capital which is related to wealth and the creation of these things. And then finally, I would say enough finally because I'm sure you can come up with others. I'd say the ability, and this is related to time, to have and nourish loving relationships. First of all, romantic love is a feature of a certain standard of living and quality of life. Love is not an issue just of convenience or marriage is not just an issue of convenience. It's now an issue of love. It's now an issue of choice. And it can be nourished because now there's time and now there's opportunities to engage in a pursuit of shared values. So economic growth is what facilitates an ever-rising standard of living and quality of life. An ever-rising standard of living quality of life are really measured by our health and longevity, by the quality and time we spend at work, by the time we have for everything else, by the availability and access of a plethora of values accessible to us by the ease of our living and by ability to have a nourished friendship and love relationships. If you add all that up, a rising standard of living is really reflect or is measured by our ability to pursue our values, to pursue our happiness, the ease and ability in which we can't attain values and values of life, physical health, longevity, work, all of those things is basically measured, basically measured in our pursuit of values. So it's our ability to pursue values. All right. Now, so what's required then for economic growth? Well, what's required is the production of values. What's required is time, over time, these things happen over time, and what's required is freedom, the freedom to pursue values, the freedom to create values, the freedom to produce values, the freedom to seek, the freedom to enjoy, the freedom to live. So what's required for the pursuit of values, what's required for raising standard of living, what's required for increased quality of life and therefore what's required for economic growth is freedom, the production of values and the production of values. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist growth. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. 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