 That's Thanos, the Marvel supervillain who kills half of all humanity with the snap of his fingers in Avengers Infinity War. As Mari and Tupi and Gal Pooley argue in their new book Super Abundance, Thanos is channeling millennia old critiques of progress and population growth. He's also flat out wrong. The past 200 years have seen historically huge increases in the number of people living on planet Earth. In 1800 there were 1 billion people, now there are 8 billion. We are flourishing more than ever before and living longer, more productive lives. Tupi and Pooley chart have the real prices of our most basic necessities and virtually all luxuries have declined over time and how free markets and human innovation mean that our planet is infinitely bountiful. Gal Pooley and Mari and Tupi, thanks for talking a reason. My pleasure. Glad to be here. Alright, so let's start with the elevator pitch for Super Abundance, the story of population growth, innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. Mari, why don't you start? What's the elevator pitch for this book? Well, people have been wondering about the relationship between resource abundance and population growth for at least 2500 years. The ancient Greeks thought about it, the ancient Romans thought about it, the Chinese thought about it, the Indians thought about it and really people have always had this sort of ambiguous feeling about population growth. But 200 years ago and really over the last 200 years specifically since Thomas Malthus published his famous essay on the principle of population, most people have been generally negative to our population growth. In other words, there was an expectation that as population grew, resources would become more expensive, therefore scarcer and there would be some kind of calamity, maybe running out of food, the starvation, the world would be destroyed as we know it. Now in the last 200 years specifically between 1800 and 2022, population of the world has increased from 1 billion people to 8 billion people. And yet what we found in our book by looking at hundreds of different commodities, fuels, minerals, metals, even finished goods and some services, everything has become cheaper in terms of time price. People simply have to work less and less time in order to buy things which are essential goods and commodities in order to survive. Things are just getting cheaper and that tells us that every human being on average creates more value than he or she consumes, that human beings are inventors and innovators and they can create more value for everyone, thereby increasing standards of labor. And that is, I mean, we'll get into this, but you guys spend a lot of time documenting the great enrichment, which is the term that Deirdre McCloskey and other economic historians have used for the past 200 years, roughly the period of industrialization where things went from being pretty flat for a thousand years or more to getting better and better. Gail, one of the kind of figure, the spirit animal of your book is Julian Simon. Can you explain who he is and why he's so important to the project here? Well, Julian Simon actually was this obscure kind of economist and was teaching at the University and there was a book that was published in 1968 by a Stanford biologist, Paul Erlich, and the title was The Population Bomb and he makes these claims about, look, we're facing this extinction because there are too many people and Julian actually said that he, when he originally read the book, he thought, well, this theory seems to be reasonable, but as he began to kind of check the facts, what he discovered, he said to his surprise is that as population increased, all these resources became even more abundant. So he and Erlich began to have this quite public dispute about what was going to happen in the future. What is that relationship between population resources? And it finally ended up in a bet and Julian said, look, pick any non-renewable resource for any period over a year and I'll bet you that it's going to become more abundant. In other words, the price is going to fall adjusted for inflation. And so Erlich picks five metals, copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten and they had this bet for a 10-year period from 1980 to 1990. And that's when Julian really put this kind of issue at the forefront. And as professors, we kind of get away with saying whatever we want to say, never really be held accountable for it. So he really made Erlich accountable for what he'd claimed. And at the end of that 10-year period, Erlich had to write Simon a check for $576. The good news is the check was worth a lot less when the bet finished than when it started. So in that way, Erlich kind of won, right? Well, it was adjusted for inflation. So, you know, he actually did, he did. But the original bet, Julian says, well, I'll bet you like $10,000. And those guys said, well, I mean, Julian says, how about just $1,000? It's just the principal. That's not the amount. And they were really opposed to him lowering the bet and end up saving him, you know, they would have lost him times more. Simon, who spent most of his academic career, I guess, at University of Maryland teaching as a business professor, was lionized in early issues of Wired Magazine in the early 90s as the doomslayer because he was against a kind of generalized intellectual background of people, cast of characters who were saying, you know what, like the world is running out of everything. It's, you know, it's running out of space. It's running out of air. It's running out of climate. It's running out of minerals and, you know, precious metals, et cetera. Simon said no, and he then went on to talk about humans as the ultimate resource, right? And that is really, you know, I mean, this is kind of the foundation upon which you guys are planting or building your case for super abundance. Can you tell either of you, could you explain the concept of time price? Because that is also central to the way that you measure whether or not things are becoming more or less abundant, more or less available, you know, more expensive or less expensive. So, yeah, Mary, and you want me to talk about it? Okay. So time price basically begins with this idea is, look, because we buy things with money, but we really pay for them with time. You know, how much time does it take you to earn the money to buy that thing? So there's a money price that you can express in dollars and cents, but there's a time price that you can express in hours and minutes. And so we felt like, look, if we can go to time prices, it's it offers really five advantages over money prices. First of all, a time price more fully captures because the time price equation is real simple. It's just how much did it cost you divided by what's your hourly income? So if something costs $20 and you're earning $20 an hour, the time price of that thing is 60 minutes. So then the question is what's happening to that time price over time for you or for the category that you're in. And so we we move to these time prices. And because it's this ratio of the two variables, you're more fully capturing innovation. When innovation shows up, it not only shows up in lower prices, it also shows up in higher incomes. So it more fully captures innovation. The second feature is you can transcend all of these issues, all these these contention about CPI and GDP deflator, all of those you can transcend. Third value is you can go to any country with any currency, look at any product at any time and calculate a time price. I can go back to France in 1850 and figure out what the time price was for a loaf of bread and compare it to the time price today. The fourth advantage is time is this universal constant. It's not you can't inflate it. You can't counterfeit it of the seven fundamental majors in science. Six of them go back to time. It's a second of time. It's this fundamental feature. So if we can move economics from thinking of money to thinking in time, I think we then allow that discipline to become more scientific. And then the last reason is that time. We have this perfect equality of time. We all get 24 hours a day. So people then think people think in time and they think relative time. So if we can measure people instead of income inequality, if we can think about time inequality, I think it's much more informative and revealing in terms of what kind of life we have. Yeah. OK. What about the question just very quickly on this, the using time prices? You know, how do I mean, is it capable? Are we capable of, you know, really comparing life today in terms of what we spend money on, what we spend time on? And, you know, 1,800 France or, you know, the we we all have more computing power than the ancient pharaohs of Egypt, you know. But do we lose something when we just focus on, you know, everything as a function of the average, you know, the average wage given to the average laborer in a given period? You know, no, no, no prices, no measurement is perfect. But there are there are there are some very important things for which time price is ideal, especially things which are of greatest importance to the least fortunate among us, be they in America or be they in Ghana. A bag of potatoes is the same today as it was in 1700 Germany. A bag of oranges is the same today as it was in as it is in Ghana. We are measuring basic food items and we are always very careful to compare like with like bananas with bananas, oranges with oranges, a pound of beef with a pound of beef. We don't look at, you know, Lamborghinis or yachts. We look at things that people need for their ordinary daily survival, especially when it comes to fuels and food and certain minerals and metals, because of course, you cannot eat a pound of aluminum or a pound of copper, but they're all part of processes of production that, of course, inputs which make outputs cheaper. So so so in that sense, in that sense, we think we are on pretty solid ground. Once you switch over from basic commodities to to services, especially things get more complicated. One reason is that services contain much more of the price of a service is contained in human labor or is determined by human labor. And if there is one thing that we have noticed in super abundance that continues to increase in price, it is human labor. And so the more human labor is part of the price, say, for example, a headdresser, then then then super abundance would not necessarily show itself as strongly. Finally, I would say that that when it comes to services, the quality of services is very different. So a trip to the dentist is very different than it was say 100 years ago. That means I could tell you from personal experience from 25 years ago. Married, you know, some of us remember dentistry when it was still at the barber shop. Yeah, it was not good. So just a final point. So so but we did look, we tried, did try to estimate one type of service. And that is cosmetic surgery. And and a listener may ask, well, why on earth would you worry yourself about that? And that is because we are conscious of the fact that in America whilst food and electronics and things like that are becoming cheaper, education and health care is definitely becoming more expensive relative to wages. So what we wanted to see is what would happen to a quote unquote medical procedure if it is subject, if it is subjected to the proper functioning of the market, you pay for it, it's largely deregulated. And what we found is that when it comes to plastic surgery or cosmetic surgery, they are growing in abundance at a super abundant rate. Everything is becoming cheaper when the market is allowed to function. What is there or explain when you talk about abundance versus super abundance? What's what's the kind of Maginot line that you're crossing there? That's a great phrase, the Maginot line. The Maginot line is the rate of growth of population. So Ehrlich was claiming that as population grew, everything would be becoming more expensive. And therefore abundance would be declining. What we found in super abundance is that everything is actually growing in abundance, at least the things that we have measured. But abundance can be growing at two different speeds. It can be growing at a lower rate than population growth or a higher rate than population growth. And what we found was that it almost invariably grows at a higher rate than population growth. So if you have population growth of 2%, but abundance is increasing or 3% or 4%, that's super abundance. And the gap between population growth and super abundance, that tells you that human beings create this new knowledge which is capable of increasing standards of living. And I'll just before we move off of time prices very quickly. I mean, one of the things I was going to say is that in a way, you guys are also underselling the improvement of certain things because when you think about something like a car and you can go back certainly 100 years, but even 20 or 30 years, when the car we are buying now generally with less time price, you know, when you think about it that way, the car is just phenomenally better. You know, the computer is phenomenally better than it was 20 or 30 years ago. That's a shortcoming of time prices and it's also a shortcoming of every single other price. Nobody knows how to properly adjust for improvements. Right. OK. So what are, well, you know, at the beginning of the book, you invoke Malthus. You invoke Julian Simon on the plus side kind of and a couple of other people. And you invoke Malthus on the negative side and Thanos, the supervillain from the Avengers movies. And he goes a long way back in the Marvel comic book industry. Summarize Thanos. Like, why do you start with Thanos? Why is Thanos kind of the anti-Julian Simon? Well, we like Thanos because he kind of he illustrates this this ideology of scarcity. And he makes a statement about the universe's finite and its resources are finite. He's he's correct on the first part. You know, we do live on a planet with a fixed number of physical atoms. But the second part of his his statement's wrong because resources aren't a function of atoms. Their atoms are important, but resources are really a function of knowledge. It's when we take the material world, atoms, and you organize them and you add knowledge to them, that's when they become resources. And that knowledge is really what creates their value. The quote from Thomas Soul about the Neanderthal or George Gilder, a little shorty says that the difference between our age and the Stone Age is entirely due to the growth of knowledge. We're not getting more atoms. What we're getting is more knowledge. Well, if that's the case, then we don't really have this this limit in terms of resources because knowledge doesn't have any kind of a doesn't appear to have any kind of limit. I want to say this and I mean this as a completely positive statement. But you guys are absolutely 100 percent satanic in in making that claim in Promethean. It's almost chilling to hear it. But it's, you know, I agree with you completely. But this that is a kind of optimism that has just really gone missing from, you know, virtually all kind of public discussions of of, you know, the world we live in and progress versus stagnation and whatnot. So Nick, Nick, you're saying Satan was optimistic. Is that what now what I'm saying is, you know, I don't know if I can go with that or not. A fire stealer, you know, is is the person. I mean, you are, you know, this. Yeah, it is, you know, a fascinating and almost, you know, I was raised Catholic, so I get a little bit nervous when I hear this kind of stuff. But the hair on my neck stands up because you're totally right. This is, you know, human humanity or intelligence is the difference maker. And, you know, and it is limitless potentially. What are give me like three of the best examples of where we have gone, you know, and in time price and things like that. What are three of the best indicators that, you know, compared to 1800 or even 1900, maybe better. You know, that we are just doing so much better in ways that surprise and stun people. So looking at a blue collar worker, this particular chart, we looked at resources relative to blue collar worker wages. And what we found, for example, is that in terms of time prices, rice has declined by 99% in terms of how much time you have to you have to work in order to buy a pound of rice. And that means that now you get 112 pounds of rice for the same amount of work that would have bought you one pound of rice in 18. I mean, it's it. I mean, it's almost as if it is now free. And I know, you know, that's an overstatement. But you talk in the book about how, you know, such a large percentage of people's time and effort went to food. And it just is now it's a shrinking and small percentage. And you translate that at some point in the book, you talk about the average calories of, you know, people in, you know, in the ancient regime in France, in France, the wealthy people were eating like 1600 calories a day. The typical Frenchman now, you know, has, you know, eats 3,500 or something like that. Yeah. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the average calorie intake today is the same what it was in Portugal in 1960s. So that gives you a sense of how much better fed we are. Now, the now one of the things that we do, we translate time prices into abundance, and there is a reason for that. People intuitively understand that if something increases in price by 100 percent, you are only going to get half as much of it as before. But people don't quite understand or rather it's counterintuitive to think that when something falls in price by by 100 percent, it becomes free. The basically the abundance of it becomes infinite. So in comparing 1850 to 2018, what we found was a number of number of different commodities. I'm just going to name them sugar, nickel, rice, tea, rye, palm oil, pork, cotton, wheat, cocoa, which have fallen by 99 percent. And on average, on average, it's by about 98 percent. So if you had to work for something for for 100 minutes to buy it in 1850, you now have to work two minutes to buy it. And that that translates into multiple multiple number of pounds of things that you can get now as opposed to. But it's also true that you don't actually you don't you don't eat 112 pounds of rice, right, in a profound way. And I mean, I think the book gets at this in a pretty spectacular way. What it does is it opens up, you know, all of the time that, you know, the instead of spending two minutes working for food or for palm oil or something like that, you now have, you know, 58 minutes in an hour to do other things. Right. Right. It's this time of Gail has a very interesting example. Yes, it's the time abundance that we're really enjoying as well. We get this time abundance and we get a choice abundance. So if you we go back to 1960 and look at somebody living in India and assume they spend eight hours a day and a lot of these guys were there, they're making $90 a year GDP per year per capita. So they spend their whole day working to earn enough rice to subsist on. Today, you know, the price of rice falls by 80 or 90 percent. They only have to spend an hour a day. So they end up with six more hours a day that they can now devote to something else to learning to earning to earning the money to buy a bicycle. They get to move out of that time scarcity into this more time abundant zone, where now they're much more similar to someone in the U.S. Yeah, we've enjoyed this this reduction in time prices, too. But they've really benefited from it because now they're they're not spending all of their time devoted to just sustaining this kind of basic level of life support of just food. So this compression of time, this time equality has become much more narrower over time. And that we believe is a huge benefit when you give people two billion people between China and India, their freedom to have five or six or seven more hours a day to devote, they then become creators, potentially, to to grow and discover new knowledge. What's yeah, I would only add to that that the cool thing about studying economy development and the workings of capitalism in the Second World War era, but especially since globalization about 40 years ago, is to see the different kinds of inequalities which have just collapsed. The left continues to obsess about income inequality. But look at the gap between between infants dying in the third world and in the West, how much it has shrunk maternal mortality, time inequality, calorie inequality. There are hundreds of different inequalities which are shrinking around the world as a result of economic development. So even though income inequality may still be increasing in some countries, even income inequality across the world. Right. And income inequality among countries is shrinking, correct? Yes. Yes. Within countries, it is increasing. I mean, but that's bizarre because it's kind of it's increasing within China. But the difference between China and the United States is shrinking. Yes. Yes. And part of the reason for that is, of course, that if you want to unleash your economic potential, you have to allow individual human beings to apply their brains and some of them are going to be more successful than others. So naturally what you are here and then some people in a free market environment are going to come up at much faster rate than others. But the society as a whole is then going to catch up with the United States. So, you know, trade offs. You know, let's talk a little bit about the the engines or the engine or engines of super abundance. And we're going to talk about the critics of it and kind of where we go forward. If we like super abundance, how do we get more of it rather than less of it in a little bit? But, you know, what are what are the main engines of super abundance that you lay out in the book? Well, really, two. Yeah, two. It's, you know, we believe that abundance is a function of population and the freedom to innovate. And you can have an increase in population, but if they're not free to innovate, you really don't have this increase in abundance. But if you add a small measure of of freedom, for example, the China the China situation, you suddenly see people begin to escape poverty because of this ability to now this freedom to innovate, which is really the freedom to go out and discover and activate of valuable new knowledge. Innovation is really this discovery of new knowledge. And then let's talk a little bit about population growth first, though, because it at one point in the book, you talk about how between eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred, the population of Europe and I don't have it exactly in front of me. You guys might remember it, but I mean, it more than doubled, I think in a century where Europe became much wealthier. So what is the role of population in creating more abundance? Innovation is a function of invention and invention is a function of ideas and ideas are a function of human human beings. So you've got to have human beings to be able to have this idea creation and discovery process. And then they have to have the freedom to act on those ideas. And then basically this is like having, you know, in the the example that I'll butcher it, but, you know, about how, you know, having a million monkeys or an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards, you'll get, you know, Shakespeare written basically by having more monkeys, by having more people. You have more kind of random choice generators who are going to come up with a better way of doing something. Yeah, I think in a way, in a way because it's only a fraction of society that ever innovates, that has the idea leading to inventions and innovations. I mean, the evidence on it is a little bit, you know, all over the place. But let's assume it's 5%. I think 5% is a good guess. So let's so 5% of 1 billion people living in 1800s will be much lower in absolute numbers as 5% of 18. And one innovation, I mean, like a great innovation, then it helps everybody. So it's it's not like only that 5% or something gets it. So yeah, I would also add to that, that that the analogy of using monkeys or earlick use butterflies and insects, you know, monkeys don't innovate. That's the distinction between us and every every other species. They will just eat all the food until it's gone. Yeah, they don't I mean, occasionally humans do this too. But I mean, but humans actually change their behavior. I mean, I guess animals do too in various ways. But we hopefully do it a little bit better than that. So population growth and innovation. Now, let's talk about or the ability to innovate. What goes into that? Because, you know, we've seen moments where countries have expanded or eras where population growth, you know, grows. But people don't necessarily get richer. People don't necessarily live longer. So it's population growth plus the ability to innovate. What are the frameworks? What are the mindsets? What are the temperaments, the institutions that go into that? I feel that we are on pretty solid ground when we say that innovation is heavily connected to some form of freedom. I don't mean by that a libertarian paradise necessarily. Even in the Soviet Union under Stalin, communists understood that they had to permit scientists a greater degree of freedom and personal dignity so that the scientists were able to contribute their brains toward the creation of the Soviet nuclear program. Throughout history, what you find is that when you have these economic fluorescences of economic growth, be it in Venice or the medieval Italian states or be it in Song China, it usually coincides with a period of greater liberality. It doesn't have to be necessarily a perfectly functioning liberal democracy. But it has to have some free component. After all, in China today, people are not free. This is not a free country, but it is much freer than what it was under Mao. So that element of liberalism, greater allowance for people to at the very least speak, associate, exchange information, invest is very important. And in part of the chapter that talks about or part of the book that talks about that, you cite Matt Ridley's, you know, the idea of ideas having sex. So that is kind of where what you're talking about is you have more people and people have some degree of greater freedom to kind of talk amongst themselves and people come up with new and interesting ideas. Yes, yes, but they must also be allowed to put those ideas into practice. One of my favorite examples is from ancient Rome. Three different ancient Roman authors talk about the unbreakable glass inventor who comes to the emperor Tiberius and tells him, I've come up with this great invention. Can I have some money, please? And Tiberius asks him, did you share this knowledge with anyone? And the inventor says no, and the inventor is put to death. Throughout human history, elites, which is the key here, because elites really determine which way the society goes. Elites have been incredibly skeptical about invention and innovation. Whenever there was a period of economic or innovative efflorescence, they tried to quash it because economic innovation and dynamism is actually very bad for totalitarian control. Part of the reason why she is doing what he is doing in China right now is because he realized that the economic dynamism of China has been getting out of control and the Communist Party was falling behind in its ability to control it. So he made a conscientious choice. I'm going to squash the economy in order so that I can still control. And we'll see how that plays out. The other great example is the printing press. I mean, the printing press was basically invented in both China and Europe. But where did it thrive? It was able to succeed where you had a culture that was competitive. In other words, the institutions had to compete with one another and that allowed this window or this opportunity for this invention to become an innovation in Europe where it was really suppressed. Right. And this also goes to the point Marion was making about. We're talking about relative liberality here because it's not like the printing press was welcomed with open arms in Europe. I mean, it helped touch off hundreds of years of war based on what was being published to what end. Yes, but in Europe, printing presses take off in the 15th, 16th centuries, whereas the Middle East, which is the Ottoman Empire, has to wait until 1728 when a Hungarian immigrant who converts to Islam establishes the first press in Istanbul, Constantinople then. And he's immediately shut down. So they had to wait for a very long time. And during this time, Europe is able to make all of this economic progress, which leaves the Ottoman Empire behind. And that's part of the reason why it turns into the sick man of Europe. Final question on this before we talk about the critics of it. Is population growth necessary for long term economic growth? Because although the world recently, we were treated to headlines talking about how there are now 8 billion people in the world, population growth, the rate of population growth is slowing. And a lot of people talk about how there are really no examples of long term countries or societies with declining populations that have sustained economic growth. And the reason we care about economic growth is because it increases living standards. Is part of your argument that population growth is actually necessary for super abundance? Yes. And I would also say that, but it's an interaction between population growth and the growth of human freedom. For example, you could imagine a situation 20 years from now, well, around 2060 or after, where the global population starts declining. But suddenly the entire world becomes free, libertarian paradise, where you can say anything you can invest anywhere. And there are no kids. Right? There are fewer kids. You have all the time to invent. The point is that you could offset the declining population by having greater share of humanity living in freedom, being able to fully participate in global economy and innovation. But if the future around 2060 is one where the population stabilizes and then started declining, and at the same time, freedom starts disappearing from the world, or it's going to be restricted to only a few number of countries, then, of course, you would expect to see lower economic growth. Could I ask, yeah, go ahead. Just one more, I'd add one more thought to that. When population declines, you have this other effect of the demographic age. And it's like not only you're not having more people, your average age is getting older. So you could end up in a Japan kind of state where the average age is much older. And Julian Simon highlighted that this innovation primarily comes from young people. And you have more young people to innovate. Even though you've got a large population of the average age is 65, you're not going to see innovation either. Well, I would say that we do have pretty solid studies showing that people on whom we rely most on technological progress, mathematicians, physicians, sorry, physicists, they tend to have their discoveries in their 20s and in their 30s. After that, there are very few discoveries coming down the pipeline. So young people matter, especially in Japan. I was going to bring up Japan because my understanding is Japan is the only OECD country that has fewer people now than in 2000. It is a relatively free economy against the backdrop of the world. But compared to the United States or many other countries, it's a pretty structured economy. Do you feel like they are doing it wrong where they have a declining birth rate and they have a sub replacement birth rate, a declining population, and they're not liberalizing their economy enough? Well, we just did a little study on Japan. And as their population tends to flatten out and it starts to decline, their GDP per capita is also following that same trend. Slows down, flattens out, and then it's going to decline. It's still a pretty good place to live. It's a good place to live. There are life expectancies like 88 in Japan. So it's a great place to live if you want to live long. But it's not that great of a place to live if you're expecting lots of new innovation and growth. And that's really going to be their challenge. Let's talk about the critics of progress, broadly speaking, not necessarily with a capital P, but at least a small P, or material progress and abundance and super abundance. Historically, you guys say that romanticism, the movement that grew out of generally is understood to have been a reaction to industrialization and kind of the move to the nation state and to what we now call capitalism. What was going on with romanticism and what was its primary criticism? And how does it continue to influence critics of material progress? Well, to some extent, I think it starts with Rousseau. Both the main figures of the Enlightenment or rather all of the figures of the Enlightenment understood that life was getting better, that people were increasing their incomes, they could see progress around them. The first progressive century is the 18th century, really, especially toward the end. But that's basically where the agreement ended. In comes Rousseau and he says, all this new wealth is corrupting us. The figures of the Enlightenment were saying, the other figures of the Enlightenment were saying, the more wealth you have, the better the society becomes. He who is engaged in making money is engaged in making peace. From Dr. Johnson to Adam Smith to Montesquieu, everybody sort of embraces creation of wealth and prosperity as a good thing until Rousseau. And he says that it's corrupting us, that it's making us less moral, it's making us more separated from nature, it's enslaving us. So the figures of the Enlightenment are saying that wealth is making us freer and Rousseau is saying it's enslaving us. And beginning with Rousseau, all the way through the 19th century and into the 20th, you see this argument in fascism, in Nazism, in communism, all the way to modern environmentalism. Basically, it's based on this notion of Rousseau's noble savage, eucolic pre-industrial paradise and things like that. So obviously, that is heavily influenced by Christian belief system, both in terms of a belief in the Garden of Eden, the fall of eating from the Tree of Knowledge being kicked out of Eden. And then industrialization becomes this moment where we are really separated from nature and whatnot. Is there a case in the early 19th century that living standards in the rush to industrialize did life expectancy decrease? Were there plausible arguments to be had that this was not a good thing? Certainly by the time Marx dies in 1883, it's obvious that whatever there was, the stagnation in wages during the so-called Engels' polls, that that has disappeared, that the working classes were beginning to see a sustained increase in standards of living that was previously unknown. As early as the is it the criticism of the Gotha program or is it the communist manifesto? Engels and Marx, both of them agree that capitalism has unleashed more productive power in humanity in last 50 years than in the previous thousands of years. So they are in a way fanboys of capitalism. They just want to transcend it. They want to get to what comes after it. But yeah, I mean, in the communist manifesto, this is where everything solid dissolves into air and whatnot. They really talk up bourgeois society as a difference. Yeah, and the communist manifesto comes out in 1848. So whatever the Engels' polls was in terms of incomes per capita, it must have become obvious to people that things were getting better. 1860s, you have French historian whose name I forget right now, but who is mentioned in the book, who says that women now have more clothes that they can buy in one year than women previously in a lifetime. So certainly by the middle of 19th century, it is obvious that things are getting better. And by the time that Marx dies, this is obvious. Part of the reason why Lenin feels that he needs to update the Marxian theory for the 20th century is because it's obvious that poor people are not becoming poorer, they're becoming richer. And so Lenin then comes out with a theory whereby poor people in the West are becoming richer as a result of exploitation of people in the colonies, which Marx didn't think about. Marx was generally pro-colonialization as a project of the Enlightenment. Can I ask, Heidegger comes up in your book, Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, who was a member of the Nazi party and remains one of the most influential thinkers on the planet. Why I bring him up is because he was a romantic. He was a German romantic. He shortly after the war kind of analogized industrial food production to concentration camps. It was kind of like the factory farm is even worse, type of thing. He is also, he's an outgrowth of the German nature movement. And there are clear kind of trends or thought lines that go from Rousseau and Romanticism to Heidegger to the modern environmentalist movement. Can you talk a little bit about how Heidegger plays in this kind of critique of the modernity that gives rise to abundance and how that kind of plays out in the modern environmentalist movement? Because it seems like there is the strongest case of people who are saying, we are destroying the planet, we are destroying Mother Gaia. I mean, they talk about all of the trends that you talk about in particularly negative terms. It seems to be the clearest case of opposition to the kind of large project that you're pushing here. So I'm a little bit leery talking about that to an actual philosopher of ideas, though, which is which is unique. But my reading of that particular period is that as a result of Napoleonic wars and the destruction of Germany by Napoleon specifically, there was a tremendous backlash against what the Germans perceived to be French Enlightenment, rationality and industrialization in part. And the German. And I guess I'm sorry to interrupt, but I mean, it's important to understand that France was the dominant economy really in Europe and in the planet and in terms of industrialization. In America, I think we give France short shrift as an economic innovator and powerhouse, particularly in the 19th century. Yeah, but back then France was the European superpower and conquered the whole of Europe under Napoleon. And really the conflicts were terribly bloody in Central Europe, in Germany, in Austria. And there's this reaction amongst Germans against the French, what they perceive as French Enlightenment, specifically reason, industrialization, capitalism, that sort of thing. And so from the beginning, it's an embrace of nature, seeing cities specifically as the centers of corruption. And the reason why we spent some time talking about German Romantics is that in every one of these eras, it is almost as though people are looking for a reason to reject capitalism, industrialization, the Enlightenment. First, it's German nationalism, which of course then translates itself into Nazism. But then even in the existentialist movement and beyond into environmental movement, there's always a sense that we need something different than what capitalism has to offer. And so there's a reason why all of these ideas get resuscitated or get renewed in Nazism, fascism, communism, existentialism, environmentalism is because it's the obvious way with which to bludgeon capitalism and industrial and industrial war. Where do you see the environmentalist movement going now in terms of, or is that the primary, is the green new deal, or is a broad based environmentalism, is that the main foe of or opponent to a superabundance agenda? Or how do you seek to engage environmentalists, I guess, or people who maybe are not hardcore environmentalists, but you know what? I care about the planet. I care about the fate of the planet. But I'm also, I don't buy all of that. How do you speak to people like that to get them to take a superabundance agenda seriously? I always begin when talking about this subject by distinguishing between smart and well-meaning environmentalists who care about the planet, but whose hierarchy of values has the planet and human flourishing at roughly the same level, right? People like Schellenberger, people like Steve Pinker, people like that. They care about the environment, they want to clean the environment, they want a safe planet, but at the same time they understand that there has to be a balance. On the other hand, you've got the extreme environmentalists who really see humanity as a cancer upon the planet, as having children as an act of ultimate selfishness and things like that. There are some positive things happening on the environmental side of things, partly because of the catastrophe that Europe is undergoing right now. The opposition to nuclear power, for example, seems to be losing steam. People are realizing that in order for civilization to continue, you have to have energy. We do have a source of energy which doesn't produce any CO2 into the atmosphere in nuclear. There are some positive things going on, but at the same time the megaphone is definitely still with the people claiming the coming of the apocalypse, which is why in the last chapter of the book we are able to point to a number of number of public opinion polls both in the United States and also in the developing world, or the rest of the world, which shows that increasingly women and parents are making their choices about how many babies to have depending on environmental concerns. The world is going to burn up in 12 years, we're going to run out of resources, our children are going to starve, and as a result of that, we think that contributes partly to the decrease in the fertility rates. We believe that because people tell us that. We are not going to have children because the world is... By the same token, it seems that what changes fertility rates overwhelmingly correlates with the years of education that women have, which is widely seen as a proxy for equality. Global equality of women is really one of the unbelievable emancipatory stories, liberatory stories of the past two centuries as well. Yes, so the fertility rates can be declining for positive and negative reasons. We are talking about changes on the margin. If people want to go into businesses or factories or whatever, because the opportunity cost of staying at home and taking care of the children is high, well, that's their choice. As a classical liberal, I understand that. All I'm saying is that on the margin, you are making choices because of these specific environmental concerns, this is the antidote. Could you briefly talk about why we know that the world is not running out of resources or the planet is not going to burn up in 8 years or 12 years or 15 years? I would say on the resource side is look at the price. Look at the prices of things. If we were truly running out of these things, the prices would be increasing dramatically. The price contains this information about the relative scarcity of things. Then the time price really goes to the next level of saying, well, how much time does it take you to earn the money to buy that thing? All of these products and services have become lower price. They're becoming more and more abundant to us. That would be the first thing. Then I think the second side, Marion, can deal with that. The second part of the question. Well, I mean, even when it comes to climate change, which is not the focus of this book, we acknowledge that climate change happens. We are not climate change deniers. We understand there's luke warming going on. We understand the role of CO2 in the warming of the atmosphere. But I think that the key is that people should sort of evaluate the climate change in the whole. There are going to be things as a result of a slightly warmer world, which are also going to be good for humanity. Eight times as many people died due to cold than died due to warmth. Having a slightly warmer world may actually decrease the number of people who died due to climactic change or variation. In addition to that, let's not forget that in the last 100 years, the number of people who have died due to extreme weather events, be it droughts or floods or earthquakes, has fallen by 98%. One way I like to answer this question, I don't know if it is totally convincing, but let me try, is that if we are going to be facing what the environmental apocalypse are talking about, an existential crisis and end of humanity, then we need a measure, some kind of a statistic that will tell us whether in fact things are getting worse or better. One statistic would be how many people are dying due to extreme weather. That has decreased by 99% over the last 100 years. In other words, we are safer from climactic changes and extreme weather events on the planet today than we were before. I think that global enrichment has a huge part to play in it. We are basically able to build sturdier buildings. We are able to estimate through satellites which way the hurricane is going to go. We have buoys at the bottom of the seas telling us when an earthquake happens at the bottom of the ocean and when there's going to be a tsunami. By emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, we are making the world much richer, which is also making us safer. That doesn't mean that we should go crazy and emit CO2 forever in large quantities, but it does mean that it's a complex subject that people should consider all of its pluses and minuses. Let's do a little biography here. I'm always curious as to why people become interested in the topics that they write about. Gail, Pooley, you teach at BYU, Hawaii, so you are in some level of heaven already on earth. Where did you come from and how does it predispose you to be interested in these kinds of questions? I grew up in Idaho. My father had a gas station. I come from this working class family of six children, so in 1970, 1968, I had to read Paul Erdick's book and I think it was Junior High on the Population Bomb. Coming from a family of six, it's like, wow, my parents are they responsible for the planet? And then just this curiosity about economics. I had the opportunity to meet Julian Simon in 1981 when I was in grad school in Econ. It's like, wow, this guy seems to be reasonable and he seems to have had this experience with the facts. And when he said, look, the facts are what really changed my mind. I thought, well, I'm going to look at your facts. And as I began to explore and do the research, do really the economic analysis of stuff, I completely changed my mind as well about what that relationship was between resource abundance and population growth. More people result in more abundance. And that was Julian's argument and that's what we try to extend in the book. And it's interesting in the book, you guys also, you participate in and extend arguments that are made by people like Steven Pinker and Max Roser, the idea of factfulness and facticity. Obviously, Marianne, you run Human Progress, a website that is published by the Cato Institute, that's been a big influence on Pinker and other people like that. You, I know from our friendship, you were born in communist, what became Slovakia, is a distant memories of communist privation. Is that what's driving your interest in not just abundance but super abundance? Yes, I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. I was 13 when the war came down. After that, I lived in South Africa in the United Kingdom and then in the United States. And with every step of the way, my standard of living has increased as I moved from as my freedom has increased. But the bottom line is that as a child, I grew up seeing the failure of socialism. And defense of capitalism has become very important to me. In other words, it's something that I feel very personally. Everything in the book that we do, we document with facts and mathematics. So people will be able to see for themselves what the evidence is. But the driving force certainly is the defense of the free markets. And there was some time, maybe about 20 years ago when I realized that after this fundamental failure of communism, the green movement has become a home for parts of the green movement. Parts of the green movement became a home for watermelons. People who are green on the outside, but red on the inside. If you asked me 10 or 15 years ago, what is the ultimate agenda of the green extremists? I will not give you an answer because I was taught it was hammered into me not to impugn other people's motives. We now thankfully live in a world where the cat is out of the bag. From the number two person at the United Nations all the way to Greta Thunberg's new book, they are explicit. The goal of the extreme environmentalist movement is the destruction of the capitalist system. Some people may find that appealing. I don't and I intend to fight against it. Is the, you know, is kind of the motivation there? Is it less about, you know, I mean, it's not like these people are Marxists and they want, they think Marx had everything right and they want to instill his version of heaven on earth or something like that. It's an interesting controlling things because things seem to be chaotic. Things seem to either be running down or out of control or doing the bidding of a few shadowy billionaires, you know, around the globe and things like that. And, you know, I guess one of the larger questions I have for both of you is, are we in a stage now where, you know, and Joseph Schumpeter talked about this at the end of capitalism, socialism and democracy, where you live in a society that becomes wealthy in a way that it takes wealth production, which has eluded humans for most of our history for granted. And then you think the only thing that matters is how do you kind of distribute a, you know, a fixed set of goods to people. That's the function of economy, of economics. That's the function of government. That's the function of civil society. Is that where we're at? I mean, that people cannot see past the idea that we can have wealth creation, innovation and growth that is not inherently destructive. And that's their main failing. I would let Gail go first because I speak too much, but I'm happy to go. Yeah, I would just say, you know, Marx, he felt like the production problem had been solved. His obsession was on distribution. So if you assume the world can produce all of this wealth and abundance and its distribution that you need to worry about, then you can become obsessed with that. But we still fundamentally have this production problem. How do things get made? And so I think that's a part of the failing is recognizing, and if you grow up in a very wealthy society, if you never actually have to do things with your hands and you're in academia, it's very easy to be kind of caught up in these ideas about how, you know, if I was in charge, given my motives and my ethics, I would do it this way. And, you know, when we allow intellectuals to have that kind of authority and power in a culture that haven't really dealt with the realities and have never really paid the costs for being wrong, then you're going to have this attention to that kind of an ideology. So our pushback once again is, look, you've got to look at the facts. You've got to think about the historical perspective of how expensive things used to be and why are they so abundant today? It wasn't because we come up with a new distribution system. It's because we've been able to continually innovate and that requires human freedom. Yeah. And I would simply add to that. Thank God that nobody had the power to stop innovation in 1900 when there's a famous anecdote of somebody who said that we can shut down the patent office in Washington DC because everything that could have been invented was. And that was 24 years before antibiotics came online. So the point is, thank God nobody did that. And I think it's incredibly silly to think that we have reached the pinnacle of prosperity. It cannot get much better. Of course, it can get much better, not just for people in the other parts of the world, but also people in the United States. And finally, I would say that, I mean, my working hypothesis is that what is happening in Western advanced nations is that when you reach the top of the Maslow pyramid of hierarchy of values. In other words, you're living in a relatively safe society, a very safe society. You have the food, you have the water, you have the shelter, you have the clothing. You have the time. You now have a lot of time to devote to the things at the top of the pyramid, which are what kind of a society am I living and am I happy with that society? It's self-actualization. So you are at the top of the pyramid and you have all this time. And all you can think about is I'm living in a society with a myriad of imperfections. And there is a utopia out there that I have just imagined in my head five seconds ago. And I want to move the society that way. And part of the reason why I think this is the working hypothesis is that we have so much conflict right now politically is because all of us are sitting at the top of the Maslow pyramid of hierarchy of values, sorry pyramid of values, pyramid of needs, but our values are different. Some of us value freedom, other people are valuing equality. And we have all this time and all this energy and all this wealth to just get on each other's nerves and try to make each other more miserable. So that's a problem. So I mean, it's fundamentally a problem of super abundance. It's a problem of super abundance and a problem of disparity that we have to resolve somehow. Yeah. And one of the broad arguments that everybody makes, and I think it's generally correct kind of following up on what you were talking about, Marion, is that we live in an era where God is dead. There is no single transcendent set of values or morals that everybody either believes or is forced to believe or forced to pretend to believe. And so we have a proliferation of different ways of living a meaningful life, which leads to conflict, which leads to sniping and tribalism. Is that, you know, how do you within the framework of super abundance, how do you manage that kind of conflict so that it is productive and not destructive? Well, thankfully, in a free society, if we can manage, if we can continue to be free, there is a scope within a free society for a communist commune where people can live together and share everything. So long as you have the right of exit, you can come and go and create your own kibbutz and whatever. Within a free society, there's a scope for a hippie commune where all that people do is to, you know, canoodle naked and smoke joints. But so free society allows these different ideas about what best life is to flourish. But the problem is that if people who fundamentally don't believe in freedom and within freedom as classical liberals or libertarians, we are also saying we don't really know what a good life is. Maybe you want to be a hippie, maybe you want to be a communist, that's okay. Create your own world within our society. Unfortunately, when freedom subsides and the regulators and the central planners get hold of society, then they impose their vision on everybody else and conflict becomes greater rather than smaller. All right, we're going to leave it there. Gal Pooley, Mary and Tupi, thanks for talking to reason. The book is super abundance, the story of population growth, innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. Thank you. Thank you Nick very much. It's been a pleasure.