November 26, 2025 • 53 mins
Though it seems like the world is in shambles, humanity has progressed quite impressively when you look at virtually any length of history. Our modern society has produced a slew of nice things that would have been hard to fathom 50 years ago, much less 250 years ago- smartphones, duct tape, GPS. They’ve all, to greater or lesser degrees, made our lives better and that’s simply looking at consumer goods. Think of other clear markers like infant mortality, literacy rates, longer lifespans and how they all point to incredible progress. But how did those innovations and that abundance come about? Why does 2025 look so radically different in the developed world than 1825? Marian Tupy’s book Superabundance explains it all and demonstrates how far we’ve come in easy-to-understand language. Marian Tupy is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He’s also the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, a site that seeks to evidence these dramatic improvements. Listen as we cover how:
- Progress is not guaranteed and can regress under certain conditions
- Life expectancy has dramatically increased over the last 200 years
- Economic freedom and openness to trade drive prosperity
- Nostalgia often overlooks the harsh realities of the past
- Environmental concerns can be addressed through innovation and technology
- Time prices illustrate the abundance of resources available today
- Gratitude for our current circumstances can lead to greater happiness
- And plenty more!
Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances:
- Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet is the book and HumanProgress.org is the site!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to had to Money. I'm Joel, and today I'm
talking about how the world is getting better with Mary
and Tupy. Okay, so you've heard the phrase this is
(00:27):
why we can't have nice things. Our modern society has
produced a slew of nice things, though that would have
been hard to fathom fifty years ago, much less two
hundred and fifty years ago. PCs and smartphones, gore tex
and duct tape, GPS and the barcode. All of these things,
to greater or lesser degrees, have made our lives better.
But how did those innovations and that abundance come about.
(00:50):
Why do twenty twenty five look so radically different in
the developed world than eighteen twenty five. Well, Mary and
Tupey's book Superabundance was a revelation to me a few
years ago, showing how far we've come in pretty easy
to understand language. Maryon Twopy is a senior fellow at
the Cato Institute. He's also the founder and editor of
human Progress dot org, a site that seeks to evidence
(01:12):
these dramatic improvements. With Thanksgiving coming up tomorrow, I couldn't
think of a better time to cover this topic. So
Mary and Twopy. Thank you so much for joining me
today on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Okay, first question we ask everybody who comes on. I
like to splorage on craft beer, fancy craft beer. Honestly,
with Thanksgiving I might pops off really nice tomorrow. What
is that for you, though? What do you like to
splurge on while you're still being smart and thoughtful about
your finances in your future.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I save a lot of money to be able to travel.
I really enjoy traveling and exploring different parts of the world,
so I would say that is my luxury, although I
do like beer as well.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Okay, all right, then we can be friends. Then what's
the last great trip you went on?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I must say I think my last great trip was
to Argentina. I think that a discovery of Buenos Aires.
It is a proper Western, well functioning, beautiful, laid out
city in Latin America that you wouldn't expect to find,
and I enjoyed being there very much.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Okay, all right, after I went a long long time ago.
It was probably thirty years ago, so I'll have to
like put it back on my list. I have to
go as an adult. Let's get to the topic. I'm curious, like,
have we as a society become too accustomed to our
current level of wealth without understanding how it's come to be.
It seems like there's like a disconnect right now, and
(02:34):
there's like a burn it down sort of mentality without
really understanding what we're attempting to burn down.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, I think that is a very good perspective to have.
We have gotten to where we are by being a
much more open society to new innovations. New innovations don't
just have to be technological, medical, scientific innovations. They can
be also ethical, cultural innovations. And basically, for a variety
(03:04):
of reasons, Europe in the eighteenth century became much more
open to new ideas. New ideas flourished, and they brought
about what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.
A lot of old presumptions, dogma's ideas were simply swept away,
(03:27):
and the society well became much more open to innovation.
And as a consequence of that, we have unleashed for
the last two hundred years an era of unprecedented innovation
and consequently greater economic growth as well as I would
say improved morality where people treat each other much better
than they used to. And I think that in certain
(03:52):
ways we have certainly forgotten about that. The society is
becoming much more close. You can see it in terms
of how we treat international trade, which is of course
very important to to to innovation and to economic growth,
but also society is becoming much more skeptical about certain
(04:15):
kinds of innovation. Tacker Carlson, for example, was interviewed by
Ben Shapiro about two years ago, and Ben Shapiro asked
him what would he do about autonomous truck trucking autonomous
you know, trucks, and Tucker said that he would ban
it in a second because it would put a lot
(04:35):
of truckers out of work. But if you made the
same argument two hundred years ago, or even one hundred
years ago about horse buggy drivers, sure, then we would
still be, you know, riding horse buggies rather than driving trucks.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
At the bank, right, I mean, there's a million things
you could point to.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, So that's that's a very long answer to your
short question, but it was a good one.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Do you think that the twenty four hour news cycle
is part of the problem that it impacts our ability
to see the good things that are happening in the world.
I know that these websites for a minute, that we're
dedicated to only publishing good news, but it does feel
like the twenty four hour news cycle before it existed,
we were just less aware of maybe some of the
negative things happening in our society, and maybe ignorance was bliss,
(05:20):
at least to a certain extent.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
I'm not sure if ignorance is ever bliss, but maybe.
All right, I will tell you I agree with you
broadly speaking, but I think that there is something else
going on, which is a negativity contagion. So it's not
so much that we have twenty four hour cycle, though
that's part of it. It's that there's just so many
(05:46):
more outlets and they're all doing the same things, which
is presenting negative news. So it's not just that Fox
has to compete against NBC and CBS and ABC. You
now have websites where most people get their news, in
addition to radio and newspapers and so forth, and we
(06:10):
have evolved to prioritize bad news. And so because you
have now this hyper competitive environment, the only way that
you can get people to come back to you. In
the phase of all of that competition is to present
the worst news first and repeatedly and in the worst
possible terms, and there is very little time and space
(06:34):
for positive news. The hundreds of little innovations that are
happening every day that are improving people's lives simply do
not make it on those websites or on those newscasts
because in order to get those eyeballs, they have to
focus on the negatives. So the perception that is created
(06:55):
in the human mind is that everything in the world
is getting worse, and that is certainly incorrect, it's unrealistic,
and it is highly damaging. So it's the negative emotional
contagent which we have to deal with, and there is
not an easy solution to it, because it's not like
(07:15):
it's a market failure in a sense of hyper competition
of of of media only there there is there is
a there is a human nature at play. We desire
bad news that because we have evolved to look out
for bad news in order to survive.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
You you run a site that focuses on a lot
of good news that highlights the progress that we've made,
so which is kind of the opposite of what drives
in the media ecosystem right now, can you share maybe
a few things, a few recent things from your site
that you guys have been working on.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Sure, so, Human progress dot org is specifically intended to
combat this negativity, emotional bias, or contagion, and people can
sign up for a week summary of all the good
things that have taken place. You know, it's just one
email a week saying hey, you know, this is what
has happened in the last few weeks. We have seen
(08:10):
children who were genetically unable to hear regain their hearing.
We have seen new advances. We have seen new statistics
showing how certain threatened species of whale are actually expanding
all over the world. We have seen the discovery of
a new antibiotic which will which will enable us to
(08:35):
get around the problem of superbugs, and so on and
so forth. So again, the good news is out there
if you just look for it. But I'm afraid that
you know, our reach is you know, hundreds of thousands
of people. It is not millions that the doom and
gloom newscasts get every day.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, okay, let's just talk about progress. Is all progress
good because it does seem like most of the time,
much of the time, specially over the past couple hundreds,
a lot of the progress that we've experienced has been
to our benefit personally economically. Automation though it can bring
down prices, but it can also reduce jobs, as we
were kind of referring to. So how do you square
(09:15):
that circle on progress, good, bad? Somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
I would say that my definition of progress obviously has
the human in front of it, so you know, it
is a very humanistic or human centric or entropercentric project,
if you will. And if there are aspects to progress
which are damaging to humanity, that then we need to
we need to we need to talk about it. For example,
(09:45):
it is an open question whether the fact that we
have much more free time than people in the past.
It's just the reality is that as people earn more
money than number of hours of work is lower or
goes down, believe it or not. Even though Americans, for example,
work much more than people in Western Europe, we still
(10:07):
work about a third less than what we did two
hundred years ago. Right, So we have all this time
on our hands, and you know that provides much more
time for introspection and especially if you are amongst the
least fortunate people in the United States, say somebody who
doesn't have a family, maybe you have just lost your job,
et cetera. Having a lot of time for rumination may
(10:31):
not be a bad idea, especially if you have access
to all the bad news. So there's another aspect of it,
which is social media. I am not putting down social
media because I think the jury is still out, you know,
social media, and it enables us to do a lot
of marvelous things, keeping up with cousins across the you know,
(10:54):
across the world, speaking to our parents who may not
live in the United States but in your or elsewhere.
It allows us to get alerts for tsunamis and things
like that. So there's a lot of positive to it.
But maybe, as Jonathan Hyde argues, taking them out of
high schools is not a bad idea. So we have
(11:15):
just hired a human progress a young psychologist from Harvard
who will be researching these issues and hopefully make us
understand better about the negative aspects of progress.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Can you talk about what has propelled human economic activity
to accelerate in such an epic way, especially over the
past one hundred and fifty years and maybe why it's
been experienced more in a more heightened way in countries
like ours then maybe and even a stark difference of
like North Korea and South Korea, right, like one thriving
(11:51):
economic hub and one closed off from the world. Is
it kind of pointing back to what you mentioned earlier,
being closed off from trade and therefore being closed off
from innovation.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, I think that you're basically a right when you
have two states made up of essentially the same people,
like East Germany and West Germany and North and South Korea,
and they are producing fundamentally different economic results, that suggests
being more open to international trade, have enforceable private property
(12:26):
rights to give just two examples, maybe a stable currency
are very important. So Economic Freedom of the World Report,
which is co published by the Cato Institute and Fraser
Frasier Institute in Canada, they look at regulatory structure, they
look at trade openers, they look at they look at
(12:48):
sound currency trade and basically what they find is that
the more open you are, the less regulated you are,
the less overtaxed you are, the better you And what
has happened was that for a variety of contingent historical reasons.
Many of these things came together in Northwestern Europe, especially
(13:11):
in Holland or Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were able to grow
rapidly and show the path to the rest of the world.
And since the United States is simply a daughter country
of Great Britain, many of those institutions and very importantly
(13:34):
cultural values that Britain had had been translated into the
American context, and America could build upon the British the
British origin story to become the wealthiest country in the
world by the year nineteen hundred. So fundamentally it's about institutions,
but I think that cultural reasons play also a part.
(13:55):
And it is a highly contentious territory, I would say,
but I think those two are very important. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I heard you say at one point that the good
old days were buying large very bad, and I loved
I love that because so many people like look back
with nostalgia to a bygone era and they're like, I
was so great back then. But I don't think if
most of us were offered a time machine, we'd go back,
probably even fifteen or twenty years when you ask a youngster, hey,
(14:24):
would you give up your smartphone for a million dollars? Like,
they wouldn't do it, you know, they just wouldn't. They
wouldn't want to be parted from that progress. So how
do you How bad was life back in the day?
How great is it? How great do we have it now?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
First of all, I wish we did have time travel,
because I think that I would love to send every
college kid or school kid to Pompeii, where I was
what three or four weeks ago. This is the city
that was destroyed by volcanic corruptions in seventy nine AD
(14:57):
and can be visited in a close on Naples today.
And the fascinating thing that you see in Pompeii is
that the tile roads have large stones running through them.
Instead of pedestrian walks, they have these large stepping stones.
Why do they have them, Well, they have them because
(15:19):
streets would basically be running with sewer. All the human excrement, urine, awfal,
blood from slaughtered animals would be simply dumped into the street,
and then you would have water running down those streets
in order to flush it into the sea, which is
partly why Pompeii is on a hill, you know, going
(15:42):
down to the Mediterranean Sea, and people used to cross
streets on stilts and things like that because basically, basically
it was incredibly filthy. That's the first thing that you
would that you would discover if you went acting time,
the fils and the stench everywhere. The other thing that
(16:05):
you would quickly realize is that people lived to about
thirty Today, life expectancy around the world is about seventy three.
It's about seventy nine in the United States, so everybody
has been granted an extra life. Fifty percent of children
before the age of fifteen died. Okay, murderate in Renaissance
(16:30):
Italy was about forty per hundred thousand. Today in Italy
it's zero point three per one hundred thousand. So when
it comes to violence, life expectancy, child maternal mortality, roughly
one thousand women per one hundred thousand childbirths would die.
In the old days to day, it's a fraction of that.
(16:51):
People were ignorant and illiterate. Our best evidence suggests that
even the most sophisticated society is roughly ten percent of
people could read and write. Today it's obviously almost universal,
so along so many dimensions, life was just so much
more difficult. And don't forget that we were incredibly poor.
(17:13):
So GDP per capita per person per day was about
two to three dollars. Right today globally it's about forty
dollars adjusted for inflation. So that gives you a sense
of where we were and where we are today. The
last two hundred years are really unprecedented in human history
in terms of the extraordinary flourishing of humanity. And I
(17:35):
think that it is deeply connected to the increased liberalization,
not using it in political terms, you know, as in
liberal in the United States, liberalization of economy and politics.
Governments became much more responsive, They started enforcing they stopped
(17:55):
behaving in arbitrary fashion, they started enforcing equality before the law.
And of course in the economy, we just became much freer.
In fifteen or sixteenth century England, for example, whether you
wanted to import something or export something, you need the
permission of the king, who would give you a monopoly
on the export of salt or the import of wool
and whatever else. Today you can pretty much start a
(18:18):
business anytime you like. You just have to deal with regulations.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, is progress something you think of as unavoidable or
do you think it's something that needs to be safeguarded?
Like I think about not being able to recreate the
pyramids right, like almost like that ability has been lost
and we don't know how right the pyramids were made,
or rockets. I've heard Elon Must say something along the
(18:43):
lines of like, if we hadn't started to make rockets again,
some of that knowledge would would have been lost. What
would have gone away? Is that how progress is? Can
it be lost?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Well? I don't know about the pyramids. I'm pretty sure
that we could make them with heavy machinery today. I
think that the question about the pyramids is how did
the ancients create them without heavy machinery? But we could
probably do that. No, progress is definitely not guaranteed. When
people started realizing that the world was improving at a
very fast click in the nineteenth century, there was an
(19:13):
emergence of a number of schools of thought. Hegel marks,
can't people like that who started talking about progress as
being unavoidable. But that is clearly not true. Progress can regress.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, Europe
forgot a lot of the knowledge that the Romans possessed.
(19:34):
To this day, we don't know how to make Roman concrete,
for example, even though it has withstood for two thousand
years and so and people in the dark ages in Europe,
you know, used to walk amongst the monuments built by
the Romans, wondering who were these people who created all
of this? Because they forgot right. So so knowledge can
(19:56):
be lost, Progress can regress. There is nothing unavoid about it.
And that's what concerns me is that, as you noted
at the beginning of the interview, so many people have
forgotten the reasons why progress has happened. It happens because
of an open economy tolerant of new ideas. And when
(20:18):
that goes, or when our institutions change, and you know,
when we embrace socialism, for example, like the North Koreans
or the Cubans or the Venezuelans, then I'm afraid progress
will stall and eventually go into reverse.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
One retort that you might hear from people who think
of progress as not like an evident, self evidently good thing, is,
in particular, like some of the environmental ramifications that progress
the negative harms to our environment, that progress can create
what would you say to that.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I would say yes and no. So what tends to
happen when countries start industrializing, So you go through this
process of moving from agriculture to industry to services, and
when countries undertake industrialization, there is a lot of ecological
harm that takes place. That being said, it's not like
life in the agricultural society was without its risks. For example,
(21:17):
food would be contaminated at all times, people were suffering
from tremendous gustro intestinal problems, riven with parasites and so forth.
But never mind, let's put that aside. The point is
that once you move from agriculture to industry, you do
tend to create a lot of environmental damage. But then
what happens is that what is called an environmental Kuznetz
curve kicks in. And this is just a fancy way
(21:41):
of saying, is that when people become rich enough, they
start caring about the environment, and they have enough wealth
to start protecting their environment. So there are a number
of things that go on. One of them is that
you simply have more money and more resources human and
otherwise to clean up your reverse, which is why today
people are swimming in the Seine, and there are dolphins
(22:04):
in Thames in London that didn't used to be the
case during industrialization, so nature naturally rebounds. Another thing that
happens is urbanization. Basically the most disruptive element on land
is the human being. And when you take humans of
the land, in other words, as you move from agriculture
(22:26):
to industry and re later to services, more and more
people end up in the cities. By twenty one hundred,
something like eighty percent of humanity will be in the cities,
which means that we will depopulate areas in which we
currently live and where we disrupt the natural flow of
flora and fauna, and that will bounce back. So the
best thing that you can do for the environment is
(22:46):
really to urbanize and to become as agricultural efficient as possible.
So the Greens, I'm afraid, are riven with contradictions. On
the one hand, they don't want to build nuclear power
stations even though they don't emit CO two, and they
are the best solution that we have currently to reducing
(23:07):
CO two in the atmosphere. It's more expensive than gas.
Gas still produces some CO two in the atmosphere, but
much less so than coal. But you know, if we
could switch all of humanity to gas and then eventually
to nuclear, then we would be able to reduce COO
two dramatically. Another thing which the Greens are against is GMOs.
But suppose that you can genetically modify some of our
(23:31):
most important crops such as sweet and corn and soy
and so forth, so that you can produce much more
per acre. That means that you can feed growing global
population on fewer and fewer acres of land, which means
that you can return more and more acres of land
back to flora and fauna. So there are solutions for
(23:54):
environmental comeback that modern society offers, and I if you're
open minded about it, and the Greens very often aren't.
And I'm not even talking about like the extinction movement,
which also holds promise for the future where we'll be
(24:14):
able to basically use the DNA of dead or extinct
animals in order to bring them back.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
We got more to get to. Specifically, it takes so
much less time to buy almost all of the goods
and services that we enjoy. We'll talk about why that
is with Mary and Tupe right after this. I'm still
talking with Mary and twopee and I want Mary and
(24:43):
I want to talk about specifically your book Superabundance. And
this was released in twenty twenty two and to me,
like as I was reading it, it was striking because
you put things in terms there were so much easier
to understand. And part of what made it easy to
comprehend was when you talk about time prices, how long
specifically people must work to be able to afford every
(25:05):
day items. Talk about that concept like how does that,
how can that help maybe us appreciate the progress that
we've made and what sort of progress have we made
when we look at the concept of time prices.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Well, time prices have been implemented in the book by
necessity because we wanted to see how much cheaper resources
are today than they used to be before. I mean,
the idea that most people subscribe to is a zero
sum idea, which is that the more people you have,
the more resources they use. Therefore resources are becoming more
(25:38):
expensive and scarcer. The opposite is true, resources are becoming
cheaper as you have more people in the world because
people bring new ideas and they basically grow the resource
by But since we were going back to eighteen fifty.
We simply didn't have the currencies, and we didn't have
the exchange rates, and we didn't have the inflation rates,
(26:00):
so we couldn't use normal currencies. So we simply what
we asked ourselves is basically, how long did people have
to work in order to buy a bag of potatoes
or a bag of oranges, or a bunch of bananas,
or a pound of beef or a pound of pork
and whatever else. And so that was done by necessity,
but it's also a smart way. I think that everybody
(26:23):
should do it to measure human well being or rather
abundance or prosperity, simply because it is a Everybody has
only twenty four hours in a day. So if you
are an Indian peasant, for example, and you are spending
six hours a day to earn enough money to buy
your food, but an American can do it in ten minutes,
(26:44):
that makes a difference. So what we really want is
for people to spend less and less time during their
work day to spend on necessities clothing, food, housing, that
sort of thing, and have more time to work to
earn money for leisure or education or alternatively, just not
(27:09):
working at all. And you know, have time off and
enjoy it with your family. So it makes it so
it made accounting sense for the book, but it also
makes sense from a moral or ethical standpoint, because what
you really want to do is a measure how much
(27:30):
more time we have today? Too? Well, let me put
it this way, because we work so little time to
earn the food that we eat, for example, we have
much more time to earn the money to travel to
Argentina for example, or you know, or buy a car,
(27:51):
which which an Indian cannot because most of the time
he spends working, he's working to provide food for his family.
So what is it?
Speaker 1 (28:00):
So? Is that what it means then, to be able
to spend so much less time to buy let's say
a pound of sugar or an hour of light like
the light bulbs and the energy that it costs to
light our homes. It doesn't mean it means more leisure,
more ability to consume new products that are made Like,
what else does it really mean that we have such
(28:20):
an abundance of extra time because it cost us less
of our working hours, less time of working to get
the money to buy that stuff.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Well, essentially, it means abundance. It means prosperity. The reason
why an American house looks very different from a Brazilian
favela or an African hut is because because we don't
have to spend all this time working to buy our food,
for example, right, you know, we have much more time
(28:53):
left after we earn enough money to buy our food,
to buy refrigerator and a tea and two cars in
a garage, and books and tables and chairs and everything else.
So if you look at a middle class American house today,
it looks very different from an African hut or Brazilian
favela precisely because we can buy so much more with
(29:18):
our time than Africans or Brazilians can.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
I think about like limited resources like oil, even that
has gotten cheaper over time, and that seems kind of
counterintuitive that a scarce resource could get less expensive. And
when you think about twenty thirty years ago, some of
the predictions about peak oil, those haven't really come to pass.
And gas prices are not six dollars a gallon where
I live.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
So what do you explain that, Well, it's just that
it's not as scarce as people thought it was. So
for example, using the old drilling methods. Many American oil
fields where quote unquote exhausted in the nineteen eight tea,
in the nineteen nineties, but then somebody again we are
(30:03):
going to going back to population and ideas. Then somebody
came up with the idea of fracking. And so what
you do. You return back to those oil fields which
are exhausted with the old technology, and you apply this
new technology, which is fracking, and you are able to
get so much oil and gas out of those out
(30:23):
of those same oil fields that America today is the
world's greatest export of oil and gas. Right, So that
is one example of how you can how something that
is supposedly scarce becomes less scarce. And even if at
(30:44):
some point in the future we run out of oil
in the ground, you can of course turn coal into oil.
The Germans during the Second World War and South Africans
under apartheid were able to do that. We have the
technology to do that. So you may go through an
extra step to get to oil, but you can still
(31:06):
do so. And we have coal deposits lasting us for
tens of thousands of years, and of course by that
time will be already switched over to a different kind
of energy.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Source and so forth as a human ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Because of human ingenuity, Yes, I mean, eventually we want
to get to a place where all of our energy
comes from the sun for example, right, yeah, which you
know there are there are a lot of sci fi
sort of ways of doing that. The technology is currently
not that. And fusion. You know, if we have fusion
and we have solar and maybe thermal thermal energy, you know,
(31:42):
we'll be able to get away from from fossil fuels altogether.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
I don't want to make light of income inequality, and
I don't want to make light of people who don't
have nearly the same resources, whether it's because of their
familial ancestry. I had a more difficult life than I
have or and you have. I don't know, But what
would you say to a US citizen listening to this
podcast who thinks they're poor? Well, and especially when you
(32:08):
think about the global context, like, how would you I
don't know, I'm curious how you would speak to someone
like that.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Well, at a metal level, I don't consider inequality to
be a proper measure of human well being. I consider
poverty to be or reduction in poverty to be a
proper measure of human well being. So I don't really
care that Jeff Bezos is worth three hundred billion dollars
and Elon Musk is worth five hundred billion dollars. It's
(32:36):
not a zero sum game. They've grown the economic pie,
and consequently the fact that they are super rich has
no negative impact on my life or the lives of
the fellow Americans. In other words, they didn't take anything
from fellow Americans. So that is not a proper measure
of human well being. What is happening at the bottom
(32:58):
of the income letter is of concern. That is a
proper measure of well being. What we want to see
is wages for the bottom ten percent or bottom twenty
percent to continue to increase, and you can really only
do that in a growing economy where there's competition for labor.
And when it comes to Americans specifically, we are of
(33:21):
course the richest large country in the world. There are
some countries which are richer per capita. They tend to
be much smaller, and they tend to be they tend
to have a specific set of characteristics, like for example,
Norway has very few people, but it has so much
oil that basically that basically they have trillions of dollars
(33:43):
in their sovereign fund. And even then, you know, going
for dinner in Norway is a nightmare because it's so expensive,
and you.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Know it isn't once it was very very expensive.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I can attest, yeah, because of taxes, and you have
similar situation in some of the Middle East and cheekdoms
like United Arab Emerits and so forth. But in terms
of Americans as such, we are of course living miraculously
better than our ancestors, and we are living extraordinarily well
(34:18):
compared to the rest of the world. The Chinese income
per capita is something like median income per capita is
something like thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars, so they at
the same level as Mexico, whereas whereas the United States
is fifty or sixty thousand dollars per person, so we
are simply much richer than even our competitors.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
This might not be a question. I don't know if
you ever gotten asked this question before, but when how
can understanding human progress change the way that we as
individuals think about personal finance or long term investing. Because
with you talking about progress, and especially in an economy
like ours, man, I want to invest in that progress,
so I can rea some of the benefit. Yeah, how
(35:03):
would you talk to somebody who was wondering about their
personal finances or their investing life.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Gosh, you know, I'm not an investor, God knows, I've
made a lot of mistakes in the stock market myself.
But basically, if anybody is approaching investment thinking, okay, let
me invest in raw materials. You know, because the population
is increasing and we are consuming more stuff and consequently
(35:27):
things must become more expensive. That's not really how it works.
So it's really a negative investment strategy. I would say
to invest in raw materials. Now you can chance upon
a time when raw materials do become more expensive, like,
for example, the first decade of the twenty first century,
when China really took off and started growing at a
(35:47):
very fast click. They were consuming so many raw materials
that raw materials actually increased in price. But you know,
at twenty or thirty or forty year strategy, investing in
raw materials is probably not a good idea. But what
drives economy forward is technology, really, and so being exposed
(36:08):
to tech stocks is probably a better idea. Again, this
is just how I read how I read the lessons
from our book is that what drives human progress forward
is really new technology.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
So a recent Pew study found that fifty seven percent
of people said that their children are going to grow
up to be worse off financially than their parents. And
this is a reversal of the American optimism that I
think has kind of been at the heart of who
we are as a country. It's gotten down to significantly
over the years. So how is that possible? Does this
(36:44):
go back to kind of the beginning of our conversation,
how is it possible? Given the progress that's been made,
and specifically in this country that's been keenly felt, why
are we so pestimistic about the future and the ability
of our children to do better than we have?
Speaker 2 (36:58):
There is a very strange thing going on whereby people
in the United States, but other places in the world
as well, are much more optimistic about the personal lives
than about the society as a whole. So there is
about thirty point difference on average if you ask people
(37:18):
how are you doing financially? Oh, I'm doing okay, you know,
things are fine. How is America doing? Oh, it's going
to help. And this is this is a consistent finding
in in opinion polls, and that I think has to
do with the fact that you know, when when you
are looking at your life, you can you can speak
(37:40):
much more objectively about where you are today as opposed
to last year, whether your income has grown and so forth,
Whereas if you are looking at society there is probably
that negative emotion contagion going on where where you only
hear bad things about the United States, and so you
you know, you you internalize that for the country, even
(38:01):
though you personally are doing well. Now, I don't want
to be too blase about it. Of course, there are possibilities.
Of course, there are scenarios under which the future generations
could be poorer. If, for example, we shut ourselves off
from global trade, we will be poorer. If we elect
(38:22):
a socialist to the presidency, we will be poorer. There
are scenarios as such. Yes, I we shouldn't be too blase.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
In some ways you're pointing to not to I try
to avoid politics on the show, but you're pointing to
both parties that could lead, of course to places that
are not great, and so I just I just want
to point that out there.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
I don't, of course, but I mean that. That is
why I've chosen examples from both parties is because both
parties are have become parties of victimhood, where the politicians,
both Republican and Democrats, are basically telling their electorates the
world is set against you. Everybody is exploiting you in
(39:05):
spite of the fact that you are the most lucky
generation in global history, in the luckiest one of the
luckiest places in the world. You know, everything sucks because
that's how you keep people, That's how you keep your
troops constantly anxious and constantly voting for you and supporting
you financially. And it's the wrong way to go about it.
(39:26):
But both parties are guilty.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
What's one data point about global progress that still blows
your mind? Maybe something that you found when writing the
book Super Abundance, or something that you featured recently on
the website Human Progress. Like, what is something that maybe
or when people are asking for like a factoid that
just is like ridiculous of human flourishing.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
What would you point to, Well, look, the obvious things
would be life expectancy. I enjoy life. I recommend that
people you know, stop worrying too much and enjoy life.
To and the fact is that life expectancy, you know,
two hundred years ago was about thirty years and today
(40:08):
it's in the United States approaching eighty. So we are
given an opportunity to enjoy twice almost three times as
much life as we as we would have had in
the past. But if you're asking me about the specific statistic,
given that Thanksgiving is coming up, we wrote an article
last year and will probably write an article this year
(40:29):
as well, about the price of Thanksgiving, a time price
of Thanksgiving, and on our calculation, basically, an American worker
today can buy one point seven Thanksgiving dinners for the
same amount of time that he or she would have
to pay for it in nineteen eighty six. Eighty six
(40:52):
is Reagan was president.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
But.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Eighty six is the first year for which we have data. Basically,
the American Farming Bureau started tracking down the price of
turkey and cranberry sauce and you know, buns and whatever else,
and they put it in this basket of commodities. How
you could, you know, feed a bunch of people for
Thanksgiving dinner? And then we track that over time all
(41:21):
the way to twenty twenty four, and I'm sure we
will do one for twenty twenty five, and basically what
we find is the relative to human labor or relative
to time that you have to spend working to earn
that money to buy Thanksgiving dinner has dropped by has
dropped so much that now you're getting one point seven
dinners for the same amount of time that you would
(41:43):
have gotten one in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
So like deflation in terms of time prices.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Oh, certainly, And there's deflation going on throughout the economy.
I mean, if you look at your iPhone and you
adjust for quality, then deflation is definitely going on, definitely
going on once you are just for quality when it
comes to cars and food, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
And deflate for all of the things the other gadgets
you don't have to buy because your iPhone does all
those things now precisely.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
So, wherever the market is allowed to function properly, wherever
you have competition, you you know, prices tend to go
down relative to labor. But that is not true for
the entire economy. In healthcare, for example, or in education,
when when you have a lot of government meddling, subsidies
and restrictions to entry and so forth, you can actually
(42:33):
have a situation where things become more expensive relative to
working time. But places where the American economy is quite open,
you know, where American farmers, for example, can work without
too many regulations, or we can import stuff that we
don't grow in the United States, things tend to go
(42:54):
down in price.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Man. There's so much good academic knowledge that you've offered. Man,
I want to get into your personal story a little bit,
which is fascinating. How and why this is meaningful to
you because of how you grew up. We'll get to
that and more right after this. We're still talking with
(43:20):
Maria to be about how the world is getting better.
Got a few more questions for you, Marion. I heard
your co author Gail Pooley of superbund It say the
difference between rich and poor is five years. What do
you think he meant when he.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Said that difference between rich and poor? Well, I don't know.
By the way, Gail is the one who writes our
articles on Thanksgiving, so please look out on Human Progress
website for his latest take on Thanksgiving. But it could be.
It could be, for example, life expectancy that rich people
in the United States live longer than poor Americans, partly
(43:55):
because of bad diet, but are other reasons as well,
So I don't know specifically what he meant.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
I think one of the things he was referring to
is the massive price decrease that happens when something new
comes to the four right, So a new piece of
some sort of new technology or some sort of new yeah,
new progress that's made, and it's very expensive, Like early
adopters end up paying gazillions of dollars sometimes for really
(44:25):
expensive new things, and because they're willing to fork over
a ton of money, the price goes down precipitously as
producers start to make more of those that good for
the masses. So especially as like a consumer just waiting
for the price to go down, just waiting five years,
you can have the same nice thing that the early
(44:46):
adopter has, but you can pay a fraction of the price.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. I
haven't heard Gail say that, but obviously it makes a
lot of sense. I would recommend that everybody watches Wall
Street where where the main protagonist walks on the beach
with an early cell phone. This was in the mid
nineteen eighties, and it looks like a brick and costs
thousands of dollars, and basically the battery lasts for a
(45:11):
couple of hours, and the phone calls are incredibly expensive.
And today we have this miracle of iPhone, and God
knows what we will have in the future. Maybe all
the functionalities of the iPhone will be put into sunglasses
or something like that, or maybe you know, microchip attached
to our heads. So I'm very bullish on the future.
(45:33):
And as Gail says, you know, the rich get there first,
and they cause a lot of envy and resentment. But
then things go down in price. Again, going back to
the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpetter, it is that the beauty
of capitalism it is that it reduces luxury goods to
(45:58):
things that an ordinary person. And by my favorite example,
since you are always interested in examples, is of course,
what's happening to the price of diamonds now. Artificial diamonds,
which are not really artificial because they are chemically and
physically indistinguishable from natural diamonds, are so pervasive and their
price is dropping so fast that even natural diamonds are
becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so when you
(46:20):
think about the very definition of luxury, which is a
diamond necklace for Marie Antoinette or something like that. Even
those things capitalism can make super abundant for the ordinary
people like you and I.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, this isn't just academic to you. Can you tell
me maybe a little bit about growing up for you
and the reality of growing up in a communist country specifically,
it feels like this, this is highly academic to you,
but it's also super personal.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Well, it's highly academic to me because it's important to
have facts in one's hands. But yes, it is personal
to me as well, because I grew up behind the
Iron Curtain. I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, where, you know,
we had constant shortages of basic necessities and not to
mention lack of political freedom. So I grew up in
(47:12):
a society which was very poor relative to the United States,
and coming to the United States was an eye opener,
you know, to be able to basically get access to
so much at a relatively affordable cost was Yeah, it
was a tremendous It was a tremendous improvement in my
(47:34):
standard of living and also reminded me of the difference
of what happens when you live in a society which
doesn't allow the human spirit to flourish and a society
which does allow human spirit to flourish. So, as an
intellectual working at a think tank, I tried to it's
my job to put things in an academic sort of
(47:55):
way and lead with the evidence and reason. But there
is a personal story here as well.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yeah, well, Mary, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed
talking to you. Do you have any like parting words
or where would you like to send our audience for
more information and more encouragement about how great the world
is and how yeah, how do we partake in this
abundance and enjoy it?
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Well, if I should put my philosophical pants on, what
I would say to your listeners is the following. You
are where you are in your life, and there are
two different perspectives on your life you can take. You
can compare your life to an idealized version of your
life where you know everything is perfect, and if you
do that, then you grow more and more resentful because
(48:43):
no matter how well off you are compared to the
ideal state of living, you're always going to come short,
and so you grow resentful and envious and unhappy. But
if you compare yourself, so to speak downwards, if you
compare yourself to thousands of previous generations, and if you
compare yourself to how people live in other parts of
(49:05):
the world, then surely the prevalent emotion that you should
have in your life is one of gratitude that you
were born in the United States today rather than being
born in the United States two hundred years ago or
being born in Nigeria. So I think that having gratitude
in your life and approach it that way can actually
(49:28):
make you a happier person. I genuinely believe that happiness
is a state of mind, and depending on what you
focus on, you're either going to be miserable or you're
going to be relatively happy. And that is basically what
my life's work is devoted to. Please go and check
out human progress dot org and sign up to our newsletter.
(49:48):
It's just one email a week that will give you
all the good news that has happened in the past week.
And if you don't subscribe, then you will never know
about it and you will go around breading doom and
gloom rather than rather than having a much more cheerful disposition.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Agreed. I think that's a great way to end it.
And I will put a link to the newsletter sign
up as well in the show notes up on our website. So,
Marian Toopy, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
My absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
Oh Man, what a great conversation. I'm so thankful that
Marian was able to join me. He's such a busy guy,
working on such important issues and trying to help us
all understand a little bit better the world that we're
living in. And it's one of those things, you know,
the proverb of the elephants, where someone's holding the trunk,
(50:38):
someone's holding the center, someone's holding the foot, and you
don't feel like you're touching the same thing. And I
think sometimes not knowing right our history, not knowing exactly
how much progress we've made, not being able to put
it into digestible terms, that can create more pessimism in
our lives. And so I think of Mary and Twopy
(50:59):
as not even an optimist, but as someone who's trying
to bring real information that does show the good, the
realistic good that's happening in our country, around the world,
to he's reporting on it so that we can see
the reality of the world we're living in more clearly.
(51:19):
And I guess my big takeaway, I mean, what gosh,
what better message than what he was saying at the end.
It makes me think of Charlie Munger when he said
former Warren Buffett partner. He said, the world is not
driven by greed, it's driven by envy. And he said
someone will always be doing better than you. This is
not a tragedy. And Marian was talking about comparing our
(51:40):
lives to the ideal and how we're bound to be
even despite all the progress we make individually, we're bound
to be not terribly happy if we're constantly comparing ourselves
to the people around us, or to the ideal life
we want to have that we don't have right now.
And he said, stop worrying too much and enjoy life.
(52:04):
I think that's a really good way to end this episode, where,
especially this week of Thanksgiving, remember how much we have
to be thankful for individually, just the non monetary aspects
of our lives. I know I'll be giving thanks for
so many things that have nothing to do with money,
(52:24):
but the fact that I have more time in my
life because of the abundance that is available to us
because what he calls superabundance, right, because of all the
progress that's been made over many decades, a couple of centuries. Really.
Then this leads to my Thanksgiving meal costing less so
(52:47):
that I can enjoy work less and enjoy more time
with my family. So I hope you're able to have
a wonderful Thanksgiving with people that you love. And I
hope this episode was helpful to you in terms of
how you perceive the world around you. Let's go out
and be super grateful this week. All right, that's going
to do it for this episode. Until next time, Best
(53:08):
Friend Out.
Welcome to had to Money. I'm Joel, and today I'm
talking about how the world is getting better with Mary
and Tupy. Okay, so you've heard the phrase this is
(00:27):
why we can't have nice things. Our modern society has
produced a slew of nice things, though that would have
been hard to fathom fifty years ago, much less two
hundred and fifty years ago. PCs and smartphones, gore tex
and duct tape, GPS and the barcode. All of these things,
to greater or lesser degrees, have made our lives better.
But how did those innovations and that abundance come about.
(00:50):
Why do twenty twenty five look so radically different in
the developed world than eighteen twenty five. Well, Mary and
Tupey's book Superabundance was a revelation to me a few
years ago, showing how far we've come in pretty easy
to understand language. Maryon Twopy is a senior fellow at
the Cato Institute. He's also the founder and editor of
human Progress dot org, a site that seeks to evidence
(01:12):
these dramatic improvements. With Thanksgiving coming up tomorrow, I couldn't
think of a better time to cover this topic. So
Mary and Twopy. Thank you so much for joining me
today on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Okay, first question we ask everybody who comes on. I
like to splorage on craft beer, fancy craft beer. Honestly,
with Thanksgiving I might pops off really nice tomorrow. What
is that for you, though? What do you like to
splurge on while you're still being smart and thoughtful about
your finances in your future.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I save a lot of money to be able to travel.
I really enjoy traveling and exploring different parts of the world,
so I would say that is my luxury, although I
do like beer as well.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Okay, all right, then we can be friends. Then what's
the last great trip you went on?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I must say I think my last great trip was
to Argentina. I think that a discovery of Buenos Aires.
It is a proper Western, well functioning, beautiful, laid out
city in Latin America that you wouldn't expect to find,
and I enjoyed being there very much.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Okay, all right, after I went a long long time ago.
It was probably thirty years ago, so I'll have to
like put it back on my list. I have to
go as an adult. Let's get to the topic. I'm curious, like,
have we as a society become too accustomed to our
current level of wealth without understanding how it's come to be.
It seems like there's like a disconnect right now, and
(02:34):
there's like a burn it down sort of mentality without
really understanding what we're attempting to burn down.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, I think that is a very good perspective to have.
We have gotten to where we are by being a
much more open society to new innovations. New innovations don't
just have to be technological, medical, scientific innovations. They can
be also ethical, cultural innovations. And basically, for a variety
(03:04):
of reasons, Europe in the eighteenth century became much more
open to new ideas. New ideas flourished, and they brought
about what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.
A lot of old presumptions, dogma's ideas were simply swept away,
(03:27):
and the society well became much more open to innovation.
And as a consequence of that, we have unleashed for
the last two hundred years an era of unprecedented innovation
and consequently greater economic growth as well as I would
say improved morality where people treat each other much better
than they used to. And I think that in certain
(03:52):
ways we have certainly forgotten about that. The society is
becoming much more close. You can see it in terms
of how we treat international trade, which is of course
very important to to to innovation and to economic growth,
but also society is becoming much more skeptical about certain
(04:15):
kinds of innovation. Tacker Carlson, for example, was interviewed by
Ben Shapiro about two years ago, and Ben Shapiro asked
him what would he do about autonomous truck trucking autonomous
you know, trucks, and Tucker said that he would ban
it in a second because it would put a lot
(04:35):
of truckers out of work. But if you made the
same argument two hundred years ago, or even one hundred
years ago about horse buggy drivers, sure, then we would
still be, you know, riding horse buggies rather than driving trucks.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
At the bank, right, I mean, there's a million things
you could point to.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, So that's that's a very long answer to your
short question, but it was a good one.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Do you think that the twenty four hour news cycle
is part of the problem that it impacts our ability
to see the good things that are happening in the world.
I know that these websites for a minute, that we're
dedicated to only publishing good news, but it does feel
like the twenty four hour news cycle before it existed,
we were just less aware of maybe some of the
negative things happening in our society, and maybe ignorance was bliss,
(05:20):
at least to a certain extent.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
I'm not sure if ignorance is ever bliss, but maybe.
All right, I will tell you I agree with you
broadly speaking, but I think that there is something else
going on, which is a negativity contagion. So it's not
so much that we have twenty four hour cycle, though
that's part of it. It's that there's just so many
(05:46):
more outlets and they're all doing the same things, which
is presenting negative news. So it's not just that Fox
has to compete against NBC and CBS and ABC. You
now have websites where most people get their news, in
addition to radio and newspapers and so forth, and we
(06:10):
have evolved to prioritize bad news. And so because you
have now this hyper competitive environment, the only way that
you can get people to come back to you. In
the phase of all of that competition is to present
the worst news first and repeatedly and in the worst
possible terms, and there is very little time and space
(06:34):
for positive news. The hundreds of little innovations that are
happening every day that are improving people's lives simply do
not make it on those websites or on those newscasts
because in order to get those eyeballs, they have to
focus on the negatives. So the perception that is created
(06:55):
in the human mind is that everything in the world
is getting worse, and that is certainly incorrect, it's unrealistic,
and it is highly damaging. So it's the negative emotional
contagent which we have to deal with, and there is
not an easy solution to it, because it's not like
(07:15):
it's a market failure in a sense of hyper competition
of of of media only there there is there is
a there is a human nature at play. We desire
bad news that because we have evolved to look out
for bad news in order to survive.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
You you run a site that focuses on a lot
of good news that highlights the progress that we've made,
so which is kind of the opposite of what drives
in the media ecosystem right now, can you share maybe
a few things, a few recent things from your site
that you guys have been working on.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Sure, so, Human progress dot org is specifically intended to
combat this negativity, emotional bias, or contagion, and people can
sign up for a week summary of all the good
things that have taken place. You know, it's just one
email a week saying hey, you know, this is what
has happened in the last few weeks. We have seen
(08:10):
children who were genetically unable to hear regain their hearing.
We have seen new advances. We have seen new statistics
showing how certain threatened species of whale are actually expanding
all over the world. We have seen the discovery of
a new antibiotic which will which will enable us to
(08:35):
get around the problem of superbugs, and so on and
so forth. So again, the good news is out there
if you just look for it. But I'm afraid that
you know, our reach is you know, hundreds of thousands
of people. It is not millions that the doom and
gloom newscasts get every day.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, okay, let's just talk about progress. Is all progress
good because it does seem like most of the time,
much of the time, specially over the past couple hundreds,
a lot of the progress that we've experienced has been
to our benefit personally economically. Automation though it can bring
down prices, but it can also reduce jobs, as we
were kind of referring to. So how do you square
(09:15):
that circle on progress, good, bad? Somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
I would say that my definition of progress obviously has
the human in front of it, so you know, it
is a very humanistic or human centric or entropercentric project,
if you will. And if there are aspects to progress
which are damaging to humanity, that then we need to
we need to we need to talk about it. For example,
(09:45):
it is an open question whether the fact that we
have much more free time than people in the past.
It's just the reality is that as people earn more
money than number of hours of work is lower or
goes down, believe it or not. Even though Americans, for example,
work much more than people in Western Europe, we still
(10:07):
work about a third less than what we did two
hundred years ago. Right, So we have all this time
on our hands, and you know that provides much more
time for introspection and especially if you are amongst the
least fortunate people in the United States, say somebody who
doesn't have a family, maybe you have just lost your job,
et cetera. Having a lot of time for rumination may
(10:31):
not be a bad idea, especially if you have access
to all the bad news. So there's another aspect of it,
which is social media. I am not putting down social
media because I think the jury is still out, you know,
social media, and it enables us to do a lot
of marvelous things, keeping up with cousins across the you know,
(10:54):
across the world, speaking to our parents who may not
live in the United States but in your or elsewhere.
It allows us to get alerts for tsunamis and things
like that. So there's a lot of positive to it.
But maybe, as Jonathan Hyde argues, taking them out of
high schools is not a bad idea. So we have
(11:15):
just hired a human progress a young psychologist from Harvard
who will be researching these issues and hopefully make us
understand better about the negative aspects of progress.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Can you talk about what has propelled human economic activity
to accelerate in such an epic way, especially over the
past one hundred and fifty years and maybe why it's
been experienced more in a more heightened way in countries
like ours then maybe and even a stark difference of
like North Korea and South Korea, right, like one thriving
(11:51):
economic hub and one closed off from the world. Is
it kind of pointing back to what you mentioned earlier,
being closed off from trade and therefore being closed off
from innovation.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, I think that you're basically a right when you
have two states made up of essentially the same people,
like East Germany and West Germany and North and South Korea,
and they are producing fundamentally different economic results, that suggests
being more open to international trade, have enforceable private property
(12:26):
rights to give just two examples, maybe a stable currency
are very important. So Economic Freedom of the World Report,
which is co published by the Cato Institute and Fraser
Frasier Institute in Canada, they look at regulatory structure, they
look at trade openers, they look at they look at
(12:48):
sound currency trade and basically what they find is that
the more open you are, the less regulated you are,
the less overtaxed you are, the better you And what
has happened was that for a variety of contingent historical reasons.
Many of these things came together in Northwestern Europe, especially
(13:11):
in Holland or Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were able to grow
rapidly and show the path to the rest of the world.
And since the United States is simply a daughter country
of Great Britain, many of those institutions and very importantly
(13:34):
cultural values that Britain had had been translated into the
American context, and America could build upon the British the
British origin story to become the wealthiest country in the
world by the year nineteen hundred. So fundamentally it's about institutions,
but I think that cultural reasons play also a part.
(13:55):
And it is a highly contentious territory, I would say,
but I think those two are very important. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I heard you say at one point that the good
old days were buying large very bad, and I loved
I love that because so many people like look back
with nostalgia to a bygone era and they're like, I
was so great back then. But I don't think if
most of us were offered a time machine, we'd go back,
probably even fifteen or twenty years when you ask a youngster, hey,
(14:24):
would you give up your smartphone for a million dollars? Like,
they wouldn't do it, you know, they just wouldn't. They
wouldn't want to be parted from that progress. So how
do you How bad was life back in the day?
How great is it? How great do we have it now?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
First of all, I wish we did have time travel,
because I think that I would love to send every
college kid or school kid to Pompeii, where I was
what three or four weeks ago. This is the city
that was destroyed by volcanic corruptions in seventy nine AD
(14:57):
and can be visited in a close on Naples today.
And the fascinating thing that you see in Pompeii is
that the tile roads have large stones running through them.
Instead of pedestrian walks, they have these large stepping stones.
Why do they have them, Well, they have them because
(15:19):
streets would basically be running with sewer. All the human excrement, urine, awfal,
blood from slaughtered animals would be simply dumped into the street,
and then you would have water running down those streets
in order to flush it into the sea, which is
partly why Pompeii is on a hill, you know, going
(15:42):
down to the Mediterranean Sea, and people used to cross
streets on stilts and things like that because basically, basically
it was incredibly filthy. That's the first thing that you
would that you would discover if you went acting time,
the fils and the stench everywhere. The other thing that
(16:05):
you would quickly realize is that people lived to about
thirty Today, life expectancy around the world is about seventy three.
It's about seventy nine in the United States, so everybody
has been granted an extra life. Fifty percent of children
before the age of fifteen died. Okay, murderate in Renaissance
(16:30):
Italy was about forty per hundred thousand. Today in Italy
it's zero point three per one hundred thousand. So when
it comes to violence, life expectancy, child maternal mortality, roughly
one thousand women per one hundred thousand childbirths would die.
In the old days to day, it's a fraction of that.
(16:51):
People were ignorant and illiterate. Our best evidence suggests that
even the most sophisticated society is roughly ten percent of
people could read and write. Today it's obviously almost universal,
so along so many dimensions, life was just so much
more difficult. And don't forget that we were incredibly poor.
(17:13):
So GDP per capita per person per day was about
two to three dollars. Right today globally it's about forty
dollars adjusted for inflation. So that gives you a sense
of where we were and where we are today. The
last two hundred years are really unprecedented in human history
in terms of the extraordinary flourishing of humanity. And I
(17:35):
think that it is deeply connected to the increased liberalization,
not using it in political terms, you know, as in
liberal in the United States, liberalization of economy and politics.
Governments became much more responsive, They started enforcing they stopped
(17:55):
behaving in arbitrary fashion, they started enforcing equality before the law.
And of course in the economy, we just became much freer.
In fifteen or sixteenth century England, for example, whether you
wanted to import something or export something, you need the
permission of the king, who would give you a monopoly
on the export of salt or the import of wool
and whatever else. Today you can pretty much start a
(18:18):
business anytime you like. You just have to deal with regulations.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, is progress something you think of as unavoidable or
do you think it's something that needs to be safeguarded?
Like I think about not being able to recreate the
pyramids right, like almost like that ability has been lost
and we don't know how right the pyramids were made,
or rockets. I've heard Elon Must say something along the
(18:43):
lines of like, if we hadn't started to make rockets again,
some of that knowledge would would have been lost. What
would have gone away? Is that how progress is? Can
it be lost?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Well? I don't know about the pyramids. I'm pretty sure
that we could make them with heavy machinery today. I
think that the question about the pyramids is how did
the ancients create them without heavy machinery? But we could
probably do that. No, progress is definitely not guaranteed. When
people started realizing that the world was improving at a
very fast click in the nineteenth century, there was an
(19:13):
emergence of a number of schools of thought. Hegel marks,
can't people like that who started talking about progress as
being unavoidable. But that is clearly not true. Progress can regress.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, Europe
forgot a lot of the knowledge that the Romans possessed.
(19:34):
To this day, we don't know how to make Roman concrete,
for example, even though it has withstood for two thousand
years and so and people in the dark ages in Europe,
you know, used to walk amongst the monuments built by
the Romans, wondering who were these people who created all
of this? Because they forgot right. So so knowledge can
(19:56):
be lost, Progress can regress. There is nothing unavoid about it.
And that's what concerns me is that, as you noted
at the beginning of the interview, so many people have
forgotten the reasons why progress has happened. It happens because
of an open economy tolerant of new ideas. And when
(20:18):
that goes, or when our institutions change, and you know,
when we embrace socialism, for example, like the North Koreans
or the Cubans or the Venezuelans, then I'm afraid progress
will stall and eventually go into reverse.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
One retort that you might hear from people who think
of progress as not like an evident, self evidently good thing, is,
in particular, like some of the environmental ramifications that progress
the negative harms to our environment, that progress can create
what would you say to that.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I would say yes and no. So what tends to
happen when countries start industrializing, So you go through this
process of moving from agriculture to industry to services, and
when countries undertake industrialization, there is a lot of ecological
harm that takes place. That being said, it's not like
life in the agricultural society was without its risks. For example,
(21:17):
food would be contaminated at all times, people were suffering
from tremendous gustro intestinal problems, riven with parasites and so forth.
But never mind, let's put that aside. The point is
that once you move from agriculture to industry, you do
tend to create a lot of environmental damage. But then
what happens is that what is called an environmental Kuznetz
curve kicks in. And this is just a fancy way
(21:41):
of saying, is that when people become rich enough, they
start caring about the environment, and they have enough wealth
to start protecting their environment. So there are a number
of things that go on. One of them is that
you simply have more money and more resources human and
otherwise to clean up your reverse, which is why today
people are swimming in the Seine, and there are dolphins
(22:04):
in Thames in London that didn't used to be the
case during industrialization, so nature naturally rebounds. Another thing that
happens is urbanization. Basically the most disruptive element on land
is the human being. And when you take humans of
the land, in other words, as you move from agriculture
(22:26):
to industry and re later to services, more and more
people end up in the cities. By twenty one hundred,
something like eighty percent of humanity will be in the cities,
which means that we will depopulate areas in which we
currently live and where we disrupt the natural flow of
flora and fauna, and that will bounce back. So the
best thing that you can do for the environment is
(22:46):
really to urbanize and to become as agricultural efficient as possible.
So the Greens, I'm afraid, are riven with contradictions. On
the one hand, they don't want to build nuclear power
stations even though they don't emit CO two, and they
are the best solution that we have currently to reducing
(23:07):
CO two in the atmosphere. It's more expensive than gas.
Gas still produces some CO two in the atmosphere, but
much less so than coal. But you know, if we
could switch all of humanity to gas and then eventually
to nuclear, then we would be able to reduce COO
two dramatically. Another thing which the Greens are against is GMOs.
But suppose that you can genetically modify some of our
(23:31):
most important crops such as sweet and corn and soy
and so forth, so that you can produce much more
per acre. That means that you can feed growing global
population on fewer and fewer acres of land, which means
that you can return more and more acres of land
back to flora and fauna. So there are solutions for
(23:54):
environmental comeback that modern society offers, and I if you're
open minded about it, and the Greens very often aren't.
And I'm not even talking about like the extinction movement,
which also holds promise for the future where we'll be
(24:14):
able to basically use the DNA of dead or extinct
animals in order to bring them back.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
We got more to get to. Specifically, it takes so
much less time to buy almost all of the goods
and services that we enjoy. We'll talk about why that
is with Mary and Tupe right after this. I'm still
talking with Mary and twopee and I want Mary and
(24:43):
I want to talk about specifically your book Superabundance. And
this was released in twenty twenty two and to me,
like as I was reading it, it was striking because
you put things in terms there were so much easier
to understand. And part of what made it easy to
comprehend was when you talk about time prices, how long
specifically people must work to be able to afford every
(25:05):
day items. Talk about that concept like how does that,
how can that help maybe us appreciate the progress that
we've made and what sort of progress have we made
when we look at the concept of time prices.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Well, time prices have been implemented in the book by
necessity because we wanted to see how much cheaper resources
are today than they used to be before. I mean,
the idea that most people subscribe to is a zero
sum idea, which is that the more people you have,
the more resources they use. Therefore resources are becoming more
(25:38):
expensive and scarcer. The opposite is true, resources are becoming
cheaper as you have more people in the world because
people bring new ideas and they basically grow the resource
by But since we were going back to eighteen fifty.
We simply didn't have the currencies, and we didn't have
the exchange rates, and we didn't have the inflation rates,
(26:00):
so we couldn't use normal currencies. So we simply what
we asked ourselves is basically, how long did people have
to work in order to buy a bag of potatoes
or a bag of oranges, or a bunch of bananas,
or a pound of beef or a pound of pork
and whatever else. And so that was done by necessity,
but it's also a smart way. I think that everybody
(26:23):
should do it to measure human well being or rather
abundance or prosperity, simply because it is a Everybody has
only twenty four hours in a day. So if you
are an Indian peasant, for example, and you are spending
six hours a day to earn enough money to buy
your food, but an American can do it in ten minutes,
(26:44):
that makes a difference. So what we really want is
for people to spend less and less time during their
work day to spend on necessities clothing, food, housing, that
sort of thing, and have more time to work to
earn money for leisure or education or alternatively, just not
(27:09):
working at all. And you know, have time off and
enjoy it with your family. So it makes it so
it made accounting sense for the book, but it also
makes sense from a moral or ethical standpoint, because what
you really want to do is a measure how much
(27:30):
more time we have today? Too? Well, let me put
it this way, because we work so little time to
earn the food that we eat, for example, we have
much more time to earn the money to travel to
Argentina for example, or you know, or buy a car,
(27:51):
which which an Indian cannot because most of the time
he spends working, he's working to provide food for his family.
So what is it?
Speaker 1 (28:00):
So? Is that what it means then, to be able
to spend so much less time to buy let's say
a pound of sugar or an hour of light like
the light bulbs and the energy that it costs to
light our homes. It doesn't mean it means more leisure,
more ability to consume new products that are made Like,
what else does it really mean that we have such
(28:20):
an abundance of extra time because it cost us less
of our working hours, less time of working to get
the money to buy that stuff.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Well, essentially, it means abundance. It means prosperity. The reason
why an American house looks very different from a Brazilian
favela or an African hut is because because we don't
have to spend all this time working to buy our food,
for example, right, you know, we have much more time
(28:53):
left after we earn enough money to buy our food,
to buy refrigerator and a tea and two cars in
a garage, and books and tables and chairs and everything else.
So if you look at a middle class American house today,
it looks very different from an African hut or Brazilian
favela precisely because we can buy so much more with
(29:18):
our time than Africans or Brazilians can.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
I think about like limited resources like oil, even that
has gotten cheaper over time, and that seems kind of
counterintuitive that a scarce resource could get less expensive. And
when you think about twenty thirty years ago, some of
the predictions about peak oil, those haven't really come to pass.
And gas prices are not six dollars a gallon where
I live.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
So what do you explain that, Well, it's just that
it's not as scarce as people thought it was. So
for example, using the old drilling methods. Many American oil
fields where quote unquote exhausted in the nineteen eight tea,
in the nineteen nineties, but then somebody again we are
(30:03):
going to going back to population and ideas. Then somebody
came up with the idea of fracking. And so what
you do. You return back to those oil fields which
are exhausted with the old technology, and you apply this
new technology, which is fracking, and you are able to
get so much oil and gas out of those out
(30:23):
of those same oil fields that America today is the
world's greatest export of oil and gas. Right, So that
is one example of how you can how something that
is supposedly scarce becomes less scarce. And even if at
(30:44):
some point in the future we run out of oil
in the ground, you can of course turn coal into oil.
The Germans during the Second World War and South Africans
under apartheid were able to do that. We have the
technology to do that. So you may go through an
extra step to get to oil, but you can still
(31:06):
do so. And we have coal deposits lasting us for
tens of thousands of years, and of course by that
time will be already switched over to a different kind
of energy.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Source and so forth as a human ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Because of human ingenuity, Yes, I mean, eventually we want
to get to a place where all of our energy
comes from the sun for example, right, yeah, which you
know there are there are a lot of sci fi
sort of ways of doing that. The technology is currently
not that. And fusion. You know, if we have fusion
and we have solar and maybe thermal thermal energy, you know,
(31:42):
we'll be able to get away from from fossil fuels altogether.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
I don't want to make light of income inequality, and
I don't want to make light of people who don't
have nearly the same resources, whether it's because of their
familial ancestry. I had a more difficult life than I
have or and you have. I don't know, But what
would you say to a US citizen listening to this
podcast who thinks they're poor? Well, and especially when you
(32:08):
think about the global context, like, how would you I
don't know, I'm curious how you would speak to someone
like that.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Well, at a metal level, I don't consider inequality to
be a proper measure of human well being. I consider
poverty to be or reduction in poverty to be a
proper measure of human well being. So I don't really
care that Jeff Bezos is worth three hundred billion dollars
and Elon Musk is worth five hundred billion dollars. It's
(32:36):
not a zero sum game. They've grown the economic pie,
and consequently the fact that they are super rich has
no negative impact on my life or the lives of
the fellow Americans. In other words, they didn't take anything
from fellow Americans. So that is not a proper measure
of human well being. What is happening at the bottom
(32:58):
of the income letter is of concern. That is a
proper measure of well being. What we want to see
is wages for the bottom ten percent or bottom twenty
percent to continue to increase, and you can really only
do that in a growing economy where there's competition for labor.
And when it comes to Americans specifically, we are of
(33:21):
course the richest large country in the world. There are
some countries which are richer per capita. They tend to
be much smaller, and they tend to be they tend
to have a specific set of characteristics, like for example,
Norway has very few people, but it has so much
oil that basically that basically they have trillions of dollars
(33:43):
in their sovereign fund. And even then, you know, going
for dinner in Norway is a nightmare because it's so expensive,
and you.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Know it isn't once it was very very expensive.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I can attest, yeah, because of taxes, and you have
similar situation in some of the Middle East and cheekdoms
like United Arab Emerits and so forth. But in terms
of Americans as such, we are of course living miraculously
better than our ancestors, and we are living extraordinarily well
(34:18):
compared to the rest of the world. The Chinese income
per capita is something like median income per capita is
something like thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars, so they at
the same level as Mexico, whereas whereas the United States
is fifty or sixty thousand dollars per person, so we
are simply much richer than even our competitors.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
This might not be a question. I don't know if
you ever gotten asked this question before, but when how
can understanding human progress change the way that we as
individuals think about personal finance or long term investing. Because
with you talking about progress, and especially in an economy
like ours, man, I want to invest in that progress,
so I can rea some of the benefit. Yeah, how
(35:03):
would you talk to somebody who was wondering about their
personal finances or their investing life.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Gosh, you know, I'm not an investor, God knows, I've
made a lot of mistakes in the stock market myself.
But basically, if anybody is approaching investment thinking, okay, let
me invest in raw materials. You know, because the population
is increasing and we are consuming more stuff and consequently
(35:27):
things must become more expensive. That's not really how it works.
So it's really a negative investment strategy. I would say
to invest in raw materials. Now you can chance upon
a time when raw materials do become more expensive, like,
for example, the first decade of the twenty first century,
when China really took off and started growing at a
(35:47):
very fast click. They were consuming so many raw materials
that raw materials actually increased in price. But you know,
at twenty or thirty or forty year strategy, investing in
raw materials is probably not a good idea. But what
drives economy forward is technology, really, and so being exposed
(36:08):
to tech stocks is probably a better idea. Again, this
is just how I read how I read the lessons
from our book is that what drives human progress forward
is really new technology.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
So a recent Pew study found that fifty seven percent
of people said that their children are going to grow
up to be worse off financially than their parents. And
this is a reversal of the American optimism that I
think has kind of been at the heart of who
we are as a country. It's gotten down to significantly
over the years. So how is that possible? Does this
(36:44):
go back to kind of the beginning of our conversation,
how is it possible? Given the progress that's been made,
and specifically in this country that's been keenly felt, why
are we so pestimistic about the future and the ability
of our children to do better than we have?
Speaker 2 (36:58):
There is a very strange thing going on whereby people
in the United States, but other places in the world
as well, are much more optimistic about the personal lives
than about the society as a whole. So there is
about thirty point difference on average if you ask people
(37:18):
how are you doing financially? Oh, I'm doing okay, you know,
things are fine. How is America doing? Oh, it's going
to help. And this is this is a consistent finding
in in opinion polls, and that I think has to
do with the fact that you know, when when you
are looking at your life, you can you can speak
(37:40):
much more objectively about where you are today as opposed
to last year, whether your income has grown and so forth,
Whereas if you are looking at society there is probably
that negative emotion contagion going on where where you only
hear bad things about the United States, and so you
you know, you you internalize that for the country, even
(38:01):
though you personally are doing well. Now, I don't want
to be too blase about it. Of course, there are possibilities.
Of course, there are scenarios under which the future generations
could be poorer. If, for example, we shut ourselves off
from global trade, we will be poorer. If we elect
(38:22):
a socialist to the presidency, we will be poorer. There
are scenarios as such. Yes, I we shouldn't be too blase.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
In some ways you're pointing to not to I try
to avoid politics on the show, but you're pointing to
both parties that could lead, of course to places that
are not great, and so I just I just want
to point that out there.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
I don't, of course, but I mean that. That is
why I've chosen examples from both parties is because both
parties are have become parties of victimhood, where the politicians,
both Republican and Democrats, are basically telling their electorates the
world is set against you. Everybody is exploiting you in
(39:05):
spite of the fact that you are the most lucky
generation in global history, in the luckiest one of the
luckiest places in the world. You know, everything sucks because
that's how you keep people, That's how you keep your
troops constantly anxious and constantly voting for you and supporting
you financially. And it's the wrong way to go about it.
(39:26):
But both parties are guilty.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
What's one data point about global progress that still blows
your mind? Maybe something that you found when writing the
book Super Abundance, or something that you featured recently on
the website Human Progress. Like, what is something that maybe
or when people are asking for like a factoid that
just is like ridiculous of human flourishing.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
What would you point to, Well, look, the obvious things
would be life expectancy. I enjoy life. I recommend that
people you know, stop worrying too much and enjoy life.
To and the fact is that life expectancy, you know,
two hundred years ago was about thirty years and today
(40:08):
it's in the United States approaching eighty. So we are
given an opportunity to enjoy twice almost three times as
much life as we as we would have had in
the past. But if you're asking me about the specific statistic,
given that Thanksgiving is coming up, we wrote an article
last year and will probably write an article this year
(40:29):
as well, about the price of Thanksgiving, a time price
of Thanksgiving, and on our calculation, basically, an American worker
today can buy one point seven Thanksgiving dinners for the
same amount of time that he or she would have
to pay for it in nineteen eighty six. Eighty six
(40:52):
is Reagan was president.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
But.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Eighty six is the first year for which we have data. Basically,
the American Farming Bureau started tracking down the price of
turkey and cranberry sauce and you know, buns and whatever else,
and they put it in this basket of commodities. How
you could, you know, feed a bunch of people for
Thanksgiving dinner? And then we track that over time all
(41:21):
the way to twenty twenty four, and I'm sure we
will do one for twenty twenty five, and basically what
we find is the relative to human labor or relative
to time that you have to spend working to earn
that money to buy Thanksgiving dinner has dropped by has
dropped so much that now you're getting one point seven
dinners for the same amount of time that you would
(41:43):
have gotten one in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
So like deflation in terms of time prices.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Oh, certainly, And there's deflation going on throughout the economy.
I mean, if you look at your iPhone and you
adjust for quality, then deflation is definitely going on, definitely
going on once you are just for quality when it
comes to cars and food, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
And deflate for all of the things the other gadgets
you don't have to buy because your iPhone does all
those things now precisely.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
So, wherever the market is allowed to function properly, wherever
you have competition, you you know, prices tend to go
down relative to labor. But that is not true for
the entire economy. In healthcare, for example, or in education,
when when you have a lot of government meddling, subsidies
and restrictions to entry and so forth, you can actually
(42:33):
have a situation where things become more expensive relative to
working time. But places where the American economy is quite open,
you know, where American farmers, for example, can work without
too many regulations, or we can import stuff that we
don't grow in the United States, things tend to go
(42:54):
down in price.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Man. There's so much good academic knowledge that you've offered. Man,
I want to get into your personal story a little bit,
which is fascinating. How and why this is meaningful to
you because of how you grew up. We'll get to
that and more right after this. We're still talking with
(43:20):
Maria to be about how the world is getting better.
Got a few more questions for you, Marion. I heard
your co author Gail Pooley of superbund It say the
difference between rich and poor is five years. What do
you think he meant when he.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Said that difference between rich and poor? Well, I don't know.
By the way, Gail is the one who writes our
articles on Thanksgiving, so please look out on Human Progress
website for his latest take on Thanksgiving. But it could be.
It could be, for example, life expectancy that rich people
in the United States live longer than poor Americans, partly
(43:55):
because of bad diet, but are other reasons as well,
So I don't know specifically what he meant.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
I think one of the things he was referring to
is the massive price decrease that happens when something new
comes to the four right, So a new piece of
some sort of new technology or some sort of new yeah,
new progress that's made, and it's very expensive, Like early
adopters end up paying gazillions of dollars sometimes for really
(44:25):
expensive new things, and because they're willing to fork over
a ton of money, the price goes down precipitously as
producers start to make more of those that good for
the masses. So especially as like a consumer just waiting
for the price to go down, just waiting five years,
you can have the same nice thing that the early
(44:46):
adopter has, but you can pay a fraction of the price.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. I
haven't heard Gail say that, but obviously it makes a
lot of sense. I would recommend that everybody watches Wall
Street where where the main protagonist walks on the beach
with an early cell phone. This was in the mid
nineteen eighties, and it looks like a brick and costs
thousands of dollars, and basically the battery lasts for a
(45:11):
couple of hours, and the phone calls are incredibly expensive.
And today we have this miracle of iPhone, and God
knows what we will have in the future. Maybe all
the functionalities of the iPhone will be put into sunglasses
or something like that, or maybe you know, microchip attached
to our heads. So I'm very bullish on the future.
(45:33):
And as Gail says, you know, the rich get there first,
and they cause a lot of envy and resentment. But
then things go down in price. Again, going back to
the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpetter, it is that the beauty
of capitalism it is that it reduces luxury goods to
(45:58):
things that an ordinary person. And by my favorite example,
since you are always interested in examples, is of course,
what's happening to the price of diamonds now. Artificial diamonds,
which are not really artificial because they are chemically and
physically indistinguishable from natural diamonds, are so pervasive and their
price is dropping so fast that even natural diamonds are
becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so when you
(46:20):
think about the very definition of luxury, which is a
diamond necklace for Marie Antoinette or something like that. Even
those things capitalism can make super abundant for the ordinary
people like you and I.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, this isn't just academic to you. Can you tell
me maybe a little bit about growing up for you
and the reality of growing up in a communist country specifically,
it feels like this, this is highly academic to you,
but it's also super personal.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Well, it's highly academic to me because it's important to
have facts in one's hands. But yes, it is personal
to me as well, because I grew up behind the
Iron Curtain. I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, where, you know,
we had constant shortages of basic necessities and not to
mention lack of political freedom. So I grew up in
(47:12):
a society which was very poor relative to the United States,
and coming to the United States was an eye opener,
you know, to be able to basically get access to
so much at a relatively affordable cost was Yeah, it
was a tremendous It was a tremendous improvement in my
(47:34):
standard of living and also reminded me of the difference
of what happens when you live in a society which
doesn't allow the human spirit to flourish and a society
which does allow human spirit to flourish. So, as an
intellectual working at a think tank, I tried to it's
my job to put things in an academic sort of
(47:55):
way and lead with the evidence and reason. But there
is a personal story here as well.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yeah, well, Mary, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed
talking to you. Do you have any like parting words
or where would you like to send our audience for
more information and more encouragement about how great the world
is and how yeah, how do we partake in this
abundance and enjoy it?
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Well, if I should put my philosophical pants on, what
I would say to your listeners is the following. You
are where you are in your life, and there are
two different perspectives on your life you can take. You
can compare your life to an idealized version of your
life where you know everything is perfect, and if you
do that, then you grow more and more resentful because
(48:43):
no matter how well off you are compared to the
ideal state of living, you're always going to come short,
and so you grow resentful and envious and unhappy. But
if you compare yourself, so to speak downwards, if you
compare yourself to thousands of previous generations, and if you
compare yourself to how people live in other parts of
(49:05):
the world, then surely the prevalent emotion that you should
have in your life is one of gratitude that you
were born in the United States today rather than being
born in the United States two hundred years ago or
being born in Nigeria. So I think that having gratitude
in your life and approach it that way can actually
(49:28):
make you a happier person. I genuinely believe that happiness
is a state of mind, and depending on what you
focus on, you're either going to be miserable or you're
going to be relatively happy. And that is basically what
my life's work is devoted to. Please go and check
out human progress dot org and sign up to our newsletter.
(49:48):
It's just one email a week that will give you
all the good news that has happened in the past week.
And if you don't subscribe, then you will never know
about it and you will go around breading doom and
gloom rather than rather than having a much more cheerful disposition.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Agreed. I think that's a great way to end it.
And I will put a link to the newsletter sign
up as well in the show notes up on our website. So,
Marian Toopy, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
My absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
Oh Man, what a great conversation. I'm so thankful that
Marian was able to join me. He's such a busy guy,
working on such important issues and trying to help us
all understand a little bit better the world that we're
living in. And it's one of those things, you know,
the proverb of the elephants, where someone's holding the trunk,
(50:38):
someone's holding the center, someone's holding the foot, and you
don't feel like you're touching the same thing. And I
think sometimes not knowing right our history, not knowing exactly
how much progress we've made, not being able to put
it into digestible terms, that can create more pessimism in
our lives. And so I think of Mary and Twopy
(50:59):
as not even an optimist, but as someone who's trying
to bring real information that does show the good, the
realistic good that's happening in our country, around the world,
to he's reporting on it so that we can see
the reality of the world we're living in more clearly.
(51:19):
And I guess my big takeaway, I mean, what gosh,
what better message than what he was saying at the end.
It makes me think of Charlie Munger when he said
former Warren Buffett partner. He said, the world is not
driven by greed, it's driven by envy. And he said
someone will always be doing better than you. This is
not a tragedy. And Marian was talking about comparing our
(51:40):
lives to the ideal and how we're bound to be
even despite all the progress we make individually, we're bound
to be not terribly happy if we're constantly comparing ourselves
to the people around us, or to the ideal life
we want to have that we don't have right now.
And he said, stop worrying too much and enjoy life.
(52:04):
I think that's a really good way to end this episode, where,
especially this week of Thanksgiving, remember how much we have
to be thankful for individually, just the non monetary aspects
of our lives. I know I'll be giving thanks for
so many things that have nothing to do with money,
(52:24):
but the fact that I have more time in my
life because of the abundance that is available to us
because what he calls superabundance, right, because of all the
progress that's been made over many decades, a couple of centuries. Really.
Then this leads to my Thanksgiving meal costing less so
(52:47):
that I can enjoy work less and enjoy more time
with my family. So I hope you're able to have
a wonderful Thanksgiving with people that you love. And I
hope this episode was helpful to you in terms of
how you perceive the world around you. Let's go out
and be super grateful this week. All right, that's going
to do it for this episode. Until next time, Best
(53:08):
Friend Out.
Hosts And Creators
Joel Larsgaard
Matthew Altmix
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