May 8, 2026 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, people often talk about the past as something to be missed, but history tells a much harder story. Johan Norberg argues that many of the most interesting periods in history were also the hardest to survive, and that modern innovations have made everyday life more secure than at any other point in human history.
Johan Norberg, author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, tells the story of why we are living in the best moment in human history.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
Support the show: https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
This is our American stories, and up next the story
on the human story, how humanity has suffered and thrived
over decades, centuries, and millennia.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I used to believe in the good old days. I
used to believe that the world was kind of an
awful place.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
You're listening to Johann Norberg, the author of a book
called Progress.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Looking at big business, looking at polluting factories, thinking that
there has to be another way. There has to be
good old days, back in the past, where we.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Live more in harmony with one another and with nature.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And when I began looking for that, when I began
looking at history specifically, and the history of my own
ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that that was all
a lie. In the late eighteen seventies, there was a
(01:24):
major crop failure in northern Sweden, where my ancestors lived.
My great great great great grandfather Eric Norberg and his
family were there trying to deal with the problems. He
tried to smuggle in bags of wheat flour from southern Sweden.
The trade wasn't open yet. There were still major difficulties
(01:49):
in trying.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
To supply for people with this.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
But when people look at their family trees at that time.
Young Swedes will look at their family history, they see
that it's been.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Cut off many of the branches.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Around eighteen sixty eight, eighteen sixty nine, eighteen seventy because
of this major crop failure it was there were famine years.
Crops had failed everywhere in the country, and obviously it
was worse in the coldest northern pots. Those who were
short of flour had to mix bark into their bread
(02:22):
to make it go longer. And one man in a
neighboring parish recalled his personal experience when he was seven
years old of those hungry years, and he said that
we often saw mother weeping to herself and was hard
on a mother not having any food to put on
the table for her hungry children. Emaciated, starving children were
(02:45):
often seen going from farm to farm begging for a
few crumbs of bread. One day, three children came to
us crying and begging for something to still the pangs
of hunger. Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother
was to tell them that we had nothing but a
few crumbs of bread, which we ourselves needed. And when
(03:06):
we children saw the anguage in the unknown children's eyes
We burst into tears and begged mother to share with
them what crumbs we had.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Hesitantly, she acceded to.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Our request, and the unknown children just ate everything before
going on to the next farm immediately, And this was
a good way off from our home, and the following
day all three children were found dead between our farm
and the next.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
It's a pretty awful story.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Well, you know where would I have been back in
those good old days. Well, I wouldn't have been anywhere,
because life expectancy was shorter than thirty years and I'm
older than that now. So it used to be that
we all suffered from chronic undernourishment. It was basically one
hundred percent except a tiny, tiny elite in even our
(04:01):
part of the world. In Europe and America, most people
lived with famine as a universal phenomenon. The moment there
was bad weather, there was a crop failure, and people stopped.
Even in the richest countries of Europe, as late as
the seventeenth and eighteenth and even the nineteenth century, there
(04:25):
were widespread local famines. They didn't have modern agricultural technology,
they didn't have trade, they didn't have infrastructure, railways, trucks
that could bring food into the areas that needed it,
so bad weather was a death sentence to a lot
(04:45):
of people. Things were far worse in poorer countries in Asia.
In China and India, even in the twentieth century, bad
harvests resulted in major disasters. This is something that specifically,
artificial fertilizer increased yields that dramatically. But more than that,
(05:08):
just having modern infrastructure and trade makes it possible to
bring food to places with food deficiency. Nowadays, it's come
down so incredibly rapidly. In the nineteen forties, it has
been estimated that every second person on the planet suffered
from chronic undernourishment.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
It's not just that.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
They suffered from a famine now and then, but constant
chronic undernourishment, which forced me to reconsider many of the
things that I took for granted, that many of the
things that I used to complain about were really the
things that save the lives of my ancestors and made
it possible for me to be here.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
In fact, technological innovation was so impactful that some word
it was too impactful that it would lead to too
many humans, way more than this Earth could provide for.
In other words overpopulation.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
If I were to mention someone is Julian Simon, the
grand old Man of development optimism, the economist who explained
in the nineteen sixties and seventies, when everybody was saying
that overpopulation would lead to starvation even in the United
States and in Europe in the longer run, he told
(06:22):
people to have a little bit more of trust in people,
in the average human being, because that's the ultimate resource,
not the resources that we have in the ground or
in our mountains.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
It's human ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
It's humans who create progress by imagining new things, experimenting
with new ideas, and experimenting then with technology and business
models to produce more things. Look, the problem is not
too many people, because human beings are the ultimate resource.
They are the most important ones. The more people, the
more eyeballs who look at our problems, and the greater
(06:58):
the chance that one of them will come up with
a great idea that we can all imitate and therefore
continue to make progress. And that had a profound effect
on me because I used to think that more people
would mean more destruction, using more resources and taking it
out of the ground and ruining the planet. Whereas no,
(07:19):
they'll come up with better ways of using of conserving
resources as well and reciting them and using substitutes for it,
and therefore, in the long run reach a state where
we create more wealth with fewer resources.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
You know, on March fourteenth, nineteen fourteen, a little boy
named Norman Borlog was born. He was just another iwind
to most folks, but he turned out to be this
ultimate resource.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
You know, if we had a contest and trying to
come up with the greatest person in history who saved
the most lives in history, we would Norman Borlau would
make the fine list because he was too many people,
an unknown person, but he probably saved the lives of
(08:06):
perhaps a billion people.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Around the world.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
And when we come back, we'll hear more of the
story of the incredible Norman Borlog. And it's so true.
Bad weather, bad harvest is throughout the centuries, right up
until the nineteenth century, the middle of it, and even
the early twentieth century were death sentences. And my goodness,
what free trade artificial fertilizer and of course energy itself
(08:32):
electricity have done and irrigation systems. These are things, but
we have to be taught in schools as we can
textualize all of our discussions about almost everything. And that's
what we try and do here on this show is
tell these stories you've been listening to Johann Norberg, a
senior fellow at the Cato Institute, an author of the
(08:52):
book Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,
which by the way, you can pick up at Amazon
dot com or heck, even a bookstore if you care to.
And when we come back, we'll continue with the story
of Norman Borolog who saved possibly up to a billion
people with his efforts and with his ideas. More of
(09:14):
all this here on our American story and we continue
(09:40):
here with our American stories and with Johann Norberg telling
the story of Norman Borlag, an Iowan who was passionate
about eradicating world hunger.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And rather than complaining about it, talking about it and
he did something about it.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
He had the idea that.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
The only thing that can deal with this is higher yields,
more agricultural productivity. So he tried to come up with
better high yield crops, and he did thousands of crossings
of wheat. That's where he started, and he came up
with a high yielding new breed that resisted many pests
and was not sensitive to the number of hours of light,
(10:25):
so they could be grown in many more climates, and
importantly was also of a dwarf variety, since wheat with tall,
thin stocks expend too much energy growing just inedible sections,
and they also collapsed when they grew too quickly. So
he had this new crop, and he wanted to expand
(10:46):
this toward farmers how to use it, and he also
show them how modern irrigation and artificial fertilizer could increase
the yields. And this was the beginning of the green
revolution that saved the lives ofhundreds of millions. He introduced
this quickly in Mexico in the nineteen sixties, and amazingly,
(11:07):
in a very short time their harvest was six times
larger because they used this new crop variety on the
new agricultural methods. But my favorite part of the story
was Norman Borlaug's obsession with making sure that more people
around the world got access to this green revolution. In
(11:28):
the early ninety sixties, India and Pakistan faced an acute
risk of massive starvation and everybody thought that millions and
millions of people would die. So he thought we had
to go there immediately. So he sent thirty five trucks
with this high yield seeds from Mexico to Los Angeles
to ship them there, and he faced so many obstacles.
(11:50):
His persistence was just amazing. The convoy was held up
by Mexican police, and then it was blocked at the
US border because they had a ban on seeds. But
then when he managed to get through that, he was
stopped by the National Guard because there.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Were riots blocking the Harborn.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He managed to deal with it all and in the
end the ship sailed away and he got there to
India and Pakistan. He tells the story about how he
went to bed thinking the problem was at last solved,
But then Orlad woke up to the news that war
had broken out between India and Pakistan. But not even
(12:31):
that stopped him and his teams. So instead they worked
hirelessly throughout the war, and they planted the seats, sometimes
within sight.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Of artillery flashes.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
And this is really how you have to decide where
to look. If you look at the politics, the governments,
the guns and the thunder, you become miserable. But if
you look at the background, what goes on on the ground,
lots of hard work by scientists and engineers and farmers,
(13:05):
and they managed to do.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
This while war was going on.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And despite lake planning and all these problems, yields rose
seventy percent, enough to prevent a general wartime famine. They
even had problems with finding bags and railcsts just to
store all the crops, all the harvest, and some school
buildings even had to be closed temporarily so that they
could be used for grain storage. So in just a
(13:31):
few years, India and Pakistan that had been written off
by others environmentalists like Paul Earl had said that we
just have to forget about India Pakistan. They will all
die because it's impossible to supply them with enough food. Well,
in just a manner of a few years, Norman Borlaug
and his team managed to help them to become self sufficient.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
In the production of cereals.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
And if that's not a true hero, I don't know
who is. And one of the last things that he
did was that he talked a lot about the problems
in Africa, because.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
The problem was that.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
The Green Revolution wasn't repeated in Africa. The big foundations
who used to support his work, the Forden Rockefeller Foundation.
They began to be a bit more skeptical, and so
was the World Bank because environmentalists they weren't that eager
on artificial fertilizer and modern agricultural technologies, so the number
(14:37):
of undernourished continued to grow. They kept destroying wild habitats
with slash and burn subsistence agriculture, and this really made
borlaugu angry.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
And Johann now reads Borolog's intense response.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are
the salt of the earth, but many of them are eatists.
They never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do
their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
If they lived just one month.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Amid the misery of the developing world, as I have
for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and
fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists
back home were trying to deny them these things. They
might not be romantic artificial fertilizers, but they save hundreds
(15:30):
of millions of lives. So could genetically modified crops that
could increase yields even more, and Borla was very angry
with Western lobbyists who tried to scare African countries away
from doing that, and on his death bed he said that, look,
(15:52):
his work is not done until these technologies could also
be implemented in Africa. You know, people have always been
innovative and hard working, and in every historical era and
in every geographical area they are. But that doesn't help
(16:15):
much if the rulers can do anything. If someone who
comes up with new solutions, new production creates wealth, if
the ruler or his uncle or second cousin can just
move in and take all of it away from them
and can change the rules immediately, nothing much happens. Then
(16:40):
they have to work hard just to get around that
kind of abuse of power and the kind of corruption
that this entails. The thing that changed and made everything
happen in basically the last two hundred years, starting in
the Western world, was the start of rule of law.
(17:00):
Because until then, why work hard? Why invest in the future,
Why invest in, for example, better agricultural technologies, invest in
a new irrigation system or a new high yielding crops
If someone else can just steal your land, if the
rules subtenly changed so that you're subtenly banned from using it.
(17:22):
In this way, the rule of law means that we're
not governed by men. We're not governed by individuals who
can constantly change their minds, governed by a system of
laws of principles. That makes the future a little bit
more foreseeable.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
It's more predictable.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You know what kind of rules will be there in
the longer term, and therefore you also begin to think.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
More long term and you can do something about it.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I remember a story from an African slum that I
visited in Kibir in Kenya, where the saying was that
it's not safe to carry cash around in the slums
because there are too many policemen. It's not that there
are too many sort of ordinary crooks, but there are
(18:16):
too many policemen and they can do anything to you.
They can tell you that you don't have a license
for this, or that you're not allowed to go here
or there. They could make up rules on the fly,
and in that case, nobody's safe. The government is always
a dangerous thing because it's based on violence, and we
(18:38):
constantly have to keep that under control. That hasn't been
the case historically. Rulers, empress kings and princes, they decide
whatever they like. The aristocrats could do anything to people,
to the peasants, and to their subjects. And in that
case you only have to do whatever you can who
(19:00):
survive in the short term because the long term you
don't know anything about it. Starting in Western Europe in
the eighteenth century and onwards and then in America, we
began to subject the government to the rule of law,
and that set up an explosion of long term thinking,
(19:20):
of imagination, of innovation.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
People subtenly devoting their.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Lives and investing everything they had in a longer term
prospect because they knew that if they managed to succeed,
the chance might be small, but if they did, they
would get rich and change the world.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
And that changed the world.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
That really saved our civilization, made it possible for us
to live the kind of lives that we do now.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And you've been listening to Johann Nrberg, a senior fellow
at the Washington, DC Thing to the Cato Institute, an
author of the book Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward
to the Future, which you can pick up at Amazon
dot com. Johann Norberg his story about progress. Here on
our American Story,
This is our American stories, and up next the story
on the human story, how humanity has suffered and thrived
over decades, centuries, and millennia.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I used to believe in the good old days. I
used to believe that the world was kind of an
awful place.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
You're listening to Johann Norberg, the author of a book
called Progress.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Looking at big business, looking at polluting factories, thinking that
there has to be another way. There has to be
good old days, back in the past, where we.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Live more in harmony with one another and with nature.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And when I began looking for that, when I began
looking at history specifically, and the history of my own
ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that that was all
a lie. In the late eighteen seventies, there was a
(01:24):
major crop failure in northern Sweden, where my ancestors lived.
My great great great great grandfather Eric Norberg and his
family were there trying to deal with the problems. He
tried to smuggle in bags of wheat flour from southern Sweden.
The trade wasn't open yet. There were still major difficulties
(01:49):
in trying.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
To supply for people with this.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
But when people look at their family trees at that time.
Young Swedes will look at their family history, they see
that it's been.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Cut off many of the branches.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Around eighteen sixty eight, eighteen sixty nine, eighteen seventy because
of this major crop failure it was there were famine years.
Crops had failed everywhere in the country, and obviously it
was worse in the coldest northern pots. Those who were
short of flour had to mix bark into their bread
(02:22):
to make it go longer. And one man in a
neighboring parish recalled his personal experience when he was seven
years old of those hungry years, and he said that
we often saw mother weeping to herself and was hard
on a mother not having any food to put on
the table for her hungry children. Emaciated, starving children were
(02:45):
often seen going from farm to farm begging for a
few crumbs of bread. One day, three children came to
us crying and begging for something to still the pangs
of hunger. Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother
was to tell them that we had nothing but a
few crumbs of bread, which we ourselves needed. And when
(03:06):
we children saw the anguage in the unknown children's eyes
We burst into tears and begged mother to share with
them what crumbs we had.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Hesitantly, she acceded to.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Our request, and the unknown children just ate everything before
going on to the next farm immediately, And this was
a good way off from our home, and the following
day all three children were found dead between our farm
and the next.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
It's a pretty awful story.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Well, you know where would I have been back in
those good old days. Well, I wouldn't have been anywhere,
because life expectancy was shorter than thirty years and I'm
older than that now. So it used to be that
we all suffered from chronic undernourishment. It was basically one
hundred percent except a tiny, tiny elite in even our
(04:01):
part of the world. In Europe and America, most people
lived with famine as a universal phenomenon. The moment there
was bad weather, there was a crop failure, and people stopped.
Even in the richest countries of Europe, as late as
the seventeenth and eighteenth and even the nineteenth century, there
(04:25):
were widespread local famines. They didn't have modern agricultural technology,
they didn't have trade, they didn't have infrastructure, railways, trucks
that could bring food into the areas that needed it,
so bad weather was a death sentence to a lot
(04:45):
of people. Things were far worse in poorer countries in Asia.
In China and India, even in the twentieth century, bad
harvests resulted in major disasters. This is something that specifically,
artificial fertilizer increased yields that dramatically. But more than that,
(05:08):
just having modern infrastructure and trade makes it possible to
bring food to places with food deficiency. Nowadays, it's come
down so incredibly rapidly. In the nineteen forties, it has
been estimated that every second person on the planet suffered
from chronic undernourishment.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
It's not just that.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
They suffered from a famine now and then, but constant
chronic undernourishment, which forced me to reconsider many of the
things that I took for granted, that many of the
things that I used to complain about were really the
things that save the lives of my ancestors and made
it possible for me to be here.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
In fact, technological innovation was so impactful that some word
it was too impactful that it would lead to too
many humans, way more than this Earth could provide for.
In other words overpopulation.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
If I were to mention someone is Julian Simon, the
grand old Man of development optimism, the economist who explained
in the nineteen sixties and seventies, when everybody was saying
that overpopulation would lead to starvation even in the United
States and in Europe in the longer run, he told
(06:22):
people to have a little bit more of trust in people,
in the average human being, because that's the ultimate resource,
not the resources that we have in the ground or
in our mountains.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
It's human ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
It's humans who create progress by imagining new things, experimenting
with new ideas, and experimenting then with technology and business
models to produce more things. Look, the problem is not
too many people, because human beings are the ultimate resource.
They are the most important ones. The more people, the
more eyeballs who look at our problems, and the greater
(06:58):
the chance that one of them will come up with
a great idea that we can all imitate and therefore
continue to make progress. And that had a profound effect
on me because I used to think that more people
would mean more destruction, using more resources and taking it
out of the ground and ruining the planet. Whereas no,
(07:19):
they'll come up with better ways of using of conserving
resources as well and reciting them and using substitutes for it,
and therefore, in the long run reach a state where
we create more wealth with fewer resources.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
You know, on March fourteenth, nineteen fourteen, a little boy
named Norman Borlog was born. He was just another iwind
to most folks, but he turned out to be this
ultimate resource.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
You know, if we had a contest and trying to
come up with the greatest person in history who saved
the most lives in history, we would Norman Borlau would
make the fine list because he was too many people,
an unknown person, but he probably saved the lives of
(08:06):
perhaps a billion people.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Around the world.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
And when we come back, we'll hear more of the
story of the incredible Norman Borlog. And it's so true.
Bad weather, bad harvest is throughout the centuries, right up
until the nineteenth century, the middle of it, and even
the early twentieth century were death sentences. And my goodness,
what free trade artificial fertilizer and of course energy itself
(08:32):
electricity have done and irrigation systems. These are things, but
we have to be taught in schools as we can
textualize all of our discussions about almost everything. And that's
what we try and do here on this show is
tell these stories you've been listening to Johann Norberg, a
senior fellow at the Cato Institute, an author of the
(08:52):
book Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,
which by the way, you can pick up at Amazon
dot com or heck, even a bookstore if you care to.
And when we come back, we'll continue with the story
of Norman Borolog who saved possibly up to a billion
people with his efforts and with his ideas. More of
(09:14):
all this here on our American story and we continue
(09:40):
here with our American stories and with Johann Norberg telling
the story of Norman Borlag, an Iowan who was passionate
about eradicating world hunger.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And rather than complaining about it, talking about it and
he did something about it.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
He had the idea that.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
The only thing that can deal with this is higher yields,
more agricultural productivity. So he tried to come up with
better high yield crops, and he did thousands of crossings
of wheat. That's where he started, and he came up
with a high yielding new breed that resisted many pests
and was not sensitive to the number of hours of light,
(10:25):
so they could be grown in many more climates, and
importantly was also of a dwarf variety, since wheat with tall,
thin stocks expend too much energy growing just inedible sections,
and they also collapsed when they grew too quickly. So
he had this new crop, and he wanted to expand
(10:46):
this toward farmers how to use it, and he also
show them how modern irrigation and artificial fertilizer could increase
the yields. And this was the beginning of the green
revolution that saved the lives ofhundreds of millions. He introduced
this quickly in Mexico in the nineteen sixties, and amazingly,
(11:07):
in a very short time their harvest was six times
larger because they used this new crop variety on the
new agricultural methods. But my favorite part of the story
was Norman Borlaug's obsession with making sure that more people
around the world got access to this green revolution. In
(11:28):
the early ninety sixties, India and Pakistan faced an acute
risk of massive starvation and everybody thought that millions and
millions of people would die. So he thought we had
to go there immediately. So he sent thirty five trucks
with this high yield seeds from Mexico to Los Angeles
to ship them there, and he faced so many obstacles.
(11:50):
His persistence was just amazing. The convoy was held up
by Mexican police, and then it was blocked at the
US border because they had a ban on seeds. But
then when he managed to get through that, he was
stopped by the National Guard because there.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Were riots blocking the Harborn.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He managed to deal with it all and in the
end the ship sailed away and he got there to
India and Pakistan. He tells the story about how he
went to bed thinking the problem was at last solved,
But then Orlad woke up to the news that war
had broken out between India and Pakistan. But not even
(12:31):
that stopped him and his teams. So instead they worked
hirelessly throughout the war, and they planted the seats, sometimes
within sight.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Of artillery flashes.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
And this is really how you have to decide where
to look. If you look at the politics, the governments,
the guns and the thunder, you become miserable. But if
you look at the background, what goes on on the ground,
lots of hard work by scientists and engineers and farmers,
(13:05):
and they managed to do.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
This while war was going on.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And despite lake planning and all these problems, yields rose
seventy percent, enough to prevent a general wartime famine. They
even had problems with finding bags and railcsts just to
store all the crops, all the harvest, and some school
buildings even had to be closed temporarily so that they
could be used for grain storage. So in just a
(13:31):
few years, India and Pakistan that had been written off
by others environmentalists like Paul Earl had said that we
just have to forget about India Pakistan. They will all
die because it's impossible to supply them with enough food. Well,
in just a manner of a few years, Norman Borlaug
and his team managed to help them to become self sufficient.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
In the production of cereals.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
And if that's not a true hero, I don't know
who is. And one of the last things that he
did was that he talked a lot about the problems
in Africa, because.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
The problem was that.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
The Green Revolution wasn't repeated in Africa. The big foundations
who used to support his work, the Forden Rockefeller Foundation.
They began to be a bit more skeptical, and so
was the World Bank because environmentalists they weren't that eager
on artificial fertilizer and modern agricultural technologies, so the number
(14:37):
of undernourished continued to grow. They kept destroying wild habitats
with slash and burn subsistence agriculture, and this really made
borlaugu angry.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
And Johann now reads Borolog's intense response.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are
the salt of the earth, but many of them are eatists.
They never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do
their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
If they lived just one month.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Amid the misery of the developing world, as I have
for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and
fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists
back home were trying to deny them these things. They
might not be romantic artificial fertilizers, but they save hundreds
(15:30):
of millions of lives. So could genetically modified crops that
could increase yields even more, and Borla was very angry
with Western lobbyists who tried to scare African countries away
from doing that, and on his death bed he said that, look,
(15:52):
his work is not done until these technologies could also
be implemented in Africa. You know, people have always been
innovative and hard working, and in every historical era and
in every geographical area they are. But that doesn't help
(16:15):
much if the rulers can do anything. If someone who
comes up with new solutions, new production creates wealth, if
the ruler or his uncle or second cousin can just
move in and take all of it away from them
and can change the rules immediately, nothing much happens. Then
(16:40):
they have to work hard just to get around that
kind of abuse of power and the kind of corruption
that this entails. The thing that changed and made everything
happen in basically the last two hundred years, starting in
the Western world, was the start of rule of law.
(17:00):
Because until then, why work hard? Why invest in the future,
Why invest in, for example, better agricultural technologies, invest in
a new irrigation system or a new high yielding crops
If someone else can just steal your land, if the
rules subtenly changed so that you're subtenly banned from using it.
(17:22):
In this way, the rule of law means that we're
not governed by men. We're not governed by individuals who
can constantly change their minds, governed by a system of
laws of principles. That makes the future a little bit
more foreseeable.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
It's more predictable.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You know what kind of rules will be there in
the longer term, and therefore you also begin to think.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
More long term and you can do something about it.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I remember a story from an African slum that I
visited in Kibir in Kenya, where the saying was that
it's not safe to carry cash around in the slums
because there are too many policemen. It's not that there
are too many sort of ordinary crooks, but there are
(18:16):
too many policemen and they can do anything to you.
They can tell you that you don't have a license
for this, or that you're not allowed to go here
or there. They could make up rules on the fly,
and in that case, nobody's safe. The government is always
a dangerous thing because it's based on violence, and we
(18:38):
constantly have to keep that under control. That hasn't been
the case historically. Rulers, empress kings and princes, they decide
whatever they like. The aristocrats could do anything to people,
to the peasants, and to their subjects. And in that
case you only have to do whatever you can who
(19:00):
survive in the short term because the long term you
don't know anything about it. Starting in Western Europe in
the eighteenth century and onwards and then in America, we
began to subject the government to the rule of law,
and that set up an explosion of long term thinking,
(19:20):
of imagination, of innovation.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
People subtenly devoting their.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Lives and investing everything they had in a longer term
prospect because they knew that if they managed to succeed,
the chance might be small, but if they did, they
would get rich and change the world.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
And that changed the world.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
That really saved our civilization, made it possible for us
to live the kind of lives that we do now.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And you've been listening to Johann Nrberg, a senior fellow
at the Washington, DC Thing to the Cato Institute, an
author of the book Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward
to the Future, which you can pick up at Amazon
dot com. Johann Norberg his story about progress. Here on
our American Story,
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Bleep! with Ana Navarro
Fear thrives in silence and confusion. Ana Navarro rejects both. Her voice is an antidote to today’s chaos. Her new podcast, Bleep! with Ana Navarro, takes on today’s most pressing issues with the voices most connected to it: decision-makers, political leaders, cultural shapers, and people on the frontlines of the story. The conversations acknowledge the emotions we all feel—despair, sadness, fear— but emerge with knowledge, perspective, and hope. The belief is simple: fearless dialogue can transform fear into courage, and courage into change. When fear dominates the headlines, this show digs deeper. Because information, debate, and conversation don’t just ease fear, they give us power to shape the future.
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.