Why More People Means More Wealth (with Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley)

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0:00:07.7 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Marian Tupy, editor of Human​Progress​.org and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and Gale Pooley, an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-​Hawaii. Together, they are the authors of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. Welcome to Free Thoughts, gentlemen.

0:00:34.0 Marian Tupy: Thanks for having us.

0:00:35.6 Gale Pooley.: Good to be here.

0:00:37.7 Trevor Burrus: I’d like to start off with a thought experiment that I often enjoy, which is that if you gave someone a time machine, an average person living in say 500 BC, let’s say they’re living in French Gaul or what would become Gaul. And they’re an average person and you give them a time machine and they go forward to the same area, France in 1000 CE. So they go forward 1500 years to the same area of Central Southern France. How much difference in life would that person have to adjust to that 1500-​year time travel span?

0:01:15.1 Marian Tupy: Not very much. The speed and the scope of technological progress prior to about 1800 was very slow, and appreciation in standards of living was very, very slow indeed. Now, during… Since really the agricultural revolution, about 12,000 years ago, there were the occasional efflorescences of prosperity. Occasional times in human history when standards of living may have… Maybe doubled, things that come to mind are like Song-​China, or maybe even Rome of the Antonines in 100 AD, when there was plenty of security trade was really humming along the Mediterranean and life was generally better than when there was warfare and what have you. But the fact remains that you could even take your experiment and compare standards of living of somebody living in say Egypt 3000 BC, and then compare them to a peasant in 500 AD or even 1000 AD and they wouldn’t be that different.

0:02:28.0 Trevor Burrus: And there’s an interesting fact there too, which I always think is not often discussed, that even the idea of time travel in the way that we talk about going to the future, especially going to the future and saying things are gonna be wildly different in the future, just that we expect them to be different. We expect them to have technologies that we can’t even comprehend, even that idea of thinking about the future or something that will be better and different is itself relatively new and tied to the type of growth you were talking about, Marian.

0:03:00.1 Marian Tupy: It is tied to the notion of sustained innovation. So people have always innovated, we have innovated or we have invented eyeglasses in, say, 12th century AD, and that was very important, not just for people’s welfare, but also their ability to continue to work in their craft. We have gotten hold of fire about 1.7 million years ago. So there were these instances where humans have either invented something or innovated something, but those sorts of innovations have been very sporadic. When economic historians talk about modernity, and by modernity, I mean the last 200 to 300 years, they talk about the period of sustained innovation, meaning that our political and economic institutions are set up in such a way that it is possible for people to continuously ping off each other’s ideas, to constantly read what research has produced on the other side of the world and then try to improve upon it or try to critique it and show it to be nonsensical.

0:04:12.9 Marian Tupy: And that kind of thing, this sort of period of sustained innovation is dependent, as we argue in the book, on couple of factors. One is that we have simply many more people who are applying their minds to research, right? Bronze Age starts in about 3000 BC. At that time, you only had 14 million people, that’s 14 million people living on the entire globe. As late as 1800, it was just one billion people, now there are eight billion of us. So having more people, of course, allows us to innovate more, but another crucial aspect of sustained innovation is that you have to have the political and economic underpinnings, setting incentive structure, so that people keep doing it.

0:05:03.8 Gale Pooley.: Angus Maddison, who is really though, one of the world’s recognized authorities on economic history, in 1999, he writes this article for The Wall Street Journal, and the title of the article was Poor Until 1820. So if you wanted to know about what conditions were like, Angus Maddison was kind of the guy to go to historically. And as far back as he could look, we had this flat line, $2 a day. Everybody’s kinda living on $2 a day, and then suddenly, 1820, this horizontal curve starts to go vertical. And he attributed it to a number of reasons. I think we can go back to, as Marian suggested, how many people were on the planet and how easy was it for people to discover new knowledge and then share that new knowledge.

0:05:51.1 Gale Pooley.: So before the printing press, it was really expensive to share knowledge. That innovation allowed people now to begin to share knowledge with one another. And that sharing of knowledge had this effect of growing new knowledge. So, this ability to kinda go, we’ve got people, they have ideas and then they can share their ideas and then the key element in the equation, did you have a political and a cultural system that allowed people to actually act on their ideas, to take that idea and actually do the invention, create the invention. And then, did you have a place where you could go and test the value of that invention? Did you have an open market, a free market where other people could vote on whether or not you had created value or not? So we see all of these things that, really, 200 years ago, kinda start.

0:06:47.0 Marian Tupy: Let me give you one example, which we do discuss in the book. Three different ancient Roman writers talk about the same example of a man who comes to Emperor Tiberius, and he presents him with an unbreakable glass. And the emperor asks him, “Have you shared this knowledge with anybody else?” And when the inventor says that he has not, Tiberius puts him to death, because he does not want this particular innovation to really upset the status quo by, for example, making all the very expensively-​made, say, jugs and cups which were made of precious metal useless. Now, two things strike you about this particular example. One is that when an inventor has an idea in the ancient world, he goes to the king or to the emperor. He does not go to the venture capitalist and say, “Hey, can I sell this idea to you?” And the second point is, of course, that innovation is discouraged, because as I said, it upsets the status quo, as opposed to the condition of the marketplace right now, where people with loads of money are constantly on the lookout for a world-​changing idea, a new app or a new way of communicating, or a new drug. So the ancient world is fundamentally different from our own, where we simply have abandoned this notion that status quo… State stasis is the natural order of things. Our minds have completely shifted in terms of how we perceive reality, how we react with the outside world. We want to improve it conscientiously, which our ancestors did not.

0:08:48.4 Trevor Burrus: Well, sure. There are people out there, as Gale said, that make ideas, that invent things and make the world a better place. But given the eight billion people that are on this planet, it cannot be the case that all those people are out there inventing something and making everything better. We know that if you put… If you triple the population of beaver or elk in some given ecosystem, they’re going to crash that ecosystem and most of them are not gonna survive. So I grant that we… Sure, we have innovators, but how can that sustain eight billion people?

0:09:24.6 Gale Pooley.: Well, first of all, I’d say that elk and beaver don’t innovate. They don’t really have the capacity to think out into the future and actually look at all of these things around them and come up with new ideas and then share these ideas with one another. So I think that’s one area that biologists made is by studying animals, then applying their results in an animal environment to human beings. I think there was a fundamental error there. Human beings are this species that have this ability to create like no others, and share their creations. In terms of the number of creative people on the human… Creative people on the planet, yeah, we’re approaching eight billion people. But it takes these one or two really good ideas that can totally change the planet. And we don’t know who that person might be. All eight billion of us are not Steve Jobs. But it doesn’t take very many Steve Jobs to be able to have this… To really dent the universe in terms of his effect. So, that contribution that an individual can make to the rest of the planet can be phenomenal. So we really trust that we have more people and they’re free to innovate, we’re gonna see ourselves lift one another through this process.

0:10:50.1 Marian Tupy: Yes. Our work does not assume that every single person living on Earth is going to be an innovator. In fact, studies show that a small fraction of humanity innovates. Maybe… Well, it’s low single digits, somewhere between three and 6%, for example. The point that we are making is that if the world is going to have only 300 million people like the world at the time of Augustus or Jesus Christ, that small fraction is going to be so much smaller than today when you have eight billion people. So the fraction of the innovators can stay the same, but the larger the population, the more likely you are going to have these new and world-​changing ideas.

0:11:31.3 Gale Pooley.: Yeah. One more thing is, we go back to 1800, we had a billion people on the planet. Today, we’ve got eight billion, we’ve got eight times more people, but not only do we have an increase in the number of people, but life expectancy has also dramatically increased. In addition to that, the time that people have to devote to creative activities is also much greater. So the time that people would take to just earn the money to buy their daily food has dropped dramatically. And that’s allowed people to have much more time to pursue these creative activities. So we really see this double effect. A lot more people living a lot longer with a lot more time. So that resource of time to pursue creativity has really grown exponentially last 200 years.

0:12:20.6 Trevor Burrus: But how sustainable is this? We look around, and maybe not in the first world, and maybe because in America, we’re predating on the developing world or the third world, but like, you go to a third world country and it’s a lot of people who’s… Just the amount of people there creates a lot of environmental impact, and if they all start consuming at the level of Americans, which would be a huge change in the resource use, it doesn’t seem like… Yes, I can grant your data in your book and say, things seem to be getting better, but it seems… It could also be a blip based on a short-​lived use of resources that are not gonna be there for future generations, so it’s just not sustainable. And we should care about future generations, not… You know, they don’t currently exist, but we should care whether or not we take everything from the Earth and leave nothing for them.

0:13:13.9 Gale Pooley.: Yeah, I would just say we absolutely do care about future generations, but when you go back to this idea, what really is wealth that we enjoy, that we consume around us? Wealth is really knowledge. Thanos, in his little argument that he made, he said, “The Universe is finite,” and then he said, “Its resources are finite.” Well, you know, the Earth really is finite in terms of the number of atoms, we’ve kind of got this set number of atoms, but it’s not finite in terms of resources, because we convert atoms into valuable resources when we apply knowledge to them. And economics is not about counting atoms, it’s about observing how value gets created. In this ability to discover new knowledge and then share it with others in markets, it doesn’t appear that there’s any kind of a limitation there. For example, we use this analogy of a piano. A piano has got 88 keys, but how many songs can you create with a piano? How many different potential combinations of songs that you could create with a piano? So, it’s really kind of infinite. And that’s, I think, the shift in our thinking is we’ve gotta move away from counting atoms, because they are fixed, to thinking about how value is created, and that’s with knowledge. And knowledge, once again, does not appear to have this kind of limitation.

0:14:48.4 Marian Tupy: Yeah, Gale likes to say that whereas atoms have a obviously a physical limit in terms of how many we have on Earth, knowledge, new ideas are not restrained by physical limits, they are just restrained by the number of people and their ability to express those ideas. In terms of what Gale said about knowledge, Tomasulo has a great, fantastic quote when he says that the Stone Age man had exactly the same amount of resources that we have today. The difference between his standard of living and our standard of living is the knowledge which we have brought to the resources that are in existence, the new knowledge which the Stone Age man did not have. I think another aspect which people often misunderstand or don’t understand at all, is that just because we are using something at this particular moment in time which powers our civilization or improves our standards of living, and that has finite quantitude, does not mean that we are going to be using that in the future. A perfect example of this… Well, I mean, a good example of it would be that we no longer use whale oil or fat to light candles to read by. Today, we are using electricity, which can be generated from anywhere, from sun and wind, to gas and nuclear.

0:16:20.5 Marian Tupy: So that would be one example, but the more recent example that I was thinking about is, as you know, the world is undergoing this change where more and more of our cars are electrically-​powered cars, and those cars need batteries. Well, currently, the best technology that’s available out there is lithium-​ion batteries, so of course, you can just Google articles about, what is going to happen to lithium supply? How many years of lithium do we have left? Are there going to be wars over lithium? Are the prices going to spike? And then a couple of months ago, MIT researchers or maybe it was somebody else, have come up with sodium-​ion battery, which apparently is even better, and sodium is just salt, of which we have a lot. And then when we switch from lithium-​ion batteries to sodium-​ion batteries, then maybe in 10 years time, somebody will come up with another ion battery, which is even better. So resources are… The number of atoms are finite, but we manage to get around the problem of scarcity in many different ways. One of them is, of course, that we use less of something. Instead of using 85 grams for a can of Coke, we now use 13.

0:17:40.9 Marian Tupy: We also substitute, as I said, instead of whales, we use electricity. And finally, what we do is that we are constantly on the lookout for efficiency gains. That’s the beauty of capitalism, is in the pursuit of profit, corporations have all the incentive they need in order to spend as little money on inputs in order to increase profit on outputs. So why would you use more iron, or steel, or copper than you absolutely have to in order to produce your product when you can save some money and not have to spend it on input? So, these are just some of the ways in which humans cope in a world of finite atoms.

0:18:28.0 Gale Pooley.: Yeah, I’d add to that you know, when you go to this market to buy a loaf of bread, what’s more important to you, the number of loaves on the shelf or the price. You know, if you’re walking and say, “Well there’s only five loaves of bread on the shelf? Looks like we’re gonna run out,” or do you look at the price? I think the price is more important to you, and that’s what the difference between economic thinking and this thinking like a biologist, or an accountant, or an engineer. Economists pay very close attention to prices because, prices contain this information about relative scarcity and it changes people’s behavior. Price goes up, you get a different behavior both from buyers and sellers, price goes down, you get a much different behavior in that event. So as we look at prices, prices should be telling you about scarcity, so when prices go down, it says something’s happening to supply and/​or demand that is making this seem more abundant relative to other products. Now, what we also did in our research is we moved from a money price to a time price, and the reason that we did that is we buy things with money, but we really pay for them with our time. So if we can measure things in the amount of time it takes you to earn the money to buy something, we think that gives you a much more accurate picture. So the real key to thinking about this is, what is the time price doing over time to a particular product? Is it requiring more or less time?

0:20:07.3 Gale Pooley.: And what we found is almost without exception, all of these products that we looked at require less and less time, and that the interpretation of that is that this innovation process, this process of adding new knowledge shows up in the markets in these time prices, these little bits of knowledge that people are discovering and sharing all over the planet. Just kind of like this Hayekian thing, where he talks about knowledge being all over the place, and it actually shows up in these products. And we all benefit from that because the time price now falls, both the price of the product and our incomes go up, innovation also increases incomes, so if you have an increase in income and a reduction of the price, the money price, occur at the same time, then that time price is going down. And that was our observation and we think that that framework, that perspective really is the proper way to look at the world.

0:21:10.2 Marian Tupy: Yeah, and the reason why we use time prices is because, as Gale said, but it’s worth repeating, is that when you look at nominal or real prices, money prices, they don’t take into account what is happening to human wages and time price takes into account the effects of innovation on both prices of goods, but also on the amount of dollars in your wallet.

0:21:35.4 Trevor Burrus: Can you clarify by just giving a more concrete example of how you would look at time price?

0:21:41.3 Marian Tupy: Sure, so for example, let’s say that a Hershey bar costs a dollar and you are making $10 an hour, so obviously you’re going to get 10 Hershey bars. Now, let’s say that in 20 years time a Hershey bar will cost $2, let’s assume the worst case scenario where Hershey bar does not fall in price, but it actually increases from $1 to $2, but your wages in the meantime increase from $10 to $30. So suddenly you’re getting 15 Hershey bars, whereas before you could get only 10.

0:22:15.2 Trevor Burrus: Okay, but it’s an interesting way of measuring wealth, I’d like to get into whether that actually measures wealth. But to return to the Gale’s piano analogy, it’s a weird analogy you make in your book because you’re talking about something ephemeral, music, and I grant there’s an infinite amount of music out there, ’cause it’s not taking up anything when you make music. But there’s definitely not an infinite amount of pianos, and if you lower the time price of piano to like, let’s say it takes 10 seconds of work for a human being to buy a piano, to earn enough money to buy a piano. Well, then we’ll just take all the trees and then suddenly piano demand goes through the roof. Everyone wants to learn the piano ’cause no longer is it expensive anymore, and maybe we put a chip in our brain so we can learn it easily, take away the difficulty of learning it. So we just take all of the trees down and there’s no more wood to make pianos anymore, that seems like a better analogy, ’cause when you lower the time price, eventually we just consume pianos, chocolate bars… Would you not agree there’s a finite amount of chocolate in this world too, it seems like we’re playing with ideas versus things, and there is a finite amount of things. There’s a word in your title infinitely abundant, I think, and infinitely seems like you’re really stretching there.

0:23:31.1 Marian Tupy: Well, there’s certainly not finality of trees, in fact, we have more trees in North America, and the tree coverage is increasing all over the world, with two exceptions, one is Sub-​Saharan Africa, where it is declining marginally by very little, it’s almost stabilized. And tree coverage is still declining in Latin America, everywhere else, it’s increasing because of course, we can regrow trees, which we’ve been very good at doing, for example. But the example that Gale uses about infinite number of songs is that they are really equivalent to infinite number of ideas which can be produced by the human mind, and Paul Romer had this very interesting example and he says, “Well, you have your periodic table which has 100 elements in it, in order to create a two-​element compound, something like bronze, which is constituted of copper and tin, you need up to 10,000 calculations.” So you need a lot of people making those calculations in order to come up with bronze, once you get to four compound, four element compounds, you need 94 million calculations, and once you start playing with 10 element compounds, the possibilities or the number of calculations are higher than the number of seconds since the Big Bang. So that gives you a sense that there is no way that the human race has had enough people and enough time on this earth to but scratch the possibility horizon of the number of ideas that are still to be discovered.

0:25:15.2 Gale Pooley.: Yeah, I would go back to this piano example, and you talk about trees, if we start cutting down all the trees, what’s gonna happen to the price of trees? It’s gonna go up, and that’s gonna be a signal that, “Look, you’ve got something that’s becoming more and more scarce.” And four things happen when the price goes up, the first thing is people use less of it, the second thing is that suppliers try to find more of it, they try to make more of it, to find more of it. They also… Suppliers also look for substitutes, and then the fourth thing is we begin to recycle that thing. Now, you think about a piano and it’s… A piano is this beautiful… It’s almost like this large piece of jewelry that people have. A Steinway, you look at one of those and it’s like, “This is a large piece of jewelry, that is really the status symbol.”

0:26:09.0 Gale Pooley.: Are we buying a piano because we want the music? Are we buying it because it has the status prestige symbol? If you think of the fundamental cost of creating music, today, it’s never been cheaper. We have moved from this physical piano made out of wood to instruments made out of other materials, and now we do these kind of virtual pianos on our computers. So the cost to be able to create music is a tiny fraction of what it was 200 years ago. I just imagine what Mozart and Beethoven would have done if they could have had GarageBand today, and the ability to have this creative… These creative tools for almost nothing. So yeah, we do live once again in this physical world, but our ability to innovate and create new products that serve the same purpose, or even a better purpose, is just to have this phenomenal growth.

0:27:11.4 Marian Tupy: One last point on this, which is that you asked about… Trevor, you asked about the usage of the word infinitely bountiful. I think that one of the things that people may underappreciate is, maybe they think that just because you have now dug out a pound of copper, or maybe you have used a gallon of water, they may think that it is gone forever, but it is not. The Earth has almost exactly the same amount of atoms, metals, minerals that we had millions of years ago. Okay, we shot a few pounds of iron and copper and steel into space, right, but the rest of it is still here, it just needs to be re-​used.

0:28:04.3 Marian Tupy: Some people, for example, are looking at the currently known reservoirs of fresh water, which are declining, partly because the price is so low that we don’t have any incentive to go in search of new fresh water deposits unless you are, of course somewhere in the Middle East, or Sahara. So that’s one thing, is that we don’t really know how much fresh water we have, and secondly, even if it became clear that fresh water was running out, let’s not forget that 75% of the world is covered by water, but it’s the wrong kind of water, and so we substitute. What we do, we take that ocean water, we run it through a desalination plant, and then we are left with fresh water once again. So there are so many different ways in which you can get around the problem of scarcity and bring about super abundance on this planet.

0:29:02.0 Trevor Burrus: And you guys have a lot of data in the book, if you are a data person. It is full of graphs and equations. I’m not gonna ask about… To summarize all of it. I definitely suggest listeners to pick it up, but in so far as you can say, what were your general finding? What did you go about doing to try and make the argument that things are getting better, and what were the general findings that you came up with?

0:29:29.1 Gale Pooley.: We began with this original bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, and our question was, “Who would win that bet today?” So we went back and looked at their original bet [0:29:40.7] ____…

0:29:42.3 Trevor Burrus: Can you explain what that bet is Gale, just for a sec?

0:29:45.0 Gale Pooley.: So in the late 1970s, well, actually 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford writes this book called “The Population Bomb,” and he makes these predictions about how we’re gonna have this mass starvation on the planet. And it was a very popular book. It sold millions of copies. And there was an economist, this obscure economist, Julian Simon, who picks the book up and he initially reads, he reads it, and he initially says, “Well, it looks like your argument does make sense,” but he decided, “I need to go check the data and see what’s actually happened here.” And when he did that, he was unable to discover anything had become more scarce in terms of the price. And once again, the price is signalling this relative scarcity, so he publishes his findings, and they had this discussion back and forth. It was in Science Magazine.

0:30:39.3 Gale Pooley.: And finally, in frustration, Professor Simon says, “Why don’t you just pick one of these non-​renewable resources, and I’ll bet you that it’s gonna become more abundant.” And so they went back and forth. Ultimately, Paul Ehrlich, he had two partners. They picked five elements. It was copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten. And they put a bet for 10 years, 1980 to 1990, and so the bet was, “Let’s put $1000 on the table and measure what that $1000, what it would cost to buy those five non-​renewable elements 10 years into the future.” Well, 10 years elapses, and in September of 1990, Paul Ehrlich writes a check to Julian Simon for $576.07. The real price, the inflation-​adjusted price of those five metals had fallen by 36%. So our question was, “Well, what… Who would win that bet today?” So one of the critiques, a couple of the critiques was, “You only… You’re really lucky, it was only 10 years.” So we said, “Well, let’s extend the period to 40 years. Let’s start at 1980, and let’s bring it up to 2018.” And then the other thing that the critique of it, it was only these five non-​renewable metals, so we extended our analysis from five to 50.

0:32:11.7 Gale Pooley.: We included commodities in general. So we looked at energy prices, oil and coal and natural gas. We looked at food. We looked at wheat and barley, meat. We looked at materials, so we looked at lumber, wool, cotton. We looked at other minerals, and then we looked at these metals, and we analyzed their time prices that… We took the nominal prices. The World Bank publishes these prices every month, so we had this really good data that we could rely on to look at the nominal prices. And then we compared those nominal prices to GDP per hour worked. So how much does the average person on the planet create with one hour of work? The GDP per hour worked served as our denominator in this time price equation.

0:33:03.1 Gale Pooley.: So we looked at all of these time prices over this 38-​year period. And we expected to find something that had gotten less abundant, and we were not able to discover not a single one. In fact, on the overall average from 1980 to 2018, the average time price fell by 70%. And then we go back to this original argument that Ehrlich and Simon had about this relationship between population and resources. The same time this occurred, population from 1980 to 2018 had increased by over 70%. So it’s like every time you increase population by 1%, it looks like the time prices go down by 1%. So we were really astonished by this, and we thought, “Is this really true?” So we just dug and dug, and said, Well, let’s go back to 1960 and look at the data. So we would go back to 1960, and the data starts to thin out as you go back in time but we were able to identify 37 commodities, and same kind of thing.

0:34:11.3 Gale Pooley.: So let’s go back to 1900. Let’s go back to 1850. So all of this stuff is suggesting that this abundance at a personal level, in other words, the size of the slice of the pizza for each one of us, is getting two to three to 4% larger every year. Well, if you can hit a 3.5% a year growth, that means that you double something in size every 20 years. Every 20 years, you double. You don’t go from one to two to three to four. You go from one to two to four to eight. So you get this exponential curve. So you step back and look at this perspective over this longer period, and you see this pattern emerge that says, “Wow, we’re adding knowledge, we’re adding innovation to all of these products.” You think about wheat. Wheat hasn’t changed. It’s not like a car or an iPhone, it’s like, wheat is kind of wheat. Well, what’s happened to wheat? The time price of wheat has fallen by 70, 80%. So it’s been… We see it all over the place. So it’s like, we got on this trend, can we continue to move on this trend?

0:35:25.5 Marian Tupy: I would simply add to that, that in the book we have 18, one eight, different data sets, with some of the data going back to 1850. And we found generally the same relationship between population and abundance. And here I want to bring in the word super-​abundance. It actually does have a meaning. So abundance can grow at three different speeds. Relative to population, abundance can grow at three different speeds. It can grow slower than population, we just call that increasing abundance. It can grow at the same rate as population, or it can grow at a faster rate than population. In all 18 data sets we found that personal abundance is increasing at a faster rate than population. And that’s what we call super-​abundance. And that tells us that, on average, every human being is contributing more than they consume. They are the creators of the innovation. The difference between population growth and super-​abundance, that is the innovation which we bring into the world.

0:36:32.9 Gale Pooley.: So the other thing that we did is we looked at this personal abundance. How much is each person’s slice changing over time? But then you also have to consider how many slices there are. And I would like to think about the size of the slice, and then the size of the pizza. So everybody’s slice is getting larger, but we’re actually adding more people to the planet so we’re getting more slices, so we get this boom boom effect. It gets larger in two dimensions. Personal abundance is increasing and population is increasing. So if we compare 1980 to 2018, we see this increase of about 500% increase in this global level of population. The size of the pie on a global level is increased by over 500%. So that’s the way that we look at it, and we think that that’s the proper way to think about how to measure how much stuff we have. It’s not counting up the number of barrels of oil and saying, “Well, we’ve got this… We’ve got five loaves of bread and we consume one loaf a day so we have only got five days left of bread.” No. It’s, that bread continues to show up at the market. And these products and services will continue to show up in the market, depending on the price.

0:37:54.0 Trevor Burrus: Are the prices for some of these goods, are they correct to the point that we can be confident, and I mean in particular about externality? So, you grow wheat, you grow it with artificial fertilizer that runs off in the water that causes genetic abnormalities and other sicknesses in different people. Obviously oil, the burning of fossil fuels has large externalities in terms of global warming, that could come back and be the comeuppance of our abundance for so many generations. There’s the price for many of these. And that doesn’t even include subsidies and other distortions from government over the years about whether or not the price is actually factoring in the environmental impact, or the shortages; if we don’t know how much something is, is it priced too low and so the future generations won’t have it? So how do we have confidence in the prices?

0:38:47.3 Marian Tupy: Well, I would simply say to that… I will take a first crack at the answer, and that is that in the absence of something like a global… Carbon tax, it’s difficult to really account for all the externalities, or even some of the externalities. However, what we do see is that more abundant populations are much more concerned with their environment. If you look at the Yale index of environmental quality, what you find is that the top of the table is always, without exception, dominated by rich advanced economies, where people are so wealthy that they are able to part with some sliver of their incomes in order to, for example, have better, more nature reserves, for example, or they invest in better scrubbers for CO2 emissions, or they are able to switch to a nuclear energy, or they are able to invest more in clean rivers and protection of animals. So really as far as I can tell, if you are concerned about environmental quality, you should try to get as rich as quickly as possible. And the alternatives, we can… We also have the alternatives. We know what happens when you have an economic catastrophe, like for example, recently in Venezuela. When you have a massive decline in GDP per capita, what happens is, of course, is that you have much less money in order to invest in environmental protection or wildlife protection.

0:40:35.6 Marian Tupy: The first thing that happened when Venezuela had hyperinflation is that it slaughtered their animals in the zoo and they ate them. Similar thing happened in Zimbabwe. I was there in 2008 when they had hyperinflation. Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe was the second highest in world history. It hit 90 sextillion percent. And of course, money lost all of their meaning. These people were so desperately poor that they were slaughtering giraffes and rhinoceroses and elephants left and right in order to sell their husks and eat their meat. So abundance to me seems like a sure way to get to environmental quality as well. Another way in which you protect the environment is that you have more money to invest in new technologies of growing food. So instead of going and catching wild salmon, for example, you just grow salmon on aqua farms. Instead of catching wild shrimp, you grow them in aqua farms. That would be a… That’s a perfect example of human ingenuity and wealth protecting the environment.

0:41:46.7 Gale Pooley.: You know, the externality issue has always been a problem in economics, and anything we do is gonna have some kind of externality, negative and positive. There are positive externalities as well. Here’s what I would say about that for the negative externalities is, I think a proxy to look at to say what effect are externalities having on population, is look at life expectancies. And as we grow, why is it that if we’re having all of these negative externalities that life expectancy continues to increase. You would think that if these externalities are really harming population that life expectancy would be going down with cancers and all of these other things. That’s not to say that we don’t have those problems. What I think we would argue is those problems seem to be becoming less and less of a problem. The other issue would be, how do you try to deal with an externality, and that typically has been… You look at these common property situations and you attempt to institutionalise a property right over that so everybody doesn’t show up at the same lake to try to fish. You develop these mechanisms that allow us to be able to create a property right, and then you have the incentive to make that place clean and productive. Let people own things, and they will make them clean and they will make them beautiful.

0:43:23.0 Marian Tupy: I can tell you from a personal experience, having grown up in a communist Eastern Europe, communism left behind it an unbelievable amount of environmental damage with which we… We. [chuckle] My former compatriots in Eastern Europe are still struggling, precisely because everything was held in common, nobody had any incentive to protect the environment. Environment became a dumping ground for the government, for the military. Nobody took care of anything. And that changed very quickly after we transferred to democracy and to capitalism.

0:43:58.1 Gale Pooley.: I always think about when you see a place is dirty, it’s probably because nobody owns it. Find me a place that’s dirty that someone really owns it, and you gotta say, “What’s the deal?” ‘Cause you just don’t find those places.

0:44:17.3 Marian Tupy: I also want to mention that, of course, once again, human ingenuity can help us to get around the problem of polluting of the planet, not just in the ways that I have already described, but, for example, there are thousands of scientists working on new crops, GMO crops, that will require less water, less pesticide, and less fertilizer, right? If you can produce wheat and corn that basically doesn’t need these chemicals and doesn’t need industrial-​produced fertilizer, then you can also prevent the outflow of these chemicals into rivers and eventually into oceans. But who is going to have access to that technology provided that we can develop it? Well, we’re already developing it, but provided that it is implemented on a large scale? First of all, it’s going to be the rich farmers in the West who have the capital to do that, and it’s going to take some time before it filters down to Sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America, whereas if these two places were rich, people could be buying into GMO crops immediately.

0:45:32.2 Gale Pooley.: Here in Hawaii, we’ve got… Where I live, we’ve got all these shrimp trucks. Places that sell shrimp, all around the island. It’s like, you know, shrimp is not native to Hawaii, what’s the deal? Well, you go out behind the truck and these guys have these little pond set up and they’re growing shrimp out behind their trucks and out behind their little restaurants. So being able to create this property right, and, you know, “I get to own this land, I’m gonna fill it up with water and fill it up with shrimp and I’m gonna grow shrimp and turn around and sell them here.” We are so adaptive to an environment if we’re given the ability to create a property right over something. Those property rights are also key to making the world cleaner.

0:46:18.1 Trevor Burrus: Are we ignoring the spiritual element in this? Because it seems like we’ve just been talking about stuff. And there’s a lot of critiques that you hear from people, and ones that I think have merit, to say that just focusing your life around stuff… Do you have the new iPhone? We need a new iPhone with a better camera every two years with who knows how many different rare Earth materials are put in that iPhone that may one day be sapped dry from those materials. We put our soul into stuff, and maybe we’re not actually achieving a level of spiritual growth because stuff is so unbelievably cheap. So buying your arguments and saying stuff is really cheap, you can buy a lot of stuff now, but are we really finding the spiritual growth that we need as human beings by just measuring how cheap stuff is?

0:47:10.8 Marian Tupy: Well, I have never discussed this with Gale, so we may have two very different answers to this, but I would simply point out that I think that a decline in spirituality, or spirituality lacking in human lives, it’s probably not a concern that is particularly new. People have been worrying about ignorance and degeneracy of the mores and morals for thousands of years. Obviously, every individual… And this is just my view. Obviously, every individual can approach new technology and abundance from different perspectives. Some can make the best of it and lead to the best life possible, and some people can waste it in the basement, I don’t know, doing pot and watching Netflix forever. But iPhone. So iPhone is not just a way of watching TikTok videos.

0:48:07.6 Marian Tupy: It’s also a way of allowing you to plug into the entirety of human knowledge, for example, which people didn’t have. There are now something like 50% of Africans have a smartphone, right, which previously would have been unimaginable by… Within a few years, just about every African will be able to do that. So, instead of relying on a state which has never been able to provide you with good education, or having no access to libraries and things like that because you are a poor child, you now have access to the entirety of human information, human knowledge. That increases the spiritual aspect of super abundance, if you are willing to go in that direction.

0:48:58.9 Gale Pooley.: So I would just add to Marian’s comment about Africa. You know, there’s more smartphones in Africa than there are toilets. When people are given the choice between a smartphone and a toilet, they’ll choose a smartphone, because I think they understand this thing has the ability to create much more value in my life. And I’d go back to this original point that you made about spirituality and prosperity, physical prosperity, material prosperity. It’s really hard to be spiritual if you’re hungry. And what we don’t realize, what we don’t appreciate here in the west, is how hungry we used to be, and how hunger is still a large problem for many human beings. If you can reduce the time it takes for someone to work to just buy their food, if you can reduce that by two or three or four hours a day. In India it’s fallen by six hours a day since 1960. So that’s six hours now that I’m not working, and I’m not hungry. So can I now pursue this creative thing? Yeah, I gotta have the time, and I gotta move up the Maslow hierarchy, I gotta get up to the next level. Can we move people up to the next level. If we’re innovating at this basic commodity level, what it suggests is people are not as hungry as they used to be, and now they have this time to pursue these things.

0:50:27.9 Gale Pooley.: It is true, I might be pursuing my video game in the basement, but there’s another guy down the street that’s trying to code up this new app that’s gonna create this thing that’s gonna be phenomenal, or write this song, or combine these elements in a new way that’s gonna make transparent aluminum. I think they actually have done that. But I hope your listeners appreciate that, look, we’re lifting people from the bottom at this phenomenal rate, and those people now can contribute. They can contribute with their ideas and their work that the rest of us get to benefit, because that contribution comes in the form of knowledge, and knowledge, as Romer makes clear to us, has this feature that, I can share it and I don’t lose it. So instead of being competitors, we’re now collaborators in this pursuit of knowledge that all of us get to share and benefit from. So all of us have this ability to lift one another with these little bits and pieces that we can discover and create and share.

0:51:34.5 Marian Tupy: Not to beat this particular subject to death, but I like Wagner, and Wagner built an opera house in Bayreuth in Bavaria in the late 19th century so that his operas could be shown there. And if you were a very, very wealthy European, maybe top 1%, maybe you could think about going to Bayreuth once in your life in order to listen to Wagner’s Ring. I have the entire Ring, which is 14 hours of music, on streaming or on disc that I have bought for less than $100, and now I can listen to any time I please. That’s modernity, that’s prosperity. It makes something that used to be pure luxury, the very definition of luxury, within the grasp of anybody on a minimum wage, really. I mean, if you are making $15 an hour, it takes you, what, seven hours to buy the entire Ring cycle. Just one example of how much more abundant we are.

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0:52:43.6 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at libertarianism…