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The Overpopulation Myth with Marian L. Tupy · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Today I'm your host, roger Ream.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure to welcome Marion L Tupe to today's show.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Marion is the founder and editor of humanprogressorg, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co-creator of the Simon Project, an initiative that examines the relationship between population growth and resource abundance and publishes the yearly Simon Abundance Index.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: He is the co-author of 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Many Others you Will Find Interesting and Superabundance the story of population growth, innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Marion has also appeared on CNN, msnbc, fox News and the BBC and has been published widely in numerous outlets, including Newsweek, the Atlantic, the Financial Times and the Spectator.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Marian.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Thank you for coming on the Liberty and Leadership podcast.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Thanks for having me.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: You're the founder of humanprogressorg, a fascinating website, and I know every week I get an email from you with great news about the world.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: What inspired you to launch this project to begin with?
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: About 15 years ago or so, I read a fascinating book by a British author and scientist, matt Ridley, called the Rational Optimist, and the book was filled with fascinating statistics about how the life has improved over time.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: That I didn't know about, and since it's my job to be pretty much on top of what is happening in the world, I thought well, if I don't know these things, many other people won't, so I wanted to create a website devoted to those statistics.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: At the same time, what happened was that the World Bank has released world economic indicators, world development indicators, from behind a paywall, and many people started looking at these indicators and started realizing that vast majority of them were moving in the same direction, which is to say, in the direction of the improvement.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: So that really gave rise to a whole discipline called human progress studies, as we try to understand.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Why is it that the world is improving to the extent that it is?
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: we try to understand.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Why is it that the world is improving to the extent that it is?
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: By coincidence, a few weeks ago my three daughters asked me to give them a list of some of the favorite books I've read in my lifetime and I had.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: The Rational Optimist was on the list and I'm embarrassed to say I didn't put Superabundance on it.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: But I should add that to the list now because you've written an outstanding book that follows up on many of those themes and goes into a lot of depth with a lot of data.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: I'd like to dig into that.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: I know you'll be speaking to our students after we record this in giving our annual Lev Dobriansky lecture and it's, I think, along the lines of what you just said.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: It's something young people need to hear because there's so much doom and gloom out there about the world, about environmental issues, population growth, all these things, and you tackle those things in your website.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: In your book let's first talk about, you use the title superabundance, but abundance has become a much talked about word lately, with another book being written along those lines.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: But what do you mean by superabundance?
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: How do you choose that for your title and what is your general conclusion?
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: Much of the criticism concerning capitalism, concerning economic freedom, concerning people getting wealthy, has come from the environmental far left.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Not all environmentalists are against technological change, against innovation, against people getting wealthier, but the people who have been in charge the vanguard of the environmental movement has been one that does not believe that human problems can be solved through innovation.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: They believe that human problems should be solved by depriving people of more money, of more consumption, of holidays abroad, of air conditioning and whatever else.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: And so when I started looking at the state of affairs, it seemed to me that the extreme of the environmentalist movement could be put into two buckets the people concerned with climate change and global warming and people concerned with consumption and overconsumption of resources and population growth.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: So I didn't want to do more work on climate change and global warming, because I think there are plenty of people who are doing that work, and it's a lot of hard science, physics, chemistry and whatever else.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: I think that you need to be highly skilled and highly educated in those areas, physics and chemistry in particular in order to be able to have a good grasp on what is happening with regard to global warming, and so what I decided to focus on was really the question of overconsumption of resources.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: So the book Superabundance is devoted to trying to understand what is the relationship between population growth and consumption of resources.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: The orthodox view is that the more people you have, the more resources you are going to consume and consequently resources are going to go up in price, they are going to become scarcer and therefore you have some sort of a calamity on your hands.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: Now that works when population increases because obviously, as you have more people consuming stuff, you are supposed to have less of it.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: But it also works if the population plateaus, because as population of the world becomes richer, then even if you have a steady number of people, they are still going to consume more and more resources because they are richer and consequently can afford greater consumption.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: So we looked at the data and what we found is that actually the relationship is inverse, meaning the more people we have, the cheaper resources become relative to wages, and this relationship has held for the last 200 years or so.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: Superabundance has a specific technical meaning in the book, which is that abundance of resources is growing at a more rapid pace than population growth.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: So if population grows at, say, 2% a year, but abundance of resources is growing at 3% or 4% a year.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: That means that it's growing at a superabundant rate, and indeed, in almost all different commodities that we looked at we looked at hundreds of different commodities, including metals, minerals, fuel and food all of those have been becoming more abundant at a superabundant rate.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: In other words, on average, every additional human being creates more than they consume.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: They create more than we destroy.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: On average, every human being contributes to moving humanity forward, including making things cheaper.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Because every human being comes into the world not just with an empty stomach, but also with a brain, a brain that is capable of coming up with some kind of an innovation which can make the world more prosperous.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: A perfect example would be something like fertilizer.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Today, half of humanity depends directly on the existence of synthetic fertilizer created from natural gas.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: If we didn't have synthetic fertilizer, half of humanity wouldn't be able to exist.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Why did scientists create synthetic fertilizer?
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: Well, because natural fertilizer, such as manure, for example, is very inefficient.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: And then we used guano, which was starting to run out.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: So then we came up with a new innovation, which once again means that every year, we are producing more food than the year before.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: When you said, as the population grows, resources become cheaper, the immediate reaction would be well, that means we're going to use more of it and use it up.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: But your meaning by that is that's a signal that resources are becoming more plentiful because the prices are dropping.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Gold isn't becoming really expensive.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: These metals aren't becoming really expensive.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: They're getting cheaper because we're innovating and finding efficiencies.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: That's the basic supply and demand.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: If something is falling in price, you know that you have more of it.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: And some of this goes back to, I know, a bet that was placed between Paul Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon about resources and about population growth, which I think was in maybe the 1970s and then even goes further back to Malthus Thomas Malthus suggesting that the population growth was going to mean terrible things for the world.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: But could you talk a little bit about that famous bet, because I know you've followed a lot of what Julian Simon has done with what you're doing.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: I'm actually very privileged, very lucky, very honored to be a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and Julian Simon was a senior fellow at Cato back in the 1990s.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: He died, unfortunately in 1998.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: But everything goes back really to Malthus, to Reverend Malthus and his essay on the principle of population where he claimed back in 1798 that the more people we have, the fewer resources we are going to have.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Now, even as Malthus wrote those words, that essay on the principal population, back in the 18th century, he was already wrong because all he saw, all that Malthus saw, was that the population of England was growing.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: But if you looked at prices, what he would have realized was that wheat in Britain was actually becoming cheaper.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: So even though the population of Britain was increasing, the main staple, food staple of the English people, which is wheat, was actually decreasing in price.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: So more people, greater innovation, greater agricultural productivity, consequently cheaper wheat.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: The Malthusians experienced something of a renaissance in the second half of the 20th century when you had a massive increase in population in especially what was called third world countries China, india, bangladesh, so forth and the concern simply returned.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: And the primary advocate of Malthusianism in the second half of the 20th century was Paul Orlick.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: He's still alive, I think he's 95 now.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: He's a biologist at Stanford University and as a biologist he sort of thinks of human beings as any kind of other animal.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: So you know, if you have plentiful rain and a lot of grass, rabbits are going to have a lot of babies, they are going to consume all the grass and then they are all going to die right, and biologists sort of think about the world in those terms, except that human beings are not like rabbits or rats or bacteria in a petri dish.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: We can figure out a way out of scarcities, and the man who opposed Paul Ehrlich, by the name of Julian Simon of the Cato Institute and University of Maryland, was an economist and he basically looked at the numbers and realized that actually prices were coming down.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: And so he challenged Paul Ehrlich to a bet which started in 1980 and would last 10 years, and Ehrlich not Simon, but Ehrlich chose five metals tungsten, zinc, chromium and tin, I believe.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: And basically they made a futures contract.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: They invested $1,000 in those five commodities and if they became more expensive over those 10 years then Simon would pay Ehrlich.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: But if they became cheaper then Ehrlich would pay Simon and, as a matter of fact, the five commodities between 1980 and 1990 fell in price by 36%, adjusted for inflation, and consequently Paul Ehrlich had to send Simon a check for something like $537 or so.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: So it was a famous bet and it should have really solved the issue, but it didn't.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: And the same concern about running out of things that were prevalent in the second half of the 20th century still remains to this day.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's extraordinary how many times you switch on TV or read a newspaper that we are going to run out of water, as though desalination didn't exist.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Or where are we going to get all the lithium for electric car batteries, even though maybe in 20 years' time we will not be using lithium?
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: In fact, already we are using sodium-ion batteries rather than lithium-ion batteries.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: So there are lots of reasons why something that you think is going to go on infinitely is going to become incredibly scarce but simply doesn't.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: You created the Simon Abundance Index.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Your project is running that.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Tell us about that Simon Abundance Index.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Is that a continuation of looking at that basket of metals?
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: Not exactly.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: We have decided to expand the scope of the research.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: So instead of five commodities we are looking at 50 commodities.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: We are looking at everything from uranium to chicken, to wood, to hides, to crops and fuels and so on and so forth, and basically it's an index which starts at a value of 100 back in 1980.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: And then we see how much more abundant these 50 commodities become relative to wages globally.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: And basically right now I believe we are like 500% rather than 100.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: So they are about four or 500% more abundant than they were 45 years ago.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: One environmental issue that relates to this, I guess, as population grows, is the disposal of all these consumer goods.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: You know, I know there are recycling programs.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: There's people concerned about the buildup of plastics in the environment.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Do you tackle some of those issues that come with growing population, that even though resources are becoming more abundant, there is perhaps an environmental impact still from this population growth?
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, I don't want to be Pollyannish about it.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Economic growth has resulted in some ecological damage.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: There is no way around it.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: Industrialization, the Industrial Revolution, has created a lot of damage, but what's important is that richer countries are more environmentally friendly and they have better environments than poor countries.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: In other words, there is what is called a Kuznets curve of environmental quality.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: So what tends to happen is that when you are poor, as you grow richer, environmental damage increases, but then, after you become rich, environmental damage declines and environmental quality improves.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: Because at some point, when you are rich enough, you start caring much more about the environment than when you were poor.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: A perfect example would be if you go to the Caribbean, the dirtiest beaches are in the poor Caribbean nations, but the most pristine beaches are also in the most prosperous Caribbean nations, such as Turks and Caicos, for example.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: The same way, if you go to Denmark or Sweden or Norway, the environmental quality is incredible, whereas if you go to, say, poor countries of Africa, places like Zimbabwe or Mozambique, environmental damage is much greater.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: Environmental quality is smaller.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: So what I'm saying is that, yes, enrichment comes with environmental damage, but rich people are much more cognizant about the environment and they are willing to part with some of their income in order to breathe clean air, swim in clean waters, etc.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: Now you were asking specific questions regarding, for example, plastics.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Plastics are a problem, but once again the issue of poverty versus riches plays a role.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: 95% of all the plastic in the oceans are flushed into the oceans from eight rivers, all of them in Asia and Africa, not in Europe, in Europe and in North America.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: Obviously, what we do, we incinerate our plastic or we recycle it, whereas in poor countries they simply flush it into the rivers and into the oceans.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: So there are two ways that you can solve it.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: One, you can make these countries rich, and the second thing, you can start developing alternatives to plastics.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: There are a number of different companies which are working on developing plastic-like substances which are easier to dissipate, to dissolve, and we even have some progress in creating bacteria which can eat up plastic under room temperatures.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: Consequently, what you could see in the future is that we don't just incinerate plastic, because that has its own hazards, but we simply destroy plastic through different types of bacteria, for example, or replacement of plastics by something else which will behave like plastic but it's not really plastic.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: I should point out that terrible tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, when one of those wells blew up and a tremendous amount of crude spilled into the Gulf of Mexico Well over time.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: What happened, of course, is that sun rays have destroyed that crude and eventually that got solved through environmental conditioning.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: So there are ways in which nature can fix itself, but we can help it along.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: You know, we hear a lot now about a birth dearth in particularly in rich countries and perhaps globally.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: People aren't having as many babies.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Some populations in some places are leveling off in Europe and North America.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Do you see that as an ominous sign in terms of the world if populations aren't growing?
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Since you consider the human mind the ultimate resource, to use Julian Simon's phrase, do we want to encourage more population growth?
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: It does worry me along many different dimensions.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: Some of them are purely.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: You know, life is wonderful falling in love, going to different places in the world, exploring different cultures, just staying alive and experiencing this wonderful earth of ours.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: That, you know, if we are going to have fewer people, fewer people are also going to be enjoying all those wonderful benefits of being alive, and that's unfortunate.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: But it's also unfortunate because we rely on future generations to pay down the massive American debt.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: We rely on future generations to pay for tomorrow's retirees, and we rely on future generations, in order to produce more solutions to our problems, to come up with new ideas.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: So it's people who have ideas which lead to inventions and innovations which then lead to increases in productivity and, consequently, higher economic growth.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: This is not Marian Tupi's thesis.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: This is a well-known way of doing things, that Nobel Prizes have been given for these sorts of discoveries to Paul Romer and Michael Kramer and others.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: So there are many different ways in which having fewer people in the world is unfortunate.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: Now, those of us who believe in freedom and free choices of people, how we are going to solve this is not entirely clear.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: Obviously, none of us thinks that we should force women into having more children than they want.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: We want parents to have as many babies as they want, but here maybe we can help.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: Maybe part of the reason why parents don't have as many children as they want is because housing is too expensive.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: And housing isn't expensive because there is some sort of law of nature which says that housing needs to be expensive.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: We just put too many barriers in place of building new houses.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: Maybe we can fix that.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: It would be easier.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Maybe what will happen in the future is that there will be some technological solutions to women's childbirth, for example.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Women currently have to interrupt their careers in order to have babies.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: Maybe we can have artificial wombs where the child can gestate, in the same way that, for example, we already have incubators devoted to a similar task.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Maybe in the future we are going to have robot nannies that are going to take care of the kids, so that mom and dad can go to the opera or dinner or can have a job.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: So maybe there's a future solution to it.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: But currently, obviously, it's something that is of concern.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: But we have time.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: We have time because the world population is going to peak in about 2065 or so, so we still have time to come up with technological solutions to the population decline.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: And without getting into the issue of legal and illegal immigration, your book, your conclusions, your data leads to the conclusion that immigration can be very beneficial to a country because you have more people and immigrants often come with new ideas.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: They have an entrepreneurial spirit that drives them to leave their country and seek opportunity.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: So it lends a good, strong case for countries being open to immigration.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: I would take it.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to be very careful about talking about immigration, because I'm an immigrant into the United States and so I have skin in the game, so to speak.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: As I recall, Marian, your family is an immigrant to South Africa as well, right From Slovakia.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we moved from Czechoslovakia to South Africa, then to Britain, then finally to the United States, and I'm not in favor of uncontrolled immigration.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: I think that we need to make sure that people come to this country, love this country, that they don't have any criminal backgrounds and so forth.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: But I do think that we ought to have a liberal immigration, which is to say that we ought to bring in people and especially and there really is very little downside to bringing people who are able of moving the American economy forward.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Obviously, the American South and the agricultural sector needs a lot of unskilled laborers, but the Silicon Valley and so forth, they also need high-skilled immigration.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: So many of our most famous companies have been started by immigrants Peter Thiel, born in Germany, elon Musk, born in South Africa, david Friedberg of Ohalo, extraordinary company, also born in South Africa.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: Then you have people behind Google who are also foreigners.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: So there's an extraordinary benefit that America has gained as a result of, especially high school immigration, and international affairs had been becoming a little less stable recently, I'm sure that many of your viewers will have realized and if there are going to be smart people working on how to defend the country, how to develop new systems of protecting us against missiles and whatever else.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: I would like them to work in the United States rather than against the United States.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: So let's bring them here.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, some of them are going to be spies, but we'll have to handle that.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: But most of them just want a better life.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: They want to be free.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: They don't want to live in repressive regimes like Iran and China and God forbid Russia.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: We should welcome them here.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: If we want to really punish our enemies, if we really want to make life difficult for Vladimir Putin, we should allow their smartest to come to the United States and work for us rather than for him.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: You also wrote a book called 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Could you touch on some of those trends that you think particularly young people aren't aware of, that they need to learn?
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Well, I think that this book has come out about five years ago, so at some point I will have to do an update because, you know, data gets old.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: But we looked at something like 78 different trends, and the basics that young people ought to understand is that they live much longer than their ancestors.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: The standard life expectancy until about 200 years ago was 35 years.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Now, when you're 20, 35 sounds like antiquity.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: But my point is that, you know, we want to live into our 80s and to our 90s and perhaps beyond, because living is good, living is great, and so just that Also.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: You know, it took the French until the middle of the 19th century to get to 2,000 calories per person per day.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: People used to starve.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, famines were once omnipresent throughout the world.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: People used to die by the millions.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: Today, our problem is not famine but obesity, which we are obviously tackling through things like GLP-1s and so forth.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: What else?
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: 50% of children between the ages of 1 and 15 would die before the age of 15 until about, once again, 200 years ago.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Today that number is something down to 4% or so.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: So from 50% to 4%, that's extraordinary.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: I encourage you in your classes and so forth, to point to the classroom and do you realize that 200 years ago, half of you would not be here?
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: Maternal mortality is much lower than it used to be, even violence At the time of Michelangelo, for example.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: In the 15th century, 75 out of 100,000 Italians could expect to die due to murder, being murdered.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Today, italy has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: It's now lower than one per 100,000.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: So there are all sorts of different ways in which the world is much safer.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: It is much better educated or at least certainly literate.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: We are better fed, we live longer and we are healthier.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: People think that if you lived 200 years ago, that life was hunky-dory because, you know, you're walking through the fields and whatever else.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: No Food was often adulterated.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: People would die from food poisoning all the time because, of course, they had no refrigeration and whatever else.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: You know, meat would spoil and so forth.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: People would be infested with all sorts of parasites against which they had absolutely no answer before the age of modern drugs.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: So no, life was pretty miserable.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: And not to mention that just about eight out of 10 people in Europe would be pockmarked by smallpox.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Those who survived smallpox would be disfigured by it.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: This was a terrible time to be alive.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, about 200 years ago the leading cause of death among women was childbirth.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: I find that astounding.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: And you know, 100 years ago if a child got diabetes it was a death sentence.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: There was no treatment, no cure, until I think it was a Canadian who developed insulin.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and what about antibiotics?
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Antibiotics are now 97 years old, so the antibiotics came out in 1928.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: In 1924, son of President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge Jr, was playing tennis on the White House lawn, shoeless, developed a blister which got infected and he died.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: This was the son of the President of the United States.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: He had access to the best healthcare in the world, but because they didn't have antibiotics, he died.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I like telling that story to young people and the story of Abraham Lincoln lost a son and Henry David Thoreau's brother died from cutting himself while shaving.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, these are the things that killed people back then.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: It's remarkable, and young people today and all of us, I guess take so much for granted about the world we live in today.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, read history and read economic history.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: It's full of fascinating insights about how our lives are much better than those of our ancestors Did your?
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: path of being from Czechoslovakia, your family, and then South Africa to England, to here.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: How did that upbringing to enjoy higher standard of living?
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: because we lived in an open air prison where nothing worked and everything was ugly and we had food shortages and so forth.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: So moving to the West was obviously a tremendous improvement in my life, but it also, I think, it made me wonder about why countries are poor, why countries are rich.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: Obviously, I'm not the first one or the last one to wonder about those things.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: Going back all the way to Adam Smith, people have been wondering about the causes of the riches and poverty of nations, and so it's very important that we continue to learn the right lessons, which is to say that freedom works.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: If you allow people to have a go, in the words of Deirdre McCloskey, then people will generally tend to improve their own lives and those of their families, and basically, this is best achieved in countries which have a very high degree of economic and political freedom, whereas in countries which are suppressed, like communist countries, where freedom is not allowed to flourish, they obviously fall behind and become impoverished as a result.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: Right, Well, I have a high regard for the Cato Institute.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: It's wonderful you're a senior fellow there.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: I've supported it for many years and I think it's a terrific project.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: That you run under their auspices is like Sweden.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: Of course Bernie Sanders does too but as this paradise because it's socialist and something the Swedes reject.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: They say they aren't a socialist country.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: But what about that kind of welfare state economy like Sweden?
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: How does that fare?
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: in the way you look at these things, First, it's important to understand that Bernie Sanders picks and chooses what he likes about Sweden.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: He doesn't like, for example, that Sweden has essentially privatized its educational system.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: Its high school education is now privatized.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: Students can go to any school, whether it's religious or for-profit, and for-profit education thrives in Sweden.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: That's not something that you normally associate with a socialist country, not something that a socialist like Bernie Sanders would want to adopt in the United States.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: But Sweden in many ways leads the way in terms of economic freedom, by which we mean capitalism.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Sweden is much more free trade country than the United States.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: So there are many aspects to the Swedish economy which are highly competitive, highly capitalistic.
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: What Sweden does have that we don't have as much is a very high rate of taxation, including a very high VAT rate.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: It's a value-added tax, correct Value-added tax, so our taxes generally are much lower than what they are in Sweden and other Nordic economies.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: So the economic model of the Nordic countries is not socialistic, it's capitalist, but they have a much higher level of taxes.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Sweden overtaxed itself in the 1970s and the 1980s.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: It had a massive economic crash in early 1990s 1988 to 1992 or so and consequently Sweden actually became much more capitalist than it did before, but it retained these high taxes.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Now the question is whether the United States can have such high taxes and also what high taxes do to things like innovation, for example, is one of the reasons why innovation happens in the United States is because our taxes are relatively low.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: In other words, in some ways, sweden parasites on American innovation.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: Innovation doesn't really happen in Nordic countries precisely because a lot of people who might come up with innovation come to the United States rather than part with 70 or 80% of their income in Sweden.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Second, would Americans put up with high tax rates as they are in Nordic countries?
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: I doubt it.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: But more importantly, or most importantly and this is not something that is very politically correct and that is that very high tax rates usually require a very high homogeneity of the population.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: In other words, people who feel like they're a part of one big family are usually willing to put up with much higher taxes.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: But once you have a very diverse population I'm not just talking about race, although race matters.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about culture and religion.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: When you have a hodgepodge of different peoples, like they are in the United States, you know it's much more difficult to increase taxes to such a level, because people who share the same culture, who share the same ethnic background, who share the same expectations and hopes and so forth, they are much more likely to put up with high taxes than very diverse countries do.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Wonderful Appreciate you talking with me today on the Liberty and Leadership podcast.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Marion's book, published three years ago, is Superabundance.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: It's the story of population growth, innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: So if you ever get depressed or down on things in the world, I urge you to buy his book and read it.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: He'll be giving our Lev Dobriansky Lecture in Political Economy a few days after we've recorded this podcast to our students who are studying from campuses around the United States.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being with me today, marian, my pleasure.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: Thanks for having me.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.