| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: July 17, 2024.] Russ Roberts: Today is July 17th, 2024. My guest is economist Noah Smith. He writes at Substack at Noahpinion, N-O-A-H-P-I-N-I-O-N, Noahpinion. This is Noah's fourth appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in January of 2024 discussing whether a nation can plunder its way to wealth. Our topic for today is poverty, what Noah calls in his essay at Noahpinion on this topic the 'elemental foe.' Noah, welcome back to EconTalk. Noah Smith: Hey, great to be back. Russ Roberts: I want to warn parents listening with children, this episode may touch on adult themes or language. |
| 1:18 | Russ Roberts: Why do you call it the 'elemental foe'? It's kind of grand, and I happen to think it deserves that grandeur. But, why did you use that wording? Noah Smith: That phrase comes from the--Dr. Frankenstein. So, the titular character, Dr. Frankenstein, is on an expedition, I believe, to the Arctic, and he writes about data that he's going to get that will help humanity against the 'elemental foes of our race.' And, he means the elements themselves. He's talking about cold. How can people better survive the cold? And the idea is that humans are born into a universe where the elements themselves are against us. Poverty is the elemental foe, not just because it's the fundamental or basic foe, but because the universe itself is always trying to kill us with rocks from space and diseases and just hunger that reappears every few hours. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's an interesting, thought-provoking observation, that we're all able to absorb. Early on in the essay, you say the following. Quote: To ask why some societies in the world are still poor is the wrong question. Poverty is the default condition, not just of humanity but of the entire Universe. If humanity simply doesn't build anything--farms, granaries, houses, water treatment systems, electric power stations--we will exist at the level of wild animals. This is simply physics. [Emphasis original.] I think that's undeniable. But you, with that stark language, make it very clear what our challenge is as human beings living on a rock. Noah Smith: Yeah. That's--I mean, that's our condition in the world, right? If you look at the planets out there in the solar system, Mars or whatever, they're just sterile. Right? Life is rare. And, even on earth, when life exists, most of it exists at a level of just absolute poverty. Animals always on the verge of starvation or predation. You know, that's the only way that animal populations get controlled. And then, when you look at human history, for most of human history, essentially everybody was living in grinding poverty. You know, even--I guess, this is kind of a cliché to point out--but even kings: kings had enough to eat and they had servants to do stuff for them. But, at the same time, because of lack of modern technology, they were still carried away by disease all the time. And they were still probably malnourished, honestly--subject to heavy disease burden as kids that stunted their intelligence and physical health. You know, we're just--a regular American is better off than a king of yesteryear, even if they have less servants. Right? And so-- Russ Roberts: We have servants that aren't human that work often much more effectively than the physical servants of the past, say, cleaning clothes, washing dishes, and the many things we've automated. Noah Smith: That's true. And so, the default state for much of the world--yanno, history, all of life--is poverty. There's only a tiny little bit of non-poverty in the universe. We live in a tiny little pocket of non-poverty in the universe. Everywhere else is constantly just on the verge of death. You know, everywhere. |
| 5:09 | Russ Roberts: I never thought about it. The lion is king of the jungle, but the lion's stardard of living is subsistence. If you find a nice herd, you might have a good day. You might even have a good couple of days. But, you can't rise above the minimum with any success because you have no technology. Is, of course--as we'll talk about what makes human beings able to imagine and then experience a standard of living that is well above subsistence requires going well beyond the natural--our natural gifts of being able to walk upright, having an opposable thumb. These are all nice things--and a brain. But if you don't have tools and those tools don't improve, you stagnate. And, most of human history--as I once heard, George Will say it, 'Most of human history is, a man, if lucky, a man standing behind a horse, walking behind the horse, looking at the horse's rear while it pulls a plow.' That's like--that's good times. And, for most of human history, that's as good as it got. And, that meant-- Noah Smith: Right. You've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, right? Russ Roberts: Absolutely. Noah Smith: I think that the best line about economic development and economic history ever uttered is uttered in that movie, where someone says, 'How do you know he's the king?' And, someone else says, 'He hasn't got shit all over him.' Russ Roberts: Yeah. That's a blunt way to describe pre-industrial life. It's a good point. And, ate off better dishes than the rest of us, of course, as well, and had more to eat. But, it was limited. The castle was bigger than the hubble, but the castle was cold, except in those handful of rooms where they would have a fire burning in that area. What? Noah Smith: Then it's smoky. You didn't have a thermostat. Yeah, we live like the kings of yesteryear. I mean, we have jobs; we've got work. But I guess, kings officially had jobs and had to work, too. A lot of kings worked really hard. We don't always have people always trying to kill us for our inheritance. It's like: the reason you have Game-of-Thrones-type of situations with people trying to kill the king all the time is because you're competing for, like, the one non-poverty position in society. Russ Roberts: Yeah, which is why uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. I hope I have that right--it's Shakespeare--but I often misquote it unintentionally. But, that's clearly the downside that that standard living brought with it, which is that other people envied it, sought it, and often would kill for it, or at least scheme for it. And, we are fortunate to have that standard of living, living in many of us. Many--not all--but many of us are able to live in uniformly warm in the winter rooms or uniformly cool rooms in the summer without the threat of being usurped that the king had to face to have that standard of living in, say, the Middle Ages. |
| 8:54 | Russ Roberts: So, let's talk about the role of technology. And of course, there's a lot to say here, but you have an interesting phrase of how we keep away poverty in the modern world. Your answer is industrial modernity. It's never going to be a, I think, refrain of a romantic song about economic development. But, it captures in a very short, pithy phrase what it is that sustains our standard of living. We'll add a few things as well, but let's start with that phrase, industrial modernity. What do you mean by it? Noah Smith: Industrial modernity is a system of technological edifices. Technology itself is the knowledge of how to do a thing. Right? You can have embodied technology, which is like a thing itself. But industrial society is a bunch of technological systems. So, for example, roads: the roads system. We know how to make roads. We have a bunch of roads. The roads go to a lot of places. You can drive on one road, and you can get off onto the other road and then get to where you're going. That's an example. Let's see: the agricultural distribution centers. We have all these big buildings full of food. And, from those buildings, mostly trucks take the food to, like, stores where you can get the food, or to places where we give way food for free to poor people, but then mostly to stores where people will buy the food. And then that's pretty amazing. That network, which includes a lot of logistics and spreadsheets and stuff, but also includes the roads; it includes the trucks; it includes the farms themselves. All these technological edifices are really impressive. These are automated farms. They have big machines driving through a field, just planting, harvesting, and tending just massive amounts of crops. And, that's part of industrial modernity. You have railroads, you have water treatment plants, you have tap water, you have hospitals, you have other medical clinics and primary care clinics and things like that. You have the Internet and the telephone network and those things like that. You have the electrical grid that gives you power to light your house, heat your house; gas pipelines, mines, and warehouses for all kinds of manufactured goods, huge factories full of machine tools. These things are industrial modernity. All of these technological edifices together are what keep us in that little non-poverty bubble of the universe. |
| 11:49 | Russ Roberts: I want to add two things to that. One, of course, is Adam Smith's division of labor observation: that we specialize in the modern world. We don't do everything for ourselves. We rely on others through this web of transactions that you've sketched out. The other thing I would mention that is remarkable about that is that the processes that you're describing--and very briefly--they're a remarkable transformation over time of relentlessly reducing the amount of human labor necessary to produce those things. And, if you think about that for a minute, which would be, you'll be wrong. But, if you think about it for a minute, you might think, 'Well, that can't be good.' I mean, you're getting rid of all these jobs. And, 1900: 40% of Americans worked on the farm, and they got replaced by bigger and bigger farms, using--as Adam Smith pointed out that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market--as the world grew. And, that transportation system expanded that you talked about with trucks and trains. The farms got bigger, the machinery then that you could use effectively on those farms got viable and then bigger. And, fewer and fewer people were needed to work on farms to make an immensely larger amount of food, such that by modern times about 2% of the American workforce is in agriculture. And that, to a farmer of 1900, would be a frightening thought. 'Oh my gosh, all those jobs are going to be lost.' And, that's happening everywhere in the country. One of my old favorite examples I haven't talked about in ages is chickens and egg production. Egg production is a massive technological project. It used to be you had some chickens in your backyard. You tossed out some feed in the morning and you see if they laid any eggs. Now, one or two people take care of--I think it's about a 100,000 chickens. I haven't looked at that data in a while--but an enormous number of chickens because technology is able to take care of all the tasks that were done before by human beings. And the joke, of course, is that in a modern factory, there's two employees: there's the dog and the worker. And the worker's job is to feed the dog. And, the dog's job is to make sure the worker doesn't interfere with the technology that's going on all around, that's producing whatever it is, whether it's eggs, pencils, shirts, shoes--all over the world, of course, not just in the United States. But, that industrial modernity is relentlessly focused on reducing the amount of labor that's involved in producing more and more goods. Getting more from less is the mantra of economic development. And, it's magical. Noah Smith: So, an interesting thing about that is--there's a couple of interesting things. One is that there's a theory that driving up the cost of labor accelerates this process. And, when you suddenly have a big flood of cheap labor, it might actually slow the process of technology. And, some people argue that when China came into the World Trade Organization [WTO] in 2001, we started offshoring a bunch of labor-intensive things to China. Nowadays, we don't do that anymore. But, back then in the 2000s, we did, when we offshored a bunch of stuff of manufacturing to China, which at that time was a very labor-intensive economy. Some people think that that might have slowed down the progress of automation because we essentially, according to this [inaudible 00:16:02], replaced robots with cheap Chinese labor. Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure. Noah Smith: And so, industrial modernity seeks to economize, but it doesn't always economize via automation. And, some people argue--what's interesting is that the first steam engine was a toy on the desk of a Greek guy living in the Roman Empire. He had a little steam engine on the desk. He called it the Aeolipile. And, it could spin around--woo!--with steam. You could have used that to create the industrial revolution in Rome. There were some things that they didn't have. It would have been a little bit harder. You know, glass, for example: they didn't have as good glass back in Rome. They had glass, but I think they invented glass, actually. But, they didn't have great glass like they did in 1607-year up or whatever. But, they had a lot of stuff. And, the basic idea of the steam engine was there. There's an argument that cheap labor in Rome due to the persistence of slavery prevented people from economizing on labor by automating, by looking for machines. Whereas--this is Robert Allen--the economist Robert Allen argues this. And, he said that the reason the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain was very expensive labor--because so many workers had left for the Americas, or there were laws driving up labor causing it--various reasons--wages, according to Allen--you know, people dispute this: economic historians looked for different data sources, and they argued back and forth. But, he says that because there were factors making the price of labor so high in Britain, it forced people to go looking for, like, James Watt's steam engine as an alternative. And, that process of automation built and built. And, once you've figured out the steam engine, 'Oh wow: we can use the steam engines to clear these mines.' 'Oh, well look: we can use them to move stuff on a railroad.' And so, innovation bred innovation. And, the question of why the industrial revolution didn't start for so long is a question that should haunt us because there were reasonably free markets in many states. It was not a case of some--there was no world government. There were certainly regimes that had reasonably free markets. A lot of the basic technologies probably could have been invented in Rome, in Song Dynasty China, and Ming Dynasty China--and a lot of these old places. And they weren't. We did not get an industrial revolution. We didn't get a takeoff. And, that question haunts me. And it should haunt every person who thinks about economics because it lasted so many thousands of years. It was over a thousand years from when Rome could have done an industrial revolution to when the Industrial Revolution actually happened. And, that's kind of scary. |
| 19:17 | Russ Roberts: Yeah--or sad. Or not. We'll talk a little bit in a minute about the non-economic aspects of this--or the non-financial, non-material aspects of it would be a better word. But my answer is not a very [?] one for why it took so long, which is: Adam Smith's about the extent of the market. So, if you're going to--and, I'll put a link-up to an essay I wrote on this--if you're going to make three sandwiches a day, you cut the meat--and they're meat sandwiches--you cut the meat with a knife and you bake the bread in your oven, and you slice the sandwiches in half with that knife, and maybe you wrap them up in something and you give them to your three friends who you're going on a fishing trip with or a hunting expedition. But if you're making 10,000 sandwiches, you have a meat slicer. And you don't use a knife. And you don't use your home oven. You build a massive oven that can much more efficiently and cheaply, per sandwich, bake the bread. But, it would be absurd--not absurd--wasteful--too expensive if you're making three sandwiches to buy an industrial oven and a giant meat slicer, and so on. Now, if you have a chance to sell--if you start making three and you realize, wow, it's really time intensive to make three sandwiches, but if I made 10,000, it could be really cheap; and then I could maybe sell most of those 10,000 to people because the price will be so much lower than it would be for them to make them themselves. But, if you can't distribute it and the roads aren't very good and your village only has a few dozen people in it, you're not going to ever--it'll never be viable to use that level of capital that a modern industrial process uses. So, it's a bit of a Just-So story, obviously. And I don't want to suggest that, 'Oh, when transportation improved and people got more connected and the world got effectively smaller that then people said, 'Oh, let's invent some stuff to take advantage of this.' I don't think that's literally what happened. I think what happened is all these things proceeded together, and not in lockstep, but in missteps and going too many steps and eventually getting things right. But, I do think that the idea of doing something extraordinary when the world you inhabit is small, economically, financially, materially, is not surprising. So, that's my first thought on that topic. Noah Smith: Yeah, you're probably right. |
| 22:19 | Russ Roberts: Well, that's simple. Okay, well, let's move on. I think you're going to think some more about it, Noah, but I appreciate the kind words. You mention--which are one of my favorite themes, you call them 'fantasies of an imagined past.' And this is what I think of as the romanticization of poverty: that human beings in ancient times avoided the alienation of industrial modernity by living simpler lives, making more things for themselves, being closer to nature, and so on. But, you call that a fantasy. Why? Noah Smith: Because, I think that--I actually don't understand the psychology behind this nostalgia. I think it's not nostalgia for a place you were. There's this nostalgia of, 'I want the world to be like it was when I was a kid, because being a kid is great. And, so, I remember the world being so great.' Right? Like: Everyone was kind of poor in the 1990s than now, or at least the 1980s. But, like, I was just raring to go, just eating crappy food but I loved it. Just playing outside with a little red wagon. I don't know: it was great. I understand that kind of nostalgia. But the kind of nostalgia where people will look at an advertisement from the 1950s and decide: Okay. That's how it really was. Everybody was flying on these luxurious planes where everyone was flying first class and people would just bring you drinks, and everyone had this giant yard where you were always having barbecues and everyone was very pretty and immaculate. And, like, you could do all that on just one income from just having one husband working at a factory job. You could support all of that, and all the kids could go to college, and everybody had cars and big lawns, and, like, that was so great. And then, you know, I don't know--like, nobody played loud music, and nobody cheated on their spouse. And, I don't know: It's a fantasy. It was created--those things were created--those pictures, those images from the 1950s that we have are not real. They are not what the 1950s really were like. Right? They were things that--they were marketing images, advertising that was created by talented fantasists of the day to get people the middle class to buy more stuff. And, in that, they did their job. I'm not criticizing the advertisers and the marketers here. I'm criticizing people who mistake that for reality. Because, reality was that rivers in major cities caught fire because of the pollution. The reality was that houses for a middle class family were half the size they were today. The reality is that if people even had a TV [television], it would be a one small black and white TV in one room that was kind of crappy and had a bunch of programs on it that you wouldn't even watch today. And, people lived in these cities where coal smoke hung like a pall[?]. Like, if you look at Pittsburgh, it looked like Beijing in 2006. Pittsburgh just looked, like, mortal. And the level of poverty was just much larger than what we're used to now. There were still--most people weren't living in those capacious houses and those nice manicured suburbs. And the ones who did--like, if you go to a poor--not a poor but a working class--neighborhood in Los Angeles today, and you see first generation immigrants from Honduras living in, like, some far-flung suburb of Los Angeles and, like, working at, like, a CVS [Consumer Value Stores, drug store chain] or something--that is a bit better. They live a bit better than your middle class family in the 1950s that are the subjects of those advertisements. And, if you went back to the 1950s, you'd be like, 'Okay, everybody's poor.' You'd think that because--I don't know why people think that, and that's not--but thinking the 1950s were economic paradise isn't even the craziest thing. People think the Middle Ages were economic paradise. There are these people who say, 'Oh, peasants actually didn't spend their time working. They were indolent peasants.' I can take you to--I can show you indolent peasants in an agricultural village in Nigeria or some parts of India. I can do that. We can go. We can see indolent peasants. They're sitting there starving. They're sitting there with nothing to do. Yes, they're indolent, but there's tons of work to do. You could tidy up the house, you could build a better house. You could do all kinds of things. You could be gainfully employed. There's nothing to do, and you don't have the energy because you don't have enough food. So, you don't have the energy to get up off your ass and work because you don't have enough calories. And, so, all you can do is sit there and be kind of--or you're medically disabled or something like that. So, you can't even fix up your house and make it look nice or go find some work to afford extra stuff. Like, it's not just people kicking back, and, like, 'Oh, yeah.' In the agricultural age, we created negative stereotypes of people who are layabouts and don't work. Right? 'Oh, they're just enjoying their life,' blah, blah, blah. The reality is that a lot of the people were disabled, sick, hungry, old, weak, and they were trying to extract labor from them by saying, 'Get up and work, you lazy ass.' But, there was not necessarily work to do. Like, if the crops aren't coming in, if you only have a little garden out in the middle of crappy soil, there's no farming to be done. And yet: 'Oh, just get some more land.' Where? No: Someone else has the other land. The farms are all overcrowded. If people don't have work--if peasants don't have work in poor subsistence-farming areas, as sometimes they don't, it's because it's either because they can't work or because the farms are too crowded. There's nothing to farm. So, you're just desperately poor. You would like to work. And so, this is why when you start the process of industrialization, everybody moves from the farms to the cities. People trade their so-called indolent, medieval-type of lifestyle as a peasant for 14-hour days of backbreaking work in some smoky sweat shop. They trade that eagerly. And very few of them go back. And, yes, it sucks to work in a sweatshop. But, like, it really sucks to be an agricultural peasant. Like, peasant is just about the only thing worse than sweatshop. Or, I guess, getting killed in a war or something. But, the number of farmer suicides in India is off the charts. They're, like: 'Oh, surrounded by enveloping warmth of community and collective society in village life, people don't have the psychological disorders and depression of the modern age. And so, you don't see suicide.' Yes, you do. People kill themselves constantly in rural areas. Peasants are just offering themselves in droves. Because poverty sucks. |
| 30:15 | Russ Roberts: Well, I thought--you know, you've gone from the 1950s to the Middle Ages. But of course, many people want to go back further and go to the hunter-gatherers that people romanticize: where, you know, you spend a few hours a day, you might catch yourself a deer. And then, the rest of the time you're reciting Homer, which you've memorized because you don't have any books, but the oral tradition has passed along. Or you're playing a flute you've carved for yourself from a nearby tree. That vision is probably a fantasy, an illusion. Ancient, primitive people spent most of their day looking for protein and struggling to find it because life is hard without modernity. Noah Smith: Right. Exactly. It is a constant desperate struggle for survival. Also, extremely violent. Like, it's more violent to be a hunter-gatherer than to be a peasant. And even being peasant is pretty violent. Yeah. So, like, we can go see hunter-gatherers. Of course, all the pastoralists, the people who believe that the hunter-gatherers had it great. They say, 'Oh, the hunter-gatherers that you see today and Papua New Guinea or the Amazon, those people aren't like the hunter-gatherers of yore, because they've been pressured by capitalism and modernity and their resources have shrunk.' Bullshit. We have archeology. We know that the hunter-gatherers of the past lived pretty much like the hunter-gatherers today. They're just--more of humanity was subject to that crap. And--you know--it sucked. Like, it's--I don't know, maybe we should blame J.R.R. Tolkien. But no, you shouldn't blame Tolkien any more than you blame the 1950s advertisers. Tolkien created fantasies of elves, right? We don't have to--if we choose to believe or allow ourselves to believe that hunter-gatherers were Tolkien elves, that's not Tolkien. That's on us. You know, that's our mistake. That's us not being able to sell fantasy from reality. I have, you know, many weaknesses and flaws as a person, but I think that one of my strengths has always been that I'm pretty damn good at recognizing fantasy when I see it. Russ Roberts: Yeah; it's an important skill. |
| 32:44 | Russ Roberts: I want to mention a show--I don't know if you saw it. But I loved it--and we haven't talked about it for, I don't know, maybe a decade on the program--called Frontier House. So, PBS [Public Broadcasting Service]--reality show--they put a group of contestants--it was, like, in my memory, it's five or six families--and they put them in rural Canada--I think it was rural Canada. And, the rules of the game are that you have to live with the technology of the 1880s. Noah Smith: Uh-huh, I love this. Russ Roberts: And--so, it's frontier--and there's humor because some of the teenagers in the show smuggle in makeup or toilet paper or other things they're not supposed to. But that's the occasional diversion on the show. But, most of the show is semi-serious. It's very serious, actually, about--and by the way, the goal is really simple. It's to get through the winter. And each family is given--they live near each other and they're given a little bit of an asset-- [More to come, 33:55] Noah Smith: [inaudible 00:33:49]-- Russ Roberts: No, I'm going to get to that. Russ Roberts: I'm going to get to that. Noah Smith: This show is not ethical. We need IRB [Institutional Review Board]. Russ Roberts: Hang on. Hang on. So, each family gets a little bit of an asset. Like, one family gets a cow, and somebody else gets a roofed place, and etc. And, the only "cheating"--in quotes--that's allowed is for medical reasons. So, if you're allowed to have access to modern health, modern medicine, and I would add dentistry, I assume if someone needed a root canal--I don't think anybody did in the short period that the show existed--but a root canal without anesthesia or painkiller would be very unpleasant. Noah Smith: I don't think they'd give you a root canal. I think they ripped out your tooth. Russ Roberts: Yeah, that's also no fun. So, the humor--it's dark, but the tragicomic thing that happens, two things happen that are worth summarizing [?] experience. One is that after a few months of the show, one of the guys--one of the men panics because he thinks he's dying. And, he asked to see the doctor and they bring in the modern doctor, and the doctor says, 'You're one of the fittest people I've ever met.' Because he's been hauling water and doing other horrible, challenging, physically demanding tasks of 1880 life. And he says, 'You've just lost 40 pounds' or whatever it is, 'and replaced it with muscle.' And basically, the guy would look at himself and his wife thinks like, 'You look horrible. What's gone wrong with you?' And the answer is: he looked like a coal miner of 1880 or a farmer because he was so fit: thin, muscular, lean. He wasn't lifting weights but he was a specimen that we don't see much of in the modern world because we were more indolent. Anyway, that's the first thing. The second thing that happened that's fantastic is they ended the show before the winter because none of them would have made it. The whole idea was to build up enough food and other resources so you could get through the winter. And, they basically had to stop the show mid-season--I don't know, was it mid-season or not? It had a lot of episodes. But, anyway, I recommend it to listeners. Noah Smith: What's the [inaudible 00:36:11]. Russ Roberts: It involves--it's called Frontier House. I'm sure you can get it on a DVD [digital video disc]-- Noah Smith: I'll look that up. Russ Roberts: DVD, but you might even be able to watch it online. It came with a-- Russ Roberts: You can get economics lessons promoted. There was a parallel version in London of--I can't remember what it was called. It was also what was was a little bit of Downton Abbey. It was kind of trying to capture what it was like to live in a--it was not in a fancy house, but a house in a 19th-century urban area. And the answer is: it's different, and it's really hard. And-- Noah Smith: Do you know why they were going to die? Russ Roberts: Well, they weren't going to have enough to eat. Noah Smith: It's because you know why? Russ Roberts: And, they'd be too cold. Noah Smith: I know exactly why. Russ Roberts: Why? Noah Smith: Their families are too small. Russ Roberts: Yeah, that may be. Noah Smith: The reason pre-industrial fertility is seven children per woman is because you need all those people to make a bunch of food. And, you were talking about specialization before: You specialize within the household. In the homestead, you have one person who is just, like, cooking and doing house stuff all day, and the other person is, like, you know, just dressing meat all day; basically, like, plowing the field. Whatever you do, you have somebody doing it all day, and then you specialize within the household. And, people work from age, like, nine or earlier, right? Little kids are running around doing errands constantly. As soon as you can talk, you start working. Child labor is the new universal norm. Russ Roberts: So, you know Homer, but you don't know what it means because there's no real education other than the rudiments of animal husbandry and what's needed on the farm. Obviously there's quite a bit of education. It's just not what we would call modern book learning. |
| 38:06 | Russ Roberts: Let's shift to a topic you write about in passing, but I want to spend a little more time on it here, which is the Degrowth Movement. It's another form of romance. What's the idea of that? What are people selling and what do you think of it? Noah Smith: Well, Degrowth, it's primarily a European movement, and I would say more British and North European than elsewhere. And there's various manifestations of it, but basically they say: 'GDP [Gross Domestic Product] is a bad indicator of human flourishing. We need to be happy instead of make GDP go up.' And then: 'We're destroying the environment with industrial society and technology. So, we need to degrow. Because, the ideology of rampant growth is just what keeps us destroying the environment. Instead, if we stopped growth, then the environment would be saved.' And, it's all complete hogwash. Russ Roberts: I assume you don't disagree with the claim that GDP is a flawed measure of human flourishing. I think it is a flawed--I would agree with that starting point. I just wouldn't necessarily go to the next chapter. Noah Smith: I would say that when you--the poorer you get, the poorer a country is, the more GDP is everything. That, when you look at poor countries, GDP is just incredibly tightly correlated with life expectancy and nutrition levels and education levels and [inaudible 00:39:45]--all these things. Everything else you can measure and quantify is incredibly highly correlated with GDP. Now, when you get to be a rich country, some of those things start breaking down. Some of those correlations start breaking down. Not completely: there still is a correlation. It's just a lot less tight. So, a lot of things aren't counted in GDP. So, when you get all the houses and the cars and the medical supply, medical care and all the other material stuff, you have some countries that just don't do very well at, say, preventing crime, or public health--having people not be fat in the first place. Or, various other things: nicely designed cities, cleanliness, things like that, that aren't measured in GDP. They're not marketized goods. You could pay someone to do some of these things, but typically don't. And so, they're not recorded GDP. So, once you get to a rich country like America, GDP still matters somewhat, but it doesn't matter nearly as much. But, when you're a poor country--if you are Bangladesh--GDP is absolutely everything. So, I think it just depends on who you are. Like, the idea that you'd want to forsake GDP in order to have, like, work/life balance or whatever in Bangladesh? No. Like, Bangladeshis will not. Like, maybe a tiny bit. But, primarily, they want to escape material poverty. Russ Roberts: Yeah, for sure. Noah Smith: I think--yeah, so GDP is great as a measure of development. Not as amazing as a measure of success as a rich country. Russ Roberts: Fair enough. |
| 41:36 | Russ Roberts: Let's go back to the romance that we were making fun of a minute ago and try to take it a little more seriously. So, while I understand the case for industrial modernity, I think it's true that things are lost in the pursuit of--not escaping poverty perhaps, and not escaping subsistence levels of standard living, but somewhere between there and what a good chunk of a modern industrialized country has as a lifestyle. I think about our old conversations on this program about economic development and the joke-that's-not-a-joke: that the biggest way to fight poverty is luggage. Get out of--away from--the poor parts of the world where there are no opportunities for industrial modernity and join the web of interacting human beings called the modern economy, which is sustained mostly through forces that no one controls--the price system that Leonard Read writes about in "I, Pencil" or that Hayek writes about in "The Use of Knowledge in Society"--that uncontrolled emergent order--you want to be a part of it because then you're not going to starve to death. And if you're not a part of it, you're going to have a tough time. So, that's your case. But certainly as you move away from, say, where you were born or you move away from where your parents are or your siblings--and most--many, not most; I don't know what the number is--many Americans will forego living near home or living near siblings for economic opportunity or career advancement or flourishing in a different way. But, something is lost. I think. And, I think that Chris Arnade talks about the front row versus the back row in the classrooms where he grew up, where the front row got out of town because the economic opportunity and the Florida place he grew up in wasn't very great. So, he pursued an advanced degree and flourished financially. But, something was lost. And, do you accept that or do you think that's different--just is kind of romance? Noah Smith: Wait, ask that last part again? Russ Roberts: My claim is, is that in the pursuit of financial and material success, some of which is about the comforts of a certain lifestyle, and some of it is about some self-expression through application of one's talents in the workforce--career development, whatever you want to call it--something is lost. We are less connected to where we grew up. We're less connected to our parents. We're less connected in America. I'm talking about--I'm in Israel. Here in Israel--it's a physically small country--and those bonds are very, very strong between siblings, between parents, between grandparents and grandchildren. And, it's strikingly different from the way I lived in the United States in the sense that people spend a lot of energy preserving those familial connections. I feel like in the United States--let's focus on that--I would suggest something is lost. I'm not saying we should subsidize families or subsidize staying at home or not moving, but there is something to the romance. Noah Smith: I don't know about that. Honestly, I think that Americans are pretty family-oriented. I think that Americans are more family-oriented than Japanese people. That's the other country where I've lived. That goes against some old stereotypes, and I'm sure that in the past--in the long past--Japan was very family oriented, but it changed. Corporations pulled apart the Japanese family to a large degree. I think people in villages in less-developed countries are probably are more family oriented than Americans, but a lot of that is family as a work unit. Yes, you get the constant--your family is your work team, and yeah, that affords you a social circle that's the case your entire life. But, it's also a trap, too. People wanted to get away from that close family life, and I think we keep in touch with our families in America pretty well, and people maintain relationships with their family pretty well. But, I think that to some degree, the constant living-your-entire-life with this small group of people that you didn't get to choose was stifling and entrapping for a lot of people. It doesn't mean you don't love your family, but it means that if your family are the only people you spend your entire life with for your life, that can be a bit confining and-- Russ Roberts: Fair enough. Noah Smith: So, I think finding your way to a better balance between family and friends and your own family, that you start with your own kids and whatnot, and people like work co-workers. I think that we're not doing too badly at that. I think we're doing better than Japan did, where the corporations and their work cultures pulled, especially men, but now everybody is just away from their families and so[?] your coworkers are the only people who matter to you. And, kids would go weeks without seeing their dads--in 1990s Japan--weeks, like, the dad would never come home. He'd commute and then sleep in a hotel in the city or maybe come home briefly, catch a few hours of sleep, and then be gone in the morning. And husbands and wives, completely estranged, talk about multi-generational households. Well, yeah, you'd have that, but it was the wife taking care of the aged parents while the dad is nowhere to be seen. And then, the wife has so much work to do doing elder care that she'll just--you know, mom will just, say, give the kids money and say, 'Go, run around the city. It's safe.' Tokyo is safe, Osaka is safe, Japan is safe. So, you just go run around the city with money, with cash. And what do they do? Well, they all got yeast infections, because they didn't change their underwear--because they were running around and had no parents take care of them, these teenage girls. And, so, the Japanese government got this brilliant idea that they were going to put women's underwear vending machines around the city, so that teenage girls who weren't going home to their parents and were just staying overnight at their friend's house or in some bar or wherever, or in the city, could get underwear without having to go all the way back home to their suburban home. And so, thus was born the legend of Japanese panty vending machines, which were actually a misguided attempt by the government of Japan to get clean underwear to teenagers who weren't going home because their parents didn't pay any attention to them ever. Russ Roberts: Well, I can't comment on the veracity of this story-- Noah Smith: Isn't this strange-- Russ Roberts: or its-how general this problem was in Japan. But-- Noah Smith: It was a short-lived, aborted experiment. No one used the vending machines. A few of them were put up as a pilot program. They were taken out when no one used them; and eventually the government just invested in social services to have people track kids down via their phones, find out where they were, and make sure they were doing something--they were in school or with their parents or whatever. That's what happened. But, the anecdote is meant to illustrate the fact that Japanese family society broke down in ways that American family society never really did. And-- |
| 49:49 | Russ Roberts: I don't mean to suggest that America is at the bottom of the family tree or pole or whatever. But, I think the claim I'm making is that when you have a desperately poor society, it's good for everyone to be part of a move toward industrial modernity--which I take is your main point. But when you live in an industrial, modern society already, one has to face the trade-offs of lifestyle and--whatever you want to call it--work/life balance. I don't like that phrase actually and I'm not sure why, but it simplifies something. I think it's much deeper is probably why I don't like it. You have to decide what you care about, and that's a personal choice. I don't think the government should make it for you, or we should push people in different--certain directions. All I'm suggesting is that what underlies some of the romantic fantasies that you and I have been critiquing about primitive life--whether it's hunter-gatherers, the medieval peasant, the 1950s--underlying that is a thirst for something that is harder to find in modern life than it might otherwise be, which are these fundamental connections between kin and friends. Now, I take your point: you don't want to spend--I like the example of George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life. The movie romanticizes Bedford Falls in a certain version of it, but a lot of people who grow up in the Bedford Falls of the world want to live in the big city. They don't want to live in the little tiny place where they see the same people every day. So, it's a personal choice. For some people, it's more comforting than for others to see the same people every day and the same tradespeople and the same friends and so on. But, I think my point is a simple one: that this move to industrial modernity, which is a fabulous one overall because it removes the threat of poverty and hunger, which hangs over all human beings--which you write so eloquently about--it comes at some kind of cost in various ways that a thoughtful person should be aware of in making choices about how to live within that modern world. Noah Smith: Yeah. I think what happened with modernity in terms of social changes is that we largely traded neighbors for co-workers and co-enthusiasts. I think we're trading what I call a horizontal community for a vertical community. So, in the old days, you'd know the people who live next door. Now, I know a couple of people who live next door. In fact, I have friends on my block. I have several friends who live very close to me, who come over to my house frequently. So, I actually do, for the first time since college, I do have real proximate neighbors. But, when I lived in Japan, I only knew maybe one neighbor. When I lived in New York, I didn't know any neighbors at all. When I lived in Michigan, I knew none of my neighbors. Growing up in College Station, Texas, I knew--sort of knew--my neighbors, but I never would talk to them. But, you know your coworkers and the people that you hike with or play Dungeons and Dragons with or pick-up basketball, whatever you do--your co-enthusiasts--and you know people online. But you know your coworkers; and then you still know your family, except for some societies like Japan that have gotten some stuff wrong. The changes in family life have not been that--as dramatic as the changes in whether you organize horizontally or vertically--vertically being, like, according to what company you work for, what you're interested in, things like that, the verticals of society. We were trading--and now with the Internet that's gone into turbo mode because with the Internet, you can just stay holed up in your cave, building what you feel to be deep bonds with someone in Australia. It's not even--like, in the days of coworkers, you'd still be physically proximate to the coworkers, right? In the case of co-enthusiasts, you'd still meet them on the basketball court. But now your co-enthusiasts are just people who write similar memes to you, and you have some notional connection with them online. I do wonder if something important is lost, but--you know? Russ Roberts: I'm not sure how that's going to play out culturally over time. I don't know if we're going to keep this. I mean, I like you, Noah. I think I've seen you physically once. I think we've been in the same room once. Twice? Okay, but not very often. Noah Smith: Not very often. Russ Roberts: A fraction of--half the number of times we've talked on Zoom via EconTalk. And I think if we spent an evening getting drinks and dinner and going to listen to music, our relationship would be very different than a fifth EconTalk. It would just be richer. I'm still a big fan of in-person interaction. Russ Roberts: Online interaction is nice. I mean, I love getting emails from you listeners out there. It makes me smile and swells[?] my--makes my day. It's lovely to know that you're listening and paying attention, and this program has some impact on you that you share and you take the trouble to share just is wonderful, but it's not the same as in person. Which is fascinating to me. I mean, I can see you really well. The technology is great. There's a tiny lag, which is a big problem for banter and interjecting the noises and sounds that we use as human beings to interact effectively. But, it's pretty good. It's worth something. Noah Smith: Yeah. But, I don't want to be a Panglossian about technology and say that every single technology that ever exists makes us better. Some technologies, if we had never invented them, like, stuff would be better. Certain military technologies that just kill a lot of people. Maybe. Russ Roberts: Or maybe the smartphone. I mean, some people--the smartphones could be a really interesting thing over the next 20 years, 10 years, because when it first came out, it was like the greatest thing since sliced bread. I thought so. I still love it. I'm addicted to it. And, there are addictions that are not deadly. I don't think it's a deadly addiction. It's just a transformative addiction. And we've transformed ourselves and our interactions with each other through that, the ever-presence, the ubiquitous nature of the cell phone, ubiquity of the cell phone. So, a lot of people are a little uncomfortable with that; and many aren't; and it is going to be interesting to see how norms and culture evolves in reaction to those reactions. I don't know. I used to assume there'd be a big backlash and I don't see it yet: so, it's a little backlash. Some places are banning phones-- Noah Smith: In classrooms-- Russ Roberts: for children in classrooms. Yeah, we'll see. |
| 57:52 | Russ Roberts: I want to close with a quote, which I think I'll just tie some of what we've said together. Although it won't get to the vending machines. Although, it might. You never know. Noah Smith: You can cut the part about the vending machines if you want. I just like that. That's a good anecdote about family breakdown. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. 58:11 So here's the quote. It's from your essay. [O]ur intelligence has given us an opportunity not afforded to other animals--the chance to conceive of our species as a single team, fighting not individually but as an army united against the implacable, elemental foe of poverty and desolation. [italics in original] That single team thing is a really cool, beautiful image. Most of us don't know we're on that team and we don't get any satisfaction. What I liked about that paragraph--or sentence, actually--is that it adds some romance to industrial modernity. It says it's not this decent, decentralized, alienating, dog-eat-dog world of corporate capitalism we're under the thumb of. We're actually cooperating, often unknowingly, in a rather extraordinary enterprise worth cherishing and honoring. Which is: not just surviving, but thriving materially, which allows us to do all kinds of things, live longer lives, travel and see parts of the world we otherwise wouldn't see. A thousand things that make life lovely. And we choose which ones we want to have, because we can. And we should use our intelligence not just to expand the scope and effectiveness of industrial modernity. We could use it to appreciate it. Noah Smith: Well, I think so. I would like us to appreciate it more, and I don't know how to get people to do that yet. I write for a living; I am pretty good at describing things to people and arguing ideas, and things like that. But, in terms of how to get people to appreciate what they have, to some degree, maybe. You know, I wrote this other essay called, "Toward a Shallower Future": maybe people who are so ignorant of pain and want that they idly romanticize the hunter-gatherer existence or the Middle Ages or the 1950s, maybe getting to the point where people are that entitled and so comfortable that they can afford to sit there making up these fantasies. Maybe that was the whole point. Maybe--children are--notoriously have difficulty telling fantasy in reality. They live their lives swimming through, like, a little fantasy world that they partially make up themselves. And, maybe the goal of human society should be to return us to that existence. Perhaps fantasy is the ultimate form of consumption. And, you know, of course, at the same time, people who understand the danger of the elemental foe of poverty lurking right outside our castle walls--people who understand that danger--we have to be the adults in the room. We have to remember that stuff like Degrowth is stupid. And we have to remember the reality of what's out there. But maybe not everybody has to. Maybe the ultimate luxury that--the ultimate escape from poverty--is to not even remember that poverty is out there. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Noah Smith. You can read his essays at Noahpinion on Substack. Noah, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Noah Smith: Thanks for having me back. |
The universe, points out economist Noah Smith, is always trying to kill us, whether through asteroids hurtling through space or our every-few-hours hunger pains. Why, then, should we expect anything but a gravitational pull toward poverty? Listen as Smith explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why he believes that poverty will always be our "elemental foe," and how what he calls "industrial modernity" is key to keeping poverty at bay. They also discuss Smith's impatience with the "degrowth movement," which he thinks jeopardizes our gains in the fight against the elemental foe.
READER COMMENTS
Shalom Freedman
Aug 5 2024 at 8:11am
Noah Smith joins the long company of those who have the one great idea that is most important in the world. The Universe wants us to be poor and only with the coming ‘industrial modernity’ have we humans for a very brief time in all the time we and our ancestors have been here and have we been able to defy it. He is not of course wrong about the transformation which came in food production with the industrial revolution but he may well be wrong in thinking that calorie -poverty will forever be our greatest challenge. It is after all conceivable that the same kind of food-wealth which characterizes a great share of humanity today will cover everyone in the not so distant future.
At another point in the conversation Smith speaks about his experience in Japan and tells a dismal tale of how the Japanese family was destroyed by having the father enslaved to his workplace. Here Smith speaks about the relatively good condition of the American family, and I was surprised that Russ Roberts did not interject with some corrective information. It would have been enough just to mention one point perhaps about the increasing loneliness of Americans, or perhaps about the declining birth rate.
In any case this was a pleasant conversation with an abundance of interesting information especially regarding romantic fantasies about the supposed glorious good old days of the pre-industrial past.
Matěj Cepl
Aug 6 2024 at 1:28am
Hi,
thank you, Mr Roberts, for the enlightening talk, it reminded me back to the Common Sense reality and gave me some strength to oppose prevalent fantasies of the current media. One thing you haven’t mentioned, which I see as very relevant for the establishing of industrial modernity, is the institutional framework required for it. The agricultural lifestyle was horrible in many aspects, but one thing which it brought to the table (and why it survived and survives so well) was to some extent independence on others (to some extent, I know). When you make your own food, clothes, etc., you can sustain your existence without relying much on others. However, the moment, you suggest, that some citizen of the city should give up all their existence and just clean the shit from streets for living, you have to offer them some reliability of income. Will be there this job around in the next year, next ten years? Am I not giving up my only source of income for fantasy, which will go away with the next administration coming to power? Will this job survive the next plague or a wave of famine? Unless there is some institutional certainty, it is very difficult to start on some division of labour to the extent you can get some industrial modernity. Yes, I know this is to a large extent what New Institutional Economists, Douglas North (and Hernando de Soto) were saying, but it needs to be emphasized.
Yes, there were technological reasons (you cannot make a steam engine until you can make airtight machines, which requires exact machining unavailable until the eighteenth century, etc.), but I think there were mostly problems of lack of institutional framework, which could guarantee a peace required for the division of labour.
Thank you very much for the show again, it made me think, which is rare.
Matěj Cepl
Doug Iliff
Aug 6 2024 at 8:32pm
Mr. Smith is a young’un, compared to Russ and me, so I am bold to address one of his “fantasies”— the 1950s. And with it, I would challenge Russ, as an economist, to address in a future podcast the economics of this fantastic era.
I was born in 1949 of postwar parents. My father lost most of his platoon-mates fighting his way with Patton through Germany, and I visited Dachau— which he also visited during the war— with my middle son. His vision of America, and Americans, was unusual, based on his experience serving with all walks and faiths of life. I can’t help but think that some form of universal service would solve some of our present sociological problems. But I digress.
He had four jobs before I finished my education. The most important was obtained by his achieving a masters degree in audiology while still serving as the sole financial support of the family. I remember him studying under a naked lightbulb on our basement ping pong table.
Prairie Village, Kansas, in the 1950s and 60s was idyllic, not fantastic. It was featured in the World Book Encyclopedia as a prototypical postwar development. There were no economic outliers in those days. The kids could disappear for the day without parental concern, turning up at dinner. All the families were intact, and all the mothers were at home.
I remember hanging clothes on the line outside, and I remember the arrival of a an electric drier. I remember the replacement of our coal chute with gas central heating. I remember sharing an upstairs bedroom with three brothers, and the window fan drawing air though the room in summer, and the arrival of central air conditioning. There wasn’t much envy, because all of us shared the same conditions of life.
The authority of teachers was sacrosanct. Adults were benevolent despots, and they knew their role. My grade school pictures displayed 25 kids in an orderly classroom with their hands folded, and that was not a fantasy. Tommy Watson, later the champion golfer, was the lion tamer in the kindergarten play. I was the lion. When I arrived in high school, I was introduced for the first time to students from a neighboring suburb, Mission Hills. They were comparatively wealthy. Looking back, very wealthy. But it made no difference.
A case could be made that this experience was fantastic. There were no blacks in my high school, but there were lots of Jews. Both blacks and Jews were excluded from home ownership in Prairie Village by the developer, J C Nichols, who also developed the notable Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. But there were Jews in Mission Hills, and we were all friends, and it didn’t seem to make an iota of difference. My junior class had 26 National Merit finalists, the second most in the nation, so maybe I was in some sort of time warp. I had more competition in my classes than I did in medical school.
But here’s my question, Russ. It has rankled my mind for a long time. How was this possible, economically? We never dined “out,” but no one was fat, either. I suspect your early years must have had similarities. How is it different today? Would that modicum of life still be achievable? Noah writes about the size of houses then as if we lived in African huts. He doesn’t know. Do you?
Luke J
Aug 7 2024 at 6:40pm
Russ, I recommend Victorian Farm which is a BBC 2 documentary series (available on Amazon Prime or Netflix). It’s like Econtalk of TV: it is inspiring, educational, thought-provoking; makes you appreciate current comforts. You’ll like it more than Frontier House.
Speaking of appreciation, I accept that industrial modernity is the single easiest explanation for today’s standards of living but I also think there are valid criticisms in light of ecological/environmental consequences. Yes, we produce more from less and that is a kind of waste reduction. But we also consume less than we produce (i.e. produce waste) and the costs of consumption do not always fall on the primary consumers.
Bálint Lukács
Aug 8 2024 at 8:24am
I enjoyed this conversation, but I was quite disappointed by Noah’s unwillingness to engage with the underlying philosophy of the degrowth movement, and his decision to instead use rely on a straw man argument to paint the movement in a negative light, and to make fun of it. While I’m sure there are many proponents of degrowth (mainly left-leaning youth without much life experience) who advocate against growth everywhere, without considering its benefits, most ecological economists do not do so. Instead, they argue that in countries where the ‘elemental foe’ has not been defeated yet, growth is essential and should be sped up, whereas in the so-called ‘developed’ countries, it is no longer required, and may even be detrimental to societal well-being.
I would have appreciated it if Russ and Noah focused more on the above, on the potential detrimental effects prioritising economic growth above all else might have on our society, instead of spending the majority of the conversation making fun of ideas that are obviously ridiculous (such as economic growth providing no benefits to society). The Japan anecdote could have provided a nice segue into this topic, but again, Noah was unwilling to go there. I must admit, I found this part of the conversation especially strange: when confronted with the idea that a lot of people are blaming our collective fixation on economic growth for the breakdown of traditional relationships (families, ‘real’ friends, etc.), Noah simply said, “well, Americans are still doing a lot better than the Japanese”. After this, he did not even attempt to say why that might be the case, even though from his perspective, this should be an interesting question, considering Japan is also a highly developed country from a material perspective. I suspect he blames something other than economic growth, but it would have been nice if he had explained this.
Maybe I’m naive, but it seems to me that most people are quite easily convinced of the idea that economic growth, in general, is a good thing. But more and more people are becoming aware of its potential downsides, and the trade-offs involved in the choice to pursue it above all else, in countries that are materially well off. What we thus need is a careful elaboration on what these downsides might be and ideas about what we can do in light of them, rather than sweeping statements such as “economic growth is good and anyone who believes otherwise lives in a fantasy world”. Luckily, I know Russ agrees with me on this, and is quite happy to discuss what is lost when we focus too much on accumulating “stuff”, as he has done in previous Econtalk episodes.
Mike J
Aug 9 2024 at 2:20pm
Great discussion. There was one area I didn’t entirely agree with Smith and Roberts, and that’s how they characterized the hunter-gatherer “Stone Age” lifestyle.
To be clear, I would *not* want to trade convenient, comfortable, prosperous modern life for that at all. But what the archaeology actually tells us from this period (and it’s tens of thousands of years with paucity of evidence) is that hunter-gatherer lifestyle varied a lot more than we think it did. They didn’t always live on the edge of privation. Sapiens often did experience times of plentiful food that could be stored and feed large populations, especially when cooperating as larger groups to hunt mammoth and other large game; there were also seasonal congregations of bands and tribes that would exchange and trade both stuff and knowledge to mutual survival and benefit.
What’s more, one could argue that many (not all) hunter-gatherers actually had better individual lives than both agricultural peasants and sweatshop workers in the Industrial Age. To me, the significance of this would be that agriculture and industry made life better collectively for civilization, but they did not make life better for most individuals. For example, while settled societies’ peasants and workers were often reliant on one major source of food, like wheat or potato, they were terribly vulnerable if that crop had a bad harvest; Paleolithic people varied their diet and could move if one food source was threatened. THis also made them less vulnerable to pandemic outbreaks of disease. And there is no doubt that peasants and workers both labored long, grueling days, whereas Paleolithic humans, while having to spend a lot of time foraging, hunting, mending clothes, building shelters, etc., clearly had more leisure time as evidenced by the material remains they have left, such as beads and jewelry, musical instruments, and elaborate cave paintings, all of which would have required thousands of hours to create.
Again, we’re much better off now than any of our ancestors. And hopefully our descendants will be even more prosperous than us. But I don’t think there has been gradual stages of progress in terms of the overall quality of human life. I think with each stage-Paleolithic, agricultural, industrial, moder-there have been enormous tradeoffs that in many cases, were not better for the individual even if they were for the progress of civilization.
Dr. Duru
Aug 13 2024 at 11:02pm
While listening to this podcast, I could not help thinking about how this modern age introduced civilization for the first time to the possibility of near instant extinction (through nuclear weapons). I was surprised there was no mention of this major downside of progress except for an off-hand reference toward the end of the podcast acknowledging the bad things technology can do. In my mind, the invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons has brought us to a kind of end game that, only in retrospect, could completely undermine the glorious and righteous pride we take in our prosperity.
So how exactly do we figure in the ultimate cost when we compare and contrast the value of today’s prosperity versus generations prior to the nuclear age? Or maybe we will invent yet more tools of existential threats that will more clearly tip the balance in favor of prior eras. I am not apocalyptic (I have faith), but I do think a complete evaluation of today’s prosperity has to somehow take into account the oh so many ways we have created to destroy ourselves in ways the nature of generations past likely did not intend (or heck, maybe it did!).
I wish there were some more comfortable middle ground…
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