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