🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #13

➡ Reminder: I will be writing much less frequently and much shorter in November — and November only. So for this month, I have paused payment from paid subscribers. Also, I’m making all new content free without a paywall. In December, however, everything will be back to normal: typically three meaty essays and two enlightening Q&As a week, along with a pro-progress podcast like this one several times a month (including transcript). And, of course, a weekly recap over the weekends. Melior Mundus “Generations of people throughout the world have been taught to believe that there is an inverse relationship between population growth and the availability of resources, which is to say that as the population grows, resources become more scarce.” That’s how Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley open their new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. It’s also the central premise of much of today’s Down Wing, zero-sum thinking. And it happens to be wrong. Tupy and Pooley: It is free people, not machines or deities, who generate new ideas, and it is free people who test those new ideas against other people’s ideas in the marketplace. The process of knowledge and value creation is at the heart of humanity’s moral and material progress. It is what enables our civilization to bend towards goodness and superabundance. What is superabundance? The authors again: “[A]bundance occurs when the nominal hourly income increases faster than the nominal price of a resource,” meaning resources become cheaper (more abundant!) in real terms. Superabundance occurs “when the abundance of resources grows at a faster rate than population increases.” And that’s exactly what we see in the world today. Cato Institute senior fellow and HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy joins me in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast to discuss superabundance, Hollywood’s Malthusianism, and more. In This Episode * Will we ever run out of Earth? (1:33) * Can our planet sustain billions of people living like Americans? (5:13) * The burden of proof is on the doomsayers (12:12) * The more people, the better (18:04) Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. Will we ever run out of Earth? James Pethokoukis: There's only so much Earth, so eventually, aren't we going to run out of Earth and its bounty? Marian Tupy: It's certainly true that the Earth has a finite number of atoms, but the amount of value that we can get from those atoms is basically infinite. Look at something as simple as sand that has been on Earth for billions of years. At some point thousands of years ago, people realize that they could turn sand into glass jars and later into windows. And now we are using sand in order to create fiber optic cables, which are carrying information around the world at very high speeds and a lot of volume in order to power our civilization's communication networks. So from something as simple as a grain of sand, you can get ever more value. If you are somebody who thinks economic growth is a good thing, who wants the global economy to keep growing—and, gee, it'd be great if it grew even faster—at some point it's going to hit a limit. Aren't we already seeing that with lithium shortages? I hear that lithium shortages are going to slow the green transition. So aren't people who are pro-growth, pro-progress, or pro-abundance—even pro-superabundance—isn't that just kind of a temporary state and eventually, I don't know, 50 years, 100, that's not a tenable position over the really long, long run? No, because knowledge continues to expand. As long as we have more people on Earth, and hopefully one day in cooperation with AI or advanced computing, we'll be able to create evermore knowledge. And it is that knowledge which allows us to get around problems of scarcity. Lithium is a perfect example. Lithium-ion batteries are a massive advance in terms of storage of electricity. But who is to say whether batteries in the future will be powered by lithium? Maybe we'll come up with a different compound, which will allow us to store energy at a much cheaper price. In fact, people are already working on basically creating batteries out of, not lithium-ion, but sodium-ion, which apparently is going to last even longer and will be massively cheaper. So it's not only a question of efficiency gains—instead of using three ounces of tin or aluminum for a can of Coke, you are now using only half an ounce—and it's not just about technological breakthroughs like, for example, GMO foods so that you can increase the yield of plants for an acre of land; it's also about substitution. This is very important. It's about substitution. You are using something in order to get to a certain goal, but you may realize 10 years, 100 years from now that you don't actually need it, that you need something completely different. And humanity has been through this very often. Two-hundred years ago, the great discovery was of course coal and steam. And people immediately started wondering, what is going to happen by the year 1900 or 1950 when we are all going to run out of coal? And then oil and gas came on board and displaced coal to a great extent. So substitution will play its role, and lithium is not going to be a problem. Can our planet sustain billions of people living like Americans? There was certainly a time where people were—and some people still are—worried very much about overpopulation. This really became a thing in the early 1970s, where we worried that we had too many people. We were worried about natural resource constraints. We were going to be running out of oil and just about everything else. How much is your thesis is based on the idea that global population will continue to grow to maybe 10 or 11 billion and then it stops? Would you still have this thesis if we were going to have a population of 30 billion people, all of whom would like to live like Americans do today, if not better? Is the idea of a constrained population key to this forecast? You started by pointing to the 1970s, and whilst it is true that many academics have departed from the basic Malthusian premise that more people will lead to an exhaustion of resources, what we found writing this book was very disturbing, which is that Malthusian ideas are much more widespread than we originally thought amongst the common public, amongst the ordinary people. In fact, as far as we can tell, a disproportionate number of mass shooters in America and also around the world, especially in developed countries, have been people driven by Malthusian ideas. This goes back to Anders Breivik in Norway, then the guy called Tarrant in New Zealand, all the way to the mass shooters in the United States, the guy who killed 22 people in El Paso in Walmart a couple of years ago—all of these people have been driven by the notion that there are far too many people in the world using far too many resources. The Malthusian notions are still very much present. You can also get them from multi-national organizations like the United Nations. You have these websites like the Overshoot Day and things like that still. So people still buy into it, and that's deeply worrying because obviously we think that population growth is… Overshoot, meaning that we're overshooting the capacity of our resources and that for everyone to live like Americans, we would need 10 Earths—and obviously we don't have 10 Earths. The current calculations say that we are already using 1.7 planets in order to maintain our standards of living, which is ridiculous because we still only have one planet. How can we already be using 1.7 planets? It doesn't make any sense. Wouldn’t they say this isn't sustainable? People who are very worried about running out of everything, when they talk about growth, it's never just growth, it’s “sustainable growth.” What they mean is sustainable environmentally. And when it comes to that, then of course we have to ask, how would this unsust… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe