sourceType:: article author:: Nick Gillespie sourcePublication:: Reason Magazine ref:: https://reason.com/?p=8218944 noteTitle:: Rousseau Malthus and Thanos Were Wrong; Nick Gillespie. (article)
Rousseau Malthus and Thanos Were Wrong; Nick Gillespie. (article)
Interview with Marian L Tupy and Gale L Pooley about Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
Pooley also makes an appearance on ref_superabundance-with-gale-pooley_saifedean-ammous_the-bitcoin-standard-podcast talking about similar topics.
Notes
Concepts
Time Price
We buy things with money, but it’s really with time (worked). How long do you have to work to buy X units of Z good? Time is a constant, can’t be changed, and everyone has the same amount per day. Think of time inequality rather than income inequality.
A bag of potatoes is the same as 300 years ago and the same as current day but in africa. the work-time required to get that bag of potatoes is wildly different across time and space, though.
The time-price of nearly everything (definitely all dailly-survival-level goods) has dropped significantly over time.
Abundance
The rate at which you can get stuff (and at what price) relative to you population. People thought that as population grew, abundance would go down (things would get more expensive), but Pooley and Tupy found that abundance growth rate almost always grows at a higher rate than population growth. That is what defines superabundance. “human beings create new knowledge which is capable of increasing standards of living”.
Resources
Atoms aren’t resources on their own. It’s atoms plus knowledge that creates resources. and this is the definition of innovation.
Innovation
Human innovation (adding knowledge to atoms) requires human freedom to explore ideas.
Examples
-
rice price has declined (since 1850 until 2018) 99% in terms of time worked to buy a pound.
- You get 112 pounds of rice for the same amount of work that would have bought you one pound in 1850.
- same is true for sugar, nickel, tea, tye, palm oil, pork, cotton, wheat, cocoa. average drop of about 98%.
- if you had to work 100 minutes to buy it in 1850, you now have to work 2 minutes to buy it today.
-
in 1960, an Indian would work all day to buy enough rice to subsist. with cost of rice coming down 80 or 90%, they only have to spend an hour a day. you’ve got six or so hours a day to learn, earn excess money for quality of life, move out of scarcity, etc.
- Multiply these 6 hours by 2 billion people in China and India (assuming their freedom to pursue it) and you’ve got a whole lot of innovation coming.
Quotes
The universe is fininte and its resources are fininte. [that’s] correct on the first part. We do live on a planet with a fixed number of atoms. Atoms are important, but resources are really a function of knowledge.
When you take the material world - atoms - and you organize them and you add knowledge to them: That’s when they become resources. And that knowledge is really what creates their value.
look at the gap between infants dying in the Third World and in the West, how much it has shrunk. Maternal mortality, time inequality, calorie inequality there are hundreds of different inequalities which are shrinking around the world as a result of economic development. So even though income inequality may still be increasing in some countries, income inequality across the world has shrunk.
When population declines, you have this other effect of the demographic age: Not only are you not having more people, [but] your average age is getting older. So you end up like Japan, where the average age is much older. Simon highlighted it: Innovation primarily comes from young people, and you have to have more young people to innovate. Even though you’ve got a large population, if the average age is 65, you’re not going to see innovation either.
In comes Rousseau, and he says, “All this new wealth is corrupting us.” The other figures of the Enlightenment were saying, “The more wealth you have, the better the society becomes.” He says that it’s corrupting us, that it’s making us less moral, it’s making us more separated from nature, it’s enslaving us. You see this argument in fascism, in Nazism and communism, all the way to modern environmentalism. Basically, it’s based on this notion of Rousseau’s noble savage.
The goal of the extreme environmentalist movement is the destruction of the capitalist system.
[Marx thought production was solved and distribution was the only problem] You’ve got to think about the historical perspective of how expensive things used to be and why they are so abundant today. It wasn’t because we came up with a new distribution system. It’s because we’ve been able to continually innovate. And that requires human freedom. Thank God that nobody had the power to stop innovation in 1900. There’s a famous anecdote of somebody who said that we can shut down the patent office in Washington, D.C., because everything that could have been invented was. And that was 24 years before antibiotics came online. It’s incredibly silly to think that we have reached the pinnacle of prosperity.
Rousseau and the ‘Noble Savage’
There are some apologetics going on in the wikipedia page for Noble Savage. I don’t really know Rousseau, but it seems like he did have a “man is inheritely good” stance, though the wikipedia is trying to distance him from connecting this with natives. probably to recover him from historical racism. Arthur O. Lovejoy said:
The notion that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality was essentially a glorification of the State of Nature, and that its influence tended to wholly or chiefly to promote “Primitivism” is one of the most persistent historical errors.
see also primitivism
GPT Summary
In his article, Nick Gillespie discusses the book “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet” by Marian L Tupy and Gale L Pooley. The authors challenge the notion that population growth inevitably leads to scarcity and inequality. They introduce the concept of Time Price, which measures how long one has to work to buy a unit of a good. They argue that thanks to human innovation, the time-price of many goods has dropped significantly over time.
Tupy and Pooley also argue that resources aren’t just atoms, but atoms plus knowledge. This idea is central to their concept of innovation - adding knowledge to atoms to create resources. They emphasize the importance of human freedom in fostering innovation.
(in anarchy-agorism-libertarianism-voluntaryism we understand that value can only be the result of resources + knowledge/effort/invention)
Gillespie provides examples such as rice prices declining by 99% since 1850 in terms of time worked to buy a pound. Similarly, an Indian worker in 1960 would work all day for enough rice but now only has to spend an hour a day due to price drops.
The article also discusses concepts like income inequality shrinking globally despite increases in some countries due to economic development. It warns against aging populations like Japan’s where fewer young people could lead to less innovation.
Gillespie criticizes Rousseau’s idea that wealth corrupts society and separates us from nature, linking it with extremism in environmentalism and political ideologies like fascism and communism. He also rebukes Marx’s notion that production was solved and only distribution was problematic.
Overall, the article argues for the power of human innovation and freedom in increasing living standards and improving economic equality.