Podcast appearances and mentions of Julian Simon

Teleclinic ist in Hausarztkreisen als Plattform für Videosprechstunden hoch umstritten. Im „ÄrzteTag“-Podcast mit Julian Simon von Teleclinic und dem Hausarzt Stefan Spieren diskutieren wir über das Geschäftsmodell.

por Yaiza Santos El gesto de Sánchez después de decir «tres años más y los que vienen», ese rictus al congelársele la sonrisa y endurecer la mandíbula, le parece la muestra de un cambio en el presidente. Ya no es aquel que ponía cara de pasmo bobalicón cuando se le insultaba; comienza a tener la cara del malo de película en que está efectivamente recalando. Lamentó que, después de tanto tiempo sin hablar de Feijóo, no sea para nada bueno. ¡Hicieron el ridículo con su estrategia en la Comisión Europea de vetar a Teresa Ribera! Y no menos bochornoso ha sido su papel al asistir al congreso de la UGT, ¡celebrado encima en Barcelona!, sin un ápice de crítica a ese sindicato que fue una de las vértebras más despreciables para la metástasis del proceso. Pero en fin, el líder de la oposición nunca lo llama cuando va a Barcelona, y por eso pasa lo que pasa. ¿Quién es Lobato?, preguntó a Santos, estupefacto. ¿Y Broncano? ¿Por qué los diarios tienen que hablar de la televisión? ¡La competencia más grave que tienen!, como advirtió Umberto Eco. No, sentenció: ¡que la televisión se cueza en su jugo! El periódico del siglo XXII que él anuncia prescindirá por completo de ella. En un periódico así, prosiguió, no presentarían sin más esa noticia del CIS que muestra el pesimismo de los españoles. A ella contrapondrían las predicciones del maravilloso Julian Simon: que el bienestar continuaría mejorando y que la gente continuaría quejándose de que las cosas eran mejores en el pasado. Elogió las crónicas de Emilia Landaluce y, ante el anuncio de las nuevas estrellas Michelin, sentenció: ninguno de los restaurantes de Barcelona que figuran en la nueva lista merece la pena. ¡Ninguno! Y fue así que Espada yiró.   Bibliografía: Eurípides, Las bacantes Umberto Eco, De la estupidez a la locura Bill Bufford, Entre los vándalos y La transmisión del sabor «Las abreviaturas en los mensajes de texto hacen que los remitentes parezcan poco sinceros, según un estudio», APA, 14 de noviembre de 2024 «Identidad de género y acceso a la enseñanza superior», Studies in Higher Education, 16 de septiembre de 2024 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The US Economy has been booming in recent years and most Americans are doing better than they were a year ago, unemployment is lower, wages are growing, and inflation is declining. It's not just the one percent either, the statistics show that Americans across ages and social classes are doing really well. While people should be feeling these tangible economic improvements, surveys show that Americans are the most pessimistic they have been about the economy in thirty years. TikTokers have coined the term “the silent depression,” claiming that it's harder to get by today than it was during the great depression. So what is the truth about the US Economy? Further Reading: It's Getting Better All The Time - Stephen Moore & Julian Simon: https://amzn.to/3CigyiK Factfulness by Hans Rosling: https://amzn.to/4fqA6QI Gilad Edelman in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/inflation-food-prices-democrat-biden/676901/ Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3eerLA0 Derivatives For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3cjsyPF Corporate Finance: https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC Ways To Support The Channel: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PatrickBoyleOnFinance Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/patrickboyle Visit our website: https://www.onfinance.org Follow Patrick on Twitter Here: https://twitter.com/PatrickEBoyle Business Inquiries ➡️ sponsors@onfinance.org

Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses his book "Super Abundance" with Gene Tunny. Tupy argues that resources are becoming more abundant relative to global population, a concept he calls "super abundance." He explains that human ingenuity has led to cheaper commodities over time. Tupy refutes Malthusian predictions of resource scarcity, citing examples like the Haber-Bosch process for synthetic fertilizer. He also addresses environmental concerns, emphasizing that economic growth and technological advancements can mitigate issues like ocean and air pollution and resource depletion.If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for Gene, please email him at contact@economicsexplored.com  or send a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. About this episode's guest: Marian Tupy, Cato InstituteMarian L. Tupy is the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.He is the co-author of the Simon Abundance Index, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (2022) and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (2020).His articles have been published in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the U.K. Spectator, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets both in the United States and overseas. He has appeared on BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other channels.Tupy received his BA in international relations and classics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.Source: https://www.cato.org/people/marian-l-tupyTimestamps for EP258Introduction and Overview of the Podcast (0:00)Explaining the Concept of Super Abundance (2:30)Methodology and Stylized Facts (6:48)Julian Simon and the Bet with Paul Ehrlich (9:46)Future Prospects and Human Ingenuity (12:45)Environmental Concerns and Degrowth (22:59)Population Growth and Resource Use (33:11)Final Thoughts and Future Prospects (34:08)TakeawaysTupy argues that human ingenuity continuously expands the resource base, making resources more abundant even as populations grow.The concept of "time prices" shows that resources are becoming cheaper relative to wages, supporting the thesis of super abundance.The famous Simon-Ehrlich bet demonstrates that commodities became cheaper over time, disproving doomsday predictions about resource depletion.Technological advancements, such as desalination and agricultural productivity, are key to sustaining resource abundance.Economic prosperity and technological innovation are essential for environmental protection.Links relevant to the conversationMarian's book Superabundance:https://www.amazon.com.au/Superabundance-Population-Growth-Innovation-Flourishing/dp/1952223393Simon–Ehrlich wager Wikipedia entry:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wagerRegarding the question, “Is it true that the majority of plastic in the oceans comes from Asia and Africa?” see:https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-it-true-that-the-majority-o-3aYOSMTyT6m9CcULDm7IugLumo Coffee promotion10% of Lumo Coffee's Seriously Healthy Organic Coffee.Website: https://www.lumocoffee.com/10EXPLOREDPromo code: 10EXPLORED 

Regular readers of my blog know I took a course, Conservatism 101, from the Leadership Institute, which led me to read conservative literature I hadn't before: Edmund Burke, Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and more. This reading came after I started reading and watching Milton Friedman, Julian Simon, Ayn Rand, and current followers of their work like Marian Tupy, Gale Pooley, and Alex Epstein. I had blogged about them after reading their works too. I began seeing relevance of their work to sustainability that I don't think even their fans appreciate.At a social event, I met a woman who works at the Cato Institute. I told her of what I was learning and invited her to talk about it. She said sustainability and the environment weren't her focus, but she could put me in touch with colleagues. She knew Jack Spencer from the Heritage Foundation.I share some of my background, generally left politics, but opening up to learning more from (podcast guest) Jonathan Haidt's work, then attending an event at the Trump Bedminster Golf Course, which led to learning about the Leadership Institute. There I took Conservatism 101, which led the above.Jack shares some of his background, also not starting on the political right, and how he applies the above to politics today, especially energy, regulation, subsidy, and the motivations of government employees and what he sees happen as they gain power.We don't reach the point of talking policy. I started to bring up the Spodek Method, but became so engrossed in Jack's sharing about nature, I followed up with it, especially wondering if he experienced environmentalists saying he didn't care. He clearly cares plenty about the environment.This conversation is different than nearly any I've heard on sustainability. I think you'll like it. My main flaw was my inexperience in talking about some topics so was tongue-tied at times.Jack's profile at Heritage Foundation Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Regular readers of my blog know I took a course, Conservatism 101, from the Leadership Institute, which led me to read conservative literature I hadn't before: Edmund Burke, Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and more. This reading came after I started reading and watching Milton Friedman, Julian Simon, Ayn Rand, and current followers of their work like Marian Tupy, Gale Pooley, and Alex Epstein. I had blogged about them after reading their works too. I began seeing relevance of their work to sustainability that I don't think even their fans appreciate.At a social event, I met a woman who works at the Cato Institute. I told her of what I was learning and invited her to talk about it. She said sustainability and the environment weren't her focus, but she could put me in touch with colleagues. She knew Nick Loris from when he worked at the Heritage Foundation. Now he works at C3 Solutions---the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions.I invited him to talk about our approaches to the environment, both our historical journeys and our philosophical views. We talked about first-principles approaches from a limited government, free market view.I haven't heard conversations like this one on sustainability. You'll hear genuine curiosity and learning.Nick's profile at C3 Solutions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dans cet épisode 130 du Trio Économique, Vincent rend hommage au Jour de la Terre en discutant de 18 prédictions faites par les plus éminents écologistes au fil du temps, toutes s'étant révélées FAUSSES ! Nous abordons le pari entre l'économiste Julian Simon et l'écologiste Paul Ehrlich à l'époque, un pari que Simon a largement GAGNÉ ! Vincent exprime même son désir d'acquérir le chèque que Simon avait reçu d'Ehrlich et qu'il avait fait encadrer... Par ailleurs, Frank diffuse un extrait de Claire Lamarche des années 1990, où elle prédit qu'en l'an 2000, il n'y aura plus de sirop d'érable et que nous devrons porter des masques à gaz en raison de la pollution de l'air ! Dans la PARTIE BONUS PATREON, Ian quitte en raison de son rhume et Vincent et Frank discutent du journalisme et du conservatisme, en lien avec Christian Dufour et la direction que prennent les médias mainstreams. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 INTRO 2:10 Le Jour de la Terre 4:00 Battre l'IRIS avec son 4e trio 7:30 Bruno Zedong et la Chine 9:15 18 prédictions écolos erronées… 21:20 Vincent, un radical ? 26:50 7 fois plus riches en 2100 ? 29:10 Le recyclage n'est pas si green 30:16 Claire Lamarche et l'an 2000 33:50 La courbe de Kuznets 36:10 Le pari entre Julian Simon et Paul Ehrlich 39:00 Vincent veut payer 8K $ pour le chèque ! 43:50 Les prédictions de Ehrlich 50:00 Les faux progressistes 58:15 Sartre ne voulait que baiser ses étudiantes 1:00:25 Conclusion Visiter notre Patreon pour des podcasts sans publicités avec quelques extras : www.patreon.com/isenechal Notre page Facebook : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ISenechal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Notre compte Twitter : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/PiluleRouge_CA⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Notrecompte TikTok : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@iansenechal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ian & Frank : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6FX9rKclX7qdlegxVFhO3B ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Les Affranchis : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/61ZraWorXHQL64KriHnWPr?si=e0ca97a8510845c6⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/letrioeconomique/message

Julian Simon's name does not mean much to many Christians today, but it should.  Julian Simon understood “the long game” when it came to public discourse. He knew that it was important not merely to win political victories, but to win hearts and change minds. It's a lesson that ministry leaders and donors who want to make a difference would do well to remember.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them, published by ymeskhout on July 14, 2023 on LessWrong. Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter. Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was: We've all heard about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. Simon the cornucopian bet that resources would get cheaper, Ehrlich the doomsayer bet that they would get pricier, and Simon crushed him. There's a whole book on it. What you probably don't know, however, is that in 1995, Paul Ehrlich and Steve Schneider proposed a long list of new bets for Simon - and that Simon refused them all. The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials: Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau - so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion - many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline! Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have? What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were: I kept thinking ".so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth. Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to h...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them, published by ymeskhout on July 14, 2023 on LessWrong. Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter. Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was: We've all heard about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. Simon the cornucopian bet that resources would get cheaper, Ehrlich the doomsayer bet that they would get pricier, and Simon crushed him. There's a whole book on it. What you probably don't know, however, is that in 1995, Paul Ehrlich and Steve Schneider proposed a long list of new bets for Simon - and that Simon refused them all. The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials: Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau - so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion - many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline! Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have? What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were: I kept thinking ".so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth. Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to h...

In 1968, Stanford ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb, arguing that rapid growth in human numbers would result in environmental catastrophe and widespread famine. Overall the dire predictions of The Population Bomb did not come to pass, with the Green Revolution staving off the specter of mass starvation. With eight billion people today, the world population has doubled since 1970, and global TFR (totality fertility rate) is now 2.4, down from 4.5 in 1970. When it comes to our planet's most populous nations, as of 2019, China and the U.S. had sub-replacement fertility levels at 1.69 and 1.71 respectively, while India hovered near the replacement rate at 2.2, and Indonesia slightly surpassed it with a TFR of 2.32. A 2020 Lancet study projected that the global population could peak in 2064 at around 9.7 billion, then declining to about 8.8 billion by the end of the century, largely due to decreasing fertility rates. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Lillian Tara, executive director of Pronatalist.org, an organization devoted to reversing the trend toward sub-replacement fertility worldwide as nations develop. Tara is notable as the youngest guest on Unsupervised Learning, born after 9/11, she is focused on the future with an awareness of the past. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia in politics and policy, set to matriculate  at Harvard University in the fall of 2023 for her master's, Tara believes that humans are a vital resource and that a future with ever-dwindling populations is a future of ever-dwindling possibilities. Following in the path of Julian Simon, an economist who was Ehrlich's great nemesis in the 1970's and 1980's, Tara outlines the anti-Malthusian economic case that far from capsizing "lifeboat earth," innovation and technology will lift all boats over time. Though Pronatalist.org promotes a change in the culture when it comes to expectations about reproduction, Tara is also an enthusiast of cutting-edge next-generation reproductive technology, from surrogacy to in vitro fertilization. She is particularly focused on how to incentivize high-status individuals to have more children. Tarra believes that cultural leaders and influencers set the norms for society as a whole and that it is critical to make having larger families cool and an aspiration, rather than the practices of marginal religious sects.

In this latest pile of TRAP, the Trap Pack discussThree glowing reviews of the podcast, read by Andy in his inimitable styleTopical issues, including Carl attending The Real Deal; TRAP being shortlisted for a podcast award; getting encouraged by podcast-meister Steven Bartlett; Berkshire Hathaway 2023 AGM; HUM London and South Africa on the horizon; Lisbon as a decent city breakMeat and Potatoes: Getting To Know YouQuestions posted by our beloved Trappists Tom R and @burtong1    Culture CornerLinks referred to in the show:Interested in coming on the show as a Guest Host? Apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScspw4v7Jq8Amuas2faXX3oIRxoZH-WdkE-r4zA_h7RoWXlLw/viewform?usp=sf_linkCEK Worldwide Total Client Profile: http://www.cegworldwide.com/downloads/bt-book/eb_ceg_sample_tcp.pdf Just Ask! Graham Eisner  Just Ask! 7 simple steps to unlock the power of clients, generate referrals and double your business PaperbackJames Dyson - Invention: A Life https://amzn.eu/d/dpXxyiPThe Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future https://amzn.eu/d/6jKIogNMerryn Somerset Webb's Tweet on why the UK stock market continues to shrink: https://twitter.com/HatTipNick/status/1654228720771641344Decent virtual financial planner website. Kindness Financial Planning, Elliott Appel: What Is It Like Working With a Virtual Financial Planner?On Healing with Brendan Ring https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/on-healing/id1682268935?i=1000611458696Michael Lewis https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/against-the-rules-with-michael-lewis/id1455379351 Take part in the conversation! We want YOU to suggest topics and questions you'd like the Trap Pack to answer. The best way to do this is to ask them here. Help us to help you! The more followers we have, the more we can do stuff going forward. So please: Subscribe and Like our YouTube Channel Leave a 6/5 star review on iTunes Share TRAP with your peers and colleagues 'Enjoy' the Twitter chat at @AdviserPodcast.

“When Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths, he replied, ‘This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.'” -Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism In 1989 a mask-off moment occurred. It was erroneously reported that fusion had been cracked: Limitless, almost free energy was humanity's immediate future. But environmentalists, far from jumping for joy, lamented the breakthrough. That's when it became clear: They hate us. “Frustrated with the incessant claims that the Earth would run out of oil, food and raw materials, the economist Julian Simon in 1980 challenged the established beliefs with a bet. He offered to bet $10,000 that any given raw material – to be picked by his opponents – would have dropped in price at least one year later.  The environmentalists Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren, all of Stanford University, accepted the challenge, stating that "the lure of easy money can be irresistable." The environmentalists staked their bets on chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten, and they picked a time frame of ten years. The bet was to be determined ten years later, assessing whether the real prices had gone up or down. In September 1990 not only had the total basket of raw materials but also each individual raw material dropped in price. Chromium had dropped 5 percent, tin a whopping 74 percent. The doomsayers had lost. Truth is they could not have won. Ehrlich and Co. would have lost no matter whether they had staked their money on petroleum, food-stuffs, sugar, coffee, cotton, wool, minerals or phosphates. They had all become cheaper.” -Lomborg, Skeptical Environmentalist

When it comes to Up Wing thinking, there's no better litmus test than nuclear power. Setting aside the regulatory barriers we've imposed on ourselves, the United States can tap a source of clean, reliable energy that overcomes the carbon emissions and geopolitical challenges of fossil fuels. Here to make the case for nuclear in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, is Robert Zubrin.Robert is a nuclear engineer and the author of the new book, The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future.In This Episode* Is the case for nukes contingent on climate change? (1:14)* How the Atomic Age ended (6:39)* A 75-percent nuclear America (15:03)* Is a nuclear renaissance coming? (23:00)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationIs the case for nukes contingent on climate change?James Pethokoukis: Were it not for climate concerns, would there still be a case for nukes, or would you be writing The Case for Carbon instead?Robert Zubrin: No, there still would be a case for nukes. The primary case for nukes is to expand humanity's energy resources. Regardless of climate change, we have an imperative to make energy more cheap and available. The primary problem in the world today is poverty. We have poverty in America, but in America, the average per capita income is $50,000 a year. Globally, the average is $10,000 a year. And half of the world is below average. So the existence of poverty in the world is quite prevalent. And that stifles people's lives. It kills people — people die of diseases that could easily be cured. They don't get educations. They suffer from malnutrition. They suffer from lack of opportunity. This is the thing that needs to be answered. We need to increase the availability of energy to put the whole world on an American standard of living. Once again, we still even have poverty here. We'd have to increase world energy five times. And fossil fuels cannot support that. So regardless of the issue of climate change or carbon enrichment of the atmosphere, we need more energy.And secondly, we need the energy to come from freedom, not from possession. It needs to come from the power of creation. A major problem with fossil fuels is it puts a lot of global power in the hands of people who just simply have it by force of possession, not through creativity. It gives wealth to those who take it rather than those who make it. For example the OPEC oil cartel could, as it did in 2008, constrict the world's energy supply below what it needs and send the price of oil up to $150 a barrel and cause a massive worldwide economic dislocation as a result. That's even a potential threat right now. Whereas nuclear power fundamentally comes from mind. That is, it's the result of technological creativity: turning something that is not a resource into a resource — an incredibly abundant resource. So it moves power where it needs to be, into the hands of the creative, which is to say in the hands of the free.Let me continue on the theme from that first question: Why isn't it The Case for Solar? I know that solar prices seem to have come way down in recent years. Why not that as the thrust of your book?The problem is this, that solar energy, and in this I would also add wind as well, are intermittent energy sources. They are not reliable sources of power with which to power an industrial civilization. They are useful boutique energy sources. Wind power has had a major role in the development of human civilization by powering ships. Worldwide commerce was enabled by putting wind to work as a classic example of off-grid power. Solar energy is predominant in space, once again, way off-grid. But if we're talking about the production of energy at scale in a reliable way to power industrial society, they simply do not cut it.Does solar still not cut it, even if we figure out new ways and better ways of storing that energy? That sounds like it's doable. We just need better batteries or ways of storing that solar energy for when it's cloudy out.There are a couple of problems there. First of all, the amount of solar energy to power Manhattan would cover most of Long Island — and try buying Long Island to put the solar energy capacity there. And then you have the problem with storage. First of all, the problem with storage on a planned basis, that is just storing for a night, is bad enough. And it basically increases the cost of a solar installation by like a factor of five just to do that. But what if it's cloudy for three days going? What if there's this thing called winter that happens? Which it does. Solar energy can be inadequate for months on end. Having the capacity to deal with that is simply not possible. So, in fact, solar energy power systems have to be 100 percent backed up by reliable sources of power, which to say either fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydroelectric.How the Atomic Age endedWhy did the Atomic Age end? Do we understand the culprits? Do we understand who the murderer was?I think I do. First of all, nuclear power in the ‘60s was so much cheaper than fossil fuel power that in the early ‘70s, we were getting orders in the United States for two new nuclear power plants per month. That's how fast it was coming online. And in fact, it caused alarm in the oil interests, who very early on tried to stop [Admiral Hyman] Rickover from introducing the nuclear submarine. Exxon and Atlantic Richfield both gave very large grants to the Sierra Club to go after nuclear power. And in fact, part of their fear was justified because after the oil price went up in ‘73, '74, nuclear power actually cleaned the lunch of oil-fired electricity in the United States. In 1972, 3 percent of American electricity was nuclear, 20 percent was oil. Now it's 3 percent oil, 20 percent nuclear. Oil, of course, maintained its premier position as transportation fuel. There, it couldn't be dislodged. It has unique advantages in that realm.But what happened was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was an ideological offensive launched by Malthusians. You may remember two very important books from that period. One was called The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. And another was called The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. That's ‘68 to ‘72. And then there were many less popular works. But they all said, “Look, we're running out of everything. We have to stop economic growth and population growth.” This was a very powerful ideological offensive, except for you may remember Julian Simon, who was an economist who said the Club of Rome was absolute nonsense. We weren't going to run out of everything, or anything, by the year 2000. But he was regarded by mainstream media as some Neanderthal from the Chamber Commerce. And if you look at the Sierra Club's statement, when they finally came out definitively against nuclear power, which was in 1974, what they said was, “We need to oppose nuclear power because it could encourage unnecessary economic growth.”And then they went on to say, “We can do this. We can stop them by stopping the establishment of any way for them to dispose of the waste.” And so they targeted nuclear waste disposal as a key weakness of nuclear power. And at that time, there were proposals in the works to just dispose of it by subsea disposal, which is easy to do. And when they got that block, and Jimmy Carter blocked that, they then opted instead for a much more elaborate program of storing the waste under a mountain in Nevada. They then campaigned against that. It baffles the mind how someone who claims to care about health and the environment can say it's better to store nuclear waste in nuclear power plants in the suburbs of major cities than under a mountain in Nevada. And yet they did. When they say there's no solution to nuclear waste disposal, there certainly is a technical solution. And the Nuclear Navy stores nuclear waste in salt domes in New Mexico. They just don't have to put up with any of this stuff. But they managed to stop the commercial nuclear waste from safely disposing of its waste and then say, “Hey, there's no way to dispose of the waste.” And they have collaborators in the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If the FAA was run like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we would have no airplanes. If you have a totally hostile regulatory structure, you can destroy any industry.Can you think of particular regulations, perhaps, that you think played a key role? Or is it just broader than that?If I was asked to name one thing that is the big problem and which needs to be corrected if we're going to have a nuclear renaissance, it's the regulatory structure, what was put in place by the Carter administration — which by the way, was in infested massively with members of the US Committee for the Club of Rome. They established this regulatory structure. In the book, The Case for Nukes, I show the flow chart of what you have to do to get a nuclear power plant license in the United States. And it looks like a map of the New York subway system with a million stops and intersections this way and that way. And guess what? Each of those subway stops themselves involves another subway map inside of it. And some of these are really ridiculous. One of the subway stops, just one, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which among many other things demands to know, and have proof to its satisfaction, that the utility should build a nuclear power plant as opposed to a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired plant, or no plant at all. Imagine if you had some land and you wanted to build a log cabin on it. And so you go to the municipal authorities and say, “I want to build a log cabin on this.” And they ask you not just for your plans to show that it's going to be a safe building, but to prove that it shouldn't be a chalet, or a cape cod, or a brick house, or a gas station, or a pet cemetery, or a zoo, or anything else.And then imagine that you actually do show that to the satisfaction of the authorities involved. But then there's now an opportunity for people who hate you to intervene in court to contest that approval. And now you have to go to court and prove to a judge and a jury that this in fact was the correct decision by the mayor. And if that court approves you, they can then appeal. That's what this is like. [Recently], we had a nuclear power plant go online in Georgia. It took 14 years to build it. Our first nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, took three years to build. That is, the amount of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant has increased by a factor of five. And this is not because they've become more complicated. It's because the legal process become vastly more complicated.And if you look at the data, as the time it has taken to build a nuclear power plant has increased, the cost has increased as the time squared. And once again, I show this in the book. It actually follows this curve. It's not even just linear, where you have to pay people for longer periods of time, you're paying all these workers to hang around doing nothing, instead of putting things together. You're paying more expensive kinds of people. Lawyers cost a lot more than plumbers, and you're paying for more and more lawyers as this thing drags on and becomes a bigger and bigger and more complex deal. So this is what has stopped nuclear power in the United States. The time to construct nuclear plants should have gone down with experience, not been quintupled.Currently, and this is a number that's sort of holding steady, we get about 20 percent of our power generation from nuclear. What is the counterfactual? What is the right number? If the ideological war had not happened, and all those nuclear plants, those two nuclear plants a year, that kept happening. What does our energy mix look like today, do you think?In France today, it is 75 percent nuclear and 10 percent hydroelectric. So it's only 15 percent fossil fuels. Here you have France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. He put together kind of a labor-industry alliance for growth that included both de Gaulle-ists and even the communists, who had a trade union. This is jobs, this is what we want. And they did it. And it's 75 percent nuclear. Meantime, here's Germany, with this massive green party, as well as green ideology infecting the social democrats and even the Christian democrats and the rest, shutting down their nuclear power plants. Germany's carbon emissions per unit power is five times that of France. Five times. There is the green Germany. And it's even worse than that, because a lot of Germany's power comes from biomass. And you have this romanticism of “We're getting our power from the forest.” Yeah, you're getting your power by killing trees and the animals that live in the trees. So how's that being a friend of nature? The way to be a friend of nature is to get your power from things that aren't involved with the natural biosphere. The person who saved the whales was Rockefeller, by switching us from whale oil to petroleum, because petroleum has much less involvement with the biosphere than the whales do. And you'll have even less involvement with the biosphere if you switch from fossil fuels to nuclear.A 75-percent nuclear AmericaHow do we get that 20 percent up to 75 percent?There needs to be, fundamentally, a societal decision. Now, one thing that very oddly works in our favor here, is that the Malthusians have oversold the case on global warming. Global warming is real. World temperatures have gone up one degree centigrade since 1870. And that's true; I don't dispute that for a minute. I dispute the fact that that is a great cause for alarm. But it's true. They have nevertheless managed to alarm people greatly, because they're trying to use global warming as a rationale for rigging up energy prices. Which is basically an extremely regressive tax. (Carbon taxes are just about the most aggressive sales tax you can have, because they don't even tax on the basis of price. They tax on the basis of mass, and a cheap cut of meat involves the same amount of carbon emissions as an expensive one. And a cheap dress involves the same amount of carbon as an expensive dress, even though one might be priced 10 times above the other.) They've oversold this. They actually got a lot of people [saying], “Oh my God, this is an existential problem. We have to stop carbon emissions.” If their primary concern actually is carbon emissions, a lot of them are saying, “Well, then why not nuclear?”So you actually have, at this point, a significant faction in the Democratic Party, and they have an organization called the Third Way, Cory Booker is a member of this faction, who say we should have nuclear power because there's an existential problem of climate change. They actually believe this. So this is the solution. The hardcore, they hate nuclear power because it would solve a problem they need to have. But these other people actually want to solve the problem. So there's some leverage there. The Biden administration, though, has responded to this faction in only limited ways. They have allocated some money to develop more advanced types of nuclear reactors. That's good.The nuclear reactors we have now are essentially the same thing that Rickover invented in the 1950s to power the Nautilus and the Shippingport plant. I don't think that that's a fundamental design flaw. Pressurized-water reactors, which is the Rickover reactor, is like 90 percent of all reactors, if you include the mild variations of it that are out there. It's a very good design. It is inherently safe. It cannot have a runaway nuclear reaction because the water that is the coolant is also necessary to sustain the nuclear reactor. And in the book, I explain the physics of that. So it's impossible. And there's been over a thousand pressurized-water reactors on land or sea over the past 60 years, and not a single person has ever been hurt from a radiological release from one of them. But that said, it's possible to have more advanced designs that would be cheaper, that would be more efficient.I hear a lot about these small modular reactors.Yeah, that's a good one. The small modular reactors are pressurized-water reactors, but it's a different kind of design where they design them to be built small so they can be built in modules in factories and literally just assembled on site. So it's not really a construction problem, it's more like a “bring a bunch of things to a place and hook them together” kind of project. That offers the chance to make them cheaper, faster to build and also to address markets not just of big cities, but maybe of towns of 100,000, 200,000, this kind of thing all over the world. That's one. There's also greener reactors, which have the capability of getting, you know, 90 percent of the energy out of nuclear fuel instead of 1 percent, which is all a pressurized-water reactor does. Thorium reactors, which [have] cheaper fuel, other things like this. I'm all for these things.But we can't have that conversation if fundamentally there's this huge division about whether we should do it at all.Correct. And in fact, if this regulatory structure remains in place, we won't have them because it's going to be even harder to get a new kind of reactor licensed than to get another reactor of a kind that people are very familiar with. There needs to be a fundamental overhaul of the entire regulatory structure. Whether you conduct your business should, number one, be between you and the authorities. Interveners from hostile interests should not be allowed to take part in that process at all. And the regulatory structure itself has to be greatly streamlined and made to operate within the law. By law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to approve plants within two years of the application. They regularly take five years, and then there's a whole bunch of agencies that take more time. Once again, this argument that nuclear power is too expensive is a fiction. Any industry can be made too expensive if there are regulators making it too expensive.Is a nuclear renaissance coming?There seem to be some things coming together which would make one optimistic about the future of nuclear. Are you an optimist or not so much?I'm fundamentally an optimist. Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” We're getting there. We're exhausting the alternatives. We fell for this bunk about, you don't really need energy, or you can get it from windmills. And that this somehow would be a much better way to do it, or anything of this sort. So this is clearly the best answer. Let me give you an idea of how much energy we're actually talking about here. The nuclear reactors, we get the fuel from uranium ore, which is several percent uranium. But if you aren't interested in just getting it from ore and you're just looking around for the uranium, granite — ordinary granite that you see, buildings are built out of it, mountains are built out of — is two parts per million uranium and eight parts per million thorium. And if you converted that to energy, a block of granite would have a hundred times the energy of an equal mass of oil. So you go through New Hampshire somewhere and you see these huge granite mountains, you're looking at mountains of energy. You're talking about more energy in one of those mountains than all the oil of Saudi Arabia. That's how much energy.And then if we talk about going the next step, which is to fusion, then one gallon of water has as much energy in fusion as 350 gallons of gasoline. We're talking about completely un-limiting the human future and the waste from it. In other words, the ironic thing about making an issue of nuclear waste is that it's the only energy source in which you actually can dispose of the waste. In other words, the waste from coal-fired power plants would be impossible to sequester it because it's literally millions of times greater in volume for a given amount of energy than nuclear power. We could easily sequester the waste. And of course, with more efficient reactors, we could actually use a lot of that waste. So there's that. It's simply the right answer, and it's being blocked by people who want there to be a limit to resources.It's a preference of sorts. It's an ideological preference.It's a problem for people who want to assert that human activities, numbers, and liberties must be fundamentally constrained because there isn't enough to go around.Let me build off that by asking you a final question, which is you dedicate the book to “the Prometheans.” Who are the Prometheans?The Prometheans are the problem solvers. There's a lot of history in this book. I talk about how we got to nuclear power, and there's a human story here that goes from Einstein and Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Rickover, and what they had to overcome to make this happen. Now, by the way, we do have a new generation of entrepreneurial people. There's a whole bunch of entrepreneurial startups in both the fission and fusion area right now who are attempting to continue this revolution by introducing even superior types of nuclear reactors. And these people have guts. I mean, it takes a lot of guts to go into the nuclear business right now. You're going to have a fight on your hands. But I think it's the right answer and I think reason carries a stick. And so I think, ultimately, the rational will prevail. 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

The Empowered Investor LIVE summit is upon us! In just 2 days, income property professionals from around the world converge on Scottsdale, Arizona! Tax professionals, asset protection and 1031 exchange experts, lenders, investment counselors and more plus a host of investors gather to join a community and share knowledge as they build up one another's portfolio. So do NOT miss this event! Join us in Scottsdale Arizona, January 27 - 29, 2023. Go to EmpoweredInvestor.com/LIVE and get your tickets NOW! And don't forget- you are invited to a western Caribbean cruise with Jason and his team! Get one on one coaching with Jason while taking a vacation from March 4 to 9. Go to EmpoweredInvestor.com/CRUISE and get your tickets today! Welcome one of Jason's senior investment counselors. Sara, a CA licensed agent, met Jason Hartman and attended her first Creating Wealth Seminar, in May 2007. Sara realized that working with him would be a perfect fit and joined the team as the National Rental Coordinator. She has successfully assisted many clients with getting their properties leased. Sara is now a Sr. Investment Counselor. “I feel extremely blessed to be a part of such an amazing team of highly qualified and experienced individuals.” Initially, Sara's main objective was to put her family's equity to work, so she worked closely with her team and purchased her first investment property at the young age of twenty-four. Sara is now planning her next strategic move in creating her mini-real estate empire. She would like to help her client's achieve success and financial freedom through real estate investing, while executing the same strategies herself. “I truly believe real estate is the superior investment vehicle! If I can do it, you can too!” If you are ready to put your money to work, please call Sara today at 714-820-4234. Specialties: Nationwide Income Property Investing. Key Takeaways: Jason's editorial 1:21 Welcome Senior Investment Counselor Sara 1:44 Housing inventory falls under 1M again as sales collapse 3:43 Number of consumers with New foreclosures and bankruptcies  7:35 Homelessness, scarcity and overpopulation 11:18 An overview of my Japan trip 12:28 The lack of sellers is also a demand problem 14:02 Altos: latest data shows surprising home price strength 15:03 Price reductions fall 16:06 Last chance to buy your tickets to the Empowered Investor LIVE conference TODAY! 16:50 Book a few days for some cruising and coaching! Get your tickets to a Western Caribbean vacation with one on one coaching with Jason! EmpoweredInvestor.com/cruise Sara's interview 17:32 Welcome investment counselor Sara 18:30 Ear to the ground; how clients/investor are reacting to the market 21:56 Money doesn't sleep 24:30 Purchasing power is going down, rents are going up with inflation 26:17 Sara's favorite markets right now 28:28 What about the older markets 30:04 'Rehabs' and the rent-to-value (RTV) ratio 31:58 Expectations of a market that no longer exists 33:05 The one percent RTV, old properties vs. new and the labor shortages 36:12 All you have to do is outrun the other guy- not the bear 38:45 Talk to your investment counselor about your plans for the future 42:24 Come to the Empowered Investor Live conference! Building bonds with our local market specialists 43:55 Join the Empowered Investor Pro community   Quotables: "Life is on-the-job training." - Jason Hartman "Investors always invest!" - Investment counselor Sara "Money doesn't sleep" - Jason Hartman   Mentioned: Neil Bawa The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future Thomas Robert Malthus Elon Musk   Follow Jason on TWITTER, INSTAGRAM & LINKEDIN Twitter.com/JasonHartmanROI Instagram.com/jasonhartman1/ Linkedin.com/in/jasonhartmaninvestor/ Call our Investment Counselors at: 1-800-HARTMAN (US) or visit: https://www.jasonhartman.com/ Free Class:  Easily get up to $250,000 in funding for real estate, business or anything else: http://JasonHartman.com/Fund CYA Protect Your Assets, Save Taxes & Estate Planning: http://JasonHartman.com/Protect Get wholesale real estate deals for investment or build a great business – Free Course: https://www.jasonhartman.com/deals Special Offer from Ron LeGrand: https://JasonHartman.com/Ron Free Mini-Book on Pandemic Investing: https://www.PandemicInvesting.com

Is humanity running out of resources, or are resources more abundant than ever? Gale Pooley is the co-author of Superabdundance, a fascinating and optimistic exploration of how economic progress has made life better for humanity. He joins us to explain why goods continue to become more abundant, why fears of overpopulation and resource depletion continue to be refuted forcefully by reality, and why human time keeps getting more valuable. We discuss the work of one of our favorite economists, Julian Simon, and how he brilliantly refuted the common view of resource scarcity, and reframed scarcity as the scarcity of human time. We also explore how inflation reverses economic progress, and how much better life would be without it, and conclude with a discussion of bitcoin's potential. Enjoyed this episode? You can take part in podcast seminars, access Saifedean's courses – including his ongoing course ECO22: The Fiat Standard – and read chapters of his forthcoming book, Principles of Economics, by becoming a Saifedean.com member. Find out more here. 

Après un match tendu, l'équipe de France s'est qualifiée pour les demi-finales de la Coupe du Monde en battant l'Angleterre (2-1). Mercredi les Bleus affronteront le Maroc tombeur du Portugal (1-0). L'Olympique Lyonnais va enfin passer sous pavillon américain. Julian Simon a doublé la mise sur la poursuite. Retrouvez toute l'actualité sportive dans votre Flash L'Équipe. 

➡ 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 unsustainability present itself in the real world? People are living longer. People are living richer lives. The very fact that longevity had been expanding until COVID suggests that we are also living healthier lives. We are better fed. And not just that: As countries become richer, they have much more money to spend on environmental protection. The extraordinary lengths that Western societies go through in order to protect their oceans and their land and their biomass and biodiversity—nothing like this has been done by humans before. Where is this apocalypse going to come from? Another way of looking at it is the question of existential threat. Well, existential threat to whom? Existential threat to humanity? But how are we going to measure it? The only way we can measure it is by looking at how many people a year are dying due to extreme weather. And that particular statistic has been reduced by 99.8 percent over the last 100 years. So even though the language of the extreme environmentalist movement is getting more and more apocalyptic, the number of people who are dying due to extreme weather is continuing to collapse.Let me ask that question in a simpler way: Do we have the ability, do we have the resources, for everyone on this planet to have at least the standard of living as Americans and Western Europeans do today? Can we do that? That's the response I often get on social media: They'll say that we cannot afford to have eight billion people living the way 300 million Americans do. Is that possible?If the basic premise of the book is correct, then yes, not just for eight billion, but potentially substantially more for the following reason: Ideas are not constrained by the laws of physics. Yes, the planets, atoms are constrained by the laws of physics, but not the ideas produced by the human brain. So long as you have more people living in freedom, communicating together, exchanging ideas—in the words of Matt Ridley, “ideas having sex”—then you can always come up with a solution to shortages, which would be, in that case, temporary, driving up prices, therefore incentivizing people to look for solutions. The essence of the book is, there are no physical limits to abundance; and therefore, it should be possible for the world to have the living standards of Americans.Is this a faith-based premise, based on a fairly short period in human existence? That you're assuming that we can still do it, that humanity is ingenious enough that we can continue to be more efficient and come up with new ways of doing things infinitely?Is it faith-based? Thomas Sowell has that great quote that the caveman had exactly the same amount of resources that we have in the world today. And the difference between their standard of living and our standard of living is the knowledge that we bring to bear onto the resources that we have. In fact, you might argue that the only reason why any resources are valuable is because of the ability of human beings to interact with them and produce value out of them. If you think about the immense difference between our standards of living and those of people in the Stone Age—again, the resources haven't gone anywhere, they're still with us; except for a few tons of metal that we have shot into space, everything else is still here: the same amount of copper, the same amount of iron—there is no reason to think that people 200 years from now who are much richer than us couldn't utilize those resources in a similarly beneficial fashion.The burden of proof is on the doomsayersLet me ask you this: Who should the burden of proof be on? People who are worried about the sustainability of growth, who think there's no way this Earth can tolerate eight or 10 billion people living like Western Europeans: Should the burden of proof be on them, or should the burden of proof be on you to say that, yes, we've done it in the past and we can continue to do it in the future?I think the burden should be on them in the following sense: This is not the first time that this particular concept has been proposed. The famous wager between Simon and Ehrlich was essentially…Explain that wager just very briefly for people. What is that wager?Paul Ehrlich is the famous biologist from Stanford University. He wrote the 1968 Population Bomb book, which became an international bestseller. He was on Johnny Carson's show like 20 times, scared and scarred generations of Americans into believing that the world was going to end because of lack of natural resources. In fact, it was based on his work that you've got Soylent Green, the famous 1973 movie with Charlton Heston. And that movie basically culminates in 2022—it's this year that the movie is supposed to happen. And of course, we never got anything like that. On the East Coast, Julian Simon at the University of Maryland basically challenged him to a bet. He said, “Look, Ehrlich, you pick any commodities you want and a time period of more than a year. We are going to put $1000 on it, and if the prices go up whilst the population expands, I'm going to pay you. If the prices go down, then you pay me.” And in fact, Ehrlich lost that bet and had to write Simon a check for $576. These believers in the apocalypse have been at this for so long that I feel that it's time for them to start convincing us that the apocalypse is coming, rather than us trying to remind them of all the previous predictions of apocalypse which didn't come true. I'm willing to go and do a bet like that.The other thing that you ask is, is this possible? Is it feasible for us to continue like that? I believe that it is feasible so long as we have at least part of the world that is still free economically and politically. I don't think that we can expect cutting-edge research from China, which is increasingly restrained politically and economically where people are not free to speak, interact with ideas. But so long as we are free in Western countries, be it the United States or some other country if freedom of speech comes to an end here, then we can still produce research, we can still produce progress. But of course, my belief, part of the book, is that the more people who are free, the better. It's not just about population, it's population times freedom. Freedom is incredibly important. China has been the most populous country for a very long time, but they were dirt poor until they started liberalizing. So the freedom component is very important.Why is this belief so persistent? I still hear people who still think that we are headed toward a population of 30 billion, who think that's a big issue, who are very surprised to learn that there are countries where if the population isn't already shrinking, it's very close. Do we naturally want to believe these kinds of stories? Was Julian Simon ever on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson?No, of course not. He never got any professional award in his entire life. And you are right to say that there was always an opposition to these Malthusian thoughts. Shortly after Malthus died, there was a big debate in Britain over who was right. Then they revisited the whole concept of shortage of natural resources in the late 19th century. So it goes through ups and downs.But there's something in that story. Have we identified what that is?There's something in that story, and the big question is what it is. I think that this particular problem could have many fathers, so to speak. One of them is that people have been traditionally not numerate. And we have a problem with the notion of exponential growth and compounding. Paul Romer put his finger on it, and that is that ideas do not add up; they multiply. And so he's got that famous example of the periodic table. Once you start interacting with compounds consisting of 10 elements on the periodic table, which has 100 elements in it, you're talking about more possible combinations, more possible calculations, more possible recipes for future progress, than there are number of seconds since the beginning of the Big Bang, 14.5 billion years ago. There's just so much knowledge which can still be discovered. We have only scratched the surface of knowledge. I think that's part of the reason why people are so pessimistic: They do not understand the potential for creation of new knowledge. The other reason, probably, is that the world really is finite. That is absolutely true. It's also irrelevant, because it's what you do with those resources that matters. As I've mentioned with the example of sand and fibers, you can use resources in evermore valuable ways.The more people, the betterI know this isn't key to your thesis, but we do live in a universe. So if you say, “Maybe you're right today, but in 1000 years you'll be wrong.” Well, a lot can happen in 1000 years. If I'm betting on 1000 years, I would also guess that if we somehow hit some constraint here on Earth, we have a whole universe of stuff that we could draw upon.Well, absolutely. Can you imagine, if wealth continues to expand at the current rate, what sort of species we would encounter in 1000 years and their technological abilities?A lot of asteroids out there!What worries me is actually that there won't be enough people to explore all those possible avenues for creation of new knowledge. You mentioned population growth: Population is below replacement level in 170 countries out of 190. We are going to peak in 2060 and then start declining. Instead of worrying about 30 billion people, we are going to have to worry about a population that is going to be basically as big in 2100 as it is today. And that really constrains the knowledge horizon and how fast we get there. And that brings with it all sorts of other problems. When people say—and I was actually speaking to somebody yesterday about this—that perhaps we have enough wealth, I cannot help but think, imagine all the possible problems that we could encounter in the future, all the other existential threats: be it asteroids, or a new pathogen, or something like that. I want our society to be super rich so that if we need to shut down the economy for another year, we can afford to do so rather than do it with that. Or if we do encounter an asteroid that's hurling towards Earth, we have a super powerful laser powered by mega fusion power stations that can blast it out of the sky. We never know what the future is going to hold, but I would much rather have a wealthier society deal with it than a poorer and more technologically primitive society dealing with it.Despite the fact that these predictions that were made a half century ago have not panned out, that these bets have been lost, if there's any example of the continued power of this idea, it's really the movie Avengers and the Infinity War series. The key villain, Thanos—and this is a multi-billion-dollar franchise—and his entire plot is to kill half of all life everywhere in the universe because we're running out of space. Apparently plenty of people signed off on the idea and said, “Yes, the audience will accept that.” And the audience did accept that.In the book we talk about that movie, and I think that one in five Americans saw it. But it was just one of the movies made based on Malthusian principles. There was Kingsman and there was also Inferno, and they were all based on Malthusian ideas.I believe that one of the James Bond films was based on the peak oil theory, too. I would doubt that there was anyone at a Hollywood studio who said “This is an absurd idea.”I don't know whether you would call it genetic or cultural, but this notion of limits must be deeply embedded in our psyche. And the key to breaking with that thinking has to be the embrace of knowledge, understanding that knowledge can solve all of our problems. Just about everything that you see around you in the world today that you bemoan is due to lack of knowledge. People are dying of cancer because of lack of knowledge. Babies are dying in Africa from malaria because of lack of knowledge, although that's being fixed already by vaccines. The more knowledge, the better. Currently it's only the human mind that is capable of producing new knowledge, so we still need people. Maybe at some point in the future we are going to have a super smart AI that is going to produce its own new knowledge. But right now that's not a realistic option. I think that there is something to be said for population growth. Now, what we are certainly not suggesting is that people should be forced to have more babies. The book's goal…Are there people who suggested that's what you're saying?I hope not. That's certainly not something. The goal of the book is much less ambitious. The goal of the book is to say to all those parents around the world who are worried about bringing a new child into the world because it'll be a drag on resources, because it'll be a cancer on the planet: You don't have to worry about that. Your child has the potential of contributing to the scope and stock of human knowledge. We are basically just tackling one aspect of this anti-nativist, anti-natalist, and anti-humanist worldview, which is the issue with resources. If we can convince people that it's still okay to have children, the question famously posed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, then we will have done something good. 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

For hundreds of years, we have thought of scarcity as an economic principle and assumed that population growth leads to a lack of resources. But what happens when you test this theory? According to Gale Pooley, when you look at the data, you discover that we actually live in a world of superabundance! Gale is Professor of Business Management at Brigham Young University—Hawaii and coauthor of the new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. On this episode of The Wiggin Sessions, Gale joins me make the distinction between abundance and superabundance and explain why scarcity is a flawed way to measure human capacity. Gale discusses why time price is a better way to measure commodities or productivity than money itself and describes how nearly all commodities have fallen in time price by 90% since 1850. Listen in to understand why economic growth and resource management are infinite and learn how the theory of superabundance holds up—even during a meltdown in the stock market or period of historic inflation. Key Takeaways How Gale defines abundance and what differentiates abundance from superabundance The bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon re: resource scarcity Gale's relationships with economics and business professor Julian Simon and tech guru George Gilder How Gale uses the concept of time price to factor inflation and economic crises into his research Why we see big decreases in the time price of commodities over time (and why it's a better tool of measurement than money) How the theory of superabundance holds up during a meltdown in the stock market or a period of historic inflation What makes long-term market trends more important than short-term fluctuations How nearly all commodities have fallen in time price by 90% since 1850 Gale's idea of adding knowledge to atoms to create infinite abundance Why Gale sees the ideology of scarcity as the deadliest virus we suffer from on this planet Where the idea of scarcity in economics came from and why population growth actually leads to more abundance Connect with Gale Pooley Gale on Substack Connect with Addison Wiggin Consilience Financial Be sure to follow The Wiggin Sessions on your socials. You can find me on— Facebook @thewigginsessions Instagram @thewigginsessions Twitter @WigginSessions Resources 5 Minute Forecast Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Gale Pooley and Marian L. Tupy Julian Simon ‘The Simon Abundance Index: A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources' by Gale Pooley and Marian L. Tupy Cato Institute George Gilder on The Wiggin Sessions EP011 George Gilder on The Wiggin Sessions EP018 Gilder's Daily Prophecy World Bank Commodity Markets Paul Ehrlich Agora Financial Jimmy Soni on The Wiggin Sessions EP055 Jordan Peterson Daily Stoic Email Newsletter Books by George Gilder

Art Carden discusses which economists should have gotten the Nobels before they died. Ludwig Von Mises was a great economist and his student Fredrick Hayek won the Nobel the year he died. Frank H. Knight the father of the Chicago School. Gordon Tullock should have shared the Nobel with James Buchanan. Armen Alchain, Harold Demsetz, William Baumol, Julian Simon, W.H. Hutt and Aaron Director should also have won the Nobel.

Bryan Caplan and I discuss the ideas of the iconoclast social critic and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Dr. Caplan won the Thomas Szasz award in 2005 for his paper, The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints, and Mental Illness. We have a wide-ranging conversation about Szasz, his ideas, and how to help ourselves and others when struggling with life. Dr. Caplan shares some of his personal experiences with depression during Covid and how he got out of it. Related Episodes Bryan Caplan on Parenting: https://youtu.be/JM0dGLRgko0 Anthony Stadlen on Szasz: https://youtu.be/wzVVLgpgLBA Jeffrey Schaler on Szasz: https://youtu.be/7wySu4S1w14 Christopher Lane on Shyness: https://youtu.be/GrV46aVkNvM Irvin Kirsch on Antidepressants: https://youtu.be/PtubmyA3BgU Related Videos John Nash on Schizophrenia: https://youtu.be/SizS1nOOeJg Take These Broken Wings (Documentary about Schizophrenia): https://youtu.be/EPfKc-TknWU Titicut Follies (Mistreatment of Involuntary Patients): https://youtu.be/e-wVwtN5f-U Crazywise Film: https://youtu.be/IXnmBIYaIZE Jim Van Os on Schizophrenia: https://youtu.be/sE3gxX5CiW0 Chapters: 00:00 Intro to Bryan Caplan https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan 00:35 Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids https://amzn.to/3NZcxQg 00:56 How did you discover Thomas Szasz? 01:33 The Untamed Tongue https://amzn.to/3NYtTwI 02:07 Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences https://amzn.to/3aAp3bn 02:34 Myth of Mental Illness https://amzn.to/3ANgIvp 02:57 Ceremonial Chemistry https://amzn.to/3P4IBU5 03:25 How long did it take you to understand Szasz? 06:13 What do you think most people misunderstood about Szasz? 08:14 Heavy drinkers respond to incentives https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1i5 10:55 How homosexuality got declassified as a disease 11:41 Transvestism 12:34 The Useful Lie https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1eT 12:56 Responsibility 14:34 Criticisms of Szasz 15:42 Szasz as a philosopher of mind https://wp.me/p8ReVr-rs 16:34 Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/07/contra-caplan-on-mental-illness/ 17:53 Drapetomania https://g.co/kgs/5qVtCe 18:06 What was it like to meet Szasz? https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/thomas_szasz_a.html 19:29 Suicide https://amzn.to/3RuQS5w 20:05 Why do you think Szasz wrote so much? 21:00 Did you get pushback when writing your paper on Szasz? 22:19 Shakespeare and Szasz 23:24 Has Szasz helped you in your personal life? 27:12 Brittany Spears 28:27 Addiction is a Choice https://wp.me/p8ReVr-9U 29:05 Karl Kraus https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1hz 29:51 Szasz's political beliefs 31:13 Suicide 32:29 Epicurus https://epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html 32:54 Julian Simon https://amzn.to/3P4Kct3 35:17 Surround yourself with friends 36:11 How do you stay productive? 37:51 Lucretius http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html 39:01 How do you deal with depression during Covid? 41:16 Faith in Freedom https://amzn.to/3caLvIq 41:38 Free will https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/freewill 43:38 Writing advice 44:45 The Baader Meinhof Complex https://youtu.be/2UPrDdb0r70 46:43 Economics of Szasz http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/szasz.pdf 49:50 Rational vs. Irrational 52:53 Schizophrenia https://amzn.to/3AK5yb3 56:10 Biographies of schizophrenics https://amzn.to/3IBtJu0 59:15 Hearing voices https://youtu.be/sE3gxX5CiW0 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aaronolson/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/aaronolson/support

Bryan Caplan and I discuss the ideas of the iconoclast social critic and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Dr. Caplan won the Thomas Szasz award in 2005 for his paper, The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints, and Mental Illness. We have a wide-ranging conversation about Szasz, his ideas, and how to help ourselves and others when struggling with life. Dr. Caplan shares some of his personal experiences with depression during Covid and how he got out of it. Related Episodes Bryan Caplan on Parenting: https://youtu.be/JM0dGLRgko0 Anthony Stadlen on Szasz: https://youtu.be/wzVVLgpgLBA Jeffrey Schaler on Szasz: https://youtu.be/7wySu4S1w14 Christopher Lane on Shyness: https://youtu.be/GrV46aVkNvM Irvin Kirsch on Antidepressants: https://youtu.be/PtubmyA3BgU Related Videos John Nash on Schizophrenia: https://youtu.be/SizS1nOOeJg Take These Broken Wings (Documentary about Schizophrenia): https://youtu.be/EPfKc-TknWU Titicut Follies (Mistreatment of Involuntary Patients): https://youtu.be/e-wVwtN5f-U Crazywise Film: https://youtu.be/IXnmBIYaIZE Jim Van Os on Schizophrenia: https://youtu.be/sE3gxX5CiW0 Chapters: 00:00 Intro to Bryan Caplan https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan 00:35 Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids https://amzn.to/3NZcxQg 00:56 How did you discover Thomas Szasz? 01:33 The Untamed Tongue https://amzn.to/3NYtTwI 02:07 Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences https://amzn.to/3aAp3bn 02:34 Myth of Mental Illness https://amzn.to/3ANgIvp 02:57 Ceremonial Chemistry https://amzn.to/3P4IBU5 03:25 How long did it take you to understand Szasz? 06:13 What do you think most people misunderstood about Szasz? 08:14 Heavy drinkers respond to incentives https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1i5 10:55 How homosexuality got declassified as a disease 11:41 Transvestism 12:34 The Useful Lie https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1eT 12:56 Responsibility 14:34 Criticisms of Szasz 15:42 Szasz as a philosopher of mind https://wp.me/p8ReVr-rs 16:34 Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/07/contra-caplan-on-mental-illness/ 17:53 Drapetomania https://g.co/kgs/5qVtCe 18:06 What was it like to meet Szasz? https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/thomas_szasz_a.html 19:29 Suicide https://amzn.to/3RuQS5w 20:05 Why do you think Szasz wrote so much? 21:00 Did you get pushback when writing your paper on Szasz? 22:19 Shakespeare and Szasz 23:24 Has Szasz helped you in your personal life? 27:12 Brittany Spears 28:27 Addiction is a Choice https://wp.me/p8ReVr-9U 29:05 Karl Kraus https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1hz 29:51 Szasz's political beliefs 31:13 Suicide 32:29 Epicurus https://epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html 32:54 Julian Simon https://amzn.to/3P4Kct3 35:17 Surround yourself with friends 36:11 How do you stay productive? 37:51 Lucretius http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html 39:01 How do you deal with depression during Covid? 41:16 Faith in Freedom https://amzn.to/3caLvIq 41:38 Free will https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/freewill 43:38 Writing advice 44:45 The Baader Meinhof Complex https://youtu.be/2UPrDdb0r70 46:43 Economics of Szasz http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/szasz.pdf 49:50 Rational vs. Irrational 52:53 Schizophrenia https://amzn.to/3AK5yb3 56:10 Biographies of schizophrenics https://amzn.to/3IBtJu0 59:15 Hearing voices https://youtu.be/sE3gxX5CiW0 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aaronolson/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/aaronolson/support

Schon vor ca. 20 Jahren habe ich Vorträge und Seminare zum Thema Wissenschaft und Umwelt gehalten. Vieles von dem, was ich damals gesagt habe, hat sich bis heute (leider) bestätigt. Diese Episode ist so etwas wie ein Frühjahrsputz für mich: Wie steht die Einordnung der verschiedenen Ideen und Ansätze der Umweltbewegungen mit-, gegen- und zueinander? Wie steht es zwischen Theorie, Ideologie und Praxis? Werten und Aktivität? Welche Rolle spielt Wissenschaft? Wo sehen wir begriffliche Verwirrungen? Wie finden wir den Weg von, aber auch der Spalt zwischen Ethik und Praxis? Diese Episode wird die Themen keinesfalls abdecken, ich sehe es eher als ein Aufwerfen von Bällen, die zum Teil in früheren Episoden, zum Teil in späteren Episoden wieder aufgefangen und genauer betrachtet wurden oder werden sollten. Welche Ansätze und Ideologien gibt es in der Umweltbewegung? 1. De-Growth (Wachstumskritik) Wachstumskritik hat eine lange und wechselhafte Tradition, die wenigstens auf Thomas Robert Malthus um 1800 zurückgeht und immer wieder neu interpretiert wurde und wird. Eine moderne Definition der Ziele  ist: »Gerechtes Herunterskalieren von Produktion und Konsum, der das menschliche Wohlbefinden und die ökologischen Bedingungen verbessert« Wir finden in dieser Gruppe leider aber auch eine nicht zu geringe Zahl an Extremisten, denen auch die radikale Reduktion der Menschheit wünschenswert erscheint um das Ziel zu erreichen, etwa: »Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.«, David Gräber 2. »Business as Usual« Wenn wir ehrlich sind, interessiert das Thema Umwelt im Alltag immer noch fast niemanden, jedenfalls dann nicht, wenn es über das Ausrollen von Wohlfühltechnologien und -ideen geht, die dem Einzelnen (scheinbar) wenig Kosten verursachen aber ein gutes Gefühl geben, etwas geleistet zu haben: »Das Ausrollen von ineffektiven Wohlfühl-Technologien ist dreifach schlecht — abgesehen vom offensichtlichen, dass sie ineffektiv sind, führt es auch dazu, dass der Druck nachlässt etwas wirkungsvolles zu tun, weil ja gehandelt wird, und vielleicht das schlimmste: es lenkt mögliche Ressourcen weg von wichtigeren Bedürfnissen.«, Steven Koonin 3. Eco-Modernismus Dder mittlerweile 101 jährige James Lovelock in seinem letzten Buch Novacen: »Das Bestreben nach einer besseren Zeit vor dem Anthropozän ist eine Phantasie. Zunächst einmal, weil es nie eine goldene Zeit frei von Wünschen und Leid gab und zweitens, weil wir, um dorthin zurück zu gelangen, die offensichtlichen Vorteile der Moderne rückgängig machen müssten« Beim Eco-Modernismus steht der Mensch im Zentrum der Veränderung aber auch der Verantwortung; Reduktion des menschlichen Einflusses auf die Natur durch Entkopplung, Intensivierung und Innovation sind der Anspruch: »Intensivierung vieler menschlicher Tätigkeiten — im besonderen Landwirtschaft, Energiegewinnung, Forstwirtschaft und Siedlung — mit dem Ziel, weniger Land zu nutzen und weniger in die natürlichen Welt einzugreifen ist der Schlüssel, menschliche Entwicklung von den negativen Einflüssen auf die Umwelt zu entkoppeln« Eco-Modernisten lehnen radikale Wachstumskritik ab. Selbst Jorgen Randers, der Mitautor der »Grenzen des Wachstums« von 1972, schreibt vor wenigen Jahren: »Der fundamentale Grund, warum die meisten Menschen Wachstum bevorzugen ist, dass es der einzige Weg ist, den moderne Gesellschaften gefunden haben um drei Probleme effektiv zu lösen: Armut, Arbeitslosigkeit und Pensionen« Aber können wir glauben, dass wir die Herausforderungen der Zeit alleine mit Technik und Wachstum lösen können? Wie lange kann das gut gehen? 4. Singularisten/Eskapisten & Post-Humanisten Die Insel oder das Landgut in Neuseeland reicht für viele Milliardäre nicht mehr aus, um sich vor den Katastrophen der Welt zu verstecken. Heute muss es der Mars, Raumstationen oder gar das Verlassen des Sonnensystems sein. Jedenfalls ist das die Vision einiger Vertreter einflussreicher US-Eliten. Sollte das doch nicht klappen, können wir uns ja in Computer hochladen und virtuell weiterleben. Oder übergeben wir als Menschen gar den Stab an intelligente Maschinen? Wer glaubt an diese Phantasien, beziehungsweise hält sie für eine wünschenswerte Zukunft? *** Im zweiten Teil dieser Episode stelle ich die Frage, was Philosophie und Ethik zu diesem Themenbereich zu sagen hat? Wer steht eigentlich im Zentrum der Betrachtung, Mensch oder Natur? Sollten wir Deep oder Shallow Ecology betreiben? Wem sollen wir folgen, Deontologen oder Utilitaristen und was ist von der »PAT« Formel zu halten? Haben die Wachstumskritiker bisher mit ihren Vorhersagen recht behalten, und selbst wenn nicht — was bedeutet dies für die Zukunft? Außerdem: nicht nur die Interessen westlicher Industrienationen zählen: »Diese verschiedenen Ansätze haben ein gemeinsames Design, das ökonomische Ziel, die Kosten des Klima-Aktivismus zu sozialisieren und die Armen die Rechnung für die Reichen zahlen zu lassen.« und »Die Weiterführung globaler Armut und niedriger Einkommen kann nicht die Klima-Strategie der reichen Welt sein.«, Samir Saran Welche Rolle spielt Ideologie und wie ist die Lücke zwischen Ideologie, Wissenschaft und tatsächlicher Umsetzung zu überbrücken. Gerade unter Aktivisten erleben wir oft ein hohes Maß an Motivation, Kritik an Missständen aber nur sehr selten kohärente und realistische Ideen, wie die Situation verbessert werden kann.  »Es zeigt sich, dass in den fortgeschrittensten Phasen der Idiotie der Ideenmangel mit Ideologieüberschuss kompensiert wird.«, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, eine Figur in Das Spiel der Engel Oftmals scheint die Medizin des Aktivismus schlimmere Folgen zu haben als die Krankheit — helfen uns die zahlreichen NGOs also, das Problem zu lösen, oder richten sie oftmals mehr Schaden als Nutzen an? »Tausende Kuhhörner, vergraben auf einem Acker, sollen für eine gute Ernte sorgen. Für Demeter-Landwirte ein gängiges Ritual. Ein Verband zwischen Biolandwirtschaft und Esoterik.«, ZDF-Bericht zur Bio-Landwirtschaft zwischen Ökologie und Esoterik Dass es nicht nur um nutzlose Esoterik geht, sondern dass inkohärente Öko-Ideen auch massive Schäden anrichten können, zeigt der radikale Versuch in Sri Lanka auf eine vermeintlich grüne Landwirtschaft umzusteigen: »Die Befürworter von Bio-Landbau, überzeugt von naturalistischen Fehlschlüssen und argwöhnisch über moderne landwirtschaftliche Forschung, können keine plausible Lösung anbieten. Was sie anbieten, wie das Disaster in Sri Lanka offen gelegt hat, ist Elend.«, Ted Nordhaus Das Experiment in Sri Lanka wurde nach wenigen Monaten beendet, weil die Folgen verheerend waren.  Ein anderes Beispiel: Greenpeace protestiert zur gleichen Zeit in England gegen ein Solarkraftwerk und in Frankreich gegen Kernkraft. Wer kann das rational nachvollziehen und unterstützen? Wenig hinterfragte Ideologisierung finden wir aber auf allen Seiten. Wie kommen wir aus diesem Patt heraus? Kann es gelingen, die vernünftigen Ideen aller Seiten zusammenführen und die wenig hilfreichen (aber lauten) Vertreter beider Seiten zu ignorieren? Es gibt gute Beispiele von Aktivisten, die tatsächlich zuhören und ihre Meinung ändern, wenn sie von besseren Argumenten überzeugt werden, wie auch Episode 46 mit der Aktivistin Zion Lights zeigt! Nehmen wir uns diese zum Vorbild. Zum Abschluss: eine ganze Reihe von Begriffen tauchen in diesem Kontext immer wieder auf, die zumindest hinterfragt werden sollten, eine kleine Auswahl diesmal: Wissenschaft und Szientismus Probleme vs. Dilemmata »Umwelt« Naturalistischer Fehlschluss Vorsorge Prinzip Zusammenfassend: wie geht es weiter? Die Zeit, wo wir uns als passive, von Natur oder Gott getriebenen Lebewesen sehen konnte ist vorbei: »Wir können uns wahrscheinlich kaum mehr so etwas wie Naturphänomene vorstellen, die im Sinne der klassischen Theodizeefrage vollständig auf Natur als Gegenkonzept zu Kultur oder Gesellschaft ausgelagert werden können. Selbst wenn ein Komet auf die Erde zurasen würde, […] würden wir das nicht alleine einem«, Armin Nassehi Wie kommen wir zu einer systemischen Sicht, zu einem Blick, die »Gaia« als ganzes betrachtet, das menschliche Wohlbefinden nicht hinten anstellt und trotzdem nicht zur Katastrophe führt? Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 7 und 8: Alles wird besser... oder nicht? Episode 15: Innovation oder Fortschritt Episode 16: Innovation oder Forrtschritt oder Stagnation? Episode 18: Fortschritt oder Stagnation: Gespräch mit Andreas Windisch Episode 39: Follow the Science Episode 42: Gesellschaftliche Verwundbarkeit, ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Gespräch mit Herbert Saurugg Episode 44: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Episode 46: Activism, a Conversation with Zion Lights Fachliche Referenzen Extinction Rebellion Website Degrowth US Readings Jason Hickel, Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance Hating Humanity Won't Get You Canceled - WSJ Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand, The Guardian (2018) Steven Koonin, Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics, An Introduction, Polity Press (2006) Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Environmental Ethics Samir Saran, Enough Sermons on Climate, It's Time for ‘Just' Action Peter Treue, Blut und Bohnen, Der Paradigmenwechsel im Künast-Ministerium ersetzt Wissenschaft durch Okkultismus, FAZ (2002) Cornelius Janzen, Ritual der Demeter-Landwirte: Warum sie Kuhhörner in der Erde vergraben, ZDF (2021) Demeter, »biodynamische« Präparate Mark Lynas, Finland's Green Party endorses nuclear power (2022) James Lovelock, Novacene, The coming age of hyper intelligence Jorgen Randers, 2052 A global forecast for the next forty years (2012) Ted Nordhaus, Sri Lanka's Organic Farming Experiment Went Catastrophically Wrong, Foreign Policy (2022) Der Mensch - das Mängelwesen, NZZ (2004) The Doomslayer. The environment is going to hell, and human life is doomed to only get worse, right? Wrong. Conventional wisdom, meet Julian Simon, the Doomslayer. Wired (1997) Population, Affluence, and Technology, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Roger Pielke Jr., More on the Iron Law of Climate Policy (2010) Carlos Ruiz Zafón, eine Figur in Das Spiel des Engels

Can we eliminate the use of fossil fuels? Can electric cars replace gasoline cars? Is a transition to wind and solar energy possible? At what cost? What impact will a forced transition have on economic development? How do the costs of eliminating fossil fuels compare to the dangers of increased CO2 emissions? What evidence is there for a pending climate catastrophe? The Mises Institute's Jeff Deist and Bob Murphy host Saifedean for a fascinating discussion of these and many more questions!ResourcesSaifedean's PhD thesis Energy Systems and the Knowledge Problem: The Case of BiofuelsThe St Louis Fed compares the cost and protein content of turkey and soy.Wikipedia article on dietician Lenna F Cooper.The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon for an analysis of resource scarcity.The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein.The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episodes with Alex Epstein here and here.The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episode Is CO2 the Climate Control Knob? with Tom Nelson.The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episode Fake Invisible Catastrophes with Patrick Moore with Patrick Moore.Saifedean's first book, The Bitcoin StandardSaifedean's second book, The Fiat StandardEnjoyed this episode? You can take part in podcast seminars, access Saifedean's courses and read chapters of his forthcoming books by becoming a Saifedean.com member. Find out more here.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What are the best examples of catastrophic resource shortages?, published by jasoncrawford on May 4, 2022 on LessWrong. A while ago I posed a question on Twitter: What's an example of a significant resource that the world has actually run out of? Not a local, temporary shortage, or a resource that we gracefully transitioned away from, but like a significant problem caused by hitting some limit we didn't prepare for? Here, in essay form, is the discussion that followed: Lots of things were predicted to have shortages (food, metals, Peak Oil) and they never quite arrived. (Julian Simon was famous for pointing out this kind of thing.) But a common argument from conservationists and environmentalists is that we are running out of some critical resource X and need to conserve it. Now, it's true that specific resources can and sometimes do get used up. Demand can outpace supply. There are various ways to respond to this: Reduce consumption Increase production Increase efficiency Switch to an alternative Increasing production can be done by exploring and discovering new sources of a material, or—this is often overlooked—by reducing costs of production, so that marginally productive sources become economical. New technology can often reduce costs of production this way, opening up resources previously thought to be closed or impractical. One example is fracking for shale oil; another is the mechanization of agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries, which reduced labor costs, thereby opening up new farmland. Increased efficiency can be just as good as increased production. However, if the new, more efficient thing is not as desirable as the old method, I would classify this as a combination of increased efficiency and reduced consumption (e.g. low-flow toilets, weak shower heads). When supplies are severely limited, we often end up switching to an alternative. There are many ways to satisfy human desires: Coal replaced wood in 18th century England. Kerosene replaced whale oil, then light bulbs replaced kerosene. Plastic replaced ivory and tortoiseshell. Again, if the alternative is less desirable along some key dimension, then this is also a form of reduced consumption, even if total volumes stay the same. However, the conservationist approach is always some form of reduced consumption: typically a combination of reduced absolute consumption, efficiency improvements that reduce quality and convenience, and/or switching to less-desirable alternatives. The arguments that people have over resources are actually a lot less about whether resources are getting used up, and much more about whether we should, or must, reduce consumption in some form. The alternative to the conservationists is to find a way to continue increasing consumption: typically new sources or high-quality alternatives. Again, it's not about the resource. It's about whether we continue to grow consumption, or whether we slow, stop or reverse that growth. The conservationist argument is a combination of practical and moral arguments. The practical argument is: we can't keep doing this. Either this particular problem we're facing now is insoluble, or the next one will be. The moral argument takes two forms. One is an extension of the practical argument: it's reckless to keep growing consumption when we're going to crash into hard limits. A deeper moral argument appeals to a different set of values, such as the value of “connection” to the land, or of tradition, or stability. Related is the argument that consumption itself is bad beyond a certain point: it makes us weak, or degrades our character. Also, there is an argument that we could keep growing consumption, but that this would have externalities, and the price for this is too high to pay, possibly even disastrous. This too becomes both a practical and a mo...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What are the best examples of catastrophic resource shortages?, published by jasoncrawford on May 4, 2022 on LessWrong. A while ago I posed a question on Twitter: What's an example of a significant resource that the world has actually run out of? Not a local, temporary shortage, or a resource that we gracefully transitioned away from, but like a significant problem caused by hitting some limit we didn't prepare for? Here, in essay form, is the discussion that followed: Lots of things were predicted to have shortages (food, metals, Peak Oil) and they never quite arrived. (Julian Simon was famous for pointing out this kind of thing.) But a common argument from conservationists and environmentalists is that we are running out of some critical resource X and need to conserve it. Now, it's true that specific resources can and sometimes do get used up. Demand can outpace supply. There are various ways to respond to this: Reduce consumption Increase production Increase efficiency Switch to an alternative Increasing production can be done by exploring and discovering new sources of a material, or—this is often overlooked—by reducing costs of production, so that marginally productive sources become economical. New technology can often reduce costs of production this way, opening up resources previously thought to be closed or impractical. One example is fracking for shale oil; another is the mechanization of agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries, which reduced labor costs, thereby opening up new farmland. Increased efficiency can be just as good as increased production. However, if the new, more efficient thing is not as desirable as the old method, I would classify this as a combination of increased efficiency and reduced consumption (e.g. low-flow toilets, weak shower heads). When supplies are severely limited, we often end up switching to an alternative. There are many ways to satisfy human desires: Coal replaced wood in 18th century England. Kerosene replaced whale oil, then light bulbs replaced kerosene. Plastic replaced ivory and tortoiseshell. Again, if the alternative is less desirable along some key dimension, then this is also a form of reduced consumption, even if total volumes stay the same. However, the conservationist approach is always some form of reduced consumption: typically a combination of reduced absolute consumption, efficiency improvements that reduce quality and convenience, and/or switching to less-desirable alternatives. The arguments that people have over resources are actually a lot less about whether resources are getting used up, and much more about whether we should, or must, reduce consumption in some form. The alternative to the conservationists is to find a way to continue increasing consumption: typically new sources or high-quality alternatives. Again, it's not about the resource. It's about whether we continue to grow consumption, or whether we slow, stop or reverse that growth. The conservationist argument is a combination of practical and moral arguments. The practical argument is: we can't keep doing this. Either this particular problem we're facing now is insoluble, or the next one will be. The moral argument takes two forms. One is an extension of the practical argument: it's reckless to keep growing consumption when we're going to crash into hard limits. A deeper moral argument appeals to a different set of values, such as the value of “connection” to the land, or of tradition, or stability. Related is the argument that consumption itself is bad beyond a certain point: it makes us weak, or degrades our character. Also, there is an argument that we could keep growing consumption, but that this would have externalities, and the price for this is too high to pay, possibly even disastrous. This too becomes both a practical and a mo...

Alex Nowrasteh is the director of Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute where he writes widely on US immigration policy. He also has several books on the topic, including his recently co-authored book, *Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.* Alex joins Macro Musings to talk about immigration in the United States and its implications for economic growth and policy. Specifically, David and Alex also discuss the current trends in population growth and immigration, the consequences of falling birthrates, Alex's rebuttals to the most common arguments against immigration, and more.   Check out Conversations with Tyler: https://conversationswithtyler.com, and subscribe to Conversations with Tyler on your favorite podcast app.   Transcript for the episode can be found here: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/tags/macro-musings   Alex's Twitter: @AlexNowrasteh Alex's Cato profile: https://www.cato.org/people/alex-nowrasteh   Related Links:   *Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions* by Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wretched-refuse/47A037EB552CDB16DC77906072A590AB   *The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They're Wrong* by Alex Nowrasteh https://store.cato.org/products/the-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-and-why-theyre-wrong   *The Ultimate Resource* by Julian Simon https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Resource-Julian-Lincoln-Simon/dp/0691003696   *Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women* by Patricia Cortes and Jose Tessada https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.3.3.88   *The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates Since the Great Recession* by Melissa Kearney, Phillip Levine, and Luke Pardue https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.36.1.151   *More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – And What Happens Next* by Andrew McAfee https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/More-from-Less/Andrew-McAfee/9781982103583   *One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger* by Matthew Yglesias https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/636499/one-billion-americans-by-matthew-yglesias/   David's Twitter: @DavidBeckworth David's blog: http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/

February 25th 2022.In this episode, Saifedean appears on The Tom Woods Show for a discussion on how the damage caused by fiat money extends beyond economics. Saifedean and Tom discuss why fiat money increases the power of governments and heightens societal time preference, disincentivising long-term planning. They also talk about the rise of “fiat mentality” and how societal attitudes have changed in areas such as diet, education and energy. They then discuss the “misery industry” of debt-based development aid – promoted by International Financial Institutions like the IMF – and how this industry has held back economic progress in the developing world.Resources:The Tom Woods Show official website.Tom's free ebook Our Enemy The FedGuido Hülsmann's book The Ethics of Money Production for a discussion of the moral implications of inflation.Gold Wars: The Battle for the Global Economy by Ferdinand LipsSaifedean's podcast episode with Nina Teicholz for a discussion of seed oils and government dietary guidelines.The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon for a discussion of failed predictions about resource scarcity.Introduction to the concept of opportunity cost on Mises Wiki.Saifedean's first book, The Bitcoin StandardSaifedean's second book, The Fiat StandardEnjoyed this episode? You can take part in podcast seminars, access Saifedean's courses and read chapters of his forthcoming books by becoming a Saifedean.com member. Find out more here.

A listener recently messaged me and said that investing in the stock market—when it's this volatile—feels like gambling at a casino. Intrigued by her observation, I dove into some research. In this episode of Retirement Made Easy, I share the results of my research and answer the question: Is investing in a volatile market the same as gambling? Don't miss it! You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in... [2:58] Check out FREE resources at RetirementMadeEasyPodcast.com [4:22] Is investing in a volatile market the same as gambling? [10:21] You're gambling if you're trying to time the market [11:44] Company earnings drive performance  [13:37] How have things changed since the 1950s?  [15:58] Submit questions that you want answered! The odds of winning at popular casino games I can't argue this fact: The stock market has been extremely volatile in 2022 (which we covered in episode #87). But you should not base your investments on short-term volatility. Instead, a wise investor invests long-term based on meeting long-term goals. If you're talking about day-trading, it does feel more like gambling to me. I've known multiple people who've lost their shirts trying to day-trade. That's not investing.  But how does long-term investing compare to gambling? Bloomberg wrote an article published on 12/31/2020 that compared investing to gambling. According to the article, these are the odds at winning at various casino games: You have a 40% chance of winning at a slot machine You have a 44.7% chance of winning at roulette You have a 48% chance of winning at blackjack You have a 48.6% chance of winning at Craps You have a 46.6% chance of winning at poker You have a 23% chance of winning at Keno Note that they are ALL under 50%. The casino knows that the longer you play, the lower your odds become, and the more money goes back to the house. That's why they offer free “refreshments”—to keep you hooked longer.  This study then looked at the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1901 to 2020. If you were invested for an entire year in one-year rolling periods (120 different timeframes), your odds of making money was 74.2%. The longer you let time work for you, the higher your odds of success.  Three-year periods: Your odds of making money were 86.5%. Five-year periods: Your odds of making money were 90%.  10-year periods: Your odds of making money were 97% 15-year periods: Your odds of making money were 99.9% The longer you stay invested, the higher your odds of success. DISCLAIMER: Obviously, I wouldn't advise you to invest all of your money in one basket. This is for illustrational purposes only.  When are you actually gambling? People who are diving in and out of the market and trying to time it are the one's gambling. Why? Because they're short-term focused. They've lost sight of their long-term goals. It's similar to the people who buy a new car every year or two. They're always “investing” in the newest shiniest toy. But it's hard to build wealth if you're buying a brand new car every year. They take the depreciation and eat it upfront. Dave Ramsey would tell you—unless your net worth is $1 million—you should never buy a brand new vehicle. Buy an older vehicle and pay cash for it. Let the initial owner eat the depreciation. Company earnings drive performance  Another Bloomberg study on the S&P 500 looked at performance and earnings. The long-term trend was upward over time. The study also looked at the S&P 500 Stock Market Index and found that there was a 97% correlation. It was driven by the earnings of the companies—which makes sense. So what drives performance? The company earnings behind them. Successful investing over the long haul gives you an optimistic outcome for the future.  Why do I believe it's getting better all the time? Listen to the whole episode to hear a study done by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon comparing the 1950s to current day America.  Resources & People Mentioned Get a FREE pre-retirement assessment It's Getting Better All the Time by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon Connect With Gregg Gonzalez Email at: Gregg@RetireSTL.com  Podcast: https://RetirementMadeEasyPodcast.com Website: https://StLouisFinancialAdvisor.com Follow Gregg on LinkedIn Follow Gregg on Facebook Follow Gregg on YouTube Subscribe to Retirement Made EasyOn Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts

In this episode, Saifedean appears on The Tom Woods Show for a discussion on how the damage caused by fiat money extends beyond economics. Saifedean and Tom discuss why fiat money increases the power of governments and heightens societal time preference, disincentivising long-term planning. They also talk about the rise of “fiat mentality” and how societal attitudes have changed in areas such as diet, education and energy. They then discuss the “misery industry” of debt-based development aid – promoted by International Financial Institutions like the IMF – and how this industry has held back economic progress in the developing world.Resources:The Tom Woods Show official website.Tom's free ebook Our Enemy The FedGuido Hülsmann's book The Ethics of Money Production for a discussion of the moral implications of inflation.Gold Wars: The Battle for the Global Economy by Ferdinand LipsSaifedean's podcast episode with Nina Teicholz for a discussion of seed oils and government dietary guidelines.The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon for a discussion of failed predictions about resource scarcity.Saifedean's podcast episodes with Alex Epstein here and here for a discussion of fossil fuels and unreliable energy.Introduction to the concept of opportunity cost on Mises Wiki.Saifedean's first book, The Bitcoin StandardSaifedean's second book, The Fiat StandardEnjoyed this episode? You can take part in podcast seminars, access Saifedean's courses and read chapters of his forthcoming books by becoming a Saifedean.com member. Find out more here.

Intellectuals need to get out of their ivory towers and take their ideas to the people, learning from them in the process. Barun Mitra joins Amit Varma in episode 264 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss what he learnt from his decades combining reflection and activism. Also check out: 1. Barun Mitra on Twitter, and at The Print, Indian Express and Pragati. Also, a bio. 2. India's Agriculture Crisis -- Episode 140 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra and Kumar Anand). 3. The Anti-Defection Law -- Episode 13 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra). 4. Sell the Tiger to Save It -- Barun Mitra. 5. Lessons From an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister -- Amit Varma. 6. Nehru's Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain). 7. The State of Our Farmers -- Episode 86 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gunvant Patil). 8. Farmers, Technology and Freedom of Choice: A Tale of Two Satyagrahas -- Amit Varma. 9. Down to Earth -- Sharad Joshi. 10. The Ultimate Resource -- Julian Simon. 11. The Simon-Ehrlich Wager. 12. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 13. Too Many People? -- Nicholas Eberstadt. 14. Atlas Shrugged -- Ayn Rand. 15. Ayn Rand on Amazon. 16. ARCH-Vahini and ARCH Gujarat. 17. The Double 'Thank-You' Moment -- John Stossel. 18. Spontaneous Order. 19. The Emergency: A Personal History -- Coomi Kapoor. 20. Understanding Gandhi. Part 1: Mohandas -- Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ramachandra Guha). 21. Understanding Gandhi. Part 2: Mahatma -- Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ramachandra Guha). 22. Romulus Whitaker on Wikipedia, YouTube and Amazon. 23. The Skeptical Environmentalist -- Bjorn Lomborg. 24. The Better Angels of Our Nature -- Steven Pinker. 25. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 26. How Social Media Threatens Society -- Episode 8 of Brave New World (Vasant Dhar in conversation with Jonathan Haidt). 27. Online Disinhibition Effect. 28. Memories and Things -- Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 29. Think Again -- Adam Grant. 30. Democracy in Pakistan -- Episode 79 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane and Hamsini Hariharan). 31. The Use of Knowledge in Society -- Friedrich Hayek. 32. The Trees -- Philip Larkin. 33. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 34. The Mahatma and the Poet -- The letters between Gandhi and Tagore, compiled by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. 35. Gora -- Rabindranath Tagore. 36. The Home and the World -- Rabindranath Tagore. 37. The Miracle of Calcutta -- Manubehn Gandhi. 38. Lakshmi: An Introduction -- Devdutt Pattanaik. 39. A Godless Congregation -- Amit Varma. 40. Hind Swaraj -- MK Gandhi. 41. Flying Spaghetti Monster. 42. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 43. Taxes Should Be Used for Governance, Not Politics -- Amit Varma. 44. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Covid-19: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 45. India Awakes. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works. His TED talk "When Ideas Have Sex" has been viewed more than two million times. He writes a weekly column in The Times (London) and writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal. As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013. He served on the science and technology select committee 2014-2017. With BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University, Matt Ridley worked for the Economist for nine years as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman. He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock plc and Northern 2 VCT plc. He also commissioned the Northumberlandia landform sculpture and country park. He founded the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010. He won the Hayek Prize in 2011, the Julian Simon award in 2012 and the Free Enterprise Award from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is honorary president of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He has honorary doctorates from Buckingham University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala. He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert. They have two children and live in Northumberland in the north of England.

You may think you have India figured out -- but do you? Rukmini S joins Amit Varma in episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen to speak about the many layers of India she has uncovered by looking closely at data, and the stories that lie beneath. Also check out: 1. Whole Numbers and Half Truths -- Rukmini S. 2. The Importance of Data Journalism -- Episode 196 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 3. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman -- Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 4. The White Album -- Joan Didion. 5. The world's most expensive coffee, made from poop of civet cat, is made in India -- Hindustan Times news report. 6. A Life in Indian Politics -- Episode 149 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jayaprakash Narayan). 7. What Have We Done With Our Independence? -- Episode 186 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pratap Bhanu Mehta). 8. The Business of Books -- Episode 150 of The Seen and the Unseen (w VK Karthika). 9. Munni Badnaam Hui. 10. Beautiful Thing -- Sonia Faleiro. 11. The Good Girls -- Sonia Faleiro. 12. Two Girls Hanging From a Tree -- Episode 209 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sonia Faleiro). 13. Daily Rituals -- Mason Currey. 14. Daily Rituals: Women at Work -- Mason Currey. 15. Pramit Bhattacharya Believes in Just One Ism -- Episode 256 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. Food and Nutrition in India: Facts and Interpretations -- Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze. 17. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 18. Modeling Covid-19 -- Episode 224 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gautam Menon). 19. The Practice of Medicine -- Episode 229 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Lancelot Pinto). 20. Sample SSR conspiracy theory: He's alive! 21. The Case Against Sugar — Gary Taubes. 22. The Big Fat Surprise — Nina Teicholz. 23. The Obesity Code — Jason Fung. 24. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal and Nishant Jain. 25. Steven Van Zandt: Springsteen, the death of rock and Van Morrison on Covid — Richard Purden. 26. Ravish Kumar's Instagram post on Rukmini's book. 27. Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) -- Christian Rudder. 28. Everybody Lies -- Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 29. The Truth About Ourselves -- Amit Varma. 30. Posts by Amit Varma on Mahindra Watsa: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 31. The Kavita Krishnan Files -- Episode 228 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. One Bad Law Goes, but Women Remain Second-Class Citizens -- Amit Varma. 33. The papers on declining labour force participation of Indian women by Ashwini Deshpande and Sonalde Desai. 34. Amit Varma's provocative tweet on Urdu poetry. 35. If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai -- Srinath Perur. 36. Ghachar Ghochar -- Vivek Shanbhag (translated by Srinath Perur). 37. Girl No.166: Will this retired cop ever stop looking for Pooja? -- Smita Nair. 38. Private Truths, Public Lies — Timur Kuran. 39. Group Polarization on Wikipedia. 40. Where Anna Hazare Gets It Wrong -- Amit Varma. 41. Superforecasting -- Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. 42. Think Again -- Adam Grant. 43. Ideology and Identity — Pradeep K Chhibber and Rahul Verma. 44. Political Ideology in India -- Episode 131 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 45. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 46. The Ultimate Resource -- Julian Simon. 47. The Simon-Ehrlich Wager. 48. India Moving — Chinmay Tumbe. 49. India = Migration -- Episode 128 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chinmay Tumbe). 50. Unemployment rate at four-decade high of 6.1% in 2017-18: NSSO survey -- Somesh Jha. 51. Consumer spend sees first fall in 4 decades on weak rural demand: NSO data -- Somesh Jha. 52. Raag Darbari (Hindi) (English) — Shrilal Shukla. 53. The Competent Authority -- Shovon Chowdhury. 54. Despite the State -- M Rajshekhar. 55. Ponniyin Selvan (Tamil) (English) (English audio) -- Kalki R Krishnamurthy. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Check out Amit's online courses, The Art of Clear Writing and The Art of Podcasting. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

Hello Interactors,As the rain returns to the northwest it’s time to summon even more motivation to get outside for exercise. I established a bit of a fitness pattern this summer and I’m motivated to keep it up. But the rain isn’t the only thing holding me back, so is my body and my mind.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…THE DEVIL MADE ME DO ITAs part of my Monday fitness routine, I begrudgingly slog jog up a steep hill in my Market neighborhood, zig-zag my way through gravel alleys, down calm side streets, and through occasional narrow easements that snake between homes guarded by fences and barking dogs. Some called this route the ‘Market wiggle’.It drops me onto an arterial road that skirts along a wooded wetlands. I suffer as I shuffle on a rolling narrow strip of painted bike lane for about a half a mile where I’m presented with a decision. Do I keep running up a gradual hill to achieve more distance or do I face the challenge of ascending a wall of over 100 steps that climb up a steep grade to my destination. It’s a short cut, but also a glute burn.My destination is an outdoor gym plopped on a patch of asphalt nestled in the corner of an expansive park made of grassy ball fields and scattered pines. I have my routine: a series of upper body exercises on machines that leverage my body weight. I do pull-ups (kind of), seated bench press, and sit-ups. I usually have the place to myself. Though I was once surprised by an eager and excitable white toy poodle. As I was doing sit-ups he ran up behind me and licked the salty sweat off my face.Upper body fitness has never been my favorite. It’s a necessary evil that seems to be getting harder all the time. But I have my repetition goals and I’m determined to improve. Pullups are the hardest. After a summer of just holding my chin above the bar, I’m finally getting to a point where I can actually pull myself up. (kind of)My forearms don’t much like supporting my weight. I finish my routine and head back home. Just across from the park is a the middle school track. It’s a cinder track; a relic in the rainy northwest where most tracks have turned artificial. On the weekends I do a timed mile. I can’t help but be disappointed in my time and progress. I just can’t run as fast as I used to.I also beat myself up over my lack of progress. I should be getting faster by now. I should be able to do more pullups. A battle in my brain ensues.DEVIL: If you lose weight, maybe you can run faster and do more pullups.ANGEL: Yeah, but you’re not really overweight – in fact, you’re maintaining a healthy weight because you’re running.DEVIL: Unless, of course, the extra weight is coming from the added muscle mass from all those stair climbs, and upper body work.ANGEL: But you can’t stop doing upper body work. You know you’ve been losing muscle mass since the day you turned 30.DEVIL: C’mon, dudes older than you can run faster than this. You can’t run faster until you start running faster. And you just have to keep doing more pullups if you want to do more pullups!”Then an independent interloping inquisitor interrupts; “Why are you trying to run faster? Why is the number of pullups important? What is your goal? Is it to increase the number of pullups and decrease your running speed, or is it to maintain your health?”It’s hard to rally behind asymptotic performance plateaus. Just ask any aging professional athlete. And it’s depressing to consider that as long as that plateau may be, its end is punctuated by a certain mortal decline. I am fully aware of my body’s limitations in this race with mortality, but my mind is trained to expect, and even crave harder, better, faster, stronger.WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWNWe are all trained by a culture infused with metaphors that lead to a desire to increase growth and optimize time. In 1980, two cognitive linguists, scientists, and philosophers, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a seminal book called Metaphors We Live By. They give examples of how orientation concepts and words like up and down shape how we think and act.You can see evidence of it in the words I’ve already written. I was beating myself up and feeling down because the number of pullups wasn’t going up. I get depressed when my running times fall off. My athletic abilities are declining as I near the height of my physical abilities. Have I reached a peak? I am now longer in top shape. As my age slowly climbs up, my abilities will be sinking fast. What if I come down with an illness? My health will decline. And one day, I will drop dead.They suggest other metaphorical orientation concepts by category:HAPPY IS UP AND SAD IS DOWN.I’m feeling up. I fell into a depression.FORESEEABLE FUTURE EVENTS ARE UP (and AHEAD)What’s up on the agenda? I’m afraid of what’s ahead of us.HIGH STATUS IS UP, LOW STATUS IS DOWNShe’ll rise to the top. He’s at the bottom of the hierarchy.MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWNThe GDP rose. My income fell.GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWNThings are looking up. Things are at an all time low.RATIONAL IS UP, EMOTIONAL IS DOWNHe couldn’t rise above his emotions. The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane.Another metaphor their book highlights also runs deep in our culture:TIME IS MONEYYou’re wasting my time.I don’t have the time to give you.I’ve invested a lot of time in her.You’re running out of time.Is it worth your while?He’s living on borrowed time.You need to budget your time.Thank you for your time.The Bible is as riddled with these metaphors as Christianity is with our culture. The great sociologist and political economist, Max Weber, claims Protestantism is at the root of capitalism in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,"In these cases the choice of occupation and future career has undoubtedly been determined by the distinct mental characteristics which have been instilled into them and indeed by the influence on them of the religious atmosphere of their locality and home background."Here are some quotes from the bible that urge followers to work their butts off, or else.Through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks.The diligent hand will rule, but laziness will lead to forced labor.Fools fold their idle hands, leading them to ruin.Here’s one from the King’s bible that lends insight into perhaps why the American workforce is overworked, has too few days off, and is led to shame should they loose their job.How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man. Proverbs 6:6It may come as a surprise, but not every culture lives by these metaphors. The culture I was raised in certainly did. It’s also one that views the more innocuous concept of future as ahead, but another culture may view it as behind — or up, down, through, under, or over for that matter. Perhaps some cultures have no orientation metaphors at all, or use them differently than, say, the Bible does.When these two researchers came together to write their book, they “discovered that [these] certain assumptions of contemporary philosophy and linguistics have been taken for granted…since the Greeks.”Substantiating the role cultural metaphors play in shaping thought and action “meant rejecting the possibility of any objective or absolute truth.” Those absolutisms, including those found in the Bible, are assumed in so much of Western tradition and contemporary belief systems.The alternative, as outlined in their book, is to suggest the human lived experience plays a more central role than some religious, mythical, or universally constant human objective truth.Our current economic system relies heavily on a belief in rational choice theory. This idea, in keeping with the Western tradition Lakoff and Johnson sought to debunk, says that humans – also known among neoliberal economists as homo economicus – routinely conduct perfectly objective and absolute rational cost-benefit analysis before deciding how to spend money or accumulate wealth.If what Lakoff and Johnson suggest is true, and I’m inclined to believe it is, there is no such thing as objective or absolute truth in decision making. Our decisions are guided by our culturally engrained metaphors. The so-called invisible hand that neoliberal economists turn to as a self-interested magical motivational source of individual wealth and prosperity is actually the invisible mind; a mind influenced by embedded conceptual metaphors that guide our emotions which in turn trigger our thoughts and actions.IN EXCESS WILL END SUCCESSSocial psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that if you want to find evidence of irrational behavior in self-reported rational people, study their entrenched dogmatic positions – it’s there you’ll find their irrational behavior. In our currently divided society, you don’t need to look far to see evidence of the myth of perfectly rational behavior in human decision making.“Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” Those are the words of British ecological economist, Tim Jackson. To illustrate the myth, he offers that “People are persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.”Aristotle observed as much in the 4th century and wrote about it in a set of eight books on the philosophy of human affairs called, Politics. He wrote,“For, as their enjoyment is in excess, they seek an art which produces the excess of enjoyment; and, if they are not able to supply their pleasures by the art of getting wealth, they try other causes, using in turn every faculty in a manner contrary to nature…some men turn every quality or art into a means of getting wealth; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end they think all things must contribute.” There are ongoing debates about what Aristotle would think of today’s economy. Both capitalists and communists draw on Aristotle as the genesis of their philosophies. But suffice it to say, Aristotle was not a fan of individual wealth accumulation. Any accumulation should be shared back to the society in support of a healthy community.Some scholars believe Aristotle would say “the lending out of money to acquire more money is merely the most unnatural and corrupting way to employ money.” As corrupt, they claim, as using human sexuality to sell sex.They believe Aristotle would not have made it a “question of the market value of your gold.” But instead, “what kind of man your gold makes of you.”It also seems Aristotle would not have been very impressed with the damage we inflicted on the earth in our pursuit of wealth accumulation. He was aware of the negative aspects of “unintended consequences” due to human activity, but he also found them to be “generally bad and disappointing.” That, for sure, is a departure from our current neoliberal stance.It was Adam Smith, the father of the capitalist economic system that dominates the world today, who said,“[People are] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”By this logic, the plastics industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, a path toward more plastic in the ocean than fish), which was no part of their intention. The oil industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, climate collapse), but is not part of their intention. Even though they’ve known this for over 30 years.The aerosol industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, a hole in the ozone, which was not part of their intention; but the world rallied to curb its use. The tobacco industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, addiction to a cancer causing drug, which was not part of their intention; but the U.S cracked down on them anyway.British economist, John Maynard Keynes – an advocate of the free market, but also of instituting limits, put it best by issuing this sober warning,“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”LEAKS AND PEAKS; GO WITH THE FLOWInfluential American economist Milton Friedman started to distance himself, and U.S. economic philosophy, from Keynesian ideas in the 70s. The country was in a recession and personal wealth accumulation had stagnated.This American ideal of wealth accumulation began in American economics in the late 1940s after two world wars and a depression. Personal and national wealth accumulation was as much a need as it was a desire. It only follows that the model of economics we have with us today puts personal and corporate wealth accumulation at the center, above all else. (note the orientation metaphors I inadvertently used: follows, center, above all else!)This economic model was drawn in a diagram by economist and Nobel prize winner, Paul Samuelson, for the canonical economic text book, Economics, in 1948. It has sold over four million copies and is still used by many schools today. That book became standard issue for Econ 101 in universities across the country that were flooded with men returning from WWII. It’s a simple diagram that shows Circular Flows of money being exchanged between households and businesses.Households flow labor into businesses which in turn crank out goods and services. Businesses flow wages to households that flow that money back to businesses through consumer spending on their goods and services.There are also leakages in this central flow from households; savings leak into banks, taxes to the government, and imports to trade. These leaks are converted into value and flowed back to the business side as injections into the economy; investments flow from banks, spending from government, and exports from trade.As economist Kate Raworth points out, missing from the diagram is the earth and the resources necessary to sustain this economic flow. But many advocates of this model believe resources are endless.In the 1980’s University of Maryland business professor and neoliberal, Julian Simon, believed that “Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.” He imagined competitive market prices would keep resources from being over exploited and novel inventions would efficiently reuse and recycle any wasted matter and energy. That doesn’t appear to be working.Instead improvements in technology have accelerated the rate of extraction resulting in environmental degradation and collapse. Take the fishing industry. With improved sensing technologies, they’re able to fish small and sparsely populated schools of fish. It can lead to collapse and extinction. What’s more, these small populations are vulnerable to effects of climate change which challenges both their survival and ability to repopulate. And sure enough, if they do recover, the fishing industry pounces and the cycle of over exploitation begins again.Systems thinker, environmentalist and Dartmouth professor, Donella Meadows, states:“Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate. But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource.” In contrast,“Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.”Indigenous cultures have known this for millennia. That’s why they leave harvestable crops behind. If they didn’t, they know there would not be any seeds for next season.We have been led to believe, and our current economic systems substantiates, nonrenewable resources are limitless. We’re taught that even though our self-interest in accumulating wealth may come with unintended consequences, those negative effects are a matter of “value judgement.”For example, valuing profit over the health of the planet and it’s occupants is a matter of judgement. It’s a line of thinking that values capitalism and corporate and individual wealth accumulation over all else – even the prospect of the collapse of entire species; including humans. Will capitalism seek to out live human existence? You be the judge.We’re reminded every day that economic indicators can only go up because our culture evolved to associate up with good. If an economy can only be deemed good by a limitless line that goes up for eternity but relies on limited resources that require periods of flattening of that curve to be renewed, we need to extend the metaphor for good to include flat and even declining.  Up is good. Growth is good. And we don’t have time to waste. But even though the Bible tells us otherwise, we might want to sit down and take a breather sometimes and call it good.  My aging body reminds me, there are limits to up. I struggle with accepting this fact. Most do. It also shows there are exceptions to metaphors. Just because our age goes up, that doesn’t necessarily mean it feels good.My body is a renewable resource but with a limited and declining life span. It can’t support the extraction of resources indefinitely, but it can maintain a finite flow of energy equal to my body’s, albeit declining, regeneration rate.But if I push too hard and exploit my resources; and equate increased pullup reps or faster running speed with good, I’ll drive my resources below a critical threshold and they’ll become nonrenewable.So now when I’m feeling up for a run. I don’t let myself get too depressed when my energy starts to fall. Instead of digging deep in a yearning for peak performance, I change my goal and shift my metaphor. I push that irrational ‘growth at all cost’ dogma to the side, bring the joy of a flat and slightly declining curve to the foreground, and feel my energy levels and my spirit rise.You see, I have a rational mind after all. Aristotle believed our ability to reason with our feelings is what makes us human. It’s what sets us apart from other animals. I have a rational choice to make when presented with a curve that flattens out or declines. I can succumb to the cultural belief and emotion that a line that curves flat or trends down is always bad, or I can shift my thinking that it is sometimes good and even necessary for survival.If I can do this with my fitness routine amidst a mid-life crisis, surely we can for an imbalanced economic regime amidst a climate crisis. Subscribe at interplace.io

This classic ID the Future resurfaces just in time to celebrate human creative capacity, and a blockbuster movie, for Labor Day weekend. Host Robert Crowther talks with Rachel Adams about Thanos, the arch-villain from Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War, and a couple of real-life thinkers, Eric Pianka and Paul Ehrlich, who share the villain's view that the world would be a better place with far fewer humans. Thanos, Pianka, and Ehrlich appear to share a materialistic view of the human person, one that ignores the inherent dignity and worth of every person as well as humanity's capacity to generate solutions and new resources through creative labor, growing the resource pie. Thanks to this, life is not a zero-sum game. The human Read More › Source

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance's secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations. Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government's ability to advance the common good. Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Think for a moment about the great WHO'S that you need in your life as an entrepreneur.If you know what you're doing, you can give those WHO'S great purpose.There are a lot of amazing WHO'S out there with incredible talents that aren't unable to find their purpose or a use for their skills.That's where YOU come in… but the great WHO'S aren't looking for schmucks.How do you not be a schmuck? How do you keep the really great WHO's inspired, impactful, focused and keep them around for a long time? That's what this episode is all about. CREATING PURPOSE FOR OTHER PEOPLE. Listen and Watch for all of this and A LOT MORE.Julian Simon said, “Humans innovate their way out of resource shortages. People are the ultimate resource. Resources aren't discovered, they're invented.”That's the basic premise here today. What are the conditions for increasing human ingenuity?It's smart people collaborating with each other.80% of the most talented people in the world need someone to give them a purpose for their talents.The phenomenal ability to GIVE other people purpose is a very rare talent.It's a serious skill to have and one that Dan and Mike are grateful for because they're both really good at it.Entrepreneurs with LOTS of big ideas…need to find right-fit WHO's to help make those ideas a reality. Otherwise they're dead in the water from the start.Finding the right-fit WHO requires giving them the right purpose to keep them moving and motivated.One of the tools that Dan uses in Strategic Coach is the “Impact Filter.” This is where you create projects that attract teamwork.Entrepreneurs, almost by definition, have the ability to create purpose in the future. One that doesn't exist...yet.In other words, something that's created in the imagination and is so compelling and persuasive that other people will say, “I'll add my capabilities to that! This is great, I'm good at __________ and I can provide value to the vision.”  At the end of the day, we're driven by impact. The impact you'll have on the organization: results, outcomes and benefits. Whether you're a collaborator or not depends on how much of the future you'd like to share with other people. If there's only room for you and your future, it's not an interesting game.There is SO much more juicy information in this episode about creating purpose for other people!

“What is the origin of Yes, No, Maybe?” Patrick asks Atom Bergstrom, referring to both the concept and the book. Is Yes, No, Maybe the way out of Yin-Yang, split-brain consciousness? What is the actual meaning of herd immunity? Is humanity being scammed from beginning to end? Are all the X-Men-type movies getting us used to transhumanism? Is that why worldwide robot manufacturing doubled last year? Where is Ground Zero for globalism? Is it really in Davos or is it in Boston? Klaus Schwab is a graduate of what U.S. school? Patrick and Atom discuss Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. President in 2004. Is it better to confront globalism sideways instead of head-on? Does gathering in crowds to protest drag us deeper into the tar pit? Atom mentions Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book,” published in 1971. Patrick explains why he’s focused on exercising and getting stronger. Stretching is an important part of his program. What are reactive muscles? How does weakening one muscle strengthen its opposing muscle? What’s the difference between concentric and eccentric muscle contraction? Patrick and Atom explore strategies for wellness and long life. How does the “Big Fat Mouth” interfere with health and longevity? Atom asks listeners to pray for Christina Ponsot of Yelapa, Mexico. She’s a long-time friend who has been single-handedly running the only Solar Nutrition restaurant in the world till she recently broke her arm. Carbon dioxide is a miracle cure. Why has it been overlooked by scientists for so many years? How were so many thousands and thousands of people cured of every disease from A to Z, and yet so few contemporary people know about it? Carbon dioxide is necessary for oxygen to give us life. Oxygen without carbon dioxide does nothing except oxidize and deteriorate the body. Oxygen plus carbon dioxide can give us the Diamond Body. What atomic element is most important to plant life in nature and agriculture? Is it carbon or is it nitrogen? What happens when sugar water is sprayed on a plant? Why are fungi so important to plant growth? Why is no-till agriculture the antithesis of monolithic corporate agriculture? Who is Gabe Brown and what is Regenerative Ranching? Why do you want more insects, not less insects, on your farm or ranch? Why are we being lied to about solar energy? Why is it much more feasible and inexpensive than we’re being told? What about zero-point energy? Who is John Hutchinson and what is the “Hutchinson Effect”? Why is there no such thing as drought on many levels from Regenerative Farming to atmospheric water generation? Who is John Nordberg and what does he know about the 37.5 million billion gallons of water recycled around the planet 40 times per year? Why are handstands, headstands, and shoulder stands good for you? Why does the iris of the eye know the secret? Why can’t the beaker boys tell “shilajit from Shinola” when it comes to DNA? Do we “get” cancer many times a day and “get rid of” it just as many times? A listener asks about scoliosis and spondylitis. Atom explains Oscillation Massage and why spinal pain has little to do with vertebral damage. A listener asks about drinking warm water with lemon juice. A listener wants to know the best time to eat chia seeds. Robert asks Patrick and Atom about goal-setting techniques. “Carol in the Country” asks about the pandemic and the vaccine. James asks about the three different versions of terrain and germ theories. Atom explains why you can dump all of your books once you learn to Mind Hack. All the answers to health, wealth, and longevity are in our living cellular matrix. No experts or personal instruction will ever be needed again. Who is Julian Simon and what did he have to say about population growth? What does it have to do with “all those wide open spaces” in Texas and elsewhere? Mary asks Patrick about adopting children versus having them.

“What is the origin of Yes, No, Maybe?” Patrick asks Atom Bergstrom, referring to both the concept and the book. Is Yes, No, Maybe the way out of Yin-Yang, split-brain consciousness? What is the actual meaning of herd immunity? Is humanity being scammed from beginning to end? Are all the X-Men-type movies getting us used to transhumanism? Is that why worldwide robot manufacturing doubled last year? Where is Ground Zero for globalism? Is it really in Davos or is it in Boston? Klaus Schwab is a graduate of what U.S. school? Patrick and Atom discuss Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. President in 2004. Is it better to confront globalism sideways instead of head-on? Does gathering in crowds to protest drag us deeper into the tar pit? Atom mentions Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book,” published in 1971. Patrick explains why he’s focused on exercising and getting stronger. Stretching is an important part of his program. What are reactive muscles? How does weakening one muscle strengthen its opposing muscle? What’s the difference between concentric and eccentric muscle contraction? Patrick and Atom explore strategies for wellness and long life. How does the “Big Fat Mouth” interfere with health and longevity? Atom asks listeners to pray for Christina Ponsot of Yelapa, Mexico. She’s a long-time friend who has been single-handedly running the only Solar Nutrition restaurant in the world till she recently broke her arm. Carbon dioxide is a miracle cure. Why has it been overlooked by scientists for so many years? How were so many thousands and thousands of people cured of every disease from A to Z, and yet so few contemporary people know about it? Carbon dioxide is necessary for oxygen to give us life. Oxygen without carbon dioxide does nothing except oxidize and deteriorate the body. Oxygen plus carbon dioxide can give us the Diamond Body. What atomic element is most important to plant life in nature and agriculture? Is it carbon or is it nitrogen? What happens when sugar water is sprayed on a plant? Why are fungi so important to plant growth? Why is no-till agriculture the antithesis of monolithic corporate agriculture? Who is Gabe Brown and what is Regenerative Ranching? Why do you want more insects, not less insects, on your farm or ranch? Why are we being lied to about solar energy? Why is it much more feasible and inexpensive than we’re being told? What about zero-point energy? Who is John Hutchinson and what is the “Hutchinson Effect”? Why is there no such thing as drought on many levels from Regenerative Farming to atmospheric water generation? Who is John Nordberg and what does he know about the 37.5 million billion gallons of water recycled around the planet 40 times per year? Why are handstands, headstands, and shoulder stands good for you? Why does the iris of the eye know the secret? Why can’t the beaker boys tell “shilajit from Shinola” when it comes to DNA? Do we “get” cancer many times a day and “get rid of” it just as many times? A listener asks about scoliosis and spondylitis. Atom explains Oscillation Massage and why spinal pain has little to do with vertebral damage. A listener asks about drinking warm water with lemon juice. A listener wants to know the best time to eat chia seeds. Robert asks Patrick and Atom about goal-setting techniques. “Carol in the Country” asks about the pandemic and the vaccine. James asks about the three different versions of terrain and germ theories. Atom explains why you can dump all of your books once you learn to Mind Hack. All the answers to health, wealth, and longevity are in our living cellular matrix. No experts or personal instruction will ever be needed again. Who is Julian Simon and what did he have to say about population growth? What does it have to do with “all those wide open spaces” in Texas and elsewhere? Mary asks Patrick about adopting children versus having them.

Julian Simon prend le contrôle du groove pour notre plus grand plaisir. BE MY GUEST c'est tous les jeudis à 19h sur Radio Monaco. Retrouvez également son actualité sur son instagram @juliansimon_dj

Dave forsyth and Robert Bradley discuss the real threat is climate policy. We discuss the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Markets are the solution for climate issues, not the state. If we want to remain free, we have to fight the carbon police.

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Severin Borenstein, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas, and member of the Board of Governors of the California Independent System Operator. As the state of Texas struggles to keep the lights on due to extreme cold, Raimi asks Borenstein about lessons learned from California’s blackouts during the summer of 2020: the cause of the outages, the role of renewables, and market reforms that could help reduce the risk of blackouts in the future. Raimi and Borenstein also discuss how California’s experience can help Texas and other regional electricity networks plan for a future with more renewable power. References and recommendations: “An empirical analysis of the potential for market power in California’s electricity industry” by Severin Borenstein and James Bushnell; http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/download/JIE99Cournot.pdf “Measuring Market Inefficiencies in California’s Restructured Wholesale Electricity Market” by Severin Borenstein, James B. Bushnell, and Frank A. Wolak; http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/download/AER02BBW.pdf “Capacity Markets at a Crossroads” by James Bushnell, Michaela Flagg, and Erin Mansur; https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP278.pdf “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” by Marc Levinson; https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/the-box “The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future” by Paul Sabin; https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300198973/bet “Under a White Sky” by Elizabeth Kolbert; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617060/under-a-white-sky-by-elizabeth-kolbert/

A famous biologist, Paul Ehrlich, predicts that overpopulation will lead to global catastrophe. He writes a bestselling book — The Population Bomb — and goes on the Tonight Show to make his case.An economist, Julian Simon, disagrees. He thinks Ehrlich isn't accounting for how clever people can be, and how shortages can lead to new, more efficient ways of doing things. So Simon challenges Ehrlich to a very public, very acrimonious, decade-long bet. On today's show: The story of that bet, and what it tells us about the future of humanity.

Let the waves of optimism wash over you as return-guests Ron Bailey (Reason) and Marian Tupy (Cato Institute) join forces as Jonah’s tour guides through the last several centuries of human progress. Listen to the first half to hear why there is actual good news about the human condition – even during a pandemic – and stick around in the second half for a satisfying helping of philosophical eggheadery on education, personal liberty, and the logic of nonviolent protest. Show Notes: -The DispatchTry a 30-day trial membership for -Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting -Marian’s project, HumanProgress.org -ReasonRon’s page at -Jason Hickel refutes the World Bank’s measurement of extreme poverty -Julian Simon’s bet with Paul Ehrlich -Malthus, the original Thanos -Famines rarely happen in democratic countries with a free press -China’s Social Credit System -University of Edinburgh set to remove David Hume’s name from building -Jonah: Irradiating the Past -DonorsTrust.org/Dingo to get a free copy of “6 Reasons to Use a Donor-Advised Fund” -ExpressVPN.com/Remnant for an extra 3 months free with 12-month plan See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Softy and Dick Brandon Huffman of 24/7 Sports joins Softy and Dick to discuss the commitment of Julian Simon to USC, the impact on missing on Simon for UW, and an update on Husky recruiting along with the Pac-12. Also, an edition of textamonials that touches heavily on the fake Seahawks trade rumor from Reddit.

Brandon Huffman of 24/7 Sports joins Softy and Dick to discuss the commitment of Julian Simon to USC, the impact on missing on Simon for UW, and an update on Husky recruiting along with the Pac-12.

Brandon Huffman of 24/7 Sports joins Softy and Dick to discuss the commitment of Julian Simon to USC, the impact on missing on Simon for UW, and an update on Husky recruiting along with the Pac-12.

Softy and Dick Brandon Huffman of 24/7 Sports joins Softy and Dick to discuss the commitment of Julian Simon to USC, the impact on missing on Simon for UW, and an update on Husky recruiting along with the Pac-12. Also, an edition of textamonials that touches heavily on the fake Seahawks trade rumor from Reddit.

Softy and Dick Brandon Huffman of 24/7 Sports joins Softy and Dick to discuss the commitment of Julian Simon to USC, the impact on missing on Simon for UW, and an update on Husky recruiting along with the Pac-12. Also, an edition of textamonials that touches heavily on the fake Seahawks trade rumor from Reddit.

With a human population larger than any point in history, we are consuming more natural resources than at any point in history. So, how can we ever expect to maintain this pace without running out of resources? As it turns out, the people who seriously sound these alarm bells are forgetting one thing. Throughout history, bigger problems have produced bigger solutions. Had those initial problems never arisen, neither would have the solutions. As noted scholar Julian Simon put it, “We need our problems. In some fundamental way we need bigger and better problems. That’s not to say we should run …

The Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Hunter Lewis. Recorded at the Mises Institute on March 22, 2019. Includes an introduction by Joseph T. Salerno. The Austrian Economics Research Conference is the international, interdisciplinary meeting of the Austrian School, bringing together leading scholars doing research in this vibrant and influential intellectual tradition. The conference is hosted by the Mises Institute at its campus in Auburn, Alabama, and is directed by Joseph Salerno, professor of economics at Pace University and academic vice president of the Mises Institute. Lecture Text: In 1946, a book named Economics in One Lesson was written by a man who did not think it would have a great impact beyond the economic fallacies of his day. That amazing man was Henry Hazlitt. Now over one million copies have been sold and it remains in print. It is a personal honor to lecture about Hazlitt: He is one of my favorite writers on economics, political economy, and ethics. Economics in One Lesson, which was based in part on Bastiat's essay, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” debunks the most prominent economic fallacies of the past and the present, summing up economics as long-term versus ephemeral thinking. He wrote more than twenty books and was the principal editorial writer on finance and economics for The New York Times for twelve years and a columnist for Newsweek for twenty years. More importantly, his writing was thoughtful, incisive, and influential, and he played a significant role in supporting, introducing, and explaining the ideas of Mises and also Hayek. He is a stellar example of the impact one person can have on our society. My mentor, Dr. Bill Peterson (a student and colleague of Mises) and his wife Mary were good friends of Hazlitt, so although I never met Henry, I did receive first-hand knowledge of his life and work from the Petersons. I am thankful to Laura Bennett Peterson, Bill and Mary Peterson's daughter, for assisting me with this lecture. Laura grew up knowing Hazlitt and she has been exceptionally helpful with her knowledge and insights about him. Dr. Peterson was very complimentary of Hazlitt's writing and personal courage, especially when he opposed the Bretton Woods agreement. Hazlitt knew Bretton Woods would cause inflation. The New York Times had no interest in criticizing this agreement, and that sent Hazlitt looking for a new job. Hulsmann indicates in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism that Hazlitt may have been one of Mises' first close American friends. In 1940, Hazlitt received a call from “Mises speaking,” and he described the encounter as if “John Stuart Mill were speaking.” This was the beginning of a long-term friendship between Hazlitt and Mises. By explaining economic theory, Hazlitt enabled many entrepreneurs to think clearly and correctly. Most of the time the world promotes compliance with existing ideas and punishes critical thinking and new ideas. This was Germany's mentality in the early 20th century, Mises was treated miserably because of what he thought; this is common today. Profound thinkers are rarely appreciated and often scorned. Today we are witnessing this in our universities, which were created for thinkers but now suppress original thoughts. This talk focuses on three of Hazlitt's central concerns: His book, The Foundations of Morality, established a high standard of morality. Current events demonstrate a widespread lack of morality in our society.His book, Thinking as a Science, elevates thinking to a new level. Today everyone is “thinking outside of the box.” The problem is, most people are not thinking most of the time.His book, Economics in One Lesson, introduces us to classical-liberal thinking, which is foreign to most Americans He wisely pointed out, along with Mises, that economics “is a description, explanation, or analysis of the determinants, consequences, and implications of human action and human choice.” Hazlitt's economic thinking is thus grounded on human behavior. The recent gyrations of the stock market, based on fears of tariffs or higher interest rates, illustrate how markets react in real time to the effects of current policies. Hazlitt was a giant in financial journalism, as noted in Jim Grant's Hazlitt lecture. But Hazlitt was also a public intellectual with unique insights on morality, thinking, and political economy. We will begin with Hazlitt's understanding of morality as embodying long-term thinking, his foundational theme. This is his most powerful message. Morality For Hazlitt, “morality is essentially, not the subordination of the ‘individual' to ‘society' but the subordination of immediate objectives to long-term ones.” Hazlitt realized that the long-term interests of the individual would serve the long-term interests of society. The long-term interests of the individual depend on social cooperation, as Hazlitt points out: “Social cooperation is the foremost means by which the majority of us attain most of our ends.” (The Foundations of Morality, 13) CAS stresses cooperation as the primary way we can progress as a company. It can be challenging and requires humility. We witness the parade of lobbyists seeking government favors: lobbyists from GM, the U.S. steel industry and Tesla, to name just a few. I might add our universities to this list, since the federal government helps to fund their excessive spending. These companies and institutions are rent seekers and tariff promoters. German and Asian automakers, which also manufacture in America, received no bailouts and don't want tariffs. In fact, BMW exports 75 percent of the SUVs it makes in South Carolina. Hazlitt reminds us to let the market decide, as “dying industries absorb labor and capital that should be released for growing industries.” Hazlitt believed that bailouts and tariffs are short-term solutions to long-term industry problems. Hazlitt's concept of morality can be summed up in two of his own sentences: “The conduct we call moral is the conduct we consider likely to lead to the most satisfactory situation in the long run.” And “immoral action is nearly always short-sighted action.” These important principles are lost on our society today. The challenge for entrepreneurs: We must focus on the long term in spite of tremendous pressure to think only over the short term. Markets are very competitive, and sometimes promote short-term thinking and solutions. But we know, short-term decisions can be very costly in the long run. It is imperative to teacher our students about Hazlitt. Many domestic steel manufacturers raised prices over this past year even higher than the steel tariffs. It did not work, Users take notice and take action. In the long term our domestic steel industry will be harmed by tariffs. This is human action in the marketplace. We are witnessing a parade of successful entrepreneurs, as well as leaders in all walks of life, fall from grace because they lacked morality. These individuals may have brilliant ideas, but they lost sight of the long term and failed to learn Hazlitt's most important lesson on morality: High integrity is required for the sustainability of an enterprise over the long term. Our society promotes and praises loud and unethical leaders such as Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk, but companies and investors suffer. Companies suffer because of these unethical individuals in charge: think of VW, Lehman Brothers, Tesla, and now Boeing. Conversely, Warren Buffet is not an Austrian Economist but he is an excellent investor, capital allocator has an exceptional reputation for honesty and became rich in the long run. Companies and Investors flock to him. The market requires moral leaders because the market cannot function without integrity. In addition to morality, Hazlitt makes the need for freedom very clear: This freedom applies to entrepreneurs: In order to have the freedom to succeed, we must have the freedom to fail. For Hazlitt, capitalism allows for freedom, It does not hinder freedom: Modern capitalism is not an inevitable or inescapable system but one that has been chosen by Americans. It is a system of freedom. In America, some 300 million people produce 24 percent of the world's goods. America leads the world in innovation, which is the essence of American exceptionalism. Too Many countries undermine freedom and the results are clear. The EU has slow growth and high unemployment. In Venezuela, freedom is denied to the point of starvation. There is concern that the free market creates inequities and failures. But Hazlitt points out that “a free-market system tends to give to every social group, and to every individual within each group, the value of what it or he has contributed to production.” Hazlitt sums it up perfectly. Socialists refuse to understand free markets. They fail to see that production is based on incentives, not coercion. Some politicians live off the fat of the land but hate producers, freedom and success. It would be entertaining to read what Hazlitt might write about the lunacy of the Green New Deal and massive government debt. Successful businesses must have a strong record of morality and must think long term to survive in a competitive marketplace. The CEO of Boeing would probably affirm this statement, at least right now. Unfortunately, Boeing's marketing group convinced the FAA the 737 Max was the same as the old reliable 737. This wasn't true. Even many pilots were not aware of the complexity of the new MCAS software. The FAA did not understand the new Boeing technology, so why are they regulating. The 737 Max's software relied on a single sensor, which failed. Some important safety features were sold as “options,” not standard equipment. Those options weren't chosen by Lion Air or Ethiopian Air, but you can count on them being standard in the future. Internal concerns from Boeing engineers and pilots' reports to the NASA system were ignored. Why? Boeing was focusing on competing with Airbus, which had the lead; morality and long-term thinking be damned. No one will ever think of Boeing in the same way and there could be criminal as well as civil liability. Lesson learned: One must bear in mind, as Hazlitt taught, the long-term consequences of conduct. Industries must be 100 % responsible 100 % of the time. Thinking H. L. Mencken described Hazlitt as "one of the few economists in human history who could really write." Hazlitt wrote well because he thought well. Hazlitt, affirms in his book, Thinking as A Science, that most people are not thinkers. I love Hazlitt's observation that if there is a problem and a solution is needed, “They want to look it up.”In today's world, they'd want to “Google it.” Too many of our educational institutions are propaganda centers and not cultivators of thinking people. Many institutions suppress thinkers and demand compliance with politically correct, non-thinking popular culture, which undermines an entrepreneurial America. I often tell our students and our interns: How you think will determine your future. Good thinking and cooperation are critical to making progress in life. Hazlitt was a great thinker by analyzing the long-term consequences of economic policies, such as tariffs and monetary and fiscal policy. He knew that our thinking will have major consequences, for good or evil. His book, The Failure of the New Economics, masterfully refutes Lord Keynes's General Theory by showing Keynes's theories as nothing more than bad thinking. Two great thinkers in the 20th century were the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers were successful in flight because they visualized the need for “suitable controls” to balance the plane once it is in the air. Our government sponsored Samuel Langley who failed to realize the need for suitable controls in flight. The Wright Brothers took no government money, they are a perfect future model for Entrepreneurs. Thinking ability is the greatest single advantage of the entrepreneur. “The greatest resource,” as Julian Simon put it, “is the human mind.” Thinkers in business applied the principles of “exit” and disruption. Think of technologist Balaji Srinivasin in genomics and mobile money, and of UBER, Airbnb, and self-driving cars. Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen is among those who have studied old industries that were disrupted by new companies with a better approach. Nucor Steel, an upstart in 1960 with its minimills, is now the largest steel company in the U.S. Our only task as entrepreneurs is to serve the user. CaptiveAire thinks in the long-term, continuously. Even with the steel tariffs in effect since 2018, CaptiveAire has refused to raise prices beyond our normal level. We gain market share because we think long-term, and we generate profits by always putting our users' interests first. We witness short-term ideas and fallacious claims every day. Socialism is being sold hard as a solution to a problem that does not exist in America.There is a Green New Deal to save our planet, which is doing pretty well.Debt and deficits do not matter, as long as interest rates are low. Congress does not even attempt to balance the budget.Free trade is portrayed as the enemy of prosperity but in fact it has made us rich. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom described those who would “buy” such fallacious claims as the gullible. Problems and solutions must be well-thought out and understood before changes are made. Good decisions require real thinking, which is hard and time-consuming.. Yet without good thinking, the consequences may be catastrophic. Long-Term Economics Hazlitt sets a clear path for entrepreneurs who think long term. The entrepreneur must make the hard decisions at the right time, based on the known facts that are often sparse in the creative world. In 1978, when we began making kitchen ventilation hoods, the machines to create more hoods faster did not exist… In 1983, the computerized hydraulic-press brakes we needed were invented by Darley in Holland. This technology revolutionized the sheet metal industry. Hydraulic-press brakes increased productivity four times and the now fully-automated machines produce eight times what they did in 1982. In 1988, international alloy prices were spiking, causing stainless steel prices to increase dramatically. My solution was to find an stainless steel product less vulnerable to volatile alloy price spikes. CaptiveAire adopted two important changes that transformed the industry: We light-weighted Commercial hoods, saving 20% of the metal.We changed the standard from 304 to 430 stainless steel, saving another 20%. In 2008, most of the food service industry adopted our 1988 standards using 430 metal when possible. CaptiveAire was a little-known manufacturer with sales of nine million dollars in 1988. These and other decisions propelled us to a half-billion dollars in sales last year. Changes are risky, but the long-term outcome was that CaptiveAire became the leading producer of commercial kitchen hoods in North America. In 1925, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and President Calvin Coolidge applied a supposedly “scientific” method in determining the marginal federal income tax rate. They chose 25 percent. The decreased income tax rate helped America to enjoy the Roaring Twenties' economy. After the stock market crashed in 1929, Hoover prolonged the Great Depression by raising the marginal rate to 63 %. Tariffs averaged 40 % with the Smoot-Hawley Act. Hazlitt clearly describes the tax dilemma: When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble. Hazlitt cautioned that tariffs do not raise the standard of living; they have the opposite effect, which we witness today. Tariffs are self-inflicted wounds and the current trade wars are slowing economic growth here and abroad. Growth is slowing internationally because of tariffs. On free trade, Hazlitt quotes Adam Smith: In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of people to buy whatever they want of those who sell the cheapest. Free trade should be intuitive, especially with the example of the 50 American states, which comprise the largest unilateral free-trade zone in history. But despite the value of free trade, large numbers of Americans believe tariffs raise our standard of living and create jobs. The steel tariffs under President George W. Bush were meant to help American steel companies, but ended up hurting even more companies and causing the loss of 200 thousand jobs in industries using steel. This exemplifies how a short-sighted policy hurts entire industries in the long term. Hazlitt's long-term approach is imperative for America. Three things we desperately need to think about in regard to the long term are: Eliminating fiscal deficitsEducating our childrenFocus on integrity to the market place, not special interests. These policies would greatly benefit our economy: The more the deficit Reducing Government spending allows more investment capital, allocated by entrepreneurs not government. The better our students are educated, the more productive our workforce will be. U.S. K-12 public schools are one of the largest monopolies in history. Costs are high, quality is low, discipline and character formation are gone. In America's public schools, you don't get what you pay for. In 2007, I opened a private K-12 chain of private schools named The Thales Academy. Hazlitt's morality, thinking, and long-term outcomes formed our philosophy. The Thales standard is the highest possible academic quality and character formation for each student at the lowest possible cost. The cost for K-5 is $ 5,000.00 per year and has not changed since the founding. Today we have 8 campuses and 3,100 students. My goal is to grow Thales to 25,000 students as an example of what can be done. The Thales model is changing the way parents think of K-12 education. One important lesson I have learned, which is contrary to conventional wisdom, is that it takes a very long time to establish a great company. And the process never ends! Individuals, companies, and our government must think about the long-term effects of their actions. Conclusion: Why Hazlitt Matters for the Entrepreneur Hazlitt states that an entrepreneur is "a capitalist willing to take unusual risks." His theories of morality and long-term economics are found in every story of a successful entrepreneur. When an entrepreneur is able to achieve excellence, society is benefited as a whole. However, the entrepreneur can only achieve excellence when freedom prevails. Calls for the government to provide its citizens with every necessity, whim, and craving lead to chaos. Venezuela is a leading example of this. This is why the moral entrepreneur is critical to the market: He is not concerned with garnering the most rights for himself, but rather gaining the most customers by serving. Hazlitt explains, “the rules of morality are those rules of conduct that tend most to increase human cooperation, happiness and well-being” The entrepreneur's morality directly correlates with society's well-being; the job is never done for entrepreneurs and economists. Hazlitt never went to college: his thoughts were not dependent on what he already knew, but rather on trying to explore things he did not know. Edwin Land affirmed this way of learning and thinking when he said: “Creativity begins at the edge of the known.” This is how successful entrepreneurs operate: They make guesses and take risks off of the edge of what they already know. They apply their thinking skills to make the best possible decisions using the information they have today to positively influence the long-term future. My Message to entrepreneurs: Maintain humility in realizing that you don't and can't know everything. In the words of Dr. Bill Peterson, “None of us get it all right.” No matter how much you know, it will always be a fraction of what is already known. In the 40 plus years that CaptiveAire has existed, we have made many mistakes but our policy is that if we are wrong, we pay the price, not our users. In 2016, we designed a new leading-edge Roof Top Heating and Cooling unit for commercial buildings. This new technology uses a modulating compressor so it's very efficient and can provide 100 % outside fresh air to buildings. We learned from past errors and elected to have a three-year BETA testing of this product. We know we are 100 % responsible for the performance of this product for the next 20 plus years. Hazlitt's long term philosophy does work in the market and it fact this is how the market works. Entrepreneurs aggressively seek new knowledge and rethink everything: they carry the torch of Hazlitt. We live at a time where Entrepreneurs & Producers are the villains and the heroes are the Government and Politicians. I quote Bill Peterson: “Entrepreneurs are every bit the heroes of our society.” I might add, the takers are the real villains. As we witness rallies and hear cheers for the short-term economic policies, we must think of the long-term to achieve the American dream. Hazlitt, Mises and Hayek lived in more challenging times, but our society is on the road to Serfdom unless the Austrian School prevails; as economic illiteracy rules the day. Hazlitt's morality through long-term thinking is hard to sell to the public because Human Nature lives in the present and wants it now. Our country's foundation is being shaken by the lack of and therefore it is imperative that we integrate long-term thinking into our homes, our schools, our places of work. I challenge you to take up the mantle of Hazlitt and be a courageous writer, debater and teacher of morality and long-term thinking. We could use an army of Hazlitts today: men and women of courage and wisdom, who are unafraid to speak and write the truth. I conclude with Hazlitt's words. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.

In his 2nd inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said, "There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams." First impression: that's a nice-sounding sentiment -- way to stay positive, Ronnie! Second impression: what a load of crap (and a horrible foundation for economic policy in the age of overshoot)! This episode of Crazy Town focuses on the limits to growth, including the growth imperatives built into our economic institutions, and explores how the economy could make a shift toward sustainability. Along the way, Asher, Rob, and Jason take some potshots at Ronnie and his cohort of math-challenged wishful thinkers. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website.Support the show (https://postcarbon.org/donate)

The team sits down with Marian Tupy, a senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, to discuss the work of the late economist Julian Simon and the condition of human progress. Links: • More from Marian on human flourishing: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/population-growth-leads-abundant-resources • Lean more about the Cato Institute: www.cato.org/

Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is the senior economic contributor for FreedomWorks. He is also a Fox News Contributor.  Stephen previously served as president of the Club for Growth and chief economist of the Heritage Foundation.  He served as a senior economic advisor to President-elect Trump’s campaign this year. Moore’s early career was shaped by three people who had a profound influence on him: Julian Simon, the late Cato Institute scholar; Edwin J. Feulner, a co-founder of Heritage; and Art Laffer, the economist best known for the Laffer curve. Moore calls his creation of the Club for Growth the defining moment of his career. The organization, which he left in 2004, helps elect conservative members of Congress. Moore next founded the Free Enterprise Fund before joining The Wall Street Journal. As senior economics writer for the newspaper’s editorial board, he covered Washington policy debates and state issues. Moore, who grew up in New Trier Township, Ill., received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a master of arts in economics from George Mason University.

Today's interview features Joanna Szurmak of the University of Toronto. Our topic for today is the second proposed bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Joanna has written a paper titled "Care to Wager Again? An Appraisal of Paul Ehrlich's Counter-Bet Offer to Julian Simon" along with coauthors Vincent Geloso and Pierre Desrochers, both former guests of this show. We mentioned the original Simon-Ehrlich bet briefly in my conversation with Steve Horwitz, but in this episode we talk about it in more detail. Julian Simon had a cornucopian vision of development and humanity. In his view, things are getting better as we develop new ideas for improving our lives and our world. Paul Ehrlich has precisely the opposite vision. He has been predicting environmental catastrophe since the 1960s. Julian Simon famously challenged Ehrlich to a wager. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any five commodities whose prices were not controlled by governments, betting that their inflation-adjusted prices would fall rather than rise. While Ehrlich was very publicly predicting the depletion of many commodities, Simon challenged him to put up or shut up. The five commodities Ehrlich chose---copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten---all fell in price between 1980 and 1990. The subject of Joanna's research is the counter-bet Ehrlich offered Simon in 1994. Ehrlich, along with climatologist Stephen Schneider, bet that 15 trends would worsen between 1994 and 2004: The three years 2002–2004 will on average be warmer than 1992–1994. There will be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2004 than in 1994. There will be more nitrous oxide in the atmosphere in 2004 than 1994. The concentration of ozone in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) will be greater than in 1994. Emissions of the air pollutant sulfur dioxide in Asia will be significantly greater in 2004 than in 1994. There will be less fertile cropland per person in 2004 than in 1994. There will be less agricultural soil per person in 2004 than 1994. There will be on average less rice and wheat grown per person in 2002–2004 than in 1992–1994. In developing nations there will be less firewood available per person in 2004 than in 1994. The remaining area of virgin tropical moist forests will be significantly smaller in 2004 than in 1994. The oceanic fishery harvest per person will continue its downward trend and thus in 2004 will be smaller than in 1994. There will be fewer plant and animal species still extant in 2004 than in 1994. More people will die of AIDS in 2004 than in 1994. Between 1994 and 2004, sperm cell counts of human males will continue to decline and reproductive disorders will continue to increase. The gap in wealth between the richest 10% of humanity and the poorest 10% will be greater in 2004 than in 1994. Simon declined the second bet because the measures were both too difficult to quantify and too disconnected from the thing Simon was actually interested in: human welfare. Simon explained it as follows: Let me characterize their offer as follows. I predict, and this is for real, that the average performances in the next Olympics will be better than those in the last Olympics. On average, the performances have gotten better, Olympics to Olympics, for a variety of reasons. What Ehrlich and others says is that they don't want to bet on athletic performances, they want to bet on the conditions of the track, or the weather, or the officials, or any other such indirect measure. Joanna, Vincent, and Pierre have gone to great lengths to figure out who would have one on each of the 15 points had Simon accepted the bet. Listen to the episode to find out! [Note: The sound quality drops about an hour into the episode. Skype failed and we had to switch to a telephone line.] Other links: Here is a 1998 interview with Julian Simon detailing his Cornucopian worldview. Pierre Desrochers and Vincent Geloso wrote a detailed article on the first bet.

Today's guest is Steve Horwitz, he is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of the economics department at St. Lawrence University. Steve recently wrote an article titled, "Make Babies, and Don't Let the Greens Guilt Trip You about It." This was a response to an argument made by the bioethicist Travis Rieder, who was recently profiled by NPR. Rieder argues that it is immoral to have children because of the burden additional humans place on the Earth, in particular because of the risk of catastrophic climate change. Here's how that NPR piece put his argument: "Back at James Madison University, Travis Rieder explains a PowerPoint graph that seems to offer hope. Bringing down global fertility by just half a child per woman 'could be the thing that saves us,' he says. He cites a study from 2010 that looked at the impact of demographic change on global carbon emissions. It found that slowing population growth could eliminate one-fifth to one-quarter of all the carbon emissions that need to be cut by midcentury to avoid that potentially catastrophic tipping point." The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it views human beings as consumers and not as producers and innovators. Humans are able to contribute to the division of labour and to come up with ideas. That division of labour allows everyone to become more productive. Rieder's ideas echo those of Thomas Robert Malthus, and he is wrong for much the same reasons. Malthus anticipated a world where the diminishing returns in agriculture and exponential population growth would lead humanity to subsistence in a few generations. As Malthus predicted, populations did skyrocket, but contra Malthus, people got significantly richer too. What happened? Innovation happened. Along with that innovation, and contributing to it, was a finer division of labour created by population growth. As Adam Smith wrote, "the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market." Humans create resources, not by violating thermodynamics, but by discovering better ways to satisfy our needs with the physical matter that exists. Resources are subjective. To a farmer 500 years ago, striking oil was a nuisance. It would ruin his crops and destroy the value of his land. Yet today, the very same oil is a valuable resource because we've discovered how to make it useful. Julian Simon challenged the idea that we're running out of resources, declaring human innovation to be "the ultimate resource." Rieder and other environmentalists are different from Malthus in that they worry not about more people eating too much food but about them releasing too much carbon. A lot of this comes down to our estimate of the social cost of carbon. Rieder sees this cost as being so high, it outstrips all other concerns. He expects apocalyptic changes in the Earth's climate within twenty years. Economists are not climate scientists, we aren't trained to be able to perform our own studies on the relationship between carbon emissions and global climate. But what we can do is look at the bulk of the published research. The two things we could say about this to someone like Rieder are, first, that he seems to have based his arguments on the absolute highest estimates of the climate impact of carbon, where a reasonable person might have looked at the median estimates. And second, people who have performed meta-analyses of this literature have found evidence of publication bias towards finding a larger impact, meaning the best estimate would be somewhat below the median estimate once we correct for publication bias. If the kind of climate change Rieder sees coming in twenty years is really more like two hundred years away, it changes the argument a lot. With the costs of climate change so far out in the future, and the costs of abatement concentrated on the present, our cost-benefit analysis needs to account for the discount factors in such long time spans. The projects that have to be sacrificed today to abate climate change over the next couple centuries have their own benefits that need to be weighed against the costs of releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. It all comes down to opportunity cost. Other links: Progress Does Not Depend on Geniuses Against Fossil Fuel Divestment with Pierre Desrochers

Historians have a pretty hard time figuring out the past; should they also try to forecast the future? My guest on today's podcast, Professor David Hochfelder, believes that, in fact, historians are uniquely qualified to forecast what comes next. In one recent interview Professor Hochfelder is quoted as saying that he's never believed in “studying the past for the past’s own sake." He observes that, “The major rationale for studying history is to figure out how we got here, and if we answer that question, if we have that mind-set, the very next question is, ‘So where are we going after this?’” David Hochfelder is associate professor of history at the University of Albany, part of the SUNY system. An electrical-engineer-turned-historian, Dr. Hochfelder has written on the histories of technology and business, combining both in his book The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920. We're very pleased to have this provocative thinker as our guest this week on Historically Thinking. Join us as we talk about why the 19th century, not the 20th, experienced civilization's greatest technological leap; the difference between predicting and forecasting; what terms of art savvy forecasters like to use; and why. For Further Investigation "Are historians the ideal futurists?" from Inside Higher Education H.G. Wells, "Wanted–Professors of Foresight!" Jason Pontin, "Why We Can't Solve Big Problems", from MIT Technology Review, November 2012 Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future  

In 1980, Julian Simon offered to let doomsayer Paul Ehrlich choose any commodity metals he liked, and if their inflation-adjusted prices increased by 1990, Simon would pay $1000. But if they fell, Ehrlich would pay. The question was: would human ingenuity figure out ways to conserve on these metals, and/or find substitutes for them? By 1990, all five metals had fallen in price, and Ehrlich paid up. What does it all mean? That's what we discuss today.

On the latest episode of Power Hour I talk with Pierre Desrochers about the 25th anniversary of the momentous bet between resource theorists Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Subscribe to Power Hour on iTunes

Are we making progress, holding steady, or retrogressing? Frank Karsten returns to make the case for libertarian optimism! About the Guest Frank Karsten is chairman of  and of the  (More Freedom Foundation), a Dutch libertarian organization which acts to reduce taxes and government intervention. Book Mentioned , by Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman Project Mentioned Guest’s Website Guest’s Twitter Books Recommended by the Guest , by Julian Simon , by Stephen Moore , by Bjørn Lomborg , by Johan Norberg Related Episode : Against the Catastrophists (Robert Bryce) Special Offers I’ve just released another free eBook: 14 Hard Questions for Libertarians — Answered.  to get your copy! Like the new TomWoods.com? It was designed by my friends at Studio 1 Design. They’ve agreed to give my listeners 10% off any design project through .

Paul Sabin of Yale University and author of The Bet talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his book. Sabin uses the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon--a bet over whether natural resources are getting scarcer as population grows--as a lens for examining the evolution of the environmental movement and its status today. Sabin considers the successes and failures of the movement and the challenges of having nuanced public policy discussions on issues where both sides have passionate opinions.

Paul Sabin of Yale University and author of The Bet talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his book. Sabin uses the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon--a bet over whether natural resources are getting scarcer as population grows--as a lens for examining the evolution of the environmental movement and its status today. Sabin considers the successes and failures of the movement and the challenges of having nuanced public policy discussions on issues where both sides have passionate opinions.

Welcome to episode #60 the Julian Simon and Micky Ranseder edition email rumblestripradio (at) gmail.com website www.rumblestripradio.com digg us!  http://digg.com/podcasts/RumbleStripRadio_Podcast Go buy some gear from MotoLiam  http://www.spreadshirt.com/shop.php?sid=44582 If you'd like to help the show by making a donation, you can paypal us some cash. Kwak seats till open, no second and or third rider confirmed Capirex to Suzuki Rossi and Capirex deal with the Italian IRS Interview with Kevin Hanson of Safety First Racinghttp://safetyfirstracing.com/ Video of that interview @ OnTheThrottle.tvhttp://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=15496216  Miguel injured at Road Atlanta test Mid Ohio  Interview with Eraldo Ferracci RSR is a production of Raoul Duke Media LLC and is protected under a Creative Commons License, some rights are reserved