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- [00:00]
Podcast Advertiser
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Commercial Announcer
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- [00:38]
Joel
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- [00:53]
Matt
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- [01:12]
Commercial Announcer
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- [01:24]
Joel
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Commercial Announcer
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Joel
Welcome to how to Money. I'm Joel and today I'm talking about how the World is Getting Better with Marion Tupy. Okay, so you've heard the phrase this is why we can't have nice things. Our modern society has produced a slew of nice things, though that would have been hard to fathom 50 years ago, much less 250 years ago. PCs and smartphones, Gore Tex and duct tape, GPS and the barcode. All of these things, to greater or lesser degrees, have made our lives better. But how did those innovations and that abundance come about? Why does 2025 look so radically different in the developed world than 1825? Well, Marian Tuppy's book Superabundance was a revelation to me a few years ago, showing how far we've come in pretty easy to understand language. Marion Tupy is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He's also the founder and editor of humanprogress.org, a site that seeks to evidence these dramatic improvements. With Thanksgiving coming up tomorrow, I couldn't think of a better time to cover this topic. So, Marion Tupy, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.
- [03:01]
Marion Tupy
Thank you for having me.
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Joel
Okay, first question we ask everybody who comes on. I like to splurge on craft beer, fancy craft beer. Honestly, with Thanksgiving, I might pop something really nice tomorrow. What is that for you, though? What do you like to splurge on while you're still being smart and thoughtful about your finances and your future?
- [03:17]
Marion Tupy
I save a lot of money to be able to travel. I really enjoy traveling and exploring different parts of the world, so I would say that is my luxury. Although I do like beer as.
- [03:28]
Joel
Okay, all right, then you're. We can be friends then. What, what's the last great trip you went on?
- [03:33]
Marion Tupy
I must say I, I think my last great trip was to Argentina. I think that discovery of, of Buenos Aires. It is a proper, Western, well functioning, beautifully laid out city in Latin America that you wouldn't expect to find. And I enjoyed being there very much.
- [03:52]
Joel
Okay, all right, I'll have to. I went a long, long time ago. It's probably 30 years ago, so I'll have to like, put it back on my list. I have to go as an adult. All right, let's get to the topic. I'm curious, like, have we as a society become too accustomed to our current level of wealth without understanding how it's come to be? It seems like there's like a disconnect right now and we, there's like a burn it down sort of mentality without really understanding what we're attempting to burn down.
- [04:20]
Marion Tupy
Yes, I think that is a very good perspective to have. We have gotten to where we are by being a much more open society to new innovations. New innovations don't just have to be technological, medical, scientific innovations. They can be also ethical or cultural innovations. And basically for a variety of reasons, Europe in the 18th century became much more open to new ideas. New ideas flourished and they brought about what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpetter called creative destruction. A lot of old presumptions, dogmas, ideas were simply swept away and the society, well, became much more open to innovation. And as a consequence of that, we have unleashed for the last 200 years an era of unprecedented innovation and consequently greater economic growth as well as I, I would say improved morality where people treat each other much better than they used to. And I think that in certain ways we have certainly forgotten about that. The society is becoming much more closed. You can see it in terms of how we treat international trade, which is of course very important to innovation and to economic growth. But also society is becoming much more skeptical about certain kinds of innovation. Tucker Carlson, for example, was interviewed by Ben Shapiro about two years ago. And Ben Shapiro asked him what would he do about autonomous trucking. Trucking. Autonomous trucks. And Tucker said that he would ban it in a second because it would put a lot of truckers out of work. But if you made the same argument 200 years ago or even 100 years ago about horse buggy drivers, then we would still be riding horse buggies rather.
- [06:30]
Joel
Than driving trucks or ATMs at the bank. Right? I mean, there's a million things you could point to.
- [06:35]
Marion Tupy
Yeah, so that's a very long answer to your short question, but it was a good one.
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Joel
Do you think that the 24 hour news cycle is part of the problem? That it impacts our ability to see the good things that are happening in the world? I know there were these websites for a minute that were dedicated to only publishing good news, but it does feel like the 24 hour news cycle before it existed, we were just less aware of maybe some of the negative things happening in our society. And maybe ignorance was bliss, at least to a certain extent.
- [07:03]
Marion Tupy
I'm not sure if ignorance is ever bliss, but maybe you're right. I will tell you, I agree with you, broadly speaking, but I think that there is something else going on which is negativity contagion. So it's not so much that we have 24 hour cycle, although that's part of it, it's that there is just so many more outlets and they are all doing the same things, which is presenting negative news. So it's not just that Fox has to compete against NBC and CBS and abc. You now have websites where most people get their news in addition to radio and newspapers and so forth. And we have evolved to prioritize bad news. And so because you have now this hyper competitive environment, the only way that you can get people to come back to you in the face of all of that competition is to present the worst news first and repeatedly and in the worst possible terms. And there is very little time and space for positive news. Hundreds of little innovations that are happening every day that are improving people's lives simply do not make it on those websites or on those newscasts. Because in order to get those eyeballs they have to focus on the negative. So the perception that is created in the human mind is that everything in the world is getting worse. And that is certainly incorrect. It's unrealistic and it is highly damaging. So it's the negative emotional contagion which we have to deal with. And there is not an easy solution to it because it's not like it's a market failure in a sense of hyper competition of media only, there is a human nature at play. We desire bad news because we have evolved to look out for bad news in order to survive.
- [09:11]
Joel
You run a site that focuses on a lot of good news that highlights the progress that we've made. So which is kind of the opposite of what thrives in the media ecosystem right now. Can you share maybe a few things, a few recent things from your site that you guys have been working on?
- [09:28]
Marion Tupy
Sure. So humanprogress.org is specifically intended to combat this negativity, emotional bias or contagion. And people can sign up for a weekly summary of all the good things that have taken place. You know, it's just one email a week saying, hey, you know, this is what has happened in the last few weeks. We have seen children who were genetically unable to hear regain their hearing. We have seen new advances. We have seen new statistics showing how certain threatened species of whale are actually expanding all over the world. We have seen the discovery of a new antibiotic which will enable us to get around the problem of superbugs and so on and so forth. So again, the good news is out there, if you just look for it. But I'm afraid that our reach is hundreds of thousands of people. It is not millions that the doom and gloom newscasts get every day.
- [10:34]
Joel
Yeah, okay, let's just talk about progress. Is all progress good? Because it does seem like most of the time, much of the time, especially over the past couple hundred years, a lot of the progress that we've experienced has been to our benefit, personally, economically. Automation, though, it can bring down prices, but it can also reduce jobs, as we were kind of referring to. So how do you square that circle on progress? Good, bad, somewhere in the middle?
- [11:00]
Marion Tupy
I would say that my definition of progress obviously has the human in front of it. So it is a very humanistic or human centric or anthropocentric project, if you will. And if there are aspects to progress which are damaging to humanity, then we need to talk about it. For example, it is an open question whether the fact that we have much more free time than people in the past, it's just the reality is that as people earn more money, they the number of hours of work is lower or goes down. Believe it or not, even though Americans, for example, work much more than people in Western Europe, we still work about a third less than what we did 200 years ago. Right. So we have all this time on our hands and that provides much more time for introspection. And especially if you are amongst the least fortunate people in the United States, say somebody who doesn't have a family, maybe you have just lost your job, etc. Having a lot of time for rumination may not be a bad idea, especially if you have access to all the bad news. So there's another aspect of it which is social media. I am not putting down social media because I think the jury is still out. Social media enables us to do a lot of marvelous things. Keeping up with cousins across the world, speaking to our parents who may not live in the United States, but in Europe or elsewhere, it allows us to get alerts for tsunamis and things like that. So there's a lot of positive to it. But maybe, as Jonathan Haidt argues, taking them out of high schools is not a bad idea. So we have just hired at Human Progress a young psychologist from Harvard who will be researching these issues and hopefully make us understand better about the negative aspects of progress.
- [13:10]
Joel
Can you, can you talk about what has propelled human economic activity to accelerate in such an epic way, especially over the past 150 years, and maybe why it's been experienced more in a more heightened way in countries like ours than maybe even a stark difference of like North Korea and South Korea. Right. Like one thriving economic hub and one closed off from the world. Is it kind of pointing back to, to what you mentioned earlier, being closed off from trade and therefore being closed off from innovation?
- [13:41]
Marion Tupy
Yeah, I think that you are basically right. When you have two states made up of essentially the same people like East Germany and West Germany and North and South Korea, and they are producing fundamentally different economic results that suggests being more open to international trade, have enforceable private property rights, to give just two examples, maybe a stable currency are very important. So Economic Freedom of the World Report, which is co published by the Cato Institute and Fraser Fraser Institute in Canada, they look at regulatory structure, they look at trade openness, they look at sound currency trade and basically what they find is that the more open you are, the less regulated you are, the less overtaxed you are, the better you perform. What has happened was that for a variety of contingent historical reasons, many of these things came together in northwestern Europe, especially in Holland or Netherlands and the United kingdom in the 17th and 18th centuries. And they were able to ship, to grow rapidly and show the path to the rest of the world. And since the United States is simply a daughter country of Great Britain, many of those institutions and very importantly, cultural values that Britain had had been translated into the American context. And America could build upon the British origin story to become the wealthiest country in the world by the year 1900. Fundamentally, it's about institutions, but I think that cultural reasons play also a part. And it is a highly contentious territory, I would say. But I think those two are very important.
- [15:43]
Joel
I heard you say at one point that the good old days were, by and large, very bad. I love that because so many people look back with nostalgia to a bygone era, and they're like, I was so great back then, but I don't think if most of us were offered a time machine, we'd go back probably even 15 or 20 years. When you ask a youngster, hey, would you give up your smartphone for a million dollars? Like, they wouldn't do it. You know, they just wouldn't. They wouldn't want to be parted from that progress. So how do you. How bad was life back in the day? How great do we have it now?
- [16:17]
Marion Tupy
First of all, I wish we did have time travel, because I think that I would love to send every college kid or school kid to Pompeii, where I was, what, three or four weeks ago. This is the city that was destroyed by volcanic eruptions in 79 AD and can be visited in close to Naples today. And the fascinating thing that you see in Pompeii is that the tile roads have large stones running through them. Instead of pedestrian walks, they have these large stepping stones. Why do they have them? Well, they have them because streets would basically be running with sewer. All the human excrement, urine, offal, blood from slaughtered animals would be simply dumped into the street. And then you would have water running down those streets in order to flush it into the sea. Which is partly why Pompeii is on a hill, you know, going down to the Mediterranean Sea. And people used to cross streets on stilts and things like that because basically, basically it was incredibly filthy. That's the first thing that you would. That you would discover if you went back in time. The filth and the stench everywhere. The other thing that you would quickly realize is that people lived to about 30. Today, life expectancy around the world is about 73. It's about 79 in the United States. So everybody has been granted an extra life. 50% of children before the age of 15 died. Okay. Murder rate in Renaissance Italy was about 40 per 100,000. Today in Italy, it's 0.3 per 100,000. So when it comes to violence, life expectancy, child mortality, maternal mortality, roughly 1,000 women per 100,000 childbirths would die in the old days. Today, it's a fraction of that. People were ignorant and illiterate. Our best evidence suggests that even in the most sophisticated societies, roughly 10% of people could read and write. Today, it's obviously almost universal. So along so many dimensions, life was just so much more difficult. And don't forget that we were incredibly poor. So GDP per capita per person per day was about 2 to $3, right. Today, globally, it's about $40, adjusted for inflation. So that gives you a sense of where we were and where we are today. The last two are really unprecedented in human history in terms of the extraordinary flourishing of humanity. And I think that it is deeply connected to the increased liberalization. I'm not using it in political terms as in liberal. In the United States, liberalization of economy and politics, governments became much more responsive. They started enforcing. They stopped behaving in arbitrary fashion. They started enforcing equality before the law. And of course, in the economy, we just became much freer. In 15 or 16th century England, for example, whether you wanted to import something or export something, you need the permission of the king, who would give you a monopoly on the export of salt or the import of wool and whatever else. Today you can pretty much start a business anytime you like. You just have to deal with regulations.
- [20:02]
Joel
Yeah. Is progress something you think of as unavoidable, or do you think it's something that needs to be safeguarded? Like, I think about not being able to recreate the pyramids. Right. Like, almost like that ability has been lost. And we don't, we don't know how right. The pyramids were made or rockets. I've heard Elon Musk say something along the lines of like, if we hadn't started to make rockets again, some of that knowledge would have been lost, would have gone away. Is that how progress is? Can it be lost?
- [20:33]
Marion Tupy
Well, I don't know about the pyramids. I'm pretty sure that we could make them with heavy machinery today. I think that the question about the pyramids is how did the ancients create them without heavy machinery? We could probably do that. No, Progress is definitely not guaranteed. When people started realizing that the world was improving at a very fast Click in the 19th century, there was an emergence of a number of schools of thought. Hegel, Marx, Kant, people like that, who started talking about progress as being unavoidable. But that is clearly not true. Progress can regress. After the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, Europe forgot a lot of the knowledge that the Romans possessed. To this day we don't know how to make Roman concrete, for example, even though it has withstood for 2000 years. And people in the Dark Ages in Europe used to walk amongst the monuments built by the Romans, wondering who were these people who created all of this? Because they forgot, right? So knowledge can be lost, progress can regress. There is nothing unavoidable about it. And that's what concerns me, is that as you noted at the beginning of the interview, so many people have forgotten the reasons why progress has happened. It happens because of an open economy, tolerant of new ideas. And when that goes, or when our institutions change and when we embrace socialism, for example, like the North Koreans or the Cubans or the Venezuelans, then I'm afraid progress will stall and eventually go into reverse.
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Joel
One retort that you might hear from people who think of progress as not like an evident self, evidently good thing is in particular some of the environmental ramifications that progress the negative harms to our environment that progress can create. What would you say to that?
- [22:31]
Marion Tupy
I would say yes and no. So what tends to happen when countries start industrializing? So you go through this process of moving from agriculture to industry to services, and when countries undertake industrialization, there is a lot of ecological harm that takes place. That being said, it's not like life in the agricultural society was without its risks. For example, food would be contaminated at all times. People were suffering from tremendous gastrointestinal problems, ribbon with parasites and so forth. But never mind, let's put that aside. The point is that once you move from agriculture to industry, you do tend to create a lot of environmental damage. But then what happens is that what is called an environmental Kuznets curve kicks in. And this is just a fancy way of saying is that when people become rich enough, they start caring about the environment and they have enough wealth to start protecting their environment. So there are a number of things that go on. One of them is that you simply have more money and more resources, human and otherwise, to clean up your rivers. Which is why today people are swimming in the Seine and there are dolphins in Thames in London. That didn't used to be the case during industrialization. So nature naturally rebounds. Another thing that happens is urbanization Basically, the most disruptive element on land is the human being. And when you take humans off the land, in other words, as you move from agriculture to industry and later to services, more and more people end up in the cities. By 2100, something like 80% of humanity will be in the cities, which means that we will depopulate areas in which we currently live and where we disrupt the natural flow of flora and fauna, and that will bounce back. So the best thing that you can do for the environment is really to urbanize and to become as agriculturally efficient as possible. So the Greens, I'm afraid, are riven with contradictions. On the one hand, they don't want to build nuclear power stations, even though they don't emit CO2. And they are the best solution that we have currently to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. It's more expensive than gas. Gas still produces some CO2 in the atmosphere, but much less so than coal. But you know, if we could switch all of humanity to gas and then eventually to nuclear, then we would be able to reduce CO2 dramatically. Another thing which the Greens are against is GMOs. But suppose that you can genetically modify some of our most important crops such as wheat and corn and soy and so forth, so that you can produce much more per acre. That means that you can feed growing global population on fewer and fewer acres of land, which means that you can return more and more acres of land back to flora and fauna. So there are solutions for environmental comeback that modern society offers. And if you are open minded about it, and the Greens very often aren't, and I'm not even talking about like the extinction movement, which also holds promise for the future where we'll be able to basically use the DNA of dead or extinct animals in order to bring them back.
- [26:01]
Joel
All right, we got more to get to. Specifically, it takes so much less time to buy almost all of the goods and services that we enjoy. We'll talk about why that is with Marion Tupi right after this. My, how time flies 2025. It's going to be gone before we know it. But before it's gone, there's a lot of life to live, right? Including a lot of kid activities, the holiday get togethers and a whole lot more. All this activity though, can cause us to put off tasks on our to do list. But juggling a million plans shouldn't mean your future doesn't make your to do list. Trust and will turns estate planning from a when I have time task into a quick, straightforward process ensuring you're protecting your family's future Today, go to trustandwill.com howtomoney to get 20% off their simple, secure and expert backed estate planning services. That's right.
- [26:56]
Matt
It makes me think. You mentioned kids, Joel. I might be done having kids at this point, but my friends, my neighbors, they aren't. I've got family members who have a fresh baby at home as well and it is such an amazing season of life. But those changes should also bring about a reassessment of whether or not you've got your estate planning ducks all in a row. Trust and Will makes it simple and straightforward. Their easy to use website is simple to navigate and plus all your information, all your documents, they are securely stored with bank level encryption.
- [27:26]
Joel
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- [27:37]
Matt
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- [27:53]
Joel
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- [28:13]
Matt
Give joy, get joy. Join now@navy federal.org @navy federal Credit Union, the members are the mission. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA. Visit Navy federal.org cashrewards for details. Cash back terms and conditions apply. Offer ends January 1, 2026. Hey y', all, it's Joel and Matt from how to Money. Joel, you were just out in Seattle recently, weren't you?
- [28:36]
Joel
Yeah man, it was amazing. I went for one of the most glorious runs of my life along the waterfront. It had everything you could ask for. Crisp air, mountain views, fairies gliding across the water. Beautiful.
- [28:46]
Matt
I love it man. Yeah.
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Joel
For us, our road trip through Charlottesville was a highlight.
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Matt
We actually splurged on a custom built Airbnb and it was well worth it. The house had these unique touches like a poured concrete counter there in the kitchen with a built in drying rack. Super functional. It even inspired some ideas for our house.
- [29:03]
Joel
Plus, with A kitchen like that, you save money eating out.
- [29:05]
Matt
Yes, exactly. That's what struck me. What seems normal to a homeowner, it can be the thing that makes a guest trip really special.
- [29:12]
Joel
Which is why hosting makes sense, Right? Travelers are looking for those authentic, memorable spaces. And if you don't have time to manage all that well, Airbnb's co host feature makes it easy. A local co host can help with everything from creating the listing to keeping your place running smooth.
- [29:27]
Matt
Yeah. So while you are off making your travel memories, your home could be helping someone else make theirs. Find a co host@airbnb.com host.
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Joel
We'Re still talking with Marion Tupy and I want Marian, I want to talk about specifically your book Superabundance. And this was released in 2022. And to me, like, as I was reading, was striking because you put things in terms that were so much easier to understand. And part of what made it easy to comprehend was when you talk about time prices, how long specifically people must work to be able to afford everyday items. Talk about that concept like, how does that, how can that help maybe us appreciate the progress that we've made? And what sort of progress have we made when we look at the concept of time prices?
- [30:14]
Marion Tupy
Well, time prices have been implemented in the book by necessity because we wanted to see how much cheaper resources are today than they used to be before. I mean, the idea that most people subscribe to is a zero sum idea, which is that the more people you have, the more resources they use. Therefore, resources are becoming more expensive and scarcer. The opposite is true. Resources are becoming cheaper as you have more people in the world, because people bring new ideas and they basically grow the resource pie. But since we were going back to 1850, we simply didn't have the currencies and we didn't have the exchange rates and we didn't have the inflation rates, so we couldn't use normal currency. So we simply, what we asked ourselves is basically how long did people have to work in order to buy a bag of potatoes or a bag of oranges or a bunch of bananas or a pound of beef or a pound of pork and whatever else? And so that was done by necessity. But it's also a smart way, I think, that everybody should do it, to measure human well being, or rather abundance or prosperity, simply because it is a. Everybody has only 24 hours in a day. So if you are an Indian peasant, for example, and you are spending six hours a day to earn enough money to buy your food, but an American can do it it in 10 minutes that makes a difference. So what we really want is for people to spend less and less time during their workday, to spend on necessities, clothing, food, housing, that sort of thing, and have more time to work to earn money for leisure or education, or alternatively just not working at all and you know, have time off and enjoy it with your family. So it made accounting sense for the book, but it also makes sense from a moral or ethical standpoint because what you really want to do is measure how much more time we have today to. Well, let me put it this way, because we work so little time to earn the food that we eat, for example, we have much more time to earn the money to travel to Argentina, for example, or, you know, or buy a car, which, which an Indian cannot because most of the time he spends working, he, he's working to provide food for his family.
- [32:57]
Joel
So what is it? So is that what it means then to be able to spend so much less time to buy, let's say, a pound of sugar or an hour of light, like the light bulbs and the energy that it costs to light our homes, does it mean. It means more leisure, more ability to consume new products that are made. Like, what else does it really mean that we have such an abundance of extra time because it costs us less of our working hours, less time of working to get the money to buy that stuff?
- [33:27]
Marion Tupy
Well, essentially it means abundance. It means prosperity. The reason why an American house, house looks very different from a Brazilian favela or an African hut is because we don't have to spend all this time working to buy our food, for example. Right. You know, we have much more time left after we earn enough money to buy our food, to buy refrigerator and a TV and two cars in a garage and books and tables and chairs and everything else. So if you look at a middle class American house today, it looks very different from an African hut or a Brazilian favela precisely because we can buy so much more with our time than Africans or Brazilians can Think about limited.
- [34:21]
Joel
Resources like oil, even that has gotten cheaper over time. And that seems kind of counterintuitive that a scarce resource could get less expensive. And when you think about 20, 30 years ago, some of the predictions about peak oil, those haven't really come to pass. And gas prices are not $6 a gallon where I live. What do you explain that?
- [34:44]
Marion Tupy
Well, it's just that it's not as scarce as people thought it was. So for example, using the old drilling methods, many American oil fields were exhausted in the 1980s and the 1990s. But then somebody, again, we are going to, going back to population and ideas. Then somebody came up with the idea of fracking. And so what you do, you return back to those oil fields which are exhausted with the old technology, and you apply this new technology which is fracking, and you are able to get so much oil and gas out of those same oil fields that, that America today is the world's greatest exporter of oil and gas. Right. So that is one example of how you can, how something that is supposedly scarce becomes less scarce. And even if at some point in the future we run out of oil in the ground, you can of course turn coal into oil. The Germans during the Second World War and South Africans under apartheid were able to do that. We have the technology to do that. So you may go through an extra step to get to oil, but you can still do so. And we have coal deposits lasting us for tens of thousands of years. And of course by that time we'll be already switched over to a different kind of energy source and so forth.
- [36:14]
Joel
Because of human ingenuity.
- [36:16]
Marion Tupy
Because of human ingenuity, yes. I mean, eventually we want to get to a place where all of our energy comes from the sun, for example. Right, yeah. Which, you know, there are, there are a lot of sci fi sort of ways of doing that. The technology is currently not there. And fusion, you know, if we have fusion and we have solar and maybe thermal, thermal energy, you know, we'll be able to get away from, from fossil fuels altogether.
- [36:43]
Joel
I don't want to make light of income inequality and I don't want to make light of with people who don't have nearly the same resources, whether it's because of their familial ancestry, they've had a more difficult life than I have or than you have. I don't know. But what would you say to a U.S. citizen listening to this podcast who thinks they're poor and especially when you think about the global context? I don't know. I'm curious how you would speak to someone like that.
- [37:13]
Marion Tupy
Well, at a meta level, I don't consider inequality to be a proper measure of human well being. I consider poverty to be, or reduction in poverty to be a proper measure of human well being. So I don't really care that Jeff Bezos is worth $300 billion and Elon Musk is worth $500 billion. It's not a zero sum game. They've grown the economic piece and consequently the fact that they are super rich has no negative impact on my life or the lives of the fellow Americans. In other words, they didn't take anything from fellow Americans. So that is not a proper measure of human well being. What is happening at the bottom of the income ladder is of concern. That is a proper measure of well being. What we want to see is wages for the bottom 10% or bottom 20% to continue to increase. And you can really only do that in a growing economy where there's competition for labor. And when it comes to Americans specifically, we are of course the richest large country in the world. There are some countries which are richer per capita. They tend to be much smaller and they tend to be, they tend to have a specific set of characteristics. Like for example, Norway has very few people, but it has so much oil that basically that basically they have trillions of dollars in their sovereign fund. And even then going for dinner in Norway is a nightmare because it's so expensive.
- [38:49]
Joel
I visited once. It was very, very expensive. I can attest.
- [38:51]
Marion Tupy
Yeah. Because of taxes. And you have similar situation in some of the Middle Eastern sheikdoms like United Arab Emirates and so forth. But in terms of Americans as such, we are of course living miraculously better than our ancestors and we are living extraordinarily well compared to the rest of the world. The Chinese income per capita is something like. Median income per capita is something like 13 or $14,000. So they are the same level as Mexico. Whereas the United States is 50 or $60,000 per person. So we are simply much richer than even our competitors.
- [39:38]
Joel
This might not be a question. I don't know if you've ever gotten asked this question before, but how can understanding human progress change the way that we as individuals think about personal finance or long term investing? Because with you talking about progress and like, especially in an economy like ours, man, I want to invest in that progress so I can reap some of the benefit. Yeah. How would you talk to somebody who is wondering about their personal finances or their investing life?
- [40:05]
Marion Tupy
Gosh, I'm, you know, I'm not an investor. God knows I've made a lot of mistakes in the stock market myself. But basically, if anybody is approaching investment thinking, okay, let me invest in raw materials, you know, because the population is increasing and we are consuming more stuff and consequently things must become more expensive. That's not really how it works. So it's really a negative investment strategy, I would say, to invest in raw materials. Now you can chance upon a time when raw materials do become more expensive, like for example, the first decade of the 21st century when China really took off and started growing at a very fast click, they were consuming so many raw materials that raw materials actually increased in price. But, you know, a 20 or 30 or 40 year strategy, investing in raw materials is probably not a good idea. But what drives economy forward is technology really. And so being exposed to tech stocks is probably a better idea. Again, this is just how I read the, the, how I read the lessons from our book is that what drives human progress forward is really new technology.
- [41:22]
Joel
So a recent Pew study found that 57% of people said that their children are going to grow up to be worse off financially than their parents. And this is a reversal of the American optimism that I think has kind of been at like the heart of who we are as a country. It's gone down to significantly over the years. So how is that possible? Does this go back to kind of the beginning of our conversation? How is it possible, given the progress that's been made and specifically in this country that's been keenly felt, why are we so pessimistic about the future and the ability of our children to do better than we have?
- [41:56]
Marion Tupy
There is a very strange thing going on whereby people in the United States but, but other places in the world as well are much more optimistic about their personal lives than about the society as a whole. So there is about 30 point difference on average. If you ask people, how are you doing financially? Oh, I'm doing okay, you know, things are fine. How is America doing? Oh, it's going to hell. And this is a consistent finding in opinion polls. And that, I think has to do with the fact that when you are looking at your life, you can speak much more objectively about where you are today as opposed to last year, whether your income has grown and so forth. Whereas if you are looking at society, there is probably that negative emotion contagion going on where, where you only hear bad things about the United States. And so you, you know, you internalize that for the country, even though you personally are doing well. Now, I don't want to be too blase about it. Of course there are possibilities. Of course there are scenarios under which the future generations could be poorer. If, for example, we shut ourselves off from global trade, we will be poorer. If we elect a socialist to the presidency, we will be poorer. There are scenarios as such, yes, we shouldn't be too blase.
- [43:29]
Joel
In some ways, you're pointing to, not to, I try to avoid politics on the show, but you're pointing to both parties that could lead us to places that are not great. And so I just wanted to point that out there, I don't think.
- [43:43]
Marion Tupy
But I mean, that is why I've chosen examples from both parties, is because both parties have become parties of victimhood, where the politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are basically telling their electorates the world is set against you, everybody's exploiting you. In spite of the fact that you are the most lucky generation in global history in one of the luckiest places in the world, everything sucks because that's how you keep people. That's how you keep your troops constantly anxious and constantly voting for you and supporting you financially. And it's the wrong way to go about it, but both parties are guilty.
- [44:26]
Joel
What's one data point about global progress that still blows your mind? Maybe something that you found when writing the book Superabundance or something that you featured recently on the website Human Progress. What is something that maybe, or when people are asking for like, a factoid that just is, like, ridiculous of human flourishing, what would you point to?
- [44:47]
Marion Tupy
Well, look, the obvious things would be life expectancy. I enjoy life. I recommend that people, you know, stop worrying too much and enjoy life too. And the fact is that life expectancy, you know, 200 years ago was about 30 years, and today it's in the United states, it's approaching 80. So we are given an opportunity to enjoy twice, almost three times as much life as we. As we would have had in the past. But if you're asking me about the specific statistic, given that Thanksgiving is coming up, we wrote an article last year and will probably write an article this year as well about the price of Thanksgiving time. Price of Thanksgiving. And on our calculation, basically, an American worker today can buy 1.7 Thanksgiving dinners for the same amount of time that he or she would have to pay for it in 1986. 86 is. Reagan was president, but 86 is the first year for which we have data. Basically, the American Farming Bureau started tracking down the price of turkey and cranberry sauce and buns and whatever else, and they put it in this basket of commodities how you could feed a bunch of people for a Thanksgiving dinner. Then we track that over time all the way to 2024, and I'm sure we will do one for 2025. And basically what we find is that relative to human labor or relative to time that you have to spend working to earn that money to buy Thanksgiving dinner has dropped by, has dropped so much that now you're getting 1.7 dinners for the same amount of time that you would have gotten one in 1986.
- [46:43]
Joel
So it's like deflation in terms of time prices.
- [46:46]
Marion Tupy
Oh, certainly. And there's deflation going on throughout the economy. I mean, if you look at your iPhone and you adjust for quality, then deflation is definitely going on. Definitely going on. Once you adjust for quality when it comes to cars and food, et cetera.
- [47:02]
Joel
And deflate for all of the things the other gadgets you don't have to buy because your iPhone does all those things now.
- [47:07]
Marion Tupy
Precisely. So wherever the market is allowed to function properly, wherever you have competition, prices tend to go down relative to labor. But that is not true for the entire economy. In health care, for example, or in education, when you have a lot of government meddling, subsidies and restrictions to entry and so forth, you can actually have a situation where things become more expensive relative to working time. But places where the American economy is quite open, you know, where American farmers, for example, can work without too many regulations, or we can import stuff that we don't grow in the United States, things tend to go down in price.
- [47:54]
Joel
Man, there's so much good academic knowledge that you've offered. Marian, I want to get into your personal story a little bit, which is fascinating how and why this is meaningful to you because of how you grew up. We'll get to that and more right after this.
- [48:15]
Matt
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Matt
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- [49:14]
Joel
Yeah, man, it was amazing. I went for one of the most glorious runs of my life, along the waterfront. It had everything you could ask for. Crisp air, mountain views, fairies Gliding across the water. Beautiful.
- [49:24]
Matt
I love it, man. Yeah.
- [49:25]
Joel
For us, our road trip through Charlottesville was a highlight.
- [49:28]
Matt
We actually splurged on a custom built Airbnb and it was well worth it. The house had these unique touches like a poured concrete counter there in the kitchen with a built in drying rack. Super functional. It even inspired some ideas for our house.
- [49:41]
Joel
Plus, with a kitchen like that, you save money eating out.
- [49:44]
Matt
Yes, exactly. That's what struck me. What seems normal to a homeowner. It can be the thing that makes a guest trip really special.
- [49:51]
Joel
Which is why hosting makes sense, right? Travelers are looking for those authentic, memorable spaces. And if you don't have time to manage all that well, Airbnb's co host feature makes it easy. A local co host can help with everything from creating the listing to keeping your place running smooth. Yeah.
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Matt
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Joel
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Matt
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Joel
Whether you manage one property or 10, Lodify helps you run your rental like a real business. How to Money listeners get 20% off with code howtomoney20@logify.com we're still talking with Marion Tupy about how the world is getting better. Got a few more questions for you, Marion. I heard your co author Gail Pooley of Superabundance say the difference between rich and poor is five years. What do you think he meant when.
- [51:01]
Marion Tupy
He said that difference between rich and poor? Well, I don't know. By the way, Gail is the one who writes articles on Thanksgiving, so please look out on Human Progress website for his latest take on Thanksgiving. But it could be, for example, life expectancy that rich people in the United States live longer than poorer Americans partly because of bad diet. But there are other reasons as well. So I don't know specifically what he meant.
- [51:31]
Joel
I think one of the things he was referring to is the massive price decrease that happens when something new comes to the fore. Right. So a new piece of some sort of new technology or some sort of new. Yeah, new progress that's made. And it's very expensive. Like early adopters end up paying gazillions of dollars, sometimes for really expensive new things. And because they're willing to fork over a ton of money, the price goes down precipitously as producers start to make more of those that good for the masses. So especially as, like, a consumer just waiting for the price to go down, just waiting five years, you can have the same nice thing that the early adopter has, but you can pay a fraction of the price.
- [52:17]
Marion Tupy
Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. I haven't heard Gail say that, but obviously it makes a lot of sense. I would recommend that everybody watches Wall street, where the main protagonist walks on the beach with a early cell phone. This was in the mid-1980s, and it looks like a brick and costs thousands of dollars. And basically the battery lasts for a couple of hours, and the phone calls are incredibly expensive. And today we have this miracle of iPhone, and God knows what we will have in the future. Maybe all the functionalities of the iPhone will be put into sunglasses or something like that, or maybe a microchip attached to our heads. So I'm very bullish on the future. And as Gael says, the rich get there first, and they cause a lot of envy and resentment. But then things go down in price again. Going back to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, it is that the beauty of capitalism is that it reduces luxury goods to things that an ordinary person can buy. My favorite example, since you are always interested in examples, is, of course, what's happening to the price of diamonds now. Artificial diamonds, which are not really artificial because they are chemically and physically indistinguishable from natural diamonds, are so pervasive and their price is dropping so fast that even natural diamonds are becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so when you think about the very definition of luxury, which is a diamond necklace for Marie Antoinette or something like that, even those things capitalism can make superabundant for the ordinary people like you and I. Yeah.
- [54:02]
Joel
And this isn't just academic to you. Can you tell me maybe a little bit about growing up for you and the reality of growing up in a communist country specifically? Like, it feels like this is. This is highly academic to you, but it's also super personal.
- [54:16]
Marion Tupy
Well, it's highly academic to me because it's important to have facts in one's hands. But, yes, it is personal to me as well, because I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. I grew up in communist Czechoslovak Slovakia, where we had constant shortages of basic necessities and not to mention lack of political freedom. So I grew up in a society which was very poor relative to the United States and coming to the United States was an eye opener. To be able to basically get access to so much at a relatively affordable cost was. Yeah, it was a tremendous. It was a tremendous improvement in my standard of living and also reminded me of the difference of what happens when you live in a society which doesn't allow the human spirit to flourish and a society which does allow human spirit to flourish. So as an intellectual working at a think tank, I try to. It's my job to put things in an academic sort of way and lead with the evidence and reason. But there is a personal story here as well.
- [55:31]
Joel
Yeah, well, Marion, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed talking to you. Do you have any parting words or where would you like to send our audience for more information and maybe more encouragement about how great the world is and how do we partake in this abundance and enjoy it?
- [55:47]
Marion Tupy
Well, if I should put my philosophical pants on, what I would say to your listeners is the following. You are where you are in your life and there are two different perspectives on your life you can take. You can compare your life to an idealized version of your life where you know everything is perfect. And if you do that, then you grow more and more resentful. Because no matter how well off you are compared to the ideal state of living, you are always going to come short. And so you grow resentful and envious and unhappy. But if you compare yourself, so to speak, downwards, if you compare yourself to thousands of previous generations, and if you compare yourself to how people live in other parts of the world, then surely the prevalent emotion that you should have in your life is one of gratitude that you were born in the United States today, rather than being born in the United States 200 years ago or being born in Nigeria. So I think that having gratitude in your life and approach it that way can actually make you a happier person. I genuinely believe that happiness is a state of mind and depending on what you focus on, you're either going to be miserable or you're going to be relatively happy. And that is basically, basically what my life's work is devoted to. Please go and check out humanprogress.org and sign up to our newsletter. It's just one email a week that will give you all the good news that has happened in the past week. And if you don't subscribe, then you will never know about it and you will go around spreading doom and gloom rather than having a much more Cheerful disposition.
- [57:33]
Joel
Agreed. I think that's a great way to end it. And we'll put a link to the newsletter sign up as well in the show notes up on our website. So, Marion Tupy, thank you so much for taking the time today.
- [57:43]
Marion Tupy
My absolute pleasure.
- [57:45]
Joel
Oh man, what a great conversation. I so thankful that Marion was able to join me. He's such a busy guy working on such important issues and trying to help us all understand a little bit better the world that we're living in. And it's one of those things, you know, the proverb of the elephant where someone's holding the trunk, someone's holding the center, someone's holding the foot, and you don't feel like you're touching the same thing. And I think sometimes not knowing, right, our history, not knowing exactly how much progress we've made, not being able to put it into digestible terms, that can create more pessimism in our lives. And so I think of Marion Tupie as not even an optimist, but as someone who's trying to bring real information that does show the good, the realistic good that's happening in our country around the world. He's reporting on it so that we can see the reality of the world we're living in more clearly. And I guess my big takeaway, I mean, what, gosh, what better message than what he was saying at the end? It makes me think of Charlie Munger when he said, former Warren Buffet partner, he said, the world is not driven by greed, it's driven by envy. And he said, someone will always be doing better than you. This is not a tragedy. And Marian was talking about comparing our lives to the ideal and how we're bound to be even despite all the progress we make individually, we're bound to be not terribly happy if we're constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us or to the ideal life we want to have that we don't have right now. And he said, stop worrying too much and enjoy life. I think that's a really good way to end this episode where especially this week of Thanksgiving, remember how much we have to be thankful for individually, just the non monetary aspects of our lives. I know I'll be giving thanks for so many things that have nothing to do with money but the fact that I have more time in my life because of the abundance that is available to us because what he calls superabundance. Right. Because of all the progress that's been made over many decades, a couple of centuries really. Then this leads to my Thanksgiving meal costing less so that I can work less and enjoy more time with my family. So I hope you're able to have a wonderful Thanksgiving with people that you love, and I hope this episode was helpful to you in terms of how you perceive the world around you. Let's go out and be super grateful this week. All right, that's going to do it for this episode. Until next time, Best Friend out.
- [60:53]
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Marion Tupy
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Matt
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