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Ep 352 | Is It Rational to Be Pessimistic? | Guest: Matt Ridley
00:38:15
Matt Kibbe sits down with Matt Ridley to discuss his next book project, to see whether there is still reason to be optimistic or if in fact it is rational to be a pessimist.
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- [00:00]
Matt Kibbe
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I am in Newcastle Upon Tyne talking to the great Matt Ridley. He's working on a new book, a counterpart to his famous book, the Rational Optimist, and he's tentatively calling it the Rational Pessimist. I asked him to talk me off the ledge and I'm going to try to talk him off the ledge and try to convince each other that the government's not going to screw up this beautiful thing that allows us to be free from and prosperous and happy. Check it out.
- [00:47]
Show Announcer
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty.
- [01:03]
Matt Kibbe
Matt. Hello again, Matt.
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Matt Ridley
Good to be with you.
- [01:06]
Matt Kibbe
We just spent the entire day shooting the final episode of my investigative series, the COVID Up. And I'm not going to spoil too much of that because I think that was a fascinating conversation. And you're right in the middle of the battle here in the UK when it came to fighting against sort of lockdown orthodoxy and the widely accepted myth that the virus had to have come from a natural source. And you've spent a good part of the last five years debunking that scientific myth. Hey, baby. And in the process of doing this today, you. You were telling me about your new book project. And for those who don't know, you are the famous author of a bunch of books, but probably most notably the Rational Optimist. About a decade old now, 15 years.
- [02:02]
Matt Ridley
Ago, actually, 2010, it came out. Yeah.
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Matt Kibbe
Give people kind of an overview of what the thesis of that book was.
- [02:08]
Matt Ridley
Well, the book said that the world is getting better in almost every way and has been for quite a time. And the improvements in human living standards, in poverty, in child mortality, in anything you care to mention have been pretty spectacular, but especially in the last 50 years and certainly in the last 200. And that needs explaining. And the explanation for me is innovation. But innovation comes from exchange and specialization and the magic alchemy by which when we all work for each other through a market system, we actually raise each other's living standards. So that's what that book argues. And of course it doesn't actually say anything about the future. It just says the world has been getting better. But the implication of that book is that the world is going to go on getting better into the future. And I sincerely believed that that at the time, and I mostly still do. But that's fingers crossed. That's the question. Have the last 15 years turned me into a rational pessimist rather than a rational optimist? That's what I'm wrestling with and that's what this new book is going to. I don't want to give too much away, partly because I haven't finished the book yet, so I don't know what it's going to say. But that. That's the question it's going to wrestle with.
- [03:36]
Matt Kibbe
I know there's. I mean, you kind of started a movement. You were not the first person to make the argument about, about how it is that. That markets and innovation and entrepreneurship and, and just the process of people solving problems makes the, the world a better place to live. But there was. There's kind of like a. There's even a club you were telling me about, the Rational Optimist Club.
- [04:02]
Matt Ridley
That's right. We've started. Steve McBride and I have started something called the Rational Optimist Society, where we're trying to spread the news. Because one of the things I discovered was that the news is completely biased against optimism. I mean, it tells you the bad news and not the good news about everything. It gives you the cloud in every silver lining, as it were. And so people are genuine. And also people take for granted the improvement. You know, you get instant mobile satellite communications and you complain it's not good enough. And so the perception of how the world is improving is completely at odds with the facts. And Hans Rosling demonstrated that brilliantly by asking a thousand Americans, has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty doubled, halved or stayed the same in the last 20 years? And of course it's halved, but 65% of people think it's doubled and only 5% think it's halved. That's bad enough. But he then points out that if he gave that question to a chimpanzee by throwing three bananas into its cage with the three answers written on it, doubled, halved or stayed the same, the chimpanzee would pick up the correct answer 33% of the time. So it would do six times as well as a human being in answering this very simple question about human society. And that really demonstrates the mismatch between our instinctive pessimism and what's actually been happening to us and almost everybody around the world. This isn't a Western phenomenon. In fact, you know, what's happening to African living standards at the moment is amazing and wonderful and will go on happening, I think. And I'm pretty sure it's impossible to stop now. I'm pretty sure that the innovation that is delivering these benefits is still going to go on delivering, however badly we manage. But, and this is the big but, it's a just possible that it won't. It's possible we're entering a period of cultural endarkenment that rejects the processes of exchange and specialization and discovery and innovation that deliver these benefits. Because there's a lot of antipathy to markets. Innovation, discovery, exchange, freedom. Freedom is the lifeblood of innovation. It's possible that therefore we will go backwards, but much more likely, in my view, is that we'll go forwards, but not nearly as fast as we could. There's a fascinating set of charts produced by the economists advising the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And there are five projections of what might happen to GDP per head in the world during this century. And the best of them has us roughly 14 times as well off as we were in 2000, by 2100, roughly 10 times as well off as we are now. At the end of this century, everybody, Africans, Chinese, you know, imagine that everybody in Africa is 10 times as well off in terms of available income. In real terms, at the end of the 21st century, think how many problems we could solve. You know, think how much money we could waste on making life even better, you know, environmentally. Water desalination, all these kind of things. But there's another graph in there which shows that we're only two times as well off. What's the difference between the two? Well, they describe this world of 10 times better off as a world of free enterprise, innovation, market economy, and open freedom of inquiry, but also a world in which we use lots of fossil fuels. So they think it's a bad world. Sounds to me quite a good world.
- [08:21]
Matt Kibbe
Well, that's like the. But is what can government do to stop this natural process? In my mind, I mean, I think there's historical examples and we have to talk about the pandemic, but obviously the great leap forward was a colossal catastrophic leap backward. And the government was able to bring the Chinese people back to essentially the Stone Age. And there's been other experiments and authoritarianism.
- [08:54]
Matt Ridley
The Chinese parallel that I'm most interested in, and which I kind of discuss at the start of the book, is the end of the Song Dynasty, which is about a thousand years ago. Song Dynasty was the best period in Chinese history for really ever, until recently. It was when they invented all those things like gunpowder and printing and paper money and the compass and all those kind of things. And what was special about it was that it was a very decentralized empire. It wasn't really run like an empire. It was city states run by merchants, free enterprise on stilts, as it were. And fantastically Productive agriculture through innovation, very well fed population, a ferment of inventory. There's a guy called Shen Kuo who, he was a very senior Mandarin and he lost his job after losing a battle, but he then sat down and chronicled all the inventions and discoveries of his lifetime. You know, things like fossils, he discusses and, you know, the rotation of the earth and things like that, as well as all these inventions in a book called the Dream Pool Essays. And he's writing at a time when it's just fantastic life. It really is good compared with anything that's gone before. For the Chinese people and for another couple of generations, that was true. But then came catastrophe. First of all, there was a sort of rebel conquest of the northern half of the empire and the. And a lot of people had to flee and that kind of thing. And then there is, and there's a sort of bureaucratic growth and incrustation and there's a growth of superstition. And then you get the Mongol invaders. And after that you get the Ming emperors coming in. And the Ming emperors take a much more centralized view of how to run an empire where every decision is including whether you're allowed to leave your home village has to be referred up to a bureaucrat, let alone whether you want to trade and there's no foreign trade allowed. And the result is the Chinese living standards descend into the most miserable poverty over the next couple of centuries. So the question is, am I like Shen Kuo sitting there thinking, this is great, the next hundred years is going to be fantastic. And in fact, a government that behaves like a Ming emperor is lurking in the background and about to come in and crush this civilizational moment. It's happened before. It happened to the Greek civilization, it happened to the Roman civilization, it happened to the Arabian civilization, happened to the Renaissance Italy, it happened to the golden age in Holland. But none of them were global and none of them had this fantastic ability to harness heat to do work, which is for me central to industrial processes. So for that reason I'm optimistic that we can't stop the innovation machine whirring, but I'm just a little bit worried that we're trying very hard to stop it. And when I say we, I mostly mean government. They overspend, they over borrow, they over regulate, they suppress freedom, they indulge superstition, and above all, they create bureaucracy, which is a dead weight, slowing down the process of growth. And if you combine that with the authoritarianism of China and Russia and many other countries, it's just not impossible that we could have a ming in darkenment around the corner and I want to make up my mind over the next few months as to whether I think that's likely or unlikely and how bad it could get.
- [13:08]
Matt Kibbe
Thank you for joining me today on.
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Show Announcer
Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week my organization, Free the People partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now let's get back to it.
- [13:39]
Matt Kibbe
It's easy to get black pilled. Very pessimistic about the bad end of that story if you just look at the last five years. Because yes, you know, China can pursue some ill fated experiment in socialism and you can have a despot that thinks that he can magically turn an agricultural economy into an industrial economy and kill a lot of people in the process. But what we just did in the last five years, we've been talking about this all day in the context of COVID lockdowns. It was a global response. You know, we talked about the five eyes countries all kind of doing the same thing in lockstep, apparently following China's lead. But it was, you know, when sort of the America first crowd talks about globalization, they're talking about that, they're talking about the World Economic Forum, they're talking about the European Union, centralization, homogenizing everything. What do they call it? What's the word they use?
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Matt Ridley
Harmonization.
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Matt Kibbe
Harmonization. It sounds so innocent but that's precisely the thing that would make the black pill option happen.
- [15:00]
Matt Ridley
Well, Europe is a very good example of how not to run an economy. Basically the priority is making sure everything is the same everywhere, which is of course not how the world works. You know, the world works because one region is better at doing one thing and another region is better at doing another. So actually you want to liberate one industry here and you want to liberate a different industry there and let them trade with each other and then both sides are better off. Whereas Europe has always taken a very centralising view that everything must be the same and dictated from the centre, including a massive external tariff. And they then complain about America putting tariffs on and tariffs are bad but you know, it's bad on both sides as it were. So the European Union is for me the classic example of an over centralized system that is incapable of innovation I mean, look at the failure to produce a single digital giant to challenge Amazon and Apple and the Chinese equivalents in Europe in the last 20 years. Look at the failure to get the genetic technologies off the ground in Europe. Look at the failure to get AI going. You know, we've, we've got better AI regulation in Europe than we have AI industries. Stricter AI regulation. That's no accident, you know, that's what's. And of course we've got ridiculously expensive energy, which is a killer to any kind of economic growth. So if the world follows Europe's example, then we are in a mess in this century. Now, my hope is that America will show that there's a different way, that India will show that there's a way to be dynamic and entrepreneurial without being authoritarian. The jury's out on that one. And that maybe even China will come to its senses. Because the over centralization of policy under Xi Jinping is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs for China for the last 30, 40 years. That innovation system is not looking nearly as healthy as it did a few years ago. So it's a, you know, what I want to do is call the world back to the opportunity we've got if we liberate individuals to interact with each other, to raise each other's living standards. Because it is a fantastic possibility.
- [17:35]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, I love to quote this cyber libertarian optimist, John Perry Barlow, who I was, and he was, most importantly, he was one of the lyricists for my beloved Grateful Dead. And you could argue that the Dead culture coming out of California Silicon Valley very much dovetailed with the early libertarianism of the technology sector. But he always said something that was true then, and it becomes more important as we get into artificial intelligence and that kind of thing. He said the Internet, this technology is the most liberating thing. It creates a right to know. It allows for everybody no matter where they live. Maybe they live in Manhattan, maybe they live in the uplands of Mali. The way he said it, anybody has the right to know anything that they're capable of comprehending if they're willing to do in the work. You don't have to get into Harvard anymore. You don't have to be born into the right family, nothing. You're free to do that. But those same technologies are weapons that governments can turn against us. They can be turned into the most common granular surveillance state. And of course, this is before Chinese social credit systems. This is before we imagined just what governments could do. And so much of that infrastructure has been adopted outside of China with vaccine passports, with monitoring whether or not people were complying with mandates that you're not allowed to work, you're not allowed to travel. So I wonder, it's like an arms race. Does freedom win this? Or do these same people that lock this down say, okay, hold my beer, I got some really cool tools to oppress you now.
- [19:33]
Matt Ridley
Well, like you, my optimism has been shaken by the pandemic. In particular by the reaction of governments to the threat of a problem pandemic and their readiness to reach for top down weaponry if you like, and bureaucratic control, but also by the degree to which the population welcomed such things. That's the really spooky one for me and it genuinely concerns me that a lesson may have been learned that the smack of firm government is actually quite popular with people. Not only do they call for government to solve every problem, but they quite like it when the government tells people not to do things, even if it also tells them not to do things. And if that is the world we're living in, then it's not impossible that we will lose this civilization and we will go backwards. I don't think so. I hope not. But as I say, the real threat is not that we go backwards, but that we don't go forwards nearly as quickly as we could. The opportunity cost for an African of not giving, delivering him the health, economic and energy benefits that we know we can deliver through the market are huge. You know, they make the difference between someone having no child mortality and losing two children or something like that. You know, so we, the compassionate approach to humanity and the planet is to liberate innovation in every way we can. While of course keeping an eye out for bad actors who are trying to do bad innovations.
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Matt Kibbe
You know, I remember we always, all of us that believe in markets, we used to brag about this beautiful downward sloping trend of extreme poverty.
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Matt Ridley
Correct.
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Matt Kibbe
And that was our, that was our proof. But there was a dramatic uptick during the pandemic. During the pandemic, for a brief time, David Malpass was the head of the World Bank. This is a funny story. So he actually published the data from the World bank showing the tremendous backsliding caused by lockdowns of poverty alleviation after you left. I think they took all that down because they don't want to admit that it was in fact government policy that did that. So they proved on a global scale you can in fact reverse the trend if you're callous enough and if you're economically ignorant enough and you're authoritarian enough so it, like in any given day, you're probably the same way. I vacillate back and forth. Am I convinced that free people will rise up? Because during lockdowns, they've found our Achilles heel, and I call it safetyism. They tried for decades on climate change. Al Gore tried to convince us that Manhattan would be underwater by now. We didn't quite buy that one yet. But during the pandemic, they. They trotted out all these scary numbers, thanks to one of your British colleagues, Neil Ferguson, and people bought that one. And whatever it took to keep us safe, they accepted.
- [23:28]
Matt Ridley
One of the themes of my inquiry is certainly that we are far too worried about the wrong things. I mean, at the moment, if you ask people what are the greatest threats to the future, they say climate change and artificial intelligence. I think climate change is generally beneficial, certainly not hugely damaging and relatively slow and easy to adapt to. I think artificial intelligence is mostly beneficial, but may bring some downsides that we, again, should be able to cope with. But I think the things that most people are relaxed about, like the growth of government spending and borrowing, like the growth of debt, like the growth of regulation, are much more frightening and much harder to stop and much more likely to immiserate the population. And once they do that, there will only be calls for more of it. And that's so, you know, the disease will be made worse by the cure.
- [24:43]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. There's been an evolution in American politics, and I'll call it the conservative side. The right side used to be kind of Tea Party libertarian and skeptical of overspending, skeptical of government power, very much revering constitutional limits on power that seems to have disappeared. There's exceptions to that. And they've fallen into this trap where they think, well, if my guy holds the reins of power, we're going to create all these new policing powers to go after. Illegal immigration is not a great example of that. We just created a new entitlement, a new police force that is supposed to deal with illegal immigration. And I tried to tell my conservative friends, what are you going to do when your worst enemy is elected in charge of that?
- [25:35]
Matt Ridley
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [25:39]
Matt Kibbe
They can't think about the future because. And the reaction, I think, is sort of rational because they've been abused by this expanding power of the presidency and the way it was weaponized against conservatives. But they don't see that. They're just giving their future worst enemy the same tools. More tools.
- [26:01]
Matt Ridley
Well, here in the uk, Theresa May, when she was prime minister, was riding very well ahead in the polls and expecting a very easy vote victory in a general election. And then she promised to just very slightly reform the social care system so that people would bear more of the cost of looking after their elderly relatives or sorry, their own old age care. And she jolly nearly lost the election. And Labour got in promising the earth last year, but then made one very slight adjustment to spending by saying that wealthy people shouldn't get a winter heating subsidy that had been brought in not very many years before. Poorer people could still get it, but wealthy people couldn't. Again, a very moderate suggestion to crimp spending just a little bit and that effectively lost them. The local elections recently was by far the most important factor we gather from the pollsters. So the lesson that both those parties have learned is that you do not ever, ever promise to cut spending or you're finished. And the Reform Party, which is the radical right wing party that's ahead in the polls at the moment, is no different. It thinks there's a magic money tree out there as well and that you can just spend more money till you're blue in the face and everything will be fine. Economically this country is heading for a crash. I think it's going to be very unfunny. But this is true of so many other countries in the world. I'd like to think there could be a soft landing in there somewhere and we all come to our senses and elect more sensible politicians and they managed to find a way to address the increasing power and non accountability of the officialdom, but I'm not seeing it yet.
- [28:13]
Show Announcer
If you've made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Kibion Liberty is just one of the amazing products we created for the people. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things Liberty. Independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show.
- [28:50]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, in the US by my count we have one or two senators that still speak about fiscal responsibility and you know, when we cut taxes we should cut spending. And this used to be Tea Party orthodoxy, obvious thing and you know, the Tea Party cut its teeth fighting against President Barack Obama's ultimately successful efforts at radically expansing the government role in health care in our country. Looking a lot more like the British system and for various parliamentary and scoring reasons, they did it by radically expanding Medicaid. And Medicaid is our program for the poorest of the poor. But now you have Republicans in the Senate, conservative Republicans. I'll put that in danger quotes because I don't know what that word quite means anymore, saying, absolutely not. Will we ever cut Medicaid? And I'm old enough to remember when every Republican, every single one, was pledging to repeal Obamacare. And a couple years later, that entire culture is gone. So it's, yeah, the fiscal cliff is.
- [30:06]
Matt Ridley
There, but a country can go down the wrong path and ruin itself, can the world. And the worry has been that when Europe became authoritarian in the 20th century and there was no real beacons of light anywhere else in China or Russia or anywhere, at least there was America keeping the spirit of enterprise and innovation alive. I think you cannot underestimate the importance of that one country being there and doing this stuff and inventing everything from right up to the Internet, as it were, and then supplying it to the world. If America were to abandon that role, could you really imagine another country adopting it? I hope so. As I say, I have slight hopes of India, but it's not a very strong possibility and I don't think Europe is in a position to do it. And yes, Argentina might become very enterprising, but it's a small country. It's not going to replace it. So.
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Matt Kibbe
The.
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Matt Ridley
You know, I hate being pessimistic because my whole thing for the last 20 years has been to remind people that everyone is always exaggerating.
- [31:38]
Matt Kibbe
I'm not sure I want to go to the pessimist club meetings. That sounds like a bummer. All you have to do is go to a pub and get that right.
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Matt Ridley
Exactly.
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Matt Kibbe
So.
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Matt Ridley
And I'll be all right. I'll go through enough therapy and I'll get my optimism back, but it's a little bit of a struggle at the moment. And that's. And I want to write a book that actually explores these issues without necessarily beating you over the head with a conclusion saying, this is how I'm thinking about this question.
- [32:12]
Matt Kibbe
One place I find optimism, and I don't think I've ever heard you talk about, about this, is cryptocurrency. And I'm a big Austrian fan of Austrian economics and their critique of the central bank and Friedrich Hayek's book, the Denationalization of Money, that whole portfolio. And one place I see really interesting things happen, is the sneaky way that cryptocurrencies might undercut rampant inflation, undercut the government control of the money supply.
- [32:47]
Matt Ridley
I quite agree. And I have actually flirted with trying to understand and write about cryptocurrencies. And I do think that Bitcoin is an extraordinary and remarkable invention. One of the things I most like about it is that we still don't know for sure who Satoshi Nakamoto was who invented it. And likewise, I think there are things about AI that will be undermining of centralization and government. And I think there are technologies in biomedicine like GLP1 agonists that, you know, are remarkable and going to deliver remarkable good things. So I think it will be very difficult to stop the innovation machine altogether together. And just imagine, you know, we're only really 75 years into this experiment. Yes, we had tremendous improvements before 1950, but the real takeoff for most people in the world has been since then. Another 75 years will put us to 2100. Our grandchildren will be alive, perhaps even our children. And it's not that far off. And yet the world could be radically different. There will be unimaginably wonderful technologies available to them. They'll probably take them for granted and grumble about them, but that is going to happen. And you know, fusion power is going to be available. We're going to de extinguish mammoths and passenger pigeons. You know, there's just gorgeous things are going to happen. And by the way, predicting what they are is a mugs game and not going to try and do that because no one ever can say anything sensible about the future.
- [34:30]
Matt Kibbe
So, last question, because I know I've worked you all day and you got to get to the airport. You are a communicator. I mean, you're a science writer, but your great success in life is trying to explain the magic and the power of innovation. Why have we, we struggled so much to tell that beautiful story? You were mentioning earlier how people are sort of naturally pessimistic. And even though you can get that brand new shirt delivered in just a few days, as you literally just did, we're inclined to grumble that it didn't show up in 24 hours. So no matter how well the markets do and how how easy our lives get and how beautiful everything is, we're going to be pessimistic about it. But how do we turn people on to this beautiful process of free people just figuring stuff out?
- [35:29]
Matt Ridley
Well, I'm quite encouraged by how successful my book the Rational Optimist was that and Hans Rosling's amazing videos on the same subject. And Johann Norberg Writing about the same subject and Steven Pinker's book, the Better Angels of Our Nature, we had a little bit of a movement going in the early 2000 and tens about rational optimism, if you like. And so the message does resonate with people when you get it out there. But there is undoubtedly, you know, bad news is just more interesting. It's more sudden for a start. Good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden. People are much more optimistic about the, their own lives than they should be, but they're much more pessimistic about other people's lives than they should be. It's quite an interesting mismatch there. So the more local it gets, the more you actually believe that you do have possibilities. So I think, and to some extent, the ultra pessimism about the future is a Western phenomenon. It's not so widely shared in China and India, for example, where, because you haven't got, you know, part of the problem is you've got these big organizations selling pessimism. Greenpeace, that's what it does, you know, Friends of the Earth. Their whole shtick is to say, we're doomed, we're doomed. Give me money. Right? That's all they do all day. And awful lot of organizations do that. And, and the determination, as I say, to see this, the, the cloud in every silver lining rather than the other way around is, is really remarkable. And we've got to mock these guys. We've got to expose their, their nonsense and, and make fun of them and show that they are profiting from people's instincts to be worried.
- [37:29]
Matt Kibbe
We will leave it on that hopeful, optimistic note. Thank you again, Matt.
- [37:34]
Matt Ridley
Thank you.
- [37:36]
Show Announcer
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- [37:39]
Matt Kibbe
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- [37:42]
Show Announcer
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- [37:51]
Matt Ridley
Sa.