John Carpenter. They Live. Genius film.
I wanted to write about it, but I couldn't crack a clever angle.
It has a verisimilitude that must be experienced, not written about. Watch it. Don't disappoint me.
That said, Carpenter is the ultimate cynic and I figured you needed a dose of positivity, some sanguinity for your work week.
Cynicism dates back to a Greek philosopher named Diogenes the Cynic who was known for living starkly nude in a barrel and complaining about absolutely everything. True story: Diogenes, the cheeky bastard, once told Alexander the Great to move his head because he was blocking the sun.
Savage.
Alexander admired the anathema towards everything, to which Diogenes replied that if he weren’t Diogenes, he would also want to be Diogenes.
Total savage.
One more Diogenes story: After Diognes was called a dog he pissed on the man saying,"Why are you surprised that a dog would do such a thing?"
We all have a bit of Diogenes in us; evolutionarily speaking, humans are wired to focus on the “danger” with cynicism, pessimism, and criticism.
But this neo-Malthusian epistemology holds us back in life. We become fixated on the bad, drowning out any potential good.
This is the argument that environmentalist Marian Tupy makes in his new book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. The title may infuriate people — “infinitely bountiful planet” — but today I want to talk about nine interesting and optimistic trends I found in it.
1. Working less for more
Tupy introduces the concept of “time price” to explain his theory of growth. It means how much time did you spend working to buy something?
If you earn $15 an hour and your rent is $1,200, you’d have to work 80 hours that month to pay it. Your “time price” is 80 hours.
As Adam Smith said, “the real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors worked between 2.8 and 7.6 hours but only owned what they could lug around. By 1830, the workweek in Western countries averaged about 70 hours, or 11.6 hours a day. By 1890, that fell to 60 hours per week; thirty years later, it was 50 and today it’s 40 hours or less.
Today, Germans work the fewest hours (1,347), and Singaporeans work the most (2,237). The real problem is finding meaning in that work for many of us.
2. The great enrichment
According to the World Bank, the number of people living in extreme poverty dropped to a record low of 8.6% in 2018.
The most powerful statistic given here is that 90% of the world’s population was uncertain about where their next meal would come from in 1820. Today, that number has dropped to just 10%.
Does California have a Skid Row? Yes.
Hell, even Denver has a Skid Row. So, there are still problems out there. Many.
3. More freedom = more innovation
A central topic in Superabundance is a 1980 wager to which economist Julian Simon challenged Nobel Prize-winning German physician Paul Elrich that resource availability would not decrease in the long term.
Elrich claimed, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” due to resource scarcity.
Bold. Simon, on the other hand, believed that a growing population promotes innovation and problem-solving through free thinking and a marketplace of ideas. More people + more freedom = more innovation.
The bet was about five metals — chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. Sure enough, by autumn 1990, the prices of each had fallen by 36 percent — indicating that they had become more abundant — and Ehrlich sent Simon a check for $576.07. What that bet didn’t include was England becoming one of the most irrelevant countries economically speaking over the last half-century.
America, China, and Japan dominate global GDP. Full stop.
Meanwhile, England is circling the drain.
4. Peak oil
Hasn’t happened.
In 1919, geologist David White boldly predicted that the world’s oil production would peak in just nine years.
Fast forward almost a century later, and Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes took a shot at forecasting that peak global oil production would happen on Thanksgiving Day in 2005.
Hey, Nostradamus said humans love predictions.
In 2000, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, dropped a truth bomb: “The stone age came to an end not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”
Oil’s lifespan hinges on consumer demand and factors like electric car production and automobile reliance. However, the models don’t suggest oil is on the brink of depletion.
5. Decriminalizing LGBTQ
Out of the 193 members of the United Nations in 2019, consensual same-sex sexual acts were legal in 123 countries, illegal in 68 countries, and de facto illegal in 2 countries.
It might not sound perfect, but that’s a vast improvement in the last decade.
6. Empowering women
Countries with more rights for women are richer and experience faster growth than countries with fewer rights.
Women make up half the world’s population and since the 19th century, when they started working and holding political positions, economic growth has accelerated. Makes sense, right?
7. Global income is rising… yeah?
Here are a few more statistics the book presents on how “time price” (i.e. how many hours you have to work for things) has been reduced:
American blue-collar and unskilled workers’ average time prices for basic commodities fell by more than 96 percent and 93 percent, respectively, between 1900 and 2018. (However, they do also have record credit debt)
In 1850, it took almost three hours of factory work to buy a pound of sugar. Today, it only takes 35 seconds. (Who the fuck is buying sugar by pounds?)
In 1952, it took over 200 hours of blue-collar work to afford an air conditioning unit. Fast forward to 2019, and it takes a mere 5.5 hours.
That final one is a genuine game-changer.
8.“The Limits to Growth”
1972 saw the birth of a notorious book called The Limits to Growth, written by a bunch of scientists known as the Club of Rome. This best-seller shook the world with its argument for controlling population growth to save our planet's resources.
This book led to China’s one-child policy which caused an alarming gender imbalance of men as compared to women.
Tupy argues that Limits to Growth demonstrates how command and control policies breed inequality and destruction compared to free markets.
As Milton Friedman taught, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
The free markets absolutely still produce inequality… but they also produce wealth. All other systems, historically speaking, only produce inequality.
9. Infinitely bountiful planet
The author argues that, apart from time, all resources on Earth are infinite and boundless thanks to constant innovation. Optimistic? Probably.
But he has a point: You couldn’t have predicted the printing press, the car, hell, the air fryer. There is a historical precedent that as a population expands people find more efficient ways to handle and overcome difficult problems.
In Conclusion
Take everything Tupy says with a grain of salt.
There’s a great book called How to Lie With Statistics which makes the case that facts can be twisted to serve any agenda.
However, it's refreshing to engage in alternative perspectives, rather than constantly seeking melodramatic Mayan-like prophecies. (That I write about constantly)
My problem with Tupy’s work is some of it forces me to shield my eyes and ears, and pretend that the messed-up reality right in front of me doesn't exist. Hell, in New York City you couldn’t go two blocks without being paranoid or seeing some otherworldly Mad Max shit.
Of course, goods are far easier to obtain than years past, but we also shouldn’t ignore the record amounts of credit card debt to obtain a lot of that.
With that, I’ll leave you with one last germane correspondence between Diogenes the Cynic and Socrates:
One day, Diogenes ran up to Socrates and said, “Socrates! I have something to tell you!”
Socrates looked up and said “hold on, first I need to ask you three things”…
Diogenes said stammering a little “alright…alright go ahead.”
So Socrates said “ First, is what you are going to say good?”
Diogenes said: “no, no I don’t think it’s that good.”
Socrates then asked “Is it useful.”
Diogenes said “I …I don’t know if it’s useful.”
Socrates then asked “Is it true?”
Diogenes said “Well, I don’t know, Filipides just told me now…”
Socrates then said “Well, if it is not good, useful or true, I don’t need to hear it, run along.”Confused and disheartened, Diogenes bid farewell to Socrates, unable to tell Socrates his wife was fucking around on him.