“Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know | Marian Tupy - Jordan B Peterson Podcast S4 E18”
"We live in a world where a lot of people find meaning and excitement in embracing a lot of movements to 'improve the world', but you cannot improve the world if you don't know what the reality of the world is. And so if you think the reality of human existence is different from what it really is, then your 'improvement' can actually detract from human flourishing rather than contribute to it."
"It's very difficult to make an informed case that things are worse now in almost every way than they were at any other time in the past, including the last two decades but certainly going back before that, things are better on almost every possible measure.
People don't know that, partly because we have a negativity bias--we're attracted by negative information, and that's what's put forth by media hellbent on attracting our attention at any cost.
We're also deluded to some degree by our historical ignorance and also by anomalies in the economic scheme--exceptionally high prices of housing in high demand, high quality areas; the same thing happening say with University education…
…Because of this pervasive, negative message that's being put forward constantly that also encourages us to exaggerate the degree to which the current condition is bad and getting worse. We don't know, [yet] we assume that, and that makes us more miserable than we need to be. The danger in that is that we're going to fail to appreciate and work to undermine all sorts of things that are actually working very well, if we only could see the facts on the ground."
~37:40 - TRENDS
(Click on each time-stamp for further discussion)
1. 37:55 “The Great Enrichment”
Marian Tupy: “If the growth rate that we have experienced over the last 100 years continues into 2100, the world will produce 600 trillion dollars in output—real inflation-adjusted output. Over the next 80 years, the globe could produce 6x more value than it is currently producing if we maintain the current economic growth rate.”
…
Peterson: “The first lesson is that something happened in the last 150 years that propelled human productive capacity and distribution globally into the stratosphere, and there’s no sign that that’s slowing. Although we could disrupt it.”
2. 47:45 “The End of Poverty”
Peterson: “To highlight the meaning of this graph. So, in 1830, 95% of global population was in absolute poverty—that was a much smaller number of people as well. By the year 2015, roughly speaking, we’re down to 10%. It’s stunning and the change from 1990 to 2010, is approximately 40% to approximately 10.”
…
Marian Tupy: “The decline in socialism, communism, basically the disappearance of socialism, at least for a little bit of time, as an alternative and widely accepted way to riches meant that developing countries changed their developing strategies beginning in the 1980s. They started opening up more. Instead of seeing multinational corporations as parasites and enemies, they started welcoming them into their own countries. Instead of rejecting foreign-driect investment they started opening up to foreign-direct investment.”
3. 57:07 “Are we running out of resources?”
Peterson: “Despite more people, despite urbanization, despite the hypothetically decreasing prevalence of resources, despite all those hypothetical problems, there’s been a 70% decline in basic, global commodity prices (adjusted for wages) from 1980-2018. Stunning, not what anyone was predicting in the 1960s by any stretch of the imagination.”
4. 1:04:46 “Peak Population”
Marian Tupy: “Right now there 7.8 billion people in the world. It looks like we are going to peak at 9.8, in the 2060s or the 80s, and then it will decline to about 8.8 by the end of this century.”
5. 1:08:08 “The End of Famine”
Peterson: “No one starves anymore except for political reason, essentially, so forced starvation, planned starvation, but not accidental.”
6. 1:12:46 “More Land for Nature”
7. 1:21:41 “Planet City” (Urbanization)
8. 1:24:52 “Democracy on the March”
9. 1:34:16 “The Long Peace”
10. 1:38:39 “A Safer World-Death From Natural Disasters”
Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting
