Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 1, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. Continued human progress depends on freedom. And human progress in the latter half of the twentieth century has been remarkable. But the threat that free trade and free movement may be curtailed is a constant concern. Johan Norberg is author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. He spoke at the Cato Club 200 event in October.

Johan Norberg: In all my years of public speaking, I’ve never prepared in a worse way than I’ve done this time around, because I prepared by staying in the U.S., specifically in D.C., for a week before talking about progress. I usually — I live in Sweden, so I usually spend my time there. And so I prepared by going to the U.S. during the presidential campaign of 2016. And that’s the worst possible preparation, as I’m sure that Caleb’s quote explained to you. It seems like both parties are now in the grips of people who think that the Renaissance only happened to other people. And they seem exhilarated by what’s going on. Both the sort of the populist, Sandersist Left, and the Trump Right. And as you know, exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and right before you understand what’s wrong with it. And some people are in this blessed state where they never understand what’s wrong with their ideas, so they keep on being exhilarated and angry. So in this context why write a book on progress? Why talk about progress? Well, for three reasons. Because progress has happened and it is the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind. Two, almost no one gets it. No one in politics, few people at the dinner parties I go to, they are all disappointed when I tell them they should stop worrying about things. That really brings them down. And three, it is dangerous if people do not understand that because that’s when we get candidates like this. And I’ll try to outline this briefly. How people get scared if they think that there’s no progress in the world and they need a strong man and they begin to search for scapegoats. It’s the rich, or the Mexicans, or the Chinese. So let me just run through a couple of facts about progress in the world. I start with a 200-year perspective, basically. In the book I present ten reasons to look forward to the future. I’ll only give you two highlights that I think summarize a lot of the progress that has gone on. Two hundred years ago, if we had redistributed all the wealth that existed in the world, all the income that existed in the world, the average person would have had a lower income than the average person in Mozambique today. Because at that time around 90% of all the people around the world lived in extreme poverty. Today 9% of the world population lives in extreme poverty, which means that in the last few decades, for the first time in world history, we’ve also reduced the absolute number who live in poverty. Previously it used to be that world population grew so fast so that even though the proportion might have been reduced, the absolute number didn’t. But today there are fewer people living in extreme poverty than two hundred years ago. If that does not sound like progress, think about the fact that back then only 60 million people around the world lived a life free from extreme poverty. 60 million people. Today it’s around 6.5 billion people. And the fastest progress has been made in the last 25 years. During this time world population has grown by 2 billion people and yet extreme poverty has been reduced by 1.25 billion, which means that every minute that I talk another 100 people rise out of poverty. And it happens in the places that open up, and the places that give their people more freedom, more freedom to create, more freedom to trade. The other fact that I would like to highlight is life expectancy, because if life expectancy continues to rise then we are doing something right when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to poverty, when it comes to health, and when it comes safety. One hundred years ago the average life expectancy in the world was 31 years. 31 years. A normal and quite brutal party at dinner parties I got to is to ask people around the people around the table would have died from at an early age if they weren’t born in our era. And it turns out obviously that everybody would have died when they were one, or five, or ten, or something like that, except for a few people. 31 years was the life expectancy back then. Today it is 71 years. Mostly it’s because we’ve reduced child mortality dramatically but also because we combat old age disease dramatically now as well. Two hundred years ago there was not a single country around the world with a life expectancy longer than 40 years. Not even Great Britain, not America. Today there’s not a single country with a life expectancy shorter than 40 years. Not even Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, and so on. In some countries actually we’ve seen something amazing in the last ten years. Some Sub-Saharan African countries like Rwanda, Botswana, they’ve increased life expectancy by ten years over the last ten years, which means, simplified, statistically at least, every person in that country got ten years older but no one approached death by a single step. They could celebrate every birthday by not getting closer to death at all. But that happens here as well, even though there are always laggards, there’s always one particular group that does not catch up with the others, but there’s a back and forth and sooner or later most groups and most countries catch up. If we look at the best practice country around the world, the country that every year has had the highest life expectancy, their life expectancy has increased by three months every year over the last 140 years. And if anything, it seems like that is accelerating, no matter what you hear on the news. And those are good years, as well. According to a recent review of the literature in Lancet, and I quote, “Present evidence suggests that people are not only living longer than they did previously, but also they are living longer with less disability and fewer functional limitations,” end of quote. So those are two facts that I think summarize a lot of things. If you want the other eight, you are going to have to go out there and get the book. And I’ve looked through the literature, I’ve studied all the research, to try to get a great definition of progress, what it’s all about. And I’ve found it in Robert Heinlein’s texts, the science fiction author, who explained that progress is not made by early rises. It is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. And I think that’s a perfect definition, because that’s exactly what progress is about. It’s not that we use more resources or anything like that, it’s that we do more things with the resources that are at our disposal. We are creative, more ingenuitive, and so that we create more things, better things, we solve more problems with resources that are at our disposal. And therefore, Julian Simon was quite right when he explained that the ultimate resource in the world is the individual human being, the individual human brain. That’s the ultimate resource. And it happens to be a reproducible resource, a pleasantly reproducible resource, in fact the only resource that can be produced on an industrial scale by low-skilled labor. And what does this resource do? Well, they all do three things, if they are free to do it. They explore, they experiment, and they exchange. They explore strange new ideas and then they experiment with how to implement those ideas to solve new problems in satisfying our needs in a better way, in a cheaper way, in a faster way. Everything from artificial fertilizer to container shipping. And three, they exchange the results of this so that we do not need to know how to do all of those things. We only need to know what we can do best and then we can trade for the rest. We’re therefore using the knowledge of others, we’re making the world so smart so that it’s safe for us to be a bit stupid, I think. So free inquiry, freedom to innovate, and free trade. Unfortunately, the three things that the populists on the Left and the Right hate the most in our era and wants to destroy because they think there’s too little progress. Apparently, they say that the glass is half empty and therefore, because there’s not more in the glass, they want to just break the glass. But so far, despite their efforts, we’ve seen more progress. It has accelerated recently because now it’s not just the Western world that has opened up. Recently with the introduction of huge economies like India and China in the world economy, with more free trade, with more capital flows, with more freedom for the individual human being, we have also seen more progress than ever before. Since I grew up the number of free countries around the world according to Freedom House has doubled. According to the Economic Freedom of the World index, we’ve seen tremendous progress. We’ve gone since 1980 from where India was before its reforms to where Taiwan was after its reforms. If the world average of 1980 were to appear here today, it would have been the 144th out of 152 countries. Actually, a bit lower than Zimbabwe today. So more people and more freedom than ever to do things, despite all the obstacles that we face. And therefore it’s no coincidence that in the last 25 years hunger has almost halved around the world, illiteracy has halved, child mortality has been cut in half, and poverty has been reduced by three-quarters. We’ve created almost as much wealth in the world in these last 25 years as we did in the 25,000 years previously, if we measure it by per capita income. Some people still think that that’s not good enough. We’d like some other kind of system that would do this better in some way and specifically a lot of people think that we in the Western world, we are hurting now that in India and China are doing a lot of things. Caleb mentioned my book In Defense of Global Capitalism something strange happened in the period between In Defense of Global Capitalism and my recent book Progress, because this is a bit of a — well, full disclosure it’s basically the same book. I’m trying to explain the same thing, how people who are free create enormous progress. At that time the target was mostly the Leftist, anti-globalization movement, because they said that yes, more free trade and capitalism will make us richer in the Western world, but it’ll ruin the exploited in the Third World. They will starve and they’ll have more child mortality and child labor. And I try to explain in the book, and all my Cato colleagues have explained ever since, that that’s not how the economy works. If we create more wealth, if we have more trade, that’s a mutual benefit and we will all benefit. And now it seems like people are catching on a little bit. Not just, I’m afraid to say, because of the work we’ve done, but also because they can see what has happened around the world. China is rising and India is rising and then they think that ‘oh my God then we must be losing, then we must be the losers’, because they still believe in the zero-sum game, that if someone wins someone else has got to lose. Because they still live in a pre-Adam Smithian worldview, where there’s always a loser in any kind of exchange. And if we are, they are not the losers, then we must be the losers. And that’s total nonsense, because the more people who can think, who can explore, who can create, experiment, and exchange, the better off we are. Because it’s difficult to create new ideas. It’s difficult to create the world wide web, or a vaccine against measles, but it’s incredibly easy in an open world to use it everywhere else. So the more people who think of such new ideas, the better off we will be. And if we look at, even in this era of wage stagnation, low and middle-income households adjusted for household size has been increased by 30% since I was born. And more than that, purchasing power is more important. It’s not what you have in your wallet, it’s what you can buy. And as Jeff pointed out earlier today, trade has been the most progressive force when it comes to that. If you look at the studies, the wealthiest 10% in the United States would lose less than 10% of their purchasing power without international trade, because they mostly consume local services, whereas the poorest 10% in the United States, those who Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump pretend, or perhaps even think that they speak for, they would lose more than 60% of their purchasing power without international trade, because they consume those goods that are produced in other countries. But more than that it’s not just the purchasing power, it’s the technology. Everything from drugs against cardiovascular disease to the internet. The Left complains about how the environment is being degraded. Since I was born, the six leading pollutants in the United States have been reduced by 70%. The Right, the populist Right, complains about rising crime spiraling out of control while violent crime and homicide rate has been cut in half since then. And, by the way, we’ve all had another ten years of life expectancy which should count as something. So that’s the progress that we’ve made. But unfortunately, it seems like no one believes it. I did a little experiment recently, a graph where I summarized the world, what had happened to it in the last 25 years, and all of it indexed to 100% in 1990 and it was poverty, it was pollution, it was child mortality, illiteracy, and something more that was bad. And they’ve basically all been reduced by half or more in those 25 years. I published it on Twitter and one of the first comments I got was from a British woman who retweeted me and wrote that ‘oh my God, this is a startling graphic that confirmed my general Hell in a handcart feeling.’ In other words, she read the graph upside-down. She thought that everything had doubled, all the problems in the world over these 25 years. And I asked her that’s very interesting, where did you get that impression, that the world is out of control? And she said I pay close attention to the media. I follow the news. I know what goes on in the world. I hear about the floods and the famines and so on, so basically I know that everything is getting worse. And she’s not alone. According to recent studies 6% of all Americans think that the world on the whole is becoming a better place — 6%. More people believe in ghosts and astrology than believe in progress. Asked whether global poverty has fallen by half, doubled, or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly, that it had doubled by half. It’s actually more, now. By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would have answered correctly much more often. So it’s not ignorance. It’s not ignorance if you can’t beat a random choice. It must be inaccurate assumptions based on misleading or outdated information. And I think that it’s much to do about the media. We all know that bad news sells. We hear about people dying in floods. We never read the story that the number who do that has been, the risk of doing that has been reduced by 99% over the last 100 years. We read, whenever there’s a risk of another 10,000 people in Northern Nigeria suffering from chronic undernourishment, but we’ve never read the story that 8 million Nigerians were liberated from chronic undernourishment over the last 25 years, because we only pay attention to the dramatic, the shocking, the instant news that throws us off and makes us scared. It’s not really the media’s fault, because as all my journalist friends tell me, when we do write those stories no one is interested. So basically it’s our own fault. That’s what they tell me at least. And when the media is not there we make up stories. We spread rumors. We create even worse ideas about what is going on in the world. And I think that this is partly a genetic predisposition. Our forefathers, who were worried, they probably survived more often when they faced predators and storms, which was a good thing. They could pass their genes onto us, but also their stress hormones, so that we always pay attention to the worst things that happens for the moment, because it could be a threat to our survival. If we hear that there’s a fire in this building we have to pay attention to that immediately. The fact that the number of people dying from fires has been reduced by some three-quarters in the last twenty years, that’s not news in that kind of way. And I also think that nostalgia plays a part. As Arthur Herman, the cultural historian, pointed out, virtually every culture past or present has believed that men and women are not up to the standards of their parents and forbearers, and we all think that of our kids, I think. And it’s interesting, when I ask people if you don’t think that this is the golden era, when was the golden era? When was the best time to be alive in harmonious society where we all lived in peace? And for some strange reason almost everybody mentions the era when they grew up, because that was probably a time of excitement and adventure. Everything was interesting but you didn’t have to pay the bills. You didn’t know about the risks in the world. And you didn’t have kids, so you didn’t worry about all the things that could go wrong in the world. It was wonderful, even though bombs were exploding in the neighborhood when you read the history books. So my generation thinks it is the ’70s and the ’80s. The baby boomer thinks we have to go back to the 1950s. Someone put it, I think it was Brink Lindsey, everybody wants to go back to the 1950s in American politics, but the Left, they want to go to work in the 1950s, the Right wants to go back to the home, the family, in the 1950s. Now it seems like everybody wants everything in the 1950s. Rick Santorum has actually mentioned the precise year that we should return to, 1955. That was the best year, because that’s when he grew up. Because he forgets that old age in that era was synonymous with being poor. He forgets the racial segregation, forgets the threat of immediate nuclear annihilation and the kind of lack of health and living standards. As we grow older we take on more responsibility and we might go through a process where we understand the risks in the world, and then we long for something else. And even though bad things happen before as well, we know that we survived it. So we can look back on it — ah it was kind of exciting to be a part of the, I don’t know, the Cuban Missile Crisis, you should have been there. Had that happened today and we sort of followed it on Twitter, we wouldn’t think it’s sort of good old days in any kind of way. So if we have those two things, some kind of genetic programming and some sort of nostalgia, and then you combine it with a new factor, global media twenty-four hours around the clock, and social media, Twitter and Facebook all the time, then something interesting happens. Because even though we have less violence, there’s always a serial murderer on the loose somewhere in the world. Even though we have fewer people dying from floods, there will always be a flood somewhere. And then that will top the news cycle everywhere, constantly. And we will think that this is more common than it used to be. And we also now have social media. We wake up in the morning, we see what’s happened on Twitter, on Facebook, and it’s all bad things, isn’t it? Sometimes there’s a nice story, but most often it’s someone who is suffering or someone stupid who did something bad. But suffering is not new. Cell phone cameras are new. So there’s always someone there covering it and telling the rest of the world, so that’s what we pay attention to. And it triggers our fear, it triggers our fight or flight instincts, and then we grow fearful about the world. As Mustafa pointed out yesterday in the context of religion and of terrorism, crazy people attract attention. What do you share? I know I share a story about some weirdo in a city that I’ve never heard of doing something stupid, because that’s an interesting story and I know that all my readers will pay attention to it. And everybody does that. So suddenly we think that everybody is a weirdo doing stupid things, even though that’s not the normal context if you think of your neighbor — oh, it depends on where you live — but that’s not the everyday experience. But that’s what we share. Crazy people attract attention. And that does not reflect badly on my Cato colleagues who manage to get so much attention in the world. Sometimes you get attention for other reasons, as well. So there’s progress in the world, most people don’t know about it, and in conclusion, the third factor, it’s dangerous if they don’t. Because fear is the health of the state. As H.L. Mencken put it, the whole aim of practical politics it to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of imaginary worries. People say that Trump is not a politician. My God, he is the best example of that kind of politician I’ve seen in decades. He knows exactly how to trigger our fear, our fight or flight instincts. This country is a hellhole. We’re going down fast. It’s not exactly Morning in America, apparently. His voters, 75%, say that the world was better 50 years ago, that the United States was better 50 years ago. But so does Bernie Sanders supporters. And they have the same kind of doomsday mongering. It’s only that they care about a couple of other issues. It’s that the world will end, yes, but that’s probably inequality and the environment rather than violence or well, trade, or something like trade there as well. So both sides, everybody who wants power, everybody who wants us to sacrifice our liberty, tells us that we should worry about what people do with their freedom if they are free. They will create chaos and therefore you need a strong person to control us. In a way, it’s not new. In every election, you tell people that the world is falling apart if the other guy wins. But I think we’ve reached another level now. This is one thing that does not get better, because now they’re saying that the world is already a hellhole and we need something strong to take care of us. In that case, we need someone to lead us to safety. In that case, we need scapegoats. In that case, we need the muscular state or the muscular strong person. In social psychology, there are thinkers like Jonathan Haidt and Karen Stenner who talks about authoritarianism and the authoritarian reflex. And I know authoritarianism is a loaded term, so let’s just say some kind of status perspective when you think you have to control other people constantly in various spheres of their life. They suggest that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. Instead it’s more like a predisposition that can be triggered when people think that something is scary in the world, when people think that their lifestyle is threatened, when people think that their society is under threat by foreign forces or minority groups. Then they suddenly answer in a more authoritarian way in other questions that do not relate to the specific threat, because we become protective when we’re fearful. We do not want to open up, we don’t want to liberalize, we don’t want people to have freedom, we want them to be kept in check. If you think that people left to their own devices will create chaos, well then you have to be worried about freedom. Then we need, well, the imperial president basically, who will take care of us all and give us safety in exchange for our freedom. So in conclusion I wrote this book not out of complacency, not as a way of saying look, everything is automatically alright. I wrote this because I am fearful, I am afraid that we are taking all this progress for granted and we do not understand that it only happened because people had the freedom to explore, to experiment, and to exchange. If we get governments that put obstacles in the way of those freedoms, then we won’t see that kind of progress in the future. We have something to fear and that is fear itself. Because fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, where we have some sort of stagnation going on, then we think that we need — we become less interested in opening up, in free trade, in liberalizing reforms. In that case, we’ll have more stagnation and more fear and even less reforms. So it’s dangerous. And more than that, it’s a boring way of spending your life, standing in the way of progress. In the words of that great thinker, Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, only a fool stands in the way of progress. Well, happily, there are no fools in this room. I am so grateful for everything that you are doing in your support to the struggle against folly, all your contributions to make the world safe for progress. Because if we can continue doing that, if we can stop those authoritarians on the Left and on the Right, or at least moderate them, then we’re making the world safe for progress. In that case, we can look forward to a future where our children and where our grandchildren can grow up in even more health, and wealth, and safety, and look back to this awful election season of 2016 as the good old days. Thank you.

Caleb Brown: Johan Norberg is author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.