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01 / 05
Despite Climate Change, Today Is the Best Time to Be Born

Blog Post | Economic Growth

Despite Climate Change, Today Is the Best Time to Be Born

Economic growth will ensure an abundant future.

Summary: Given the choice to be born in 1924, 1974, or 2024, the present moment stands out as the most promising and hopeful era, despite widespread climate anxiety. Advances in technology, healthcare, and economic development have dramatically improved living standards, making now the best time in history to begin a life.


Imagine you could choose a moment to be born, and you were offered three options: a century ago, half a century ago or right now. Let’s assume that, behind your veil of ignorance, you don’t know in advance where on Earth you’ll end up—just when. Which era would you choose? Of course, the thought experiment is not entirely fair, because we already know how the last century unfolded. But still, which year looks like the most auspicious and hopeful one in which to draw your first breath: 1924, 1974 or 2024?

If you were to ask the tens of thousands of activists that are protesting on the streetsgluing themselves to highwaysblocking roads and staging die-ins, I doubt that 2024 would be the most frequently picked answer. According to the founder of environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, climate change will lead to the “slaughter, death, and starvation of 6 billion people this century.” According to Just Stop Oil, the climate group behind many disruptive actions making news headlines, any further exploration of oil and gas will amount to “genocide” and the “starvation and the slaughter of billions,” and will “condemn humanity to oblivion.” Four in 10 Americans believe that global warming will likely lead to human extinction. Not surprisingly, a quarter of childless adults cite climate change as part of their motivation for not having children. After all, what’s the point of having children if you can’t give them a liveable future? As one young woman put it: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”

Better than You Think

Before we consider the future of our climate, let’s get some perspective. Here’s a not unimportant consideration should you contemplate having a baby: What are its chances of dying? Fifty years ago, in 1973, the global child mortality rate was three-and-a-half times higher than today (three times, even in the U.S.), and in 1923, it was almost nine times higher. The distant past was even worse. For all of human history up until the Industrial Revolution, at least three in 10 children died before reaching their fifth birthday. In the past half-century, extreme poverty has also been slashed, for the first time in history: While nine out of 10 people were extremely poor before the Industrial Revolution, today the proportions are inverted: Fewer than one in 10 falls below the absolute poverty level. In almost every respect, the world is a much better place to be born right now than at any previous time in history.

So far, so good. But of course, all of this still leaves open the possibility that our hard-won progress will soon be swept away by catastrophic global warming. Progress is not something that is mandated by the laws of nature, and there is no guarantee that it will continue indefinitely in the future. And yet, such a catastrophe is extremely unlikely. In fact, it is doubtful whether any of our recent victories over poverty and child mortality will be lost again, let alone slide back to the levels of 1973 or 1923. The opening line of David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth,” the most-read essay in the history of New York magazine, reads as follows: “It is, I promise, worse than you think” (in his subsequent book, he ups the ante, writing that it’s “worse, much worse” than you think). However, if you’re like most people—eight in 10 consider climate change a “catastrophic risk”—the reality about global warming is in fact much better than you think. If you have consumed an unhealthy dose of doom porn about the climate, you have likely ended up with a view of the future that is much more bleak and terrifying than what is scientifically plausible. In fact, I hope to convince you that this the greatest time in human history to be born. We ought to face the future with abundant optimism—thanks to science and human ingenuity.

Predicting the Future

It’s hard to make predictions,” quipped the physicist Niels Bohr, “especially about the future.” Scientists are studying a range of climate scenarios, with different emission scenarios and assumptions about the sensitivity of our climate to greenhouse gas emissions. These predictions are continuously honed and improved over time, as we learn more about the behavior of our climate systems and the policies and commitments of various nations.

But here’s a fact that you may never glean from reading climate doomer literature, even though it is also solidly based on the scientific consensus as documented in the successive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: A temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius—slightly more than we expect right now—will most likely reduce global GDP by only a couple of percentage points. That is not an absolute reduction compared to today, mind you, but compared to a hypothetical future without climate change: In all likelihood, our prosperity will keep growing and child mortality will keep falling, just by a bit less than in a counterfactual world without global warming.

But how can this be? Predicting the future of our global climate system is one of the most impressive scientific achievements of our time, but that by itself tells us precious little about how human societies will respond and adapt. Complicated though our climate system may be, and with all due respect to climatologists, human societies are far more complicated and less predictable. If we want to know how much damage climate change will cause—and whether it will be better or worse than you think—we should first and foremost listen not to climatologists, but to climate economists.

The main reason why climate economists expect that the negative effects of climate change will be overwhelmed by positive developments is human ingenuity. Our species has always developed smart solutions to protect us against the natural elements, populating many regions on Earth that would be “uninhabitable” without technology, but especially over the past two centuries, our mastery over nature has achieved spectacular successes. The best illustration is the one that is on every climate catastrophist’s mind: natural disasters. Despite what everyone believes and what every sensationalist news headline is telling you, global deaths per million people due to natural disasters have fallen by a factor of 100 over the past century. Mother Nature has become more violent and capricious in recent years (at least when it comes to hurricanes and floods, though not to earthquakes or volcanic eruptions), but that makes our achievement all the more impressive.

If you compare different countries and time periods, you will find time and again that the very best protection against natural disasters—whether caused by global warming or not—is economic growth and development. Material and economic progress is what allows us to build dikes, sturdy houses, hospitals and hurricane shelters, install air-conditioning and tsunami alarms and build infrastructure for early warning and evacuation.

On the remaining occasions when the news reports a flood or hurricane that has caused tens of thousands of casualties, the explanation is almost always poverty and, thus, lack of resilience. For rich and resilient countries, a heat wave or hurricane is usually little more than an inconvenience or manageable nuisance at worst, but for poor countries it can mean starvation, homelessness and death on a massive scale. In 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti killed more than 220,000 people. Six weeks later, Chile was rocked by an earthquake that released 500 times more energy than the one in Haiti. The Chilean quake resulted in 500 casualties—still tragic, but a fraction of the Haitian death toll. The main difference? Haiti is one of the poorest countries on the planet, while Chile is now a high-income country. As soon as Haiti becomes rich and prosperous—and we should urgently help it do so—it will become as resilient against nature as we are (this, incidentally, is one of many reasons why we should never allow advocates of “degrowth” anywhere near the levers of political power).

Status Quo Bias

The enormous benefits of economic growth have been on full display for two centuries, but because human ingenuity and technological innovation are inherently unpredictable, the climate debate suffers from a persistent status quo bias—the tacit or explicit assumption that human societies will just passively suffer rising sea levels, intensifying heat waves and extreme droughts, stuck at our current level of wealth and technology. But consider that even today, millions of people are living in regions that would be “uninhabitable” without modern technologies like air-conditioning, irrigation and dikes. Much of California, for example, was “arid beyond habitability” before visionary engineers turned all that inhospitable wasteland into “one of the world’s most vibrant economies.” When the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was asked what enabled the economic miracle of the tropical city-state (its GDP per capita is 65% higher than the U.S.’s), his answer was simple: modern air-conditioning. Even in the U.S., cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas would be virtually uninhabitable without artificial cooling.

The immense benefits of human innovation are just as apparent at the opposite end of the temperature scale: Four million people currently live above the Arctic Circle, where winter temperatures can kill any human being without sufficient protective technology—from clothes to insulation—within an hour. In 2021, The Lancet published a studythe first overview of the global mortality burden of extreme temperatures—showing that extreme cold still kills nine times as many people as extreme heat, and that the region with the largest rate of cold-related deaths is … sub-Saharan Africa. That sounds bizarre, but it drives home the overwhelming importance of adaptation: Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region on the planet, which makes it more vulnerable to cold even than rich countries in the Arctic North, even though Africa is of course much warmer overall.

Another popular source of climate catastrophism stemming from the status quo bias is food production. Will rising temperatures, increasing droughts and weather extremes lead to simultaneous harvest failures, and even to “billions of deaths,” as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil claim? Here again, it is beyond dispute that climate change will cause some damage to food production systems, at least in some regions, compared to a world without climate change (though it will definitely also benefit some regions). But in any tug-of-war between the climate and human ingenuity, you would be well advised to bet on the latter. In the past half-century, artificial fertilizer, irrigation, genetic modification and mechanized harvesting have made agriculture far more resilient against weather extremes, quadrupling global food production even as the Earth was warming by 1.2 degrees Celsius. Thanks to the globalization of our food system, famines are now mostly a thing of the past, and the only ones that remain are caused by political conflict and mismanagement.

It is extremely unlikely that rising crop yields will suddenly start falling, because there is still tremendous room for improvement, especially in developing countries. If you take into account all the factors affecting the future of food, the (real) negative impact of global warming will in all likelihood be completely swamped by technological progress. A study from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations forecasts that global food production will increase by another 30% by 2050, after taking into account climate change. According to a meta-analysis in Nature, by 2050 average caloric intake is expected to increase, and undernourishment to decrease, at all socioeconomic levels.

And bear in mind that such projections still rely on conservative assumptions, not accounting for game-changing technologies like precision fermentationcontrolled-environment agriculture and lab-grown meat, which have the potential to make food production completely independent of outside weather conditions. There is simply no mainstream model in climate economics that predicts an absolute rise in hunger and malnourishment, let alone a return to the levels of starvation from a century ago.

Misleading “Tipping Points”

But what about the potential of “tipping points”—the positive feedback loops in our climate system that could suddenly trigger catastrophic warming, and which understandably loom large in the imagination of climate catastrophists? As our understanding of the global climate is improving, the list of these theoretical tipping points is changing over time, with some falling off the list and others being added. Notable tipping points include the thawing of Arctic permafrost (releasing huge quantities of methane), the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or the dieback of boreal forests. While tipping points evoke the image of teetering on the balance of a ravine and suddenly slipping off, the concept has a more restricted or technical definition (or range of definitions)—namely a nonlinear process that becomes self-reinforcing after being pushed beyond some point, even if the original cause ceases to operate.

It is, in fact, misleading to portray such tipping points as abrupt or sudden. Many theoretical tipping points are only “sudden” on a geological time scale and would take decades, centuries or even millennia to unfold (even a millennium is still a blink in the eye of geologists). In its sixth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change writes that “there is no evidence of abrupt change in climate projections of global temperature for the next century.” What compounds the confusion is that tipping points are often confused with the political thresholds of 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, as written down in the Paris agreement. This has given rise to unscientific deadline-ism, where climate hucksters say the game for humanity is over once we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. But the risk of reaching specific tipping points increases with every increment of warming. For some of them, we might already be entering the danger zone, while other tipping points are only expected to occur at around 4 or 5 degrees of warming (with large margins of uncertainty).

For all these reasons, climate scientists such as Seaver Wang have argued that we should discard the concept of tipping points altogether—not because there’s no such thing as a “tipping point,” suitably defined, but because the metaphor speaks to a popular but inaccurate understanding that “the climate system is on the verge of very unstable, self-reinforcing, and abruptly rapid disaster.” Even climate scientists who don’t agree with Wang should make clear to the public that a “tipping point” should not be equated with some irreversible point-of-no-return or “game over” situation. That’s because, again, no matter how accurate your model of the climate system is, it cannot predict the evolution of human ingenuity and adaptation. Even speculative projections of extreme climate scenarios with multiple dramatic tipping points provide no basis for confident predictions about “billions of deaths” or “collective suicide.”

Why So Gloomy?

More and more climate scientists are starting to push back against excessive doomism and especially defeatism about the climate, but frankly, they should shoulder some of the blame for misleading the public. For years, serious scientific publications have tended to focus on the most dramatic predictions and outlier scenarios. The most extreme one (known to insiders as “RCP 8.5”) imagined a century-long frenzied global coal orgy that was never even remotely plausible, but that was nonetheless often misleadingly represented as “business as usual.”

If such a dramatic rise in coal consumption was ever in the cards, we now know it’s a complete fantasy. Electric cars are finally going mainstream, coal is being replaced by much cleaner natural gas, solar panels and batteries have achieved spectacular cost reductions and many countries are reconsidering their distaste for nuclear energy. Most importantly, dozens of countries are now achieving absolute decoupling of carbon dioxide and economic growth: Their economies are still growing, but their emissions are steadily going downward. Just a decade ago, the world was still on course for 4 or 5 degrees of warming, but thanks to our climate efforts we are now heading for “only” 2.6 to 2.9 degrees Celsius—still a worrying prospect indeed, but already dramatically better than before. Even David Wallace-Wells has started to strike a more hopeful tone since he published his catastrophist essay in 2017.

As a recent commentary in Nature argued, climate scientists have often failed to communicate that many dire warnings about damages from climate change refer to the additional risk from climate change in the total balance. But since economic growth and material progress are powerful tides that lift all boats, we should still expect the overall scales to tilt in a positive direction. Poverty and mortality will likely keep falling while wealth will keep increasing—only somewhat less so than in a world without global warming.

Most of all, climate scientists are guilty by omission: Too often, they have remained silent while their work was being distorted in the media, with hysterical warnings about “12 years to save the planet” or “collective suicide.” Perhaps they have turned a blind eye to these alarmist distortions because they believed—understandably but wrongheadedly—that stoking climate fears was necessary to raise public awareness and spur people into action.

But now we have a society that is suffused with climate dread and anxiety, with millions of people thinking that children no longer have a future. Even more importantly, our climate fears are causing real and material damage abroad. Many Western nations and institutions like the World Bank and the European Union have become so terrified of climate change that, pressured by Western nongovernmental organizations, they have resolved to choke off any funding to fossil fuel projects abroad, even in poor nations that direly need it. In effect, they think that climate change will be so catastrophic for future people that it trumps everything else, including economic development of poor people alive today. This is the “height of injustice,” as another commentary in Nature put it. Or in the words of the vice-president of Nigeria in Foreign Affairs: “A just global energy transition cannot deny African people their right to a more prosperous future.”

The Best Moment in History

Let’s think back to our thought experiment. When would you prefer to be born? Anthropogenic climate change is a serious global challenge, but this is not the first time humanity has had to deal with one of those. Fifty years ago, people were not worried about rising temperatures, but other global threats instilled fears and apocalyptic predictions, including deadly ultraviolet radiation (because of the growing hole in the ozone layer), mass famine (because of overpopulation) and catastrophic pollution of air and water (because of industrialization and overpopulation). If these threats no longer hold sway over our imagination, that’s because they have been pretty much solved since then, at least in rich countries, through ingenious innovations and without sacrificing our standards of living.

It’s true that, as global challenges go, phasing out chlorofluorocarbons in spray cans and refrigerators is a piece of cake compared to phasing out fossil fuels, which permeate our whole economy and have a gazillion useful applications. But then again, our starting position is much stronger than ever before in history, because our resilience and resourcefulness have never been greater and will continue to grow. If you doubt the ethics of putting a new life on the planet in the year 2024, you should realize that by that standard, it has never ever been ethical to make a baby, anywhere. Bringing a life into the world has always been an act of hope, often against all odds.

But now that we have finally escaped from thousands of years of drudgery and suffering and entered an age of abundance, it would be bizarrely self-indulgent to imagine that today, of all times, is the wrong moment to be born. The words spoken by Barack Obama in 2016 still ring true today, no matter how bad climate change might turn out to be: “If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be, you’d choose right now.” Though we can only ever see the future through a glass darkly, even with our best scientific models, the year 2024 promises to be the best moment in history (thus far) to bring a child into the world.

This article was published in Discourse Magazine on 1/13/2024.

Blog Post | Economic Growth

What Unifies the Enemies of Civilization?

Socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism all have one thing in common.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Summary: Anti-merit, authoritarian, collectivist ideas like socialism, environmental extremism, and doomerism are enemies of human progress because they impede innovation, limit personal freedom, and prevent societal growth. Fostering decentralized creativity, by contrast, improves the continued ability of human civilization to advance.


We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded . . . blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas . . . luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control—the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual . . .

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death . . .

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us . . .

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

—Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Although our society is becoming more dynamic over time, some creativity-suppressing memes that had dominated our static ancestors survive to this day, albeit under different guises. As we saw, those memes ensured that societies like Sparta made practically no progress at all. Thankfully, in our time, such memes don’t stop us from improving our lives and the world more broadly. But they do slow us down, and if left unchecked, they could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We, therefore, have a duty not only to recognize them for the threat that they are but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

Socialism advocates for centralized institutions, like States, to take the means of production away from citizens against their will. Socialists falsely assume that States can better allocate wealth in the form of consumer goods and services better than the private sector. But in the absence of free markets, States cannot determine prices and so cannot discover how resources can be best allocated. Resources like wood and gold could go toward producing all sorts of consumer goods, and market prices signal to entrepreneurs which resources should go into producing which consumer goods. That is, entrepreneurs use prices to “calculate” whether or not a particular venture will improve consumers’ lives. For instance, entrepreneurs might want to buy wood to build houses that they wish to sell. But they can only determine whether such a venture is profitable—that is, if it makes people better off—if they know the prices of the wood they’d buy and the houses they’d sell. But centralizing all of society’s resources into the hands of a single institution obliterates the possibility of prices. As economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “The paradox of ‘planning’ is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.”

The impossibility of socialist-style central planning came to light in 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Soviet Union, visited a grocery store in the United States. Back in Russia, people waited in line for food and other goods, but in the capitalist United States, Yeltsin could buy as much of any of the countless items he wanted, and the lines were nothing like they were back home. In recognition of the stark contrast, Yeltsin told some Russians who were with him that if Russians saw what American supermarkets were like, “there would be a revolution.”

Many socialists think that wealth is a fixed pie. They see rich people and poor people and think that such inequality is unfair or unjust. Because they think wealth is fixed, they are sure that the moral thing to do is to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich people to the poor people. They think that the State ought to do such things—hence, they want the State to own the means of production, use them to create goods and services, and allocate them in a fair and just way to the people.

But wealth is not a fixed pie. Mankind was born into utter poverty, and now billions of people are wealthy enough to have the free time to read articles such as this one. So, yes, poverty is a tragedy. But with enough progress, we can all become as wealthy as today’s billionaires—indeed, most modern Westerners are wealthier than the kings of old, who died of diseases we’ve long since cured and who lacked basic comforts such as air conditioning.

The answer to poverty is not socialism, which only makes it more difficult to create more wealth. But trends indicate that young people in the West don’t know that—an Axios poll showed that 41 percent of American adults in 2021 held favorable views toward socialism.

Extreme environmentalism, or the so-called degrowth movement, aims to minimize humanity’s environmental impact by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. As documented in a June 2024 New York Times article, anthropologist and prominent degrowth advocate Jason Hickel once wrote, “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

The author of the New York Times piece, Jennifer Szalai, further writes, “The distinctive argument that Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: ‘We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.’”

But there is nothing moral about slowing down growth for the planet’s sake or of rebalancing our relationship with nature. Growth is not some abstract thing that greedy capitalists have made a deity of. Growth means more wealth for people in the form of lifesaving and life-enhancing technologies, from shelter to protect us from the violent forces of the Earth to mass food production to bring starvation to an all-time low.

Some environmentalists are willing to sacrifice the well-being of humans for the sake of the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. But they fail to appreciate that it is only humans who stand a chance at saving the planet and every species in existence! After all, the sun will eventually engulf the Earth, and most species have gone extinct, never mind what humans have done. But only humans are capable of developing the technology to protect the Earth from the sun’s death and revive any species we so choose. This might sound like science fiction, but already we deflect asteroids from the Earth and create cells with synthetic genomes. The gap between those feats and the ones you think are science fiction is not insurmountable—but human civilization will need to grow to achieve them.

So, even by the environmentalists’ own standards, people are the primary moral agent in the world. Any side effect we cause can, in principle, be reversed in the long run. Incidentally, the primacy of people serves as a devastating criticism against those who advocate that we have fewer children—after all, more people means more creativity and more boundless potential to make progress.

And if something like climate change is judged by its effects on people, things have never been better thanks to growth. The Earth doesn’t care about us—but we care about each other. As philosopher Alex Epstein notes, “If you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.”

Yes, fossil fuels have changed the Earth. But they’ve also given us enough energy to create solutions to an uncountable number of problems, including developing safe, manmade environments that shield us from Mother Earth’s dangers. Degrowth would rob us of such creations and leave us cold, dark, and vulnerable. “On a human flourishing standard,” Epstein writes, “we want to avoid not ‘climate change’ but ‘climate danger’—and we want to increase ‘climate livability’ by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.”

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.

Scientism is the false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge—that science alone can answer all our questions. But moral, economic, political, and philosophical problems can’t be answered by science alone. This is why the phrase “follow the science,” as we heard so often during the 2020 pandemic, doesn’t make sense. Scientific knowledge can inform our choices, but it alone cannot tell us what to do next, either in our personal lives or in politics more widely. For instance, science might offer us an explanation for how and why COVID-19 spreads, the conditions under which masks reduce spread, and the effect of age and body fat percentage on the risk of infection. But science cannot tell us whether the trade-offs associated with government-mandated lockdowns are worth it, whether the government should invest public funds into drug companies for the development of a vaccine, whether all questions pertaining to a pandemic should be left to the most local level of government or to the most global level of government, whether a grandparent ought to risk infection to visit his grandchildren, or whether a businessman should run an underground (and illegal) speakeasy during lockdowns so that he can afford rent. The answers to such questions require more than just scientific knowledge—they require political, economic, and moral knowledge. Knowledge about what one ought to want in life, knowledge about the trade-offs involved in our decisions, knowledge about the intended and unintended consequences of governmental policy, knowledge about legal precedent, and knowledge about what our political institutions are capable of doing. None of this could possibly be found in a science textbook. Those who claim otherwise are guilty of the sins of scientism.

As the Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek, inventor of the term “scientism,” wrote, “It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the ‘scientistic’ attitude—an attitude which . . . is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

But if we cannot acquire moral, economic, or political knowledge via the methods that work so well in physics, how do we get such knowledge? The same way we always do: by conjecture and criticism. We guess what the right policy is, how we ought to act in the world, and how the economy works. And we criticize all those guesses—maybe not with the rigorous experiments we conduct in the physics laboratory, but experimentation is just one way of criticizing ideas.

Ironically, with the staggering advances made in the hard sciences over the past century, scientism has been on the rise. Quite simply, people think that they can take science’s successes and carry them over into every other field of human endeavor. In political and cultural battles, it is often thought that he who knows the most science must be in the right. If only we put the most scientifically minded people in charge of the world, it is thought, then they could solve all our problems from on high. But science alone cannot tell us whether children have a right to take hormone blockers, whether circumcision should be legal, or how long patents should last. That is no reason to despair—with or without the microscope, we can continue to make progress with creative guessing and criticizing.

Relativism comes in many forms, but perhaps the most dangerous is moral relativism—the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong or good and evil. “Who’s to say who is in the wrong?” the relativist ponders high-mindedly. “What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th is barbaric, but we must end this cycle of violence,” a relativist would say, implicating both sides. “Russia may have invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine is conscripting its own citizens. Therefore, both sides have committed wrongdoing.” “If Hitler was a villain for his genocide, then so was Churchill.”

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right and the other in the wrong. It is not open to the idea that one society is open and dynamic and the other closed and static. It is not open to the notion that one country cherishes life while the other worships death. Nor is relativism fair—the relativist does static societies no favors by denying that they could become as prosperous as dynamic ones should they choose to do so. In their own way, relativists trap evil under the weight of their own suppressive culture when they could have cleansed it with the light of better ideas. And the relativist distorts the self-confidence of dynamic, progressive societies by muddying their understanding of why they’re so successful in the first place, mitigating their ability to make even further progress and spread the right ideas to static societies. The relativist is no highfalutin hero—he keeps evil on life support long past its expiration date.

Perhaps relativism is thriving in the West right now because people can afford to make such an egregious error. But not forever. For the enemies of the West are the enemies of civilization more broadly. They will not stop their anti-human ambitions, no matter how much relativists deny that that is what they are. Nor will it be relativists who ultimately stand up to them but rather those who distinguish between right and wrong, stasis and progress, victory and defeat.

Dogmatism refers to an idea that is considered, implicitly or explicitly, uncriticizable. The final truth. Known with certainty. Never to be changed. People tend to associate religious doctrines with dogmatism, but the connection is not a necessary one. After all, some religions have evolved to cohabitate with the rapid progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment (to be sure, other religions, tragically, have not yet done so—and whenever someone admits to “taking something on faith,” dogmatism is surely at work). But dogma is not confined to the cathedral. For instance, many political ideologies are thought to have perfect foundations by their adherents. And even in science, our best theories could, in principle, spread by dogmatic means. Karl Popper described Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as dogmatic. As philosopher Bryan Magee described psychoanalysts, “We should not . . . systematically evade refutation by continually reformulating either our theory or our evidence in order to keep the two in accord. . . . Thus they are substituting dogmatism for science while claiming to be scientific.” Even in the hard sciences, we could imagine a world in which people are not persuaded that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is true but rather are pressured to accept it as an uncriticizable foundation of our scientific worldview.

Because all our ideas contain errors, dogmatism always prevents us from improving on the ideas locked in dogma’s cage. Couple that with the fact that any error, no matter how small, could result in the eventual extinction of the human race, and we have good reason to rid our society of all dogmatic elements.

Doomerism is the idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, or that we are uniquely vulnerable to being wiped out today, or that we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline.

This attitude neutralizes the human spirit—after all, if humanity is sunk, why bother trying in the first place?

One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate over artificial intelligence. Some think that if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet. First, if the machine is not creative, it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are. And any unintentional side effects of AI can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars. Second, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so. New humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them. Of course, sometimes they rebel, especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do. Therefore, the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries.

Another dangerous effect of doomerism is tyranny, whether through cultural taboos, governmental regulations, or outright bans. They all amount to slowing the growth of knowledge and wealth, and of progress more generally. For if the next innovative step marks our doom, then surely a little—or a lot—of tyranny is justified! But innovation is the very panacea that doomers are worried about. It is stasis, not change, that will mark our end.

Moreover, we might choose to slow ourselves down, but the bad guys won’t. So there’s no world in which AI doesn’t continue to progress. But there is a world in which the bad guys get a hold of novel technologies before we do—and, with it, the end of our sustained Enlightenment.

So socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as enemies of civilization. In one way or another, they curb our ability to make progress, a stain on the project that is humanity. But is each stain a unique color, or do they come from the same poisonous ink jar?

Indeed, all memetic enemies of civilization have one thing in common: They slow the growth of knowledge.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Blog Post | Economic Growth

The Radical Ideology Behind “Degrowth”

Unpacking the call for less.

Summary: The degrowth movement advocates for an economic and philosophical shift away from capitalism’s growth paradigm, arguing that continuous growth is unsustainable for the planet. It proposes a cultural overhaul that challenges capitalism and promotes a no-growth economy to preserve resources. Degrowth misinterprets the nature of capitalism and resources, overlooking the role of human innovation and voluntary exchange in creating sustainable progress.


You might see trouble when you look at power outages, declining birth rates and exorbitant grocery prices. Certain intellectuals and environmentalists, however, see something so wonderful that they had to create a word for it: Degrowth.

In the 2014 book Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, a collection of European thinkers presented an ideological movement that aimed to overturn the “growth paradigm” and usher in “an economy of common feast for all sober individuals.” The movement relies heavily on arcane and fustian terminology such as “dépense,” “nowtopian,” “dematerialization,” “economic disobedience,” “post-normal science,” and the use of “imaginary” as a noun, while “degrowth” itself comes from the French coinage “décroissance.”

Despite their arcane terminology, the ideas are straightforward. Degrowthers claim that capitalism “requires and perpetuates growth” and that this growth imposes an unsustainable stress on the planet’s finite resources. This mindset must be eliminated, and it can be eliminated because, as the editors gnomically announce, “scarcity is social.”

Degrowth is not just a social, economic, or environmental policy critique. The movement represents a cultural and philosophical challenge to capitalism and free markets. To understand its appeal, we must examine the deeper philosophical roots that sustain its radical vision.

Marxist philosopher André Gorz coined the term “décroissance” in 1972, drawing from the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, which outlined the planet’s purported ecological limits and suggested zeroing out economic growth to stop resource depletion.

Gorz, the Club of Rome (which made headlines in 2016 by calling for a one-child policy in the developed world), and others claimed that global ecological stability was fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.

“Is the earth’s balance,” asked Gorz, “for which no-growth — or even degrowth — of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?” Gorz assumed that his perception of “the earth’s balance” required that growth to end.

Contemporary degrowthers embrace the same fundamental error. First, they (and other green philosophers) stipulate a highly debatable definition of “the earth’s balance.” Second, at its core, capitalism does not have a singular goal of perpetual growth. Instead, capitalism is a social system rooted in the principles of individual freedom, where people can pursue their self-interests and make decisions based on rational judgments.

Capitalism does not have goals or desires of its own; it is not a conscious actor but a framework that facilitates the voluntary exchange of goods and services, innovation, and the creation of value. The growth paradigm criticized by degrowthers is not imposed by a framework of rules. It is the natural outcome of individuals acting freely and rationally to improve their circumstances. Profit is not a result of coercion or an insatiable drive to accumulate wealth but a reflection of one’s ability to provide goods and services that others value.

Degrowth scholars also argue that competition pressures businesses to grow, because a company that chooses to forego higher profits would lose market share and go out of business. They contend that the drive creates a relentless cycle of accumulation, where companies must continuously grow or face decline.

However, this critique fails to recognize that the motivation to compete is not an external force. Instead, business owners have a rational desire to improve their well-being. People compete to innovate, provide better services or products, and enhance their material circumstances. Competition is not a coercive system that demands growth for its own sake. It is a mechanism that rewards those who can meet consumer needs more effectively and efficiently.

The degrowth movement also misunderstands natural resources by making the same flawed ecological assumptions made by neo-Malthusian biologists. They believe the planet has finite resources and that growth must inevitably lead to unsustainable resource depletion.

Natural resources are not fixed amounts of matter. They are defined by their utility to human ends. While a fixed number of atoms produce natural resources, there are limitless ways those atoms can be organized to satisfy human needs. That is the reality that defines a resource. “The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge,” said the late economist Julian Simon. “The brakes are our lack of imagination.”

Understanding the philosophical motivations behind the degrowth movement helps to outline the potential impacts of the movement’s plans. As with the attitudes and policy proposals of the Deep Ecologists and other progressive green movements, degrowth would fundamentally undermine the structure and philosophies that established Western society. By misunderstanding humanity’s role in the natural environment and the essential nature of free market systems, degrowthers also recommend policy solutions that would do far more harm than the problem they claim to solve.

This article was published by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on 9/20/2024.

Blog Post | Natural Disasters

Degrowth Means Certain Death for Humanity

Just because the Earth is habitable today does not mean that it will be habitable tomorrow.

Summary: falsely thinking of Earth as reliably habitable, proponents of degrowth ignore the numerous natural threats that could end human civilization. The planet faces potential dangers ranging from asteroid impacts, to supernova explosions, to gamma-ray bursts. Addressing these threats requires advancing technology and wealth, as emphasized by Elon Musk’s vision of interplanetary colonization to improve humanity’s chances of long-term survival.


According to scientists, the Earth has experienced five mass extinction events, which means that well over 99 percent of species that have ever lived have gone the way of the dodo. Keep that in mind the next time you hear proponents of degrowth advocate in favor of a poorer and, therefore, technologically less-sophisticated future of humanity. So marinated are we in the cult of Mother Gaia that we have forgotten the many ways in which our planet could, completely unaided, put an end to human consciousness. Here are some key scenarios:

  • Weakening or reversal of the magnetosphere: Earth’s magnetic field protects us from harmful solar and cosmic radiation. A significant weakening or a complete reversal of the magnetic field could lead to increased radiation reaching the surface, which could cause widespread damage to living organisms and potentially lead to mass extinctions.
  • Supervolcano eruptions: Supervolcanoes, such as the one beneath Yellowstone National Park, could erupt with such force that they would release vast amounts of ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. That could block sunlight, leading to a “volcanic winter” with drastic cooling and disruption of global climate patterns, resulting in widespread crop failures and mass starvation.
  • Plate tectonics and continental drift: Significant shifts in tectonic plates could cause massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Over long periods, these shifts could also alter ocean currents and climate patterns, potentially making the planet inhospitable for many forms of life.
  • Ice ages: Natural cycles in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt, known as Milankovitch cycles, could trigger ice ages. A severe ice age could cover large parts of the planet in ice, drastically reducing habitable areas and potentially leading to mass extinctions.
  • Ocean current disruption: The global ocean conveyor belt, which circulates warm and cold water around the planet, is crucial for regulating climate. Natural changes that disrupt these currents could lead to extreme and rapid climate changes, potentially making the environment hostile to current forms of life.
  • Methane hydrate release: Natural warming could trigger the release of methane stored in ocean sediments and permafrost. This potent greenhouse gas could lead to runaway global warming, significantly altering the climate and potentially leading to mass extinctions.

These scenarios, while varying in likelihood and timescales, highlight the range of natural processes that could severely impact life on Earth. There are also several ways in which cosmic events and processes in space could potentially lead to the extinction of all life on Earth. Here are the primary threats:

  • Asteroid and comet impacts: Large asteroid or comet impacts could cause massive destruction. The impact could create shock waves, earthquakes, and tsunamis and throw up so much debris into the atmosphere that it blocks sunlight, leading to a significant drop in temperatures and a phenomenon known as an “impact winter.”
  • Supernova explosions: A supernova within 30 light-years of Earth could be catastrophic. The explosion would emit high levels of radiation, including gamma rays, which could strip away the ozone layer, exposing life on Earth to harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
  • Nearby hypernova: Besides a supernova, a hypernova, which is an even more powerful explosion, could also pose a threat. A nearby hypernova could similarly strip away the ozone layer and bombard Earth with high levels of radiation.
  • Gamma-ray bursts: Gamma-ray bursts are intense bursts of gamma rays from distant galaxies. If one were to occur within our galaxy and be pointed directly at Earth, the radiation could deplete the ozone layer and cause severe damage to the atmosphere, leading to mass extinction.
  • Solar flares and coronal mass ejections: The sun occasionally emits large bursts of solar energy. While Earth’s magnetic field provides some protection, a particularly strong flare or coronal mass ejection could overwhelm this protection, causing widespread electrical disruptions and potentially damaging the atmosphere.
  • Rogue planets or stars: A rogue planet or star passing close to the solar system could gravitationally disrupt the orbits of planets, potentially sending Earth into a destabilized orbit, either closer to or further from the sun, leading to extreme climate changes.
  • Black holes: A wandering black hole passing through the solar system could have devastating gravitational effects. It could disturb the orbits of planets, potentially ejecting Earth from the solar system or drawing it in.
  • Solar evolution: The sun will eventually evolve into a red giant, expanding and possibly engulfing Earth. Long before this, increasing solar radiation could boil away the oceans and strip away the atmosphere, making Earth uninhabitable.
  • Milky Way collisions: The Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. While this event is billions of years away, such a collision could disrupt the solar system and potentially lead to the end of life on Earth due to gravitational disturbances and increased radiation.

In his “New Rule: No Planet B” segment on Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher critiqued Elon Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars. Maher argued that no matter how bad things get on Earth, they cannot be worse than the harsh conditions on Mars, which lacks breathable air, has extreme temperatures, and experiences long dust storms. He emphasized that we should focus on solving our planet’s problems rather than escaping to another inhospitable one.

That’s lazy thinking. Just because the Earth is habitable today does not mean that it will be habitable tomorrow. And no matter how careless we supposedly are in our interaction with the environment, the negative consequences of human activity pale in comparison with the dangers posed by natural planetary and cosmic events and processes. Musk is right: In the long run, the only way to ensure the future of our (hopefully interplanetary) species is through exponential increase in wealth and technological sophistication.

New York Times | Economic Growth

US Productivity Surges 2.3 Percent, Beating Forecasts

“Productivity grew at a 2.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday, surpassing economists’ expectations. The pickup was a major improvement upon the sluggish 0.4 percent rate in the first quarter. And on a yearly basis, productivity increased 2.7 percent. That far exceeds prepandemic averages.”

From New York Times.