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01 / 05
Marian Tupy’s Interview with James Pethokoukis

Blog Post | Science & Technology

Marian Tupy’s Interview with James Pethokoukis

The future is full of potential, so long as we maintain our freedoms.

Summary: Marian Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. In this interview with James Pethokoukis, a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute, Marian discusses human progress, unfounded pessimism, economic growth, and his book, Superabundance.


This interview originally appeared in Faster, Please!

1. Marian Tupy, you are the editor of HumanProgress.org, which chronicles the ways human welfare has improved dramatically over the last few centuries. Why is this an important project?

The last two or three centuries, which we call “modernity,” are fundamentally different from the previous 12,000 years, when we lived primarily as agriculturalists, let alone the previous 300,000 years (i.e., since our emergence as a separate species). A peasant born in Sumer (the earliest known civilization in southern Mesopotamia, which lasted between the sixth and fifth millennium BCE) would feel right at home in pharaonic Egypt in 3000 BCE, ancient Rome at the time of the Caesars, or France under the ancien regime. But that person would find life in the developed world around 1900 or 2000 completely incomprehensible. The speed of human progress since, say, 1750, is astonishing. It behooves us to figure out and, preferably, to internalize, the reasons for the emergence of the modern world. If we cannot derive the proper lessons from history—that the rise of the West and, later, much of the rest of the world, is deeply connected to the spread of individual and economic freedom, as opposed to, for example, colonial exploitation, slavery, or state planning—we might not be able to continue growing our economies and protect our liberties. We could stagnate or even retrogress. 

2. Despite all the progress we’ve seen, many people think poverty is getting worse and that we’re on the precipice of a climate catastrophe that threatens human existence. Why is this pessimism so pervasive?

Our hardware (i.e., the structure of our brains) and our software (i.e., psychology) have evolved to prioritize the negative. That’s the proper mechanism to survive in a world that, until recently, was mindbogglingly dangerous, cruel, and unpleasant. Overreaction to a potential threat that turned out to be false was less costly to the organism than underreaction to a threat that turned out to be real. Pessimists flourished and optimists got eaten by a saber-toothed cat. From the perspective of Homo sapiens, relative prosperity (let alone peace) account for about 0.08 percent of our existence. Is it any wonder that we don’t know how to handle the good news? 

3. How do you respond to critics who say that despite economic progress we’ve seen regression across other (arguably more important) domains over the last few centuries?

Like what? Women in ancient Greece (and today’s Afghanistan) were the property of men. Today, women run many countries and have a vote pretty much everywhere. That started in the late 1890s in New Zealand. Men’s likelihood of dying while performing a dangerous job or fighting in a foreign war is much lower than ever before. Likewise, slavery has probably been around since the birth of agriculture. Yet no culture developed a systematic and sustained anti-slavery movement until Great Britain in the 18th century. Child labor and corporal punishment were common. Homosexuality was punished. Cruelty to animals was ubiquitous. And don’t forget witch-hunts, cannibalism, exposure of unwanted new-born children to the elements, and human sacrifice. 

4. Is the problem of pessimism and doomsaying getting better or worse? Why?

I don’t think it is getting worse over the long run. Just about every major religion or civilization I can think of, including the Hindu, Buddhist, Graeco-Roman, Muslim, and Christian ones, developed some sort of eschatology or “end-of-days” scenarios, which the religiously inclined embraced and even looked forward to. In the short run, we have seen the emergence of apocalyptic environmentalism, which has a purchase on the public’s imagination partly because it is relatively new and, therefore, seemingly plausible. As more and more of the hysterical predictions fail to materialize, people will lose interest and move on to some other source of the apocalypse. That’s not to say that everything must work out in the long run. Not at all! We have, for example, nuclear weapons and deadly pathogens to contend with. Those should be our priority.

5. Has the pandemic changed your thinking about long-run economic growth and human progress?

I am concerned about governments’ fiscal and monetary policies; potentially changing attitudes to work; the revelation of government incompetence (which turned out to be significantly greater than even a jaded libertarian like me suspected); the relative ease with which my fellow citizens accepted immensely harmful society-wide lockdowns; a significant breakdown of global trade (just think how marvelous it is that we can import safe baby formula from Europe); and the rise of extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. So, overall, I would say that the pandemic made me more worried about the future than I was before. But, just to be clear, I think that we can solve these problems, if we derive the right lessons from the past and find the leaders with the backbone to implement wise and time-tested policies that have worked before. 

6. How should climate change be dealt with? Should we just ignore it in the blind hope that technology will offer us a Get Out of Jail Free card?

We already have the technology we need to deal with excessive carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Fission reactors are (Chernobyl and communist mismanagement notwithstanding) safe and have been around for some 70 years. I am all in favor of getting away from fossil fuels in the long run, if it can be done intelligently and without harming the least fortunate among us, who can’t afford to pay high energy bills. It is shocking that the same people who claim to care about the planet and the poor continue to reject the one technology that could help both. I also think that—if the government must get involved—more money for research and development in fusion technology is wiser and more economical than subsidizing solar and wind power. 

7. You and Ron Bailey coauthored Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Was there a trend that readers have told you they found particularly surprising?

The massive expansion of tree coverage is beautiful (e.g., the forests grew by 35 percent in the United States and Europe, and 15 percent in China, between 1982 and 2016). I like nature and, it turns out that when high-efficiency agriculture is combined with urbanization, nature rebounds very quickly. By 2100, 85 percent of humanity will live in the cities, and flora and fauna will once again rule the roost. Another positive environmental trend that we do not discuss in the book is the “greening of the planet.” According to NASA, between 1982 and 2016, additional CO2 in the atmosphere has led to an “increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.” Almost no one knows about these trends and I think that they are being hidden from the public for a reason.

8. If there was one fact of human progress that you could make sure everyone in America knew, what would it be and why?

The one concern that emerges from the historical record is the omnipresence of hunger in the past. War, loss of children at birth, pandemics, and so on, were horrible, but intermittent. Hunger (along with chronic diseases that could not be cured) was constant. Something as simple as consumption of a chicken was a rare luxury to our ancestors. Not only were you killing the bird, but also a source of a secondary food item—eggs. Today, you can get a whole rotisserie chicken from Costco for $4.99. An hourly wage of an unskilled laborer in the United States is fast approaching $15. So, for an hour of work, a person at the very bottom of the income stratum can purchase well over 3,000 calories—more than enough to sustain that person for a day. Even 50 years ago, such a thing was the stuff of dreams. 

9. You have a book coming out later this year titled Superabundance. Can you give Faster, Please! readers a preview of what that’s about?

Speaking of chicken and eggs, the same amount of time that an American blue-collar worker needed to work to earn enough money to buy one chicken (and egg) in 1850 bought that worker 26 chickens (and 36 eggs) in 2018. That’s to say that the main thrust of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet is to measure the increase in American and global standards of living using “time prices.” Time prices are superior to real (let alone nominal) prices, because new knowledge, which is to say innovation or productivity, shows up not only in lower prices of goods, but also in higher wages. In the book, we look at time prices of hundreds of commodities, goods, and services going back to 1850. We find that resources have been getting more abundant at a rate of roughly 3 percent a year—and the speed of progress has been increasing in recent decades. Our book is an antidote to the doomsayers who believe that humans are a cancer on the planet. Quite the reverse is true. On average, people, especially free people, produce more than they consume. And they do so in increasingly environmentally friendly ways. The future is full of potential, so long as we maintain our freedoms. 

World Bank | Quality of Government

Côte D’Ivoire’s Land Reforms Are Unlocking Jobs and Growth

“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.

When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…

Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).

This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”

From World Bank.

UNICEF | Child Labor

100 Million Fewer Children Are in Child Labour Today than in 2000

“While the elimination of child labour remains an unfinished task, the latest global estimates bring some welcome news. After a concerning rise in child labour captured by the global estimates for 2020, a feared further deterioration in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has not materialized, and the world has succeeded in returning to a path of progress. There are over 100 million fewer children in child labour today than in 2000, even as the child population increased by 230 million over the same period.”

From UNICEF.

Blog Post | Manufacturing

Grim Old Days: Virginia Postrel’s Fabric of Civilization

Beneath today’s abundance of clothing lies a long and brutal history.

Summary: Virginia Postrel’s book weaves a sweeping history of textiles as both drivers of innovation and toil. From ancient women spinning for months to make a single garment to brutal sumptuary laws and dye trades steeped in labor and odor, it is revealed how fabric shaped the foundations of human society.


Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is the riveting story of how humanity’s quest for thread, cloth, and clothing built modern civilization, by motivating achievements from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and more. While much of the book contains inspiring tales of innovation, artistry, and entrepreneurship, the parts of the book about the preindustrial era also reveal some dark and disturbing facts about the past.

In the preindustrial era, clothing was often painstakingly produced at home. Postrel estimates that, in Roman times, it took a woman about 909 hours—or 114 days, almost 4 months—to spin enough wool into yarn for a single toga. With the later invention of the spinning wheel, the time needed to produce yarn for a similarly sized garment dropped to around 440 hours, or 50 days. Even in the 18th century, on the eve of industrialization, Yorkshire wool spinners using the most advanced treadle spinning wheels of the time would have needed 14 days to produce enough yarn for a single pair of trousers. Today, by contrast, spinning is almost entirely automated, with a single worker overseeing machines that are able to produce 75,000 pounds of yarn a year—enough to knit 18 million T-shirts.

Most preindustrial women devoted enormous amounts of time to producing thread, which they learned how to make during childhood. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Postrel does, “Most preindustrial women spent their lives spinning.” This was true across much of the world. Consider Mesoamerica:

At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.

These girls often multitasked while spinning: “preindustrial spinners could work while minding children or tending flocks, gossiping or shopping, or waiting for a pot to boil.” The near-constant nature of the task meant that prior to the Industrial Revolution, “industry’s visual representation was a woman spinning thread: diligent, productive, and absolutely essential” to the functioning of society, and from antiquity onward cloth-making was viewed as a key feminine virtue. Ancient Greek pottery portrays spinning “as both the signature activity of the good housewife and something prostitutes do between clients,” showing that women of different social classes were bound to spend much of their lives engaged in this task.

Women of every background worked day and night, but still, their efforts were never enough. “Throughout most of human history, producing enough yarn to make cloth was so time-consuming that this essential raw material was always in short supply.”

Having sufficient spun yarn or thread was only the beginning; it still had to be transformed into cloth. “It took three days of steady work to weave a single bolt of silk, about thirteen yards long, enough to outfit two women in blouses and trousers,” although silk-weavers themselves could rarely afford to wear silk. According to Postrel, a Chinese poem from the year 1145, paired with a painting of a modestly dressed, barefoot peasant weaving silk, suggests that “the couple in damask silk . . . should think of the one who wears coarse hemp.”

Subdued colors often defined the clothing of the masses. “‘Any weed can be a dye,’ fifteenth-century Florentine dyers used to say. But that’s only if you want yellows, browns, or grays—the colors yielded by the flavonoids and tannins common in shrubs and trees.” Other dye colors were harder to produce.

In antiquity, Tyrian purple was a dye derived from crushed sea snails, and the notoriously laborious and foul-smelling production process made it expensive. As a result, it became a status symbol, despite the repulsive stench that clung to the fabric it colored. In fact, according to Postrel, the poet Martial included “a fleece twice drenched in Tyrian dye” in a list of offensive odors, with a joke that a wealthy woman wore the reeking color to conceal her own body odor. The fetor became a status symbol. “Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not an imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.” The color itself was not purple, despite the name, but a dark hue similar to the color of dried blood. Later, during the Renaissance, Italian dyers yielded a bright red from crushed cochineal insects imported from the Americas, as well as other colors that were created by using acidic bran water that was said to smell “like vomit.”

Numerous laws strictly regulated what people were allowed to wear. Italian city-states issued more than 300 sumptuary laws between 1300 and 1500, motivated in part by revenue-hungry governments’ appetite for fines. For example, in the early 1320s, Florence forbade women from owning more than four outfits that were considered presentable enough to wear outside. Postrel quotes the Florentine sumptuary law official Franco Sacchetti as writing that women often ignored the rules and argued with officials until the latter gave up on enforcement; he ends his exasperated account with the saying, “What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass.” But enough fines were collected to motivate officials to enact ever more restrictions.

In Ming Dynasty China, punishment for dressing above one’s station could include corporal punishment or penal servitude. Yet, as in Florence, and seemingly nearly everywhere that sumptuary laws were imposed, such regulations were routinely flouted, with violators willing to risk punishment or fines. In France in 1726, the authorities harshened the penalty for trafficking certain restricted cotton fabrics, which were made illegal in 1686, to include the death penalty. The French law was not a traditional sumptuary law, but an economic protectionist measure intended to insulate the domestic cloth industry from foreign competition. Postrel quotes the French economist André Morellet lamenting the barbarity of this rule, writing in 1758,

Is it not strange that an otherwise respectable order of citizens solicits terrible punishments such as death and the galleys against Frenchmen, and does so for reasons of commercial interest? Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying [banned cloth] to sell in Grenoble for 58 [coins]?

Despite such disproportionate punishments, the textile-smuggling trade continued.

Postrel’s book exposes the brutal realities woven into the history of textiles; stories not just of uplifting innovation, but of relentless toil, repression, and suffering. Her book fosters a deeper appreciation for the wide range of fabrics and clothes that we now take for granted, and it underscores the human resilience that made such abundance and choice possible.

Curiosities | Trade

The Real Story of the “China Shock”

“The total number of jobs remained largely stable in the U.S.—and even slightly increased—as people adapted to competition from Chinese trade. Trade-exposed places recovered after 2010, primarily by adding young-adult workers, foreign-born immigrants, women and the college-educated to service-sector jobs.

Lost in the alarm over jobs is that trade with China delivered substantial benefits to the U.S. economy. Most obvious are the lower prices Americans pay for everything from clothing and electronics to furniture. One study found that a 1 percentage point increase in imports from China led to about a 1.9% drop in consumer prices in the U.S. For every factory job lost to Chinese competition, American consumers in aggregate gained an estimated $411,000 in consumer welfare. This so-called Walmart effect disproportionately helped middle- and lower-income families, who spend a bigger share of their budget on the kinds of cheap goods China excels at producing.

U.S. businesses also reaped advantages. Manufacturers who use imported parts or materials benefited from cheaper inputs, making them more competitive globally. An American appliance company, for example, could buy low-cost Chinese components to lower its production costs, keep its product prices down and potentially hire more workers.”

From Wall Street Journal.