One of the most famous arguments in Christian apologetics is Pascal’s Wager. Pascal writes in his posthumously published 1670 book Pensées (as translated by W.F. Trotter), “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.” (The subsequent pages go into more detail about the decision theory of the wager, but I will not belabor the technicalities here.)

This argument was revolutionary because, while acknowledging uncertainty as to the truth of God’s existence, it attempted to make an expected value calculation to manage the risk of being wrong about God. Having co-invented modern probability theory in correspondence with Pierre de Fermat about 14 years earlier, Pascal was the first to explicitly apply the mathematics of expected value to moral decision-making. Such reasoning is now commonplace in moral philosophy.

Pascal’s Wager is widely considered by atheists, as well as many theologians, to be refuted. Some theologians will defend it, but it is less ubiquitous than arguments such as the cosmological argument and the teleological argument.

A key objection to the argument is the “many gods objection.” This is the objection that Pascal’s Wager rests on the false dichotomy of nihilism and a particular conception of God. If those are the only two possibilities, then you should bet on God if you can, because you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. But obviously there are infinite other possibilities as well, all of which have their possible negation. To cite just two examples, Conservative Evangelical Protestant Christianity and Ash’ari Sunni Islam each have conflicting doctrines. If one is true, paradise awaits its adherents and Hell awaits adherents of the other, and vice versa. And those are just two of infinite conflicting possibilities.

Therefore, Pascal’s critics argue, the wager argument could lead you to bet on infinite different doctrines, and to make matters worse each bet would also be a bet against your doctrine’s theoretical negation, and so the wager gets you nowhere.

This criticism is true as far as it goes, but stopping the analysis there misses out on a valuable element of Pascal’s argument. Pascal was trying to solve a real problem that, for many, remains unacknowledged: you have no choice but to wager on uncertain moral doctrines. Responding to the argument that you are less likely to lose if you refrain from wagering at all, Pascal points out, “Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?” To refrain from wagering, fallible beings would have to pause the passage of time, and even then they would only be delaying the impending wager on how best to spend the resources of their life.

Given this necessity to wager, paired with the seemingly paralyzing “many gods objection,” what is there to do?

To answer that, it must be noted that the wager is not just a one-time thing. Every moment of action or inaction is a new wager. In other words, after this moment’s wager, you’ll almost always get another chance to wager.

Given that context, all doctrines are not equal. Some moral doctrines, or “gods,” if you like, improve the wagerer’s chances in future wagers, while others diminish them. They do this by increasing or decreasing the wagerer’s body of knowledge, equipping them with a better or worse basis on which to place wagers.

The wager can improve the wagerer’s future odds through direct knowledge acquisition, but also through indirect positioning improvements. For example, working a lucrative job or making financial investments often provides direct improvements to the wagerer’s understanding of the world, but increased financial prosperity also indirectly increases the wagerer’s expected all-time knowledge set by increasing the sustainability of their life and therefore giving them more time, resources, and stability for future knowledge improvements.

No two doctrines will virtually ever be equally conducive to the long-term growth of knowledge. For example, even if we have equal credence in the truth value of Christianity and Islam, one of these sets of doctrines will be more conducive than the other to human flourishing, to the continued pursuit of truth, to sustaining human civilization. And in this manner all competing doctrines can theoretically be placed on a hierarchy from most to least conducive to the continued improvement of knowledge. Whatever is at the top of that hierarchy is what Pascal should have wagered on, and what we should wager on now.

With the complex doctrines that enjoy widespread adherence today, such as Christianity and Islam, it is difficult to determine which are more or less conducive to the growth of knowledge. While it seems that Christianity (with its mandate to “render unto Caeser” and so on) generally beats Islam (with its doctrines of Sharia, Jihad, and so on), this is a topic for historians, theologians, psychologists, and economists to debate. Even harder are the more granular debates, such as those about Catholicism versus Protestantism, Sunni versus Shia, and so on.

But one thing is clear: we can posit a theoretical doctrine, “knowledge maximalism,” and know that this is the doctrine that we should wager on. We are then left with the hard work of figuring out how best to maximize knowledge. Is capitalism or socialism more conducive to the long-term maximization of knowledge? What about veganism or meat eating? Lying to our wives or being honest with them? And so on.

While Pascal’s Wager is flawed because it presupposes a particular conception of the ultimate good, this new “knowledge maximalist’s wager” does not attempt to specify the correct payoff function in advance. Instead, it seeks to improve the wagerer’s capacity to evaluate and pursue whatever payoff function would ultimately prove most compelling. While never explained quite this way during the 18^th century Age of Enlightenment, I believe this was a core element of the Enlightenment meta-ethic. Enlightenment thinkers disagreed strongly about the nature of morality. Bentham favored maximizing utility, while Kant defended his categorical imperative, and so on. But they were all part of the “Enlightenment” because they perpetuated the ethos that treats such theories as fallible and subject to potential improvement, and bets that the process of expanding human knowledge will improve the expected value of such theories generally.

If we make an effort to live in such a way that our body of knowledge is improving to the greatest and most sustainable extent possible, we will be maximizing our chances in the continuous moral gambling necessitated by living a fallible life.

This article was published at Human Progress on 6/24/2026.

In his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon, the classic science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein explores the problem of nihilism or aimlessness that can befall a prosperous civilization. The cover of the book’s first edition reads, “The intriguing novel of a future Earth when science and technology have solved all problems – except the ‘why’ of life.”

This predicament of material prosperity combined with moral aimlessness is at least as resonant today as it was when Heinlein wrote in the mid-20^th century. What some researchers describe as a “crisis of purpose,” as well as my own personal knowledge of many of my peers, suggests that many people in developed society struggle to find a strong basis for moral conviction. Some cannot accept theological dogmas themselves but hope for a religious revival to rescue civilization from encroaching nihilism. Some believe that humans must agree on a set of broad humanist morals even while admitting an inability to offer firm grounding for such morals. Others advocate and celebrate the abolition of moral norms and standards altogether.

Heinlein imagines a different path forward.

When Hamilton Felix, one of the main characters in Beyond This Horizon, is offered the opportunity to contribute to the human race’s sustained prosperity, he questions why he should bother. An official named Mordan explains to Felix that by participating in a largely costless program he can aid in humanity’s far-future survival, but Felix replies, “Even so, I know of no reason why the human race should survive... There’s no point to being alive at all. I’m damned if I’ll contribute to continuing the comedy.” After Mordan continues attempting to persuade him, Felix replies, “Survival! What for? Until you can give me some convincing explanation why the human race should go on at all, my answer is ‘no.’”

Later in the book, Felix is again called upon to hear out Mordan. This time, Mordan has devised a response to Felix’s question about the “why” of it all. “I don’t propose to give you an answer here and now,” Mordan admits. But he asks, “Would you be willing to cooperate if you knew that a serious attempt was being made to answer your question?”

Mordan explains that, “Such a research might not be completed in years, or in our lifetimes. But suppose I declare to you that such a research were to be attempted, seriously, hard headedly, all out, and no trouble spared, would you then consent to co-operate?”

I shall not needlessly spoil Felix’s response, except to give away that this “Great Research” does eventually begin, and the characters of the novel realize that its scope and scale must be very grand in order to rise to the vastness of the project of searching the universe for moral truth. The narrator explains:

The Great Research in its opening phases seemed to fall into half a dozen major projects, some of which interested him more than others because they gave some hope of producing results during his lifetime. Some, however, were almost as colossal as the building of the Grand Eidouranion. The distribution of life through the physical universe, for example, and the possibility that other, nonhuman intelligences existed somewhere. If there were such, then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men. In which case they might give Man a “leg up” in his philosophical education. They might have discovered “Why” as well as “How.”

This fictional “Great Research” project of an epistemically mature, non-dogmatic civilization bears striking resemblance to a real prescription from leading moral philosophers in the 21^st century. The University of Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, founders of the highly influential effective altruism movement, have advocated what is often called the “Long Reflection” (a term coined by MacAskill).

These philosophers admit that, relative to the grand timescale of human history, humanity may not have made much progress yet in developing robust moral theories. But rather than conceding to nihilism, they point out that moral questions may not be impossible to answer even if they are so difficult that little to no progress has yet been made. Moral philosophy may still be in its infancy, like physics before Newton or biology before Darwin. In 1790 Immanuel Kant famously declared that “there will never be a Newton of the blade of grass,” failing to imagine that something as chaotic and complex as biological life could ever be subjected to a rigorous scientific theory. Darwin arguably proved him wrong less than a century later, and likewise, some future moral theorists may prove the nihilists and dogmatists wrong in ways not yet conceived.

Thus, the Oxford philosophers propose the Long Reflection: a hypothetical period of centuries, millennia, or longer for humanity to investigate moral questions instead of calling off the search for moral truth. As Ord explains it in his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity:

During the Long Reflection, we would need to develop mature theories that allow us to compare the grand accomplishments our descendants might achieve with eons and galaxies as their canvas.

Present-day humans, myself included, are poorly positioned to anticipate the results of this reflection. But we are uniquely positioned to make it possible.

…

While moral philosophy would play a central role, the Long Reflection would require insights from many disciplines. For it isn’t just about determining which futures are best, but which are feasible in the first place, and which strategies are most likely to bring them about. This requires analysis from science, engineering, economics, political theory and beyond.

In his 2022 New York Times bestselling book What We Owe the Future, MacAskill elaborates:

I think we should accept that we don’t know what the ideal state would be; the primary question is how we can build a society such that, over time, our moral views improve… What we want to do is build a morally exploratory world: one structured so that, over time, the norms and institutions that are morally better are more likely to win out, leading us, over time, to converge on the best possible society.

As Heinlein depicts in his novel, and as Oxford philosophers Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and Nick Bostrom are now contending with, the post-Enlightenment scientifically sophisticated modern world is one in which no religious dogmas or naively adopted moral philosophies can be relied on to guide civilization. While plenty of radical sects still uphold their dogmas and fight for their causes, the baseline skepticism and belief siloing of the culture at large have become so strong that it is hard to imagine any one set of moral dogmas recapturing vast swaths of hearts and minds without a stronger philosophical basis than any already existing ideology has yet demonstrated.

But in such a society it is understood that the most important truths about the world are likely not yet discovered. Nihilism, like any other moral theory yet developed, should be considered too premature to win the day. Thus, epistemically mature society must not succumb to moral aimlessness. Rather, it must be devoted to the moral pursuit of expanding Enlightenment and expanding the scope and scale of human knowledge.

This is an updated version of an article that was published at the Foundation for Economic Education on 7/18/2019.

There is an allegedly beautiful vision shared by many economists, policymakers, and workers: One day, it is supposed, working hours will become so productive that each worker will only have to work a few hours per week and then they will luxuriously spend the rest of their time on leisure.

The New Economics Foundation advocates for a 21-hour work week. Sociologist Peter Fleming suggests a three-day work week in his 2015 book The Mythology of Work. Historian Rutger Bregman argues in his bestselling 2017 book Utopia for Realists that a 15-hour work week is achievable and desirable. Business Insider claims that “The 40-hour week isn’t working anymore,” and advocates instead for a 15-hour work week. These are just a few of countless examples.

John Maynard Keynes, one of history’s most influential economists, predicted in 1930 that the grandchildren of his generation would enjoy 15-hour work weeks. The rest of the labor would be done by machines. This was a popular idea. In 1965, a Senate subcommittee projected that we would only work 14 hours per week by the year 2000.

These projections are now typically understood to have been wildly off. Productivity has indeed massively increased, and so have the material living standards of workers. But this has not seemed to result in the massive decline in working hours that many predicted.

According to recent data from Gallup, full-time employees were working an average of 42.9 hours per week as of 2024. This alone doesn’t mean that Keynes was wildly wrong. The math is a lot more complicated. Matthew Yglesias defends Keynes in a recent article by pointing out that, even if Keynes was wrong to imagine each work week being radically diminished, he may have been right to imagine that hours worked over a lifetime would go significantly down in some way. Yglesias points out that people spend many more years in retirement than they used to, and also that many hours of household drudgery have been transformed into leisure time by the spread of technological advancements such as washing machines and dishwashers.

But none of these people seem to question the assumption that more leisure time and fewer working hours would be a desirable outcome. Regardless of how accurate Keynes’s prediction was, I think the question of how desirable leisure time is compared to working hours is more important and less frequently discussed.

Leisure Versus Investment

When you gain access to a time-saving innovation such as a dishwasher or other labor-saving technology, you have two options: You can fritter away the newfound time on leisure and relaxation, or you can spend your extra time increasing your productivity. This dilemma of time expenditure is equivalent to the more frequently articulated dilemma of money expenditure. When you have extra money, you can temporarily increase your leisure (or your consumption of some other luxury good), or you can invest that money in future productivity gains.

And these are not new dilemmas introduced by modern technology. These problems have been with humanity since time immemorial. Whichever Stone Age hunters first invented the spear, the axe, the sling, and so on had these same two options. They could spend extra time on leisure, or they could use their newfound hunting abilities to bring extra meat home to their kin. Those who chose option B enabled more population growth and probably aided in our ability to exist today.

The cultivation of domestic crops and livestock over 10,000 years ago was probably one of the greatest innovations for economic growth in human history. For the first time, humans had the ability to create a massive food surplus. Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains in his international bestselling book Sapiens that, “With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted.”

People theoretically could have chosen leisure over investment in new children and more crops. If everyone had chosen leisure, the population would not have boomed. If some people chose leisure, they were out-populated and outcompeted by those who chose investment. Harari calls the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud” because the early agriculturalists likely intended to increase their leisure and instead increased their productivity.

Like the grandchildren of Keynes’s generation, they probably fantasized about using technological productivity gains to increase their leisure.

People in hunter-gatherer societies worked far fewer hours than people in agrarian and modern societies, but that is because they lacked the opportunities for productive work that more advanced societies offer. In their book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy explain:

Based on their observations of extant hunter-gatherer societies, scholars estimate that our foraging ancestors worked anywhere between 2.8 hours and 7.6 hours per day. Once they secured their food for the day, they stopped. The foragers’ workload was comparatively low, but so was their standard of living. Our ancestors’ wealth was limited to the weight of the possessions they could carry on their backs from one location to the next.

About 12,000 years ago, people started to settle down, cultivate crops, and domesticate animals. The total number of hours worked rose, but people were willing to sacrifice free time in exchange for a more stable food supply. Since artificial lighting was prohibitively expensive, daylight regulated the amount of work that could be done. In summer, most people worked between 6 and 10 hours in the fields and an additional 3 hours at home. In winter, daylight limited the total number of work hours to 8.

Only by developing the tools to productively work longer hours did agrarian societies lay the groundwork for the massive gains in safety, life expectancy, and wealth enjoyed by most people today.

To Stagnate or to Achieve Great Things?

We face the choice between leisure and productivity every day of our lives. As Harari points out, an email is a lot faster and cheaper to send than a snail mail letter. When email was invented, people could have made their lives more leisurely by writing to people just as infrequently as they ever did—and more efficiently than before. Instead, people invested their saved time in writing to more people and doing so more frequently. As a result, people are more productive through their email and just as stressed as they used to be.

Leisure is just one of countless nice things that increased productivity can buy. It is no more desirable, and ultimately probably far less desirable, than other things that can be achieved instead, such as more scientific knowledge, more medical research and other investments in health, improved safety, transportation technology, communications technology, and other upgrades to the human condition.

At any level of technological and economic advancement throughout the last many millennia of human civilization, humans could have stopped advancing and simply “taken it easy.” If they had done so, the “taking it easy” phase would have only lasted a short period, and then the human project would have stagnated or succumbed to any number of new threats that inevitably arise as the result of constant exogenous change. What is more, their “taking it easy” in the distant past would have included far more pain from horrible diseases, famines, wolves, tribal violence, and so on than the weekends, evenings, and vacations of most modern people. The project of human civilization and prosperity has gotten as far as it has because people often invested in the future instead of indulging in those temporary opportunities to “take it easy.”

None of this is to suggest that people should never take a day off, or never indulge in leisure or frivolous consumption and luxury. Sustainably accomplishing great things and creating value requires spending time and resources to rest, experience beauty, grow as an individual in ways that are hard to measure, and maintain psychological and physical wellbeing. Taking vacations, relaxing for some portion of every day, and partaking in some frivolity can be important aspects of this process. But the idea that productivity should serve the purpose of facilitating leisure, and not the other way around, puts leisure unfoundedly high on the hierarchy of achievable values. This is pessimistic. There are far greater things to be achieved.

When they put their mind to it, humans can imagine possible achievements of vast and heroic magnificence. If enough hard work and ingenuity is invested, humans could build or terraform new and better worlds in outer space, develop radically more illuminating scientific theories than have yet been fathomed, dramatically extend human life expectancy, and so on, ad infinitum.

As significant productivity gains continue to be made, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to shorten the work week, people could better serve themselves, their grandchildren, and humanity generally by thinking of the newfound wealth as an opportunity to keep working and gain more ground in the march toward greater and more brilliant horizons of human achievement.

Author’s Note: My first child was born earlier this month. Becoming a father has inspired me to republish (with some minor edits) the following article, which was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education on 12/7/2021. It was written in response to the COVID-19-related slump in US population growth that was breaking news at the time, but its topic is of timeless importance, and its relevance hasn’t changed much in the years since its original release. The opportunity for Americans, and humans generally, to improve their lot by increasing the human population is as pressing as ever.

Population growth in the United States declined to an all-time low during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a decade-long fertility slump, 2020 saw more people dying than being born in half of all US states. Early estimates suggest that the US population grew only 0.35 percent, the lowest rate ever recorded, and growth is expected to remain near flat this year, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ writers Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros report, “With the birthrate already drifting down, the nudge from the pandemic could result in what amounts to a scar on population growth, researchers say, which could be deeper than those left by historic periods of economic turmoil, such as the Great Depression and the stagnation and inflation of the 1970s, because it is underpinned by a shift toward lower fertility.”

The Malthusian View of Population

This demographic news comes at a time when limiting family size is widely encouraged in the media. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry won an award in 2021 for their “enlightened decision” to limit themselves to two children. And in response to a recent Census Bureau report of low population growth over the last decade, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in a New York Times column that “In fact, in a world of limited resources and major environmental problems there’s something to be said for a reduction in population pressure.”

And it does seem plausible at first glance that having fewer people would result in greater prosperity. Afterall, a larger population will lead to more resource consumption, which would seem to suggest that the average member of the population would have access to a smaller share of resources. This perspective has been popular ever since the economist Thomas Malthus published his seminal 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that food supply could not possibly keep up with exponential population growth.

The Malthusian worldview has even been represented in popular culture in recent years, especially in the Marvel character of Thanos, the ultimate nemesis of the Avengers. As economist Gale Pooley has pointed out, In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos plots to save humanity from economic collapse by halving the population of life in the universe, thus leaving the remaining half with double the resources.

While Thanos is portrayed as the villain, the film never really articulates the flaw in his logic. But there is, in fact, a fundamental flaw in Malthusian thinking, whether it comes from Malthus, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Paul Krugman, or Thanos. And that flaw is known as the fixed pie fallacy.

The fixed pie fallacy is the idea that there is a fixed amount of resources in an economy, and that if there are more people to consume resources, the pie must be divided into smaller slices for each person. In this view, if the population continues to increase, eventually there will be more and more people left with nothing but crumbs. But this is a fallacy because in reality, each person is not just a pie consumer, but a pie maker as well. In other words, each new person is accompanied not only by a new mouth that consumes resources, but also a new mind and pair of hands that produce resources.

The question is whether the average person consumes more than she produces, or vice versa. If people generally consume more than they produce, then Malthusians may not be pessimistic enough, and even a stagnant population would be unsustainable. If, however, people produce more than they consume, then a growing population is likely a powerful force for the economic success of a civilization, and America’s relatively stagnant population is likely among the most economically devastating missed opportunities of our time.

Humans as Machines of Production

Any animal species of which the average member is more consumptive than productive will eventually go extinct. Squirrels cannot consume more nuts than they collect, lions cannot eat more zebras than they kill, and so on. Production must necessarily equal or exceed consumption. Most animals produce just barely enough to sustain themselves, and they increase their population in times of abundance, so they constantly live at subsistence.

In order for human civilization to become as wealthy as it has, the average human must have created far more wealth than she consumed. Judging by the vast cities, libraries of knowledge, vehicles, smartphones, computers, nuclear power plants, and other wealth abundant in modern society, the average human’s creative economic impact must exceed her destructive economic impact by multitudes. Otherwise, we would be living in a wilderness or a wasteland.

For most of human history, humanity did subsist only barely. Incomes almost never exceeded $3.50 per day in today’s dollars. But ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed humans to multiply their productivity with technology and science, economic growth per capita has skyrocketed and the portion of the population living in extreme poverty has diminished from over 80 percent to less than 10 percent. All of this occurred while the human population exploded from less than 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today.

Given that economic growth comes from the productivity of people, the fact that the global economy has been growing rapidly, not stagnating or shrinking, almost every year for the last several centuries demonstrates that people are generally adding more wealth to the economy than they’re subtracting. Indeed, past population growth has been correlated, and likely causally linked, with economic growth, and there is no reason to think that additional people wouldn’t continue this trend.

Increasing the population is arguably wonderful for those coming into existence, who are given the beautiful gift of life. But in addition, adding people to our world is wonderful economically for those of us who already exist, because most people who are left relatively free to engage in economic activity contribute to the supply of labor and innovative thought, thus increasing the abundance of goods and services available in the economy.

Increasing the Division of Labor

The benefits of a larger population are more than just the fact that the average person produces more wealth than she consumes. There is also the important fact that a group of people engaging in the division of labor form an economy that is far greater than the sum of its parts. This happens because as a workforce grows, so do the opportunities of its members to specialize.

This is easy to see if you start with a small example.

If one person is alone on an island, she may spend half her working hours collecting coconuts from trees, and the other half building and maintaining her shelter and campsite. If, however, two people are together on the island and willing to trade, whichever one is relatively more suited to collecting coconuts (perhaps the taller one) can spend disproportionate working hours doing that, and whichever is relatively more suited to campsite maintenance (perhaps the more mechanically inclined one) can spend disproportionate working hours doing that. This will result in the set of tasks getting done more efficiently than they would without the division of labor, because of each person being relatively more suited to their task and also because of the greater accumulation of expertise each person will gain by specializing.

Any two people are at least slightly differentially optimized for any given task, because personal preferences, relevant experience, aptitudes, and even physical location in space at a particular moment are all variables that differ from person to person and affect how well a given task can be completed. Therefore, an increased division of labor will virtually always have the potential to yield economic benefits.

It is important to note that, even if one side of a trading partnership is better at everything, both parties still gain from the division of labor. This is shown by the classical economist David Ricardo in his theory of comparative advantage.

Ricardo’s theory was initially described in the context of international trade between nations, but it applies just as well to trade between individuals. Callum Williams, senior economics writer at The Economist, summarizes the theory well in his book The Classical School: The Birth of Economics in 20 Enlightened Lives. “In a nutshell, Ricardo shows that international trade allows countries to buy commodities at a better price–that is, with the loss of less labour time–than they can get at home,” Williams writes. “But crucially, he demonstrates that two countries can benefit from international trade even if one is better than the other at producing everything.”

Earlier trade theory from the founder of modern economics Adam Smith made clear that if one party is better at producing cloth while another is better at producing wine, then the two parties can mutually benefit from specializing in producing cloth and wine, respectively. But Ricardo’s logic shows trade to be even more widely useful than that. As Williams explains:

A helpful way to remember comparative advantage is as follows: England exports the cloth and Portugal exports the wine. Ricardo imagined that Portugal was better at producing both cloth and wine than England–ie, that it could produce both these commodities with less labour input than England. According to the Smithian approach, it would seem to make sense for Portugal to import nothing from England. In Smith’s language, the “foreign country”, in this case England, “can [not] supply [Portugal] with a commodity cheaper than [Portugal] can make it”.

Ricardo’s logic goes a step further. The question is, which is Portugal relatively better at producing, wine or cloth? In Ricardo’s example, Portugal was relatively more efficient at producing wine, meaning that Portugal would have to give up less cloth to make extra wine than England would. It follows, according to Ricardo, that Portugal should produce wine, and England cloth. Portugal exports wine, England exports cloth. Under that arrangement, both England and Portugal can consume more cloth and wine than under any other arrangement.

And what’s more, there is a fundamental asymmetry between each person as a “pie consumer” and a “pie producer”: Adding more consumers is merely arithmetical (if people consume more than they used to, it is because they are richer and can afford to), whereas adding more producers can increase production exponentially.

Scaling Up from the Island

Population size has been a crucial aspect of economic progress from the marketplaces of the Stone Age to those of modern times. In his book The Rational Optimist, biologist Matt Ridley elucidates how insufficient population sizes held back hunter-gatherer societies by limiting their division of labor.

“A band of a hundred people cannot sustain more than a certain number of tools, for the simple reason that both the production and the consumption of tools require a minimum size of market,” Ridley writes. “People will only learn a limited set of skills and if there are not enough experts to learn one rare skill from, they will lose that skill. A good idea, manifest in bone, stone or string, needs to be kept alive by numbers.”

Ridley discusses the catastrophic example of Tasmania, which was cut off from Australia by rising sea levels in the Bass Strait about 10,000 years ago. “Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology,” Ridley explains. “By the time Europeans first encountered Tasmanian natives, they found them not only to lack many of the skills and tools of their mainland cousins, but to lack many technologies that their own ancestors had once possessed.”

Adam Smith put it simply in his classic 1776 book The Wealth of Nations when he wrote that, “The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.”

Fast forward to contemporary times, and the correlation between demographic growth and economic prosperity suggests the vast significance of an increasingly large and specialized labor force. Ruchir Sharma reports in Foreign Affairs magazine:

To get a better handle on how demographics will limit national economies in the future, I looked at population trends in the 56 cases since 1960 in which a country sustained economic growth of at least six percent for a decade or more. On average, the working-age population grew at 2.7 percent during these booms, suggesting that explosions in the number of workers deserve a great deal of the credit for economic miracles. This connection has played out in dozens of cases, from Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s to Malaysia in the 1960s through the 1990s.

Moreover, Sharma notes:

Indeed, countries with shrinking working-age populations have found it nearly impossible to produce strong economic growth. Going back to 1960, there are 698 decadelong periods for which data on a country’s population growth and GDP growth are available. In 38 of these cases, the working-age population shrank. The average GDP growth rate in these countries was a measly 1.5 percent.

In their annual Simon Abundance Index, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley have shown that population growth is positively correlated with resource abundance at the global scale. As they explain in their 2025 release:

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the relationship between resource abundance and population. It converts the per capita abundance of 50 basic commodities and the size of the global population into a single value. The index began in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2024, the SAI stood at 618.4, indicating that resources have become 518.4 percent more abundant over the past 44 years. All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2024 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.22 percent, thus doubling every 17 years.

Of Monkeys and Shakespeare

There’s a theorem that says if you give enough monkeys typewriters and enough time, they’ll produce Shakespeare. Likewise, add enough humans to the marketplace and they’ll produce self-driving cars, spaceships, synthetic meat, the internet, NFTs, Neuralink, nuclear power plants, CRISPR, 3D-printed replacement limbs, and also Shakespeare.

The reason you can find Reddit threads about such niche information and such specific problems you’re trying to solve or hobbies you’re exploring, and the reason your large language models such as ChatGPT can be trained on such narrowly applicable information, is thanks to the vastness of humanity’s division of labor. Indeed, the vast tapestry of human cultural diversity, with all the dividends it yields, is in large part a product of the division of labor.

New forms of labor and specializations of knowledge are being invented every day, partly because so many people exist that a highly diverse marketplace can be sustained. In principle, there would be effectively no limit of problems to solve and tasks to valuably accomplish if there were only enough innovators to specialize in them. Therefore, mutual economic gains from an expanding marketplace can increase virtually indefinitely.

And the more these mutual gains proliferate, the more harmonious people’s interests generally become. As the economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1949 masterpiece Human Action:

The very condition from which the irreconcilable conflicts of biological competition arise–viz., the fact that all people by and large strive after the same things–is transformed [by the division of labor] into a factor making for harmony of interests. Because many people or even all people want bread, clothes, shoes, and cars, large-scale production of these goods becomes feasible and reduces the costs of production to such an extent that they are accessible at low prices. The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.

The Malthusian idea that a growing population is one in which each individual will find it ever-harder to get by may be true for most animal species (since they don’t typically specialize and trade), but in modern human society just the opposite is so.

2023 Pew research says that 51 percent of young adults who aren’t parents say that they would like to have children one day. Meanwhile, 30 percent aren’t sure, and only 18 percent say they don’t want to have children. This widespread openness to procreation is an opportunity to shift the cultural incentives in favor of having more children, for the enormous benefit of the children themselves who otherwise will not be given the beautiful gift of life, but also to promote the harmony and prosperity of society at large.

If humans want to expand our economic and social flourishing, a top priority should be increasing the human population. Who knows, we might even enjoy ourselves in the process.

Prior to the Scientific Revolution and broader Age of Enlightenment, it was generally assumed that all important knowledge was already known.

In his massively bestselling book Sapiens, Hebrew University of Jerusalem historian Yuval Noah Harari explains:

The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.

As Harari elucidates in his book, “Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.” For example, “After centuries of extensive scientific research, biologists admit that they still don’t have any good explanation for how brains produce consciousness. Physicists admit that they don’t know what caused the Big Bang, or how to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of general relativity.”

In the face of this newfound collective ignorance, some humans despair, but others rejoice. Two geniuses of expansive vision in the 20^th century, the classic horror author H. P. Lovecraft and the influential philosopher of science Karl Popper, represent these two extremes well.

A central theme in Lovecraft’s work is the horror of discovering how nightmarish the deep truths of the universe really are. Most of his stories are about science or exploration uncovering horrible realities that should have never been discovered and cannot be unlearned. The opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu (1928), probably his most famous story, illustrates this attitude well:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

While this quote is from a work of fiction, that attitude toward the advancement of human knowledge permeates both his fiction and nonfiction writings. For example, in the 1933 nonfiction essay “Some Repetitions on the Times,” Lovecraft vilifies technological automation as a source of mass unemployment that must be prevented by government subversion of the “laissez-faire system.” Technological progress must be fought against, Lovecraft argues, “if the peril of an unfathomed revolutionary abyss is to be averted.”

The checking of Lovecraft’s century-old fears against current unemployment rates, and the comparisons to contemporary AI doomerism, pretty much write themselves.

Conversely, Karl Popper saw in the vastness of human ignorance a great cause for optimism. If humans have an infinity yet to learn, he reasons, then science can progress human knowledge and the human standard of living unboundedly into the future. In Volume 2 of Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he writes:

First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it. We have learned in the past, from many disappointments, that we must not expect finality. And we have learned not to be disappointed any longer if our scientific theories are overthrown; for we can, in many cases, determine with great confidence which of the two theories is the better one. We can therefore know that we are making progress; and it is this knowledge that to most of us atones for the loss of the illusion of finality and certainty. In other words, we know that our scientific theories must always remain hypotheses, but that, in many important cases, we can find out whether or not a new hypothesis is superior to an old one. For if they are different, then they will lead to different predictions, which can often be tested experimentally; and on the basis of such a crucial experiment, we can sometimes find out that the new theory leads to satisfactory results where the old one breaks down. Thus we can say that in our search for truth, we have replaced scientific certainty by scientific progress.

Is Lovecraft’s or Popper’s attitude toward the future of human enlightenment more compelling? The future is highly uncertain, but as I have argued at length in the past, the logical conclusion of stagnating human knowledge is the death of humanity and all life on Earth, because the environment is always changing and thus mass extinction is the rule, not the exception. Countless existential threats exist out there in the universe, known and unknown, one or more of which will be the downfall of any species that aren’t able to adapt through scientific and technological advancement.

If human knowledge continues to expand, this expansion might cause the end of humanity through deadly artificial intelligence, viral bioweapons, or some other self-inflicted horror. But at least this way, humanity has a fighting chance to deflect asteroids, cure diseases, terraform other planets, spread out into space, and build an amazing future of continued and exponentiating technological abundance.

A version of this article was published by the Libertarian Institute on 1/12/2026.

Tucker Carlson, who has recently been identified in the New York Times as “arguably at this point the most significant media figure on the American right,” gave a telling account of his political priorities in his speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in late December.

“All I really care about is that the people in charge care—that they love the people they lead,” he explained from the podium. “That is the first and most important requirement of leadership. A father who loves his children may make mistakes… but if he loves his kids, he’ll do a pretty good job and they’ll do fine.” Likewise, Carlson analogizes, “The president who truly loves his people will, over time, tend to make wiser decisions on their behalf. But the leaders who don’t care at all? They’ll destroy your country, and that is absolutely what we’ve had.”

This was not an anomalous diagnosis from Carlson. He has frequently made that same basic argument, such as when he went on comedian Theo Von’s podcast last month:

What really matters is the willingness of your leaders to actually die for you as you would for your children. Like, it’s that simple. If they love you, your country will prosper. If they hate you, it will fail. It’s super simple. They don’t like us.

This repeated analogizing of federal government employees to parental figures on whom we should depend for love could hardly be less accurate or more dangerous. Indeed, it suggests a profoundly authoritarian and sycophantic view of the federal government.

To understand why, a summary of the basic nature of tax-funded governance is warranted. In his seminal 1974 essay Anatomy of the State, economist Murray Rothbard gives a concise overview:

Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.

Also helpfully, Rothbard goes further than describing the basic nature of tax-funded institutions. He explains the timeless logic of how such institutions come about in the first place:

Man is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in “capital”) into shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources (“production”) and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence, the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously. … He does this, first, by finding natural resources, and then by transforming them (by “mixing his labor” with them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individual property, and then by exchanging this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the requirements of man’s nature, therefore, is the path of “property rights” and the “free market” of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the “jungle” methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed “the political means” to wealth. …The “political means” siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence. …

The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.

Given this context, let’s take Carlson’s familial analogy seriously.

As evolutionary biology teaches us, and as biologist Richard Dawkins elucidates in his renowned 1976 book The Selfish Gene, natural selection tends to favor behavioral dispositions that promote an organism’s “inclusive fitness,” meaning the propagation of its genes through both direct reproduction and genetically related offspring. Because biological parents share a substantial portion of their genes with their children, traits that dispose parents to protect and invest in their offspring are strongly selected for across human evolutionary history. This means that parental interests and children’s interests are far more tightly aligned than the interests of unrelated strangers.

Market economics works similarly. The reason that free markets have typically resulted in so much wealth creation is that they exclude parasitic resource acquisition strategies such as violent seizure of wealth, and therefore they incentivize people to offer each other mutually beneficial transactions that all parties involved willingly agree to. This means that in a market context, people serve their own interests by serving those of others. As the founder of modern economics Adam Smith famously writes in his 1776 masterpiece The Wealth Of Nations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

Therefore, as we can trust our biological father far more than a stranger to look out for our interests, we can trust associates in the private sector far more than federal government employees to look out for our interests. Our father’s biological interests are to a large degree our biological interests, and our voluntary associates’ economic interests are to a large degree our economic interests.

Of course, associates in the private sector will often rip us off and cheat us if they can, but at least they know that if we catch them doing so (or even never catch them but gradually cease to see a benefit from associating with them) we are free to immediately take our business elsewhere and spread the word of their poor service. Federal government employees, conversely, have enslaved us to the coercive and involuntary institutions of taxation and federal regulation. If we don’t like the “products” provided by them, we may have an opportunity years later to lodge a largely impotent vote in the deeply flawed and corrupted electoral system, but we cannot automatically and easily take our business elsewhere like we can in the private sector.

These largely parasitic expropriators of privately earned resources are highly unaccountable compared to voluntary associates in the private sector, such as those who employ most of us, sell us groceries, and so on. Rather than being compelled to steward resources wisely and benevolently, federal government employees are largely incentivized to enable fraud and loot the treasuries they have temporary access to before the end of their limited term.

Tucker Carlson’s idea that a more loving leadership class will solve America’s problems is like hoping, while being mugged, that the mugger will start loving you and therefore start serving your interests. While it may be nice if that would happen, thinking of it as a serious solution to the problem of being mugged is laughable. Similarly, hoping that US political leadership starts governing well out of love for the strangers who inhabit America’s landmass suggests a deeply misguided assessment of the nature of tax-funded governance.

Instead of longing to be loved by representatives of coercive parasitic institutions, and hoping that they treat us benevolently despite their incentives to the contrary, Carlson and the rest of America’s population would be wise to focus on the love of their families and associates in the private sector, whose interests are much more closely aligned, and who can therefore be relied on in much more robust and valuable relationships.

As for the coercive parasitism, private citizens would be wise to take any opportunity to diminish its influence over family and market life. If representatives of parasitic institutions want to be valued as contributors to human wellbeing, they should have to stop relying on tax dollars and start creating something of value that people demonstrate a willingness to pay for voluntarily.

Infallible or absolute knowledge has never been demonstrated. Some theories are very strong, but even the strongest ones may turn out to be incorrect. As the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon writes in the 6^th century BC (as translated by philosopher Karl Popper in his 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations),

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Does this mean there is a limit on what can be achieved through science and human inquiry? In a narrow sense, yes: The pursuit of truth can probably never produce absolute and infallible knowledge. But in a much broader and more important sense, it means quite the opposite: Since there is no final conclusion of the project of better understanding the world, the scope and scale of knowledge can increase unboundedly.

As Popper writes,

But is there any danger that our need to progress will go unsatisfied, and that the growth of scientific knowledge will come to an end? In particular, is there any danger that the advance of science will come to an end because science has completed its task? I hardly think so, thanks to the infinity of our ignorance.

Some people conflate fallibilism with extreme skepticism. While fallibilism admits that knowledge is tentative and incomplete, skepticism in its most extreme form denies the existence of real knowledge altogether. These two views are incompatible and must not be conflated. In his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch explains the distinction well:

In its most peculiar and extreme philosophical form, skepticism refers to the doctrine that we have no reason to believe anything, and so should believe nothing. That, however, is on its face an unsustainable argument. Believing nothing is impossible. Even the belief that you are justified in believing nothing is a belief. And even when we refuse to conclude, we do so only against the background of other conclusions. No one could possibly be a genuinely beliefless skeptic, even in principle.

The “skepticism” upon which liberal science is based is something quite different. (To distinguish it from the kind which says that we should never conclude anything, philosophers often call it “fallibilism.”) This kind of skepticism says cheerfully that we have to draw conclusions, but that we may regard none of our conclusions as being beyond any further scrutiny or change. … This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty, which is not the same thing.

The tentative, fallible knowledge that humans can create is far from illusory. Despite its incompleteness, it has enabled humans to live in outer space, split atomic nuclei, double human life expectancy, and achieve countless other feats that people from pre-scientific civilization would have found miraculous.

And thanks to the infinity of human ignorance, given the real tools of inquiry and discovery that can be deployed, infinitely more can yet be achieved.

Under any form of governmental rule, including a democracy, the “ruling class” (politicians and civil servants) represents only a small proportion of the total population. While it is possible that one hundred parasites may lead a comfortable life on the products of one thousand hosts, one thousand parasites cannot live off of one hundred hosts.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed

Free markets are the path to long-term economic growth. And economic growth isn’t just good for Wall Street—it enables ordinary people to access more of virtually everything they care about, such as nutrition, medical care, safety, education, better job opportunities, and the rest of what constitutes material prosperity.

Moderate defenders of free markets are happy to acknowledge this for many purposes. For example, they understand that food was more widely available in the United States than in the Soviet Union because the Soviet communists interfered more with market forces on food production than US capitalists did. But moderate defenders of free markets, and people who are entirely against free markets, often doubt whether pure free markets would be a good idea.

While many societies on Earth today contain significant free-market elements, none of them are pure free markets, or purely any other one system of political economy. They have elements of free-market capitalism mixed in with some socialist policies, and so on. Pure free markets would entail radical reforms such as the complete elimination of taxation, since taxation is an involuntary forfeiture of private assets and therefore constitutes a violation of the private property rights that define the free market capitalist system. Radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard proposed a “non-aggression principle” whereby “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else,” except in defense against those who have already initiated such aggression. This standard, constantly breached to a greater or lesser extent by every national government currently existing on Earth, is essentially what a society would have to uphold in order to count as a fully free market.

Critics of radical freedom and private property rights often ask: “If pure free markets would work so well, why don’t we see any national-scale examples in the real world?” It is a valid question. If reducing taxation and other infringements on private property rights to zero could make an economy vastly wealthier, as is the prediction of radical capitalists such as myself, wouldn’t we see at least one country take advantage of this opportunity?

The Direction of Causality Between Wealth and Parasitic Governance

One tempting answer is that taxation and other rights-violating institutions must somehow contribute to prosperity, since they are present in all wealthy societies. But this inference is not as strong as many assume it to be. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has suggested, “Perhaps rich societies have big governments because it takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism.”

Similarly, all healthy adult elephants have parasites but that doesn’t mean the parasites are making them healthier. The fact that parasitic institutions can persist does not mean they are beneficial any more than the presence of parasites on a healthy organism implies that the parasites are helping it. It simply means that the cost of eliminating such institutions is high, and that they are able to sustain themselves on the surplus generated by productive activity.

Instead of tax-collection enabling governance that makes societies rich, it is plausible that wealth generated through voluntary exchange creates an attractive target for political extraction. The presence of large governments in wealthy societies may reflect not their necessity, but their ability to feed on existing prosperity without immediately destroying it. This is a plausible explanation for why we do not observe national-scale pure free markets, even if government infringements on free market principles hinder rather than aid human wellbeing.

Historically, states have emerged not as the result of careful institutional design aimed at maximizing prosperity, but through conquest, coercion, and the gradual development of ideological justifications for rule. Once established, they persist by extracting resources from productive populations, often while convincing those populations of their legitimacy or necessity.

Prospects for the Future of Free Markets

Even if tax-funded institutions are merely parasitic, that doesn’t mean they’re all equally detrimental to human flourishing. Some are far less destructive than others, partly due to institutional tendencies toward self-restraint that some exhibit far more than others. Institutional self-constraints can raise the cost of coercion and lower the tolerance for rights violations, thereby reducing the scale of parasitism even if they do not eliminate it entirely.

For example, the First and Second Amendments of the United States Constitution make it harder for members of the federal government to infringe upon the speech, property, and association of US citizens. Though US statists still sometimes get away with it, the added cost of having to face constitutional backlash for infringements on free speech reduces such infringements at the margins. Even if marginal, such institutional constraints enable higher levels of innovation, productivity, and material prosperity than would exist under less scrupulous parasitic institutions.

Just because there has never been a national-scale experiment in pure free markets doesn’t mean that one can’t exist in the future. Slavery was omnipresent in every major society throughout most of recorded history, but in the post-Enlightenment world it was abolished in most societies thanks largely to conscious efforts beginning in Britain and other parts of the Western world. This happened extremely quickly relative to the grand sweep of human history. In the United States just a few years before the Civil War, abolition was widely considered extremely unlikely (when it was considered at all) and abolitionists were seen as fringe radicals. The institutionalized mass theft known as taxation could similarly fall away and become largely unthinkable to advanced societies.

But even if taxation and other widespread parasitic policies are never abolished, diminishing them at the margins is feasible and meaningful. By analogy, the idea of completely eliminating murder or rape from a society is unrealistic, but we do not conclude from this that efforts to reduce them are worthless or futile. Social norms, legal institutions, and cultural attitudes can significantly reduce the prevalence of such behaviors, even if they cannot eliminate them entirely.

Parasitic institutions such as taxation may likewise be difficult to eliminate completely, but they can be constrained, reduced, and delegitimized over time. And to the extent that this occurs, societies can move closer to a system of fully voluntary exchange, with corresponding marginal but meaningful gains in prosperity and human flourishing.

A version of this article was originally published in The Daily Economy on 11/18/2025.

In recent decades, and especially since the release of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence use has rapidly spread into almost every industry. And as AI proliferates, so do fears that a wave of mass unemployment will follow. Concerns are widespread that AI will be deployed to accomplish an ever-greater share of the labor needed throughout the economy, leaving fewer and fewer jobs available for human workers.

This fear led Dario Amodei, one of the world’s leading AI technologists, to sound the alarm earlier this year about an impending “white-collar bloodbath.” The Anthropic CEO told Axios that one very possible scenario within the next one to five years is that, “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs.”

This was predictably latched onto by economic interventionists, such as US Senator Bernie Sanders. “We must demand that increased worker productivity from AI benefits working people, not just wealthy stockholders on Wall St,” Sanders posted on X in response to Amodei’s statement. Sanders later posted that, “With the explosion of AI, new technology and increased worker productivity, we should demand a shorter work week, increased life expectancy and a decent standard of living for all.” Other politicians have gone even further since then. US Senator Josh Hawley, like Tucker Carlson started advocating years ago, supports banning self-driving cars to protect the jobs of car and truck drivers.

Indeed, AI has already created countless efficiencies and new capabilities throughout the economy that have made specific jobs redundant. Consider the global herbicide industry. A Bloomberg article titled “AI-Powered Weed-Killing Robots Threaten a $37 Billion Market” explains:

After almost a century of deploying a more-is-more approach to chemical herbicides, the global agricultural sector is rapidly rolling out advancements that promise to curb the use of weed-control sprays by as much as 90 percent. Using artificial-intelligence powered cameras, the new sprayers can identify and target invasive plants while avoiding the cash crops. If even a fraction of growers adopt the new tools, it could mean a big shift for crop-chemical majors like Bayer AG and BASF SE.

This potential tenfold improvement in herbicide use efficiency may significantly reduce the agricultural demand for herbicide production, and thus put many people out of their jobs in that industry. And this is just one example. From facilitating new scientific research methods, to transforming solar cell production, to improving healthcare safety, to proliferating self-driving car use, AI offers new ways of doing things throughout every industry, which devalues some skillsets in the job market and rewards others.

However, there is an opposite fear as well. Last month, during a press conference the day he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, Joel Mokyr gave a speech about the grand sweep of economic history. Toward the end of his lecture he weighed in on the AI job loss debate: “As I see it, the main concern about the labor market is not technological unemployment. It’s labor scarcity.”

Mokyr is an economic historian who is renowned for looking at the big picture. And when you do that, it is clear that technological unemployment is nowhere near as big a concern as the set of problems that AI will help solve if politicians like Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley don’t succeed in debilitating it.

Specific jobs becoming obsolete is only one side of the coin of technology’s effect on employment. The other side of the coin reveals why artificial intelligence will lead to no overall reduction in employment opportunities. Like all prior technological revolutions, AI will create at least as many jobs as it eliminates, and most importantly, the new jobs will tend to be preferable to and easier to find than the old jobs.

Unemployment rates have remained relatively constant and quite low in recent decades, currently standing at about 4.3 percent in the US and 4.9 percent across the globe, according to recent estimates. This is approximately as low as they have ever been.

Meanwhile, ever since the industrial revolution, there has been an explosion of technological advancement and proliferation that has almost completely transformed all economic industries and everyday life across the globe.

Virtually every instance of technological progress reduces the need to employ some specific form of labor. Dish washing machines have meant that homes and restaurants need only employ a small fraction of the cleaning staff that was once required per meal served. Refrigeration has conserved countless labor hours preserving foods. Electric power has exponentiated the manufacturing capability of each factory worker by enabling a new class of machinery. And the list goes on and on.

The constantly low unemployment rate, in light of recent history’s technological progress, would amaze the Industrial-Revolution-era activist group known as the Luddites, a radical labor movement of anti-technologists who rioted and destroyed factory machinery to protect their jobs from automation in the early 19th-century. Their initial concern was for the jobs of craftsmen competing with mechanized looms and knitting equipment that allowed a single worker to produce the output of a hundred craftsmen. But the scope of Luddite animosity quickly widened to oppose industrialization generally.

The nineteenth-century Luddites made the same mistake, known to economists as the “lump of labor fallacy,” that antagonists of AI are making today. In a New York Times article titled “Trump, Immigration and the Lump of Labor Fallacy,” Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman explains the fallacy: “This is the view that there is a fixed amount of work to be done and that if someone or something — some group of workers or some kind of machine — is doing some of that work, that means fewer jobs for everyone else.”

Krugman also explains why this “lump of labor” view is false:

When incomes rise, people will find something to spend their money on, creating jobs for workers displaced by technology or newcomers to the work force. Machines do, in fact, perform many tasks that used to require people; output per worker is more than four times what it was [in 1952], so we could produce 1952’s level of output with only a quarter as many workers. In fact, however, employment has tripled. … No, AI and automation, for all the changes they may bring, won’t ultimately take away jobs, and neither will immigrants.

The point about incomes rising is key, because aggregate income rising is a predictable consequence of technological automation and it is a reason, along with new forms of work created by new technologies, why the newly created jobs will tend to be preferable to the old jobs. As productivity rises and real prices fall, people can afford to be increasingly selective about which sort of jobs to do.

Workers will only be displaced by technology if the technology is capable of producing more valuable output, meaning some net-positive combination of cheaper and higher quality, than human labor. Otherwise, mechanization won’t be profitable and employers will stick to employing humans. Therefore, we can safely bet that wherever AI is displacing human workers, consumers are benefitting from some net-positive combination of falling prices and rising quality. This means that consumers will have more income left to spend, and will therefore consume an ever-wider range of goods and services, thus funding more and more niche forms of employment that replace the jobs lost to technological improvements in the production process.

This is crystal clear if you look at the history of labor specialization. Since the mid 19th century, agriculture has gone from employing about 70 percent of US workers to employing only 2 percent. Meanwhile, the productivity of US agriculture has massively increased due to improved farming technology and food has become about 10 times more affordable for blue-collar workers in the last century.

If no new jobs had been created in America since 1840, this process would have left 68 percent of the population permanently out of work. But to the contrary, the modern economy is composed largely of jobs that people in any prior century probably never even imagined. Web designers, pet therapists, dietitians, travel agents, nail technicians, cosmetic surgeons, neuroscientists, and countless others are employed in now-common forms of labor that would have seemed either laughably frivolous or entirely unimaginable just a century ago. “Really, therapy for my dog while my children are starving?”

For a detailed description of one of the most recent and frivolous new industries imaginable, read the article titled “Does Your Plant Need a Nanny? A new crop of caretakers will spritz, polish and prune your houseplants — and even send photos while you’re away.” published by the New York Times in April. These new “plant nannies” offer virtual plant visits, and services such as speaking to, lighting, and photographing plants while their owners are away, in addition to traditional plant maintenance practices.

In his seminal 1946 book Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt points out that a luddite view of technological progress requires not only problematic predictions about future unemployment, but also absurd retrodictions about all of human history. “If it were indeed true that the introduction of labor-saving machinery is a cause of constantly mounting unemployment and misery, the logical conclusions to be drawn would be revolutionary, not only in the technical field but for our whole concept of civilization,” he writes. “Not only should we have to regard all further technical progress as a calamity; we should have to regard all past technical progress with equal horror.”

New and ever-more-niche and personalized forms of work are constantly made possible by the vast abundance of labor and consumption freed up by labor-saving technology. Monotonous or backbreaking tasks are left to machines while humans are freed to invent new tasks to pay each other for with all the wealth that technological efficiencies have saved or created for them.

As amazing as the present is compared to the past, the future can be an even more extreme improvement. If AI proves powerful enough to continuously transform the macroeconomy as the fearmongers predict, and so do I, this will mean such massive productivity gains that machines will eventually be running the farms and factories at almost no cost. This will render necessities more and more affordable until almost every worker can engage in more niche artforms, services, and research areas than employ almost anyone full-time in today’s economy. In addition, whole new realms of technological possibility can be unlocked, in outer space, the Metaverse, and elsewhere.

It is hard to imagine ever reaching a logical conclusion of this process, at which artificial intelligence is better than human labor for literally every purpose. That would even involve convincing those who prefer some services to have a “human touch” for sentimental, aesthetic, philosophical, or spiritual reasons that human labor is unhelpful even to them. If AI does get that powerful, that will be an end of material scarcity in which everything is free and worrying about “unemployment” will make no sense at all.

Instead of worrying about that hypothetical utopia of widespread godlike agency and infinite abundance, let’s focus on reducing human drudgery and increasing material wealth by proliferating artificial intelligence and other technological progress in the here and now.

I was recently happy to notice that Mark Perry, esteemed economist and Senior Fellow Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, had excerpted my work as his “quotation of the day” at AEI.org. The excerpt comes from an essay (“Capitalism or the Climate?”) I wrote over half a decade ago, which I reposted right when I joined Substack and had almost no subscribers, so most of you have probably not read it. Here is the quote that Mr. Perry reprinted (bold added by him):

A few hundred years ago, before the rise of capitalism, humans were no different—they lived roughly 35 years on average and had about one-and-a-half billion heartbeats just like any other mammal. But gains in knowledge since then, such as innovations in medicine, agriculture, and government, have roughly doubled our life expectancy and with it our average number of heartbeats per lifetime (some dogs and other domesticated animals have been similarly altered by access to human innovations). This constitutes a totally unprecedented departure from the biological status quo.

Technological knowledge, fueled by capital, has allowed us to do many things categorically unlike the achievements of other species as far as we know. The universal extinction paradigm, which has limited all mammal species so far to one million years or less, should be high on our list of patterns to break. We don’t know what existential threats will come or how long we have to prepare for them, but we can’t expect human ingenuity to rush us past the finish line at the last minute without a context of widespread continuous technological and scientific progress until that point—a project it seems only capitalism can hope to fund.

David Deutsch observes that the word “sustain” generally refers to the absence or prevention of change. This is what environmentalists such as Naomi Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would like to do with our environment by ending capitalism. Their solution to climate change is what all non-human animals have always done: leave the environment basically unaltered by refraining from large-scale production, and wait around to go extinct. Unfortunately, as Deutsch writes, “Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe.” Thus, it is not that capitalism is the problem and sustainability is the solution, but that sustainability is the problem and capitalism is the solution.

Every year, global capitalism allows more research and development departments to be funded. Every day it gives more citizens of affluent and developing nations the material wealth required for better education and information technology. Economic growth, coupled with rising carbon emissions, might lead to a climate apocalypse—or it might continue to bring us material and technological salvation. We cannot really know in advance. But we would be crazy to choose the time-tested alternative to capitalism: extinction by stagnation.

For context, read the full essay. It covers some key concepts that I think are underappreciated and increasingly crucial.

This article was originally published in The Daily Economy on 12/5/2025.

“The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness,” The New York Times reported in a bombshell article on November 30.

“Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided,” The Times reports. “Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating.”

Most notably, officers of a tax-funded “nonprofit” called “Feeding Our Future” claimed to have fed tens of thousands of children, but really spent the money on fancy cars, houses, and foreign real estate investments for themselves, according to federal prosecutors.

As a Minnesota Star Tribune article outlines, red flags began to appear as early as 2018. When concerns about a forged signature were brought to a Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) official overseeing the food program, she said in an email that, “Unless there is a conviction for any business-related offense, or the organization is no longer in good standing with the IRS, I prefer not to be kept informed of developments related to the dispute.”

In 2021, after years of suspicious evidence had piled up, such as falsified documents and many reports that reimbursements had been made for meals that were never served, the MDE sought permission from a District Judge to withhold reimbursement claims from Feeding Our Future. But the MDE had forfeited its powers to obtain financial documents and elected not to request a civil investigation, so the Judge rejected the effort to withhold funds.

The fraudsters only began to be prosecuted after officials had dragged their feet, waiving their power to pull the relevant bank records, delaying executing search warrants for 9-10 months, delaying issuing indictments for 17 months, and waiting to launch an investigation until after Feeding Our Future had already ceased operations in 2022.

This was not just a freak occurrence, but part of a widespread norm of defrauding social programs in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as The New York Times article notes, “…Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.” Overall, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud every year, and far more to improper payments generally.

Figure 1: Programs with the Largest Percentage of Government-Wide Improper Payment Estimates, FY 2024

“Additionally, federal improper payment estimates have totaled about $2.8 trillion since FY 2003 — and the actual amount may be significantly higher because this is based on a small number of programs that report these numbers,” the GAO states. While the real amount of fraud is likewise probably far higher than the known amount, even those incidents that are discovered and “corrected” are hugely costly to taxpayers because of the high costs of investigating and prosecuting the incidents.

How are these fraudsters allowed to get away with so much for so long? The truth is, unlike spenders in the private sector, bureaucrats administering tax dollars are often not incentivized to care whether the money they send out is used well or not.

As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously explained, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

The Minnesota fraud cases are a good illustration of Friedman’s insight. The government bureaucrats who kept sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the fraudsters year after year had every indication of what they were enabling, but their incentives were to enable rather than prevent the theft.

The Times reports that, “Mr. Pacyga, who also has represented other defendants in the fraud cases, said that some involved became convinced that state agencies were tolerating, if not tacitly allowing, the fraud.” The article quotes him as saying, “No one was doing anything about the red flags. It was like someone was stealing money from the cookie jar and they kept refilling it.” The Times explains that, “Red flags in the meals program surfaced in the early months of the pandemic, but the money kept flowing.”

So, if the bureaucrats entrusted with Americans’ tax dollars were not motivated to prevent welfare abuses, what was motivating them?

The Times explains that, “In 2020, Minnesota Department of Education officials who administered the program became overwhelmed by the number of applicants seeking to register new feeding sites and began raising questions about the plausibility of some invoices.” But Feeding Our Future responded to the questioning with an ominous warning. If the state agency stopped approving the applications from the “minority-owned businesses,” the fraudsters threatened, the response would be lawsuits and news releases based on accusations of racism.

Consequently, as The Times explains, “A report by Minnesota’s nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor about the lapses that enabled the meals fraud later found that the threat of litigation and of negative press affected how state officials used their regulatory power.”

The Times also notes that “’There is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc’ for Democrats, said Mr. Magan, who is among the few prominent figures in the Somali community to speak about the fraud.”

While the bureaucrats may not have liked to waste tax dollars, at the end of the day it was not their money that was being lost. Their immediate self-interest likely pushed them at least as strongly in the direction of protecting themselves against accusations of racism and protecting their political careers against the ire of a major voting constituency.

They did eventually get around to intervening in the fraud scheme, but not with anywhere near the urgency or thoroughness with which private people can be relied on to protect their own assets.

It is incentives such as these that make the common labeling of tax-funded government officials as “public servants” so ironic. Tax-funded officials receive money not because they produce a product that anybody wants to buy, but rather because their organization forces people to pay taxes. Therefore, instead of doing the hard work of producing valuable products and stewarding funds responsibly, they tend to win votes from one constituency by explicitly or implicitly promising benefits funded by some other group of unwilling taxpayers.

Conversely, it is people who operate in the private sector who generally must produce valuable products to get a paycheck. They have to earn and steward funding from voluntary customers instead of relying on the coercive expropriation of tax dollars.

This is among the reasons why, as Jon Moynihan shows in his book Return to Growth, economic growth rates are generally higher in countries where government spending is a smaller share of the economy. When more of an economy’s spending is done in the private sector, you see more creation of actual value, rather than mere shuffling of pre-existing wealth through government favors and benefits.

Figure 2: Size of Government and the Annual Growth of Real GDP for OECD Countries 1960-2019

Over time, these higher growth rates enabled by the private sector’s superior financial stewardship makes a huge difference in people’s lives, bringing people out of poverty in positive-sum ways that are more sustainable and robust than any government spending programs ever have. I have made this argument and filled in more details of it in previous articles.

Minnesota’s recent fraud scandal appears to be opening some people’s eyes to this. “The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes,” The Times notes.

Let the conduct of the statists and their criminal associates in Minnesota be an enduring lesson for those interested in higher growth rates and the uniquely sustainable long-term positive-sum alleviation of poverty that results from them.

In his instantly infamous interview with the highly influential white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which was released in late October and has accrued almost 7 million views on YouTube alone, Tucker Carlson challenged Fuentes on collectivism.

What I do think is bad, just objectively bad and destructive, is the ‘all Jews are guilty,’ or all anybody is guilty of anything. Because that’s just, like, not true. …there’s a true, not just principle, but spiritual reality that we have to defend, which is: God created every person as an individual, not as a group. No woman gave birth to a community. Like, we hate that kind of thinking, right? Collectivist thinking like that. That’s identity politics. …that principle, that we’re all judged as individuals by what we do, our faith, the decisions that we make, the way we live our lives. And God will judge every one of us in that way, and that’s how we’re supposed to judge. I think that’s true.

I was happy to hear Carlson challenge what I regard to be unsound and dangerous collectivist concepts, especially in conversation with one of America’s leading collectivists. But I was also skeptical because Carlson frequently espouses precisely the fallacious sentiment that he refuted in conversation with Fuentes.

A good example came soon after the Fuentes interview in another Tucker Carlson podcast, this one reflecting on the Fuentes interview and criticizing #1 New York Times bestselling author and Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro.

Talking about the high cost of living in New York City during a recent interview, Shapiro had suggested that certain policy changes, such as building code and rent control reform, could improve affordability in NYC. But he also made a broader point about the nature of affordability in a free-market capitalist system:

If you’re a young person and you can’t afford to live [in New York City], then maybe you should not live here. I mean that is a real thing. I know that we’ve now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up, but the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity. And if the opportunities are limited here and they’re not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.

Carlson reacts to this by accusing Shapiro of having “contempt for the people who live here” and says that people “really should” experience “gut-level revulsion” from Shapiro’s statement. Carlson suggests that in fact you do have the right to live in a town, “just because your parents are buried there,” and “your ancestors built the town.”

But what does “the right” to live in a particular town mean in practice?

According to the individualist system of free market capitalism, you only have a right to what you personally built, purchased, or were gifted.

Carlson’s above-mentioned statement of individualism, according to which people are to be judged only on the basis of their own actions, runs counter to his idea that anyone has a right to live anywhere because their ancestors built it. To give someone the “right” to live in a particular place because of what their ancestors built, you would have to judge them on the basis of their belonging to a particular familial group, rather than purely what they built, purchased, or were gifted themselves. This would violate Carlson’s individualist principle (or “spiritual reality” as he calls it).

And since one person’s right is another person’s responsibility not to transgress upon that right, this would also require you to impose force on others on the basis of their familial group belonging (or lack thereof), regardless of their individual behavior. For example, if I had a right to live on a particular plot of land because my father was buried there, even though he sold the land to you before he died, my right to live there would constitute a revocation of your right to use your land as you see fit. And both my right and your lack of a right would be based on our familial group characteristics rather than any individual choices we made.

Individualism results in a system of free market capitalism because it rejects collectivist notions of property rights in favor of individual consumer and producer decisions.

Since Carlson seems to accept both individualist and collectivist principles even though they contradict each other, how can we discern which direction he leans in more strongly?

His largely anti-free-market policy positions, such as banning self-driving cars, breaking up big tech companies, outlawing high-interest loans, and countless others strongly suggest an answer to that question that individualists should find rather unfortunate.

The original version of this article was published in Discourse, an online journal of politics and economics published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, on 5/14/2025.

“Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

When a government deploys mass coercion against peaceful people, as we have seen under Trump’s trade and immigration policies, the government’s representatives and apologists tend to roll out a series of moral justifications. These arguments can elucidate the character of the political faction in power, and MAGA has been no exception. Throughout the last few months, one of their defenses of Trump’s trade and immigration policies, contrary to the pre-MAGA Republican Party’s free market rhetoric, has frequently been the allegation that low wages for voluntary labor are exploitative.

One example comes from a recent CNN interview with Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Adviser. Anchor Jake Tapper told Miller, “The Department of Agriculture says that between 2020 and 2022, 42% of crop workers were undocumented immigrants. And in many cases, as you know, these migrants do jobs many Americans do not want to do. So,” Tapper asked, “how do you, how does President Trump, make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn’t end up hurting Americans who ... don’t want to see even more higher prices in groceries?”

Implying that the undocumented crop workers are victimized by their positions in such jobs, Miller replied, “Well, I’m sure it’s not your position, Jake—you’re just asking the question—that we should supply America’s food with exploitative illegal alien labor.”

The idea that low wages for voluntary employment are exploitative is in line with the generally anti-market ethos that permeates MAGA’s stances against trade and immigration. But more specifically, it also coincides with the Marxist and socialist tradition that has gone further than any other to develop a sophisticated and complete repudiation of capitalism.

MAGA’s Bleeding-Heart Rhetoric

Several popular MAGA media pundits go even further than Miller did on CNN, describing low wages for voluntary Chinese and illegal immigrant labor as not just exploitative but akin to enslavement.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, the most successful political documentarian in two decades, invokes the slavery analogy in a response to U.S. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. Defending immigration based on “what immigrants do for this country,” the representative for Texas’s 30th congressional district had told an audience of presumably U.S. citizens, “The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now. ... You’re not, you’re not. We done picking cotton. We are. You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation.” Walsh concluded from this: “So this is Jasmine Crockett openly admitting that they want illegal aliens in this country as slave labor. ... we now have Democrats just coming out and admitting that this is about slave labor. ... So, if you agree with that then congratulations, you’re pro-slavery.” He claims that, by contrast, he and others “who are opposed to illegal immigration” are “saying that we shouldn’t have an underclass of servants who we import to do menial labor that we don’t want to do.”

Similarly, bestselling author Michael Knowles argues that illegal immigrants “allow the elites to pay slave wages” and that immigration advocates want to pay immigrants “slave wages.” Knowles goes on: “The best argument the Democrats are making right now ... is that these illegal aliens need to be imported into the country so that they can work for very, very low wages that Americans won’t work for ... So hold on, your liberal bleeding-heart kumbaya humanitarian argument for mass migration is that we need to oppress the poor?” He admonishes the immigration advocates that, “Oppression of the poor is one of the four sins that cries out to heaven for vengeance.”

He makes similar arguments about the impact of international trade on Chinese labor. After declaring that “globalization is bad,” Knowles repeatedly stigmatizes globalization as pro-slavery, summarizing what he takes to be the agenda of globalism as, “We’re going to call the shots, we’re going to be running the companies, and we’re just going to have the slaves in China make the widgets.”

The popular MAGA podcast and radio pundit Benny Johnson also repeatedly analogizes cheap foreign labor to slavery—by, for example, accusing global trade of making Americans “completely and totally dependent upon slave labor peasants across Asia to make every good, service and pharmaceutical.”

The Marxist Exploitation Mirage

Like the Marxists, MAGA thought leaders have the interests of low-wage laborers completely backwards when they use the language of “exploitation” to justify destroying the best financial opportunities those laborers have available to them.

The allegedly exploited and enslaved nature of wage labor under capitalist employment was popularized as a key aspect of Marxism. In his 1867 magnum opus “Capital,” Karl Marx uses the concepts of exploitation and enslavement to stigmatize the capitalist employment of wage labor. For example, in chapter 15, he writes:

In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence.

His screed goes even further in chapter 25:

... within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.

For Marx, “exploitation” is also a technical term. He defines “the degree of exploitation of labor” as “the rate of surplus-value” produced in capitalist firms. According to his labor theory of value, “surplus value” is the amount more that labor produces than it is paid in wages. In this framework, the larger the labor market is relative to capital, and the less beholden employers are to labor regulations such as minimum wage laws, the more “surplus value” (and therefore exploitation) can be produced, because under those conditions, wages can be lower relative to productivity. This would be the most robust theory on which to base suggestions that Chinese and illegal immigrant labor is particularly exploitative.

But this way of thinking about labor exploitation is fundamentally flawed. It rests on the misconception that capitalist enterprises are somehow crowding out better opportunities by offering wages for labor.

One possible source of this misconception is what economists call “the fixed pie fallacy.” This is the belief that resources and opportunities are preexisting rather than created, meaning that one entity having a larger share leaves less behind for others. Bellyaching over “exploitative” wages may arise from the belief that capitalist enterprises are created through privatization of previously commonly held resources. For example, the prominent Marxist professor Slavoj Žižek mistakenly holds this view, as I have explained elsewhere. On the contrary, as I discuss in that essay, free market capitalist enterprises are actually about investing to create new opportunities (for example, through innovation or technological advancement) where none previously existed. This is what characterizes them as free market and capitalist rather than socialist, corporatist, fascist or any other system of political economy based on expropriation and seizure of preexisting assets.

If it’s not the fixed pie fallacy leading Marxist or MAGA intellectuals to imagine capitalist enterprises crowding out better labor opportunities, then it is probably them conflating the productive capitalists with other factions that really do diminish the profitability of labor. While it is not the capitalist employers who impoverish workers, there are others—public policymakers—who do impoverish workers by implementing laws and regulations to prevent the free flow of labor and capital into its most productive uses.

Ironically, by advocating policies alleged to prevent exploitative labor conditions, it is precisely the likes of Miller, Walsh, Knowles and Johnson who would condemn laborers to much lower wages under worse circumstances. Illegal immigrants working for low wages in U.S. agriculture are typically in this country because they made an extreme effort to immigrate, in part because the low-paying jobs they voluntarily accept in the U.S., which improve the American economy, are better than the opportunities they had at home. The deportation of immigrants back to poorer countries, and the prevention of Chinese factory workers from accessing American markets, “rescue” workers from their preferred employment opportunities only by condemning them to return to the generally far worse labor conditions from which they deliberately came.

“Rescuing” Workers… from Their Best Available Options (Thanks a Lot)

In their excellent bestselling 2015 book “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality,” Yaron Brook and Don Watkins explain that the fight against low-wage Chinese labor should only be expected to leave Chinese workers with even worse opportunities:

Workers in places like China and India are said to be working for “slave wages” in “sweat shops,” and American companies like Apple are maligned for “profiting off their backs.”

No American would want to work in a Chinese factory eleven hours a day for $1.50 an hour. But that is because we have better opportunities available. The reason thousands of Chinese willingly flock to these “sweat shops” is because these are better opportunities than the alternatives that are open to them. ...

Research by economist Benjamin Powell ... found that “sweat shops” typically deliver a far higher standard of living than is available elsewhere in developing countries—sometimes as much as three times the average national income. ...

The lesson, Powell stresses, is that we can’t evaluate work opportunities in a given economy according to how they compare to the opportunities we have. We have to compare them to the next best alternatives that are actually available in those countries. Powell recounts how, in one famous 1993 case, “U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam, a large number of them became prostitutes.”

“But why do so many people remain poor in a world that is so rich?” Brook and Watkins ask. “Often there is an injustice involved: individuals are oppressed through political power, and, as a result, they live in abject poverty, subsisting on as little as a dollar a day.” It is that sort of injustice, the kind of which trade and immigration restrictionism foment, that coercively withholds economic opportunity from the low-wage workers who need it most.

Now that radical political thought is reigniting and realigning on so many fronts, perhaps the MAGA intelligentsia has adopted some rhetorical tools from Marxism or Marx-adjacent movements because that is the tradition in which the most robust defenses of anti-market policy are available. Some of them may have genuinely become persuaded of these ideas, while others may be cynically attempting to use the language of leftism against the leftists. I have my doubts about the degree to which genuine concern over the exploitation of illegal immigrants and Chinese factory workers is really motivating their utterances. If it were, it is hard to imagine how they could have convinced themselves that a way to help low-wage farm workers is to ship them against their will to the impoverished countries from whence they voluntarily came.

Regardless of MAGA’s motivations, they use the same fallacious language as the Marxists by claiming that laborers who voluntarily accept employment opportunities are being unjustly treated by being given those options in addition to the options they already had. Those interested in the economic growth and resulting advancement of human flourishing that accrues to capitalist societies should not allow anti-market MAGA intellectuals to invoke false Marxist or Marx-adjacent premises unchallenged.

The original version of this article was published by the Foundation for Economic Education on 8/16/2024.

Perhaps the most amazing fact in all of economic history is the unprecedented rise in wealth per person that has taken place in the last two centuries, following the Industrial Revolution. But it remains a widespread belief that these fruits of capitalism have only benefited the rich at the expense of the poor.

This perspective is made crystal clear in the 2024 international bestselling book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. “Under capitalism, we have consistently sought to raise the GDP in the belief that economic growth brings prosperity to everyone. But this prosperity has yet to arrive for the average person,” writes University of Tokyo philosopher Kohei Saito. He further argues, “The world undergoes ‘structural reforms’ over and over to foster growth, and yet the results are always the same: gaps widen between the rich and the poor, and the rates of both poverty and austerity increase.”

Saito is correct to associate capitalism with the economic growth rate, but wrong in his claims about the ineffectiveness of capitalism in improving living standards. While the economy has grown exponentially over the last two centuries, poverty has exponentially decreased. Extreme poverty has declined to less than 10 percent of the human population for the first time ever. Never in history prior to 1820 had the global extreme poverty rate been less than 80 percent. While the more moderately poor segments of the population have not improved their income as rapidly as the extreme poor, they too have shared significantly in the world’s recent centuries of exponential growth.

Poverty’s unprecedented decline has contributed to unprecedented improvements in human flourishing along nearly every measurable dimension, including life expectancy, literacy, nutrition, education, safety from natural disasters, access to electricity, and countless others. Individuals and societies that have more wealth can generally afford to invest more in food, medical care, education, infrastructure, technological innovations, scientific research, and most of the other things that measurably facilitate human flourishing.

Saito asks, “In a world in which capitalism has progressed as far as it has, isn’t it strange that so many living even in Global North countries continue to languish in poverty, their lives only getting harder as time goes on?” As we have seen, this question can only result from extreme ignorance of how truly grim much of economic history has been.

Rather than rewarding productive investments and thus proliferating economic opportunity, all anti-capitalist economic systems come down to one form or another of political conflict between economic interests to see who can consume a larger share of a stagnant or dwindling supply of wealth. Socialism, fascism, corporatism, feudalism, and especially the “degrowth communism” proposed by Saito diverge from the free-market protection of individual private property rights, and therefore, under those systems, you are less incentivized to produce economic value and more enabled to parasitize the value creation of others.

In contrast, free-market capitalism is unique because it alone is the system that, by protecting private property, maximally rewards the production of economic value. Therefore, by generating economic abundance, the capitalist system allows for an ever-increasing share of people from all economic classes to raise their living standards. Capital investment results in the creation of more businesses, goods and services, and technological advancements. This increased supply of opportunities for material flourishing reduces the barriers to entry into market consumption and production because there are simply more goods, services, jobs, and investment opportunities to go around.

That is one of the key reasons that only in the last few hundred years have we seen the rise of capitalism, the exponential rise of per capita economic growth, and the consequent rapid decline of poverty for the first time in human history.

This article was originally published at Human Progress on 5/30/2023.

Despite often being obscured by doom and gloom in the media, and risks of potential future hardships, the most important trends in human well-being still tell a story of progress.

After falling back slightly in 2020–2022 due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, global life expectancy has reached an all-time high of about 73 years as of 2023—that’s more than double what it was in 1900. Global literacy, at 87 percent as of 2021, has been rising steadily from 12 percent in 1820. Even climate-related deaths, despite the fears about anthropogenic climate change, are still falling steadily due to increased climate resilience—down from almost 500,000 per year in the 1920s to well under 50,000 per year in the last decade.

But what motivation for future action should humanity draw from these and other similar facts? In a recent New York Times opinion piece, London School of Economics economist Jerome Roos criticizes the “progress narrative” as an excuse for inaction:

If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better—and are likely to continue to do so in the future. . . . Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. . . . The Panglossian scenario painted by these new optimists naturally appeals to defenders of the status quo. If things are really getting better, there is clearly no need for transformative change to confront the most pressing problems of our time.

It is generally only the critics of human progress—not its proponents—who draw this profoundly flawed conclusion. Past progress has often been the result of transformative change, from political changes like the abolition of slavery and empowerment of women to technological and scientific changes like the green revolution and the invention of the internet. And it is likely that future progress will also take the form of transformative change to address the most pressing problems of the future.

The story of humanity’s exponential advance since the Industrial Revolution would only represent a call to inaction if progress were fundamentally limited to something approximating what has already been achieved. But that premise is precisely what the “progress narrative” corrects.

No fundamental limit to progress is yet in evidence. In his book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch shows the enormity of the burden of proof on anyone positing a fundamental limit to, for example, material progress:

Consider the set of all conceivable transformations of physical objects. Some of those (like faster-than-light communication) never happen because they are forbidden by laws of nature; some (like the formation of stars out of primordial hydrogen) happen spontaneously; and some (such as converting air and water into trees, or converting raw materials into a radio telescope) are possible, but happen only when the requisite knowledge is present—for instance, imbodied in genes or brains. But those are the only possibilities. That is to say, every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either

— impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or
— achievable, given the right knowledge.

That momentous dichotomy exists because if there were transformations that technology could never achieve regardless of what knowledge was brought to bear, then this fact would itself be a testable regularity in nature.

Any such regularity, if both demonstrated to exist and shown to broadly prohibit the continued accrual of human knowledge and material advancement for millennia to come, would represent a scientific paradigm shift worthy of a Nobel Prize and then some.

As an example of the implications of his abovementioned dichotomy, Deutsch explains that:

Whether humans could live entirely outside the biosphere—say, on the moon—does not depend on the quirks of human biochemistry. Just as humans currently cause over a tonne of vitamin C to appear in Oxfordshire every week (from their farms and factories), so they could do the same on the moon—and the same goes for breathable air, water, a comfortable temperature and all their other parochial needs. Those needs can all be met, given the right knowledge, by transforming other resources.

Global poverty has been enormously reduced by transformative change throughout the last century, and there is no reason why human enrichment should not continue. Extreme poverty defined as $1.90 per person per day fell steadily from over 75 percent of the population in 1820 (and all of human history before that) to about 60 percent in 1920 to under 10 percent in 2020. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted gross world product per capita increased from around $1,000 per year to around $15,000 per year over that period. That said, about half the humans on Earth still live on less than $7 per day. So, the urgency of accelerating economic growth and increasing wealth availability is (for practical and moral purposes) as pressing as ever.

And after that, everyone can become countless times wealthier still. What would life be like after another few thousand years of continued technological, scientific, and economic improvements? We can only begin to speculate.

To get a hint of how different the future might look, imagine trying to explain modern prosperity to humans living 12,000 years ago. Those people subsisted from caves or shanty huts and typically died agonizing deaths of disease, violence, or hunger after living only around 30 years on average. What would they think of running water, electric lighting, anesthesia, vaccines, digital photography, air and space travel, 3D printing, ChatGPT, global life expectancies of over 73 years, and so on?

Now think how much greater and faster the next 12,000 years of progress can be, especially given the relatively recent introductions of science, the internet, artificial intelligence, and other innovations capable of exponentially accelerating technological progress.

Perhaps human innovators or artificial intelligence will master the creation and terraforming of idyllic new worlds throughout space, facilitating yet-unimagined horizons of flourishing for life of all sorts. Perhaps biotech will expand the capacity of conscious beings to survive and thrive beyond what the human mind has yet begun to fathom. Or perhaps even these fanciful conjectures will pale in comparison to what the future really holds, as the predictions of past thinkers so often have.

What is the point of bringing up such outlandish-sounding sci-fi scenarios? To show how terribly unambitious it is to suggest, as Roos does, that the progress narrative indicates “no need for transformative change.” On the contrary, it is his apparent ignorance of humanity’s track record of progress that downplays the utility of transformative change.

While misunderstanding the progress narrative’s main advocates on the topic of “transformative change,” Roos also falsely claims that they view progress as “inexorable” and “Panglossian.” These straw men are almost identical to those marshaled by Alain de Botton in his and Malcolm Gladwell’s debate against Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker (two of the most prominent figures advancing the “progress narrative”). In response, Ridley summarizes what he and Pinker make abundantly clear throughout their respective books The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress:

Don’t go away with the idea that optimists like Steve and I think the world is perfect. I have no idea where Alain got that idea. Of course we don’t think that! We think quite the reverse! We think this world is a vale of tears, a slough of despond, compared to what it could be, and will be in the future if we do the right things.

The history of progress demonstrates that there is plenty of scope for transformative change. We should not settle for any “status quo” before aging is cured, depression is solved, political oppression is abolished, wealth is universal, space is colonized, quantum mechanics are understood, and every other good thing compatible with the laws of physics is achieved. And if there is no upper limit to how much better things can get, as I suspect there may not be, then stagnation will never be justified. That is the implication of the human progress trends, which are hopefully only just beginning.

This article was originally published at Quillette on 3/13/2025.

Rising ocean temperatures, deforestation, replacement of grassland with agricultural land, and many other environmental effects of human activity have been taking an enormous toll on wildlife. Around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction according to a 2019 United Nations (UN) report, which states, “The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900.” The most heavily affected are insect species, among which the extinction rate is about eight times faster than among mammals, reptiles, or birds.

But despite this, the popular idea that Earth is seeing a “sixth mass extinction” is premature. According to conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas, we will only reach mass extinction after about 10,000 years if current trends continue. In response to the UN report, National Geographic explains that only “if all species currently designated as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable go extinct in the next century, and if that rate of extinction continues without slowing down” will we experience a mass extinction within the next few centuries. It is extremely unlikely that all the “critically endangered” species will go extinct so soon, to say nothing of the “endangered” and “vulnerable” species. And even National Geographic’s projection is probably overly pessimistic. As science journalist Ronald Bailey has shown, reports of mass extinction, including the UN’s, tend to assume worst-case instead of most-likely scenarios and therefore probably overestimate extinction rates.

But even if “mass extinction” fears are overblown, the increased rate of species extinctions is worth taking seriously. That is why it’s important to clear up some widespread confusion about the interests of Earth’s wildlife.

One particularly dangerous misconception is that the interests of human beings are fundamentally at odds with those of wildlife. According to this belief, continued economic growth and industrialization may benefit humans, but only at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of nonhuman life.

The truth is quite different. In the long run, the dangers of disordered nature are so pervasive, and humanity’s potential solutions so indispensable, that advancing human wealth and economic flourishing is necessary, not detrimental, if we want to protect wildlife and maintain or even increase biodiversity.

The Zero-Sum “Man Versus Nature” Premise

The zero-sum view of the relationship between humanity and wildlife often leads humanists and environmentalists to think of each other as enemies. On the environmentalist side, perhaps the most explicit statement of this binary thinking comes from the late David M. Graber (1948–2022). In 1989, before taking up his post as the Chief Scientist for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, where he served for over three decades, he elucidated his priorities in the Los Angeles Times:

We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

Dave Foreman, founder of the environmental group “Earth First!” and “a leading figure among a generation of activists,” according to the New York Times, likewise advocated what the Times describes as “aggressive protection of the environment for its own sake”: “a … philosophy, known as deep ecology, which holds that nature has inherent value, not just in its utility to people” and whose proposals include “returning vast swaths of land to nature, ripping out any trace of human intervention.”

In his bestselling 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet George Monbiot writes:

The more land that farming occupies, the less is available for forests and wetlands, savannas and wild grasslands, and the greater is the loss of wildlife and the rate of extinction. All farming, however kind and careful and complex, involves a radical simplification of natural ecosystems. This simplification is required to extract something that humans can eat. In other words, farming inflicts an ecological opportunity cost. Minimizing our impact means minimizing our use of land.

I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species and the habitats they need, and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives might depend.

Unlike Graber and Foreman, Monbiot pays lip service to the necessity of taking human needs into account in any efforts to protect wildlife by scaling back food production. But the clear implication of the “counter-agricultural revolution” he advocates is the mass impoverishment and undernourishment of vast swaths of humanity to lessen human impact on wildlife.

Even the United Nations, in the “Summary for Policymakers” of its biodiversity report, suggests reducing economic activity and human population growth as strategies for protecting biodiversity: “The negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem functions are projected to continue or worsen in many future scenarios in response to indirect drivers such as rapid human population growth, unsustainable production and consumption and associated technological development.” Therefore, the summary claims that, “Transformations towards sustainability are more likely when efforts are directed at … lowering total consumption and waste, including by addressing both population growth and per capita consumption.”

Among those on the pro-human side of the zero-sum premise is Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. “I hold human life as the standard of value,” Epstein writes in his 2014 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels: “This is the essence of the conflict: the humanist, which is the term I will use to describe someone on a human standard of value, treats the rest of nature as something to use for his benefit; the nonhumanist treats the rest of nature as something that must be served.”

Epstein is generally careful to propose positive-sum policies, but he is so focused on the case for humanism that even he often speaks in zero-sum terms about the relationship between human and non-human animals. In his 2022 book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, Epstein writes: “To the extent one’s primary goal is animal equality one will be morally driven to eliminate all human impacts on animals, including human-benefitting impacts such as the use of animals for medical research.”

Graber, Foreman, Monbiot, and Epstein don’t all agree on whether to prioritise humanity or wildlife, but not one of them questions the assumption that wildlife’s flourishing depends on human retreat and non-intervention.

Mother Nature Is a Grim Reaper

While human activity has accelerated the rate of species extinction in recent history, extinction has been the rule, not the exception, since the dawn of life on Earth. Over 99.9 percent of species that have existed on this planet are now extinct—a story overwhelmingly written prior to the ascension of humankind. Most species have perished in so-called “background extinctions,” but at least five mass extinction events have also occurred, each wiping out over 75 percent of species on Earth at the time. And the rest of non-human life is nearly certain to follow if left to its own devices. Countless threats exist, each of which may be highly unlikely to manifest in any given century, but let the clock tick long enough and the odds eventually become high.

Take asteroids, for example. The New York Times reported in 2023 that, “The world’s family of asteroid-hunting telescopic surveys have so far found more than 32,000 near-Earth asteroids.” They added, reassuringly, that “[m]ost of those capable of inflicting planet-scale devastation have been found because it’s easier to spot bigger rocks glinting in sunlight.”

Still, there are likely to be many Earth-threatening asteroids out there that have not been found. A 2022 National Geographic article reporting on new asteroid research explains that life on Earth is at risk of extinction by “a largely unseen population of space rocks—one that could threaten life as we know it.” Summarising discoveries published in the journal Science, the article explains that, “A group of space rocks stays mostly inside the orbit of Earth, making them difficult to pick out in the glare of the sun—and potentially a threat to our planet.”

As I write this, reports of an asteroid designated “2024 YR4” are all over the news. “The object, first detected in December, is 130 to 300 feet long and expected to make a very close pass of the planet in 2032,” the New York Times reported on 18 February. “Its odds of impacting Earth on Dec. 22 of that year currently stand at 3.1 percent.” (The risk has since been downgraded to a more reassuring 0.004 percent.) This particular asteroid is not large enough to destroy more than a city, but it illustrates the fact that a planetary threat could be discovered at any moment.

Asteroids are just one of many known threat categories that we Earthlings are counting on future technological advances to avert. Marian L. Tupy, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, has surveyed these natural existential threats in his article “Degrowth Means Certain Death for Humanity.” The list includes asteroid and comet impacts, the weakening or reversal of the magnetosphere, supervolcano eruptions, plate tectonics and continental drift, ice ages, ocean current disruption, methane hydrate release, supernova explosions, nearby hypernovas, gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, rogue planets or stars, black holes, solar evolution, and Milky Way collisions.

That list may be just the beginning. In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, philosopher Toby Ord notes:

It is striking how recently many of these risks were discovered. Magnetic field reversal was discovered in 1906. Proof that Earth had been hit by a large asteroid or comet first emerged in 1960. And we had no idea gamma ray bursts even existed until 1969. For almost our entire history we have been subject to risks to which we were completely oblivious.

And there is no reason to think that the flurry of discovery has finished—that we are the first generation to have discovered all the natural risks we face. Indeed, it would surely be premature to conclude that we have discovered all of the possible mechanisms of natural extinction while major mass-extinction events remain unexplained.

In any one century, the odds of a catastrophe threatening all life on Earth may be tiny. But there are 10,000,000 centuries in a billion years. And if no existential catastrophe occurs by then, complex life will be long gone a billion years from now when the planet’s oxygen levels will have greatly diminished. That is, unless some technologically advanced species changes the odds in time.

Expanding the Scope of Human and Non-Human Life

In the future, humans may develop the technological capacity to affordably travel to outer space and terraform previously uninhabited worlds. Since many known extinction-level threats are restricted to a single planet, creating self-sustaining habitats outside Earth’s biosphere would significantly reduce the chance of some catastrophe ending all known life. Therefore, if life could become multiplanetary, species-level extinctions need not be the inevitable, almost universal rule.

This is among Elon Musk’s long-term goals at SpaceX. “If we’re a multi-planet species, it’s like life insurance for life itself. Not just for humans, but for all the creatures on Earth, because we would bring them with us. And they can’t build spaceships, so we are in effect the steward of life,” Musk has explained.

Perhaps in addition to or instead of terraforming other planets, humans will engineer giant artificial worlds, which physicist Gerard K. O’Neill first conceptualised in detail, to circumvent the many technical challenges of interplanetary travel. Progress toward the development of O’Neill cylinders, which would contain entire ecosystems and fine-tuned environments for the flourishing of life, is Jeff Bezos’s long-term goal for his aerospace company Blue Origin. These “O’Neill colonies,” as Bezos calls them, which would rotate to create artificial gravity using centrifugal force, would be large enough to comfortably hold at least a million people each and would provide attractive environments that people would want to live in, according to Bezos’s vision. He doesn’t believe that he’ll live to see O’Neill colonies himself, but he believes that future generations will.

By these or other means, humans could offer a long-term future to Earth’s lifeforms and increase the number and well-being of animal and plant species, unconstrained by the resources of Earth or of any other single planet. Once space travel and terraformation become cheap enough, entire planets or artificial worlds could be fine-tuned to benefit specific species. Perhaps this process could even be automated and expanded exponentially with the help of AI, which could provide the necessary research and manage the construction many magnitudes faster and more accurately than human beings.

Scientists are already conducting preliminary research on terraforming space habitats. In 2022, a team of University of Rochester scientists laid out a theoretical plan to terraform asteroids into Manhattan-scale space habitats. In 2023, researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center discovered how to turn moon dust into breathable oxygen. And several recent papers have offered strategies for heating up Mars for eventual habitation. Those are just a few of many recent examples.

Even sceptics tend to question only the timeline—not the possibility—of space colonisation. Jonathan McDowell, physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently commented that Musk is “not at all” close to building “a human civilization on Mars that is self-sustaining,” but added that “towards the end of this century” we might have Mars settlements whose inhabitants could even bring their pets with them from Earth. I have not been able to find any experts who seriously doubt that we will be able to build Earth-like habitats outside Earth’s atmosphere sometime this millennium, which is a short period in evolutionary terms—short enough to prevent the next mass extinction.

A Positive-Sum Environmental Strategy

As philosopher William MacAskill has asked, “if it really is of value to have greater diversity of species, why do we not actively try and promote a greater amount of biodiversity above merely preventing loss of biodiversity?” The opportunity to terraform extraterrestrial environments is just one reason why environmentalists should set their sights far higher than mere conservation.

Areas of Earth that are currently of limited habitability such as deserts and tundra could be transformed into comparatively biodiverse paradises. We could create countless new species through practices like hybridisation and genetic modification—as has already been done with the Italian sparrow (Passer italiae), the apple fly (Rhagoletis pomonella), the yellow-flowered Yorkwort (Senecio eboracensis), and scores of others—as biologist Chris D. Thomas describes in his book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. We could also resurrect extinct species, which is the goal of the ten billion USD-valued Dallas-based startup Colossal Biosciences, which is currently working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird, and the Tasmanian tiger.

Attempts to conserve Earth’s current ecosystems through non-intervention are doomed because change is a constant of nature and environmental change is a constant of Earth’s geology. Plus, in addition to being futile, it is pessimistic to think that mere conservation should be the highest hope of a forward-looking environmentalist movement. Human non-intervention may benefit non-human life in an unsustainable, short-term way. But acting in the long-term interest of Earth’s wildlife means protecting species from exogenous existential threats and investing in technological and scientific advances that will enable them to thrive at unprecedented levels.

As Tupy explains, “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.” Such a wealthy and innovative economy as humans must continue to build cannot be sustained without significant environmental change. But there is no reason to assume that the damage to wildlife caused by human industry outweighs the benefits—especially possible salvation from extinction—that could accrue to wildlife through the advancement of human knowledge.

If people had not been growing the world economy by using fossil fuels, agriculture, and other ecologically disruptive industries since at least the Industrial Revolution, humans would not be much closer than chimpanzees to colonising space and securing the future of life on Earth and beyond. And as MacAskill argues in his book What We Owe the Future, “if society stagnates technologically, it could remain stuck in a period of high catastrophic risk for such a long time that extinction or collapse would be all but inevitable.” Since we can only guess when and how existential threats will manifest, every extra dollar of research, development, or education might be the dollar that gets Earth’s humanity and wildlife through the technological bottleneck and into the next phase of consciousness in the universe.

The UN’s projections suggest that population growth and economic activity have negative effects on biodiversity because their statistical models can only estimate the destructive aspects of these phenomena. Due to the intrinsic unpredictability of future knowledge, creative transformations such as terraforming other planets and reviving extinct species are outside the scope of UN projections. But this means that their suggestions about reducing production, consumption, and population growth are biased against positive-sum solutions to the point of probably being counterproductive to the advancement of human and wildlife interests alike.

It is true that technological progress is itself a source of existential risks, but unlike the alternative (stagnation in ignorance), it has salvational potential as well, and thus the demise of life on Earth is more likely without technological progress than it is with it. Plus, a positive-sum (technological accelerationist) environmentalism is more politically achievable than a zero-sum (degrowth) environmentalism. The former merely requires that technologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs are left to their own devices within a market economy, while the latter requires everyone to make major sacrifices of their own comfort and prosperity.

As Elon Musk commented in 2022, “I think it’s important that we become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilization, because eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on earth. So if one is a true environmentalist or cares about the future of life, it is obviously important that life become multiplanetary and ultimately multi-stellar.” That is a positive-sum environmentalist agenda with a decent shot at benefiting both human and non-human life. Conversely, when Dave Foreman advocates “ripping out any trace of human intervention” for nature’s sake, or Alex Epstein implies that achieving animal equality would require eliminating “all human impacts on animals,” or David M. Graber hopes “for the right virus to come along” to wipe out humans, they are falsely assuming a zero-sum relationship between humans and other lifeforms. They are missing the larger point that on a long enough timeline the interests of all living beings are aligned and are best served by technological and scientific progress.

This article was originally published in The Daily Economy on 11/19/2024.

There is a common view that free-market capitalism systematically perpetuates short-sightedness. The dog-eat-dog selection pressures of the free market force capitalist enterprises to focus on next quarter’s profit-margins at the expense of any long-term vision of a better future, so the argument goes.

This is a central thesis of the 2024 international bestselling book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito, philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo.

Saito blames capitalist short-sightedness for virtually all major problems of modern society, from the world hunger of the post-Industrial past to the environmental collapse he predicts will happen in the future.

About the future, he writes:

Capitalism reflects the opinions of shareholders and business owners living in the present and therefore ignores the voices of future generations, creating yet another type of externality by shifting the burden of environmental damage to the future.

About the past, he writes:

Problems arose from conducting agriculture under capitalism as well. Agricultural businessmen became concerned primarily with the short-term bottom line, preferring to profit from serial cultivation of the same land over leaving fields fallow to allow their nutrients to be renewed. Funds used to maintain the soil, such as those used for irrigation systems and the like, were also cut to the bare minimum. Capitalism always prioritizes short-term profits.

This argument has a fundamental flaw, one that is common to many critiques of capitalism: it blames the economic freedoms of capitalism for failing to perfectly solve a problem that all other systems of political economy solve even less well.

Saito is correct to observe that sometimes capitalists are short-sighted, often pursuing short-term profits instead of their own long-term interests, let alone the wellbeing of future generations. But nowhere does he even begin to explain how the government officials empowered within his preferred system would be better incentivized than private property owners to think long-term.

Despite all rhetoric about “the common good” and “collective ownership” and “the will of the people,” at the end of the day each limited resource is going to be controlled by some individual with a disproportionate material interest in the wellbeing of herself and her family. A regime of private property allows for long-term planning by ensuring that what individuals don’t consume today they can save for tomorrow, or better yet invest and profit from tomorrow. By contrast, all divergences from the system of private property result in a “tragedy of the commons” to a greater or lesser degree.

The tragedy of the commons, a basic concept in economic theory, is the circumstance that arises when multiple agents have access to a scarce resource that is unowned or “commonly” owned between them. It is a “tragedy” because the lack of private ownership creates a race to exploit the resource before anyone else does, destroying the feasibility of long-term planning. Long-term planning may be in everyone’s interest, but the first agent to sacrifice the common good gets rewarded at the expense of everyone else.

This situation manifests frequently in the real world. In a New York Times article reporting the extinction of several species of aquatic wildlife in Bahía de Los Ángeles, Aaron E. Hirsch explains:

If a fish population is controlled by a single, perfectly rational agent — an idealized entity economists refer to as “the sole owner” — he or she will manage it to maximize its total value over time. For almost every population, that means leaving a lot of fish in the water, where they can continue to make young fish. The sole owner, then, will cautiously withdraw the biological equivalent of interest, without reducing the capital — the healthy population that remains in the sea. But if the fish population is available to many independent parties, competition becomes a driving concern. If I don’t extract as much as I can today, there’s no guarantee you won’t take everything tomorrow. … Around the globe, the same dynamic has unfolded in one fishery after another. … A 2008 United Nations report estimates that global fisheries, currently worth about 80 billion dollars per year, could be worth more like 140 billion — if only they were managed properly.

In his 1962 book Man, Economy, and State, the economist Murray Rothbard explains that much the same dynamic is at play in the allocations of tax dollars by government officials:

…while a private owner, secure in his property and owning its capital value, plans the use of his resource over a long period of time, the government official must milk the property as quickly as he can, since he has no security of ownership. … In short, government officials own the use of resources, but not their capital value (except in the case of the “private property” of a hereditary monarch). When only the current use can be owned, but not the resource itself, there will quickly ensue uneconomic exhaustion of the resources, since it will be to no one’s benefit to conserve it over a period of time and to every owner’s advantage to use it up as quickly as possible. In the same way, government officials will consume their property as rapidly as possible. It is curious that almost all writers parrot the notion that private owners, possessing time preference, must take the “short view,” while only government officials can take the “long view” and allocate property to advance the “general welfare.” The truth is exactly the reverse. The private individual, secure in his property and in his capital resource, can take the long view, for he wants to maintain the capital value of his resource. It is the government official who must take and run, who must plunder the property while he is still in command.

For these reasons, you could have predicted correctly throughout capitalism’s history, or determine from the data now, that Saito’s pessimism about the consequences of free-market capitalism is misplaced.

More because of privatization than despite it global per capita daily food supply has increased from 2,181.25 kcal in 1961 (the earliest year for which reliable global data are available) to 2,959.11 kcal in 2021. And similarly, that annual climate-related deaths have declined from 1.27 million in 1900 (the earliest year for which reliable global data are available) to just 86,500 in 2023. And so on.

It is time for the likes of Saito to quit idolizing coercive government power and start subjecting it to at least as much scrutiny as private capital.

As I began to argue earlier this year and elaborated on last week, the growth of knowledge has positive expected moral value because it tends toward moral self-improvement.

Humans produce a lot of knowledge. The total wealth of human-produced knowledge is astonishingly vast, as indicated by the contents of the internet, or the Library of Congress, or Wall Street, or ChatGPT’s training data. This suggests that the average (although not necessarily the median) person produces quite a lot of knowledge.

Some people produce far more knowledge than others. For example, the occasional genius makes some scientific, technological, or entrepreneurial breakthrough that is so significant it changes the world in widely noticeable ways. But even the vast majority of ordinary people create knowledge. By participating in the market-place, for instance, most people create a lot of economically valuable specific local knowledge through the price system, as the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek explains in his classic articles “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) and “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” (1968).

Therefore, almost all humans have considerable positive expected moral value as knowledge-producing entities. This even, or perhaps especially, applies to newborn babies, who are barely producing any knowledge now but are likely to one day become effective knowledge producers if nurtured.

Of course, by this standard, some people are worthless or less than worthless. It is possible to commit such evil acts, or make such giant mistakes, that your net effect on knowledge production becomes neutral or negative. For example, if your actions contribute significantly to a genocide, the destructive effects of your actions on the world’s knowledge content likely outweigh the creative effects, despite your market participation and other knowledge-creating activities. This is because the people murdered in a genocide generally had a lot of knowledge of their own that is wiped out with them, and they generally were contributors to knowledge-creating institutions and processes (such as the market economy as noted above) that will be lessor for their absence.

This knowledge-based source of human moral value is philosophically non-exclusive: It is not a refutation of most other moral frameworks. It plays well with others. If you have a sound argument that pleasure, or happiness, or worship, are reasons to morally value human life, then your argument probably still stands, and you can include the knowledge argument in your moral calculations without abandoning your other moral arguments. But if you have no other sound arguments for human moral worth, then at least there is this one.

The growth of knowledge, the moral value that is the distillation and crown jewel of the Enlightenment, is a special value because it intrinsically tends toward self-correction. All other value systems must be defended by some additional steps—some arguments or evidence on behalf of some metaethical framework—none of which have thus far been quite satisfactory. The pursuit of any value other than knowledge, if misguided, must be corrected by new knowledge.

If there was anything wrong with the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment (and indeed, plenty of errors were made), the solution was and is more enlightenment.

Knowledge maximalism, likewise, if in need of correction and if followed long enough, will correct itself from within. Misguided knowledge maximalists are mandated by the value they already follow to eventually discover their error; the more knowledge maximalism, the sooner the correction.

The original version of this article was published by the Foundation for Economic Education on 6/12/2021.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, United States population growth was momentarily at its lowest rate since the Great Depression. It has since picked back up a bit, but polling data suggests that women are still having far fewer children than they want to have.

From an environmentalist perspective, many people think this relatively stagnant population growth is a good thing. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has said positive things about the environmental impact of population stagnation. He wrote in a 2021 New York Times column, “Is stagnant or declining population a big economic problem? It doesn’t have to be. In fact, in a world of limited resources and major environmental problems there’s something to be said for a reduction in population pressure.”

By expressing a rosy attitude toward the waning of humankind’s proliferation on Earth, Krugman is joining a dubious tradition that has been ascendant since the 18th century.

From Malthus to Krugman

The idea that a smaller human population is desirable on environmental grounds has been popular ever since the economist Thomas Malthus published his highly influential 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Arguing that each plot of land could only yield so much produce, Malthus surmised that if population growth were to continue without drastic reduction, the vast majority of humanity would inevitably starve within a century of his writing.

Throughout the 19th century, Malthus’s predictions were conclusively disproved by widespread reductions in both poverty and food prices as the population continued to increase. But in the 1960s and 1970s, when the global population was roughly half what it is today, Malthusian ideas once again rose to global prominence. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, became a celebrity by inciting an international hysteria over population growth. His 1968 book The Population Bomb became a worldwide bestseller, and he got plentiful mainstream media exposure for his ideas, including in over twenty appearances on NBC’s “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. Ehrlich claimed that not just food, but virtually all natural resource supplies were at the brink of collapse.

His predictions included death by starvation for hundreds of millions before the end of the 1970s (including 65 million Americans), the essential doom of India in its entirety, and even the non-existence of England by the year 2000. Perhaps his grandest forecast, made in 1970, was that “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity” would arrive by 1985.

In the 21st century, population panic has shifted focus mostly to climate change. Environmentalists can now often be heard advocating smaller family sizes, or avoiding child conception altogether, in an effort to limit carbon emissions.

An article in The Guardian is titled, “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children.” According to an NPR piece, “A recent study from Lund University in Sweden shows that the biggest way to reduce climate change is to have fewer children.” And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an essay titled, “Stabilize global population and tax carbon to reduce per-capita emissions,” in which it is argued that, “Tax and other economic incentives should be continuously reconsidered to make population stabilization more likely.“

Given the apocalyptic terms in which some of our most esteemed politicians and news outlets speak about the risks of climate change, these contemporary population critics can hardly be considered much less alarmist than Malthus and Ehrlich.

Hunger Versus Science

As you may have noticed, the predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich turned out to be drastically off.

Food prices have been falling rapidly, as has the poverty rate in general.

Global per capita calorie intake increased nearly every year during the period about which Ehrlich made his dire predictions. Meanwhile, the world’s human population has roughly doubled.

Reliable global undernourishment data doesn’t go back that far, but it has probably declined significantly over the same period as well.

What accounts for the radical improvements in global nutrition? The New York Times ran an article about the progress against world hunger since Ehrlich’s predictions. The author stated that, “No small measure of thanks belonged to Norman E. Borlaug, an American plant scientist whose breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant crops led to the agricultural savior known as the Green Revolution. While shortages persisted in some regions, they were often more a function of government incompetence, corruption or civil strife than of an absolute lack of food.”

Borlaug’s innovation was part of a long trend of improvements to agricultural technology. Early that century, in 1909-1910, the Haber-Bosch process was invented, for which Haber and Bosch each earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their process facilitated the creation of synthetic fertilizers, which revolutionized the capabilities of farmers worldwide and made it possible to feed a much larger population from the same amount of farmland.

Even throughout the nineteenth century, industrialization was radically improving farmland efficiency. The political economist and historian Peter Kropotkin wrote in his 1892 book The Conquest of Bread about the game-changing impact greenhouses were having on agriculture. “And yet the market-gardeners of Paris and Rouen labour three times as hard to obtain the same results as their fellow-workers in Guernscy or in England. Applying industry to agriculture these last make their climate in addition to their soil, by means of the greenhouse.”

Kropotkin noted, “Fifty years ago the greenhouse was the luxury of the rich. It was kept to grow exotic plants for pleasure. But nowadays its use begins to be generalized. A tremendous industry has grown up lately in Guernsey and Jersey, where hundreds of acres are already covered with glass — to say nothing of the countless small greenhouses kept in every little farm garden.”

To this day, agricultural breakthroughs are constantly being made that improve the ability of humankind to subsist in its environment. Just this morning, Malcolm Cochran wrote in Human Progress’s weekly news roundup that, “A biotechnology company called InnerPlant has developed soybeans that glow when stressed, allowing farmers to intervene early and avoid crop losses. Recently, their system, which pairs the fluorescent soybeans with optical sensors, detected a fungal infection weeks before it would have been visible to the naked eye.”

The Population Is the Resource

Every new human will consume resources, produce carbon emissions, and pollute their environment to some degree. But every new human also comes with a human mind, which is the source of potential solutions to these problems and many others. Each new able body also contributes precious labor to the economy, contributing to the rearrangement of the world’s atoms into more useful configurations.

The people whose future existence Malthus feared would lead to mass starvation, in some cases, turned out to be the very people who would revolutionize agriculture and virtually every other productive industry, making it easier rather than harder for future generations to be fed.

Likewise, when Krugman’s fear of “limited resources and major environmental problems” leads him to speak positively of “a reduction in population pressure,” he assumes that the destructive capacities of future people are likely to outweigh their creative capacities. But as we have seen, the history of such predictions suggests the opposite. The above-mentioned Lund University study accounts for the carbon emissions of future people, but it does not account for the creative visions of those people, nor can any study before the people exist.

Paul Ehrlich’s archnemesis, the economist Julian Simon, elucidated this fundamental flaw in Malthusian thinking. As he argued in his 1996 book The Ultimate Resource 2, “Adding more people to any community causes problems, but people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination. The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in a spirit of faith and social concern. Inevitably they will benefit not only themselves but the poor and the rest of us as well.”

If you want to increase resource abundance and have the climate engineered to your liking, you should probably have more children. Your future descendants may be the ones to grow up and create the knowledge required to usher in yet-unseen levels of prosperity and flourishing.