How Free-Market Fundamentalism Fuels Population Denialism & Undermines Democracy

PronatalismSocio-Economic JusticePopulation DenialismTechnological FundamentalismEcological Overshoot

Jun 1

We are joined by Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and a world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker. Using her latest book that she co-authored with Erik M. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loath Government and Love the Free Market as the basis of our conversation, she explains how free-market fundamentalism has had a long history of undermining democracy and exploiting marginalized communities to benefit a small minority of elites. We also discuss the role that libertarian, techno-fundamentalist, and Catholic anti-choice think tanks such as the Cato Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, the Breakthrough Institute, and Population Research Institute have played in fueling anti-Science propaganda on overpopulation denialism, and why these forces must be vehemently opposed for a more just and sustainable planet.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Naomi Oreskes 0:00
Why would an organization like the Cato Institute or the Foundation for Economic Education say that overpopulation is a myth? Well, these are organizations whose central activities is to promote libertarian ideology in order to push back against government action in the marketplace. And we do know that many of these organizations are heavily heavily funded by Fortune 500 companies, captains of industries, who stand to benefit from weak government regulation. And so if we say population is a serious issue, in part because of the destruction of biodiversity, the destruction of habitat pushing up against planetary limits, coerced reproduction of many women across the world, there's a whole set of issues here that invite a conversation about governance, about the role of governments, and also about governance through NGOs, local institutions, etc. And all of these things point to the need for planning, thinking about the future and figuring out what are appropriate responses. They hate planning because they associate planning with socialism.
Alan Ware 1:02
That was today's guest, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and co-author of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. We'll be discussing the history and the power of the free market myth with Dr. Oreskes in this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 1:30
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:52
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pro natal ism human supremacy and ecological overshoot, and offer solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals.
Nandita Bajaj 2:12
And also thanks to listeners like you, we now rank in the top 2% of all the podcasts globally. In addition to this podcast, we also run virtual educational programs at schools and conferences with a goal of empowering people to make liberated and responsible reproductive and consumptive choices. And we do all of this with a really small staff and we count on you to keep doing this important work, and we hope you'll consider supporting our transformative programs. And now on to today's guest.
Alan Ware 2:14
Naomi Oreskes is professor of the History of Science and affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She's the author of the 2010 best selling book, Merchants of Doubt, and a leading voice on the role of science and society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action. Oreskes is author or co-author of nine books and over one hundred and fifty articles, essays, and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt, The Collapse of Western Civilization, Discerning Experts, Why Trust Science, and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change. Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name, and it's been translated into nine languages. Oreskes wrote the introduction of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality - Laudato Si, and her essays and opinion pieces on climate change have appeared in leading newspapers around the globe including: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The London Times, and Frankfurter Allgemeine. In 2018, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2019, she was awarded the British Academy medal. Her new book co-authored with Erik Conway and the book we'll be discussing today with Dr. Oreskes is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.
Nandita Bajaj 3:40
Dr. Oreskes, you have done excellent work in bridging the academic disciplines of science and history. And we greatly appreciate the big picture analysis that you bring to the general public in such an accessible way. We're thrilled to have this conversation with you today. Welcome to our podcast.
Naomi Oreskes 3:58
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Nandita Bajaj 4:00
We like to start with some discussion about a short and excellent essay you recently wrote for Scientific American, titled Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement. What motivated you to write this piece seeing that population has not been a central feature of the recent books that you've written? Is this something you've been thinking about for a while?
Naomi Oreskes 4:23
Well, it is something I've been thinking about for a while. But the immediate provocation was an editorial in the Washington Post. The Washington Post editorial was written on the occasion of the world population surpassing eight billion people, and the editorial said, "Well, this is great, because all these people are a resource. And somewhere among these eight billion people will be the geniuses who will solve climate change and all the other crises of the globe." And I thought that argument was astonishingly foolish for a variety of reasons that we can get into, but also annoying because it was recycling an old, and to my mind, discredited argument - an argument that is sometimes referred to as cornucopianism. That innovation is our most important resource, that our problems are solved through technical innovation. Typically, it's linked to free market ideology. So if you just let markets do their thing, encourage innovators to be innovative, the markets will respond, inventors will respond, and we'll get the solutions that we need to our problems. And usually the argument is linked as well to other forms of regulatory activities. I think history shows that that argument is massively false. It's been refuted in so many ways by all of the cascading crises in the last 20th century, it's utterly refuted by what scientists call the great acceleration, and the ways in which we are coming up to or transgressing planetary limits in so many domains. This is so well documented. If someone believed this to be true back in 1905, I might have said, "Okay, well, you know, they have a point." But this is a hypothesis that has been refuted by enormous amounts of evidence. And so it was deeply disturbing to see a newspaper as distinguished as the Washington Post putting this forward in an editorial.
Nandita Bajaj 6:02
Yeah, we were similarly shocked by lots of similar reports that were actually marking this event as an achievement, including the United Nations Population Fund, using the hashtag #8billionstrong, #eight billion possibilities. And it's bizarre seeing a message like that come out of an organization such as the UN, especially when so many other arms of the UN are reporting on the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the extinction crisis, and the billion children that are going to be living in unimaginably dire conditions because of what's to come. So we really appreciated the light that you shone on this issue, especially as a distinguished authority that you are.
Alan Ware 6:50
And of course, yeah, on the other side of that article, you got some criticisms, and specifically one we saw was in The Atlantic, titled The Malthusians are Back. Certainly something we've heard before. The author's mentioned in the article that they had an email correspondence with you. And we were wondering, what are some of your thoughts about their article? And what was memorable about your email exchange with them?
Naomi Oreskes 7:13
Well, I'd say that that article was deeply offensive on multiple levels. First of all, it completely misrepresented my position. I'm not now nor have I ever been a Malthusian. Thomas Malthus is notorious in history because of his heartless arguments about population control. I mean, his argument was used as an argument against what today we would call Development Aid, or against what today we would call programs to educate women, it was really an argument that any attempt to help the poor just makes it worse, it just encourages them. You shouldn't feed the poor, you should send debtors to debtors prison, because otherwise, it just encourages them. And there have to be the sort of harsh consequences, what he called checks, in order to prevent people from having so many children. That is so not my argument and so not the argument of any feminists that I know on the planet today. So it's a massive misrepresentation, both of Malthus and his relationship to the argument that we are in now, by the way, what three hundred years later, I mean, and it's taking something totally out of context, as if it were somehow appropriate for the present debate, which it's not. It's also a massive misrepresentation of my views. When these people approached me, it was pretty clear from their backgrounds and their affiliation that they were not people I agreed with. Initially, I declined to comment, because one often has the experience, it's not actually worth engaging with people who will misrepresent your views. But then they sent me a second email, basically, I don't want to quite say threatening, but kind of threatening, saying, "Well, if you don't comment, then we'll just say what we want about you." So then I did comment, and then they said what they wanted about me anyway. And then the third insult is that, given that that piece was published, and mentioned me by name, and misrepresented my views, I wrote a letter to the editor thinking that at minimum, The Atlantic would allow me a brief, polite rebuttal. And I'm not an idiot about these things, I understood that I had to be brief, had to be focused. I ran it past a couple of colleagues, including some journalist colleagues, to make sure that they thought it was appropriate. They all thought it was great. Not only did The Atlantic never publish it, never even had the courtesy of replying. And I followed up a second time - nothing.
Alan Ware 9:12
Wow.
Naomi Oreskes 9:13
So this is just, to me, a really upsetting example of how certain kinds of pro-market, anti-regulatory thinking have infiltrated into mainstream media, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and as you said, even at the United Nations, which of all organizations are to be acutely sensitive to all the challenges associated with population and what we conventionally call development, although I don't really like that word. So you know, it's an appalling misrepresentation of history. And it's especially egregious to me how the people who do this are often men, typically white men, who think that they somehow have the right to speak for the poor and the females of the world. But when a woman actually tries to speak up, you know, then they don't hesitate to misrepresent my voice, along with the voices of billions of women on this planet who do not agree with their argument.
Alan Ware 10:00
And it's interesting that both of the authors of The Atlantic article were from the Breakthrough Institute, which is very eco-modernist, green growth, green tech kind of organization that believes we can grow and we don't have to have increased material consumption, that we can decouple despite there being no evidence that we really can decouple. GDP grows at lockstep, nearly 100% lockstep with material consumption. But those are the kinds of people that The Atlantic, as you mentioned, with WaPo's cornucopian bias that The Atlantic has that too. And it's a real shame.
Naomi Oreskes 10:34
Right. And the Breakthrough Institute views are well known to me, which is why initially, I was skeptical that I could trust them to appropriately represent my views. But I think the thing about this is that, you know, the question of whether we can have economic growth without consumption growth, or without increasing damage to people and the planet, and all of the life on the planet is a really important question. And it's not a question that I dismiss, but it's, as you said, what is the evidence? Where are the examples where this is happening and where it's working well? And this is where there's a lot of arm waving about green growth, often without a substantive argument. And when someone tries to challenge the argument or raise what I would consider to be a set of legitimate questions about this issue, well, then they accuse us of being Malthusians and that's just not, that's not a legitimate intellectual argument. But the Malthusian thing drives me particularly crazy because here's the thing. Okay, so Malthus says we have to worry about population. Lots of people say that, but it doesn't make us Malthusians any more than, you know, if I were a vegetarian, it doesn't make me a Nazi.
Nandita Bajaj 11:37
Perfect encapsulation of our views, because it's the same thing - just because there were some nasty people who have done nasty things around population control in the past or even currently does not mean that anyone who's speaking about population is guilty by association. And that's the battle we are constantly fighting as an anti-oppression feminist organization fighting for reproductive liberation of billions of women who do not have a say, or young girls who do not have a say in what's happening to them. And to be reduced to this one awful word. I went on to actually do a Google search on the term overpopulation myth just to see to what degree some of what you've found in your exposé of these libertarian think tanks on free market fundamentalism, and the top responses came from some of these institutions that were very similar to the ones you named: Cato, Foundation for Economic Education, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Enterprise Institute, all of which are American libertarian think tanks. Breakthrough Institute, of course, we spoke about, and then the other ones, majority of them were Catholic anti-choice groups, including an organization called Population Research Institute, who is reported to have successfully helped lobby the Bush administration to withhold thirty-four to $40 million per year for seven years from the United Nations Population Fund. And the US was the largest international donor to family planning programs. So of course, there are other environmental organizations that have bought into quote unquote, the overpopulation myth, but it's so interesting to see where it's being birthed. And then perpetuated.
Naomi Oreskes 13:28
Well, exactly. And it's important, two things. So first of all, we should not use that term. Because it's not a myth, right? We have huge amounts of evidence that overpopulation is a serious problem on many different levels in terms of social equality, destruction of habitats, destruction of economic opportunities for people across the world, the denial of women's rights, coerced reproduction, so many ways in which overpopulation expresses itself in the modern world, but also what you just said a minute ago about the libertarian organizations is so important. So if you ask yourself, "Why is the Cato Institute or the Foundation for Economic Education promoting the idea that population growth is great?" Well, these are organizations whose central activities is to try to limit government regulation of the marketplace. If you go to their websites, you almost always find the same expressions or phrases, sometimes slightly differently, but basically limited government, low taxation, personal freedom, individual responsibility. These are the mantras. So why would an organization like that say that overpopulation is a myth? Well, it's because of their relationship to government and governance. They oppose government action in the marketplace on libertarian principles. Now, we could get into an argument about how authentically these views are held or whether they're just shills for regulated industries. I think it's a bit of a mix of both. But we do know that many of these organizations are heavily, heavily funded by Fortune 500 companies, captains of industries, who stand to benefit from weak government regulation. My own personal view is that many of these organizations really don't care at all about population, what they care is this idea about governance. And so if we say population is a serious issue, in part because of the destruction of biodiversity, the destruction of habitat, pushing up against planetary limits, coerced reproduction of many women across the world, and not just in so-called developing nations, but also in wealthy nations. There's a whole set of issues here that invite a conversation about governance, about the role of governments, and also about governance through NGOs, local institutions, etc. And all of these things point to the need for, well, something that they really hate, which is planning - thinking about the future and figuring out what are appropriate responses? They hate planning because they associate planning with socialism. And this is a major, major theme of my new book with Erik Conway. So it's interesting to me that you mentioned the Foundation for Economic Education, because they are under the radar screen of many progressive groups. But they have been absolutely central in the 20th century in the United States, since they were founded in 1946, in promoting libertarian thinking, promoting libertarian writers, books; Leonard Read, who was the original founder, has published twenty-nine books all about freedom. And it's all about using this notion of freedom to push back against government engagement where our economic systems are failing us. And of course, this is hypocritical on so many different levels. But the deepest level that I feel very strongly as a woman is, what is the freedom for women across this planet who would like to have fewer children, who believe it would be better for them and their families to have, you know, only one, two, or maybe no children, and who want the right to decide that for themselves? I mean, being able to decide whether or not to give birth to children is the most fundamental aspect of female freedom that a person can possibly imagine. And the second most fundamental is being able to be educated, which you cannot do if you have children when you're fifteen years old. And yet these people who are waving the banner of freedom all the time, seem to be conspicuously unconcerned with the freedom of the, what, four billion women who live on this planet?
Nandita Bajaj 17:05
Yeah, very well said. And we even wonder, we're going to speak to Kevin Bales later in the summer who talks about modern day slavery. To what degree population growth actually does benefit these think tanks and the elites because of the large swaths of disempowered people that they can continue to exploit for free labor and in countries that have very poor human rights or environmental regulations?
Naomi Oreskes 17:32
Well, that's a really good question. And it's, of course, this gets into the real depths of the venality that we sometimes see in this space. Most of my work is not about that. It's really about how groups like Cato and FEE - Foundation for Economic Education - promote libertarian ideology in order to push back against government action in the marketplace. But certainly, some of those actions that I've studied personally, and that we talk about in our new book, The Big Myth, involve the exploitation of labor or the attempts to prevent the exploitation of labor. So in our book, we talk about child labor, we talked about minimum wage laws, workman's compensation, social security - these are all programs or laws or statutes that the US government, typically on the federal level, but sometimes in the state level, enacted to protect workers and to enable workers, for example, to bargain collectively for better working conditions or better wages. And these organizations have consistently pushed back against these kinds of statutes that protect and empower workers. So there is clearly an economic incentive associated with keeping the underclass under, and we're seeing that in the United States today with these attempts, already successful in ten states, to rollback laws against child labor. You know, in the book, one of things we talk about is there's a famous court case in the United States, went to the Supreme Court over whether or not the federal government could restrict child labor, the court actually said that government couldn't on jurisdictional grounds. But in the dissent, Oliver Wendell Holmes says, "If there's one thing that everyone in the civilized world agrees upon, it's the evils of child labor." And here we are a hundred years later, seeing conservatives, reactionary politicians, business leaders in this country, rolling back protections for child labor and saying that it's perfectly fine for a fifteen-year-old to work all night in a meatpacking plant. And why do they do that? Well, obviously, there are businesses that would like to employ children and teenagers because they're less expensive and who do not care whether or not these young people, often they're the children of immigrants, whether they're stripped of the opportunity to go to school and improve their lives.
Nandita Bajaj 19:29
Right.
Alan Ware 19:29
So in your latest book that you co-authored with Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, you talk about the ideology of market fundamentalism, and how it's gained increasing influence within US politics and the broader culture over the past one hundred years or so. So how would you describe market fundamentalism and why did you want to study it so in depth?
Naomi Oreskes 19:53
Well, I wouldn't say I wanted to study it. I would say my work led me to that. I mean, almost everything I work on, I don't really want to study, it's like, you know, I have a good friend who studies the Nazis. It's like, he doesn't study the Nazis because he likes the Nazis, he studies them because he thinks they're important, and that we need to understand how such a toxic ideology gained so much power in what at the time was considered the world's most sophisticated nation, Germany. So I got involved in climate change denial, climate change disinformation, because I really stumbled over it. So I began my career first as an Earth scientist, and then as a historian of earth science. And I did study those things because I liked them, because I love the Earth, and I find the Earth infinitely majestic and amazing. But in the process of doing this work, I stumbled across climate change denial, and I became interested in understanding it because it seemed to me to be quite important, because I started doing this work about twenty years ago. By that time, the scientific consensus on climate change was clear, overwhelming. It had been clearly articulated in 1995, in the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC. And so I wanted to know why would anyone reject hard won, well supported scientific evidence? And that led me down, I call that my Alice Through the Looking Glass moment, led me into this whole parallel universe of science denial, fact denial, I would say today, it includes election denial, vaccine safety denial - there's a whole universe of people fighting back against scientific evidence and facts in a variety of domains. And so when Erik and I started writing Merchants of Doubt, the key question we had was, "Why would these people do this?" And at the time, most scientists thought it was a question of scientific illiteracy, that the people who were rejecting climate science just didn't understand the science. And if only you explained it more clearly, than all would be well in the world. Well, Erik and I showed that wasn't true. And what we found was that climate change denial was heavily promoted by market fundamentalists, including groups like the Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute that you just mentioned. And they did it because they were subscribing to a market fundamentalist ideology. So I would define, in the new book, Erik and I define it this way, we say the big myth has three components. The first is the idea of The Free Market, the idea that there even is such a thing as the free market, which we say is a myth, because the reality is that markets are human institutions, we make markets, they don't exist outside of history, outside of culture - it's a human institution. And as such, we can make choices about how we want markets to operate. The second myth is that the market is wise, that it's efficient, and that if we just have faith in the Invisible Hand, which has this sort of godlike quality, if we just have faith in markets to do their magic, everything will work out well. So the government should just, quote get out of the way, as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And then the third part, and I think this is actually the most pernicious, and it's the part that I think is least understood, and so I see as kind of the most important original contribution of our book is that the market fundamentalists make a third argument, and that is that economic freedom is a bulwark of political freedom, and therefore a market-based economy protects democracy. And so therefore, they use this as an argument against government action in the marketplace, they call it encroachment. But I won't use that word because it's not encroachment, its political economy, the politics and economics go together. But they argue that if the government acts in the marketplace, even if it's for a seemingly good cause, like eliminating or reducing child labor, that this will put us on a slippery slope into totalitarianism, that today, we'll lose our economic rights. Tomorrow, we'll lose all of our rights. And we saw this very explicitly in the tobacco story that we wrote about in Merchants of Doubt, our first book, that some of the scientists we were studying were pretty famous scientists, they were people who have distinguished careers, and they made common cause with the tobacco industry. We thought, "Why the heck would they do that?" I mean, of all the industries to align yourself with, an industry that we know grossly misrepresented scientific data for decades, lied about it, even lied about it under oath in Congress, claiming nicotine was not addictive, when not only did they know that it was addictive, but their companies were working to make it more addictive by hybridizing and genetically modifying tobacco plants. So what we found was this third piece of the market fundamentalist argument, these people arguing literally in print, in writing, in places that were hidden in plain sight, that if you allow the government to regulate tobacco, then there's no limit to how much government can control our lives. And they said that in virtually those many words. So when we finished Merchants of Doubt, we thought we've done a pretty good thing explaining this important phenomenon. But it left us with a new question, which was, "Where did market fundamentalism come from? And why would anyone believe that because the evidence in the 20th century didn't support it, right?" Lots of European social democracies have mixed economies. I mean, we have a mixed economy in the United States with national health insurance and all kinds of government social welfare programs, and they didn't become communist dictatorships. And here in the United States, under the New Deal, the United States introduced, finally after three decades of debate, introduced laws to restrict child labor, minimum wage, Social Security, workman's compensation - and we didn't become a Soviet dictatorship. So history clearly didn't support this market fundamentalist framework. And yet, we were seeing it put forward by a lot of people in a variety of contexts. And so we decided, "Okay, next question." In research, if you're doing it right, one good question always leads to another. The question is, "What is market fundamentalism? Where did it come from? And why do so many people believe it?"
Alan Ware 25:20
You trace the beginning of that process, partly to this tripod of freedom concept, right? Where typically, liberal democracy is a combination of protecting the liberties of the minority while allowing the majority to rule the democracy part, civil democracy. And they added this third part of that tripod, free enterprise, which you mentioned also was started as private enterprise, and that had some bad connotations, apparently, or didn't sound as touchy feely or warm as free. So they brought in free enterprise. How did that happen?
Naomi Oreskes 25:52
So one of the things we see in this story is the way in which the propagandists deliberately and consciously try to link their arguments to values that people hold dear, because propaganda doesn't really work if it's an obvious sales job for a vested interest. But if you can link into something people value, like freedom or liberty, then many people will say, "Well, sure, I believe in freedom and I don't want the government to do something that will undermine my freedom." So one of the things we do in the book is show all the different places and film, radio, television, children's books, universities, where the market fundamentalists attempt to get their message through. And one of the key moments in the story involves a group, a trade organization called the National Association of Manufacturers. In the 1930s, they were the largest trade association in the United States, they're still active today, they're still powerful and influential. Manufacturing is still important in America, not as important as it once was, but it's still significant. And they had launched a propaganda campaign in the 1930s to try to propagandize people against the New Deal and in favor of the idea of just letting the markets do their magic, trusting business, trusting the wisdom of business people, mostly men, to help us recover from the Great Depression. The American people were not buying that story. And if you think about it, in 1933, it's a pretty preposterous claim to make when the American economy is in freefall. Capitalism seems to be failing catastrophically. 25% of the American workforce is out of work. Farms are closing everywhere, people are being displaced. People are moving from Oklahoma to California and being turned away at the border. I mean, a lot of really terrible things are happening, banks are failing, people are losing their money, their businesses, their farms, and in the midst of this, the National Association of Manufacturers says, "Oh, don't worry, it'll all be fine. Just trust us." So manufacturers, the business community was, in effect, asking the American people to trust the very people who had created this crisis somehow to fix it. And of course, that is more or less what Herbert Hoover had argued. And for that, he was tossed out of the White House. So the American people were really not buying it. And so now leaders actually have a conversation, and we have the documents to show it, where they say, "Well, we need to do something to make our case more effectively. And the way to do that is to link it to the notion of something that Americans hold dear. And that's freedom." And so they invent this idea of the tripod of freedom, and it is a complete invention, doesn't come out of history, it's not in the Declaration of Independence, it's not in the Bill of Rights, it's not in the US Constitution. But they claim, as you just said, that American society, American democracy, was founded on three essential legs and so hence the tripod, three legs. One leg, we all know: representative democracy. A second leg, we also know, the civil and political rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But the third leg, they claimed, was free enterprise capitalism. And as you said, it starts as private enterprise, and they say, "Yeah, people don't really like private things, right? Private, it smacks of private property. And that's associated with big business. So we'll change it to free enterprise." Larry Glickman has a really nice book just on this point. So they made this claim. It's completely fabricated. I don't think any US historian at the time would have agreed with that. And in fact, if you look at the history of 19th century America, you see massive government involvement in the economy, protectionist tariffs to protect fledgling industries, which by the way, NAM had supported in the 19th century, they wanted government to help them when it was in their interest and they wanted government to get out of the way when that was in their interest. And we see that going on today with bank regulation. So they really create this argument out of whole cloth, but then they use it to say, "And this is why, when we push back against the New Deal, it's not just greed, it's not just our self interest. We're really defending American democracy." Now, again, the American people are not idiots. They don't buy that. But over time, as the economy begins to recover, and as people begin to forget about how bad the depression really was, and as they continue to make this argument over and over and over again, and bring it into Hollywood films, and bring it into American homes through television, then we begin to see that the argument does begin, over time, to take hold.
Nandita Bajaj 29:54
Right. It's basically freedom here just means freedom for businessmen to pursue self interest without any restrictions, but not so much for the people, the children, who are being exploited in unsafe workplaces, child labor.
Naomi Oreskes 30:10
Well, that's right. And of course, this gets into the deep philosophical problem of competing freedoms, because it's always the case that freedom can be interpreted in different ways. And it's always the case that some of the things that I might want to do might hurt you. Like we did eventually, in the United States, and many parts of the world, ban smoking in public places, ban smoking on airplanes because my freedom to smoke actually puts your life at risk, because science shows that if you breathe in secondhand smoke, even if you never smoked a cigarette in your life, you could get lung cancer from that secondhand smoke. So this is all about balancing competing interests and competing freedoms. But the business community never framed it that way, they always tried to make it seem as the protection of business freedoms would benefit us all, even though the evidence was clear that that wasn't, in fact, true.
Nandita Bajaj 30:56
Right. And the slippery slope argument reminds us too, of why, in the work that we do, they try to bring up the Malthusian arguments as, "Well, once you say it's an issue, it automatically must mean that you are going to coercively quote, unquote, control the population," instead of trying to understand that population control or reproductive control has been at play since the beginning of patriarchy. It's the oldest form of population control. And that if we truly had gender equality and reproductive freedom, we would not have a population issue to the same degree that we do now. So that often gets brought up, is anyone who talks about population is somehow implying that we're going to be going down a slippery slope of control.
Naomi Oreskes 31:43
Right. And I think it's really important to recognize that many of these pronatalist policies are in fact deeply coercive, because they deny women the rights to decide for themselves how they want to manage their families. Or the other thing I don't like, I hate in America we sometimes talk about starting a family, meaning that you're going to have children as opposed to, "No, I started a family the day I married my husband."
Nandita Bajaj 32:04
Right.
Naomi Oreskes 32:05
Right? We were a family before we ever had children, and we would have still been a family even if we didn't decide to have children. So these pronatalist arguments are denying women their basic freedoms, their basic individual autonomy, their basic liberties. So I think it's really important to point out that coercion argument - that shoe is really on the other foot.
Nandita Bajaj 32:24
It really is, yes. In fact, we're seeing a rise in authoritarianism now that the population is declining in some Western countries. And you know, we're seeing this backsliding of a lot of democratic principles to try to force women to have children to solve whatever aging crisis we're experiencing, because it's apparently the only solution we can think of to pay for our Social Security is to push women to have more kids.
Naomi Oreskes 32:51
Yeah. And I know, and this is a very weird thing that's going on right now. I've noticed it's almost like there are two different conversations going on in the political economy world and the natural environment, climate change, planetary limits world. And I want to be clear, I'm not saying that anyone who's worried about demographics is necessarily promoting coercive, pronatalist policies. But even among those who are not, there's a weird gap, there's a kind of disconnect. So there are many people who you know, and you can pick up any newspaper, any magazine: Time, Newsweek, the Financial Times, and there'll be some kind of discussion about the demographic crisis - that there aren't enough young people to support the Social Security system. Or China, right? There's been a lot of stuff in the news just in recent weeks and months about how China is going to face a crisis and how so they're backing off their one-child policy and now beginning to think about having more pronatalist policies. And this conversation seems to be taking place in kind of blissful neglect of this whole other conversation taking place, you know, in the UN Development Fund, or the IPCC, or the UN Environment Program, that we are massively transgressing planetary limits, and absolutely have to do something about that if the quality of life for those of us on Earth, as well as for all the other plants and animals with whom we share this planet, these two conversations, and when I look at them, I think, "Well, is that really the only solution? Is there not some way to slightly reorganize or rejigger our Social Security programs? Or what about migration, right?" I mean, lots of people want to come to America and lots of those people are young, and lots of those people could help solve this problem. But somehow that piece of the conversation seems to be off limits, which also I think is somewhat revealing.
Nandita Bajaj 34:29
Yeah.
Alan Ware 34:29
So who are some of the major thinkers whose ideas helped create the intellectual foundations of market fundamentalism?
Naomi Oreskes 34:37
There are a few key thinkers. And the story about how these thinkers became influence in the United States is a very interesting one that we tell in the book, The Big Myth. Most of these key ideas come out of Europe, and they come not just from Europe, but from a specific country in Europe. They come from Austria, and what's known as the Austrian School of Economics. In hindsight, some people would say these are the founders of neoliberalism. So there's two keys thinkers in this school that are important for understanding what happens later, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. And early in the 1920s, or even into the late 1910s, Mises is writing about the problem of centralized planning. And he raises a question that I think was legitimate, I think most scholars would say legitimate, which is, "How can you do centralized planning without compromising freedom?" Because he says, "Think of it this way, one of the reasons markets are good," and I think this was a very important insight and I think like a lot of bad ideas, you know, starts with something that makes sense at first, but then someone takes it in a weird way, or like a lot of propaganda begins with a kernel of truth, but then it gets used in a very untruthful way. So the truthful piece here is he says, "Look, markets are really good for amassing information, they tell us a lot about what people want, how much they're willing to pay for it, how far they're willing to go to get it. And that's really, really useful. An essentially planned economy, you don't have that information. And so essentially planned economy is bound to be less efficient than a market-based economy because of this lack of really useful information." Okay, so far, so good. And then he says, "And moreover, without that information, the government has to decide from on high how many cars it will manufacture, how many tractors, you know, how many hydroelectric dams, and in order to do that, because it also doesn't have the information about how much people are willing to move, let's say for a job in those places, it has to enforce it. So it necessarily becomes coercive." Well, we could argue about that. But he has a point, if you look at what happened in the Soviet Union, certainly at least that example seems to support the argument, or central planning in China. You know, if you think about the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution, these were highly coercive and deadly programs. So that part of the argument seems supported, at least by a degree of evidence as well. But then he makes the slippery slope move. Then he says, "And therefore, if you allow the government to become engaged in the marketplace, you're on the slippery slope to socialism." And this is the idea that is taken up by his protege Friedrich von Hyack, in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. He's a hero to the American libertarian right, frequently quoted on American right-wing talk radio, frequently cited by Republican politicians, although I doubt most of them have actually read it. We know that Ronald Reagan read a Reader's Digest condensed version of it. So, which we talk about the book. So this is the key argument - that you should not support restrictions. Let's say the example Hyack uses is the National Health Service in Britain, because these will put you on a slippery slope to socialism and worse. Now, we'll never know how influential these ideas would or would not have been in the United States, counterfactual history, but what we do know is there were some people in the United States who were saying some similar things in the 1930s. And they were mostly people who were associated with the National Association of Manufacturers. So one question we had in our research was, "Oh, well was this coincidence? Did NAM come up with these ideas on their own? And then they discovered there was this great Austrian who they could cite and use and that would give them credibility? Or did they get the ideas from Ludwig von Mises?" Well, we don't know for sure, we weren't able to answer that definitively. But what we were able to discover was that NAM had hired von Mises as a consultant in the 1930s. So there's a close connection. And the other person who's part of the story is Herbert Hoover, who in 1934, after he loses the presidency, publishes a book called Challenge to Liberty, which essentially puts forward this argument in the American context. So these libertarian thinkers in the United States looked to the Austrian School of Economics to help bolster the argument they are developing, and then they do something that I think is really crucial. They bring von Mises and von Hayek to the states. They pay for them to come to United States, they arrange for them to be hired, Mises at NYU, Hayek at the University of Chicago. They pay their salaries. And at the University of Chicago, they begin to fund a project called The Free Market Project, whose goal is explicitly, first of all, to produce an American version of The Road to Serfdom, and second of all, to promote what they call a blueprint for a free enterprise system in the United States with minimal government regulation. And so in the years to come, through the 50s and 60s, they fund scholars at the Chicago School who include Milton Friedman, and Milton Friedman's book, Capitalism and Freedom, ends up being the American version of The Road to Serfdom.
Alan Ware 39:25
And they're really in the kind of in the wilderness in that the US and Europe and all major economies have accepted some sort of mixed economy. There are arguments that FDR did it partly so that US didn't go fascist or communist, to save capitalism. So it's interesting that they weren't seeing that the creative destruction of another Austrian Schumpeter might be good at making some firms go away that no longer provide anything any people want and new firms, but it also can really tear apart the social fabric if it leads to a whole lot of unemployment and dissatisfaction.
Naomi Oreskes 39:59
Well, that's right. And that's where these questions get complicated because, and that's where it does begin to look as if these particular manufacturers are really just protecting their own self interest. And of course, during the New Deal, there are American businesses who do cooperate with FDR, and do see it that way. And many historians have argued that FDR saved capitalism, certainly many historians would say that when Bismarck first introduces social reforms in Germany in the late 19th century, it is consciously and deliberately to undercut socialist and communist movements that are developing in Germany at that time. So there's no question that progressive reform can stabilize a capitalist system, it can stabilize a democracy. And so the fact that these people refuse to entertain that idea and insist on this very extremist view of free markets, that that is, in my opinion, a strong argument for this being very motivated by their own self interest. But of course, they believe in self interest, and that's another part of our story. They will refer back to Adam Smith. Milton Friedman, in his Capitalism and Freedom, is constantly referring back to Adam Smith. Well, Adam Smith said this, Adam Smith said that. And I remember when I first read this, "Well, you know, who made Adam Smith God?" I mean, I don't say something is true scientifically because Newton said it, I would think I would have to invoke something that had happened since Isaac Newton, after all, Adam Smith was writing in 1776. It's kind of a long time ago. And it's a bit of a tell that economists will cite Adam Smith, as if it was some kind of proof, when, of course, it's really just a kind of conceptual framework. But it motivated us to go back and look more closely at Adam Smith. And that turned out to be revelatory as well, because when you actually read the Wealth of Nations, what you find is that Adam Smith is not the ruthless capitalist that the libertarians have made him out to be. It turns out, he actually has an extensive discussion of the need for bank regulation. He has an extensive discussion of taxation and while you do need taxes to pay for public goods like roads and bridges, and he also has a discussion of the need for minimum wages, how factory owners will pay workers as little as they can get away with, often leading to literally starvation wages, where factory workers' children are starving in the late 18th century. And he says, "And this is why workers need to gather to collective," he doesn't use the word unionization, but he says, "They have to work collectively to balance the playing field because the factory owners will always collude, and they will always do everything they can to keep wages as low as possible, so workers have to organize and join forces in order to fight back against the control and the collusion of factory owners." Who knew that Adam Smith had so many great things to say? I'm really resisting the temptation to launch immediately into the next book. But I'm kind of thinking that the next book is Adam Smith for Progressives.
Nandita Bajaj 42:40
Well, he's obviously been reduced to whatever they want him to become.
Naomi Oreskes 42:44
Right. Well, it's a caricature. And it's a caricature that has been used to foster certain interests in a way that really is quite different from what Adam Smith's work actually shows. And many scholars have said this before, but usually, when they make this argument it's by invoking Smith's other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he goes into great detail about what else you need in addition to self interest to run a society. But what I think is more amazing is that you don't even have to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments to get that argument. It's actually right there in the Wealth of Nations.
Nandita Bajaj 43:13
And who were some of the major actors and what events, beginning around the early 70s, helped push market fundamentalism into the mainstream of US politics and culture?
Naomi Oreskes 43:25
Well, there's two things that we look at closely in the book, I guess, maybe three. So the first one is Ronald Reagan. So Ronald Reagan is a key figure in the story, and that he helps to bring these ideas, which up until the 1960s were decidedly not mainstream, and were not mainstream, even in the Republican Party. I mean, we talk a bit about Dwight Eisenhower. By the 1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower was President he's accepted Social Security, he's accepted almost all of the reforms of the New Deal, historians like Gary Gerstle have referred to this as the New Deal of consensus, or the New Deal social order. Majority of Republicans and business leaders have really accepted that, okay, yeah, minimum wage, eight hour day, forty hour workweek, paid overtime. These were all reasonable compromises. But Reagan begins to change that. So one of the questions we had was, "So where did Ronald Reagan come from?" Especially because in the 1940s, Ronald Reagan was a New Deal Democrat. He was the president of a union, the Screen Actors Guild, but by the 1960s, when he runs for office, runs to be governor of California, he's completely changed his politics. He's become a Goldwater Republican, anti-union, anti-government, and he gets elected on a pro-property rights, anti-government agenda. And he starts using the term government encroachment, which many historians view is actually a cipher for minority encroachment, because a lot of the debate has to do with housing rights and anti-discrimination laws in housing. As you might imagine, all these libertarian property rights folks want to say, "Anti-discrimination laws in housing are infringement of freedom. If I own a house, I ought to be able to sell that house to anyone I want to and not sell it to anyone I don't want to." And the laws that were passed at that time said "No, actually you don't actually have the right to not sell your house to someone just because they're black or Jewish," which was rampant in California at that time. So Reagan runs for office on a anti-discrimination platform saying that it's a violation of property rights. So how does this transformation come about? It's a giant about face for him. And so what we found was that it has everything to do with the time he spent, in between Hollywood and the governor's mansion in California, he worked for the General Electric Corporation. Now the electricity industry plays a big role in our book because we show how throughout the 20th century, the electricity industry fought government regulation of electricity markets, and was heavily involved in pro-market propaganda, including a massive campaign to alter textbooks in the United States in the 1920s. So electricity is in our story right from the beginning, and it shows up again in the 1950s. GE hires Ronald Reagan to do two things. They hired him to host a television program called General Electric Theater, which some people in audiences I've spoken to are old enough to remember, and it's like, "I watched that show!" So this was the third most popular television show in America in the late 1950s. It was seen by tens of millions of Americans every week, and it presented didactic stories of people succeeding through dint of hard effort, individual initiative without help from the government, or in some cases from anyone, like one episode we write about involves an alcoholic who solves his problems by just will, by sheer individual will. And Reagan was the host. So through this work, he became extremely well known to the American people, much more well known than he had been when he was a B-list, Hollywood actor. And this really sets the stage then for him to be able to move into politics as this very known person. But in addition, he also has another job working for GE, which is as the public face for a GE propaganda program. So throughout the 1950s, GE ran a massive internal propaganda campaign to persuade GE workers, their families, and people in GE communities, that unions were bad, that the government was bad, that you should trust the captains of industry to create jobs and to make things better. And of course GE's model was, "Progress is our most important product." So we could rely on the private sector for progress in American society, both economic, social, everything. And so they launched these massive propaganda campaigns to discredit unions. They were ultimately cited by the National Labor Relations Board for violations of federal law. They had reading lists, they encouraged managers to set up reading groups in GE communities, and the reading lists were developed by GE management. They were all extreme right-wing libertarian reading. One of them was the Reader's Digest version of The Road to Serfdom. And George Nash, who's a historian of conservative America says that he believes that that's where Reagan got introduced to Friedrich von Hayek, by reading the Reader's Digest condensed version. And that matters because the condensed version is even more extreme and more polemical than the original. The original is actually a pretty nuanced book, where Hayek makes exceptions for things like Social Security, the Reader's Digest version gets rid of all the exceptions. So, and some of the books they promote are explicitly racist. So there's a book called The Road Ahead by a man named John T. Flynn, who was associated with the American Liberty League, which was a racist, pro-private property organization, closely linked to the DuPont corporation. They're all these corporate connections, it was founded by two of the DuPont brothers. And in this book, he has a discussion of racism. And he says that the reports of lynching in the American South are greatly exaggerated, and that it's a fact, a well known fact, that actually most of this is communist propaganda, it's not actually true. This is one of the books that GE is promoting to its managers and its community members. And then Reagan would go around the country to GE factories, GE communities, making speeches, meeting with schoolchildren meeting with people in GE factories, giving rubber chicken dinner talks in the evenings. And through this, he begins to cultivate the GE message, and he turns it in what comes to be known as "The Speech", a speech that basically lionizes free enterprise and individual initiative and demonizes the government or really the subtitle of our talk, to love the free market and loathe the government. And that speech becomes the kernel of the speech he gives endorsing Barry Goldwater for President United States in 1964. And really becomes the foundation of Ronald Reagan's whole political ideology.
Alan Ware 49:20
Right. And then the infrastructure for the libertarian loathing the government group gets greater power in the 70s with the Powell Memorandum.
Naomi Oreskes 49:28
Right, exactly. So then this gets going further when a group of businesses decide they really need to follow the GE model and become more aggressively involved in politics and culture. And so there's something called the Powell Memo, which we write about in the book. And again, this is something other people have written about, too, but I think they haven't quite connected the dots and shown how all these things are really closely related. So Lewis Powell had been closely associated with the US Chamber of Commerce. This is before he gets elevated to the US Supreme Court, and he writes a memo which is basically a blueprint for now expanding the GE approach across American life, and saying that business executives have to be much more aggressive in pushing forward a pro-market ideology, that in the past, business people have often given money to universities without really thinking about what those universities are doing. He said, "We have to stop that, we have to support universities that will promote free-market thinking. And the same with foundations, we have to be much more strategic." This is when the Business Roundtable gets going to really promote the business perspectives in Washington, DC. And they also begin to do a lot of work to support the Federalist Society with a conscious idea of influencing the American judiciary, again, to be much more pro-market, anti-union. A lot of this is about fighting the power of unions, who have been the most important countervailing force to this story, is the union movement. And so they do everything they can to undermine legal protections for unions and unionization, and to influence the judiciary, the courts, federal government, the state government. I mean, it's a very, very ambitious plan. And when you read it, in hindsight, it's quite frightening how many of the things they lay out as goals, they did, in fact, achieve.
Alan Ware 51:04
Right. Reagan takes the ideas lying around, which they had these think tanks he'd helped develop all through the 70s. And he was ready to go with huge tax cuts and supply side economics and trickle down. And -
Naomi Oreskes 51:17
Exactly.
Alan Ware 51:18
All of that just takes hold of the American imagination almost, culturally and politically.
Naomi Oreskes 51:24
Well, that's right. And many of these think tanks are created in the 70s and 80s. So one we've mentioned, the American Enterprise Institute, that's quite old, that goes back to the 1930s. But the vast majority of this network of think tanks, places like Heritage, Cato, George C. Marshall Institute, they all are developed in the 70s, into the 80s. And many of them are explicitly developing white papers for Ronald Reagan and other Republicans to use. So when Reagan goes and takes office, he has a whole notebook of white papers that have been provided for him by the Heritage Foundation. And as you say, a key part of this is the idea of cutting taxes on the wealthy, something NAM had been arguing for going back to the 1930s, under the rubric of supply side economics, that if we cut taxes on the rich, they will reinvest in the economy. And that will be good for everyone. So what I like to say about that is, "So that experiment was tried, that hypothesis was tested, and it failed, it failed quite miserably."
Alan Ware 52:18
And one party keeps doing it - the Republican Party.
Naomi Oreskes 52:21
Right. And again, so proving that this is not evidence based, despite the fact that it fails, they continue, and they influence Democrats, because then Democrats feel pressure to cut taxes too, because let's face it, nobody really likes paying taxes. So if you can make a case, "Oh, don't worry, you don't really need to pay these taxes for roads and bridges and hospitals and schools, the market will take care of it all." This becomes a very convenient argument to justify cutting taxes on the wealthy. But as we've said, what it does is it makes the rich richer, it makes the poor poorer.
Nandita Bajaj 52:51
Right.
Naomi Oreskes 52:51
And it leaves the roads and bridges a wreck, and bridges that fall down and, and other such things.
Alan Ware 52:57
And you mention how really the Reagan Revolution continues into the 90s with Clinton, although he's a Democrat, he's talking about the era of big government being over and the telecommunications and financial deregulation continue in a big way. So in a way, that's still part of the Reagan era, right?
Naomi Oreskes 53:16
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is, in some ways, the most important part of our story, right? Because in order for our story to be convincing, we have to persuade people that these ideas really made a difference and it wasn't just sort of a little outlier group of crazy libertarians making these cases. And so the latter third of the book really shows how this way of thinking became mainstream, and how it's taken up first by Jimmy Carter, but then in a really big way, by Bill Clinton. And I was just hearing a talk by Gary Gerstle today who has also written on related topics, and he thinks Bill Clinton was even more of a true believer in this than I necessarily had concluded, but that Clinton really came to believe that the way to improve American prosperity was by deregulating the economy, and that this would be the old rising tide - raises all ships - that he really believed this. And so we see massive deregulation in telecommunications, in finance, banking, but and again, like supply side economics, it does not work the way that theory predicts. So in telecommunication, deregulation is supposed to lead to more competition, more consumer choice, and lower prices. Oh, aviation is the big one under Carter, also trucking. But it doesn't work that way, it actually leads to the massive consolidation in telecommunications, so that now we're back into a system that is, you know, highly monopolistic or oligopolistic, with just a handful of players controlling almost the entire telecommunications market, much less consumer choice. And anyone who has streaming services knows we are paying so much more just to watch TV than we used to.
Nandita Bajaj 54:42
Right. And the government continues to lose its power with all of these monopolies.
Naomi Oreskes 54:47
Well, that's right. And this is one of the things about monopolies that I think people sometimes forget. Monopolies are doubly destructive because they destroy markets, so they destroy the very thing that capitalism does do well. Having competitive markets does lead to more choice for consumers and often does bring down the price of consumer goods and that is often a good thing. So they destroy that. And once someone has monopoly or heavy control of a market, often they raise prices, and they drive out competitors, or they buy them up. We've seen a lot of that, you know, in the tech industry, where whenever someone begins to compete in an effective way with a good product, they either destroy them, or they buy them, but often, they just buy them and they subsume them into the tech giant. But they're also incredibly bad for democracy, because now you begin to have a small number of people who have tremendous economic power, and economic power translates to political power. And one of the interesting things about our book is so much of our book is about how the lessons of history were, I don't want to say forgotten, because it's worse than that, that these people actively work to deny the lessons of history. So one of the people we write in that in the book is the jurist, Robert Bork. Most people know Bork as a failed nominee to the Supreme Court. And a lot of the discussion had to do with what he believed about whether there was or wasn't a constitutional right to privacy. But actually, I think the most damaging thing that Bork did wasn't that, at least at that time, he hadn't persuaded people, it's true in fact, most people thought that argument was ridiculous. But it was his arguments against antitrust enforcement, which have been deeply, deeply influential in American jurisprudence. So he argued that monopolies can be good. It's a kind of Darwinian argument, a sort of social Darwinism applied to capitalism, that a monopoly is simply the company that has won in the struggle for survival, and the other species have gone extinct because they couldn't compete. And therefore this means that these are actually the best companies, the fittest companies, and therefore they must be providing the consumer with something good, otherwise, they wouldn't have succeeded. Wow, that is so counterfactual that even repeating it threatens to blow my brain apart. And so he introduces something, and this is another example of introducing something out of whole cloth, he introduces what he calls the consumer welfare standard, and argues that actually monopolies can be good. But he also does something else really pernicious. He rewrites history to say that the Sherman Antitrust Act was about what was good for consumers. So therefore, if we can make an argument that monopolies actually are good for consumers, then we don't have to enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act. Well, that is completely dishonest, it is a complete misrepresentation of history. Because if you actually go back and read the Sherman Antitrust Act and the senatorial debates about it, which we did for this book, and if you read what John Sherman himself said about this law, he said that one of the reasons monopolies were so pernicious is the way economic power turns into political power.
Nandita Bajaj 57:36
Right.
Naomi Oreskes 57:37
And that these captains of industry, these robber barons, they weren't just strangling the marketplace. They were strangling American democracy. And you had to stop that if you wanted democracy to be able to continue. And boy, are we seeing that in spades today, the way in which, especially after Citizens United, billionaires can just buy almost unlimited amounts of political influence almost unlimited amounts of influence in the media, domain buying. I mean, look at Elon Musk buying Twitter, right? Twitter was a place that, before Elon Musk, a lot of different ideas were flourishing. And I don't know about you, my Twitter feed since Musk took over is filled now with disinformation stuff that I did not see before.
Nandita Bajaj 58:14
Including that the biggest issue of our time is population collapse.
Naomi Oreskes 58:18
Yeah, right. There you go. Right. Circle back to population. Exactly.
Nandita Bajaj 58:23
Okay, so one of the things you and your co-author write at the end of the book is that our most consequential problems have arisen, not because of too much government, but because of too little. Government is not the solution to all of our problems, but it is the solution to many of our biggest ones. Why do you think the government is so valuable in solving our biggest problems? And maybe you can give a few examples.
Naomi Oreskes 58:47
Well, I think that history shows it. We do know that markets can be quite effective at doing certain kinds of things, but we also know they're quite ineffective at others. And as I said before, I mean, Adam Smith recognized this in 1776, that markets aren't very good at providing for public goods, roads, bridges, anything that's shared, a park, a national park, recreational facility. In general, markets don't do a good job at that. And they certainly do an appallingly bad job at protecting and preserving resources for the future. Because market-based economies are focused so much on what you can buy and sell in the marketplace today, this year, this quarter, etc. So what is the other important part of life? I mean, if we live in a world, and if we bring back the notion of not just economics, but political economy, which is what Adam Smith understood himself to be contributing to, you know, that well, in addition to markets, you have governance. And governance functions on many levels, it could be the federal government, could be state and local government, it could be corporate governance, institutional governance, but all institutions have some forms of governance because you need rules of the road. You need ways of deciding how we're going to operate, what's fair, what's not fair, what's going to be permitted, what's not permitted, and that whole essential conversation about the role of governments has, to my mind, been really squashed by forty years of market fundamentalist thinking.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:04
Right.
Alan Ware 1:00:05
And government becomes the Galbraith, "The Countervailing Power". It's really the only major countervailing power, if the market is allowed to run free, it will create enormous inequalities and abuses of power and short-term thinking and everything that you mentioned there.
Naomi Oreskes 1:00:21
Right. And we've had three hundred years of history to prove that. You know, I came to this whole issue through the problem of climate change, which Nick Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, has called the largest and most wide ranging market failure in history. So economists know the market failure is a real thing. It's not like it was only just discovered with climate change. And yet, there's been a kind of denial about its significance, you know, Milton Friedman liked to call market failure the external costs, he used to like to call them neighborhood effects, which makes them sound small and friendly. Right?
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:52
Right.
Naomi Oreskes 1:00:52
But market failures have been with us as long as they've been markets. And how do you remedy a market failure? Well, by definition, the market failure is a place where the market didn't self correct. And so you need an external force. And in most cases, that's governance. And as I said, it could be corporate governance, it doesn't necessarily have to be political governance, but in history, it typically has been political governance.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:13
And what have you discovered about the correlation between a country having a more free market orientation and its citizens wellbeing?
Naomi Oreskes 1:01:20
Well, yeah, so towards the end of the book, we talked about this. And so being a scientist by training, I always think the proof of any hypothesis is in the evidence, it's in the data. And what's really interesting is that if you look at any of the major indices that attempt to measure happiness, what we find is people are not happiest in the countries that have the most economic freedom, as these groups we've been discussing would call it, people are actually happiest in the European social democracies that have strong mixed economies, that are basically structured as market-based economies, but have strong social safety nets to make up for those areas that markets don't do well. And to me, that's the proof of the pudding. And those countries did not become communist: France, Germany, Italy, you know, the United Kingdom. These are all still liberal democracies, they are arguably, in some cases, healthier democracies than the United States. Although again, I mean, we could argue about that. But what's very clear is that by and large, their people are, and not just a little bit happier than Americans, but a lot happier than Americans.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:19
Absolutely.
Alan Ware 1:02:20
Yeah. It's interesting how much Americans underestimate the level of wealth inequality. I was looking at a Dan Ariely TED Talk, and he talked about how in the US, the top 20% own 85% of the nation's wealth. People thought they owned fifty-nine, and their ideal of what the top twenty should own is thirty-two.
Naomi Oreskes 1:02:38
Wow. So that shows that Americans are not against people being rewarded for hard work. The question is how much? So if 20% are entitled to 30%, you know, it's okay. We'll give a little something for all that hard work, but not everything, right?
Alan Ware 1:02:52
Yeah. That is encouraging. In your book, Why Trust Science, you emphasize the fact that science is based on hard evidence, as truth is verified by a community of scientists who committed to the truth. But as you note, science is also a social process that has some of the downsides of any social process. And the questions that get asked by scientists are often governed by those social processes internal to the scientific community and the broader culture. Do you have any thoughts on why scientists are less likely to research ecological overshoot and human overpopulation compared to what we wish they would?
Naomi Oreskes 1:03:24
Well, I think there's a tremendous amount of research being done on this now because it is such an important question and because you can't not see it. But we certainly know there's a lot of pushback from the private sector who are consciously and deliberately trying to fund projects that would seem to suggest we don't have to worry about planetary limits, like the enormous amounts of money that are flowing into universities from the fossil fuel industry to study direct air capture of carbon dioxide, for example. I mean, this is something that's not intrinsically bad. You know, it's like what Gandhi said about Western civilization, it would be a good idea. It's not a realistic solution to the climate crisis in the short run, but the fossil fuel industry is trying to construct this as a solution to the climate crisis. It gets back to our original discussion about cornucopianism, that we can just continue to use fossil fuels, have this tremendously consumptive lifestyle with a kind of reckless disregard for planetary limits, because don't worry, technology will solve the problem. And of course, technology does solve a lot of problems. I'm not anti-technology. You know, I always point out, I'm talking to you today on a laptop computer. This is a very helpful and useful piece of technology. My phone is sitting right here, this is a good piece of technology, too. And I have this very nice waterbottle. So I'm not a Luddite because there'll be people out there who will be immediately prepared to say I'm a Luddite, Luddite Malthusian. Right?
Nandita Bajaj 1:04:38
Right.
Naomi Oreskes 1:04:40
Right. But the point is, technology can solve many of our problems, but it can't solve all of them. And especially not when we're talking about planetary limits. Not when we're talking about problems that were created by consumption. It's extremely unlikely to think that we can solve, well, this is what I said in my population piece, so to bring us back to that, the idea that we can solve the problem of population with more population? There's just like a basic logical flaw there.
Nandita Bajaj 1:05:03
Yeah, right. Yes. That seems like a really nice place to end the conversation. This was such a fabulous and enlightening discussion. Thank you so much for your time. It's definitely heartening to us to have a sustainable population ally like you. You're one of a rare group of people who's dug so deep to expose this growth obsessed economic thinking that is putting profits above the health and wellbeing of people on the planet. So it is such an honor to have you here today with us. Thank you very much.
Naomi Oreskes 1:05:34
Thanks. It's been my pleasure.
Alan Ware 1:05:35
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. And if you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also, to help expand our listenership, please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:06:02
And until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts and helping us all shrink toward abundance.