Then at 10 00 p. M. Eastern time, on book tvs after words program, capital Founding Partner discusses income inequality with the former chair of the council of economic advisers during the bush administration. We wrap up in prime time at 11 00 p. M. Chuck collins will be the author hes the greatgrandson of meatpacker oscar meyer and he talks about wealth inequality and his decision to give away much of his inheritance. Of morning welcome to the Cato Institute. I am a senior policy analyst and also editor of Human Progress which is an educational website that tries to put together as many statistics as human wellbeing as possible in order to present to our users and our more real picture of the world than the headlines would suggest thinking about the headlines, it is perhaps an understatement to say that we live in an era of great pessimism. This pessimism is not distributed evenly across the world. It is felt very acutely in many western democracies including ours here in the United States. Some three quarters of americans believe that the United States is going in the wrong direction. The choices that the electorate will be presented with come november exaggerate, rather than suit the National Feeling of impending doom. Americans feel poor even though our gdp. Capita has never been higher. We feel less safe even though International Conflict have almost disappeared and threats from terrorism are extremely rare. Overall Life Expectancy is at an alltime high. Progress is being made in curing cancer, alzheimers and hivaids globally, the the speed of improvements in human wellbeing is staggering. Fuel embrace capitalism. Chinese income has grown by 900 in my lifetime. During that time, indian Life Expectancy rose by a third from 52 years 68 years. If for all the good news, it is pervasive doom and pessimism is widespread, the gap between the perception is not new. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached its best days. On what principle is it that we see nothing but improvement behind us yet we expect nothing but deterioration i had of us. Luckily, a small but merry group of optimists have been trying to cheer us up. They include the late julian simon, the Cato Institute, Charles Kenny and others and our two speakers today. Johan is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and focuses on globalization, entrepreneurship and double liberty. Is the author and editor of several books, books exploring libertarian ideas and how americas infatuation with Home Ownership and easy money create the economy crisis. His book, global capitalism which was published in 2001 was then published in 20 different countries. He was previously at the swedish think tank in 2003 and 2005. [inaudible] he received his masters degree from chacon university and today he is here to present his new book and talk about it. Its called progress, ten reasons to look forward to the future. Please help me welcome him. [applause] thank you and thank you for keeping Human Progress at work and my daily dose. [inaudible] im happen to happy to have him joining me here on stage. He explains to me once, and i think he writes about this in his latest book that when he wrote a book on Human Progress, his agent said look, this book will make us some money, but if you had written a book outlining why the world will end very shortly, then we would both be richmond. So why do you write a book on progress . With all the trouble in the world, why do i write a book about reasons to look forward to the future. Three reasons. One, because it happens. Its one of the most important things that ever happened to mankind. Two, no one believes me when i tell them thats the case, and three, its dangerous that they dont. Pessimism is a powerful political force. Let me start with what happened and how it happens. This is the gdp. Capita around the world over the last 2000 years. We can see that not much happened. Until the early 19th century when suddenly we saw an explosion of growth. In 1820, then ounce that there wasnt much wealth around in the world. Even the richest countries suffered from desperate poverty. If we had shared all the wealth that existed, the average person around the world would have a gdp. Capita lower than the. Capita of mozambique. It made this possible. The eradication of poverty around the world over the last 200 years. 200 years ago, 19 of, 19 of the World Population lived in extreme poverty, around less than 2. Day of consumption adjusted for inflation, and budgeting. Today, its less than 10 . Since 1990, this has accelerated. In 1990, 7 of the World Population lived in extreme poverty. Today its around 9 . That means for for the first time in world history, the absolute number of poor people has been reduced as well. For the First Time Since the 1800s, we have seen fewer people him a we have fewer People Living in extreme poverty today than in 1800 spread that might not sound like much progress, but if you consider the broken World Population, it is tremendous progress. In 1800 theyre only 60 Million People around the world who did not live in extreme poverty. Today, ask. 5 billion people do. This is, as i pointed out accelerated since 1990. Over that time the population grew by around 2 billion people and yet the absolute number of extremely poor was reduced by 1. 25 billion people which means every minute that we talk about the subject, another 100 people rise out of extreme poverty. Mankind has never ever seen that kind of progress. Here is another graph that summarizes the changes that have taken place over the last few hundred years. Life expectancy. That continues to climb. It means we have done something right when it comes to health, nutrition and lifestyle. In 1900s, the average Life Expectancy around the world was 31 years. Today, amazingly, it is 71 years in the year 1800, no country, nowhere had a Life Expectancy higher than 40 years. Today, there is not a single country anywhere with a Life Expectancy shorter than 40. This continues every day around the world, not for for every group. There are always outliers but Life Expectancy continues nonetheless. The country with best practice, has increased Life Expectancy by three months every year for the past 140 years. That continues. We can celebrate every birthday by just approaching death by nine months rather than one year this because of the reduction in size mythology in many subsaharan african countries. This has resulted in the largest increase of Life Expectancy. Some places have increased it by ten years over the past ten years. That means collectively you can say that every person got ten years older but none of them approached death by a single day those new years are also good years. As they reviewed the literature thats pointed out, present evidence suggests that people are not only living longer than they did previously, but also they are living longer with less disability. All those dates are quite impressive over the past 200 years, years, but whats even more impressive in the last few years, in the last 25 years, this is a summary graph over hunger, property, and the six leading pollutants in britain. I use britain because it was originally published there, but if we had had the United States there, it would have been even more impressive. You can see all those things indexed so that 100 is the level in 1990 has been. [inaudible] when it comes to wealth, we created as much increase in gdp. Capita in the past 30 years as we have in the 30,000 years before. And yet, this does not come across as good news to everybody in the western world, in western europe and in the United States, a lot of people look at these data and think that they have lost out, at least relatively, they are the losers of globalization. Something strange happened in the years since i wrote the book in 2003i kind of wrote the same book about Human Progress and free markets and free trade could benefit others. At that time, the proponents were the and take Globalization Movement who thought that free trade, multinational companies, investments, market capitalism, that might benefit us, the rich in the richest countries but there would be losers, poor people in poor countries who would be exploited would see their life and Living Standards deteriorate. I think its fair to say that these 13 years have proved them wrong. It was a tremendous boom to their Living Standards and a lot of people expect that. Then they say they set oh, we were wrong thinking they would lose out from capitalism. They won big time which must mean that we are the losers in rich countries but they still believe that the economy and the World Economy is a game in which people can only gain if someone else loses. A kind of preadam smith view of the economy where trade does not benefit both parties to the agreement. Thats a very dangerous assumption that leads to a search for a scapegoat. This is a graph that you might scene, a socalled elephant graph of average. Capita and Household Income of each group around the world. Between 1988 and 2008. If they. [inaudible] it looks a bit like an elephant. You can see the poor in the world have increased dramatically over the past 25 years by 40 80 . You also see the trunk as raised because the superrich in the world, the 1 for the 2 have also benefited tremendously. Look at what is the middle class in europe. People who didnt see any kind of Income Growth over the aeros 20 years. That was the graph that was presented around the world, the graph that explains globalization and the losers of globalization. Those who vote for donald trump or Bernie Sanders. It is a powerful graph but its wrong it was presented recently by the foundation and this is a combination that people move through these percentiles, countries shift, population Growth Growth in some places but not others means that the percentile is not the same people. It used to be the case in 1988. For three reasons. First, the countries in this data shifted dramatically. There wasnt data for a lot of these countries but there were in 2008. Countries like vietnam, congo, russia were added. That lowers the Income Growth in every percentile basically because you can add countries. You can see the old elephant graph is the blue one, the yellow dotted line is the one if we keep the countries in the sample constant over these years. Then you can see that the western middle class increased their Income Growth from 0 to 10 . The red line compensates for Something Else that population growth was bigger in poor countries than in rich countries which means that a lot of people that they took a larger percentile in asia pushed the western middle class from the lower percentile into the higher one so what used to be the 80th and 90th percentile of western middle class people were replaced by the richest people in china. They are still poor, some 60 as rich as the western middle class which means it looks like Income Growth is coming down in those areas as well, but thats more an allusion that comes from population growth. If you keep population growth, if you pretend that the population is stable over these years, the elephant graph shifts to the redline instead and then its not 0 Income Growth, its a 25 Income Growth. But then, Something Else interesting happens there are a few countries that stagnated they made more progress after 2008 but thats not relevant for this graph which only goes to 2008. They dont they dont live in Eastern Europe or japan. They just for that as well and look at a new version. You can see a constant population we have the redline instead where the percentile that we talk about increased income by 40 over these 20 years. We dont have to bother about the yellow one. There has been an increase in incomes in western countries for western middle classes as well, but i also have to point out thats not the most important thing. The most important thing is not what you have in your wallet, but the purchasing power and the technology at your disposal. Thats much more important than income. Weve seen progress in other areas. Cleaner air, with seen more than half the leading pollutants that affects your lungs. Crime rate, homicide rate has been cut in half including Better Technology and another ten years of Life Expectancy. Those are the loop losers of globalization, that we need to reconsider what we mean by loser what is progress . What does it mean . To me, it means that we can do more things today than we could before. We know more things, we are able to create more things. As a great thinker, progress is not made by early risers, its made by lazy man looking for easier ways to do things. We can solve more problems, we can deal with more of our problems, we can satisfy more of our ambition and more of our demands. We do that by exploring and thereby finding better knowledge about the way things work in producing new innovations in technology, artificial fertilizers and machines that make us more productive, but its not just that we explore and experiment, but its also that we change the result of this. Trade, communication, movements over borders which means we can use knowledge that we do not have ourselves. That means we need freedom, freedom to think, freaking to be innovative, freedom to implement your ideas and freedom to trade across borders. We need it. Its no coincidence that this began to happen in Northern Europe and China Vietnam after they began to open up their economies. More people than ever and now contribute to this progress because they have access to more knowledge than ever and they are freer to experiment with those ideas and exchange it with other people. Human being, the human brain is the ultimate resource. That is also something that is reproducible. The human brain is a beautiful thing that happens between consenting adults. The problem is, almost no one believes it. Lets go back to this graph about Human Progress since 1990 and all all of those areas and all of those dimensions. I posted this on twitter a few weeks ago to tell the world, look, this is the world in one graph. Wire we complaining . This is what happens to the world did one of the first responses i got was this from a british woman who retweeted this and said oh my god, this reflects my hell anna hancock position. She read it upside down. She thought Child Mortality had doubled them pollution and illiteracy had doubled around the world. I asked her, how did you get that impression and she responded i do pay close attention to the news and to the media. I follow what happened in the world and i read about the floods in the war and the famine and thats true. That is something that happens, but it also means she misses out on the great trend around the world. And so, all the gallup show that people are pessimists. X of americans think the world is becoming a better place. More people believe in ghosts than ufo and progress. Global poverty had doubled or remain the same. Only 5 of americans. [inaudible] post said that it was stable or had doubled. You cannot call this ignorance if you cant see a random choice we must have inaccurate assumptions about the world based on some misleading or outdated information about the world. As this british woman, most people get it from the media, from the headlines, from from the breaking news. I picked this illustration from a newspaper, i love that headline because it says total chaos everywhere. Thousands of people were stuck because of this total chaos everywhere. An airplane accident is not is news. Airplanes taking off is not. Weve seen flights increase tenfold and yet accidents have not. Thats not news, that statistics if there were news about flights landing safely it would mean it was a strange occurrence to be news. The problem is, when we only hear about those accidents and those disasters, that we think this is the only thing that goes on in the world. Tens of thousands of people in Northern Nigeria are now threatened by chronic undernourishment and famine. Thats correct. That happens and we need to know about that, but i have never read a story about the fact that 8 million nigerians were liberated for chronic undernourishment over the past 25 years because thats not the kind of shocking instantaneous thing that makes the news. Its not really about the media or the journalists that bad news sells. When the media is not there, we actually invent stories and rumors that are so it sounds like we are to blame. It doesnt sell good news. We need something dramatic and shocking to sell the news. I think this is because we are genetically predisposed to Pay Attention to bad things. Bad is stronger than good because the bad things could be a threat to our survival. Our forefathers who were a bit worried and didnt relax and looked anxiously toward the horizons, they