Joe Rogan - The End of Third World Countries?

The history of the human race is so weird in terms of the rise and fall of these civilizations and cultures that we're always, at least I am, always looking at like, how long is this going to last? Like, how long is this one particular nation going to keep it together? I mean, if you look at how many different countries have been around, that just, how many, you know, dominant cultures, Rome, for instance, like, just now it's just Italy. It's just normal. You know, it's like a normal European country. It used to be this conquering nation. Like, how long can we kind of keep this thing up? And what are your thoughts on the future of just even the idea of nations? It seems like our boundaries and our borders, the way we have online, this ability to communicate with people all over the place, everywhere, it seems to me to lessen the necessary, or the need rather, for borders and for these walls that we're now literally and figuratively talking about putting up. Yeah, I think there's going to be a kind of balance. I mean, an interesting thing about nation states now is that they are, there's a sense in which they're treated as immortal. Whereas, as you mentioned, for most of history, they were conquering emperors and nations were wiped off the map and engulfed and conquered. And now you look at a map of the world, and it's actually not that different from what it was 70 years ago. I mean, there are colonies that achieved independence. There are some big states like Soviet Union that broke, fragmented. But the borders in between the Soviet republics are now borders between nation states. And no nation has gone out of existence through conquest since 1945, at least internationally recognized state by the UN. So there's this norm, even though the borders are often crazy, and there are arbitrary lines drawn on a map. But one of the reasons that, again, this is counterintuitive, that wars have gone down and deaths in wars have gone down, is that borders are now treated as sacrosanct by the kind of international community. About 100% of the time, you had Russia annexing Crimea. But those are exceptions. By and large, unlike, say, in the past, in the 19th century, where the US had an unpaid debt from Mexico, so it conquered Texas and Colorado and Nevada and California, that doesn't happen anymore. And so the borders have kind of been grandfathered in, and it's one of the reasons why the world has been more stable in terms of the map. On the other hand, as you mentioned, there's another sense in which we have this global community that transcends borders. We have things like the European Union. We have the United Nations. We have trade agreements like NAFTA, which try to get simultaneously the grandfathered borders, but this extra layer of cooperation that transcends the borders. And we need them more and more, despite the fact that our current president is pushing back against the global community. But because there are problems that are global, migration, terrorism, climate, pollution, rogue states, and the fact that people, even if you grew up in France and you consider yourself a French citizen, you want to be able to spend a summer in Italy or in England or in Belgium, if that's where there's a good job. And there's a desire among people to be able to move to wherever the opportunities are best. So there's going to be some kind of compromise, I think, between keeping the nation-state borders just so you don't have constant wars of conquest and border disputes, but allowing the world and allowing the people of the world to take advantage of a true global community. Yeah, I feel like that's one of the things that people were most upset about Brexit, was that this is, even though the people that were pro-Brexit felt like this was in the interest of the UK and the interest of England to be separate from all this because they were doing better and because they didn't want all the negative possibilities from all these other places coming into their environment. But what I think that people, what they didn't like about it was the idea that this is a regressive move and that the progressive move is that we would all move towards this idea of a global community, of this entire world being free and connected. And we've talked about some of the problems that Paris has with immigration. We showed some of the videos of these immigrants that had just littered all over the street and taking this place apart. And we were looking at it and going, man, that is a real tragedy. But what it represents is a bunch of people that really don't have anything. Like the real tragedy is that these people live like this. The real tragedy is not that they've done it to Paris. The real tragedy is that these people exist at all and that they moved to Paris looking for a better life and now they're stuck in the situation where there's not a lot of sanitation and the garbage is all over the place, they're littering everywhere. I wonder if we ever will have a world where there isn't a place where you can go and ship a factory and pay people a dollar an hour because they don't need a dollar an hour because it's just like living in Los Angeles or just like living in Phoenix. Like you would never be able to pay someone a dollar an hour because there's too much opportunity that the world has caught up and surpassed it. Yeah, I mean, there are a number of really complicated issues that they, you know, mobility is in general a good thing and countries do well when they welcome in immigrants, but not in the short term. Yeah, not too many too fast, faster than they can be assimilated and integrated into the new country. So just opening the doors probably is not a good idea. No country really does that, but building the wall is a terrible idea too. And of course the best way to prevent massive amounts of migration is to make life better in the countries of origin. That is happening slowly and unevenly, but it's been noted that even in the United States and Mexico more people are going, or the same number of people are doing the reverse migration from the U.S. back to Mexico now that the economy of Mexico is so much better than the next 25 years. My own parents. Okay, yeah. Yeah, my parents live in Mexico. Okay, there you go. Yeah. And there is a, hard to detect, but there is a huge improvement in the standard of living in what used to be called the third world, the developing world, where if you look at the cutoff for extreme poverty, it's kind of defined somewhat arbitrarily as $1.90 per person per day, kind of the bare, bare minimum to feed your family. It's down now from 50% a few decades ago to 10% now, and the United Nations has set the goal of bringing it to zero by the year 2030. And what is causing that? What's causing the change? So a lot of it is globalization, that even though that's kind of a villain in many people's eyes, but when you have a huge global market and the introduction of factories and industrialization in China, in India, in Bangladesh, sometimes the conditions are grim, but the conditions, being a peasant in the rice paddies was even grimmer. And when you have people integrated to the economy selling their products on a world age, they can get richer. And so a lot, also better policies. We have governments that are no longer communist or like really heavy-handed forms of socialism where everything is defined by the bureaucrats and you need 50 licenses to do anything and you have a little bit more economic flexibility. That tends to make countries richer. It doesn't mean that you could do away with regulations on workplace safety and environment. And as countries get richer, they tend to be more protective of their workers and of the environment. Right. And leaders that think of their mandate as, how do I get my country to be richer? In the most dramatic case was China, where Mao had these hairbrained schemes of huge collective farms and people smelting iron in their backyards and anything that occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would force on hundreds of millions of people and it caused these massive famines. Then Deng Xiaoping took over and he said, getting rich is good. And he said, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice, it's a good cat. So much more pragmatic, much more concerned with the welfare of their citizens. When you have leaders who have that mindset, then their country can get wealthier and their citizens better off. Now, but are you concerned? I mean, I agree with you that it probably is one of the reasons why these people are experiencing this greater quality of life is because of globalization, because of these factors moving in. But they're living lives that are very different and maybe perhaps it's by our standards that their lives are better. That maybe if these indigenous people were living this sort of subsistence lifestyle, that even though on paper there would be existing and extreme poverty, but if they're perhaps like living in the jungle or somewhere along those lines where you have access to all these natural resources, that even though they'd be living in extreme poverty, they'd be living maybe perhaps even a better life by just eating the fish and eating the plants and hunting and fishing and doing what they had normally done for thousands and thousands of years, rather than making a dollar an hour in a Nike factory. Right. And it's certainly true that of indigenous peoples who are living in hunter and horticultural lifestyles that there are real crimes in displacing them, often not so much by factories, but by miners and loggers. But they're a very tiny fraction of the world's population, tragically. The vast majority of poor people are peasants, not horticulturalists. And they're agricultural laborers. And for them, just based on their own choices, often the factory life is an improvement. It's an improvement not just because they're not in the fields knee-deep in muck, pulling up seedlings and getting bitten by disease-carrying bugs. But for women, being able to move from a village to a city often means liberation, that they can start a business, send their kids to school, be out from under the thumbs of their husbands and the husband's family. There can be a liberation, just as what our ancestors did when they left the farms for cities 150 years ago. So this is not to say there isn't exploitation and cruelty, which ought to be opposed, and in the case of native peoples, often criminal displacements. But on the whole, globalization has led to this escape from grinding poverty for literally hundreds of millions of people. So even when they move these factories into these places and charge or pay them a dollar an hour, rather, it's still a dollar more an hour than they would have gotten if the factory had been there. In many cases, that's true, which is not to say there isn't exploitation. But we look at our answer. My grandparents worked in a clothing factory when they emigrated from Poland to Canada, and it often is a route of upward mobility. Yeah, it's hard for us to accept that or even think about it that way because it would say, well, why, how come they don't have to pay these Mexican folks minimum wage, just like they do in America? Like, well, why don't they have the same sort of setup that we do here? Just seems cruel. It does. And there's no doubt there is cruelty. But the relevant comparison is not so much the difference between working in a factory there and working in an office in Berkeley or Manhattan. It's the difference between working in a factory there and laboring in the fields there. And the people often, given that choice, they line up to the factory jobs. Do you anticipate a time where there is no third world and there is no, like, a massive economic disparity? It's conceivable. It's always off, but it's happened in huge parts of the world. I mean, we forget that places like South Korea, now, you know, this rich upper-middle-class society, not so long ago, that was the third world. I mean, they were hungry. The children died young. A lot of them living in squalor. And that was true in, certainly, in China, lots of parts of China now that are pretty much middle class that were squalid not so long ago. Singapore. I have an anecdote in the book, in Enlightenment Now, of my ex-mother-in-law who grew up in Singapore. And she remembers a childhood meal in which her family split one egg four ways. That was back in the 1940s. Oh, my goodness. And Singapore is now one of the world's richest countries. So it can happen. It is happening. The most remote, poorest parts of the world are going to be the hardest to bring up to middle-class standards, like, you know, Congo, like Haiti, like Afghanistan. But in large parts of the world, there's been a huge increase in the standard of living.