Talking Big Ideas.
“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
~ G.K. Chesterton
Maryrose was on the First Principles Pod to chat about entrepreneurship. If you like podcasts, do check it out.
I’ve had a few people express interest in my wager on our future, but no one has accepted yet. I’m honored Steven Pinker promoted it on X, along with an essay I wrote for the Mercatus Center’s Discourse magazine.
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You’ve assuredly heard about Brian Thompson’s murder.
On Wednesday, the UnitedHealthcare CEO was gunned down in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan. An Ivy League professor and numerous journalists responded by celebrating the murder.
I have no expertise to weigh in on the complexities and dysfunctions of our current healthcare system, but given the unexpected outrage towards the CEO – and by proxy the entire system – I would like to share with you an experience my family had this summer.
To quote at length from my recent essay in Discourse:
My wife, Maryrose, gave birth to our first child this summer. The experience was amazing – and absolutely terrifying.
Three weeks before our due date, Maryrose discovered she had a rare, life-threatening condition. We live in rural Colorado and had to get to a specific hospital in Denver right away.
We were life-flighted in a small airplane together. Maryrose was strapped to a stretcher as we flew across the Rocky Mountains in silence. My heart sank as I asked myself, “Are my wife and son going to survive?”
We arrived at the hospital and met with a team of world-class medical experts. The only cure for Maryrose’s condition was to deliver the baby. She was induced and, while confined to a bed, connected to tubes and closely monitored, labored until our son was born.
He arrived healthy. We cried and celebrated. We named him Pearson Douglass: Pearson is a family name, and Douglass is in honor of the civil rights leader Frederick Douglass.
Shortly after delivery, Maryrose had more complications. She was wheeled to the operating room and received multiple blood transfusions. I held my newborn as well as my breath, waiting in terror for Maryrose to return. Thankfully, she came back two hours later, exhausted but healthy.
That night, lying awake, I thought about how grateful I am for everyone who helped us. Our ordeal reminded me of a classic essay by the philosopher Leonard Read, who explained how countless people work together to make the various things we enjoy in our modern world.
The materials for a simple pencil, he explains, come from places spread across the planet: China, Oregon, Sri Lanka and more. Lumberjacks, mill workers and truck drivers are all involved, and they use tools that many other people built. Add in the roads, trains, ships and communications systems—and all the people who built those—and we see thousands or perhaps even millions of people working together to make a pencil.
This same truth applies to most things humans build, from rocket ships to the plastic bags you use to pick up dog poop. They’re all the products of a mind-boggling network of human cooperation.
I think of the doctors and nurses at our son’s delivery. The machines and medicines they used—and all the innovators, philanthropists and scientists who helped make them. The pilot who flew us to Denver, and the craftsmen, engineers and metal workers who built the plane. And so on.
Maryrose and Pearson are alive and healthy today because a vast network of people cooperated across time and space to save them. Virtually all our ancestors throughout history who were in my wife’s situation died, and so did their babies. But today, nearly all of them survive.
I encourage you to read the full essay. The point I want to make here is that, despite all the frustrations we have with our healthcare system, we’ve made tremendous progress in the United States and around the world.
For example, today about 6 moms die for every 100,000 births. Just a few generations ago it was 800 moms:
As remarkable as this progress is, child mortality rates are even more impressive. For the vast majority of human history, half of all children died.
Half.
That’s a horrifying reality. Today we’re down to 4% globally – and well below 1% in the United States. As a new father, I embrace this progress with profound gratitude.
I don’t doubt countless people have serious and warranted frustrations with the healthcare system in our country. But when I read a popular journalist writing “we want these executives dead” in response to Thompson’s murder, I can’t help but continue contrasting this moment with long-term data trends.
Global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, democracy, literacy rates, and basic education have all skyrocketed in the past century, while extreme poverty, violent deaths, and famine deaths have all plummeted worldwide.
And since just 1990, more than a billion people have escaped extreme poverty:
The truth is, we’ve done a damn good job working together to make life better! That spans governments, corporations, non-profits, volunteers, and people from every ethnicity, ideological makeup, and walk of life – including CEOs.
While I certainly don’t condone the celebration of anyone’s murder, I understand it’s natural to feel angry at “elites” in government and corporate America. It’s also natural to hear about a horrible crime in the news and think that the world is getting worse, and that humans in general are violent and bad.
The truth is, very few people die from violence today. In fact, the world is so safe we are far more likely to die by our own hand than someone else’s:
It’s amazing how peaceful humans are. There are eight million people in New York City right now. Imagine if that was any other species. Eight million gorillas or bears or wolves. The pure violence that would ensue!
As the author Matt Ridley writes in The Rational Optimist: “No other species of ape can encounter strangers without trying to kill them.” Other primates cooperate within their families and tribes, but none cooperate across tribes.
Neither do dolphins, whales, or any other sea creature. Bees, ants, and various insects cooperate incredibly well within their colonies, but none cooperate across colonies.
The secret to our success, according to anthropologist Joseph Henrich, is our ability to cooperate on a large scale. We work together better than any species, sharing our ideas, skills and tools with other humans across the globe and throughout time. This creates a growing “collective brain” we all can use to solve problems and build a better world.
The violence we saw this week in Thompson’s murder isn’t unique to humans. The agitation we saw in the privileged professor / journalist camp isn’t unique to humans. Mammals often exhibit violence and agitation.
What makes us unique is our ability to transcend violence and agitation – and tribal boundaries – to work together peacefully. Humans are, hands down, the best cooperators on the planet. And the more we cooperate, the more progress we make.
We’ve already worked together to build massive electron smashers, quantum computers, and telescopes peering back to the dawn of creation. We’ve eradicated smallpox, mapped our genome, explored the depths of the ocean, harnessed clean nuclear energy, walked on the moon, and work together internationally to conduct science experiments on a station we built in outer space:
And when it comes to the environment, we’ve decoupled economic growth from carbon emissions, expanded our woodlands, cleaned up our oceans and rivers, restored the Great Barrier Reef, and fixed a giant hole in the ozone layer!
What we rarely notice is that the everyday objects surrounding us are also mind-boggling manifestations of global teamwork. From our bathroom sink and our bedsheets to the floors beneath our feet, from the furniture we sit on to the foods we eat – look around now at everything you see – products of countless humans cooperating.
I encourage you to pick one seemingly banal item near you right now and ask Chat GPT to give it the “Leonard Read” treatment:
PROMPT: Hey Chat, please describe my salt shaker the way Leonard Read described a pencil in his classic essay. Use less than 75 words.
CHAT GPT: I did not emerge from a single plan or inventor. I owe my form to distant miners who wrested salt crystals from hidden caverns, to metalworkers shaping my lid, to glassblowers spinning molten sand into smooth clarity, to sailors hauling raw materials across oceans, and to farmers who fueled those laborers with food. Each played their silent role without ever knowing me fully. Yet here I stand now, a quiet testament to countless, unseen collaborators.
We are surrounded by wonders brought to life through human cooperation. We are the sole species on this planet able to work together peacefully across vast stretches of space and time to solve problems and build a better world.
It’s what makes us human.
