Do People Need Protection From Themselves? | Clips | Dad Saves America

0:00 - I think one of the problems, is that people have been brought up to think that the world is run by somebody. They think that somebody's in charge, be it the government, or be it the civil servants, or officials or something. The world wouldn't work without people telling the world to work, okay? And they assume that's true of absolutely everything. And therefore, if you're gonna defeat a pandemic, you have to tell people what to do. Now, the way to answer that is to use Frederic Bastiat's example of how Paris got fed every day.

0:33 I use the example of London. There are 10 million people eat lunch in London every day. They each choose what they're gonna eat at the last minute, frankly, they go into a restaurant, or they go to a cafe or they go to a sandwich shop and say, I'll have one of those. And how on earth do we make sure that the right quantity of the right type of food is available in the right place at the right time for those 10 million people?

0:57 I mean it's an unbelievably difficult problem, isn't it? Who is the guy in charge of this? The London lunch commissioner? He's a brilliant person. I've met him. He's unbelievably clever. And, - The lunch Szar. - He's got a really big computer - The Earl of sandwich. (laughing) - There is a guy called the Earl of Sandwich, actually. And of course, the point is, it's not a person it's a market. It's a negotiation between supply and demand that happens in real time every day.

1:30 And you know, the fact that the, you just didn't have quite enough avocados today means you order slightly more tomorrow and so on. And that is an example of a bottom up system. Of a system that works out its own solution to the problem. And yes, you can nudge it, you can give it incentives, you can say, actually you know, we want people to eat less refined sugar or something, so we're we're gonna put a tax on it.

1:57 - You can go full Bloomberg if you want. - Exactly. And likewise, we should have approached pandemic like that. People are gonna wanna continue living their lives, but we want them to do less unsafe behaviors. Let's give them as much good advice as we can and let's encourage them. Maybe even incentivize them to stay at home, to not go to things. Maybe we can do some things by compulsory banning, banning large gatherings. That probably does make sense.

2:28 Sweden did that too, but the idea that we should try and micromanage what happens in every part of everybody's life is just based on this top down myth. That's the way the world works. It's what I call, I call it political creationism. It's like saying that the reason the rainforest is so beautifully diverse is because it's an intelligent designer who designed it, instead of saying it came from a Darwinian process, from beneath. So it's a form of intelligent design, this approach and, - The intelligent might be going a little farther.

3:00 - Well, that's true. Yeah, that's that point. - On that point, you know you're, that's such a great way to sort of summarize, I think in a way the thesis of your book, "The Evolution of Everything," right? That we have, I mean everything evolves. Markets evolve, language evolves, what we eat for lunch evolves over time by individuals making choices and the hard part is how do we make good choices for ourselves? How do we make choices that align with what we want for ourselves?

3:27 - There's a wonderful line from a Scottish philosopher, 18th century Scottish philosopher called Adam Ferguson which says, "There are things that are the result of human action but not the result of any design." And what he's saying is something like the English language that is obviously a manmade thing, it's not a natural phenomenon like a volcano. The English language is made by people but there's no sense in which it was designed. I mean it has grammar, it has syntax, it has vocabulary, it has meaning all these, it's unbelievably intricate.

4:01 It's very clever and well put together, but there wasn't a, there isn't a committee that decides whether a new word should be allowed or not. There probably is, but we ignore it. - Only in France, I think. - (laughing) Yes, exactly. So it evolves, it emerges from below. We're all in charge of the English language. We're all contributing to it, where none of us are able to decide one way or other. It's kind of the market that decides.

4:31 For example, there's a rule that if you use a word a lot, you shorten it. We tend to use short words for things that we're gonna speak about a lot. We tend to find the shortest possible way. So we talk about COVID, we don't talk about SARS like coronavirus, whose rule is that? Who thought up that rule? It's a good rule. Well, we all did and none of us did. And so that for me is a very important insight into how the world works.

4:56 The internet is another example, who who invented the internet? It's a meaningless question. I mean yes, Vint Cerf deserves some credit and the guy who invented packet switching deserves some credit and Al gore perhaps deserves a bit of credit though maybe not as much as he allegedly claimed. - No it's not zero, it's above zero, but it's close to zero. - Yeah, exactly. But on the whole, we all reinvent the internet all the time. We find new ways of dealing with it.

5:21 Some of those ways work better than others and get kept and others bad ideas and get dropped and so on. That's, even an airplane evolves when you think about it. I mean, I flew across the Atlantic at the weekend on a 787, which is the newest form of aircraft. And I would hope that it was designed by an intelligent designer, so that it doesn't fall apart in midair. But actually in what sense did he design it?

5:44 Cause he just took a 777 and changed it a bit, and that guy took a 767 and changed that a bit all the way back to the Wright brothers. And at each case they kept things that were good and dropped things that were bad. For example, in early post war jets, they had square windows. Then they had a bunch of crashes and they realized that metal fatigue was spreading from the corner of square windows, so they made slightly rounded windows in airplanes.

6:11 That's an example of natural selection of evolution in in the design of airplanes. - It's the ocean creating the shape of the boat, right? - Exactly. - And by sinking some and keeping others.