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What would it take to eradicate poverty on a global scale? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Calvin Beisner, author of "Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity," to explore the fundamental conditions necessary for societies to rise and stay out of poverty.

Dr. Beisner reveals five critical social institutions and one surprising material condition that most people overlook. This episode will transform how you think about energy policy, environmental trade-offs, and effective compassion for the world's poor.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We promised to have Doctor Calvin Beisner back, and this is the second of three episodes we plan with him.

Marlin Detweiler:
Dr.Beiser, welcome.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Hey, it's great to be back with you, Marlin. Thank you very much.

Marlin Detweiler:
Dr. Beiser is an accomplished author and has written much on science related topics, notably around climate change. Today we're going to make a connection, though, that he had to explain to me before I could understand it. And that's the economics of poverty eradication. And how it relates to climate, which was not intuitive to me by any means.

Let me start with this, maybe a softball simple question for you, Cal, you thought deeply about poverty eradication. But, Ben, tell us, what have you learned? What is at that very highest level?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Five minutes or less?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, five minutes or less.

Marlin Detweiler:
Not a great question, but I understand we do have constraints.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah. All right. Well, I might first say, hey, to get all that I can't say in five minutes or less. I could recommend to people that they read my book, Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity. That's published by Crossway Books, part of their Turning Point Christian Worldview series.

General Introduction to Economics from a biblical worldview perspective and so there will be a whole lot there that we can't go into that right now. But okay, so what have I learned about poverty eradication? The first thing is that there are five social institutions that are absolutely indispensable to having any whole society, not an isolated individual or family, but a whole society rise and stay out of poverty.

And then there is one material condition. So you've got social institutions, you know, how is your society structured as far as its economic order is concerned. And then you have something material that you depend on. As far as the social institutions, they are essentially private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government and the rule of law. Now, those basically are the characteristics of what we properly call a market economy or a free market economy.

And they are the opposite of a state controlled economy. And they're very important. I mean, frankly, if you look at economic history anywhere in the world, you discover that no society has ever risen out of poverty and stayed out of poverty without embracing and sticking with all five of those, societies that deny private property rights, that deny free trade, that deny entrepreneurship, that deny the rule of law and limited government, those societies basically we call them socialist societies – Yeah, I understand everything happens on a on a continuum from the most absolutely socialist communist right to the most absolutely free market libertarian.

The things happen on a continuum, but the more socialist countries have never conquered poverty. And those market economies that have conquered poverty and then turned back to socialism have always fallen back into poverty. So those are the social institutions, and they're really critically important to us, for a variety of different reasons having to do with human nature.

I mean, for example, private property rights are connected to incentives to produce. I really don't have much incentive to produce something if having produced it, I don't own it and I can't then trade it with others for my benefit.

Marlin Detweiler:
I'm going to work hard to grow corn on my 40 acres, and all of a sudden somebody comes along and takes it because they're good for it.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah. William Bradford experienced that with the pilgrims, when they first came to America. And they tried what they called the common course and condition, where everybody was to work together for the common good. Everything that was produced was to be divided equally among the whole community. And what did they get? They got starvation for the first year or two, and then they abandoned that.

And they said, all right, it's every one for himself. And suddenly they had booming crops. They just did great. So they had to abandon that. But, that's, you know, those five are the social institutions. And then there is the one material condition. And that is abundant, affordable, reliable energy. Now, why do I state energy?

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, this was the one that just absolutely threw me when you mentioned that. So I'm looking forward to an expanded explanation, and I hope it's captured the imagination of our listener.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah, I hope so. I mean, we could mention minerals, we could mention houses, we could mention canals or airplanes or cars or anything like that. And we could mention any of those things. We could even mention food. But I say energy. Why? Well, because energy is absolutely indispensable to all that we produce. We produce things by work.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Now, way back in middle school, you might have learned that energy means for physicists, the capacity to do work. Right. So the more energy you have, the more work you can do, and the more work you can do, the more you can make of all those things that we need. So energy is indispensable for making food, clothing, shelter, transportation, communication, medical care, housing, education.

All of these things require energy. And the more of that energy you can apply, the more of those things you can produce. The more affordable your energy is, the more of it you can apply. And you need that energy to be realiable. You need to know for sure that when you go and switch on your light switch, the lights are going to come on when you flip that power switch in the factory on the assembly line.

The assembly line is going to work. When you turn the key in your car, it's going to turn on and it's going to stay on for a good long time. So energy has to be abundant. It has to be affordable. It has to be reliable. And those three things all are related to why the demand that we should be fighting climate change by abandoning the energy sources that contribute to it. Coal, oil and natural gas, is really a demand that the world descend back into poverty.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wow. That now I can expect that people will have some objections to that. Shouldn't we be looking for clean energy? What's what is wrong with harnessing the sun or harnessing the power of water or air? Moving water or wind? Help us understand what the problem is here.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah, well, first of all, I would quote one of my most revered economists. That's Thomas Saul, who says in economics there are no solutions. There are only trade offs. Right. So should we be trying to use clean energy? Yes, of course we should. The question is, how clean?

Marlin Detweiler:
And at what cost?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
And at what cost. Right. So let me illustrate this in a more concrete way, a sort of a more personal way that all of us can understand. We all like clean, right? So, Marlin, I would ask you a question. Why are you not right now at home, scrubbing all of the walls and all of the apparatus in your bathroom with ammonia and bleach and other such cleansers to make sure that it is as clean as you can possibly make it? Why are you not doing that right now?

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, there are a couple reasons. The first one, the tongue in cheek. One is because if I did, my wife would think I had gone nuts.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
And she'd be right, by the way.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's true too. Secondly, because they are by a reasonable definition, my definition and my wife's definition, clean enough as they are.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Right? How clean is clean enough? Well, clean enough is as clean as you can make it without the cost of making it cleaner exceeding the benefit of making it cleaner.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Now let's go back to wind and solar and running water energy. Hydro. For one thing, hydro in good circumstances is absolutely fabulous. It is very clean. And it is very inexpensive. It's quite abundant where you have it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Everyone lives next door to the Niagara Falls.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Exactly right. That's why you have a lot of hydro energy in the Pacific Northwest and hardly any hydro energy in flat Texas or Florida. Not going to get it right or Florida, right? I mean, there's a whole lot of water in Florida, but there are no fast running rivers. So why don't we use more wind and solar?

Because after all, those are clean, and, hey, wind is free. Solar is free, right? Well, several different reasons.

Marlin Detweiler:
Not. I'm not Biden. I know it's not.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah. First off, when we use coal, for instance, we are using solar energy because coal is formed by the deposition of vegetation deep underground and under pressure and temperature, and it turns to coal that traps that. Essentially, coal is batteries, batteries storing the energy that went into the plants when they performed photosynthesis from the solar energy entering into the atmosphere.

So coal is batteries and everybody wants to run on batteries. Well, there you go. You got batteries right there. Coal. But let's go a little more precisely to the point on the abundance. And the affordability abundance has to do with something called energy density. That's how many watts of energy, or how many BTUs of energy are stored per say, pound of some substance or some say, some, you know, a square meter or a cubic meter of a substance.

How much energy is in there? How dense is it? The reason that's important is that the primary cost of transforming from energy, as we find it in nature, and energy as we can actually use it, is bridging the gap between the density in nature and the density we need to use. So, for example, electricity is extremely high density, but wind and solar are very, very low density.

Coal runs typically anywhere from about 600 to 8 or 900 times as dense as either wind or solar. Natural gas tends to run about 1100 to 1200 times as dense. And, petroleum for oil, right. That runs, close to 1213 hundred times as dense nuclear fuel. By the way, uranium is well over 1200 times as dense as wind or solar.

So right off the bat, when you try to go to a lower density energy source in the name of being more clean, you're going to have to up all the things that you have to do to ramp that up from the low density source to the high density usable energy. And to do that, you're going to have to bring in other sorts of factors.

For example, the many, many tons of concrete that go into the slab on which a wind turbine is built and the tons of steel and of very high density plastic that go into wind turbines and the rare earth metals that go into the turbine manufacture itself. And you're going to have to mine all of those different things.

And actually, when we do a lifecycle assessment on wind turbines as well as solar panels, in terms of having to mine all of the different ingredients that go into making them and refining them and shipping those and installing them. And by the way, cleaning them up after they've long exceeded their effective lifespan. When you do a life cycle assessment like that, the actual impact, the ecological impact of wind and solar is in many cases higher than the ecological impact of mining for coal or drilling for oil or natural gas.

And refining those and transporting those and converting them to to usable form. So, in fact, we're not really cleaner there. We are at least as dirty, in many cases dirtier, and we're much more expensive because being so low density as they are, they are not so abundant. So you don't have affordable, reliable and abundant energy from the so-called renewables or the clean energy of wind.

Marlin Detweiler:
I have a question begging here, but I want to be careful to not get too far away from connecting to eradication of poverty. But yeah, it would seem to me that the argument that somebody might throw back to what you just said would be. But isn't the burning of coal or the burning of fossil fuels dirty and a contamination that has adverse effects on our environment, on our lives, on our health?

As one and then the second one related to it would be, and aren't we dealing with limited resources as opposed to wind and sun, unlimited resources?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
You know, we'll run out of coal and oil and natural gas someday. We'll never run out of sunlight. We'll never run out of wind. And, you know, after all, you can see smoke from coal, from coal burning and so on. Yeah. First off, I've already actually addressed the first part of this question. When you do a life cycle assessment that includes all of the emissions generated by mining, refining and transporting all of the material substances necessary for wind and solar energy production.

It turns out that you pretty well match both the economic and the ecological harms created by mining or drilling for and refining and transporting.

Marlin Detweiler:
Could that change with better technology?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yes, it could. And that's one reason why over time, you always have to readdress these questions, because as technology changes, you might answer them differently. For example, and it's a great question because it refers to what economists of the environment refer to kind of call the environmental transition or the environmental Kuznets curve. And this transition is understood this way: As a society rises out of subsistence agriculture into early industrialization, like in the late 1700s, the early 1800s, and in Britain, in the United States, and so on.

As it does that transition, air pollution and water pollution increase. But at the very same time, the amount of food, clothing, shelter and other goods and services that can be produced rises so rapidly that health and longevity increase even while pollution is increasing. But as any given society reaches a particular economic level. And this level differs from societies to society, and it differs over time.

And it differs depending on what pollutant you're talking about because of the different costs of reducing pollutants as a society reaches a particular economic level, it then can afford the more expensive technologies that produce goods and services more cleanly. And so what you have is as and as you go through this transition, pollution rises early in economic development and industrialization.

And then when you reach a high tech industrial society and a more service oriented society, pollution not only peaks, but it declines. And before long, you're actually cleaner than you were before you left subsistence agriculture. Meanwhile, all the benefits of that great productivity far outweigh any of the risks from the pollution that comes along with it. And that's clear from the fact that human life expectancy at birth has risen from around 27 or 28 years before the Industrial revolution, to about 70 years in the developing world right now, at about 80 years in the developed world.

And it continues to rise. So that's a part of the answer to that question. We can also look at the fact that poverty is a far greater risk to human health and life than anything connected with either the weather or, for that matter, pollution that we saw the first in the simple fact that even as pollution was rising in early industrialization, life expectancy was improving.

Right. But we can see the second in that, as well. Let me try to put it this way. I want to be careful here not to give a wrong impression. Over the past hundred years, annual human mortality rate from extreme weather events has fallen by more than 98%. Well, now that has nothing to do with any reduction in the frequency or severity of extreme weather events.

There has been none. There. Also, by the way, has been no increase in their frequency or intensity. Despite the fact that climate catastrophe says that there will be what they're doing is they're talking about what the models say they should be seeing. But in the real world, we're not seeing that. And we can talk about that some other time, maybe in talking about the problems of science in our modern age.

But, what's what's reduced human sickness and and death rates from weather extremes is economic development, economic growth, the fact that now we have air conditioning systems to protect us from heat waves and reliable heating systems to protect us from cold snaps that we have, very reliable early, early warning systems of storms, hurricanes coming.

So we can protect ourselves. We have stronger, buildings for residential use and commercial use and industrial use and so on. All of these things enable us to protect us, but they all cost something. So the wealthier you are, the more of those you can have and therefore the better protected you are from anything related to weather and climate.

So when people say okay, but burning coal, oil and natural gas is going to promote climate change, a global warming, right. Though we've not had as much as that, of that as was predicted. When they, when they make that point. Yes, of course. But back to Seoul's wonderful point. There are no solutions that are only trade offs.

And the question is, do we get a better trade off from going ahead and using the coal, oil and natural gas with whatever impact they have on the climate, or from stopping using them, in which case we might reduce that impact? Well, here's one quick and simple way to answer that question. Approximately half the world's people depend completely on food grown using nitrous fertilizers made from natural gas.

We stop using natural gas. We stop using natural fertilizers and nitrous fertilizers, and half the world's people die. About half of the remainder of the world's people depend for their lives on concrete, steel, plastics, and other products made from fossil fuels, or made using fossil fuels. Stop using fossil fuels. We lose all of those. That's another quarter of the total population.

So together, that's 6 billion people dead. So I think that it's a good trade off to continue to use these magnificent fuels that God designed in the earth for us. The last part of your question, by the way, was, well, but we're running out of those, right? They're finite resources. Well, the whole universe is finite, after all, you know, but that really doesn't matter very much.

Oil, coal, natural gas finite. There is some interesting recent science coming on that indicates these could be produced, not there properly, not fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas, but fuels that are being, produced in the Earth's mantle and then seeping upward. Coal is more limited. But what we know is the known world reserves, proven world reserves of coal at this time are enough to continue to serve our needs for thousands of years.

If anybody is worried about our running out of coal in that amount of time, he's forgotten that back in the 1800s, we were worried that we were going to run out of whale oil for our lighting in our homes. And then when we figured out how to create kerosene out of petroleum, that worry disappeared, right? And when we were worried about other things, you know, nobody predicted that we would be getting energy from uranium.

You know, as of the early 20th century, nobody thought that. Now we do. So we're going to come up with ways if the price of coal rises high enough, to find other sources of energy, oil and natural gas, similar stories there. In those cases, the cost of exploring for oil and natural gas reserves is such that it makes sense to find reserves stretching out to only about, say, 40 to 50 years in advance of consumption.

But through the whole history of our use of oil and natural gas, our proven known reserves as a ratio compared with annual use have grown and grown and grown. And that's, you know, are we is it is it finite? Yes, it's finite. But again, the economist says, well, if it's scarcity rises sufficiently, its cost will rise sufficiently to power to force us to find substitutes or more efficient ways to use it.

So the answer is we'll never run out. We'll never use the last of the oil. We'll never use the last of the natural gas. We'll never use the last of the coal, because when they get down to that tiny an amount left, the price will be too high to use. And we're talking thousands of years, not hundreds.

Marlin Detweiler:
Let's bring this back now to the simple, we've talked a lot about, energy. Take the last couple minutes and connect that to poverty solutions.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah. Well, first off, I would just remind us, those five social institutions, private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, the rule of law, and then, abundant, affordable, reliable energy. Those have to go together. But then we start looking at issues like, you know, how is it after all that we make wealth? Well, it's my hard work.

Go to the ant, thous sluggard, from Proverbs, right? And so part of that is a matter of values in a given society. Do people value hard work? Do people value being on time for a job? Do people value, you know, creativity and inventiveness and so on. Those are really important issues. And those things are promoted in the Christian worldview.

They're not so well promoted in some other worldviews. And we can talk about that perhaps some other time in talking about the relationship between Christian and a Christian worldview in science. But then also, we need to look at what we can do in charitable work. And unfortunately, I think a whole lot of charity is very, very well-intended but tends to do more harm than good.

I discussed this in my book, Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity, which, by the way, is available from the online store of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. And in fact, I'll make this offer right now to your listeners if they will, if, when they go to cornwallalliance.org/give and make a donation of any size, regardless how large or small, and ask for Prosperity and Poverty, we will send a free copy of that.

No charge, no shipping charge, nothing. As our way of saying thanks when they make that donation. But they need to mention that they heard this offer on your program Veritas Vox.

So, what happens in many instances in charitable work, and this is discussed brilliantly in the book When Helping Hurts –

Marlin Detweiler:
Glad you mentioned off. I need to read that it's out of the title. Really, destructive, not instructive in a way that draws me in.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
But part of what is so fabulous about this book is that it largely arises out of Brian Vickers having spent many years doing charitable mission trips to sub-Saharan Africa, doing things that he thought were helping people. And then as an economist, looking back at what he had done and realizing, oh, no, I thought this would help. It actually had the opposite effect from what I intended.

I thought that would help. It did the opposite. I thought this over here would help over and over and Brian's humility in this is really amazing because he's always pointing at his own mistakes and learning from them. And that's wonderful. So I give you one example of that kind of thing. It's very, very popular to load up a shipping container with a bunch of shoes and take them over to, say, Haiti or some other place where, people can't afford shoes and you then give them out.

Sounds wonderful. Now people have shoes, but the people in that community who might be shoe repairman or shoemakers can't compete with free. So you have disemployed anybody who might have done that. And the same is true with all sorts of different things, basically charitable gifts of food, clothing, anything like that. Those are appropriate in the immediate aftermath of some great disaster, when there's no way for anybody on the scene to be doing things to help.

But very shortly after that, they become counterproductive by destroying the incentive for people to do for themselves. So what that means is that we have to go back to, okay, so what is the long term path to really eradicating poverty on the societal level? And that takes us back to private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, the rule of law, and access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy.

Put those things together. The society will rise out of poverty, keep them together and the society will stay out of poverty. Abandon them and it will fall back into it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wonderful, folks. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. And Doctor Beiser, thank you. That is a wonderful lesson for us to heed and to adjust how we think and how we live.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Marlin, thank you. It's been a pleasure being with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
All right. Bye bye.