Mind the Shift

The experienced, sharp-minded, productive and – to some – controversial German ecologist Josef Reichholf is a humble Bavarian scientist who realized early on that he couldn’t compromise with his conscience. That entailed breaking with fellow ecologists, who in Reichholf’s mind had become too ideological. He thinks climate change policy for the most part is a big waste of money – not because there is no warming, but because there are a myriad ways the money could be used wiser. Who is then the biggest culprit in the destruction of habitats? Modern agriculture. Some quotes: ”Nature has always changed. When our bodies reach equilibrium, we are dead. There is no state of nature that is the ’right’ one.” ”Since Enlightenment we have separated nature from humankind. This separation is now predominant in the Western culture.” ”As a nature scientist I want to stay unbiased by ideology. The green ideology came into conflict with the scientific facts.”

Shouldn’t an economist count money all the time? ”No”, is the unequivocal answer from Andreas Bergh, associate professor in economics at Lund university in southern Sweden. In this episode you can hear Bergh develop his sharp observations of human behavior in all kinds of contexts. Some samples: On globalization: ”We are seeing a backlash against the very forceful and rapid increase in globalization in the 80’s and 90’s, and what else is to expect, really?” ”But preventing people from communicating across borders, I don’t see that happening, not even if you try hard to stop it.” On the negativity bias: ”We are not freeing ourselves from the lizard brain but we are learning how to handle it better.” On the internet’s impact on polarization: ”Your friends, your family and your workmates are even more similar to you than the people you meet online. Yes, there are echo chambers, but they didn’t appear with the internet.” On the rise of right-wing populism: ”I was shocked when the liberal elites acted as if these opinions had never existed. Many had naïve expectations of the effect of political participation. Democracy is working; that’s why we are seeing a rise of right wing populist parties.” ”At the same time the potential for these parties is decreasing because tolerance is increasing in the long run.” On inequality: ”It is a problem if the biggest decision regarding your economic standard is the timing of your real estate transactions. It’s hard to get rich by working.”

In this episode we meet UNFPA doctor Bernadette ”Bernie” Ssebadduka, who dedicates her working hours to fighting harmful cultural practices in poor rural areas in northern Uganda, such as ”courtship rape” and female genital mutilation performed under the radar. But Bernie has also seen change sweeping across Uganda. There is hope, she says: ”We have seen the benefits of empowering women. The game changer has been education.” Her own journey is a case in point, from growing up in a large family in a small village via the big city to becoming a highly educated, skilled professional.

”This is like a bushfire. If there is one spark, this thing will catch fire”, says epidemiologist Debby Guha-Sapir about the fact that authorities stopped measles vaccinations due to covid-19. Debby founded the world’s best and most reliable database on natural disasters, EM-DAT, at the university of Louvain, Belgium. Dry numbers can be more contentious than you think: ”We get a lot of hate mails about the fact that our data doesn’t show that disasters are increasing. Nobody wants good news.”

”The most important weapons for terrorists isn’t Kalashnikovs or suicide bombs, it’s journalists. We journalists are part of the problem of trust meltdown in society. Now we have to be part of the solution”, says this Danish former editor in chief, who fled the bleeding headlines and decided to dedicate his time to making journalism constructive. In 2017 he founded Constructive Institute. He is confident things will change: ”There is one force which is even stronger than fear, and that’s hope.”

Why our charity is so ineffective. Why (just possibly) there is reason for optimism. And why we should plan for an extremely long-term future. Hear this Oxford psychology/philosophy researcher and Effective Altruism advocate answer mega-questions.

”If life is a game, then the barriers are the game. If you wanna play big you need big barriers, if not you want smaller barriers. The mechanism is the same.” This brit calls himself an expert on failures, but listen to his gems of wisdom.

”A lot of things have just not been discussed openly. We were met with an avalanche of harsh comments. They accused us of being irresponsible.” The lockdowns are more harmful than the coronavirus itself, says this professor of epidemiology.

No, democracy isn’t dying. Setbacks in qualified democracies are offset by gains in autocracies, explain the men behind the world’s largest and most reliable dataset on regime types. Check out their work here. 

My name is Anders Bolling, and I’m your host. Who am I, and why am I starting this podcast? In this intro I talk about my background, my viewpoint, some pivotal happenings in my life and my driving forces.