Jim Penman argues that food restriction in early life creates epigenetic changes that make people more hard-working and long-term focused, potentially solving poverty in poor countries. He cites economic historian Gregory Clark and claims such interventions would be cheap and voluntary.
So welcome to another episode of Conversations with Jim Penman podcast where we talk about birth rate and the other interviews that Jim will do. And let's pick up sort of where we went off with last week, which was about now talking about poverty aspect. So you mentioned poverty just then and you want to speak about it, so let's talk about that aspect of it.
Yeah, well, this, this system, this food restriction system we were interested in reproducing, one of the effects it has is on economic thinking. It makes people more hard working, more long term thinking. People think that, you know, racists, for example, they look at, look at the way the world works and they say people in Africa are poor and people in Europe are rich. You know, that's because they're inferior genetically. That's a racist, eugenic sort of idea. So you stop people who are in, you know, genetically inferior from breeding. Now the interesting thing about that is that humans are actually very, very similar. We're astonishingly similar genetically. Genetically speaking, people in the poorest countries on earth, like say the Congo or Gabon, are just the same as people in the wealthiest countries in Earth. The actual difference is epigenetic. It's not that their genes are different, it's in certain cultures because of the way they been historically from parents, grandparents, ancestors and so forth. Certain genes are switched off when they should be on or vice versa. So it's an epigenetic difference. Now if we can develop a system that actually mimics the effect of food restriction, particularly in early life, what you've got is the potential to in a sense, cure poverty. And that's again, goes against what people think because, okay, let's talk about what the racists think. The people are genetically inferior. Now what other people think these days is that it's all to do with the economy, it's to do with the society, it's to do with the form of government, it's to do with the culture, it's to do with the education. The trouble with that is we haven't had much effect in changing those things either. You've still got incredibly poor countries that are not becoming wealthier. It's not actually working. Now that's because the problem with these countries is it's not genetics, it's epigenetic, which has an effect on character. So if we can actually help people to become more, to have this food restriction effect, especially from early life, what it would do is change character in such a way is that these countries could become wealthy. They could become as wealthy as any Western country. In fact, Potentially far, far wealthier because they'd be able to think long term, think creatively. All these sort of things, they're all epigenetic. They're not genetic at all. They're epigenetic.
And from what you know about all your research, has that ever been something that's posed as a possible solution or is it only you proposing this sort of.
I don't know if anybody else thinks that way. The only person I know is Gregory Clark, who's an economic historian who looked at changes in English society over the several hundred years in the 19th century and he said people seem to change in their attitudes. They became, well, more, more long term thinking. Later, literacy were rising for centuries. Well before, you know, universal schooling and so forth. People were more interested in becoming skilled. And you can see that because you look at the ratio of skilled to unskilled labor and actually reduced with time. You look at things like the investments in land and so forth, property prices and rents, and there's a whole lot of things indicate that people were becoming different. Now Clark actually proposed that this was because there was a genetic change as a possibility. He couldn't otherwise explain it. I don't think that's what it taught. It's an epigenetic change going on. So it's not a commonplace thinking. People in the past used to say it was genetic, people were racially inferior. People at the present say to do with the economics, with the politics. I think it's about character. And that's the thing we can actually change. And actually the point about it is too, you could actually, if you understood what you're doing, you could change character. You could help countries to develop and become prosperous and peaceful and stable and it would be incredibly cheap. It'd be a rounding error in terms of current aid. It's like a vaccination campaign, something like that, but really, really, really inexpensive because you're actually going into the brain helping people. And this is purely voluntary. It's what people want to do. These treatments will become incredibly attractive once we develop them, that everybody will want them and people in poor countries will want them too, because it helped them to be successful and prosperous and hard working and just naturally form better governments and so forth with time.
We'll leave it there today, Jim. That's a nice short episode on it as well. So make sure you join the mailing list for birth rate crisis in the link to the bio as well for the book coming out later in the year. So thank you very much for your time today, Jim.
