Latest / Liberty + Leadership / Socialism Sucks: Robert Lawson on the Real-World Consequences of Central Planning

Transcript

Socialism Sucks: Robert Lawson on the Real-World Consequences of Central Planning · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Today.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, Roger Ream.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Today on Liberty and Leadership, my guest is Robert Lawson, Director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Bob is also a clinical professor and the Jerome M Fulenwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Bob is a prolific writer who has authored or co-authored over 100 academic publications.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: He is the founding co-author of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report and he co-wrote with Benjamin Powell the best-selling book Socialism Sucks.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Two Economists Drink their Way Through the Unfree World.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Bob's accolades include being senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and the past president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, from whom he received their prestigious Adam Smith Award.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Bob is also recently the recipient of TFAS's 2025 Gary M Walton Award for Excellence in Economic Education, which we presented to him at our annual conference in Naples, Florida, this past March.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: Bob, welcome to the show.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Hi, Roger, Good to be here.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, this book, Socialism Sucks, was published in 2019, if I'm not mistaken, and it's a great book.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I suspect it's still selling, at least somewhat.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: I hope it's something that college professors at least are giving to students or parents are buying for young people, because it has lessons in here that we certainly need today, in 2025.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Let me begin by just asking you kind of, what was the motivation or where'd the idea come to you and to Ben Powell to take off and travel the world to see what socialism was really like?
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: It really didn't start out as a socialism book as such.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: It might've been a midlife crisis.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: I'm in my mid-50s, ben's in his mid-40s.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: We both checked off a lot of our career boxes.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: You know professors at major universities.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: We both run fairly major institutes.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: I run the Bridwell Institute, he runs something called the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech and you know one more journal article doesn't really advance our career that much at the margin at this point and we have big travel budgets.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: So we're like, you know, let's go somewhere.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: I wanted to go to Cuba just to see it, and being professors, it was easy for us to go.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: We don't need any.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: You know special requirements or rules to follow.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: But as we were writing it though, you know, bernie Sanders became a credible candidate for the presidency and he calls himself a socialist.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: He usually calls himself a democratic socialist, to maybe soften the edge of that word, but he's socialist and AOC had been elected.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: And so we decided, since half the countries we were targeting anyway on this midlife crisis, half of them, were socialists, we just sort of pivoted the book to talk about socialism, to sort of ride the Bernie wave, and one thing led to another, and there we are.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Since you mentioned Bernie Sanders on your second chapter I think it is is about Venezuela and you quote Bernie Sanders there, and this is him in 2011.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: He writes these days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, venezuela and Argentina this was before Malay, of course where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger, who's the banana republic now.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, that is such a telling quote you found of him.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: His measure of success is equality, so in that sense, venezuela is the socialist paradise.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Everyone's equally destitute, except for the rulers, of course.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about Venezuela.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: You found equality there.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: I guess Everyone was in the same situation trying to get across to Colombia to buy food in the sense that rich and poor alike were walking across the border to go shopping, because on the Venezuelan side there were massive and there still are massive shortages of basic items aspirin, deodorant, rice, beans, diapers for children, everything.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: And so we saw peasants, people who were clearly very, very poor, walking across the border to buy things.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: And we saw well-dressed, well-mannered, clearly not peasant Venezuelans who were also crossing the border.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: So there was a sort of equality of misery and equality of shortage.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: The people we talked to at the border it was Ana and Paulo Ana Maria and Paulo and they had come three days.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: One way They'd driven from Ciudad Bolivar, which is on the far other side of Venezuela, so they basically crossed the entire country to come to the Colombian border to go grocery shopping.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: And they were middle-class people.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: Paulo had a little English, he worked in a hotel.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: I mean again, these were not peasants.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: I don't want to make light of poverty, but when poor people by necessity do crazy things like walk great distances for water, for food, but when you see a society where even the sort of middle and upper class that was, when you know this was a societal level breakdown, Let me ask when you went I know in Venezuela you were able to go across the border briefly you had to be a little careful, since you had families back home you wanted to get home to In Cuba.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Did you sense you had handlers who were monitoring where you went and what you did and who you talked to?
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: No, not, obviously.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: And again, we didn't sign up for one of the friends to friends or whatever they call them, tours, and if you do that you're going to have a handler through your trip.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: We just got on a charter plane and at this time it was relaxing a little bit.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: You could fly on a charter, not a commercial like scheduled airline, but you could get on a charter.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: It was actually operated by American Airlines, but we flew from Miami to Cuba, just as private individuals had organized visas ahead of time the usual drill.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: But we got there and we were completely unscheduled.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: We didn't even know ourselves where we were going half the time.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: We were deliberately doing it that way.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: We wanted to get a sort of more realistic view I mean as realistic as two sort of rich obviously not Cuban Americans can.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: I mean we're never going to get a full picture as visitors of what it's like to live there.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: So we, you know, we ended up staying in sort of off the beaten path hotels, which were horrible, and ended up spending most of our time in parts of Havana and parts of the island that tourists would not typically go to.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: We didn't have a real interpreter there.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: My Spanish is pretty much restaurant.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: Spanish and English on Cuba is not as prevalent as it would, be say, in most of Latin America, but still we were able to talk to people and I didn't get much sense of guardedness from them.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: But again, I wasn't able to really have deep conversations either.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: A colleague of mine visited Cuba part of one of those educational friend-to-friend tours a few years before you did, and one story she brought back was being taken to a school to be impressed with how high tech it was.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: And they walked into the computer room and there were all these young kids in there on computers and she noticed they were all using just their index fingers to type.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: So it appeared that this may have been the first day they were ever on the computer, that they were brought into this classroom to impress these Americans about how high tech the schools were.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: There was one anecdote and in retrospect it occurred to me he might have been a plant or somebody, but we were walking up the steps at the old, glorious well, it's decrepit now, but the glorious University of Havana, and beautiful, you know colonial architecture.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: And we're walking up the stairs.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: And again, beautiful, you know colonial architecture.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: And we're walking up the stairs.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: And again, we're clearly not Cuban by our dress and everything.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: And this young man is 20 something year old.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: I was walking down and just as he passed us on the steps he turned around and says hey, in perfect English.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: And again, that was unusual.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: He said where are you guys from?
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: And you know I said Los Estados Unidos and we had a nice conversation.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: This was again right after some relaxation.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: President Obama had come and visited the island for the first time and a president do that forever now and there was some falling in relations.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: And the kid said I'm not making this up.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: He said to us as we were leaving, he said we're so happy you Americans are coming because you bring us more freedom.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: He actually said that and of course I get chills when I tell the story now.
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: We thought he was going to say we're happy you're bringing more money, and I wouldn't have blamed him for that view.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, we all like money but he understood that the thawing of relations between the two countries was likely to bring freedom to Cuba as well as tourist dollars.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: And we were stupid we're not actual journalists, you know and we just said, all right, see you man.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: And we let him go and we should have invited him to dinner because he could have told us a lot.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: But it did occur to me that maybe he was some sort of spy that you know.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: But I don't think so.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: I didn't get that, you know at all.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: One thing that's noteworthy, and you touch on it too is, you know, in Venezuela I touch on it too is you know in Venezuela?
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: I don't know what the number is now I think in your book you say three or four million people have fled the country.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Cuba, of course, has had an exodus by boat and by any means possible, north Korea.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: People who are able to get out, it's at great risk to their lives and not many do make it, but some do you know.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: This evidence is that socialism is just terrible for human beings.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: It destroys countries, economies and life itself.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: And yet you know you have lots of people advocating socialism and you, in fact, at the end of the book you talk about going to a socialist convention in Chicago.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: I think it is, but what's your conclusion there?
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Is it that economists don't do an adequate job explaining it?
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Why is it that socialism's your conclusion there?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Is it that economists don't do an adequate job explaining it?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Why is it that socialism still has this appeal?
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Or people just don't associate socialism with the evils of these places?
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: There are some evil people in the socialist movement, but I generally don't think that we can just attribute this to pure evil.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: I mean there is injustice in the world.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: I mean people do see poverty to be an injustice.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: To an extent, inequality people see as an injustice and racism, sexism.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: There's a whole bunch of things that are just bad in our world and many people are deeply concerned and care about that.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: And socialists are selling this utopic vision, this gloriously well-lit future that's going to get rid of sexism and it's going to get rid of inequality and whatever injustice is bothering you.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: The socialists are going to promise to fix it and it's very intoxicating, particularly when you're young, to latch onto that.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: Analytically, socialism, meaning the collective control of resources in the hands of a central planner that economic system is a failure.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Empirically it's a failure, as you know.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: It's also a theoretical failure.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: One of the sayings sometimes you'll hear Marxists or socials say is you know, it's good in theory, but maybe it doesn't work in practice.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: Well, no, it's actually not good in theory either.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: The problem is the theory is hard Understanding the intricacies of why prices set by markets are better than prices set by bureaucrats.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: I'm just saying that is actually analytically challenging and it's not something that a lot of people are going to get.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: I think that's the main thing is just this sort of intoxicating snake oil that they sell and it does make you feel good for a while, maybe.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: I mean snake oil usually was basically alcohol, and it makes you feel good for a minute and it doesn't cure the disease.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: In fact, taking too much it can make it worse.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: So I think that's the main issue.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: When we were at the socialism conference in Chicago, I took that to be an optimistic spin in the sense that they weren't literally interested in murdering people, which is the fact of the matter is, socialism has resulted in the direct murder of millions, tens of millions of people in different places.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: They weren't for that, they weren't just pure evil.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: The challenge for us is how do we communicate that?
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: And one of the things that the reason we wrote this book, which is a little bit of a man on the street, a little bit of a you know two middle-aged bros carousing, drinking too much beer and so forth was to try to tell that story in a way that's different than the normal way economists tell it.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: You know, I've got books.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: I've got, you know, stacks of journal articles that no one's read, and so we figured, if we're going to try to communicate to the sort of Bernie bros of the world, we needed to do it with a vehicle that was going to be more approachable to them.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: There is another dimension, and that is our side.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: By that I mean sort of the people that believe in private property and markets and freedom of exchange and so forth.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: We're selling hard medicine.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: It actually is medicine that will cure a lot of those diseases, but they're never going to go away.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: We're never going to get rid of racism, sexism, completely probably, and a lot of times that we're selling like, hey, you need to take this medicine, you need to take this free trade medicine and it's going to make you better in the future, but right now it feels painful and that's bad politics, it's just bad marketing in a lot of ways.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: But we're right, our medicine does cure.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: It helps the patient.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Socialism is a tonic that makes you feel good in the short run but hurts you in the long run.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Our medicine does the reverse.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: I recall Hayek, in something he wrote, suggested that something along the lines that you were saying.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: That came to my mind that the advocates for the free society need a utopian vision.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: We don't have that.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: We're competing against the utopian vision and we're lacking that in what we do.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: And he wrote that years ago and perhaps we have that to some extent in talking about the great enrichment that took place and the billions of people lifted out of poverty through prices and property rights and markets.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: But I think you're onto something there.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but our future is an open-ended one.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: Liberalism, and again in the original sense of that word, is an open-ended future.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: It's not an end point, I guess.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also what you decide.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: It's what the person next to you decides their future is.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: And we're letting you decide what utopia you want to build with your friends, neighbors, family, you know, and so forth, whereas the socialists, they've got a vision, they've preordained what they think is going to happen.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: We're sort of saying well, trust us, the future is going to be great, but you have to trust us.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: Well, and someone asked what's the future going to look like?
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: We're like well, that's for you to decide.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Again, it's not very easy to sell that product, I think.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: In your first chapter, you and Ben Powell visit Sweden, which is often pointed to by people such as Bernie Sanders and others as the socialism they're talking about, though you found that quote where he actually says Venezuela, ecuador, is the model.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: But what did you find when you went to the Scandinavian countries, particularly in Sweden?
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: Well, we found good beer and that was our first tell that it wasn't socialist.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: The beer was expensive and, as you know, sweden has very high taxes.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: It's a very large, fiscal, large government.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: They tax and spend a lot.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: But if you look at the structure of the Swedish economy, it's in no way, shape or form socialist Socialism and we define this at the beginning of the book to make sure everyone's on the same page.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: It's defined as a collective control of resources, the means of production, the factories, the farms, the workers, that there's a collective control of those things.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: In a sense there's going to be a central plan and for large societies that has always meant the state.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: The state is going to be the central planner for how the economy runs.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: And the Swedish economy has a big government.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: But those bureaucrats in Stockholm don't run the economy.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: Volvo is a famous Swedish firm.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: They're a completely private company.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Their stock trades on stock exchanges.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: The workers go home to privately owned homes and flats and apartments and whatever, and they drive private cars.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: There's no major system of allocating, picking you off the street and say well, you're going to be an engineer, you're going to be a mathematician, you're going to be a taxi car driver.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: People get to decide their own occupations in a pretty open labor market.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: So the Swedish economy is structurally very much like ours.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: Sure, they have a big government, but people are quite free to choose their own occupations, their own lines of work, paint their houses the way they want to paint them.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Again, there's probably rules on that.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: But Swedish farmers and Swedish fishermen own their own fish.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: They decide if they go out Tuesday or Wednesday, and all of that.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: There's no central plan.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: And that's the difference between, say, cuba and Sweden, where in Cuba there's a central plan, like the restaurants, the farms, the factories, the fishing fleets, everything is owned by the government and aligned with some kind of plan that the bureaucrats in Havana have written down on paper.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: You also, as I mentioned, produce the Index of Economic Freedom with the Fraser Institute each year.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Where does a country like Sweden rank, and do you recall where it ranks in your latest ranking?
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah sure.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: So my day job, so to speak, isn't to travel the country and drink beer with Ben, as fun as that was is to be a professor, and the research product I work on is the Economic Freedom of the World Index, and we rate and rank countries for the degree to which they're following sort of free market principles.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: The first country in the list is Hong Kong, and like Singapore, and then the last one is Venezuela.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: Venezuela was dead last.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: So Sweden.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, when we wrote the book they were in the high 20s.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: I think they dropped to the 30s, but they're out of 165 countries that we score, Sweden is in the upper quarter of the rankings.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: It's much closer to free market Hong Kong or United States, let's say than they are Venezuela.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: Venezuela is hard socialism now.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Where'd the US rank in the latest ranking?
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: We're fifth in the last rankings and we've been in the sort of top 10.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: We used to be third.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: It was for decades of doing this project.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: The US was always third and then we've dropped considerably in terms of the number and the ranking a little bit over the last, say, two decades.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Have you given any thought to whether Hong Kong would belong in there as an independent country, now that China's exerted so much control over it?
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: Well, we have.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: So long as data are available, I'm going to continue to rate Hong Kong.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: That's my position and I want to sort of document the decline of freedom.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: To be fair, most of the freedom declining there has been on the political and civil liberties side of things and we're not measuring that in our index.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: If you think about taxes and tariffs and basic property rights, you know real estate transactions and such.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: That system has not changed a lot in Hong Kong.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: We do measure property rights and rule of law in a broader sense as well and Hong Kong's numbers have gone down.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: But they were very much in first and now they're only slightly in first.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: I mean the tail's long.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Their score has dropped almost more than any country in the world.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: They just went from really first to sort of just sort of first.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: One year in the index Singapore did pass them.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: They've been basically tied, statistically tied for the last year.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: And I know there's a lag in terms of getting statistics and your rating that comes out each year.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: Just a thought and aside is good luck trying to figure out how you evaluate the US this year in terms of tariffs, because they seem to change from week to week to week.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: Well, I've done a little bit of an exercise.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: We do lag a couple of years.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: It takes a year for the data to get collected by the agencies that collect it and then maybe another year for us to get it from them and process and such.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: So you know, here is 2025.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: I won't really have a number for the US until 2027.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: With that said, you can do some back of the envelope projections, sort of holding everything else equal With respect to the biggest economic issue of the day tariffs.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Right now in the tariff we have a component for tariffs.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: It measures tariffs in three different ways but that particular component the US ranks 52nd out of 165.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: So by no means are we very free market now.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: We're not like that's a few years ago, right, yeah, that's from 2023.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: We project I mean, if the tariffs that Trump has outlined now pass and stick, we're predicting we would go from 50th to somewhere in the 70s.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: So we'll go from like upper middle to about basically middle.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: So it'll move us further away from the free trade direction.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: You know there's a lot of countries that are very restrictive.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: You know Iran and many of these such countries.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: So it'll take a hit.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: The US score will take a hit Overall.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: That effect probably lowers us from I said fifth.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: I got them going to about 10th overall based on these tariff moves.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: So it's not going to make us Venezuela right, but it's definitely not going to move us up in the scores.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: I should mention we're recording this on May 6th, so when Bob says if the tariffs are what they are today, because they may be different tomorrow or next week.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: So, getting back to your book, you didn't visit North Korea but you have a chapter on North Korea.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: Could you talk about your approach to that country?
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Since it's closed off?
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: Well, we went to South Korea, went to Seoul and did the usual DMZ tour.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: That was kind of a tourist trap, but we kind of did the same thing we did in Venezuela.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: It was more interesting to go to the Colombian-Venezuela border.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: Likewise, we went to the northern North Korea border, the southern China border, the border with China.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: It was a major city on the Chinese side called Dandong.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: It's a big city.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, you've never heard of it, probably, but like it's got 9 million people.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: We would consider it like Dallas, fort Worth.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: So it's a huge city, right there on the border of North Korea, on the old Yalu River, if you remember your Korean War history and across the river is a major.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: I forget the name of the city on the North Korean side, but it's hundreds of thousands of people.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: And one of the interesting things is when we got there at night we had an evening flight to arrive and we took a taxi to our hotel right on the river and we look across the river and it's just utter darkness across the river.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: There were a couple pinpoint pricks of light and then you wake up in the morning and you look across the river and there is hundreds of thousands of people.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: It's a major city in North Korea, Mid-rise buildings, no high rises like they have on the Chinese side, so absolute darkness.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: People over there living in medieval conditions.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: We saw a guy using a tractor.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: The tractor I could hear it, even though it was across the river.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: It was hundreds of meters away but I could hear it.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: And it was his old diesel tractor, with that low thump, thump, thump, low RPM diesel tractor and he had a very small hill.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: He was trying to get up.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: And.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: I felt so sorry for him, but he just, the tractor, just couldn't do it, it just, and eventually he gave up and I saw the.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: But most of the people were using animals to pull plows and things of that sort.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: So when I say medieval, I mean it quite literally.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that view you had across the river at night is similar to that satellite photo that is often shown in presentations of the Korean peninsula at night.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the satellite photo is not a Photoshop.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: It actually is dark at night Not someone with a Sharpie coloring it and it's really quite shocking.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: I've heard it said that people in North Korea now are, on average, three or four inches shorter than people in South Korea, and you mentioned in Venezuela the dramatic loss of average weight of a Venezuelan due to the famines, the lack of food there.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the Venezuelans are short on food, and it's something like 20, 30 pounds per person on average.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: And high levels of malnutrition.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: Quite literally, the country is not able to provide enough calories to sustain the body weight of the population.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: It's interesting about Korea, though, is after the Korean War, you know, the North was richer by a long long shot.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: The North was industrialized, it was rich, had big factories, and the South was the sort of poor agrarian part.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: And, of course, 50 years, 70 years however many years of socialism has reversed those roles.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: You know South Korea adopted something like capitalism and you know Seoul's skyline speaks for itself and North Korea went the other way, and those two countries have reversed.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: I've heard Koreans say that in the very old days, you know, north Koreans told jokes about South Koreans how backward they were, how poor they were, how lazy they were.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: And you know the North was the industrial.
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: You know innovative, that was the more hip place to be in Korea.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: Well, we were pleased that you could join with that literacy.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: Infant mortality, the environment all performing so much better in freer countries.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Do you get much feedback from the index and how valuable it is as a teaching tool?
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: Well, first of all, thank you.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: Receiving the award was a real honor, I have to say.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: It's embarrassing maybe, but I was not fully aware of the extent to which you all at Foundation for Teaching Economics have used the index.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: It's gratifying for me to discover that.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, I had a vague sense it was being used, but the extent was not well known to me.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: I'm an academic, I live in my little silo.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: I'm happy if I go into the office, close the door and spend my day in spreadsheets.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: I'm a weirdo like that.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: So it was gratifying to hear those stories about how much you guys use the product.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: So I live in this sort of little weird academic bubble.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: When an academic cites my work, I get a notification from Google, but when you do a workshop for school teachers somewhere, I don't get a notification necessarily, and I'm very happy to have learned about you know all the work you guys are doing with it.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: We have programs in Santiago, chile and in Prague for students from those regions of the world, and it's a very effective tool there when you bring together students from 15 or 20 or 25 countries in the classroom and they immediately want to see how their country is compared to the other countries of classmates there, and it's a great tool there too.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Do you find time amidst everything else you're doing heading up a center and doing the index and writing books and academic papers?
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: Are you in the classroom as well?
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: I do teach.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: As one of my mentors, dwight Lee, used to say, I like teaching a lot.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: I just don't like teaching a lot, so I do teach.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: I would never not want to teach.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: Right now, though, I teach executive MBAs, which are a very special kind of group of people Teaching basic economics, and they need it too, and it's very rewarding.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: And, again, I only go into a classroom, quite honestly, a handful of days a year, because those courses are very compressed, and maybe in a future that's yet to be written, I will get back.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: I love teaching undergraduates.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: I was good at it.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: I don't think I'm that good at teaching executive MBA, so I'm adequate at it, but I was really good at teaching undergrads.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: I really enjoyed it, and I would hope that, if my life settles down a little bit and maybe I move on from this particular role that I'm in now, which is a very demanding one, running the institute and all that, that I get back into the classroom with undergrads, because their learning curve is so steep.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: With undergrads, you can just see them like breaking.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: Their brains are breaking as you're speaking to them.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: They're just.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: You know, they're learning so fast, and it's rewarding as a teacher to see that so fast and it's rewarding as a teacher to see that.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Well, since you mentioned Dwight Lee, I joined him on a panel he organized once at an Association of Private Enterprise Educators conference in all places in Maui I think it was.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: But we did a panel and Dwight talked about you know how to improve the teaching of introductory economics and trying to teach it as a course.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: That is not the first course a student's going to take on their way to a PhD, but likely the one and only economics course.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: They'll have to try to give them that economic way of thinking in that first course and I think it would just spark an interest in more undergraduates wanting to take more economics if they had that kind of course as an introductory course.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure you succeed in teaching it that way and lighting a spark in the students who are in your classroom.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: Well, it is a conversation killer when you tell someone you're an economics professor, because most people go oh, I hated that.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: It's very often taught in a very poor way, very technical way, very dry, and there's no need for that.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Dwight was right Very, very, very few One person out of a thousand of our undergrads are going to go get a PhD in economics.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: That's probably too high a number and yet too often we're teaching those courses as if they're going to become econ majors or econ professors someday, and that's just ridiculous.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: It's not what happens.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: That's why I like teaching the UK of MBAs, because I know they're not going to get a PhD in economics.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: They already have careers and so I'm liberated there, even though they're not as young and they really do know a lot already.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: But I'm liberated because I don't need to follow some kind of a curriculum.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: I do what I want and my goal there is to get them to think about economics, knowing that they're not going to become economists.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I've seen statistics in the past of the percentage of journalists who've taken economics is very, very low.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: The percentage of members of Congress who've studied economics is very, very low and it's reflected in what we see and hear and what's going on in Washington DC these days.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: So fortunately, I think with FTE, our high school programs really do teach economics in this activities-based methods that really spark an interest in students and the lessons have a stickiness to them when they do the trading games and the other types of activities in the classroom and look at the Index of Economic Freedom.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Even like activities.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: But I use a lot of multimedia video clips from movies.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: I use some music, lyrics, comic strips and so forth.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: I use that with my executive MBAs yeah, we do some algebra and all that too.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: But years later they'll come to me and say you know, I remember that Pretty Woman clip or I remember that comic strip, and that method of teaching is the kind of teaching that does work.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: It's actually harder to do that than it is just to teach out of the textbook and do the graphs and the math and that's kind of the easiest path for most teachers.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: We've had your co-author, ben Powell, teach courses for us and hopefully we'll get you a little more involved in giving guest lectures or teaching with us too.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: But we appreciate all you're doing there at SMU, and your book Socialism Sucks to Economists Drink their Way Through the Unfree World is something I highly recommend.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: Thank you, bob, for being on the Liberty and Leadership podcast today.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, it was fun.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.