Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 494: The Dark Ages Never Went Away

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Episode 494: The Dark Ages Never Went Away · Words & Numbers

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  Coming up next on Words and numbers, executions in China,
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  losing spoons. Land acknowledgments and the
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  economics of the Dark Ages. All this and more coming up on
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  Words and Numbers, the Civil original production.
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  Check us out at civil.com. That's cibl.com.
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  Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony and.
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  This is words and numbers and well, you know, Aunt, let's
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  break with tradition. I always ask what's new and
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  exciting in your world? Always.
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  But this time, Aunt, I want to begin our little podcast with a
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  land, a land use acknowledgement.
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  Go for it. We do hereby recognize that the
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  British once owned the land upon which we stand and toil and may
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  exercise a legitimate claim thereupon.
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  That's good enough. Because, you know, that's all
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  land acknowledgement. Nonsense always does.
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  We'll get back to that in a minute.
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  Well, well, we'll get back to it in a minute.
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  Don't. Don't.
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  No, No, no, no, no. I all right, all right if as
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  long as we get back to it because I've got a beef.
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  Yeah, I promise we're going to get back to it, OK?
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  I have run across. I still have to say it.
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  Go ahead. What's new and exciting in your
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  world this weekend? Not new, but exciting.
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  This is an academic article, and I swear I ran across this years
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  ago, but I'd forgotten and just came back to it.
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  Let me read you the This is a legitimate research article
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  published in the National Library of Medicine, National
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  Center for Biotechnology Information.
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  Title of the article The case of the disappearing teaspoons.
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  Longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an
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  Australian Research Institute. These guys.
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  Get together. All right, Let me solve this
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  mystery before it even gets out of hand.
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  The teaspoons were in the coffee cups that they walked out of the
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  break room with as stirring their various hot drinks, and
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  they forgot to return them. That's my official guess.
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  They forgot the what to return them.
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  Yeah. So these guys are asking the
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  question, why is it their teaspoons keep disappearing?
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  So they get a set of 70 teaspoons and they mark them in
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  certain ways so they can identify which teaspoons which
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  and put them about the the Research Institute where they
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  are. When I say put them about, I
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  gather they can just lay them around.
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  They put them in with the teaspoons that people use with
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  their coffee, this sort of thing.
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  And they monitor this over time and they come to the conclusion
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  that First off, 80% of the teaspoons disappeared during the
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  study. From that, based on how long it
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  took, they determined the half life of a teaspoon was 81 days.
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  And that given all of that, at that rate, they would require an
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  estimated 250 teaspoons a year just to maintain a practical
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  institute wide population of 70 teaspoons given the
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  disappearance. Teaspoons.
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  Now I found that much. Time on their hands.
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  Way too much time. I found this incredibly amusing,
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  and anyone who reads it would probably go the next step and
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  say, well, this is ridiculous, this complete waste of
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  resources. Why aren't you using the wooden
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  stirs? That's a very good question.
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  Except an economist would go the next step and say, OK, you can
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  argue that the wooden stir sticks that you throw away, and
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  you could say, well, you throw them away, but maybe they're
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  recyclable. All right, granted, all of that,
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  but on the other side, there's these teaspoons.
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  So you use the teaspoons and you're losing these things and
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  you've got to pay for new teaspoons and they're metal and
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  there's resources involved there.
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  But the, the stirrer sticks, those also use resources and the
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  recycling takes so much energy or whatever it is.
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  And all of a sudden you're left with what started out being a no
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  bringer of don't use teaspoons, use wooden stirrers to something
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  that raises a question, well, which of these two things uses
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  more resources? Not just more resources, but you
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  have to consider the value of the resources that go into these
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  two things. And this is the beauty of free
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  market prices. Free market prices do all of
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  that work for you. If at the end of the day, it's
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  more expensive for you to replace the metal teaspoons than
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  it is to buy the disposable wooden stir things, then the
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  wooden stir things by definition useless resources.
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  Conversely, if the wooden stir things because you throw them
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  away, they're more costly than the spoons that although they're
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  reusable, you do lose them. If that's the case, then the
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  wooden stirrer things are using more resources.
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  And notice the the absolute beauty of of a price system.
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  And again I have to put the footnote.
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  This is a price system in a free market environment.
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  It does all of the calculations for you.
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  You don't have to ask how much resources are being used, what's
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  the cost of the resource, What's the trade off?
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  All you have to do is look at the price tag.
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  The thing that's cheaper, that's the thing that uses less
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  resources. A great lesson, I agree
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  completely, but you've buried the lead.
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  Where did the spoons go? Oh.
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  People are just throwing them away.
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  Moving right along, Jesus. Anyway, I'm going to say
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  something which I thought would never happen.
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  I'm going to say something in favor of the present Chinese
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  regime because, get this, they're executing people.
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  I know. That's not the surprising part.
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  They are executing people who are committing online scams.
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  Really. You can't kill these people fast
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  enough in in my view and and I am, generally speaking,
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  ambivalent at best about the death penalty.
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  And yet, for online scammers, off to the gallows you should
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  go. These are the lowest form of of
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  humanity, and they're even lower than you might think.
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  And because the well, first, the Chinese are executing people
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  from Myanmar, which, you know, isn't China, So there's that.
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  So they're executing from their perspective, foreigners for
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  doing this nonsense. But come to find out the people
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  in Myanmar who are are involved in these scams are kidnapping
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  people and forcing them to work in these little scam factories
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  that they've got. They brutalize them, they
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  intention, they occasionally execute them.
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  These are horrific, horrific people.
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  Well, and and their entire claim to fame is to get your
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  grandfather to cough up his last bit of money because he thinks
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  some woman he's never laid eyes on is in love with him.
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  Oh, so it's it's not a it's not a pay money to get your, your
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  grandchild out of the slave. Labor, they're running, they are
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  running all kinds of scams. Wow.
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  All kinds. But they are horrible people and
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  I don't think you can kill them fast enough.
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  I really don't. And this is from a man who is at
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  best ambivalent about the death penalty.
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  Most days I walk around thinking that's something that probably
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  neither we nor anyone else should do.
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  But there are just certain subgroups of people, scammers
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  being one of them. Child molesters, another
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  rapists. 1/3 right? I shed no tears.
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  I mean, just none. You get yourself into this.
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  Maybe it's best that you can't get yourself out of it, but.
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  See, and, and that's, that's the hard thing, isn't it?
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  Because I'm somewhat embarrassed that I'm not as morally outraged
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  as what I'd hoped. However, my attitude changed
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  when you started listing. First the scammers, then the
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  child molesters, then the rapists, and all of a sudden I
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  saw a government adding 456101520 and all of a sudden,
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  you know, jaywalking is is well subject to the death.
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  Penalty. Probably not jaywalking, but
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  protesting sure is. Right, right.
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  Yep. Yep.
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  And I guess we'll just leave it at that and people can ask
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  whether I'm referring to the United States or Iran.
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  Well, it's a mystery. I'm Anthony Davies, Co host of
• 9:31
  Words and Numbers. James Harrigan and I are proud
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  to be on Civil's Network because we believe in their unifying
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  principle of human respect, which is the idea that our
• 9:39
  well-being as humans is diminished when we employ
• 9:42
  coercion and that conversely, our happiness and prosperity are
• 9:45
  maximized when we cooperate. If you believe in our mission,
• 9:48
  join civil.com. That's civl.com.
• 9:52
  This, of course, brings us to the foolishness of the week.
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  And for the foolishness of the week, there's this dude, Stuart
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  Regis. Have you ever heard of him yet?
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  No. Yeah, most people haven't,
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  unless you happen to work at the University of Washington, where
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  Stuart Regis toils away as a professor, so he automatically
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  has my sympathies, I guess would be the right word.
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  And the University of Washington, like many if not
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  most land grant public institutions, is beside itself
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  with guilt because it sits upon land that was once occupied by
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  one native tribe or another. And at the University of
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  Arizona, I was supposed to, I believe, read a, a land
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  acknowledgement before a class inserted on my syllabi,
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  whatever. And you know, we've all seen
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  this nonsense. As a matter of fact, that's why
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  I wanted to start today's episode with a land
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  acknowledgement towards the British who once occupied this
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  fair area. You know, or if, if we wanted,
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  we could go back before that, the British, and find all the
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  Indian tribes who occupied all the land.
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  But then we would have to go back and find out who those
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  tribes took it from. And we would have to then after
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  that, go back and find out who those tribes took it from.
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  And before you know it, we're going to be reading land grant
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  acknowledgments to Dinosaurs roamed the Earth freely long
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  before they were displaced. I I'm with you 100%.
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  They're what really irks me is these universities, that is
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  typically universities that will do this land grant
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  acknowledgement. No, no, that it's completely
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  meaningless. You know why it's meaningless?
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  Because if they meant it, they'd be tearing, tearing down their
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  buildings and giving the land back.
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  That's exactly right. It's like I I can't even come up
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  with an easy analog. This is just so stupid that it
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  seems to be in a category of 1. If you honestly believe this
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  nonsense, give the land back and shut up.
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  And, and I've always found Ant. And I don't know if this has
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  been your experience. The faculty who wring their
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  hands the hardest about this sort of thing are exactly the
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  the the same people who don't give to charity at all.
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  Why not? Oh, that's for government to do.
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  Well, look, either you have the courage of your convictions or
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  you don't. And if you keep proving me to me
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  that you don't up yours, it's plain and simple.
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  But anyway, we haven't even got to the funny part yet 'cause the
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  funny part is, is that the University of Washington made
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  their faculty include land grant land acknowledgement nonsense on
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  their syllabi and, and, and, and this one dude didn't use the the
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  the university's preferred verbiage and instead wrote his
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  own. And he wrote simply.
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  I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property, the Coast
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  Solish people can claim historical ownership of almost
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  none of the land currently occupied by the University of
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  Washington. Almost none of it.
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  Almost none of it. And, and he just went going and
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  going and going and he actually sued the university because his
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  First Amendment rights were being violated when they told
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  him he couldn't do that shit. Anymore so so for our listeners
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  who aren't up on the labor theory of value, his claim is
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  that this is. The labor.
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  This is the labor theory of property.
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  So a. Property.
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  It's it's different, it's different, it's different
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  enough. Let's not muddy the waters.
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  But we might do a whole episode on this.
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  It's not a bad thing to do. But he sued and.
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  Won in Washington, Yeah, in the 9th.
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  Circuit he actually won a free a free speech case.
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  I don't know, James, This is this is great.
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  But if I were the faculty member there and I were required to
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  have that declaration in my syllabus, I think I would refuse
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  to use the classroom because I had no right.
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  In fact, the Dean had no right to tell me I had to use the
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  classroom. The students shouldn't be
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  allowed in there. None of it belongs to us.
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  And moreover, we can't have class outside because that land
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  is spoiled as well. Great.
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  Yeah, as and then. And then watch the university
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  fall over itself. Say no, we didn't mean it.
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  Yeah, but I, I mean, this is a question for AI guess a
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  evolutionary geologist, would that be right?
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  No, I'm not thinking about geology at all.
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  Some sort of demographer, right, An evolutionary demographer.
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  Is there any place in the United States, even one square inch of
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  of land that has not been contested at one point?
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  I I wonder if there is. I mean, I don't know but.
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  The snowy, the snowy parts of Alaska, maybe, but I bet they've
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  been contended. I, I don't know, but I do know
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  that in my time as an adult, I bought 3 houses and each time I
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  purchased property insurance, or I should say title insurance,
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  just in case there was some problem somewhere along the
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  chain of, of ownership going backward.
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  But, but let, let me throw in here.
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  Neither one of us believes it that, you know, might makes
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  right. And if you just take the land at
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  yours, that's, that's not it. We're not advocating any of
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  that. What we are saying is that look,
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  at some point you just can't figure it out anymore.
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  And to arbitrarily pick somebody along the, the, the chain of
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  ownership and say that's the guy who actually owns it.
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  Well, it's arbitrary. Yeah, I think that's exactly
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  right. And even even if you don't want
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  to impute ownership, if you just want to say these people have a
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  traditional claim on the land, which you and I might readily
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  agree to, right? There are all kinds of people
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  out there who might have traditional claims on lands.
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  And that's especially true where I am in, in dusty Arizona, where
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  I am almost surrounded by Indian reservations.
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  Right. But, but how far do we have to
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  go? Right, 'cause if I say the
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  Tohono Odom, which is a, a, a local tribe, if I say the Tohono
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  Odom have a traditional claim on the land, roughly, that is
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  Tucson. Who had it before them and who
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  had it before them? And, and what I'm really asking
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  for is who did they take it from?
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  Right. Because everybody who ended up
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  with it took it from somebody else.
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  Until you can locate the first people who were just magically
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  born here and you can't because that's not how people work.
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  So, yeah, I, I don't know what to say about this.
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  I'm incredibly interested in this guy's story, and I'm going
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  to give him an e-mail tonight and ask him if he wants to come
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  on and talk all about. Oh.
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  Absolutely, dude. Yeah, wouldn't that be great?
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  But in case he says no, at least not him.
• 18:10
  But his ordeal made the foolishness of the week.
• 18:14
  Our show Words and Numbers is a part of Civil's podcast network.
• 18:18
  Civil supports creators who embody the philosophy of human
• 18:21
  respect, which means embracing cooperation over coercion.
• 18:25
  We're committed to this mission. And if you are also welcome
• 18:28
  home, join us at civil.com. That's civl.com.
• 18:32
  Comedian, author and political satirist Andrew Heaton joins us
• 18:36
  this week. Andrew is host of the podcast of
• 18:40
  the Political Orphanage and the sci-fi deep dive podcast
• 18:44
  Alienating the Audience. He's a frequent contributor to
• 18:47
  Reason TV and hosted the popular web series mostly weekly.
• 18:52
  Pretty nice guy too. Andrew, welcome back to Words of
• 18:54
  Numbers. A pleasure to be back.
• 18:56
  I don't think I've been on the show since I was living in a
• 18:58
  cabin during the recession or during the the pandemic, that
• 19:02
  is. That is correct that.
• 19:04
  Is correct. We haven't dealt with you since
• 19:07
  you Co opted our fan base. Yeah.
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  That's we had, this was maybe a year or more ago, maybe 2 years.
• 19:14
  We had a words of numbers gathering of fans here in the
• 19:18
  Washington, DC area. And I was, I was coming down
• 19:21
  with something and I had to travel the next day and I, I
• 19:25
  couldn't risk pushing it. And you came to the rescue.
• 19:28
  I said, you know, well, can you like host these guys?
• 19:31
  I never anticipated you'd actually like Co-op the whole
• 19:35
  thing. So it was no longer words and
• 19:37
  numbers gathering. It was heating mainly or
• 19:40
  something. It was words and heatings and I
• 19:42
  and I absolutely threw on you to the bus 300.
• 19:45
  I, I like it. At first, I kind of sowed doubt.
• 19:48
  I was like everybody, you know, Anthony's not here.
• 19:50
  It's not indictment. He's not been indicted.
• 19:52
  It's totally legal. And then later I was like, no,
• 19:54
  he's been indicted. He's he's, it's, it's all
• 19:56
  illegal stuff. He's he's on the Lam right now.
• 19:59
  I think we took a video to that effect where, where I sent it to
• 20:01
  you and complained about you'd abandoned everybody.
• 20:04
  And yeah, it was, it was really good.
• 20:05
  I, I'm not good at building my own audience, but my, my career
• 20:08
  path is what I call hermit crabbing my way to success.
• 20:13
  And I was able to do that that day.
• 20:15
  Well, Heaton, you'll be very happy to know that on words and
• 20:18
  numbers backstage, I think it was 2 days ago, a bunch of
• 20:23
  people said, and I quote, you should have Andrew Heaton on as
• 20:28
  if that has never once happened before.
• 20:30
  And so I assured them it would happen next week because they
• 20:34
  were so important to us that we would make this happen within
• 20:39
  days. Not here.
• 20:40
  We are great I you guys are responsive to your loving fan
• 20:45
  base and I am flattered that they would think of me.
• 20:49
  They think of you more than they think of us.
• 20:50
  But hey, let's move on. When we were deciding to to talk
• 20:56
  today, we asked you for, you know what you've been working on
• 20:59
  some ideas you might have. And, and, and you sent back an
• 21:03
  e-mail so full of crazy that I don't even know where to begin.
• 21:07
  But, but I think the interesting 1, the fascinating one, the one
• 21:10
  that I really want to hear about is, is that you've been thinking
• 21:14
  and looking into economics in the dark ages.
• 21:18
  This has been a hobby horse of mine for the last 2-3 years.
• 21:21
  And when I say economics of the dark Ages, I'm really interested
• 21:24
  in how people thought about economics in the dark ages.
• 21:26
  So I'm, I'm not really talking about specifically how feudalism
• 21:31
  worked in terms of agriculture or the various rules and
• 21:34
  restrictions. That's all very interesting.
• 21:36
  Political economy. I'm very interested in how
• 21:39
  people approached economics in the dark ages.
• 21:42
  And the reason that I've become increasingly interested in that
• 21:46
  is I have a theory that I think I can back up that the dark ages
• 21:50
  never really went away, that the, the default position for,
• 21:54
  for most people, if they don't know economics is actually dark
• 21:58
  age thinking. And more to the point, you know,
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  I, I, I'm, I'm a fairly staunch anti communist and am old enough
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  to remember the, the Soviet Union and, and, and still herald
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  that as one of the great developments of, of mankind.
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  But even then, when I'm arguing with people, it's very rarely
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  that I'm actually arguing with them in modern America about
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  nationalizing industries and having a top down demand economy
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  run by a, a, a Soviet Bureau that, you know, there's touches
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  of that. But what, what I find more often
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  is that it's the sort of unexamined presuppositions that
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  have been leftover from the dark ages.
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  And so I, I keep telling people, and I think I'm right about this
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  when I'm arguing with a lot of my, my leftist friends, they're
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  not the new guy. I'm the new guy.
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  The ideas that were promulgated by the Enlightenment, that are
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  embodied in classical liberalism, those are the new
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  ideas. The old ideas are the dark age
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  ideas that we're still fighting, we're still arguing about.
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  And and I'd love to get into them.
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  And let's be clear, the Enlightenment was 3 to 400 years
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  ago, yes? It's not like this happened late
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  last week. Don't push people.
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  Don't push people. They're coming along.
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  Yeah, they're, they're, they're, you know, they, they say that
• 23:15
  you, you all would have you, you've got more successful and
• 23:19
  longer careers than I have at this point.
• 23:21
  I am a congenital optimist and I'm very sunny in my disposition
• 23:25
  and I and I think my grandkids will have a better life than me,
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  assuming that I eventually trick a woman into having children
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  with me. And, and I'm I'm generally very
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  positively inclined. I see very little evidence, your
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  audience notwithstanding, that people actually are learning
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  economics. We're becoming more economically
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  literate. And what worries me is I think
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  the default state is one that comes naturally to us from
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  evolution that is contravened to the world we're living in and,
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  and that that understanding economics has to be taught.
• 23:54
  And I don't see evidence that that is why spread or getting
• 23:57
  better. I don't know.
• 23:59
  Do you, do you share that same concern?
• 24:01
  Yeah, although you put some interesting words to it, now
• 24:05
  that I'm listening to you, I'm likening it to to physics that
• 24:10
  that Newtonian physics, we understand it intuitive level.
• 24:15
  Quantum mechanics makes no sense to us.
• 24:18
  And and yet when it comes to economics, more often than not,
• 24:21
  we're actually living in a quantum mechanics world.
• 24:24
  But you got people, communist, socialist, what have you,
• 24:28
  bringing in Newtonian physics view to it, which may may have
• 24:33
  worked, I shouldn't say may have worked.
• 24:35
  I'm sure it worked better when economies were much simpler, but
• 24:40
  it works much worse with complex economies.
• 24:43
  You know, I so if we're just talking about dark age
• 24:45
  economics, I think there's really only one provision of
• 24:49
  dark age economics that I would even concede on that.
• 24:52
  And, and that is the idea that we live in a 0 sum world.
• 24:55
  So were we to go back to the dark ages where all wealth was
• 25:00
  land, they had a point. If, if somebody was wealthy, it
• 25:03
  was because they owned a lot of land and they took it from
• 25:05
  somebody else. And you can even go further back
• 25:08
  than that. The great Matt Ridley writes in
• 25:10
  his book The Rational Optimist about how the Roman Empire was
• 25:14
  an economy largely based on conquest and predation, as
• 25:18
  opposed to the Blessed Carthaginians who were based on
• 25:21
  trade. So there's there's a whole
• 25:22
  period of classical antiquity followed by the Middle Ages
• 25:25
  where accurately the economy was such that if you were wealthy,
• 25:29
  it came at somebody else's expense.
• 25:31
  And I think that that is an intuitive thing that is born
• 25:34
  into us because we've been around about our species, been
• 25:38
  around about 300,000 years. When I was in high school, it
• 25:40
  was 200,000 years. Then we found like a shin bone
• 25:42
  in northern Africa. We now know we're 300,000 years
• 25:45
  old. And for most of that history,
• 25:47
  if, if the three of us and Danny were in a tribe of 80 people and
• 25:51
  we went out and killed an elk and I ate more of that elk than
• 25:54
  you did. I got more calories there.
• 25:56
  But now it's different. We got too many Elks.
• 25:58
  We got we're, we're getting fat. It's, it's a different
• 26:00
  situation. And thank God, capitalism came
• 26:03
  along and displaced feudalism and we now live in a world where
• 26:07
  wealth can be created, where if I build a house and you pay me
• 26:11
  money for the house, we didn't exchange a limited amount of
• 26:15
  resources. We created resources.
• 26:17
  We, we grew the pie. But that's really the only, the
• 26:19
  only mindset from the Middle Ages that temporarily I think
• 26:22
  was accurate. Right.
• 26:24
  Feudalism is, I think, relatively easily explained,
• 26:28
  right? And because where do you find
• 26:30
  it? You find it in small land masses
• 26:33
  with a lot of people. So you're going to find it in in
• 26:36
  the UK, England, you're going to find it in Japan, right?
• 26:41
  But the United States comes along.
• 26:42
  There's limitless land to the West.
• 26:44
  Feudalism never stood a chance here.
• 26:47
  But we just re elected a mercantilist president, right?
• 26:55
  Who's absolute? Who's absolute?
• 26:58
  First point is that someone always loses in a transaction
• 27:04
  and it's not going to be me. And, and this does seem to
• 27:08
  resonate with people in a way that you would think it wouldn't
• 27:12
  'cause if that were true, we'd all still be living in caves
• 27:16
  and, and we're not. But none the less, it resonates
• 27:20
  with people quite significantly and apparently always has.
• 27:26
  And I'm wondering, you use the word hard wired, which I think
• 27:29
  is fascinating. Do you think that's really hard
• 27:33
  wired into our humanity? Yes, I think that the default
• 27:40
  position is 1, where human beings understand resources
• 27:44
  being limited. And that's that's something that
• 27:46
  was bred into us on an evolutionary basis.
• 27:49
  There are other things that you can see it still work today.
• 27:51
  I don't know that they're directly applicable to
• 27:53
  economics, but just cognitively, we don't think in terms of
• 27:57
  actual numbers. We think in terms of proportion.
• 27:59
  So which makes sense if, if we're walking through a an
• 28:03
  orchard in the prehistoric days, it was most useful for us to be
• 28:08
  able to look at a tree and see which tree had the most apples
• 28:11
  on it, not to know the number of apples on the tree.
• 28:14
  But it creates weird, weird cognitive effects where for
• 28:19
  example, let's say the three of us are going to go get
• 28:22
  sandwiches for lunch and we're going to go get po boys.
• 28:27
  And then aunt says, oh, you know what, actually that place right
• 28:30
  there, there's, there's sandwiches.
• 28:32
  They're identical. They're exactly the same.
• 28:34
  It's actually the brother of the chef.
• 28:36
  It's, it's three blocks over, but it's $10 less.
• 28:39
  You know, we'd probably go do that.
• 28:41
  But if the three of us were getting suits, we're each
• 28:44
  getting $1000 suits. Let's say we're doing very well
• 28:46
  in the scenario, we're getting $1000 suits and then Ant goes,
• 28:49
  you know what, I actually know what Taylor three blocks over,
• 28:52
  he's just as good. His brother is the brothers of
• 28:55
  this Taylor and he charges $10 less.
• 28:57
  So we could get suits for $990.00.
• 29:00
  Almost everybody, myself included, would go Nah, why, why
• 29:04
  bother? It's only $10 because we're,
• 29:06
  we're looking at the proportional thing.
• 29:07
  So I think that kind of things wired in and I do think we have
• 29:09
  to be, we have to get kind of an an additional layer of of tools
• 29:14
  that are that are put on top of that in order to think around
• 29:17
  it. I think that that seems to play
• 29:20
  as well with people's fixation on inequality.
• 29:25
  By the same token that you know, so often when I have
• 29:28
  conversations with people who say, look, they're concerned
• 29:30
  about inequality in the United States and, and I get them to.
• 29:35
  Acknowledge that there's a. Difference between inequality
• 29:38
  and poverty. Poverty is the real problem.
• 29:41
  And they'll say yes, yes I can see that poverty is a real
• 29:44
  problem. Except this guy has more money
• 29:46
  than I do, and they're back to that proportional comparison.
• 29:51
  Yes, very much so. And I, I, I, I'm 100% on your
• 29:54
  camp on that one. I, I am concerned about the
• 29:56
  floor. I am not worried about the
• 29:58
  ceiling. I'm like, I, I went to Sweden,
• 30:01
  Finland and Norway over the summer and I, I hung out with,
• 30:05
  of various people and I, I'll say like the, the social system
• 30:08
  they have there seems to work very well.
• 30:10
  They get a lot of bang for their buck in terms of the high taxes
• 30:13
  that they're paying. And I want there to be a social
• 30:15
  safety net. So if the conversation is we're
• 30:18
  going to tax billionaires more in order to alleviate
• 30:21
  homelessness, I I'm happy to engage in that, but that's
• 30:25
  taking money from a particular group for a specific problem.
• 30:28
  And we think the people that have money have more money.
• 30:30
  So we're going to do that. I don't have any ethical problem
• 30:32
  with that. That's a very different
• 30:33
  consideration than the people are poor because there are
• 30:36
  billionaires. And if we just get rid of the
• 30:38
  billionaires, the people will stop being poor, which I do
• 30:41
  think is a pretty medieval mindset that it.
• 30:44
  Seems like envy's the actual. Problem.
• 30:47
  Yeah, I think so. And I think that that I think
• 30:49
  that's probably wired into US. And I, I I think that there are
• 30:54
  little pieces of my brain that are missing.
• 30:56
  I don't really get sports. I wish I did.
• 30:57
  I think my life would be a lot more colorful and enjoyable.
• 31:00
  Seems to be a. No, no, it wouldn't.
• 31:01
  It really wouldn't. Anthony is an idiot.
• 31:04
  Pino, Martin. I, I have, I have friends that
• 31:06
  sports is such a big part of their life and they get to have
• 31:08
  a spirit decor and I'm jealous. I think it would be great.
• 31:10
  I don't seem to have that part of the brain.
• 31:12
  I also just don't seem to maybe I'm doing so well right now.
• 31:15
  I can't see it. And all of all of my peers are
• 31:17
  doing about equally well. So I it maybe would change if
• 31:19
  all of my podcasting buddies sudden suddenly became Joe Rogan
• 31:22
  level. Maybe it would really rankle me.
• 31:24
  But at the moment I don't seem to have that as much.
• 31:26
  I'm concerned about actual poverty rather than the gap.
• 31:30
  And I'm concerned about relative growth more than, excuse me,
• 31:33
  I'm, I'm concerned about actual growth in terms of economics
• 31:36
  more than I am about relative growth.
• 31:38
  One, one of the middle models that I put forward when I talk
• 31:41
  to people have been inequalities.
• 31:42
  If you could push a button and it would double the amount of
• 31:44
  wealth everybody in the country had their, their real wealth,
• 31:47
  not their nominal wealth, their real wealth.
• 31:49
  Would you put the button and everybody goes, yes.
• 31:51
  And I go, OK, that's great, but keep mine.
• 31:53
  Like now I have three suits that look like I stole them from some
• 31:56
  British game show host. But like, Warren Buffett now has
• 32:00
  $180 billion as opposed to $90 billion.
• 32:04
  And the inequality is significantly increased by this
• 32:06
  action. But we're all better off.
• 32:08
  I would absolutely take that deal.
• 32:10
  But a lot of people, when they, when they think about it, they
• 32:13
  don't like it. I can make it even better for
• 32:15
  you. John Rawls, who's a Darwin of
• 32:18
  the liberal left in political philosophy circles, had this
• 32:23
  thing called the Difference Principle.
• 32:25
  And he said that if we as a society were to do something,
• 32:29
  anything, that increased our wealth but did so
• 32:34
  disproportionately even, it would be perfectly just.
• 32:40
  Even if the the the relative wealth of the very, very poor
• 32:45
  increased very little and the relative wealth of the very,
• 32:49
  very rich skyrocketed. As long as everybody's better
• 32:53
  off, it's perfectly acceptable. He says might be the only smart
• 32:58
  thing he ever said. Yeah, OK, Good.
• 33:00
  I I, I thought you were, you were going to get me all riled
• 33:02
  up. No, I agree with that.
• 33:03
  If everybody's better off, good. Rising tide lifts all boats.
• 33:06
  All that kind of does. I'm here for that.
• 33:08
  But to your, it's your example. It's going to be the case in
• 33:13
  almost every instance that that thing that rises all boats is
• 33:18
  going to rise. The boats on the right hand side
• 33:22
  of the bell, the bell curve a lot more than on the left hand
• 33:25
  side. Yes.
• 33:27
  And it's also going to be sorry. Go ahead, Dan.
• 33:29
  No, it is, but it it largely has to do with the laws of
• 33:34
  statistics. It's the way income and just
• 33:37
  naturally is distributed that if you do what you're suggesting,
• 33:40
  you're going to get more on the top, tailed in the bottom.
• 33:43
  But I want to go back to, to James pointed out that, well,
• 33:46
  this isn't a concern about inequality.
• 33:48
  It's a concern or, or it's actually envy, which people get
• 33:52
  very riled up about. And I think the I think he's
• 33:55
  right and I think the proof there is very simple that when
• 33:59
  people are concerned about inequality, they're never
• 34:03
  concerned about themselves having more than others.
• 34:06
  They're always concerned about others having more than
• 34:09
  themselves. And you could say, well, that's
• 34:11
  because, you know, there you got Buffett and Gates and and Musk
• 34:14
  and all of those who have billions of dollars, to which I
• 34:16
  respond, well, hang on. A poor person in America is
• 34:21
  richer than half the people on the planet.
• 34:23
  There's way more people poorer than the typical American.
• 34:26
  Then there are people who are richer.
• 34:28
  So if you're really concerned about inequality and it's not
• 34:31
  envy, start digging into your pockets and handing it out to
• 34:34
  poor people. Yeah, I, I agree with that.
• 34:37
  But I, you know, I think one of the other factors that that goes
• 34:40
  in that is part of this lingering dark age mentality
• 34:42
  that that dovetails with that 0 sum thinking and the, the
• 34:46
  politics of envy. There's a radical departure that
• 34:50
  takes place in 1776 when the most important document in the
• 34:54
  modern era was written, which is of course The Wealth of Nations
• 34:56
  by Adam Smith, followed by the Declaration of Independence.
• 35:00
  But prior to Adam Smith and the Enlightenment of the, the
• 35:05
  universal belief in Europe amongst educated people was
• 35:10
  that. And it goes all the way through
• 35:11
  classical antiquity, goes through the Roman Empire, back
• 35:14
  to Plato, is that prices rise because of greed, Because in the
• 35:18
  Middle Ages in particular, they understood economics as a
• 35:21
  substet of theology or possibly as a subset of ethics.
• 35:25
  And they, and they therefore tried to understand things not
• 35:28
  in terms of systems, outcomes and incentives, which is how we
• 35:32
  approach things in modern economics, but rather to think
• 35:34
  of it in terms of are you being virtuous or are you being
• 35:38
  immoral. And so there was a presumption
• 35:40
  that prices go up because people are greedy, particularly
• 35:44
  merchants. In the Middle Ages and all the
• 35:46
  way back, everybody hated merchants.
• 35:48
  They were the most reviled class.
• 35:49
  You can go back and read, it's either Plato or Aristotle, I
• 35:52
  forget which one. But he talks about how in the
• 35:55
  ideal Utopia, citizens would not be allowed to be merchants, and
• 35:58
  if they did it, they'd be jailed for bringing dishonor on their
• 36:00
  family. And Cicero talks about how
• 36:03
  merchants are vile. I mean, everybody accepted that
• 36:06
  merchants are the not the predacious Lords who are sucking
• 36:10
  the wealth out of everybody. Not the bishops were just the
• 36:13
  the ecclesiastical Lords, but the merchants, who are probably
• 36:16
  the only people during the dark ages that are actually growing
• 36:19
  the pie in any meaningful sense. But there was an idea that
• 36:22
  prices prices rise because of greed, and therefore the way we
• 36:26
  combat poverty is by suppressing greed.
• 36:29
  If we want to make poverty go away, we have to cap prices and
• 36:33
  we have to run greedy people out of town.
• 36:36
  Adam Smith comes along and goes, well, no, it's not that
• 36:39
  self-interest is corrosive and that it suppresses affluence
• 36:44
  when you put it in a competitive market economy.
• 36:46
  I get money by selling you stuff and I'm going to compete with
• 36:51
  James on how how cheap I can sell everything.
• 36:55
  And so it ends up being a propulsive mechanism, which is a
• 36:57
  huge difference between dark age thinking and modern thinking.
• 37:00
  We think of self-interest as something that one, is
• 37:03
  inevitable and baked into the human condition, and two,
• 37:06
  something that when you put it in a competitive economy, is a
• 37:08
  good thing. Because I it is not from the
• 37:12
  what is? It is not from the the
• 37:14
  generosity of the Baker that he sells you your bread, but but
• 37:17
  out of his own way. Whatever the quote is right?
• 37:19
  That that's a. Huge, huge departure and it's
• 37:21
  one that never went away. It's why there are are still
• 37:24
  persistent calls today for price controls, rent caps, things like
• 37:28
  that. I'm Donnie, just selected in New
• 37:30
  York. One of his signature pieces is
• 37:32
  we're going to put a cap on rent and we're going to enforce this
• 37:35
  here. Why is rent going up?
• 37:36
  It's not supply and demand. It's that these greedy landlords
• 37:40
  keep raising the prices, which I guess means that my native state
• 37:43
  of Oklahoma's just far less greedy.
• 37:45
  That's the difference is that Oklahomans are just pure of
• 37:48
  heart. And we're, we're going to charge
• 37:50
  you for a three bedroom house, $800 a month in Guthrie because
• 37:53
  we're just better people and folks in New York are evil.
• 37:56
  And so the landlady that's renting out half of her duplex
• 37:59
  is just much. And it, it, I, I think that
• 38:02
  breaks down very rapidly, but it never went away.
• 38:04
  And this is unfortunately, this is something that we've got to
• 38:07
  relearn every generation. It seems like every generation
• 38:10
  we're back at 0 again. And then you over the course of
• 38:14
  20 years, people come to realize, Oh yes, that economics
• 38:18
  is not a 0 sum game. And and no, businesses didn't
• 38:22
  suddenly discover that they could be greedy in 2022.
• 38:26
  They were. If they were greedy, they were
• 38:27
  greedy before. If they weren't, they weren't
• 38:29
  before. It has nothing to do with greed.
• 38:31
  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's that old, that old trope that I
• 38:34
  think is accurate. Like blaming rising prices on
• 38:37
  greed is like blaming air crashes on gravity.
• 38:40
  Like it's like this is this is a given.
• 38:42
  And again, it's a good thing in a market economy for people to
• 38:45
  make money because they go out and do more stuff.
• 38:47
  And we're so quick to point to businesses being greedy because
• 38:50
  they want more money, but nobody points to consumers being greedy
• 38:54
  because they want to pay less, right?
• 38:56
  We applaud that. Oh, look, I found a deal on
• 38:59
  this. Well, good for you.
• 39:01
  Well, why isn't that greedy? No one applauds the government
• 39:04
  for taking more in some instances than businesses have
• 39:08
  on their bottom line. Yeah.
• 39:11
  That. Even then, I'm, I'm, I'm getting
• 39:13
  into some real supposition here because I can't talk to any
• 39:15
  medieval people. But in in the episode that I, I
• 39:18
  recently did on the political orphanage entitled, I went back
• 39:23
  in time to talk to drunks about how people thought about
• 39:26
  economics in the Middle Ages. The conceit of the episode is
• 39:28
  that I, I literally time travel to 1282 to talk to people about
• 39:31
  what they think of economics. And then I wind up going forward
• 39:34
  a little bit and I talked to a priest and, and actually get
• 39:36
  there. There is actual theories that
• 39:40
  that were intellectual theories during the, the Middle Ages.
• 39:43
  But when, when we, when we go back there and look at it, I, I
• 39:49
  think it would not have been crazy for the priest I'm talking
• 39:52
  to to go, well, you know, what we ought to do is we ought to
• 39:55
  just take the Kyra, say, because, you know, priests
• 39:58
  aren't in it for the money. They're public servants.
• 40:00
  They're they're there to. Be be there as stewards of the
• 40:04
  community and for mankind. They're highly educated and we
• 40:07
  should just put them in charge of stuff like like they they
• 40:09
  could dictate what prices should be.
• 40:11
  You don't need to worry about it because they're afraid of going
• 40:13
  to hell. Therefore they will always be in
• 40:15
  good behavior. And then you flash forward it
• 40:17
  now. Well, we don't even have the
• 40:18
  fear of hell to to stop people from doing that.
• 40:21
  So like, why would if if you can't count on the Catholic
• 40:24
  Church in the dark ages to restrain its own corruption to
• 40:27
  incompetency for fear of going to hell for all eternity, why
• 40:32
  would you? And I'm not even saying that
• 40:33
  like public servants are bad, I'm just saying why would you
• 40:36
  assume that they're inoculated if that period of time didn't
• 40:39
  work? I I am saying public servants
• 40:42
  are bad. I say it all the time.
• 40:44
  I mean it right down to my core. Civil is on a mission to host
• 40:48
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• 40:50
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• 40:54
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• 40:56
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• 40:59
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• 41:03
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• 41:06
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• 41:11
  The other bit that, that I think goes along with this idea that
• 41:13
  prices rise because of greed. This is something that is part
• 41:15
  of the, the theoretical construct of the Middle Ages.
• 41:18
  The in the same way that like Adam Smith and the
• 41:20
  enlightenments, the, the core of economics for classical liberals
• 41:24
  and we can, we can add in Bastiat and, and various other
• 41:27
  characters to it as well. The, the main thinker during the
• 41:30
  Middle Ages is Thomas Aquinas when it comes to economics.
• 41:32
  He's the guy that people are keying off of.
• 41:34
  Now, I'm not a Catholic and I, I don't know Catholic theology
• 41:37
  terribly well. So he might have been great in
• 41:39
  terms of theology. I don't know, I don't mean to
• 41:41
  cast stones at him theologically, but he
• 41:44
  promulgated the idea called just price theory.
• 41:47
  And this was like the the main doctrine of the Middle Ages.
• 41:50
  And the idea of just price theory was that profits are
• 41:54
  inherently skeptic. They're they're inherently
• 41:56
  suspicious. Profits are inherently
• 41:57
  suspicious and that it is immoral for anybody to make
• 42:01
  excessive profits. That the, the moral thing
• 42:04
  everyone must be constrained by both personally and by law, is
• 42:08
  that you, you do a thing and you recover the costs of the thing
• 42:14
  you did. You built a house, you charge
• 42:16
  someone for the materials that you used to build the house, and
• 42:19
  then you take a modest addition to that for your own living and
• 42:23
  then you stop. So if I, if I build a house for,
• 42:27
  for, for you 2, you're living in a, a duplex in the Middle Ages.
• 42:31
  I can charge you for the wood and I can charge you a, a
• 42:33
  reasonable salary. But if I were to make like a 20%
• 42:38
  profit on the House, that's not OK.
• 42:40
  That is immoral and, and, and unacceptable to do.
• 42:43
  And I, I think you see that as, as well today where I, I have
• 42:46
  friends, when you talk to them, it's like I'm talking to Thomas
• 42:49
  Aquinas where they will say we shouldn't have a society where
• 42:52
  people earn money for something other than labor.
• 42:55
  People should only be paid for that which they do.
• 42:57
  It's immoral to have money derived from unearned non labor
• 43:02
  income and excessive profits are evil.
• 43:04
  Corporations that make too much profits are bad.
• 43:06
  There should be caps on how much profit they can make.
• 43:09
  What would happen if you do that?
• 43:10
  If, if, if you were to put a a cap on how much profit I can
• 43:14
  make as a podcaster, you know what?
• 43:15
  I would suddenly find a lot more episodes to do abroad at
• 43:18
  interesting locations so that I could just write them off My my
• 43:22
  my profit margin would go down. But suddenly I would do a lot
• 43:25
  more cool stuff. I wouldn't or I would just do
• 43:27
  less podcast one of the two. But but that like that idea that
• 43:30
  profits are suspect and and high profits are immoral.
• 43:33
  This is straight up in arguably the intellectual doctrine of the
• 43:37
  dark ages and it never went away.
• 43:38
  Oh. It's not just a Dark Ages.
• 43:39
  I mean, Pope Francis was much more aligned with Thomas Aquinas
• 43:44
  than he was Adam Smith. James and I have written about
• 43:47
  him many times. They were.
• 43:49
  Both much more aligned with Karl Marx than damn near anybody.
• 43:52
  Else, and this is, and this is a very, very smart guy who just
• 43:56
  went completely off the rails when it comes to economics, this
• 43:59
  is. This is the Platonic problem or
• 44:01
  the Socratic problem, right? People who are very, very good
• 44:04
  at one thing naturally assume that they're very, very good at
• 44:08
  everything. But but the interesting thing
• 44:11
  with with this nonsense, Andrews, I I've had those same
• 44:14
  conversations with people who I consider friends and they will
• 44:18
  tell me repeatedly that ExxonMobil should never make a a
• 44:23
  huge profit. And my rejoinder is, what about
• 44:27
  Apple? Is that OK?
• 44:28
  And for some reason, that's always OK.
• 44:31
  Yeah, yeah, because we we like apple and we hate oil.
• 44:35
  And there's there's something. There's something very deep
• 44:38
  underneath that realization, right?
• 44:39
  There are corporations that we can't stand and they tend to be
• 44:44
  things. They tend to produce things that
• 44:46
  we absolutely must have. And then there are corporations
• 44:49
  that we love and they tend to produce things that are luxury
• 44:54
  purchases. Whenever any of my friends bring
• 44:57
  up multinational corporations and for some reason
• 45:00
  multinational is brought up as a horrible thing.
• 45:02
  The idea that there would be I, I don't know why, because they
• 45:04
  tend to like foreigners. The people that I've, I'm
• 45:05
  talking about. What is multinational
• 45:07
  corporation though? And I immediately go like IKEA,
• 45:09
  like that's the first thing I say, like IKEA, because that's a
• 45:13
  multinational corporation. Those are Swedes you're dealing
• 45:15
  with. And they're like, well, not
• 45:16
  really that one because it's cute and I like it.
• 45:18
  And I don't know what their profit margin is even to, to
• 45:21
  your point on the Pope, that one is not surprising to me at all.
• 45:24
  And I, I don't even it, it, it makes sense because you're
• 45:28
  trying to approach economics as a subset of theology, which is
• 45:31
  literally what they did in the dark ages.
• 45:33
  That's exactly what they did. And I'm not surprised that
• 45:35
  somebody trained in theology that doesn't have a background
• 45:37
  in economics would naturally do that.
• 45:40
  But I don't think that the Bible is an economic text.
• 45:45
  I'm no longer religious. I used to be very religious and
• 45:48
  it would be crazy if I were an electrician and I tried to wire
• 45:52
  your house based on my interpretation of the Bible.
• 45:55
  I think any everybody rational would go, the Bible really
• 45:57
  doesn't have a lot to say about electrons and protons like it.
• 45:59
  It has things to say about how you comport yourself in terms of
• 46:03
  your interactions with other people and your interpersonal
• 46:05
  ethics. You can have that.
• 46:07
  But when we get into economics, we're we're talking about
• 46:09
  something else. But it's not surprising to me
• 46:11
  that the previous Pope would view it as you should not be
• 46:14
  avaricious. You should you should not be
• 46:17
  greedy. You should just do things out of
• 46:19
  the good of your heart. And on that note, I, I, it would
• 46:22
  be wonderful if people did all sorts of great, great things out
• 46:24
  of the goodness of their heart. I'm a big fan of charity.
• 46:26
  I'm a big fan of generosity, but it doesn't tend to scale
• 46:30
  terribly well. And if somebody's not going to
• 46:33
  do something out of the goodness of their heart, which I applaud,
• 46:36
  then we're left with two options.
• 46:38
  We either force them to do it through threat of imprisonment
• 46:41
  or fines, or they make a buck off of it.
• 46:44
  And society just seems to work a lot better when people are
• 46:47
  incentivized to provide goods and services because it's in
• 46:49
  their self-interest than to punish them if they failed to do
• 46:53
  the thing we're going to do. That's just a less efficient way
• 46:55
  of doing things. I I have to come to the rescue
• 46:57
  of the papacy a little bit here because there there is a recent
• 47:01
  Pope who actually did get economics pretty right, despite
• 47:06
  the fact that when he talked about it, he was talking about
• 47:08
  it from moral perspective. And that's John Paul too.
• 47:12
  I perhaps not coincidentally, the guy who grew up under
• 47:16
  communism, he understands how economic should work that.
• 47:20
  Makes a lot of sense at all. Not coincidentally at all.
• 47:24
  What one more reason to like John Paul, too?
• 47:25
  I've always liked that guy, so I'm going to add that to my
• 47:27
  quiver of a fake art Pope. Yeah, he's got, he's got.
• 47:30
  A great he's got a great quote which people only quote half of
• 47:34
  it and he says something, I'm going to butcher it.
• 47:36
  He says something's the effect of the the landlord should not
• 47:39
  exploit the renter and that's the part people quote.
• 47:43
  But then like it's I don't even think it's a period.
• 47:46
  I think it's a semi colon and the renter should not exploit
• 47:49
  the landlord, which to an economist I read that as.
• 47:53
  Oh he's talking about a free market price.
• 47:58
  One of the other things and I, I couldn't find this, I don't
• 48:00
  there, there might have been nascent ideas of supply and
• 48:03
  demand in the dark ages. I would be very surprised if
• 48:05
  merchants didn't have some idea that when demand goes up, they
• 48:09
  can charge more and that kind of thing.
• 48:11
  But I, I find that a, a kind of continuation of this thought
• 48:16
  process that we're still dealing with today is the idea that
• 48:19
  supply and demand is optional and that we should, we should
• 48:22
  restrict it when it's something truly important.
• 48:24
  And, and the rejoinder I always have is supply and demand is not
• 48:27
  optional. It you can't wish it away, you
• 48:29
  can't make it go away by Fiat. That's like trying to change the
• 48:32
  weight on your scale by capping the scale or trying to lower the
• 48:36
  temperature in your room by adjusting the numbers on the
• 48:39
  thermostat. You can't do that.
• 48:41
  And I, I have this conversation with people all the time where
• 48:43
  they'll say like, you know, I, I understand why you like markets,
• 48:48
  but for something truly important like housing, we can't
• 48:51
  leave it to supply and demand. And, and I go, you know, it's,
• 48:55
  this isn't a situation where I'm just fetishizing markets so hard
• 48:58
  that I want to apply supply and demand.
• 49:00
  And I, I believe it's modular and I can pick which sector
• 49:03
  defects. It's always there.
• 49:05
  Now the government can get in and say it's going to increase
• 49:08
  the supply of houses. They, they sort of do that in
• 49:10
  Singapore. The way they do it, it can, it
• 49:13
  can increase the demand side by providing subsidies or, or like
• 49:17
  when we get to food, we could talk about like food stamps.
• 49:20
  That's, that's the government subsidizing the demand side.
• 49:22
  So, and I'm I'm there for that. Again, I want a social safety
• 49:25
  net, but you can't get away from the equation itself.
• 49:28
  You can just, you can just adjust the players on the teeter
• 49:31
  totter, but you can't get rid of the teeter totter.
• 49:33
  The supply and demand is always there.
• 49:35
  No, you you could also hide. It.
• 49:38
  Governments are great at transforming prices into pain
• 49:41
  and and they'll claim that, well, they've controlled the
• 49:44
  price. You know, all they've done is
• 49:45
  they've hidden it, the pains being felt over here or
• 49:47
  somewhere else. And, and I come into this every
• 49:50
  single time there's a natural disaster of any kind and the
• 49:54
  price of generators goes up, the price of gas goes up.
• 49:57
  And look, either the price goes up and people regulate what they
• 50:01
  consume, or the price stays the same and the first guy in line
• 50:04
  gets all of it. Yeah, I'm, I'm with you on that.
• 50:06
  And that, that one is a hard sell.
• 50:08
  Like I've, I've had conversations, I spent a lot of
• 50:10
  time in Scotland and I love the Scots.
• 50:13
  I say this is an associate Scott.
• 50:15
  They're, they're kind of Venezuelan tweed and their
• 50:17
  orientation economically, they like to think of themselves as
• 50:20
  Scandinavians. And I wish they would spend more
• 50:21
  time over there because I don't think they've got the actual
• 50:23
  same economic process going on. They're they're, they're more of
• 50:26
  the Shabbos camp that I'd like. And I've had conversations about
• 50:29
  that of, you know, there, there should be, what are what are
• 50:33
  they called? Greed law.
• 50:36
  I can't remember the term here, but when you when you put a
• 50:39
  moratorium on people charging more for gas during a yeah,
• 50:42
  you're talking about price cap, right?
• 50:44
  That's it. Price gouging laws, anti gouging
• 50:47
  laws. Yes.
• 50:47
  I actually, I did talk to somebody who at least I thought
• 50:49
  was very honest where I explained it to her.
• 50:52
  I, I, I, I went through all that you're going to get, you can
• 50:55
  either have no gas that costs very little or you can have more
• 50:59
  gas that costs more. That to me is not a hard one.
• 51:02
  And she went, I would rather not have the gas be taken advantage
• 51:05
  of then then have the gas be taken advantage of.
• 51:07
  And I went, well, you know, that is, that is your call.
• 51:11
  I do not want to inflict that perspective on the other people.
• 51:15
  And I you know what, certain times I would agree with you
• 51:17
  where like I, I don't know, I'm going to catch a plane or
• 51:20
  something and the the airlines are just horrible.
• 51:22
  And maybe I'd rather take a train because you guys are
• 51:24
  assholes. Like maybe so, but but it's
• 51:26
  still overall going to be ameliorative to just let the
• 51:29
  prices work. But see, The thing is, if she
• 51:32
  wants to not have the gas and not be taken advantage of, she
• 51:35
  has that option. Just don't fly the gas.
• 51:38
  Stay home. Exactly.
• 51:40
  Yep, there's, there's, there's one more thing.
• 51:43
  And then I think I've had all my major points in terms of dark
• 51:45
  age thinking. And this is more mindset than
• 51:47
  economics specifically other what applies to economics.
• 51:50
  And that is that today we tend to particularly economics,
• 51:53
  economists tend to look at economies as incentive
• 51:57
  structures and we look at problems as systemic issues.
• 52:00
  So right now with housing, I would say 80 to 90% of the
• 52:04
  housing problem we've got in this country is that we restrict
• 52:07
  supply and that if we were to remove the caps on supply,
• 52:11
  prices would go down. We've seen that in Austin, TX,
• 52:13
  where I was living up until a couple years ago.
• 52:15
  They, they, they changed the laws in Austin, TX to make it
• 52:18
  easier to build housing and then prices went down.
• 52:20
  But that's a very modern way of looking at it of a series of, of
• 52:24
  levers that you push and stuff goes up and stuff goes down.
• 52:27
  And a way of approaching this, say, during the 2008 recession
• 52:32
  would be to go, OK, the the government was incentivizing
• 52:36
  bankers to take on subprime applicants.
• 52:40
  And that created this very large pool of people that actually
• 52:43
  couldn't pay back the money and and so on and so forth.
• 52:46
  In in the dark ages. I think overwhelmingly people
• 52:49
  approach things not systemically, but on an agentic
• 52:52
  basis. And what I mean by that is, you
• 52:55
  know, system systemic. I think I think that's that's
• 52:57
  kind of straightforward there. There's a system we're looking
• 52:59
  at incentives. Agentic thinking is the idea
• 53:02
  that if something bad happens, it's because there is a specific
• 53:04
  personal agent who is responsible for it and needs to
• 53:08
  be stopped and brought to justice.
• 53:09
  So when I was working on the Hill, right at the tail end of
• 53:13
  the Great Recession, so many people would call in and go.
• 53:16
  Who? Who?
• 53:16
  Is responsible for this that should go to jail.
• 53:19
  There's got to be some guy in in a corporation that we can we can
• 53:23
  put behind bars for this catastrophe.
• 53:25
  And you know, I I couldn't really like 1 I didn't have
• 53:28
  economic training at the time. And two wasn't my job to to
• 53:30
  espouse my opinion. I was there as a vox for the the
• 53:33
  member of Congress. But the reality was, look, we
• 53:36
  had a really dumb system in place.
• 53:38
  And yes, there were people that took advantage of it and if they
• 53:40
  committed fraud or they did something illegal, they should
• 53:42
  be they should deal with the consequences of it.
• 53:44
  But the reality is it's not that the economy was fine and then
• 53:47
  seven bad dudes wrecked everything in the same way that
• 53:51
  if we would go back to the the dark ages, if you were to talk
• 53:54
  to people about crop failure, which was persistent.
• 53:57
  There were two phenomena going on.
• 53:59
  There was one a really, really unproductive system that
• 54:02
  existed. What they had the Commons where
• 54:05
  at least in England and in Scotland, where you'd you'd have
• 54:08
  the village allocate the farmland on a on a regular basis
• 54:11
  every year, every few years based on how many people are in
• 54:13
  the family, which is a very fair and egalitarian way of doing it.
• 54:16
  But if you know that the land is going to be reapportioned every
• 54:19
  so often, you don't have a lot of incentive to take time out of
• 54:22
  your already miserable back breaking day to drain a swamp
• 54:25
  and add land to it because you're not going to get the pay
• 54:26
  off from it. And there's lots of other things
• 54:29
  like that, but it's a very unproductive system.
• 54:31
  And then on top of that, you get like the Little Ice Age that
• 54:33
  starts in the year 1300, goes to about the year 1800, where it's
• 54:37
  just cooler and the growing season's shorter.
• 54:39
  And you have droughts and you have rainy seasons.
• 54:42
  And these are just things that make agriculture not work well.
• 54:46
  But the way people would approach it was there's a
• 54:49
  drought there. Has to be a.
• 54:51
  Person responsible for this. Therefore, there's got to be a
• 54:54
  witch somewhere in our county that used probably her black
• 54:59
  magic in order to afflict this on us.
• 55:01
  So we've got to find the witch. We've got a killer.
• 55:04
  And I, I find this when I talk to people today where they,
• 55:07
  they, they want to find the bad guy, find the bad guy, stop the
• 55:11
  bad guy, spot the bad guy, stop the bad guy.
• 55:14
  And we're going to play whack A mole with a bad actor.
• 55:17
  And that's going to fix the system where is I think
• 55:19
  modernity goes, no, you've, we've got a incentive structure
• 55:22
  in place. We have to make sure the
• 55:23
  incentives are good. To.
• 55:25
  Arrive at an optimum outcome. I I refer to all of this as the
• 55:30
  mysterious dude issue, right? There's always some mysterious
• 55:34
  dude who's causing a problem. But but let's not also for
• 55:38
  forget Heaton, that the primary tool in the Middle Ages against
• 55:45
  famine was prayer. Not terribly effective.
• 55:49
  Not terribly effective. Pray all you won't.
• 55:52
  That's not going to be on that too, too, James, Like it's, you
• 55:56
  know, I have a lot of religious friends and, and, and I, I used
• 55:58
  to be religious and I, I don't want to, I don't want to crap on
• 56:01
  anybody. But the, the dark ages were, if,
• 56:04
  if nothing else, religious. I don't think anybody would
• 56:06
  debate that. And Christianity was more front
• 56:09
  and center back then and prayer was a lot more common and it,
• 56:12
  we've got a lot more food today. So they do seem to be orthogonal
• 56:15
  to one another. Yeah, I think that's right.
• 56:17
  And, and I can tell you from personal experience that when I
• 56:20
  went to Catholic High School, I prayed daily for the affections
• 56:24
  of Marianne Christadolpho and she never came near me.
• 56:28
  I I doubt to this day she even knows who I was.
• 56:31
  How do you how do you know what she was praying?
• 56:33
  For Well, it wasn't for me, that's for sure.
• 56:38
  I. I want to send my kids to
• 56:40
  Catholic school because all the people that I know that have
• 56:43
  come out of Catholic school are atheists that really love sex
• 56:45
  and I want that for my children. There there is that and I don't
• 56:49
  think they I don't think they allow beating in them anymore.
• 56:52
  Oh good. I had some I had some unique
• 56:55
  punishments laid on me in Catholic school.
• 56:58
  I unique, let's just call them the the most unique was the they
• 57:02
  used to keep a jar of dried peas on on a desk.
• 57:07
  And when you had been especially naughty in the eyes of God and
• 57:10
  all of his earthly representatives, they would drop
• 57:13
  a hand in that, pull out a handful, throw them on the floor
• 57:17
  and you got to kneel on them and you knelt on those peas until
• 57:21
  they told you you felt badly enough.
• 57:23
  Didn't matter if you cried or not, you were going to do some
• 57:26
  time. Huh.
• 57:29
  Yeah, I could do without that. It it sucked, I or I'm sure it
• 57:36
  did suck. Not because of course, that
• 57:38
  would never happen to me, but there you go.
• 57:41
  All right, So Andrew, let me let me play us out with one last
• 57:45
  question for you. And it's probably a deeply
• 57:48
  unfair question. And if it's so you can kind of
• 57:51
  wave it off with you through hand, I won't take any offense.
• 57:54
  At all. I'm 1/4 politician James I can
• 57:55
  sidestep if I need to. Yeah, I, I, I was just trying to
• 58:00
  make myself look nice. It had nothing to do with you.
• 58:02
  Anyway, dealing with the Dark Ages is phenomenally difficult,
• 58:07
  right? You, you run into the the
• 58:09
  problem of the lack of sources. Primary sources seem almost not
• 58:14
  to exist at all. How did you do it?
• 58:19
  How'd you go digging through this stuff?
• 58:20
  Where, where were your big fines that you did?
• 58:24
  Because nobody expects big fines, right?
• 58:26
  What were the huge things you found and where did you find
• 58:29
  them? And what did you expect?
• 58:30
  You could have found but didn't? That's a great question.
• 58:36
  Some of it is supposition, but I think it's, I think it's pretty
• 58:40
  sound like agentic thinking, just the way people dealt with
• 58:45
  calamities by by finding somebody and bringing them to
• 58:50
  justice. I think is I, I fairly
• 58:52
  self-evident. So I, I, I feel like I'm on
• 58:54
  good, good footing for that, even if I don't have direct
• 58:57
  quotes for it. I did do an episode, a bonus
• 58:59
  episode that was a corollary to that episode called The
• 59:01
  Economics of Witch Hunting, where I did get into it where a
• 59:05
  huge amount of witch killings took place in Europe between
• 59:09
  1550 and 1800, which is actually kind of late in the game if you
• 59:12
  think about it. And so I was able to find
• 59:15
  sources on that in terms of how people approach things.
• 59:18
  But in terms of the other stuff, Thomas Aquinas was probably the
• 59:23
  the best and key thing to go off of because that's an actual
• 59:26
  educated, erudite thinker who could give voice to these
• 59:32
  positions and, and either was summarizing what was already on
• 59:36
  the ground or alternately became the the intellectual linchpin of
• 59:39
  everything that was to follow. So I think he was there.
• 59:42
  One of the other things too is just going through I, I really
• 59:47
  enjoy reading history and I, it's, I just, I found these
• 59:50
  little Nuggets that I've stored at the back of my mind over time
• 59:53
  where I would go. That's really interesting like I
• 59:58
  found OK here's here's a quote from Cicero.
• 1:00:00
  He said that retail commerce is Sordidas or vile because
• 1:00:05
  merchants exact quote would not make any profit unless they lied
• 1:00:08
  constantly. End Quote the.
• 1:00:11
  The philosopher Aristotle wrote in the city that is the most
• 1:00:14
  finely governed, the citizens should not live a vulgar or
• 1:00:17
  merchants way of life. For the sort of that way of life
• 1:00:20
  is ignoble and contrary to virtue.
• 1:00:23
  And Plato when when he wrote about his ideal society would
• 1:00:26
  not be 1. Where the guardians of it owned
• 1:00:28
  private property because he thought the ownership of private
• 1:00:31
  property would incentivize people to fight over what they
• 1:00:34
  owned and therefore citizens of the city would not engage in
• 1:00:38
  commerce and trade. So I found lots of things like
• 1:00:40
  that, but the main thing thing though is I'd say Thomas
• 1:00:42
  Aquinas, because we can at least go, there's a thing called just
• 1:00:45
  price theory. You can look up articles on it,
• 1:00:48
  you can look up quotes of it. And that's the thing where I
• 1:00:51
  can, I can point to a specific intellectual construct that was
• 1:00:55
  there and I would argue still is today.
• 1:00:58
  And if our listeners want to go look for that, it's in the Summa
• 1:01:01
  Theologica. And trust me, you don't want to
• 1:01:05
  read the entire Summa Theologica looking for this so helpful
• 1:01:09
  publishers have pulled out the questions on law and you can you
• 1:01:16
  can find it there. Nice and nice and simple 8080
• 1:01:19
  page book. Or I'll, I'll, if I might, if I
• 1:01:22
  might plug myself for a moment. Of course you want a more
• 1:01:24
  entertaining version. And I, I think I'm pretty safe
• 1:01:27
  in saying that. Say what you will about me, I am
• 1:01:29
  funnier than Thomas Aquinas. I'm sure he's a better person
• 1:01:34
  than me. Everything else but but by
• 1:01:35
  orders. Of magnitude.
• 1:01:37
  You're lot funnier than I did. In the most recent episode I did
• 1:01:41
  on the political orphanage, I did two things.
• 1:01:43
  The first half is me just talking to randos, blacksmith,
• 1:01:48
  bartender, farmer, that kind of thing.
• 1:01:50
  And then I, I kind of do some meta where I'm like, you know,
• 1:01:53
  I'm, I'm doing a straw man argument here because I'm
• 1:01:56
  talking to the uneducated rubes of the dark ages.
• 1:01:58
  At one point I'm literally arguing with a scarecrow.
• 1:02:00
  So I am, I am fighting straw man.
• 1:02:03
  And then I, I, I spent about 40 minutes where I really tried to
• 1:02:09
  come up with an articulate intellectual defense of just
• 1:02:15
  price theory and the, the thinking of the Middle Ages.
• 1:02:18
  So if you were to listen to that episode, there's a character,
• 1:02:20
  Father Richard, who's in the latter half, who I think is a, a
• 1:02:24
  succinct and eloquent and more entertaining version of Thomas
• 1:02:28
  Aquinas and his king off of him. And that's on my show, The
• 1:02:31
  Political Orphanage. Excellent.
• 1:02:33
  Thank you, Andrew. This has been wonderful.
• 1:02:35
  Please stand. My pleasure.
• 1:02:37
  Good to be back on the show. Thanks guys.
• 1:02:39
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• 1:02:42
  Numbers and join Civil to get access to film shows and live
• 1:02:46
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• 1:02:48
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• 1:02:51
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• 1:02:53
  Learn more at civil.com. That's civl.com.