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Angus Deaton on the Financial Advantage of College Degrees · Masters in Business

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio.
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  Speaker 2: This week on the podcast what a Delight, I got
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  Speaker 2: to spend about two hours with Sir Angus Deeton. He
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  Speaker 2: won the Nobel Prize in twenty fifteen for his work
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  Speaker 2: on consumption, poverty, welfare, wealth and health inequality. Really, the
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  Speaker 2: work he's done on inequality tame after the Nobel Prize,
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: based on a book him and his wife put out
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  Speaker 2: in a number of papers, he wrote, what can I say?
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  Speaker 2: He is just so fascinating, such an interesting person born
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  Speaker 2: in the UK, grows up in Scotland, is becomes a
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  Speaker 2: professor in the UK and then says, let's go check
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  Speaker 2: out that place America and starts teaching at Princeton forty
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: years ago. He's been here about half his life. I
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  Speaker 2: found this conversation be just delightful, so interesting, so fascinating.
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  Speaker 2: He is so knowledgeable about so many unusual areas in economics.
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  Speaker 2: We only got to scratch the surface on some of them. Healthcare,
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  Speaker 2: minimum wage, what really makes people happy? And how significant
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  Speaker 2: having or not having a college degree. You know, the
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: United States has very much become a bifurcated nation and
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  Speaker 2: where Professor Daton draws the line, if you don't have
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  Speaker 2: a college degree, you are just at a huge disadvantage
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  Speaker 2: in this society, and he brings the receipts, he has
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  Speaker 2: all the data that proves it. I found this just
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  Speaker 2: to be fascinating, charming, delightful, and I think you will also,
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: with no further ado my conversation with Sir Angus Deeton.
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  Speaker 1: Thank you very much for having me.
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  Speaker 2: Well, well, I've left out about ninety percent of your CV.
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  Speaker 2: You're the author of two hundred plus papers, six books.
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  Speaker 2: Deaths of Despair, which you wrote with and Case Happens
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: to Be Your Wife was a New York Times bestseller,
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  Speaker 2: and your latest book, Economics in America An Immigrant Economist,
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  Speaker 2: explores the land of inequality. We're going to talk about
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: in a few minutes, but let's just start with what
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  Speaker 2: you cover, which is kind of fascinating health, happiness, development, poverty,
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  Speaker 2: well being, inequality, and the best ways to collect and
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  Speaker 2: interpret evidence for a public policy. That is quite an eclectic,
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  Speaker 2: broad set of interests. How do they all relate to
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  Speaker 2: each other?
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  Speaker 1: Well, I think there are all sort of sides of
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  Speaker 1: the same thing, which is, I'm interested in what makes
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  Speaker 1: people tick. You know what makes people do what they do.
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  Speaker 1: I'm interested in their wealth being in a fairly broad sense.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, in England we used to call it welfare,
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  Speaker 1: but welfare here means something else.
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  Speaker 2: You got a dirty connotation in the United States.
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  Speaker 1: I'm interested in people's wellbeing, and that's to do with
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  Speaker 1: how much they spend, how much they save. You know,
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  Speaker 1: it's to do with getting from poor country, turning poor
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  Speaker 1: countries into rich countries. It's to do with poverty, is
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  Speaker 1: to do with inequality. All of these things hang together.
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  Speaker 1: And I'm a data guy, so I'm really interested in
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  Speaker 1: how you interpret data.
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  Speaker 2: Let's just start with your career, which I love how
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: you describe your early part of your career. After a
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  Speaker 2: brief and undistinguished career at the Bank of England, you
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  Speaker 2: return to academia as a professor of econometrics at the
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: University of Bristol. Brief and undistinguished. Who puts that in
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  Speaker 2: their CV?
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  Speaker 1: Well, I was not cut out to be a banker.
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  Speaker 1: But one of the things that was good about spending
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: nine months there was I discovered that I wasn't cut
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  Speaker 1: out to be a banker and it was much more
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  Speaker 1: fun to be an academic. There's also I had a
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  Speaker 1: girlfriend in Cambridge.
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  Speaker 2: So about that. One of the things I found fascinating
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  Speaker 2: in your Nopell Prize acceptance speech, for lack of a
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  Speaker 2: better word, you said you became an economist by accident.
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  Speaker 2: You're going to have to give us some more color
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  Speaker 2: on that. Well.
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  Speaker 1: I was always interested in a wide range of things.
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  Speaker 1: So when I was at this very fancy private school
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  Speaker 1: that I was at as a kid, I did math
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  Speaker 1: because it gave me a huge amount of free time
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  Speaker 1: to do the things I really cared about, like reading
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  Speaker 1: books and playing the pipe organ and playing rugby and
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  Speaker 1: sports and things. But when I got to Cambridge, you know,
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  Speaker 1: the math was sort of serious there, and so I
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  Speaker 1: discovered this was not really for me. And like most students,
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: you move up a grade and you discover you've been
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  Speaker 1: the smartest thing there's ever been until you get there
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  Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, there's a whole lot of
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  Speaker 1: other people.
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  Speaker 2: Who are These guys are really good at this.
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  Speaker 1: They're really good at this. So after a couple of years,
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  Speaker 1: in something of despair, my tutors said to me, you
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  Speaker 1: have to give up doing this, And I said, well,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: you know what, could I do. They said, well, you
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  Speaker 1: could leave, and I said, without a degree, my dad
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  Speaker 1: would be very unhappy. So I said, what's the alternaty said,
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  Speaker 1: There's only one other thing for people like you.
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  Speaker 2: It's called economics, right, Economics for people who were only
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  Speaker 2: fair at mathematics or.
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  Speaker 1: Something like that. I wasn't a bad mathematician, and I've
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  Speaker 1: used a lot of math in my career as an economist,
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  Speaker 1: and it's a very useful thing. But I just had
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  Speaker 1: lost interest in it anymore. And as soon as I
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  Speaker 1: started studying economics, I always thought it hooked.
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  Speaker 2: That raises a question. You're a lad from Edinburgh, how
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  Speaker 2: do you become so interested in United States economics? It
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  Speaker 2: would seem that there's a ton of history and a
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  Speaker 2: lot of stuff happening in the UK. What brought you here?
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  Speaker 1: Well, I think I'd remember I was an academic economist,
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  Speaker 1: and it was pretty clear from the very first economics
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  Speaker 1: book I read, which was by Paul Samuelson, that the
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  Speaker 1: most famous, most interesting economists were working in the US.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, it was a bigger country. That had not
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  Speaker 1: been true forty years before when Keynes was in Cambridge, right,
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  Speaker 1: and so on. But you know, the Kynesianism had sort
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  Speaker 1: of lost its well, he was no longer alive, right,
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  Speaker 1: and the old Kynsians were a bit grumpy and not
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  Speaker 1: so very interesting.
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  Speaker 2: At the time. You have Paul Samuelson at MIT, you
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  Speaker 2: have Milton Friedman at Chicago. You have a run of people.
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  Speaker 2: Maybe it's a little early for the Berkeley crowd and
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  Speaker 2: Princeton Harvard Yale crowd comes a little later.
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  Speaker 1: There were a lot of people I remember reading the
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  Speaker 1: Princeton Studies and International Finance, which seemed to me very
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  Speaker 1: interesting at the time. I'd met Fritz Makhlop, who was
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  Speaker 1: at Princeton when I was still in Britain. For instance,
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  Speaker 1: there was Bob Solo, who was always, you know, a
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  Speaker 1: great hero of mine, even long before I met him.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, that paper on Economic Growth is a transcendent
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  Speaker 1: piece of work and really sort of shaped the way
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  Speaker 1: generations of economists have thought. And it's one of these
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  Speaker 1: things that really does tell you something that you've always
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  Speaker 1: thought is really not quite right, and it just comes
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: from thinking about it harder. And boy, was that an
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  Speaker 1: amazing example to all of us. There were also a
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  Speaker 1: lot of econometricians here, and I was sort of into
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  Speaker 1: My first job as a professor was a professor of
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  Speaker 1: econometrics at Bristol, So you know, I took my math
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  Speaker 1: into statistics and things.
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  Speaker 2: Am I remembering correctly? Is Solo the economist who said
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  Speaker 2: productivity is everywhere except the economic data?
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  Speaker 1: Am I getting one of the many clever things right?
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  Speaker 2: He was quite an influential economist. So you have all
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  Speaker 2: of these big economic names in the United States taking
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  Speaker 2: the mantle from Kines and other people in the UK
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  Speaker 2: and elsewhere. How do you translate that into a job
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  Speaker 2: at Princeton when you're working at Cambridge or Bristol.
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  Speaker 1: Well, I was working at Bristol. I was publishing papers
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  Speaker 1: that were attracting a certain amount of attention. I'd met
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: some of the Princeton people at a conference that i'd
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: organized helped organize in Italy. Become very good friends with
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: the Orly Ashenfelter, who's another incredibly influential person in modern economics.
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  Speaker 1: And I went to visit Princeton for a year in
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: seventy nine and really liked it. At Bristol at that
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  Speaker 1: time was suffering from a real cash crunch. Missus Thatcher
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  Speaker 1: didn't care for the universities very much. Really, yeah, really.
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  Speaker 2: That's surprising to someone in the United States because the
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  Speaker 2: especially the elite universities, they always seem to have a
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  Speaker 2: ton of cash. The joke is Harvard is a fifty
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: billion dollar hedge fund with a small liberal arts college
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  Speaker 2: attached to it. I'm surprised to learn of that.
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  Speaker 1: Well, they're really British universities are nothing like that now,
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  Speaker 1: and then they were a million miles away from there.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: So there were places like Cambridge whose colleges were immensely wealthy.
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  Speaker 1: So you could walk on Trinity Land all the way
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: from Trinity College to the center of London. Wow. But
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: that did not accrue to the university, which was relatively poor.
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  Speaker 1: And what had happened was that there was a five
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  Speaker 1: year financial settlement every five years at Conquinium with the universities,
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: and unfortunately it was not indexed. So when we got
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: this burst of inflation in the early seventies, the universities
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  Speaker 1: were going bankrupt. And Missus Stancher, I think it's not uncommon.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think missus Stancher thought much of
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  Speaker 1: sort of point he headed intellectuals, as it were, And
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  Speaker 1: even though she'd been to Oxford to herself, and I
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  Speaker 1: think it was probably true that most of the university
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  Speaker 1: establishment was fairly hostile.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: Are you finding after forty years here in the United States,
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  Speaker 2: we're starting to see some criticism, at least in terms
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  Speaker 2: of political correctness. And even what young and not particularly
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: experienced college students say about things in the Middle East
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  Speaker 2: of Harvard was essentially shouted out of her office. How
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: do you look at this?
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: The mess that's happening in Israel and cause is something
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: very different, I think, and huge, and it's affecting all
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  Speaker 1: parts of American society in ways that we really have
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  Speaker 1: not seen before. But there's a sort of separate issue
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  Speaker 1: of sort of political correctness within American universities. It's interesting that.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, I taught at Princeton for more than thirty years.
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  Speaker 1: I never encountered that at Princeton, So I never felt
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: that I had to issue trigger warnings or that students
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: wouldn't let me talk about certain things so they put
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: their hands out with their face when I said the
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: wrong words.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: That really goes on in college.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm told it does. But you know, I'm a
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: consumer of this, just as you are read about it
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  Speaker 1: in the newspapers, and it makes me scared. I worry.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: I have grandchildren to granddaughters at school in the city here,
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: and I wore by the political correctness of their teachers,
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  Speaker 1: for example. But I haven't seen much of it in
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  Speaker 1: the university so as far as Harvard, Mit pen et cetera.
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  Speaker 1: I read about it in the newspapers. I don't have anything
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  Speaker 1: original to say.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Maybe it's generational. But if I had a professor I
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: didn't like, I would go down to the registrar drop
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: the class. There was a market system there that if
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: you really said stuff that enough students didn't care for,
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: they wouldn't take your class. They'd take somebody else's.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: That rarely happened to me. I remember one student who
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: didn't like the grade at given.
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  Speaker 2: Way that it's too late.
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  Speaker 1: It was too late, but I don't think she came
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  Speaker 1: back for the second half of the course.
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  Speaker 2: And then the other thing I have to ask you
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: about having grown up in the UK. What was your
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: experience like being an immigrant to the United States in
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  Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties and having to adopt to a very
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: different set of economic circumstances. We'll talk more about healthcare,
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: which obviously is a world of difference. What we your
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: experience is like as a legal immigrant.
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  Speaker 1: Legal Yeah, I was legitimate, documented alien. The initial title of.
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  Speaker 2: That book was shock and Awe, really.
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  Speaker 1: Which was in this sense, you know, I felt a
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  Speaker 1: lot of awe at the amazing things that went on
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  Speaker 1: in America and also a good deal of shock. So
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: the healthcare system was a big part of it, which
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: was sort of feeling that I didn't know how to
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: negotiate this. I didn't know the difference between a pediatrist
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: and a pediatrician, which turned out to be something I
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: had to know.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: You had a GP, a general practitioner if you needed
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: something specific, they would send you that way. Or did
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: everybody do everything in the UK?
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: No, not everybody did everything, but the gps. The general
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: practitioners were gatekeepers too, you know, more advanced care or
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: specialized care, and I think that worked pretty well for us.
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  Speaker 1: So that was quite a shock. I also liked having
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: a lot more money. That was certainly different, and I'd
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: worried about money my whole life.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: Our professors higher paid in the United States than they
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: are in the UK.
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  Speaker 1: They were then, for sure in Britain in those days,
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  Speaker 1: pretty much all professors were paid the same and it
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: wasn't very much. Really, I had a lot more money.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: Here in the United States. Yes, I have a vivid
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: recollection of being in the UK during the financial crisis
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  Speaker 2: for work, and you walk down the streets from New
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: York in mid two thousand and eight, the tension is palpable,
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: and I didn't get that same sense in Europe. I
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: was in the UK and Brussels on one trip and
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: my conclusion was, Hey, if you're not stressing about losing
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: your healthcare because you're getting fired, it still sucks to
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: lose your job, but the stress level seems to be
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: a little less. Is that an oversimplification or is that a.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: I hadn't noticed that, But it's certainly true that not
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: having to worry about healthcare is something that is a
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: big difference between the two much.
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  Speaker 2: It's a huge burden, and when people do the comparison,
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: all right, you're paying a lot more taxes there. But
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: one of the biggest single contributors to inflation here, not
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: the past few years during the post COVID surge, but
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: the past forty years it's been growing at seven eight
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: nine percent. Your insurance costs and your hospital costs that's
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: a lot relative to two percent inflation rate.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Here, I'm a little time, and that's not happened in Britain,
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: and it hasn't happened in other European countries, and it
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: hasn't happened in Canada. It's just specifically specific to the
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: United States. And we could talk about some of the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: reasons for that. But when I first came here, I mean,
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: the other bits about it that I really liked is,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: you know, I worked with and got to know and
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: hung out with a lot of really great economists, and
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: I learned a ton. I deflected a little bit of
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: your question, but my interests are fairly eclectic, so I
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: work on a lot of different things. And at Princeton
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: I could always find some colleague who knew about X,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: and X was something I'd just gotten interested in, whereas
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: in Britain that would have been much harder, really interdisciplinary
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: sort of thing, or even within the discipline, you know.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: And some of it was the mathematics, you know, I
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: would have colleagues who knew how to do some obscure
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: piece of mathematics, or I would say, this person's using
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: this estimator, you know, how does that work? I remember
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: John Campbell and I when he was a young assistant professor.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: He's now a very senior finance guy at Harvard. He
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: and I went down to the Engineering Library to discover
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: how what the spectrum at zero meant idea, and then
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: we used that in our work, you know. So it
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: was a wonderful place to do that, whereas at Bristol
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: it would be much harder. Quite apart from the fact
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: that at Bristol University of the library was unionized and
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: shut at four o'clock in the afternoon and was open
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: on weekend.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: Wow. Plus, just off the top of my head. At
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: Princeton you had some guy named Ben Bernanke. I think
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: he did something.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: I helped him. He came after I did.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. And then Paul Krugman, another Nobel laureate, has
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: been there for the longest time. I think he now
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: is affiliated with City University.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: That's right. And Chris Simms, who's a Nobel laureate, and
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Danny Knneman was there and I worked with that. Danny
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: and I wrote a paper together. The one I don't
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: want to forget is Arthur Lewis, who got the Nobel
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Prize the year I was visiting, and he remains the
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: only black scientific Nobel Laureate ever true. Yes, on the
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: others are peace laureates or literally.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: So let's start with that subtitle. You call the US
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: the land of inequality. I'm not arguing with that premise.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: I'm curious what led you to make that the subtitles.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: Why is that so defining to the economy of the
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: United States.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Well, it's not just income inequality. It's inequality in many spaces.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: So the qualities of extreme wealth and the extreme poverty
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: which seem to exist here. I mean, you have people
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: African Americans living along the Mississippi Delta who are probably
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: a poorest just about anyone in the world. And you know,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: you have the richest people in the world, and you
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: don't seem to have quite those same extremes in Europe
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: the same extent. But if you come to inquality itself,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: that's pretty why too. So you know, we economists like
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: to use things called Genie coefficients and so on, and
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: the Genie coefficients are you know, Americas are one of
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: the champion Genie coefficients.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: Of fine Genie coefficients for the for the late people.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: It's a measure of how far people are apart on average,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: and unless you want the mathematics, that's a good way
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: of thinking about it, right. It's the sort of average
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: distance between any two pairs of people divided.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: By the mean, the dispersion of wealth.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, well or everybody so, and a lot of that
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: is good. You know. It is the land of opportunities, right,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: and you know people are encouraged to get very, very rich,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: and very rich people are celebrated in America. In Britain
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: where I grew up, they were described as fat cats,
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: and the newspapers really.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Like that here too, but that was the nineteen twenties.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Well, there's some truth to that. And as I think
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: I say in the book, in America, ordinary people seem
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: to like fat cats. They would like a dose of
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: feline obesity for themselves.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Which is which is a great line. You're implying something
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: I want to explore because I think you're onto something.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: Are these two sides of the same coin? Is wealth
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: inequality and you know, greater riches than previously imagined? Do
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: these go hand in hand? And how does opportunity play
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: into that?
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Well, that's something that people have thought about it in
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: economics for hundreds of years. Perhaps thousands of years really,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: so that you know, these two things certainly aren't connected
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: for sure, And a lot of it's also got to
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: do with mobility. So societies that have a lot of
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: mobility tend to be relatively equal, where societies where everybody
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: inherits everything, like Britain land on a class in the
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: seventeenth century.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Although being landed gentry doesn't seem like a bad gig, No, it's.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Not a bad gig at all. But what happens if
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: you're the third son of a landed gentry and you're
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: in trouble. You're in trouble.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: You better have some skills.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: You're a lot of inequality there right for that sort
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: of thing, and that you.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: Forget about prema geniture and the first son. We don't
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: really think in those terms.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: In the States, maybe there's anyway.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: But the other one, well, well, correct me if I'm wrong.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Is that more of a UK thing or do you
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: see parallels in the United States?
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: No, it's it's very much a UK thing, and it
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: goes with not just the UK but the European thing.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: And like when the Tokeville came here, you know there
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: were none of those kings or jukes or all the
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: rest of it, and that was, you know, a big difference,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: and that made them very unequal compared with here. So
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: America at its funding was a very equal place. And
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: you know, the finding fathers sort of assumed that democracy
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: would work and would require a fairly equal class of
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: artisans and farmers and so on. So it was only
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: when it became a sort of industrial society and finance
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: crept in and so on, then you begin to get
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: these normous spread Now that's the good side of it.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: You know, it's very hard to complain about people who
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: get rich in the public interest, right, so who do
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: things that help spread wet wealth around that creates jobs,
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: that makes other people well love to But there's a
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: potential dark site, which is the takers, as it were,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: the people who use government or who use regulars or
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: you would lose lobbying. For example, the term that we
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: economists tend to use is rent seeking rather than rentiers.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: I mean a rent here is someone who owns land
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: and rents it out right, whereas or someone who lives
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: off capital. But rent seeking is people who use the
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: political system to try and butter their bread a little
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: more thickly and of course you get that in Britain too,
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: I mean the corn Laws, which were you know, you
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: had an aristocratic land owning class who passed the corn
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: laws to keep the price of grain up and that's
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: what they lived off, was growing wheat and selling it.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: But here you worry a lot about people getting rich
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: through lobbying, through restrictive practices, minor ones, major ones. You
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: worry about the way that banks sometimes behave. I mean,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: our banks really sucking blood from the rest of us
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: sort of ideas. Some people tend to think we need
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: banks are very important, but banks and then of course
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: you got this healthcare system that seems to be making
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: a huge amount of money, which they don't make in
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: other countries. And there's a lot of people get paid
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: huge sums of money, a lot of stuff that's being done.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: So that's the negative side of high inequality, which is
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: an equality not doing anyone any good. Sometimes we talk
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: about takers versus makers, uh huh, And you know makers
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: are good and they benefit everybody, but takers are not good.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: They're stealing from people.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: So let's there's so many different ways to go with this.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: Why don't we talk first before we get to healthcare.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about minimum wage. Okay, all right. So carden
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: Krueger very famously wrote a paper about changing in the
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: minimum wage. They were looking at fast food restaurants in
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I think New Jersey had
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: an increase in the minimum wage. And it's not like
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: there's a very robust border there. You can hardly tell
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: when you're one area or the other. It didn't the
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: rising minimum wage. A modest increase in minimum wage did
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: not seem, according to the data, to cause an increase
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: in unemployment, as was widely predicted. They got pushback on
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: that paper for literally decades before card won the Nobel
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Prize in was that twenty one.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's died down. I quote Jason Furman
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: as saying, even today they persuaded about half of the profession,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: and the other half of the profession think it's not right.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: It's important too. They wrote a book called method Measurement,
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: which had many studies in it, and they did a
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: really very good job of reconciling their findings and other findings.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: And that's in some ways much more important work. I mean,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: the Pennsylvania New Jersey thing, it sounds like, you know,
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: ones on either side of the Delaware water gap sort
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: of idea. But some of the New Jersey restaurants were
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: on the shore and some of the Pennsylvania ones were
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: in Pittsburgh or something, you know, So there were a
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: lot of and what should happened was they what happened
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: was not. There was certainly no decrease in employment in
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: New Jersey. There was a decrease in employment. Sorry, yes,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: there was a decrease in employment in Pennsylvania.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: A rise in unemployment.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: So when you compared the difference of the two, it
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: was quite large, and it went in the opposite direction
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: to what people have predicted. But the action was actually
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania rather than in New Jersey. But
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: in their book and in dozens and dozens and dozens
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: of studies since, that result has been pretty strongly replicated
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: that for modest increases in the minimum wage, it does
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: not give rise to increases unemployment.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: If you just stop and think about it for a moment,
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: if you're paying the poorest or the lowest paid people
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: in a region a dollar or two more in an hour,
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: they're just going to go out and spend that on
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: you know, frivolous things like food and medicine and rent.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: But if if you are freezing that so that the
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: profits are higher for either the corporation or the franchise owner,
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: that's probably not going to be spent locally. It's going
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: to be saved or invested, but that'll be elsewhere. It
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: won't be in that local town. I would assume the
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: higher salary is just going to stimulate the local economy.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: Is that an oversimplification of what they found or is
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: that no?
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: I think that's there, but I don't think they would
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: have thought of that as the major effect. I mean,
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: after all of that, that many fast food workers in
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: you know, Pennsylvania, and compared with everyone, so the amount
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: of extra money they get from the minimum wage is
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: going to be pretty small relative to the size.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: I drive down the New Jersey Turnpike, it looks like
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: ninety percent of the people are working in fast foods.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: Well, that's because you're on the New Jersey Turnpike, you know.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: For in Princeton for a long time, they wouldn't let
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: fast food joints in the town. Right There are a
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: few places, snooty places, Yeah, there are a few. So
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: it's a small impact on the macro economy the local.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: On the local economy. Why is this is the assumption just, hey,
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: if you make us pay more per hour, we're going
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: to hire less workers.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Well, that's the belief, and that's what happens in textbook
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: models of labor markets. It's just that the textbook model
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: doesn't do a very good job. But there's a very
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: important issue with this that I talk about in the book.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: And I think this over the last of the years
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: since that paper was written and that book was written,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: not only has there been a lot of replication, but
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: what it's suggesting is there really is some surplus in
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: these joints which could be dedicated to either profits or
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: labor wages.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: In other words, they're not working on such a tight
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: margin that there is a little buffer.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: Well that what economists call that is monopsony, which means
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: they have some power over the workers, so they can
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: actually deliberately lower their wages because it's hard for the
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: workers to go somewhere else Whereas in the textbook, if
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: you lower someone's wage below the prevailing wage, those people
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: will just vanish.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: They'll quit the job.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: They'll quit the job. So what you've got here is
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: there is monopsony in that you can force people's wages
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: down and it's hard for them to move.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: I love that word, which I think I don't remember
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: if you mentioned it or I just know her work.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: Joan Robinson. She has one of my all time favorite
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: quotes about economics, which is, we study economics not to
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: predict the future, but so as to not be fooled
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: by economists. There's a that's just so full of insight
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: and so interesting. I think she's finally getting her due
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: these days, and she hadn't for a long time. Let's
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: stay with minimum wage, you implied, this still isn't accepted.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: There's a Nobel Prize to card and I guess indirectly
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: to Kruger. There's tons and tons of studies that have
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: validated their original research. There still seems to be a
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: lot of resistance to accepting those facts. Is this a
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: case I forgot what physicist I'm stealing this from Physics
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Advances One funeral at a time is the same thing
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: taking place in economics?
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: There may be some of that. I think it's rather
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: more than a half. And in Britain, where they have
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: a much much higher minimum wage than here. It's supported
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: by everyone on the right and the left.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: Really, yes, is it thinking, Hey, if the companies pay
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: for it, well, then it's not on the government to
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: cover it.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: That I think is an important part of the story.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: And I don't think they have the lobby that they
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: have here by the fast food industry to help keep
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: wages done.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: And that's a big deal.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: A lot of the opposition against carden Kruger was from
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: the EPI, which is a lobby against cute for Faster.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Now that changed. EPI is also the economic policy and
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: one that's very funny. I recall about a decade ago
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: looking at minimum wage and it hadn't increased in a while,
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: and the big opponents were not just fast food, but
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: the big box retailers like Walmart. And what's kind of ironic,
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: by fighting minimum wage, they ended up giving the upstart
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: Amazon an opportunity. At one point, I want to say,
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: this is about five six, seven years ago, Amazon just
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: said our minimum is fifteen dollars an hour. They went
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: out and scooped up all the best people in areas
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: for warehouses and delivery, and suddenly places like Walmart were scrambling,
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: and there was a long period of time where Walmart
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: couldn't get enough w workers to stock their shelves. It
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: ultimately they ended up hurting themselves.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Yep. But another part of this that is very important
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: is most states or I don't know what fraction of
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: American above the federal minimum wages that are above the
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: federal ones. It's also true that something like seventy percent
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: of Americans would like to see a higher minimum way
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: seventy percent. That's the sort of number that comes out
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: in these polls. I haven't looked at the most recent one.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: And yet you know it doesn't go through in Washington
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: because the lobbyists are very powerful and they're you know,
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: paying campaign contributions and all the rest of it.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: world if your taco bell or your McDonald's cost a
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: buck or so more. We're all going to end up
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: paying for it through Medicare Medicaid eventually, right indirectly between
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: diabetes and god knows what else in a country that
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: has our healthcare issues. So let's transition. Let's talk a
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: little bit about healthcare. Okay, in the UK, it's cradle great, right,
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: You're covered from you're born a UK citizen, you got
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: full healthcare coverage.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Not for there are some things where you have to pay,
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: like prescriptions prescription drugs, but very heavily subsidized, and also
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: you have to wait. And so there's a lot of
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: private healthcare in Britain where people avoid the lines.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: So if you how bad are the lines, well, it.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: Depends where you are and it can be quite soon,
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: but you might have to wait a couple of years
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: to get a hip replace for you. Really, and the
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: same is true in Canada.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: I was going to ask because I've heard the same
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: thing in Canada about both things about some of the
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: weights for specific surgeries and the rise of this sort
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: of concierge medicine for the people who can afford it,
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: they wait a week to get in to see a doctor.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: If that a lot of people in America have concierge medicine, Yeah, they.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: Have, so clearly it's it's a you difference. Ultimately in
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: canon and the UK you're paying for that through higher taxes, but.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: It only costs half as much as the charegy.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: So that's where I was going to go. Why if
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: the US has the supposedly more efficient private sector, then
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: big slow, incompetent, bureaucratic government. Why does US healthcare cost
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: twice as much as the rest of the world and
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: create worse outcomes.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: Well, because it's full of rent seecrets, which is what
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: we were talking about before. I mean, there's a lot
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: of people getting very wealthy out of that. Their device manufacturers,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: they're pharma companies. There's hospitals which are a huge part
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: of this. Also, remember if you're in the UK and
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the government pays for everything, there's no insurance industry. Uh huh, right,
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: So that insurance industry is a big chunk of change.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: And it's not their profits they're making it so expensive though,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: that's in there too, But it's just that they exist.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: There's a giant middleman between the doctor and the patient.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: Who's spending a lot of time trying to stop the
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: stop you getting the healthcare you need.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: That is very true. My personal experience has been insurers
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: are very happy not to have you do anything. To
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: be fair, A lot of times people will make an
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: appointment and it's a month off and by the time
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: the month rolls away. The issue is especially if it's
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: like a sports injury, but if you have something really
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: serious don't we want people to get in and engage
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: in preventive medicine before it gets worse.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: It's not entirely clear. Preventive medicine sounds like a great idea,
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: but it's not always such a great idea. So, for instance,
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: one of the thing about prevented medsine I worry about
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: a lot is smart watches for it, right, So if
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: you got one of those, you're going to get all
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: sorts of false positives, right, and you're going to spend
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: a huge amount of time getting tests for things that
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: you know you probably don't have. And so prevented medicine
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: of that sort can cost a lot of money. There
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: are types of prevented medicine like taking anti hypertensives or
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: taking statins, for instance, which save an enormous number of lives.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: They don't cost hardly anything, and those have been the
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: things that have been largely responsible for the rapidly increase
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: well the decrease in mortality and the increase in life
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: expectancy in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: I sort not the studies themselves, but some articles about
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: them that found there are all these proactive things that
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: are a little expensive that insurers could do, but they
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: don't because their experience has been the average person switches
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: either insurers or jobs, and therefore you're going to switch
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: your coverage provider something like every four point seven years,
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: and if the payoff for these expensive preventive things are
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: seven to ten years down the world road, they have
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: no incentive to do it.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: I didn't I haven't seen that, but it sounds entirely plausible.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: It was just kind of, hey, don't you want to
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: prevent these No, they're not going to be a client
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: in five years, so I mean, yeah, well that could be.
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: What other factors do you observe about healthcare in the
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: United States versus elsewhere?
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Well, the major thing my colleague, my late colleague, Ryan Hart,
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: who is our sort of local healthcare expert, and it
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: was a very fine researcher and lecturer, is a very
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: funny man, very witty man. He wrote a book called
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: It's the Price is Stupid sort of idea, and the
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: argument is that almost everything in the US costs about
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: twice as much as it costs another country. Really, yeah,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: so all these drugs, you know.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: Everything healthcare related.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: You're saying, yeah, everything healthcare. So if you look at
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: the price of drugs, and you can look at the
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: identical drugs, and you can look at them across countries,
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: and there's any number of papers who've done this, you know,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: in the New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMMA
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: and so on, and you know they costs. The same
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: company is selling the same drug at twice the price,
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: are more than twice the price here than they do
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: in other countries. Now, in Britain, for instance, they have
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: a thing called NICE, which is the National Institute for
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: Healthcare Excellence or something, and what they do is they
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: evaluate new drugs and they look, they do a cost
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: benefit test and they disallow it if it doesn't save
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: enough lives as it were, or cause enough extra health
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: route per dollar. So then what happens is the farmer companies,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: if they want to sell it in Britain, they reduce
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: the price to meet that cut off. Right in America
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: they don't. They charge the full freight, so it just
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: costs a lot more. There are arguments for that that
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: you hear from the farmer companies all the time, which
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: they say, we're doing their research here, and you know
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: Britain is just piggybacking off that I think those arguments
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: are wearing a little bit thin nowadays, but it's I
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: can't disprove that.
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: Do any other countries. And I don't watch a whole
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: lot of television commercials. Everything I watch is either streaming
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: or DVR, so I fast forward through it. But it
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: seems every other commercial is for some pharma product. When
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: I was a kid, none of these obscure medicines advertised
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: on TV. I still don't even know who asked their
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: physicists about restless leg syndrome. Their physician, right, their physician,
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: not their physicists. But it just seems sort of bizarre
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: that we have all these ads. Does any other country
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: in the world.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: I think there's a one, which it may be New Zealand,
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: either New Zealand or Australia forget me. And that's illegal
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: everywhere else in the rich world. And it's true. I
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: went along to my doctor and he said, well, you know,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: if you're a pregnant woman, maybe it would be a
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: good idea, but you're not, so we don't really need that.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: But that's part of it. The other part of it
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: is there's a very large amount of relatively low value
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: stuff that's quite profitable and is done on a regular basis. So,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: for instance, if you want to have an MRI in Britain,
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: you might have to drive ways or travel in order
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: to get one, or you might have wait a month
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: or two. Whereas every doctor's office in Princeton has one
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: of these things. They're laying idle most of the time.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: That costs a lot of money. So there's just a
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: lot more of those procedures being done which are helpful
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: but maybe not super helpful.
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: I really kind of fascinating. What else accounts for this
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: big gap? You mentioned certain things that are inexpensive. We
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: just passed a law here that capped insulin for I
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: want to say Medicaid recipients. I could be getting that wrong.
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: At some very moderate modest cost. I think insulin has
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: been off patent for decades.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: It was off patent from the day it was invented.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: Oh is that the inventor sold it to a hospital
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: in Canada for a dollar each and that was it.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: They no money, no patent, no nothing, It's never been.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: So how on earth does something like that become crazy
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: expensive in a place like the United States.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: Well, because it's allowed to become crazy, pens you know,
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: they have different delivery systems or slightly different drugs, so
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: they'll tell you that drugs are a little bit better
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: and all the rest of it. So they can keep
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: rolling this out and then get patents on things that
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: don't change the basic thing very much. And so that happens.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: And I think it's not Medicaid. I think it's anyone
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: on Medicare Medicare who's like anyone over sixty five, and
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: there's a limit on how much, And so it's pretty widespread.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: Given all of this, what has led to all of
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: this inequality in the United States, what policies are should
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: we be pointing a finger at.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: Well, here's something. Maybe let's just go back one second
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: to the because the hospital's a big part of this.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: They're just unbelievably expensive and they're very luxurious compared with
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: hospitals in Britain. If you go into a hospital in Britain,
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: there might be twelve people in the ward. There's no
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: private rooms, for instance, and that sort of thing is
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: very very expensive. And maybe we're a rich country, maybe
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: we want to have that, but it certainly costs a lot,
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: and there are cheaper ways of doing that, and it
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: seems to have very little effect on life expectancy, and
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: you know it doesn't kill you as part of it.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: And one other thing that's worth noting is no one
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: really understands that. But I think the last four or
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: five years has stopped growing, the total expenditure and health
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: has stopped growing. And there are people who were involved
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: in the writing of Obamacare who claim that the provisions
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: in Obamacare are actually kicking in, but I don't think
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: anyone knows the answer to that.
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you my single biggest observation about
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: the ACA and Obamacare is as soon as that became
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: a law of land, which is what was that two eleven.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: It was the law earlier, but it didn't kick in
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: for a couple of years.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: All of these walking clinics popped up everywhere where you
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: didn't have to go to your regular physician, and you
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: didn't have to go to the emergency room. You could
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: walk in, show an insurance card, they would diagnose you
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: for something. Half the time it's an antibiotic, and they
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: send you on your way. And those are everywhere, especially
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: in cities that were kind of medical deserts for a while.
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: I'm curious what the impact of that might have been.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: Some of them are very cheap. They don't do very
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: much most of them, and a lot of people go
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: in there wanting an antibiotic, but they've got flu and
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: it's a virus. They say, you can't do that. So
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: I've gone in there to try and get things, and
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: you know, I didn't get what I wanted. To go
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: somewhere else. But I think there are things like that
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: which are helping control costs. But I'm now out of
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: my zone of expertise here, But I mean, the one
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: thing that Anna and I spent a lot of time
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: writing about in our book was that if you have
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: insurance through your employer, right, that cost nowadays about eleven
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year per employee and about twenty thousand
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: dollars for a family policy. That costs about the same
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: for the CEO as it does for the CEO's driver, right,
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: because you're ensuring the body, not the salary, right, Right.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: So this puts an enormous burden on low wage workers,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: and it's been a big contributor to outsourcing jobs, so
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: that most companies don't hire their own security, their elevator operators,
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: they're transport people their you know, food service people and
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: all the rest of it, and a lot of good
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: jobs have been lost because of that. So that's one
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: of the ways in which this very expensive healthcare is
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: eating the harm of our economy.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: Huh. So, in other words, people, companies, employers don't want
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: to hire a forty thousand dollars employee right still far
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: above minimum wage, but on the bottom half of the
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: wage spectrum, because there's an eleven thousand dollars right tag
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: on top of that for healthcare.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: One CEO told us that their HR people came run
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: into the annual conference where they were looking ahead for
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: the pricing and a lots of it, and he said,
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: we have bad news for you that your health care
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: costs the policies you have are going to cost forty percent.
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: More forty forty zero.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: It was only one year, but as you said, these
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: things are going up like crazy.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: Nine percent a year for yeah, again, three or.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: Four years and it can be forty percent. So there's
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: this sort of thing. And so the company said, you
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: know that we can't do that, it's not going to happen,
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: and what should we do? And they said, you get
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: McKenzie and you fire all your low paid.
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: Staff really and then hire them back through some company
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: that is gonna.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: The ramjam cleaning company, you know, a wheels driving company,
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: and you know this CEO at least, and I have
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: no way of verifying this thought that many of these
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: workers were undocumented, ah.
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: Alien, so they would never get hired anywhere else anyway.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: Well, there's an informal economy. Yeah, but they're probably not
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: getting healthcare benefits, so you've shifted the healthcare benefits out
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: of the company essentially. And you know it means you're
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: much more interested in hiring high income workers and very uninterested.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: You said, as someone who's being paid thirty thousand a year,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: forty thousand a year, you don't want to carry eleven
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars worth of health care insurance.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: Huh. That's really quite fascinating. Let's talk about immigration. It
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: seems like the total numbers of legal US immigrants have
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: been falling over the past few decades, at least relative
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: to the overall labor pool. Tell us what's going on
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: with immigration in the United States.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: I actually didn't know that, though i'd heard something yesterday which.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Well, is falling and then it's starting to tick back up.
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: But it's still below where we were had you just
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: projected it out twenty years ago.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that could well be. No, I don't know much
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: about that, and you know, I am obviously a well
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: documented alien. I'm not an alien. I'm not an American citizen,
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: though it took me thirty years to get run into
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: doing that.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: Dual passports or just one.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: I have dual passports, which in Britain they allow you
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: to do. I would not be sir Angus if I'd
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: given up my b that's right passport and they check
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: on that.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: Oh really, Well you get a phone call from the
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: Queen Angus, what's going on?
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: No? No, no, no no. But it's a very British thing.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: That are secret committees that you've no idea, who are
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: members of those of the Great and the Good who
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: decide who they're going to give knighthoods to or other honors.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: And I have friends who are British who have a
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: Nobel prize who did not get one for many, many years.
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: So it wasn't just the pride because you are a year
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: later got the knighthood, that's right. What was that call like?
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: As long as we're talking about it, well, it.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: Doesn't come from the Queen or even from the Prime Minister,
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: but it does come from the British Consulate here in
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: New York City and say would you accept a knighthood
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: if it was bestowed on you? And I said, well,
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: are you kidding?
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: Of course, of course you have to go fly back
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: to London for this.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: Well, there's actually a bunch of places you could go.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: I could do what Sean Connery did and insist that
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: it'd be given to me in Scotland, which is where
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: I grew up, at Holyrood Palace. But there's a whole
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: bunch of dates over the years, and it's an interesting
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: thing because the royal family always does it. They've never delegated,
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: even during wartime to civil servants however, elevated or anything.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: So there's about four members that are all who do this,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: and the Queen, you know, did very few towards the
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: end of her life. But you know, Charles did a lot,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: Princess Anne does a lot, and William Wills does a lot.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: He did me, he knew quite a lot about my
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: work and he hit me with the sword that was
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: his grandfather.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: So I think it's hilarious that Sean Connery said oh, knighthood,
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: bring me the Queen, send the royal family to me.
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: I'll be right here in Scotland. Who else could have
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: gotten away with that? I don't know, but that's absolutely hilio.
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: So so let's talk a little bit about what you
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: see in terms of legal immigration, what's happening here in
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: the States and how important is it?
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I mean the legal immigration is a lot
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: of its high end immigration.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: I mean skilled, skilled people, semi wealthy.
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: Who are going to work for you know, and you
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: see the CEOs of people like Microsoft.
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: And so all the Silicon Valley, something like twenty five
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: percent of the c suite, maybe even more. We're not
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: not born in.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: The United We're not born in the United States, right,
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: And there's also long literature of creativity and immigrants, so
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: that many of immigrants in the United States Tesla not
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: Elon Musk, but Elon Musk of course was born in
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: South Africa. Yeah, we're immigrants. And there's some suggestion immigrants
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: are much healthier than non immigrants, and that's partly because
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: immigrants are sort of selected special people.
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: Self selecting. You're going to pick up and move halfway
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: around the world. Yeah, you have to be motivated. You
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: have to be fairly robust to do that, and you
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: have to have a certain type of mental attitude and constitution,
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: I would imagine.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: I think that's right. But of course the big controversy
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: nowadays is not about that end of things. It's about
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: the other.
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: End, illegal immigration, well, or.
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: The less skilled undocumented aliens who are swarming across the
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: border in large numbers, and we have no mechanism for
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: stopping that. So I don't want to talk about that
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: because that's not my area of expertise, and you hear
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: about it in the newspapers and on the radio and
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: television all the time. But just about this question as
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: to whether immigration lowers the wages of Native Americans now,
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: David Carr is one of the big authors who claims
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: it doesn't have any such effect as the toll. Paul Krugman,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: who you've talked about, has been writing blistering pieces in
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: the New York Times saying it doesn't decrease local wages,
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: denouncing the lump fallacy, which says that there's only finite
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: number of jobs in America and if immigrants get them,
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: there's none left, or there's fewer left for ordinary people,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: and I suspect that's not true. I think we've been
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: getting this wrong actually, and really I think it does
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: in fact, and so I think one of the reasons
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: that inequality is so high now is because fifteen percent
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: of the population is foreign born, which was also true
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: during the Gilded Age, and we had this huge dip.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you've seen these pictures, but if
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: you go back to eighteen ninety, but fifteen percent of
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: the population was foreign born. If you look at it now,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: fifteen percent is foreign born. And in the trough in
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: the late sixties it was down to I don't know,
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: seven or eight percent.
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: Post war era is that it dropped in half.
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, what happened was the laws the banning of
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: immigrants making it almost impossible were in the twenties, so
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: it took a long time to come down. And then
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: there was this Heart Cellar Act which was passed in
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: I think nineteen sixty eight, and it was passed under
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: the promise that there would be no increase in immigration
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: at all, and that turned out to be completely false.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: And it was completely false because they weren't counting the
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: family members who were allowed to come in afterwards, and
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: that's what's driven the huge increase.
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: Back to fifteen percent what we saw, or go.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: Back to fifteen percent, And if you look at income
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: inequality in America it looks exactly like that too.
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: So so that leads to the obvious question, how parallel
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: is or what is there a mechanism between immigration and inequality?
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, I think so, though I'm now out on a
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: limb and lots of my economist friends are going to
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: denounce me and Paul Krugman and that is probably going
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: to beat me over the head with a chair or something.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: But even in that, you know.
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: David Lee, by the way, he's a very genteel.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: I know, I know, Paul. It's not like debating Larry Summers,
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: which I did recently.
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: Oh I'm so sorry.
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you should watch the video as a video.
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: Oh really, I'll link to it in there.
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: Which it was a very unpleasant unkinnter. But he took
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: great objection to this book. So I think it is
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: true that once happened, if you bring in large numbers
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: of unskilled immigrants, then that is good for rich people
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: because it provides and it's good for employers and provides
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: a very large, very cheap labor force pool of low
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: wage workers who work in agriculture, who work you know,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: if you go to Princeton, New Jersey and walk around town,
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: they are all these beautifully maintained houses covered with velvet
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: green lawns, you know, and everything is immaculately maintained. Well.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: I don't think anyone who you would see doing that work.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: You would hear them speaking English.
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: All farm born. They're all foreign so at least the
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: children of farm board I've noticed. So it's landscapers, it's
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: farm workers. During the financial the building boom leading up
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: to the financial crisis, the it was commonly understood that painters, framers, stonemason,
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: roof plumbers, electric like a huge influx of people from
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: Mexico and South America who were skilled workers. These aren't
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: unskilled workers, and they paid they were paid a pretty
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: decent wage for building houses. You still see, that's a
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: pretty substantial slice. And when people complain they can't find
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: farm workers or they can't find roofers, it's because they're
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: very often it's because there's been some shift in who
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: is working where, who was staying where. Right, Again, all anecdotal,
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: not hard data, but it's just if you look.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: At these inequality patterns in the Gilded Age when you
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: had these huge houses and many servants and all the
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: rest of it. Now we don't have domestic servants, but
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: we do have people who do the same things. We
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: look after our yards and to look after it. And
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: you know, if you go to European countries, you just
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: don't see that. I mean, I remember talking to some
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Danish friends and they say they can't afford to have
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: the roof on their house replaced because you know, relative
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: to their salaries, it costs four or five times what
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: it would cost in prinsident.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: Really. Yeah, so we pay more for health care but
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: less for landscaping and contract absolutely. Huh. That's really fascinating.
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: So what other factors are driving inequality? When it comes
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: to immigration, I have like a very distorted perspective because
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: I think of the people like yourself or Silicon Valley
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: or Elon Musk coming into the United States either starting
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: businesses or bringing over a highly regarded stem we call
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: it skill set, science, technology, engineering, and math. Is that
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: who's coming over as legal immigrants? Or is that sort
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: of a distorted perspective?
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: And legal immigrants You've got both because a lot of
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: them are families of unskilled people, not particularly skilled. But
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: you also compared with the general population, where you think
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: it would probably be a normal curve with skills in
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: the middle. Immigrants, I think in almost all countries are
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: more bimodal. H Yes, you've got these very skilled people
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: places like Australia. And someone told me the other day
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: that sheriff immigrants foreign born in Australia is over thirty percent.
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: That wouldn't surprise me.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: And they would like more. And that's because they have
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: an income test or they have a wealth test or whatever.
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: Oh really, yes, And where are those immigrants coming from.
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: Are they coming from the Philippines and Vietnam or are
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: they coming from elsewhere?
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: Many places, I think. I mean they're very you know,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: strong Serbian Greek communities, but also a lot of them
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: from East Asia nowadays.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: Pretty good for a penal colony, right.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: Pretty good for a penal colony. You know, they call
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: the latest the new immigrants, they call them boat people,
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: and that's the first thing they do when they get
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: to Australia is buy a bone.
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: That's very funny because when we talk about both people
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: in the United States, they're coming over from Cuban elsewhere
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: on a boat, not buying a boat. That's really fascinating.
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: So we haven't really talked about education very much other
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: other than the whole PC thing. How significant is education
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: to inequality, whether it's on the immigrant side or domestically
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: born and raised.
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let me go back to not income inequality
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: against so much, but this education inequality because I think
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: this distinction that is so important here between people who
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: have a four year college degree and people who do not,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: that inequality is threatening to bring us down. I think
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: that's the most serious.
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: So before we get to college, there is a relatively
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: small group of people who aren't even high school graduates.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: But that's the client over tirement.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: That's faded to a very small percentage.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: About what third of the population has a four year
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: BA or more about a third of the population has
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: some college, which means they went to So it's two
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: thirds no some college, but some college include a two
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: year no.
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: I mean there's a third with a college degree, and
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: then another an additional third with some college meaning they
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: have a high school degree.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: No, they have a high school degree, but they also
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: have maybe a whatever the thing that you get from
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: a junior.
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: College ged the equivalent degree.
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, g d's equivalent for high school. This
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: is oh, the community college. It's called an associates agree
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: or something, or they've been to college but didn't finish. Right,
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: So the people with a two year degree and being
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: to college but didn't finish or another third got it,
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: and then there's a third who have high school or less.
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: And the people who didn't graduate from high school are
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: not all that many anymore.
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: It's becoming a small So let's bring this back to college.
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: How significant I assume a college degree is very significant,
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: or even a two year degree is significant to your
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: future earnings and your standard of living. How why does
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: that gap?
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: Well, the gap is enormous. If you look at the
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: wages we used to You know, when I first came
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: to Princeton, what you were handed out with the ration
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: was that a BA bought you a forty percent premium.
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: And your wage that much.
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: It's now over one hundred.
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: Get out of here, double, it's double. That's amazing.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: So not only that, but those are the people who
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: are not getting fired from their jobs because the rising
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: healthcare costs. Whereas the people that degree or not and
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: what had really changed my mind about it, you know,
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: and this happened to me very late in life after
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: with it about pride, was this realization that when Anne
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: and I were working on these people who were dying.
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: From deaths of despair, that's of.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: Despair from opioid overdoses, from suicide, from alcoholism, that those
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: that huge increase which started, you know, in the late
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: nineties and goes on rising today, that's all among people
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: without a BA. So you've got a BA, you've got
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: a vaccine against these things.
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. I vividly recalled during the pandemic lockdown, if
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: you had a college degree and you're working in what
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: we think of as a white collar job, you could
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: work remote. Your job was pretty safe, and if you
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: didn't have a college degree, you were up for grabs.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: If you look at the data, and then we have
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: a recent paper that's coming out at Brookings, if you
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: look at what happened during COVID, the people with a
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: college degree had a slight drop in life expectancy, maybe
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: half a year. But if you didn't have a four
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: year degree, it's huge drops. It really got hit.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: So not just income but life expectance.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: Expectance yeah, income, I don't care about so much, you know,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: because if you're.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 2: Dead doesn't really matter.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: It doesn't really matter. And this is a terrible inequality
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: because you know, this third of it's only a third
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: of the population. I have a four year college degree
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: and they're doing great. Their life expectancy continues to go
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: up at least until the pandemic, and then only fell
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: a little during the pandemic. But if you don't have that,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: your life expectance had been falling since nineteen twenty ten.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: Really, yes, that's amazing.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's just awful. And this gap in nineteen
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: ninety two and life experiences about two years, it's not
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: like thirteen years.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 2: And this is driven by the opioid crisis and the
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 2: tendency for people without education are just much more likely
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: to find themselves on the wrong end of that.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: It's not just the opioid crisis. The opioid is very important.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: Suicides are probably important, and suicide just a horrible thing,
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: you know. The suicide researchers have believed since the nineteenth
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: century that more educated people more likely to commit suicide.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: Is that true? It was true for many years. It's
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: not true in the US anymore.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: It's flip and.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: Our suicide rate is like it used to be in
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: Lithuania or in the Soviet Union before it collapsed. So
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: this is to us, is a signal that there's something really,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: really wrong. But the fallen life experiencing a lot of
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: them being driven by cardiovascular disease, which is, you know,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: this drop that was falling like a stone in the
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: seventies and eighties and nineties for people that to be
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: it stopped.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: Huh, that's fascinating. I was looking at gun deaths earlier
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: today for a different project I was working on. I
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: think it's something like, I'm doing these numbers off the
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: top of my head, so I'm going to get it wrong.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: I think there's something like forty thousand automobile deaths a
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: year in the United States, a slightly higher number of
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: gun related deaths, of which something like two thirds or
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: three quarters or suicides does sound about right.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know that number, but I know that the
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: suicide rate is running at about forty thousand Americans a year,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: oh so, and much of that is guns, at least
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: by men. Women tend not to shoot themselves. They take
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: poison or suffocatable.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: The numbers are really quite astonishing. How does the US
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: compare to other developed, modern wealthy.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: Countries incredibly badly?
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, first of all, the US is the
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: only country that let pharma companies like Purdue Pharma poison
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: the population. It just doesn't happen in other countries because
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: that's not allowed. And you know, Perdue Pharma was paying
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: enormous sums of money for campaign finance for politicians. Some
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: of those politicians intervene to stop Pharma being you know
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: that stop that. The DEA investigating these people. There's a
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: thirty minute show which is just incredibly horrible, and that happened.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: To be fair, they made them take their name off
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: of a wing of a museum. So now they've certainly
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: learned their lesson. Yeah, absolutely, And in fact, the settlement,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 2: which costs eight or ten or twelve, but some ungodly
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: amount of money, keeps getting rolled back. I don't know
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: what the state is now.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: There are a lot of lawyers out there. Half the
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: lawyers are working for Purdue and the other half are
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: working for ex President Trump.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a that's a challenge. I guess it's the
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: attorney full employment legislation.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: Well, except you know, the thing about the FIRMA was
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: once the docs realized what they'd done right and pulled
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: back and said, we're not giving you any more of that,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: the illegal drug dealers moved in. And so it's now
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: a fentanyl epidemic. Fentanyl is in some sense of illegal drug.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: But it's it's poison. The number of overdose is it's
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: been a line straight up going back, you know, for
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: almost fifteen years now.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but it picked up once the doctor you know,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: so this was ignited by pharma. You know, J and Jay,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: which is one of the most you know, prize names
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: in corporate America, was growing poppies and half of opium
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: puppies over half of Tasmania to feed this thing. Oh really, Yes,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: that's a huge fine for that.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: And you know, you could get legal weed anywhere. I know,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: it's a different body.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: I think it's a terrible stuff, you do, Yeah, I do.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: I think it's a great mistake.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: Huh.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: And I think a lot of young people get their
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: brains deformed.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: Well, you really shouldn't be smoking or eating edibles when
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: you're fourteen. You're not supposed to have access to that.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: But they always had access to illegal drugs. That's the challenge.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 2: Do you take the money away from the illegal cartels
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 2: who do marijuana and worse. You know, we see the
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: parallels with cigarettes and alcohol. We still haven't figured this out.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: We certainly haven't figured it out. So the alcohol is
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: another way of killing yourself, you know, like suicide.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 2: And slowly over time.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it just takes longer.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's there's no doubt about that. So I'm kind
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: of fascinating you're bringing up deaths of Despair from the
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: book you wrote co wrote with your wife. When we
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: look at consumer sentiment in the United States, despite lowest
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: unemployment rate in fifty years, a fairly robust economy, stock
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: market all time, Hyes, the consumer sentiment, especially in twenty
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: twenty two, during that inflation surge, it collapsed. It was
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 2: worse than during COVID, worse than the financial crisis, worse
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: than the dot com implosion, worse than the eighty seven crash.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: Is this spate of negative consumer sentiment less related to
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: inflation than perhaps all of these other things, inequality, deaths
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: of despair, and a streak of hopelessness that seems to
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 2: be at work in the bottom half of the United.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: States that's my hypothesis too. I read the book, but
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: I don't have any well, except the consumer sentiment bit
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: was sort of more recent than It's not really in there.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: But it drives me nuts that people say, well, you know,
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: America is the most successful economy in the world, and
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: if you look at all these European economies, they're doing
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: terribly badly. And why don't Americans realize that? Well, one
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: point two million of them died during COVID, and you
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: know another two hundred thousand a year are dying from
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand a year are dying from alcohol, opioids,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: and suicide, and none of that is happening in any
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: of these European countries.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 2: Oh really, the gap is that big, So clearly we.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: Need They're obviously suicides in Europe.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: Sure, but I mean one point two million is a
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: low estimate. I've seen numbers as high as two million.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: Clearly we didn't do a great job during COVID. Hold
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: that aside, alcohol related deaths, suicide go down the list.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: The US is far and away worse than Well.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: The right way to put this is, it's not worse
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: than if you go to Lithuania, for instance, a lot
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: of people died by suicide.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: But I'm not sure Lithuania is the country I want
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 2: to con you know, to me, I look at Switzerland,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: the UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, those should be Australia.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we have to be a bit careful about levels
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: and changes. So this huge upsurge since the late nineties
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: in deaths of despair and to some extent in cardiovascular
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: disease going the wrong way is unique. You don't see
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: that rise in any other rich country. There's one other
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: rich country. It's where I come from, Scotland. It has
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: a drug epidemic almost as bad as the.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: Oh And where are those drugs coming from?
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: If they're illegal drugs? But they're not opioids, they're metem
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: tedements and things. Huh. And I don't really know enough
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: about that. It's very hard to get the sort of
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: data that and I would like to get, even though
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: people in Scotland certainly talk to us about it.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: So why is the US seeing the cardiac deaths which
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: have been improving for so long? Is this just a
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: function of US obesity or what's the driver of that?
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows, and
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: there's been The literature is not really picked up on
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: the fact that it's cardiovascular mortality is going up for
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: people without a degree, and it's going down for people
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: with a degree.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: Oh really, so it's very bifurcated.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: Also, well, it's bifurcating too, and it may be that
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: people are not taking their antique hypertensives that they used
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: to obesity. It's possible, but it's a little hard to
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: tell the story because if you look across different states,
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: they're different to beast levels that it doesn't really seem to correlate.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: Generally speaking, if you don't have a college degree, are
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: you more likely to disregard doctor's orders and not take medicine?
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: Is that the implication here?
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: It's possible. That's an inflammatory statement. People get very upset
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: with you when you say that. It's like blaming the
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: victim sort of idea.
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: But it's probably trying to figure out why the victims
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: are victims and there should be no stone left on time.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: Well, it also may be that it's hard to get
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: in some places, it's hard to get access to doctors
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: and stuff. And also, I mean, there's a positive side,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: but the gaps are still increasing, which is in cancer.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: So you know, Nixon declared war on cancer in what nineteen.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: Sixty fifty years ago.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: Nothing happened until nineteen ninety and then cancer downs have
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: been falling quite rapidly, but they've been falling much more
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: rapidly for people with a college degree people without. So
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: for instance, breast cancer mortality for women used to be
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: higher among people who were not educated, and that's the higher. Sorry,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: it used to be higher among women who were educated.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: College women had much higher mortality rates from breast cancer,
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: and that's not true anymore.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: Were I kind of remember seeing something about that. Was
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: it that the rates were higher or the discovery of
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 2: that's what it was that was ultimately at fault.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: No, the discovery doesn't affect mortality. The discovery effects the
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: number of years you survive after diagnosis, which is why
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: we should never pay any attention to that number. Well,
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: people do, but mortality rates are not affected by you know,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: well except that you might save someone's life by tacticularly.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: But the statistic that's very dubious is the one that says,
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: you know, how many years you get to survive after diagnosis,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: because you could diagnose everybody with cancer at birth and
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: then they'd live a really long time.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean credible diagnosies. So let's bring this back
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: to economics, okay, because I have to ask what should
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: be the role of economists in issues of public policy,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: deaths of despair, wealth, health and income inequality? What role
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: should your profession play in trying to make this a
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 2: little less terrible.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: Well, let me take back to one of the very
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: first questions you asked me, which is I think about
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: human well being, right, and it's much broader than just money.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: And economists have been focused on money or the amount
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: of money that people spend, you know, on consumption, on income,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: and some economists of March Sen would be the leading
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: figure here, has always said you've got to look at
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: mortality rates, you've got to look at health. But there's
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: happiness measures, so lots of other things there too. But
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: you know, this is what I was saying a few
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: minutes ago, that the American economy, just in terms of money,
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: doing so much better than the European countries. But we're
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: dying in drops, the bodies are piling up in the street.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: In what sense can you say we're doing well? And
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: I think economists just have to get much broader about
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: what they think about. Doing well.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: Means is that the phrase economism is that where that
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: comes from ignoring not really.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: I mean economism is more like the minimum wage stuff
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: you use a simple textbook, And that was James Quack
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: calling that term, but it's no. I think it's just
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: when you economists do policy and they think about people
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: getting better off or worse off, they're thinking about unemployment
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: and jobs and money, and they're not really thinking about
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: whether people are flourishing or not.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 2: Let's take that another step. When I think of how
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: economists play into the role of things like this, the
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 2: focus seems to be things like efficiency, productivity, not life
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: satisfaction or happiness. How do you steer the profession towards
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: being a little more holistic and looking at the whole picture,
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: not just the dollars and cents.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: Well, what made me steer back was these deaths of despair,
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: because you can't talk about them in ordinary economics language.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: There's something else going on, and I think the sociologists,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: many of the good sociologists, have really much better handle
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: on what how people's lives are coming apart with de industrialization,
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: for instance, So well.
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: Let me interrupt you a second. In the other book
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: which I didn't read but kind of skimmed an online
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: outlearn you do turn that into an economic analysis. It's
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: not just woe is us. These are the deaths of despair.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: You correlate it to regional income and health education levels.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 2: You really bring in a lot of things I think
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: of as classical economics into analyzing deaths of despairs. Is
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: that fair?
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, But not only we talk about levels of religion,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: how people have checked out of going to churches anymore.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: We talk about that's community as well.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: It's not unity. But that's a big difference. Economists don't
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: talk about community at all, whereas sociologists spend a lot
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: of time thinking about community. And so their chain would
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: be here's the wages in some place in the rust
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: belt or something. The wages go down, the jobs go away.
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: But it's not just the jobs. I mean, it's the schools,
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: it's the police force, it's the you know, community. Bob
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: Putnam wrote this fabulous book on bowling alone, you know
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: and social capital. His bowling alone guy was bowling in
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: a union hall, or no unions in the private sector anymore.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: You know, and that was an important sort of power
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: for ordinary working people. So I think power is incredibly important,
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: and I think economists have just lost it there.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: So I want to tie this back to economics, and
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 2: I'm going to share an anecdote, will you. So during
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: the pandemic in the first few months, we're locked down.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 2: You can't really do anything. You're a little bored. My
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 2: wife and I, we live out on Long Island. We
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: would get in the car and go for a ride
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: and just drive around different towns where perhaps we might
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: not have been previously. And to me, everything is an
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: economic study. Whatever I do, I try and find a
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: way to turn it back into economic data. And one
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: of the things I noticed is that towns that had
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: robust public spaces could be a waterfront beach, could be
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 2: a large park, athletic fields, whatever seemed to be open
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 2: to the public and was a useful recreational area. Those
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: seemed to be affiliated more with wealthier towns. Now I
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: can't figure out which came first. Did the town become
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: wealthy because they had this attractive area and a lot
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: of people wanted to live by it, or do only
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: wealthy towns are only they able to afford these sorts
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 2: of things. So it's a little bit of a chicken
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: or an egg. But it comes back to if there's
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: a robust sense of community, what does that mean for inequality,
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: what does it mean for general happiness? And does that
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: reduce those sort of deaths of despair that you've highlighted.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: I think it probably does, And I think that I'm
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: not sure you have to disentangle the chicken and egg.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: And I think we're on the same page here that
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm an economist, you know you're in cognist.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: I'm not really, but I'm fascinated by the wage and
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 2: the wealth.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: That's coming into the community is the driving of this thing, right.
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: But you know, if people lose their jobs, for instance,
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: you can't just give them the money to make it up,
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: and any we don't, okay. And those things that happen
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: in the community, like the destruction of those open spaces,
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: the destruction of the public library, the destruction of the schools,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: you know, the loss of unions and things. Those are
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: aspects of people life that are not summarized by the
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: amount of money they spend. So those public goods, those
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: public spaces are important to people, but They're not just
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: the money they get, right, it was just the money
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: that mattered to them. They would never invest in those
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: public spices.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: So I'm glad you brought that up because part of
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 2: the reason you won the Nobel Prize was saying, why
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 2: are we looking at people's income? We should really look
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 2: at how consumers spend their money, and that gives us
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: a better way to evaluate, especially the bottom quartile or
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: so tell us about this kind of error by economics
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 2: focusing on income instead of focusing on consumption.
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: Well, in the current speak that I'm talking about now,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: I think of income and consumption is sort of the
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: same time. Huh right, I just want to get away
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: from money. I want to say that their marriages are
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: really important to them. Sure, and marriages are dysenterating among
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: people without a behavior exactly?
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 2: Oh is it?
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: So?
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: US has been about a fifty percent divorce rate for
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: since World War Two? What is it for people who
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: don't have.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: I don't know the rates, but there are graphs and
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: animized book. And what happened was divorce went up for everybody,
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: and then it stopped going up for people with a
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: college degree, and it's still going up for people without
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: a degree. So you get these serial cohabitations, you know,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: in which men and women get together, they don't get married.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: The woman doesn't think the guy has got enough prospects,
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: she doesn't stop her having a couple of kids with him, right,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: and then she trades him in for a better model,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: as they were. And so you get these families which
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: the sociologists have studied in great depth of people. You know,
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: men in their fifties who have maybe six kids, but
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: they don't know any of them because they're all living
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: with other men. Well, that du to your life, and
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: that's not just sort of a consumption thing. That's your
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: life coming apart. You know, the things that give you
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: meaning are just not there anymore.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 2: The household formation failing to gel is very significant, yeah,
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: and more significant for people without color absolutely.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: And the same is true for pain, for instance. Not
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: pain is hard to measure, but if you look at
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: something that people usually wouldn't lie about, like psiatic pain,
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: you know specific enough if you had it, you would
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: know about it, and you wouldn't say you had it.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: That's gone up through the roof. For people without a BEA.
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 2: The assumption is they're more likely to be in a
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: trade or some doesn't do it from manual labor that
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 2: leads to that or no.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: In fact that people have looked at that and it
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: doesn't work because actually the jobs they're doing in McDonald's
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: are an Amazon warehouse. They may not be ideal, but
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: they're not as dangerous working in a car assembly plant
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: wherever they were working.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: Where they may have a college degree.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: Well they have, but the point is that you can't
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: explain the rising pain by the changing job makes.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: So it's not just physical labor. The degree is very
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: very significant, seems to.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: Be, and we don't really know what produces that. It's
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: like half the pup Well's. I don't want to quote
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: a number, but a large number of Americans suffer from
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: non specific lower back pain for its rights, which the
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: medical system has no idea what to do with. Again,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: less less than a college degree.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: Wow, that's unbelievable.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: So this really is a story of people's lives coming apart.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 2: So the question is as a society, as a nation, uh,
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 2: and not just economists but all of us, what should
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 2: we be trying to do to improve the overall standard
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: of living throughout the United States? What what else can
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 2: we be doing? Besides mandating a college degree.
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: I don't think mandating and college degree would nestlely do
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: it because it's the social function of the college degree
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: or the college degrees. So think one of my favorite
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: things that gets me into trouble, that would get me
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: into trouble in this building is I think we ought
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: to be much more friendly to unions and that working
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: people need more power. There's hardly any members of Congress
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: who don't have a college degree. For instance, I think
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: something like two percent of all state legislators do not
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: have a college degree.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: And I always think of going back to Britain in
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: nineteen forty five when Clement Attlee was the socialist Prime
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: minister immusiately out of the war. Seven members of his
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: cabinet had their first jobs down a coal mine.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: Right, And so that was just a completely different you know,
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: and those people had their hands on the levers of power.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: Probably the greatest foreign secretary that Britain ever had, Ernest Bevin,
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: who was the driving force behind NATO, was the illegitimate
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: child of a prostitute who came up through the union movement.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: Wow. So I don't see the unions reversing their negative fortunes.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: This has been a trend. I think you can go
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: back to nineteen eighty with the rescue of Chrysler. It's
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 2: been pretty much pat Co. Yeah, it's been pretty straight
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: down since that era. So besides the rise of unions,
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 2: what else could impact this challenge we face.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: Well, I think that the de industrialization is much more
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: serious than economists have tended to be. And they said,
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: you know, loring tariffs is a good thing. You know,
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: we can almost compensate the losers the gainers get more.
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: But that's all done in terms of money, right, and
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: there's no accounting for the community destruction and all the
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: rest of that.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: So you raise a really fascinating point. People have been
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 2: talking lately about reshoring as opposed to offshoring and deglobalization.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 2: We've just passed a lot of legislation and funded building
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 2: semiconductor plants, building wobile plants, anything that's decarbonized. Manufacturing has
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 2: gotten the green light in the United States. Might this
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 2: have a positive impact on inequality?
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: Absolutely? I think so. I'm quite enthusiastic about it. And
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: it's not an accident. You know, Janet Yellen is a
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: good friend and she has promoted our Deaths of Despair
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: book every time she gets a chance, for example, And
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: we have other friends in the administration who are very
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: much on the same page on this too.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 2: How long does it take?
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: That's a question, isn't it right?
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: So if we're in the midst of you know, all
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 2: this legislation, the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 2: Infrastructure Bill, these are all ten year funded policies. Ten
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 2: years from now, might we see a country where the
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 2: Deaths of Despair has fallen and some of the healthcare outcomes,
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: wealth and income inequalities. Might they be shrinking ten years
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 2: from now?
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: That's what I'd like to see.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: So I know I only have you for a limited
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: amount of time, Why don't I jump to my favorite
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 2: questions that I ask all our guests? Okay, starting with
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 2: what what has been keeping you entertain these days? What
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 2: are you what are you watching or listening to?
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: Well? I was a late comer to podcast, but I've
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: done a fair number like this, and some of the
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: people like I like Cardiff Garcia's podcast The New.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: Bar Ft is that where he is.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: He used to be the ft but now he's independent.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: He has a podcast called The New Bizarre which I
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: like a lot. The New Bizarre Okay, it's not Bizarre,
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: but bizzarre as an Arab market, right, and he has
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: a very entertaining range of guests, and I like him.
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: The other one that's a bit different is The New
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: Yorker has writers and sas choose one of their favorite
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: pieces of fiction and reads it on a podcast someone else's,
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: and then the fiction editor of The New Yorker, Deborah Triesman,
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: who was Danny Conneman's daughter in law, I think huh,
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: discusses the in a lengthy conversation after the reading. And
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: I find those absolutely fascinating. I mean, I've always liked
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: short stories, and hearing people really people who spend their
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: lives thinking about short stories talking about them is quite
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: a revelation. So those are two of my favorite parts.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 2: I have a flight coming up. I'm gonna definitely download
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: some of those.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: Someone we haven't talked about was a man called Sir
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: Richard Stone, who was a who worked for Canes during
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: the War on helping to pay for the war when
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: Kines was working on that, and he got an l
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: price for his work on national income accounting, and I
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: always wanted to be like him. And he was very
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: kind to me, and you know, he had a wonderful
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: dinner table where all sorts of interesting people came for meals.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: He was a real wine connoisseur, and he wrote beautifully
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: and he was a real imparasis. So these were all
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: the things I wanted to be.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 2: How did you know him.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: Well, I was just when I came back from the
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: Bank of England, which I was so memorably unsuccessful. He
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: had a research project funded by someone or other and
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: I was a lowly research assistant on that for five
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: years or something, so about the lowest job you can
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: ever have in academia, I think.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about books. What are some of your
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 2: favorites and what are you reading right now?
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: Well? I like detective novels, though I think of that
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: as a sort of guilty pleasure, and being a good Calvinist,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: I tried to ration that a little bit.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 2: Uh huh.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: I love the uh the Ian Rankin books about Edinburgh,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: for instance.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: And Rankin Ian Rankin Ian Rankin gotcha.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: And he has a detective called John Reebis who's one
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: of these emotionally underdeveloped cops who is very smart but
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: has problems with these emotions. I like those a lot,
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: but I read a wider I tried to alternate between
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: work and you know, so I've been reading and Admati's
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: book on the Bankers have No Clothes, but banks alto
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: have been made to have more capital than they have,
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: which I was reading the newspaper yesterday. They're not taking
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: huge ads at National Air, Union station and so on,
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: demanding that they don't have to do that.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: It's going to affect profitability if they do well, that's.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: Right, But they're getting profits at the at the expense
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: of putting all the rest of us at risk. Right,
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: And you know that that's one of the takers that
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: we're talking about as opposed to makers that we need
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: to do something about. And we haven't really talked about
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: banks that I don't know as much about them as
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: I know about healthcare. But there's a similar amount of
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: rent seeking going on in.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 2: Both those to say the very least.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: To say the very least in both of those industries.
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: And I'm reading Paul Thereu's in your book about George
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: orwoll uh And it's a novel and it's a novel
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: about Oral's early days in the Burmese police.
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: Huh, that sounds really interesting.
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: It is very good.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 2: Our final two questions, what sort of advice would you
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: give a recent college grad interested in a career in
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: any of the sort of economics work that you've done.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: I think it's it's advice that I would probably have
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: moved away from. But it's still true, which is, you
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: really need to learn as much method as you can handle,
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: and in finance and in many other things too. I mean,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: I don't really subscribe to the view that you can't
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: think straight unless you can do it mathematically. But you know,
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: I remember my son saying to me when he was fourteen,
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: He said, would you have regarded yourself as a well
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: qualified mathematician in your time? But not like you? So
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: I think that's a lot of these people have done very,
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: very well. So that's a piece of advice I would
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: it's a bit late by the time you graduated from college.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: If you cadure in the social department, that's probably not
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: the best advice.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 2: And our final question, what do you know about the
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: world of economics today? You wish you knew forty or
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: so years ago when you were leaving the Bank of England.
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: Not much actually, I think for me it's been a
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: great adventure all along. And I love learning new stuff,
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: and I love reading stuff and their real ideas there
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: that I didn't know before. And I've been incredibly important
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: to fortunate. I was going to almost said, unfortunately, I've
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: been incredibly fortunate Mary. And you know I got the
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: Nobel Prize in twenty fifteen. The work that and Case
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: and I have done, which is what both of us
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: are best known for, was done after that. Really, so
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: it's like a whole new career for me.
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: With the Nobel Prize focusing attention on that work.
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: It certainly did because the first paper in the precedings
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: in National Academy of Sciences came out three days after
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize by coincidence. And I can tell you
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: when you get the Nobel Prize, it really is being
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: like hit by a bus. You know, there were reporters
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: on our lawn about half an hour after the announcement.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 2: You didn't get the did you get the phone call?
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 2: Where who is this? Really?
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah? I knew the person I was took to. I
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: know you did pretty well. Yeah, so and he said angus,
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: this is not a prank, and I said, tourist. And
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: I never thought it was a preak until you said that.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 2: And now I'm wondering, So I think it was Dick
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 2: Taylor said he was in the shower and his wife
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: answered the phone. Tell he's and yells from the shower
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 2: tell them thanks. But I'm busy thinking it's someone's just
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 2: pulling his leg, right, right, I could be getting it wrong.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 2: It may not be.
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: I hadn't heard that story, but it's like you hear
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: all sorts of things like that, right, yeah, yeah, sure.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: But then this paper came out about a week later,
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: and it was like being hit by ten buses because
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: it had this enormous impact. Right, And you know that
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: one of the best stories I think I'm tell in
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: the book was in those days, and I think they've
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: resumed it again. The American Nobel's got to go to
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: the Oval Office and meet the president, right. And when
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: we were in, there's a little ante room outside the
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: Oval Office which had these Norman Rocks whole paintings which
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: are not there anymore. They belong to someone else. And
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: a voice, someone came from inside and said, would Deaton
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: and Case go to the front of the line please,
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: which we were not there alphabetically, And the door opened
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: and it was not a flunky. It was Obama. Oh
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: really yeah, And so I said, mister President, I'm delighted
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: to meet you, and I'd like to introduce you. And
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: he said, Professor Case needs no introduction. Oh really, I
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: am familiar with her work and I'm a great fan. Wow.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: And we spent almost all the time in the Oval
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: office talking about the paper that had come out three
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: days before. Hu and he knew it inside out.
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 2: Your wife must have been walking on air.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she came out of the White House floating. I
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: think I'm in love.
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: Fascinating, Professor, Thank you for being so generous with your time.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: We have been speaking with Sir Angus Deaton, winner of
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 2: the twenty fifteen Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. His latest book,
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 2: Economics in America, An Immigrant Economist, explores the Land of Inequality,
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 2: is out today. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: sure and check out any of the previous five hundred
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 2: discussions we've had over the past nine and a half years.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 2: You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 2: find your favorite podcasts. And check out my new podcast,
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: At the Money. It's in the Masters and Business feed
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 2: and it's short, ten minute conversations about money with some
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: of our favorite Masters and business guests are earning it,
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• 1:33:46
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• 1:33:50
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• 1:34:01
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