Monopsony, or How You Get Underpaid

Summary

Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here — "Monopsony, or How You Get Underpaid"

Date: May 20, 2026
Hosts: Mia Wong and Molly (Cool Zone Media)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the economic concept of "monopsony"—the labor market equivalent of a monopoly—and explains how it causes workers to be underpaid. Host Mia Wong elucidates the term's origins and its crucial implications, weaving in the overlooked legacy of economist Joan Robinson and the effects of economic orthodoxy on real-world incomes. Through approachable analogies, academic history, and pointed critique, Mia and Molly explore why mainstream economics sidesteps monopsony, how intellectual purges shaped the field, and the human consequences of these policies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Monopsony

• What is Monopsony?

  • Monopsony: A market with only one buyer, in this case, one employer dominating a local job market, suppressing worker wages (04:08–08:54).
  • Monopolies are to consumers what monopsonies are to workers—both manipulate the market to their own benefit.

• Real-World Examples:

  • Single hospital in a town hiring all nurses, Walmart being the only big employer, or a state-sanctioned private power company in a region.

2. The Roots and Suppression of the Monopsony Concept

• Joan Robinson's Contribution:

  • Robinson invented the term "monopsony" to describe these labor market conditions (08:40).
  • Despite her foundational insights, Robinson's influence was minimized due to ideological purges in academia (20:44).

• Academic Erasure and Propaganda:

  • Heterodox and left-leaning economists like Robinson were systematically purged by neoclassical (mainstream) economists hired to defend capitalist interests (21:20–22:09).
  • This not only erased radical critiques but also discouraged empirical study in favor of economic dogma.

"It's not about who is correct, it's about who has power." — Mia (29:53)

3. Mainstream Economics: Flaws, Circular Logic, and Propaganda

• The Myth of Perfect Competition:

  • Most labor and goods markets are dominated by a handful of powerful players, not the competitive ideal taught in school (05:15–06:29).

• Empirical Data Ignored:

  • Economics classes are rooted in anti-communist propaganda, not scientific examination (11:46–12:23).

• The Cambridge Capital Controversy:

  • Mia explains an epic, unresolved debate over how to actually value capital goods, exposing circular reasoning at the heart of neoclassical economics—literally, no way to empirically calculate the value of a factory or tool (29:53–41:36).
    • "If you want to compare how much two different types of machinery are worth, you have to compare them in terms of money... but the moment you start doing that, you then have to go, okay, how much is it worth? And how much is it worth in theory is like... marginal utility. So, in order to know how much the machine is worth, you have to know how much money it can make. But in order to know how much money it can make, you need to know how much the machine is worth." — Mia (35:14–36:52)

• Fields Ignore Their Own Logical Defeats:

  • Even after losing intellectual arguments (like the Cambridge Capital Controversy), neoclassical economists simply 'shrugged and moved on,' continuing business as usual (40:48–42:42).

4. How This Affects Workers and Wages

• Monopsony: The Wage Suppression Mechanism
  • Monopsonies mean fewer employers, so workers have no competitive leverage; companies pay less because "where else are you going to work?" (08:08, 14:56).
  • This debunks arguments against the minimum wage, since companies are already holding pay below what true competition would create.

"They're hiring them even lower than that because they can suppress the wages because where the fuck else are you going to work?" — Mia (14:56)

• Recuperation and Defanging Radical Ideas
  • Mainstream economics textbooks may mention 'monopsony,' but only as a bland aside—never grappling with its real-world, systemic consequences (45:01-45:29).

5. Implications Beyond Labor: Media and Information Monopsonies

• Opinion and Journalism as Monopsony:
  • Just as workers' wages are restrained by employer dominance, ideas in media and journalism are controlled by a handful of powerful institutions. Writers who challenge orthodoxy are marginalized—or not hired at all (47:55-48:49).
  • The only way to get a decent job in such fields is extreme luck (eg., getting a "unicorn job" in unionized podcasting) or radically changing the system (49:14–49:44).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Purpose of Economic Education

  "The reason there are economics classes in high schools is not to teach people economics… It's literally propaganda. That's what it was designed to be."
  — Mia (11:47–12:23)

• On Market ‘Science’

  "Economics as a field is not…a science. It doesn't come from science. It comes from moral philosophy."
  — Mia (15:04–15:18)

• On Empirical Failure

  "Being right doesn't do anything in economics."
  — Mia (30:04)

• On Monopsony’s Political Significance

  "Monopsony as a concept is why you get paid… like, shit. And Joan Robinson's conclusion is like, yeah, capitalism is an inherently exploitive economic system."
  — Mia (45:08)

• On Elite Indifference

  "They just kept writing as if they didn't lose…This is why I was saying it doesn't matter because who can say who wins or loses, because it's all fake."
  — Mia and Molly (40:48–41:10)

• On Media Monopsony and Opinion

  "Every opinion writer is saying the dumbest shit you've ever heard because of monopsony."
  — Molly (48:01)

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Key Timestamps by Segment

• [02:16] – Episode begins; Mia introduces monopsony and Joan Robinson
• [04:08] – Definitions: Monopoly vs. Monopsony
• [05:15–06:29] – Real-world examples of monopolies and monopsonies
• [08:08] – How monopsony relates to job markets and wage suppression
• [14:56] – Debunking minimum wage myths using monopsony logic
• [15:04–16:17] – Economics as moral philosophy, not science
• [20:44–22:09] – Systematic purging of ‘heterodox’ economists from academia
• [29:53] – "It's not about who is correct, it's about who has power"
• [29:53–41:36] – Cambridge Capital Controversy; exposing the infinite loop and circular logic of value in economics
• [45:01–45:29] – Recuperation of radical concepts; monopsony watered down in textbooks
• [47:55–48:49] – Monopsony and the scarcity of good jobs in media/journalism
• [49:04–49:44] – The reality of getting a "good" job and the need for systemic change

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Tone and Approach

• Conversational, irreverent, sharp, and often funny: the hosts joke about economic jargon, math in economics, and the absurdities of academic and media orthodoxy.
• They maintain a critical and leftist perspective, regularly highlighting the politics behind supposedly neutral economic science.

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Takeaways

• Monopsony is a central but under-taught concept explaining why wages stay low even in "booming" economies: workers lack meaningful choices due to employer dominance.
• The legacy of Joan Robinson and heterodox economics was actively suppressed by those in power, not by lack of relevance or academic rigor.
• Mainstream economics persists more by institutional inertia and propaganda than by sound reasoning or evidence.
• Workers' best hope lies in organizing for systemic change—"so you don't have to win the lottery" to get paid what you deserve.

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Recommended for: Listeners seeking a critical, accessible, and deeply researched challenge to economic orthodoxy—explaining not just the roots of wage suppression, but the power structures that keep it hidden.

Transcript

[Mia]

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Media

[Mia]

welcome to Ick. It Happened Here, a podcast where I try to explain economics to you and Molly. I'm your host, Bia Wong. And thank you, Molly, for agreeing to do this, especially on extremely short notice. So I really appreciate it.

[Molly]

I am so excited to struggle to learn.

[Mia]

So okay, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the central thing that this episode is about nominally is a concept called monopsony, and it's actually really Easy.

[Molly]

No, see, you said that. You said that in the work chat earlier. You said monopsony. And I was like, oh, man, she's so tired. That's not even a word.

[Mia]

Well, okay, this actually gets into the thing, because this is a word that was made up specifically for this concept. Unfortunately, I do also have to do the bad news, which is that to actually understand the history of this, we do have to explain stuff that's legitimately very complicated.

[Molly]

So I'm locked in.

[Mia]

Yay. But, okay, okay. Monopsony. The hook of this. This is part of the reason why you get paid like shit is because of monopsony. So I first was interested in writing about this specifically for this show because, weirdly, NPR's Planet Money, like, discovered the concept of monopsony and did a couple of pretty interesting pieces on the history of the concept. And the place that they go with it is they start talking about one of my favorite economists, Joanne Robinson, who is really good. And we're gonna spend most of this episode talking about her. But one of the stories that they tell, this is a very famous story in the circles of economists that I'm around, I guess, is about her sitting down with, like, a British classicist and inventing the term monopsony. So, okay, what. What is. What is monopsony?

[Molly]

It's one. Something mono.

[Mia]

You. You know what a monopoly is? So monopoly is when one seller. Right? So, okay, it's like, yeah, you have. I don't know, you have, like, Google, which is a monopoly on, like, search engines. Right. And, you know, monopoly doesn't necessarily. We'll be getting into this more in a second. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that there's literally only one.

[Molly]

Right.

[Mia]

But, you know, like, the US like, every market you are dealing with in the United States is some kind of monopoly where, you know, sometimes there's like a big three, or sometimes there's like two, or sometimes there's maybe five, or

[Molly]

sometimes it's quite literal. Like, we only have one power company in Virginia.

[Mia]

Yeah, yeah. You know, and sometimes monopolies are deliberately set up by the state. Right. Where sometimes, you know, the state. A state would just be like, yeah, fuck it, there's only one power company here.

[Molly]

Oh, no, it's a private company. It's a private company.

[Mia]

Yeah. Right. Yeah. But sometimes private companies will be handed monopolies like this.

[Molly]

Right.

[Mia]

Utility companies are a thing where it does kind of make sense, because having two companies setting up rival electrical grids is like, a nightmare. But.

[Molly]

Well, that's why the State should do it, Mia.

[Mia]

Yeah, well, it's like, it's like. Yeah. This is the issue though, right? And this is why monopoly, in theory is like a thing that economists are not supposed to like. Because monopoly screws up the sort of like perfect competition between all of these 1 million different companies that's supposed to like make your life good because they're all forced to sell everything at like the lowest possible price because they have to outcompete everyone else and there's like all of this stuff. But then if you have, if you have one monopoly, they can charge you whatever the fuck price they want because there's only one of them. And the alternatives are to eat shit.

[Molly]

Or like, like Amazon choking out was, it was 1, 800 diapers, right? It was a diaper company that offered like affordable mail order diapers and they would undercut them really hard for like concentrated period of time. So they went out of business and then they jacked up the prices on diapers.

[Mia]

Yep, yep. This is basically just what the modern tech economy is, is that some company will come in with like a hundred billion dollars worth of tech money. For example, there were a bunch of rideshare wars in India over this where like all these rideshare companies were basically giving people like really, really low cost rides. I mean, they were obviously still screwing the drivers, but like.

[Molly]

Oh yeah, naturally.

[Mia]

Yeah, yeah. And so they were just trying to like edge everyone else out of the market so that they could take control of it and raise the prices and stuff eventually.

[Molly]

I guess it's like, you know, the capitalism enthusiast likes to imagine that the economy is like, you know, Darwinian evolution. Survival of the fittest. Right. We evolve and compete and the best man wins. But, but actually it's more like intentionally introducing mongooses to the islands of Hawaii.

[Mia]

Yeah, like that, That's.

[Molly]

Yeah, this isn't evolution. You just introduce a giant weasel that ate all the bird eggs.

[Mia]

Yeah, right. And it's like, you know, if, if you look at how capitalism spreads historically, it's, it's not even like capitalism doesn't outproduce other like economic systems. Usually what it does is like, you know, there's, there's this line in the Communist Manifesto that I think Marx was extremely wrong about, which he's talking about like, like trade is the canon that will bring down walls. And he's talking about like free trade will like destroy China's trade barriers. It's like. Well, no, like China's trade barriers were brought down by the opium wars. Like the British Navy, like sailed in and like besieged the capital. Like, you know, but when people talk about monopolies, they're talking about selling goods. Right, Right. And what Dylan Robinson realizes very quickly is that, hold on, this is also true for employers. Right. If you are trying to find a fucking job. Right.

[Molly]

Oh.

[Mia]

Under sort of like the models of perfect competition that, like neoclassical economics, the economics that like you learned in school, they just normally assume that, oh yeah, you can just switch jobs really easily. So obviously companies have to pay you.

[Molly]

Right. But in most towns, there's one major employer who kind of sets the bar.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

Like here it's uva.

[Mia]

Yeah. Like it's Walgreens or like Walmart. And like, if you've ever had to find a job, like, you understand how this works.

[Molly]

I actually haven't, but I understand in theory.

[Mia]

Yeah, listener, you, you've, you've had to find a job.

[Molly]

You're so, you're speaking to the, you're speaking to the only person who's never applied for a job.

[Mia]

We've literally never applied for a job.

[Molly]

It's a complicated situation. Yeah, I've never liked.

[Mia]

Oh, wow, good for you. I love this for you. This rules for everyone else.

[Molly]

Yeah.

[Mia]

Like, it's really obvious that, you know, there exist conditions where you have monopolies but for like hiring people. So Joan Robinson, like at this meeting with this classicist, coins the term monopsony to be like, okay, there's one seller.

[Molly]

Okay. I'm usually against a neologism, but I understand the need for this word. I'm on board. Yeah, I'm on board with Joanne.

[Mia]

It's a good word. She, she's really cool. Yeah. I mentioned the caveat here, which is she does do the like classic 1950s communist thing of like going to China and then getting led around on like state sponsored tours and then coming back and assuming you understand what's happening in communist China. And that didn't go great, but, you know, the rest of her work is really good. And this is kind of where Planet Money does a really interesting history skip where in their version of the story they go, oh, yeah. And then everyone just kind of ignored it until recently. It got picked back up by these economists who were like, wow. We did peer reviewed research and we found out that like, it turns out that, yeah, actually there isn't perfect competition in the labor market and that, yeah, labor markets are controlled by these like, monopolies.

[Molly]

I mean, I guess you have to do studies to prove things. You can't just vibe it out. But I Would say just the general vibe. Like, I could have told you that. I could have told you that.

[Mia]

Molly. Molly. Okay, I have such bad news for you, which is we are going to meet the person in this story whose idea it was to be like, hey, we should like figure out how the economy works using data.

[Molly]

That was a new concept for them.

[Mia]

Yeah, yeah, was. Was invented by a guy who. We're going to get to the story of the inv.

[Molly]

And it was in like 1987.

[Mia]

It was like the 30s, 1930s when we invented this.

[Molly]

It was in 2004. They brought math into it.

[Mia]

Oh God. One of my absolute favorite stories of all time is like, you know, in like the 90s there was like the craze over chaos theory, which I think the only artifact of that is like the chaos theory guy in Jurassic Park. But if it flashes wings and all these things happen, like, chaos theory is like a, it's a, it's a, like a genuinely very interesting math concept. But the thing about chaos theory is that it only applies to things that are third order equations, a thing.

[Molly]

I definitely know what that is.

[Mia]

Yeah, we could go off on a tangent on this, but I'm just, I'm just going to tell the econ joke.

[Molly]

No, we don't need to. We don't need to.

[Mia]

So everyone, economics immediately was like, oh my God, there's this hot topic. But the problem is it doesn't apply to the economic stuff people were doing in the 90s because they don't use third order equations. They only use second order ones because they're dumb asses. This is like one of the trends of the show is that the people who do mainstream economics are extremely dumb.

[Molly]

And I've always had that feeling. But because I don't understand the economy, it's hard for me to be sure.

[Mia]

Yeah, well, it's, it's because it's ideologically motivated. Right. You know the reason that you study economics in high school?

[Molly]

Who studies economics in high school? I didn't.

[Mia]

No, there are like economics classes in high school. Right, like that. Right. Sorry, when I say studies, like, yeah, like you had to take an econ class.

[Molly]

I didn't go to a great school.

[Mia]

Yeah. The reason there are economics classes in high schools is not the teach people economics. It's specific. It was specifically designed as an anti communist thing to like teach kids how capitalism really works through like again, a model where they don't teach you that monopolies exist. And you know, obviously like some of this has been incorporated into more modern stuff. Like, the concept of monopsony, like, kind of has entered into the lexicon of, like, the economics. You get taught as, like, a little, tiny baby child, which is not actually economics. It's literally propaganda. That's what it was designed to be.

[Molly]

I mean, how fun to get to pretend to be a scientist when you don't do real math and really you're just a propagandist.

[Mia]

Oh, it's so fun. It's so fun. One of the other things, like, if you're ever, like, in university settings and you want to just, like, listen to someone complain about shit for a while, go talk to the math people about the shit people get Nobel Prizes for in economics, where it's like, this is like, shit that, like, a child who studies mathematics could do. The math doesn't even have a Nobel Prize. Right. If you want to get, like, a Fields Medal, there's not. No.

[Molly]

That's so sad for the math guys.

[Mia]

Math doesn't have one. Yeah, well, and the other thing is, Econ. Nobel Prize is fake, too. This is. This is another thing that's important. It's not. It's not one of the prizes that was set down by. By Nobel, which are, like, the Nobel Prizes. They created their own, and the dynamite

[Molly]

guy knew what he was doing.

[Mia]

Yeah, but. But it's like, like, literally, like the Central bank of Sweden made their own and called it a Nobel. And it's not a real one. It's a fake one.

[Molly]

Wait, so you're saying that if we are confident enough in our assertion, oh,

[Mia]

yeah, we could just make a Nobel.

[Molly]

We could tell people that we are Nobel laureates in podcasting.

[Mia]

Yeah. I mean, as a huge thing, you also have to have an extraordinarily large amount of money to do. To do propaganda for this, because the reason this works is that the Nobel Prize in Economics is also a propaganda effort. Right. And one of the ways you can tell that's a propaganda effort is that they didn't give one to Joanne Robinson, who was one of the most, like, influential economists who has ever lived.

[Molly]

Justice for Joanne, genuinely, like, it's.

[Mia]

It's outrageous. Just like, one of the few things even the people who hate her are like, yeah, no, she should have gotten one. Because she's one of the people who invents the idea that competition isn't perfect. Like, she invents imperfect competition where there's, like, monopolies and shit. So this is all, like, stuff that's, like, foundational to, like, everyone's, to some extent, understanding of economics. But most of her ideas are completely ignored. And same like, monopsony is like a thing that you put in textbooks. But then when you're trying to like, you know, you're an economist at like, not even like the fucking Heritage Institute or Heritage foundation or whatever, you're at like a, just like a random economics think tank, right? Like, you don't take nopsony into account when you're like, hey, we can't raise the minimum wage because if we raise the minimum wage then everyone's going to get fired. And it turns out they're like, well, no, that's not true. And the reason that's not true is because if you assume that neoclassical economics is real is that companies aren't hiring people at like the lowest possible wage that like, that they could do without someone going to somewhere else, they're hiring them even lower than that because they can suppress the wages because where the fuck else are you going to work?

[Molly]

Right?

[Mia]

Right.

[Molly]

But also like people, like human behavior is not subject to the rules of mathematics in that straightforward kind of way either.

[Mia]

No, it's very dumb. And like, like, because this goes back to something that's important to all of this, which is that like, economics as a field is not, it's not a science. It doesn't come from science. It comes from moral philosophy.

[Molly]

The economy guys, they're always saying stuff. They're just like confidently asserting something and showing me a graph that's just like, does not reflect my lived reality at all. But they're very confident about the graph.

[Mia]

No, well, and that's the thing. Because, because, because it's originally philosophy.

[Molly]

It's like, no, the economy's going great. It's like, not right.

[Mia]

Not for, not in my house. No, it's like, it's fucking bullshit. That's a reflection of the fact that economics as a discipline works backwards from the way that a science works, which is economics starts out with assumptions about how humans work. Right? It starts out with the assumption that like, everyone's like a rationally calculating actor who's like, seeking to maximize their own utility.

[Molly]

And I've never met that person.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's philosophy.

[Molly]

Oh, actually, no, I love maximizing utility. Don't get me started on maximizing my economic utility.

[Mia]

It's literally utilitarianism, Right? It's not something that's derived from, from empirical data. It's. It starts with an assumption about how things work and then projects that assumption onto the world.

[Molly]

I don't want to be melodramatic, but I'm having a breakthrough here in my understanding of what economics is. I thought they were just being dumb before suddenly I see it completely differently.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's ideologically motivated reason. They have. They have a philosophy they were attempting to mathematically define, like project their philosophy onto the world. And it doesn't work very well because it's philosophy. It's not right.

[Molly]

They're trying to prove a conclusion rather than map reality.

[Mia]

Yeah, they're going backwards.

[Molly]

Yeah.

[Mia]

And this is something that we're going to get into in a second. But first, what we're going to get into are the products and services that support this podcast.

[Molly]

Wow. Speaking of the economy.

[Mia]

Woo.

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[Mia]

We are back. So one of the things that's actually interesting about the story of Joanne Robinson is that there's a reason why almost no one. I mean, I don't know, people listening to this podcast have a higher likelihood of knowing who Joanne Robinson is than, like, almost any other group of people on Earth. But, like, there's a reason why she's not extremely well known by normal people.

[Molly]

I'm going to be so honest with you, Mia. The only economists I know are the ones that Javier Millay named his clone dogs after.

[Mia]

That makes sense. Well, like, like you've heard of you. Like, you've heard of, like, Adam Smith, right?

[Molly]

That's true. That's not one of the clone dogs.

[Mia]

Joan Robinson is an economist who is important enough that, like, you should know who she is.

[Molly]

Yeah, but he would not have named one of the clone dogs after her. I think they're. I think they're all BO.

[Mia]

No, absolutely not. He. He probably, like, he would chainsaw her. It's bad. But the reason that you don't know who she is and the reason that monopsony kind of, like, sat in the closet of mainstream economics until people started digging it out recently is because John Robinson is part of a tradition of heterodox economics, which is it's, you know, the economics that's not the mainstream ones. And all of those people got systematically Purged from every academic institution over the span of about 30 by the neoclassical economist because the government doesn't want you

[Molly]

to know their ideas.

[Mia]

I mean, like, like, like genuinely what happened was it was like, it was, it was a bunch of these people, like, hired by capitalists in order to do propaganda for them. And they went through and systematically took over and purged all of the country's economics departments.

[Molly]

If what she's saying is the entire framework of your worldview just like, functionally doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's not a good vibe for them.

[Mia]

So let's talk about the kind of tradition that Joan Robinson operates in, because this is actually a story that really, really tangentially, the planet Money people kind of allude to and then never talk about again, even though it's fascinating. So Joan Robinson is, I guess you could call her one of the sort of first people in what you would call the post Keynesian traditional.

[Molly]

Absolutely. I'm always saying that.

[Mia]

Do you know who Keynes is?

[Molly]

An economist? Was his name Maynard?

[Mia]

Yeah, John Maynard Keynes. His.

[Molly]

Okay.

[Mia]

He's like, like, if you remember one thing about Keynes, like, if you need to just be like, you have a flashcard, you need to be like. Someone says Keynes, he's the, I guess like the technical term is like countercyclical spending. But he's, he's the guy who's like, when economy. Bad government should spend money in order to make economy not bad. Again, that's like the most basic part

[Molly]

of Keynesianism and that's all I need.

[Mia]

Yeah, but like, the thing about Keynes is that, like, he wants like a nicer version of capitalism, but he is like a capitalist. And so there's a sort of milieu around him that John Robinson is kind of part of, but there's a lot of elements of it and people who Keynes, like, take stuff from. Who are extremely obscure now because, you know, Keynes did a version of it that like, took the radicalism out. I promise earlier we were going to get to the guy who like, invented the concept of actually doing scientific studies for macroeconomics.

[Molly]

And we've now reached that makes me so mad that the answer to that question isn't the first guy who, who put math. Who decided that we should do math and economics. Oh, the first guy that did it. The first economist. Right. The guy who invented economics. Right.

[Mia]

Economists do a bunch of math. It's just not math. That's.

[Molly]

But like, we should study the currently existing reality yeah, the world first.

[Mia]

Right.

[Molly]

Like trying to force reality into this chart that I made. That's awesome.

[Mia]

Yeah. And so the guy who was like, hey, what. What if we observed reality? His name is Michael Colecki.

[Molly]

Good for him. Great job, Michael.

[Mia]

He rocks. Yeah. He has a long and convoluted history of stuff.

[Molly]

Yeah. I'm gonna go ahead and say I don't endorse everything he did. I don't know anything about him.

[Mia]

Honestly, he kind of rocks. He's so. He. Koleki, like, foundationally, is a Marxist, Right. It's not true that he's from this school, but he's the guy from which one of the major schools of Marxist economics is born, which is called the Monopoly Capital School, who are kind of the Marxist version of the people who were like, oh, my God, hold on. Monopoly has gotten so out of hand, we have to change how our economics work. Robinson kind of discovers Kalecki a little bit later in her career. It's sort of like a 40s thing where she's originally writing about imperfect competition and, like, monopsony in, like, the 30s. But Kalecki is one of the people who is responsible for a bunch of these ideas around, like, him and Robinson are responsible for a bunch of these ideas around, like, okay, yeah. Actually, it turns out that everything we've been talking about is, like, the world is. Is composed of monopolies and monopsonies, and everything exists, at best, in. In the state of. Of. Of competition. And this. This becomes kind of its own. Own school. And, like, you know, it branches out in a bunch of different ways through the work of some other people who start to look at, like, how is price set? And this is something that we've talked about on this show before. So. So, like, okay, if you've ever seen the graph that, like, all of the econ people use, where it's like, price is supply and demand, right?

[Molly]

What is it?

[Mia]

Well, okay, so at a certain point, and we've talked about this on the show before, our friends at Strange Matters, the magazine Strange Matters, have written about this a lot. If you, like, ask a person. It's funny. I actually did this by accident with a friend who runs, like, a very, very small business. Well, it's not that small, but, like, run runs. Runs, like a very, very small business. And I asked her, like, she was. She was talking about, like, okay, how do we figure out how to, like, price something? And I talked to her about it, and she goes, yeah, it's cost plus markup, right? And the thing about price, right, Is price is not set by a graph. Like, Prices are set by a person in an office who figures out what the price is going to be.

[Molly]

Right.

[Mia]

And the way that they do that is cost plus markup. It's like, how expensive was the item for us to obtain? And then what's the, like, additional price that we need to sell it for in order to both make profit and pay everyone? And this is really obvious to, like, anyone who's done a job that, like. Well, yeah, no shit. Of course it's costless markup. In economics, this is considered an extremely radical idea.

[Molly]

Right. I guess, you know, in this, in this supply and demand model, it's just like, whatever people are willing to pay, you just keep increasing the price until demand drops off and then you back off a little.

[Mia]

Yeah. In economics, that's called, like, companies being, like, price takers. The theory in, like, normal economics, quote unquote, is that companies, they don't set prices, they take the price from, like, what people are willing to pay. And that's objectively not true.

[Molly]

They're just constantly standing there tweaking the dial.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, just, just on an objective level, what's happening is, is, you know, this, this is what's called, like, administrative prices. Right. And this is, this is like the basic, like one of the basic revelations of, like, post Keynesian economics is that price is set by a person who sets it by cost plus markup.

[Molly]

And like, there's, there's a. The precog who floats in a pool of goo and just intuits the prices.

[Mia]

Yeah, they, like, see the data. It's like. No, no, no, no, no. It's literally just a person. They set the price. It's cost plus markup. There's, there's some, like, psychology stuff there about, like, what kinds of prices will break a consumer's loyalty to, like, a store. Right. Because if you, like, raise the price at a store too much, people will stop shopping at the store. But like, that, that's, that's like, the way this stuff actually works. And this is one of the big post Keynesian innovations. It's like, hi, we're trying to figure out how price works. So we went and we asked a bunch of people how it works.

[Molly]

A remarkable choice.

[Mia]

Yeah, right. God. But this is an issue for neoclassical economics because the whole, like, supply and demand setting price is like the basis of their whole thing, and it's the basis of all of their politics. Now, at this point, we need to talk about the thing that's legitimately complicated before we get into that, we're going to talk about something that's not complicated, which is how to use these products and services.

[Molly]

Wow. We're actually doing the economy right now.

[Mia]

We are. We are back. Okay, so we're gonna stop doing the economy. And the reason we're going to stop doing the economy is that, you know, when I talked about there being an ideological purge. Right. The people at Strange Matters wrote about this economist named Frederick Lee, who was an IWW member and who was one of the sort of, I don't know, like the guy trying to pull the 5,000 different strands of heterodox economics together. And he writes a really, really detailed in depth analysis of at each individual school. How did the neoclassical people come in and purge everyone and then maintain control of it? And one of the, one of the ways you can tell that this isn't about who is correct, it is about who has power is something called the Cambridge Capital Controversy, which I'm gonna assume. Molly, you have. You haven't heard of this?

[Molly]

No, I was just really sort of marveling and turning that phrase over in my mind. It's not about who is correct, it's about who has power. Yeah, I'm gonna store that one away. That's a, that's a good turn of phrase.

[Mia]

It's a good way of understanding this. And it's a good way of understanding the central thing of like, hey, why did everyone kind of ignore monopsony for 80 years? And it turns out that the answer is that being right doesn't do anything in economics.

[Molly]

That's heartbreaking.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's bleak. And some of these people are people who have institutional power. So one of the things that Joanne Robinson is most famous for doing is her and her collaborator Piero Serafa, who's another whole story, who's an extremely wild guy. Seraph is the other person who a bunch of this, like, heterodox economics is based off of. There's a large extent to which heterodox economics means that, like, you think Seraphra was right instead of the Chicago School people and like the neoclassical people or Marx, or you're sort of like fusing the two of them. And he and Joan Robinson are writing out of Cambridge, the one in England. But then there's also a whole bunch of neoclassical economists are at Cambridge, the one in Massachusetts.

[Molly]

They really can't be doing that. Yeah, well, we gotta rename at least

[Mia]

one of these and they fight it out. That's why it's called the Cambridge Capital Controversy. They Go to war. Yeah. So, okay, the thing that they're fighting about is extremely convoluted. At some point, Wally, I'm gonna drag you on here and we're gonna do the actual full version of it, but the short version of it is really funny. And the short version of it is that this is a fight about. Okay, so you have, like, two different kinds of what are called capital goods. So you have, like, I don't know, I think the capital's power one, it's like tools that make ice cream and tools that make airplane. And the question is, how do you figure out how much those tools are worth together?

[Molly]

Well, are you selling ice cream on the airplanes?

[Mia]

You know, I. They. Where you're selling them doesn't have to be.

[Molly]

Really? I'm just saying. Is there synergy at play here, Mia?

[Mia]

Like, well, this is actually one of the. Legitimately, the idea that you could use the same equipment to do multiple things is, like, a really serious problem for an enormous number of economic schools. Like, it's like real bad. It's like kind of. It's kind of even bad for, like, the mathematics behind, like, classical Marxist political economy. It's. It's really bad for, like, the neoclassical people. It's not great.

[Molly]

So my new airline, where everyone gets a free ice cream is really throwing a wrench into this.

[Mia]

Yeah, well, as. As long as. As long as the same machines can either be making ice cream or you can be making airplane and you can't tell which one.

[Molly]

What are they teaching at economy school? What is even happening? So they're arguing about ice cream machines.

[Mia]

Well, so, so what, what, what they're. What they're arguing about, right, Is if. If you are doing like normal neoclassical economics, can you point at, like, factories and go, how much is this worth? And this is a real problem because it turns out that the way that neoclassical economists do this is circular. So, okay, you're trying to figure out how much money a factory is worth. I'm going to quote here from the book Capital is Power, which has. Has a very good explanation of, like, what's happening here. The money value of any capital good, that is the amount investors are willing to pay for it is the present value of its expected future profits computed by discounting this profit by the prevailing rate of interest. So value equals expected profit divided by rate of interest. So basically what they're saying here is that, like, okay, you're trying to figure out how much money is the factory worth? The amount of money that the factory is worth depends on how much money you make from using the factory to make plane or make ice cream. That's like, basically what that's saying. And then there's a discounting rate because you're making that money in the future.

[Molly]

The problem with all of these principles is it's a perfect blend of stuff that's like, completely fucking obvious. Like statements of observed reality.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

And then also stuff that somebody just made up based on a feeling that they had. And you can never tell which one you're dealing. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, like, what the factory is worth is based on how much money it can make, obviously.

[Mia]

But here's the problem. This is one of those, you know. You know, like the Calvin Hawes meme, where it's like you can divide everything into two categories. This one surprisingly seems like his observed reality is actually bullshit. Because. Because the problem is. All right, so, okay, so in order to find out the value of the factory, you need to know what the profits are going to be.

[Molly]

Well, I thought the value of things. I thought the price of things was set by supply and demand. So the value of the factories, whatever someone's willing to pay for it.

[Mia]

Right. But here's the issue, though. Like, that's, like, sort of true.

[Molly]

No, I'm just making a joke that, like, prices and values appear to be disconnected legitimately.

[Mia]

That is drilling into the problem with what's happening here, which is that, okay, but how do you know how much money the factory is going to be worth?

[Molly]

So we're saying, like, the factory has an inherent value versus the factory has a price.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

So our price is not reflected inherent value.

[Mia]

So this is also kind of the core of this issue.

[Molly]

Right, which is like, that money isn't even real.

[Mia]

Well, yeah, but it's like, okay, if you want to compare how much two different types of machinery are worth, you need to compare them in terms of money. Because they're making two different things. You have to be able to compare them. But the problem is the moment you start doing that, you then have to go, okay, how much is it worth? And how much is it worth in theory is like. It's. It's. It's like marginal utility. Right. So in order to know how much the machine is worth, you have to know how much money it can make. But in order to know how much money it can make, you need to know how much the machine is worth. The issue here, right, is that you're trying to find one price for how much the factory is worth, but you can't find that one Price without knowing how much profit you're getting from using the factory to make the thing. But you could have multiple different levels of profit from that same factory. The problem is, how do you determine, you know, you could make $10 in the factory, but the factory could also make $20. How do you figure out which one of those it is? Because that's what determines the value of the factory, is how much money it makes. So, okay, you turn around to the neoclassical theory of how, of how you figure out what the profit is. But that, that theorem requires you to know the marginal utility of the factory. So it requires you to know how much profit you're going to get from using the tool. Right. You have to know how much the tool is worth in order to figure out how much the profit is. But then you have to figure out in order to figure out.

[Molly]

So this is why they just make stuff up, because otherwise they get trapped in the infinite loop.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's worse than that because the value of the factory depends on, on how much money you're going to make from the ice cream. But how much money you make from the ice cream depends on, like, how expensive it is to have the ice cream machine. Right. So they're both set by each other.

[Molly]

Right.

[Mia]

If you only have one of them, you can't calculate the other one. They're, they're both like X and Y. And in order to figure out what one of them is worth, you already have to know the other one.

[Molly]

Right. You need a constant at some point.

[Mia]

Yeah. And legitimately. And this is a shit show because it means that you actually can't figure out how much the capital goods are worth in order to move on to stage two of the process where you figure out the profit. Because you already need to have the answer to the question you are asking. And so, like, this is an issue bad enough that the, the IMF publishes these, or I think it's maybe it's the World bank publishes these, like, giant tables of like, the value of capital stocks. Right. In a country. Well, they'll go through. And they're trying to produce economic data about, like, a country. And they're like, okay, like, how much are the factories worth? And the people who are trained to produce these books, there's multiple different values that these factories could have depending on how much money they make. And they literally just chose to choose one of them, like, at random. They're like, fuck it, pick one.

[Molly]

This is not making me more confident about the economy.

[Mia]

No. Well, but, but this, this is a shit show. Because. Because this is what this fight is about. It's about, like, the whole Cambridge capital controversy is. Is like Joanne Robinson going. Hold on. In order. In order to, like, figure out your equation for how price works, you need to know something that you can only figure out by knowing the price already.

[Molly]

Well, that's why you just feel the price in your heart.

[Mia]

Well, yeah, this causes. This causes, like, a decade of, like, fighting about this. All of the, like, famous neoclassical economists actually. Hold on. Can you list Javier's dogs?

[Molly]

Yeah. Okay, so Milton from Milton Friedman, Murray from Murray Rothbard, and two dogs. One Robert, one Lucas for Robert Lucas junior.

[Mia]

Wow. He actually. I think he actually dodged all of them. I think. I think he meant by not naming someone Paul Samuelson. I think he actually dodged it.

[Molly]

He considers these dogs to be Conan's offspring. So these are all clones of his dog, Conan. He considers the dogs to be Conan's offspring and. And thus his own grandsons because he believes the dog is his son.

[Mia]

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Molly]

Anyway. Yeah, but that's the only reason I know who any of those people are.

[Mia]

Oh, my God. Wait, hold on, hold on. I'm sorry. I'm not looking at. Which robbery is this named after Robert

[Molly]

Lucas Jr. From the University of Chicago.

[Mia]

Oh, he dodged it. It was. It was mostly the other Robert. Robert. Slow. O. Slow. God damn it. I think. I think he actually dodged having any of his dogs be named after the people who got their asses kicked in. I think he managed to do it. So Paul Samuelson is, like, after Milton Friedman and maybe Hayek. He's, like, probably the third most influential neoclassical economist, and he's, like, one of the people at the American Cambridge who are, like, arguing with, like, neoclassical people, and they lose. They just straight up lose this fight because they're wrong. And the consequence of them being wrong is every single thing they've ever written is wrong. Because if you can't calculate how much a factory is worth, literally nothing you've ever written functions.

[Molly]

That's so funny.

[Mia]

They can't do it.

[Molly]

Did any of them kill themselves?

[Mia]

You would think, but they were just like, oh, well, we'll just guess.

[Molly]

Because I bet a lot of people were at the end of their careers. You're 60, 70 years old, you're professor emeritus of macroeconomics at Cambridge or whatever the fuck, and you find out that everything you've ever written was no longer like, we're all. We all agreed that everything you ever said was wrong. How do you. How do you deal with that?

[Mia]

Here's the thing. They just kept writing as if it. As if they didn't lose. Okay, this is. This is why I was saying it doesn't matter because who can.

[Molly]

Who can say who wins or loses? Because it's all fake.

[Mia]

Yeah. And so. And so, like, literally, literally what they did is that this stuff, this fight never, like, broke out of, like, academic economist circles. And so no one today has any idea any of this shit happened.

[Molly]

But no, because it doesn't mean anything.

[Mia]

Yeah, well, I mean, it does in the sense that, like, you can demonstrably prove that, like, these people can't tell you how much a factory is worth.

[Molly]

I've read the Wall Street Journal. I know there's no such thing as an economist.

[Mia]

Yeah, part of what's happening here is that, like, the reason we all intuitively do that is because these people win.

[Molly]

Right? So this entire, like, academic field just kind of shrugged and said, it doesn't matter of what we're saying. Does it mean anything?

[Mia]

Yeah, there were, like, a couple of people who tried to, like, actually work with it, and everyone eventually just stopped paying attention legitimately. The answer for, like, modern economics is just to pretend that it never happened and then go like, oh, well, these people never produced anything of note academically. And it's like. Well, on the one hand, that's, like, not true because the stuff that they did. Right. Is really good. But also their descendants. Yeah. Didn't get academic positions because you purged them all. And this is. This is one of these things where, like, part of the reason that the neoclassical people took over in the first place was because they thought that they were right about this argument of, like, what caused the 70s economic collapse, which had, like, supposedly disproved Keynesianism. But then in this time period, they got just obliterated. Like, they have taken an L the size of which genuinely. I don't know if anyone in an academic field has ever taken a bigger living than these people did in this fight. They got just, like, beaten into pulp and it just didn't matter.

[Molly]

It's like Naomi Wolf finding out live on air that her entire book was based on a misunderstanding of a term.

[Mia]

Yeah, it's. It's like that. Like, except this. This is like every economist except in this.

[Molly]

Except in this case, they went on to continue to produce work based on that premise.

[Mia]

Yeah. You know, but. But this is the part of the story that, like, isn't in the accounts. You know, when Planet Money has to explain, like, why the work of Joan Robinson, like, isn't something that mainstream economists pay Attention to.

[Molly]

Oh, full circle. Okay.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

That's where we were going. Yes.

[Mia]

It's because, like, John Robinson had the temerity to A, be a woman, B, be a leftist, and C, not be one of these like, neoclassical freaks and D, she beat them. Like, Joanne Robinson is one of the major people in this fight.

[Molly]

I should have had more faith that we were coming back around. I thought we were lost. I was confused. No, I get it now. So when they're writing about, like, it's so crazy that nobody uses this term anymore.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

The underlying truth there is that they are. This is why, glossing over this, the fact that the reason this term isn't better known is because the entire field of economics is based on support pressing, challenging truths.

[Mia]

Yeah. And there's one other aspect too, which is the economics is, is, is an example of how this works on like a small scale. Right. But this, this happens on a macro scale with just about everything that you consume, which is there are two models for sort of suppressing how information spreads and how like, you know, how social movements develop where one, you just suppress them or two, you co opt them. Mm. And you, you do what's called recuperation. And you know, it is interesting, like the concept monopsony will appear sometimes like, like in like textbooks, but they'll just be like, oh yeah, this is another thing that can exist. And like monopolies can also exist. Let's go back to spending all of our time dealing with like a bunch of stuff that's incredibly fake. And they will strategically like misuse the concept of monopsony in order to deal with it like, as a critique. They'll recuperate like the word, but then they won't use any of the political conclusions of it.

[Molly]

That's clever of them. That's clever of them. So that you don't go looking for more about the term because you have it and it's defanged and you don't need to worry about it.

[Mia]

Yeah. And the thing is the political consequences of it is this is the thing I talked about at the beginning, which is like, yeah, monopsony as a concept is why you get paid. One of the reasons you get paid like, shit. And John Robinson's conclusion is like, yeah, capitalism is an inherently exploitive economic system.

[Molly]

Yeah. That's the logical conclusion there, right?

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

But that's not allowed.

[Mia]

No. And so, you know, like, Robinson's legacy is that part of her work is co opted and recuperated in a way where they teach the tiniest part of it that can't be used to challenge the system and the part of it where she deals a kind of intellectual death blow to an entire field of economics that in like the history of academia, I don't know if anyone has ever been so decisively defeated intellectually.

[Molly]

And yet they just sort of brushed it off and moved on.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

Which I feel like that is so damning. Right. That you're just, I mean you've just admitted that everything you've ever said is based on nothing. If you can just disregard this.

[Mia]

Yeah. God, I can't find the exact quote. But Samuelson has this line about how like they need to just treat it as an article of faith that this can be done. And they just kept going and it's

[Molly]

just like, so you can't tell me this is a science if you're like, well, it's just based on. You just have to have faith. You just have to believe.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Molly]

I mean the economy has always put on Tinkerbell rules. Right. Like you have to believe or it won't work. You have to clap for her.

[Mia]

Yeah. In order for the entire system that these people are paid to propagate. Because this entire school of economics is created by a bunch of right wing billionaires to get them together in order to push against like both communism and like the Keynesian idea they should pay taxes. This is something also, I guess I kind of want to conclude about. This is like, there are a lot of times where you see like a, like a newspaper columnist and they're saying the most unhinged thing you've ever seen. Or like, you know, I'm going to take, I'm take a very incendiary example and you look at like Ezra Klein and Ezra Klein is like being like, oh, you have to like take the ideas of like some random fucking Nazi seriously. And.

[Molly]

No, I don't.

[Mia]

No, you don't. But the re. But the reason he's saying this, it does. It's not even about what he believes.

[Molly]

Oh, these people believe nothing.

[Mia]

Yeah. This is what they're being paid to say. Because Klein's job is to, is to act as a way to sell like fascist tech oligarchy to liberals. Like, and this is the same thing with like you get these newspaper columnists who will like say like the most unhinged shit you've ever seen. And yeah, they're saying that because it's their job to produce this. Right. Like they're not acting as individual people, they're acting as cutouts and projections of like the people who They've been hired by.

[Molly]

And those people have a monopsony on opinions. Yeah, well, every opinion, every opinion writer is saying the dumbest shit you've ever heard because of monopson.

[Mia]

Well, yeah, I mean, but like, literally, it's because they can. They can choose who the fudge to hire.

[Molly]

Right?

[Mia]

Like, that's the actual reason. And, you know, and like, journalism is one of these things where it's like, these newspapers have an incredible amount of power because there's like seven fucking newspapers left. And if you want to do journalism, like, you're fucked. You either, like, fall in line and accept them paying you, like, absolute dog shit, or you go unemployed, or you're like, one of the very few people who is able to, like, make a living doing this independently. But, like.

[Molly]

Or you're us. We found a way.

[Mia]

Yeah, or. Or like a rich and successful podcaster picks you out and goes, hey, we're gonna pay you to do this, right?

[Molly]

Like, no, but I think, I think about that all the time. That it really. This is such a unicorn job, because almost every job in media you do, you. You have to. You have to suck it up and eat the shit and you have to say the dumbest thing anyone's ever heard, because that's how you keep your job. And that's not our reality. And I'm so grateful for that.

[Mia]

Yeah, I think, I think that's a good place to end, I guess. I don't know. We're. We're. We're going to end on a hopeful note, which is we got. Well, okay, we're going to end on the cynical note, which is like, the only way to have an even sort of good job in this economy where employment is controlled by employers is to get incredibly luck. Like, be the most lucky person in the entire world. Yeah. So I don't know if you. If you want to live in a world where you don't have to win the lottery in order to have, like, a pretty well pay in order to. I. I am so close to hitting the median salary of a CIS white dude in the US I'm so close. I can see it. I can taste it. If you want that.

[Molly]

I love my union podcasting job.

[Mia]

You got to. You got to win the lottery or you got to build a world where that's not how any of this works, which is what Joan Robinson would have wanted.

[Molly]

Sorry, Joanne. It could happen. Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us

[Mia]

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you

[Molly]

can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Mia]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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