← Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
Back to Basics Series: Is Econ 101 a Lie? (with Eric Beinhocker and James Kwak)
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A
Hey, Pitchfork listeners. Goldy here. We've been doing this podcast for a long time now, so we thought we'd take a little break this summer, but we don't want you to miss us too much. So we thought we'd revisit some of the most central episodes from early in our history with a Back to Basics summer series. And if you're a connoisseur of rhetorical questions, you're gonna love this old episode. Is Econ 101 a lie? With Eric Beinhocker and James Kwok.
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In a sense, economics has become the religion of our time.
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It's not a law of nature. It's an intimidation tactic masquerading as an economic theory. It's a way to negotiate wages at scale.
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In the neoliberal political movement, we argue that this imaginary world got confused with the real world.
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We made rich people richer and occasionally threw a bone to the poor.
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At the end of the day, if all we stand for is leveling the playing field of the free market, that's not enough.
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From the offices of Civic Ventures in.
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Downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer.
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It's like Econ 101 without all the BS. I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
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A
I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
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I'm Stephanie Ervin. I run a lot of our advocacy and campaign work here at Civic Ventures.
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A
So, Nick, last week you introduced us to Pitchfork Economics. You told us that the pitchforks are coming for us.
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E
Right?
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This episode, we will talk about why. And start by asking the question, is Econ 101 a lie?
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F
You ever taken, like, an Econ 101 course?
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No, I've never taken an economy class.
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D
Yes.
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Microeconomics and macroeconomics 101.
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No, I haven't. Oh, I guess I did in college.
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I have taken Econ 101. 201, 301, 401.
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A
No.
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F
Yeah, I did in college.
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A
So really, there's kind of two ways to talk about Econ 101. There's Econ 101, the actual class you might have taken in college, and that taught you neoclassical economics. Then there's Econ 101 in the rhetorical, political sense, where you make some argument for raising the minimum wage and somebody rolls their eyes at you and says, it'll kill jobs. I mean, come on. It's Econ 101.
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E
Yes. Yeah. And that form of Econ 101, what the writer James Kwok calls economism, is best understood, really as methodology for social control, it's a way of enforcing status constructs. It's a way of sort of bludgeoning people into believing that what they get is what they deserve, among other things. But in this episode we should really focus, I think, more particularly on the weaknesses of the underlying academic economic construct, which is the neoclassical economics. The way in which the definitions, the assumptions about human behavior are wanting. The assumptions about the dynamics of human social systems, in other words, how people interact is deficient. And the way in which we characterize prosperity and economic growth largely around statistics like gdp, why that's also deficient and why that's just not working out. But a fun thing to reflect on is the way in which the sort of macroeconomic neoclassical construct is under attack.
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F
So can you guys just explain the difference between macroeconomics and microeconomics?
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E
Yeah, there's a difference between micro and macroeconomics. Microeconomics is about economic behavior on the microscale, how people behave and what their interactions are, and among other things, the impact of taxes on incentives and so on and so forth. And macroeconomics is about the big picture, how the whole economy behaves as a consequence of those micro interactions. We have a problem with microeconomics here at Civic Ventures because all of the underlying assumptions that neoclassical microeconomists make about human behavior turn out to be just objectively false. And. And the point of the podcast is to explain to people how and why those assumptions are wrong, and more particularly why they should care why it matters.
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F
So since I skipped taking economics 101 honestly, why should I care?
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E
So the existing theory in all economics is built on the assumption that people are perfectly selfish, perfectly rational and perfectly calculating. And that assumption about human behavior undergirds everything that economists do. So why does this matter so much? Because if your economics accepts the truth about human behavior, that people are reciprocal, moral, approximating, emotional rather than selfish, rational calculators of their self interest, then when you look around the world at all the prosperity in it, what you can see quite clearly is that it was reciprocity and cooperation and morality that created all this prosperity, not selfishness. And once you see that connection in a more honest way about what it is that creates prosperity in human societies, then you can optimize for more of the good thing, rather than optimizing for more of the bad things. So we live, Steph, in a culture, as you know, where people celebrate selfishness, where they literally believe that the more aggressively and narrowly they pursue their own self interest, the better it will be for everyone. Like people Literally believe that. And they believe it because this false assumption of neoclassical economics taught them that it was true. And, you know, in the first episode, we talked a little about the ideological layer of neoliberalism. And one of the cornerstone beliefs in neoliberalism is this idea that the only purpose of the corporation is to enrich shareholders. Why? Because that's how humans efficiently create prosperity for everyone, relying in turn on that assumption about human behavior. But once you kill that dumb idea about human behavior, now the idea that the only purpose of the corporations to enrich the shareholders and the executives is just obviously nonsense. It's bullshit. And so that's why getting this right is so important. It's not just an academic question. By accurately settling the academic question, you inform the ideology that people will accept about how to organize their lives and the policy agendas they will enact to make the world a better place.
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A
So, Nick, you just expanded on our fundamental theme that we stated in the first episode, which is bad theory leads to bad policy, which leads to bad outcomes. We need to insert something in there. It's actually bad theory leads to bad narrative, which leads to bad policy, which leads to bad outcome.
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And the worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
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Exactly.
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They're the most convincing.
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I don't think I have choice or agency or can change anything about how the economic world is just inserting itself on me. Then I am less likely to advance our collective interest in doing something differently.
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E
That's right. And so people over the last 40 years have been relentlessly told that selfishness is righteousness and that your only responsibility is to advance your own narrow self interest. And if you do that, the public interest is served. And that is just a complete lie. That human societies are big, built from reciprocity and cooperation, and cooperation in turn is built by trust. It's only possible with high levels of trust. And trust is the product of justice. That that's why justice is so important in human societies, is that it creates trust, which enables cooperation from which all human prosperity is built. It's not competition that does it, it's cooperation. The reason you care about these academic issues is that these academic assumptions will end up framing everything in your life about how we organize the society and who gets what and why. Okay, so on today's podcast, one of my very dear friends and longtime collaborators, Eric Beinhocker, is going to be with us. Eric is currently the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University, where he leads a team of, I don't know, 125 researchers at the bleeding edge of economic research and theory. Eric is regarded as the world's leading heterodox economic thinker and runs around the world talking to people about new ways to think about economics. He lives in London with his family. And in the interest of full transparency, Eric and I are currently co writing a book on economics that will cover in greater depth a lot of the issues that we touch in this podcast, Pitchfork Economics. So Eric today is going to talk to us a little bit more in detail about the weaknesses of neoclassical economics and point towards a new way of thinking about human behavior, human social systems, and how we might measure whether things are getting better or worse. So, Eric, good morning.
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Good morning.
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How is merry old England?
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Very rainy as usual.
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So, Eric, can we talk about the concept of equilibrium and why, assuming that the system is an equilibrium system, what that means, and how it informs your intuitions about how it works?
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Yeah, this is, you know, it may sound like a bit of a academic point, but it's actually a pretty fundamental one. So if you look at the work of earlier classical economists, many of them were actually what they were describing was a system that was in change, that was evolving and moving over time, and they were often actually quite interested in the dynamics of the economy. A lot of the interesting questions are about how does it change over time and where might it go? But starting in the late 1800s, as economists tried to make economics more mathematical, the tools that they had at the time, which were borrowed from physics, were tools that looked at systems at rest. Can we describe what happens when a pendulum stops swinging or a rock rolls down a hill and comes to rest, or a pencil falls down on a table? They had pretty good mathematics for these static systems going to a state of rest or equilibrium. And they used those tools to apply to the economy. And it seemed like a good fit. Particularly you think of something like the law of supply and demand, which describes how buyers and sellers meet in the market and then come to agree on a price in a kind of state of rest or equilibrium. That math was a real breakthrough and came to dominate the field. But what it missed was the fundamental issues in the economy, that the economy rarely is in a state of rest. It's constantly in motion. There's innovators, innovating and consumers changing their tastes and preferences and firms changing their strategies and developing new products and services and so on. The economy is constantly in motion. It's inherently a disequilibrium system. But it's only very recently that we've had the Tools, in particular computer power, to be able to describe the economy more realistically as a disequilibrium system. The problem with the equilibrium models is again, they cause you to miss many of the most important phenomena in the economy, like booms and busts and crashes and things like 2008, or on the positive side, questions of economic growth, or how do we transition to a sustainable green economy, or how do we deal with problems like inequality. A lot of the big issues that we're wrestling with now are inherently disequilibrium phenomena.
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And just I guess to underscore your point, if your baseline assumption is that the economy is an equilibrium system, a boom or a bust, a bubble sort of can't happen. It's not supposed to happen.
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Well, you kind of go through two stages. First is a sort of denial. Can't happen. But then when it's happening, then you know the answer is do nothing.
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Right.
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Because you know the system will.
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Because it will come back to equilibrium.
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It will come back to equilibrium. And you can see how this kind of thinking and these theories then inform the political debate.
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Right.
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You know, there were many during the 2008 crisis that did argue the best thing we could do is do nothing. And I think the evidence is pretty strong that if we did nothing, we probably would have, instead of a Great Recession, we would have had a true Great Depression. Right.
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Again, it's a very abstract concept, but if you're in a closed equilibrium system, like a bowl with a marble, if you throw the bowl in the marble, eventually it will come to rest at the bottom. It will come to.
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Exactly.
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And all you have to do is do nothing. In fact, if you wanted to come to rest, doing nothing is your best bet.
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Doing nothing is your best bet. Exactly. And also, quite importantly, a brilliant but rather strange Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto, who is known not just for his mathematics, but also the fact that he kept something like 20 cats in his house, he came up with this idea that this equilibrium point was also the optimal point for the. It was the economy, when resources are being used in their most efficient and best way for society as a whole. So a further point is that by doing nothing, letting the economy come to equilibrium, that you'll come to the best outcome for society. So this leads to then views that, like the economy on economic inequality, that there's nothing we can do about it. And that's actually the level of inequality we have is the best and most efficient outcome for society. Right.
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Well, this all makes sense now because anybody who's Had a cat knows that they reach equilibrium 17 hours a day.
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Excellent point.
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So, to be clear, Eric, you are outside of the economic consensus. So when you talk to your fellow economists who still subscribe to the neoclassical equilibrium models, how do they explain things like the minimum wage that it never seems to work the way their models predict it will work?
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D
Well, it's funny. Economics is in a real state of flux right now, which actually makes it a very exciting time to be an economist. So many of my colleagues will actually push back at me and say, eric, you're fighting against a straw man. The neoclassical model is dead. Nobody takes it seriously anymore. Don't flog a dead horse. And Congress takes itself to many degrees. That's true. Again, as I mentioned, lots of economists are doing work on behavioral models and realistic institutional models and more dynamic views of the economy and so on. But there's a big disconnect between this work and work in the more applied and policy area. Again, if you look at a lot of the academic work on an issue like the minimum wage, it is in this kind of fairly narrow neoclassical framework. If you look at a lot of macroeconomic modeling on things like monetary policy or fiscal policy, again, it comes from this neoclassical view. Part of this is just economics takes time to change. Part of it is that it's hard to do these things in a new and better way, and it takes more work. But some of it is also just habits of mind. People have been used to thinking this way for a long time, and it's hard to change.
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A
So the policymakers are lagging the discipline?
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Well, no, actually, the other. So it's kind of a bit of a sandwich. So I'd say at the more kind of level of basic research, there's a lot of exciting stuff going on. And in the policy community itself, there's a big appetite for new approaches and models. So actually, the central banks are some of the leading advocates for these new approaches and are very disillusioned with the standard models. And we have conversations in treasuries and finance ministries or environmental ministries, or lots of places in governments and in the policy community where we get a lot of interest and support for these ideas. It's more the kind of applied part of economics in academia that actually seems to be lagging.
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Our next guest is James Kwok, who is a law professor at the University of Connecticut.
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And James has written this amazing book.
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Called Economism, Bad Economics, and the Rise of Inequality.
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Nick, it's a pleasure to hear from you.
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How are you?
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I'm well how are you? Good.
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How goes the battle?
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Poorly.
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I think that's honest but accurate.
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Hi, Professor Kwok, thanks for joining us. This is Stephanie.
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Yeah, my pleasure.
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Why don't we start by just telling us what economism is, because we should start with our listeners with that. So just reprise the book and the concept.
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B
Yeah. So economism is the misuse of very simplistic models from first year economics to try to make claims about the world, claims that are politically convenient to some people. So for those of you who have taken economics or haven't taken it, the first thing you learn is you learn about supply and demand and competitive markets, and you learned that the forces of supply and demand essentially create a perfect world because everyone gets paid exactly what they deserve and all products cost exactly what they should make and all resources get allocated to their best uses. And I say this is first year economics because when people study more economics and go to graduate school and so on, they learn that this model really applies to a very small segment of the economy. But what's happened is that beginning especially in the 1950s, 1960s, conservative ideologues started using arguments based on this very simple supply and demand model to say things like, you know, very famously, the minimum wage hurts poor people because the minimum wage is essentially a price floor in the market for labor and it creates a shortage, and that shortage is unemployment. And I think this kind of argument has been very powerful for a couple of reasons. One is that it invokes the power of economics, which many people are just intimidated by.
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Right.
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And then secondly, it allows this particular kind of rhetorical argument that you heard first among conservatives, which is that I really like poor people and I really want to help poor people, and that's why I'm against the minimum wage, and that's why I'm against welfare. You hear that one too? Right? Welfare hurts poor people because it undermines the incentive to work.
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Yeah.
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That we would pay you more, except.
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That would be bad for you.
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For you. Exactly. And that is. That is a godsend for the right because they've been accused for centuries, you know, since Dickensian England, they've been accused of just, like, not caring about poor people.
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Right.
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What Milton Friedman, the economist, gave them was this tool to say, no, we are actually the champions of the poor.
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What was your goal in writing economism? What were you hoping to achieve?
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B
I guess I had two audiences. Neither one was kind of conservative Republicans. One was I wanted to equip progressives to be able to understand what people were saying when they said, it's just economics 101. Because I think a lot of people find that intimidating. And I think a lot of progressives would not know how to argue with someone who gets out a cocktail napkin and draws a picture and shows that their minimum wage creates unemployment. So I wanted them to give them a little bit of economics and to show that this is not the whole story. In a few cases, to teach them the other side of the story, but more generally, just to make people more suspicious of that whole line of reasoning. It's just economics. And then I guess my second audience was, I guess, moderate Democrats, because I think many people have been won over to the idea that as Bill Clinton said, government's not the solution, as Al Gore said, government should be smaller. A lot of Democrats have been won over to the idea that really we want the free market to generate prosperity and all we need to do is kind of tweak it around the margins. I think that's just wrong. So I was hoping to convince a few people of that, but.
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F
So, Professor Kwok, are you arguing that folks are applying the lessons of Econ101 incorrectly, or that the lessons in Econ101 are themselves wrong, or both?
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B
I think they're being applied incorrectly. But it's partly the way people learn Economics 101. Because in a first year class with a good teacher, with most economics teachers, I have no reason to think are bad. They will explain the model and then they will say, this is an analytical model. We use it as a starting point and then we look at ways in which the world differs from the model and how that changes the outcomes. But I think that first of all, it's much easier to remember the model than the caveats. And secondly, a lot of public policy debate is essentially kind of like it's a debating club in which people try to score points by clarity and simplicity. And this provides a handbook of clear and simple arguments against many kinds of government intervention. Because again, the starting point is essentially that private markets generally produce optimal outcomes. So I think it's largely a case of misapplication. You know, often it's a common trope among commentators. They will say, you know, I'm sorry the world is this way, but it's just economics 101. There's nothing I can do about it. It's a way of disclaiming all agency, pretending politics doesn't exist, and saying, this is just a force of nature. It's like gravity. But again, if you talk to an economist who, you know, a Professor, maybe one with Nobel Prize in that very subject. Most of the time they will tell you things are more complicated.
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Yeah.
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So can you deconstruct the claims of economism a little bit more like, you know, how do they resolve in the public discourse?
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B
Yeah. So, I mean, I think the minimum wage is perhaps the simplest example to talk about. As I said, the diagram you can draw on a cocktail napkin says that if you have a minimum wage, it will cause unemployment. And then I would say that at the high level, this is if you look at op eds written against increasing the minimum wage, that is usually the core of the argument, that as Milton Friedman said, it harms the very people it was meant to help. But then I think there's a level below this as well, because what's happened, I think has been amply documented is over the past 50 years, the conservatives have funded and developed a network of think tanks that dwarfs anything comparable on the left, in part because most democratic funded institutions end up being centrist for reasons that I don't fully understand. And so this kind of basic claim becomes then the starting point for these think tanks to put out industry funded studies that then purport to back up the claims of economism. Because I would say that on questions like this, on public policy questions, the attack from the right kind of takes two forms. One is the sound bites that politicians use and that people use in op ed articles saying, look, it's just economics 101. And then on the second level, there is an industry of organizations who will churn out white papers and empirical studies to kind of just muddy the waters. It's the industry of, well, if we have a study and they have a study, then Fox News will say, we can't decide which one it is.
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C
Yeah. So you know what's fascinating to me is that the chamber of commerce and their allies churn out a lot of papers on why raising wages will be terrible for workers. But what they never do is turn out papers and send them to the press showing why raising wages will be bad for executive bonuses.
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E
Even though, like, why is that?
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And bad for shareholders? Why is it that they only seem to release papers about it will be bad for workers and never release papers of why it will be bad for owners and shareholders. And this is of course because they're trying to advance a moral argument that they think can win the day. And we're rich, you're poor, and we want to keep it that way. Doesn't sell. And the other thing that I think is worth mentioning is that the marvelous historian Yuval Harari has said in his books, and I really do think this is true, is that the iron law of history and the one that, you know, sort of undergirds all of the narratives that hold human societies together, comes in one of two forms. Either God says or it's a law of nature. And that is why economism is so powerful and that is why it takes that form, is because what folks are saying is that raising wages kills jobs is just like force equals mass times acceleration, that these are laws of nature, they're inviolate. And that if you contradict them, well, you just don't understand physics or you just don't understand economics. They are asserted as if they're laws of nature. And here's the thing about force times mass equals acceleration is that it is true in every circumstance where it has ever been tested. It is always true, is never not true. That's why it's a physical law. But raising wages kills jobs is never true. It's not a law of nature. It's an intimidation tactic masquerading as an economic theory. It's a way to negotiate wages at scale.
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B
Yeah. So that sentiment is very familiar to me. The epigraph to the book is a quote from Baudelaire. It's the one that's been cited many times where he said the devil's greatest trick was convincing people that he didn't exist. And I started off the book talking about Candide by Voltaire, which was most, you know, well known character is the philosopher Pangloss, who's a caricature of Leibniz, who says this is the best of all possible worlds. And I think that, you know, part of the. I don't know if I quite make the analogy in the book, but in a sense, economics has become the religion of our time, or at least the religion of the kind of policy and political elite. And I think that this is one reason when you talk about this, convincing people that it's a law of nature. You know, obviously we've talked a little bit about how this is very convenient for Republicans, but I think this is also this idea that it's a natural law is part of what has helped move the Democratic Party so far to the center and to the center. Right. On many economic issues.
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Yeah.
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But some of the policies that Democrats support actually do are better for the economy. Right. Are better for growth, unambiguous growth. So why don't we ever make that argument? Why are we instead making arguments about fairness and helping poor People or to your point Professor Kwok, leveling the playing field.
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B
So let's just take Obamacare. I think Obamacare is the best example. Obamacare is a very kind of over engineered. Well, it's the long way to try to use market forces to approximate the outcome you would get with single payer when single payer is obviously the short way to get there. And Obamacare was designed that way. There's a whole question of whether we had the votes. Let's leave that aside for a second. It was designed that way so that people would not accuse Democrats of being socialist. Well, guess what, they call us socialist anyway.
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E
Yeah, right.
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And it is a less good outcome because I think it's unsustainable because it doesn't do enough to. Healthcare is just getting too expensive and it doesn't do enough to solve that problem at the end of the day. But I think that we propose policies that are certainly better than the Republican alternatives but they are perceived as technocratic and they do not give people what they really want. What people really want is security in a few basic areas such as healthcare. And what we've had with Obamacare, again I will say it's better than the Republican alternative. What we've done is we've shifted health care costs from upfront premiums to back end cost sharing because basically in order to create a policy that people can afford, it often has to be a high deductible plan. So we have these kind of technocratic half measures and we say that we're harnessing market forces. And that's part of why I think people think Democrats don't stand for anything because the Republican message is one sentence long. We're going to get government out of the way and we're going to let innovation and entrepreneurship in the American way will make everyone rich.
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Right.
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B
I mean it's completely false. But it's one sentence.
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C
It is persuasive.
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B
We don't have a sentence. You know, a lot of the Democrats position on policy debates ends up being well, my complicated policy is better for more people than your simple policy. Yeah, and they're white.
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C
But it's not perceptible.
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B
That doesn't win you any vote. It doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't get you any votes. And as I said, in the long term our policies tend to be better for economic growth. But the problem that an increasing number of people in this country face is not a lack of growth, it's not a lack of jobs, it's just inequality.
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C
We have plenty of Jobs. The problem is that the jobs don't pay enough. That's the principal problem with the economy. And people aren't paid enough because they.
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Don'T have good jobs.
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They're not paid enough because their employers don't pay them enough. That has nothing to do with the job. It has to do with the power. And that, I think, is the underlying lie of economism, which is the most pernicious part about it, is that what economism does tells you is if you are paid $7.25 an hour, you only deserve $7.25 an hour. And if the government intervenes and requires your employer to pay you more than $7.25 an hour, then a law of nature has been violated. Cats and dogs are going to start to live together, Earth is going to crack open, we're all going to slide into hell, and the economy will collapse. And the. And that is simply a lie that people are not paid what they're worth. They're paid what they negotiate. And how much power you have to negotiate, frankly, is orthogonal to what you make. In some cases, you have a lot of negotiating power. In most cases, people don't. And that's the role of government in any democratic society, is to try to balance the power of elites versus non elites.
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B
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, you know, in economics, there's obviously a whole field devoted to market power. But again, going back to what is economism and the way it draws on a very small part of first year economics, the supply and demand competitive market model does not have any market power in it. Right. So when you say the minimum wage necessarily paying people more will necessarily cause unemployment, you're drawing on a picture of the world in which power just doesn't exist, and yet you're able to pretend it doesn't exist.
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E
Yeah.
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C
In a world where mostly that's the only thing that's important.
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B
Yeah.
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F
So, Professor, I know you've offered to have your book Economism included in the syllabuses of real econ 101 courses. Has anyone actually taken you up on that?
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B
You know, to be honest, I'm not actually sure. I get requests for review copies. I send them out. I haven't followed up to find out. I'm probably a little scared to ask.
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F
Well, so I think we share a lot of the same goals in our efforts to put out this podcast. So thanks for being a part of it this morning. We really appreciate it.
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C
Thank you so much for joining us.
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D
Thank you.
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B
For having me. I really appreciate it.
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C
It's wonderful to talk to you.
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B
Same here.
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C
Talk to you soon.
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B
Okay, bye.
- [34:29]
F
Bye.
- [34:33]
G
There's a lot of, you know, and I can't remember any of it because it's been well over 10 years, but the, the, you know, there were a lot of supply side stuff, a lot of supply and demand talk, different ways to figure out what was going to be, you know, like what indicators there were for whatever, you know, like insert this into our supply and demand underneath algorithm, I guess, and, and then you can hopefully see what is going to come out on the other end.
- [35:07]
F
Do you think neoclassical economics was a lie from the beginning or was it some guys really just trying to simplify how they understood the economic world?
- [35:16]
E
Yeah.
- [35:16]
F
And explain it.
- [35:17]
E
Yeah. So it's unfair to call neoclassical economics a lie. It's fair to call trickle down economics a lie because that's a very deliberate effort to manipulate power and economic arrangements. The people who built neoclassical economics did so for the best. Mostly. I mean, don't know all of them, but certainly most of them for the best reasons. They were just trying to understand the world using the best tools that they had available. And many of them at the time that they offered these theoretical constructs were explicit about saying, look, this is just a model. This is just a way of modeling some things. Don't take it too seriously. I mean, for instance, gdp, which is our current measure of growth and economic prosperity, was developed by this guy named Kuznets in the 1940s who was absolutely explicit that this should never be used as a way of measuring welfare for all of the really obvious reasons in which it is deficient. And yet we grabbed onto it. And we grabbed onto it for a couple of reasons.
- [36:33]
C
First, it was simple.
- [36:34]
E
And second, because if you measure things in a particular way that benefits a particular group of people, if you measure output and define output as good, the people in charge of the output are highly rewarded. And you know, if.
- [36:52]
F
Well, at the time, I'm sure it was really easy to believe these things because those people in the Econ 101 classes or whatever 60 years ago, 80 years ago, were elites.
- [37:02]
E
Yes, that's right. And you know, another theme of the podcast here is that economics is presented as if it's this sort of set of revealed laws of nature. And indeed, there's some very fine academic work that is done on how economies work by legit, objective, fine people. But the way that most people experience economists is as a construct or a rationalization of who gets what and why. It is how economics is how modern.
- [37:40]
C
Societies.
- [37:43]
E
Instantiate our social and moral preferences about status, privileges, and power. And whether economists want to acknowledge that or not, or whether they want to admit it or not, their work is often harnessed to or in service of enforcing these status contracts that benefit some people and don't benefit others. And there's a very fine line between objective economic research and a very deliberate effort, almost certainly, of elites to enrich themselves at the expense of others using that research or those arguments or that data.
- [38:33]
F
Remember anything that you learned in that class?
- [38:36]
A
No, not a thing. It's been a long time.
- [38:38]
E
I don't remember anything.
- [38:39]
G
I don't remember whether or not it was true. You know, I guess I don't know because I didn't pay close enough attention.
- [38:52]
H
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us. Wherever you get your podcasts, find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and threads. Pitchfork Economics Nick's on Twitter and Facebook as well. Ickhanhauer for more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Pitch, over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, Visit our website, Pitchfork economics.com as always from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.