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Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
How Economists Cause Harm Even as They Aspire to Do Good (with George DeMartino)
00:39:23
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- [00:02]
Paul
The rising inequality and growing political instability.
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Goldie
That we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory. The last five decades of trickle down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative?
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Paul
Middle out economics is the answer.
- [00:19]
Goldie
Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence. That's right.
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Paul
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer.
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Goldie
A podcast about how to build the.
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Paul
Economy from the middle out.
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Goldie
Welcome to the show.
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George DiMartino
Paul.
- [00:44]
Paul
Hi Goldie, how are you?
- [00:45]
Goldie
Oh, always happy to get to have you on the pod for a change.
- [00:51]
Paul
Uh huh. You know, you'd think I'd learn at this point not to ask you how you are because more often than not the answer is incredibly pessimistic. Pessimistic. But you did a good job there. I'm proud of you. So yeah, I'm excited to join the podcast today because I've been thinking a lot about when I first started at this job, Goldie, and I did not know much about economics at all. I had not started my reading.
- [01:20]
Goldie
You hadn't started your layman's PhD program.
- [01:25]
Paul
That's right. And I was surprised when I started exactly how skeptical you and Nick were about economics because, you know, I only had the layman's view. Right. Of economics. I assumed it was a science that knew everything, that could predict everything. And you know, so it was, it was a little shocking to me when I started and all of the things that you were saying about economics and all that. But I think, and I've shared that skepticism as I've, as I've, as I've read more and learned more and you know, done all the reading and writing that we've done over the years. But, but I am excited because today I think that we have somebody who might be more skeptical about economics than you or Nick. I think it might be the one guy. And I'm very excited to talk to him.
- [02:13]
Goldie
And weirdly, he's an actual economist.
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Paul
He is, he is a unlike you and Nick. He is a, a literal economist who is skeptical about economics and has basically made his life's work questioning some of the, the fundamental load bearing pill economics in general.
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Goldie
Yeah, I don't know that you'd want to go to a surgeon who is skeptical about surgery.
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Paul
Or you'd want somebody at the Department of Health who was skeptical about vaccines.
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Goldie
Yeah, yeah. But you know, sometimes, you know. Well, let's put it this way, you'd want to go to like maybe a rabbi or a priest who's a little skeptical about religion.
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Paul
Exactly. I like a Jesuit more Than a, than a conservative Catholic, for instance.
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Goldie
There you go.
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Paul
But yeah, yeah. So our guest today is George DiMartino. He is a professor of economics at the Joseph Corbell School of International Studies at the University of Denver, and he has written a lot about the economics profession. His latest book is titled the Tragic How Economists Cause Harm Even as they Aspire to Do Good.
- [03:25]
Goldie
Let's talk to George.
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Paul
Yeah, let's talk to George.
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George DiMartino
Hi, I'm George DiMartino. I'm a professor of international economics at the University of Denver. And I have spent the last 20, 25 years studying and writing about the ethical behavior of economists and their ethical responsibilities. The project has been to create a new field that doesn't exist, the field of professional economics. So in most any other profession, in most professions, students are immersed in the ethical responsibilities of that profession. In economics, we haven't had even a five minute conversation about what it means to be a responsible economist and, and to face our ethical responsibilities. So I've been publishing books on this, the most recent of which is the Tragic How Economists Cause Harm Even as they Aspire to Do Good.
- [04:30]
Goldie
You start off talking about how they don't worry about ethics. I'll tell you a little personal story. I went undergrad to the University of Pennsylvania in the early mid-1980s. And at the time the university dictated that the Wharton School every student would have to take one ethics class. And there was such an uproar about that, so much pushback from Wharton that they eventually took that back that it was inappropriate to teach economics and business students about ethics. It was a waste of time.
- [05:08]
George DiMartino
You know, this allergy to ethics in economics goes back well over 100 years. In fact, to the turn of the 20th century, economics really tried to position itself as the physics of the social world. And it was thought that just as physics is an objective science, you don't describe the world the way you want it to be. You describe the world exactly as it is. So economics should do the same in the social world. And so ethics could only muddy the waters. And the idea was hard headed investigation of what is, and then prescribing policy based on those objective findings. There was very little room here for ethics.
- [05:54]
Goldie
If we could just start with something a little definitional before we get into the thesis, because I think this is important, you talk about the difference between positive economics and normative economics. If you could just explain to our listeners what you mean by those terms.
- [06:09]
George DiMartino
Positive economics is the kind of economics I was just describing. It's taken to be the objective Value free description of the way the world is. Normative economics is the branch of economics that talks about what we should do, what policy interventions should be pursued in order to make the world better. In economics, positive economics has always been primary. Normative economics has always been derivative.
- [06:38]
Paul
One thing I wanted to talk about is on this podcast we've, we've had discussions about the demographic makeup of economics and, and economists and the fact that it is overwhelmingly white and male. I was wondering fluent and affluent also. Yes, sorry, I'm trying to sort of understand how much of that is this, how much of this is, is demographic problem and how much of this is just sort of big baked into the core of economics as a, as a study.
- [07:06]
George DiMartino
I don't know to what degree we can separate those two. Historically, you're quite right, economics has been populated by white men who are quite privileged. But of course that's changing dramatically now. If you look at the percentage of students in PhD programs in economics in the United States, something like 30% are from North America or from the United States, I should say. The other 70% are international students. The largest contingent is from Asia and South Asia. And so the demographics of the profession are changing dramatically. I happen to think that this is a wonderful thing because it opens the door to economics, to whole parts of the globe that have been largely ignored by the economics profession. The United States has always been the center of economic training. Some international students would come here and we train them up in what we thought was appropriate and then send them back to their home countries to engage in social engineering. But now the field is really becoming much more diverse. And so there's at least a chance that we might start to see much wider range of perspectives than those that we saw, say during the Cold War when the economics profession was obsessed with promoting market fundamentalism. It was seen as a bulwark against any other kind of economic regime, such as state socialism.
- [08:43]
Goldie
So you title your book the Tragic Science. We'll put aside for a moment the question of whether economics is a science. I mean, you've already said it. It's clearly not a natural science like the field of physics that it modeled itself on. But let's get into the word tragic. What has made economics so tragic? And are economists aware of the tragedy they're involved in?
- [09:10]
George DiMartino
I use the term tragedy in the title for a reason, which is that the practice of economics inescapably causes harm to some, even if and as it's benefiting others. And this is a problem that can't be eliminated. That's why I called it the tragedy of economics. The problem is that economists have been trained to essentially turn a blind eye to this problem. It's almost like this. We come to think that, yeah, there will always be some losers in any economic policy that we prescribe. And given that that's the case, then so long as the gains to the winners are greater than the losses to the losers, we should just comfort ourselves with the belief that in the aggregate, society is becoming better off. And we kind of hope and we kind of teach that those losses will be temporary. You know, think of a pebble being thrown into a still pond. The initial ripples are pretty big, but they very quickly dissipate. That's how we train students and society to think about the harms from economic policies that we prefer, such as, say, international trade, trade liberalization. We've taught our students and the public for over a hundred years that in the aggregate, trade liberalization is great. Yes, there will be some harms, but those harms, these are the dislocated workers. Who's Johnson then offshore. Those harms will be temporary, just like ripples on a pond. The problem is that the harms aren't always like ripples on a pond. Instead, think of an avalanche. An avalanche starts slowly with a little force, but then gains momentum and deepens and worsens as it as it comes cascading down the mountain. Many economic harms are of that sort. That is to say, a community that's been affected by deindustrialization, it doesn't spring back in five weeks, five months, or even five years. What we see is deterioration over long periods of time that are then transmitted intergenerationally, so that the children of those who have been harmed in the first instance by trade liberalization live much worse lives than they would have had the harm not occur. Economists are not trained to think of economic harm as avalanches. We're trained to think of them as ripples on a pond. And as a consequence, we become blase about the harms because we think, well, the repair will come quickly enough, and in the long run, whenever that comes, we'll all be better off. I think that this is professionally irresponsible.
- [11:50]
Paul
So to bring up a specific example, talking about harm, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Russia's shock therapy in the early 1990s and how that relates to a failure of economics.
- [12:02]
George DiMartino
Yeah. Unfortunately for Russia, it made its transition during what I think of now as the heroic era of economics, when economists really thought that they fully understood the world and could manage it, that they had sufficient knowledge to control the world. And of course they came to mistake influence for control. I call this the Jeffrey Sachs in Russia problem. When you think that because you have a lot of influence, you can control what happens in the world. Russia undertook its transition in the early 1990s. It was given advice, it was advised by leading economist. Jeffrey Sachs is just one of many who advocated for a forceful, dramatic, immediate transformation away from a state led economy to a free market economy. The idea was to privatize hundreds of thousands of firms all at once, while at the same time re engineering the Russian economy away from state direction toward market mediation. Well, the project was an enormous failure. The estimates of extra deaths, these were deaths of young men in their 20s, 30s and 40s primarily ranges from something like 3 million to 10 million Russians who died in the wake of this shock therapy. They died what we now think of as deaths of despair as their communities were wiped out, their jobs were wiped out, their identities were destroyed. I hold the economics profession responsible for for making the fundamental mistake of thinking that it had the right to try and dictate what happened in countries like Russia and the epistemic mistake of thinking it knew enough to actually control what happened next. And of course we can't. The world is far too complex for economists to understand and predict what will happen next. We need to lead with what we don't know rather than trying to persuade the public and decision makers that we know enough.
- [14:11]
Goldie
On the line of that, you mention in your book what you call the Larry Summers problem. And by that you don't mean his problem seducing a young female mentee. Explain the Larry Summers problem. Me, because I was just appalled by that quote in the book.
- [14:34]
George DiMartino
The Larry Summers problem refers to this tendency that I see in economics all the time. It's the mistake of thinking that because you're the smartest person in the room, parenthesis, by your own estimation and parenthesis, you are then smart enough to know how to design the world. And you therefore think you're warranted in using your authority to design economies and to tell decision makers how they should organize their economies. This is a massive failure that comes from the way economics is thought of as an objective science. The physics of the social world, which we talked about earlier, but also about the way it's taught. We teach the world our students in Econ 101 class. We teach them what we know. We put up these wonderful proofs like we're wizards that really understand the way the world is. We Try to persuade them that our economic models are really time machines that let us zip out into the future, see the way the world is going, come back and tell decision makers today what policies they should pursue to prepare for that future. Now this is insanity. In my humble opinion. This is professional malpractice. Larry Summers as a person always has embodied this the most for me, or I should say he's the most high profile of economists who suffer from the Larry Summers problem. But he's, he's just an example of the problem that infects the profession that derives from our sense of economics as having powers and capacities that it cannot possibly have.
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Paul
Right.
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Goldie
And one of those capacities that's always bothered me, these claims, is that it's predictive. I mean, a real science like physics is predictive. You can use Newtonian physics to land a rocket ship on Mars or on the moon, you can calculate that and know exactly how these forces are going to interact. And that's just not true in economics. It has a terrible history of forecasting. And one of the analogies I love to use particularly econometricians defend themselves by saying, well, it's complicated, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to predict, especially the future. And they compare themselves to meteorologists that, you know, meteorologists get the weather forecast wrong too. But the difference is, first of all, meteorology is actually has gotten pretty damn good, at least in a five to 10 day forecast. But the other thing is that when a meteorologist makes a forecast, regardless of whether it's right or wrong, they never ever, ever change the weather. The weather never changes based on their forecast. But in economics, it's not just their policy prescriptions that cause harm. Their forecasts cause harm because they actually change the economy.
- [17:39]
George DiMartino
Economic forecasting, in my view, it represents professional malpractice. The problem is that to make predictions, dependable predictions, predictions that are correct, you need to understand causality in the world. That works fine in the little models we construct. In our little model worlds, we have so few variables and we've got such simple mathematical relationships that we can change one variable, it's called the independent variable, and then trace through quite nicely exactly what's going to happen to all the other variables in the system. The world is not like that. The social world, I should say, is not a simple system. The social world comprises many, many, many diverse complex systems, none of which lend themselves to this kind of causal specification. And making matters worse, all these complex systems are constantly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways. So the idea that we can begin to predict dependably, as I said a moment. It's intellectually dishonest. It's professional malpractice. Add into that the point you just made about the fact that when we make these predictions and we publish them, people read them and they adjust their behavior. And in adjusting their behavior, the prediction actually changes the direction of the economy. This means that the forecaster has tremendous responsibility because they're actually not just describing the world, they're changing the world. And here's the problem. They're changing the world in fundamentally unpredictable ways, which means that there's going to be tremendous harm. And so I agree with those economists that, like Danny Roger, just to name one, who argues that the financial crisis of 2008 was brought about in part by economic theory that was teaching students that markets are efficient, therefore there can't be a bubble in the housing market, there can't be a bubble in the asset market. And we could therefore trust these trends. And people kept then investing and investing and borrowing and investing, creating this house of cards where one little wind knock the whole thing down. Economists are culpable for that. Those kinds of crises, when their predictions, their forecasts have led people to believe that the future is going to be safe, when in fact the future is just too unpredictable to know if it's going to be safe or very, very dangerous.
- [20:09]
Goldie
Yeah. I mean, to be clear on that, orthodox economics, theoretically, according to theory, bubbles shouldn't be possible.
- [20:19]
George DiMartino
Correct. One of the things that's interesting, in a previous book that I wrote, the Economist Oath, I interviewed many, many dozens of applied economists. Economists are out there in the world actually doing cost benefit analysis and long term forecasting, economic impact analysis. And one of the things I. Well, I heard two things that really shocked me. First, Zacama said, we'll look. We know that these forecasts are incorrect, but this is what's asked of us, this is what's demanded of us. So we have to give people what they demand of us. To which I say, if, and to the degree that decision makers are asking this of us, it's because we trained them when they were college students to expect that this is exactly what we can deliver, that nobody else can deliver. We so wowed them with our expertise that we should not be surprised when they come back to us later on and say, okay, give me the forecast. Tell me how the change in this policy is going to lead to some other policy. The second thing I learned, which is even more distressing, is that economists don't believe economics. They do all this Work that they themselves don't trust. No economist is ever persuaded by the economic analysis of another economist. Fundamentally change their view. Economists understand that so much of the work that's being generated is biased in one way or another was done under time pressures that would never allow for adequate work. And so there's this deep, deep distrust in economics, of economics. And yet we don't talk about that when we train our students or when we. When we engage the public. For example, I interviewed an economist who was on the Council of Economic Advisors at the time I was doing my interviews. He had had a long career as an economic consultant. And he ended the conversation by saying to me, george, don't ever trust an economic consultant. Now, this happened time and time again. I was interviewing people at think tanks in Washington, and one of them said to me, look, we have to make our arguments louder. He said, we have to speak louder than. Than we know is right, by which, you know, we had to exaggerate our findings, and we had to broadcast them with more confidence than we felt because we're up against other economists working for the other think tanks who are doing the very same thing. So we're locked in this competitive battle, and we have to do what it takes to win that battle. His argument was, you can't trust economists at think tanks. And so it went. Government economists. There's one exception here, which is forensic economists. These are economists who testify in court when in civil disputes, one corporation, say, is suing another over, let's say, trademark infringement. Somebody has to calculate the damages. Those are the forensic economies. That's the one group I found in economics that's really gone to work on thinking about what does it mean to be an ethical forensic economist, a trustworthy forensic economist. But outside of forensic economics, there's no attention to these matters.
- [23:29]
Paul
So we have. We generally ask people what we call the magic wand question in your case would be if you could redesign economics from the ground up, what would be the first thing you would do? But I also want to sort of incorporate in that a question about what you think that a more ethical economics might look like in practice. Which is. It's a very broad question, but I was hoping you could indulge me a little bit.
- [23:54]
George DiMartino
If I were in position to redesign economics, I'd start with economics training. Rather than try to bedazzle students with proofs and a demonstration of the things we know that they don't know, rather than teaching them to defer to our judgments, I would lead with all that economists can't know. I would lead with a warning to students explaining the potential of economics, but warning about the downsides of economics. With respect to PhD students, I would move much more closely toward anthropological training where economists are actually immersed in the communities that they're going to try and serve. Right now, we keep those communities at an arm's length. We don't know the communities that we're trying to serve. There are some efforts by, say, Ravi Conver at Cornell University leading these immersion and dialogue programs where economists actually are situated in the communities of those they're trying to help so that they can actually start to understand these communities. I think that this is terribly necessary. Next, I would turn policy economic analysis away from forecasting and cost benefit analysis and all the things that rely on knowledge that we can't possibly have. I'll give you one example. There's a new approach to policy called decision making under deep uncertainty dmdu. These are practitioners from across the disciplines, largely, however, in climate climate fields that lead in their policy work with the emphasis on the unknowability of the future. And yet they try to find ways to help communities, especially stakeholders who are going to be affected by policy, to help those stakeholders think about and prepare for an unknowable future. So rather than seeking efficiency and optimality, they seek robust policies. This is a fundamental shift that has to happen in economics. The problem with efficient policies where you got your marginal social benefit curve, cutting your marginal social cost curve, which tells us what is exactly, exactly the optimal strategy. Optimal strategies have zero robustness, which is to say if anything at all goes wrong, if anything is different in the world than we expected, we cannot achieve that optimality. So pursuing optimality in a world of complex systems is far too dangerous and people suffer and die because of it. What we need to do instead is acceptable the unknowability of the future and pursue robust policies point 1. That engages the stakeholders directly in policy formation. That's point number two. We have such a paternalistic ethic in economics that says we know best, you should defer. The ethic that we see in DMDU strategies is to look to empower those who are going to be affected by policy to make their own decisions about what makes for good policy. The field of economics has a tremendous amount to offer to these kinds of policy exercises, but it would require a fundamental change in how economists understand their expertise and their role vis a vis society and policy.
- [27:11]
Goldie
So that's a novel idea. So we should get to choose the outcomes we want and then get some advice from economists as to how we might get there, as opposed to just assuming the utilitarian benefit of the greatest good for the greatest number, which is really at the heart of orthodox economics.
- [27:34]
George DiMartino
We have to understand that there's no common metric which we should reduce all of people's values and wants and aspirations. People differ fundamentally on what it is, right? Not that just will make them happy in the utilitarian framework, but what they need, what they value most of all. And so the policy exercise should not be about trying to come up with a common measure like social welfare, which is what economists use, and then looking for the policy that promises to maximize social welfare in the aggregate. The strategy's got to be to find a way to work with diverse stakeholders with diverse values who just fundamentally disagree on what they want out of the world world, and yet look to find a way to engage them so that they can come up with common policies. And I know this sounds fanciful for economists, but in fact, this is being pursued all over the world by experts outside of economics who have come to appreciate the unknowability of the future. Great.
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Goldie
And I guess one final question. Why do you do this work?
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George DiMartino
I came into the economics profession as a critic of economics. I just spent 10 years working in the labor movement in the 1980s, and I saw economists advocating essentially what came to be known as global neoliberalism. And of course, in the labor movement, I could see the damaging impacts. I was angry. And so I became an economist in order to learn the logic by which economists could be making these arguments, and then to do everything I could. And this is what I've been doing for 30 years, to do everything I could to alert the public to the fact that there's something fundamentally wrong, they're fundamentally dangerous, while at the same time trying to press on the profession itself to see that despite its best intentions. And I just accept that most economists become economists out of good intentions to make the world better. Despite their best intentions, they were engaging in practices that were fundamentally damaging and to try to do something about amending professional behavior so as to diminish the problem. And here I am, 30 years later, still trying to nudge.
- [29:50]
Goldie
Well, thank you for your service.
- [30:01]
Paul
So, Goldie, what did you think about Professor DeMartino's brand of skepticism, economic skepticism, Economists do harm.
- [30:10]
Goldie
Who knew? I've never heard that mentioned on this podcast, that possibly some of the theories and forecasts and policies prescribed by economists might actually cause harm. And I guess the real question here, and this is what he's addressing, is whether economists are willing to admit that. That they are causing harm even when they're trying not to. One of the things that jumped out at me was talking about the Russian shock therapy, where he says the estimates are that it created 3 to 10 million excess deaths. And those are. Those are Stalin numbers. This is what his policies in Ukraine. The famine he, he intentionally. Well, the famine, whether it was intentional or not, the famine he caused in Ukraine, that was like the 6 to 9 million range. So Jeffrey Sachs is the. The Stalin of the 1990s. I mean, it's an amazing number. And you don't hear a. Obviously you will hear economists saying, well, maybe it didn't work all that well now that we have this fascist. Sure, yeah, you know, whatever. But you don't hear anybody taking responsibility for 6 to 10 million deaths. I'm sorry, 3 to 10 million deaths, excess deaths. And that. Just, you know, we're willing to talk about the mistakes in communism. We're talking about the millions of people that Dalin and to a greater extent, Mao ended up killing with their policies, but we don't admit to the body count from orthodox economics, and that's within our lifetime. It's really horrific. But of course, of more concern is the everyday harm that economics does. And I think it gets back to really, at the heart of neoclassical economics is really one philosophy, one ethical consideration, and that is utilitarianism. It all comes down to utilitarianism. And literally it's about maximizing utility. You want. You make decisions based on whether it gives you more utils or less utils. And really, util is a word. That's what they use. It's not something I just made up. That's your. It is. The metric of utility is utils, your number of utils. I mean, when you go to the market, like you go shopping, Paul, you're interested in maximizing your utils, right? You're getting the most utils for the dollar.
- [32:58]
Paul
I feel like I'm in a Dr. Seuss poem. Yes, yes, I do. I maximize my utils, right?
- [33:04]
Goldie
And so that's how you get a world where a. It's, you know, fundamental. It's the Spock line, the greatest good for the greatest number. And while, you know, and economists know, there are people who are displaced by their policies that the results are necessarily uneven in the short run, they'll say, well, in the long run, it's better for society, right? So you know what that is? The only thing that matters is, are you maximizing social welfare? That is, that's why it's called social welfare economics. So there is a morality at the heart of economics, even if they don't acknowledge it. It's not a very moral or ethical morality, but there is a morality that's there. So it's obviously a lot of this was self, this conversation was self reinforcing.
- [34:01]
Paul
Yeah. Always good to have an opportunity to trash talk Larry Summers. I will take any opportunity I can to.
- [34:07]
Goldie
That's right.
- [34:09]
Paul
How much Larry Summers sucks.
- [34:11]
Goldie
Yeah, the quote of his in the book where he basically takes offense at people saying that economics works different here. Well, it turns out economics does work differently in different places with different people because it's subjective. People want different things out of the economy. And in the end, as we say this, this is what economics should be about. It should be about broadly improving the lives of people. And if you want to worry about improving the lives of people, then their judgment of their own lives matters as opposed to some calculus.
- [34:45]
Paul
I just really appreciated the idea of leading with ignorance is I think, a highly undervalued quality, especially in America, especially in the year 2025. And I think the idea of economists actually meeting the communities that they're talking about is sadly a groundbreaking one. Also in the year 2025. I think that Professor DeMartino makes the case that the failures of economics was one of the sort of leading edges of this fight against professionalism that we're seeing now from the right, the populist parties, specifically maga, but also on the left. You see people doubting the professions and it's because they are continually wrong and they are very out of touch about what a working American's day to day life is. And so I think that, that starting from the ground up is the only reasonable reaction to, to a field that has seen so many grandiose failures over the last hundred and twenty years. I think that makes sense to me.
- [35:46]
Goldie
It's this balance that needs to be struck though, between, it's interesting, between skepticism and, and expertise relying on. I mean, it's this weird thing. I mean, you started by saying that you were surprised at how skeptical Nick and I were of economics in general economic theory. You know, at the time when you joined, I was also. It's funny, we talk about, he talks about harm, about economists doing harm. And I was relatively confident, you know, the minimum wage was our initial issue, the $15 minimum wage. And I was relatively confident that we were probably right, but I wasn't sure. And at the time I voiced this a number of times, you know, I didn't want to win on the policy and win on the narrative if it ended up doing harm in the end. And it was an experiment because nobody had done this before, raised the minimum wage that much all at once. And it turned out it was fine. It did not create the disemployment. It did not destroy the Seattle economy or the economies elsewhere where people raised the minimum wage. But we didn't know and you had to be open to the fact that if we were wrong, we'd learn from that. And I think this is another part of my criticism with economics is it doesn't seem to be concerned with the empirical reality. And you know, we mentioned that prior to the 2008 collapse, economists didn't see it coming because theoretically bubbles are impossible. And that is a thing in orthodox economics that a bubble should be impossible. And what's really astounding about that is there's this long history of economic bubbles that predated yeah, we'd had the dot com bubble just a few years before, a half decade before, there was the dot com bubble that burst throughout us in world history, economic history, it's filled with bubbles. But somehow in the mid aughts they were pretty sure that bubbles, this there couldn't be a bubble, a real estate bubble, because theoretically that was impossible. It's an amazing profession, If you want to call it that. In any case, it's always good to hear from an actual economist about how harmful economics can be. If you want to read more from George, we will provide a link in the show Notes to his book the Tragic How Economists Cause Harm Even as they Aspire to Do Good.
- [38:46]
Podcast Producer/Narrator
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 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.