Felix Hates Polls

Summary

Slate Money: "Felix Hates Polls"

Date: October 16, 2021
Hosts: Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, Stacey Marie Ishmael

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Episode Overview

This episode revolves around Felix Salmon’s well-known disdain for opinion polls, but goes far beyond to offer an insightful roundup of the week’s pressing business and finance stories. The hosts discuss record job-quitting rates in the US, escalating customer incivility, the Southwest Airlines meltdown, the drama and politics at the IMF, and the inherent flaws of polling as a basis for news or policy. The conversation is candid, filled with lively anecdotes, biting humor (often at the expense of polls), and critical economic insights.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Great Resignation" and Customer Rage

[01:38]

• Record Quit Rates: August set a record with 2.9% of US workers quitting their jobs. Felix notes, "[...] if you keep that level going for 12 months, it would be like 30% of all employed Americans would quit their jobs over the course of a year."
• Drivers of Departures: Emily attributes the labor exodus, particularly in the service sector, to rampant customer abuse:
  • “Customers are out of control right now... physically assaulting restaurant workers or retail workers who are just trying... to enforce mask rules. They're getting very impatient, just yelling at service workers...” [02:40]
• Broader Causes:
  • Isolation, uncertainty, and longer wait times due to labor shortages exacerbate anger.
  • US consumers are unused to paying “more money for worse service.”
  • Felix suggests pent-up pandemic frustrations fuel this rage:
    • "I always thought of America as being like this sort of passive aggressive kind of place... The idea that, like, when faced with this bad service, your reaction is going to be anger... that's just pent up frustration from the pandemic." [07:03]

Memorable Anecdote

• Stacey describes witnessing a customer scream at a JetBlue gate agent, symbolizing today’s “pandemic of rage”:
  • “It just really to me was like almost a comical example of the kinds of strains that folks are under... You have this kind of vicious cycle of no one feeling in control of what's going on.” [04:36]

Quotes

• Emily: “American consumers are like the most spoiledest brats on the planet. You’re used to getting really good customer service for like dirt cheap...” [07:27]

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2. Southwest Airlines & Systemic Fragility

[09:37]

• Root of the Meltdown:
  • Debate continues whether vaccine mandates drove mass cancellations, but hosts agree systemic over-stretching and stress are main culprits.
  • Felix: “Southwest is built on a model of extreme efficiency. That's the way they can be cheap... And efficiency breaks very easily; it's not robust compared to inefficiency.” [10:46]
• Wider Economic Implications:
  • The “just-in-time” economy is proving unsustainable under new pressures, challenging decades of operational assumptions.

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3. Pricing in Hotels & the Disrupted Consumer Economy

[11:48]

• Luxury Hotels Override Algorithms:
  • Hotels are seeing sky-high demand but can’t deliver value at peak algorithmic prices.
  • “We can deliver $350 worth of… value. There’s no way we can deliver a $950 a night experience.” [12:54]
• Contrast with the Housing Market:
  • “This apartment that doesn’t have like a fridge or a washing machine or a closet is still $4,000 a month.” [13:04]
• General Mood:
  • “It all feels very up in the air at the moment. It feels like we’re in a new kind of economy.” [13:21]

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4. IMF Scandal – Politics, Tokenism, and Institutional Weakness

[15:35]

• Scandal Summary:
  • IMF head Kristalina Georgieva accused of manipulating World Bank rankings to favor China.
  • “She massaged some of the numbers so that it went back up to 78 again. The IMF ... is a deeply political organization...” – Felix [18:29]
  • Previous MDs (Rodrigo Rato, DSK) have been ousted for more egregious misconduct.
• Politics Over Principle:
  • Manipulating rankings is routine, but this time provoked a transatlantic rift.
  • “Her doing something very political ... is very much in line with the kinds of things you expect people in those positions to do.” – Stacey [21:34]
  • The US wanted her out; Europe, Britain, and others defended her.
• Impact:
  • The Doing Business report has been canceled—a "good" outcome, says Felix.
  • Both IMF and World Bank are now “weakened”, undermining global COVID recovery efforts.
  • “You need the World Bank and the IMF for that. And they’re both weak now.” – Felix [26:01]
• Tokenism Called Out:
  • Simply "trying a woman" for the top job does not resolve systemic problems.
  • “Tokenism is not a great way to try to run your organization in any context.” – Stacey [27:21]

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5. Why Felix Hates Polls

[28:06]

• Polls in Headlines:
  • NPR/Harvard poll claims a third of US households under $50k lost all savings to COVID.
  • Felix rails against media reliance on single, small-scale (N≈3,000) polls:
    • “Polls are only useful longitudinally. Like, a single poll tells you nothing.” [29:27]
    • “Every single data point we have... says that [the] wealth of poor Americans over the course of the pandemic... has gone up by an unprecedented amount.” [31:09]
  • Cites selection bias (“people... terrible at self reporting, financial anything”) and lack of proper baselines.
• Deeper Data Concerns:
  • Stacey raises alarm over future data quality and policy-making as traditional data collection falters post-pandemic.
• Alternatives & Data Riches Ignored:
  • Felix laments companies using tiny sample polls when their own data would be far richer:
    • “Dear fintech PR people... You have data on this. Why are you doing a poll to find out what you already know?” [36:31]
• Memorable Quote:
  • “Nobody ever needs a survey of investor sentiment. You just look at the stock market…” – Paul Murphy (cited by Stacey) [37:40]

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6. Numbers Round—Wit, Irony, and Pasta

[38:08]

1. Felix: 87% – Of 10,000 teens polled, 87% have iPhones.

   • Admits irony after lengthy anti-poll screed: “Having said that polls are terrible, I’m going to... segue from polls are terrible into a poll number.” [38:08]

2. Stacey: $25.4 Million – The auction price fetched for Banksy’s shredded artwork, “Love is in the Bin”.

   • “25.4 million for a piece that was shredded... half of it is ... out of the frame and the top half is in the frame...” [41:28]

3. Emily: $19.96 – For four boxes of “Cascatelli” pasta, invented by Dan Pashman of The Sporkful podcast.

   • “He set out to invent a new pasta shape. ... It's four boxes, one pound each, and it's $19.96. And it sold out.” [42:11]
   • Lively chat ensues about gourmet pasta pricing.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the pandemic’s impact:

  • “It all feels very up in the air at the moment. It feels like we’re in a new kind of economy.” – Emily [13:21]

• On polls and self-deception:

  • “People like… there was this huge... moment of joy. New Britain, New Labor, Tony Blair. And people liked Tony Blair... everyone got so caught up in how wonderful Tony Blair was that they genuinely believed that they had voted for him. Even if they hadn’t.” – Felix [35:19]

• On the enduring lure of Apple stock:

  • “If your big picture view of Apple is... this is a stock that is massively undervalued... you have basically been right all along, and I don't see any reason why you wouldn't still be right on that one.” – Felix [40:10]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Great Resignation & Angry Customers: 01:38 – 08:39
• Airlines/Southwest Meltdown & Efficiency: 09:37 – 11:18
• Luxury Hotel Pricing & Disrupted Economy: 11:48 – 13:41
• IMF Scandal (Georgieva, Doing Business): 15:35 – 27:56
• Why Felix Hates Polls: 28:06 – 38:08
• Numbers Round (Apple, Banksy, Pasta): 38:08 – 44:36

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Language & Tone

The hosts maintain a lively, critical, and often humorous tone, skewering the week’s headlines, advising skepticism about “just-so” narratives (especially polls), and mixing serious analysis with personal anecdotes and playful banter. They deftly balance skepticism, economic rigor, and relatable storytelling.

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For listeners seeking a sharp, skeptical take on the intersections of economics, business, public frustration, and international politics—with a dash of irreverence—this episode of Slate Money delivers in spades.

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to the Felix Hates Polls edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I am Emily Peck of Funrise. I am here with Stacey Marie Ismael of Bloomberg. Hello, and of course I am here with your host, your actual host, Felix Salmon, the hater of polls.

[B]

Felix, we are all hosts here. Emily.

[A]

Are you going to say your trademark greetings?

[B]

Hello. Hello everyone. We had to try and work out whether Emily could do that because I'm not going to call this the Felix Hates Polls editions. That would be like weirdly self referential. But we are going to talk about me hating polls.

[C]

We are. And Emily did a great job.

[A]

We're going to talk about Felix hating polls. We are going to talk about customers behaving very, very badly and try and figure out exactly why that is. We are going to talk about the drama at the imf, which I initially thought was boring, but you'll come to see is actually fascinating and highly political. We are going to talk about the survey thing, as I mentioned. And in plus today we're getting into crypto again because now we have our resident expert, Stacy, who can tell us everything we need to know about Coinbase and regulation, all coming up on Slate Money.

[B]

So this week we had the Jolts survey, which stands for something something labor turnover. Basically it's this big national official federal government survey which measures how many people are quitting their jobs. And in August it was an absolute record. It was 2.9% of every single employed person in America quit their job in August. That's an all time high. I did some mathematics. If you keep that level going for 12 months, it would be like 30% of all employed Americans would quit their jobs over the course of a year, some of them more than once. And it Stacy's like, yeah, all of us have quit our jobs. I have never quit my job. Actually, no, I have quit my job. I don't quit my job very often, but it seems to be a very hot thing to do right now. And Emily, one of the reasons that people are quitting their jobs, especially in the service sector, is they can't. They're just like, they've had it up to here with rude customers.

[A]

Customers are out of control right now. Felix and Stacey, you've read the reports, people, you've seen it in action. But I mean people are attack, physically assaulting restaurant workers or retail workers who are just trying, trying to enforce mask rules. They're getting very impatient, just yelling at service workers, just making their lives miserable. I have My sister in law works in a customer facing business and she's just like every day just destroyed by just the rudeness and the just horrendous customer behavior. And it's actually I think pushing some restaurant workers even farther to the brink and to quit their jobs.

[B]

And not just restaurant workers, anyone who works like on airlines or basically anyone customer facing. And yeah, what is the explanation? Because I don't think it's just anti maskers.

[A]

Well, I don't know. I think people are just angry. They've been isolated. We live in a confusing moment in time where the old ways are, are gone and the new ways are weird. And it's still, we live in this uncertain moment. I think that plays a role in it. People's like emotions are kind of on edge, I think is part of it. Also I think there is a legitimate labor shortage. So when you go to a restaurant or a cafe or anywhere these days, the lines are longer, it's harder. You don't get that instant service that you used to pre pandemic like it things do take longer. And that always has pissed people off like time immemorial. We've all been on like a supermarket line and felt like what the, like why does that person have so much stuff on the conveyor? I don't understand.

[C]

Don't worry. The supply chain crisis means no one will have any stuff.

[A]

The supply chain crisis, there's just so much.

[C]

You remember a couple of months ago when we talked about the pandemic of rage.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

I feel like this is, this is very much a right because a lot of stuff is going on. But this is such a continuation of that. I was, I remember being in an airport which is already even on the best of times, not the funnest place to be on hold with JetBlue for like the fourth hour to try to get a flight changed. For another thing that I was going to land at watching a woman scream at the top of her lungs at a gate agent because she got to the gate sort of five minutes after the time was closed. And having everybody there just trying to navigate between I'm going to bury myself in my noise canceling headphones or is this woman going to get arrested or do we need to rescue that gate agent? And it just really to me was like almost a comical example of the kinds of strains that folks are under. Where to your point, Emily? There's been so much complexity that people need addressed in their lives that the lack of customer service is making it worse. And that lack of customer service is leading to people yelling at the last remaining agents. So then they leave. And you have this kind of vicious cycle of no one feeling in control of what's going on.

[B]

One thing that's definitely happening is that people are paying more money for worse service.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And this is, this is basically what Emily was talking about. Like, you know, because it's hard to. Because of labor shortages and because a bunch of people who knew how to do certain jobs and had been in there, been in those jobs for years, looked lost those jobs during the pandemic. Now you have very green people coming in and who, you know, don't have institutional knowledge, don't really know how to do their jobs very well. There aren't as many of them as there used to be. So the quality of the service has gone down from what people remember pre pandemic. At the same time, the amount you're needing to pay these people has gone up. So those costs get passed through to customers. So people are finding that combination of worse service with higher pay cost incredibly aggravating. Now, that, of course, does not excuse or even really necessarily explain the sort of outbursts of anger. I always thought of America as being like this sort of passive aggressive kind of place where people would smile to your face. California, or maybe that's just a Californian thing. But yeah, the idea that, like, when faced with this bad service, your reaction is going to be anger. That, yeah, I think that's just like pent up frustrations from the pandemic.

[A]

I also think there's something going on here where that does kind of tie back to the supply chain and all the disruptions in the economy that we're now, like, working through. American consumers are like the most spoiledest brats on the planet. Like, you're used to getting really good customer service for like, dirt cheap, right? Like, restaurant workers have always been kind of mistreated, underpaid, harassed. It's worse now, for sure, but that's always been true. But now the service that you were paying almost nothing for isn't as good anymore. And I think there is. The supply chains are disrupted. It's harder to get this. It's harder to get that. There's this element of just like spoiled children having tantrums because they're not getting their super cheap, fancy lifestyles seamlessly, frictionlessly supported in the way they used to. Maybe.

[B]

I, yeah, I just have this idea, right? Like any American who visits Paris, right, is going to experience bad service and high prices, but that doesn't cause them to like, go Postal. It's something about like it happening in your like local suburb that makes it much more annoying.

[C]

I mean, I also think, I mean one, the US is the place that had, for very unfortunate historical reasons, the originating of the phrase going postal. But I also think the past four to six years of rhetoric have been really inflammatory and really poisonous. And you know, various of my friends who study political communication or who study general public health communication have been saying that the normalization of just like insults from politicians, from people in sort of what were supposedly non political positions of power does have effects where if you think that the way to get what you want is to insult someone or threaten violence or actually engage in violence and to generally see that there are fewer and fewer repercussions for that, that's a non trivial contributor to this kind of environment.

[B]

One thing I want to talk about a little bit is the wave of cancellations that Southwest Airlines suffered this week, which there's an enormous amount of debate about whether or not it may or may not have had something to do with vaccine mandates. But I think underlying it was this just general being stretched and extreme frustration among the workforce. Like they were so stressed and at the end of their rope as it were, that whatever tiny thing it was that caused it or big thing, I don't want to say one way or another whether the VAX mandate was a cause, but the whole thing just fell apart and they had to cancel like 2,000 flights.

[A]

I mean that's what we're seeing with sort of everything. I listened to the Daily Today about supply chains and the economy is in this just used to be run on this kind of just in time model. Everything was so well calibrated but you throw it off just a little bit and it all kind of falls apart. Is that part of what happens with an airline like Southwest? Like there's no backup plans there because.

[B]

Southwest is built on a model of extreme efficiency. That's the way they can be cheap is by being efficient. And efficiency breaks very easily. It's not robust compared to inefficiency. Inefficiency, you can throw shit at it and it will keep on going, whereas efficiency is much more fragile. And I think we're seeing that.

[A]

Yeah, in every corner. I think now the efficient way things ran before is not sustained, is not sustainable. It doesn't hold up to pressures to pandemics, to vaccine mandates.

[C]

Apparently we were willing to put up with that so called efficiency in airlines by which they meant higher fees because they don't even want you to like bring Carry on luggage because that's inefficient and it takes longer to load to, you know, just all of these restrictions and now you're still faced with those restrictions and your flight is late and it's more expensive to fly, you know, so from a consumer psychology perspective, it just, like there's no upside to anything is kind of the vibe that's out there.

[B]

One of the things I've seen reported is that luxury hotels have started overriding their sophisticated pricing algorithms. Most hotels these days have computers which basically tell them how much to charge for any given room at any given time. And the algorithms are perfectly optimized to maximize revenue. And there's so much demand for hotels right now that what you have is these like high end hotels that would normally be charging, say, I don't know, $350 a night. Suddenly the computer is spitting out like $950 a night and there's demand at $950 a night and people willing to pay it. But the hotel is, is basically saying, we can't do that. We can deliver $350 worth of like, value. There's no way we can deliver a $950 a night experience. You're going to be disappointed in your stay if you come here and spend that much. So we're just gonna sell out at much lower prices than we could, you know, theoretically charge.

[A]

That's so interesting.

[C]

Like that is. Wow. You know, I'm just.

[A]

Why isn't the housing market like that? Like some houses shouldn't be $2 million.

[C]

This apartment that doesn't have like a fridge or a washing machine or a Closet is still $4,000 a month.

[B]

We're so sorry.

[A]

No, no shame there.

[C]

Landlords are not luxury hotel owners for sure.

[A]

It does, it does seem like all consumer products and services now. And the way those experiences are structured and priced, it all feels very up in the air at the moment. It feels like we're in a new kind of economy.

[C]

What, the last dying embers of capitalism. Like what? I don't know.

[A]

Maybe we're headed towards something more sustainable or something. Or maybe it's time to pause and be like, do I need that book overnight?

[B]

I mean, you can't get a will from an ought. Emily.

[A]

Can I be a little optimistic? I mean, maybe something good comes of it.

[B]

No, I like it. I'm glad that Emily's gonna be optimistic.

[A]

Just for this segment, I mean, I don't know.

[B]

I have a special announcement for you. Today, this year is the 25th anniversary of Slate. I remember when I started reading Slate 25 years ago, and it was a weekly magazine and it is by Michael Kinsley, that was published by Microsoft and you could print it out in Microsoft Word with page numbers at the bottom every week. It has come a long way for their. It has come a long way from there. And to celebrate all of its various iterations and what it has become, we are offering the annual Slate plus membership at $25 off. Now, remember, you will get all of our Slate plus segments, which are amazing. You'll get no ads on any of the podcasts and you get Unlimited access to Slate.com Believe it or not, Slate podcasts have been going for a large chunk of those 25 years. Slate Money has been going for. Well, I've had, let's just put it this way, I've had three different jobs since Slate money started. So sign up for slate [e-mail] moneyplus to keep us going for another 25 years. Again, that's $25 off an annual membership three through October 31st. So between now and the end of the month, sign [e-mail] MoneyPlus Are we.

[C]

Optimistic about the IMF?

[B]

Oh, my God. IMF. Yeah, we have to talk about the IMF. The IMF is like. So I was running down the list of IMF managing director scandals, as one does, you know, since 2000. We had, I mean, Stacy, do you remember Horst Kohler? Like, no one remembers Warsaw?

[C]

No, I don't.

[B]

He quit as IMF managing director to become president of Germany, which is a job that most people don't even realize exists. And then he quit as president of Germany because there was some major scandal about what he said about German troops in Afghanistan or something like that. But then we had Rodrigo Dorato, who changed his name to Rodrigo Rato when he moved back to Spain, joined the board of a bank, embezzled a bunch of money, and wound up getting sentenced prison for four and a half years. And then we had dsk.

[C]

Oh, yeah, that I remember.

[B]

And so we remember what happened to dsk. He got arrested in New York on, like, sexual assault charges. He managed to sort of wiggle out of those ones. And then he got arrested in France on, I love this phrase, aggravated pimping charges, where he would basically organize these sordid sex parties. Anyway, like, the IMF managing director is. Is a job that is highly political and it seems to attract sort of skeevy men who fall down in unfortunate manner. And then they realized that the way to solve this problem was to hire a woman instead. And so they hired Christine Lagarde, who was awesome. Eventually she left to become the European Central bank chief. And so they said, well, let's keep on doing this. And they hired this woman, Kristalina Georgieva. And now she has held on by the skin of her teeth to the job in another scandal. Like this is just the most scandal prone job. And I am convinced that this really has damaged the imf. Like this scandal in particular, and all of these scandals in aggregate have basically just meant that the IMF has not been there when the world needed it most.

[A]

And should you explain what the scandal is? I mean, as far as I can tell, Kristalina doctored some report to make China's ranking look a little bit better. And it's sad because the ranking already was like 78 and it moved to like 75. Like the particulars of the scandal are.

[B]

They kept it at 78. So, okay, so Kristalina Georgieva, before she took over the IMF was this other job you've never heard of called CEO of the World bank, which is sort of not the CEO in any real sense, that's the World bank president, but there's this other job they gave her called CEO. And as CEO of the World bank, she was somewhat responsible for this silly thing that the World bank puts out called the Doing Business rankings. They rank every country in the world.

[C]

Which every country that is considered an emerging market is obsessed with.

[B]

And the idea is you look at a bunch of, you survey a bunch of people and we're going to talk about the uselessness of surveys in the next segment. But you survey a bunch of people and say, how easy is it to do business in XYZ country? And then you rank all the countries on how easy it is to open a business and that kind of thing. This all goes back to Hernando De Soto and his idea of economies are successful if normal people can open businesses easily. And they did this survey, China got exactly the same number of points as it had done the previous year, but other countries got more points than they had done the previous year. So that meant that China was going to go down in the rankings from 78 to 85. And then apparently no one wanted to piss off the Chinese. And so they massaged some of the numbers so that it went back up to 78 again. The IMF is a deeply political organization, the World Bank, I should say, because this is all at the World bank, it's a deeply political organization. And this came as a surprise to absolutely no One. This reminded me very much of the scandal over when, like, Henry Blodgett was caught giving higher ratings to investment banking clients. It's like everyone knew that was what was going on, and everyone just kind of accepted it. And then suddenly one day, take a.

[C]

Time out to acknowledge that you managed to tie the scandal back to Henry Blodgett. That is a leap I would not have anticipated. Please carry on.

[B]

But, yeah, it was just. It's one of those things which everyone knew about. And then suddenly someone came out first, like Elliot Spitzer in the case of Henry Blodgett or David Malpass in the case of the World bank, and said, this is terrible. This is a scandal. And then everyone had to pretend to be shocked and scandalized by something that everyone knew that had been going on all along. And so there was this massive law firm report, and there was thousands of doc. Millions of documents, millions of dollars spent on reports. And then eventually it reached the level of the IMF board, because they're now the employer of Georgieva, and they're like, can we even have you running the IMF if you would do such a terrible thing as to massage China's position in doing business rankings? To which the Europeans, the Chinese, the Russians, the Brits all said, dude, there's nothing there. What the hell? This is some dumb witch hunt from David Malpass. And said, no, she should keep her job. The Americans, for reasons I don't understand, were like, no, she has to leave. And then the Americans lost. It's very rare for the Americans to lose in these contexts.

[C]

So my. My big question back to all of this is, and it sort of feels very much like the conversation that we're having about, like, the perception of the US and the world is like, why does anyone care.

[B]

About the IMF or about the scandal?

[C]

I think about the scandal. Right. I understand from the perspective of a. A person from a region that has had various types of fractious relationships with the imf, but is the idea that her doing something very political that is very much in line with the kinds of things you expect people in those positions to do, going to nefariously affect her performance at the IMF in a way that somehow everyone was chill with DSK's actual bad behavior?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is exactly right. So the job of IMF Managing director is a job of herding political cats, right? You have a bunch of permanent board members. There's no other board of directors quite like the IMF and World bank boards of directors, where they literally have offices in the building and they come in and work every day and they're breathing down your neck every day. And your job as the executive is basically to manage up even more than it is to manage down. You need to make sure that you can keep the board cohesive and on the same page. And so it's a deeply, deeply political job. And the idea that you're going to be sort of agnostic, you're going to be like arm's length removed from any kind of political decision is ridiculous. And I have to give huge credit to Bloomberg on this story because in the middle of this whole thing, Bloomberg came out and said, you do realize that David Malpass, who is the current, you know, Trump nominated president of the World bank, he did exactly the same thing with China's ranking, except for he pushed to move it down instead of up because he's like this anti China, you know, that's the only thing he cares about basically is like, I don't like China. So like. But, you know, that wasn't the investigation. His, you know, he kind of asked for this investigation of Georgieva. So his name never appears in the report. He now seems to be safe as well. But yeah, the idea that these deeply political multilateral institutions aren't deeply political multilateral institutions seems to be completely insane. Of course they are.

[A]

So the mistake she made wasn't exactly monkeying with the rankings, which is something everyone kind of does. The mistake is that she didn't do it in a way that was okay politically. She did something that pissed someone off politically. Right.

[C]

Which is also how all political spats happen. Right. Like somebody in power has the ability to make somebody else's life in power miserable. I mean, but there was actual fallout from this. Right. Because as far as I can tell, the World bank has just stopped publishing the doing business.

[B]

Yeah. And that's the only good outcome here.

[C]

So as far as you're concerned, they shouldn't publish this report.

[B]

And therefore, this was a dumb, this was a dumb report and it should never have been published. And it made no sense. And it was empirically extreme, extremely dubious. And the fact that they're no longer publishing this dubious, pseudoscientific report on which multi billion dollar decisions were made has to be a good thing.

[A]

Wait, that's what I was going to ask you. What was the report used for? Speaking of multi billion dollar decisions, what were the decisions the report would inform?

[C]

Things like, oh, the perception of this country is that it's too hard to do business there. So some CFO somewhere would be like we're going to domicile one of our factories in some other place. And there are also.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, like that, you know, in terms of private sector decisions. Yeah, maybe kind of, maybe not. But like, definitely in terms of like the IFC and the World bank, which are these, you know, public sector institutions, they would, like, pressure countries to, you know, increase their scores. And if they didn't increase their scores, they wouldn't get certain types of loans and stuff like that from the World Bank.

[A]

I mean, it is hard to do business in China. Right, I know that because I know.

[B]

You just need to know the right people. I mean, you remember that great episode we had with Yuen Yuan Ang. She was like, explaining how that works and it works in a very different way from the way in which doing business in Canada works. Right. And that's one of the reasons why this whole report is kind of silly, Right, because it's really impossible to compare those two experiences on a sort of single yardstick.

[A]

So now Kristalina Georgieva is going to keep her job, but is going to be ineffective in it. Is that the consensus?

[B]

So I think she's definitely weakened, right. The whole, like, you can't do anything at the IMF without the support of the US and the US Kind of. Clearly she doesn't really have the US behind her anymore. So given that most of the world is really struggling still to get Baxter to recover from the pandemic, we really need the IMF and the World bank to be stronger than ever, to make sure that the rest of the Global south basically catches up with with the west in terms of vaccination and economic growth. And you need the World bank and the IMF for that. And they're both weak now. You know, Georgieva has been weakened by this. No one likes Malpass at the World Bank. You know, this is just deeply unfortunate. I think if, if they had been more powerful, Kovacs, for one, might have been much more successful than it was.

[A]

Oh, Kovacs, is this a failure of gender essentialism? When you were setting up this story, Felix, you said something like, well, Christine Lagarde was great. They tried a woman that works. So now they're just going to put another woman in there because women do this better. And it seems like that is not correct. So just a reminder that that is ridiculous.

[C]

Tokenism. I'm just going to say that tokenism is not a great way to try to run your organization in any context.

[A]

Yeah, like, I'm all for women getting these roles, but not simply it's interesting to me.

[B]

Like, she was. She was not generally regarded as the front runner to get the job. She kind of came out of nowhere because she was considered more of a technocrat and less of a politician. Right. Like the. The front runners to get the job were European politicians rather than, like some World bank, you know, technocrat.

[C]

And to. To your earlier point, Felix, like, political canny is such a key part of this gig.

[B]

Let's stick on this subject of dubious polls. Stacy, you wanted to talk about dubious polls.

[C]

Wow. So there was a story that I found interesting about, which is based on a poll that something like 20% of U.S. households had lost or spent through their ENT savings during COVID And this is. Let me read it. It's based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, and the Harvard T.H. chan, as in Zuckerberg and Chan School of Public Health, found that in the sample, most of the households making less than $50,000 had their entire financial cushion wiped out, or a third of households making less than $50,000 had their entire financial cushion wiped out. And when I sent this story to Felix, he was like, oh, my God, I hate this story so much. Partly because you hate polls, but also why. Please explain to our audience why it is you have such a reaction.

[B]

Okay, so many reasons why I hate this story. Let's start with this idea that polls are presumptively more better. I don't know, to use a very grammatical term, if you attach a bunch of grand names to them, like Harvard and npr and then, oh, it's a Harvard poll. It must be good. No, like, polls are polls. And the first thing you want to look at is, like, how many people are polled? I think it was about 3,000 on this one. It was not a huge number of people. And so you can get, like, a little bit of a vague idea of what's going on from polling 3,000 people, but you don't sort of, like, reconceptualize your entire view of what happened during the pandemic on that basis. Second thing is, polls are only useful longitudinally. Like, a single poll tells you nothing. In order for a poll to tell you anything at all, you need to run it on a regular basis, every week, month, year, whatever it is. And then what you can do is you can say, well, I can compare this number to where it was in the past, and it's gone up a lot or gone down a lot. So what we would need in order for this poll to mean something would be for this poll to have been run in many years past and specifically in pre pandemic years. And you do the same thing and you ask people who earn less than $50,000 a year, did you lose all of your savings over the past X months? And then that gives you a baseline to be able to tell whether this number is high or low. And then the third thing which is definitely worth talking about here is that the Federal Reserve does not do a poll. It does this. Well, it's a kind of a poll. It's called survey of consumer. Literally called a survey survey of consumer finances. But it's based on actual data. It's not based on self reporting. And every single data point we have about the wealth of poor Americans over the course of the pandemic says that it has gone up by an unprecedented amount of money. That like rich people got richer by a certain percentage, poor people got richer by an even larger percentage. Now, are there people whose savings were wiped out? Sure, in every demographic group I'm sure there are. But the overall story that we know from quantitative data at banks, from the Federal Reserve and so on and so forth is that wealth has gone up and not down so suddenly. To take this poll and remember, this is a broad poll of Americans generally. Right. So the n the number of people you're actually measuring who are earning less than $50,000 is not $3,000. I don't know, $1,000. I didn't look at the cross tab, so I couldn't work out how many it was. But it's a relatively small subset of that number. And you're asking them to self report something like, people are notoriously terrible at self reporting, financial anything. So for all of these reasons, I feel like basing some sort of massive headline about what happened to poorer people over the course of the pandemic on this kind of flimsy basis is weak af.

[C]

And that is how Felix really feels.

[A]

So, Mic, drop this story.

[C]

I will say. Here is what I will say. In addition to all of those things, I do think that we are about to have a real problem with data for the next couple of years. One, because of all the things that we know about like recency bias. You see this in the conversations about people being like, working from home is the best thing ever or the worst thing ever based entirely on the pandemic as an experience. You're seeing conversations about the 2020 census. There were some interesting headlines about the difficulty of data collection, about how the response rate may have been affected by the screaming for what felt like weeks about whether you're going to have to declare your citizenship status on the census. And I am just generally quite worried actually about how and whether we are going to be positioned societally, politically, financially to be making policy decisions when there are all sorts of questions about like what do we really have to go on that's robust given just the sort of upheaval of the past couple of years.

[A]

We talked about this a while ago because Felix wrote about the unemployment. Was it the unemployment numbers the survey used there? And how it's become harder to do and less reliable.

[B]

Right. I mean, so the, the ones, the one set of surveys that I, that is way more reliable than most is the official government surveys from places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve and so on those have those survey like orders of magnitude more people. They're incredibly robust and you know, they, and they also are time series that go back for as far as you want them to go back. And you can call them up on thread. They have problems where they have many fewer problems than some random one off poll that you get sent in a press release. But yeah, my point was that especially at the height of the pandemic and especially for polls which historically involve sitting down with people and meeting them in person, a lot of the quality of that data really deteriorated significantly. And I think it's coming back now. But yeah, I think polls in general have become less reliable. People have become less willing to answer pollsters questions. There's just a huge number of Americans who just don't answer polls at all anymore. And there's no particular reason to believe that the people who do answer polls are representative of the people who don't answer polls.

[C]

Flying spaghetti monster religion situation.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

I mean polls aren't that great anyway. People will tell you one thing and like you just said, they'll tell you one thing and then their actual behavior is completely different.

[B]

And it's not even that they're lying. Like I remember vividly a poll in the UK after the 1997 general election where they came out, I think it was like a week and a half or two weeks after the election and said who did you vote for in the election? And like 50% more people said they'd voted for labor than had actually voted for Labor. Like people. And it wasn't even that they were lying, it's just people like there was this huge like Stacey will remember this, this huge like moment of joy. New Britain, New Labor, Tony Blair. And people liked Tony Blair. This is so long ago that people were like such a long time. And everyone got so caught up in how wonderful Tony Blair was that they genuinely believed that they had voted for him. Even if they hadn't.

[C]

Even if they hadn't voted at all. It somehow channeled their frothiness into polling.

[A]

I mean, data collection is so much more easy now, robust. There's so much information you can get, isn't there, that it would make render polls a little yet less necessary.

[B]

So one of the things that drives me up the wall and dear fintech PR people, if you're listening to this, like for instance, last week there was this huge report that came out from Plaid about consumer adoption of fintech and how many apps people have on their phone. And it was, it was very large and it was based on a poll of like 2,000 people. And they just literally phoned up people and said, how many apps do you have on your phone? And I'm like, you're Plaid. You literally sit at the center of this. You have data on this. Why are you doing a poll to find out what you already know? And I get this from company after company after company. Fidelity Charitable will send me a poll telling me how much money people are giving to charity. I'm like, you are Fidelity Charitable, all of these customers, they are giving money to charity.

[A]

That's what I'm saying.

[B]

Tell me how much they're giving. Use your own data. But for some reason which I don't understand, they keep on doing these polls rather than just sharing their data.

[A]

Maybe it's easier to do the polls than to figure out their own data or they're embarrassed about their data. Write in and tell us.

[C]

My last comment on this is something that Paul Murphy used to say. Paul Murphy is still at the ft and he said, you know, nobody ever needs a survey of investor sentiment. You just look at the stock market and we have all sorts of interesting primary materials. But I think the problem for a lot of policy is a lot of the policy making has been based on self reporting. And so if self reporting is getting less and less robust, I hope that we are rapidly thinking about better alternatives.

[B]

Agreed. If you have any better alternatives to polls, please send them in slatemoneylate.com I think it's time for numbers round. I am going to start 87% because, like having said that polls are terrible, I'm going to. I feel like I need to segue from polls are terrible into a poll number. This is a poll of 10,000 teens.

[C]

The most reliable demographic for self reporting.

[B]

They found 10,000 teens. This is A huge end. And then they only polled teens, only polled people between the ages of 13 and 19, and 87% of them have an iPhone.

[A]

I cannot believe your number is a poll result after you just spent 10 minutes, 15, I don't know, telling me not to take. Not to pay attention to polls or believe them or that they're worthless. So, I mean, Felix, you have to elaborate a little more here. You have to really sell this to me, that, why does this matter? Is it real.

[B]

Good for Apple mind?

[C]

Oh, my word.

[A]

It's believable, though. I believe that the teens have iPhones. My kids have iPhones.

[B]

It's obviously much, much higher than iPhone penetration more broadly and certainly iPhone penetration nationally. Yeah, the kids these days. And one of the things that has been fascinating, fascinating me looking at the stock market, is why is it that Apple is trading on a pe ratio of 28 when the new York Times is trading on the PE ratio of 65? Apple obviously has a bright future.

[A]

He's lost Stacy completely.

[C]

Oh, my God. Okay, carry on. Tell me again about how the teens are insufficiently represented in the PE ratios of Apple as it relates to the New York Times.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, something like that. I haven't really thought this one through, but I do think that if your big picture view of Apple is this is a stock that is massively undervalued, if you've just kept that view for the past 25 years, that you have basically been right all along, and I don't see any reason why you wouldn't still be right on that one. It does strike me, if you look at the valuations of other companies that are perfectly good companies, but Apple just looks so much cheaper in comparison given how strong its brand is, especially with like. And I'm going to say something very profound here, but I believe the children are our future.

[C]

On that note, I'm going to share my number, which is not about children, I suppose. It's about the future. It's 25.4 million, which is how much Banksy's shredded Painting Lovers in the Bin fetched at auction, according to Sotheby's. And Felix can write an entire book about why auction prices are garbage.

[B]

Auction prices are great. We love auction prices. They're the only transparent prices in the entire art world.

[C]

But, yeah, 25.4 million for a piece that was shredded and now sort of hangs in a really interesting way where half of it is sort of out of the frame and the top half is in the frame and. And it's one of his more famous prints. It's like the little girl looking up at a red balloon that's shaped like a heart.

[A]

Oh, well, that makes more sense to me than, like, the monkey NFT going around today. That sold.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, by. By. By NFT standards, it's positive.

[C]

A bargain. Frankly. I'm. I'm. I mean, I give Banksy five minutes before he comes out with some kind of NFT art situation. So, yeah, Banksy, if you're listening, I want to break that story. Call me.

[B]

Emily.

[A]

So my number is $19.96. Okay, that is the cost of four boxes of cascatelli, which is the new pasta invented by Dan Pashman, who hosts the Sporkful podcast. He's been mentioned on other Slate podcasts. Oh, I know that Porkful first.

[B]

Yeah, he invented a pasta.

[A]

He had four episodes on his podcast the Sporkful, in which he set out to invent a new pasta shape. And he, like, he travels to North Dakota where they make the semolina. He gets a guy, I think, in either New Jersey or Italy to make the dye, you know, that the pasta gets extruded in, and he comes up with this new shape called Cascatelli, which kind of means little waterfalls. It's a brilliant marketing. He didn't mean for it to be a brilliant marketing strategy, but it for sure was, because you listened to the four episodes called Mission Impostible, and when you finish, and when you finish, you're like, I must have the pasta. And you go immediately to buy it. This is what happened to me. And I'm late to this. Very late. And you buy the pasta, and it's four boxes of pasta, one pound each, and it's $19.96. And it sold out, like, immediately. He's on his bajillionth production run, and now it soon will be available in stores. Me and my daughter listens to the podcast. We're obsessed with the pasta. Honestly. Is it that good?

[C]

Is it good?

[A]

I mean, it's really good, but, you know, it's really good. I would love for you guys to try. I would love for Felix to try it.

[B]

I will try it, but also because I live with my head in the clouds, like, is that cheap? Is it expensive?

[A]

Oh, no, it's really a banana cost. Oh, it's bananas. Expensive. A pound of pasta. If you go to your local supermarket, which maybe you don't. I don't know, you get a pound of pasta for a dollar.

[B]

Well, my local supermarket is Italy, and so I have very weirdly ideas.

[A]

Oh, you're just not a normal person. But yeah, that's bananas. Expensive for pasta. Like, I mean, it's worth it. If you listen to the podcast and he uses the producer, everything's very small and artisanal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, like, yeah, you can get a box of ronzoni for like 69 cents still, even in these times. But, yeah, but it was fun. It was like a whole experience. I. I recommend it. First listen to the podcast, then buy the pasta.

[B]

First of all, I will listen to the podcast.

[C]

We're gonna throw a Slate Money dinner party with Cascatelli as the center thrills.

[B]

Yeah, that's what we should do that.

[C]

Invite Banksy.

[A]

Banksy, if you're listening to Slate Money.

[C]

Please launch your NFT at this party.

[B]

Come on, Banksy. Launch your NFT at the Slate Money Cascatelli dinner party. That was a sentence that has never been said before. Okay, I think that's it. Thank you so much for listening to Slate Money this week. The Slate Money Succession podcast kicks off for reals on Monday with the one and only Janine Gibson. We are recapping season three, episode one. There will be swearing. It's awesome, so tune in for that, which, just like Slate Money itself, is produced by the awesome Shayna Roth. And you also need to be nice to us on the podcast rating thing. I meant to say that give us lots of stars. Anyway, we be back on Monday with Slate Money Succession and on Saturday with Regular State Money. See you then.