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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless Way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
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Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com this Father's Day helped dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot. Because he's not just dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch and the emergency mechanic. Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with the Husky mechanic's 270 piece tool set from the Home Depot. Now on Special buy for $119 a $695 value for every kind of dad. Find the perfect gift this Father's Day at the Home Depot. I have a substack. Don't know if you know that sometimes on my sub stack I'll write an essay that I call the Pesca Profundities portion of the substack. But really, every day I'll have five to seven items that if you fail to acknowledge them, you're going to be a worse person. Not just worse off, but not as interesting. Behind the times and a little slow on the uptake. This is called the Gist List. It is shot through with my aphorisms and observations. For instance, did you know that Texas was making Daylight Savings Time permanent? You would if you read the Gist list. Do you know that penguin poop cools the planet? You would if you read the Gist list. Did you know that if Trump's threats to Harvard go through their crew team, or I guess you could say their crew is going to be hit hard. A lot of Englishmen and women on the crew team. These are just some of the exciting items on the Just list. Again, I would just hate for you to be an unoptimized, less than extremely interesting person. Go to Mike pesca.substack.com to get the written word and now enjoy the spoken It's Friday, May 30, 2025. Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and it is quite obvious that Donald Trump is taking aim at Harvard and Columbia because of a fit of pique, because of a cultural clash, because he can, because it puts him in good stead with his supporters, has no costs. You get to beat up on a bully, a bully with a lot of resources. So if nothing else, Harvard ensures that the fight will stay in court forever. But one of the positions of the administration that is illiberal and mean spir actually demands a little bit of scrutiny. And this is the call to limit international students at the Ivy League schools. I will say I am against this. International students, the cross pollination of our elite institutions. We still have the best in the world and elite students is mostly for the good. However, when it comes to China, which is if not an enemy, then certainly a rival, are we meaning the American people getting all we can and out of the deal? I know the colleges are. The stats on some of these Ivy League schools and enrollment of Chinese nationals is quite staggering. So 2020 was the high watermark or at least the most that Chinese students enrolled in the US schools. Well over 300,000. Maybe they were stuck here. I think that's why so many of them conglomerated at that time. Since then it's gone down and now there are about 275,000 Chinese nationals studying in US schools. But look at the Ivy Leagues. In fact, look at Columbia. The Columbia graduate schools have almost 7,000 Chinese nationals within and their engineering program is, I was going to say lousy, but let us just say rife with Chinese and foreign nationals. 4900 foreign students are are studying in the program. 65% of the engineering school is foreign and many of those are Indian, Nigerian, South Korean. But by far the largest number are Chinese. Is this bad? Is this inherently bad? It is not. But within Colombia, there are many people who study there who will tell you what's going on is that China and the Chinese people pay full freight. Colombia gives an enormous sticker price and China, some of these other countries too will pay that sticker price. The admission standards are pretty lax and it wounds up and it winds up having an effect on the education of everyone else. Computer science studies and data science are ones within the engineering school, though I, from what I understand, data science has application throughout. A bunch of different schools at Columbia are seen as areas of studies that often come with an asterisk because the entire project is funded by the sons and daughters, the princes and princelings of China who. Not that they don't get a great education, but undergraduates are prized at Columbia and many Ivy League schools. They take a back seat in terms of class selection and the resources of the university, but they do get their Ivy League degrees. The Ivy League does get the full freight of education. But do we as American taxpayers who fund these schools, do we really prosper over the last 20 years? And I'm not being a knee jerk xenophobe, is it really worth what we're paying as taxpayers? And we're paying a lot. This is why Columbia and Harvard greatly objected to the defunding proposals. We're paying a lot. When all these princes and princelings go back to China with their engineering degrees, is that a good bargain for us? Does that help us as Americans? The argument would be, well, just them being here exposes them to America. The openness and freedom of America makes such an impression. Is that really true? Politico a couple of years ago ran a pretty good article. America and Britain are still educating the world leaders. Is there any correlation between an elite Western education and future good governance? And the two poster boys for this weren't educated in America, but they were Viktor Orban, the backwards leader of Hungary, the autocratic leader of Hungary, and Bashar al Assad, the genocidal leader, former leader of Syria. They were educated in the uk. The United States has many foreign presidents and heads of state who are educated here. The United States does a great job, or at least a proficient job, at educating foreign economic ministers. I don't know how much bang, if any, we get for the buck. The Politico cites the recent Soft Power index and lists 40 names, presidents and prime ministers from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Switzerland, Cyprus, Malta, Bolivia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Barbados, Philippines and Singapore who studied at Western UK and US institutions. And I've got to say, if you were to look up the letter grades of all those countries on the Freedom House or other indices of international good governance and human rights, it would be a pretty random scatter plot. There doesn't seem to be any, any good relationship between going to one of these Western schools and being a good person, or at least a non autocratic person. Something to think about. And that is what the Trump administration can be trusted to do. Think hard, assiduously and with all the rigor of an Ivy League graduate student on the show today. Well, speaking of Western universities, Ben Ansel is a political scientist who I encountered first on Substack. His newsletter was and is Political Calculus. And then I said to myself upon reading a few of these and liking them, I know this guy. This is the guy from the podcast what's Wrong with Democracy BBC podcast. He has the great credentials you'd want. Professor of Comparative democratic institutions at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. He he gave lectures for the BBC titled Our Democratic Future. Isn't that great? Isn't that all high minded? And yet if he hadn't written this latest substack about fucking around and finding out, I might not have found out about him. In fact, Ben Ansel's column is about a close cousin of fucking around or fucking about and finding out. It is about what's going on throughout the world today. Fucking around and yet not finding out. So what's Ben Anselon about? Let's not fuck around, but let's find out. You know, there's a lot of stress out there and sometimes that could have an impact on your performance. You don't like to talk about it, you don't like to think about it, and then it becomes a spiral getting in the way of your performance. If ED is getting you down, you know, the Ed that I speak of hims will help you get your confidence and some other things back up. 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Hisss.com the Gist the featured products include compounded products which are not approved nor verified for safety, effectiveness or quality by the fda. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. Prices vary based on product and subscription plan. This message is sponsored by Green Light Growing up, did you get any better advice in financial education than the phrase money doesn't grow on trees? And this was of course during a time when more money was cash than there is now. So in a way it kind of did. I mean, what a cliche. How unhelpful. You need better. And this is where greenlight enters the picture. They're a debit card and a money app made for families that help kids learn to save, invest and spend wisely. And you as the parents can set conditions, let's say do some chores along with the money. But there's learning involved, there's confidence and skill building and it's accessible. Games are played. But I come back to the chores feature. The chores feature really does link money with a reason that you've earned your money. I wish we had something like Green light in my house. My house was pretty good growing up. I don't know that the money doesn't grow on trees thing was said so often, but there just wasn't the technology available. That green light brings to the picture where you could do all the things that I'm talking about and really make learning about money an enjoyable and remunerative to some extent experience. Easy, convenient. Parents and kids together, millions of them are using Greenlight. Start your risk free greenlight trial today@greenlight.com the gist. That's greenlight.com the gist to get started greenlight.com/the gist every once in a while an article comes along that crystallizes a thought that you had been having. And then within that article there are crystallizations of sub thoughts. Such was the case of an article by Ben Ansel, who is a professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford Nuffield College. And the name of this article was an acronym. It was FAD fo. Now have you heard of fafo? FAFO has gotten very, very popular as a descriptor of things in the universe. It means fuck around and find out. So you see the wisdom of that. But Ben has put his finger on the FAD FO phenomenon. Fuck around and don't find out which is essentially what's going on around the world. Ben, welcome to the gist.
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A
Thank you for having me here, Mike. And I'm glad that we're allowed to use the F word out loud because I was wondering how we were going to make it through this convers without that.
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B
This is one of my theories that you had another substack posting go pretty viral. And it was, I don't know viral, but it was mentioned in the Financial Times, in the New York Times, and that was a good post to Twilight of Populism. Maybe we'll touch upon it. In fact, the two posts are interrelated. But my theory is Twilight of Populism has the possibility of going popular. Fuck around and 5 out find out has a bit of a limiter on it.
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A
Yeah, yeah, they know that's the sad truth. But I was hoping that, you know, I could come up with my own little acronym like that would be a big achievement for me as an academic, so.
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B
Exactly. So. Well, look at the book on bullshit.
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A
Yeah, there we are.
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B
Yeah, yeah, that made. And it was this thick. So before we get to fad foe, have you been seeing a rise in fafo? Is this a. I sometimes associate it with English football supporters, so maybe it came over to this side of the pond a little late, but has this been in your life for many, many years, or is it a recent phenomenon that people are saying F around and find out, especially online?
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A
Yeah, that's a good point. So the FAFO thing that many of your listeners will remember is this. It's kind of a video of an economics professor drawing a line where on the X axis he has fucking around, on the Y axis he has finding out, he just draws like a straight diagonal line between them. And so that's where it's got into kind of popular memes that people think about. But yeah, I mean, it's quite British, isn't it? In style Fuck around. Find out, mate.
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B
Well, except for one thing, I think. Except for the fact that the second half of it is find out. Yeah, I think the British would say fuck about.
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A
Yeah, yeah, No, I think. I think that's right. Jamie Vardy, the. The Leicester City footballer who's about to retire, who won them this crazy league victory, you know, one in a million chance in 2016. He. He was famous that for saying. Which is another version of this, which is chat shit, get banged, which is.
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B
There you go.
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A
Which is, you know, another kind of. So I think this kind of motif is quite popular in British English and.
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B
I think it shows that the world is getting a little less forgiving and there's a joy in people getting their. What is seen as their deserved comeuppance. And the fact that you can film this and put this on social media is probably accelerating this trend.
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A
Yeah, that's right. And if you think about all the other memes that people will be familiar with, right, we have the. The leopard eating people's faces party meme. The idea being that if you vote for this party and then the leopard eats your face, you should not have been surprised. Or we have the. The Tim Robinson in a hot dog suit. We're all looking for the guy who did this while his hot dog car has smashed into a building. Right. So I think that kind of really obvious outcome that we should have expected from doing something crazy. That meme, we're seeing it everywhere.
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B
Right, Right. What do you expect? It's a more violent or biblical version of what do you expect? And also the person saying it is taking some pleasure in it. And in American politics. Well, it's used across political lines, but how is it used in British politics?
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A
Mostly, Yeah. I think it's mostly been used in response to Brexit because the. The Brexit vote had lots and lots of, you know, people sitting in ivory tower institutions like me sitting here in my Oxford office saying, well, that might not work out so well, and then getting to spend the last nine years now of our lives saying, yep, told you so. Right. And. And that's been our own experience of such. You know, when you have a really simple binary, definable event where a bunch of people are saying, don't do this, and other people are being like, go on, do it. That's what's going to give you this whole FAFO logic.
- [17:43]
B
Yes. Okay. You've just lit in me realization that there is this phrase told you so doesn't feel great to say. And I bet that if we did an engram search of told you so, half the time, it would be as part of the phrase. I hate to say I told you so, but people love to say fuck around and find out that's why. Why it was invented.
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A
It sounds less supercilious and snobby. Right. I mean, everybody hates being told I told you so. And no one, you know, we understand that. We understand that no one's going to want us here, hear us say it. So getting to say, oh, you fucked around and you found out. Or you. You know, there's that. That other meme of. It was a Twitter meme of me. Me sewing. Oh, yeah. Fuck, yeah. Me reaping. Oh, my God, what the hell's happened? The same kind of, you know, we found a different way and a more comedic and maybe a more vicious way to basically resay told you so.
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B
Right. By the way, let's just go back. Give us a thumbnail. I know Brexit didn't deliver on the promises, but how much has it hurt the British and how much do the British. I'm not talking about the Nigel Farage backers, of which they're a legion.
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A
Yeah.
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B
How much did the British realize that they found out?
- [19:00]
A
Yeah. Look, Brexit hasn't been a total disaster by any stretch of the imagination. Right. We're still here. We're definitely not in the European Union anymore. Right. So also, if you just wanted to Brexit to leave the European Union. Well, job done, that worked. But there were lots of promises that this would be good for the British economy, that we would become global Britain, that we would, you know, set out with our suitcase in hand getting deals around the world and that our economy would grow. And that hasn't really happened. So Britain, Britain's last decade of economic growth, this is an amazing fact, is as bad as it has been since the Napoleonic Wars. So that's over 200 years ago. So that's quite poor. That's quite poor growth. And if you compare it to America, which.
- [19:41]
B
But then you got the Trafalgar spike, right?
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A
Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, this was, this was the era of the Luddites, the guys who used to bash machines up to get rid of them. So that was how, how good things were at that time compared to the U.S. right. And I know lots of people in the U.S. have not enjoyed the economy since COVID Right. That's why Joe Biden lost the election. But you, on almost every measure, the British economy has lagged it pretty badly over that.
- [20:05]
B
Well, the U.S. economy has been really great compared to almost every other. You can't take, you know, Ethiopia, which has amazing growth because the starting place of almost nothing. But the US economy has been excellent compared to the eu. All the countries in the EU basically. Do they realize that in the other OECD countries?
- [20:23]
A
I think they do. I mean, I think this is where you get lots of kind of Europe explaining from. I mean, I'm an Anglo American, right. So I'll just flip whichever side works for me here. But there is this kind of European line that, oh, well, we don't really want tumble dryers anyway. And you know, who, who wants ice makers or air conditioners? So there's a lot of kind of, you know, sour grapes, I guess, response. I think there's also a view though.
- [20:49]
B
And warm beer. Sour grapes and warm beer.
- [20:51]
A
Yeah.
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B
There's your next.
- [20:52]
A
Exactly.
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B
I'd say, yeah.
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A
There is a concern though that, you know, Europeans, you know, maybe rightfully look at some of the problems with America. They look at higher crime, they certainly look at higher homicide rates. They, you know, look at higher inequality, they look at the health care system, they say, yeah, I don't really want that. And so that's how they would think of the trade off.
- [21:11]
B
That's true. But I monitor a lot of British media and there is not a stereotype. It is true that there's a lot of violent crime in the US but The Brits are obsessed with knife crime and I sometimes laugh. Although it's tragic that it's a 80 to 1 ratio of knifings to homicide. In fact, probably more like how many, how many people are knifed to death each year in the uk?
- [21:32]
A
I mean, the UK homicide rate is in the hundreds, so it's not very high. Yeah, if I remember right, United states, you know, 20,000. Yeah. I used to live in Minneapolis and the homicide rate in Minneapolis and homicide rate in London are very similar. Right. And obviously London is a much, much larger city, to give you a sense.
- [21:47]
B
It was huge spike in Minneapolis in.
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A
The last few years, by the way.
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B
So. So we've done some chronicling of the fuck around and find out the appeal of it, what it's used for. It's all true, it's all fascinating, it's all useful as a phrase, fun to say, an improvement on previous phrases. But what about what you put your finger on the fuck around and don't find out phenomenon? Describe that.
- [22:10]
A
Yeah. So here's the thing about FAFO is it's great and it's fun to say, but actually doesn't happen very often because most of the time people make decisions that seem pretty radical and then nothing really happens. And in a way, that's what happened in 2016 when America voted for Donald Trump because all there was the Spiegel in Germany had Trump decapitating the Statue of Liberty. There were some pretty extreme examples of what people thought was going to happen. They thought there'd be World War three, that it would kill the economy. That's not what happened in the period 2016 to 2020. We can argue back and forth about some of the. The worst stuff that happened in the first Trump administration at the border and so on, but there wasn't a global war. The economy didn't collapse and people had voted in this guy who really did promise to tear up the whole system. So why didn't America find out? Well, maybe it was the genius of Donald Trump, or maybe it was the genius of the guys who were constraining Donald Trump, keeping him from doing the more wild things he'd thought of doing and keeping onside the parts of Trumpism that were going to work better, tax cuts or slightly more aggressive foreign policy. Right.
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B
So very irresponsible. People can then fuck around and know that or have a strong inclination that they won't pay the consequences of their fucking around. And we see it in policies which are really just fucking around with what's working, but consequences aren't really visited upon people.
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A
Yeah. And that's why, you know, the tariffs. Liberation Day has been so interesting because the tariffs have happened or are happening. There are boats in the Pacific from China right now. When those boats arrive, the tariffs are going to go up. Right. So we are like right on the cusp between fad, FO and FAFO right now. Because as those things arrive, people are going to be like, oh, yes, we did vote for the tariffs. We kind of think. Didn't think they'd happen. Right. Think about Wall Street's reaction to Trump. When he came in with the initial tariffs on Colombia, Trump got mad about Colombia not accepting a flight of deportees. And so then there were 20% tariffs, but then they went away overnight. And the same for Canada and Mexico. And so people thought, yeah, it's fuck around, but don't find out because Trump says he'll do tariffs. But look, it's all negotiating and really at the end of the day, it won't happen. And then Liberation Day happened and some of this has been forestalled, right, with the 90 day delay. But other bits like the Chinese tariffs, those are totally happening. And so we're in a really interesting moment right now.
- [24:41]
B
Well, there is a parallel, as you know, to British politics. Liz Truss comes in, she has an economic policy of massive tax cuts that are unfunded, which have more salience in a place that doesn't make the world's reserve currency. And she anymore, yeah, sadly, sorry about the pound. So there was a mini version of tariffs with Liz Truss. Now is the fact that she fucked around and found out and the tariffs were a fuck around and find out, not, not a don't find out, is it that on things that are purely economic, in which this is what I've surmised, when there is a market every day that tracks incremental changes up and down, the finding out aspect is immediate, it's well chronicled, it's unavoidable. So in other aspects of life, the changes, the changes wrought, that which is reaped and sowed can be a little opaque, but not with the markets. Do you think that's going on?
- [25:42]
A
Yeah, that's absolutely right. The way to think about the US bond market is it is the only political actor in the entire world that has consistently batted 1.0. Right. It is undefeated. It never loses out. And, you know, you try and push against the market. You remember back with the 2008 financial crisis when it was still, it was the tail days of Bush and it was Hank Paulson but it was before the presidential election. They went to do a bailout bill. It didn't satisfy the markets. Markets collapsed. Next day, they had to go back and do another bailout bill. The markets can compel. They compelled in the UK and in a way, the US can still fuck around a little bit more because as you say, the dollar is the global reserve currency, so the interest rates aren't going to spike quite as dramatically. But with Liz Truss. Yeah, you know, that's why the lettuce was such appealing metaphor, because people knew the moment you do this and the markets react, your, you know, your shelf life is that of a thin green.
- [26:43]
B
Salad with little nutritional value. Is one of the reason that. One of the reasons that politicians will always fuck around and then rely on the fact that they don't. That they won't find out. Can the media or our human inclination towards catastrophizing be somewhat blamed? And the people who propose these big radical swings of policies understand this more than, I don't know, the regular person just trying to sort through the information of the world.
- [27:19]
A
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, when Donald Trump used his, his interesting neologism, Panican, remember he had this, like, complained about the panicans, where the hell he got that from? But, you know, he actually, he put his nail on something there, which is that there is a tendency for lots of people to panic with new political news. There was a lot of panic, for example, after Brexit. Ultimately, Brexit slowed the UK rate of growth by like, you know, half a percent a year for a few years. Like, we are poorer than we otherwise would have been. But being 3% poorer is sort of noticeable at the margin. So I think a lot of the time you can do something pretty dramatic that changes the incentives dramatically. Dramatically for a lot of market actors. But as long as markets can adjust, then we're okay. I mean, there are many. Think about Fukushima. The Japanese nuclear reactor blew up and now we're at a point where people are rebuilding there again. So really terrible things can happen. And humanity's pretty good at adjusting. The danger is that that I think makes politicians think, well, what's the real risk? Because there will be an adjustment. We can adjust. People will figure things out. And all the people who are freaking out at the start are just freaking out. And I think there is some truth to that.
- [28:34]
B
Mm. Successful societies build guardrails, build. Build systems so that when there is a failure, it's not a catastrophic failure. And that's to their credit. But cynical actors or I Guess you could say people who understand these systems can exploit that, can exploit that rhetorically and can exploit politically and can exploit that to propose solutions that are in solutions but won't have the find out aspect of it.
- [29:05]
A
Yeah, that's right. Lots of institutions we have have this fatal kind of Greek tragic flaw that they operate, they prevent bad things from happening and barely anybody knows. Right. So one of the examples I talk about in the fadfo pieces is the millennium bug. You know, as a, as a Gen X service is familiar to me, but I'm beginning to worry that other people don't know what it is.
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B
But in the year 2000, it's not even generational, right?
- [29:31]
A
Yeah.
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B
It's familial with you.
- [29:33]
A
Yeah, indeed. Right. Because my father, a boomer, he was, he was working for hsbc, the bank. He was one of those kind of logistics troubleshooters. So he had to spend the millennium in an office trying to make sure that the bank's entire computer systems didn't blow up because the computer systems had never been programmed to recognize two zeros as the year. Now, you know, that was true for lots and lots of people in IT and logistics and ops management, and they worked on it really hard for half a year. And the millennium happened and almost no computer systems went down. So everybody was like, well, what was the problem? Well, of course you don't see the problem because everybody sorted it out ahead of time. So you can see this with a lot of public health issues where people with vaccinations, we're seeing that with measles right now, that you can push the lines a bit and the public health system responds, presumably though is some kind of threshold, right? I mean, you must be able to overload these systems if you don't do anything at all or if you push the institutions too hard, too far. And that's when politically you get democratic backsliding. Economically you become Argentina and everything just falls apart. And in wealthy OECD countries like the US and the UK and France and Switzerland and so on, you don't usually reach that point. And so then people think, well, maybe that point doesn't exist, but it must, right? I mean, there has to be some limit point where you fuck around too much and the system can't handle it.
- [31:01]
B
And we'll be back in a minute with more of Ben Ansell foreign. Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places.
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A
That take credit cards nationwide.
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A
Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report.
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B
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- [33:11]
A
Yeah. So look, most people are not me or you, and they don't spend all day, like, reading the news and caring about policy. You know, I'm employed to do this stuff. That's great. They pay me to know. But most people, for understandable reasons, do not spend all their time thinking about how well a policy is going. So ultimately, what they see is they see how well their job is going, what the price of things in the store and how people in their neighborhood are feeling. And so you can get through quite a lot of fucking around until all of those things turn south. You know, poor old Joe Biden had to deal with the fact that prices going up is a pretty obvious problem, right? Everybody sees it. And you could come up with all kinds of complicated reasons about why the policies that he had in the inflation Reduction act and the CHIPS act would make America richer. But people don't see that. They see the price of eggs. And that's why we talk about, that's why we talk so much about egg prices. I think basically publics, Democratic publics, you know, we think of them in political science as pretty thermostatic. So they, when the temperature gets too hot, they want to cool down and when the temperature gets too cold, they want to heat it up. And that's true for this is why.
- [34:18]
B
The out party almost always wins midterms.
- [34:20]
A
Midterms, exactly. And so I suspect that a lot of that will happen and publics are pretty good at responding. I do think it's the case that in polarized media environments it becomes easier to disguise how badly things are going from some of your own partisan audience. But I think swing voters aren't spending a lot of time on polarized media either. It may be that right now the people who watch Fox News aren't seeing the stock market ticker when it goes down and are seeing it when it goes up, but those people were going to vote for Trump anyway. So maybe that doesn't matter.
- [34:54]
B
I think, I think fad foe is characterized or the people who benefit from it are, tend to be the more radical actors in our, on the political spectrum, maybe populists. Then again, I'll just say maybe this is reflecting my own kind of moderate centrist worldview. But I'm thinking of the left and not communism, but just the pretty far left in the US have they can to this point, point still propose solutions that I guess they don't get implemented. So therefore they don't find out. I'm thinking of two things. The calls to, you know, actually literally defund the police. There were a couple of instances where not necessarily defunding as, as a policy going in, but this was the consequence of a lot of police officers quitting in cities like Minneapolis. And then crime went up a lot. But I'm also thinking of modern monetary theory and the idea that essentially simplifying it, we could print more money and because us, the reserve currency, inflation won't be a problem. Or another way to put it is if inflation is a problem, we'll always be able to deal with it. Let's just spend more on things. Seems to me that they fucked around and found out. But I don't know that they found out. I don't see many signs that the left has thought thing. Sorry, I don't see many signs that the left has concluded that they found out a to you and B1 not.
- [36:22]
A
Yeah. So I think what's great about FADFO is it's an equal opportunity critique. Right. So and I'm, you know, you could even apply it to kind of centrists in this kind of waving away people's, you know, legitimate concerns, left behind areas, all that. That hasn't worked out that well for, for the centrists either. Right. So we've, we've probably all been guilty of this, but on the left. Yeah, I mean.
- [36:44]
B
Right, right. So you're saying the kind of person who said oh, trade will be great and don't worry this we won't create hollowed out towns where there was once industry.
- [36:52]
A
Exactly. You know, it's positive sum in the aggregate. So who cares about who the losers are? Well, the losers it turns out, right. So many of us are guilty of this. And so, you know, the version of the hot dog meme or the leopards meme. Use, use to attack populists. But you know, on the right, Rob Henderson had his line, you know about. Oh yeah, now I've forgotten the name of this. What was Rob's line? Luxury. Luxury beliefs. Thank you. So yeah, the idea of luxury beliefs, basically some people on the right wokeness was a set of luxury beliefs that people on the left had that they didn't actually really want fully imposed but they felt had consumption value to believe and maybe made you look, you know, gave you higher status among a group. So yeah, you know, I think that all of these things are different ways of looking at fadfo. I think on the left, you know, if we move the kind of debate about wokeness aside, defund the police, you know, was, was a very memorable slogan. And then if you asked a lot of defund the police people, they would say, well actually what we really mean is in Europe they spend less money on the police because they have a good welfare state. I'm like, well why did, why does your slogan not expand the welfare state? But you know, you can, you can see why. And it turns out that the thing about the police is that they are political actors as well. So if you defund them, they can do things like, like not show up, they can slow walk everything. And you know, as you said, that is what happened in Minneapolis with mmt. That was a crew of heterodox economists who absolutely thought that you should basically be targeting printing more money and assuming that that would become more raw output and you shouldn't worry about inflation. Well, I think what we've relearned, which we'd forgotten, maybe for 40 years, is that people really hate inflation and that's why it was part of the misery index in the 70s. So the big question, though, Mike, is do any of the people advocating these ideas, are they the ones who found out, or is it just everybody else finding out? Like, do they admit it? And I don't know. Right. Because if you've put a lot of effort into believing this idea and promulgating it, you're probably not going to be the first person who's like, yeah, you're right, we shouldn't have defunded the police.
- [39:07]
B
I guess when your belief is not a luxury belief, but a niche belief, there's not the mechanism by which there's this huge backlash and everyone finds out. I guess the MMT people can kind of gather among themselves and tell themselves reasons why they didn't get a rebuke of their overall philosophy.
- [39:23]
A
Yeah, because it really happened. Right. Like that'll be the argument. This is the. The no true Scotsman argument. Right. Well, that wasn't proper mmt. And we had this, by the way, so much true communism's never true communism tried. So true Brexit has never been tried. Is the call of Nigel Farage when he's criticized, well, look, this didn't have all the. All the effects that you claimed it would he say, yeah, but I didn't implement it and they didn't do it properly.
- [39:46]
B
Right, right. I know. That's what they're going to say about Doge. Absolutely, yes. The inevitable. Oh, so fascinating. Wait. Oh, yeah, there's one more thing I want to get to, but we wouldn't want. At the same time, we wouldn't want to be so allergic of the possibility of running into a FAFO or a fad fox that we don't try some amount of fucking around. Right. My fuck my fucking around could be your hope and change or your radical solutions that are brought up by terrible situations. So you don't want to be too constrained in your. Your capacity to, quote, unquote, fuck around.
- [40:26]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely right. Right. I've written other substacks about disruption, whether disruption's a good thing or not. And I'm a bit torn because you could argue that a lot of the problems that America and European countries got into the 1970s is that they did have a pretty. Pretty stagnant and stagflatory environment where nothing really changed, where the same interest groups and business lobbyists and parties made the same policies year after year. And that's why the Economy's kind of got. Got stuck. And so there were lots of people arguing in the 70s that actually that system needed to be disrupted. And the disruption which we saw, you know, in the US under Volcker, Paul Volcker at the head of the Fed and Reagan, and certainly in the UK under Thatcher, that disruption was really disruptive. But it's not clear to me that it wasn't to some degree necessary. Right. So I think there's always a balance between getting stuck in this very stagnant system where we have too much stability and then just abandoning stability entirely. Right. Like everything in moderation, including moderation.
- [41:36]
B
So measles, tariffs, tariffs. We talked about Nigel Farage's Reform Party, I don't know, Romanian right wing elections. What do you, as a political calculator, see as the next likely fad foe culprit?
- [41:51]
A
Yeah, that's a good question. Right. Because we're seeing, you know, as you mentioned, my kind of twilight of the populist, this piece earlier, we're also seeing this backlash with people like Mark Carney and now in Australia, Anthony Albanese kind of push back. So I think we're pivoting back and forth at the moment. It's hard to know exactly which way we're going to go on that. I mean, in the uk it would be something like Nigel Farage's reform actually becoming the official opposition. So they, we had our local elections. They won a lot of. Of councils. They never run a council before that. You know, council normally has 100 to 100,000 to a million people in it. They're going to have to provide bus services and parks and libraries. That is pretty thankless. Right.
- [42:37]
B
The analogy I think of is the Taliban.
- [42:40]
A
Yeah.
- [42:40]
B
Right. When it's, when, when it's broad and sweeping and ideological, it sounds great, but when it comes to actually running a water filtration plant or buses, it's a little harder.
- [42:49]
A
Yeah. And that's, you know, that's, that's not what a lot of people who get into more populist radical politics really want to spend their time doing. They don't want to be fixing church roofs. This is not their bag. I think Musk found this a bit with Doge, which is that he was absolutely certain there would be lots of easy wins. And it became clear that actually if you tried to slice the big stuff like Social Security, the immune system of America would just, just react and scream you down. And so then you're spending your time, like cutting back the National Institute for Health and all the cancer care money and I'm not totally sure that's why Musk got into this, but he went to where the easy cuts were in the end because it proved more complicated and more boring than he thought it would be.
- [43:34]
B
Ben Ansell is the author on Substack of Political Calculus and he also teaches at Oxford. He's the author of why Politics Fails, and I have to say the US edition is also called Politics why Politics Fails, Not Fail, which is, I guess a debate. And also I listened to him on a podcast called Rethinking, which I have to go to the BBC app. It's not available here. It's a huge pain in the ass to get to, but a worth it podcast. Ben Great talking to you Mike.
- [44:02]
A
Thank you so much for having me.
- [44:09]
B
And that's it for today's show that just was produced by Cory Wara. The CBSO is Michelle Pesca. The CO CBSO is Ashley Khan. Astrid Green runs our socials. Leo Baum does our interning improve. G Peru du Peru thanks for listening. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.