Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today I will be talking with Doctor Brian Kaplan, economist at George Mason University to discuss his book Self Help is Like a Vaccine. Dr. Kaplan, where is the best place for people to purchase this book? Actually it's an Amazon exclusive, so the best and only place is Amazon. Terrific, I highly recommend the book. I have a number of things I'd like to go over.
Can you please explain the concept of There is no such thing as a free lunch to me? Like I'm 10 years old and I've never heard of it before. All right, there's no such thing as a free lunch. It's a slogan which is not literally true. But anyway, the idea of is it if it is in the real world, normally in order to go and get any additional thing that you want, you've got to give up
something else, right? It's probably made made famous by Milton Friedman, although I think it actually came from Einlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress, if I remember the history correctly, and it's just saying that it seems too good to be true. It probably is. If you want to change your life, it's not going to be just getting more of everything you want, it's going to be having to
make at least some sacrifice. If you're playing your cards right, of course the sacrifice is less valuable than what you're getting. The reason that I think this is so important is maybe in the last week or so I have heard both Democrats and Republicans say healthcare we that should be free, childcare should be free, education should be free, college should be free, housing as well as food stamps should be free. So when it comes to the concept of opportunity. Food should be free.
I guess foods be odd if food stamps weren't free. It's like here's some help now pay me for it. So if you could just walk the average voter through what they are actually saying, assuming, well, government can just print the money, as the modern monetary theorists like to remind us. Is this an actual like loop in the matrix that we found this traveling opportunity to Narnia where we could make it free? You print the money, you increase the money supply. What is the opportunity cost of
all these free things? Yeah, I think probably the best way of thinking about it is to, you know, agree and amplify, say, all right, yeah, you're right. Your health care should be free. Education should be free, food should be free. Everything should be free. Everybody should get everything they want for no money. And at this point, I think you'd have to be pretty deluded not to say, well, there could be some problems with that.
Oh, like, what? Like if everybody gets everything they want for free, then why work? And if people don't work then what's going to actually be available for purchase? It really does get to the point where if everything is free, then you shouldn't expect the total amount of stuff available to be more than a rounding error. That's is a nice way of thinking about it. Also like the reason why people work is generally to get stuff. That's also the way that stuff
comes to exist. If you make everything free, then you are basically just going in that opposite direction to the maximum degree. And then the question is, yeah, but why couldn't this one thing be free? It's like, well, why should we make this the exception? Why does that make sense? Now in terms of deeper economics, the key point is that when something is free, then people will consume things that they do not appreciate very
much, right? I always like to give the example of some elderly relative who gives you like a a Ming vase for Christmas. You're not allowed to resell it. It's worth like $1,000,000, but you're five years old. So it is wasteful to go and give someone something really expensive that they do not appreciate. And that is what we standardly see when there are government giveaways. This is most obvious for
healthcare. A lot of that stuff is crazy expensive and if it really is free then people will go and use treatments they do not value all that much and would be willing to go without without actually feeling all that bad about it. Is it fair to summarize social desirability bias as when the truth sounds bad, people lie? Yeah, totally. It's a good one. Sentence summary.
So I want to give you a genuine statement that I, in the last week or so since I've been reading the book, have really wanted to say to people, but it's not professional. I want to see if you could help me find a way to say this without lying. I'm going to New York and a relative said, oh, I'd love for you to come and visit me. This guy's been disrespecting me for 10 years. And I said I don't want, I don't want to see you when I'm in town. Is there a way I could say that
when without sounding terrible? I'd probably go with, oh, we'll see. Literally true. Yeah. By the way, when you asked the first question about the free lunch, I thought you were going to go in a totally different direction. I thought it was going to be. We all know there's no such thing as a free lunch. So how can all of these self help ideas be actually work? What am I giving up?
And my answer was going to be, you know, normally there's not such a thing as a free lunch, but actually there's a bunch of free lunches. There's just a lot of things that people are doing where they are wasting resources. And if they would just change the way that they're doing, they could actually have a better life without have without giving anything else up. I mean like the simplest example from the first day of econ is if you're sitting in a bad movie,
just get up and walk out. That's a free lunch. You get your time back and you avoid watching a movie you don't even like. So there are in fact free lunches in the world while economist main job is telling people that they don't exist. That's an overstatement. It's poetic license. The real truth is usually people are not correct to think that are round.
But on the other hand, if you keep your eyes open, you will find all kinds of opportunities to get a better life without having to give up anything other than you. You might say, other than the pride of admitting that up till that point you've been making a mistake. That is a big one though. Isn't that a big opportunity cost and risk to your ego and reputation that you have to bear? So it's. Still not the way that I put it is.
Look, do you, don't you want to be the kind of person that starts being right when you learn something? And so I consider it very pro ego to to be the kind of person who says I'm figured out another way to make things better. I'm just so good at this. Wow, I found another improvement, another free lunch. Man, I'm great at finding these free lunches. And what a fool I would be not to take advantage of everything I'm figuring out because it's
just so awesome. So yes, a lot of people are held back by their foolish pride. This is actually the real meaning of Emerson's quote. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. He didn't say consistency, he said a foolish consistency. And by that he meant continuing to do things the way you did them in the past, even though you have discovered that you've been making a mistake. Very nice. OK, I got a few more social
desirability ones for you. Co worker asks you out to dinner and you just want to say no I don't want to meet you for dinner. Not because I'm busy, I don't enjoy your company. What's a nice way to say that? Let's see. I mean, you're depending upon you. So of course a lot of times it's vague and then you can just go, but you know, the timing is vague and then you say, oh, we'll see. So there's that one there. There's a oh, not tonight, right? Which is totally true, yes.
I'm not doing it tonight. And then actually one of the better parts of lightness norms is after you get a couple, not tonight. It is considered rude to keep asking. So I think I would go with that. Not tonight. Finally, if someone says I did not like that book you wrote or recommended to me, what is a polite way to say it without lying? This is in reference to I'm sorry I didn't say. There is a chapter where you talk about the importance of
using the word can't with care. Don't say, oh, I can't make it. You don't have access to a car, your legs are broken, you can't travel means you have different priorities and that's fine. But there is it. It is a little annoying when people say I cannot do something when they do similar things. So that's why we come up with this. What do you say when you don't like the book that someone wrote or recommended to you? Yeah, I mean, the easiest thing is of course not to say anything at all.
Silence is not a lie. If the person does keep pushing, then I would probably just say switch from words to noises. The reason that I didn't once have a colleague who just kept hassling me. And finally, I did say like, in particular just to at least try it. And and I just say, yeah, it's not my cup of tea. Like, like you still got quite, quite angry. I mean, my honest reaction was your book is an insult to me after talking to you about how wrong what you're saying is.
For 10 years you showed no sign that you would ever listen to a word I had said. It wasn't even like you had some reply to my criticism. You just acted like I hadn't even spoken to you. That is a terrible affront to my personage. That's kind of what I was feeling, but I just went with not my cup of tea. Well, the the reason I ask is there is a great Thomas old quote of if you want to help people, tell them the truth, If you want to make yourself feel good, tell them what they want
to hear. And sometimes I feel like, you know, I really wish someone would have told me the truth a lot earlier in life. We're going to get into my specific example, but don't you ever feel like, gosh, I could really help this person, but in your case, you had helped him for 10 years. Sometimes I feel like it's better to be the voice of reason to bring a horse to water, so to speak. Yeah, you totally.
So like as a parent, you are very mindful of I don't want to crush this child, I don't want to hurt them so much. And then it's a question of how can I be honest without doing grave psychological harm to the child? I think it's almost all in tone. It's almost all in tone. It's all in tone. Good lesson. Almost all you know, there's, there's more to it than that.
You know, like another thing is positive framing of saying let's focus on what you are good at. Since you're not going to be a mass, you're not going to be a mass * all right. So like let's, you know, these are the things that you are really good at. That's another good approach. But a lot of it is just not saying like you suck at math, but rather this isn't your strength. This isn't your strength. That's a good one. Division of Labor. What did Robin Hanson teach you
about the medical field? One of your citations is an article from him Cut Medicine in Half, not asking you to remember the specifics. What is the general lesson you learned from Robin Hanson about the medical? Field Before I met Robin, I just took for granted the conventional view that a large majority of the rise in life expectancy and human health over the last century is due to
better medical care. What Robin did is showed me that almost no one who has looked at the data seriously will agree with that. There's basically debate between people saying it's a modest effect and people saying it's hard even to find a modest effect. It is puzzling as to what's going on. Like, how could that really be? But just to give you a feel for what kind of evidence that there is, early on people noticed, you know, like that richer people live longer.
All right. And once modern medicine started to be available, the they very quickly said, OK, the reason has got to be that richer people have better access to modern medicine. But then there were some early natural experiments, like for example, I think early on in the British hill service, the high ranks got medical care provided as part of their compensation package. The low ranks didn't. And then they say, OK, while they're living longer, we know why.
Then they extended this free medical care to everyone in the British civil service and the gap in life expectancy, if I recall, did not shrink at all. And they're like, that's strange. How could it not shrink at all? Then we have seen very similar things where with the extension of socialized medicine, universal healthcare in general, we have not seen much of A shrinkage, if any shrinkage in the life expectancy gap between rich and poor.
So, you know, it says, well, then what else could it be? And then you start actually really thinking, right, And there's things like, well, there's, you know, better access to food and sanitation. And then it's like, huh. Yeah. But when did when did access to food become the, like, cease to become an important difference in rich and poor? And then when you start pushing further, it's like, well, let's go into the real socially undesirable stories, like more responsible behavior.
Oh, yeah, that's a big one. So just taking care of yourself. So diet and exercise just avoiding violence for males turns out to be a notable factor. You know, drug and alcohol consumption. If I remember correctly, the the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor and the US has actually risen a lot in recent years, probably driven by opioids and other deaths to despair. Kind of stuff that you'll get from Case and Deaton. On page 19, you discuss your
experiences with doctors. I'm curious, when we're trying to really develop a hypothesis or a valid intellectual position on a person or field group of people, how can we differentiate between anecdotal evidence and solid theories? Yeah, that's a good question. And what I would say is literally, it's pretty easy. It's like anecdotes are like different stories than things that you've seen with your own eyes. And then we, you know, systematic evidence is where we've got nationally
representative statistics. But a lot of the thing that I've been telling people is that in many ways, first hand experience is a more reliable guide to how the real world works than the media 'cause the media is really taking the most exaggerated, unrepresentative, but dramatic incidents and then trying to make everyone think and talk about them all the time.
So while yes, it is good to check your first hand experience against nationally representative statistics, and yet first hand experience is overall quite reliable, especially compared to the news Things like, so you're worried about terrorism, right? How many cases of terrorism is you? Have you ever witnessed with your own eyes? 0 Right now, if you go to the data, you'll find that your experience is actually quite normal because hardly anyone's experienced any of this stuff.
And the reason why the media is talking about it is not because it is something that a reasonable person would ever worry about, but rather because they are terrifying people in order to get clicks. When it comes to doctors, you had said that doctors specialize in finding a name for the thing you have and costing tons of money. This was very shocking to me as well. I thought, well, doctors, this is a scientific it's not like, you know, politics where there's opinions.
This is an objective field. Why is it that doctors have completely succumbed to, I mean, maybe the same exact thing that everyone else does? What was it about the medical field that made you start questioning it? So like, Robin was the one that got me really thinking about it seriously because he was able to point me to actual research on what in fact is the share of the rise in human health is attributable medicine. And at minimum it's grossly overstated. It's nowhere close to 100%.
But then once he had me thinking, I did start paying more attention, just realizing a lot of what doctors were saying was either stuff that was just obvious, like, you should lose weight. It's like, did you need to go to medical school to know something like that? Or just repeating popular nostrums, like you should be eating more vegetables. Like, well, so do you read research on the effect of diet on human health?
And do you actually know how hard it would be to even know that thing, since we can't do experiments on human beings for both practical and legal reasons, You can't go and actually make one person have a diet for 30 years and have another one do a different diet and then compare the two. So there's a lot of that. Let's see, I'll be in the. And also, I did have a few unpleasant problems, usually
involving pain. And I noticed that doctors just didn't really have much of anything for me other than a name. So my feet hurt. Wow, that's plantar fasciitis. All right, great. Now what can we do about it? I did have one Doctor Who went and gave me a prescription strength painkiller and when I read the actual chemical formula I realized it was equivalent to two non prescription pills. So like, yeah, that was quite
sleazy on your part. Now, to be clear, I mean, the thing about doctors is that the range of what they do is shocking. So doctors do everything from the magic of cutting open a woman with twins that are not in the correct position, opening her up, getting the babies out, stitching her up, and she's fine. So I saw that with my own eyes, too. It's like, all right, there's some doctors who can do amazing things where it's like, I just don't think that things would
have worked out otherwise. At least it's like really high risk. But on the other hand, there are doctors who basically just go and tell you to eat vegetables and don't be fat, and that's what you're paying for. And then there's the ones that just give you names for your problems without having any actual practical remedy for your problems. Although I think the main point of that chapter in particular was, well, I found doctors to be
useless for pain. I found paying very careful attention to my behavior and what I'm doing to aggravate the pain to be highly helpful. So, and I have had some crazy, horrible amounts of pain without any obvious cause. But I have found that just paying very close attention to exactly what I'm doing, what makes the pain go up and down, and then avoiding doing those things to be really helpful. And you know, I'll say like I've cured 99% of my problems and you knock on wood. Yes, very nice.
The reason that I have become a little obsessed with this is this is the first time that you and I ever had a conversation. Now you will see this is Doctor Kaplan and I discussing open borders, the science and ethics of immigration. I weighed this much. At one point I was 290 lbs and I was listening to doctors very closely, obeying what is referred to as the USDA food pyramid. That is what got me to that level, listening to doctors.
I also listened to a Doctor Who was kind enough to give me an Adderall prescription, which of course turned me into a drug addict for four years. Again, my fault. However, they're the ones with the fancy degrees you'd think might be a little more productive. So two of the worst things that I've ever had were the result of listening to people who I'm told I should blindly obey. That's why I appreciated that section so much.
Didn't. Those food pyramid doctors tell you to reduce your calories at least. They said you could eat, you should eat less and exercise. The problem with this is it is the equivalent of telling drug addicts and Alcoholics the solution is to stop using drugs, stop using alcohol, you're a gambler, stop gambling. Yes, technically it's a a solution. However, it's not within a foreseeable reach of a person who's so deep into something that's really difficult to get out of. It's the.
I would start with all right, cut back your calories 5%. 5% you know I even I was eating so much bread and pasta not knowing that bread and pasta made me fat. I thought it was only soda and sweets or something. I was working a job at Walmart where I was walking 8 hours a day so I was getting plenty of exercise. I'd never really cut back on the food, but when you're always hungry you don't know what to do. And then I found the carnivore diet just on YouTube.
YouTube gave me more of a more of a health education then all the doctors I spoke with and I went. Hey, you did your own research, Keith. Literally it was just watching a ton of YouTube videos, taking notes and saying what are the correlations between all these video recommendations. Once I heard something about 10 times, then I put a check next to it and that's what what what I came across. Yeah, the research word that I think you're looking for is satiation.
Satiation. So basically there are diets with the same number of calories and yet some of them will just make you feel a lot more full than the others. So yeah, my friend Jim Schneider, who is a voracious reader and has a whole book on health economics called The Seven Deadly Sins. Anyway, one of the main things that you that is useful to learn about diet is calories are the
crucial direct variable. But in terms of getting your calories under control, it is very helpful to go and find out what calories fill you up and which calories don't, because it is not the case that 1000 calories of every kind fill you up equally. And I think that's what's going on is that meat is actually very satiating. There's a bunch of other things though also, like a regular potato with no salt or butter is very satiating for calorie.
It's carbs, but partly it's just so bland that you eat it and you're like, OK, I'm just don't feel like eating anymore if this is all I've got. Yes, I totally agree. Satiation, See, it's something I understood just with pattern recognition. I didn't really understand it intellectually, but that's my thing. OK, You talk about individual solutions versus social revolutions. In other words, when people look
at a problem, poverty exists. Why is it that people are so addicted to focusing on social changes they could only microscopically have a differential effect on, and they seem almost allergic to solutions which are actually under their control? For example, whenever I hear society is racist and sexist and the poor just get poorer. So until we completely overthrow the system, there's nothing we can do in the interim. Right. I mean, fortunately I will say most people are not into
revolution. That's a good news because revolutions almost always end in a horrifying bloodbath and things are get much worse still. What the inner psychology is, you know, a lot of it is the same impulse that you have with religion where you want to get some big world view and feel like that makes you important, feel like you got answers to the
big questions. And so anytime someone has a solution of that kind, it does satisfy this desire to be at one with the universe in, in some sense, like I'm part of a great cause. Whereas when you talk about individual solutions, then that is engaging a very different mindset. It's one where it is demanding in a sense a lot more of you 'cause it's saying, look, repent, repent, you know, change what you're doing, right?
Don't just go and say we need to have society change, which is pretty much equivalent to nothing's going to happen on your end. Rather, it puts the ball back in your court as to why there are so few people that are just focused primarily on individual solutions. Yeah, yeah. I think about the concluding speech of the movie Scent of a Woman, where Al Pacino just says, you know, like, like I always knew the right way, but it was too damn hard. It like it is hard in many ways
to go and improve your behavior. And especially a lot of what has to happen with self help is you have to temporarily make your problem even worse or make your suffering even worse in order for it to get to get better. Think about someone who just has no friends and they're miserable. All right. And what is the advice? Like, you've got to go and risk rejection by trying to meet more people. It's like, I'm already really sad. I don't want to be really sad
plus get rejected. So yeah, I'm sorry. There's no other path to something better. So there is that. Is that like a lot of times when someone has a big problem, things have to get worse before they get better? So when it comes to what can individuals do to increase their income, we can say, well, the state should be doing AB and C, OK. I'm sure they're going to get on top of it immediately. What is it that listeners can do today if they want to have an increased income? Right.
All right. So I think in the book I've got a chapter on what's called the First Law of Wing Walking. This comes from the early days of aeronautics when acrobats would get on flying planes and do acrobats do acrobatics. The first law of wing walking is don't let go of what you're holding on to until you're holding on to something else first, right? This is a very important piece of advice for career advancement. Do not quit your job and try to find a better job.
That is a bad idea. Instead, hold on to whatever your current job is, almost no matter how unsatisfactory it is, and then start looking around for something better. Often you can use the connections that you have on your job to find something better, but also just keep your eyes peeled. This isn't just something where
you've got a safety net. It is also true and confirmed in a number of bodies of evidence, that employers prefer to hire the currently employed because they are nervous about possible problems with the unemployed. It's what economists call adverse selection. So yeah, so quitting your job and then trying to find something from scratch is just a bad idea. But also, you know, feeling sorry for yourself is a bad idea.
Instead, be looking around now important to understand by the way, that there's a lot of ways to improve your job that don't mean your income goes up. You're just looking around for something that is a better match for you. One of my very favorite books for self help is called Why Men Earn More. It's a self help book for women about how to go and get a better job. What the book has is 25 different sacrifices that men
make to get more money. Things like work the night shift, go and do a more dangerous job, work alone. All right. Now when I was reading it, though, I was realizing, sure, these are these are all good piece of advice for women about how to make more money, But it's also just as good advice for men to realize, hey, do you really want to go and have these jobs that you don't like in order
just to get a bit more money? Maybe you should go and be more like women and choose jobs based upon satisfaction or personal satisfaction rather than income alone. So that is a standard thing for men to do is to heavily prioritize income. And I'd say that, at least for a lot of guys, that's a mistake. So more dangerous jobs being open to more opportunities in dangerous fields that explains the male female wage gap these. Explains a lot of it.
These are 25 things that are characteristics of jobs that men do relative to women, and all of them do predict higher income for pretty obvious reasons. And what explains the Asian white income gap where Asians are at the top of the incomes? I think since 1969 Japanese Americans surpassed white Americans. Right. So in the data, we'll definitely see that just higher Asian education explains a lot of it. I, I'm not sure if it's actually been done, but it is that's related.
Research has been done anyway, so a lot of it is also probably the Asians are more likely to do high earning majors like STEM. As to what else is going on, or alternately you could say yes, but what explains why they're getting more education or why they're focusing on STEM? Then I'd say there's two things. So one is there is good, though not bulletproof evidence that E Asians have moderately higher Iqs than whites.
So that'll give them some boost. And then secondly, there is very hard to deny observational evidence, although I don't know of any good data that confirms that, just that Asians have markedly higher conscientiousness. They just have better worth that work ethics more focused. They're just willing to put up with more boredom.
So I mean, I get like, I guess I would say that, you know, the kind of evidence that I would focus on just to show that Asians do do in fact have higher conscientiousness would just be behavioral saying things like Asians are a lot less likely to have non marital births. Asians are a lot less likely lesion males are a lot less likely to be out of the labor force. Asians are less likely to go and have serious substance abuse problems.
So I mean, those are all in a sense, you could say, well, that's kind of circular. Like I don't think it's that circular. It's just saying that these are things where it's very easy to do it or not do it based upon just what your internal preferences are. So I mean, I say it's no more circular than saying that if you want to see whether it will like what people's preferences and food are, look at what they eat at a buffet, right?
Because that's where all options are equal of the same price. And then say, what did you put on your plate and how high did you stack the food on that plate? Yeah, I went to three colleges in Arizona and Arizona. Maybe in the at the college level there's a little more, maybe 15% of the students are Asian, but 95% of the library was Asian. So it's definitely behavioral.
OK, two more things. What I've noticed, but I have very limited knowledge in this area, is the two things that I've seen people do to increase their income without having to get a new job is show up on time. Because people not showing up was the biggest issue in my last two jobs #1 cause of getting fired and requesting training. There are people who don't know that if you request training, there are opportunities for you to get more income at your
current job. Is that just racist patriarchy of me to think that those two possibilities are within our reach? Or is that really something we can do? Seems extremely sensible and I would add make friends with the boss. Make friends with the boss. Which you might say, so it's just trying to appeal. Nepotism was like, no, because the a crucial part of making friends with the boss is to be a good employee, to try to help them do their job. Because the life of a boss is actually not easy.
They are balancing a lot of complaints and back talk and just difficulty with figuring out where to place people. And if you have a can do attitude and clearly indicate you were there to help, that almost instantly makes you their friend. Yeah, I remember my first job when I was 14. I was a landscaper, and my friend and I started our own business. And I said, finally, we're our own boss. We just call the shots. All the power is ours.
Well, every customer had competing interests, and the customers were the bosses. It was even worse. I do not envy my boss at all. You say that kids are a consumer. Good.
What does that mean? Means is that the key reason that people do have kids and that it makes sense to and then why you would want to have kids is that they're fun, they're companions, you do stuff with them right There is this long standing idea that maybe that's true now, but for most of human history people had kids to get help on their farms. This argument really makes very little sense.
Just imagine being a farmer in the year 1000 AD and it's like Gee, I really want to get some help on my farm. Plan A is to take some money and hire a competent adult to assist me. Plan B is to have a baby with my wife, which incapacitates her for a couple of years, and then go and feed and care for this baby for a bunch of more years when he is totally incapable of working.
Then put all the effort into training the kid and then hope that when he gets old enough to actually do a good job, he doesn't just go off on his own. Obviously the first strategy is a way better way to get a worker. And it's like, so then why were people having kids? It's like the same reason why lions have kids, right? Evolution, evolution. They have kids because of evolution. Animals that just say of what use is this pauper to me? They don't have kids and then
their genes die out. So human beings are evolved to, of course, want sex, but also in addition to want kids. Some people don't like kids very much, but a lot of other people do get great meaning and joy from their children. And my advice to people is if you're thinking about having kids, well, actually how it tried babysitting a kid and meet some kids. I mean, I don't mean I am amazed by people say, Oh, I want to have six kids. Like, do you know any kids? And like, no, well, I think you
should meet some kids first. That would actually be a good idea. Now there is the old saying, which is completely true. It's different and better when they're your kids, but still I would say that first see how much you like taking care of somebody else's kids and then think, OK, my kids, I will enjoy them. Three out of throw on a scale of one to 10, like 3 better. So it's not like if you don't like other people's kids, you
love your own. It's more like if you like other people's kids, you'll really like yours. There is an author, David Benatar, who says in a book better never to have been sentient beings are harmed when they are brought into existence and it is therefore wrong to procreate. This is his anti natalism philosophy. What do you have to say to this
worldview? That people should not reproduce because human beings, while being terrible parasites to the environment, also experience pain and it's not worth bringing people into existence. Yeah, Benatar is an extremely smart, yet crazy and dogmatic philosopher, right? Just to understand where he's coming from, he actually does have the position that you should not consider net happiness. You should not go and say, I had some pain, but I also had some good stuff.
The good stuff exceeded the bad stuff, therefore it's good to be alive. Instead, he wants to only look at gross suffering and say, if gross suffering is greater than 0, then you're better off never existing. All right, there's a bit more to it than that, but that is a fund his fundamental premise. And I'll just say like, that is absolute madness to say, like, well, I stubbed my toe today, therefore it would have been better if the day hadn't happened. What the is wrong with you?
Like, a lot of great stuff happened and the package is not good enough for you. Oh, no, you shouldn't judge the package. You should just judge the negative part of the package. It was like, yeah, that's absurd, Absolutely ridiculous. There's also an argument that Benatar has that. Well, look, you when you create a life, you are causing them to have some suffering and you never got their consent. All right. And again, this is part of the story about why you shouldn't do
the net. It's like, look, I can't go up to you and then step on your foot and then give you $1000 and then and then walk away and say I'm I've done the right thing, right? So, and even though you value $1000 more, the story goes like I needed your consent to go and step in your foot. It's not enough to give you a package that is good. I also have to say, Keith, may I step on your foot in exchange for $1000? Obviously with a baby you can't get that consent.
And therefore, again, the story is you are doing something that is morally wrong to hear. I am very happy to invoke the concept of hypothetical consent, Right? And it's like, well, but would you have consented? Now, there are important limits on hypothetical consent. Namely, if you can easily get real explicit consent, then get it. However, if for some reason it is just not doable, or the cost is enormous, then hypothetical
consent makes a lot of sense. For example, if you see someone is passed out from a heart attack, you can't get their consent explicitly. And this is where it is totally reasonable to say it is super likely they would consent to being revived. Now if the person had a giant shirt on or you know, his shirt on with giant letter saying if I get a heart attack, absolutely do not revive me, then I would say all right, maybe there's an issue here.
But otherwise, or if they had actually told you, if I ever get a heart attack I don't want to be revived, I refuse consent to revival, then there's a moral issue. But otherwise, no. And the same obviously goes for having babies. We can't get their consent before it happens, but we do know that almost everyone would get would give consent if they could. And that's plenty of moral justification for creating a life. I love the chapter that people
should check out. Doctor Kaplan says, all right, giving someone $100 Beth seen as a nice thing to do. Giving someone life, is that a nice thing? Well, that's actually really complex. I just love this book so much. You discuss merit good, such as the opera or education. What is a merit good? All right, this is a concept that economists came up with really kind of reinventing the wheel of what ideas that are
already in velocity. But anyway, it's basically it's a good where even if the person receiving it doesn't appreciate it, it still is wonderful that it exists. All right, so philosophers might talk about intrinsic value or something like that. Economists had to multiply vocabulary, so we call it a merit. Good. This is an explanation that economists will give like, well, so we subsidized opera.
Sure, people could pay for it if they wanted it, but opera is just so freakishly awesome, even if people don't appreciate it, that we should do it and hope that maybe it's free. People will come to their senses and realize how great it is. You recommend frugal living as opposed to financial assistance when it comes to monetary well-being? This is in opposition to quite a bit of what I hear. It's that, well, people need more money. People need more financial assistance.
The vice president came out and said, I'm going to start funding more small businesses. I'm going to start giving people a $25,000 tax credit on buying a house. Why is it people should focus more on frugal living as opposed to financial assistance? Well, from a self help point of view, the main point obviously is you can't change the amount of money the government hands out. I guess you'd go and apply for more programs, but basically
that's set by somebody else. So then the question is, what should you be doing in order to go and help yourself? What I say is that if in particular you, you have a philosophy saying that material goods aren't that important and quality of life is what counts. I said, look, you don't have to wait for government. You don't have to wait for a revolution. Just start doing it right now.
You can indeed go and just consume less and then use the savings to either allow you to get a easier job or a job that's more pleasant, right? Or you can even just go and start saving. So eventually you don't need to work. Really the point of that piece was to say anyone who sort of glorifies the simple life, it's like you, this is something you don't have to wait for.
Now, I would also add, I think they know there are a lot of people who work really hard and they spend a lot of money on stuff that they don't enjoy very much. And I would tell them just as a friend, like, I think you should really think more about what you're spending money on.
And if you don't actually get joy out of it, then stop doing it. You can then take that money and save it. You can use that either in the short run or maybe over the longer run to actually have a better life in terms of what kind of work you do. I think that is so true. I have gotten more joy out of low cost spending money on travel and just I've stopped going out to dinner just because it's just not worth it. I just invite people over to my place.
I mean the bills that you rack up between drinks and all the food, I think going out to eat is just a huge 1 for me. Yeah, yeah, sort of. My rule is I only go to restaurants that cook food that I am not good at making myself. Yeah. And of course it also has to be good, right? So, but like, but just to go and spend money for an average mediocre restaurant? No way. Like it's got to be great.
Oh, and and especially drinks 'cause they're almost pouring the same bottle that I could get at Winco or Total Wine. What is rent seeking? And seeking is a name that economists have given to something that almost everybody knew about before. It's basically spending resources in order to get RE, in order to get a a larger share of a fixed pie of resources, right? So the classic example is lobbying the government. You aren't going and creating
value. Instead, you go and lobby the government and you try to get a bigger piece of the government's giveaways for yourself. The key inside of the idea is, selfishly speaking, rent seeking often really pays off. You say, hey, why don't I go and just try to go and grab a bigger
share of that fixed pie. But from a social point of view, rent seeking is a bad thing because if all resources were going into trying to get a larger share of a fixed pie, then the amount of pie available would be quite small. Or really, principal could just go down to 0. This is kind of what the worst civil wars look like is you have people murdering each other over a can of corn. On page 39 you discuss preferences versus meta preferences. What is the difference between
these two? All right, so this is a concept that philosophers invented and economists went and borrowed very eagerly. The idea is like, you could have a preference for eating a big plate of pasta, but you could also have a higher level preference to not do that, right? There's the internal struggle. Like on the one hand, I really want to drink, On the other hand, I don't want to be an alcoholic.
Their intention, all right? Now, this has been a big part, especially of behavioral economics saying that, look, a lot of government regulation, especially paternalistic regulation, it actually is really very sensible because it's just government helping people to realize their true preferences, their meta preferences. I have a lot of things to say about this. I don't have a fundamental logical objection to it. I'll just say that I think the concept is grossly over applied
in many ways. Most obviously, look, if you really have this conflicting preference and meta preference, and if the meta preference is really stronger, there is a nice website calledstick.com that will allow you to solve your own problem without any government at all. This is a website where you make a contract with someone else where you have to pay money if you don't follow through on your own plan. A classic example.
I think the founders of the website, they were both overweight and they both did a a deal with each other where they said we will go and both be losing weight. And whoever loses more weight will receive $1.00 or $10 per pound of extra weight loss compared to the other. And so it's like a bet, like I'm betting I can lose more weight than you and I my winnings will be $10 times the the difference between the amount of weight that the two of us have lost.
What's striking is let's see. Have you heard of stick.com, Keith? You said STICK. There's an extra K, so it's stick with an extra K at the end. That's why it says something totally. Different.
You never heard of it, right? No, no. So, you know, like it's a reasonably successful minor website, but what's notable is that it is not Google, it's not Facebook, it's not a big website, nor are there any other websites that are similar that are super successful, which I say shows that in fact, most of what are supposed to be meta preferences that people are just struggling to realize. But somehow freedom doesn't let them. Freedom does let you go and realize your matter preferences.
The real story is that most people do not want to change. They what it what they call their meta preferences are rather primarily a smokescreen or defense mechanism where you go and say, look, I mean, I, I really love my family so much. I just feel terrible about how my drinking is affecting you, but I just can't stop. Oh, poor me. It's like, or you value your drinking more than you value the welfare of your family. Actions speak louder than words
and that is my main take. So if you really did have a meta preference, you could solve the problem without without any help from government. The fact that hardly anybody does, I say, shows that mostly this concept does not apply in
the real world. There is a great contradiction between most of what we hear with both Democrats and Republicans. They say if there is something you disagree with about the federal government, you think they're violating your freedoms, you talk it over, you engage in deliberative democracy, you vote. And this is how you really sort of reorganize things.
But if there is a potential foreign threat from China or Russia or Iraq or Yemen or Afghanistan, we need to declare war and justify mass violence, especially against civilians. It's totally fine if Kaiser Wilhelm ends up living in the Netherlands for the rest of his life, so long as we get those Germans you have. This is the blatant appeasement contradiction. When our domestic government violates our freedoms, you got to talk it over.
Don't get aroused when it comes to foreign governments. If there's even a potential we might have to nuke Beijing if they go into Taiwan. You discussed this in the Weekly Dominant Strategy section along with the benefits of appeasement. What is your thesis on the Weekly Dominant strategy and benefits of appeasement? I mean just to back up. So I think you are exaggerating how opposed to appeasement most governments are. They usually just use a different word which is de
escalation. So appeasement is terrible, but de escalation that's good. It's like it's just different words for the same thing. But anyway, I do have this essay called My Life of Appeasement, where start off with this idea that appeasement never works. Appeasement never works. As soon as you appease, they just ratchet up their demands and it just gets worse and worse. And you never should have given them to the 1st place. And I say like, yeah, open your eyes.
Think about what you did today. Were you ever treated unfairly by any human being? Today? Most people say, yeah, OK, yeah. Or what did you do about it? Yeah, like, nothing. All right. Why not? And is it just because you were an idiot, or is it because if you had escalated until you got what you wanted, you didn't think it would actually work out, right? And that's the truth is that
escalation is playing with fire. And usually when there's a conflict, it is better just to go and humor people and give in. I'm not saying never go and assert yourself, but I'm saying that appeasement is really underrated and often contrary to the story that as soon as you appease, once people ratchet up their demands, like in the real world, what you usually see is someone makes some demand, which seems unreasonable to you, you give it to them and that settles the issue.
If someone bumps into you and they seem annoyed and you say you're sorry and they'll say, oh, OK, no problem. That's the that's what usually what happens. It's very rare that they then pull their grocery cart back and shove it back into you again and say apologize again, sucker. That's not the way that things actually often work.
And in particular, the more you think about it, the more you realize, look, is it possible that what I'm thinking of as unfair didn't seem unfair to that other person? What would a neutral observer think? Maybe I'm the one that's being hypersensitive rather than them being insensitive. These are all good questions to ask. And I say that in real life, in general, most people would be better off with more appeasement. You just think about people that
do not practice appeasements. Where are they? Heavily overrepresented? And I'll say, yeah, jail, they're not Easers are heavily represented. These are people who went pushed, pushed back. Sometimes it gets them what they want. But in the long run, they're doing 10 years in prison, right? They would have been way better off if they had been a lot less macho and it just went and said, oh, sorry, my mistake. Even if it were you, even if you might really think, well, it's
not really my mistake, but yes. And then yes, the same thing of course holds true for countries and in actual international relations, of course, countries again, appease each other all the time. Appeasement is basically the word that you throw out when you are determined not to appease and you want to pretend like it's always a good idea, rather than something where you've got to go and think hard about the
facts. On page 62, you say money has little effect on happiness, mentioning that you could have a great thing happen to you yet. Before long, however, hedonic adaptation kicks in. All right, so money has little effect on happiness. What does have a big effect on happiness? What can I do to increase the likelihood that I will experience happiness in my life? Yeah, the number one by far is spending more time with people
whose company you enjoy, right? So that means getting a romantic partner that works for you, getting friends that work for you, getting a job that works for you. Most people like their jobs, but the main thing they like about it is getting to work with the other people. There's some great stuff on what a what a big ticket lottery winners do. Most of them go back to their jobs after they go and have a spending spree.
And the main reason that they don't is just that their Co workers don't treat them the same anymore. Yes. So overwhelming importance is good human relations. That is the very top score. Something that it requires work but it's totally doable. Also I would start there again since I am an economist and I do think a lot about material wealth. A lot of the reason why money doesn't actually in the data have have very much effect on happiness that people are not
spending it in very good ways. There's a lot of people who go and put money down on things like a new car or granite countertop where we've got very good evidence that people very quickly get used to these things and stop enjoying them. On the other hand, they spend, they are a lot more a lot more a lot more reluctant to go and spend on things where they
clearly do make people happier. Things like paying for tolls to get out of congestion, paying ASL cleaning lady to go and do and clean your house so you don't have to, you know, so, you know, get avoiding drudgery, right? But also going back to human beings going and spending money doing things that you enjoy with the people's company you enjoy. So, I mean, I do know a few people actually like traveling
alone, but that is unusual. Most of the joy travel is you get to do it with a person whose company you enjoy. On page 66, you talk about the importance not of betting, but especially a person's betting record being an indication of their reputation when it comes to market actors and consumer well-being and employee well-being. What do you think is in the driver's seat for consumer well-being and employee well-being? Market reputation or state regulators?
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question, Keith. So there's basically 2 theories that I have seen. The free market advocates say the reason that we have good products and services, the reason we don't see 100% of people earning minimum wage is competition, reputation. Other people say it's OSHA and it's the New Deal policies. What is in the driver's seat when it comes to the wealth and great things we see today? Is it reputation? Something else? I get it.
All right. Yeah. So business reputation is overwhelmingly more important than anything that government does, obviously. And you don't have to be an ideologue, you don't have to have any philosophy. You don't have to go and study economics. Just look at your own first hand experience. How often in your entire life have you ever had a bad experience with a business and contacted a regular regulator about it? I don't care how progressive you are, the answer is probably 0.
How often have you ever filed a lawsuit again? Zero. How often have you, on the other hand, just gone and returned a product you didn't like? Yeah, everybody does that. How often have you gone and just complained to the business and said that it wasn't satisfactory? Yeah, everybody does that. And why does everybody do these things? Because they totally demonstrably work. And on the other hand, why not contact regulators and file lawsuits? Because that is a total Hail
Mary pass. It would be amazing if that got you anywhere, right? The truth is that businesses are hyper concerned about what their customers think and feel. And really all you need to do most of the time in order to get better treatment is to speak up. Does not mean that it is always great. The we all like we've all been on the consumer service, our customer support line for Verizon or something like that, like oh this is terrible. The reason why it registers as terrible is that the system
almost always works. And then every now and then there's some screwed up part where you are totally frustrated, right. So, but on the other hand, imagine if every time something went wrong, you called up the regulator. Then it wouldn't just be that you'd be frustrated two or three times a year, Then you'd be frustrated every time you had a problem because calling up regulators or filing lawsuits is just a terrible approach.
Normally I would say that in markets, if there is one part of the free market that isn't actually giving you good service, the solution is just to find a different pressure point and push there, right? So this summer I had a horrible hacking experience on Expedia. Expedia wasn't helpful. The airlines involved weren't helpful. But guess who was helpful? Can you guess, Keith? Yeah, gosh, I can't remember the name. I worked with these people. Would it have been Webroot?
No, no, no, no, no. So something much simpler. It was my credit card company. Oh, credit card company solved the problem for me. So Expedia wouldn't wouldn't go and refund my money. They wouldn't go and fix the horrible problem. The but I just we just went to, we didn't even have to call the credit card company actually just go to the website. We go and dispute the dispute, the relevant charges and we and the problem was just solved itself. That was it.
Very good. Thinking, and by the way, this is actually another way the reputation works. You probably know, but maybe you don't actually. So going and disputing a charge on your credit card is highly effective. Credit card companies almost always take your side even against a very large business. So like, that is your last line of defense, and it totally
works. Anytime you're worried, maybe you'll be taken advantage of. So for example, I remember like 27 years ago when I was moving down to Virginia, I was kind of concerned because I'd heard some horror stories about movers going and giving you a low price. And then once all the stuff is in the truck, they go and say, yeah, well, before we can actually bring it to your house, you're going to have to pay us another $700.00 or something anyway, but pay with credit card.
And then if that happens, what you should do is say, fine, I'll pay it. And then as soon as you got yourself back, then you instantly call the credit or contact the credit card company, go to the website and dispute the charge and say what they did and you almost certainly get your money back. Free market regulation. I love it. On page 99 you say you love education, yet you are very critical of the schooling system. Why is that?
Let me just back up. So I'm the kind of person who has just loved reading and ideas from the earliest age. I am a professor. The stuff gives great meaning to my life. And yet when school say that's what we do, that's why we're so great. That's why we deserve all kinds of support from government and philanthropists. This is where I really do have to roll my eyes, because like, what you are giving is just a hollow shell of actual curiosity, of actual love of
learning. What really goes on in almost all education is you've got a bunch of conscripts, the students who don't want to be there, who find it boring, listening to a teacher that is not actually exciting or motivating. And then often the material itself, it's like, all right, we're going to learn all the state capitals or whatever. It's like that's not something that's really important to learn. It's not something that would enrich my understanding of the
human experience. So what I say is education is great if it has all the right ingredients, if you got students that want to be there, professors who are masters of and passionate about their subject, and if the subject is actually something that really matters. I do add, of course, that there can be something that's very boring and the students are bored and the press are not exciting and it's worth teaching it because it's a saves lives or
it gets buildings built. There's a lot of stuff that's just practical and it's not very fun. Like, you know, like if I met someone who just said like, I'm just fascinated by plastics, like really all right. But like most people work in those industries or not, it's they provide a useful service and then the education is self justifying because it teaches people how to do a useful thing. But if you're doing it for its own sake, that's where I'd say
we need to have high quality. And regular school just has rock bottom quality. Even very top schools usually just suck. The only clear exception I know is the University of Chicago, where the students there I have seen with my own eyes. They are just crazy motivated and the faculty not perfect, but still unusually good.
And yeah, they do focus on bigger questions, but other than University of Chicago, I don't know of any real institution where they just have this great love of learning and curiosity. On page 68, you discuss the concept that there are widely accepted views today which were seen as insane a short time ago, and this could give us some optimism with regard to terrible
things that are happening today. If we'd like to radically change public opinion, what are some of the best examples you could think of of views that are widely accepted today, which in previous generations would have seen absolutely insane? Start with religious toleration. You can't have two religions in one country. They'll all kill each other, all right? And you got that one. You got general free speech. You can't just let people say what they want to say. It'll destroy society, right?
And then you obviously slavery, like, you can't just let them be free. Like, think about what will happen. So yeah, those are obvious ones. Could you imagine being in America in 1860 or something like and it's like 3.9 million people. Yeah, definitely freedom's better than slavery. Well, none of them have an education. What's going to happen? We have this wolf by the ears, so to speak. It would be a little scary.
I'm not justifying slavery or Jim Crow or anything that violates a non aggression principle, but you can see that there really are costs as well as benefits to these things. Yeah, I mean, someone who was really confident, workout great. I would say. It's like, why are you so confident? And someone who knew history would even say, yeah, you know what happened when the when when slavery was ended in Haiti, Genocide of the white
population, right. With the exception of like a few Poles, there were some Polish soldiers who fought with the Haitian revolutionary, so they got spared. But it really was a giant genocide. So like, doesn't it like not always does it work out, but still like it worked out way better than definitely. And for for the Haitian population, it didn't exactly turn into Singapore for the people. Who got their freedom? As well.
Yes. On page 72 you talk about examples of the masses today being verifiably wrong even though they have access to the Internet. You use an example with a gentleman who had a bet with his friend on the Wall Street Journal supporting open borders. Yes, thank you. What are some examples today of the masses are verifiably wrong about something? Wow. I mean, where do you even start? I mean, you could just do like, you know, crime rates. What's happening with crime rates?
Or you could do racial differences in crime rates. That's one where I think people would realize the direction, but just not the magnitude. So you'll have something like murder rates for blacks would be 7 or 8 times the white population. So that's just, you know, one random thing, you know, like, so you know, bigger issues like how much have living standards risen over the last century? How much richer have poor countries gotten in the last 30
years? So these are really obvious things that's and yet people are quite shocked by. Here's another one inspired by Alex Epstein's fossil Fossil future. Total number of deaths from adverse climate events over the last century. It's gone from being really high to basically 0 fact. On page one O 5 you discuss make work bias. What is that? Make work bias is evaluating the performance of an economy based upon employment rather than production. Very understandable during a
period of high employment. And yet if you step back, it's like, well, we could just create a bunch of jobs by having people dig ditches and fill them up again. That won't make us rich. And yes, make work bias is a standard argument for locking obsolete technologies and business models into place. You can see it definitely with protectionism where there's another country that just gotten better at doing something than your country. Well, let's go and save those jobs anyway.
Bunch of people who are producing little value. Let's just protect their jobs and make the rest of society go and pay so that they don't need to go and find something else to do. It's it is a very tempting idea and yet, when you think about it, a terrible one. What is the iron law of? I've only read this word, I've never said it out loud. What is the iron law of pedagogy? Yeah, Good. Yeah. So pedagogy or pedagogy? I think. I think I've heard it both ways,
as they say. OK, Yeah. So the iron law is a pedagogy, right? So iron law is a pedagogy. All right, first of all, students learn only a small fraction of what you teach. Anyone who's ever taught students knows this to be true. Like I've said this 10 times. How come you still don't know it? A lot of students don't know it. You know, next iron law of pedagogy, Students retain only a
small fraction what they learn. You go and look at what the students knew on the day of the exam and it's like, all right, I guess it's something. Come and ask them the same questions again in a few months, like they've forgotten it all. What the hell, right? And then the Third Point, students apply only a very small fraction of what they remember.
Even if a student learns it, even if they remember it when the rubber meets the road and they have an opportunity to apply it in the real world, they usually don't. You could use the Pythagorean theorem when you are figuring out measurements for your house, but most people will just go and do the measurements and will not use the Pythagorean theorem. And you say, wait, what's that Pythagorean theorem again? Oh, yeah, it's the C is equal to sqrt a ^2 + b ^2.
Well, you realize you were just doing a diagonal of a right angle, so you could have done that. And yeah, most people don't. And then I think you can add a fourth iron law to pedagogy, which is that most people are very, most people are very bad at applying, transferring the way, whatever knowledge that they can apply in a narrow case to any broader case. Right. And this is all just the way the world works.
If you teach students in MIT then you might not have to experience the bitterness of this so often, but if you just get down one step from the very best students in the world, then you will see it is really hard to teach anybody anything of any value. So if I just want to be the greatest economist of all time and I want to learn and then maybe teach myself, how would I go about learning such a thing?
And what advice would you want to give my teacher to make sure that I become the greatest economist of all time? Yeah, I mean, depending on where you are, but honestly, I always tell people start with textbooks they've got. There's a lot of screwed up stuff in textbooks, but still, it gives you a quick overview of the field and will get you thinking, if you have a critical mind at all, about what parts of the textbook are more and less compelling in terms of how the
teacher can go and help you. I mean, most of it is motivational. We're all to say, look, you've got to make it fun. Make it funny. Don't take yourself so seriously. Sell your field. Sell your field. Be like always be telling your students this is what economics illuminates in the real world. This is something from real life, something from your own experience that you will understand better as a result. Of course, most students, there's just no way of reaching them at all.
So hard truth. But this is how you do the best that you can. On page 111 I'm keeping an eye on the time. I know you got to go in 5 minutes. Page 111 you have an objection to egalitarianism focusing on grade merit verse income merit. Can you walk us through what egalitarianism is? Because I think it is straw manned a lot and what your
objection is to egalitarianism? Yeah, well, simple version of egalitarianism is if you're going to eat that candy, you have to share it equally with everyone. You bring it up for everyone. Everyone can get 130th of your chocolate bar or something like that. All right, so that's the simplest version. I would say. It's not a straw man to say that a lot of people just think that the more equal things are, the
better, no matter what. Right now, if you are something that is handing out grades and the question is, so should I just give the average grade to every student regardless of their work? You might say, well, this will give bad incentives or whatever. All right, so I suppose there are new incentives and just a matter of I could either give BS to everyone or I could give ACE to the students that know the material and CS to the ones that don't really know the material.
All right, what should I do then? And I say, look, I would just think it's wrong to go and give the same grades to people who know different amounts of stuff. I'd say the people that have learned the material have done well and they just, they have earned their As and they're entitled to them and it doesn't really matter what the consequences are. And on the other hand, the people that don't know the material, like they deserve those low grades, like they didn't learn it and so they do
not merit those higher grades. I'd say a lot of people are comfortable with this, but then it like even very left wing professors are not comfortable giving A's to students that never showed up. And then it's like, well, why don't we think about the economy in the same way? Like, it's just not right that someone that really produced a lot of value got would get paid the same amount of someone that
didn't. And never mind the incentive effect, which is also important, but even without the incentive effect, shouldn't someone that did better actually get the rewards? You can also think about this as like at the Olympics, should everybody get a medal, right? And you know, and furthermore, to say, well, you don't really deserve your gold medal cause your parents really helped you.
It's like, you know, it's true. My parents helped me and I couldn't have gotten here without my parents, but I'm still the fastest runner on earth. Give me my gold medal. I deserve it. Oh please don't give the world gold medal inflation. How can I differentiate between a good economist and a bad
economist? Well, there is the classic line from Henry Hazlett saying that a bad economist only thinks about the effects in the short run and only the immediate facts, whereas a good of an economist thinks about the more distant effects and the effects in the long run.
I think that's a pretty good way to start, although actually I think I would probably say it differently and rather say, look, a a good economist is one that scrupulously avoids social desirability bias, that makes a strong effort not to go and sugarcoat the truth, doesn't try to figure out a way to make the results socially acceptable, and instead just describes the world really bluntly as it is. You know, my view is most of the value additive economics is that it is the one social science
where there is a strong tradition of just speaking very candidly, no matter how offensive what we're saying is to the rest of the world. And that's why we make a lot more progress in understanding the human condition than other fields where they've got tools that are good, but they're just handcuffed by their own fear of offending other people.
So I have heard the line so many times since the debate that Americans are as divided as ever, as if there wasn't a civil war or the Kent State shootings of OK. So the point is, people think this is a really bad situation. We got on our hands. What is something you would say if you were the Martin Luther King Junior of today? What is a message you would give to Americans in hopes of unifying them in a positive way? That's common, that would lead
to peace? Because I'm afraid the only way they can unify us is war against China or war against Russia. Seems like the only thing we have in common is we fought those National Socialists together. So what is a message you would give to the masses to unify blacks, whites, men, women, Americans? This is going to sound crazy, but I'm just going to go back to the book before the one we're talking about.
Build, BB, build. Finally, here's the message that all that we need to talk about Let's deregulate housing. Housing is crazy expensive. Government strangled it, and if we would just go and deregulate housing, it would lead to massive economic growth, rising living standards, lower inequality, lower poverty, lower crime, more babies. Let's just put aside all these other arguments and just get together and take a flamethrower to the building code and the
land use regulation. That is what IA message that is totally constructive. And as I argue in Bill baby build, both liberals and conservatives, people of all ideological views who are at least a little reasonable should be able to agree on this. And it's a big project to go and get rid of height restrictions, multi family restrictions, minimum lot size, parking regulations, historic reservation regulations, just to get rid of all this stuff.
It's a massive project, would take a lot of time, and something that we could all do together for our own reasons, which from our own philosophical views makes sense. I don't think I could actually sell this, but in terms of an idea that deserves to be a common goal that we can agree on and without agreeing on the rationale, agree on the destination, I think housing deregulation is a great one.
Thank you to everyone for watching the Libertarian Institute and Keith Knight Don't tread on anyone. The book is self help is like a vaccine essays on better living. Find it exclusively at Amazon. Doctor Kaplan, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much and $12.00 for the paperback and 999 for the ebook. Despite tons of abide inflation, I have not raised the price. Worth every penny.