Pearl - June 19, 2024


Aaron Cleary on Economics and Thomas Sowell ｜ The Sitdown w⧸Pearl

Mentioned
Paul Krugman Joe Biden Peter Schiff Clark Medal Oprah
Paul Elam on FAMILY LAW ATTORNEYS & DIVORCE Coffee Thoughts： I am Moving to America, the Future of the Channel, and what’s coming next

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

190.26

Word count

1,901

Sentence count

52

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

16

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with economist and author Andrew Yang to talk about his views on economics. We talk about why economists are full of shit and why they should be ashamed of themselves. We also talk about how economists have been politicized into being part of a self-serving economic system.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And I've heard you say that economists are full of shit. 1.00
00:00:02.420 They're full of shit. 1.00
00:00:03.180 Okay, why? 1.00
00:00:04.120 Because it's not, it's like therapy, the psychology industry, all right?
00:00:10.940 Wait, economics is as bad as the psychology?
00:00:14.060 Yeah, it's efficacy is, I'm not saying there isn't things in economics or psychology or
00:00:19.280 any of the social sciences that doesn't have merit or worth.
00:00:22.980 It's not like there aren't things that are worth studying, but to treat it as a real
00:00:26.300 profession that has any kind of practical use or efficacy in the real world it's it's absolutely
00:00:32.380 horrible um for example if you look at psychologists should be ashamed of themselves today in the
00:00:38.140 united states i don't know about other countries because we're not getting healthier mentally
00:00:41.900 speaking people are more anti-depressants the self-deletion rate is going up all these metrics
00:00:47.020 are getting worse it's the same thing with economics we have higher debt to gdp ratios
00:00:52.220 lower labor force participation um let's see other there's like some inflation obviously
00:00:58.060 aren't economists just supposed to give like reports isn't that just advice yeah but you're
00:01:02.940 so you're yeah that's what they do you're supposed to be an advisor to the people who have the
00:01:07.100 levers of power in whatever institution whether it's a government or a bank i'll give you a classic
00:01:11.100 example if my first book is all about me trying to tell the bankers hey don't make that loan uh
00:01:19.420 Housing prices are overvalued.
00:01:21.740 The rents, price to rents, the cash flow of these properties don't rationalize the valuations and the amount that you're lending out on them.
00:01:30.840 And then they should follow that advice, but they don't.
00:01:34.860 And so that's in banking, where it's more so, I would say, academia and the government, where they fail, where you are to inform the government that you just can't print off money.
00:01:45.960 It's so ridiculously simple.
00:01:47.880 you go in but a lot of the economists now are and have been politicized themselves where they're no
00:01:53.840 longer coming in like stop printing off money they're like they come up with a way well you
00:01:58.580 can actually print off more money and you can lower the reserve requirement ratio and you could 0.98
00:02:02.260 do all these things but it won't trigger inflation because literally pulled it out of my ass theory 0.91
00:02:08.680 explanation or rationalization okay that's what happens sometimes where i'll talk to someone 0.93
00:02:13.580 that's like i can tell they're smart yeah but their theory doesn't make sense right but like
00:02:20.380 because i was an economics major and even like i can't even remember so long ago but i remember
00:02:26.020 them explaining to me why they could keep printing off money in school it i'm not like
00:02:33.600 and i was like that doesn't really make sense but i guess i'll take it and that that's why
00:02:39.160 More or less, I would say today, the economics profession is horrendously corrupt and ineffectual. 0.73
00:02:46.260 It's pointless. 0.94
00:02:47.180 Got it.
00:02:47.920 I mean, what's his name?
00:02:49.300 Paul Krugman, who's a Clark Medal winner, which is like the most prestigious economics award you can get.
00:02:55.440 He was like, oh, yeah, you can print off money.
00:02:57.380 And then I think two, three years ago, he was shocked about all the inflation.
00:03:01.280 It's like, dude, if you can't.
00:03:03.760 But how do they get in these high up positions?
00:03:05.480 You, you, you give the people in power, for example, let's go back to banking.
00:03:11.180 If I told them what they wanted to hear, then they could continue lending money.
00:03:16.280 And because of their economic, uh, their, their compensation package rather is based
00:03:20.380 on sales and volumes, not whether you're actually paid back.
00:03:23.900 Now I'm greasing the skids for them, making it easier for them, uh, giving them the rationalization
00:03:29.400 for them to do what they want to do.
00:03:31.020 It comes to do the same thing with politicians.
00:03:32.700 a politician might say well geez won't that cause inflation or don't we have to increase taxes and
00:03:39.420 if if you're um a snake of an economist you can no no no there's a special magic economic theory
00:03:46.020 and it'll totally work and you can have your cake and eat it too and like okay and then they'll cite
00:03:51.040 well all the social sciences here's a study that shows this here's some research that shows that
00:03:56.500 and like this research shows that you can bang yourself in the toe with a sledgehammer and not
00:04:01.600 feel any pain. And people are like, oh, my God, I can pay. And they all see it's peer reviewed.
00:04:06.640 It's like this. None of it means anything anymore because it's all a self-serving kind of
00:04:11.700 rationalization, particularly in the domain of government academia.
00:04:15.400 OK, so how do you know the difference between an economist who's being honest and an economist
00:04:19.760 who's not? It's it because the economist who's being honest is going to give you advice you
00:04:24.700 don't want to hear. An economist that is lying is like Oprah. You want to hear it.
00:04:28.660 You're big is anything that sounds great. We could print off more money. It's not going to be any inflation. It's not your fault. You're unemployed. It's the patriarchy or pick whatever group. Any degree is a good degree. I can major in fluffy bunny studies and get, you know, a quarter million dollar a year job. Of course you can. If you don't, it's Trump's fault.
00:04:48.940 anything nothing productive or good in any system right comes from less effort
00:04:58.520 everything that is good comes from work and pain and sacrifice or cost we just call it cost right
00:05:05.400 either physical labor time money intellectual rigor you have to sit down and think or study
00:05:11.860 and research your car doesn't fix itself you have to get under there bust a knuckle and get dirty
00:05:18.100 and so anyone who tells you in anything whether it's economics or not if it sounds good chances
00:05:24.140 are it's not true if it sounds well you know losing weight how you lose weight you work out
00:05:29.280 more and you eat less right that's it and that's the truth and it's the same thing with economics
00:05:34.380 or any other field i'd imagine do you think they're all in on it like do you think they all
00:05:38.620 know or do they i think both i think some people actually believe their own farts i think they
00:05:44.480 actually you know like oh because they they were academians they've never tried to practically put
00:05:48.580 into the real world uh joe biden kind of in a bubble they are very much in a bubble they actually
00:05:53.780 believe their own stuff um biden has never worked a real job in his life he has never been outside
00:05:59.120 of politics he's he's just he was he's been in office longer than i've been alive yeah and this
00:06:06.660 guy is leading the freaking cut so i could see people like that who come from genuinely privileged
00:06:12.300 backgrounds never had to work um and then you have like a perfect example would be his wife 0.99
00:06:18.080 joel biden she has a doctor in education that's not a real thing that's not a that's not a real
00:06:23.480 you know you're not a doctor you're a make-believe play school playmate doctor refused to date 1.00
00:06:28.480 education majors yeah they're too stupid yeah no and they are if you look at the iq you rank by iq 1.00
00:06:34.420 early childhood education majors have the lowest iq up top is astrophysicists and economists i might 1.00
00:06:40.680 but um yes i do believe these people a fair amount of them believe their own shit uh and then others 0.59
00:06:47.740 i think paul krugman is one of them he's too smart uh having read his stuff a long time ago 0.98
00:06:53.680 oh who's that he's uh probably the most famous boomer economist um now thomas solwell is taken
00:06:59.920 over because he is he is he is awesome he is that's my other him and you are like the two
00:07:06.860 my two favorite books like one's from you and one's from him i wish i just would like to meet
00:07:11.200 the man before he passes but um paul krugman i think he knows he's too smart the way he writes
00:07:19.080 in his research i'm like do i see what you did there like it's conscious he knows what he's
00:07:22.980 doing yeah he is making a ton of money telling people in the new york times or whatever 0.99
00:07:27.540 advisory or politician he's making a lot of money so i i don't think he believes his own shit so 0.90
00:07:33.860 So you predicted 2007, 2008 crash, and there was a bunch of economists that also predicted it. 0.98
00:07:39.700 Yeah, it wasn't just you.
00:07:40.700 Yeah, it was, it was, there was Peter Schiff.
00:07:44.440 I mean, we're going to go back 15, 16 years.
00:07:46.380 There were other people out there who were, even The Economist, the publication was worrying about price to rents and some other indicators.
00:07:55.440 So it wasn't, it wasn't like just me.
00:07:58.640 There were thousands of people, so it just wasn't popular to point out.
00:08:02.060 because once you point it was the same thing with the dot-com bubble which probably predates uh
00:08:07.300 that was the late 90s where if you told someone yeah these companies that don't make no money
00:08:13.380 i don't know how their stock prices keep going up you need to make money for that to happen
00:08:18.020 there's gonna be an influencer bubble there's um because i'll meet people that like make so much
00:08:25.740 money off of just doing nothing and i mean there's people that are legit but there's people that
00:08:31.980 just like off of snapchat making thousands and thousands of dollars a day and i'm like this can't
00:08:37.080 go on forever there has to be some catch yeah i don't know if there'd be an economic way to
00:08:41.800 analyze i'm sure there always is but i think that's just good times don't last forever save
00:08:46.620 your money yeah like i have not been pissing away my money for the past 15 years i'm like what i get
00:08:51.700 paid to yell on the internet like okay we're saving this ain't gonna last forever and surprisingly
00:08:57.140 this lasted a long time but yeah all good things come to an end predicting it i i wouldn't know but
00:09:02.400 all would take us another adpocalypse from youtube or a great demonetization uh spree um i i could
00:09:10.620 see it happening there's been a piece of me that's wanted to look at what is the up because it's all
00:09:15.500 based on advertising what is the possible upper limit like what percent of our gdpr economy
00:09:19.940 is going to be youtube advertisements you know how many people you could kind of see it already
00:09:24.900 in only fans where it's very asymptotic um the top one or two percent make nearly all the money
00:09:31.220 in the bottom 98 don't so i i'm thinking if that money from advertising starts to shrink yeah you
00:09:39.740 could you could have a collapse uh and certainly if people spend their money and borrow money
00:09:45.020 and thinking the good times are going oh i'm making two you know two million a year for the
00:09:49.160 rest of my life like no man save your money don't don't buy boats don't don't get fancy cars yeah
00:09:54.440 Just save your money, and then if it goes away, you can be retired for the rest of your life.