The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Should Education Be Decentralised？｜ Interview with Dr. Erik Lidström

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this interview. I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Erik Lidstrom, the author of Education Unchanged, and we spoke about several matters such as evolutionary psychology, the knowledge problem, and the pitfalls of centralizing education. Please enjoy.

00:00:16.980 Right. So first of all, let me just start by asking you, what's going on in Sweden at the moment? Because we are listening to news that say that there are several bombings in the country.

00:00:30.300 It's not good. At the moment, I don't see any hope for improvements either. It's sort of the perfect storm.

00:00:43.440 As you may know, there's a bombing a day and there's people being shot here and there. And it's a combination of, I would say, the world's silliest legal system introduced in the 1960s.

00:01:03.040 So if you murder someone when you're 17 or 15 or so, then you get at maximum four years of closed youth care that might not even be an enclosed prison for you because you're a child.

00:01:23.700 You have to, it's an illness to commit a crime. So you have to be, you have to be, you have to be, people have to be nice to you and then you'll be good again because you're only a child.

00:01:36.100 If you're under 15, nothing at all happens basically. And so a crime here, a brutal rape could give you two years of that compared to 30 years in prison in France.

00:01:48.320 That's the, and that was introduced in the 60s. And then we have the welfare state so that people are, if they have lots of children and don't work, they get essentially more money than if they, they worked.

00:02:03.240 And then mass migration, mass immigration. And you combine those, then, then you get, you get what you get.

00:02:14.560 Yeah.

00:02:15.080 It looks like this is basically late stage statism where people are incentivized to not work. And those who do work are disrespected because they are somehow forced in order to procure welfare for those who are unproductive and sometimes downright.

00:02:34.560 In a sense, in a sense. But if you compare it to France, France, the French have a rather cynical view of human nature. They, they don't trust people. 0.52

00:02:45.720 Whilst in Sweden, the official dogma is that everyone is nice, basically. And you can't be harsh, too harsh on them.

00:02:54.280 After all, and I use square quotes, they are small brown people. And then they are treated like children, even though they are mass murderers. 1.00

00:03:04.640 I'm not going to lie. I remember some years ago, I was reading a newspaper about Scandinavia and prisons, especially. And they were showing prisons in Scandinavia. And they showed the images that would remind people of really luxurious hotels.

00:03:22.260 Exactly.

00:03:23.260 And they were essentially saying that. So, so that wasn't an exaggeration.

00:03:27.260 That wasn't.

00:03:28.260 No, no, the prison from this article from 2014. Sweden had the most expensive prisons in Europe per prisoner, except for San Marino. But San Marino only had one prisoner six. So it's a six times the average in Sweden.

00:03:44.260 In Sweden. And we have extremely low incarceration rate. And if you look at data from 2004, I think it was, you have, we have three times the criminality of the United States, for example.

00:03:59.260 But, and now after that, a million, million and a half immigrants have arrived from culturally incompatible nations, to a large degree.

00:04:11.260 Do you think that there are any reasons to be optimistic at the moment about Scandinavia and Sweden in particular?

00:04:18.260 I think you can be optimistic about Denmark and Finland. Finland, the Finns don't go for this being nice to people approach. And the Danes have really woken up.

00:04:32.260 In Sweden, there is, it's hopeless at the moment. There is no party in parliament that can do anything about it. And there's no party that can get into parliament either.

00:04:45.260 I've heard you discuss on the Lotus Eater's proportional representation. But the most right wing you get then is Sunak, I would say. Mainly you have 80% Lib Dems and Labour. That's what you get in parliament. And no one else can get into.

00:05:06.260 So the question to ask there is what has to happen for people of that persuasion to, in a sense, wake up.

00:05:15.260 How more tragic events must happen for people to stop being so, let's say, ridiculously charitable about this?

00:05:27.260 I mean, it's, it reminds me of Trump derangement syndrome, that people are, even though all the information in the world is available today, we have the internet, you can get to all the sources, you can watch any person live or what they said in an interview or read about them. But people don't.

00:05:54.260 So, you have, you're supposed to have multiculturalism in Sweden. But it's like in Britain, you have enclaves of people living, they, and they, they, they live sort of back to back to each other, they don't interact.

00:06:12.260 Maybe those who work, you see them as bus drivers and nurses and so on and so forth. But people don't socialize after work. There's no reason for it. And I mean, there is this mathematical formula, I think, Schelling's law of segregation. I don't know if you've heard of that.

00:06:35.260 No, I will, if you don't mind, I'll type it. You said Schelling, I think S-C-H, Schelling. But basically, it says that you get segregation, even though you don't need to have racism or hatred for each other.

00:06:55.260 It's just that you have a bit of friction, sort of people don't get along. It's maybe their kids are too loud, or it doesn't smell right, they're cooking or something like that.

00:07:04.140 So people, one person after another, when they move, because people move, they move to an area where they feel more comfortable.

00:07:14.220 So even though there is no serious animosity, you get segregation.

00:07:20.700 So you get islands in Britain, Pakistanis here, you get Somalis, and you get Sunni Arabs in one area, and so on and so forth.

00:07:32.080 And they don't interact.

00:07:35.780 So the people, those in power, it's like in Britain, I would say, those in power are a bit wealthier, they live in nice neighborhoods, they are not affected.

00:07:46.800 So why would they care?

00:07:49.660 Do you think that sometimes it's not just an issue of not being personally affected, but also an issue of ideology?

00:07:56.540 And that is important here.

00:07:58.480 I'll just give you an example that happened hours ago.

00:08:01.480 Now, this interview is going to be uploaded in a few weeks from now.

00:08:07.440 But today we had the tragic incident in Germany, in Munich, where an Afghan asylum seeker literally drove a car into a group of leftists.

00:08:18.300 I think they're called the Verdi organization.

00:08:20.700 And they instantly made an announcement that we're not going to talk, we don't want to give any room to far-right racism.

00:08:30.660 A car literally injured their arm?

00:08:33.340 And there is a people's self-perception is very important, and their beliefs are very important.

00:08:42.040 And they usually are protected from intrusion.

00:08:47.240 I remember, I can't find the article, but 9-11, after 9-11, people came together in the United States.

00:08:57.040 It was a terrible tragedy.

00:08:58.600 But it took six months, nine months, before George Bush was the devil again, and corrupt, and so on and so forth, according to the media.

00:09:09.520 As long as people don't basically don't get their house bombed, they don't shift opinions.

00:09:20.400 So it's tragic.

00:09:24.020 And would you say that this suggests that there is a more or less fixed human nature that the sort of narrative that destroys Europe and the West at the moment is trying to tell us does not exist?

00:09:39.520 In other words, would you say, for instance, that the law of segregation that you mentioned is something that is supposed to be an inevitable outcome of human interaction?

00:09:50.720 I would say, yeah, sort of formulate my thoughts.

00:09:58.140 Because I think this Thomas Sowell's vision of the anointed, the anointed class, I think Deirdre McCloskey calls them the clerisy.

00:10:09.760 They form a tribe of their own, which is close to the outside, and they're happy.

00:10:16.680 They go to the same dinner parties, and they speak to the same people, read the same newspapers in Britain.

00:10:22.540 They watch the BBC, and they're happy.

00:10:24.380 They see a world that is okay.

00:10:28.540 No problem here.

00:10:29.820 I think we have the same in the UK, the same in Greece, and I think it's the same in every other Western country.

00:10:39.300 Yeah.

00:10:40.100 It's exactly the class you just said, as Thomas Sowell described them as the anointed.

00:10:46.040 I think they have lost any kind of sentiment that is patriotic.

00:10:54.640 They will say that they are patriots, but they do not understand patriotism as I would say it's traditionally understood.

00:11:00.780 They seem to me to be very much viewing themselves as the enlightened ones.

00:11:10.760 There is a, if I remember, intellectuals in society, if you read that book by Thomas Sowell, he talks about French intellectuals.

00:11:20.300 And they were in the 1930s.

00:11:22.200 They had survived the horrors of the First World War, and now they were citizens of the world.

00:11:27.300 And they didn't want militarism and so on and so forth.

00:11:33.120 And then France got invaded.

00:11:35.920 And as he says, much to their credit, lots of them died in the resistance afterwards.

00:11:41.380 But then they flipped, and that flipped their worldview.

00:11:46.640 Peace damaged is a Swedish expression from 200 years of no wars in Sweden.

00:11:57.540 But it's less than that, I would say.

00:12:00.440 It's from 1970 that things turned really ugly here.

00:12:05.120 So you would say that ever since the 70s, Sweden has been very much a welfarist, and that's the main reason of the situation we see today?

00:12:19.600 Well, what happened was that, well, it's a 20th century history.

00:12:25.720 1914, there were big demonstrations against the militarization and so on and so forth.

00:12:31.720 And suddenly, soon after, the First World War came.

00:12:36.300 And then in the middle of 1917, I think Sweden could mobilize 600,000 well-trained soldiers.

00:12:43.000 And there was a competition for a while between the Entente and the Central Powers.

00:12:49.080 And they wanted Sweden to join, because 600,000 men were important.

00:12:54.280 And then came the eternal peace in 1918.

00:13:00.080 And Sweden closed down half the defense in 1925 and continued demobilizing.

00:13:06.000 So in 1936, it was decided to increase defense spending to 1.5% of GDP.

00:13:15.780 And if I calculate correctly, in 1940, it went to 21%.

00:13:19.580 And then it stayed about 20% during the whole war.

00:13:23.780 So the class of politicians that were caught with their trousers down in 1940, really, when Denmark and Norway were occupied,

00:13:32.040 they were in power until about 1970.

00:13:36.340 Then they retired.

00:13:37.480 And then there was a new era of perpetual peace that, well, that a lot of politicians thought they were living in.

00:13:49.080 And that's where we are now.

00:13:50.620 So I regularly see several socialist or socialist-leaning people who upload articles about Scandinavian.

00:14:02.700 They say that the Scandinavian countries are the model of social democrat countries and that they are the happiest countries to be alive.

00:14:12.980 Now, generally speaking, I'm not a doomer and I don't want to advocate gloom or something.

00:14:19.180 But would you say that this is far-fetched and that this is a sort of narrative that they are communicating in order to hide the sad realities that exist?

00:14:30.140 I don't think they're hiding anything.

00:14:35.700 I mean, Sweden was an extremely homogenous country.

00:14:40.300 Okay.

00:14:41.520 Where people...

00:14:44.720 And very conformist.

00:14:47.620 Until 1850 in Sweden, most people lived in small villages where everyone knew everyone else and knew what they were doing.

00:14:54.840 So people don't want to speak out and they stick to themselves.

00:14:58.820 So it's, I would say, very hard to get to know Swedes, to get integrated in Sweden for a foreigner.

00:15:06.320 So Swedes are not... 1.00

00:15:07.480 And then we live in a corner of the world.

00:15:09.740 We are not used to foreigners. 1.00

00:15:11.520 I mean, you are Greek.

00:15:12.820 You know that the Turks are different. 0.98

00:15:15.360 The Bulgarians are different. 1.00

00:15:17.340 The former Yugoslavians are different.

00:15:20.760 They have...

00:15:22.500 And Swedes think that everyone is the same.

00:15:25.040 And the dream of everyone is to become a Swede.

00:15:30.460 That is actual...

00:15:32.500 I would say a majority opinion in Sweden that as soon as people arrive in Sweden, they see how great we are.

00:15:38.800 And they didn't want to become Swedish.

00:15:41.400 It sounds silly to someone from the middle of Central Europe.

00:15:46.140 But that's a common opinion here.

00:15:49.320 I think that this is an opinion that I have heard from several countries.

00:15:56.680 And I do think that this is...

00:16:00.140 It's not particularly surprising for me to hear it.

00:16:03.080 But I understand it.

00:16:04.660 So I wanted to ask you about your...

00:16:09.620 I want us to set up the context that will make your insights a bit more intelligible to our audience.

00:16:18.900 Because I think that you are largely operating within a tradition that I would refer to as classical liberal.

00:16:28.140 Is that correct?

00:16:29.700 That's correct.

00:16:30.140 I think it's sort of...

00:16:31.900 You are writing a book about it.

00:16:34.660 Which I have read.

00:16:36.000 And I thought it was really good.

00:16:39.400 And so one of the problems with classical liberalism is that in today's world, a lot of...

00:16:47.280 And actually, I think that this is from the last decades.

00:16:50.120 That in some cases, there are several good defenses of it that seem a bit counterintuitive.

00:16:58.500 And that a lot of people, when they come across several implications of the theory or in several, let's say, areas such as education,

00:17:13.320 their knee-jerk reaction is to say, okay, well, this is all nonsense.

00:17:18.080 It goes against what my intuition says.

00:17:22.500 So I'm going to just reject it.

00:17:24.600 But it seems to me that there is far more into the tradition.

00:17:28.480 And you are actually making a very good job at describing this about in your books.

00:17:35.940 And you're referring to anthropology and also to evolutionary psychology.

00:17:40.820 And you also mentioned that they are very much influenced by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the ideas of David Hume and Adam Smith and people who follow that tradition, such as Hayek and Sowell in the 20th century.

00:17:58.700 So I think the best way to start is to talk about these theories and then talk about the knowledge problem, which I think forms the, let's say, the cornerstone of the argument of your book.

00:18:13.020 And then start going to more specific areas about education and educational reform and what you think the government does particularly bad when it comes to education.

00:18:26.860 So what do you think are the basic insights you are drawing from anthropology and evolutionary psychology?

00:18:39.600 Well, first of all, that we are a biological being.

00:18:43.080 We have human nature.

00:18:46.740 And it might appear as we have culture.

00:18:50.100 Our human nature is moderated, modulated by culture.

00:18:55.360 And we get the impression that culture is infinitely malleable.

00:19:02.180 And that's a common opinion.

00:19:04.580 But it operates within strict bounds.

00:19:08.720 And cultures are sort of varieties of, on a theme, you could say.

00:19:16.000 So the basics don't differ.

00:19:18.960 It's the details that differ.

00:19:24.240 And...

00:19:25.360 Our intellect is designed also to pick up on differences.

00:19:36.040 So we forget about it.

00:19:38.120 One of the strongest indicators of someone is foreign is an accent, which you can't fake.

00:19:45.240 And probably fashion is also a way of distinguishing people, groups from each other.

00:19:51.860 So we think that we see infinite variety, whilst at the same time we have a language that is designed to evolve away from other groups, so that we have our own lingo, and so on and so forth.

00:20:03.860 And so, any study of human behavior should really, if it's possible, we should ground it in evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology.

00:20:17.240 That's, I think that's, I think that's, that should be the base, base assumption.

00:20:23.580 And then, but then there are things that are different in the book.

00:20:31.860 I don't know if you've read anything about what I sent you.

00:20:34.060 But there is also, we live in a different world today.

00:20:39.980 We live in what Abdon Smith called the great society, which is a complex adaptive system where people interact with people they don't know.

00:20:50.980 And there's a quote by, I have a jar of diamonds said that with the rise of, if I remember correctly, with agricultural societies 8,500 years ago, for the first time in history, we had to meet foreign people without trying to kill them, which was the default for 2 million years of human existence. 0.76

00:21:14.060 So, it's, our world is very strange, and our gut reactions to certain problems are not, not what they should be in the, in the market economy.

00:21:29.580 Let's put it that way.

00:21:30.900 They're unreliable, you mean?

00:21:33.280 I mean that we can accept that we can trade, buy and sell things when it comes to bicycles or cameras or computers and so on.

00:21:41.980 But as soon as we come to human beings, and especially vulnerable human beings, we have an obligation, a tribal obligation to help those in need.

00:21:55.120 So, on the one hand, people will want to pitch in.

00:21:58.760 On the other hand, they want everyone to do something about it.

00:22:02.300 So, then we get, the worst performing areas of human society are probably healthcare, care for the elderly, other vulnerable people.

00:22:14.300 With regard to education, we also have a deep desire for social conformity.

00:22:21.840 And that's what I'm arguing in the book, that to a large degree, education has become a tribal ritual that you have to go through.

00:22:33.040 People have to go to school.

00:22:35.800 And I try to argue, you need to get an education, and school is just a tool.

00:22:40.880 But since it has become such a ritual, like initiation rite in tribes, it's, if you don't go to school, you're sort of, you're tainted.

00:22:53.700 You can't be trusted.

00:22:55.920 And that's a serious issue for understanding the problem of education correctly.

00:23:02.980 I don't know if I make myself understood clearly, because it's a very complicated area.

00:23:09.380 Yes, I think it's good if we take each of these insights into isolation, because I think that they're really rich, and I want our audience to appreciate it.

00:23:22.380 So, we have so many years of evolution, so many two million years, as you mentioned.

00:23:30.660 And for the most part of that, we are sort of habituated by being, by the universe, into living in hunter-gatherer societies.

00:23:43.500 Yeah.

00:23:44.720 And of a really small number.

00:23:50.660 Yeah, about, the average of a human-gatherer tribe is about 500.

00:23:56.020 Right.

00:23:56.440 That's the whole country.

00:23:57.400 So, this is what two million years of evolution have prepared us for?

00:24:04.300 More than two.

00:24:05.100 I mean, it's basically hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

00:24:09.840 Yes.

00:24:10.000 Because we also had the baggage, when we came in to becoming hunter-gatherers, we had a history that had to be taken into account.

00:24:19.000 Yeah, that's a fair point.

00:24:21.100 Thanks for the correction.

00:24:22.100 So, and suddenly, with, you would say, ingenuity and technology, the world has been transformed much faster than our nature has been allowed to adapt to it.

00:24:35.760 Is that a good way of putting it?

00:24:39.200 Sort of.

00:24:40.100 I think what I see in philosophy, which I think in many ways is very much different to evolutionary psychology, we do see a kind of clash between what is called our habitual nature and our rational nature.

00:25:01.340 Yeah.

00:25:02.340 And I would say even an ultra-rationalist like Leibniz would say that three-quarters of us are habitual.

00:25:12.240 Hmm.

00:25:12.340 So, he wasn't someone who would say, well, if reason tells us something should be done, it can be immediately done, and there is no bad implication that it may come out of it.

00:25:27.180 So, I think that this is something that, actually, we may be a bit more habitual, as you may be implying, I think, and that we have been habituated so much into conditions, but for millions of years, that now have changed rapidly.

00:25:46.740 And they also seem to change rapidly, even in the last 10,000 years.

00:25:55.480 Sort of.

00:25:55.960 Is that the issue?

00:25:57.220 That we sort of, there's an evolutionary lag.

00:26:00.560 There are certain things like the internet and social media and so on that are really, truly novel phenomena, I think you could say.

00:26:11.820 But technology as such, making a stone axe or a fishing net or a cathedral, they are not that different.

00:26:23.680 What is different is that we interact in the market with people we don't know.

00:26:28.880 And our prosperity requires that we set aside our intuitive desires and just treat certain aspects as just like things, just like money.

00:26:46.660 And that's possible when it comes to hard objects, but it's not possible when it comes to people.

00:26:52.460 So, if you want good health care, government should not be involved.

00:27:00.800 We should let people interact freely between themselves.

00:27:04.720 But our instincts tell us that we must do something together and that it is sinful and it's really despicable to charge money from a patient, for example.

00:27:17.820 Because that is your obligation is to help them.

00:27:22.900 But if you try to do that, the whole market economy breaks down.

00:27:27.300 It works for 20 people, but it doesn't work for 50 million.

00:27:33.340 That's the key issue.

00:27:35.500 And I think it's Benjamin Constant, I think Hayek quotes him and says that classical liberalism is an ideology of principle.

00:27:48.000 There are principle rules that we must follow.

00:27:50.980 And even though they sound counterintuitive or bad, it's like the rule of law.

00:27:58.480 If everyone follows these rules all the time, the overall picture will be prosperity.

00:28:07.300 But in each instance, we might say that I would like to make a slight deviation here and make an exception and so on and so forth.

00:28:15.320 And then everything breaks down.

00:28:16.560 So I think one of the implications from this view is that there are several moral views that are particularly opposed to the kind of distinct layers of society that, for instance, human Smith are talking about.

00:28:40.900 That may, that lead to deviations from this.

00:28:46.480 And let me, let me rephrase it because I expressed this in a very abstract way.

00:28:50.840 As you said, Smith said, we're living in great society.

00:28:57.360 And I think that he wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which I think is a very important book to understand before someone reads The Wealth of Nations.

00:29:06.440 Yeah.

00:29:06.920 And it forms the backdrop of his theory.

00:29:10.240 And he says that on the one hand, we live on a neighborhood level with our friends and neighbors.

00:29:17.320 And on the other hand, we're citizens of an extended order, citizens of great society.

00:29:23.880 And our moral sentiments are mostly attached into our day-to-day interaction, human interactions at the neighborhood level.

00:29:36.920 But we shouldn't think of it like that when it comes to society as an extended order.

00:29:42.380 And let me just give an example that I can think about is it's policing.

00:29:48.620 In a small neighborhood, everyone knows each other.

00:29:52.380 So, it's very difficult for the police to actually do the work because it's not impersonal.

00:30:02.480 It's not the officer who is arresting the criminal.

00:30:06.380 No, it's John, the son of Matthew and Helen, who is arresting Pete, the son of, let's say, Josh and Samantha.

00:30:20.520 Let me just give names.

00:30:21.440 And that's likely to cause feuds and cause vendettas.

00:30:26.860 And there are all sorts of problems that can be solved by more impersonal institutions when we are talking about distinct neighborhoods that must coexist together under a common umbrella.

00:30:41.300 Do you think that this is sort of a way of shooting?

00:30:44.600 Yeah, I think this is an area where we solve the problem or we solve the problem as far as it could be solved by, if you read Homicide by Mark Wilson and Daly, for example.

00:31:01.220 It's a book on abortion psychology, but it's also Stephen Pinkett's book on the better angels of our future talks about this.

00:31:12.840 But there is a distinct problem in how to gather a society in that you are often faced with this problem that you need to get justice, but you have to sort it out yourself.

00:31:29.440 And that can require revenge killings that go on, feuds that go on forever.

00:31:36.880 And it is in Papua New Guinea, they say when the Australians came in there and finally put an end to it, they were delighted because suddenly you could go out in the morning out of the hut and go and have a pee. 0.97

00:31:57.860 Without fearing having an arrow through your body as soon as you stepped out of your hut, which was the standard, what they were living in for millions of years, tens of thousands of years.

00:32:09.760 So that part of it, that part of it, that the king's peace has externalized, because if there's an obligation, the whole society, the whole clan has to get together to try to kill someone else to get justice.

00:32:27.940 And this is hazardous, and this is hazardous, and if you can find a third party that can be trusted to deal with this, that's fine.

00:32:38.260 And with regard to policing, that part wasn't, that was also solved before.

00:32:46.800 The police was a local guy, or the police was everyone who dealt with this.

00:32:52.280 And they had the justice of the peace, who was an impartial third party.

00:32:59.100 So that part worked.

00:33:01.720 Where it doesn't work is when you nationalize the police.

00:33:05.880 And the policemen, they are, it's in Sweden, as it is in Britain, I think that you have the Scotland Yard, you have the national police in Sweden.

00:33:16.220 And they are not detached locally, and they are torn between, they have a few friends who are subject to crime, and then they have these, well, left-wing policies that you should be nice to the criminal, because really, they are the sufferers, and so and so.

00:33:35.820 So the whole thing breaks down, because, you know, the policing was local before.

00:33:40.900 Right, so I think we need to talk about the knowledge problem here, because I think it's something that is derived precisely from these considerations that we have mentioned right now, and is really important, not just for education, but also for the market, for basically everything.

00:34:04.920 So how would you describe the knowledge problem in, say, a simple way?

00:34:14.320 The issue is that we all know different things, and everyone knows different things, everyone has different wants and desires, and we don't know what others don't know, and we don't know what we know ourselves even.

00:34:32.520 You can't describe to yourself even how to ride a bicycle, and there's many things that we do that we only discover we can do when we have to do them, and other people know other things.

00:34:46.440 So knowledge is distributed in all of society, between millions of millions of people, and the amazing thing, what Hayek pointed out, or formalized, I think Edmund Burke essentially talks about the same thing in an essay, is that the signaling system in a market economy is money, prices.

00:35:09.160 Yeah, and that's, as he says, is such an astonishing thing, that it would, if someone had invented it, it would have been sort of noble price worth it 10 times over.

00:35:20.980 Everything is collapsed into a number, and that sounds cynical, but you can decide, if you have, say, 100 tons of iron, what should you do with the iron?

00:35:33.140 In the Soviet Union, they had no prices, so they didn't know.

00:35:38.260 So should you make nails? 0.95

00:35:39.580 Should you make railroad tracks?

00:35:41.320 Should you make screws? 0.81

00:35:43.000 Should you do, what is the purpose?

00:35:45.840 What should you do with this?

00:35:47.140 And the price tells you what you can do with it, and cannot do with it.

00:35:52.540 And so it is for millions of things.

00:35:58.300 I think, I can't remember the book from the top of my head now, Company of Strangers, it's called.

00:36:06.100 In New York alone, there are 10 billion stock-keeping units in the city.

00:36:12.280 There are things that can change price from one day to the next, from one hour to the next, and everything is coordinated that way, without anyone having to organize a society.

00:36:27.920 It's like a spontaneous order.

00:36:30.060 A spontaneous order.

00:36:31.320 But I read about, a professor said that this paper, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which Hayek published in 1945, he said he re-read it once a year, and he thought he discovered new things every time.

00:36:46.940 Because it's 10 pages, and it's mind-blowing when you get it.

00:36:52.320 And it's counterintuitive.

00:36:54.180 You don't understand how can something, how can you measure something by money?

00:36:58.120 Yeah, but it's, it's, it's a light by which we see in a large society.

00:37:04.500 That's the important thing.

00:37:07.800 Would you say that this is directly relevant also to the debate about economic calculation that the Austrians had in the 20s?

00:37:18.140 But was it Mises and Hilferding?

00:37:20.940 Well, von Mises, he said, he said in 1920, I think, in the paper, which for some reason, he was a major in the First World War, and somehow he managed to write things anyway.

00:37:33.980 He published this, and he pointed out that Marx had talked about the state going away, and everyone would share equally, and so on and so forth.

00:37:43.360 There would be no capitalism.

00:37:45.740 And he pointed out that then you can't, you can't make economic calculations, because the only prices are decided in the market, and exactly, it's exactly this thing.

00:37:57.260 And then other, a few other economists, socialist economists, they tried to work around that problem in the 1930s.

00:38:07.140 And Hayek wrote three papers on it, and did the big smackdown.

00:38:12.740 And he used his theory of knowledge being distributed as the basis for it, whilst von Mises used prices a bit cruder.

00:38:25.700 So I think Hayek's formulation is more thorough, you could say.

00:38:32.120 But essentially, what's happened, as far as I can tell, in the economics profession, is that, okay, well, moving on.

00:38:43.480 Most economists work for the government in universities, or they work in big banks, and they don't consider the knowledge problem.

00:38:55.540 So they make their beautiful theories anyway.

00:38:57.660 Sadly, sadly, this is the case.

00:39:03.380 Right, so let us now go and talk about education, because I started reading your book, and in the beginning, you make an observation, and I just said, wait a minute, this is basically true and brilliant.

00:39:19.480 You said that a lot of people, the knee-jerk reaction, when people talk about education, is that people have an idea of how education should be, but also have an idea of why education has failed, because it deviates from their ideal about how education should be.

00:39:39.280 And they want, in order to improve things, to create a board of experts, and that is going to lay down the principles of reform.

00:39:54.740 But what you observe is that it's almost never the case that the best author of literature is also a professor of literature, that the best musician is also a professor of music, and that the best, let's say, trader or something is a professor of economics.

00:40:17.340 So, and I think we couldn't go on forever.

00:40:23.360 Elon Musk had to become a space engineer.

00:40:26.420 He didn't know anything about rockets.

00:40:28.300 He wanted to go fly to Mars.

00:40:30.260 So he had to become a space engineer.

00:40:31.960 He has no degree in that area whatsoever.

00:40:34.780 That's...

00:40:35.340 Yeah, so I think that this is the main thing we need to tell people, and I also want to ask you about this.

00:40:45.740 What is it precisely you think that is most people's idea of how education reform should come about, and why do you think it's mistaken?

00:40:55.660 I think most people, building on what you said, have an idea from their own childhood.

00:41:06.060 They saw what seemed to work and what didn't seem to work, and then they think a few more fixes.

00:41:12.260 You should have order in the classroom, and more resources, and higher salaries for teachers, and more stringent requirements, and performance league tables, I think they're called in the UK, and so on and so forth.

00:41:29.840 So you measure things, and then you've seen that picture.

00:41:35.000 And then a miracle happens, and you get good education.

00:41:43.080 The problem is that there are no such experts that can't do it, and education is a very complicated area where you talk to people, where you deal with people.

00:41:55.960 And, I mean, you can't put a professor of musicology and write the next hit song.

00:42:02.860 It doesn't work like that.

00:42:04.360 It's trial and error.

00:42:07.340 And we think all these, I mean, Mark Tyson said that everyone's got a plan, and then they get, until they get hit in the face, and they have to readjust.

00:42:19.400 And all those beautiful things that people think up when they think they know what education is and how it should be done, when they try them out, they won't quite work.

00:42:29.200 And we'll be the wrong people and the wrong teaching methods, and so on and so forth.

00:42:34.360 Right, so I think it's really important to draw a distinction here, because it's a distinction that most people don't draw, is that it's one thing to teach.

00:42:47.680 Yeah.

00:42:48.160 And quite another, the skill of teaching is one thing, and quite another to implement educational reform.

00:42:56.400 And a lot of the time, the people who are advocating for really strong education reform along the lines or along status lines, they seem to me to not be aware of the difference.

00:43:12.960 And they say, I think teaching has become, it's like a lot of areas in society, has become an academic subject.

00:43:25.940 And whilst it is a trade, it's a craft, how to teach something, your practice makes perfect as a teacher.

00:43:35.420 And it's been turned into an academic subject with professors of pedagogy and so on and so forth.

00:43:45.380 And something I point out in my book is that you have an area of education which is, when it worked, was based on 2,500 years of trial and error, beginning with the Greeks, the European tradition of teaching.

00:44:00.700 Other countries have other traditions, but it's based on trial and error, and now you turn it into an academic subject.

00:44:10.260 And then you have to get a PhD in teaching.

00:44:14.200 So how do you get a PhD in something?

00:44:16.520 You discover something new.

00:44:18.620 So you have something, how to teach, which you don't need to know how to express how you teach, even.

00:44:25.320 You just do it, and it works.

00:44:26.740 So you have to come up with a theory that goes away from proven practice, discover something new.

00:44:36.260 So as soon as you get a PhD, you can basically be certain that anyone with a PhD in pedagogy has sort of discovered something that doesn't work or deviates from proven practice.

00:44:52.640 But they haven't found something that actually works.

00:44:55.320 Well, they are not tested on that.

00:44:57.660 I mean, I don't know how it is in Britain, but here in Sweden, someone made a study and said that 2 to 3% of PhDs in education were based on, used empirical data.

00:45:13.340 97, 98% did not use empirical data, but they got their PhDs anyway.

00:45:17.980 The idea I wanted to push forward with what I said before in the distinction is that there is the importance of gaining expertise.

00:45:30.300 And I think, is it Daniel Kahneman, who got a Nobel Prize, who said that in order to be truly considered an expert in a field, you need to have devoted around 10,000 hours of dedicated practice of that skill.

00:45:50.880 So, and a lot of teachers may end up getting that amount of expertise, but it's completely different when it comes to education reform, because in education reform, as you mentioned, I think in the book, there isn't so much trial and error involved.

00:46:07.900 There is no, well, in practice, there's none at all, because, or virtually none at all, because I think, as Karl Marx says, it takes 20 to 20 years normally to prepare an education reform, a national education reform.

00:46:22.360 And then if you want to evaluate what it brought, you have to wait another 10 to 20 years, it takes 12 years to go through school, and it takes time for the reform to settle, and then you have the old teachers that might not pay lip service to the new ideas and not teach according to them.

00:46:41.880 So, say, you can make a, if you, if you want to do this properly, every 20 to 40 years, you can implement the national school reform, education reform, and that's, and most of them make education worse.

00:46:58.560 So, it's basically the equivalent of having a 20 or 40 year plan.

00:47:04.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:47:04.940 So, if you want to wait until the government gets it right, you should put your children into liquid helium, liquid nitrogen, and wait 2,000, 3,000 years, then maybe they get it right.

00:47:18.300 So, it seems to me that it's remarkably analogous to the market, and especially when we are comparing the, let's say, freer economies, economies with freer markets, and really centralized systems, such as the Soviet Union.

00:47:34.240 It seems to me that we see a distinction, a, yeah, a distinction, a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, having an economy where there are all sorts, there are various experiments, economic experiments, and the risk of each of them failing is minimized because if one experiment fails, 10 others may succeed.

00:47:59.120 10 probably fail, but they, they have to, they have to be corrected immediately, you have to backpedal immediately, and go back to what you did before and try something different, otherwise you go out of business.

00:48:10.860 But, but, and, and in the opposite case, when it comes to the five-year-old plan, you have just one giant economic experiment.

00:48:18.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:18.640 And if it fails, everything, yeah, goes south.

00:48:21.120 Yeah, yeah, you have thousands of people working on, on this reform, and then it's, then it's introduced, and everything goes to, yeah, down the drain.

00:48:29.040 So, I think, I think, I would say one way of selling my argument might be that if, if you look back at your own schooling, and you, you think of, you had very good teachers, and you had some poor teachers, and what would happen in market society, market system, is that the good teachers would get more pupils, and teach friends to be as good as they are, and all the bad teachers would disappear.

00:48:58.020 They couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't, can't sustain themselves, they would just have to do something else.

00:49:04.260 Yeah.

00:49:04.840 And that, that's, but that doesn't happen in a, in a national school system.

00:49:11.260 Right, so, I think, I want us to approach what you're saying from another angle, because there are several questions I have, that I wouldn't say necessarily are, are rejections of what you're saying, but I want to see how they could be incorporated in,

00:49:28.020 in your framework.

00:49:28.700 So, first of all, what is education?

00:49:34.260 Because that, that's a very important question.

00:49:37.520 When we start talking about the quality of education, and education as being an important good or value, our lives, it may be a good idea if we come up with a definition, or at least an approach towards.

00:49:49.520 And maybe, maybe take it from the start, sort of, when you live as a hunter-gatherer, or as a peasant farmer, they don't do education.

00:50:02.280 They, the children learn lots of things, and they're rarely taught, but they copy their parents, and they copy older friends, and they learn how to work in that environment.

00:50:12.800 But then you get more advanced things in society, like reading and writing, that are, they're called biologically secondary things that you need to, your brain is not designed to do it.

00:50:30.320 So, you have to repeat and practice these things.

00:50:32.740 And so, the, and what you could say, education boils down to primary education.

00:50:40.740 I like, I love the English term, primary education, is the, the body of knowledge that it is socially expected that everyone should possess.

00:50:51.360 You could say, you could say, in, in modern society, it's reading, writing, arithmetic, a bit of, uh, uh, uh, history, and, uh, you need to understand the political society you live in, and so on.

00:51:07.720 And if you're a Swede or a Greek, you need to learn English as well.

00:51:11.700 And this body of knowledge, if you, if you possess that body of knowledge, you are treated like a functioning part of society. 0.97

00:51:20.340 If you're not, you're treated like an idiot, essentially, because it's socially expected that you have this body. 0.93

00:51:27.100 And then, so that, that is the core of education. 0.99

00:51:31.520 And then there is secondary education, which is more advanced stuff, which has, unfortunately, become compulsory.

00:51:38.740 So, um, where you're supposed, where you learn several foreign languages, more advanced history, more advanced chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on, on a more advanced level, which really don't, most people don't apply in life.

00:51:58.140 But it, it, it was, um, as it developed, it was something, uh, minority or not so small minority used for their trades, you could say.

00:52:11.240 Right, so I, I have several questions.

00:52:13.220 So, first of all, it, it seems to me that in hunter-gatherer society, there is such a process of educating, not in a, in a conventional sense where we have a classroom and we have a teacher.

00:52:24.180 But for instance, in the sense of transmitting know-how.

00:52:29.620 Yeah, uh, but it's usually done by copying.

00:52:32.460 Wouldn't that be a kind of education, education?

00:52:35.140 Yes, but it's, it's sort of, uh, it's called cultural learning is, uh, one way of, uh, Heinrich has written a book about that.

00:52:44.360 Okay.

00:52:44.920 So, children copy, they're not, they're, I discovered this recently, they're rarely taught.

00:52:50.940 They just watch their parents and copy, and then they're told to go do that, and they do that.

00:52:58.280 So.

00:52:59.580 Right, and when, when you are saying that education is a body of knowledge that is socially required for people to be seen as members of society, you,

00:53:10.560 I'd, I'd, I'd presume you, you mean primary education, like primary education, basic arithmetic skills and stuff, because we can be educated in really niche fields that a lot of people don't know what they are.

00:53:23.820 They can't be making any demands that we know of them in order to not be treated as outcome.

00:53:30.500 So you're talking about the primary education.

00:53:32.220 Um, yes, I, I, I, I think that's, um, the problem with the, the education debate is that as long as it was, as long as education, the compulsory education or voluntary education only concerned, uh, primary education, it was voluntarily entered into, and everyone did it.

00:53:57.260 And everyone learned it, whether it was in the private school or in the later on government schools, but then government started to tack on secondary education and force it upon everyone.

00:54:10.720 And that, that created the culture of large swathes of society hating education.

00:54:19.260 You know, in, in, in Britain, you have, um, a white underclass that used to be the pillars of society. 1.00

00:54:27.420 I don't know if you read the life at the bottom of Dalrymple talks about how the welfare status, but also education has destroyed the white working class.

00:54:39.260 And, uh, because people, people don't want to be force fed these things.

00:54:44.380 They are not interested in, there's a natural reaction to be, to rebel against what it is you're being told.

00:54:51.700 I think what happened in Sweden when it became compulsory to continue after age 13 was that immediately you got chaos in the last, they added, added three years.

00:55:04.220 And this chaos then spread during the 1970s down to, well, first year of school.

00:55:09.600 And, uh, now you have the second generation, it's not soon third generation of children whose parents and soon grandparents hated school.

00:55:24.620 And it, the whole, the whole thing is breaking down.

00:55:28.500 Right.

00:55:29.160 So I want to ask you about the issue of regulation here, because it seems to me that we are talking about centralization and decentralization.

00:55:38.600 In education, as if we're taking the two extremes of the two extreme options, but perhaps there are several arguments to be made against particular regulations or not.

00:55:51.020 Of course, there's what you said in the very beginning, that the moment you start making exceptions, you have a problem.

00:55:57.360 But let us, let us, let us run the argument for that sake.

00:56:02.160 So for instance, when we're talking about a body of knowledge that needs to be accepted, or at least it needs to be socially accepted.

00:56:10.920 So what if people in, let's say, in politics, let's say we have politicians who are, who end up in a position where they can actually influence things.

00:56:22.740 And they say that I need to instill a sentiment of patriotism in children through education.

00:56:31.820 And education is teaching them the exact opposite.

00:56:36.660 And I want to change that.

00:56:38.440 And that could result, that could actually manifest in all sorts of ways.

00:56:44.900 One way would be to have a very strictly centralized system of education that said that this is what you're going to be taught and a kind of patriotism is going to be part of it.

00:56:57.340 Or you could have a sort of mixed system where you say, where the government says, well, you will have to teach A, B, and C, but you are free with respect to D, E, F, G, H, I, J, whatever.

00:57:14.320 Do you think that that would be disastrous?

00:57:18.880 What you mean, the point is the point to, to instill certain values in the population, essentially.

00:57:25.740 Yes.

00:57:26.640 Yeah.

00:57:27.960 That, and these values, not just because someone wakes up and says, okay, I want to do social engineering.

00:57:35.560 I would say, I say, I would say that, I mean, I know it's been done.

00:57:41.200 I know that small French children learned about the Gauls and the Swedish children learned about the Swedish heroes and so on and so forth.

00:57:49.860 And people were, I mean, they read about Charles XII and Gustavus Adolphus and Charles X going across, crushing Denmark and so on and so forth.

00:58:04.220 And, I mean, it was, Swedish history is rock and roll.

00:58:09.640 It's Swedish history, the last, well, between 1500 and, well, really between 1300 and 1721 is like Greek, as much rock and roll as Greek history in the antiquity.

00:58:25.140 It's a sort of heroic things and feats of arms and stuff.

00:58:29.000 So that's interesting.

00:58:30.040 And this was instilled in schools and so on and so forth.

00:58:32.440 But you had a, you had a homogenous society where everyone agreed on everything already.

00:58:42.160 So it wasn't a problem.

00:58:43.400 It wasn't like force fed into people.

00:58:45.320 But I don't, I think in the modern world where we, things have gone haywire, I don't think, I don't think it's, education is the wrong tool to install.

00:59:01.220 It's like in the States now you have Donald Trump who it's, it's really the revolt of the masses against, against the anointed, you could say.

00:59:14.520 And he's a big wrecking ball.

00:59:16.960 And patriotism should come from a great country.

00:59:22.660 You should have a country to be proud of.

00:59:24.280 And then it comes out, comes on its own.

00:59:26.440 You don't need to spoon feed it.

00:59:29.620 Right.

00:59:30.100 But the reason I'm asking is because if, for instance, we have really strong lobbies in other countries, and let's say there are other countries other than England that have a really strong lobby within England.

00:59:43.400 And they, as you said, that they create enclaves and they have schools of their own and suddenly start teaching anti-English propaganda.

00:59:54.280 Wouldn't that be an issue?

00:59:56.400 Wouldn't that be, for instance, a call for the government to regulate that?

00:59:59.340 If, if, I think both in Sweden and in Britain, we are late to the party.

01:00:08.000 If there had been one or two children per class out of 30 in that category, go ahead.

01:00:15.840 That could work.

01:00:16.680 Not that when you have enclaves.

01:00:20.020 I mean, people go to mosque schools and so on in Sweden.

01:00:26.740 They don't learn anything during the day, but they, they studied the Quran during, during the evenings.

01:00:34.580 And so the same in Britain, the tool to, which I'm trying to convince people of without much success.

01:00:45.500 And I think you agree, is the tool to use is the welfare state.

01:00:50.940 It should go.

01:00:53.220 The benefits should go completely.

01:00:56.600 And if you don't have a welfare state, if you, if, if you use the Christian message from Paul, St. Paul,

01:01:04.160 those who don't work shall not eat, he says.

01:01:10.160 And, uh, if you take it down to, to sleeping in army barracks with three meals a day, that's the, so you survive nothing else.

01:01:21.180 Then the rest of the problem would sort itself out.

01:01:24.480 I think quite a few people would leave both Britain and Sweden and others.

01:01:30.880 I think, I don't know how big the enclave, enclave problem is in Britain, if they would leave or if they would stay,

01:01:38.380 but they would have to interact with the rest of society to survive.

01:01:45.200 And yes, I think.

01:01:47.080 If they don't do.

01:01:48.760 Yeah.

01:01:50.200 If they don't interact with the rest of society, they can live peacefully without interacting with society,

01:01:56.660 but they have to sort themselves out without otherwise other people paying for them.

01:02:03.120 Right.

01:02:03.400 So another question I have here is, comes from my experience as a teacher,

01:02:08.060 because I was teaching at the university for six years.

01:02:12.900 And, um, of course, I think what, what we're talking about is really important.

01:02:18.600 And you are highlighting the importance of context and a lot of the people who are comprising bodies of experts,

01:02:28.160 they very frequently think in abstract ways, but ignoring context.

01:02:32.400 I think one of the things that come to mind is if education is treated entirely as a commodity,

01:02:43.400 there could be some, there could be some avenues towards the, let's say, decreasing of quality in education.

01:02:52.980 Obviously, this could go the other way around.

01:02:55.440 A centralized education can lead into a very bad education system.

01:02:59.540 But one of the things I saw is that in England, for instance, there are some universities like Oxford and Cambridge

01:03:07.420 that have centuries of history and a tradition and a name and a reputation that they have made throughout centuries

01:03:15.080 that they're just not going to be taught.

01:03:17.240 And there are several other universities that are competing with them in order to gain, let's say, funding

01:03:27.120 and in order to also get a name outside.

01:03:29.680 And they compete for student satisfaction.

01:03:32.160 And sadly, student satisfaction is one of those indexes that a lot of, a lot of universities go for,

01:03:37.960 because it's something that they think they can deliver easily.

01:03:43.320 And what I saw was a complete decrease, a very low quality, let's say, in what was given,

01:03:52.480 because students were treated like customers.

01:03:55.420 Because if education is seen, let's say, as a commodity,

01:03:58.780 there is a tendency to say that the customer is always right.

01:04:06.420 And for instance, in things like philosophy, it's the exact opposite,

01:04:10.700 because you need to teach, let's say, first year undergraduates philosophy,

01:04:17.000 you need to actually be very painful for them and tell them that,

01:04:23.980 listen, you may think you know, but you don't know.

01:04:26.120 This is the very nature of philosophy.

01:04:28.840 I think I read in the National Review of someone who the teacher explained to her,

01:04:35.760 David Hume's induction problem.

01:04:41.080 Yes, yes.

01:04:42.700 And eventually she ran out crying.

01:04:45.320 She couldn't take it.

01:04:48.000 But I would say, well, first of all, you have, in Sweden,

01:04:55.160 you have a slightly different system.

01:04:56.840 But student financing is very, very strange,

01:05:00.500 because there's an overproduction in the whole system,

01:05:05.000 not of knowledge, but of, you have long education,

01:05:11.220 you don't have good education.

01:05:14.960 As I try to explain my book,

01:05:18.200 what I think would happen if education were to be set free,

01:05:22.920 there were no government involvement in any way.

01:05:26.440 It would resemble the old Swedish system.

01:05:29.620 You would have, and the old English system as well,

01:05:32.840 you would have,

01:05:34.760 children would start at five, six or seven,

01:05:37.240 and then they would get the primary education by 11, 12 or 13 or so.

01:05:41.320 Then about probably 60% based on Swedish numbers would either start work

01:05:49.840 or do vocational training.

01:05:54.180 In Sweden, we had four-year courses to become a carpenter or plumber

01:05:59.160 or all sorts of things.

01:06:00.380 By 16, 17, they are highly trained, skilled workmen.

01:06:04.700 And they already, they know how to read and write.

01:06:08.720 They have a good primary education, which they don't have now.

01:06:12.780 So you get about 40% are left.

01:06:16.600 And 20, about, well, they continue for three or four years

01:06:24.620 and got another secondary education to be,

01:06:29.100 and went on to either work or become a policeman

01:06:32.020 or a nurse or something like that. 0.99

01:06:35.060 And then you got 27% at the end,

01:06:38.980 took the student exam,

01:06:40.840 which is the, you've seen, it's a very broad curriculum.

01:06:44.180 It's like the French baccalaureate,

01:06:46.940 which were either bac S, it was a science, 0.85

01:06:51.520 or it was the Latin humanities,

01:06:55.200 or it was, there was a common mix between the two at the end.

01:06:58.560 And then you have maybe 15, 20% would go on,

01:07:04.840 two-thirds of those would go on to university.

01:07:08.260 If you take, but if you took a student exam

01:07:10.620 or the baccalaureate from 1968,

01:07:15.120 I would say it's worth about going,

01:07:20.680 finishing lycée, high school, whatever,

01:07:24.340 in today, plus six years additional studies

01:07:28.560 of traditional subjects.

01:07:31.660 That's the level of collapse now.

01:07:35.200 So you are faced at university,

01:07:38.800 you have student satisfaction.

01:07:40.720 What is student satisfaction?

01:07:42.040 You have half an age group go to university

01:07:44.680 because everyone goes to university.

01:07:47.720 And employers, they have no clue what you did,

01:07:51.060 but they know that the higher grade average

01:07:54.660 is better than the lower grade average.

01:07:57.340 So they will favor higher grade average.

01:08:01.500 So the students you have,

01:08:03.300 all they're interested in is,

01:08:05.680 most of them, or a large part of them,

01:08:08.700 is as high grade average

01:08:10.840 for as little effort as possible.

01:08:13.940 So after four years, they can get a job.

01:08:16.980 That's it.

01:08:18.400 They are not seeking knowledge.

01:08:20.220 That's correct.

01:08:23.900 And the final question I want to ask you

01:08:26.540 has to do with what is called

01:08:28.180 negative externalities.

01:08:30.420 And I want to develop a line of thought

01:08:34.340 that I've read somewhere

01:08:37.380 that was interesting.

01:08:39.100 And it had to do with an argument for,

01:08:42.180 let's say, the welfare state.

01:08:45.600 It went like this.

01:08:46.860 It said that, for instance,

01:08:48.580 one of the main reasons

01:08:54.300 why there needs to be,

01:08:55.740 let's say,

01:08:57.000 social provisions of several,

01:09:00.400 let's say, benefits,

01:09:01.840 social benefits,

01:09:02.860 like education and healthcare

01:09:05.060 to people,

01:09:06.320 is because it minimizes

01:09:08.040 negative externalities

01:09:09.380 or it prevents negative externalities.

01:09:12.220 And one of the externalities,

01:09:14.080 they said they tied to crime.

01:09:17.280 They said, for instance,

01:09:18.380 that the main,

01:09:21.280 let's say, weapon,

01:09:23.240 the main tool the police has

01:09:24.840 isn't physical presence.

01:09:26.740 It's the threat of future punishment.

01:09:28.740 So, the main,

01:09:31.120 the driving engine of law enforcement

01:09:34.320 is the fear of future punishment.

01:09:37.400 So, when you have a population

01:09:38.740 that is afraid,

01:09:41.320 is not afraid

01:09:42.540 that they will get caught

01:09:45.640 if they do something

01:09:47.460 and they think they're going to get away with it,

01:09:50.140 that you are sort of

01:09:52.660 eroding the fear of future punishment.

01:09:56.300 And they're saying that

01:09:57.260 one of the reasons,

01:09:58.360 one of the factors

01:09:59.220 that erode the fear of future punishment

01:10:01.360 has to do with destitution

01:10:03.380 in the here and now,

01:10:05.980 but also thinking that you lack a future.

01:10:08.180 And they said that,

01:10:10.180 for instance,

01:10:11.220 a lot of people,

01:10:12.520 people are much more likely to think

01:10:16.640 that they are desperate

01:10:18.400 in the here and now

01:10:19.880 if, for instance,

01:10:21.760 they think that

01:10:22.600 people aren't going to have their back

01:10:24.420 if, for instance,

01:10:25.420 they get sick

01:10:26.040 and if they think

01:10:28.140 that they aren't going to have a future

01:10:29.580 because you're not afraid

01:10:30.960 of future punishment.

01:10:32.080 If you think that you don't,

01:10:33.360 you're not going to have a future.

01:10:35.060 And they tie education with,

01:10:37.820 let's say,

01:10:38.800 the future and healthcare with them now.

01:10:41.360 What do you think of that argument?

01:10:45.040 Yeah, well, it's not,

01:10:46.300 it's a problem.

01:10:49.620 The welfare state,

01:10:51.400 it's a very good argument,

01:10:53.840 but not for the welfare state.

01:10:55.380 It's an argument against the welfare state

01:10:57.460 because before you had the welfare state,

01:10:59.880 you had burial societies

01:11:02.260 that actually go back to Rome

01:11:03.880 and continued in medieval Europe.

01:11:07.060 you had fraternal societies,

01:11:08.800 you had temperance lodges,

01:11:11.000 you had friendly societies,

01:11:14.240 which one is English

01:11:15.960 and which one is American.

01:11:17.720 But you have millions of people

01:11:19.360 and churches

01:11:20.840 and all sorts of organizations

01:11:23.420 that joined up

01:11:26.600 and they tried to teach its members

01:11:29.020 self-discipline

01:11:30.660 and how to behave.

01:11:32.040 And if you look at the data

01:11:34.620 from the 19th century Britain,

01:11:37.000 at the same time,

01:11:38.260 there is this argument

01:11:41.400 in favor of,

01:11:44.380 against the disruption

01:11:45.860 of the industrial state.

01:11:47.520 You went from farming

01:11:49.800 with everyone,

01:11:50.600 you, everyone else,

01:11:51.480 and took care of each other,

01:11:52.540 supposedly.

01:11:53.120 And then suddenly,

01:11:55.680 from the 1780s

01:11:57.540 or 1800s in Britain,

01:11:59.480 that was all ripped apart

01:12:01.440 and people moved into

01:12:02.560 the satanic mills,

01:12:05.600 as they called,

01:12:06.360 which is,

01:12:07.220 it's said so,

01:12:08.740 but Charles Dickens

01:12:10.160 never visited.

01:12:11.460 He was a part of the tribe

01:12:13.060 anointed as well.

01:12:14.340 But at the same time

01:12:18.060 a society was ripped apart

01:12:19.620 by this,

01:12:20.820 the old traditional society,

01:12:22.200 you had all these organizations

01:12:23.500 and they worked hard

01:12:25.760 and illegitimacy went down,

01:12:28.600 drunkenness went down,

01:12:30.140 savings went up,

01:12:31.620 and people policed themselves.

01:12:33.960 And you got an enormous

01:12:35.400 sense of community,

01:12:37.360 not the same as living

01:12:38.800 in a little village

01:12:39.680 where everyone knows each other,

01:12:41.700 everyone else,

01:12:42.520 but you had all these societies.

01:12:44.840 You had in Britain, 0.90

01:12:45.520 I think,

01:12:45.820 working men's clubs

01:12:47.100 and so on and so forth.

01:12:48.900 And I'm a great Deep Purple fan.

01:12:51.860 And they used to play,

01:12:53.200 bands used to play in pubs.

01:12:55.120 And there were different pubs

01:12:56.440 for different groups of people

01:12:58.620 all over the place.

01:13:00.480 And people joined up.

01:13:02.020 The idea behind the welfare state

01:13:04.100 then is,

01:13:07.380 this voluntary society

01:13:09.960 comes with strings attached.

01:13:11.440 If you get help from someone,

01:13:14.060 you stand in there,

01:13:16.220 you have to pay back.

01:13:19.140 And if you can't pay back,

01:13:21.300 I mean,

01:13:21.540 it's an obligation you have,

01:13:23.320 which is hard work.

01:13:25.660 I mean,

01:13:26.460 if you can't,

01:13:28.080 you're forced to contribute.

01:13:30.000 So instead,

01:13:30.960 you come with a welfare state

01:13:32.520 that creates a right.

01:13:34.500 And it pretended

01:13:36.020 to take this sense of community

01:13:38.260 and extend it

01:13:39.200 to everyone in society.

01:13:40.920 But instead,

01:13:41.600 you get faceless abstract rights

01:13:45.060 where all the connections

01:13:47.360 you have with anyone

01:13:48.280 is through the state.

01:13:51.260 So you atomize society.

01:13:53.460 The middleman.

01:13:53.920 Yeah.

01:13:56.080 It's sort of.

01:13:56.980 You fill in the form.

01:13:58.980 Now you fill it in on the internet

01:14:00.380 and you get your benefits.

01:14:02.480 And you don't need to work for anyone.

01:14:04.160 You don't need to please anyone.

01:14:05.780 And they don't need to work for you

01:14:07.580 or please you either.

01:14:09.120 So the welfare state

01:14:11.440 is like a gigantic pair of scissors

01:14:13.700 that cut through the fabric of society.

01:14:16.720 And you think it leads

01:14:19.920 to the disintegration

01:14:21.160 of the sentiment of community.

01:14:23.260 Yes.

01:14:23.760 And it fosters a culture of dependence.

01:14:27.000 Yeah.

01:14:27.400 And that's what the result of that is.

01:14:30.380 Dalrymple's book,

01:14:31.660 Life at the Bottom.

01:14:32.900 It's a horror story.

01:14:35.060 And that was before

01:14:35.840 mass migration into Britain.

01:14:37.260 It was the white working class 0.99

01:14:39.040 which was proud,

01:14:40.900 stood in its own two feet

01:14:42.140 and paid in the 19th century,

01:14:44.960 had all their children

01:14:46.500 went to private schools

01:14:47.680 and everyone learned

01:14:49.820 how to read and write

01:14:51.160 and they behaved properly

01:14:53.960 towards their neighbors.

01:14:56.080 And that's been ripped apart.

01:14:59.660 Right.

01:15:00.660 So thank you very much for this.

01:15:03.640 I enjoyed this.

01:15:04.440 It was a pleasure.

01:15:06.200 Where can people find

01:15:07.640 more of your work?

01:15:10.100 I have created a sub stack

01:15:13.860 which I could provide you

01:15:16.300 a link with.

01:15:16.940 I can't remember this.

01:15:18.220 I have a blog in Swedish,

01:15:21.820 unfortunately,

01:15:22.980 but I started writing

01:15:24.820 in an English sub stack.

01:15:26.340 I can send you the link to it.

01:15:28.820 Thank you very much.

01:15:30.860 So I found it very interesting

01:15:34.300 and really eye-opening

01:15:36.780 and challenging

01:15:38.320 because it's like

01:15:40.080 it's a worldview

01:15:41.540 that you're developing

01:15:42.440 that is very distinct

01:15:44.540 and different

01:15:45.540 from the one

01:15:46.260 we're used to

01:15:47.600 being exposed to

01:15:49.260 on a daily basis.

01:15:50.700 So Dr. Lidstrom,

01:15:52.400 thank you very much for this.

01:15:53.900 Well, thank you.

01:15:55.320 It was a pleasure.

01:15:56.360 Thank you.

01:15:57.060 So I hope you enjoyed

01:15:58.940 this interview

01:15:59.540 for the Lotus Seaters

01:16:00.860 and goodbye.

01:16:02.180 Bye.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 14, 2025

Should Education Be Decentralised？｜ Interview with Dr. Erik Lidström

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Summary

Transcript

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 14, 2025

Should Education Be Decentralised？ ｜ Interview with Dr. Erik Lidström

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Should Education Be Decentralised？｜ Interview with Dr. Erik Lidström