Sam Bowman
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Length
1 hour and 5 minutes
Words per minute
197.84679
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
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Toxicity
52
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Hate speech
34
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Summary
Sam Bowman, former Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute, joins us this week to talk about his journey from being a liberal to a libertarian, and why he doesn't consider himself to be a liberal anymore. Triggenometry is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. We don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant expert guest is Sam Bowman.
Transcript
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hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is a
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show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing
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about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our brilliant expert
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guest this week is the former executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman. Welcome
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to Trigonautry. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to have you on and thank you
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for coming in. Let's just get right into it. We always ask our guests, first of all, what's
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been your journey to the place that you're in now? How have you got to where you are?
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District line or no? Well, I call myself a neoliberal. I spent a lot of my 20s, I guess,
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calling myself a libertarian. From the age of about 12, when I read On Liberty by John
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Stuart Mill, I kind of thought, yep, this is the one for me. I'm a liberal of some kind.
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Well, I was interested in that kind of thing from quite a young age.
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I mean, I probably still don't understand it very well. But yeah, so for most of my kind
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of teenage years and 20s, I thought of myself as being a liberal or a libertarian. And so
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in the last few years, for various reasons, I started to kind of realise or identify my
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view a sort of split going on in the libertarian world and also kind of a parallel that kind of
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split within libertarianism a distinct group of people who were quite libertarian in some areas
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but much less so in other areas. Sam maybe for those people who are not fully familiar with the
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whole thing can you just lay out what is libertarianism? So libertarianism is I guess
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the idea that individual liberty trumps pretty much everything else so it's much more important
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that the state does not interfere, and other people, don't interfere with your right to do
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what you want with your life, to do what you want with your money, with your property, than all the
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other concerns that we have. So, for example, a libertarian and a socialist might disagree about
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property rights. Socialists might say it's reasonable for us to take money or property
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from rich people in order to give it to poor people, or in order to provide things like health
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services or education services to poor people libertarians to varying degrees would disagree
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some libertarians would just say no it's never acceptable to take property from one person to
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give it to another taxation is theft other libertarians would say even though it might
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seem like a good idea that will lead to bad outcomes and then they'll get kind of some sort
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of you'll get a spectrum in between as well now I kind of always they're also very very strong
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free free speech people they're people who think that you should be able to have sex with whoever
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you want as long as they consent as well and they're adults you should be able to put into
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your body whatever kind of drug you want you should be able to more or less move around the
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planet wherever you want provided there is somebody in another country willing to take you there
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you know put you up in their house or something like that um and the view the kind of basic
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libertarian view is that kind of individual liberty is the it kind of trumps everything else
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and and where that differentiates from kind of conventional liberalism which also agrees
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individual liberty is important. Liberals are a much, much broader set of people, and they tend
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to think that, many liberals tend to think that that kind of individual autonomy doesn't extend
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into your economic lives. Libertarians think that it very much does extend to your economic lives,
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and your economic liberty is just as important as any other kind of liberty that there is.
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So for a long time I saw myself as sort of working within that vein, and I had a lot of time for
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libertarians, even though I no longer consider myself to be one. I was the, as you said, I ran
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a think tank called the Adam Smith Institute, which for a long time was the only kind of
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self-identified libertarian think tank in the UK. But for me, libertarianism was always a big tent,
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but I think began to, and I think it has really split in kind of not very nice ways into groups
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that I wouldn't really identify as being liberals.
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They might be libertarians in the sense that they use that word,
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but I don't consider themselves to be people who are that interested in individual liberty.
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And also, I think that, and I have become persuaded, and I did become persuaded,
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that libertarianism was really not sufficient when it came to the kind of distribution of resources.
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My view, kind of in a sentence, is a neoliberal, which is what I consider myself to be now,
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somebody who thinks that markets are very good at creating wealth,
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but they're not very good at allocating wealth.
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and that markets really are very brutal, they're very amoral forces.
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And even though they're very efficient, people who haven't been born with great gifts,
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will often get a very, very bad kind of sort of slice of the pie,
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So a libertarian would say, that's meritocracy.
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They would say that's, yeah, they'd say that's meritocracy, that's tolerable.
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They'd say as long as that, you know, as long as the market process has been fair,
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That could be said of almost any political position, right?
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or arrangements that kind of don't do very much
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A lot of people who have similar beliefs to me do,
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but one device he uses is called the veil of ignorance.
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or what a good sort of arrangement for society would be,
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imagine you didn't know who you were in that society,
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where you didn't know where in that distribution you would be,
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would that be a just, or could that be a kind of a society
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Where I disagree with Rawls is that he thinks that that implies
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What we should care about is the well-being of people.
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I'd be much happier to live in an unequal but rich country.
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I'd rather live in somewhere like the UK, which is very unequal,
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than in a much poorer country that had a much more equal distribution of wealth.
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And that's where I think the kind of Rawlsian approach isn't always that useful.
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So what's your solution to this meritocracy is brutal problem?
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For me, the kind of neoliberal arrangement is very low regulation markets.
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markets that are regulated really only in order to make them work better so you might have
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regulations against cartels or in some cases monopolies but you don't have regulations that
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are there to for example give workers a bigger share of the pie but after you've generated the
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wealth the point of that being to have as much wealth generation and to have as much kind of
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efficiency and innovation as possible and then after you've had the market process through a
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reasonably simple tax system and a reasonably simple wealth welfare system you just tax the
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rich and you give it to the poor. And the arrangement being very, very free markets
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with simple redistribution of income from the rich to the poor.
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I mean, in theory, that's great. But we can see now the problems we're trying to tax big
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corporations is that they find loopholes in loopholes and loopholes. And it's very, very
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difficult to tax them effectively, like we've seen with Amazon or with Starbucks. I mean,
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Well, I wouldn't tax corporations at all. Corporations are not the way. Taxing corporations is a really bad way of taxing the rich, because that money comes out of investment, because it returns to investment lower, and it comes out of workers' wages. The evidence is reasonably strong about this.
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where we should be taxing rich people isn't when they save or invest their money investment i think
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is really good we should be basically investment is you not using resources that you have a claim
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to so that other people can and use those resources in a more productive way so we should
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want as much investment as possible what we should do what we should be taxing is consumption so it's
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when you when you draw down those investments and say okay i'm going to buy a boat or i'm going to
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spend this money on a night out or i'm going to just eat this eat these resources by spending it
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on food, that's when that wealth is destroyed. That's when the wealth is no longer usable by
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other people. And we're kind of socially, as far as society is concerned, the wealth is no longer
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useful. And that's the point where we should be taxing it. So we can do that through. It's a bit
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maybe boring to go into different types of tax like that. Actually, the value-added tax is a
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pretty good way of doing that. I was going to say you want 80% VAT on boats. Is that where you are?
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Something like that, yeah. I probably wouldn't have different rates for different things.
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What I would probably do is have a flat rate on everything and then give poorer people a cash, just a cash payment.
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Because having exemptions, so for example, having exemptions on food, even though obviously the point is that poor people spend a higher fraction of their income on food than rich people do.
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Rich people spend more money overall on food than poor people do.
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So the money that we've not taken in in tax, we're actually effectively giving rich people more, or we're foregoing more tax from rich than we are from the poor.
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so a better thing to do would be to have a kind of a flat VAT
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there's something called a progressive consumption tax
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or in fact to everybody, we could just give everybody a cash transfer
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you're making it like Sam is going to be walking around
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a simple man. I deal in simple ideas. How much are you going to fucking give me?
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Well, I've tried to work this out for the UK and I can't work it out because it depends on what you get rid of, right?
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I'm starting to dislike you now. You promised me cash.
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Sam, I've never seen Francis so engaged with one of our guests before.
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So, for example, by getting rid of the exemptions on VAT in the UK, we'd raise about £60 billion extra a year.
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So you could, if you used all that, that would be like an extra £1,000 per person a year.
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Now, if we said that the welfare system, so things like housing benefit, unemployment insurance, job seekers allowance, things like that,
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if we said that we wanted to replace those things with just a basic cash payment, then the money would be higher.
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The problem is that poor people at the moment get housing benefit and get job seekers allowance, and rich people don't get that.
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If you have a basic income, then rich people do get some fraction of that.
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So if all you do is eliminate existing welfare payments to pay for a basic income,
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then you're effectively redistributing money that we're spending on the poor towards the rich.
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This is the reason that I'm kind of, even though I quite like the basic income idea in theory,
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because what it would require would be for headline tax rates to rise
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in order to kind of fund quite a high basic income.
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It would be like saying we're going to give you,
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let's say you earn a million pounds a year, you work for a...
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So we're going to give you an extra £10,000 a year in basic income,
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but we're also going to tax you an extra £10,000 a year in your tax.
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That would be how we would kind of make the system work.
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But honestly, I think it's a pretty hard sell to say we're going to raise taxes by this much
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so that, you know, the bottom 25% of society get to have this extra amount of money.
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Another way of doing it is through something called a negative income tax,
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which is to just say, if you earn nothing, you'll get £10,000 a year or £15,000 a year.
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And then for every pound you earn after a certain point, we'll take away 50p.
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So you're always better off, you know, it's kind of fixing the marginal tax rate.
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so you always have an incentive to earn more but we're kind of slowly withdrawing the money as you
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do earn more um to me i've become i guess less um fixated on kind of grand schemes to change the
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welfare system and more fixated on kind of principles to do with it's better to if you're
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liberal at least it's better to give people money than it is to give people services it's like which
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would you rather get uh money a book voucher or money for christmas yeah you know if you're if
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your grandmother or your aunt gives you a 20 pound waterstones voucher you're like well thanks very
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much what the fuck can i do with that i wanted the money you know amazon vouchers are the closest
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thing to money because you can spend them on you amazon has everything so they're like a bit like
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money and so they're a lot better than you know a body shop 20 pounds because i don't buy things
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from the body shop they don't have anything i want um the same is true when it comes to kind
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of government services versus giving people cash um if you'd rather 100 pounds worth of nhs vouchers
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or £100 worth of education vouchers to £100, you're an idiot.
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Because £100 can buy everything that £100 worth of NHS vouchers
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or £100 worth of education vouchers can get you,
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And we might talk about this a little bit later.
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I have become convinced that the core liberal belief,
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the thing that whether you're a left-wing liberal or a right-wing liberal,
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when it comes to markets, the core liberal belief is anti-paternalism.
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It's the idea that people in charge don't know better than individuals
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provided there isn't some sort of information that they're not aware of.
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And in that case, if we do think that individuals are the best people
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to make the decisions for themselves with that money,
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we should be looking for a government that, as much as possible,
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and it's not always possible in police and courts and things like that,
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it's not always possible, but as much as possible gives people the cash,
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gives people the money according to what they need,
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I mean that's having trust and faith in human beings isn't it that's where you lost me I don't
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trust I don't have faith in anybody well it's not actually a question of having trust and faith in
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human beings it's which human beings do you have trust and faith in I have no trust and faith in
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government human beings I have a little bit more trust and faith that you have your own self
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interests at heart oh yeah it's not so it's not a question of oh well you'll spend it in a way
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that's really good for everybody else it's just you aren't a better person to judge what you can
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spend that money on than you are. So it's purely that I think you have the knowledge and you have
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the kind of incentives to spend that money wisely better than other people do. So it's actually,
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you know, I would say it's almost distrust of other people. It's kind of cynicism that makes
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me prefer sort of let the individual decide approach to government spending. So I'm in
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favour of quite a high degree of government spending and government redistribution. I just
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don't want the government to actually be spending the money. I want government to take the money
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from the rich, give it to the poor in cash, and then let markets provide the services that they
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want with that. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. So we've got a kind of philosophical
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background to some of your views. Let's talk a little bit more specifics. I heard you talking
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about Jeremy Corbyn, and we're not huge fans of Jeremy Corbyn on the show. Don't let that prejudge
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your attitude. But you talked about him being a Marxist. And I don't know if you saw, there was
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a woman on on the good morning show uh by the time this goes out it will be a couple of weeks ago
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who uh supposedly shut down pierce morgan by ending her whatever she was saying with
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i am literally a communist you idiot i don't know if you caught this yeah sure yeah what do you make
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of the rise of this kind of far left socialism communist because i'm from russia right so for
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me when someone says i'm a communist and no one seems to be amazed by this that's basically like
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someone saying i'm a nazi right given what communists did in my country in china in venezuela
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all over the place someone's basically saying on national television i'm a nazi you idiot and
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they're getting praised for it what do you make of the rise because some of the ideas you talk
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about they sound a little bit like you know the far left to send in a sense i well i strongly
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disagree at the last point yeah um i know you strongly disagree i think that um the the kind
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of fundamental the kind of defining characteristic of the far left is the idea that the state should
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organize people's lives the state should organize things it's not that um you know it's not that
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some redistribution is tolerable pretty much everybody i mean milton friedman and f.a hayek
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who are kind of libertarian liberal heroes of mine both um believed in quite a high amount of
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government redistribution so i don't agree with that you're right that was an unfair point in
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I would like to officially apologize to Sam Barber.
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For the other point, I think we're seeing this on both sides.
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I think the right is becoming much, much closer.
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The kind of mainstream right is flirting much more with the far right.
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And I think the mainstream left is flirting much more with the far left.
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I mean, communism, in my opinion, communism and Nazism are roughly as bad as each other.
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Nazism did its murder on a per capita basis in a more brutal way.
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But in terms of outcomes, I certainly would not want to live under either kind of regime.
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The obsession over kind of left and right when it comes to Nazism and communism misses.
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and you can give it whatever kind of flavour or whatever kind of banners you want.
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Ultimately, it's when the state controls people's lives to a total degree,
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that's when you get this sort of mass murder and evil and so on.
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Why is communism tolerated in the public sphere?
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Well, partly it's because culture, elite culture, is just, in my opinion, much more left-wing, just institutionally.
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I think, I don't say that, I don't believe in, I don't really even know what cultural Marxism is,
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I don't believe in that, but I think it's obvious that most journalists are on the left.
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It's basically impossible to be so left-wing in elite circles in academia and so on
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whereas it's very easy to be so right-wing that you're considered to be untouchable.
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There's basically no way you can say anything in terms of how left-wing it is
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wow, you're very optimistic, or you're very utopian.
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Or if you're a communist, at worst, you're a utopian.
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There are people on the left who hate communism
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But clearly, the fact that this is like a fun Twitter
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kind of trending moment that this woman said to Piers Morgan
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partly it's because your average 18 year old because we have such a strong filter in society
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a strong cultural filter against fascism and nazism and for obvious reasons we fought a war
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that nearly destroyed civilization uh to destroy these people and it's it's a very good thing that
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we did we built up sort of cultural antibodies it's like a virus that as soon as it comes into
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the system everything shuts down we're going to destroy it we're going to destroy this virus
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um and and that's a very good thing um but we haven't developed those antibodies to um come
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communism for various reasons because we were allied to the soviets during the um during the
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second world war because the elite because elites have been quite left-wing for a very long time
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long since the kind of beginning of the 19th century at least um and so they have a sort of
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well you know i might not want to go as far as them but i definitely sympathize with their aims
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and so on and partly because fascism and nazism just have much more evil kind of motivations
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you know communists can at least claim that well i didn't i don't mean for it to go into death camps
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and gulags um i i mean for it to go to go really nicely whereas it's very hard to say you're a nazi
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and not and kind of disavow yourself of um of the kind of basically evil intentions um but i think
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that because we have um quite a lot of tolerance for you know the 18 year old communist or the kind
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of mid-20s sort of cool communist type person uh because of that um we allow we allow that kind of
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meme to grow much much more in my opinion we shouldn't be saying look you're evil if you're
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a communist um but we should say you should be aware that the thing you're in favor of
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is as evil as the thing that these evil Nazis are in favour of.
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You know, you don't mean for this to happen,
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but you should be aware that this is what happens.
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You know, there's very little in terms of history.
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I mean, history in the UK is very much focused on
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when it does come to kind of the 20th century ideological struggles.
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It focuses on the kind of evils of Nazism and fascism
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and doesn't really go that much into communism.
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communism is almost sort of treated as aesthetically quite interesting um you know the british library
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did and it is quite aesthetically interesting you know i i understand all these things and i i don't
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think anybody's bad for this but um but it's sort of treated as a curiosity and as a thing that
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occasionally went wrong rather than something that rather than well it is i mean it is rather
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than something that's kill me now that's kind of inherently um you know at best like giving a drunk
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child the keys to a car filled with people you know that's that's the best possible way of
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describing communism like the most generous possible way is it's it's something it's like
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you're doing something so stupid you might not realize what you're doing but you're doing
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something so stupid that you are criminally negligent um but it would go viral on the
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internet well yeah well right exactly um you know and i and look pierce morgan is an asshole
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either pierce morgan actually is the asshole that he appears to be on screen or he's such an
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asshole that he acts like an asshole that he appears to be on screen neither I don't know
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which is worse I actually I suspect Piers Morgan being in on the joke is worse than Piers Morgan
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not being in on the joke um so yeah it's fun watching somebody tell him he's an idiot on his
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show that's great um but it's I think people are excessively generous uh but for for various reasons
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so it's about education for it it's more about challenging than education I would say um you
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know i i think it's important to just establish in terms of their outcomes communism and nazism
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are roughly as bad as each other that is a that is a very i don't want to get into you know which
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is worse um that don't think that's a useful uh they're both very very very bad both very very
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bad nazis had better uniforms are designed by hugo boss yes um but they i mean actually what's
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interesting is how much of um western kind of i can't believe you're taking this seriously well
00:23:11.860
No, but think about how much of what we consider to be the aesthetics of evil,
00:23:21.760
There's a brilliant book called Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics,
0.53
00:23:24.120
and it's about the self-conscious attempt by the Nazi regime
00:23:36.660
The reason I'm going with this is this goes back to the cultural antibodies we've got.
00:23:40.500
You know, it's so deep into our consciousness that Nazism is evil, which it clearly is, that even the sort of icons that are used in kind of Star Trek or in kind of Star Wars, that in other respects, you know, it's not that closely modeled on Adolf Hitler or anything, still uses the same kind of uniforms and so on.
0.82
00:24:03.040
It was that deeply ingrained into people's consciences, which is interesting.
00:24:12.260
What I guess I'm trying to get across is I can see why we've come to this point.
00:24:17.680
The average, as I say, the average 18-year-old communist, I think, is probably a bit silly.
1.00
00:24:21.680
I don't think they're often not that stupid even.
1.00
00:24:24.780
Whereas the average 18-year-old Nazi is either probably a combination of both deeply stupid and probably deeply quite evil.
1.00
00:24:31.340
um you know so there's clearly a difference in terms of the intentions of people um but I think
0.94
00:24:37.360
that rather than educating or as well as educating I would like to be challenging those people more
00:24:41.980
and I and I would like to just establish you might not realize this but everybody else does
00:24:46.280
think you guys are just as bad as each other in terms of what you're actually promoting
00:24:49.380
one thing that blew my mind is when Castro died and so I'm in the comedy industry which is
00:24:56.240
incredibly left wing and the amount of people who went on the internet mourning his death
00:25:01.680
well i just i just found it unbelievable and especially because my mother's from venezuela
00:25:07.300
castro did a speech in venezuela in 2005 i think it was where he talked about the evils of the
00:25:14.320
internet and how he said all young people shouldn't go on the internet and he got openly booed yeah
00:25:20.880
wow and it's just the fact that people would go on the internet and use a tool that he himself
00:25:25.700
prevented his own people from using to mourn his death.
00:25:30.700
But, I mean, again, they would probably tell themselves,
00:25:33.060
well, he was an idealist, you know, he wanted it to be this way,
00:25:37.240
And as if that's an important distinction, you know,
00:25:41.940
I mean, I know, so one of the reasons that I'm a neoliberal
00:25:44.100
is that I think outcomes matter above all else.
00:25:47.420
I don't care what your intentions are, pretty much in any situation.
00:25:52.660
I care about the outcomes and what actually happened
00:25:54.600
And what does this actually look like in real life?
00:25:57.180
And I think that's a, when it comes to people praising Castro,
00:26:00.780
because I'm sure he went really well in the 1950s.
00:26:08.140
and I take back what I said about your ideas sounding left wing.
00:26:11.740
What I meant was, yes, I understand the difference between a planned economy
00:26:15.720
and what you're talking about, which is a very loosely regulated economy.
00:26:19.360
But the wealth redistribution is kind of part of that, right?
00:26:23.560
Do you think that the rise of someone, well, rise is a relative term, but the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as a viable leader of the Labour Party, the huge popularity Bernie Sanders gathered from young people in America during the last election, is that an indicator of the fact that wealth redistribution is an issue that's really, really key right now?
00:26:43.720
I think partly. I think the underlying cause of that and of the broader, and I see Corbyn and Trump and Sanders and Le Pen and the Italians, the Liga Norde and the Five Star Movement, as all being kind of part of the same, you know, some are on the left, ostensibly, some are on the right.
00:27:02.780
But the people vote for them as a sort of, the system has failed us.
00:27:12.960
Productivity growth, which is the kind of bedrock of economic growth,
00:27:16.560
getting better at doing what we're doing, that is economic growth.
00:27:27.300
As far as I remember, I think Italians are no richer now than they were in 2002,
00:27:33.540
so they're effectively stagnant for the last 16 years.
00:27:36.700
It's been a bit better in America, but it hasn't been...
00:27:39.480
I mean, wage growth has still been pretty poor,
00:27:41.480
and they had a much deeper recession than we did.
00:27:45.180
If you are somebody who is on the median income, you're in the middle in the UK,
00:27:49.380
you're lucky if your wages, in real terms, are what they were 10 years ago.
00:27:56.700
It's very, very possible that they are not what they were 10 years ago.
00:28:01.200
I mean, of course, why wouldn't you be a Corbynite, you know?
00:28:06.380
If I didn't have quite strong beliefs about economics and politics already,
00:28:12.640
It's not just to do with income growth in the UK.
00:28:14.960
I mean, housing is the biggest expenditure for almost everybody,
00:28:19.900
and housing in the places that people actually want to live
00:28:22.600
is increasingly expensive and difficult to... and worse.
00:28:25.680
it's not just the price but it's the quality um so you you used to have flats with a sitting room
00:28:30.980
um a kitchen and two bedrooms that are now a bedroom a bedroom a bedroom and a kitchen
00:28:36.040
um you know and that's not picked up exactly by the um by the rents data um obviously house
00:28:41.560
prices are very very high and it's quite difficult to afford to buy a house um the reason is that we
00:28:47.640
don't build enough of them but yeah of course especially if you're younger why wouldn't you
00:28:52.380
be a Corbynite. I would be shocked if I met somebody who didn't have kind of pretty strong
00:28:57.960
beliefs that would kind of almost inoculate them against Corbynism if they weren't a
00:29:04.880
Corbynite. So to me, the kind of fundamentals, the sort of economic fundamentals matter quite
00:29:11.240
a lot and are the sort of explanation for why we have this sort of dissatisfaction.
00:29:16.240
And then the proximate reasons, the kind of specific to each country reasons, then might
00:29:21.740
explain why you get Trump in one country and why you get Corbyn in another or why you get
00:29:25.720
Brexit or something like that. So, you know, they have quite strong concerns about Hispanic
00:29:30.540
immigration in the US, so people are more inclined to vote for Trump, and there's pretty
0.97
00:29:35.300
good evidence around that. You obviously have the migrant crisis, which leads to support
0.99
00:29:39.880
for Orbán in Hungary and Lega Norte in Italy. So in each country, there are kind of specific
00:29:46.180
things in those countries that kind of might tell you the flavor of, if you want to call
00:29:50.260
populism national nationalist populism might be the best term for it um but and and corbyn
00:29:55.780
is a nationalist populist you know corbyn is very pro brexit he's very pro hard brexit and um in in
00:30:02.980
my view um he is just as much a nationalist really in i mean i he's he's not in favor of freedom of
00:30:10.900
movement with europe um he's he's a person who is just as much a nationalist as nigel farage
00:30:16.660
just in a different way so if you were talking to a young corbinite uh what would you say to them
0.50
00:30:22.740
are the reasons that they shouldn't be a young corbinite i mean i don't even know if i would try
00:30:26.980
and argue them away from being a young corbinite um i'd say i think you're wrong i think that my
00:30:31.380
solution i'd say i'm strong i'd say i'd say that i don't have a lot of evidence right now that i'm
00:30:36.100
right um you know i would say that my solution i think i've got i do have evidence that building
00:30:40.100
more houses is a better way of getting house prices down than rent controls and i and i have
00:30:45.300
evidence that if the private sector builds those houses they'll be nicer to live in than if the
00:30:49.920
government or local council builds those houses, that you won't have people dropped into sink
00:30:54.420
estates and forgotten about if it's done by the private sector instead of done by the government.
00:30:59.500
I'd probably agree that Corbyn is no worse on Brexit than the government is, because I think
00:31:06.520
the evidence is reasonably clear that most younger people are kind of disproportionately
00:31:11.180
apparently anti-Brexit and as am I and I think I'd say well yeah he's not he's not much worse
00:31:18.460
than the government on that a lot of people seem to be voting him on the assumption that he is a
00:31:22.120
lot better than the government he's a lot more kind of pro-EU or kind of pro-British membership
00:31:27.400
of the EU than the government is but I but I I feel like the real people that I want to argue
00:31:33.320
with and that I do argue with are the government because it's all very well for me to say to the
00:31:37.800
to the Corbyn voter, oh, you should do what I want to do, but nobody's doing what I want
00:31:41.800
to do. The people who should be doing what I want them to do, which is to deregulate
00:31:45.160
the housing sector so we can build houses and make it cheaper for people to buy and
00:31:49.920
to rent, are the government. I think it's gotten a lot worse under Theresa May, but
00:31:55.780
the Conservative Party in particular is completely bankrupt of ideas. I think they have no idea
00:32:00.920
where they're going. They have kind of intentionally choked off the sort of source of ideas that
00:32:13.580
And I think that they're the ones who deserve the blame for, in part,
00:32:23.340
the slow global recovery since the financial crisis is not their fault.
00:32:30.020
But just as the financial crisis wasn't Gordon Brown's fault,
00:32:33.080
but the government could have done and could easily do a lot more to increase economic growth
00:32:39.440
here and that would mean wage growth and to lower house prices and that would mean the cost of living
00:32:43.660
falling and they're not doing any of that so I wouldn't be arguing with the Corbyn voter I'd be
00:32:47.620
arguing with the Tory voter and I'd be saying get these people to to actually do something to make
00:32:52.820
the market actually work for people instead of just trying to put out fires across the country
00:32:57.480
across the economy. But isn't the issue with the housing prices that no government politically can
00:33:03.160
afford to allow housing prices to fall because the people who vote, the vast majority of the
00:33:08.380
people who vote and own homes don't want that to happen. And so you end up in this, I think it's
00:33:12.740
called the wealth trap in economics, where you can't allow house prices to fall because the
00:33:17.560
price you would pay for that politically would be so high, you probably wouldn't be elected again
00:33:22.020
for generations because the people who lost value in their homes would never vote for your party
00:33:27.320
again that's possible um in 1992 there was a pretty sharp reduction in house prices and
00:33:34.200
obviously the subsequent years weren't very good for the conservative party but um it doesn't seem
00:33:39.360
like they were it wasn't house prices in particular that it was more to do with the kind of
00:33:44.200
um i guess people were bored of having you know 17 years of conservative government and so on
00:33:50.720
um i'm not i'm not completely convinced that house prices falling would would put the tories out of
00:33:56.480
power. I do think that a kind of grand policy like abolishing the Green Belt would be pretty
0.99
00:34:01.720
bad for the Tories. I think that we possibly overestimate in politics how much people vote
00:34:07.120
out of self-interest and underestimate people's idea of what, and don't properly appreciate
00:34:12.860
people's idea of what's kind of good for society. My view is the Green Belt, yeah, some people
00:34:17.400
are voting to protect the Green Belt to protect their own house price. I think a lot of people
00:34:21.220
are protecting an idea of England and an idea of kind of green lungs for the cities that
00:34:25.860
people can go to and that's on the one hand that makes it more challenging as an economist to kind
00:34:31.300
of design a system that might sort of satisfy them but on the other hand it means that if they could
00:34:35.800
be convinced that we could have a greener system for example we could say new developments need to
00:34:40.880
have more parks and gardens. Parks and gardens tend to be environmentally a lot better for the
00:34:44.900
environment than the farmland that's on the green belt because they're biodiverse and greenland farm
00:34:49.000
belt is usually a monoculture. There are things like that that we could do. We could point out
00:34:53.660
that people go to their garden and go to their local park
00:34:59.120
In fact, I think the statistics for London are that
00:35:03.220
to actually for recreation less than once a year,
00:35:05.760
which is pretty bad if the Greenbelt is supposed to be there
00:35:18.100
We can allow streets by streets to have just votes.
00:35:22.700
there's no real reason that I shouldn't be able to
00:35:25.060
perhaps in association with some lucky property developer
00:35:31.240
everybody is allowed to add one story to their building
00:35:40.060
there's no reason that that shouldn't be possible
00:35:46.620
and there you've sort of improved the connection
00:35:49.840
between new house building and the existing homeowners benefiting.
00:35:54.320
There are things that we can do to just allow more density in general
00:36:02.460
But I think being fatalistic about it is the thing that we have to avoid
00:36:07.480
because, really, if you don't build more houses
00:36:16.360
you're going to have non-homeowners punishing you.
00:36:19.020
you know somebody's going to punish you and at least by building more houses you create more
00:36:23.100
growth you create more wealth there's more stuff um there people are better off um generally in
00:36:30.120
politics i think the best thing to do is to think one step ahead not two or three um because it's
00:36:35.400
the world is so complex that even if you just get that one step ahead right you're you're pretty
00:36:39.840
lucky and do you think it's a problem especially in london where people buy flats not in order to
00:36:45.620
live not in order to stay not even in order to have a holiday home or whatever it may be it's
00:36:50.220
simply as an investment or do you think that is a problem that's been over exaggerated by the media
00:36:55.180
it's been massively exaggerated especially foreign buyers and foreign owners are more likely i believe
00:37:00.800
to let the units be empty um which obviously if you're buying it to rent it out um that shifts
00:37:07.420
the market somewhat towards rental that isn't obviously a bad thing um lots of people rent
00:37:18.780
and I decided I'm going to rent for at least another year
00:37:25.460
Foreign ownership, just in general, of luxury flats in London
00:37:29.300
is a very, very small fraction of the market in terms of actual units.
00:37:32.620
It's quite a big fraction of the market in terms of the money
00:37:49.920
So we also have the possible problem of land banking,
00:37:55.700
where developers have permission to build on a plot
00:38:01.600
And there are actually rational reasons for that.
00:38:05.740
for a given amount of workforce and capital and so on.
00:38:08.940
They need to have an assurance that for the next six years
00:38:11.140
they'll have plots they'll be able to build on but it's also pretty annoying if you're a local
00:38:14.420
council you give permission to build to build on a piece of land and they don't go for that
00:38:18.640
you think well what's the point you know why am i why are we bothering to go to this political
00:38:22.080
effort um but all those things are kind of symptoms of a deeper problem housing shouldn't
00:38:28.120
be an investment the fundamental problem is that housing is an investment it shouldn't be an
00:38:32.740
investment any more than you know a plane ticket is an investment or a or a car you know a used
00:38:39.640
toyota is an investment those things are consumption goods they're things that we pay for
00:38:44.040
because we like using them um housing should be the same the only reason that housing is an
00:38:48.900
investment good the only reason housing is more economically like a piece of fine art or a piece
00:38:53.540
of gold is because the supply is fixed or the supply is nearly fixed and that's because of
00:38:58.420
the planning system so then so the problems that that exist which i admit i i in my opinion the
00:39:04.020
foreign owners problem is a small part of the problem but it's clearly any unit that's going
00:39:08.500
vacant is sort of suboptimal you know it's not what we want if there are
00:39:13.300
people who don't have places to live but the problem is that it's an
00:39:16.720
investment good and it shouldn't be an investment good but the other problem
00:39:19.660
there Sam is that housing is the only time in the normal person's life when
00:39:24.340
they can borrow a huge amount of money to gamble with right you cannot borrow
00:39:28.820
two hundred thousand or three hundred or five hundred thousand pounds from a bank
00:39:32.800
yeah to invest in the stock market yeah as an ordinary person but housing is one
00:39:37.540
area where you can do that because you've got the collateral of the house and I think that's what's
00:39:41.340
happened over the last 20 years is a lot of people have treated it as an investment as you say
00:39:45.220
not because they have money sitting around to invest in it but because they've been able to
00:39:49.620
borrow money to do that and the second homes issue I think is one of the reasons that also
00:39:53.960
the government doesn't want to allow house prices to fall because if they were a lot of these people
00:39:58.540
would lose out and again as I say politically the price would be very helpful. I think that's right
00:40:06.340
You kind of need both for the effect that we've seen to happen.
00:40:11.000
It doesn't matter how much you can borrow to fund the price of a car, right?
00:40:16.980
Borrowing interest rates falling doesn't mean that car prices rise,
00:40:19.840
even though people could, in theory, borrow more to get a bigger auto loan
00:40:29.680
So, yeah, you can borrow 100,000, but you just end up with five Toyotas.
00:40:36.960
Yeah, exactly, because they're not investment goods,
00:40:39.360
because we can just build more of them as we want to.
00:40:42.800
Classic cars are different, because they are actually fixed in supply.
00:40:48.880
Can I just say, this episode has been sponsored by Toyota.
00:40:54.140
Well, it hasn't, but if you'd like to sponsor us.
0.86
00:41:05.040
A Russian and a Venezuelan offering to do anything for money, that's a good look.
1.00
00:41:13.800
I think you're right, though, that there is what economists call a moral hazard.
00:41:16.980
In the same way that when you bail out a bank, you encourage the bank to take more risks in the future.
00:41:22.380
And when the bank thinks it'll be bailed out, you encourage them to take more risks.
00:41:25.460
I think there might be an implicit moral hazard in the system.
00:41:27.680
where people, if you're looking at a mortgage, for one thing, this I'm sure isn't a system-wide
00:41:35.320
problem, but it is very strange when you look at the cost of a mortgage that they only show you
00:41:39.640
based on today's interest rates, when we know that interest rates are going to rise in the future.
00:41:44.060
Now, I don't think the bank would lend that money out if they didn't think that they'd get that
00:41:47.140
money back, but I do think it's possible that a lot of people are borrowing money without realizing
00:41:50.980
that a much bigger fraction of their income is going to be taken up in interest payments
00:41:54.700
in five years' time once interest rates are probably up by, you know,
00:41:59.920
half a percentage point or one percentage point, I don't know.
00:42:09.400
But, yeah, I think it's two blades of a scissors.
00:42:11.900
Let's move on a little bit and talk about technology.
00:42:14.020
You're someone who's optimistic about the future of technology.
00:42:19.580
was convincing me that we're about to eliminate scarcity
00:42:23.860
he right about that he's not allowed to join in by the way so you say whatever you want um no i
00:42:29.120
don't think we're going to eliminate scarcity ever no ever i mean we'll always you're wrong
00:42:34.080
that's it that's it you're wrong i mean time time will always be scarce um you know we will always
00:42:40.400
have a scarcity of time um even if resources become uh abundant and super abundant this time
00:42:46.100
will always be scarce so we'll always have to figure out ways both of using our own time and
00:42:50.040
of using other people's time. And a lot of, you know, a lot of what we want from other
00:42:54.760
people is their time, whether it's to do a service for us or to just spend time with
00:42:58.240
us. But I think we're very, very far away from material superabundance. It's true that
00:43:06.140
the kind of basic, some of the basics of living are very cheap. To me, technology is more
00:43:13.260
likely to expand the frontier of what we can do than it is to kind of make it trivially
00:43:18.900
easy uh to until we have kind of extremely extremely good ai that isn't so good that it can
00:43:25.020
that it has a desire to um eliminate us uh for self-interested reasons purely rational desire
00:43:30.580
to destroy all humanity until we have that i mean there's a there then we get into other questions
00:43:35.480
about um kind of the dangers of ai and so on but um i think what's more likely is that um technology
00:43:42.580
will make kind of recreation much more enjoyable and so i think that might be the thing that um
00:43:47.620
You know, Keynes famously wrote an essay about 100 years ago
00:43:51.180
called The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.
00:43:59.680
And his view was that what they had at the time in terms of resources,
00:44:04.420
like what your kind of weekly income was, that was enough for anybody.
00:44:07.760
So as we get better at making things, we'll stick with that
00:44:13.040
And as it turned out, actually, we just wanted more stuff.
00:44:34.260
economist in America, he writes the Marginal
0.60
00:44:43.540
youth unemployment is probably partly driven by video games because it's just much more enjoyable
0.84
00:44:49.680
to be unemployed now than it was to be unemployed 15 or 20 years ago there's just more you can do
00:44:54.580
with your with with spare time and i mean as somebody who just spent the weekend playing on
00:44:59.280
my switch my octopath traveler rpg just came out and it was a great weekend you know in between
00:45:05.380
world cup games it was too hot to go outside so i just played video games and as that becomes
00:45:10.660
better and as sort of leisure as we come up with better things to do with leisure so it might begin
00:45:15.380
with virtual reality um i think simulated reality when you when you actually experience the thing
00:45:20.540
in your head is is the real is the real prize that we really should be looking for um but as
00:45:26.080
things like that probably better drugs come available um you know i think that this sounds
00:45:30.540
like a great future which is all going to be high playing computer games sure and that's basically
00:46:04.740
it's it's inconceivable to me that um the kind of innovative the kind of advances we're making
00:46:09.900
in biochemistry and in genetics um that we will not figure out how to for example give
00:46:15.320
a kind of time limited uh experience similar to taking ecstasy or cocaine in a very safe way i
00:46:20.960
just think it's inconceivable you know um i like you i mean the argument the best argument against
00:46:27.420
what i'm saying is how bad artificial sweeteners still are you know it's been legal to research
00:47:00.740
have a joint on set yeah and actually we can't because we're smoking indoors that's no longer
00:47:04.880
oh yeah that'll be that that's very bad yeah you'll have to you'll have to smoke it in special
00:47:09.740
government approved areas but um which will take all the joy out of it yeah well that's so that's
00:47:15.420
the like the grayification of life is as we as we kind of move towards um greater liberalism in
00:47:21.460
terms of drugs as i i think we are the reason i say five years is because i don't think it'll
00:47:25.540
happen before the next election but i think it will happen straight after the next election yeah
00:47:31.120
Because the major parties are both opposed to it.
00:47:34.600
The last time this issue came up in a massive way,
00:47:38.460
the guy who we were trying to get him on the show
00:47:40.280
and hopefully we were David Nutt, Professor David Nutt,
00:47:42.240
he got us to leave for saying that marijuana is not as bad as alcohol.
00:47:50.120
Yeah, and he completely correctly compared the dangers of the deaths from ecstasy
00:47:56.140
And for making a correct, completely clear, anybody can check the data, comparison, he was fired.
00:48:06.100
I mean, tell me what you're saying that I'm not saying.
00:48:13.580
One, I think, being that the paradox being there, much more illiberal drinking culture
00:48:19.160
means that it's much more normal for kind of just smoking cannabis
00:48:23.480
is just much more widespread in the U.S. than it is here.
00:48:25.780
even more widespread in the U.S. than it is here.
00:48:29.260
That has now led to it being legalized on the entire West Coast now.
00:48:34.600
California, the really crucial state, because it's so culturally important,
00:48:38.220
because most TV shows in America, most sitcoms and things like that are filmed in California,
00:48:47.080
and I think they normalize it in a way that is sort of the key to getting,
00:49:01.040
they weren't kind of people that were there as like
00:49:04.380
they were just normal human beings who happened to be gay
00:49:09.780
who maybe didn't know people like that in their lives
00:49:15.840
and I think a similar thing would probably happen with cannabis
00:49:19.400
Are you saying Will and Grace made gay marriage?
00:49:23.220
Yeah, I would say that it had a huge, huge contributing effect.
00:49:28.840
So I try to, you know, I'm straying off my economist's territory.
00:49:32.560
But yeah, I think normalization is the kind of a key to that kind of liberalization.
00:49:37.660
And I think that as it gets normalized across America, we just follow America.
00:49:42.240
I mean, the UK just follows all political discourse follows American discourse.
00:49:46.360
You know, we have arguments about things that have nothing to, you know, that just are not
00:49:50.480
We have huge arguments about Black Lives Matter, which just isn't a thing in the UK.
00:49:54.420
There are problems to do with the police and so on, but the kind of things that Black Lives Matter were campaigning about,
00:50:01.220
still somehow this became the kind of number one thing that we were talking about because we consume so much American media.
00:50:07.420
We just take, and this happens left and right politically, we look to Americans for what we talk about.
00:50:36.860
why am I a communist, and it was something to do with
00:50:46.280
Military imperialism, putting too many people in jail.
00:51:00.560
they were things that are American talking points.
00:51:06.440
We don't put millions of people in jail in the UK
00:51:13.360
are driven oh yeah and sorry the third one was um the separation of children and their parents
00:51:19.060
um when they when they migrate into the u.s uh which i which i think is appalling which i hate
0.50
00:51:24.680
um but this isn't something that we do in the uk um and so you're defining yourself by american
00:51:30.240
by american uh talking points by american political wedge issues um and everybody does
00:51:35.560
you know liz truss who i think is wonderful the chief secretary of the treasury gave a speech
00:51:44.160
you need to have a license to become a hair braider.
00:51:48.320
In the UK, you need to have a license to be a doctor or a lawyer
00:51:53.260
Just everybody just adopts these American political talking points
00:52:05.160
As America legalizes, we will legalize as well.
00:52:11.840
They just follow culture when it comes to stuff like this, at least.
00:52:37.360
No, no, I'm joking. I mean, in terms of, do you think that's going to be legalized anytime soon,
00:52:41.940
or do you think that's going to be a much harder sell?
00:52:44.140
I think it's a harder sell. Probably cocaine is harder than MDMA,
00:52:48.020
because cocaine is reasonably easy to turn into crack,
00:52:51.380
and if cocaine became widely available, I actually don't think people would move on to crack,
00:52:57.820
because the reason you smoke crack is because it's cheaper per the effect it has than cocaine is.
00:53:03.640
I mean crack exists really because cocaine is expensive and legalization would make it much much cheaper
00:53:08.960
but that might be an issue but I think MDMA, cocaine and cannabis are the three that
00:53:14.600
really there should be no debate about legalizing. Heroin becomes much more difficult because it's
00:53:19.500
so strongly addictive and it's much more like a kind of medical problem and kind of paternalism
00:53:27.200
where you know which I said earlier being anti-paternalist is a sort of defining liberal
00:53:31.260
trait but but heroin is where most people um i think including myself although i i don't i don't
00:53:39.220
know for certain would say that you're kind of not in your right mind if you if you take heroin
00:53:42.980
you've sort of become uh you've kind of you lost you're not you're not you don't have your full
00:53:47.640
faculties available to you but cannabis mdma and cocaine no question they'd be much safer for one
00:53:54.660
they'd be probably a lot more enjoyable um which is important um you know it's maybe you'd enjoy
00:54:00.120
enjoy it i think i would enjoy the mgma and the cocaine
00:54:02.620
all right we've added you all right so so drugs all around um so where what's the future according
00:54:09.740
to sauerbach and where are we going to be five ten years from now what are we not seeing that's
00:54:13.740
coming towards us well i think politically um a lot depends on productivity growth uh i know it's a
00:54:28.500
A lot depends on us being able to return to the kind of trend that we were at before the crisis.
00:54:34.360
It really seems as if something has broken in the economy.
00:54:38.780
That means that it's sort of fundamentally, in terms of output, growing in different ways.
00:54:45.020
And that people at the top, the kind of software engineers and the people who are very gifted,
00:54:54.080
and be able to be extremely productive and innovative.
00:55:03.760
if this sort of coming apart of the kind of cognitive elite
00:55:12.200
And I don't think that's just an economic problem.
00:55:15.060
I think the feeling that somebody else has a great life
00:55:20.340
i mean that's a very troubling feeling and the feeling that your kids aren't going to have a
00:55:25.880
great life and somebody else's kids are going to have a great life that's a very very um troubling
00:55:29.780
thing and i think that's a maybe at the root of uh kind of where we are politically right now
00:55:34.860
and i don't know if and that's why i think the kind of economic fundamentals matter so much because
00:55:39.000
that's what that's what determines whether you feel like tomorrow is going to be better than
00:55:43.260
today was and next year will be better for your kids than this than this year is um and whether
00:55:48.520
that changes, I don't know. I think it probably will. I tend to think that the economy and
00:55:56.120
the global economy is more robust than people give it credit for. I think China not stagnating
00:56:05.000
matters a lot. If China continues to grow, then that's very, very good for everybody
1.00
00:56:08.800
else. That's not only a country that is just producing things, demanding things, buying
00:56:16.860
things um but it's also a country that has a strong stake in the global kind of trading the
00:56:22.960
global liberal trading order the kind of relatively free trade order uh being preserved and in kind of
00:56:28.980
peace in the sort of eurasian continent um being preserved so i think that's a good thing
00:56:34.500
um and india might drive that as well but i don't know uh i think it feels to me like europe and
00:56:40.440
The United States are kind of stagnating a bit.
00:56:44.480
And it feels, apart from the Silicon Valley element of the United States,
00:56:49.280
like Europe is too focused on getting the rules right
00:56:56.660
and getting a perfect set of rules when it comes to technology
00:57:00.300
and when it comes to the economy and trade and so on.
00:57:06.660
Bruno Macaes, who's a former Portuguese minister for Europe, has his book called The Dawn of Eurasia.
00:57:13.620
And the way he describes the European Union is, and I say this as a person who's anti-Brexit,
00:57:19.340
is as people trying to kind of design a system that can run without human control.
00:57:23.880
And so they're trying to devise kind of formula for allocating refugees to countries.
00:57:28.280
And it's just crazy, because that's not what the real world is, and that's not what politics is.
00:57:31.760
And I worry that that sort of obsession with kind of getting the kind of building this sort of perfect, beautiful structure, a perfect, beautiful constitution will really hurt Europe because they've missed the kind of energy and dynamism that is what really drives economic improvement.
00:57:49.080
And in the U.S., I think all sorts of the Trump madness seems to have infected the whole political culture there.
00:58:03.280
And really, the ultimate problem actually in the U.S., and I think possibly it will come over here,
0.53
00:58:09.360
because the downside of us taking all American politics is that we take all American politics,
00:58:27.300
and that doesn't really matter very much to people
00:58:34.720
if you like it you like it and you can choose a team
00:58:42.540
whatever and um and that and that's that it's like a kind of a hobbyist thing um it shouldn't
00:58:48.080
be something that obsesses people uh at every point in their lives and and unfortunately whether
00:58:53.840
people like it or not it is now something that affects every every element of their lives um and
00:58:58.520
that for me is a kind of uh a sort of modest case for a small state or for a limited state is that
00:59:05.720
politics makes us hate each other politics makes us enemies and adversaries because politics really
00:59:11.440
is zero-sum game. Most of the world is not positive-sum game. We can interact with each
00:59:15.540
other and we're both better off, but politics is zero-sum game. If you get this, I don't get it.
00:59:20.280
And so we hate each other when it comes to that. And I think that the more that that kind of
00:59:27.120
mindset bleeds into the more elements of our lives and the more our interactions with each
00:59:32.520
other are defined by what side are you on, the more we'll hate each other. And my fear is that
00:59:37.140
that will happen in America, and I worry that that might spread to the rest of the English-speaking
0.53
00:59:41.780
world as well. How much do you blame social media for that? To some extent, a little bit. I don't
00:59:48.920
know how much I blame social media. I blame, certainly I blame old people using the internet
1.00
00:59:55.520
for a while, but it's true. I mean, young people know that most of the internet is bollocks.
01:00:01.780
You know, young people, they kind of have an inoculation against what they read online,
01:00:08.100
whereas old people are much more credulous because they're used to what they read being true,
0.97
01:00:11.820
and they're used to having kind of gatekeepers only let them read what's basically true.
01:00:17.580
So, yeah, I blame, and I mean, old people are much, much, much more susceptible to fake news,
01:00:22.860
and to not just fake news, but kind of crappy news.
01:00:26.100
You know, fake news is like actually just lies.
0.62
01:00:30.680
you know there might be there's there's probably some truth like the words are probably true but
01:00:35.680
what they're omitting means that they've slanted the story in such a terrible way old people are
1.00
01:00:40.040
really susceptible to that um because they're really they're used to news being a thing that's
01:00:44.160
fairly neutral and that they can trust um so i think it might be a little bit i mean this is a
01:00:49.460
this is a kind of um you know the expression apart from that mrs lincoln how is the play
01:00:54.020
it might be a bit like this but to say that um this might be a bit like the printing press
01:01:08.000
So it might be, I hope it doesn't come to that.
01:01:17.800
that nobody wanted to talk about politics online,
01:01:20.300
I think that would make the world a lot better place.
01:01:22.660
because I don't want to give anybody the power to censor that.
01:01:25.460
but um they kind of as i i'm a huge free speech person um because i think that free speech helps
01:01:33.040
us arrive at the right answer i think free speech in science is what helps us arrive at the right
01:01:37.380
answer and if you didn't have free speech in science then you would often get the wrong answer
01:01:41.000
and i sort of draw that into other areas of our lives free speech in markets is good because it
01:01:46.240
allows us to say this is a good product this is a bad product don't go to this company because
01:01:50.200
they'll rip you off that's a really great way of making markets honest um but i don't know if
01:01:54.660
Politics has the same kind of correction mechanisms.
01:01:57.120
Politics seems to not have the kind of correction mechanisms of science and markets.
01:02:02.200
For, you know, if a theory is wrong, you can test it, and it's wrong.
01:02:05.820
If a product is bad, you can try it, and it's bad.
01:02:09.660
How do we figure out what the right answer is, what the wrong answer is?
01:02:13.600
Because there will always be 100 explanations as to why it failed, even if you do it and you think that it's good.
01:02:33.540
an optimist. If you're an old person watching
1.00
01:02:52.800
If you combine the two, you can combine drugs and old people,
1.00
01:02:58.400
I feel like we've taken it in the wrong direction.
01:03:01.360
Sam, the last question we always like to ask our guests is,
01:03:04.120
what is the one thing that we're not talking about
01:03:08.940
Animal welfare is the thing that we should be talking about.
01:03:12.300
I think that this will be the thing that has the technological solution.
01:03:16.600
I think that as we are increasingly able to grow meat,
01:03:21.420
not meat replicas, but actual meat in factories and in labs,
01:03:26.180
I think that we will begin to realize that the way animals are treated
01:03:32.840
And I suspect it's the thing that our children will look to us and say,
01:03:35.940
why on earth, why the hell are you treating animals that way?
01:03:51.120
My view is that it's better to have lived a life that's good
01:03:54.740
and then to be killed than to have never lived it all.
01:04:01.600
or you'll live your life and then at the age of 40
1.00
01:04:07.820
And I think that most animals would probably make that choice too if they could.
01:04:10.760
So I think that veganism isn't actually demanded,
01:04:20.440
You had Diana Fleischman on a few weeks ago
0.87
01:04:36.500
Like Sam B, but with the number eight for an A.
01:04:38.760
Perfect, we'll put that at the bottom of the video.