TRIGGERnometry - Sam Bowman

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is a

00:00:14.580 show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:19.140 about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our brilliant expert

00:00:26.220 guest this week is the former executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman. Welcome

00:00:31.580 to Trigonautry. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to have you on and thank you

00:00:34.960 for coming in. Let's just get right into it. We always ask our guests, first of all, what's

00:00:38.880 been your journey to the place that you're in now? How have you got to where you are?

00:00:42.440 District line or no? Well, I call myself a neoliberal. I spent a lot of my 20s, I guess,

00:00:49.520 calling myself a libertarian. From the age of about 12, when I read On Liberty by John

00:00:55.680 Stuart Mill, I kind of thought, yep, this is the one for me. I'm a liberal of some kind.

00:00:59.440 Can I just interrupt you? At 12?

00:01:01.880 Well, I was interested in that kind of thing from quite a young age.

00:01:05.820 Wow. Okay.

00:01:06.840 I mean, I probably still don't understand it very well. But yeah, so for most of my kind

00:01:12.720 of teenage years and 20s, I thought of myself as being a liberal or a libertarian. And so

00:01:18.900 in the last few years, for various reasons, I started to kind of realise or identify my

00:01:24.780 view a sort of split going on in the libertarian world and also kind of a parallel that kind of

00:01:30.500 split within libertarianism a distinct group of people who were quite libertarian in some areas

00:01:37.520 but much less so in other areas. Sam maybe for those people who are not fully familiar with the

00:01:42.800 whole thing can you just lay out what is libertarianism? So libertarianism is I guess

00:01:48.180 the idea that individual liberty trumps pretty much everything else so it's much more important

00:01:54.120 that the state does not interfere, and other people, don't interfere with your right to do

00:01:59.400 what you want with your life, to do what you want with your money, with your property, than all the

00:02:03.440 other concerns that we have. So, for example, a libertarian and a socialist might disagree about

00:02:09.800 property rights. Socialists might say it's reasonable for us to take money or property

00:02:15.120 from rich people in order to give it to poor people, or in order to provide things like health

00:02:19.200 services or education services to poor people libertarians to varying degrees would disagree

00:02:24.680 some libertarians would just say no it's never acceptable to take property from one person to

00:02:29.180 give it to another taxation is theft other libertarians would say even though it might

00:02:35.720 seem like a good idea that will lead to bad outcomes and then they'll get kind of some sort

00:02:40.580 of you'll get a spectrum in between as well now I kind of always they're also very very strong

00:02:46.760 free free speech people they're people who think that you should be able to have sex with whoever

00:02:51.020 you want as long as they consent as well and they're adults you should be able to put into

00:02:54.360 your body whatever kind of drug you want you should be able to more or less move around the

00:02:57.760 planet wherever you want provided there is somebody in another country willing to take you there

00:03:02.080 you know put you up in their house or something like that um and the view the kind of basic

00:03:06.640 libertarian view is that kind of individual liberty is the it kind of trumps everything else

00:03:11.300 and and where that differentiates from kind of conventional liberalism which also agrees

00:03:16.260 individual liberty is important. Liberals are a much, much broader set of people, and they tend

00:03:21.480 to think that, many liberals tend to think that that kind of individual autonomy doesn't extend

00:03:27.220 into your economic lives. Libertarians think that it very much does extend to your economic lives,

00:03:32.640 and your economic liberty is just as important as any other kind of liberty that there is.

00:03:37.600 So for a long time I saw myself as sort of working within that vein, and I had a lot of time for

00:03:43.220 libertarians, even though I no longer consider myself to be one. I was the, as you said, I ran

00:03:48.660 a think tank called the Adam Smith Institute, which for a long time was the only kind of

00:03:52.360 self-identified libertarian think tank in the UK. But for me, libertarianism was always a big tent,

00:04:01.160 but I think began to, and I think it has really split in kind of not very nice ways into groups

00:04:09.580 that I wouldn't really identify as being liberals.

00:04:12.280 They might be libertarians in the sense that they use that word,

00:04:15.600 but I don't consider themselves to be people who are that interested in individual liberty.

00:04:19.240 And also, I think that, and I have become persuaded, and I did become persuaded,

00:04:23.620 that libertarianism was really not sufficient when it came to the kind of distribution of resources.

00:04:30.040 My view, kind of in a sentence, is a neoliberal, which is what I consider myself to be now,

00:04:34.400 somebody who thinks that markets are very good at creating wealth,

00:04:37.780 but they're not very good at allocating wealth.

00:04:39.580 and that markets really are very brutal, they're very amoral forces.

00:04:44.420 And even though they're very efficient, people who haven't been born with great gifts,

00:04:48.360 people who have been unlucky in their life,

00:04:50.420 will often get a very, very bad kind of sort of slice of the pie,

00:04:54.900 a very small slice of the pie at the end.

00:04:56.620 So a libertarian would say, that's meritocracy.

00:04:58.820 They would say that's, yeah, they'd say that's meritocracy, that's tolerable.

00:05:02.740 They'd say as long as that, you know, as long as the market process has been fair,

00:05:06.700 then the outcomes, okay, that's a shame.

00:05:09.400 That's a pity that that's happened,

00:05:10.840 that there are poor people, basically.

00:05:12.360 But the thing that I think sometimes

00:05:14.460 with those types of libertarians,

00:05:15.780 they go, well, that's fair, it's acceptable.

00:05:17.460 And I'm always saying, yeah,

00:05:18.340 you're saying that because it's not you, mate.

00:05:20.320 Yeah, right.

00:05:21.440 That might be true.

00:05:22.340 That might be true.

00:05:23.060 I mean, that could be true.

00:05:24.200 That could be said of almost any political position, right?

00:05:27.380 That there will always be losers

00:05:29.400 in any political arrangement.

00:05:31.320 and arrangements that are brutal

00:05:36.540 or arrangements that kind of don't do very much

00:05:38.700 to help those losers,

00:05:40.160 it's easy to just say,

00:05:42.120 well, what if that was you?

00:05:44.340 And there's a philosopher

00:05:45.800 who I don't actually like that much.

00:05:47.920 A lot of people who have similar beliefs to me do,

00:05:51.400 a guy called John Rawls.

00:05:53.060 And one device he uses,

00:05:54.300 I'm not a huge fan of his,

00:05:55.320 but one device he uses is called the veil of ignorance.

00:05:58.940 So if we were thinking about

00:05:59.880 or what a good sort of arrangement for society would be,

00:06:03.180 imagine you didn't know who you were in that society,

00:06:06.140 and then only if you would accept a society

00:06:08.940 where you didn't know where in that distribution you would be,

00:06:11.860 would that be a just, or could that be a kind of a society

00:06:14.200 that would be sort of morally acceptable?

00:06:16.400 And I think that's a reasonable tool to use.

00:06:18.580 Where I disagree with Rawls is that he thinks that that implies

00:06:21.200 a high degree of equality.

00:06:23.560 For me, equality is not really the end,

00:06:25.940 the thing that we should be caring about.

00:06:27.520 What we should care about is the well-being of people.

00:06:29.880 I'd be much happier to live in an unequal but rich country.

00:06:34.260 I'd rather live in somewhere like the UK, which is very unequal,

00:06:37.340 than in a much poorer country that had a much more equal distribution of wealth.

00:06:41.200 And that's where I think the kind of Rawlsian approach isn't always that useful.

00:06:46.380 So what's your solution to this meritocracy is brutal problem?

00:06:51.080 For me, the kind of neoliberal arrangement is very low regulation markets.

00:06:58.240 markets that are regulated really only in order to make them work better so you might have

00:07:02.140 regulations against cartels or in some cases monopolies but you don't have regulations that

00:07:08.300 are there to for example give workers a bigger share of the pie but after you've generated the

00:07:13.840 wealth the point of that being to have as much wealth generation and to have as much kind of

00:07:17.100 efficiency and innovation as possible and then after you've had the market process through a

00:07:21.920 reasonably simple tax system and a reasonably simple wealth welfare system you just tax the

00:07:27.060 rich and you give it to the poor. And the arrangement being very, very free markets

00:07:33.180 with simple redistribution of income from the rich to the poor.

00:07:37.580 I mean, in theory, that's great. But we can see now the problems we're trying to tax big

00:07:43.400 corporations is that they find loopholes in loopholes and loopholes. And it's very, very

00:07:48.800 difficult to tax them effectively, like we've seen with Amazon or with Starbucks. I mean,

00:07:53.940 how would you ensure that works?

00:07:55.180 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.

00:08:11.640 where we should be taxing rich people isn't when they save or invest their money investment i think

00:08:16.600 is really good we should be basically investment is you not using resources that you have a claim

00:08:21.340 to so that other people can and use those resources in a more productive way so we should

00:08:25.380 want as much investment as possible what we should do what we should be taxing is consumption so it's

00:08:30.820 when you when you draw down those investments and say okay i'm going to buy a boat or i'm going to

00:08:35.220 spend this money on a night out or i'm going to just eat this eat these resources by spending it

00:08:39.700 on food, that's when that wealth is destroyed. That's when the wealth is no longer usable by

00:08:44.580 other people. And we're kind of socially, as far as society is concerned, the wealth is no longer

00:08:49.200 useful. And that's the point where we should be taxing it. So we can do that through. It's a bit

00:08:54.240 maybe boring to go into different types of tax like that. Actually, the value-added tax is a

00:08:58.800 pretty good way of doing that. I was going to say you want 80% VAT on boats. Is that where you are?

00:09:03.800 Something like that, yeah. I probably wouldn't have different rates for different things.

00:09:07.260 What I would probably do is have a flat rate on everything and then give poorer people a cash, just a cash payment.

00:09:14.420 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.

00:09:24.480 Rich people spend more money overall on food than poor people do.

00:09:27.160 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.

00:09:35.300 so a better thing to do would be to have a kind of a flat VAT

00:09:37.840 there are other things as well

00:09:39.400 there's something called a progressive consumption tax

00:09:41.400 but a tax on consumption

00:09:43.580 and also a cash transfer

00:09:45.920 to poorer people

00:09:47.060 or in fact to everybody, we could just give everybody a cash transfer

00:09:50.060 that's what I was going to go next

00:09:51.200 is universal basic income

00:09:52.620 what do you think about the idea of

00:09:54.540 I'd like a cash transfer

00:09:55.940 how much would you give?

00:10:00.220 you're making it like Sam is going to be walking around

00:10:02.580 just handing out the cash

00:10:03.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a simple man. I deal in simple ideas. How much are you going to fucking give me?

00:10:08.260 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?

00:10:14.800 Right.

00:10:15.420 So you could have a...

00:10:17.240 I'm starting to dislike you now. You promised me cash.

00:10:20.860 Sam, I've never seen Francis so engaged with one of our guests before.

00:10:25.140 So, for example, by getting rid of the exemptions on VAT in the UK, we'd raise about £60 billion extra a year.

00:10:30.940 So you could, if you used all that, that would be like an extra £1,000 per person a year.

00:10:34.580 But that's just for the VAT exemptions.

00:10:36.640 Now, if we said that the welfare system, so things like housing benefit, unemployment insurance, job seekers allowance, things like that,

00:10:44.600 if we said that we wanted to replace those things with just a basic cash payment, then the money would be higher.

00:10:50.660 But you have the problem.

00:10:52.360 The problem is that poor people at the moment get housing benefit and get job seekers allowance, and rich people don't get that.

00:10:58.120 If you have a basic income, then rich people do get some fraction of that.

00:11:02.320 So if all you do is eliminate existing welfare payments to pay for a basic income,

00:11:07.380 then you're effectively redistributing money that we're spending on the poor towards the rich.

00:11:11.060 That's a very bad outcome.

00:11:12.240 That's not the kind of outcome that we want.

00:11:14.440 So there are different ways of doing it.

00:11:17.380 This is the reason that I'm kind of, even though I quite like the basic income idea in theory,

00:11:22.520 I think that it's politically very difficult

00:11:24.340 because what it would require would be for headline tax rates to rise

00:11:29.160 in order to kind of fund quite a high basic income.

00:11:32.720 It would be like saying we're going to give you,

00:11:34.820 let's say you earn a million pounds a year, you work for a...

00:11:38.780 Close.

00:11:40.680 So we're going to give you an extra £10,000 a year in basic income,

00:11:44.260 but we're also going to tax you an extra £10,000 a year in your tax.

00:11:47.580 That would be neutral for you.

00:11:49.440 That would be how we would kind of make the system work.

00:11:51.880 But honestly, I think it's a pretty hard sell to say we're going to raise taxes by this much

00:11:56.440 so that, you know, the bottom 25% of society get to have this extra amount of money.

00:12:01.020 Another way of doing it is through something called a negative income tax,

00:12:03.900 which is to just say, if you earn nothing, you'll get £10,000 a year or £15,000 a year.

00:12:08.840 And then for every pound you earn after a certain point, we'll take away 50p.

00:12:13.660 So you're always better off, you know, it's kind of fixing the marginal tax rate.

00:12:17.880 so you always have an incentive to earn more but we're kind of slowly withdrawing the money as you

00:12:22.060 do earn more um to me i've become i guess less um fixated on kind of grand schemes to change the

00:12:30.260 welfare system and more fixated on kind of principles to do with it's better to if you're

00:12:35.600 liberal at least it's better to give people money than it is to give people services it's like which

00:12:39.840 would you rather get uh money a book voucher or money for christmas yeah you know if you're if

00:12:44.460 your grandmother or your aunt gives you a 20 pound waterstones voucher you're like well thanks very

00:12:49.160 much what the fuck can i do with that i wanted the money you know amazon vouchers are the closest

00:12:53.120 thing to money because you can spend them on you amazon has everything so they're like a bit like

00:12:57.300 money and so they're a lot better than you know a body shop 20 pounds because i don't buy things

00:13:01.760 from the body shop they don't have anything i want um the same is true when it comes to kind

00:13:05.720 of government services versus giving people cash um if you'd rather 100 pounds worth of nhs vouchers

00:13:12.080 or £100 worth of education vouchers to £100, you're an idiot.

00:13:17.140 Because £100 can buy everything that £100 worth of NHS vouchers

00:13:20.300 or £100 worth of education vouchers can get you,

00:13:22.640 but it can also buy you a lot of other things.

00:13:25.120 And we might talk about this a little bit later.

00:13:28.040 I have become convinced that the core liberal belief,

00:13:31.000 the thing that whether you're a left-wing liberal or a right-wing liberal,

00:13:34.260 when it comes to markets, the core liberal belief is anti-paternalism.

00:13:39.140 It's the idea that people in charge don't know better than individuals

00:13:42.700 about what's best for those individuals,

00:13:44.600 provided there isn't some sort of information that they're not aware of.

00:13:47.960 And in that case, if we do think that individuals are the best people

00:13:51.560 to make the decisions for themselves with that money,

00:13:54.040 we should be looking for a government that, as much as possible,

00:13:58.180 and it's not always possible in police and courts and things like that,

00:14:01.260 it's not always possible, but as much as possible gives people the cash,

00:14:05.080 gives people the money according to what they need,

00:14:07.360 but doesn't try and spend it for them.

00:14:08.820 I mean that's having trust and faith in human beings isn't it that's where you lost me I don't

00:14:14.280 trust I don't have faith in anybody well it's not actually a question of having trust and faith in

00:14:18.780 human beings it's which human beings do you have trust and faith in I have no trust and faith in

00:14:23.040 government human beings I have a little bit more trust and faith that you have your own self

00:14:27.800 interests at heart oh yeah it's not so it's not a question of oh well you'll spend it in a way

00:14:32.400 that's really good for everybody else it's just you aren't a better person to judge what you can

00:14:38.180 spend that money on than you are. So it's purely that I think you have the knowledge and you have

00:14:43.820 the kind of incentives to spend that money wisely better than other people do. So it's actually,

00:14:48.880 you know, I would say it's almost distrust of other people. It's kind of cynicism that makes

00:14:53.100 me prefer sort of let the individual decide approach to government spending. So I'm in

00:14:57.840 favour of quite a high degree of government spending and government redistribution. I just

00:15:01.320 don't want the government to actually be spending the money. I want government to take the money

00:15:04.940 from the rich, give it to the poor in cash, and then let markets provide the services that they

00:15:09.360 want with that. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. So we've got a kind of philosophical

00:15:13.920 background to some of your views. Let's talk a little bit more specifics. I heard you talking

00:15:18.380 about Jeremy Corbyn, and we're not huge fans of Jeremy Corbyn on the show. Don't let that prejudge

00:15:24.140 your attitude. But you talked about him being a Marxist. And I don't know if you saw, there was

00:15:28.960 a woman on on the good morning show uh by the time this goes out it will be a couple of weeks ago

00:15:35.000 who uh supposedly shut down pierce morgan by ending her whatever she was saying with

00:15:41.020 i am literally a communist you idiot i don't know if you caught this yeah sure yeah what do you make

00:15:45.580 of the rise of this kind of far left socialism communist because i'm from russia right so for

00:15:51.020 me when someone says i'm a communist and no one seems to be amazed by this that's basically like

00:15:56.900 someone saying i'm a nazi right given what communists did in my country in china in venezuela

00:16:02.160 all over the place someone's basically saying on national television i'm a nazi you idiot and

00:16:07.060 they're getting praised for it what do you make of the rise because some of the ideas you talk

00:16:10.580 about they sound a little bit like you know the far left to send in a sense i well i strongly

00:16:16.740 disagree at the last point yeah um i know you strongly disagree i think that um the the kind

00:16:22.220 of fundamental the kind of defining characteristic of the far left is the idea that the state should

00:16:27.460 organize people's lives the state should organize things it's not that um you know it's not that

00:16:32.920 some redistribution is tolerable pretty much everybody i mean milton friedman and f.a hayek

00:16:36.760 who are kind of libertarian liberal heroes of mine both um believed in quite a high amount of

00:16:42.560 government redistribution so i don't agree with that you're right that was an unfair point in

00:16:46.260 You're right. Apologize.

00:16:48.820 I would like to officially apologize to Sam Barber.

00:16:52.680 For the other point, I think we're seeing this on both sides.

00:16:55.680 I think the right is becoming much, much closer.

00:16:59.500 The kind of mainstream right is flirting much more with the far right.

00:17:02.180 And I think the mainstream left is flirting much more with the far left.

00:17:05.540 When it comes to the left, you're right.

00:17:07.940 There's a total double standard.

00:17:09.680 I mean, communism, in my opinion, communism and Nazism are roughly as bad as each other.

00:17:14.240 Communism killed more people.

00:17:15.620 Nazism did its murder on a per capita basis in a more brutal way.

00:17:22.240 And a more targeted way.

00:17:23.180 And a more targeted way.

00:17:24.100 A more racist way.

00:17:24.940 Yeah, yeah.

00:17:25.540 But in terms of outcomes, I certainly would not want to live under either kind of regime.

00:17:30.480 Both regimes are totalitarianism.

00:17:33.380 That's the point.

00:17:35.120 The obsession over kind of left and right when it comes to Nazism and communism misses.

00:17:39.940 It's totalitarianism that's the problem.

00:17:41.460 and you can give it whatever kind of flavour or whatever kind of banners you want.

00:17:45.480 Ultimately, it's when the state controls people's lives to a total degree,

00:17:50.020 that's when you get this sort of mass murder and evil and so on.

00:17:54.220 Why is communism tolerated in the public sphere?

00:17:58.860 Well, partly it's because culture, elite culture, is just, in my opinion, much more left-wing, just institutionally.

00:18:06.340 I think, I don't say that, I don't believe in, I don't really even know what cultural Marxism is,

00:18:10.400 I don't believe in that, but I think it's obvious that most journalists are on the left.

00:18:18.160 It's basically impossible to be so left-wing in elite circles in academia and so on

00:18:26.120 that you're considered to be untouchable,

00:18:29.220 whereas it's very easy to be so right-wing that you're considered to be untouchable.

00:18:34.340 There's basically no way you can say anything in terms of how left-wing it is

00:18:38.940 that isn't just sort of laughed off as like,

00:18:41.440 wow, you're very optimistic, or you're very utopian.

00:18:45.280 Or if you're a communist, at worst, you're a utopian.

00:18:48.320 And that's not entirely true.

00:18:50.060 There are people on the left who hate communism

00:18:52.020 as much as they hate fascism and Nazism.

00:18:55.060 But clearly, the fact that this is like a fun Twitter

00:18:58.380 kind of trending moment that this woman said to Piers Morgan

00:19:03.680 that she's a communist, that really, I think,

00:19:06.380 says something quite bad.

00:19:08.140 partly it's because your average 18 year old because we have such a strong filter in society

00:19:13.720 a strong cultural filter against fascism and nazism and for obvious reasons we fought a war

00:19:19.380 that nearly destroyed civilization uh to destroy these people and it's it's a very good thing that

00:19:24.580 we did we built up sort of cultural antibodies it's like a virus that as soon as it comes into

00:19:30.340 the system everything shuts down we're going to destroy it we're going to destroy this virus

00:19:34.080 um and and that's a very good thing um but we haven't developed those antibodies to um come

00:19:40.420 communism for various reasons because we were allied to the soviets during the um during the

00:19:45.360 second world war because the elite because elites have been quite left-wing for a very long time

00:19:51.200 long since the kind of beginning of the 19th century at least um and so they have a sort of

00:19:57.160 well you know i might not want to go as far as them but i definitely sympathize with their aims

00:20:02.620 and so on and partly because fascism and nazism just have much more evil kind of motivations

00:20:07.580 you know communists can at least claim that well i didn't i don't mean for it to go into death camps

00:20:12.840 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

00:20:19.260 and not and kind of disavow yourself of um of the kind of basically evil intentions um but i think

00:20:27.860 that because we have um quite a lot of tolerance for you know the 18 year old communist or the kind

00:20:33.420 of mid-20s sort of cool communist type person uh because of that um we allow we allow that kind of

00:20:43.880 meme to grow much much more in my opinion we shouldn't be saying look you're evil if you're

00:20:49.840 a communist um but we should say you should be aware that the thing you're in favor of

00:20:54.360 is as evil as the thing that these evil Nazis are in favour of.

00:20:58.460 You know, you don't mean for this to happen,

00:21:00.100 but you should be aware that this is what happens.

00:21:02.180 And I don't think we do that.

00:21:03.540 You know, there's very little in terms of history.

00:21:07.400 I mean, history in the UK is very much focused on

00:21:11.560 when it does come to kind of the 20th century ideological struggles.

00:21:16.440 It focuses on the kind of evils of Nazism and fascism

00:21:19.980 and doesn't really go that much into communism.

00:21:23.420 communism is almost sort of treated as aesthetically quite interesting um you know the british library

00:21:28.200 did and it is quite aesthetically interesting you know i i understand all these things and i i don't

00:21:32.800 think anybody's bad for this but um but it's sort of treated as a curiosity and as a thing that

00:21:39.560 occasionally went wrong rather than something that rather than well it is i mean it is rather

00:21:45.380 than something that's kill me now that's kind of inherently um you know at best like giving a drunk

00:21:53.240 child the keys to a car filled with people you know that's that's the best possible way of

00:21:58.240 describing communism like the most generous possible way is it's it's something it's like

00:22:02.060 you're doing something so stupid you might not realize what you're doing but you're doing

00:22:05.880 something so stupid that you are criminally negligent um but it would go viral on the

00:22:10.780 internet well yeah well right exactly um you know and i and look pierce morgan is an asshole

00:22:15.800 either pierce morgan actually is the asshole that he appears to be on screen or he's such an

00:22:20.460 asshole that he acts like an asshole that he appears to be on screen neither I don't know

00:22:23.680 which is worse I actually I suspect Piers Morgan being in on the joke is worse than Piers Morgan

00:22:27.860 not being in on the joke um so yeah it's fun watching somebody tell him he's an idiot on his

00:22:32.060 show that's great um but it's I think people are excessively generous uh but for for various reasons

00:22:39.560 so it's about education for it it's more about challenging than education I would say um you

00:22:45.600 know i i think it's important to just establish in terms of their outcomes communism and nazism

00:22:51.180 are roughly as bad as each other that is a that is a very i don't want to get into you know which

00:22:55.240 is worse um that don't think that's a useful uh they're both very very very bad both very very

00:23:00.720 bad nazis had better uniforms are designed by hugo boss yes um but they i mean actually what's

00:23:06.920 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,

00:23:16.980 how much of that has come from Nazism.

00:23:21.760 There's a brilliant book called Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics,

00:23:24.120 and it's about the self-conscious attempt by the Nazi regime

00:23:27.620 to develop a quasi-Neo-Roman aesthetic.

00:23:34.080 And that's now what we associate.

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.

00:24:03.040 It was that deeply ingrained into people's consciences, which is interesting.

00:24:10.260 And you can kind of understand.

00:24:12.260 What I guess I'm trying to get across is I can see why we've come to this point.

00:24:16.380 I have quite a lot of sympathy.

00:24:17.680 The average, as I say, the average 18-year-old communist, I think, is probably a bit silly.

00:24:21.680 I don't think they're often not that stupid even.

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.

00:24:31.340 um you know so there's clearly a difference in terms of the intentions of people um but I think

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.

00:25:28.640 Yeah, that's astonishing, yeah.

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,

00:25:35.840 but it had to be this way.

00:25:37.240 And as if that's an important distinction, you know,

00:25:40.060 I really have very little time.

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.

00:25:51.280 I don't care about your intentions.

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.

00:26:04.540 It's sad. It's really sad.

00:26:06.420 So coming back to my Jeremy Corbyn question,

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.

00:27:07.440 What we thought was working isn't working.

00:27:11.240 And I don't blame them for that, right?

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.

00:27:20.360 And that's what leads to wages growing.

00:27:22.600 It's been abysmal in the UK.

00:27:24.760 It's been worse than abysmal in Italy.

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?

00:28:04.600 I would be a Corbynite if I wasn't somebody...

00:28:06.380 If I didn't have quite strong beliefs about economics and politics already,

00:28:11.060 yeah, of course I'd be a Corbynite.

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

00:29:35.300 good evidence around that. You obviously have the migrant crisis, which leads to support

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

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

00:32:07.580 that in previous generations was think tanks

00:32:10.340 and newspaper columnists and so on.

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

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

00:34:56.780 much more often than go to the Greenbelt.

00:34:59.120 In fact, I think the statistics for London are that

00:35:01.160 the average person visits the Greenbelt

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

00:35:08.700 for recreation or for a kind of immunity.

00:35:12.080 And I think we can do marginal improvements.

00:35:15.380 So we can make it easier to densify streets.

00:35:18.100 We can allow streets by streets to have just votes.

00:35:20.880 I live on a street in South London.

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

00:35:28.680 set up a little vote for my street

00:35:31.240 everybody is allowed to add one story to their building

00:35:34.400 and there you go, that's 50 extra flats

00:35:38.020 maybe 60 extra flats on that street

00:35:40.060 there's no reason that that shouldn't be possible

00:35:41.920 all the individual house owners, their benefit

00:35:44.680 they get to improve their property

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

00:35:57.460 without necessarily having a lot more towers,

00:36:00.260 although I would like quite a lot more towers.

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

00:36:12.940 out of fear of homeowners punishing you,

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

00:37:12.200 And just this weekend, I made a decision.

00:37:16.280 I was considering buying a house,

00:37:18.780 and I decided I'm going to rent for at least another year

00:37:20.820 because it gives me flexibility and freedom.

00:37:23.000 So renting isn't bad.

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

00:37:34.580 because the flats are so expensive.

00:37:36.620 But in terms of the actual number of units,

00:37:41.820 It's a drop in the ocean.

00:37:44.000 So I don't think it's that important.

00:37:46.780 I think it's more...

00:37:47.680 I think any issue like that...

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

00:37:58.200 but don't build on it for five or six years.

00:38:01.600 And there are actually rational reasons for that.

00:38:03.740 It's because they need to be able to queue up

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

00:40:03.000 I view that as two blades of a scissors.

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

00:40:24.040 because the supply of cars is pretty elastic.

00:40:27.120 As demand increases, we just build more cars.

00:40:29.680 So, yeah, you can borrow 100,000, but you just end up with five Toyotas.

00:40:33.000 instead of one Toyota.

00:40:35.520 And they all diminish in value over time.

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.

00:40:41.160 They're consumption goods, for the most part.

00:40:42.800 Classic cars are different, because they are actually fixed in supply.

00:40:45.560 But modern cars are what I'm talking about.

00:40:48.880 Can I just say, this episode has been sponsored by Toyota.

00:40:51.680 Yeah, I know.

00:40:52.780 It's literally a car.

00:40:54.140 Well, it hasn't, but if you'd like to sponsor us.

00:40:58.080 We are corrupt.

00:40:59.560 I will take any money or cash payment.

00:41:02.180 Anyway, sorry, Sam.

00:41:02.820 You're not giving immigrants a good look here.

00:41:05.040 A Russian and a Venezuelan offering to do anything for money, that's a good look.

00:41:09.380 Yeah, although accurate.

00:41:11.340 But yeah, it's two blades of a scissors.

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.

00:42:03.400 That, to me, seems like a huge, nasty surprise

00:42:06.580 that a lot of people are facing.

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.

00:42:17.700 Our producer, before we started this show,

00:42:19.580 was convincing me that we're about to eliminate scarcity

00:42:21.820 and everything is going to be dandies.

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.

00:43:54.260 And he sort of famously predicted, you know,

00:43:55.700 we'd be working three days a week and so on.

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

00:44:11.240 and then we'll just spend more time off.

00:44:13.040 And as it turned out, actually, we just wanted more stuff.

00:44:15.780 our desire for more stuff is just infinite

00:44:18.680 so we kept just

00:44:20.300 our frontiers of sort of what we wanted

00:44:22.260 just grew and grew and grew

00:44:23.460 and that's good, that's fine

00:44:25.860 the only thing that might push against

00:44:28.500 that is that if actually

00:44:30.220 leisure itself can become more pleasurable

00:44:31.980 so Tyler Cowen who's an

00:44:34.260 economist in America, he writes the Marginal

00:44:36.200 Revolution blog along with Alex Tabarrok

00:44:38.100 he argues that

00:44:40.320 to some extent, and this sounds a bit

00:44:42.180 silly, but to some extent

00:44:43.540 youth unemployment is probably partly driven by video games because it's just much more enjoyable

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

00:45:34.940 my university

00:45:35.680 but I mean

00:45:37.760 that was fun

00:45:38.400 oh it was great

00:45:39.400 that was my

00:45:40.120 university too

00:45:40.820 and I liked that

00:45:41.480 yeah I'll happily

00:45:42.960 go back there now

00:45:43.820 I'll be honest with you

00:45:44.720 so yeah

00:45:45.460 so I mean

00:45:45.960 there are certain

00:45:47.700 dimensions

00:45:48.160 to do with

00:45:49.240 in terms of

00:45:50.620 kind of

00:45:51.080 making the world

00:45:52.560 better

00:45:52.880 I think it'll be

00:45:53.900 a lot easier

00:45:54.260 to feed people

00:45:54.880 I think it'll be

00:45:55.380 a lot easier

00:45:55.800 to prevent people

00:45:56.660 from dying of disease

00:45:57.600 and that's obvious

00:45:58.960 but I think

00:46:00.560 the really interesting

00:46:01.260 dimension will be

00:46:02.160 as leisure time

00:46:03.180 gets better and better

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

00:46:31.220 artificial sweeteners

00:46:32.060 for forever

00:46:32.940 and they still suck

00:46:34.080 you know

00:46:34.460 they're still

00:46:34.820 unbelievably bad

00:46:35.680 compared to sugar

00:46:36.380 but they operate

00:46:38.200 in slightly different ways

00:46:39.220 and I think that

00:46:40.920 as we move towards

00:46:43.420 drug legalisation

00:46:44.220 and I think we are

00:46:45.060 and I think we will

00:46:45.600 legalise most

00:46:46.820 if not all drugs

00:46:47.600 quite soon

00:46:48.240 Really?

00:46:49.920 Within my lifetime

00:46:50.620 is what I mean by

00:46:51.300 quite soon

00:46:51.400 Oh, within your lifetime

00:46:52.160 Yeah, I think cannabis

00:46:52.960 will be legalised here

00:46:54.040 within five years

00:46:54.940 Within five years?

00:46:56.200 Yeah

00:46:56.380 So in 2018

00:46:57.400 we'll have you back on

00:46:58.280 in 2023

00:46:59.400 And if you can't

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

00:47:29.360 Hold on, what's your evidence for that?

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,

00:47:36.940 I think it was about 2010,

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

00:47:54.580 to the deaths from horse riding.

00:47:56.140 And for making a correct, completely clear, anybody can check the data, comparison, he was fired.

00:48:02.380 Right, so that's my point.

00:48:04.160 Politically, this issue doesn't...

00:48:06.100 I mean, tell me what you're saying that I'm not saying.

00:48:09.320 It's the shift in the United States.

00:48:11.860 It's moving there for different reasons.

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,

00:48:44.600 these things have an enormous cultural impact,

00:48:47.080 and I think they normalize it in a way that is sort of the key to getting,

00:48:51.660 to me, gay marriage happening.

00:48:53.800 the cause of that was cultural normalization

00:48:57.040 it was having gay characters in TV shows

00:48:59.740 that weren't kind of jokes

00:49:01.040 they weren't kind of people that were there as like

00:49:03.220 haha let's laugh at these people

00:49:04.380 they were just normal human beings who happened to be gay

00:49:06.740 and I think that that helped people

00:49:09.780 who maybe didn't know people like that in their lives

00:49:11.620 or maybe didn't see gay people like that

00:49:13.520 to begin to see that in that way

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?

00:49:22.460 Yeah almost certainly

00:49:23.220 Yeah, I would say that it had a huge, huge contributing effect.

00:49:27.280 Yeah, I mean, I don't have data for this.

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

00:49:49.520 relevant in the UK.

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.

00:50:14.300 one of the major

00:50:16.780 the woman, Ash Sarkar

00:50:19.180 who we talked about earlier

00:50:21.680 who said to

00:50:23.020 I'm literally a communist

00:50:24.260 she was in Teen Vogue

00:50:26.780 which isn't actually a thing that teenagers

00:50:29.600 read I don't think, I think it's like a weird

00:50:31.280 agitprop magazine

00:50:32.740 it's a weird thing, but anyway

00:50:35.160 and she was sort of saying

00:50:36.860 why am I a communist, and it was something to do with

00:50:39.620 she's against sort of

00:50:40.880 military imperialism, which is a big thing

00:50:43.700 The communists never did any of that, right?

00:50:45.260 Sure, sure.

00:50:46.280 Military imperialism, putting too many people in jail.

00:50:50.860 Yeah, communists never did any of that either.

00:50:53.240 And the third one was something to do with,

00:50:57.780 I wish I could remember, but either way,

00:51:00.560 they were things that are American talking points.

00:51:03.880 We don't have a mass imprisonment in the UK.

00:51:06.440 We don't put millions of people in jail in the UK

00:51:09.640 the way they do in America.

00:51:10.900 All of the things that people think about

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

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

00:51:40.200 about occupational licensing.

00:51:42.360 Now, in the US, occupational licensing,

00:51:44.160 you need to have a license to become a hair braider.

00:51:46.020 You know, everything is licensed.

00:51:47.180 It's insane.

00:51:48.320 In the UK, you need to have a license to be a doctor or a lawyer

00:51:51.020 and maybe two or three other things.

00:51:53.260 Just everybody just adopts these American political talking points

00:51:58.160 and political wedge issues wholesale

00:51:59.840 because that's what our culture comes from.

00:52:03.160 So I think with cannabis, it's no different.

00:52:05.160 As America legalizes, we will legalize as well.

00:52:08.920 The parties don't define things, really.

00:52:10.900 They just follow the rest of it.

00:52:11.840 They just follow culture when it comes to stuff like this, at least.

00:52:14.240 That's fascinating.

00:52:15.020 In my view.

00:52:15.460 So, joints all around within five years.

00:52:18.240 Unfortunately, I hate cannabis.

00:52:19.180 So, yeah, for me...

00:52:20.180 You're such a square.

00:52:21.360 I know, I know.

00:52:22.780 Yeah, I really...

00:52:24.040 I think it's an awful drug.

00:52:26.480 Why?

00:52:27.480 It makes me feel ill and makes me sleepy.

00:52:30.260 Oh, there you go.

00:52:31.020 One of them.

00:52:31.880 Can't hack it.

00:52:34.560 So, what do you think about cocaine?

00:52:36.740 I mean, do you enjoy it?

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

00:54:25.520 It's an exciting and sexy concept.

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,

00:54:50.540 will be able to grow and grow and grow

00:54:54.080 and be able to be extremely productive and innovative.

00:54:58.860 And that's good for everybody

00:54:59.680 because you get to use the products they make,

00:55:01.520 but it's not so great in terms of incomes

00:55:03.760 if this sort of coming apart of the kind of cognitive elite

00:55:08.580 and everybody else continues.

00:55:12.200 And I don't think that's just an economic problem.

00:55:14.040 I think it's a social problem.

00:55:15.060 I think the feeling that somebody else has a great life

00:55:18.460 and you don't have 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

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.

00:57:03.480 And when it comes to migration, actually,

00:57:04.960 when it comes to refugees coming in.

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,

00:58:09.360 because the downside of us taking all American politics is that we take all American politics,

00:58:14.900 but is the bleeding of politics

00:58:17.380 into every step of people's lives

00:58:18.940 you know is everything

00:58:21.060 becomes a political action

00:58:22.460 politics really in my view should be a thing

00:58:25.280 that weirdos debate amongst themselves

00:58:27.300 and that doesn't really matter very much to people

00:58:29.360 he's talking about us

00:58:30.400 it should be like football

00:58:32.760 it should be like a hobbyist thing that

00:58:34.720 if you like it you like it and you can choose a team

00:58:37.100 we can have a fun argument

00:58:38.460 maybe we can argue

00:58:40.940 and maybe change each other's minds or not

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

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

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,

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.

01:00:28.740 Crappy news is heavily biased.

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

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

01:00:58.560 which we eventually got used to.

01:01:00.280 It took about 100 years of bloody civil war

01:01:02.380 and everybody hating each other

01:01:04.360 because religion is what to find their lives.

01:01:08.000 So it might be, I hope it doesn't come to that.

01:01:11.960 I'd like social media to some extent.

01:01:14.200 If I could push a button

01:01:15.340 and just sort of magically mean

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.

01:01:21.900 I wouldn't censor them

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.

01:02:08.440 In politics, it's kind of hard.

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.

01:02:18.880 so that's a very long

01:02:21.720 and rambling way of saying

01:02:23.680 my biggest fear is that politics ends up

01:02:25.660 dominating economic growth

01:02:27.560 and trade and technological advances

01:02:29.640 I think it might

01:02:31.440 I think it might, but I'm generally

01:02:33.540 an optimist. If you're an old person watching

01:02:35.580 this online, just get off the internet

01:02:37.200 you're taking up space

01:02:39.480 get off the internet, why are you even here

01:02:41.700 you're susceptible to fake news

01:02:43.620 just turn this shit off

01:02:44.600 just a nice positive

01:02:47.260 Yeah, I thought it was so excellent.

01:02:49.660 So pro-drugs, anti-old people.

01:02:52.800 If you combine the two, you can combine drugs and old people,

01:02:55.620 kill off the old people.

01:02:57.020 Problem solved.

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

01:03:06.080 that we should be talking about?

01:03:07.540 Animal welfare.

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

01:03:29.000 in our world is very, very bad.

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?

01:03:39.660 Wow. There we go. You're a vegan.

01:03:42.260 No.

01:03:44.460 I'm a hypocrite.

01:03:45.940 Because meat tastes good.

01:03:48.540 I do eat humanely reared meat.

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.

01:03:57.640 I would much rather if my own life,

01:03:59.720 if you said to me you can either never be born

01:04:01.600 or you'll live your life and then at the age of 40

01:04:04.300 somebody's going to kill you and eat you,

01:04:06.460 I would definitely take the second one.

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,

01:04:13.260 but eating humanely treated animals is.

01:04:16.440 Can you write that down for me

01:04:17.480 so I can regurgitate it

01:04:18.760 the next time someone lectures me about you?

01:04:20.440 You had Diana Fleischman on a few weeks ago

01:04:22.740 and I have this debate with her occasionally.

01:04:24.300 She completely thinks I'm wrong

01:04:25.360 and she's a lot smarter than me.

01:04:28.500 All right, well...

01:04:29.740 Now we've had you on as well.

01:04:30.720 Thank you so much for coming on.

01:04:32.240 You're on Twitter at...

01:04:33.820 S8MB, the number eight.

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.

01:04:41.080 And is there anything else

01:04:41.960 that you would like to promote

01:04:42.840 anything in particular

01:04:44.720 you're not writing a book yet

01:04:45.820 no

01:04:46.340 I don't have the attention span

01:04:48.060 to write a book

01:04:48.600 well when you do

01:04:50.420 which I suspect

01:04:51.140 you probably will

01:04:51.940 at some point

01:04:52.460 let us know

01:04:53.080 thanks very much

01:04:53.980 it's been really enjoyable

01:04:55.440 coming here

01:04:55.920 really nice conversation

01:04:57.000 I thought

01:04:57.360 great stuff

01:04:58.560 thank you

01:04:58.940 thank you

01:04:59.340 I'm at Constance in Kitchen

01:05:00.840 you can follow me on Twitter as well

01:05:02.060 I'm at Failing Human

01:05:03.260 and if you've enjoyed the podcast

01:05:05.220 please give us a rating

01:05:06.800 on iTunes

01:05:07.960 five stars

01:05:08.840 thank you

01:05:09.260 comment

01:05:09.560 thank you

01:05:10.200 tell a friend

01:05:11.300 you can also go on YouTube

01:05:13.920 give us a follow

01:05:15.400 sub us in

01:05:16.120 and there was something

01:05:17.300 to do with a bell

01:05:17.920 what was it

01:05:18.320 there's a bell

01:05:19.700 next to the subscribe button

01:05:20.860 if you click that

01:05:21.860 you will actually get

01:05:22.660 notifications when we

01:05:23.700 put a video out

01:05:24.460 there you go

01:05:25.420 Francis is an old person

01:05:26.780 he's not familiar

01:05:27.460 with technology

01:05:28.040 I know I love fake news

01:05:29.400 alright thank you very much

01:05:31.820 and we'll see you next week

TRIGGERnometry - August 13, 2018

Sam Bowman

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