We should make no mistake about it. I think financial elites are nervous. I think you see this in the increased criticism of the Fed, which is really kind of an unusual narrative in the United States, and especially in US politics, and Trump has done something to bring the issue of the Fed to the forefront. You may have noticed that the vice-chairman of of the Fed, Stanley Fischer, was at Howard University earlier this week, I believe. And he talked about how he was nervous, and it made him upset that they could raise interest rates. Then he had a great quote. He said we would be better off if there was a price for using money. Right? Also known as an "interest rate". And it's interesting, because we laugh about that, because it seems so self-evident to those of us in the room, right? But the point is not that Stanley Fischer or the 300 mostly Ivy League PhD economists who work at the Fed are unintelligent or clueless. That's not true. On the contrary, these are very bright people, but I think the lesson we have to take from this is they inhabit a very different reality. A very different universe from the one that that we think is rational and just from having studied Austrian economics and libertarian theory. And from our perspective their universe ignore some very important facts. And this is to our detriment, I think. I'm sure a lot of you watched the Hillary-Trump debate, as it were, the other evening. I let my son stay up to watch the beginning of it, and it started off really badly. Did you notice that the very first question was this broad-ended "What would you do?" kind of question. And so Trump.. I try so hard sometimes to like Mr. Trump. He's gone against progressives and PC. He's gone against this horrible campus atmosphere that students are enduring today. He's spoken out about the Fed. But, boy, the very first thing he said in the debate the other night was, "Well, if these companies want to leave America and go to Mexico, here's how we're going to punish them, and here's how we're going to put a tariff on their important products..." So, he started off really badly. And then Hillary got her chance, and she immediately launched into, "Well, I believe in profit sharing." Well, yeah, I'm sure you do. It's the owner who might have a problem with that, right? And then she talked about the living wage. We're going to decree this living wage, and I was just thinking, you know, profits to be shared by whom? A living wage to be shared by whom? We always get sort of a blank-out when it comes to this. And, you know, I'll just say this: I'm pretty jaded when it comes to political platitudes. But, even now, even well into middle age, I'm still sometimes astounded by this cavalier attitude towards other people's property that you get from the political class without any pushback. But I would say that this the political rhetoric is really just a symptom. It's a symptom of our barter culture's rejection of economics. Really a willful rejection of economics as a subject for ordinary people, and I think in many ways we did this to ourselves. We dumbed it down, ourselves. I got a phone call last week from a reporter at 'The Chronicle of Higher Education', and he was asking in a pointed way about some of these free market-ish think tanks that have risen up around universities across America. And he was asking me whether, you know, can anyone at the Mises Institute, or one of these other organizations, provide me with some kind of scientific foundation for this. For what he sees as an increasing faith among politicians in the power of markets — free markets — to solve economic and political and cultural problems. To solve societal problems — craft the best outcomes. So he said, where's the scientific evidence for this? Where is the proof? How do we know that all this free market stuff you guys are talking about actually works? So, I talked to him on the phone for a while, and I resisted mightily... that I wanted to to respond, well, there's this little thing called the 20th Century you might want to take a look at. But I didn't say that. I talked to my... I know a hit piece when I see one coming, and I suspect he's writing an anti-Koch brothers article, at the end of the day. But I did manage to have a civil conversation with him, and gently explained, no, you know, the politicians aren't necessarily enthralled with the free market. Most of them actually advocate what we would call a "mixed economy" and da da da. And, of course, as a young person he'd never heard this term "mixed economy". This used to be a widely-used term, at least when I was coming up. So, he'd never heard that, so I kind of explained what I thought it meant. But it's striking to me the degree to which this journalist — and not to pick on him — and so many people like him are are deeply suspicious of capitalism. They're convinced that there's some sinister plot afoot, and we're going to impose free-market fundamentalism on the country. That's actually a term he used. Then, of course, you know, he doesn't see state universities or the media or academia or government officials... He doesn't see any of these people as enormously well-funded advocates for his point of view. No, on the contrary this gentleman imagines himself the underdog in our society. Now I wish... I wish that this were true. You know, the case for political liberalism and laissez-faire, which those of us in this room would probably say has been made so clearly both in the theoretical literature and and by history had finally overcome the majority of academics and politicians. And I wish that American universities were not, in fact, "nurseries of socialism" — to use Ludwig von Mises's term —but they remain just that. And actually much worse. In fact, I would argue that American universities and western universities have deteriorated rapidly since Mises died in the 1970s. We've really lost any pretext of academic freedom, what we used to call "free inquiry"... another outdated term, apparently. If we judge modern universities by one simple criteria: are they committed to seeking and teaching truth above all else? Then, I think the answer to that question has to be "no". I think we have to conclude that they are failing in their central mission, and I think that we have to conclude that they are actually committed, not to truth, but to cultural political and economic and social agenda that has little to do with truth-seeking. And, in a sense, I would argue that today's universities are really just a microcosm of what progressives have planned for us in the broader culture. And part of that vision that they have, it requires a kind of collective amnesia and ignorance about entire fields of knowledge. And this relates to my message for you today, and that's namely, that we — intelligent laypeople — not just PhDs — have allowed economics to be lost as a subject that's viable for average people. So, on this topic a few weeks ago, we were in Asheville, North Carolina, for an event and I spoke about how economics has become a kind of broken profession. My point being that we now have entire generations of economists — supposedly mainstream economists — who fundamentally don't understand economics as a social science. They see it as a physical science that requires testing of hypotheses. They don't understand money as a market commodity to be provided by the market, rather than to be provided and regulated by the state. They don't understand inflation, therefore, as a monetary phenomenon. They don't understand interest rates as prices — as price signals — rather than some sort of policy tool. And, because they don't understand inflation, and they don't understand interest rates, they can't explain the booms and busts. These become mysterious events. And, perhaps, worst of all, modern economists today — especially those under let's say age 40 or 50 — often know nothing about the history of economic thought. They've simply accepted, without much context or understanding, whatsoever, a whole host of assumptions that make up modern mainstream economics. So, if we think about that it's... imagine if bloodletting had become the consensus method by which we alleviate disease and suffering. What if that had become mainstream medicine? And now 80 years later all doctors did was was talk about, "Well, let's focus on the rate of bloodletting, or the timing of bloodletting, or the least- painful approach to bloodletting..." So, by "broken", I don't mean to say that the profession of economics doesn't work for those who are actually in it. It provides benefits for them, surely. But, I mean it's broken in the same way that universities are broken, that it no longer serves truth or society or humanity or a greater goal. But, instead, just nakedly serves an agenda. It starts with the wrong premises. It asks the wrong questions. It applies the wrong methods — very important from the Austrian perspective — and, thus, not surprisingly to any of us, it arrives at the wrong conclusions. And, I think the key is that we let it happen. We let this academicization — to use a general term — of a field that we once expected high school seniors to grasp the basics of. You know, we can call it "formalism". We can call it "scientism". We can just call it "the intrusion of mathematics" into a social science. But, it represents a timeline, really, of about a century, now, of diversion from classical and Austrian economics. You know, at some point in the 20th century we all became convinced that certain fields were too complicated and too technical to understand. We decided we would let a group of technocratic elites capture economics for their own purposes, and we were encouraged to throw up our hands and say, "I give up!" "I'll leave everything to the experts. It's too complex. Economics is somehow like advanced physics, and it's not something that us average people should worry ourselves about." Now, on the subject of "mathiness," if you've heard this term. Those of us who aren't economist by profession — haven't gone through a PhD program — we may not understand the degree to which math really defines and dominates PhD economics programs, today. If you want to get a PhD in Econ you have to do some very daunting seven- and eight-hundred level math classes. And if you look at — especially public — but also private US universities, Econ PhD programs are often dominated by Asian students, because they're coming out of universities in Asia we're math was focused on in ways that it wasn't here. So, it's really become a mathematics degree, and that eliminates a lot of not only bright kids, but curious kids who might be far more interested if they saw it as a social science. And the thing about the mathiness of PhD programs today is we can... given that the difficulty of this math we can hardly be surprised that there isn't much time left over for theory. Mises or Menger or Hayek, much less even Samuelson or Keynes. So, David Gordon, aname some of you might know, is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, he recommended a book to me. It's called 'How Economics Became a Mathematical Science' by a gentleman named Roy Weintraub. And his father was a pioneer in this field, and he's writing about his father in this book. And I managed to read about half of it on the plane. And what's so interesting about this book is... I still didn't completely grasp the degree to which mathematicians in economics think that any economic question can be posed in mathematical language. That if we just pose it correctly as an equation of sorts, it ought to be possible for the economists to reach definitive conclusions. And, of course, this goes against pretty much everything that the major Austrians counsel; that economics is not a prescriptive discipline. So Mises, himself, certainly did not see economics as a mathematical exercise. He understood economics is a subset of praxeology, as a subset of human action, itself; and, therefore, proper for all intelligent laypersons to study. And in Mises's economics it's the human elements of consciousness and volition that distinguish Econ from Physics or Chemistry or Math. And, yet, all of us would be alarmed, I think, if our if our children graduated from high school unable to write in complete sentences or unable to perform basic algebra or unable to make change at a cash register. You know? But we don't mind sending them out in the world without a single economics class — completely vulnerable to politicians and the supposed experts. And I think we see that in the political debates. We saw that Monday evening, and the same falsehoods are repeated ad nauseam every four years, time and time again, and I think this ignorance allows us... it helps us to understand how these radicals, like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty and Christine Lagarde at the IMF became viewed as "mainstream thinkers" rather than, I said, really the radicals that they are, when compared to the whole history of economics. So, what do we do to correct this? Well, it's a difficult question and it's one we wrestle with every day. I'm sure a lot of you in this room do, as well. How do we make economics less dismal and more relevant, so that were not this nation of gullible voters who fall for political nonsense? And, especially, how do we convince younger people that economics matters? We might call this saving economics from economists. But I think, first and foremost, we have to accept that academia — with some wonderful exceptions — is, by and large, captured. You know, the Mises Institute, we produce summer fellows and we have a lot of young people who come to our events and our Mises U week, and then some of them do decide to go on and get a PhD. And then some of them do go become tenured professors at universities across the country —really around the world. And we're going to continue to do that that. And, there are Austrian-friendly Economics Departments scattered on campuses. Sometimes that means there's just one or two professors in a department of 20 or 30, but sometimes it means the whole department. But, trying to reclaim academia and economics professor by professor... I think is an enormous task. From my perspective, the return on investment is far greater when we focus on young people and intelligent laypersons. And, second, we need to understand that it's really up to us to create the economics education that the world needs. There's no group that's going to save us. There's no white knight. Certainly no one in the government academia complex is going to do it. But, thanks to the digital revolution, we don't have to build whole new brick-and-mortar structures like Radcliffe had to whenever this building was built. I'm sorry I don't know. I mean, thanks to the digital revolution, new structures — new platforms — can be built far faster and far more cheaply than we imagined. I mean, we really can invert the classroom. We can do away with make-work curricula. We can align economics education with the marketplace: give people what they need and want — what the market demands — rather than what some administrator in a big university decided. I think more than anything, Peter Klein — another one of our senior fellows — makes this point: we can reject this one-way production model of a lecturer and passive students that universities have been clinging to... This model has existed for 2,000 years, since Aristotle, and it hasn't much changed. You know, I think the Mises Academy is one example of what we can do to make real economics —from our perspective — available to the layperson, and I'll be frank. You know, we started with online education pretty early, in about 2010. And, that might as well be 1910, because the online learning landscape has changed so rapidly, and is changing so rapidly, today. Every six or eight months there's whole new technologies. And, so no one has really completely figured it out, yet. If you go to Harvard online, for example, and look at their online program: it's really just a video of their lecturer that you can watch at home, and then take a test online, or something. They're really just using the name "Harvard" to attract people. They're not being dynamic or innovative in the way that they present the material, so really from that sense, a tiny organization like the Mises Institute is on a much more even playing field with the big boys and the big girls then we could ever have imagined. So, what we're doing is... we're trying to build out our online platform slowly but surely to make it, initially, the Mises U expereince available to anybody, anywhere in the world, anytime they want. What I's ask you to do is go to my twitter feed. I'm @JeffDeist, or go to the Mises Institute twitter feed @Mises, and if you're interested, we will send any of you a link to our Austrian economics boot camp class, and I would challenge you to send that link to 10 people you know. If you send that link to 10 people you know, and say, "You know what, take three-and-a-half hours... three-and-a-half hours out of your life... no books, no signing-up for classes, no boring lectures... And, in three-and-a-half hours in an interactive online course, you will know more about economics than ninety-nine percent of the people walking the street. I think that's probably true. It might be sad, but I think it's true. So, it starts with a drop in the bucket, but it also starts with the people in this room today. I mean, everything starts with the individual, and you'd be amazed at over the 30-some-years the Mises Institute's existed... you would be amazed how some of the tiny seeds we planted have grown into mighty oak trees later on, and influenced hundreds or thousands of young people as a result. But I think finally our challenge really lies in returning to Mises's more visceral approach to making economics real again. You know, like progressives, we shouldn't be afraid to appeal to the heart as much as we do the head. When we view and talk about economics more as "the stuff of life", we can energize and humanize it. We can approach it more like philosophy — as the study of general and fundamental human problems involving knowledge and reason. We create a whole new perspective, and we introduce logic and metaphysics into the equation. We make it a more vital subject. Economics is not an equation to be balanced like in algebra. It's not a model to be filled with statistics. I think we need to restore its popularity among bright young people who really do — cliched or not — want to change the world. So, in closing, let me just say that, from my perspective, I don't think we have to abandon intellectual rigor to sell Austrian economics, but we do have to make it more relevant and more vital to the average person, and we have to reclaim it from academics. We have to ask the visceral questions: "Why are we so rich, and what if it all went away?" But we can't begin to do that... we can't begin to understand or address what, I would say, are very serious structural economic problems when the very science that's tasked with studying them has lost its way. So, let's reclaim economics from academia, from mathematicians, from politicians, and especially from the state and its court intellectuals. Thank you, very much.
