Mark Blyth - Why People Vote for Those Who Work Against Their Best Interests

good evening ladies and gentlemen i'm mike zell with the university and it's my honor to welcome you to a new season of the Ian Thompson forum on world issues for nearly three decades the University and the Cooper Foundation have partnered with the lead Center for Performing Arts to make this forum possible tonight our speaker is an internationally renowned author professor and expert on global politics and economics dr. mark Blythe currently serves as Eastman professor of political political economy at Brown University his research focuses on the causes of stability and change in the economy and why people continue to believe certain economic ideas despite evidence to the contrary professor Blythe earned a PhD in political science from Columbia University and the common theme of his research has been how macroeconomic knowledge is used in politics dr. Blythe internationally acclaimed books have been translated into 14 languages they include the future of the euro austerity the history of a dangerous idea and great transformations economic ideas and institutional change in the 20th century dr. Blythe is a regular contributor to the journal on the of the Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs and the Guardian newspapers he's appeared multiple times on NPR BBC and Bloomberg tonight after his remarks you will have the opportunity to ask mark questions via twitter using the hashtag Ian Thompson forum also ushers will be the Isles to collect your written questions and bring them to the stage the title of tonight's presentation is why people vote for those who work against their best interests please join me in a warm Thompson forum welcome for mark Blythe [Applause] [Music] Wow can you hear me everyone can you hear me yes you hear me all right good because I can't see you I can't see a damn thing whoa there's a lot of people here is Netflix broken I mean really I mean what is it choose that you know someone Wow thank you thanks for coming it's brilliant all right I can't see you it's very disconcerting but I suppose it's good in some ways let's get started first of all I'm Scottish so you might have a problem with the way I sound for those of you who are going why does that guy sound funny let me explain this have you ever seen the film Shrek right so after 27 years the United States I have exactly the same voice as Shrek I will prove this to you now Don King so if you're any point you're sort of fiddling out going what's that guy talking about just think Shrek and it'll all come back in right second thing is actually have a bit of a cough so have I basically go down and coffee up along halfway through it's normal I'll be fine and then the third one is the title I didn't actually make this title up the Thompson form dead so when I was putting the slides together I went to the website and said oh I didn't give them a title I wonder what and I saw this and I thought oh I'm in trouble see because I actually to get things started I actually don't believe that's true so let me explain what I mean by that I think it's incredibly patronizing for anyone to tell someone else what they think should be in their interest so it's very easy particularly for sort of you know elites however that what is used and abused to say well it's in the best interests of people to do this so people vote against it undressed that's like really maybe they just see the world in a very different way from you maybe you don't like the way that they see the world but they're entitled to see the world that way and they will act upon it and the more that you tell them they shouldn't do this they're probably going to tell you no that's what I'm gonna do so I'm gonna use the title as a provocation to then feed into this and see where we go with it so you ready to play all right let's go let's see if I can figure out this is like one of this like remember Star Trek think this thing come on yeah there we go alright here's here's the thing so I you may or may not know I got Trump six months oh and I got Bragg's it three months before LA because I pay attention to what's called macro economic regimes boring title we'll be there in a minute here's the thing president Trump is a local event but it's part of a global trend brags it's the same thing the German elections have just happened to reconfirmed the Train despite the fact that the French National Front didn't get elected this has been 30 years in the making it's popular everybody has a version of this whether it's the guy in the Philippines that like killing people who are on drugs whether it's the Japanese Prime Minister who like provoking things with Japan whether it's the Trump telling us that NAFTA's dead and tweeting various things whether it's Nicolas started in Scotland saying she wants independence she doesn't want independence does want advance right the Catalans in Spain could be up there right this is kicking off everywhere in fact here's a little picture of some of the most notable ones left and right oddly the left-wing ones are on the right the right-wing ones are on the left but bear with me but as you can see and this is very important there's a huge left-wing phenomena here Jeremy Corbyn Nicola we've got the alinker you have the Italian version up there Spain and then Alex tsipras increase as well as the world more well known ones on the right but we tend to think of populism as populism nationalism anti-immigration racism and that is totally partial if you go to Europe three major countries party systems all the political parties have been completely transformed in the past ten years the Italians the Greeks and the Spanish they will never be the same again and it's insurgents from the left rather than the right that's actually transformed these places and there's a left-wing version of this one and there's a right-wing version of this so I want to go through both short version of how we got here apparently if I walk this far I disappeared it's not true because otherwise I have to stand here under these interrogation lights so there's a particular episode of Star Trek where what's he's doing a job that Picard was tortured it's a bit like that anyway short version of how we got here I by the way they didn't tell you I used to do stand-up and occasionally I just dive out into all right so back in the day at the end of World War two from World War two 74 for 45 - by 75 this is the golden era and it was the period when something very weird happened that never happened before the top of the income distribution came down the bottom went up and the whole distribution jumped this is when you got the bust of the American middle classes this is when British Prime Minister Harold Wilson said to the working people in Britain you've never had it so good and he was right and it was a unique combination of circumstances that produced art world mainly the reaction to the great depression fascism World War two and the success of the Soviet Union and appealing as an alternative economic model after the chaos of the twenties and thirties so the end of our period we built a world that looked like this the Cold War II know the policy target was full employment regardless of whether you were Sweden or Spain in the United States that's what the government cared the boat because we saw the disastrous consequences of mass unemployment on a decade-long period national economies what that meant was the capital was sealed off there was no international banking running around there was no derivatives trades there's no mortgage-backed securities there was Sylar banking commercial banks savings and loans investment banks they all did discrete things and it was all about forcing investment at home you had highly restricted financial markets you had big organized labor dealing with big business in big production units you had cost of living adjustment contracts all of that made possible a high rate of investment which led to a high rate of growth which led to high rates of taxes and transfers crucial bit of information no one knew the name of the person who ran the central bank nobody now jump forward to the era that I grew up and I left Britain in 1991 because of a woman mrs. Thatcher and and I jumped straight into the arms of Bill Clinton I don't think it was actually such a good idea but anyway we went to the new Liberal leader what did that mean we built a regime that was entirely different all these different economies are all very different to each other but they no longer cared about unemployment because it had this inflationary crisis welcome back to the in a minute what do we care about now price the Bell and what do you care about globalization and what does globalization allow you to do we make stuff really cheaply well yes cuz you've globalized your labour markets so the ability of labour to go on strike demand higher wages done it's over with open financial markets why because capital and technology flowing abroad create those global subscribe supply chains the make globalization possible so the only way you can cope a home is get out of the unions and be more flexible we have flexible labor markets and you get much lower taxes much lower transfers and here's the weird thing everybody knows the name of the person who runs the central bank because they are the most important person in the country two distinct regimes watch this that's US corporate profits gone from 1960 down in 1992 and back up look at that I wonder what was squeezing them and what made them boom here's another one u.s. inflation all the way up in the 1970s boom 1980 Volcker jacks up interest rates the long decline in inflation and then what do you see Treasury yields a proxy for interest rates up and up and up and up coping with inflation and then down and down and down to where they are today oops back up they ever gone so what killed our force regime was inflation Nixon vows inflation cut there's the winter of discontent and Bretton with the unions were striking and no one was even getting buried that was the tabloid story what actually happened was the ground was frozen so you couldn't borrow anyone but you could always blame the unions that's actually what happened and then there's our own chair no click claim there the Great Inflation destroyed faith in people assets cuz if you held the bond suddenly the bond was worth much less money than was before but it was a brilliant time to be a debt or how many of you took her a mortgage in the 1970s come on put your hand up you made out like bandits because of you to 3% mortgage in your 10% inflation if it's great the bank was eating and you will get in the capital gain and then when you elected Regan Regan you walked in high real interest rates and your hosts increased in value why deal it's fantastic when it fielded the seventies and the reason it field was the following there was a system recenter here's the failure and Marcin you've decided that I'm gonna target full employment and that's gonna be my one policy goal so you're gonna run a very tight restricted set of labor markets and wages are going to get bed up to the point that by the time you get to the late sixties when you're running the Vietnam War off the books your real unemployment rates but two and a half to three percent so how it happens at that point is that the worst guy in your forum can leave work and then walk straight into another job and get a pay rise the only way that firms can deal with this is by pushing up prices so they push up prices then what happens liberal factors aren't they haven't really had a pay rise so they want more money so they get a peon right so they want more money and it all gets pushed up into inflation when inflation goes up and up and up like this guess what happens it becomes irrational to be an investor so the investment rate collapses unemployment goes up despite the inflation we get the great stagflation of the 1970s and what's the solution a stark flashing Hunt policy to central bankers because they're not elected they can't be thrown out of office and they can do the nasty they can jack up interest rates to 20% when inflation 16% cause a massive hemorrhaging of the economy a construction of credit and you get the big recessions that happened in the early 1980s but it really reset the system because it was a new software and onto that hardware if you want to use that analogy and that was the ideas of Thaksin and Reagan and the people behind them the open markets price stability going global that was the way you do it the flexibility was good the labor was bad that the returns to capital had to go up otherwise what's the point in running capitalism that was the neoliberal compact now in 2008 that regime blew up if you have a look at this slide what it shows you is percentage of GDP as bank assets and a selection of countries so let's have a look at Iceland well that's good that's about 800 percent of GDP in bank assets let's remember what a bank asset as bucks call those things assets normal people called them debt right cut what also explain this one right so I have a condo in Boston which is nice and I have a mortgage on the other end of that no the condo is my asset and it's the bank's law ability because they don't want a condo they want the money right now on the other end of that trades the bank and the bank looks and says I have an a say it's called mark Blythe's and I'm like wow you've chosen poorly but nonetheless I rely on their asset it's not the condo they care about the income stream and assets and liabilities sum to zero so if you've got a bank that has in this case six hundred and twenty three percent of the economy's total value out there in wounds do you think that might be slightly risky I and everybody was out that even though his conservative Germans 86 percent of German GDP in one bank called Deutsche Bank which lon average leverage right assets the liability of sixty to one on an average Tuesday that's stable all right that's great now why did we get like this because remember that inflation rate that's very high you kill it with ideal interest rates but then you've got a problem because you liberalize finance when the sixteen fifteen percent interest oh my god is so easy to make money I mean I get 15% just for showing up and Citibank and opening a check okay that's incredible what a bonanza for savers this is awesome so anybody can do this remember Wall Street in the movie right now here's the problem those interest rates go down over time because you make more and more financial transactions you integrate different markets you open up globally so the pool of money gets bigger as the pool of money gets bigger while Harpster the price of money if Falls what's the price of money the interest rate so how do you make money on a declining spread you pump up the leverage you do this and the banking system of the West became multiples to the size of the underlying economy and it was all working great so long as everyone was rolling current revolving credit whether it was your credit card your house your mortgage loan your corporate the loan book whatever it was so long as it doesn't go bust but remember we've been we've abolished the business cycle everything's fine we know what we're doing they all blew up and at that point in time remember I said the central bankers run the world here's why they build the system in the nineteen seventies the system filled out a heart attack because of inflation the neoliberals came along and reset the system they don't new software for the hardware we didn't do that in 2008 will it the money doctors comment and what they did was they pumped thirteen trillion of euros dollars and yen into the global banking system to keep the system going I had a heart attack and we basically put them in intensive care for ten years this is the Federal Reserve's balance sheet that's all assets that they have bought from the private sector and swapped it out for money so that the private sector super cheap loans you know what they do with sup Apple sits on the largest pile of cash of any corporate in the world they think it's about a quarter of a billion at the quarter of a trillion dollars rather than using that they borrowed money because it was so cheap issued their own bonds which earns them a premium on top of that took the cash from that and then bought their own shares but to boost the value of the stock so they could reward themselves even more money and we booked that as investment so they don't pay any taxes does anyone else want to call that book the euro system is no different in fact they're in much deeper so let's bring all this back to populism do you think there might be a connection let's figure this out so you can't really see this because I made it all up no you can't really see this because it's very small unfortunately but let me try and explain what's up here percent price changes in consumer goods and services in the US from 97 to 2017 so over a twenty year period right what costs more you know what's at the top of that college education you know what the next one is healthcare you know where the next one is child care you know what's at the bottom I pods you can't eat an iPod and if you can't afford to go to college what are you going to do apart from sit at home and play games with it here's the global story on income this is called the elephant graph for obvious reasons so what it shows here is the real increase in incomes from the poorest person in the world literally to the richest and if you do this by country what those dots represent at different countries is you see that basically the country of Eastern South Asia have had the largest gains if you go up to the 45th percentile that's China they've been doing quite well why because they came from here we were there and it went like that now when you get to the 67th percentile you get to the purest person in the United States notice all those incomes have been falling a relative to where they've been growing and in fact at the bottom of the distribution at 78% to 87% the American metal classes you've taken a real hit and then guess what there's been fantastic gains that's your 1% in the trunk now who gets this of your breakout for the US this is quintiles 20% 40% 60% guess what the top 20% have made off with all the cash and then everybody else is when and if you're actually in the bottom look it's hardly budged since 1980 and that's true for the bottom three quintiles so 60% in the country hasn't really had a pure eyes when you adjust for inflation since 1980 meanwhile people like me on the coasts we've been wiping it up I've been having Lobster Thermidor on the bus don't tell my wife she hates when I do that here's a close to well this broke remember that first regime I was talking about full employment cops at labor markets what other eyes that look what have you got 1940 a 30 1973 productivity and hourly compensation truck each other completely cool or contracts Labor's big enough the heart business business beggin of the heart labor you cooperate because you have to constantly pay labor more business is forced to innovate that's how you maintain your margins and tell the system self destructs with inflation because no amount of innovation is going to get your own da it's a structural problem so you go for the des inflation solution you start to globalize your production you build under the industrialization is being going on from the 7 is the move from here to the south what do you find hourly compensation starts the lot productivity continues what's in the gap that's your one percent trunk here's the quintile wage growth again the 20 percent the wage cuenta what's actually changed hourly wages who been making out again the top and the upper medal the medals barely budged the bottom two you can't even talk about it the bottom has fallen in real terms labor share of income used to be in the 70s we'd never had it so good that's because capital C Levin Cup was law and labeling of income as an all-time high since then look what's happened down and down and down now this creates a big problem at the end of the day because I like Mitt Romney but there's only so many fridges he can buy and you do have a basic consumption problem if you've been running your economy as we have for the past thirty years off of credit and if people's wages aren't rising and you're strapped with too much debt which banks call credit remember that a little trick assets and liabilities then they can't service the debts if at the same time they're being told if you don't go to college you'll never amount to anything there's no jobs for anyone who doesn't have a college degree these days I wish I knew what a college degree qualified most people to do by the way but we'll figure out to the side for the woman what is it you end up with you end up with the world in which your share of the national product is falling despite the fact that the country has never been richer and it's not just this country it's every country I'm gonna take you to Germany at the end of this and show you the stories just the same this is the zip code distress map what you see there are the blue areas on the left hand side are prosperous communities the orange are at risk the red one are distressed high unemployment obesity moderate opioid addiction all of the buds are the red bets there's the electoral map it's not a perfect fit because one zip codes in the other one or districts but it does tell you story it might suggest that people who are living in distressed communities don't actually think when politicians show up and say fall for me jobs vote for me change and their community just stagnates and gets worse that they don't actually update the information and maybe figure out these people are just professional wires and then when someone comes along and calls on them they go I may not like this guy but he's telling the truth so how do people survive when wages are growing they borrow this law graph shows you bank assets your liabilities your debt their income since 1970 bank loans to GDP boom off the scale now this is my favorite advert from the lunacy that was the early 2000s Citibank had an advertising campaign cost of a hundred million dollars they spent on advertising and they're a crap bank and the Artic Ratburn but anyway they had this whole advertisement this is an example of an opener cravings account right this is from 2005 just before the boss do you remember what the advertising slogan for the whole campaign was five bucks to anybody who knows this live richly you remember this right not save up and buy yourself something nice or you might want to put something away and use the power of compound interest not just live directly how can we do that in 2004 I lived in Baltimore I went away for two weeks I couldn't open the door when I came home because I had so many credit card offers I of control now that's where this goes remember that thing about labels shear is declining all the incomes go to top 20 percent this is euro area consumer credit there's a US consumer credit look at the jump that's people borrowing to fill in that gap that's what banks that's why the banking so big because every single one of us is running a deficit for 50 years old for everybody is 50 years old or older do you remember a time when you didn't have credit cards yes right for everybody who's under 50 that happened right and we used to have this thing called the state that run deficits for us and paid for stuff but now you do it yourself through student loans through revolving lines of credit through borrowing from your houses if it's an ATM because that's what you're using to fill in the gap because the cost of college has gone up 150 percent in real terms where is your wages if you're in the middle of the distribution have barely budged this is euro area wage growth too in 2017 even the European to the beggar welfare states same trend and there's the wage share of GDP again same as we saw before labour still falling off so what happens when you be like that massively levered system in 2008 when regime 2 has the heart attack and the money doctors coming this is where all the debt came from it wasn't that we went on an orgy of spending that's why I got pissed off enough to write that book austerity that has to have a dangerous idea this was the greatest beaten switch in human history folks what actually happened was the banking sectors of all the advanced countries blew up and rather than them taking their losses they told the politicians oh my god there'll be no money in the ATMs think what'll happen the whole world will die maybe it's true maybe it's not but like all good stories it makes you afraid so what do you do you open up the monetary tops and you bill them out and you run large deficits which lead to more debt you recapitalize the financial institutions you do all this stuff that produces in the Americas a giant raise and the amount of federal debt and the seam in the EU despite the fact that they're not even one country all the buying of those assets put on the ballot she handed them the cash they then issue the bonds buyback their own share price and we still don't have a Paris it's called financial engineering 13 trillion in central bank intervention layer here's the funny thing there's no inflation see the start of the crisis the one big fear was if the government steps in is not spending all this money I'll be like Germany in the 1920s they'll be this huge hyperinflation and it'll be terrible and inflation has been falling and falling and falling and falling here's why remember I'm actually the 1970s is very important it was that moment when the inflationary crisis took hold and broke the post-war model of capitalism who did we get that wrong here's my favorite graph in the world you ready because I've got a few but this one's at all I got this from a guy who smuggled it over the carb in the office of the Japanese Prime Minister it's fantastic right well it's Weis all in Japanese right but what does it show you it shows you interest rates since 1350 now when you get to I know it's brilliant right when you get to let's stay with me pay attention I know it's fun but it's worth it now look here's the thing Bucky you're watching Game of Thrones right you know so Game of Thrones hi I'm the king I'd like to borrow some money I'm the iron bank of Braavos you know what happened everybody dies so in that world you have very high real interest rates because of you get a bond from a government they might rip you off there's no secondary market where you buy and swap different bonds around take us offset the risk so you have very high real interest rates the Italians and the Dutch come along in the 15 16th century and in vain a secondary market for government debt that starts to grow rapidly the risk dissipates and then by the time you get to the 1700s real interest rates are below 4% the Brits can issue a perpetual bond a forever bond to fight the Napoleonic Wars at 3% and it's oversubscribed by the time you get to 1941 the real rate of interest is 1.88 so the long run reorder event ties for the global economy is 2% then does the 70s all the inflation is in the seventies because of the one unique confluence of events that was that post-war regime in its breakdown but all of the economics we've ever learned is based upon the experience of that one bit of the time series everything else is for gone here's what lies lies this is important that's the federal funds rate forget the financial crisis where's that been going down and down and down here's the four big central banks in the world down and down and down 1980s inflationary crisis all the way down banks build-up leverage on the way up pop interest rates are still down there's no inflation and the sister why because it's labor that produces inflation and once you've globalized your labor markets there's no inflation anymore why can't Johnny Yellen bring interest rates up why can't Draghi by interest rates because there's no reason to there's no inflation why would you do it you'd simply slow down the economy but what does that mean for savers what does that mean for painted funds whoops now add this all are gathered in my opinion you get populism that's are too high wages are too low to pay off the debt inflation is too low to eat the debt you can't play the trick it into the seven is when you got a mortgage it's the other way around this is a creditors paradise not a debtors paradise the left response is blame capital and blame globalization I'm not blameless the right response blame emigration blame globalization we can disagree in the immigrants one but they're basically hang on the same thing now the results of this are credited they are standoffs gun fights if you will at the level of states and the level of localities at the level of communities what you have is a situation now where there's no inflation and translates a really law where your debts are stable but it's very hard to service them and all the laws have been written to the advantage of creditors now you can't declare personal bankruptcy on student loans etc etc so what do you have the real value of debt goes up but your ability to collect goes down what does that do who are the losers the pro globalization Left parties of the 1990s the German Social Democrats new labor Clinton's version of the Democrats credibility is gone they're dead who are seen as the new stars all of this law bernie podemos five star who's on the other side of this debtors the winners and the most perverse sense can't pay won't pay to hell with you that's your trump force that's your lepen force it's also the left force it's just expressed in a different way people have seen the system systematically not work for them and what do you get there that's when it's quoted through nationalism included against immigrants EFD defense feed has lured justice all the right-wing versions backed a lot once laid both sides same thing producing both now in closing a deeper dive into the german elections for a while it seemed it was all going so well we got rid of the populist Europe was growing I mean I love what Paul session and the right mind gets that picture taken and doesn't think James Bond bad guy right it's just perfect right and Marines on the other side ever like immigrants the door is over there you know just go away please so anyway they got tough so it was like it was good it was all fine people in Brussels are very happy right and then this happened the economy was going well so obviously people were bored of war in their interests right we don't have to worry about the German elections is fine look the here's our GDP it's going up finally you know it's the almost bit forecast then they're in small print and then here's unemployment going down forecast right but things are moving in the right way just in the same way that the Democrats simply didn't get it the one that will wandering around America and the campaign telling everyone that things have never been so good the unemployment's back to where it was before the crisis things are great for millions of Americans and were like you got rocks in your head have you been to where I live all you need to do is walk I'm a live in Providence Rhode Island really really wealthy a little part where aren't where the university is the east side I just need to drive two miles and I can take my students to places where there are pawn shops the some of the major businesses are mobile shops there's networks these students have never heard of two completely different Americas all in the one city you can bike from one site to the other and yet we think in averages on average wages have gone up on average unemployment's gone down we don't live on an average it's all skewed it's all gone at the top twenty now the thought in Europe it was over everything was heading in the right direction and then that's happened we're back so what you've got the black at the top there is Merkel's party the Coalition on the right 33% is the worst they've done in recorded history the SPD the help are up from the left the people who are meant to offer an alternative but have been in the coalition basically pushing this agenda along they have done the worst result ever have a look at the winners and losers on this one it's the two mainstream parties that have lost who's up on the other side it's the alternatives in this case it's the right one now here's the two faces of the German economy this is this whole story about evidence fine why is everyone whining about it it's not the economics so he is real GDP per capita average growth rate seven to sixteen Germany outstripping everybody they sell BMWs to the rest the world they're awesome we buy them it's not simple right he is declining unemployment right going down and down this is 2016-17 down from four point three we'd kill for four point three we've got four point three but the way we calculate unemployment is really weird and then they're down no to basically three point seven if you're over full employment they have a shortage of skilled workers so why is everyone complaining well here's why this is poverty in development have a look at that purple line that's the poverty rate right now this came from two sources number one buying East Germany basically seventeen million unemployed Communist showed up and said get me a job you had to integrate them in your economy that costs a lot of money and the land or the eastern land are the ones where you still have the number of highest number of people in poverty on social benefits etc now for the past ten years the German government like everyone else has been saying we need to tighten our belts we need to pay back out there we need to cut back this wealth in a state we can't afford that anymore but at the same time what are they doing they're opening their daughter two million refugees so what does that look like to the people who are the recipients sitting in the East who have seen their industry stripped their country destroyed and their homes devalued while the rest of the West is doing fine and now they're meant to accept a bunch of immigrants Zenor seem to go all the way of your transfers how come I can't get my school renovate you can see how this one plays out this is the election results in East and West Berlin this is one city that used to be divided twenty years ago the division is stole their what you see in the West Merkel's party thirty four percent in the East 27 percent EFD the right-wing upstarts the Ottoman emigration party West Berlin ten point nine twenty one point six that's in one city identity politics dumar but all identity coded through economics you can't explain a rise in the number of races by virtue of a rise of the number of races you need explain where it comes from and when it comes from in the German elections which I think is very very germane for thinking about this problem in general is what is it unique about this one area why is it that if you're in the East you're far more likely to have a higher level of xenophobia in the West even when you control for each well part of the fact is go back to the prior slide you live in the area that's deprived you live in the area that since 1991 has been in the receipt of transfers and now you feel you're in competition for those transfers with a bunch of people who have come into your country that you didn't invite do you think populace can pick up on this and make this into a politics and if the center parties are unable to talk about it unable to explain rationally why they should want to make these choices then the results inevitable and the tragedy in the German case and this argument could be extended here and everywhere is the following the West is old the West is rich but you don't have enough kids there one point for new Germans for every two that are there just know that economy is shrinking the whole of Europe is just below two and its replacement rate so that means one of two things either if an economy is nothing more than a number of workers number of hours walked in the amount of capital if you take out the number of workers you have a shrinking pie given in the pies already skewed in its distribution that's gonna get ugly so the solution would be immigrants because they can come in you can put their kids in your system you can tax them across the generations they pay for your debts they pay for your old care they pay for your pensions or you can do the stupidest thing ever you can say no to the on demand that you want more which seems to be what people are doing here's an interesting one this is contact with immigrants people in the West have far more contact with immigrants the people in the East but if the East is where they vote for the EFD so how do you explain that because it's not even contact with real people it's the imaginary that these people are taking things from me that's a pure populist creation so why do people vote against those who work against the best and tres well it's not clear to me that's the case it's not clear to the populace oh really the problem even on the right or even on the left scene there's a presumption that we had that the mainstream parties were working for them and it turned out it wasn't true I'll give you a lot of anak data from this and you can check it out in The Guardian newspaper Tom Frank wrote about this is the obvious most obvious site to get a link to him anyway here's a story when they did the Podesta email Hawks when they got the Democrats emails somebody took the data from WikiLeaks and decided it was called geo locate the data in other words what were the place names that the leading Democrats who are the last part of her mentor represent all of us remember right not the elite Republicans what were the police names that he talked about and their private communications and their selection what was the number one most frequently named place in their communications can you guess have a guess Martha Martha's Vineyard yeah number two Eastern Southampton then New York then San Francisco then I think it was Ellie in DC and the rest of the country two standard deviations out so what's the imaginary of a party this seeks to represent all if that's all the places did they talk about because that's where the money is and it's not just to castigate the Democrats the British Labour Party was like this under blare of the German SPD under shorter it's done that's the left is systematically failed the people that it supposedly represents so why should we be in the least surprised that they defect and then go to any one at all that actually says here I know that everyone's ignored you for 25 years I at least hear the fact that you're crying and I understand why people's everyday experience is very different from a national average walking out and telling people that the price of iPods has fallen which means that really they've got more money than they think at a time when they can't afford to send their kids to college or their kids would be insane to take on that much debt because it's like having a house with no ASSA it's just parts on izing and the example of immigration occupied to that one it's very different depending on where you live immigration to me is another person from another interesting country who has a phd but that's what it means where I live right but that's because I'm in the top 20% if you're living in public housing in France right and those resources are been finite and those resources are being cut and you're the ones are confronted with incredibly different cultures coming and not integrating with you taking the resources from you at least as you perceive it and that's what's been narrated by the National Front don't expect them not to make end roads because it gels with everybody's common sense regardless of whether we can say well on average and migrants benefit the economy no one lives in an average now the problem here now close with us is that you can identify with all of that and I hope to understand populism people begin to accept because it's not joining one side of the other to understand the phenomena the fear phenomena you need to understand it but it's the problem is over here their economic policies are trash they can't work the first one has explained with immigration and debt you need more immigrants not last so you're going to go bankrupt so think about this one this country 80% of all financial assets are held by baby boomers 80% of those assets are held by 20% of baby boomers they're going to get liquidated in the next 20 years because everybody dies and when they do that will either be spent in the most inefficient way possible running down those assets until you qualify for Medicare which is just insane horrible lead to the greatest non work transfer of wealth in the history of the Republic whereby an entire generation inherits a huge amount of cash for doing nothing that's not good globalization Walmart wages it's all a problem but there's also an upside to this the only reason people are actually able to eat just now is because of global supply chains if you want to tear all that down exactly what are you going to get not just your kiwi fruit from your very basics given a complex the end of the pendency isn't the world economy are so simply tunnelling and what's there's a country that rises it's called North Korea it's not very good globalization has certainly harmed a lot of jobs but not as much as you think the main culprit has been technology and also labor migration what I mean by that Wisconsin lost one front of its jobs not to Mexico but de Texas and Florida another right-to-work states back in the 1970s we've been industrializing for a very long period and particularly in manufacturing carbonyl substitutes for labor really efficiently not sewing services well are just fastest largest volume growing job in the United States elder care nurse and home help because that's where we need it because the baby boomers are getting older and they need the help right but in manufacturing robots will take everything but this has been going on for 50 years so the notion that this is NAFTA laughs there's a rounding error on this and if you tried this model although all you do is piss off the Canadians nobody wants to do the harm they will they will deny us maple syrup an NFL it's not worth it and finally the last one I'll come back to this is aging at the end of the day were an older society and an older society is one that saves too much and invest too little because it when you're at the to sound like an economist when you're at the end of the lifecycle you care about present consumption so you don't care about the ability of somebody else you don't know to go to college so you vote for tax cuts because that's in you know media interests because you want to leave it all to your kids but the world that your kids are gonna grow up in is the one everybody else's kids are growing up in and have 80% and unsexy systems bust and 66% if you here think the system's boss by the voting I saw earlier it doesn't matter how much he trying self-insure through assets for your own kids you're leaving the country don't do that and the first step to that it's very simple go back to that graph imagine what would happen if you had free college tuition 60 billion a year would do it we spend more on DARPA and the Defense Research Institute's subsidized childcare imagine what it would actually be like if women particularly single mothers were actually able to be active members of the workforce rather than mean general stress cases as this spend 60% of the take-home Pig and their catch looked after so you can put 40% on the table of feed them every other country in the world has managed to have a single-payer health care system it's just more efficient we spent 17% of GDP on health care everybody else spends about 7 10 % of American GDP is more money than I could spend on a Victoria's Secret supermodel and that's a lot of money imagine what we could do with that something that really would help we have this obsession with short-termism quarterly reports shareholder value what that means is I've met tons of CEOs and they also the same thing I would love to invest in communities I would love to do more in a long-term R&D I'd love to own Shore stuff I really would but I can't because of something it's control of 5% of my shares usually some activist idiot from a hedge fund then they will come in and replace the entire board because they're not maximizing the share price well how about we change corporate and sent as my change in the law to stop that nonsense and then you'll be more like general corporations and then we could make the BMW's for a change and finally the last one why is it okay for Facebook and Google to know more than the CIA about who you are and then to sell that for profit and Equifax to have all your details and then loser and gold whoops what's happening is we're building these one or take all digital monopolies the margins on which are incredible imagine you have a 60% profit margin because the cost of providing your marginal cost your next good is zero which is what these guys have so what's their incentive to invest well they will send a rocket to the moon and we're doing deep mind that yeah whatever great but what's your actual investment in communities what's your investment in labor we don't have to have one it's just scalable tech so because of that you cost an incredible a lawyer tons are unbelievably high you're making money for just showing up but because you're the monopolist huge body as to entry nobody else gets to play that's what we have taught in the economy and - so it's a run tears paradise it doesn't work to work and only pees to be one of those guys we can't all be one of those guys so some way to do it is just follow up those five things just do that and you'll kill populism in a heartbeat and if you don't don't be surprised that they're in charge thanks professor for your inspiring and proposed solutions at the end at this time dr. Blythe will take questions from the audience please submit your questions on twitter using the hashtag en thompson forum you may also write questions on note cards which are provided by the ushers our first question this evening comes from the students for the Ian Thompson international scholars professor Blythe do you believe that American people voted against their best interest due to a deteriorating trust for the system and if so do you think the 2008 financial crisis could have been the beginning I think it is begun long before the financial crisis the financial crisis exacerbated what was going on but the generic collapse in trust in public institutions has been a long time coming and has many many causes some of which I've talked about there so but I don't think people vote against the best interest I really don't I I will defend the right of the most heart the right of the most hardcore Trump vote to vote for Trump because if at the end of the day your life experience says I really don't believe a word to anybody else says and this guy may be a whore peddler be he speaks my type of language right let me put it this way tears either way to think about less I'm quite serious if you really think everyone is someone's a liar there is no point in putting any investment in them you will be disappointed if you think someone's a darnest there may be an upside right why not on the other hand if things get worse they finally get worse for the top 20% welcome to my downside Germans have a word for this is called schadenfreude nobody thinks that way I do I'm evil in some sense but anyway that's that's my sincere answer mark what do you think about the free health care in the UK does it work because of a country size or another reason you can do all sorts of skills it doesn't have to be one giant bureaucracy I mean the NHS is about kind of our control it's too hierarchical it tries to serve the entire nation you can have devolved regionally funded versions of this that share costs across things my basic point is everybody else has managed to do this and they all spend less than we do usually half and you know healthcare outcomes longevity Japan kicks ass right quality of life less stress Spain tops the list not this weekend things are kicking off but usually right there's lots of different ways you can look at this if you want sort of like highly stressed out societies with lots of social problems we Rock right in part because we want too many hours and because of that were totally stressed so we consume far too many pharmaceuticals etc etc etc so it's not just the question of the nature of this the payer system it's what you expect healthcare to do and that's part of a larger conversation with me about what are we trying to do because we're all just running to stay still apart from a few of us who have managed to basically take the cake and really until we get to the heart of that everything else is scarring around us you all right thank you we'll stay in the United Kingdom why did the Brits vote for brexit because they're morons next question so this is what it becomes comedy but it's also tried today and the best comedy is tragedy right so here's the way it worked before the Brits had the thing called the pound right it's cute by the picture Elizabeth on her right now they were never going to join the euro and because they were never gonna join you you know they didn't have to put up with any of the nonsense of the Germans and the perpetual belt tightening right any of that crap they'd have to put up with all these rules called the fiscal compact and the deficit reduction procedure they were never gonna join and the best thing about being a country is having your own money because if your banking system goes you can print money is save it if you want you can also decide not to you can take ahead through the gingery because you have one so you basically default slowly on foreigners in your caste or rather than on your own people if you don't have your own currency if you give that up you can't do any of these tricks and what that means is either you'll let everything default you blow up the banking system which would be for the whole of Europe but to be crazy or alternatively you squeeze internal devaluation welcome to Greece right wise Greece it's such a suit that's why there are their own money now the Brits are smart enough to cope will never govern this up well one of the big three we get to like tell the Germans in the French no we're not do not know we're not doing that look at the veto and we don't like we have our own massive financial sector which is really begging on just tons of money we get to clean all these euro transactions we have this lovely little hedge currency between the euro and the dollar called the pound it's deep and it's liquid our property markets are the biggest money-laundering scheme on the planet right we have the best deal ever David Cameron renegotiated the best deal of them and then decide he didn't like it took it to the British people and said what do you think of the EU and they basically said we don't know but we hate you because it wasn't really about here it was about to the elites basically and then the result came in and they went our crop so they'll handed it to me and now me has to negotiate the best deal ever having defaulted on the best deal ever twice so in my book the morons know is that fear yeah if you better decide when someone is as complex and important as the EU have it to be about the EU don't make up stuff about 350 million a week for the health care system if we don't pay taxes to Brussels you might as well turn around to say well mark life would be seven foot tall if he doesn't eat carrots right there's just as much factual content in that one but we've got this world now where you have to give both sighted it did to be an answer all right over here we have someone with Fox and knowledge dealer and over here we have a complete lunatic let's give them equal time that was basically the Bragg's in four all right let's take some rapid-fire questions from our rapidly filling up Twitter feed this evening first what happens when there are no more jobs because robots have taken them all robots can't take them all for the simple reason that the fastest growing jobs for the next 20 years are going to be looking after baby boomers and they haven't invented that robot yet when we talk about robots once you get our manufacturing which is shrinking everywhere because you can efficiently add robotic processors what you're really talking about things called algorithmic processes right con machines learn to do things and if they can con those tasks being routinized in such a way that they can do them much faster and much more efficiently this is where you're taking jobs now where are you taking jobs number one the financial sector why because they've lent all this money and we're not borrowing anymore because our wages aren't going up so the only way they're going to maintain their money margins is if they cut their costs so what do they do they're automating the whole back-office it's called FinTech financial technology right these are the jobs are actually more vulnerable to this than anything else Manufacturing is going the way of 19th century manufacturing it's been replaced by something better and smarter what bothers me is what happens when you have concentration of returns to assets it's not about the robots it's about who controls the returns the robots because of a handful of monopolistic digital forums actually control these technologies they're just gonna basically extract range from the rest of society and pay us wherever they see fit that's when it becomes really problematic but it's not about robots right that's not the one to worry about so I the second thing I must say this is what's actually very important every time that there's been a technological revolution there has been a net increase in the size of the labor market not a decrease so why should this time be different well because it's digital it's different it's gonna happen so fast bla bla bla Sweden very high tax and transfer our society welfare state big state the whole lot right number two in the world for startups very technologically advanced 5% of their transactions last year were cash everything else is digital they're already a digital society there's no more employment what's of all of faith here we remember the jobs that have been lost we are unable to picture the jobs that will be there I stole her faith that that's the case economies do you think debt has a place in them all remember debts not a bad thing unless you speak German sprechen zie thoughts nein yeah those of us is de votre for debt shoeld which is the same word this guilt I'm not making this up I wish I well any Italians here Italian speakers maybe speak Italian Catholics any Catholics here come on half the town's Catholic what's the middle of the mass called will you profess your faith the credo comes from the Italian and Latin credit to credit ah so you a bunch of people who think debt is guilt and you are not a bunch of people who think debt is credits what's the secondary meaning of credit in English to believe what's the Credo the profession of faith the whole thing is based on faith you just believe you're gonna get paid back that's it now you can have an attitude to that they're like debt as an obligation it must be paid back or you can say no the reason you get paid an interest rate is because you're taking a risk here's the risk you might not get paid back it's not a moral obligation so there is the opposite of credit our sense of the opposites of liabilities there's nothing wrong with debt it's a question of who's been asked to bear it and if you're asking people to take on debt that you know they can't pay back you're a predator [Applause] based on your proposed solutions are there any US politicians who can get elected I think so I do and he'll be too old to do it himself but I'm a big believer in founding the reason being apparently he's not the nicest guy I can't I don't know but he seems very avuncular who knows right but that's irrelevant who cares about personalities that's what you're seeing what are you putting on the platform what are you actually telling us and he's actually pointing out good god if we could save 10% of GDP you wouldn't need to have 1.2 trillion in student loan debt wing during the next generation so basically save it in health care you can just wipe out the student loan problem this is simple accounting why are we getting guaranteed interest rate repayment to commercial banks to give you students loans which you can't default on because you're not allowed to that's called usury that's ridiculous it's not a debt if you can't default on it it's not a moral obligation to go back to the earlier ones so I think that he's on the right track now something else is gonna take this on I think that the world changes in cycles just like these regimes and I'll give you an example just known Britain me is dead the Conservative Party's dead their message is dead as a guy you've had local jeremy corbyn jeremy corbyn's a little Labour Party he basically bought out the Labour Party is a kind of completely unfunded leveraged buyout of a dead institution and he walked in and said let's actually talk about things that might make a difference in the lives of ordinary people and everyone said you outdated 1980 socialists go away so he's completely pail up in the press and he's meant to be a moron whatever fine it's a brilliant book up at the 1970s by peril steam called the invisible bridge is anybody on Verona no I highly recommend it Victor back history the 70s were bonkers the young people no idea a mental it was right and it's a book about the 70s but it's also a book about Ronald Reagan and in 1969 he was on the Board of Regents of the University of California Berkeley and he was going on about free speech and the repression of speech amongst the right-wing students and he was given a damn about religious rights and he think the government should be in our affairs and all the stuff glory instead for this was the Summer of Love like never had someone been so long and wrong at a historical moment he was a laughingstock by the end of that decade the entire world had come to him he hadn't changed at all everything else had moved and joined up I think when undergoing a similar transition I think that the money doctor saved the regime that was born in 70 and died in 2000 and he they pumped it along on monetary life support but ultimately it's bankrupt financially intellectually and morally and I think particularly the young generation see this the recent professional action will hadn't run for another few days Corbin would have won despite the fact that every ponder was producing projection of the projections in landslides for the Conservatives and also you can think of a Trump's victory the same way people have had enough and one way or another they're gonna vote for change I think that are positive and progressive forces out there and all we need to do is buy their time there's that moment of change is coming again where the people who are laughter will be the ones where the world comes to them mark why did the world why did the word China not appear in your talk because they paid me not to I'm a paid agent of the Chinese Communist Party well it depends on you handle er I mean look so here's my stucco in China door balk if you ever get a chance to go to Shanghai go to the Chinese museums a Shanghai Museum of Art and planning I think they call it that to make sure you don't go but when you go in as kind of a car park it's like a square Guggenheim so rather than being round right with the paintings it's square and you go under the first one it's all calligraphy and you've got it's a big piece of Chinese writing and it says something like 3800 BC decade edge and you go along like a few feet there's another backpack calligraphy in the translation of the bomb and while you're not to clean up the trash and then you go along it's another 100 years and it says and while you're not to get that Rhodey lot from down the stairs and put them in jail and you go along and it says and then put in street lights right and then by the tell you know you go up and it's like but the ten of my people were running around themselves blue and eating each other right like oh we need to figure out a public education system we're going to lock this much in the budget for doing this of blah blah and it's like this is like new you zero for us like the beginning of the age of Christ right so what you do is you walk up and you go holy crap these guys have been around for a long time and what you're also getting is a message this is the Chinese state this is what we do don't get in the way so you get up to where they get to the opium wars and a complete breakdown of China which they believe I remember memory serves me like they call the European integral or something and uh Nadine like this it takes up like half a wall then there's moe you'd think that would be a big thing seriously he gets one panel and then you open the door you ever seen the film Mission Impossible they have a scale model of Shanghai and they got guys on wires coming down put into buildings in hi we're back right now why are they doing this it's a sure of the power of the state and that's the way that works that's the way in that economy works the not top-down communists don't think that for a minute they're the most fiscally decentralized country in the world 80% of their public expenditure spent at the local level like when we talk about giving back to the states like the Republicans master plan would be half of what China's already achieved because they've got 1.2 billion people so they have regions which have a hundred million people in them you can do a lot of experiments you can get things wrong and still get things right fairly robust the shocks no we don't let them buy stuff we have a thing called the national security foreign investment after 2007 they can't buy guns can't buy tech can't buy pharma go away so we sell them stuff they sell it through a Walmart they get dollars we make them buy Treasury bills they're fed up doing that they're not stupid so they've got this project called one belt one road if we are not allowing them to buy assets here they will go for marsan cells where they're investing 40 billion dollars in ports and pakistan they've already built a railway that stretches right across Transcaucasia you can bet that those nice compliant governments in Tajikistan Kazakh the rest never will make sure that nobody ever buys anything near that railway line you'll bet that railway line will be moving freight trains in 300 miles an hour well we are still dealing with a seller and on those freight trains will be all the goods that Europe can possibly want to consume they'll just bypass us now you can either engage with that you can get a stupid fight with over some islands which is utterly pointless because at the end of the day it's their neighborhood not yours and more than the point unless you're willing to actually invade them occupy them and kill them do it try we've been doing a lot of that it's usually working out badly right so they're just going to buy passes and do the thing you can either engage with our and SWAT our own house I'll ask the most powerful country in the world as the richest country in the world we still got so much we can do or we can retreat and what and worry about China as a threat and say that we can't have health care and we can't do that so we can't do that while all the profits go to a tiny handful of people who are telling us all our stuff I don't want to do that do you believe there is a tech bubble or entrepreneurial facade that promotes a false sense and lack of genuine genuine innovate innovation oh my god yes absolutely called jusuru ever hear about that's what our Juice Sarah or one of these things you know about this one so a couple millions of dollars of Silicon Valley money into this wonderful thing we're buying you know those green juices you get usually airports and you drink some cuz you don't take it on a plane and you don't want to die but nobody actually likes them right so imagine you could make this at home while I can't put in a blender and press go right no no no to get the real nutrients out what you need is a press which has like the power of seven planets gravity snows whatever right and then you get it so basically you buy this bar go through and you put it in this big press and it was and all this just comes out and it's amazing right so millions and millions and millions of dollars into a technology which we already have called a fruit press but anyway it's fancy right so they put this in in some guys will stick John or got one of these things I went I don't believe for a minute it says that it's like the power of three suns or whatever eyes right so the pillow underneath squeeze the juice and they got the juice bug and one of them held and the other one squeezed there and they got more juice so squeeze again this actually happened end of company right so all this sort of like unicorn stuff that's only other people refer to this is a status competition there was an economist that turn of the century called thorn stand Valen wrote the theory of the leisure class and it really applies to today as much as it did then when the Vanderbilts and all our around it's about showing off that you're part of the community that you're another Silicon Valley entrepreneur with your finger on the pulse investing in the latest thing why because that's what your body does and you're all the same club together and you're not all 50 and you're buying blood from thought wattle children and given yourself infusion so you can live forever goes on so I've had but anyway it's a stars competition does it really matter if you lose the money no because you've got so much so you know when you talk about being on the technological frontier right we are there when you do the next big innovation it's not another app on my phone I'm not gonna use I mean I'll give you a lot muskers joo-hee some do genuinely impressive me if you can honestly go to Puerto Rico and rebuild their grid and do it with renewables get them on the job right fantastic but if it turns out you're basically somebody who's using this as an excuse to be along a bankrupt solo company shame on you how or why do you think race and immigration becomes the lightning rod for populist anger is a simply convenient scapegoat I think it's more than that I think it's easy to mobilize against that because it's a def and other right so you know the United States the classic one is lefty of 27 years right but it's just continue to fascinate me I've lived in Baltimore incredibly divided city alright I've lived in full and Providence particularly undivided mainly because there aren't any african-americans really the main ones are Portuguese and Italians are not sort of like last divisive so this incredible division is kind of particularly like I say of slavery etc etc and yeah this is the number one country for immigration and yet lots of other immigrants come across from all over the world and immigrant listen this city itself is a big migration center for refugees so on the one hand you've got on the other hand you have this now every country has a version of this it may not be as deep as the one in the United States and the trauma of slavery but for example in France you've got the trauma of colonialism so then you have the withdrawal from North Africa the legacy of what they called the paid war the ones who had to come back and liquidate everything there and come back to France now they were being followed in by the Arabs that they'd left behind there are the ones who have taken the houses from the working classes and the public housing all right so it depends on where you are in the country what the legacy is how does that get interpreted if you're in an area where you have seen or contact with immigrants as I showed you the East German slides you can still be more anti-immigrant the people who are half contours so it's highly this is a product of historical nada F product of personal experience and a product of the deep political culture of these countries but the bottom line is economics is always expressed in a cultural frame only in our models do we imagine something called a representative agent that runs through life jumping and adjusting to shocks and maximising their utility that's not what real people do real people have stories and they live their life through those stories and sometimes those stories are colored by very ugly things and that's just part of life that we have to accept and try and improve upon mark what should baby boomers be doing with their assets giving them away last question ladies and gentlemen thanks very much Martin this is this one's uh what role this is from our Twitter feed this evening what role does the study of leadership play into how we balance government society education and give others a chance so leadership is way more as I got older I realize the leadership is way more important than I thought it was when I was younger because you know leaders are annoying right it's like the person who wants to be class captain right nobody really likes them you have an election cuz you have to they're annoying it gives them something to do right you know it's called Washington DC right you know so they all end up there and there's a there's a way in which when you're younger particularly leadership whatever then as you go older and you start to be in charge of things and run things you recognize the massive difference the leadership can make but somebody with an actual clearer version who can gain the trust of the people around them can take something it seems utterly bankrupt in transformer and how somebody who's a leader who thinks they're good can do incredible damage so it's unbeli but when it comes to the big skill questions the big government questions I think it's actually less important all right so one of the students in a chart gave me a question and I mean it prompted the following response I think the election of Trump has been good for climate change because it stops the rest of the world waiting around for America to solve the problem so if the gentleman's and the Chinese now get together and do technolog greentech bring it to scale China for example has installed more solar in the past few years in the United States has right if they end up doing that we're the suckers because we should have been leading the investment we'll be buying it from them but in a way if that forces them to do that and that's good in a global sense go for it so does that mean Trump was a good leader in that regard well that's a different question right but it can have a positive effect so the mark like let's not summit all up to you know the one leader the genius the charisma whatever the doesn't that's not good we are thinking about it they can't make a difference but the key thing is when they've actually got the trust of everybody who's who wants them to lead that's when societies work better but when you have leaders who are divisive who pet people against each other I never walk so for anybody that's the type of populism you want to avoid all right ladies and gentlemen two things first I'd like to remind you to mark your calendars for the next Iain Thompson forum it will feature the British national debate team as they tackle the question is regulation of social media necessary to protect democracy it's November 11th at 7 p.m. here at the lead Center secondly join me in thanking dr. mark life thank you all for coming oh fish fish

Channel: Washington Watch

Views: 261,767

Rating: 4.7874002 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Blyth, austerity

Id: BsqGITb0W4A

Length: 72min 11sec (4331 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/meerian]

He had me at "Shrek"

[u/rafikievergreen]

Because there is absolutely no alternative given to us.

[u/Ismoketomuch]

Mark Blyth is the man. He gives pretty good lectures, I will definitely give this one a listen.

[u/Arrogus]

Posted 4 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/comments/7kmfhk/mark_blyth_why_people_vote_for_those_who_work/