Transcription
How's the journey?
Nicholas, it's great to have you on the episode. Really, really excited about this. I've been consuming your content now.
Oh, have you? Ever since ever since Rory was raving on about you. I was like, whenever Rory gets excited, I get excited. Whenever I get excited about, he gets excited.
Rory is a very generous man, so you have to you have to exercise care. He's he I'm late for this interview. who's been incredibly gentlemanly making me feel as if it's entirely normal to turn up half an hour late for things and I'm mortified. But anyway,
Well, you got some creatives on the podcast, so we tend to be very very understanding the fact the whole entire process.
But, uh, do you know what? We'll just get straight into it. So, for our guests that don't know who you are, it'll be great for you to give a bit of a summary of like yourself, the work you've been doing, and we can start to dive into some of the bottlenecks that you've been experiencing along the way.
Okay, good. So I um let me tell a little story is that my father was an economist. My brother and I tried very hard not to be economists and we both failed. Um, and but I'm a a kind of roving economist and I've uh spent uh 30 odd years thinking about uh public policy, economics, the inadequacies of economics and I've spent the last 5 years fairly intensively looking at the inadequacies of our democracy and uh I've been asking very simple questions and looking at things in a very simple kind of way. And when you do that and you do sometimes it pays some dividends and you you come to think that you understand certain things that are simple but that people are missing and you try and point it out to them and they tell you you're wrong a lot of the time cuz it takes a while to to kind of decompress and to see some of the things that uh some of the deep structures in uh uh in the systems that we're all part of.
And when you ask these simple questions, do people give you simple answers?
No, no, no. Because what happens is that we are as as is natural and appropriate. We're acculturated. Um, you know, we look at that thing over there and we see a chair and that's what it is, but it's also a bunch of other things. It's plastic, it's wood, it's it's it's there. And and so if you look at something and you start uh and [clears throat] you start think you start asking yourself why isn't this thing working the way everyone says it should work? Uh is it is the fact that everyone is preoccupied with how a thing should be actually part of the reason why it's not that way.
Um,
So how you categorize a thing automatically then induces kind of biases and habits of thoughts.
Exactly.
Simply as a simply as a product of the categorization.
Exactly. But if a thing is a planet, you might not have a very strong idea of what a planet should be. But if a thing is a politician,
Yes,
you have a strong idea that this politician is a politician, is in the House of Commons, and they're doing the wrong thing, and they should do the right thing. And so you can go one of two ways. You can go the way that most politics goes, which is to wag the finger and say, "Should should should, or well, why isn't he doing the right thing? Are there things about the way we've set this up that mean that it's not doing the right thing? And one way to think about our political system, one way to think about left and right,
Yeah,
is that is to ask the role of the ask the question what is shoulding doing here? What is the desire to look at something and say you should be not the way I see you but some other way? And so I would say that the left do shooting all the time.
Yes.
And the right do suck it up.
Uh that's the way it is.
And they just don't understand each other in that way. Uh but the right I think the left have really got themselves uh rather unmed through the woke ex the the woke adventure and all that sort of stuff which was endlessly shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting shooting and then we say that trans women are women. Uh therefore someone selfidentifying as trans born a man gone through puberty as a man goes to a male prison even uh sorry goes to a female prison and they have been uh convicted of a of a sex offense. You know that's just completely nuts. uh and what's happened to society because just like this podcast I I really like the ability for people that even if you don't have the same views you can at least have a conversation around something.
What's happened in society where everybody's kind of like
gone to their direction and they've stuck to their guns and not willing to cooperate and have a conversation. What's happened there? What's happened is that for the past 250 years, we've set up everything that matters to us and our society as a competition between for and against. Everything. So the very terms left and right, where do they turn up in the French Revolution where where you sat in the assembly meant whether you were for or against. So everything we have even when it's brand new like where did co come from?
Mhm.
A few months people go by and they're kind of actually curious and then somehow it gets a should it gets an or it gets an ideological orientation which is absurd for the question of where did a virus come from to acquire an ideological connotation. We can do it in months. we can do it in weeks and that's what we did and that's what we do with everything and so we can't really uh and so everyone participates in discussions as if they already know the answer.
It's very interesting. Um I mean the the distinction I always make is do you want to win an argument or do you want to solve a problem?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,
because if you think about probably the worst influence on British politics is the PPE degree at Oxford.
In fact, Oxford in general, I would I would extend it [laughter] even more broadly. Uh and say that effectively it's 3 to four years training in argumentation.
Yes.
And therefore the consistency of your rationale is more important than the consequences of the implementation of that idea.
Okay. And that I mean it always interests me partly because what's quite interesting about the advertising industry is I always joke about this in most in most areas of decision-m rationality is the gold standard and I always argue in advertising it's the bronze standard. You go that makes sense but it's a bit boring. Can we do something a bit better? [laughter] Right. Okay. And it's always been interesting because it's a different way to think because most people are thinking in a way which is as long as you can create a kind of internal consistency y
to your model therefore the model is valid and you should therefore apply it very widely regardless of the consequences.
And I I think argumentation and this is why I'm occasionally seen as kind of anti-rationalist because I think rationality is often quite a low bar in many ways. you are, but you're associating rationality with very much with this idea of having it out between two sides. And what and so if we're trying to work out something that we don't know much about, well, there are you might arrange yourself into two sides, but then you will also be both aware that you of all the things you don't know. And so anyway, so so an argument or a discussion is uh is an ecology of shared things and contested things. And uh so it isn't the so I would say that simply imagining that a discussion which is a debate between two people who disagree with each other. Simply imagining that as a paradigm of rationality is irrational in itself. in itself because we have to be able to
feel towards the truth together and and and sometimes I'll say say no no that's I don't think that's right. Um, you might say no no it is right and then we might say right okay well we we've come to an impass there let's go look somewhere else or is there another way of looking at things there all those there are all those things and uh in our universities we teach that we teach overconfidence in what we know all this kind of stuff also there's a weird thing which is the urge to be singularly right
the byproduct of that is you autom dramatically reduce the solution set because if if you have a large solution set
that requires subjective judgment, intuition and actually probably debate and discussion
and you will actually inform your own opinions as a
byproduct of that discussion. If you want to be right right now, what you do is you limit the number of variables.
Exactly.
Typically, as an economist, you'll create it as a tradeoff between two things with a single optimand somewhere in between. Or if you're a politician, you will engage in what I call preemptary framing. So you will say uh as Tucker Carlson said to somebody in the military, so tell us how um tell us how your policy of of not discriminating not discriminating against gay people will help us in win a battle in Iran. Well, it won't do that. It's not that's not its function. It's it the the the there are you know this is these are people these are human beings there's a lot of things to think about but you can frame it in a particular way that you look silly defending what we need is more gay soldiers you know that they're just different things and so a huge amount of politics think of the two terms um pro-life and pro-choice well those are perempary framings what they're saying is you couldn't possibly, you know, could you could you be anything but pro-choice? Could you be anything but pro-life? And so the whole point of this maneuver is to foreshadow is to forestoall the possibility of debate.
Um, so it's uh it's it's a crazy
give a very interesting example of where debate comes to a better answer. And I I've I've funny enough this is where marketing slightly helps because interestingly in marketing you know every individual is a potential market. So you have to be interested in everybody to some extent uh if you want to actually grow your business
and this was one I think that happened in the UK which was a discussion on the on uh effectively uh taxation of taking airline flights.
Okay. And it started off framed in yes, we should tax uh every flight people take.
Yeah.
No, we shouldn't.
Yeah.
And eventually, I think there was some sort of effectively deliberative democracy took place and they took a representative sample of people and they arrived at what was actually a very clever reframing of the whole question, which is basically everybody's got the right to their Fortnite in Tenneref. Okay. But if you fly in as an individual more than a certain number of times a year then there should be a kind of sliding scale of how much tax you pay on your flights
which is completely different if you like it's sort of squaring the circle between more tax less tax.
It's taxed differently. Now one of the things I said to transport for London is the whole policy of the um what is it the the effectively there's this clean air air area. If you've got an old diesel car, you've got to pay what is it 1520 pound or something every time you drive into more or less into into
even out of London.
And my only argument was look um there's a huge difference between a 100 people paying 20 once and one person paying 2000 times. If you're a nurse, you've got an old diesel, you've got no choice but to drive into work at 5 in the morning. Okay,
charging that person £2,000 is ridiculous. And there needs to be some sort of capping system
you know, or Amazon Prime you you know, if you you pay £150 and then you're exempt for two years
and then you've got two years to replace your car
and this very very crude um uh effectively I suppose one of the things I think Gary Stevenson I don't know if you've come across Gary's economics kind of the economics channel one of the points he makes which I think is a totally valid criticism of mainstream economics is the single representative agent model
which is you optimize for a single average person and it's assumed therefore that you've optimized for everybody which becomes I think less and less successful in a world where of its nature people are just more different in their circumstances
and so um you know I've I've always thought that optimized for the average is a fundamental flaw of economics that you know you know essentially one of the points Gary makes is it doesn't really capture inequality of course because you can have fix people becoming monumentally wealthy and as far as an economist is concerned the economy is doing greatly
y
they always say that there's no one more dangerous than an intelligent person with a fixed mindset right because they'll stick to their guns and they'll [ __ ] their way through and say enough smart things for people to do
this is this [clears throat] is a great point that Alexander Solzaniten makes which is he says you know of all the villains in Shakespeare about 200 people are killed uh but in the modern world. The villains have got ideology and tens of millions of people get killed.
Oh wow. And but then going back to the whole conversation, everybody thinks that it's one or the other, but really it's not an all conversation. It's an and conversation, right? No one ever considers the and because people are not looking to actually solve the problem. It seems like it's more linked to people's identity now.
Yeah. Y like like I remember when I was at I was at um six form uh and I think it was the time when um um Nick Cleg that that uh almost like political run was happening and um um I was of I was labor right and I said okay but then if I actually just like made uh uh my answers based on the policies that I believed in what would I actually end up being right but then because I put it into my identity that I'm part of a party it's almost like blindly you have to choose one side or the other. Right.
That's right. And what you do is you should your opponents and you make excuses for your own side and you go, "Yeah, yeah. Well, he he, you know, didn't answer the question in in in prime minister's questions, but that was because, you know, if he'd done that, then they would have done this really unfair thing to him or whatever." And uh yeah, so so this is the same ability to get away from the facts with with spin effectively sort of self spin saying they should have done this, they should have done that.
And it seems like why why is the world cuz it was already a little bit like that 10 years ago, 10 or so years ago. It's become even more polarizing now, right? It's almost like, and I think Rory talked about this in the last um episode, that if you're moderately left or moderately right, it's almost like no one listens to you. If you're far one end or far the other side, that's I'll tell you the I'll give you the answer to your question in one in one word.
Uh entertainment much more entertaining to run a story about some extreme view, some extreme event. Uh so that's that's the bias and it then becomes a tool of political combat. So you'll pick some completely crazy uh some some crazy proposition from among your opponents.
Uh that's that's
political combat. There's another thing too which I don't think anybody's remarked on which is when you introduce prohibition. Okay, in in in the United States, no one bothers with beer anymore, okay? Because what's the hell's the point of smuggling beer? It's massively high in volume. Okay, similarly, if you watch narcos, they were basically cannabis smugglers, okay? and they suddenly go, "Look, if we're going to take all this risk of getting something through the American border, we might as well pack the truck with cocaine rather than cannabis because it's a highintensity product." Okay. Similarly, not many bootleggers bothered opening a brewery. It was all high high strength spirits. And similarly, if you're in a world where you're not allowed to make a mildly politically incorrect joke, you might as you said you end up with Andrew Tate. Okay. Andrew Tate is the cocaine or the bootleg jin of
incorrect opinion. You see, because it's I suppose, you know,
well, Nick Fuentes says the current,
it's kind of might as well be hang for a sheep as a lamb. So, if you you know, if you're if you're actually going to transgress and there's no distinction made between mild transgression and extreme transgression, well,
what the hell, right? That's right.
Well, they call it rage baiting now, right? and and and as somebody that obviously like specializing in in digital marketing etc etc you recognize that you need to do a lot uh uh to almost like set yourself apart in the doom scrolling era right so you have to do something that jumps out at people and makes people feel something and I feel like we're so hung up or we're so drained uh uh in dopamine um excess that it seems like we not only want and adrenaline
so it seems like we don't only want that in our digital lives but also in our physical lives as well. And unless something hits a particular note, it almost like doesn't register in people's minds. And is that one of the things that you think are
Yeah. Oh, sorry.
One of the things that you think are influencing that.
Um, yeah. I think our our see sometimes people someone like Ian uh McGill will say this is western and it is western but it's now a western institutionalized in this in these adversarial structures.
And it's so it makes it harder to represent the center. The center is boring. The center is not um the center is not as immediately you you can't cut through quite as easily.
Um, well, you can't be completely right as a centrist, can you? It's all the kind of bargaining thing. I mean, I'm intrigued by this as an enthusiastic georgist
because of course, one of the reasons georgism never takes any route is that it's inherently contradictory in that it's incredibly free market in terms of the fruits of people's labors, effort, or indeed imagination.
Y
and it's socialistic with relation to what you might call well typically land historically land. You could extend it actually to scarce resources like fossil
anything that Yes, indeed. things with rent.
So, so it was almost a religious distinction which I think people understood in the 19th century which is that land and oil are actually the creation of God
and therefore the proceeds from those things should be reortioned fairly because the value of your land is as much to do with the efforts of your neighbors as it is of your own. Okay. But I think in the 19th century they probably had a kind of religious way of understanding this which is why Georgeism went very big. M I you could extend it also to I mean Facebook or something if you wanted to. You could just say okay there's a kind of georgist approach to the web and that certain behaviors become essentially so habitual that the ownership of that behavior becomes a kind of extractive rentseeking activity and it it stop in shitification. It stops being value creation. You you go from being a property developer to being a slum landlord effectively. And but the Georgees thing is interesting because it's always difficult for it to take seed because it requires people to be both at the same time leftwing in in relation to certain forms of economic activity and rightwing in relation to others.
Um, but it's a and I think it's actually inherently beautiful for that reason because it takes what is what appears to be a contradiction and says well, you know, the extent to which you deserve to keep the fruits of your fruits of your labor entirely depend on the social contribution that your labor makes.
Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of a of a philosopher. He was a scientist then an economist then a philosopher. A guy called Michael Palani.
Oh yes of course.
who
tedious man.
Well, he was very so he was a liberal. He was a friend of Friedrich Hayek and a strong free market guy, but he also thought that Kanes was right and which he was in my opinion. And what he then did was he designed a system that would be Keynesian at the same time as leaving as focusing the interventions of government as tightly around what Kanes had identified as the problem which is the flow of money around the economy.
Got it.
And what had happened with Keynesianism is that it had picked up a lot of left-wing baggage. a lot of um the idea that these that that of for more state investment, more state uh supervision of investment and stuff like this uh more labor market regulation and and so Palani designed this system which would be very very free market but would um toss money into the economy when it needed to be tossed in and suck it back out when it when it was time to suck it out. So, so that's uh that's another examp that never took off either because you sort of have to
you have you have to ride two horses.
Well, well, that's well well that's right. And so the right was successful at peddling their their wares by so someone like Friedri Hayek raised his money from PE the owners of capital and Labour was much keener on Keynesian policies uh which came with a bunch of other uh which came with a bunch of other accutramals of the left um so there's a that's a that's an analogy in macro
he was also interesting wasn't he because he was an early AI pep pioneer if I'm right am I right
because he invented this whole concept of
tacid that's exactly exactly um but but yeah he he was um uh he came up with a a much more general way to show um to show the yeah the the the way in which once you get a degree of complexity you cannot govern from the center and he in fact designed this model it was a plywood model. And he showed that if you connect up all these all these planks um to calcul and then you stretch this thing that you've bolted together. If you had to
if you had to calculate all the changes in angles at the center, you'd be calculating forever. Whereas you just pull it and the thing is a big analog computer and works it works it all out. Anyway,
that's a I don't know whether I've explained that.
So, literally the interconnectedness is incalculable effectively, but that if you do physically in reality,
it will calculate itself.
It will calculate itself obviously. Exactly. That's it's a bit like the three body problem or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That it's easier to do it than it is to try and predict it. And it's a much better I think it's a much more general illustration of this point that you can't govern complex systems from the center than Hayek's argument which was much more tired economics and prices and then business people ended up being the heroes and and I don't know how that's going right now but
talk about heroes we're talking about um superheroes before the the podcast started and there's a famous quote from well it was from Twoface in Batman that says you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain. Right. I see. Which is which is why [laughter] Right. Which is why I've always said that sometimes the the the value of being central but a little bit to one side is that you also think about what does the world need right now. Yeah. because sometimes the world needs optimism or like like free thinking on the other side and sometimes you need to almost like go back to your conservative views, right? So I think that but then people don't think about it that way. They don't take they don't go outside themselves to think what does the world need right now?
What kind of leadership do we need right now and let's pivot to that for this season? Because everybody always thinks that something is like a forever decision.
It's not a seasonal decision. And uh do you why do you think that people don't consider it that way?
Uh all I can say is what we've already said, which is that um memes travel in extremes. There you are. That's a nice rhyme for you. [laughter] Um, if you want to Yeah. If you want to get velocity on these things, you make them simple and forever and tribal and left and right.
However, what are the Check this thing about what scales, okay, what pointing scale. And by the way, there w there was a healthy number of Brexiteers who were whose motivation was essentially localist. In other words, they believed that decisions should be taken by people who actually get to experience the consequences of those decisions close to the point where the decision was made. And I've got friends who are in local politics, okay? And they say it's not actually very partisan. Most of the discussions in local politics and nothing to do with left and right. It's they're practical. Where do we put this incinerator? That's right. Okay. And very occasionally there may be a political angle to it, which is obviously the leftwing people watch in the posh area, [laughter] but broadly speaking, they solve problems through intelligent debate. And actually um I would also argue that if you look at polarization and the kind of weird woke thing
it doesn't really exist in provincial or remote areas. So this is the strangest thing is a New York friend during
co it's very interesting.
So so universities can maintain it the level of weird intensity that makes it possible and very large cities like New York or London will maintain it. Yeah. Yeah.
When I moved when I moved to Kent,
you know, blessed decision in my opinion.
Shout out to Kent.
One of the first things I do is I go to one of these county fairs. Okay.
And there are three stalls at the county fair.
And there is literally, I'm not making this up, the RSBB, Bird Charity, right?
Uh a stall selling jawsticks run by hippies and a stall selling shotgun, cartridges, and hunting equipment. And having moved from London, I who the hell was the idiot who put these three people together, okay, these three stands together, because it was just comical, right?
And then I went closer. They were making each other cups of tea. [laughter]
And a friend of mine left New York. Um, I'm I'm actually basically a provincial advocate. I think that urbanization and gains to elomeration, the idea that economists have forced us all to believe that the future of humanity is living in ever greater population densities.
They only that that was something they came up with about 30 or 40 years ago and they were telling they were saying the opposite before that.
You know, I I'm I'm basic, you know, I I want to lead the suburban m movement. You know, mockta homes, everybody's got a lawn mower. Actually, Australia basically, [laughter] right? You know, you like a bit of space, don't you?
Well, no, because we're the most urbanized country in the world.
But on the other hand, your cities are enormous.
Sucker cities. Yeah. Absolutely huge. [laughter]
But the funny thing was this friend of mine left New York and he moved somewhere in Montana.
Yeah.
And the local co-op, which is slightly more up market, and I think than it is in the I like the co-op in the UK. The local co-op was entirely run by transgender hippies.
Yeah. The clearel of the local co-op was people who turned up in pickup trucks with gun racks.
Yeah.
There was and he comes from New York and he just cannot understand what's happening.
But these people coexist completely happen. I've got a Texan friend who just goes basically you don't get riots or anything of the kind in because you said very simple we're all Texan.
Yeah.
Okay. So the Texanness basically effectively overrides any other differences you may generally experience because you've [clears throat] got your own identity. And I wonder about this because the media are we effectively allowing our debate to be dominated by something and this is my big question which is why I won't get into very woke debates about trans issues on either side
is simply the opportunity cost.
Well, you you basically will be misunderstood. I mean, the People will willfully misunderstand what I say.
Built on willful misunderstanding in both directions
or confected outrage
and it's it's no fun. It's absolutely no fun. It's if you are hated for what you believe and people understand what you believe. That's one thing. Being hated because people don't understand what you believe. You know, it's really really annoying.
It's really Yeah. What's the point of that? Everyone's wasting their time and everyone's upset. and and actually my my contention would be that in provincial settings
Yep
okay generally when you have lower population density and the same people encounter the you know, the same people one thing is you can't become an absolute bore
okay you can't on social media you can be a single issue fanatic where you talk about nothing but Brexit
who's that philosopher guy AC graing okay you go to his Twitter feed and there hasn't been anything other than an anti-rexit tweet
[laughter]
And I'm kind of going, "Look, mate, can we just have a kitten falling off a skateboard, please?" You know, crying out loud. Now, you couldn't do that in a pub setting because you'd basically be known as Boring Dave and no one would talk to you.
So, let me let I had this thought about
I think we should just reproentialize. I think you just go move back to the country, rewind it, everybody has a bit of space, you know, we'd all be happy, you know.
So, so
Kent nationalism, that's me.
That's very grand. And I'm not I don't none of my thoughts are grand in the sense that I'm not um uh recommending any large scale social engineering Rory but uh just a few weeks ago I was thinking about do you remember Rory you may well do you know the so the Royal Society founded in this town London in 1660 and it had a motto in Latin you remember what it is
oh yeah it's
Nllius Yeah.
Nolius inver except nothing by word. And the idea was that all there were all these people around who thought that angels dragged the planets around the sky. Why? Well, because Aristotle said so. Uh now I don't know whether Aristotle said that. I think he didn't. But he said that they that planets have a tea loss and they're following their t- loss or their purpose or their end in life and so on. And there was this incredible idea that we've got to that we've actually got to actively get that out of our system and we've got to try to accept only what our experience tells us works. And I'm thinking null inverh well I think the I think the motto of our systems of politics and governance in the cities not in the country [snorts]
is omnia inverbber and I don't know whether that Latin is correct
think it is.
Yeah
but everything's in words.
Yeah.
And and and there is one institution in our governance structure which isn't like that. Um, and it actually brings up this question that we've talked about before, which is tacet knowledge. Knowledge that is not articulated and possibly because it cannot be articulated.
How to ride a bicycle.
How to ride a bicycle. How to come up with the next word I am assembling in this sentence.
That is done with tacet knowledge. I have no [ __ ] idea how I do it.
No.
Uh, but there it is. And that is according to some people including me the most important thing the foundation of our knowledge. Not explicit knowledge but how do we learn to walk? How do we learn to talk? How do we learn to ride a bicycle? How do we learn to interact? All these things are flush with tacet knowledge. But our political system is a memedriven political system. But in the counties, that's not how people think. And in a jury, that's not how people think. They think, "Yeah, I like that. That person, I trust them. I trust them. They they they're not playing to the gallery. They're not giving me a hard time. They they heard what I said and they they you know, last time they heard what I said and they agreed with me. This time they're disagreeing with me. I think I'll try and figure out why."
Um, and that's not there in our political system. It's not there in uh our uh our media system. You can't uh you've got to be extremely articulate, very quick, very uh succinct and determinative if you're asked a question. Uh if you so imagine saying as a politician and this is an actual quote imagine you're the treasurer of a country and um a journalist says when will this recession end and you say your guess is as good as mine well you've lost a job you you within a week you will be out of your job for telling the truth
and that's that's the that's the world of omnia in verbus
that that's really interesting because I saw a quote um online that basically talked about the fact that um whoever it was convinced us to leave the village and then to buy it back at a premium, right? So that's effectively how society worked. You had people around you, your family, support,
and then you had to go to a completely different location, be by yourself and go into this rat race so that you can just buy the village back for a higher premium, which is effectively what happens, right? And and not only are you on your own, not only you have to buy it for a premium, you also uh a sheep towards the mentality and the attitudes of what happens within that location, which is super super interesting. But I I I just feel
that's a beautiful phrase. It never occurred to me that is exactly what's happening.
That's exactly what happens, right? You're just buy well you you leave you're forced to leave the village and then go and buy it back at a premium is an extraordinary way of looking at things. That's how society is, right? So they make they convince us that we need these things. They convince us that we need to embody this identity. They convince us that we need to the the films like um there's so many films like uh Wolf of Wall Street and Sex in the City and all these things that glamorize this like city business person life. Even I would say people like Gary Vaynerchuk who I love so much from what he's done for my career. He got me on this hustle train to want to be super productive and on everything and consume everything.
But but I think that
as people now start to almost like unwire and unplug from the matrix, like I like to say, and are starting to spend more time on God's green earth, we're now starting to think for ourselves a little bit more. I think that the sensationalism that's happening on social platforms, a lot of people are talking about the great like unplug
that's already starting to happen. But it's starting to happen amongst a younger audience already.
They're starting to realize that this is not where the vibe is, right?
Very interesting thing when you work in advertising. One of the things you start to notice is the things that are advertised unconsciously without anybody needing to pay any money to do so.
And one of them is that uh you know urbanism is wonderful. Suburbia is dreadful and small-minded and provincial and the countryside is full of hicks. You know, that's an absolutely common media narrative. Of course, the other narrative which is extraordinary when you look at it. I mean, I joke about things like the worst treated thing in the world by the media is undoubtedly the underground car park. I I was giving a talk last week in a Norwegian underground car park. They obviously dressed it up a bit and I joke that of course this is to me the most dangerous place in the world because if you watch a lot of Scandi Noir, there is never a film scene set in an underground car park without someone being killed. Okay. So, underground car park, the actual data on, you know, crimes committed in underground car parks is probably quite forgiving. [laughter]
But the other one which astounds me because it went on for 50 years was that rising property prices are a good news story.
Yes.
And that was sold to everybody. Um, you know, so that literally now people have a mentality which is if I spend money on rent, it is completely wasted.
If I spend money on property, it is an investment. a completely bifocated idea. Now, never mind the fact that if you just invested some of the money you would spending on a mortgage,
you know, you might get a better return or the fact that most of your mortgage is actually going to the bank in the shape of interest payments over 20 years.
But that has created this literal framing where oh no, no, if you're renting, you're just pissing money off the wall, for example.
But then also there's a whole conversation around opportunity cost, right? Because because you're now have a mortgage and you're planted in one place,
what can't you do? What can't you do? Right? I think people don't talk about and if you live in the house, it's not really an investment because you're spending a lot of money to uptake the house. It's only if somebody else is paying for it that's an investment. I think there's a lot of narrative that's just been put out there. Absolutely right. Right.
That that that everybody has just assumed to be like factual and the way that it is, right? The the whole um you see that with now with the crypto kind of like space. was buy at the dip, buy high, sell low. All this kind of stuff that's happening, but a lot of it is just about adrenaline.
Yeah.
Even though they say this in theory, as soon as they see something going to the moon,
everyone buys it anyway. It's really, we're talking about the meme uh era right now. And Trump has his own coin. When he started intervening in the Middle East in a deeply, you know, irrational and random way, okay, it was primatology. It wasn't rationality. The only thing I said to my wife, I said, "It's not like all the rational people have solved this problem." And that was my only defense, which is occasionally if something if a problem proves itself ideology proof, rationality proof,
actually going in and doing something completely random is probably not all that crazy.
Yeah. No, no, I'm I'm not that critical of Trump's uh of what Trump's done externally.
Um, anyway, that could be read in lots of different ways.
You'll get misrepresented here. Yes, exactly. [laughter]
Massive mega fan Nicholas Gruin here.
Yes, exactly. Don't worry. Yeah,
dear.
Oh, man. But uh talk about countries and running countries. You obviously talked about the fact that GDP is not the only way to measure the the quality of how a country is doing at that given moment in time. Yeah.
Because right now in the UK, as soon as you talk about what's happening, everyone's like, "It's a bad times, isn't it?" That's that's just the narrative that's going on around. But is it really bad times?
What's happening? It'll be great to get your view on.
Well, I Yes, I've spent a fair bit of time on the question of GDP. It's a very Bobby Kennedy in 1968 said this famous thing which is that GD me GDP measures how many guns we make contribute to GDP weapons all the things anything that is run through the economy contributes to GDP how much we love our children uh the the quality of our relationships none of that's in GDP and so he summarizes this by saying in other words GDP measures everything in life except what's most important. Now, that's a good meme and, you know, good luck to him because I think it was a very important thing to say. Uh, and we are a civilization that's been overrun by uh a material a craze for material things.
Um, however, then there are people who point out that GD if you go on a holiday or spend it on your education, GDP tells you that you're equally rich after you've spent that money, which is not true because if you build it into your education, then you have more you have more assets to work with when when you've done that. That's one example.
Although not if everybody else does the same thing. Uh well,
so we've created a bottleneck here in education which is we've told everybody that the route to success.
Well, yeah, yeah, but you're framing education as a positional which it is which it is, but it's also
it's also an absolute good. I completely exactly um and then there are things like
I think the University of Cambridge is a positional good and I think that YouTube Premium is an absolute good actually. [laughter] Nicely put um Yeah. Yeah. And and one way to think about this is and it's a very important thing which economists haven't got anywhere near really is that um I actually haven't there must be some studies of this but I think our world is becoming more and more and more saturated with positional goods and positional goods are this maddening thing that have an infinite capacity to spend money and and as you race up the chain you get no more welfare. So as you spend more and more money on more and more exclusive brands, you don't you don't get anything.
It's complicated. Uh I would argue okay that there are two kinds of positional goods. Okay. So no [laughter] no there are positional goods which ultimately end up as absolute goods. So my my so my grandparents were the fourth family in Wales to own a dishwasher. It cost That's right.
It cost an insane amount of money but they were providing early stage funding for the dishwasher skid brakes. anti-skid brakes in luxury cars and then they they then become available to everybody
and it's not true of handbags is it?
It's emphatically not true
and it's not true of real estate which is more and more important and it's increasingly less true of education which is your point.
So the computer was a positional good I mean you know most things started
education wasn't nearly as much of a positional goodund years ago as it is now so particularly in the United States. Well, this is I think Scott Galloway's point which is the ultimate luxury goods brands aren't Louis Vuitton. It's actually Ivy League universities which are creating art. Now the other the condition I think that makes it clear which is which is artificial scarcity. So you know if you're artificially limiting the quantity of something you
well that's a positional well no but there real estate is not artificial scarcity but it's natural scar
scarity and so so scarcity with status driven competition that's a positional good and uh that's making us less well off.
There is there are some good things to consumerism as a positional good
which is in a consumerrist society a good plumber has a better car than a bad doctor. If you have a status system which doesn't have the consumerist element, okay,
uh arguably your status is kind of fixed by your level of educational attainment age 23. Bit like it is in Fr. It always has been in France. Okay. The first question literally someone could be 50 in a French business and they're appointed CEO and the first question everyone asks is where do they go to university? Okay.
Like that's relevant you know 30 years later maybe.
Okay. Oh, they gone to the AK national administration. fantastic, right? [laughter] They must be absolutely brilliant. And so there's an element to me which actually supports a level of consumerism in the sense that it is at least attainable by everybody.
Okay. Whereas other forms of status, particularly if they're conferred by credentialism early in life, strike me as a bit dodgy.
Totally correct.
So Nicholas, we've come to the time. Uh I wish this was longer. I I loved listening to this.
We will have to continue. I'll just continued online.
I'll just appear from the other side of the world
like Zordon and uh
here's my point now. Martin Wolf and FT describes Nick as the best economist you've never heard of. I also explain why he's the best economist which is that Australian economists are a bit like Australian fora that you've evolved in isolation, right?
So you know if you see what I mean if you if you'd grown up in the United States you would have ended up as a Chicago school economist or a Harvard economist. But being in Australia or New Zealand, you're sufficiently remote for evolution to take really interesting and new forms. You see, I I genuinely believe that about a lot of Australian intellectual life. It's really really interesting
because actually precisely for the same reasons that you know, Australian wildlife is really interesting.
I hear we had a a technical malfunction here. We've missed something actually. Anna, what we got over there?
I'll order. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Rory. [singing] Happy birthday to you.
Oh, excellent. I will pretend to blow the candles out.
Don't spit on it.
The cameras are still
the most calorific cake I've ever seen in my life. I mean, you're trying to kill me. You're a feeder. [laughter] You're basically a feeder. But that is fantastic. Thank you very much indeed.