It Could Happen Here - Economists Win Worst Nobel Prize Yet, Asked to Please Stop

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Mia and James discuss Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson's recent fake economics Nobel won for being to first economists to discover that history exists. Sources: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.4.938 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023118773614https://www.nber.org/papers/w10481https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/117/4/1231/1875948https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/advanced-economicsciencesprize2024.pdfhttps://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/advanced-economicsciencesprize2024.pdfhttps://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.91.5.1369See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas,

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Call Zone Media. Better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. CallZone Media Nobel Prize! Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Nobel Prizes, I guess.

I'm your host, V-Wog. With me is James. Hi there. Excited to hear about the Dynamite Guy prizes. Yeah, so as people I think are aware, the man who invented Dynamite established a bunch of prizes to be like the pinnacle of human achievement, right, every year. He decided on a bunch of judges. And, you know, in this year, in the Nobel Prize in Physics, right, Nobel Prize in Physics went to two guys who did a whole bunch of the fundamental basic work on what became machine learning algorithms. And as annoying as modern AI is,

machine learning algorithms has fundamentally changed the way that science works. It changed astronomy. I've used new astronomy. There's all this... It has fundamentally changed the way that humanity functions. Yeah. It's an important discovery. Yeah.

And the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to a group of people who discovered microRNA, which is like a different type of RNA that fundamentally changed the way that we understand how gene regulation works. It's like a fundamental path-breaking thing in biology they got that they got the fucking medicine noah prize for uh the noah prize in economics went to uh three guys who discovered that institutions affect prosperity huge groundbreaking shit it's like economists don't discover shit. They just say shit, and then other economists are like, yeah, cool. Okay, so

when I was originally planning this episode, this is going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize, which is the economics Nobel Prize, which we've talked about on the show before, but it's worth saying again. This is not a real Nobel Prize. Like, this is not one of the prizes that was established by Alfred Nobel. This was a thing established by the Swedish Central Bank as a way to push neoliberal economics,

classical economics. And every year, they're always very stupid, is the thing, right? And my plan for this episode, because I started seeing stuff about this Nobel Prize, and I was looking at this, and I was like, this is one of the dumbest ones they've had since they gave out one in the 2000s for realizing that people could simply not make a trade. Like, but it's, I was like,

okay, I'm going to go read all of these papers, right? We're going to come back. We're going to have a detailed analysis of it. And I'm, and I'm reading these papers and it's like, it's nothing.

These three economists are, they're, they're from what's called institutional economics. These are supposed to be the smart ones, right? These are the economists that, like, the neoclassical economists have to bring in, like the normal neoclassical economists have to bring in because their models don't work, right? And the thing that makes them, like, quote-unquote smart is that they understand that institutions exist and they know how to use really, really basic game theory models.

And this makes them, like, the cutting edge, the absolute elite cutting edge of bourgeois economics. Yes, they're on the front lines. What have these people discovered? What do these people win this prize for? Right? Okay. The thing that they won this prize for,

like, the initial thing, and there's a couple of stuff that we'll get to in a second, but, like, the big thing that they figured out is through a series of thunderously stupid regression analyses. They discovered something

I don't even know how to frame the magnitude of this discovery, but it took them a shit ton of math and a bunch of tabulations of mortality data to discover that in some places, European colonial

powers form settler colonies, and in some places, they established colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies, and that these were different? This is what they won the Nobel Prize for! They did a bunch of regression analyses, and were like, holy shit!

In some places, the Europeans did settler colonies, and in some places, they didn't, and it, and in some places they didn't, and it had to do with, like, disease and a level of resistance from the indigenous population. They won a Nobel Prize in economics for this. Are you fucking kidding me? Also, a paper that you could write for my history 110 class at a community college. Okay, some of the discourse about this right the marxist economist shara

mazar pointed out that like these fundamental observations were made by another guy we've talked about on this show the renegade marxist economist paul baron and that's a good point but also when i was thinking about how to do this episode right this isn't a thing like with like donald harris like we talked about kamal harris's dad's book right and that's that's a book where there's there's like ideas in it right right you can go through it and you can watch him developing ideas you can't do that with this because these people are not developing ideas they have discovered the most obvious things yeah they have read a single book about history and they have attempted to use a bunch of regression analyses to prove things that you can just read a Wikipedia article and discover about the course of colonization. Yeah, and then you can go back and do a bunch of regression analyses to prove something that everyone already knew.

Yeah, and the place that I got to about this was, I have this joke about Maoism, where all the things that people get from Maoism are things that you should have learned in elementary school. Like one of the most common things you get from Maoist is like, oh, you have to read. No investigation. No right to speak. And like, my friend, okay, if you needed Mao Zedong to tell you that you needed to research something before you talked about it. What the fuck happened in your life? What went wrong with your life? What went wrong with your education?

What has gone wrong with the way you think about the world that you needed Mao Zedong to tell you this? This is what most Nobel Prizes in economics are, and this is the most that it has ever been. So basically, their argument is that like, this is also an argument that Paul Baran makes,

is that like, okay, depending on whether you're dealing with a settler colony or a sort of like India style, like administrative colony, I guess. I don't know. I'm playing a technical term for it. I guess like an extractive colony where you're more about extracting labor

and raw materials and settling. Yeah, that changes the kinds of institutions that are set up. And like, okay, you can, if you want to, credit Paul Baran for the discovery that like settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different legal institutions and they function differently and that has had long range economic impacts like stretching into the future but

this is something again that you can find in a history book and immediately understand and these people have tried to do this. They're trying to track the difference in why were some colonies more prosperous later than other colonies, right? They're trying to track this process through a whole bunch of

incredibly sketchy regression analyses and weird assumptions about what income is. They're trying to track this process through a whole bunch of incredibly sketchy regression analyses and weird assumptions about what income is they're trying to track like why was it that like china and turkey were like rich in the 1500s but they ceased to be rich after that oh sick they're doing a fucking jared diamond yeah they're doing a west and the rest yeah yeah it's it's warned over j, I am bullshit. Except, you know, with China, standard of living in Europe, if you actually go back to the historical record and aren't doing their, like, stupid, weird, like, using population

density as an index for stuff where they start bringing Malthus into it, if you don't do that and you look at, like, the actual, like, historical record, like, the average, like, quality of life in China, like, is not eclipsed by Europe until, like, the mid-1800s. Yeah. look at like the actual like historical record like the average like quality of life in china like is not eclipsed by europe until like the mid-1800s yeah like you know so like this is all this is all like very even then like life expects in the mid-1800s didn't it took decades to go up

after the industrial revolution right lately yeah this is this is sort of drawing to what they're trying to do here is that like a lot of of this is directly just a product of colonialism, right? And they sort of acknowledge that colonialism existed and that it was, like, extractive, but their job is to take the basic insights of history and depoliticize it, right? We are going to get to later. One of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution,

turning revolution into, like, a Nash equilibrium game theory thing. Oh, God. Which is unbelievable. It's incredible. Yeah. revolution turning revolution into like a nash equilibrium game theory thing oh god which is unbelievable it's incredible yeah these are the kind of people who i have to deal with on a daily basis on list serves like these are the economists emailing the entire list serve with their unique insight into something that we all knew 30 years like the all faculty email list is plagued by this kind of individual yeah and like, this is a thing where... So they're absolutely convinced that, like, 100% convinced that the thing that leads to economic prosperity

is, like, the safeguarding of individual property rights. And, like, I will give them a little tiny bit of credit where they're like, well, yeah, so direct colonial institutions were extractive and they're bad because they infringe on property rights and that's mildly better than most of these people yeah these are these are these are again these are the most advanced bourgeois economists right they're not they're not like pro-rodesia and neoclassical guys right they do they do have a line where they say we're not going to say whether colonialism is good or bad and i think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because like in their work, they're pretty clear that it's bad.

It is trying not to make like a moral judgment because God forbid. Yeah. Well, they said they're saying it's extractive and they think that like extraction is bad because it's inefficient. Yeah. But basically, they think that like, OK, so like if you set up like regimes that like safeguard private property, this will make people richer. But I want to read a quote from one of the papers they wrote. Quote,

In comparatively poor and less dense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle, it was in the colonizers' interest to introduce inclusive economic institutions that helped to boost prosperity for the majority in the long run. No! No! Fuck me! institutions that help to boost prosperity for the majority in the long run now now fuck me

do they then go on to say how like yeah but britain built the railways in india like and like this is one of these things right because what's happening here you know this is something that economists love to do it's like economists love to go into other fields and have to colonize them right yes like what they're doing here is they're they've gone into like this field of history yeah and they're attempting to sort of colonize them right many such cases yeah and you know they're looking at this stuff right and you've got things like this where it's like no like the economic institutions that were set up in like settler colonies were not designed to introduce inclusive economic institutions to

like help us boost our prosperity for the majority in the long run like that was the result of social struggle yeah but they for some reason basically think that social struggle started in like the 1880s um yeah the nobel like committee they're like econ fake econ nobel committee like releases like a giant statement like there's like press summaries they have like a slightly more detail and they have like the econ one and i want to read this from so the part of part of what they're doing right you're talking about like the work that was inspired by this by the by the by the understanding that like the different institutions change economic outcomes quote betteree and Ivor 2005 examined the legacy of British land institutions

in India that gave cultivators in certain regions proprietary rights, including their productivity was higher in these regions post-independence. Ginnioli and Rainier

and Michaelopoulos and Papaianu studied the impact of differences in political centralization along ethnic groups during pre-colonial times. Nunn documented the long-run negative impacts of the slave trade. Dell, 2010. By the way, Nunn paper in 2008.

So we'll go back to that in a second. Dell, 2010, investigated the long-run effects of the so-called Mita system. An operation between 1573 and 1812 in Bolivia and Peru, where men were forced to work in mines. Within the boundaries of Mita, household consumption was 25% lower in 2021 than just outside the boundaries. So, what they have discovered here,

again, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, they discovered that slavery had long-run negative economic impacts on the places where there was slavery Thanks for trying guys shit that they gave these people a Nobel Prize for inspiring People are Nobel Prize for inspiring. This is insane. You're right. Economists do just love to tourist in someone else's discipline and like fucking have the most basic insight possible. All of these are things that would be like an interesting undergraduate paper.

Right. Insane that these people are getting Nobel prizes for this. It's not insane. It's economics, but same difference, I guess. All right. So speaking of economics,

we need to go to ads. Yeah, because there'll be a long-term detrimental consequence for us. We don't, but when we come back, there's some more unreal bullshit. On Thanksgiving day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. El will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Or his relatives in Miami. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about

their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry we'll explore the stories that shape our culture together we'll dissect classics and contemporary

works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them black lit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists

in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,

sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme, laughs, and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. Okay, so speaking of undergrad bullshit, one of the big things in their initial paper where they did the whole, oh my God, they discovered that there's a difference between settler colonies and extractive colonies. One of the big things in that paper

was they spent a whole bunch of time looking into was the economic difference in these countries because of the climate? Which, now, for those of you who are students of history, right, the thing you will remember is that this was like the most advanced race science

theory of the early 1800s. Yes. And these people are like, the economists are finally getting around to busting this in like 2004. have they ever looked at skull measurements because i feel like i feel like we're heading down that path like econophrenology so bad incredible that was actually a whole thing in fascist japan where they had all i can't remember if i ever talked about this in the episodes that i did on bastards episodes but they had this whole thing where they had like racial categorizations

and like biological characteristics of like the races and they would use them to like determine allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use to do what oh cool cool cool cool it was it was great and by great i mean like holy fucking shit. It's so bad. They dismissed their time, man. Those people could kick the shit out of a Nobel Prize in, like, 2025. They came back with that stuff. Yeah. I get, like, you know, I mean, one of the things we were talking about, right, is, like, you were mentioning, is, like, these are, like, such obvious insights.

And I remember, so I went to the University of Chicago, right? And that means that I fucking know all of these fucking ghouls. Like, I met all the people who are going to become these econ dipshits. Yeah, you have ground zero for that shit. One of the things that's funny is that, like, this is, like, a particular thing of the University of Chicago. Econ people, like, they all think they can do math, and they can't, right? They suck at it. But one of the

things on his phone was, like, so a bunch of my friends are math majors, and math majors can, like, actually do math. Like, they can do the kind of math that's like there's no there aren't like numbers involved like it's like they're doing like field theory or some shit or like they're doing a kind of math that when someone tries to explain it to you they have to start like making diagrams of like the faces of cubes and then like explaining how there's like 32 dimensional edges or whatever and there's always this joke from the math professors where they'd be mad because like they'd look at the accountable

price and they'd be like this person made like an incredibly minor optimization to a trading algorithm that's like incredibly obvious to anyone who even sort of knows math and they gave them a double price for this and this is that but for history yeah so the other thing that that they discovered right oh god i i i'm trying to find the least depressing way to put this they they discovered that there are revolutions and they discovered that like there are different interest groups at a revolution who have different interests and like legitimately one of the things that they won this prize for is a paper where they discovered that giving people

like the franchise like giving people the ability to vote and setting up the welfare state was something that was done by elites to stop revolutions yeah again yeah they have all these mathematical models that look very impressive until you realize they're just they're like incredibly stupid game theory bullshit to like determine

whether or not a country will do a revolution and their model for it basically is and you know they've discovered some some genuinely impressive insights for like a 16 year old who wants to go into political science right like they discovered that for example elites have economic interests and that those economic interests are different from masses but because they're economists the only way they can conceptualize this is in terms of tax rates so they make the argument and this is not a joke um i i am i am being serious about this i read this fucking footnote they make the argument that the overthrow of salvador allende was about elite tax rates oh that one is fucking like jesus wept

and it's so funny too and this is this is like one of the biggest most obvious problems with their models right and this is this is this is from all the way back to like their whole thing about like how the institutions that were set up by colonialists being different affected like the long-term trajectory of these countries they treat this entire process because like this is one of the things that they've discovered is that there are revolutions and counter-revolutions because they read a wikipedia article about like right-wing coups in latin america and they discovered that elites can do anti-democratic coups because they don't want their taxes to be too high that's the only reason they do it yeah but but their discovery of this right that that right-wingers do anti-democratic coups

to like preserve their wealth and political power right yeah but never at any point in their process does it seem to have occurred to them that elites are not purely single national figures and that there are in fact multinational elites and in fact there's something called the central intelligence agency that does in fact hope these people do good and this is like the fundamental core of this right it's like these models talk about sort of like elite extraction right but it's all framed through the language of sort of like either like taxes or like rent basically like like they're making like land rent or like they're fighting over a surplus right okay but what they're trying to do is depoliticize how this actually works because the thing they're trying to present is that all extraction happens through the state

right yeah like the the state is the tool that elites use and now if you think about this about five seconds we're like well no, no, obviously, there's an exploitation in the workplace that's actually, in these military dictatorships, that's actually the primary place where extraction happens, where you shoot all the union organizers, and then you fucking force all the peasants to work in

the fields and shoot them if they don't, right? But what they're doing is attempting to sort of depoliticize, to depoliticize this entire process this is what i'm talking about like they are the most advanced bourgeois economists and being the most advanced bourgeois economists they have finally figured out that the whole they call it modernization theory that's not really what modernization theory is but they're economists they're fucking stupid they don't know anything you you you can't judge them for not actually

knowing what modernization theory is but they finally discovered that the old line about how uh economic development inevitably brought democracy was wrong again huge insight here yeah but this this brings them into the world of democratic transitions now after we come back from these ad breaks i am going to read you the most thunderously stupid line I've ever read in a paper in my entire life and that is fucking saying something given how many econ papers I've read. Yeah, you've been in the trenches. On Thanksgiving Day

1999, a five year old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack B. Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. It's the one with the green guy on it. dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep podcast. with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, El Te Caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change

if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Okay. Oh, God. Let me read this line this is a quote from the econ Nobel prizes site

in their 2006 book two of the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consolidation of democracy the first the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consolidation of democracy the first the first the this is very funny this is fucking insane this is like an entire field of international relations

of political scientists and shit not no just like there are literally multiple disciplines where this is an entire field of study yeah right like i i have read it like obviously this is like this is an entire branch of political science this is an entire branch of international relations this is an entire branch of sociology there's like there's like an anthropological school kind of that's about this very interdisciplinary fucking institute so it exist for this reason. Like, this is shit that I studied from people who wrote books about it in the 1950s. Like, this is like, like, the funny thing is, they literally quote people who are writing about this from the 1840s. Like, people have been studying this for fucking as long as there has been democracy. People have been studying this shit.

Yeah, yeah. Their econ thing that they always do is like, oh, nobody ever did formal analysis before. It's like, have you ever fucking read? Yeah, have you read a poli sci paper? I understand. I, too, dropped my public policy major the moment I realized that public policy was just fucking econ with the lines on the graph relabeled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like, have you ever fucking read one of these papers like you you actually have a chance of understanding

them because they are you know i okay i can't bet you mean to political science they are about 150 times more advanced than than the econ papers on this subject but that's still not like a very high level of advancement right but like still they're like they have formal models of this they they've done all the stupid math bullshit the sociologists have done all the fucking number crunching like okay okay here's another quote for this the authors start the paper by showing that democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in gdp per capita they discovered this in 2019 I was having Twitter arguments! Like, arguments, again, with, like, 16-year-olds on Twitter in, like, 2016 about what the relationship between revolutions and declining and raising living standards were. Like, this was Twitter discourse, right?

This is seven years after the Arab Spring. Like, just... 2019! Insane. They discovered this. Yeah. Do they do formal analyses of the Arab Spring, famously the first and only democratic transition that's ever happened?

No. That's, like, too recent for them. All their stuff is what they call, quote, the second wave of democratic transitions, which is not the second wave at all. They're just such idiots. They're talking about the pro-democracy movements in the 80s in Latin America

and East Asia. Great, yeah. Which they also were just thunderously wrong about all of the time. Yeah, I was going to say, I can't wait to hear what they have to say about those. I'm literally not even going to talk about it because it's nothing. It's just like air. I'm just looking up a very

insightful paper that Ali Khadiva wrote, who I've interviewed several times for different things. It's called Stick Stones and Molotovs Cocktails. Oh, that rules. It is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation it has between successful democratic transition movements. It's a good paper. Read that.

Yeah. There's a lot of great analysis. We'll put that in the notes here. There's a lot of great analysis of this. What they're trying to do is they're trying to build this model where they're looking at basically bargaining between the masses and elites to decide whether to do a revolution or a counter-revolution. They're trying to build a game theory model

based on the elites and give or take concessions and when they don't grant concessions and whether people believe they're gonna grant concession the other thing that's also very stupid about this right is that like the thing that they're interested in is why or why not people like believe that neoliberal economic reforms are going to work and a lot of democratic transitions are also about like resistance to that shit. Yeah. Like, the revolution in Sudan, for example.

It, like, is a pro-democracy movement, but, like, it is also, in large part, a reaction to IMF and post-structural reforms, which these people all think are good and will, like, cause long-term prosperity. And, like, a lot of the democratic transitions they're talking about, like, for example, again, Pinochet, right? Like, that was, like, you know, like, obviously, the pro-democracy reformers like did more neoliberalism but like a part of the big part of the reason like that stuff worked was because pinochet ran the economy into the crowd doing neoliberal economic bullshit right which is what he was there to do but yeah but like i want to close out on two things one i want to read this line right from from talking talking about the advances in their papers. This is again from the Equitable Prize thing. Quote, in the earlier models

the probability that the masses are successful when they stage a revolution is always one. But this is a strong assumption that does not reflect real world events very well. They published a paper about how people make a decision

To do a revolution This was peer reviewed in an economics journal It's one of the papers that is cited In the fucking Nobel Prize they gave them Where they assumed that revolutions always succeed Nobel Prize And the second paper was the one They realized holy shit that's not true

This is the kind of assumption that these absolute fucking morons make all of the time. All of the fucking, this is why they had to bring in the institutional economists in the first place to bring this shit in, right? Because, like, their basic models of how humans work where, like, every single human, like, sits down and calculates a fucking utility curve. Yeah, yeah.

To figure out whether they're going to brush their hair in the morning was obviously not true. That's why they had to bring in game theory in the first place, right right they make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time and again this is one of the ones they're making in one of the papers that was cited in here as the reason they want to know what bryson economics yeah i want to read this molotov cocktails paper out to everyone here's a fun little sentence an event history analysis finds that riots are positively associated with political liberalization in 103 non-democracies from 1990 to 2004. Attacks by civilians on police stations during the January 25th Egyptian revolution illustrate one way in which unarmed collective violence can bring about a democratic breakthrough.

Incredible. Thank you. We love to see it. Great stuff. We love this. we love to see it great stuff yeah we love this that's a pretty normal thing from like i guess you would call it like the center left of like democratic transition studies stuff right yeah it's a sociology paper yeah that's like a pretty normal it's like a good life a good paper this is from one of the books written by people who won the economics nobel prize quote chapter six

explains why several europe European countries have managed to build broadly participatory societies with capable but still shackled states. Our answer focuses on the factors that led much of Europe

towards the corridor during the early Middle Ages as Germanic tribes, especially the Franks, came to invade lands dominated by the Western Roman Empire

after its collapse. We argue that the marriage of bottom-up participatory institutions and norms of Germanic tribes and the centralizing bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman Empire forged a unique balance of power between the state and society, enabling the rise of the Shackled Leviathan. Fucking German.

Oh, God. Fuck me. Sorry, this is so depressing. I spent 10 years getting a PhD in history, and they've just given these people a Nobel Prize for, like, Jordan Peterson shit. They have discovered... Like, this is the thing.

Like, these people have discovered the concept of history. Yeah. And they've read, like, four Wikipedia articles, and they've used those Wikipedia articles and started doing regression analysis. Yeah. And this is what they won a Nobel Prize for. Yeah, this is, yeah. A fake Nobel Prize.

Like, again, like I've been thinking about like, you know, in physics, what you have to do to win a Nobel Prize is you have to make a prediction about the fundamental nature of the universe that can only be tested by building a fucking machine that can measure a vibration of gravitational waves, which is a has to be able to measure a ripple in the fabric of space-time that is smaller than the diameter

of the fucking nucleus of an atom. That is what you have to do to win the Nobel Prize in physics. What you have to do to win the Nobel Prize in economics is realize that institutions affect prosperity. Jesus.

I just cannot. So, this has been the Vibes Econ Nobel Prize episode. I don't know. I hope this made your day slightly this has been the vibes econ double prize episode I I don't know I hope this made

your day slightly slightly better because holy shit this is the fakest prize in the entire world shout out to the

economists like I guess I'm eagerly awaiting you discovering some other shit from my 101 class feel free to sign up at any time

if you want to get a Nobel fucking prize in economics i guess all right well this has been it could happen here i will return yeah next time they give the economics the prize for tying their shoes or something it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

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