Odd Lots - This is How Economic Crisis and Precarity Shaped the Millennial Generation

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

How do Millennials view investing and spending? How do the rising costs of healthcare, education, and housing affect their economic outlook? How does fear of climate change affect one's long-term life choices? These questions are crucial for understanding the perspective of Millennials as they increasingly enter middle age. On this week's episode, we speak with freelance writer Karen Ho about her perspective as both a member of this generation and a journalist who has covered their attitudes about money.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, I always forget, are you a millennial? I knew this was going to be the first question that you asked me

on this episode. I am, I believe, what is known as an elder millennial basically sort of on the cusp of the millennial generation, depending on where you define it. But, you know, if you define it as kids born from the 1980s onwards, I'm definitely there. And if you define it as the children of baby boomers, I'm definitely there.

You're an older millennial, right? No, I was born in 1980, so I think I missed it by that definition. But here's my question. Did you use Facebook when you were in college? Yes. but only because only because our college got it early. To me, that is the, like in my view,

that is the crucial dividing line between millennial and Gen X because obviously, like, so much of the modern era is defined by, you know, everything with the internet and social media and all that stuff. And I really feel like if you didn't have Facebook yet in college, you're not a millennial.

And if you did, you are. And so I guess you are. And I'm not. Look, we can. go back and forth on the definitions. I actually like the way you define it because I think the internet has been clearly so crucial to the experience of a lot of millennials and creating your own online identity has been quite important as well. So it makes sense, yes, okay, I'm a millennial, but I'm an older one. Yeah, you're still good. But beyond the internet and

beyond like the way social media and all that is changing everything, one of the sort of like persistent frameworks or tropes or themes that happens when people talk about millennials is the economic situation. And you hear a lot about millennials being late to form families or buy homes or their distrust of the stock market. The millennial generation has sort of came of age, at least the sort of middle to late millennials, during a period of labor market precarity. So in addition to everything that we were talking about with Facebook and all that, there really is this sort of very big economic dimension to how we talk about this generation. Right. So many millennials hit the job market precisely at the wrong time, which would have been after the 2008 financial crisis

and have sort of had their entire labor market experience defined by that. And of course, you've seen all this tension that's bubbling up between millennials and boomers characterized or crystallized, I should say, in the OK boomer movement that now seems to be a thing. You know what I think is lame, though, how millennials want to side with Gen Z. It's like, come on, millennials are old too. It's like, don't pretend you're young anymore. Okay, too. Okay, Gen Z.

But all that being said, so let's talk about the millennial economic situation. But before we do remember, a couple weeks ago or like maybe a month ago, we talked to Karen Ho of the University of Minnesota about. her anthropological take on Wall Street? Yeah, the anthropologist who worked at a major bank. Yeah. Well, I'm excited because today we are speaking to another Karen Ho, the other one. There's probably several more, but this is the other really prominent one if you look online.

And so we'll, odd lots in a matter of like five episodes, we'll have spoken to two Karen Ho's. But this time, instead of talking about Wall Street, we're going to talk about the economic and investing condition of the millennial generation. Yeah. You wait for one Karen Ho and then two come along all at once. Yeah. All right. Without further ado, let's bring in Karen Ho.

She is the, she's a freelance writer. She's written a lot about business, cultural thing. She's also the editor of the significant digits newsletter for 538. Karen, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. You're aware of the other Karen Hove before this, right? Like, how much that? I get a lot of her emails.

And so I literally have her email address bookmarked. And I have to remind people constantly, are you asking for, you know, people have told me. They're like, I love your book. And I was like, I'm not that person. And so it was really funny when Laura, your producer, reached out to me, I was like, are you sure you want to talk to me? Because there's this other Karen Ho that's a big expert on Wall Street. And she's like, yes, yes, I want to talk to you.

So I was really thrilled. And I've been friends with Joe for a couple of years. So it was a great opportunity to come and chat about something that I, a topic that I hold really near and dear to my heart. Wait, did she ever get your emails? I don't think she's ever told me that. But I think there has been one time where I emailed her and I was like, I get a lot of your fan mail. I just want you to know that. So before we start out, do we have our definition of millennials roughly correct?

like what is the group, the generational group that we are talking about here? I think both of you are correct in that I would say the upper tier of the current age of an, I would say an older millennial is around 38, any older than that I would consider. Okay, I'm 39, so I'm in the clear. You know what I mean? It was like 38 because under the definition of, like you said, using Facebook in undergrad, I would say especially, and then I would say the youngest millennials, I would say are maybe 26 or 28 because anything younger than that is a totally different circumstance when it comes

to the labor market and in terms of the age of their parents. And I would say I have boomer parents, but they had me very, very late. My mother was almost 40 when she had my younger sister. And so, like, when we talk about generations as defined by economics, the older generations has much longer spans than the way that we are defining Gen Z and even the generation after Gen Z. It's much, much narrower. And I always find that really interesting because there's no consistency in terms of the time period between these generations. Yeah, it's interesting to think about, like, if you're Gen Z, you've basically, unlike millennials, your entire working career has been economic expansion. If you're 28 or 26 or younger, you graduated in the last, I don't know,

four or six years. Like, it's basically been economic expansion that whole time, maybe not the best labor market, but not terrible. But millennials are really, in large part, Facebook aside, by the sort of like long stretch of economic precarity. Absolutely. How is that to find the generation in your view? So having personally graduated undergrad in 2010, that generation has entirely started in the whole. Everything from you're graduating into the market where there are freezes, there are mass layoffs on Wall Street and in Bay Street. And the problem is right now, So you are starting at a place where the compound interest racks up in the period where you're supposed to see your career rapidly increase, you know, whether it be in terms of earnings, whether it be in terms of income potential, you know, future investment decisions, even in terms of even the way that you date, right, the way that you spend money while dating. And then you're making long-term plans for investing in real estate, having a family, or even if you're in a job that is automatically doesn't include a pension or,

doesn't include investment opportunities or doesn't even have benefits, then you can't set aside the money that you need in the long term to take care of things like your health or for retirement. So can you give a bit more detail on that statement? So what exactly is the job market or the employment benefits that most millennials have encountered? And how do they differ from generations previously? I think the millennial generation is much more hyper-aware of the jobs that we've seen a lot of economic coverage of the gig economy or, you know, you have these really tenuous circumstances where you're essentially given full-time hours without any benefits or permalancing. You know, if you are laid off, there's no such thing as severance or,

you know, a period where you have health benefits for a week or two. And then there's, like I said, no defined contributions to pensions or investments. And there's no offset for or contribution to health insurance or other benefits. And so all of those costs are put on the millennials themselves, everything from, you know, basic things like gym memberships all the way to health savings plans. They don't get any of those cumulative benefits from stable employment and financial security. And then on top of that, you know, this is the start, I would say, of a very noticeable year-over-year increase in terms of the cost of education and health, especially in the United States, but in other countries as well, where you're seeing, I think, from the

period in which I graduated and I checked this right before coming in, just in Canada, which, you know, has a much higher tax base and is seen as a much more affordable place, you get higher education, the cost of tuition at the undergraduate level for a domestic tuition has risen anywhere from 30 to 50 percent in 10 years. So one of the things that's become something of a trope is this notion of millennials as entitled, ungrateful workers in the office. Is it possible that instead of just being, you know, spoiled and entitled, that what a lot of them are actually asking for are things that the previous generation was given without asking for explicitly? I'm always really interested in questioning

those statements and the specific of those statements in terms of what is entitlement when it comes to circumstances. Because I think even in terms of the conversation regarding treatment of women in the workforce, you know, some of those demands or requests in terms of we would like to not be sexually harassed at work. We would like equal pay. We would like to consider, you know, policies regarding maternity leave. The people making those policy decisions and workplace, you know, employment decisions can argue that these are entitlements or attitudes of entitlements. But it's also in terms of what we know the demands that millennials are asking for in terms of things like contracts that are very clear regarding diversity, pay gaps, you know, severance,

if someone is laid off, especially in industries where layoffs are incredibly common and have happened in huge waves. I'm really interested in who defines these entitlements, like who are the financial writers, who are, who is saying these statements in the press and saying these millennials are entitled. It's usually, you know, people who feel like they have been mistreated in the workforce, and that mistreatment needs to continue to happen. You know, But they survive that mistreatment to get to where they are. And there's a level of Stockholm syndrome that they survived a kind of hazing for lack of a better term. And there's this fear that they didn't survive that mistreatment for their own benefit.

And, you know, there's a duty to continue that. Going back to, as you point out, there's all these costs. There's sort of a couple, from an economic standpoint, there's a couple of things that, as you put it, have characterized this generation. There's the financial precarity, the labor market, and then also just all these added costs that have been put on to millennials in terms of health care, paying for their education, and so forth. And what I'm curious about and what I'm always trying to wrap my head around is to what degree does this change financial behavior such that even if one is in the position where they're able to build up savings, even if they're in the position where they have a good paying job, they could easily cover their rent, et cetera, that changes their willingness to, say, invest or their spending decisions because there's so much uncertainty. If they have a health crisis, then that will cause their, you know, that will deplete their savings. And it's sort of an unwillingness to make the same like sort of savings and investment choices of someone from a previous generation who may have also been in the same economic situation.

I think you're starting to see a lot of mimicking that unfortunately happened on Wall Street and this hyper focus on the short-term gains. I mean, there's endless jokes regarding self-care and the millennial spending on self-care or tourism, you know, all these derogatory statements regarding how much millennials spend on eating out or coffees and things like that. But I think it's a reflection of what has happened on Wall Street for decades, which is this hyper-focus on the short-term gains and immediate benefits rather than long-term. sustainability. And so if Wall Street is teaching this to everyone that is really about quarterly returns and we're in earnings seasons right now, then why would the millennial generation be inclined to think anything differently when everything is about cost of goods sold, right? And it's the same thing when you think about reducing your expenses, you know, on a day-to-day basis, if I'm hyper-focused on reducing my expenses, then I'm going to think about not necessarily, you know, rather than

setting aside money because I need that money to reduce my expenses, right? now. So I think that that's one of the things that I think has been a big picture trend that people really forget is these are financial lessons. Because financial literacy is not necessarily a core component in, say, high school and middle school education, especially in the United States, you know, where else are you getting these financial lessons? And then I also want to remind people that for better or for worse, like reducing pay inequality, especially among women and visible minorities, increases the cost of goods sold. Like there's no inclination if Wall Street is not inclined to reduce these pay gaps and increase, you know, say, employee satisfaction

or with these benefits because that is not what corporate finance teaches in MBA programs because it increases cost of goods sold. And that's something like when I was re-listening to Karen's episode regarding the ethnography of Wall Street, especially prior to the crash. Like right now, this hyper focus, especially in tech, right, especially when you're incentivizing paying people in stock rather than in money. they can take home right away in their salaries and benefits, they're going to incentivize, like I said, also these short-term behaviors that reduce expenses and also they're going to make

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and subject to risk vanguard marketing corporation distributor. I definitely feel like one of the big, I'm not sure if it's political per se, but one of the big things that we know about sort of younger generations, whether it's millennial or maybe Gen Z as well, is a significant focus and concern about climate and climate change more than previous generations. And something I've always wondered about, and I'm curious your take on it, is does the sense of impending doom that is a growing, a growing sense, I think, among many people, in your view, change behaviors and that if someone says like, okay, well, you know, invest in this 401k and maybe you're 25 and you retire at 65, so it's like, okay, you're not going to be able to touch it for 40 years. But backs out your 401K. I'm curious whether this growing sense of climate doom, in your view, changes the calculus

about whether even a 40-year weight on an investment vehicle is makes sense. I think it's one of several factors. I think even before our understanding of how climate change will affect the likelihood that this generation will be able to retire or set these benchmarks for how much of their income they're supposed to set aside for various investments. Yeah. There's the basic fact that there is still the day-to-day of like credit card bills, student loans, your monthly rent, buying basic groceries. Those are still day-to-day concerns or monthly concerns long before. investments that millennials are trying to stay above water for. And unfortunately, like, credit card companies do not care about the impending climate crisis. They care if you are

late on your credit card payments or your student loan payments, right? Like Navient does not care if you are anxious through the roof and are trying to pay out of pocket for therapy or medications in order to deal with, you know, this climate crisis. They care if you're making your student loan payments on time for an education. that is right now very difficult to get a job for. I read a report this morning from CNBC talking about the inverted yield curve. You know, all these economic indicators are saying right now people are girding themselves for a recession. So millennials, regardless of even thinking about retirement, they're just worried about the fact that if they can even get a new job or keep their current job right now.

Like the problem is this generation is burdened by so many other legitimate concerns in regards to these economic factors. and if they'll be able to afford getting married, buying a home, having children, right? There was another report over the weekend from the New York Times estimating the cost of a child at $200,000. You know, I'm at the perfect age where I have to consider egg freezing or, you know, if I'm going to use that money for a work visa, like all of these things. And so there's that combination, but it's just unfortunately another thing on top of the pile in terms of climate change. But I think that's a huge concern. It's just like I've seen several jokes on Twitter saying, do I really have to put aside money for retirement? Like, who knows if we're even going to have a planet, if everyone's trying to boost up and go to Mars.

If all the rich people are investing in Mars One tickets. Yeah, you got to save up for a ticket to Mars. I feel kind of bad asking this question because you just laid out a whole host of economic anxieties for millennials. But I'm curious, does the bull market that we've basically seen for the past 10 years in stocks and a bunch of other assets. Does that factor into or offset any of the reluctance of millennials to actually invest? Because year after year after year, for the most part, had they just invested in an index fund pegged to the S&P 500, they would have made a decent return. Is there not a sort of fear of missing out among some millennials? Or are they just so

overwhelmed with their other economic needs that it doesn't even come into play. So I would preface this by saying I'm the child of two bankers who worked for TD for 20 years each. I am literally the perfect example of someone who grew up with financial literacy from birth. If you're saying, you know, with the bull market, I was, I chose an industry, unfortunately, that I was not given the breathing room to continue to either have a savings cushion or add to that savings cushion during the period of the bull market, you know, to invest in the bull market, you have to have capital in order to put in. And if we've seen continuously, the millennial generation does not have this excess capital. Either they could not access the loans. They were

either discriminated against, especially if they were women and minorities for accessing these loans, for mortgages, personal finance, or they were charged significantly more for car loans and education and personal finance loans. Then there's the fact that they started off with education loans and they couldn't immediately pay them off in the first five to 10 years following graduation the same way that previous generations could, even with Gen X's experience of their own recession, right, with the dot-com boon in the 90s. Then there's also the fact that you're just like crawling yourself out of that hole over and over again. And so even the bull market, it's really about watching which organizations continue to look for efficiencies and either crawling back

pay raises or in terms of new hiring or even benefits, right? There was continuing to. continuous union busting or in terms of reducing the portion of benefits, everything from defined pension plans and defined benefits, or even the contributions that they were making to 401Ks and the Canadian and UK equivalents. I imagine someone listening to this, maybe they're Gen X, not me, but, you know, someone, maybe they're a little older Gen X or maybe they're a boomer. And they're like, millennials, it's like, yeah, there's all this stuff that's been difficult for them, but we had our own difficulty. we had like inflation in the 70s. We were terrified of the Cold War and we had to duck and cover and we were worried about a nuclear bomb annihilating the world. They would say like we had all kinds of things.

You know, we had our own issues. We had our own college costs to deal with. Whatever it is. What are the sort of data points that you look at? They would say, yes, of course every generation has its anxieties. But substantively, this is how, why millennials like really did start deeper in a whole. than other generations. So I think going back to the subject of capital and capital investments, so to go back to the boomer generation and even to a small degree Gen X, the boomers could access capital, whether it be through wealth building, through real estate, and as well in terms of there's intellectual capital through education.

Those definitive costs, and remember using the concept of compound interest, they were able to benefit in a multi-decade experience in the way that the millennials will never. have. And the Cold War is a real concern, right? Nuclear disaster is a real concern. The problem is it's the millennial generation that has to deal with, you know, say the toxic pool of waste right now in the Marshall Islands that could be uncovered due to climate change. And Gen Z, to a larger degree, will also have to deal with this. And so it's the wealth that boomers, especially white boomers in several countries, have been able to build up and benefit from compound interest, whether be through capital investments in property and in financial investments. They had the excess capital in order to invest in the bull market over the last decade and benefit from those gains.

And then they were able to also benefit from the low cost of education, right? Like my mother talks about going to university for the cost of a car. In the United States now, the cost of a car is one semester as tuition, not including room and board. So I think about that. And then, And then there's also physical and mental anxiety and the long-term effects. We know right now that there are studies showing millennials will suffer both in the short and long-term in terms of healthcare costs because of all of these cumulative factors that we've outlined. So they also have to plan to spend both in the short and long-term on these, on dealing with these issues, whether it be heart issues, health issues, right? And possibly cancers and other long-term illnesses. All of those combinations combined, there's definitely going to be a lot of issues. But even, when it comes to boomer healthcare, there's going to be much more capital for them to, say, retrofit their homes or go into long-term care facilities and also to buy the things that they need, even when there is income disparities. They're going to be able to access social security in a way that the millennial generation has totally written off. I'm actually really interested in that last point. But real quickly, would you say that you and your peers just assume that Social Security isn't going to be there when you retire?

I mean, we've stopped assuming that we're going to have pensions. Like, the joke is like, no has a pension. But no, like, I mean, theoretically, the law says you're paying into this trust fund. It's kind of made up. But the law as it stands says that you'll get this money out of every paycheck. But in your view, do you think people are just like, yeah, it's not going to be there? So the problem with Social Security and the way that it's funding, you know, I look at a lot of economic indicators every day. everything from the replacement rate, like if you're having fewer kids, if people, every generation

continues to have fewer kids based on the projected costs of everything from educating and feeding them and, you know, making sure that they're still alive. Then there's also the fact of Social Security. I think it's also just like, you know, like the minimum wage has an increase since July 2009. And, you know, there was a report recently that shows people who are earning less than $15 an hour. If they try to get a new job, it's very difficult for them to ascend to a job that will pay the more than $15 an hour. So there's incredible wage stagnation among a generation, not just millennials, but millennials are highly affected by this lack of basically mobility in the ability to rise to the middle class on a stable long-term basis. So this precarity just precludes you from setting

aside money, both that the government needs, but also that these individuals need on a long-term basis. So just zooming out a little bit, you're talking about, well, you mentioned union busting earlier, and you're talking about a vastly, vastly different, both work and personal situation for millennials today versus what their parents experienced when they sort of came of age in the workforce. What do you think changed sort of economically or in society or in the way corporations operate. That's a really big question. Sorry. But like something must have happened, right? So there's a culture in which, unfortunately, I think there's a generation, I would say, that leans libertarian or conservative in terms of everything from how things are taxed. There was a huge withdrawal of public

funding towards education, especially in many specific states, but across the United States. For better or for worse, it was hyper-focused on the individual. It's like you're not working hard enough. You're not doing enough to save personally. So it made system disparities much greater, especially among genders and minorities, which are growing groups in the United States through immigration and through birth rates, right? Like, we know birth rates very wildly between different ethnicities. Like, I really think the rise of personal finance is individualizing systemic factors and saying, you are not saving enough of your own personal income, regardless of these systemic factors that are preventing you from earning more at work or setting aside these funds, you know, things that other countries have taken care of for them, whether it be child care or, you know, the cost of going to the hospital or paying for higher education, or even in terms of the way that costs have been privatized and what is a government's priority?

I think it's really about, like I said, going back to the philosophy of thinking and the culture of thinking about the short term. and then especially the rapid focus, especially in the last decade that the other Karen talked about on Wall Street, it's really about what can you get so that your latest quarter's results increase the share price on the market. You know, it's actually, it'd be so ridiculous, kind of. But you guys would have been a good joint. No, seriously, because so much of like what her point was that like the sort of internal culture of the banks then has the sort of like outward man of station, and now I feel like you're talking about the outward side of it. And so even though it's kind of random that maybe one day we should have another one where you're both on at the same

time, because I feel like there's a lot of what you're both saying that are kind of like the same story from a different perspective. Before we wrap up, I'm curious, like, in your view, is this whole too big to dig out of like, if let's say the expansion, the economic recovery were to continue to go on and the labor market were to continue to be. you know, 3.6% unemployment, pretty good. If that were to continue, could eventually this whole be dug out of? Or do you think that the sort of economic traumas that are unique and specific to this generation, plus the burden of various debts, the sort of gouging that we see in health care and education,

really basically guarantees that a permanent scar has been left on the millennial generation that essentially last forever? On that happy note. I think it's really about what's going to happen in 2020. That's going to determine a lot of what's going to change or not change. Because there is right now no incentive or no motivation for a lot of these organizations and corporations to change their behavior, right? In terms of the tax cuts, basically so far the reporting shows that none of the organizations have really reinvested the money that they supposedly saved on taxes, right? They just continue to either give that out to shareholders or retain it as cash on hand.

Then there's the problem in regards to digging out of the whole requires specific government policies like raising the minimum wage. You know, I was shocked to see that there are exemptions, I think, in Montana and Georgia for minimum wages lower than, I think, $5.15. And Montana, it's $4. And then, you know, we have an increasing number of people who are participating in a gig economy that is paying wildly, you know, exploitive rates for everything. I think it's really about looking at the systems that are pushing people to need this money. You know, I thought the report on mechanical turking was horrifying in terms of what people felt like they had to do in order to pay for basic medical prescriptions, life-saving insulin. It's really about, unfortunately, what are the priorities of governments because corporations are not being incentivized. Like I said, doing things like investing in reducing pay gaps or even tuition incentives, that increases cogs and expenses.

And on their balance sheets, that looks bad, right? Because it looks bad for net income. It looks bad for quarterly results. And unfortunately, it's treated very differently than if you got like a government fine for violating privacy issues. Karen, thank you very much for joining us. That was awesome. Thanks so much. Love your perspective.

Thanks, Karen. Tracy, I really, I wasn't kidding. We should have or we should at some point have a podcast with the two Karen's at the same time. because I really did feel like her, this Karen's perspective was almost exactly what the other Karen was talking about in terms of that culture of Wall Street, then manifesting into a culture of corporations, then bleeding down into the culture of employees and other people who live in this world today. Right. I would totally agree with you. They are surprisingly in sync. And what this Karen was talking about was basically the societal impact of all that short termism on one. Wall Street. One thing that really struck me was this idea of compound interest between generations as well. Because one thing you often hear nowadays is that, you know, millennials are complaining now, but eventually, and this is quite dark, but it is sadly true, eventually the baby boomers

are going to die and there could be this big transfer of capital slash wealth to their children. And at that point, millennials will have some capital to play around with. But of course, as Karen pointed out, they've already missed out on decades of actually doing something with that capital. I also think it's interesting because this concept of labor market precarity or economic precarity, I think for millennials in particular, there's actually been like a double whammy because there's one, there's like the deep economic cycle. So we had the Great Recession and we've had a pretty weak labor market for a long time, particularly in this country. So that lends itself to economic precarity because the job market's not that great. Compounded with or added on to that, we have these new modes of labor, expectations of the gig economy, other things in which even in a good economy, even when the job market is robust, there are these changing expectations about how much permanent an employer owes an employee and so forth. And so I really think that, like, there is the cyclical aspect to precarity.

That's the ups and downs of the GDP and the unemployment rate. And then there is the structural aspect of labor market precarity, which is just the nature of work seems to be changing. And it really feels like millennials, unlike any other generation, just got hit with two different kinds of precarity at the same time. Yeah, I would also say it's even a triple whammy because you also have the impact of sort of starting your career immediately. after the financial crisis, when people really weren't certain what investing was or what the market was going to look like. And then at the same time, you're sort of struggling to gather together enough money to actually put in a 401k or any type of financial asset. And you're watching stocks hit new highs basically every year. And you're worried that you're coming in at exactly the end of the bull market.

And I mean, you and I both know that for the past eight years, people have been talking about the end of the bull market. And I think it's really, really hard for people to get over that initial experience and actually dip into the market. Oh, totally. Everyone always thinks that the moment they get in is going to be the peak. And then I think the one other thing, and I think this is like an ongoing worsening trend in American economy, which is just these crucial sectors of the economy. I think are getting ridden by oligopoly and rent-seeking. And so whether it's universities, whether it's health care, whether it's rent, you have these entrenched powerful forces that are really sort of, I think in a lot of people's views,

kind of making a mockery of capitalism and free markets where prices are just getting worse. As Karen put it, like, you know, now one semester of college basically costs as much as a car as opposed to a whole education. It is getting worse. These things are getting more expensive. Healthcare is getting more unaffordable by leaps and bounds every year, in part because these industries are just like so broken and arguably so corrupt.

So lots of bad things. Or an Amazon that's able to sort of exert enormous downward pressure on wages. And what's actually really worrying is that a lot of policymakers are only just beginning to scratch the surface of these dynamics. And I know at Jackson Hole last year, people were talking a lot about monopsony, which was sort of the technical term, I guess, for a lot of these dynamics. We haven't really heard that much since then. No. But I guess, you know, Karen mentioned 2020.

And I think a lot of the question for policy perspective is like, you know, no trend can last forever. So are we going to find a way as a country to sort of curb some of these trends or is it going to like all break one day in some huge revolution and cataclysm? So that's something investors should think about. Okay. On that happy note. On that note. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.

You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allowway. And you should follow our guest on Twitter. She's at Karen K. Ho. And be sure to follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. And check out.

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