Ologies with Alie Ward - Economic Sociology Pt. 1 (MONEY/FREAKONOMICS) with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Steven Levitt

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Choices! Trade-offs! Money! How much should you save? And how much should stimulus checks be? Don’t be scared by the term “economics,” especially since it doesn’t end in -ology. This 2-part Economic Sociology bonanza addresses the behavior that motivates the fiscal systems of the world, from avocado toast to retirement funds. Economist, professor and “Freakonomics” co-author Steven Levitt joins to chat about why we learn too much of the wrong math and how everything from marriage to dinner parties involves little choices rooted in economic principles. Rising economics star and Harvard Fellow Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman graces us with her thoughts on macroeconomics, human capital, when to outsource your work and how she realized she loved Econ. Also: how these interviews helped me make one of my life’s biggest decisions. Follow Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman at Twitter.com/itsafronomics and Instagram.com/itsafronomics Follow Steven Levitt at Twitter.com/stevendlevitt or Twitter.com/Freakonomics A donation was made to: https://www.sadiecollective.org/ Steven’s podcast is People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/pima/ Sponsor links: www.alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/economicsociology Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Support the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's a gift card you found in the back of your wallet and you have no idea how much is left on it. Allie Ward, back with the first half of an episode that was never meant to be. This topic, it rules all of our lives in every aspect, but it's not an ology. So I just skirted the issue by finding arguably the two most exciting people in the field of economics who could chat all about numbers and our brains and quantifying our choices. And then I just bent it into an ology. So I love this episode, I love it so much, I'm making it two episodes, but before we

meet them, let's thank you. So patrons at patreon.com slash ologies make this show possible and they also submit great questions and you can join for a dollar a month, one dollar. My love is very cheap. But as long as we are talking cheddar, you can support ologies for zero dollars if you like. Just tell your friends about it or post about it. You could subscribe right now, you could rate it.

Or if you have 30 seconds, writing a review helps so much and to prove it, I read every single review that you all have ever left and I pick a still steaming one. And I read it to you, such as this one left this week by TayTat213 who wrote, listen to every episode and then cry and re-listen to them all again. It will change your life, it will make you love everything. TayTat213, I love you. Okay. Hot stuffs.

You ready? No, you're not. But you are. Okay. So this one is economic sociology. So economic sociology, social cause and effect of various economic phenomena. Economics is just a way to quantify the choices we make. It's so exciting, I promise.

Okay. So these two ologists are personal economic heroes to many. And you may know one as the co-author of the book Freakonomics, a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. This guy studied economics at Harvard University, got his PhD in economics from MIT. He's the host of the long running marketplace show Freakonomics Radio and now has a new interview show called People I Mostly Admire. And he's currently a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

He's the co-founder of Risk, the center for radical innovation for social change. He's been named one of Time Magazine's 100 people who shaped the world. And now you're going to listen to me talking to him while I'm in my pajamas. But wait, there's more. The other ologist for this episode because there's two is a huge rising star in the field of economics. I'm so excited. She's an activist.

She's an economist. She's an author of two upcoming books. She's also the CEO and co-founder of The Sadie Collective, which is a nonprofit. It's the first of its kind. She's a university of Maryland alum and a 2019-2020 Harvard University visiting research scholar in economics. She's been affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Last year, she became the youngest recipient of an award from the UN Convention on the

elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. This is an honor previously bestowed upon our vice president Kamala Harris and also Nancy Pelosi. What? She's talking to us. So you may have read about her in Fortune or CNN or The Economist. She's written pieces for The New York Times in Newsweek. During Black Burgers Week, I tuned into a Facebook panel.

She was moderating. And I was like, who is this? I was smitten. I have never seen someone so engaging and charming and dynamic, so good at moderating a panel, keeping the energy and the tone flowing. She's brilliant and hilarious and confident and humble all at once. Mark my words, despite her being more lauded in her 20s than my whole life combined, this is just the start of a huge career for her.

So learn her name now because you're going to be hearing a lot in the future. So you may think economics is all about math and accounting and that economists are dry and robotic. Neither are true. These interviews changed the way I look at my life and it led to a really big decision in my life. So naturally, I wanted to milk this and make it a two-parter. So tune in both weeks and change the way you look at money and the forces that lead us

to make decisions and choices, the current and future effects of this pandemic, how to hack your retirement savings, what makes a really good partnership, when to dip out of a situation and when to stay. And so much more next week when we answer listener questions with two fascinating groundbreaking economists who would probably not call themselves economic sociologists, the Anna Gifty Apoku Ajmen and Stephen Leavitt. So my name is Steve Leavitt and I'm a he-him. And now would you say, are you drawn to what you do for the economics or the sociology

of it? I know that's a huge question. So I am an economist, I think of myself as an economist, but I don't really like economics per se. So let me go back to the beginning. So I was never thought, oh, I should do economics, I had no particular interest. But when I was in college my first year, I was the worst kind of college student in that I only cared about getting good grades, I didn't care about learning anything.

And I was strategic and I figured I'm just going to take whatever classes everybody else takes because those must be good classes because other people have invested in trying to figure out what the right classes are. And it turned out that I went to Harvard. At Harvard everybody took this course called Act 10, it was the beginning economics class. And so I just signed up for it. Maybe three weeks into that class I would say there was kind of a low ebb in the sense that I sat in the lecture and it was on something we call comparative advantage.

And it's a really simple concept and honestly it's a concept I knew when I was five years old. I mean, it's like everybody understands comparative advantage. And I remember sitting in that lecture and doing some calculations to try to figure out how much my parents were paying for me to sit there and listen to this like kindergarten level material. And I was completely disgusted with economics at that point. And I walked out of the class and my good friend, Matt Spangler, so my best friend essentially,

was in the same class with me and as we were walking away he said, oh my god, that was crazy. And I said, no, so stupid, so obvious. It's like, what are you talking about? I didn't understand a single word of it from beginning to end. And I said, what? He said, yeah, like that is the most confusing thing I've ever seen. And it was like a moment of revelation for me because I realized to that moment, wait,

this isn't easy for everyone, I just was born with a brain that worked like an economist. And it suddenly started making sense to me that that was just the way I was wired. And so even though I've never been interested in money or inflation, macroeconomics, any of those things, I for better or worse just realized, wow, this is the only thing I'm good at. I'd better just ride this as far as I could go. So Stephen Levin knew in college that he was good at this. And at this stage of my life, I was wearing fishnet shirts and my favorite food was powdered

mashed potatoes, so choices. Now let's ask another Harvard University economics scholar when the econ bug bit, once we just get over some dongle problems. Sorry, Ali. That's okay. No, I mean, the dongles, I hate a dongle. I hear you. I hear you.

Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. So my name is Anna Gifty Apoco-Ajman, but I go by Anna and my pronouns are the she series, she, her, hers. Cool. Have you always been economically minded? You know, it's so funny that you say that. Yes and no.

So growing up, my, like I was very young when this happened. My dad and my brother would talk to me about politics and, you know, I'm originally from Ghana and so my dad would kind of just say off cuff marks about, you know, I think the future of education really will shape kind of the political atmosphere in Ghana and, you know, this needs to happen to make sure there's development in the country. Just like off the cuff remarks and when I got to be a little bit older, I would say sometime in middle school, I was able to respond because at that point I had taken like a history class.

I was a little bit more well versed in what was happening in the world. And so I can kind of talk back and forth about, yeah, you know, I agree with that. And where my brother comes in is I started watching the Daily Show as like a middle schooler. So it was not by choice at first. My brother was like, I'm watching the TV. So I'm watching the Daily Show. If you want to watch the TV, you got to watch it with me.

So I was like, okay, fine. But it was like fascinating at a certain point I was like, wait a minute, I kind of understand with this, you know, very angry white man, John Stor at the time. I was not elected to serve one party. You were not elected. It's talking about like, yeah, that isn't fair. Or, you know, I like the fact that he brought on people that were kind of familiar in the pop culture space, but weren't like celebrities per se.

They were thinkers and people who were kind of in this space of politics and economics. But at the time, I didn't know what economics was. And I was also watching TED Talk. So I spent a lot of my time in high school, for example, watching a lot of TED Talks, you know, found out several years later that I was watching a lot of economists and I had no idea. I was like, what is that? I was like, maybe they're a lawyer or something.

I don't know. But I like what they're talking about. I think they're, you know, using numbers in a really interesting way I'd never thought of before. But yeah, there were sort of like early points where I was introduced to economics unbeknownst to me and eventually found my way back to it. Was there economics at play when your brother, I'm guessing older brother, just said, if you want to watch this, you're watching it as well, if I'm watching it.

Is there, you know, economics a factor in that? I think to some degree, right, because, you know, there's a level of tradeoff there, right? Where it's like, I could have spent my time doing something else, but because I really wanted to watch TV, I made the decision that, you know, like, I want to watch TV, I might as well just like sit here and enjoy whatever he's doing. And it just turns out that that ended up being a huge part of my journey and why I do what I do today. Do you think that we make economical decisions more times than we realize are a lot of our

decisions a matter of economics when it comes to it? 1000%. Yeah, okay. 1000%. Every decision you make is fundamentally economical, right? So like the idea of tradeoffs is, you know, when we talk about it in economics or in an economics class, people are like, oh my God, this is like such an abstract idea. But when you think about it, it's just saying like, would I rather do this or would I rather

do that? And every single day we make those types of decisions. Would I rather eat a donut now or would I rather go to the gym, right? I would say do both, but obviously there's comparative advantage and that's another economic concept where it's sort of like, there's certain things that you are stronger in that you feel like you are more comfortable in than somebody else. And so even if you're sitting on a team, you're kind of exuding that economic principle as well.

So I feel like economics is one of those things that many people don't know how ingrained it is in our day to day lives, mainly because the people who call themselves economists are very, you know, not all of them, but like the people you see in the news and stuff seem like they know way more than everybody else and it's like completely above people's pay grade. So to be told, it's, you know, these are the decisions that I'm making. These are the decisions I'm not making. And then if we're talking about companies, it's the same thing.

If we're talking about countries, governments, it's the same thing. We're really just asking, you know, what kinds of decisions are you making and how is that going to affect outcomes that impact people ultimately? So economics, not just about making a grocery budget. You may not even know you're an econ herd at heart. What if you are? Anna and Stephen both kind of occupy a niche in economics that really serves as a portal, ushering people into a world they didn't realize that their bonkers stoked about.

Is everyone an economist, but are we all living by these principles of economics, but we maybe just don't have the attention for numbers to really kind of parse out what's happening? And economists would say we should all be living by those rules, but many people aren't. So really most of what's important about economics can be boiled onto a couple simple things. So one of them is that the answer to virtually every question on the planet is that you set marginal cost equal to marginal benefit. And that's almost always the right answer to any problem that involves optimizing where there's trade-offs, because economics is really only about things that have trade-offs.

So how much I should spend on somebody's birthday, whether I should buy a Toyota or a Ford, all of these things really come down to marginal cost and marginal benefit, really most decisions we make. And so are people doing a good job of that? The evidence suggests maybe not that great that every day people do it, but there are a handful of simple lessons if you did subscribe to Economic Ideas that could make people's lives I think better, maybe a little bit better, maybe a lot better if they were part of your daily routine.

And I'm going to make you break it down for people who maybe are a little bit intimidated by economics. What even is a marginal cost and marginal benefit? How would you describe that? So the great point, it's funny because I pride myself on not talking about jargon, but that's obviously jargon and it's so intuitive to me that I forget it's even jargon. So let's talk about what it means to be marginal. By marginal what an economist means is that you start wherever you are and you go a little

bit further. So if you already work 40 hours a week, a marginal hour work would be the 41st hour worked and then the next margin would be 42. And so when you think about whether or not you want to work an hour of overtime, the right way to think about it is, well, I'm already working 40 hours and now my job gives me the opportunity to work 41. I should say, what's the cost of that extra hour of work? What will I be missing out on that I would have liked to do in that hour?

Maybe it's sleep, maybe it's hang out with my friends, maybe it's play video games, whatever. And then I would weigh that against the marginal benefit of what I get from one extra hour of work. And that's the salary, the wage that I get from that extra hour of work. Or maybe it's the wage plus the good will of my boss because now I'm working that extra hour. And by working that extra hour, I'll get some other favors in the future. And so the right question is, that's the right way from an economist perspective to set up

the problem of, should I work that hour of overtime? Now, the kinds of mistakes people sometimes make is they say, well, let's see, if I work 41 hours versus zero hours, which makes no sense because you've already worked 40 hours. So it's not the right comparison. A lot of times people fall prey to what we call the sunk cost fallacy. So let's say that I've decided that I want to paint the outside of my house. And I get all the paint and the ladders and stuff and I start painting the first side of the house.

And whoa, it is a lot worse than I thought it was. It's a lot hotter, the paint quality is a lot worse, like I'm really terrible at it. The right answer is probably say, oh my God, I completely misjudged, even though I've already wasted a lot of money on paint and all this time, I'm going to go hire a professional painter to do it. But a lot of people say, well, I can't stop now. I already did this one fourth of it, I got to keep on going. And it's really not relevant.

What I've already done is really never relevant to my decision. The right perspective from an economist is, I look at exactly this moment. I identify what my choices are. I can either keep on painting the house or I can stop painting the house and I can hire a painter. And it doesn't matter that I've done other things, that they're already in the past. That's done now. I can't undo that.

So ology's life lesson, don't live in the past. Exist in the present and make a choice for the future based on where you're at right now. Whoo! Boy, howdy. What a ding-dang breakthrough. Who knew economics was actually therapy and that it's so emotional? But now, maybe some advice, just saying, just sleep on before acting on, just a caveat from

me, your internet daddy. I shouldn't get stuck on a path simply because I'm a long way on that path. Probably its parents would be really upset if they knew I do this. But the students who are in college, my students are in college who might be in their third year of college, but they're miserable and they hate it, especially my Ph.D. students who are in their fourth year and really in founding. I say, look, you should decide today. Maybe you should just drop out.

Who cares if you've spent three years? What you have to think about is this next year, the cost of the next year worth the benefits having a college degree? And from all the whining and unhappiness and tears I'm seeing, I'm not sure that's true. And it's really hard. It's very hard for people to quit. One thing that I've realized, I've even done research on it, is that people get stuck on a path and we really have demonized quitting.

And so we don't quit nearly enough. That we as individuals and I think society as a whole will be much better off if people quit more. And quitting is really more in line with the economic view of I always at any point look at marginal cost versus marginal benefit. I'll give you another example. I had a friend. He and his wife every day, they wake up in the morning and they ask themselves, would

I rather be married today or not? Would I rather be married or not? And if the answer is not, then they're going to get divorced. Now, obviously you've got to be careful because you might not want to be married today but want to be married tomorrow. But to try to view, and I think that's actually a great idea and a lot of people I think are married and they feel like, well, I have to be married. I got married.

But look, if especially if both spouses agree that taking seriously the idea that we'd both be better off unmarried than married, then you probably shouldn't be married. Okay. I have a question. I was just hiking with a friend of mine. We were talking about this as we were on this hike. My parents have been married for 50 years and I have another girlfriend whose parents have been married for over 50 years.

And maybe this has, maybe this does not, is not rooted in economics, but we seem to find that people whose parents are married for a long time have a harder time committing. Is there anything about the sunk cost fallacy, is there anything about like too much projection? Do you think that people are afraid, more afraid to commit because of economics? So this sounds more like psychology, but I have to say the lines between economics and psychology get more and more blurred all the time. But you could imagine the idea where in a world in which your experience is that once you get married, you are married forever.

Okay. You just have that view that that's kind of your take on marriage. Then clearly you would be much more cautious than someone whose view is, look, marriage, that's just this piece of paper and I throw it out, you know, as soon as I meet someone better. Yeah, I think that's real. If you really take till death do us part seriously, then I would not go lightly into marriage, given that we know that half the marriages fail.

Now if you listened to the secret at the end of rats, you know that this was a timely interview and it actually occurred just about a few weeks before my long-term boyfriend, one Jared Sleeper, shocked me by asking me to marry him. Also, I am bad at decisions. It once took me five years to purchase a couch. Commitment spooks my soul. And I am so afraid of getting butt hurt in the end. But the night that he asked, my answer was, heck yeah, hottie.

And it was partly because of this episode interview, y'all. So more on that in a bit. But now let's get back to Anna though. I want to know how one of the world's best and brightest economic minds approaches the sociology versus the cold hard mathematics of the field. Would you say that when economics is taught or the thing that drew you to it, how much of it is the number crunching and the numerical results versus how much of economics when you're a scholar like you are, is the sociology and the decision making and the psychology

of it? Ugh. You're asking such good questions. Thank you. As I expected. As I expected. Okay. So I was looking forward to this for a long time.

So you know, that is actually a really great question for a couple of reasons. The economics profession right now is having a very public sort of reckoning and it's having a reckoning and a couple of different fronts. But one of the places where it's having this reckoning or having this come to, you know, Jesus moment or whatever is around how economics is taught. And it kind of comes back to what you just asked. Is economics more numerical or is it really talking about the effects on people? And I would say historically as a student of economics and as somebody who knows economics

professors, it has been taught really about kind of the numbers and the graphs and do you understand why we are taking this derivative? Do you understand why we are using this math equation? But it doesn't necessarily connect those numbers and those equations and those concepts to what is happening in the real world. And a lot of us are saying, well, that might be why y'all all look the same because you know, like if you're not connecting it to my experience, I won't feel empowered enough to really say, wait a minute, this is a tool that I can use to really explore the world

better. And so I will say from my experience, I took an economics course intro to macroeconomics with a professor at my school and what really did it for me? She was throwing up these equations, I was like, I can do math, whatever. But the lecture that did it for me was when she introduced me to human capital. The idea of human capital was sort of the accumulation of skills and knowledge amongst a population. And I was like, wait a minute, this is stuff that I'm really interested in.

And then she went so far to say, wait a minute, you can measure this and let me apply it to this situation in sub-Saharan Africa. If we think about investing in the educational infrastructure of some of these countries, you might see an increase in human capital. And I was like, wait, this makes so much sense. Why didn't anybody ever tell me this? Look at how math is being connected to this concept. And I'll share one more example.

One of my friends who first got me into economics, his name is Brandon Enriquez, he's now at MIT. When I first met him, I said, hey man, the president of our university told me to reach out to you because you're doing math. You say you're doing this thing called economics, I don't know what that is. What are you doing? And he said, well, I'm actually using math to understand educational outcomes among students in community college.

And I said, how are you doing that? And he was like, well, it seems like if you take these numbers and then you apply sort of the sociological context, you apply sort of the decision-making context into these questions, you can come up with a really robust answer that might give us a better insight as to what the solution is. And I was like, yo, this is exactly what I want to do with my life. And that is sort of like bringing in those like, quote unquote, humanity kind of aspects into the numerical aspects.

I always say that the marriage of math and social science is economics at its core. So yeah. To repeat, the marriage of math and social science is economics at its core. What a quote. I'm going to tattoo that on my face. Now, quantifying our decisions. How exciting is that? Okay.

On the topic of quantities. I feel like the way that we learn economics if we are not econ majors is something about supply, demand, and scarcity being the red line of economics. And I think that that kind of gives a lot of people financial anxiety because you just think we're based in an economy of like everything's scarce, everything's scarce. What does economics actually teach you about scarcity? That's a great question. The big idea around scarcity is that we have a limited number of stuff.

You can replace stuff with anything, computers, quite frankly, lives, you know, resources or whatever. And so we have to maximize that. Right. And some people would say that's actually not a really great way to think about the world because obviously people who have had that sort of mentality have exploited it. And that's why we have capitalism. Right.

So there's that. And so some people are thinking, well, another way to think about economics is, you know, there are groups of people who are trying to maximize their well-being. And that's sort of this, but like very abstract idea of stratification economics, heterodox economics, but scarcity ultimately boils down to that. You don't have a lot of something. So how do we make the best of it? Quick jargon buster here.

So stratification economics refers to how social classes are stratified along economic lines. And one huge voice in this field is economist and Duke University professor, Dr. William Darity Jr., who has studied everything from workplace discrimination, solutions to generational wealth gaps, and even colorism within racial distinctions. His focus is equity and he seems rad as hell. So hello to him. And heterodox economics is a broad term to mean anything that's outside the neoclassic

ways of looking at supply and demand economies. So kind of fringe ideals about economics. But again, as Anna says, if we have a lot of something, how do we make the best use of it? What does Stephen say about scarcity? I think without scarcity, there is nothing interesting in economics because economics is all about the trade-offs when you can't have everything you want. And absent scarcity, then there's no trade-off, there's nothing hard, right?

So if I can have as much money as I want and as much leisure time as I want and all of the most beautiful surroundings, then there's nothing hard. Everything's easy. So ultimately, economics is about scarcity. But honestly, it's almost impossible to think about a world in which scarcity isn't fundamental and binding. I mean, if nothing else, time, even Bill Gates and Elon Musk face a real constraint in limits on time.

And so they can buy anything they want. That is used to be a trade-off. But time is the great equalizer. And I think so. The tools of economics, even absent financial constraints, which of course all of us are these time constraints are really interesting ones to use the tools of economics on. I was actually wondering about that. I mean, we hear more and more, obviously, that it's an attention economy.

Do you find that over the span of your work you've seen with economics, the product is more and more our attention and our time? So there are two ways to answer that. Within academic economics, absolutely not. So I don't think academic economics is really so much focused in the here and now. And so it's not reacting with lightning speed to what's going on in our economy. So maybe not academically, because there's a bit of a lag there, because research and paper writing and publishing is a relatively involved process.

So academics can't always reflect real time. What I do think is in life, which is like I actually think about economics about life rather than about academics, I think absolutely what has happened, like take TV is the best example. I'm much older than you. But when I was young, there were four channels plus PBS, you know, and that's what you got. And then you didn't have to make a lot of choices and you often suboptimized. I mean, the landscape of TV now is absurd. First of all, you don't have to watch it, you know, at the time that the TV executive

prescribes, you can watch it whenever you want, but the amount of content and the quality of the content and the instantaneous access to it has completely changed. And and then you combine that, say, with how amazing video games have become and streaming music and FaceTime and Zoom. I mean, like, it's exactly your point, which is that this set of options available to us and the set of good options available to us has exploded. And that has put a demand on our attention that I think didn't didn't used to be present. Even even 30 or 40 years ago, there was something called boredom.

And like young people don't actually know what that is, you know, because, you know, where you actually wouldn't be doing anything, you would just be sitting there. So just imagine sitting there scrolling for a few hours, but there's no phone. You're just looking at a wall because a new book is like 15 miles away at a library and you have to ride a donkey in a bonnet to get to it. Back then, you were just as my grandpa, Walter Willis Ward used to say, Oh, you know, just watching the wind blow. And I kind of think that's good, though.

I mean, again, I'm probably showing my age and stuff. But but I think the quiet and the boredom and I do think in modern society now people try to create that in the same way that farming and gardening used to be a really hard, awful job. Well, now it's fun. Now people like to, I think boredom is also so now people are trying really hard to find quiet and to, you know, meditate and yoga things that only become attractive because there are so many options to keep our brain rattled all the time. As someone who has a brain that does feel rattled all the time, just cerebral

maracas over here, babies. How do we wrap our shaky noggins around time? I asked Anna, who once again has a CV packed with terms like CEO, author, Harvard fellow organizer, award winner, boss lady, et cetera. How do you use your knowledge of economics like on a day to day basis? Because you're number one, like you kick so much ass. Thank you. And you must you must apply like time management.

Is it about time management? Is it about energy management? Is it about saying no to things and cost benefit? How fix what I'm saying is fix my life with economics and make me like you. Thank you. I love that. So I talked about this idea very early on around compared to the advantage. I'm going to be very vulnerable for a second. So a couple of weeks ago, I woke up on a Monday morning.

I had work and something just told me to check my calendar. So I checked my calendar and I noticed I had missed three meetings. And it didn't even occur. It didn't even track. I was just like, oh, you know, I'm just going on Netflix, whatever. And that's when I was like, I need somebody who is going to offload some of this off of me because there's absolutely no way that I can do it all myself. And the idea of comparative advantage is saying there are some things you're really

good at and there are some things that somebody else is really good at. And you need to work together to ensure that you get the maximum potential out of the task that you're hoping to achieve. And so in this case, the task that I was hoping to achieve was living my life to the fullest, right? And so I was like, OK, I think I need to get an assistant. This seems really bougie, though, because I'm 24 years old. So what 24? You know, I'm not Yara Shahidi.

I'm Anna and, you know, I just graduated. So who gets an assistant right now? But that was probably the best decision I've ever done. Shout out to my girl, Danielle, who I later hired and has been an exceptional. I've been thanking her every day. I'm like, I don't know what I would have done without you because the fact that you are taking this load off of me because this is something that you're good at and I'm able to focus on what I'm

good at has allowed us to do a lot more in a shorter period of time, which is really exciting. And so I think that's one thing around it. P.S. How busy is Yara Shahidi? I looked it up. So she's an actress and an activist who is on Blackish. She's a star of Gronish. She has her own production company.

She founded an organization to encourage the youth vote. Oh, and also is a student at Harvard. Her recommendation letter there was written by Michelle Obama. She is currently 20 years old and probably has an assistant. Actually, I Googled the words assistant to Yara Shahidi. And I came up with a resume on LinkedIn for one young man listing that he assisted Yara in 2015 when she would have been 15. So to be a boss, lady, you might have to be a boss, ladies.

Anna says that one way she looks at economics is it's all about tradeoffs and tradeoffs ultimately boil down to decisions. And so one thing that I think about often is like, do I want to respond to this comment that's out of pocket on Twitter? Or do I not want to respond? Right. What what is the tradeoff? What do I gain? What do I lose? And so for me, ultimately, it comes down to like, if the person is in,

you know, good faith, they'll have a dialogue with me. And that will come through in like maybe a question or maybe they weigh the phrase they their their comment. But if they're like, yeah, well, you're just trash, block, delete, I'm done. Like, I'm not even going to waste any energy on that. So those are some practical ways I've used economics in my day to day and how you can kind of fix your life around that. And and it should be noted to you that this meeting that we're having right now

in this recording was completely scheduled by both of our assistants. Because for the same reason, I was on a shoot and I missed a really important conference call and it was not the first one I missed because I just either didn't put it in my calendar or, you know, I was I put it in the wrong time because I was in a different time zone when I said yes to the meat, whatever. Yeah. And so, yeah, the best decision. And it just turns out I had to I had to admit, this is not my strength. And that's fine.

I would say like from a business perspective, you're trying to ever carry out an idea, find somebody who kind of compliments you rather than replicates you. Yeah. That's so smart. So smart. Do I always shake down smart people for relationship advice? Not always. Sometimes I badger them for productivity hacks. And sometimes their answers shock me.

So time is scarce, but it's it's funny. I don't work very hard on anything. So there was a time when I worked really, really hard. So as a young academic, I loved what I was doing. I didn't have any hobbies and I would wake up in the morning and I would work for four or five hours and I'd realize, oh, my God, I'm starving. I haven't had breakfast and I'd eat and I'd work. So then somewhere along the way, I got lazy.

But the good thing was that now I have a lot of people who work with me. So I'm trying to save the world at my new center. So I have this center called Risk at UChicago, where we're just out trying to find big ways to try to do good things in the world. Honestly, the biggest time sink I have is I have six kids, believe it or not. And and COVID lockdown has been tough in that regard. I have two little ones, a four year old and a two year old and then four teenagers. So but, you know, it's honestly time is a big constraint.

But I mostly I mostly avoid things that are like real jobs. I I've just decided that I won't take on any obligation that really will consume my life. And I double dabble in a lot of different things. Do you make a schedule for the day coming or do you just kind of like freewheel it? I freewheel it. I'm not like most people. So I know a lot of people are on Zoom all day long doing meetings. And I'm not really like that.

I I don't give anybody my calendar. I don't let people set up meetings. And most of the time I spend doing stuff I just like doing stuff I want to do. This is so inspiring. If you are trying to prescribe how data science and how mathematics and how economics should be taught to get more people who would be asking good questions involved. How do you kind of break that barrier between people thinking I don't have a brain for economics versus I do like my mom.

We call her Nancy numbers. She was out in her whole life. She thinks in numbers. She's amazing at it. How do we sort of break down that fear of economics of getting getting the science or the data wrong? So I have many, many ideas in that regard. So let's let's start with math rather than economics.

Because most people don't really even get a chance to learn economics because they've already been been put off of quantitative things with our math curriculum. And I've been on this crusade of late to try to change our math curriculum. I'm not particularly successful and it's hard to change the math curriculum. But I think the facts are that the math we teach and the way we teach it is probably so archaic and so out of touch and has the effect of convincing many people. So we teach topics that are not useful because people will never use them again. It's actually interesting.

The math you learn up until about sixth or seventh grade is really important math. Being able to multiply and divide and fractions and people use that their entire life. But what we teach after that cubic polynomials and we know that any polynomial is infinitely often continuously differentiable. Mostly people don't use it all. I'm guessing in your everyday life, you don't use calculus. You certainly don't mess around with triangles and ways that require you to do a lot of geometry or trigonometry.

I bet you haven't taken a cosine or a sine in your adult life. And so we spend years and years like the interesting years of people's math development teaching them things that they don't need to know. And so my own view is why not teach people things that maybe they'd use. A lot of people use Excel. Wouldn't it be nice to teach people how to use Excel when they're in high school? I mean, it might be boring, but at least it at least it will be functional. Or, you know, just to think about data.

We're bombarded with data and really there's been a data revolution. So what about the basics of understanding data? And, you know, someone shows you some data and can you look at the data and see whether it's got errors in it and how would you organize it into a little graph? So you could kind of understand a little bar chart or how do you then visualize it? How do you tell stories with it? So much of what we do in life is storytelling. I mean, you're a storyteller, obviously, but we can also tell stories with data.

And what about teaching people to do that? So that's really what I have in mind for the math curriculum and maybe some financial literacy in there as well. And when it comes to economics, I also think economics should not be equated with math because I think the basic ideas of economics have nothing to do with math. They're these things like what I just said, marginal cost and marginal benefit, or the idea of comparative advantage, like the simplest idea in the world. It's just that if I'm good at one thing and you're good at another thing, then

they're gains from trade. That if you're really good at making conversation at dinner parties and I'm really good at cooking, then I should be in the kitchen cooking. You should be doing the dinner party. Not vice versa. Like there's no math to that. It's really obvious. Comparative advantage people.

Honestly, hearing this from two world renowned economists changed the way I looked at my relationship and I adore Jared. I love him so much. We're very different though. He, for example, knows how to chill out while I have anxiety about taking a relaxing bath because I can't work in the bathtub. He goes to sleep when he's tired and if we're at a place that sells empanadas, he doesn't wring his hands agonizing over which flavor to pick.

He just gets one of each and he enjoys them all. So this realization of comparative advantage of a duo being stronger than the sum of its parts of understanding how team members can really complement each other made me appreciate my relationship and partner so much more. But there are maybe 10 principles of economics that are along those lines that I think it would be a good idea if we taught everybody those things. They're not hard. So you could teach them in sixth grade or eighth grade or 10th grade.

And if it were up to me, if I were the czar, the educations are, I would really, I think, switch education away from so much memorization and technicality to try and focus more on ideas and on creation, on asking questions and trying to go out and find the answers yourself as opposed to having some canon of brilliance that's handed down that we consume. I was really in favor of producing ideas instead of just consuming them. So Anna and Stephen changing lives, but who changed theirs? Do you have any role models?

Any heroes in terms of economics, either contemporary or historical or anyone who's doing economics differently? Anyone anyone come to mind any books anyone should read? Sure. So there's somebody called Esther Duflo and she's married to someone called Abhiji Benjari and they have written a book. They're actually Nobel Prize winners that kind of talks about economics in a broad sense. So they cover a number of different topics, but essentially they kind of talk

through, you know, why does economics matter? Why does it matter to the real world? I highly, highly recommend it. This book, Side Note, is called Poor Economics, a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty. And on the site for the book, the authors pose the questions. Why would a man in Morocco who doesn't have enough to eat by a television? Why is it so hard for children in poor areas to learn even when they

attend school? Does having a lot of children actually make you poor? And the book lays out that around the world in 2005, 13% of the world's population lived off less than the equivalent of a dollar a day. And a little excerpt from Poor Economics, if I may, I'm just going to read some because it's so brilliantly written. What is striking is that even people who are that poor are just like the rest of us in almost every way.

We have the same desires and weaknesses. The poor are no less rational than anyone else. Quite the contrary, precisely because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices. They have to be sophisticated economists just to survive. To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives and all their complexity and richness.

Again, that is from Poor Economics and I will link that book on my website at alleyword.com slash allergies slash economic sociology. A link to that will be in the show notes. And Anna says, another rock star of economics. And I would say in terms of people who I am very much inspired by. So I recently wrote a Teen Vogue op-ed on Dr. Lisa D Cook. So Dr. Lisa D Cook is my mentor.

She's my sister friend. She is a collaborator. She was actually my educator at one point. She was my research advisor at one point. And essentially this woman is a boss. Like I, I don't, I don't know anybody in the economics profession who bosses up like Dr. Cook, right?

In the sense that her research has been very, very influential. And so she recently wrote a New York Times op-ed around the fact that racism actually undermines our entire economy. If, you know, people just stop being racist, we might see a lot more economic growth. We might see a lot more economic stability, more jobs, more opportunities, more, you know, improvements in how we treat certain people, as well as how those people flourish in the society. And so she made a really great case on that based on her research, that sort

of linked African American innovation to violence against African Americans. So she showed basically that during heightened times of violence against African Americans, African American innovation went down. And she looked at patents as a way to measure that. So again, super dope work. In addition to that, she's somebody who's just been critical to the number of black and brown people who have entered the profession in the last five years. I am obviously a result of that.

She's actually somebody who I approached at the very, very beginning of my career and said, Hey, can you mentor me? She said, say less, I got you. And she has gotten me to this point. So I even have a check in with her tomorrow. Honestly, she's just somebody who's amazing. She's currently on Biden's transition team, most likely going to be on his administration at some point.

And so again, I'm just really happy to know her. And then Sadie Alexander, who the Sadie collective is named after. People don't realize that Sadie Alexander got her PhD when she was my age. She was actually 22 when she got her PhD. Yes, insanity. She was really, really young, a modern day Zendaya, if you will, you know, saying, and so the idea here was she was somebody who, just like Dr. Cook, was really interested in civil rights and seeing African-American

people flourish in this country. And so unfortunately, because of racism and sexism in the early 1900s, she was not able to do the work that she set out to do. And so instead, she decided to pivot into a different career that would allow her to do that work. And so that ended up becoming law and she ended up becoming the first black woman lawyer to practice in the state of Pennsylvania. And later on was actually very integral to the U.S.

Army, the U.S. military desegregating, getting black people actually to, you know, fight on the front lines and defend our country. And so that's essentially those two women, I think, have been really critical to my kind of career path in economics and related fields. OK, so plenty here to stoke a newfound raging passion for economics. But what about money? What about cabbage?

We're talking dough, frog skins, duckets, paper. That's plenty. We're going to get into it. OK, we're going to be getting to some of the best financial advice I have ever heard right after a break to hear about word approved sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate thousands of oligies dollars a month to causes of the oligest choosing and assorted mutual aid causes and individuals who might need a little help.

It's one of the greatest joys of making the show. So you're going to hear more about this week's donation later in the show. So thank you to patrons and sponsors who make it possible, including. OK, money, how much is enough and how do you not worry about the future as much? And what about a tool for financial literacy or the basics of economics? Is there a documentary or a book or a source that you think can really get people hooked, especially with financial literacy? Because I know that like avoidance is probably one of the top tools

that we use when it comes to financial literacy. I have really strong feelings about financial literacy. Now, I know that there is a mini, mini, mini billion dollar industry built around managing people's money, but I believe firmly that everything you need to know about financial literacy fits on a single three by five index card. Very, very small. And and and that actually idea really hit home to me when one of my colleagues, a guy named Harold Pollack, actually just wrote on an index card

everything you need to know about financial literacy, and it was so popular, it went very viral on the internet, and he ended up writing a book about it. It's called The Index Card. That's the book, simple title. OK, do you want me to find the original index card and then read it in abbreviated form? OK, I will. Here we go. Money in your ears.

You ready? One, max your 401k or equivalent employee contribution. Two, buy inexpensive, well-diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard, Target, 20XX funds. Three, never buy or sell an individual security. The person on the other side of the table knows more than you about that stuff. Four, save 20% of your money. Five, pay your credit card balance in full every month.

Six, maximize tax-advantaged savings vehicles like Roth, SEP and 529 accounts. Seven, pay attention to fees. Avoid actively managed funds. OK. Eight, make financial advisor commit to a fiduciary standard. Nine, promote social insurance programs to help people when things go wrong. If you're like, I didn't understand some of those words, that's OK. That's why he wrote a book called The Index Card to explain it.

Now, if you're not an econ major, you just learn the bare bones of what you need to know or at least where to get that information. But wait, there is more. So Professor Leavitt shares a boggling tuition-free lesson. So I teach a class at the University of Chicago with my colleague, John List, which is economics without any math. It's called economics for everyone and it has zero math in it. It's just the ideas.

And I think the single best lecture I have given to my students ever in any of the classes I've ever taught is the one on financial literacy, where I just walk them through essentially one index card worth of information. And I do this calculation, which is what really blew my mind completely. Like, I wasn't even ready for the answer. So here's the problem. I might begin the math a little bit wrong because I'm just doing it from the top of my head. But here's the scenario I set up.

So you have $100,000 and you want to invest it. And you're faced with two choices. You can either put it into like a mutual fund that mirrors the S&P 500, that just like tries to get an average return of what the market will return. And you just put it in that mutual fund and then you let that mutual buy and hold. And in 50 years when you retire, you'll have a certain amount of money. Okay. The other opportunity is you can hire me, Professor Levitt, to be your money manager.

And you will pay me a standard money management fee. I think I can't remember if the number I used was 1% or 1.5%. That's the kind of standard if you have someone manage your money for you. And unbeknownst to you, what I do is I just take all your money and I put it exactly into that same mutual fund that you would have put it in on your own. I just take 1% a year as a fee for managing your money. Okay. So then the question is at the end of 50 years, how much money have you paid me?

Okay. And so the simple way to think about, well, it's $100,000. Okay. So that first year, you're going to pay me $1,000 because that's, it's 1%. You pay me 1% of your money. I get paid $1,000 to manage your money. And so out of your $100,000, I get paid $1,000. And so if you're kind of naive, you say, well, it's $1,000 a first year and multiplied by 50,

you'll end up paying Professor Levitt $50,000 over the course of those 50 years. But that ignores the power of compounding. So markets go up, the value of your portfolio goes up over time. And it turns out if you just took those $100,000 and at the standard kind of increases that we've seen in stock markets over the last 50 years, that if that happened over the next 50 years, at the end of the day, if you manage your own money, that $100,000 would turn into $7.3 million or some, some number very much like it's like really big. Like the power of compounding on your investments is really, really important.

If, however, you let Professor Levitt manage your money and take 1%, it is incredible, but I will get paid about $3.5 million. So essentially about half of the value of your portfolio would go to me over those 50 years because the money would never get to compound because it was, well, it would compound, but it would compound in my market and my account, not in your account. That's the problem. And so like that little exercise, which I thought I must have done it wrong because I couldn't believe it myself, but the math is right.

I put that in front of the students and it's really hard to get in a ha moment with college students because most of you are on the computer students, but like that is a moment where like the whole room goes, what? And, and it shocks people. So really, look, I think that the answer to financial literacy is super simple. You need to save some amount of money. Like you need to save like, if you're young, you should save 5% of what you're earning, say, and you should just put it into stock markets and you should not let other people

manage your money, buy and hold. It's like five things you should do that if you do it, you're, you're more or less guaranteed to have relatively good outcomes, like never have credit card debt. It's like really simple things. Okay. So if you're doing the calculations and you're thinking of retiring at 65, that would mean you'd need to sock away 100 G's at the age of 15 when you need a car and can barely grow a mustache.

So I get that this $7 million advice is not actionable for everyone who wasn't born into royalty or at least got one of those race car beds. We all wanted us kids. Now, some people are handed money just for being alive and being related to someone else who had money from someone else. And some are not, especially if your family moved to this country in desperation or had their land stolen or was shipped here, not of their own volition. And when you're barely scraping by, even 5% into savings is a lot, but those

calculations are just an illustration that when it comes to socking cash away, it may feel like stealing from present you, but anything you can save, just shift the perspective into giving future you a shitload more money at a time when future you can maybe no longer earn it, then savings become more incentivized. And of course, privilege comes not just in the form of a lump of cash from dead old people, but also just generational information passed down. So how can we make money less confusing and scary? I asked Steve for myself.

Yeah. The fact that we teach people how to, you know, that the cosecant is the inverse of, of the, of sign or whatever the thing is, and we don't teach them these five basic things about how to live a financial life, I think is a, a travesty. But let me go even further. That the real travesty, I think is that we don't teach kids to manage their emotional life. Like, why not teach kids anger management or how to, how to get along with people

or how to think about their own bodies? And like, it's weird. It's somehow, I think that's too new wave, you know, too a new agey or whatever. Um, but I honestly think if, if sensible people, if like assuming you and I are sensible, but if, if sensible people like you and I and others sat down and tried to think about, you hold kids hostage for six or eight hours a day for the first 18 years of your life, what would we want them to know at the end? I'm not sure, I'm not sure, like how to solve the Quadega equation would be

near the top of that list. So, so, so important. So if you have kids, teach the next generation how to money, because if there's one thing the community of the internet has taught us is that we're all just kids in bigger pants, googling our way through the Willy Wonka horror tunnel of adult responsibility. Now, I don't have kids, but I do have one thing. Oh my gosh.

So if I have a financial manager, I should gently fire them, right? Um, so yes. Okay, you should. Okay, you should fire them. Okay. Um, but the only reason you might not want to fire them is because if they could get you an extra two or 3% return a year, then they would be invaluable. Okay.

But the simple fact is that if they're willing to manage your money, they probably not getting that extra couple percent, because if they could get that extra couple percent, they should be, you know, some of the richest people in the world, because the people who manage to get excess returns, those people end up running $20 billion hedge funds and living very fancy lives. I have never summered on the vineyard. So I don't know what a hedge fund is, but I Googled it. And apparently it's pooled and sometimes borrowed money put into high risk

investments in the hopes of getting an absolute torrent of wealth in return. And it's how billionaires are made. Now, my family drove a Ford Pinto with one mismatched copper door. And when we sold it to a sheep farmer, we all cried because we loved it so much. Even though it smelled like a seafood chowder, we spilled it years prior. My point is millionaires, great. Billionaires, why are you? I wish that we looked at people who hoard money.

They don't need the same way we look at people who have doll collections. Dolls are like wealth. They're great to a point. But when you have three of the four bedrooms in your home filled to the ceiling with dolls, do you need all that? Are you OK? Don't you think a lot of people out there could appreciate these dolls even more than you do, who could not possibly play with all of the dolls at once?

OK, this is a podcast. This is not an op-ed. I really should leave those to the experts or theologists. I read your op-ed in the New York Times as well about how much racism and misogyny affects people who go into economics. Is there any economics of that racism and sexism? Like as economists, should they be able to see what what they're doing and how that's happening or no?

Yes, and there are economists who evaluate that. So somebody who inspires both myself and Fanta, who is my co-founder, is Dr. Radhavi Sharpe. And she's actually one of the reasons why we ended up co-founding the Sadie Collective. So when we actually heard her presidential address at a large economics conference, she basically said that upon her analysis, she shows that black women are not entering economics at the undergraduate level. And so there are economists that are actually focused on sexism

and racism within economics and related fields. It's actually kind of the work that I'm interested in doing as well. And then obviously broadening it beyond just economics. But there are folks who do study this. These are people who are doing exceptionally important work. And it kind of goes back to this idea of interrogating the space that you reside in. If the space you reside in has a lot of power, it absolutely needs to be interrogated, especially if that power is concentrated amongst one group.

And so I think that these economists are doing such such exceptional work around this. And obviously the Sadie Collective is also starting to contribute to this body of work as well. And so I'm hoping that it gets amplified over time. That's great. What about myths? Any myths about economics that you really want to bust? Yes, this myth that all economists understand that stock market. Don't ask me about what stocks you should invest in. I don't know. Listen, I actually wanted to buy Zoom stock at the very, very early part of the pandemic.

I'm sorry, that's a horrible thing to think about. But like, you know, if I'm thinking about stock and it was like $100, now it's worth $900, y'all. I do not know how to purchase the stock. Don't ask me about stocks. I don't know. I think another myth is that, you know, economists have all the answers because they understand the numbers.

No, they don't. Who told you that? That's why we have people like sociologists, psychologists, different folks across the social science spectrum that fill in basically the gaps. And economists have a lot of gaps, quite frankly. That economists have, right? And they're researching the way that they think. Because I think, as I mentioned before, and as you talked about Ali,

you know, a lot of economists are white. A lot of economists come from privileged backgrounds. And so they have a very limited understanding of the world and the lens in which they see the world is also limited. I'm hoping by the time I get through the profession, we'll be in a place where that is the norm. And so I would say those are two big myths that I feel like people have. Yeah. Well, you know what?

It makes me think about it because I feel like if you come from an affluent background and a privileged background of maybe less personal scarcity, less anxiety about the future, maybe it becomes like an interesting thing to look at. Like if you know that you're not allergic to bee stings, maybe you become a bee scientist. Exactly. For me, when I think about the future,

the scariest thing about the future is money is just like, will I have a disease that don't have enough money to try to fix? Like, will I have a place to live? Like, and I understand that women more than men have those fears. People who don't have privileged backgrounds, people of color, people who have been historically oppressed, marginalized. Do you think that the anxiety, just the pure financial anxiety that more marginalized populations hold would prevent them

from wanting to go near the field at all? Oh, yes. Yes. And I think it's also this like the anxiety is part of it. And then this other part of it is like, you're anxious because you don't understand what they're talking about. And that's honestly because they're not doing a great job communicating it. Anna echoed something that Steven touched on earlier. I always say this and I'm pretty sure I got it from somebody else.

If you can't explain something without using jargon, you don't understand it. You know, that's great. I have mastered the art of writing about economics and Twitter threads. And I think that's going to take me far as a researcher who communicates with the public, because I think at the end of the day, what you're saying is exactly right. This idea of what is happening next in the economy. What do all these words mean?

How does that affect me and my family? I think that there needs to be more people like me, like folks who are in think tanks and in sort of spaces that regularly communicate with the public about the economy, because there's so much anxiety, as you mentioned, that needs to be addressed, especially during an earth wide pandemic. I am so, so lucky that I can still do my job while recording in my closet. Thank you all for that.

But not everyone is so fortunate to address that anxiety a little bit. You know, one thing that economists almost across the board are pushing for is more money in people's pockets. Clearly, the $1,200 check that came to some people, quite frankly, right? And the small business funding that landed in some people's hands, mainly white people's hands, is not enough. It's not even close to enough. People can't survive without paying their bills

and feeding themselves. And a lot of economists are begging the government to please give people more money because the joblessness is out of this world. If you thought 2008, for some of you who might be a little younger, 2008, what happened was basically the financial market crashed. And so imagine the stock market looking entirely red. That was 2008.

And so the idea here was that if the government didn't save the stock market, it might have affected basically everyone. Spoiler, it did, regardless. Like people who are most marginalized, such as black and brown folks, were, you know, disproportionately impacted by 2008. And so right now we're in a global pandemic and the joblessness that's happened because of the pandemic is, again, disproportionately affecting black and brown people.

And so the urgency to get more money to people's hands is a matter of saving communities from economic ruin for generations. And so that's what economists are really focused on right now, especially those who are considered labor economists. Labor economists are people who study work and how people get jobs and why people get jobs and sort of measure, analyze that data. And so that's sort of what I would say to quam people's anxiety. People care.

And, you know, hopefully with Biden's administration, that will be one of the first things they do. And if you want to look at how other countries are kind of kind of addressing the situation, Canada is giving their citizens over $2,000 per month, just free of charge, you know, because they understand like people are losing their jobs. This is having, you know, there's there's also this added health cost, right? And so the idea of like, let's go ahead and actually make sure

that people get through this. I do know that the next administration has people on its team that are solely dedicated to this. And one thing that's really exciting to share is that the Council of Economic Advisers, which is basically the economists that advise President Biden is led by the first black person to ever hold that post and actually the only black person to ever be a part of the Council of Economic Advisers as like a member, Cecilia Rouse.

And so Dr. Cecilia Rouse is a labor economist. She focuses on getting people jobs and focuses on that as it relates to inequality. And so that's some hope that I hope I can share with you all that things will hopefully get better. Well, I'm wondering in terms of like forecasting, because you're kind of like a money meteorologist, do we know if the fallout from the pandemic will happen like in two years, in six months, in five years, never? You know, January.

Any idea when to predict when shit is going to really hit the fan? Oh, shit has already hit the fan. Okay. There. Sorry. I'm so sorry. I believe 12 million people are unemployed right now. That's not the worst part.

I'm somebody who's interested in labor economics. And so there's something called the labor force. The labor force basically means there are people who are employed, who are working right now, and then there are people who have just looked for a job in the last three weeks. What's happening is that people are losing their jobs and people aren't looking for jobs. And so that means they're just leaving the labor force.

That is horrible for a lot of reasons. But what is even more horrible is that black women and brown women, especially are falling into this. And that's not the worst part. The worst part is black women in particular, if they are mothers, over 70% of them are the breadwinners of their households. So when I say economic ruin for generate, I literally mean for generate like kids right now can be affected.

And so when we say shit has hit the fan, we have hundreds of economists that are pleading with the government, please, please, please, please, please give people money because people are suffering and you, you have to do this or we don't know where this country is going to land come next year. Yeah. Do you think as someone who is 24 and a scholar and a CEO, do you feel like Generation Z is more informed than millennials and Gen X? I know that millennials were criticized a few years ago that they just can't

buy houses because of avocado toast. Do you feel like Gen Z is like, oh, no, don't even try that with us. Where do you think that's coming from? Because I do feel like we're all pretty much relying on Gen Z to fuck shit up. You know? Oh, yeah. I mean, in a good way. And thank you.

And I'm sorry. And you're amazing. Gen Z, please keep being you. Yeah. Someone said something like Gen Z is coming in with a bat and is saying, like, we're just going to destroy all of it. And you know, it's interesting. You say that I'm actually a millennial, which I learned this year.

I'm 1996 is the last year for millennial. And then 1997 is Gen Z. But I'm basically Gen Z. I spent a lot of my time with Gen Z folks. So what I would say is Gen Z is striving to be informed. But I think ultimately Gen Z is going to be the generation that finally holds power accountable, like for real. And I, you know, that's why I'm like, I'm actually really Gen Z because

you know, I'm interested in holding power accountable. And you see a lot of young people challenging power, you know, the whole climate change movement was championed by, you know, indigenous black and brown folks initially who were young, right? Who said, yeah, we are going to speak out and talk about this. And, you know, and it was then, you know, added with white folks and folks who were white passing, of course, that came in and said, yeah, we're going to amplify this.

And now it's a global movement where you now have someone like Greta in front of the UN saying, how dare you? Y'all are trash, you know what I'm saying? How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. And like, I don't know if we would have seen something like that even just three years ago.

So we are in a really unique time where the younger generation is kind of, you know, waking up and has enough information to say, wait a minute, this is how y'all been living. And I remember I actually tweeted something like this recently when George Floyd was killed, basically. And economics Twitter was quiet, like really quiet. And I said, wow, y'all are really trash because y'all have a lot of power, especially in the policy world.

And y'all don't have anything to say about this. Y'all are trash, like miss me with that. And surprisingly, that actually woke some people up. People are like, OK, so what do I do here? But it's like, that's kind of what our generation is about at this point. Or generations even more specifically, we're just saying, hey, we're done. Y'all done with that? We don't want to deal with that.

We know there's a better way to do this, and we're going to demand it. And if we have to push for it, we're going to push for it. And that's kind of what the Sadie Collective is, too. At some point, we were like, so y'all don't have a congregation of black women economists and people who are in related fields. OK, we'll just create it ourselves. And like a lot of people doubted us. They were like, I don't think you guys can pull this off.

And then we did. Oh, wait a minute. So like, I guess we should pay attention to you now. Well, yeah, because we demanded attention. And so I think that's what Gen Z is doing. And I'm I'm happy that they're informed and they're they're making moves based on the information that they have. Yeah. And for this episode, the donation going to Sadie Collective, is that cool? Oh, my God. Yes.

OK, good. We donate to a cause of theologous choosing every episode. And I'm going to guess it's going to be the Sadie Collective. Yes, that would be great. Can I ask you some questions from patrons? Sure. OK, we have. Oh, my God. Economic questions. Are you ready? OK. OK. I think so.

Are they both ready for next week's Part Two? Can I ask you a few questions from patrons, from listeners? Of course, we'd love that. OK, they're very excited. And next week, we will be donating to a cause of Stevens choosing, as well as peppering them both with more questions. And so now that you're obsessed with these two, you can follow Anna Gifty, Apoku Ajaman on Twitter and Instagram at its Afronomics. There's a link in the show notes to her website and her nonprofit, Sadie Collective,

which we donated to this week. And Steven Levitt's website and social handles are also in the show notes. And he hosts the podcast, People I Mostly Admire. So find that wherever you get podcasts and honestly, get pumped for Part Two out next Tuesday, where we take your questions and my word, you had good ones. So we get into it. So we'll see you next week for that.

And in the meantime, there is Allergy's merch available at Allergy's Merch.com. Thanks to Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. They are of the comedy podcast. You are that they manage all the merch. Thank you to birthday, babe. Erin Talbert, who admins the Allergy's podcast Facebook group. She has been a superb friend since we were four. I can't imagine my life without her.

Love you, old lady. Thank you to Emily White and all the transcribers making transcripts for these episodes. They are available for zero dollars on my website. Thank you to Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes and making them kids safe. Also for free on my website. There was a link to bleeped episodes and transcripts in the show notes. Thank you to assistant editor and professional handsome, Jared Sleeper, who also does quarantine callisthenics every weekday on Twitch at 9 a.m.

Pacific. Sometimes I walk by with bad hair. And of course, huge thanks to million dollar editor, Steven Pay Morris, who also hosts the podcast and see Jurassic Wright. Nick Thorburn did the music for Serial and also this podcast. He's in a band called Islands. If you stick around to the end of the episode, you know, I tell you secrets. This week, it's that I'm trying the Pomodoro method, which is working 25 minutes and then taking a five minute break.

And you're supposed to use like a kitchen timer, but mine is very shrill. It scares me and Jared and our tiny werewolf when it goes off. But also I want something physical to use instead of a phone timer. And I have spent probably two full hours researching the best productivity timer instead of just returning emails and working. So I have to admit to myself that maybe it's not about the timer. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the problem. I'm working on it. Time is money, people.

OK, we'll see you next week. You excited? I'm excited. All right. Bye. Hackadermatology. Amniology. Cryptozoology. Litology. Nanotechnology. Meteorology.

Peptology. Nephology. Seriology. Peptology. Economics or the future is somewhat different.