Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Problem with Economic Thinking with Jonathan Aldred and Elizabeth Popp Berman

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

The logic of orthodox economic thinking has come to dominate and permeate every aspect of our lives, from the deeply internalized capitalism which shapes our thoughts and hopes and dreams, to policy decisions that shape our lives, constrain our possibilities, and steal public goods out from under our noses. How did we get here? How did economic rigidity gain such supremacy? Are the principles of orthodox economics really value neutral, as its champions claim? And if not, what moral philosophies underpin them? What are their origins? And how have they come to dominate policymaking in the last several decades? In the first half of this Conversation, we’ve brought on Jonathan Aldred, a Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Emmanuel College, Lecturer in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, and author of the book License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us. Jonathan will walk us through the philosophical foundations of orthodox and neoliberal economics. And then in the second half we’ve brought on Elizabeth Popp Berman, an economic sociologist, associate professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and author of the book Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. We’ll talk with Elizabeth about the policy implications of dogmatic economic thinking.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. Centering efficiency and cost-effectiveness as our main goals of policy kind of comes into conflict with a lot of other values and other ways of thinking about policy that have traditionally been successful you know for people who are interested in using government to do good in the world in some way and so in particular you know a lot of ideas about rights about the idea of universalism about equality as an oriented principle often come into conflict with these other ideas. And as economic framings have become the norm, those other ways of thinking about policy have been marginalized in a lot of ways. You are listening to upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The logic of Orthodox economic thinking has come to dominate and permeate every aspect of our lives.

From the deeply internalized capitalism which shapes our thoughts, hopes, and dreams, to policy decisions that shape our lives, constrain our possibilities, and steal public goods right from under our noses. How did we get here? How did economic rigidity gain such supremacy? Are the principles of Orthodox economics really value neutral as its champions claim? And if not, what moral philosophies underpin them?

What are their origins? And how have they come to dominate policymaking in the last several decades. In the first half of this conversation, we've brought on Jonathan Aldrid, a fellow and director of studies in economics and a manual college, a lecturer in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge, an author of the book, license to be Bad, how economics corrupted us. Jonathan will walk us through the philosophical foundations of Orthodox and neoliberal economics, and then in the second half, we've brought on Elizabeth Popperman, an economic sociologist, associate professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and the author of the book Thinking Like an Economist,

how efficiency replaced equality in U.S. public policy. Michigan and the author of the book, Thinking Like An Economist, How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. We'll talk with Elizabeth about the policy implications of dogmatic economic thinking. But first, here's Robert to have you on upstream. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. Good to be here. So I'm wondering just to start, could you maybe introduce yourself to our listeners and

tell us what inspired you to write license to be bad? Okay, so I'm an economist at Cambridge University, so I've always been an economist, an academic economist, kind of quite a narrow career path, I'm afraid, but I've always been interested in where economics meet politics and meets philosophy and kind of ethical issues that arise in everyday life. And so that's where I kind of ethical issues that arise in everyday life. And so that's where I kind of came in to think about license to be bad

and kind of more specifically, seeing the kind of harmful decisions that are made so often by governments and people in power and they're being justified by some bogus kind of economics. And I wanted to kind of expose that really. You know, when we decide how we should organize economy and society, developments in economics have fundamentally changed how we think about that. And I want to to lift the lid on that, show how economics has affected our thinking. Yeah, and that's a topic that's really central to this podcast, and so I'm really excited to talk to you about your thoughts on it. And I guess just to start with some basic table sitting to ground everything and set some

context, I'm wondering if you could briefly describe just the discipline of economics. It's core assumptions, it's foundations, it's purpose. Okay, I mean, that's quite a big question. So maybe I'll kind of zoom in on that. I mean, the kind of, the answer in the economics textbook, the orthodox answer is that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. So we can best satisfy our wants.

So we can get as much of what we want as possible. That's the kind of textbook answer and it presents it as a kind of science, okay? But I completely disagree with that. It doesn't have universal laws like the laws of physics or laws of chemistry. laws, like the laws of physics or laws of chemistry, you know, you might kind of think you've established some pattern or some relationship between, I don't know, inflation and unemployment or whatever it is, but then you find that only works in a particular country, a particular time, and then 20 years later, or even five years later, it doesn't work or we're looking at a different country at the same time, it still doesn't work. So economics isn't science. And I don't think you can separate it from political economy as it used to be called, about

the economy used to be called political economy, which kind of is the kind of blend of economics, politics and philosophy. I mean, I think we can see the kind of link with economics and politics in the obvious eight places, in a lot of the kind of debates about economics that you see in the news and so on. But even if you just look at the kind of basic building blocks, the kind of scientific data that people would just take for granted at the kind of economic equivalent as You know when scientists measure the temperature of something or whatever so like inflation and unemployment People treat those as kind of facts, you know the inflation rate if this the unemployment rate is that

Okay, but actually how we define those inflation and unemployment is totally woven through that or all sorts of value judgments, ethical judgments about what we mean by inflation, well, what's the basket of goods we're looking at? And how do we change that basket of goods over time? And what would be the average basket of goods? How do we measure average? Do we kind of pay attention to the fact that some things in the basket of goods are essential, like energy and food, and some things

of the basket are not essential? Should that influence what's in the basket of goods that we then see how it's price changed over time to measure inflation? That's just one example. Or an employment, you know, how actively, if you've got to be seeking work, to count as unemployed. There's a whole tradition in economics of talking about

voluntary unemployment, which, you know, just straight away you say, well, what's voluntary unemployment, you know? So, yeah, I mean, I could go on all day, but if you... a lot of what seems like is kind of solid crumbles when you sort of push against it and when you sort of dig in, you realise the assumptions that are made that are not, I say, that are kind of ethical assumptions and assumptions to do with what you're trying to do with the data or who's asking, who's paying for the data, frankly,

is gonna re-implants these things. And another example, which I took around the book, is the kind of use of words, of kind of crept into everyday life and have come from economics words like rational. Okay, oh that's totally irrational, that's totally irrational there. What does that mean? So it's kind of used as a kind of scientific gloss to tell someone that this kind of behavior, or that kind of choice, is smart or not smart or stupid. so these days this idea of free riding which is you know where you you let other people kind of bear the costs of some

kind of collective activity whether it's you know in the community we're kind of doing recycling or maybe it's the collective activity of in your community people voting for kind of local government. It could be all kinds of collective activities. Free riding is where you let other people do the work or put in the time or put in the effort and you sit back and enjoy some of the benefits. And as all the books in economics which basically say that's that's irrational, that's the smart thing to do. And so justify what would have been seen as selfish, short-sighted kind

of behavior as suddenly as being actually the smart thing to do. So that's changed the way we look at the world. So much there to unpack. you hit on so many interesting and rich points, and we'll get into like selfishness, for example, and how that's really sort of normalized, and it's a huge part of economics, I think. And so, but yeah, so you just sort of unpacked really, helpfully, a lot of the traditional assumptions

that go into Orthodox economics. And now, I wanted to sort of get into maybe how you conceptualize economics. Like, personally, for me, and you mentioned this as well, I think it's silly how we sort of separate economics from the realm of politics. And you mentioned that economics, the discipline used to be called political economy. And I know that folks in the past, such as Adam Smith, like he certainly, and historians like Carl Polanje, who he wrote, the great transformation, a really sort of seminal book on exploring political economy.

And yeah, I'm wondering just for you what is the relationship of economics and politics and culture how do they sort of overlap with each other how are they part of each other and how might this differ from the more traditional conceptions? I don't have a kind of neat answer to that question I mean I don't think that there is a kind of sharp dividing line between what's I mean, I don't think that there is a kind of sharp dividing line between what's economics and what's politics or what's economics and what's ethics or philosophy.

And I don't really think it matters that there isn't a sharp dividing line that we can't answer those questions. The people I criticize say, oh yeah, economics is science and this stuff isn't science. And so they say, oh oh well we can look at policy questions like I don't know the effect of minimum wages for example and we can we can trace out the kind of effects in the economy and that's economics and then economics finishes there and any

other questions about whether we should raise the minimum wage or not that's politics or ethics or something else nothing to do the economics well of course the problem with wage or not, that's politics or ethics or something else, nothing to do with economics. Well, of course, the problem with all that is that that's not policymakers and politicians and decision-makers ask economists for advice well, should we raise the minimum wage or not? That's the one. And for two, as I say, you can't interpret the evidence

on the effect of minimum wages in the labor market, for example, you can't interpret that evidence in a way that's purely objective and purely scientific, at least not if you're a model of science. We could argue all day about what would mean by science, but if your model of science is physics and chemistry, economics is not like that for sure, which is why there are kind of internal debates in economics, which never seem to get resolved. So about inflation, you know, we're having a big bout of inflation around now, in most of the richer economies, whether it's in the States or in the UK or whatever,

and then the last time we had a serious bout of inflation was the 1970s. Well, we never really answered the question about how to deal with inflation back then, you know, there were different measures, and you can't kind of say, oh well, But we never really answered the question about how to deal with inflation back then. There were different measures and you can't say, oh well, we know now that that worked and that didn't. It was really complicated because there were lots of different things happening at once and so on and so on. And now we're in a different world.

Obviously, the economy is different, society is different, everything's different to the 1970s anyway. So we're going to have all those questions again about how to tackle inflation and what works and what doesn't. So I'm more interested in they kind of you start with a question whether it's inflation or I don't know in the pandemic. You start with some policy question and you you look to a whole range of disciplines to try and answer that question disciplines to try and answer that question and they kind of and they merge. And so, you know, John Maynard Kane said that seemingly it's an easy subject,

but it's really hard to do well. And he kind of expanded on that and said, well, this because you basically got to be knowledgeable about lots of different things. You've got to know the kind of economic processes. You've got to have an understanding of that, but you've also got to know your history, you've got no politics and philosophy and psychology and so on. And obviously you've got to be able to understand the mathematical modeling and be able to interpret data.

So, yeah, there's a lot of different skills you need to be an economist. So that's another way of answering the question about what's doing economics, that's another way of putting it. And I really appreciate your advocacy for a more multidisciplinary approach to economics and particularly philosophy as an undergrad many years ago now. I did study philosophy and so I feel uniquely grateful, I guess, to have had that background and to be able to see of see how it views everything that I think about, and particularly economics.

I think it would be very helpful if more folks had that sort of background who go into economics. Yeah, and so just sort of reading your book, I just kept thinking back on this tweet that I saw a few years ago and sort of pops back up every so often and goes viral. And it goes something like, economic students will take a ruler and point to a graph on a chalkboard and say, do you see where this line meets this line? This is why poor people deserve to die. And you know, it's not that far off the mark and I'm bringing it up to open up this conversation about morals and we mentioned Adam Smith earlier. He saw himself, he literally described himself as

a moral philosopher, right? So this idea of morality doesn't have a place in sort of modern economics or more traditional forms of modern economics and yeah, I'm just wondering, can you talk about that, can you let us know what your thoughts are in that? Yeah yeah yeah yeah so okay so let me start with your deserve to die kind of comment. So I think that most economists whether they're students or professional economists whatever that means would kind of of bulk the word deserve. But they what they do do is they talk about what's efficient or what's optimal. And those words, you know, people say, oh yeah, that's efficient. We can't be inefficient. Efficient must be

better than inefficient. You know, who would want to be suboptimal when you can be optimal? So those words have a kind of automatic good feeling about them and people kind of sit up and listen when economists tell us what's efficient. And a good example that comes to mind about that kind of links to this deserve to die. If you look at the 2018 Nobel Prize winner in economics Bill Nordhaus, he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to environmentally economics and particularly the economics of climate change. Now in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and this kind of stuff in 2018, he presented some kind of analysis about the costs and benefits of tackling climate change, of adopting various measures to

reduce climate change. And if you kind of look at what that analysis implies, he's basically saying that unless we have four degrees of global warming, the costs of tackling climate change outweigh the benefits. So another way of putting that from in economics languages, the optimal amount of global warming is 4 degrees, okay? Which is crazy. And of course, if you say this, he wasn't saying this in 2008 or 1998, if you say this in 2018, when there was already a well-established scientific consensus that, you know, four degrees of global warming had a not insignificant risk of a total change in life-all humanity. You know, you're rolling the dice if you let four degrees of warming happen.

And you're guaranteed to have mega-changers, but you could have a global catastrophe, a kind of irreversible global catastrophe. So the kind of arrogance that's built into an analysis that says that said, well, the cost of doing anything about climate change outweigh the benefits unless we get four degrees. So IE, so we don't do much. The arrogance in that is a kind of playing god arrogance about,

you know, is kind of optimal that we let an amount of climate change happen, which means of course people will die. So it's kind of, it's all buried in these people just see the kind of mathematical model and they see the equations and the data and so on, but this stuff is powerful and it gets listened to and it influences politicians in big ways of course. So yeah, a last that meme on, I think on Twitter you are saying is it does have a kind of real wood echo. And then you're asking me about why we are, where we are, when we start with Adam Smith as a moral philosopher. Well, I mean, again, kind of how long you've got for the history of economics, but the

kind of short version would be something like this. It wasn't just Adam Smith, so then you were, you know, Adam Smith has seen it with good reason, the kind of father of market economics, if you like, of capitalist economics. But then if you go to the other poll, Karl Marx, again, very much a philosopher and saw himself as a philosopher, and then this notion of political economy, and then other people who were building up the mainstream of economics, following on from Adam Smith, people like David Wacado and Alfred Marshall, again saw themselves as at least in part doing philosophy and in Cambridge UK, where I'm based which was at this home of a lot of these developments in economics through the

19th century and into the first half of the 20th century, the kind of economics course in the university. You didn't study an economics degree, it was called the Moral Sciences degree, Moral Sciences. That went on until the early 20th century with that name. And then there was John Maynard Keynes, who was called an economist by that time, by the time of the 1930s and so on, in his work on the Great Depression, that was seen as economics,

but he was also deeply interested in philosophy, at all sorts of levels, both kind of ethical issues and stuff about uncertainty and probability, those kind of questions in philosophy. So really it's not till after the Second World War, when we have this big turn towards economics and economies wanting to see themselves as scientists, and kind of wanting to compete in some sense with physics and so on. And yeah, there are lots of reasons why that happened. I mean, the kind of prestige and status of science immediately after the Second World War, you know, science

had brought us lots of technologies, ending obviously with the bomb that kind of were seen to have won the Second World War, you know, in the jet engine. So we'd seen the kind of breakthroughs that are possible by science, and we hadn't seen any of the drawbacks if you like at that stage as all the costs. We weren't thinking about pollution and what do you do with nuclear waste and all that. We weren't thinking about that at that stage. So science was at the peak of the prestige. So of course you wanted economics to be scientific. And it's also incredibly seductive, that idea of a sort of science of society.

Let's kind of solve some of our economic problems once and for all and make definitive irreversible progress with how to organize capitalism. This kind of capitalism works better than that kind of capitalism end of game over decision done. You know, that is incredibly attractive and that idea of the science of society has been bubbling around there for hundreds of years. But it was really after the second world war with all kinds of changes that it became kind of embedded in the practice of economics,

in universities and rolling out from there. The Cold War, as well, at the time, so the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pat countries presented themselves as, you know, scientific planning for organizing society. So we needed an equally kind of scientific kind of theory of society that we could say, yeah, we've got a science too and it says that capitalism's best and free markets are best. So that's, you know, politicians don't hear, yes, maybe, yes, no, maybe on the one hand and on the other, you know, Truman, the US president said, you know, bring me a one armed economist because he was kind of set up you know, bring me a one-armed economist because he was kind of set up of of economists saying on the one hand and on the other hand, they want answers, they want

proof, they want things to be definitive. So that's really in the post-war period that that this idea of economic science really took hold. It's interesting because I'm not an expert at all in Marxism. I do dabble here and there. I've been listening to a lot of theory podcasts recently and I know that a lot of folks really strongly including Marx. I'm pretty sure he saw what he was doing as a science, like the science of historical materialism, for example, and I was literally listening to someone speaking about like Marxist-Leninism recently and they were so adamant that what they,

like this discipline of thought was a science. And yeah, I'm just wondering, like, do you think that there are sort of like scientific, maybe social scientific elements to either Marxist or capitalist economics at all? Like, how does science, and maybe even it might be helpful to unpack what you think of science as being. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so various things there, as I said earlier, I'm just using science in a kind of informal, lay kind of way as in comparing it to natural sciences like physics and chemistry.

And that's the sense in which I'm saying economics is not scientific. And it is the sense that economists, mainstream economists after the Second World War were wanting to be scientific. They were wanting mathematical theories where you could prove things using the mathematical formulations definitively just on the model of physics. And then more recently you've had Conovist wanting to be able to do experiments with a control and so on. And you've had that claim in certain areas of behavioural economics in recent years, that we can do experiments that are comparable to the kind of experiments that go on in the natural sciences. I suppose, so I think Marx was the only word science in a different way, but nevertheless,

there's always been this tradition in Marx, I'm no expert on Marx either, in Marx and economics, that kind of historical determinism thing, you can't really get that kind of deterministic analysis unless you think it's, there are laws, if you like, there are, there are kind of inexorable laws of capitalism. And largely I reject that because I just think capitalism is too diverse, too slippery a concept really, to be able to kind of talk about capitalism as a single thing rather than the immense varieties of capitalism in different places and at different times. So I'm reluctant to kind of concede that there's much, if you like, that could be called science, but then we've got this category of social science, okay? So, I mean, what can we say? I mean, we look at

sure, we look at data and we collect empirical observations in all kinds of contexts and all kinds of ways. I mean, I've not sure I've got anything profound to say here. I've not reflected deeply on the difference between say history and social science and of course a plenty of historians who feel they pay just as close attention to empirical data and they've got just a sophisticated methodologies they use as a sociologist do or indeed economists. They use different kinds of data. That's another thing that's quite distinctive about modern economics that they're very interested in, if you like, what you do with the data set, what you've once you've got it, so they're highly trained in sophisticated statistical techniques.

But the data itself is taken as a kind of given, as a black box, as just kind of, we're not going to inquire into the reliability of the numbers. Whereas the kind of training I received was quite different. It was very much, where does this data set on inflation, on employment, whatever, where does it come from? Where does that data come from? And how's that data being created? And how it was measured?

And what are the definitions and the assumptions? And rather than just if you're like sitting in your office and as an economist and downloading a data set, you might want to get out there into the world and you know, go around workplaces and interview people. So, you know, if you're wanting to know, are we going to have a wage price spiral in the current circumstances with prices rising? Is that going to push up wages and then going going to push up prices? Or maybe you could get out there and interview people and see how managers and workers in different parts of the economy understand that kind of dynamic,

how they feel they're going to respond to it. That's an obvious way of doing empirical social sense, but it's not the way that modern economists normally do it. doing empirical social science, but it's not the way that modern economists normally do it. So one thing about orthodox economic thinking is that it ascribes value to things based purely on sort of like or with market measures. And so I'm wondering if you could sort of unpack what that means more broadly and describe why this idea of like really valuing things through just the market is problematic? Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely everywhere that idea of valuing things in terms of market measures. So, it kind of pervades almost every aspect of life these days, almost without knowing

it. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that an economist is someone who knows the price of everything of the value of nothing. So it is that difference between price and value. In terms of what's wrong with just relying on price and other market measures to value things, there isn't a one single problem, there isn't kind of one thing you can point to. And that's because we use prices and measure of value in so many different contexts

in different ways. And sure, when you go to the shops, yeah, you go shopping and you're making decisions about whether to buy this computer or that brand, a toothpaste or whatever it is. Then price may be a good measure, measure of value, how much value a thing has to you in that context sure, but then there are all the other contexts where things go wrong. So I mean

three things that occur to me, there's things which don't really have a market price and then there's the problems with taking price as a measure of how much something's worth to us and then there's the fact we're not always good at judging how much things are worth to us, how valuable things are. So let me take those kind of in turn. So things which don't really have a market price well, I mean, I was talking about Nordhouse and climate change. It's not just him. This sort of mainstream approach to saying, well, answering the question, what should we do, you know, how serious a problem is climate change, how much should we spend as an economy and society now on tackling the climate crisis.

The mainstream where I'm answering it, well let's monetize all the impacts of climate change. Let's do a whole big pile of modeling in different ways and make some amazing assumptions and put them all into the model and stir it. And then add some more assumptions which translate that scientific data in terms of forecasts of what might happen if we don't do anything or if we only do not much. Then let's translate that scientific data into impacts on GDP, for example. In a lot of it boils down to what's the cost in terms of GDP? The impact on the economy. Well, I don't know where to start really, but I mean,

one, we could just point to in the second world war, GDP went up a lot. So if GDP is your measure of good and bad, then the second world war was a great success, okay? We did really well in the second world war because there were big increases in GDP across all the economies at war, okay? But of course, GDP misses out a lot of what matters. And it's hard to really, when you try to push at it, can we really make decisions about climate change that are going to affect our grandchildren and their grandchildren and so on over many generations, can we make those decisions by trying to monetize all the impacts, whether it's the loss of life or the potentially completely different kind of life we lead? So that's an obvious example of where there aren't really money prices available. If we turn to a different kind of example, the problem with

using prices a measure of the value of things is that if you basically say, well, if people are willing to pay more for something than it's worth more, okay, that's what it boils down to. If people are willing to pay more for something than it's worth more, well, the problem with that, the biggest problem with that probably is that the rich are willing to pay more. The rich are always willing to pay more because they've got more money to pay. They've got more money available for everything. And where does that lead? Well, I'll tell you where it leads. It leads to more resources, you know, if economics is about deciding where we should allocate our resources. It leads to more resources being devoted to developing anti-wrinkle creams, then it does to malaria treatments. Because the people

who are suffering from malaria, they can't afford to pay much. So if you do your survey, as economists might do, that's the market test. How much are people willing to pay in the market for this product, for these tablets or whatever the drug? It may be a lot of money to them, but it may be a heck of a lot less than the people in the rich country are willing to pay for anti-wrinkle creams. So using prices a measure of value, it just ignores the idea that some of the things we value are not just what we want, they're what we need. And this distinction between needs

and wants and our basic needs are what they sound like, they're essential to our humanity. And surely they should be valued more highly because of that. And that's why we should devote more resources to malaria treatments than anti-wink or creams. Even if the kind of market measure in terms of prices says otherwise. I mean, another way I've sort of summarising it is a few measure things by how much people are willing to pay for them. It's like voting where the rich always get more votes. It's just like having voting, you know, where you do a poll, but the rich always get more votes every time. And, you know, if they've got a thousand times of wealth, then they've got a thousand times as many votes, kind of

thing. The scale is quite dramatic. The difference of power and influence that people have given today's levels of inequality. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I guess just to close out here, I don't know, this whole, everything that we've been talking about in the way that sort of this economics way of thinking has taken over the world is just so depressing and... Fishhole. ...it really is, and I don't know that a lot of people are conscious of it's sort of the water we swim in, right?

But yeah, you do open your book explaining that these ideologies embedded within Orthodox economics thinking these ideas, which completely dominate every aspect of our world now pretty much. They would have been thought of as, quote, stupid and wicked just a few hundred years ago. And I mean, it's absolutely true that we kind of do live in a fairly stupid and wicked world in many ways and everything is commodified and like Wall Street is literally speculating on water futures. We calculate acceptable levels of death like you mentioned. And I'm trying to just end a little bit on a positive note here, not toxic positivity or anything like that, but I'm just wondering, do you see any hope and if so, what are some potential paths out of this?

Yeah, well, as you say, there's no point in just dwelling on the negative, so I could tell you that actually in all sorts of ways I'm quite pessimistic, and I don't see that major change is very likely in the near future, in the immediate future, but who knows? But let me try and talk about some possible positives. I mean, I finished the book. One of the things I do towards the end of the book, I just refer to someone who ought to run the nowhere prize, but didn't, who not coincidentally was a woman, Joan Robinson. And she said the purpose of studying economics is to avoid being deceived by economists. Okay? So and the reason I'm bringing that in is that we've spent decades being told there is no alternative.

This is just how the world works. Just accept it and get on with it because this is how it's got to be. So I want to urge your listeners to be confident when they are confronting economics and economists. And it's the job of the economist to convince your listeners that they are wrong, if you like. And if you don't hear a convincing argument, then you don't buy it to you. So it's really important for us to kind of escape from this frame of there is no alternative and stop being deceived by economists. And that was part of the kind of message of the book. But to try to kind of point out kind of path out,

positive paths and way we could go forward. I mean, I would say that the two biggest challenges facing us, particularly in certainly in the West, are inequality and the climate crisis. And the more I think about it, I think those two things are interlinked and that we're not gonna get the major change we need in terms of how we organize our economy and how we take our economy away from being a carbon economy, a fossil fuel dependent economy. We're not gonna get those major changes

unless we also get a more equal economy and society. unless we also get a more equal economy and society. Now, that could sound really, really pessimistic because it kind of sounds like, well, if we're not going to get a more equal society then the whole ship's going to sink. But in a sense, it means that the fate of the billionaires and any of others with a lot of power is tied to the rest of us. Unless we get a more equal society, we're not going to get the major changes we need to tackle the climate crisis.

But it does mean that, say, eventually, they'll come a point because the billionaires live on the same planet too. In so many ways, they try and live completely, they do live completely separate lives to everyone else, but they still share the same planet. I also think that there are in modern capitalism there are limits to how unequal society can get. We've never really lived in a time where, I mean the last time Western societies were as unequal as they are now

would have been around about 1900. But compared to then, yeah, we had mass production in 1900, but compared to then mass production is at a whole different level in terms of the economies of scale are Extreme and global now, you know whatever Product you can think of all the kind of cost is in the upfront design and development And then the marginal cost of production is kind of peanuts in comparison which means that you want to produce Billions if you can of the product, not just millions. So the kind of the logic of the production process is towards these huge economies of scale and towards therefore being able to sell these products to billions of people.

But there's a tension between that and the fact that many people are getting relatively poorer and poorer. So you know I could pull it down to in the end they'll come a point when people aren't rich enough to buy all the stuff that capitalism is producing. I think that's been understated, I'm not enough of a macroeconomist to kind of develop that idea further with you, but that's been understated. I'm not enough of a macroeconomist to kind of develop that idea further with you, but that's starting to be explored now. So I think I do see some chance that there will come a time when there are limits to the... I mean we're already seeing it obviously in the way that most poorer people in countries like the US and the UK rely on loans to meet the, not meet

the, get the by the luxuries, but just to get by and get to the next paycheck they're relying on loans. So there's already that breakdown in the system, in the capitalist system. And I think there's only so much further that can go before there will be just the kind of force for change which even the billionaires can't ignore. So I suppose I think things are going to have to get worse before they get better, but there are kind of strains and tensions in the system which should mean that ultimately things will get better. Yeah, I'm hearing that what you're saying is that this can't last. Something's going to happen. Yeah. And I think that my my immediate thoughts hearing that are agreement and thinking, I mean, yeah, you know, could go, there's a famous quote, socialism or barbarism.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I guess that's the most positive of a note that we can end it on. And so I really appreciate that. And I also really appreciate that you brought up the idea of there is no alternative or what's been called Tina sometime from Margaret Thatcher. We have sort of an informal drinking game on this show. Anytime Margaret Thatcher is brought on

Our listeners can take a shot. So thank you for that. So now people can take a shot She comes up all the time and Reagan. Yeah for sure Alas, I mean, we're still living under their shadow if you'd like under their dark shadow. Yes Absolutely if you'd like. Under that dark shadow. Yes, absolutely. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much. This has been a really informative, rich conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Thank you very much. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jonathan Aldrid, author of License to Be Bad, How Economics Corrupted Us. We'll be right back for the second half of our show with Elizabeth Popperman, author of

Thinking Like An Economist, How Efficiency Replace to Quality in U.S. Public Policy. I'm gonna go back to the place where I was born and I'm gonna go back to the place where I was born and I'm gonna go back to the place where I was born and I'm gonna go back to the place where I was born and I'm gonna go back to the place where I was born

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I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. That was Strange by Galaxy 500. Now here's the second half of our show with Elizabeth Popperman, author of the book, Thinking Like An Economist, How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. public policy. Welcome to upstream Elizabeth. It's great to have you on. I'm wondering to start maybe if you could just introduce yourself or our listeners and just tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write thinking like an economist. Yeah, so I am a sociologist and on the faculty University of Michigan and organizational studies.

And I think there's sort of two versions of why I wrote this. One is sort of the intellectual piece of it, which is that I've always been interested in economic ideas and how we think about the rules that we're going to set to govern markets. And so that's sort of my broad set of interests. But the underlying more political interest is, you know, somebody who came of political age in the 90s, I've always sort of been just really felt like

our politics are very constrained, and been interested in this question of why that is, and so when I started to see those two things intersecting with each other, that's what motivated me to start this project. I really appreciate how you just frame that in terms of our politics being constrained and we don't have to get into this quite yet. Well, I'm sure it'll come up at some point, but just thinking about the, as Biden phrased it, gas tax holiday and how constrained of a way that is to sort of approach this crisis that we're experiencing. And, but yeah, we'll get into all the details about certain policy examples of how Orthodox

economics shapes our policy makers decision-making in every way. But yeah, so the first half of this episode we spoke with Jonathan Aldred, who really presents like a fantastic philosophical case against orthodox economics, and of course that extends out into the practical world as well, and that's really why I'm excited to talk to you about some of the policy implications of how economic thinking has sort of come to dominate the policy landscape. And so I think maybe just to start, I'm wondering if you can outline the basic thesis of your book and also maybe just sort of walk us through how economic reasoning came to dominate policymaking. Yeah, sure. So the basic topic of the book is looking at how between roughly the 1960s and the 1980s, what I'm calling an economic style of reasoning,

really spread through Washington and became institutionalized with lasting consequences. And so when I talk about an economic style of reasoning, what I'm really referring to specifically is something that is microeconomic, something that is basically a loose collection of the kinds of concepts you might learn in Econ 101 for thinking about problems. So incentives, choice, efficiency, cost effectiveness,

thinking about trade-offs, these sorts of very basic framings of problems that you can apply to lots of different contexts and are very flexible in their use. And so the book is partly about showing historically how and why that became so widespread in policy circles and so naturalized. But then it's also about what the political consequences of that have been.

And so a big piece of it is arguing that for Democrats in particular, this has been really politically constraining because centering efficiency and cost effectiveness as our main goals of policy kind of comes into conflict with a lot of other values and other ways of thinking about policy that have traditionally been successful

for people who are interested in using government to do good in the world in some way. And so in particular, a lot of ideas about rights, about the idea of universalism, about equality as an orienting principle often come into the conflict with these other ideas. And as economic framings have become the norm, those other ways of thinking about policy have been marginalized in a lot of ways. Absolutely. Yes, thank you so much for that. And I'm wondering maybe just to clarify,

if we can unpack this idea of efficiency a little bit more, and then why is it wrong to prioritize efficiency? Like, what kinds of things does efficiency bump up against, or sometimes prove to be incompatible with? Like, you were just mentioning rights and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, so the book talks about several different kinds of efficiency and they're not, and they're not all identical, and, you know, without going too far into definitions, I mean, at least one important way that people talk about efficiency and policy context is in

terms of cost effectiveness, basically. So if you want to think about what the best policy is, you know, you think about weighing the costs and benefits, and either looking for the policy, the maximizes benefits over costs, or alternatively that if you are choosing between two different policies, that the one that is better is the one that's going to be more cost-effective. So that's not the only way I talk about efficiency, but that's a really prominent one that we see in policy making.

And on the one hand, nobody argues for inefficiency. Nobody holds up inefficiency as a positive value in and of itself. And so efficiency is often something that it's important to think about and that we want to achieve and that is valuable. But when it is put too much at the center, it comes into conflict with other kinds of values.

And I think the sort of classic example, I think that is in my book among others, is the example of universal health insurance, that the idea of having universal health insurance, which very nearly came to be in the early 1970s, was premised on the idea, both that health care is a right, that universal programs are politically resilient and thus that there's sort of a political case

to be made for them. But as efficiency and cost effectiveness became more central in policy making, what ended up happening is that people start making the argument that well, it's more cost-effective if people who can pay for health insurance themselves, they should be doing it themselves.

And so we should have means testing. Or people are going to over-consume medical care if they don't have to pay any at the cost. And so we should have cost-sharing. And so those kinds of arguments, which certainly have their own logic to them, push away from the idea that a policy that is being pursued on the basis of some sort of underlying value orientation

or because of political reasons and political resilience, that's not a good enough argument. Okay, so we've unpacked this idea of cost efficiency a little bit and how it plays out in policy. And I know it's important to think of these processes in terms of systems and not necessarily imagining a smoke-filled room of shady, nefarious men conspiring necessarily. But I mean, that being said, can you point to any specific groups or organizations or even individuals that you

might single out as sort of having a disproportionate impact in pushing this economic reasoning into the policy making sphere and maybe just If you could outline how we got where we are at now. Yeah, I mean so the book focuses on Two particular groups of people who were really sort of important for introducing these ideas to Washington And so one group was a set of of economists and you know people in related areas of people who were really sort of important for introducing these ideas to Washington. And so one group was a set of economists and people in related areas who were centered at the RAND Corporation. So these are the folks who are doing Cold War research in the 1950s. They're brought to Washington by McNamara at the beginning of the Kennedy administration.

And they really are the ones who are strong advocates of thinking about policy decisions in terms of cost effectiveness. Is that's the useful lens for making decisions about what kinds of policies we should have. And they're able to sort of bring their ideas to Washington and circulate them through a whole bunch of different pathways in ways that end up having these lasting consequences.

And then the second group I follow in the book is sort of a network of industrial organization economists. And so these folks are a little more academic in orientation than the ran folks were. They're interested in questions about how the markets work, what's the relationship between firms within markets. And they came to Washington and started to introduce new ways of thinking about areas

like antitrust policy, about areas like transportation deregulation. And similarly, over a period of time, their representatives and their ideas were integrated into a lot of new spaces. And one thing the book really emphasizes that I think is different from a lot of new spaces. And one thing the book really emphasizes that I think is different from a lot of other work that is out there is that most of the people in these groups

were basically kind of center-left technocrats. For the most part, these aren't the Chicago School, free marketer, super libertarian types. They're people who thought they were trying to make government better by doing this, who weren't trying to get rid of it. But at the same time, the very specific way that they thought about policymaking meant that they had a particular type of effect as they tried to implement their ideas. And it's interesting that you bring up that these are sort of central left leaning folks because, and we'll get into this a little bit more further on in the interview, but, and you did sort of mention this already how the

Democrats are a little bit more wedded, even to these orthodox economic ideas than the Republicans are. But I want to sort of, before we get into that conversation and sort of the capital P politics of it, you did mention that a lot of these folks are a little bit more on the academic side. And I've been reading a little bit of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althouzet outlined a really helpful framework in understanding how sort of like ideology is replicated in spreading capitalist society

through like both what he refers to as repressive state apparatuses, so things like cops and courts, but also through these ideological state apparatuses, for example, educational institutions. And so, yeah, I'm just curious if we can maybe get a little bit more into how education and the education system, what role that plays in inculcating these ideas. system, like what role that plays in inculcating these ideas? Yeah, no, these are absolutely critical institutions in kind of replicating these ideas and, you know, helping them become as well established as they are.

And in a sort of practical sense, I mean, the big two spaces where the most important changes were happening were in policy schools and law schools. So it's a little bit less in the space of undergraduate education. And even economics departments themselves, they're not producing as many of the people who are going into policy spaces. But what ends up happening in the 1960s and 70s is that as this sort of economic way of thinking starts to gain hold in policy spaces, it kind of generates a response in academic circles. And so, for example, just to choose one strand of it,

the Rand folks came to Washington. They implemented this budgeting system. It was called the planning programming budgeting system. It was sort of built around their ideas. And it became a really big thing in Washington. It created a lot of demand for people who could do this kind of analysis, because now all of a sudden, various federal agencies needed to complete these analyses.

And so they're like, we don't know what we're doing. We need people who can do this. And universities responded to that. And so universities created schools of public policy, which really hadn't existed before this. So a historically public administration was a discipline, but it was kind of a different thing and more focused on sort of like competent management

than identifying what the best policy was. And as public policy programs were created, they were organized around this microeconomic way of thinking. They're very centered on the idea that, you know, the good policy is cost-effective policy, that a cost-benefit framework is the best way of thinking about policy. And they're created because there's a market for them in government. But then they themselves become advocates of

the way that they are thinking within Washington. And so you have this sort of cycle where the ideas get reinforced because you have new academic spaces where they're being advocated for at the same time that the demand and government is partly what is making that academic space possible that's providing the resources for it to exist. So it's the sort of cycle that reinforces that dynamic and makes it very, very stable and very difficult to dislodge. And dialectics. Exactly. I always think about how like so many fixtures of US public life, you know, things like

the Postal Service libraries, even free K through 12 public education would like never ever happen today. Yeah. Right? Like if they were, we're already established. Like these things don't fit at all into the logic of economics as we're talking about it. And like I'm just curious, you know, what are some of the things that have really been stolen from the public sphere since economic efficiency and like you say cost benefit analysis, things like that began to dominate.

Yeah, the one that I always immediately think of is Medicare, right? That there's no way that Medicare could have been created 10 years later. There's no way that if we had a congressional budget office in 1965, we would have managed to pull that off. But the one I think of that's been particularly important in the long run is really environmental policy. And this is because there was a real shift in environmental policy from what it looked like and how people thought about it in the early 1970s, where it had a strong moral valence.

So it was really about pollution. Those wrong was sort of a strong part of what was motivating policy. And it was really oriented towards we're going to set limits on what is permitted, and you're just going to have to figure out how to deal with them. And that was at the time, it was a very effective way

of dealing with the problem. But what happens over the period of a couple decades is you get this shift away from these regulatory methods that are seen as being too strict, that are seen as being less efficient than they could be, and towards seeing policies that really treat in pollution as an externality as the best way to think about how we should solve problems. And so what you end up with is either cap and trade systems or some kind of carbon tax, these are seen as, you know, these are the right ways to solve environmental problems. These are the correct ways to do it.

Other ways are sort of unreasonable, nonsensical, that's sort of the battle days. But the problem with those is not that they wouldn't work if they were implemented as designed in theory, but that they've always been politically very difficult to achieve on multiple levels. And so what sort of happened is that we have nothing rather than having these ideal systems implemented.

And because other kinds of options, like industrial policy or the possibility of using technology forcing, which is where government sets unrealistic regulatory targets and then says, OK, well, having to achieve this goal is going to force people to innovate and develop new technologies because those kinds of options are off the table. Those are things that maybe could have been achieved in some ways, even as these more economic solutions prove to be not very viable in practice.

Yeah, no, absolutely. There's so many things which are just not on the table, right? And so what's so powerful about this idea of economic efficiency and sort of like supremacy is just how deeply, deeply ingrained it is in every aspect of policy. And this like capitalist economic hegemony just permeates so many aspects of political life from climate policy, like you're just talking about to healthcare, to COVID response. There's just such a huge constraint on political will and like the political imaginary. And it seems impossible that like, I'm thinking like I brought up at the top of our conversation, like this gas tax holiday

that Biden has just proposed. Let's put aside the fact that gas prices are not necessarily just this sort of like blind response to market demands or like supply and demands. Like there's price gouging going on. We don't even need to get into that to criticize this argument. There's nothing in this proposal that would compel, like legally compel gas companies to actually pass on that 18.4 cents to consumers. It's just a suggestion.

It's just this like pulling this lever and hoping, you know, that by using these policies, something magical will happen. And it's so frustrating because you wonder, do these people get what they're doing? Is this just another example of conscious class war being waged and the state being uses an organ of the capitalist class? Or are they just so wedded to these ideas that they cannot think of anything else? Yeah, and I think the sort of ubiquity of this way of thinking, it's not just competing alternatives become not just politically difficult to achieve, or something that's

going to be really challenging to implement, but they become sort of, they're misguided, right, or they're ridiculous. And I think, you know, I think the other place that you're seeing this right now that's interesting is in, you know, in the debate around inflation more generally, right, where there is, on the one hand, you know, I think it's very encouraging that there is a fairly loud mainstream voice articulating the argument that corporate power is one piece of what's driving inflation, right? And that corporations have a certain amount of leeway and where they set prices and

that there is evidence that they're taking advantage of that to increase prices. But at the same time, those ideas have really been dismissed and even ridiculed by a lot of people on the center left who see them as being beyond the pale, not worthy of consideration, because they don't kind of fit within what the accepted explanations are within economics. And if you're not willing, you can see the possibility that maybe corporate power is a piece of what's going on, then you're pretty limited in terms of what you can do to try to address the problem, other than do something like you can do to try to address the problem, other than do something like,

tighten monetary policy and try to induce a recession, right? Try to increase unemployment. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this sort of brings me to this idea that this is definitely a bipartisan consensus. You know, like, I mean, you do, you have mentioned how the adherence to these sort of policies that are based purely off of like economic thinking, like Democrats haven't

even more sort of principled fidelity to those than the Republicans often do. But what I think is really interesting is like, and we talked about this with Jonathan Aldrid in the previous half of this conversation. This idea that this economic form of thinking is somehow neutral, that it claims to rise above morality, and it's just using this very mathematical, calculated approach, which is, of course, absolutely bullshit. It absolutely has a moral valence,

but in terms of policy, it's definitely bipartisan. And I think part of that is because it does frame itself as being this value neutral mathematical approach. Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. The ability to portray itself as value neutral is a big piece of what makes it as powerful as it is. And I think one of the things that I'm trying to do here is just point out one that efficiency is a value. It's competing with other values. And it may be one value to consider at particular moments.

But it is not something that is neutral in and of itself. And that's not even to get into issues around, for example, distributional effects. So if you look at, for example, the history of cost benefit analysis, the argument that has been made in policy circles has typically been, well, we're going to ignore who exactly benefits from a policy and who it's costing, because those are distributional concerns,

and they're sort of separate. They're political. They're outside of the decisions that we're making. But the effect of that isn't that you're somehow making neutral decisions and then separately people are considering the moral or distributional side of it. The effect is that you are basically excluding distribution from being a concern because, you know, the numbers that you're using have already decided that that's not something that's going to be considered or is going to be weighed.

And so I think there's a lot of this story that is about these very technical decisions that are made in kind of the, you know, battles of government offices that in fact have all sorts of values embedded in them, but that are able to give the appearance of being neutral and scientific, so that they become very difficult to question. Bowls. I love that framing. They're very much bowels, yes. And so I guess the most painful part of this is that this kind of reasoning has been like

spectacularly a failure. Like just take COVID for example, like just an utter failure on the policy level in terms of like Our cases globally and we spend more on healthcare than any other industrialized country and have the worst health outcomes And I love that you bring this up in that your book kind of this idea of how these policies fail upwards Yeah, no, I have a section in the book that's called the Successive Failure, right? And in that particular context, it's about these budgetary methods that were used in the 1960s where, you know, the idea was that, so how are we going to decide what the best way is to solve poverty, for example? You know, we're going to set some goals

and then we're going to very carefully imagine what are our different possible programs that might help us achieve those goals, and we're going to quantitatively compare the cost effectiveness of those different programs, and then we're going to use that to try to set what our budgets are. And so it was this idea that the policy decisions could be made in this very rational, calculated fashion, somehow outside the scope of actual politics. And so this was a huge trend. It was sort of a fad for a while, I guess. And there was a period when everybody, all the executive agencies had to use this system.

But it became pretty clear within a few years that it was not working at all, that it was for a lot of agencies. It didn't really even apply very well. You know, there were agencies that said, well, what is it that you think are measurable goals are, you know, what is it that you're supposed to be that we're supposed to be trying to achieve here and measure? It was very difficult in the sense that politics were always getting in the way. So these agencies would produce one set of numbers for the budgeters that kind of use

these methods, and then there would be the back channel phone calls that would go on to try to pull the strings that would get the real budget number set. And so it just didn't work on on multiple different levels. But it did succeed in creating this whole institutional structure that embedded this way of thinking in policy spaces. And so that was because it created new offices that outlasted the actual system. And those offices would employ people who were broadly entrenched in this way of thinking.

And we mentioned already how it affected policy. It created policy schools and they changed it in law schools that would create this lasting effect. It changed the space of think tanks. It made think tanks and created new streams of funding for them that again provided resources where this sort of framing for thinking about policy could be established and sort of remain stable in the long run. And so even though by 1970 they've given up on this idea, nobody ever really talks about this again, and it's sort of a footnote to history,

all these institutional changes that happened as a result mean that you have so many people who are committed to this as a broad approach to problems, even in the face of evidence that it didn't work. And I think you can see that echoed in all sorts of accounts, all sorts of stories that have happened since then. So it's not a one time scenario. No, it is not.

Well, all right. So Elizabeth, I tried to end things on a hopeful note with Jonathan in the first half and didn't feel as hopeful. So it's like all on you now. Right, yes. No, I'm just kidding. I think sometimes we have to just accept that this shit is dark overwhelmingly so. And it's almost like algorithmic to a point where it feels difficult to understand exactly how to intervene in these systems.

But I am curious, do you have an alternative vision of alternative styles of reasoning? What are some possible paths out of this political, cultural, intellectual, hegemony meticulously constructed and cemented over us? What might that look like and how might it be achieved? Yeah, I mean, I guess first, I don't think there's going to be one equally coherent framework that is going to come in and replace this economic style of reasoning. But I do think that any broad framework that's going to replace this has to really center power in a different way, has to really understand that power is at the heart of politics, and that's not just about market power in the sense of who has the ability to set prices, but

who has the ability to actually control the frameworks that we use for thinking about problems? Who is able to support the broad frameworks that we use for thinking about problems, who was able to support the broad ways that new frameworks for thinking actually arise and end up being implemented in policy spaces. And so on the one hand, I don't know exactly what that framework is, but I do think there's a lot of energy around people looking for alternatives to it, right?

So there's a lot of a lot of interesting stuff that's going on. I mean, in terms of what makes me hopeful, I do think that you see cracks in this consensus. I do think in the Biden administration, you know, there's very clearly people who are in positions of power who have not bought into this framework and who are trying to do different things, you know, I think when a con at the Federal Trade Commission, is just one person who immediately comes to mind. Now, those folks have themselves been constrained by what else is going on politically and by the people in their own agencies.

So it's not like you can just stick a couple of new people into the right places and everything will change. But the fact that new kinds of people and new questions are on the table, I think, is something that is encouraging. I mean, I think the other big piece that encourages me and that I think is critical in a long run is that, yeah, I think changes are really ultimately going to come from social movement kinds of spaces and from organizing. And I think that the intellectual frameworks will follow from that, right?

I think when there is power that is organized on the ground and that is creating pressure on political systems from the outside, then as those start to affect politics, then all of a sudden people find new ideas and they say, oh, well, you know, people whose ideas might even have been seen as beyond the mainstream or beyond the pale or suddenly put into a position where they actually can start to have an influence.

So, yeah, so I guess that is both a challenge, but I think also the hope that the real space where we can see change in the long run is from collective action by people who want to see change. Yeah, I absolutely love that and couldn't agree more. And, you know, oftentimes we fall into the trap of trying to fiddle with the knobs and tinker around the edges of these systems and frameworks when really we need to be zooming out and just focusing on how do we build power to topple the system entirely. And we just released a sort of emergency extra episode last week on abortion and we ended

up tying things on a very similar note. Just the importance of mass movements and organizing, and I think especially now that it's becoming undeniably clear to more and more people that the Democratic Party cannot and will not, well, not only do anything meaningful, but they can't even extend like a figurative call to arms out to their base. Like the Democratic Party wants us to stay home. One of the things a Biden did after the Supreme Court overturned

row was to implore us not to go out and protest. And yeah, I think that's exactly what we need to do. But oftentimes our protests and the Union drives, which are incredibly inspiring right now, places like Amazon and Starbucks and Trader Joe's and Chipotle, they all need to be tied together, and right now they're not. They need to be tied together by a unified theoretical framework and organizational strategies and tactics that ensure that these things aren't just isolated and individualized. So much of liberalism tends to be so

individualized, but these things need to be integrated into our lives and an ongoing and sort of collective basis. So yeah, anyways, just I just wanted to end on that call to action and economic reasoning, which exists arguably more dogmatically on the liberal and democratic side of things, has gotten us to where we are now. And perhaps now that we're seeing the Democratic Party for the hollow bankrupt club that it is, perhaps now we can start to look at alternatives

in a real and meaningful way. And that gives me hope. So thank you so much for this incredibly insightful and informative conversation. I really appreciated your book. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. It was great to talk to you. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jonathan Aldred, author of License to

Be Bad, How Economics Corrupted Us, and Elizabeth Popperman, author of Thinking Like An Economist, how efficiency replaced equality in US public policy. Thank you to Galaxy 500 for the intermission music. Upstream The Music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate, and because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit independent arts and media, any donations that you make to upstream our tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with ongoing support from the incredible folks at Gorilla Foundation. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast.

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