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You're listening to the first episode of 2021, and a horrible year is behind us.
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It's safe to say that 2020 changed the way we live our lives forever.
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It changed the way we work.
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It changed the way we spend our time.
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It changed the way we relate to other people.
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Most of all, it forced all of us to spend more time with ourselves and perhaps re-examine
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what our priorities are.
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There are many lessons we can draw from 2020, and this episode is about some of them.
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But the most important one, and perhaps the most obvious one, is this.
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Do not take anything for granted.
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Cherish all that is good in your life, and don't be too disheartened by all the bad
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No matter how 2020 was for you, I hope 2021 will bring you happiness.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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I wanted to spend this first episode of 2021 taking stock of what we learned in 2020.
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To this effect, I invited my friends Shruti Rajgopalan and Alex Tabiroc onto the show.
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They have both been frequent guests before on The Seen and the Unseen.
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Shruti is a constitutional economist who works for the Mercatus Center, and Alex is an economist
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who is one of the two co-authors of the best blog in the world, Marginal Revolution.
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He is also one of the brains behind the incredible Marginal Revolution University.
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Here's how we structured this episode.
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Shruti, Alex, and I each came prepared with a list of five lessons we think 2020 held
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And during our free flowing conversation, we actually came up with even more lessons
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than the 15 you would expect.
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You may not agree with us on all of these, but our aim was to be thought provoking and
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everything Shruti and Alex said certainly gave me ideas to process and mull over.
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Before we get to the conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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It's no surprise that over the 206 episodes of The Seen and the Unseen, I've had many
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economists on the show, even when we are not talking about economics.
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It's because as I keep saying, economics is the study of human behavior, the tools
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of economics can help us understand the world better and even live our lives better.
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So I'd like to introduce you today to a new podcast that I've been following.
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Think Like an Economist is a podcast hosted by the famous economist Betsy Stevenson and
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In small bite sized episodes of less than 20 minutes, they shed light on a number of
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For example, how can we live our lives without regrets?
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Why the best drummer in a band should not necessarily be the guy doing the drumming?
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Think of Paul McCartney and the Beatles.
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Why it may often be difficult to forgive, but it is rational to do so.
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Stevenson and Wolfers will be joined by guests like Janet Yellen of Federal Reserve fame
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and two-time Basia Prize winner Tim Halford.
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Think Like an Economist is available on all podcast apps and you can also go over to himalaya.com
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slash econ and enter the bonus code econ for a free trial of some of the podcast premium
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I'll put that link in the show notes.
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And I have to say I love the name of the show because it's what I try to do so often.
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Think Like an Economist.
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Given the circumstances, surprisingly good.
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You know, I mean, in the sense I have a job and we've been healthy, we've been able to
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socially distance and shelter in place.
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I have a kind of job that, you know, you can just immediately do from home seamlessly,
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If this had happened even 10, 12 years ago, I don't think I would have had access to broadband
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and online libraries and stuff like that.
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So given the circumstances, surprisingly good.
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Yeah, it's true for me as well.
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A little bit embarrassed to say because things have been going well given, you know, what
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a terrible situation so many other people are in.
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You know, I was teaching online to begin with, so that has not disrupted my life too much.
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And I found myself kind of oddly, I was asked to speak to the White House and to the Council
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of Economic Advisers to give them some advice on prizes.
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And I went to that talk and it turned out to be me and Nobel Prize winner Michael Kramer
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So we gave them some advice and I was very sort of forthright and forceful and Michael
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Kramer was more reserved and conservative.
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But that turned out to be a good team.
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And they asked us to start writing some reports for them.
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And Michael Kramer then pulled out his Rolodex and started calling all of his friends like
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Susan Athie and Chris Snyder, all these top notch economists all around the world to start
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writing and advising governments.
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So I found myself unexpectedly on this team and it's been very intellectually stimulating
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Again, I sort of hate to say that because so many other people, you know, it's been
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a terrible, terrible year, but at least intellectually it's been stimulating for me.
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Wow, okay, that sounds like a much more impactful year than I think many others have had.
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So yeah, so we know the kind of theme of the episode five lessons from 2020 and at least
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as far as, you know, my lessons are concerned, there are more things that I have had reason
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to think about, you know, through the course of the year and not necessarily something
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that wasn't true earlier or something that, you know, suddenly came to light in 2020 itself,
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but just circumstances make you think about different things in particular ways.
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So all my listeners, how we're going to do this is each of us have prepared five lessons
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that 2020 holds for us in general.
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These are our personal takes and we'll go one by one in the sense, you know, first Alex
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and Shruti, then me and Rince and repeat four more times.
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And yeah, and if you're still with us, we'll have 15 such lessons.
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So Alex, you know, because you joined the session last, it has been decided by those
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who were here before you that you are first to go.
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So let me start with a bit of philosophy and that is the omission commission distinction.
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I think this needs to be destroyed because it's killing people, it's killing people.
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So what is the omission commission distinction?
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This is basically the idea that killing somebody is worse than letting them die, right?
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Which kind of has some sense in some circumstances, but it's been overgeneralized and I think
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it's creating a huge amount of problems.
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One of the first studies of this actually sort of accidentally, but good for our purposes,
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So if you ask people, suppose there's some disease which kills, you know, 10 out of every
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100,000 people and then there's a vaccine and the vaccine can also have some side effects,
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it could also hurt people.
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What is the minimum, you know, death rate which you would accept to take the vaccine,
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So the disease kills 10 out of every 100,000.
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People are still not willing to take the vaccine even when it's like two out of 100,000, you
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They are much, much more hesitant to take the vaccine even when it has a lower death
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And kind of the reason for that seems to be that if you choose the vaccine and your child
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or you or your spouse die, then you cause the death, right?
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It's sort of your fault.
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That's how people think about this.
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On the other hand, if you choose not to take the vaccine and you die from the disease,
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well, that was just bad luck.
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I mean, that's not your fault.
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You didn't make a decision.
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Of course, this is crazy, right?
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And this is a very bad kind of decision-making, right?
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To me, as a sort of consequentialist, utilitarian, cost-benefit economist, I'm gonna say, look,
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take the vaccine so long as the death rate is less than 9, you know, less than 10 out
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of every 100,000, you're better off.
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Just do the thing which makes you better off.
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And yet people don't do this.
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And we've seen this error apply not just to ordinary people who, you know, you know, maybe,
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you know, they make mistakes or they're low-educated.
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I don't actually think this is true, but you might think that, oh, maybe it's just people
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of low education make this mistake.
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No, our leaders make this mistake time and time again.
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So for example, we could have done challenge trials for a vaccine.
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So a challenge trial, as you probably know, is where you take a small group of people
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and some of them you give the vaccine, some of them you don't, and then you deliberately
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expose them all to the virus, right?
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The virtue of a challenge trial is with only about 100 people, you can very, very quickly
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find out whether the vaccine is working.
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Now, we didn't do that.
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Because, well, to do that, we have to expose people, we have somebody might die, even though
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there were institutions, like one day sooner, who had got tens of thousands of people willing
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to do a challenge trial.
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So instead, what did we do?
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Well, we did a randomized controlled trial, which is good, but look, what we did, Pfizer
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and Moderna and so forth, they got 40,000 people, much bigger sample, gave half of them,
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gave 20,000 people the vaccine, and then he said, oh, just go off and do your thing, right?
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And then what they found, of course, is the vaccine was highly effective.
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But look, 20,000 people were doing their own thing, and some of them got the virus, some
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of them got COVID, right?
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So the omission commission distinction, again, came here because we weren't willing to do
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the thing which was cheap and quick and fast because, oh, you've got to give them the virus,
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you're doing something bad.
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On the other hand, doing a randomized controlled trial in which 20,000 people were left exposed
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to get COVID and a bunch of them did get COVID, well, that's okay, because we're not causing
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That's an era of omission.
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We're not helping them, but we're not stopping them, you know, and we're not requiring them
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So again, this was just kind of crazy, I think, that we didn't do the sensible thing.
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And we saw this again and again.
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So it's very surprising, the military, right, like the military, you would think that the
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military would be among the first people to sort of volunteer for things like this.
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But no, we couldn't do that.
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And again, when it comes to FDA approval, right, there's a very big asymmetry.
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We think that the disease, that's rampant.
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You know, right now, 3,500 people a day are dying in the United States, that's rampant.
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But we couldn't possibly approve a vaccine early.
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We have to do, you know, the FDA kept reassuring us, we're not cutting corners.
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Well, wait a second, there is a virus out there, there's a pandemic, surely there is
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a time in which you should be cutting corners, right?
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I mean, you know, there is a time and place for going slow, but there's also a time and
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place for cutting corners.
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That's how you get there fast, right?
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You're on the racetrack, you're supposed to cut the corner, right?
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But yet, you know, we have to reassure, oh, we can't be doing anything unsafe.
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And again, that seems crazy.
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It's almost like the seen and the unseen, right?
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Like that's exactly what it is, right?
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We see certain types of deaths and we ignore other types of deaths.
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And I think the larger lesson of what Alex is saying, I think it goes beyond the pandemic,
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We go through all sorts of clinical trials, like, you know, it takes like eight years
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and a billion dollars to get any new breakthrough through the FDA.
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So no wonder we don't have more, you know, life-saving medication and vaccines, you know,
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available to poorer countries and things like that, because it's just so damn expensive
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to get these through the door in the developed world.
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And the other part also is like this bizarre misplaced sense of equity, like this one version
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of equity, which is only parentalism or, you know, some kind of paternalism, where apparently
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people are not smart enough to take the risks that they wish to take, right?
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Some of the vaccine trials are lower risk than getting on a skateboard, right, or bungee
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jumping or getting on a motorcycle.
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And we let people do that all the time, right?
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So there's this very misplaced sense of, oh, of course they're willing to take the risk,
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but they don't know better.
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That's why they're willing to take the risk, right?
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They are too poor and that's why they are forced to take the risk, you know, something
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Like the moment you would say something about maybe the military should do this, they'd
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start talking about, you know, how there are more people from lower income families who
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join the military and it's inherently unfair.
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And I'm sure there are a lot of people from poorer neighborhoods or people who genuinely
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believe in public service, firefighters, people in the military who would have been happy
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I know a couple of people in the UK who were part of the vaccine, the randomized trial,
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they were happy to do it, right?
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They knew the risks involved and they didn't think it was insane.
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They were young, they were healthy, they were fit, they said, I'm single, I don't have
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I think that's a good idea.
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So we do end up taking more risks than people think, but they don't want, you know, quote
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unquote blood on their hands, right?
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So that's kind of what's going on.
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Yeah, I mean, when Alex was, you know, describing the concept, the same phrase popped to my
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This is the seen and the unseen in the sense that you have the seen effects of action,
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but you don't see the unseen effects of inaction or at least you don't consider them.
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You know, when we did that episode on COVID in April, Shruti, we also discussed how, you
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know, the problem with any policy decision at a time like this is that the lives that
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go because of it will be seen, but the lives that are saved will therefore be unseen.
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And in a sense, the same logic, of course, applies to the FDA with their legendary delays
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and all that, that, you know, they talk about the lives that they are saving by taking their
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time, but you don't, you know, what is unseen is the lives that could have been saved had
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they moved a little quicker.
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And again, I agree on the voluntary thing.
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I mean, that's really my one metric for thinking about policy or thinking about action in any
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sphere is that how much of it is voluntary.
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And when you have people actually signing up and volunteering for this trial, so it's
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not like a decision that a government has to make that do we inflict this and, you know,
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it's 10 deaths in one group of people versus 100 in another.
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People are volunteering to be part of a trial, aware of the risks.
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So you know, why would you not just go for that?
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So yeah, it's very resonant at different levels.
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And Shruti, it's your turn now.
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So, you know, one of the things that I learned this year is something I've not paid any attention
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to for the most part, except academically, which is tail risks, right?
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So these are very low probability events, but when they do happen, and it's uncertain
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if they will ever happen, they come at a very, very high cost, right?
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And so one way of thinking about this is the way, you know, the public choice way, which
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is governments are never going to act on these matters because, you know, these things may
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You know, prevention is so costly, it requires massive amount of coordination, and there's
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literally no interest group that is trying to get this going, right?
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On the other hand, there are so many urgent needs and there are so many interest groups,
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you know, whether it's sugar subsidy to, you know, stimulus payments to social security
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to education, there are so many interest groups lobbying for so many things that those things
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get prioritized and perhaps rightly so in the democratic process, right?
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Maybe this is how it's supposed to work.
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But I think this year has really taught us that we need to pay more attention to tail
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And there have been people who've talked about this before, so of course Bill Gates has famously
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talked about, you know, pandemics and how we need to focus on, you know, some kind of
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not just pandemic prevention plan, but also pandemic action plan, like vaccines and things
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You know, there is Bill Nordus, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, talked about
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the tail risks coming out of climate change, right?
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Something that we just literally pay no attention to.
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If you want to lose sleep tonight, you should ask Alex about asteroids hitting the earth,
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solar flares killing our communication systems and other really terrifying, it's scary to
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talk to Alex about these things.
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But Alex has written about these sort of, you know, tail risks that no one pays attention
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And they are a little bit apocalyptic.
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So I think it might make sense for the world to start thinking a little bit more about
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tail risks and paying attention.
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I don't think, you know, your standard democratic government process is a good way of doing
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I think, you know, maybe the multilateral United Nations coalition, you know, something
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like that, something that we developed post-World War II to end a different kind of apocalyptic
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Something like that might be more suitable, where people who are a little bit removed
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from everyday politics, you know, with some level of, you know, government funding and
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backing exactly like the UN or the World Bank or something, you know, they are the people
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who are staffed and in charge of solely thinking about these kinds of problems.
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Right now, there are some risks to this because, you know, that can become its own lobbying
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effort, right, to get more money for these things.
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You might play up these apocalyptic situations and spread paranoia.
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But frankly, right now, we are thinking so little about tail risks that we might be better
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off if people did go with some scaremongering tactics.
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And if they did form a legitimate interest group or lobby, do you know, seriously lobby
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for these sorts of things?
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So I think, you know, climate change has gotten it going.
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But climate change, again, they are not so focused on tail risks.
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They are too focused on immediate marginal, you know, what should the emission level be
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They don't really focus on some of the really terrifying situations.
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So I think, you know, we could have a little bit more of that.
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And certainly on the question of pandemics, I mean, we're already hearing about a new
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mutation of the novel coronavirus, which is, you know, apparently spreads more rapidly and
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we don't know anything about it yet.
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But apparently these mutations are coming.
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So this is not the last pandemic we have seen, is my sense.
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And we could do this better if theoretically we change the mental model to think about
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Yeah, just just earlier today, you know, the government banned flights to India coming
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from to and for the UK.
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And that kind of reminded me of Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, in which he wrote about how railways
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were responsible for spreading disease throughout India.
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So no doubt, Gandhi would have approved of this.
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So I have a question for the two of you on...
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A few hundred years too late on banning the British.
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So I kind of have a question for you on tail risks, which is that when I put myself in
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the shoes of a politician, and on the one hand, obviously, your imperatives are, you
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know, aligned towards number one, satisfying the people who give you money, because that's
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what you need to win elections, and those are the interest groups and so on.
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And number two, you're catering to voters, and therefore you care about what they care
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about, which is not the tail risks.
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And you have limited state capacity.
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As an individual politician, you have limited attentional bandwidth to devote to these matters.
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So isn't it rational to ignore extremely low probable events like pandemics or and, you
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know, I'd love to know more about asteroids hitting the earth as well.
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But that seems to me to fall in the category of things we cannot control.
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But you know, when it comes to incentives, it's easy in hindsight to say that, you know,
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politicians should have paid attention and all of that.
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But is it realistic to expect that to happen?
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No, I completely agree with you.
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It's in fact rational for them not to pay attention to tail risk, which is why I think
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it's a lesson that we need to find something outside of democratic politics to pay attention
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And we know that regular folks voting are not going to make this an important issue.
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They don't even make it an important issue when they're buying insurance.
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It's really they have a lot of skin in the game.
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But so it's completely rational for politicians.
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And I think that's why this is such a big problem.
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And that's why even when someone like Bill Gates is willing to put his own money, right,
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is willing to find coalition partners, has a really big voice and a global platform and
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a megaphone, he gets very few takers when he does warn people about these kinds of risks.
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So we do need something.
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I don't think everyday politics is the obvious solution for this.
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Telling people that they should pay attention to something that they're rationally not going
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to gravitate towards has never been a good idea in any kind of politics.
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So there I completely agree with you.
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So I think there's a few things we can do.
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You have to find some you have to tie some private good to the public good.
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So thinking about asteroids, for example, one of the things which is going to help us
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with the asteroids is if we have a bigger space program.
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So there is a public good aspect to everything which Elon Musk and SpaceX are doing.
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The more capability we have to operate in space, the bigger the chance that we might
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be able to do something if we discovered an asteroid which was, you know, coming towards
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And by the way, I'm just to give you the sleepless night, by some calculations, your probability
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of dying from an asteroid strike is about the same as your probability of dying in an
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Now you might wonder, well, how is that possible?
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Well, it's possible because if there's an asteroid strike, we're all dead.
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Most of us are not going to die from an airplane crash.
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But if there's an asteroid strike, the whole planet is gone.
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So the probabilities are actually much higher than you might think.
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So we want to look for things with private goods which are going to help us to produce
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Another related thing is the, which keeps me up at night actually, is the solar flares.
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You know, around 1890, this so-called Arrington event, we had a solar flare just at the beginning
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of the internet of the time, the telegraph era.
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And that solar flare knocked out all the telegraph systems in the world.
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And if we had something similar today, it would knock out the internet, it would knock
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You wouldn't be able to drive your car because of the electrical system.
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So there are things we can do today to protect our electrical systems, to protect the internet,
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to shield them from this type of solar flare.
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And the way we might be able to do that is to attach some pork, right, to the public
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You know, here's an opportunity for firms to make some money, right, shielding all of
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our cables and so forth.
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So I think a greater awareness of these low probability events is extremely important.
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And the way to kind of approach it politically is to attach these private goods to producing
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something which has an externality, a public good externality.
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That's the end of the show.
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After asteroids and solar flares, we can go home.
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Yeah, I mean, if they happen in the middle of this recording, that will be quite unlikely.
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But I once wrote a column called Unlikely is Inevitable.
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And this was part of the series of columns I did on poker, where, you know, people would
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complain to me that, yeah, I got two one-outers on the river, two hands in a row, that should
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happen one in four thousand times, obviously, the game is rigged.
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And I would just say that, no, no, the game is not rigged.
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The thing is, if you consider the law of truly large numbers, then everything that is no
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matter how unlikely it is to happen, given enough iterations of something, it will happen
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at some point or the other.
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So, you know, it is unlikely that an asteroid will strike the earth.
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But if we survive long enough, it is inevitable that at some point it will happen.
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The only question is that will there be a solar flare right before that, so we can't
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even tell each other an asteroid is coming.
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Actually, if an asteroid is coming, there's no point telling each other.
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It will be over before the broadband takes it across the world.
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No, no, but you want like a few days of drama and you want all the religious God men getting
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into the act and saying, do this, do that.
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And this is a punishment for, you know, absence of virtue and all of that.
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So, you know, that little entertainment before we go.
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And speaking of entertainment, my first lesson is kind of like I kind of divvied up five
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lessons across the fields of entertainment, education, society, politics and the personal,
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because I figured I'll leave covid and science to you guys.
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And I'm not sure I'm, you know, I should really butt in there.
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And here's my thought about entertainment, which is something that I kind of figured
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out in a very personal way through the experience, in fact, of doing this podcast, that if you
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go back in time, you know, entertainment and art until recently was essentially broadcasting.
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You had one person, maybe one artist or entertainer talking to many people and often out of necessity,
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because if you're going to be profitable, you achieve some kind of scale.
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You have to kind of cater to the masses.
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So very rarely are you going to have any one on one intimate form, which is why that whole
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mode of radio broadcasting comes in where you talk in a particular way.
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And there is an artifice to all of that, to the presentation and all of those things.
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Now a couple of aspects to this.
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One of the things that I realized this year with the podcast was that one people seem
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to feel this incredibly intimate connection to it.
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And I didn't realize how much and you know, one of the realizations I've had about the
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medium which I talk about in the course I teach on podcasting is that, you know, not
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only is audio very different from other mediums because, you know, you're a passive audience
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and you're listening at higher speeds and all that, but podcasting is very different
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from radio because in radio you're broadcasting and talking to many people.
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But when you listen to a podcast, you have a person's voice in your head and it is as
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intimate as any medium can get.
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And you know, all the podcasts that I listen to like Econ Talk or Tyler's podcast, you
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know, you feel that connection to that person, you listen to that podcast for them.
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And I sort of realized this when I opened up support for the seen and the unseen and
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just saw the depth of emotion that people kind of have for the show.
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And even the 200th episode, I thought five hours of me talking about myself is intolerable.
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But that's, you know, one of the most popular episodes this year and many people seem to
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have horror of horrors heard all five hours.
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So well done Shruti on breaking that record as a host.
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And another medium where I kind of noticed this because what's also happened is a lot
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of us are sort of sitting home and consuming more content on the internet than we otherwise
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would where we'll consume a lot of that content in passing is what I have seen on YouTube
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And earlier I thought, okay, people are just streaming games or they'll, you know, stream
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panel discussions and all of that.
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And it's just you're capturing something on video that has happened.
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But some of the best streams out there are also, you know, achieve a similar level of
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intimacy and personal connection.
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Like one sort of development that I followed very closely is after the lockdown started,
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I think towards the end of April, this guy called Sameer Raina, who's a standup comedian,
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21 year old kid, he started stream.
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He was just throwing different things at the wall, trying different things, which is what
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you should do as a creator.
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And he started streaming on chess and Indian grandmaster called Vidyut Gujarati, who is
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right now India's number two.
#
He came across Sameer Raina's channel and they got together, they played chess on the
#
There's a young guy called Sagar Shah, who runs a magazine called ChessBase India, and
#
he's been doing stellar work for years.
#
And as a chess fan, I've kind of been noticing his stellar work, you know, for very small
#
audiences, but you know, interviewing players, trying to demystify the game for new learners.
#
He came on the channel and then suddenly the whole streaming scene exploded.
#
Sameer helped all of them set up their own streams.
#
In fact, ChessBase India on YouTube has more than half a million subscribers.
#
And what they would do is they would call in these guest grandmasters like, you know,
#
Magnus Carlsen and Vishy Anand have all appeared on these shows and they'd call in all these
#
grandmasters and they'd also cover live events where they would do commentary.
#
And I remember one live event where they had like a three hour commentary on something.
#
And after that commentary was over and everybody was expected to go home, they spoke for three
#
more hours where they spoke about their lives and how they got into the game and all of
#
And I was watching till five in the morning.
#
It's like you come for the chess, you stay for the people, like in one of those broadcasts
#
and it's really incredible how it panned out.
#
You have thousands of people watching and Sagar Shah who lives in Goregaon, by the way,
#
I must get in touch with him one of these days to tell him how much I like his work.
#
So Sagar, you know, his internet went five minutes before the stream was going to start.
#
So he kind of ran to office.
#
His office was two minutes away.
#
He ran to office holding his laptop and his camera and all his equipment.
#
And then when the show is getting over at four, you know, there is this dialogue about
#
how is he going to get home because you know, there are dogs on the lane outside apparently
#
and he's scared of them and all his viewers get very worried for him.
#
And then at one point he says, okay, I will shut the stream and I will start Instagram
#
live and he Instagram live his whole walk from his office to his home.
#
And I don't think there were any dogs on the way.
#
And this kind of intimate connection which forms between creators and viewers is something
#
that obviously it's been there before in various forms and it's kind of been creeping up.
#
But it's something that I really noticed a lot of only sort of during this specific year.
#
And obviously it's enabled by technology and it's something interesting and very beautiful
#
and something that I hadn't kind of thought of earlier that, you know, no longer are you
#
broadcasting to many people that even if you are effectively broadcasting to many people
#
and you have, you know, thousands watching your stream, you feel that intimate connection
#
with the artist and you know, all of that.
#
So for me, that was, you know, one of the things that surprised and delighted me.
#
Yeah, I think you're right, Amit.
#
And I think the classic case, not that I would know anything about it, it would be only fans,
#
Which is the kind of porn.
#
It is a huge exploding, basically soft porn or pornographic streaming.
#
But it's exactly what Amit is talking about.
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
#
But it's exactly what Amit is talking about in that there's a very personal connection.
#
So a big only fan account might have, you know, a thousand or, you know, five thousand
#
subscribers, right, which at $10 a month, you know, it can be a lot of money.
#
But it has succeeded, as far as I've been told, precisely because it's establishing
#
this personal connection.
#
So a lot of it is not actually pornographic.
#
A lot of it is lonely men speaking with attractive women and having them talk about their lives
#
and just having these women just, you know, converse.
#
So a lot of it is conversation.
#
And I think the question is how much this is due to the pandemic that there's a lot
#
You know, a lot of people are cut off from friends and family and how much will go away.
#
But how much of these innovations may also last?
#
Yeah, and this also, you know, in a related sense, speaks to Kevin Kelly's concept of
#
a thousand true fans, which he wrote about in an essay like more than a decade ago.
#
But it's finally happening where you can have a newsletter where you just have a thousand
#
people subscribing, but at a hundred dollars a year, that's still, you know, a reasonable
#
amount of money, if I might use that euphemism.
#
So I find all this, you know, so fascinating.
#
It changes the world for creators, but it also, you know, changes the world for fans,
#
You know, I'm almost envious of the people who can like watch chess and discuss it for
#
six hours and things like that.
#
Because my first reaction to anything like that is that just sounds exhausting to me.
#
And that's probably because, you know, in one sense, I'm a different generation technologically,
#
I'm the generation of the written word.
#
And even that was really hard to get.
#
You had to Xerox the written word and then sort of hold on to it and then read whatever
#
So this idea that you can have like lots and lots of stuff happening at the same time and
#
you can interact with people and you learn necessarily by talking to people, that was
#
never an option growing up in India for me, trying to read the kinds of things I wanted
#
So the reliance has always been to go by myself and read or something like that.
#
And we all fall back into our usual patterns when something bad happens.
#
And the upside to COVID has been, I think I've read the most this year since probably
#
But on the other hand, I have probably missed every cool social phenomenon of community
#
viewing and people are watching things at the same time and people are, you know, like
#
when a show launches or they're playing video games or whatever board games simultaneously
#
And I sound terrible, but I have no interest in any of that and I don't gravitate towards
#
But at the same time, now that you talk about it, I feel like maybe I'm missing out on something
#
sitting by myself, having my notes in these books.
#
There's also a negative aspect to this, which a lot of people have talked about, is that
#
without broadcasting, the society is becoming much more divided and there's less of a common
#
consensus about even what the facts are.
#
As we know, I saw recently a list of the top 10 streamers on YouTube and I did not recognize
#
And I'm pretty connected, you know, as far as a middle-aged man might be.
#
But you know, it's not like I'd heard the names but just didn't know, you know, hadn't
#
bought their album or something like that.
#
I did not recognize a single name.
#
And these were all people with, you know, 10 million subscribers or something like that,
#
you know, lots of subscribers.
#
And so we are becoming, you know, you can now find your own facts, right?
#
It's very easy to go out into the world and no matter how crazy your view is, you can
#
find lots of people who are supporting and encouraging you.
#
And one thing which very surprisingly has been found in the behavioral economics literature,
#
right, is that when you get a bunch of people, let's call them crazy people, they're not
#
necessarily good, but you get a bunch of people together, okay, they become even crazier,
#
Everybody sort of wants to be in the middle as it were.
#
And so you get these people together, they hear, oh, maybe my view is not as crazy as
#
I thought, therefore I should move even further, you know, they all support one another.
#
And so you get these communities, you know, the anti-vaxxers are one community, you know,
#
the election was stolen is another community, the UFO people, that's a community.
#
It doesn't matter how crazy your view is, you can find a group out there who will, you
#
know, send you reports or emails and send you Facebook, look at this, how do you explain,
#
you know, how the towers on 9-11, you know, why did they fall and steel is supposed to,
#
you know, it's not supposed to melt and, you know, there must have been an inside job.
#
Any kind of crazy view can be supported now.
#
And they all think they are Copernicus, right, that they are the first people to discover
#
this and we are the establishment who just doesn't believe anything.
#
Everyone on Twitter is an expert in whatever hashtag is trending that day.
#
And I'll actually, you know, because Alex sort of almost segued into one of my other
#
lessons, let's invert the order.
#
So I'll go with my second lesson now and then we'll just invert it.
#
So the narrative flow seems smooth to the listener.
#
And my second lesson is about narratives, which is that one of the things that, you
#
know, we knew it before, but I think this year has helped make it even more stark is
#
that reality doesn't really matter.
#
You know, narratives are everything and there are all kinds of crazy narratives out there.
#
And much as, you know, we lived in a less connected, less democratic in the sense of
#
ease of entry, you know, with the means of production not available to everyone in the
#
eighties and nineties, at least what we had when I was growing up where you had a handful
#
of mainstream publications was you had a broad consensus on the truth.
#
One you no longer have that because everyone is producing their own stuff, which is great.
#
But to what it then does is it leads to everybody living in a web of shared interconnected realities.
#
And we've seen some crazy stories this year is like, of course, there are all these stories
#
about how vaccines are a Bill Gates plot for surveillance and all of that.
#
And you know, when SSR died, Sushant Singh Rajput, by the way, Alex was an Indian film
#
star who tragically took his own life earlier this year.
#
And that should have opened up a healthy dialogue on mental health and all of that.
#
But instead, what it did was it led to this bunch of crazy conspiracy theories, not only
#
about his alleged murder by some politicians, but there were people who said that he created
#
And because politicians wanted COVID to continue, they bumped him off.
#
There was another theory on Twitter floating about that said that he created this video
#
game called 4G, which had just been launched by the star called Akshay Kumar.
#
So Akshay Kumar had him bumped off.
#
So all these crazy theories were kind of floating around and which also kind of leads to a related
#
question that, listen, I know we need narratives to explain the world.
#
The world is complex and really impossible to make sense of in its entirety.
#
So we need these simple narratives to make sense of the world.
#
But people increasingly seem drawn towards these really outlandish narratives, which,
#
you know, and that attraction is something that I am not sure I understand.
#
And the other thing that I kind of, you know, that we, I think all of us know, but often
#
it is just better to be in denial of it, is that we all live in our own constructed worlds.
#
In a sense, everyone is a character in someone else's imaginary universe.
#
And that can be a very scary and lonely thought.
#
You know, honestly, like this whole Sushant Singh, Rajput Singh and the other things,
#
I think it's like, you know, people who gather around an accident that happens, you know,
#
somewhere on a road in India, no one helps.
#
It's like a way to pass 10 minutes of the traffic jam and then they move on.
#
I think a lot of it is that, right?
#
I don't think people are seriously making decisions in their life based on this.
#
It's about as much as I am making decisions in my life watching Tony Soprano.
#
You know, there is something very fascinating about watching like a mob movie or, you know,
#
Martin Scorsese and blow is flying all over the place and good fellows, but that doesn't
#
mean I'm doing anything stronger than caffeine.
#
So I think there is something fascinating about it.
#
I think what's happening with the internet is more your earlier point, which is broadcasting
#
has become intimate, right?
#
Movie news channels with their graphics and their access to, you know, you're literally
#
in Sushant Singh Rajput's bedroom and his balcony.
#
So now you feel like you're watching something and you're very intimately involved in it
#
in a way that earlier maybe you would have read about it in a newspaper, thought about
#
it for a couple of minutes and moved on.
#
So I don't think it is that people are changing in any particular way.
#
I think it's just now they're consuming real life events like entertainment, right?
#
I knew people who had the popcorn ready when the Trump Biden debate was going on.
#
Nobody took it as a presidential debate.
#
The first thing I learned about the debate because I didn't watch it is the fly on Mike
#
Because this whole thing is nuts.
#
They catch up on what happened in the debate on SNL, right?
#
That's people's source of information.
#
It's Colbert and SNL and Trevor Noah and things like that.
#
So I think we're taking it too seriously.
#
I don't think people really live their regular lives like that.
#
They have just converted information, facts, science and broadcasting into entertainment
#
and we're all part of it, right?
#
In one sense, like Alex does MRU videos, which are perfect on economics, but they're entertaining.
#
We're all trying to turn the content we put out there as entertainment and now we can't
#
blame people in one sense for thinking of this as entertainment and getting carried
#
away by it and then just moving on with their life and in the process maybe inadvertently
#
support some kind of crazy TV news channel or conspiracy theory or internet meme or something
#
But I wouldn't take it too seriously.
#
I think regular folks have been exactly the same.
#
They have always been in 2020 as they were in any other year when you talk to them like
#
I hope you're right, Shruti.
#
So here's something which I worry about.
#
I think about like why was Hitler so successful?
#
And when you look at Hitler today, news footage or something like that, he just looks comic.
#
He just looks foolish and kind of like how could people take this guy seriously?
#
He was supposed to be this great orator and he looks kind of silly.
#
And I think my theory is that a lot of what happened was we got radio and television and
#
cinema all at the same kind of time or all very close together and our brains could not
#
So we literally thought that these people were sort of gods because even though you
#
understand when you see an actor on the movie screen that they're not really 100 foot tall,
#
your brain just thinks, oh, this is a god, they're 100 foot tall, right?
#
And so I think these dictators were in part a response to this new media.
#
And the new media just broke people's brains.
#
And eventually we kind of got used to it and learned, I hope, I think, to clamp down on
#
some of these feelings and to take things with a bit more grain of salt and you get
#
used to them and you've seen it a hundred or a thousand times and maybe then you begin
#
to see, oh, this is not a god, you get used to it.
#
But I think the internet and social media are a new media challenge that is breaking
#
And the difficulty now is can we get through this period for a long enough time to be vaccinated,
#
To be vaccinated against the new social media, right?
#
We need time for our brains to become inert to this intimacy, right?
#
This industry that Ahmed was talking about, oh, Donald Trump is my friend.
#
He speaks to me, right?
#
I mean, this I see in his family, Ivanka and whatever the other ones are called, they're
#
part of my family or whatever.
#
And we just need time to become inert to it.
#
And maybe the new generation, I think my kids are a little bit more, like Batman, they grew
#
up in the darkness, right?
#
But I don't know, I'm not sure.
#
And I think I really worry, for example, about China, right?
#
The Communist Party in China is very, very bad, but what would a populist politician
#
And would a populist, you know, launch a war against Taiwan or something like that?
#
Or India, of course, exactly.
#
So just the way social media breaks our brains and can we live for long enough to become
#
I think that's a question, especially as it's getting...
#
The new media are hitting us faster and faster and faster.
#
So we already are challenged by social media and, you know, virtual reality is just around
#
And here I was thinking that we need a vaccine against COVID.
#
But even after that comes, we need a vaccine against social media, who can inoculate us
#
So Shruti, since we inverted the order, it is now your turn to share your second lesson
#
Yeah, you know, I've been thinking a lot about intergenerational trade-offs right now.
#
As an economist, I would typically think about this in the context of public debt, right?
#
This is the classic example that governments tend to overspend because they know not only
#
is it they're able to spread the cause differently from the people who benefit in the present,
#
but also inter temporally, right?
#
So all the older people today are going to get their, you know, big welfare checks and
#
But we're actually borrowing from the future.
#
And the future happens to be in kindergarten right now, right?
#
But the future cannot vote.
#
And therefore, you know, it's pretty easy to pass on this huge debt burden to them.
#
And this is, you know, I mean, this is a very classic George Mason thing.
#
I mean, James Buchanan, Dick Wagner, they've done the pioneering work on debt deficits
#
and democratic politics in one sense, right?
#
How this intergenerational trade-off works and really all the standard constraints one
#
would imagine in democratic politics disappear once debt is in the picture.
#
And I've been thinking about that in the context of COVID because this pandemic is a little
#
There is a big cost and, you know, high fatality rates and things like that with a generation
#
And almost all the costs are being imposed to benefit this group.
#
I mean, when I say this group, just please note that I'm saying that academically, right?
#
This group is my parents and my grandparents and things.
#
So, you know, it's not like random people.
#
But it is still a different group which benefits from all the major lockdowns and, you know,
#
like socialist policies, the FDA policies, and maybe not all of them.
#
But you know, the vaccine distribution plan that's coming in place and things like that.
#
And the group that's in one sense the unseen group which is suffering the most is the kids
#
because of school closures, right?
#
Especially really young kids from poorer backgrounds, right?
#
A year lost in their life is going to have very big consequences for their mental development
#
and their, you know, education developments.
#
There is good research out there that even one year of education lost has, you know,
#
reasonable impact, a significant impact on lifetime earnings and things like that.
#
And building of human capital.
#
And even though over and over again, it's been shown that children are not at risk at
#
all or, you know, at such low risk that it could be the flu or, you know, any one of
#
I mean, they're at higher risk from air pollution in Delhi than from COVID, you know, in those
#
particular age groups in one sense.
#
That we really should have made effort as a society to keep, you know, schools open
#
and maybe find another way to mitigate the costs on the older generation.
#
But once again, all the incentives are stacked against that because these kids don't vote
#
for a very long time, right?
#
So one lesson for me, and I'm only being partly facetious because I'm laughing, but I do want
#
to think about this seriously, is should we, I mean, I think I would seriously consider
#
reducing the voting age, right, to maybe like 14 or something like that.
#
Like, I think the voting age right now is too high.
#
And even if it's 18, people don't start voting at 18, they're in college.
#
They just got, you know, a privilege of driving and drinking and things like that, or, you
#
know, being able to buy a chainsaw if you live in the United States, right?
#
So now we really want to think about getting them started younger.
#
Maybe they will think more about democratic politics.
#
Maybe they need an interest group backing them.
#
We are really missing a very big lobby that has student interests in mind, right?
#
So there are lobbies that pretend to have student interests in mind, like school teachers,
#
They're their own lobby.
#
In fact, all the COVID closures are to protect the teachers, not the students, right?
#
Because the teachers who are of a certain age and might get infected.
#
So as outrageous as this sounds, I don't see adults making amazing decisions.
#
So I don't think age has anything to do with it.
#
But I do think, you know, there is some merit in maybe start voting younger because some
#
of these intergenerational trade-offs might become a little less skewed, you know, against
#
the future, against the children as it may.
#
Yeah, the idea of lowering the voting age is so counterintuitive that, you know, one
#
reflexively thinks, what the hell?
#
So I'm going to, so whenever I hear counterintuitive ideas, I'm kind of don't react to it immediately.
#
It takes some time to process it.
#
Though it does strike me that one, you are, of course, absolutely right that adults make
#
And it's not like adults are particularly mature, you know, when you are a young person,
#
you think that, oh, people in their 40s have everything figured out and then you reach
#
your 40s and you realize that everyone is winging it, including you.
#
But my other question there would be that 14 year olds wouldn't necessarily be an interest
#
group for their own interests as regards their future selves, because, you know, it might
#
be a bit much for them to, to expect them also to think about future trade-offs and
#
The intuitive solutions that, oh, social security is good, it will take care of all of us just
#
like my parents are doing now is probably more attractive.
#
But then, I mean, I realized that as I say this, I am in danger of condescending to 14
#
year olds and perhaps the world would be a better place if 14 year olds instead of 60
#
But yeah, that's my instinctive.
#
You know, 14 year old kids can run a paper route, right?
#
So I mean, if that is still a thing, it's not a thing anymore.
#
But let, okay, let me give you a different example.
#
They can shovel snow, it's no season here.
#
They can walk my dogs, right?
#
My dogs are the most important things in my life and I trust them with 16 year old kids,
#
And they're very responsible.
#
So in one sense, just like adults, I think even with kids, and I don't have any, so maybe
#
I'm a little overly optimistic about this.
#
Alex has raised teenagers already, so he can tell us more.
#
But my sense is when people need to be informed about something, they get informed about it,
#
Right now, we have no guarantee that adults are informed about these policies either.
#
My hunch is not that the moment they get the right to vote earlier, they will immediately
#
But I do think lobbies will get created, interest groups will get created that will cater to
#
Above 50, above 60 age group, there might be something like AARP for kids, you know,
#
that actually sends them brochures that they don't need and informs them about things and
#
tells them how to vote and gives them some discounts and Teen Vogue or something.
#
But here's a way of generalizing a little bit.
#
I mean, I think it's true that the space of institutions, including democratic institutions
#
that we know, is a very small part of the potential space.
#
And we ought to have more experimentation in governance systems.
#
And like to generalize what Trudy said, how about we have a distribution of votes such
#
that 18 year olds get, you know, five votes, and it decreases over time.
#
So every decade, you get, you know, one fewer vote, you know, so six year olds only get
#
And when you immediately hear this, Amit, as you said, what this is totally crazy.
#
But if you think about it a little bit, I mean, it makes a lot of sense in that young
#
people, they're the most affected by any decisions because they're going to live the longest,
#
So they have the most incentive to think long term, maybe you're right that they don't have
#
the ability, but maybe 18 year olds or 20 year olds, but they have the most incentive
#
On the other hand, you know, the 70 or 80 year olds, even the really lucky ones, they're
#
not going to be around for that much longer.
#
Now, maybe the counter argument is that they have the wisdom, you know, or they think about
#
their kids more and, you know, and so forth.
#
So I don't know which one of these arguments is correct.
#
But it's interesting to me that what seems like a very radical position that votes should
#
be weighted according to age with people who are younger getting a greater weight.
#
That seems like very, very different from anything we've ever done, and yet perfectly
#
I mean, there's nothing obviously wrong with it.
#
And I think if we had that system, suppose for random reasons that we had started with
#
that system, if then you were to argue, no, no, no, no, everyone should just get one vote
#
People say, are you crazy?
#
That's a stupid system.
#
Why would you give everybody just one vote, you know?
#
So it seems like there's a lot of room for different types of governance systems.
#
We're seeing this a little bit in blockchain, new ways of governing systems.
#
But more generally, I would like to see a lot more experimentation in collective governance.
#
Buchanan and Talek started some of this, but we don't see very much of it.
#
You know, we developed our democratic institutions in, you know, late 1700s, 1800s, and haven't
#
really changed them since then.
#
And you know, just in the vein of this whole experimentation thing.
#
So I started with a really radical position.
#
Now let me give you a maybe more palatable version of that.
#
I don't think it is that outrageous to have kids involved in, say, referendum questions,
#
In all schools or, you know, legalizing marijuana or, you know, legalizing, you know, whatever
#
is the driving or drinking age and things like that.
#
I think they have the most skin in the game and they should have a seat at the table weighted
#
I think it would be a great idea to experiment and have children in India vote in the Panchayati
#
Raj elections, for instance, right?
#
Because that is where you're really thinking about long run public goods building, the
#
You know, they're the people who run the local schools, right?
#
And that might be a good way to break the stronghold of the teachers union who are paid
#
by the government and propped up by the government.
#
And maybe, you know, we can get 14 year old kids to start voting in Panchayati Raj elections
#
or on specific referendum questions.
#
So I think that's, you know, maybe a little better than like, you know, overall stepping
#
away from one individual one vote systems that we have and maybe experiment on particular
#
There's an agenda sitting in a question of which issue gets what age group to vote and
#
there's a whole public choice literature about that.
#
But I do think there is merit and experimentation.
#
Yeah, no, you know, I was chatting on a panel discussion a few days ago about cricket where,
#
you know, I was telling people who are sort of, you know, purists of test cricket, cricket
#
tragics as it were, who hate 2020 cricket that listen, if 2020 cricket had come first,
#
you would think that the idea of playing a sport over five days is completely absurd.
#
So you have the anchoring effect of an existing format.
#
And similarly, if 14 year olds were allowed to vote today and you were to propose that,
#
no, we should, you know, lift the age to 18, there would be outrage and scandal everywhere.
#
So you know, whenever we encounter what appears to be a radical idea, we should just think
#
about, you know, are we being anchored by an earlier and old normal as it were.
#
And at this point, I'll tell you a little personal anecdote and it will seem irrelevant,
#
but I'll tell you why I am telling it.
#
So when I was 18 or so, because of Punjabi jeans and all that, I had a beard.
#
So I had grown this big beard when I was 18.
#
And I went to play the Maharashtra junior chess championships in a city called Aurangabad.
#
And this was in the early 1990s.
#
And after six rounds, I was the sole leader having beaten the local favorites also.
#
So the next day, it was a nine round tournament.
#
So the next day, their main English newspaper, some local newspaper, not one of the national
#
ones, but it was the biggest English newspaper then had me on their front page, a photograph
#
of me with my beard had me on my front page, not the sports page, the front page with the
#
headline is this man really under 20, which was what juniors was.
#
And you know, it's actually a valid, though I was of course legit and I showed my birth
#
certificate and all that, but it is actually a scam in many parts of Northern India because
#
people want to play for under 19 and under 16.
#
There's a, you know, they, they fake their age and they have fake certificates.
#
And there is in fact a joke about the Pakistani cricket, who was 17 for 10 years.
#
And it strikes me that if you actually, you know, had this kind of proportional, the weight
#
ages for younger people where a 14 year old gets five votes, then you would have a similar
#
scam kind of cropping up.
#
Actually, you know, that way maybe we can shoot, kill two birds with one stone and the
#
government has better incentive to register birds in India.
#
And just throwing this out there, that if the birth certificate becomes such a big issue.
#
And as if that process cannot get corrupted and as if you don't have a state capacity
#
problem, but I guess blockchain could be a solution down the line, right?
#
But you know, going back to the thing you said, which is this radical, you know, we
#
get anchored to particular systems and then anything else sounds crazy.
#
I think we should take a leaf out of like Ambedkar's book, like introducing universal
#
adult franchise in India in 1950 is one of the most outrageous things that the world
#
has ever heard of, right?
#
And literally nobody thought it would work, right?
#
Everyone said, this is going to be bad, 90% of your population is illiterate.
#
How are illiterate people going to even know the name to put on the ballot?
#
And you know, I mean, we've moved to a system of symbols and hence the Lotus and the Han
#
and they, like they managed to solve every single problem.
#
India is a very thriving democracy in terms of voting, right?
#
India votes in overwhelming numbers, one of the highest voter turnouts in the world, repeatedly
#
across all levels of election, local to national.
#
So this thing that was called the most outrageous experiment to ever be conducted, right?
#
You're handing women the right to vote along with everyone else, right?
#
How are we going to verify women who are in Parda?
#
They're going to cover their face, right?
#
How do we register their name, Mrs. So-and-so or by their own name?
#
These crazy questions that popped up, they're all there in Ornit Shani's book and you know,
#
we can read about it, but it was an outrageous experiment and now we just completely take
#
So maybe we should be like Ambedkar and push for some really, really outrageous experiments,
#
And have, you know, illiterate people, young people, 14 year olds, why not?
#
Fascinating, fascinating.
#
And even to ultrasound on babies still in the womb to figure out their voting preferences,
#
technology can achieve...
#
That's illegal in India.
#
So Alex, let's, let's move on to your second lesson.
#
We're only on the second lesson.
#
Second is something which Mark Andreessen, the venture capitalist, but also the writer
#
of the first web browser, he said a few years ago, software is eating the world.
#
And I think that's true in a lot of circumstances, but what is particular, what we're seeing
#
now is software is eating the biological world because these mRNA vaccines, it's really incredible,
#
Here's an amazing fact is that the virus was coded, you know, by Chinese scientists, something
#
like January 13th, and was sent...
#
The people in the United States got it at Moderna, and they developed a vaccine literally
#
within two days, right?
#
And so the digital virus got to the United States before the actual virus did.
#
You know, maybe there's some dispute about when exactly it came, but the digital virus
#
moved around the world very, very quickly, right?
#
And so Moderna, who has developed this vaccine, they never even looked at the virus itself,
#
So they didn't get any samples, you know, they just looked at the code.
#
So they read the code, and then they figured out, okay, here is a...
#
Here's the protein, which we're going to go after, and in the computer, they designed
#
the vaccine, the mRNA vaccine, and then essentially what happens is that that vaccine is printed.
#
So on previous vaccines, you know, we grew them in these vats, right?
#
And that's actually part of the danger because one, if you're dealing with the actual virus,
#
it could contaminate, and get out, and infect the vaccine itself.
#
And two, when you're growing things, there is an opportunity for bacterial infection,
#
and it's very complicated, always very...
#
It's like cooking, it's like making a souffle, right?
#
So the old way of making a vaccine was like making a souffle, and you get just one element
#
wrong and the souffle collapses.
#
In the new style, the mRNA vaccines, you're more or less printing the vaccine.
#
And then when you inject it into the body, you're actually not injecting the vaccine
#
per se, you're injecting instructions.
#
And the body's cells pick up those instructions, and they use that to generate the so-called
#
spike protein, which then the body is alerted to, oh, this is a foreign, gets a sneak peek
#
at, this is a foreign invader.
#
And so the body's immune system learns how to attack the spike protein so that when it's
#
actually challenged by the real virus, the body has built up its defenses.
#
So what we have done in effect is, this is what we...
#
We knew we were getting there when we had the human genome project.
#
We've always talked about, well, we had the blueprint, and now we're gonna read the code.
#
This is the code, but this is a really a tremendous example of this in practice.
#
We read the code of the virus, we created a code for the vaccine, we inject that into
#
the body, and then the body produces its own defenses by reading this code.
#
And we're gonna be able to do that for many, many other things, because everything that
#
goes on in the body involves creating a protein, right?
#
Creating some kind of machine, which is basically what proteins are.
#
And there's a system for reading the DNA or the RNA, the messenger RNA, and creating these
#
And so everything which goes on in the body is creating these proteins.
#
So one of the things which Moderna is working on, for example, is to target the messenger
#
RNA to the type of cells which you need to read it and create a new protein.
#
So one of the things that they're working on is you have a heart attack, you need to
#
develop new heart muscle.
#
So if you can have a mRNA and you inject it, and so that it's read by the heart muscle
#
cells, and then they're told, create this protein for building blood vessels, for building
#
So you can instruct the body to fix itself.
#
And we're gonna see a lot more of this.
#
And so I think that one of the unexpected or one of the unintended consequences of this
#
is that we've advanced the mRNA technology.
#
And more and more, biology is going to be understood as software.
#
And we're going to be able to program that software to do things which are gonna save
#
lives and improve health.
#
It almost feels magical, right?
#
And I remember an old Douglas Adams quote where he's talking about religion.
#
And you know how one of the things that religion tries to do through ritual and spectacle and
#
these grand churches and all of that is institute a sense of awe and wonder in the person.
#
And Adams's point was that, you know, when I first understood how natural selection works,
#
the science of it, that is what filled me with awe and wonder.
#
And that's what this kind of science does.
#
You know, like, although I'm utterly ignorant of the science, I was skeptical of a vaccine
#
coming so fast simply because there had never been a coronavirus vaccine before.
#
There were other vaccines for the flus, which are not caused by coronaviruses, but never
#
a vaccine for the coronavirus.
#
And we've seen how long the HIV vaccine has been, they've been trying to get an HIV vaccine
#
out which is also, you know, addressing a virus and they failed to do that.
#
So to have this happen within a period of months and almost, you know, with a software
#
update as it were instead of, you know, working with old clunky hardware seems to me magical.
#
And it also seems to me that this also tells us that we are old clunky hardware and that
#
we are creating this incredible software which can, you know, although people, you know,
#
talk about, talk in alarmist tones about the existential threat to humanity from it.
#
I think it's incredible because it can just, you know, our hardware is what it is, but
#
our software can improve our lives in such incredible ways.
#
You know, this brings me to something that was one of my lessons, but I think this is
#
a nice point to add this in.
#
Like one of the things I've learned is science is on its path to solving these problems.
#
The problem is economic illiteracy, right?
#
So, so this is your lesson three, this is my lesson three, but it works perfectly well
#
with our, it follows perfectly from what Alex is saying because just think about this, right?
#
By late Jan, we have already coded and sequenced the vaccine, right?
#
Everything else is an enormous failure in the understanding of costs and benefits and
#
allocation and delivery, right?
#
I mean, I'm in December right now, we're just shy of Christmas.
#
I don't expect to get the vaccine because I'm young and healthy and, you know, not an
#
essential worker or anything before the end of spring, maybe even halfway through summer,
#
depending on when Virginia gets its act together.
#
It would have by then been maybe 17, 18 months since we actually have the scientific answer,
#
And all the other problems are things like, you know, the omission commission bias that
#
You know, one thing Alex, I don't know if you mentioned this here or before, but you
#
know, the FDA is supposed to be bureaucratic, right?
#
Like, I mean, their entire job is to slow down things so that they get the mandate during
#
a global pandemic, which is also an emergency.
#
They just don't know how to speed it up because every protocol in their book is to slow things
#
down and make them safer and consider every, you know, one side of the trade off alone.
#
That's the job we gave them to do, right?
#
So we don't get more Ford Pinto equivalents in the, in the, you know, medical world or
#
And now we're telling them act fast and we just don't have an alternative.
#
FDA's emergency procedures are slower than their regular procedures, believe it or not,
#
Their emergency procedures stop labs from innovating and private labs from testing,
#
So if they hadn't declared an emergency, then they, we might have had better testing in
#
the United States than we actually did after the FDA declared the emergency, right?
#
So there are like just these bizarre institutions we've created that have no, I mean, it's not
#
clear that they're good on science, but let's assume they're good on the science, but they're
#
certainly not good on the economics, right?
#
We had such a big and political problem with masks in the United States because initially
#
Dr. Fauci and others, right, they said masks are not necessary because they were worried
#
that there won't be enough masks for, you know, frontline workers.
#
That is a failure in understanding demand and supply.
#
You know, that is not a failure in communication and that is certainly not a failure.
#
I mean, you could have just called Alex Dabrock or watch like one of the MRU videos and they
#
will tell you, I have made a video on price gouging and how supply is forthcoming, right?
#
Like ask anyone who knows Econ 101 and they will tell you that if you tell people masks
#
are essential, supply of masks is going to be forthcoming.
#
There is no inelastic demand curve for that.
#
So my big lesson is we are not teaching enough people outside of, you know, professional
#
academic economists or maybe we will go to business school and take a couple of sequences.
#
We don't teach them enough economics, right?
#
And the follow up to that is we certainly don't teach them enough ethics, right, to
#
think about these broader questions of, you know, how we choose, solve the trolley problem
#
or how do we solve a challenge trial problem or something like that, which I also think
#
But economics could have, you know, just having basic understanding of how supply chains work
#
and the world works would have gotten us this vaccine a hell of a lot sooner than it actually
#
The failure to do cost benefit analysis, even very simple cost benefit analysis is unbelievable
#
and it affected even economists.
#
I've just been shocked, actually, the debates that I have had with fellow economists who
#
in the face of thousands of people dying are still saying, well, maybe the, you know, FDA
#
waiting three weeks, you know, maybe that's okay.
#
We still need to do peer review.
#
And like just not being able to, you know, run some simple numbers and do the cost benefit
#
analysis, run the numbers, you know, and a lot of economists even have not been able
#
to do that with some exceptions.
#
Like Paul Romer has been great right from the very beginning.
#
He ran the numbers on testing and said, look, this is insane.
#
We're losing trillions of dollars in wealth and we could save this with billions of dollars
#
And he was saying that, you know, practically from day one.
#
So a few economists have been good.
#
You know, when I spoke with people in Congress, you know, I told them, you know, like I'm
#
a fairly conservative kind of free market economist, you know, I don't say this very
#
often, in fact, I've never said this before, but now is the time to throw money at the
#
And, you know, it's not like some genius insight here.
#
The insight was, you know, the US economy is losing hundreds of billions of dollars
#
every single month and we have trillions on one side and billions on the other.
#
That's a very simple cost benefit analysis.
#
We need to invest in vaccines.
#
We need to invest in testing and this is going to save lives and it's going to save money
#
And yet that was just incredibly hard even to get that simple message across.
#
You know, we've got sticker shock when the Kramer and I and the team were saying we ought
#
to be spending, you know, 100 billion on vaccines and people were, you can't say 100 billion.
#
That's just going to freak people out, you know, sticker shock.
#
And so fortunately we did Operation Warp Speed, which was very, very good.
#
You know, Operation Warp Speed is really the only bright spot in the Trump administration's
#
response to the pandemic, but it still was too small and we told them it was too small.
#
I mean, again, I want to say I'm grateful.
#
I really am grateful for Operation Warp Speed and Peter Marks at the FDA and Perna, General
#
Perna and Zlawi and all those guys have done great, better than anybody else in the world
#
in fact, as Europe is now finding out.
#
But we should have done more and it was obvious that we should have done more.
#
And, you know, so one part is like just Operation Warp Speed and like getting like the big numbers
#
and those kinds of, you know, someone needs to do this analysis and get it across sort
#
But a lot of it is even like baby stuff, right?
#
I mean, we're having a run on toilet paper in the United States.
#
It's like, you know, you're in Soviet Union or something.
#
The whole thing is nuts.
#
It's just a complete misunderstanding of, you know, very basic things like, you know,
#
people struggling to get a mask, people struggling to get hand sanitizer, you know, not being
#
I bought hand sanitizer in a gallon size and I sent it to our friend Mario Rizzo in New
#
York City because they had all sorts of like price gouging laws where nobody could sell
#
hand sanitizer in reasonable quantities.
#
So this is just like, I mean, it's so basic.
#
If a student of mine in my principles class did not know the answers to this question,
#
they would probably fail the class, right?
#
And these are the people at the highest levels of government and policy and technology who
#
are making decisions, who are allowed to do this, not just with other people's money,
#
but with other people's lives, right?
#
And it permeates everything.
#
It's like, you know, I mean, we have Emily Oster.
#
She has this great substack on, you know, COVID and its impact on children and school
#
closures and things like that, and just massive amount of evidence on the costs on the one
#
side because of the loss of learning, especially disproportionately falling on the poor and
#
the benefits of, you know, allowing a little bit of, you know, opening of schools and maybe
#
closing something else down instead.
#
What shocks me is these are non-starters in the United States.
#
There are just no takers for these conversations, right?
#
It's like even in India, opening schools right now is dead on arrival.
#
No one will even consider it, but you can go to a movie theater, right?
#
Because that's 25% occupancy, movie theaters are allowed.
#
So the whole thing just seems a little bit like, you know, odd to me that these people
#
don't get these basic concepts.
#
Not only do they not know cost benefit analysis, as Alex pointed out, they don't even know
#
that cost benefit analysis should be done to guide the decision, right?
#
Step two is you pick up the phone and call Michael Kramer and Alex Dabrock and say, Hey,
#
you guys seem like you know how to do this thing.
#
Why don't you do it for us?
#
But the instinct is just not to do it.
#
The second thing I want to say here is there is this extreme reaction to profit, right?
#
Like just people making money.
#
That is enough for progressives in the United States to shut every good idea down.
#
We are okay delaying the vaccine, but we don't want a big pharma company to profit.
#
And I'm sort of the opposite, right?
#
I'm like, can we make them more profit so that I can get it tomorrow instead of getting
#
the vaccine six months from now?
#
But this somehow like almost like, I don't know what it is.
#
It's like some visceral biological reaction against profit making by somebody else, where
#
even ideas that would benefit oneself, like they will cut their nose to spite their face.
#
By day, I mean the New York Times, right?
#
Like that's how bad the narrative and the commentary is when it discusses things like,
#
you know, should you give someone a subsidy or a short contract or some, it just complete
#
misunderstanding of what is at stake.
#
You know, do we really need to prevent them from making a few extra dollars or a few extra
#
million dollars if we can save, you know, so many lives?
#
Every life, by the way, you know, the rough estimate is like nine to $10 million.
#
I think Alex will know this number better with Operation Warp Speed, right?
#
But what's the, you know, economists reduce the human life, we're always called reductive,
#
But they reduce it to a pretty large and meaningful number that tells you that we must act very,
#
So those are the sorts of things that have just annoyed me and I have become more of
#
an economic imperialist than I ever was before this.
#
And I come from George Mason, so I was already there, right?
#
But I'm really, I have gone nuts in my head over this.
#
This just really bothers me.
#
Yeah, riffing off Menken, I said progressivism, the haunting fear that someone somewhere is
#
So, I mean, I have a couple of thoughts.
#
One, I'd like to clarify to the listeners that when we use all these numbers, when Alex
#
says that, you know, hundreds of billions were lost by the economy every month, these
#
We're not just talking about money.
#
These have economics, economics has humanitarian consequences.
#
This is lives being lost, futures being stunted.
#
It's humanitarian all the way, which is why, you know, one of the reasons I call Indira
#
Gandhi such a monster was not just what she did during the emergency and the forced sterilizations
#
and all that, but the disastrous economics, which kept millions of people in India in
#
poverty for decades longer than necessary.
#
And some of that came down from this mindset, like about profit, you know, Nehru once famously
#
said to JRD Tata, quote, do not speak to me of profit.
#
It is a dirty word, stop quote.
#
And this brings me to my question of one reason people do think of profit in these terms is
#
because they think of the world in zero-sum ways, which our brains are wired to do because
#
we have evolved in times of scarcity.
#
And it's rational to think in terms of zero-sum ways that, you know, if somebody else gets
#
something that means I can't and therefore it's that kind of an equation.
#
And you see the same thing playing out where people are complaining about all the companies
#
that have profited during the pandemic.
#
But the bottom line is how do you make a profit in a free market?
#
You know, one way, of course, is you use the coercive power of the state and you become
#
a crony and you use those privileges.
#
But in a free market where you aren't being a crony, the only way to make a profit is
#
to make people better off.
#
It is a positive sum game.
#
You make their lives better off in some way and you'll make a profit.
#
And like you said, if they were allowed to make more profit, they'd work harder at serving
#
To me, profit is much more, much more effective than philanthropy in that sense.
#
So my question here is that, sure, I get your lament that economic illiteracy remains a
#
Even if the science works out, you know, what do we do about the economic illiteracy?
#
But isn't that almost an insurmountable problem because our brains are wired to think in ways
#
which mitigate against, you know, like many of the concepts that we know explain the world,
#
like the positive sum nature of voluntary exchange, like spontaneous order are deeply
#
unintuitive and therefore people simply, you know, resist accepting those kinds of truths
#
and even trained economists will often, you know, revert back to the way their brains
#
So is that more of a lament than a lesson?
#
No, you know, I'm an optimist and this might be because of my choice of profession, but
#
I have taught principles microeconomics less than Alex has.
#
He's written a book that I have taught, but I have taught that book and you can literally
#
see the wheels turning in the class, right?
#
When you explain how choice is made on the margin or the world is not a zero sum game
#
or, you know, the gains from trade, I teach comparative advantage and literally like their
#
brain explodes when that production possibility frontier like goes out.
#
I don't think of myself as anyone with exceptional capacity or my students were certainly not
#
people of above average intelligence.
#
They were just regular college students, you know, trying to get through whatever one of
#
their basic one-on-one courses they got it.
#
It is unintuitive, but that means it needs to be taught, right?
#
Even 12 times 12 was unintuitive until I learned what it was.
#
So I think this whole like, I know the zero sum game thing, but there is, we don't think
#
of economics as a science.
#
We don't think it has value in anything beyond making money, and I think that is just a fundamental
#
misunderstanding of, you know, I don't know if this is the, it does, Alex, how does the
#
Does it say economics is the science of living a better life?
#
It starts with the example of insanity.
#
No, no, no, the quotation before the...
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
#
Economics is all about getting the most out of life.
#
Economics is all about getting the most out of life, right?
#
So it's not about making money.
#
It's not like the scientific abstract thing, though there are abstract concepts.
#
If I can teach it, right, and I'm not Isaac Newton to like do any of like genius level
#
And if my students can learn it, then it can be done.
#
We just need to start them younger.
#
Yeah, I mean, Shruti is right, of course.
#
She was a great teacher, as are you, Amit.
#
But there is another problem, and that is that we have collectivized decision making
#
so much that actually teaching people economics is sort of the second best solution in a way
#
Because we are making so many decisions collectively, and that is now our reflex, right, to think
#
that every single decision, well, we got to talk about it.
#
You know, we have to subject this to the democratic process.
#
Everyone has to have their take on Twitter and so forth.
#
While in the past, we wouldn't debate price gouging because people would just raise their
#
If you have a free market, you know, things happen as if guided by an invisible hand,
#
And the problem is, is that now the invisible hand needs permission.
#
It needs permission to do just about anything.
#
We have locked the invisible hand in a cage, and sometimes we'll say, okay, we'll let it
#
out, you know, and we'll let it do its magic here.
#
But before we do that, we got to have a debate about it.
#
We got to talk about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
We have to have some, you know, some voting, and everyone gets their say, and so...
#
And this is the problem with when you collectivize in particular innovation, nobody, very few
#
people are in favor of innovation, right?
#
Because innovation always disrupts rents.
#
It disrupts the ordinary way of doing things, the old way of doing things, the way which
#
has satisfied people in the past.
#
And innovation benefits only a small number of people at the very beginning.
#
Often that small number of people, they get rich, you know, like Jeff Bezos, something
#
And then over time, everyone benefits, as we've discovered in the pandemic, as we've
#
all had to rely on Amazon trucks delivering us goods and services to survive.
#
But if you had to put that up to a vote, it would never have passed.
#
You know, I give the example of Uber, right?
#
Uber was very wise in scaling up extremely quickly and starting before anybody had a
#
chance to vote on this, right?
#
So if you would ask people, do you think it's a good idea that strangers in a car should
#
be able to pick other people up, other strangers, and give them a ride?
#
Our mothers always told us, right?
#
There's the one thing our mother kept telling us, never get in a car with a stranger, okay?
#
You know, if a stranger offers you a ride, say no and run away as quickly as you can.
#
Now, you want to make it so that anybody can stop and give you a ride just because you
#
get a message on your phone?
#
If we had had to put Uber up to a vote, Uber would never have won, right?
#
And there's a huge amount of innovations like that.
#
Like Asprin would never have gotten through the FDA process today, right?
#
And so we have collectivized decision-making so much that now we have to teach people economics
#
just so that we might hope to get some decent decisions.
#
But I would also, and we should do that and I want to do that, but we should also, let's
#
lead more decisions to individual choice and the market and let's collectivize fewer decisions.
#
But Alex, even that insight that one must collectivize fewer decisions come from having
#
an understanding of the market that you can have, you know, in the right institutional
#
setting self-interest aligned with social interest.
#
That idea itself is not intuitive to anyone outside of economics.
#
No, it can also come from a basic moral compass.
#
For example, one thing I want to kind of clarify for my listeners is that when Alex is speaking
#
against collectivized decision-making and I agree with him entirely, he is not saying
#
that an autocrat or a dictator make the decision instead.
#
What he is saying is leave it to individual choice, respect individual choice and things
#
Individuals can make decisions for themselves on what they want to do and those kind of
#
voluntary interaction in the marketplace can help and to give a very brief econ 101 for
#
people who are wondering why we are not against price gouging.
#
You know, what would happen if you put a price control on masks, for example, if you say
#
masks are important, therefore they should not be too expensive, therefore they should
#
only be like 30 rupees each or whatever.
#
What would instantly happen is that your existing supply of masks would be sold out on a first
#
come first serve basis, leading to an immediate scarcity.
#
What would then further happen is that, you know, a higher price would be an incentive
#
to potential manufacturers to put masks out there for that evil word profit, which would
#
benefit everybody because your supply of mass would go up.
#
But that information and that incentive would no longer be there because who's going to
#
make mass for 30 bucks.
#
And therefore even that supply would kind of not get filled up.
#
So on that note of concurrence, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And then when we come back, we shall go through the rest of our 84 lessons from 2020.
#
As many of you know, I'll soon be coming out with a four volume anthology of the Seen
#
and the Unseen books organized around the themes of politics, history, economics and
#
These days I'm wading through over three million words of conversation from all my episodes
#
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#
And for this to happen, I needed transcripts.
#
And that was made possible by a remarkable young startup called Tap Chief.
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So do go over to TapChief.com and check out all that Tap Chief has to offer.
#
Maybe they could solve your problem too.
#
Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen.
#
Shruti Rajgopal and Alex Tabarrok and I are sharing five lessons each which we learned
#
from 2020 or which we think 2020 holds for us.
#
And we are through seven of them.
#
There are eight more to go.
#
And of course, it's entirely natural for Shruti and Alex to do this because they are professional
#
I, on the other hand, am a bit of a pretender.
#
So I hope you're not too bored by my lesson.
#
You know, since we are mixing the order up like this, I'll kind of go next because it
#
follows from what both of you were talking about earlier.
#
And it is outrageously enough, given that you guys are the educators, it's about education.
#
But it's been something that I've been thinking about for a while.
#
And this lesson is not one of the standard lessons that people are learning about education
#
from 2020 about, you know, whether online education is good or bad or whatever.
#
It is just that, you know, there is, like Shruti, you spoke about, you know, how one
#
of the things that plagues America, for example, is these outdated institutions like the FDA.
#
And we've also spoken before this of the anchoring effects of old normals.
#
And it strikes me that the way education is designed is it's a complete misfit for the
#
Like our education system essentially was, you know, designed in the 19th century.
#
And all it's, you know, everything that it kind of does in the sense that you have so
#
many classes or standards or grades, you know, you go from class one to class ten, these
#
are the subjects you learn.
#
Everybody just goes one year at a time, kids of the same age study together what the subjects
#
are, the way that they are taught.
#
The entire structure of that system, I think, is open to questioning because, you know,
#
the premises that existed when that system was designed, they don't really exist right
#
We know that higher education, for example, works for signaling, but does it work for
#
Like, you know, in India, for example, I'd done an episode on education with Kartik Mudlidharan
#
where he said that the Indian education system is designed to sort and not teach, is good
#
for sorting versus teaching, we're not really teaching anything.
#
And this is reflected in the supply demand mismatch that, yes, there is a jobs crisis,
#
but regardless of that, there is an issue that very often companies cannot find trained
#
workers while you have these tens of thousands of graduates and even PhDs who are coming
#
out of Indian universities who do not have the skills to do anything useful in the world,
#
at least not given to them by education.
#
On their own, they might pick up stuff, you know, so you have hundreds of PhDs applying
#
for the single vacancy of a peon.
#
And this alone indicates that there is, you know, a savage problem here.
#
And what I find is that many of the new online startups that are starting are again mimicking
#
this old model of education, that, you know, someone like a by Jews is basically focusing
#
on what your school syllabus is and just teaching you to perform better at school.
#
And you know, it is few to many, by few to many, I mean, it's a few people teaching many
#
And to me, a good market should work differently.
#
What I think is that over a period of time, and this is a problem to solve for young entrepreneurs
#
who might be listening to this, I think we need a new model that incentivizes those who
#
have knowledge to impart it to those who need that knowledge.
#
And we also therefore need to create a mechanism of filtering.
#
Anybody should be able to teach anything if they feel they are able to.
#
Anybody should be able to kind of, you know, learn from them.
#
And that's the way that we'll actually learn useful things like if I might be controversial,
#
you know, whenever I hear about these outrageous college loans in the USA and all this talk
#
of forgiving them and all of that, you know, from my vantage point in India, it just seems
#
to me that listen, if you've, there's something wrong with the market, if education is so
#
expensive that you have to take a loan and you cannot pay it back.
#
And also if what you are learning does not actually give you real world skills for you
#
to earn the money very fast that you spent learning it, something is broken in that whole
#
system and is possibly beyond my education to, beyond my understanding to figure out
#
where it is broken and how it can be fixed.
#
But you know, it seems clear to me that many of these things that we take for granted that
#
this is how learning and education should be structured is something that we at least
#
need to think about seriously.
#
And you guys are the professionals.
#
So what do you feel about this?
#
And I think it's much even, it's a really deep, deep, deep seated problem because here's
#
The private schools are really not much better.
#
That's the amazing thing.
#
You know, I'll speak about the United States, but this is true for any as well.
#
Yes, they're a little bit better about teaching, reading, writing arithmetic.
#
You know, if you have a choice, whatever it's done in the private school.
#
But in terms of innovation, in terms of using these new techniques in teaching in a different
#
way, in teaching things which are more relevant to work, the private schools are no better.
#
So this is the case, I think, where something is so deep seated that the market, you know,
#
hasn't solved this problem.
#
Let me just give you a few examples which have occurred to me is like something I think
#
schools should teach is like memorization techniques, right?
#
This is probably something Ahmed, you got from playing cards, right?
#
This is extremely useful to know, you know, what's on the deck, right?
#
And there are techniques which people can use, you know, memory palaces and so forth
#
to vastly increase their ability to learn and retain material.
#
And yet nowhere is this kind of stuff taught or fast math, right?
#
There are techniques to quickly multiply numbers and so forth, which can be taught, but schools
#
don't teach this stuff.
#
Why isn't there even just a few places which, you know, take a radically different approach?
#
It's very puzzling to me.
#
Part of it, I think, is that we say schooling is about education.
#
But what we see is obviously it's actually a lot of it is about warehousing, right?
#
The parents don't want to look after the kids, right?
#
And we see a lot of complaints about that right now, right?
#
People are complaining, you know, I can't go to work.
#
This is much more difficult for me, you know, and I'm not discounting those complaints.
#
It is difficult to have kids at home all the time.
#
But a lot of what schooling does is just take the kids off the parents' hands for a while.
#
So the demanders are not as much interested in education as you might imagine.
#
But still, it is puzzling to me, Ahmed, why we don't see more radical experimentation
#
and innovation in teaching and education.
#
You know, speaking of learning useless things, I got an incredible education, I mean, compared
#
to 99% of Indians or maybe even more, right?
#
And I went to an all-girls, you know, Catholic run, missionary run school, and I know how
#
to knit, I know how to sew, I know how to crochet, I know how to bake, right?
#
I could have sewn my own masks if the price was high enough and, you know, surpassed my
#
But I don't know how to code because they were, you know, teaching us how to fold napkins
#
and knit and turning us into very well-educated upper-class elite housewives at some level,
#
So my job was to raise kids and knit their mittens.
#
It was not to know coding so that one day I can use Python to make graphs.
#
I still don't know how to do that.
#
I asked my research assistants to do it for me, right?
#
These young kids who grew up coding, who just like do things 10 times faster than I do them.
#
So there is, and I'm not that old, boys who are my counterparts in my generation were
#
taught how to code, right?
#
So first, I think there is this sense of, you know, this version of what kind of education
#
There's this one size fits all, very centralized model.
#
If you're rich, you must need this kind of an education.
#
If you're female, you must be educated in this way, right?
#
If you want a great job, you must be educated in English.
#
And, you know, we have all these, you know, very standard methods of thinking about it.
#
So in India, the problem is complicated by the fact that we have like complete state
#
capture on curriculum, right?
#
So if in a marketplace, we might have had a little bit more, you know, experimentation
#
in the state and just, you know, dead, right, they can barely master teaching kids, you
#
know, numeracy and literacy, let alone experiment in any way possible on other margins.
#
So I think one part of it is centralization, you know, one is, of course, centralization
#
But there's also like this kind of group thinking society, you know, they want all schools to
#
teach the same thing, right?
#
Because they think that's fair, it'll be all kids will get the same stuff.
#
Of course, they're not going to get the same start, right?
#
Genetics are going to determine, right, IQ and parents income are going to determine
#
90% of their lifetime and future outcomes believe, you know, as unfair as that sounds.
#
So the birth lottery is why I do everything that I do, right?
#
The reasons I can't do some of the things that I learned how to knit instead of code.
#
So I think there's that problem and we haven't quite figured out that we don't need this
#
overly centralized system either imposed socially or imposed by the government and America is
#
not that much different, you know, in one sense.
#
Our colleague, Trudy and I know our friend, Brian Kaplan, has he been on the podcast?
#
Not yet, but I keep thinking of inviting him because he has these incredible counterintuitive
#
insights which always make me kind of sit back and think.
#
Yeah, yeah, he's very good.
#
He has two twins who are extremely studious.
#
Not so much interested in sports or things like this.
#
And he went around to a bunch of private schools and said, you know, here are my kids, look,
#
they don't want to do art.
#
They don't want to do sports.
#
Can you just teach them some more mathematics?
#
And the private schools were, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, we teach the whole kid, you know.
#
We could never do that.
#
You know, it's very important that we round them out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
So he ended up homeschooling them, actually, home office schooling them.
#
They were schooled literally in the office across the hall from me.
#
And they were rounded, they intellectually were rounded.
#
They may not know how to run, you know, whatever your PT exercises or some nonsense like that,
#
but they are very well rounded kids.
#
I mean, they were pretty young when I was in graduate school.
#
They must have been in middle school then.
#
They were pretty well rounded then.
#
They have their first publication already as 18 year olds.
#
But my point is that even in this private marketplace, he could not get a deviation
#
from even, you know, even a simple one, even when he was willing to pay, right?
#
I mean, private schools are not cheap.
#
So here he is willing to give a private school, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, right,
#
And they could not deviate from the lesson plan.
#
So there's something about education, which is just, I don't understand it, actually,
#
but it's just very difficult to innovate and to break into the social, to change the social
#
And let alone, of course, we have all the problems with, you know, state intervention
#
and not having a market, but even in the market, it's less than I would have expected.
#
You know, one personal anecdote here, when I was about eight years old, my dad had to
#
go on a fellowship to the Netherlands, right?
#
And this was something related to work.
#
He had to spend seven or eight months in Netherlands.
#
My mother, who's a musician, was simultaneously invited to give a number of concerts, you
#
know, all across Europe.
#
And my parents were like, amazing.
#
My mother at that time was about the age I am right now.
#
So, you know, more credit to her at this age, I'm able to appreciate her decision so much
#
They could have left their kids with the grandparents and just taken off and spent eight months
#
And they said, no, we'll take the kids.
#
And they just yanked me and my sister out of school.
#
My sister was 11 at the time.
#
And we thought we were going to go to school in the Netherlands, right?
#
And we were so excited about it because they don't have school uniforms.
#
They have cafeterias and lockers.
#
You know, it looks like a school out of Archie comics or something like that.
#
My sister and I were like over the moon that we might get to go to school there.
#
And my parents said, why do you want to go to go to school?
#
You learn more traveling across Europe with us.
#
And we thought they're insane.
#
Everyone, my parents, you thought they were insane, yanking kids out of school for eight
#
We just toured with my mom.
#
You know, I've toured like all over Western Europe.
#
It was the opening act for a big, you know, Drupad follow up act.
#
And I've toured France for 31 days.
#
I've been to villages in France normal people haven't been to.
#
But the education I got as an eight year old was the Vienna symphony is different from
#
the Lamm Philharmonic, right?
#
It's a different kind of education, but it's the kind of education you get when you travel
#
and you see the world and you're with your parents.
#
And we came back and my parents just hired a tutor for us to like quickly pass the final
#
And we went on to the next grade.
#
And that was the end of that.
#
And nobody, you know, if my parents had been in India and they had yanked us out of school
#
to maybe travel across India like that, that would have been the end of it.
#
Like, I think there would have been a family intervention.
#
They would have come and told my parents that we're taking your kids away, your terrible
#
You have no idea what you're doing.
#
You're going to ruin their lives because they didn't learn like 12 times table or whatever.
#
And it's the amount of social pressure to get a particular kind of schooling for all
#
kids to get, you know, you know, all the typical, right?
#
In addition to schooling, you should learn a musical instrument, you should learn karate,
#
you should learn a foreign language.
#
I mean, these kids who learn the foreign language can't even order like food in French, right?
#
It's just completely useless information.
#
My foreign language was Sanskrit, which is still foreign to me.
#
So it's just like there's some system we've come up with.
#
I have no idea when it might have ever been useful.
#
It's certainly not useful today.
#
And not only do we not have experimentation, anyone willing to experiment like Brian or
#
my parents, they are punished for it.
#
You know, like there is just outrageous amount of social sanction.
#
I don't imagine a lot of people outside of, you know, Carow Hall support Brian's choice
#
to homeschool the kids or someone who knows the kids well, who know the twins well, they
#
might support that choice.
#
But everyone else will just think like these are insane parents.
#
And homeschoolers in the United States are typically vilified, right?
#
They say you want to homeschool your kids because of religious education or something
#
Because you don't want them to read Darwin or whatever the latest thing, political thing
#
So it's mired in a lot of these things.
#
I have no answers on how to break out of it.
#
I thought the big MOOCs, you know, the Khan Academy and things like MRU, of course, which
#
is very much more niche.
#
I thought that might have picked up a bigger movement in homeschooling because it used
#
to be so costly to exit the state, you know, so on that margin, a lot of the costs of exiting
#
the state school system or the social schooling system have reduced.
#
And I imagined a bigger exodus than what actually happened.
#
But my sense is it's because of what Alex said, which is schools are acting like warehouses,
#
you know, where you put your kids for six hours so that you can get your work done because
#
we can't afford nannies and we don't have grandparents in the United States and, you
#
know, those kinds of things.
#
I was also raised by my grandparents.
#
So, you know, I mean, if Khan Academy was better, I can imagine my parents just putting
#
me in front of Khan Academy and doing whatever they needed to do.
#
They might have been experimental.
#
So I think there are multiple things going on.
#
Immigration can solve the warehousing problem.
#
We're very bad on immigration in the United States, right?
#
You could have a lot of people from poorer countries who know how to raise kids really
#
Happy, well-rounded kids who are kind, good people.
#
They could be helping you raise your kids instead of warehousing them in a jail, a
#
centralized jail system, wearing masks right now.
#
But that's not an option on the table because of bad immigration laws.
#
So it's not, I think, one thing that solves it.
#
It's not just the politics of education.
#
I think it's so many things about education.
#
It's our notion of fairness.
#
It's our notion of how children must be raised, where they must go.
#
No one should be left out.
#
No one should be left behind, you know, all of those things mired in one.
#
And I guess, you know, the fact that so many people homeschool at all tells you that the
#
system is broken because homeschooling doesn't really make rational sense from a comparative
#
advantage point of view.
#
You're better off outsourcing that and just focusing on what you do.
#
But the fact that so many parents who obviously care about their kids feel the need to do
#
that is itself indicative.
#
And I've often, you know, amused at putting, you know, with other people putting together
#
a sort of a course called life lessons, which teaches you all the basic things which should
#
be taught in education, but aren't taught.
#
For example, econ 101, you know, probabilistic thinking, how the brain works, communication,
#
how to code, you know, like Alex said, memorization techniques or knowledge management, all of
#
Yeah, financial literacy.
#
Something we are terrible at in the United States.
#
I have college kids who don't know how to balance a checkbook.
#
I mean, they don't know what that means, you know, to have to manage their own money and
#
how compound interest works when they are, there's a massive amount of student debt because
#
they have no conception of how big this is going to get, right?
#
So compound interest is magical when you're an investor, right?
#
It's the devil for when you're a student in debt.
#
So just explaining those numbers to them, I mean, they need to, even putting it in the
#
compound interest calculator, it doesn't quite process until they see the, you know, the
#
exponential curve of how much they're going to have to pay the longer they have this going.
#
So the financial literacy part is one of the reasons we have such terrible levels of student
#
So let's move on now to Alex's third lesson of the day.
#
So, you know, I'm going to now sort of contradict myself a little bit because, you know, you
#
had Shruti and I on earlier and we talked about state capacity and India kind of as
#
And I've changed my mind a little bit in the following sense is that at the beginning of
#
the pandemic, I thought the US will, it'll be bad, but it'll probably be okay.
#
But I was very worried about India because already lots of pollution, lots of comorbidities,
#
I didn't, a flailing state, you know, I was very, very concerned with India.
#
And in fact, what we know is that it's been much worse in the United States than in India.
#
India has done, has made mistakes, a lot of mistakes, we can talk about that.
#
And India certainly has not done worse than the United States.
#
And so I'm less focused now on state capacity and then on what my colleague, Brian Kaplan,
#
who was always somewhat skeptical about state capacity, he calls state will, right?
#
And states have a lot of untapped power, which they can use and sometimes they do and sometimes
#
So a lot of what happened in the United States, you could say it's low state capacity, but
#
actually it's probably just low state will.
#
The Trump administration in particular, but for a whole variety of reasons of complacency
#
and, you know, regulation and so forth, we just did not have the will, you know, we just
#
did not summon the will to do radical things, to make big, big steps, to make big changes.
#
So, you know, again, I'm not supportive of this, but India had the, you know, the biggest
#
India had capacity, India showed will, India had made big moves.
#
So this idea of state capacity, I've sort of downgraded it a little bit in favor of
#
kind of state will, and I don't always understand why some states, they have the will to make
#
these big moves, make these big changes.
#
China, for example, you know, has vaccinated more than a million people.
#
China did what you would think the United States would have done, you know, 50 years
#
They said, well, we're going to create a vaccine and we're going to start giving it out to
#
people even before we've gone through all the trials.
#
So China did a lot, a lot of capacity, a lot of action, but also a lot of will.
#
And the United States, you know, I spoke with people in Congress and they would just, well,
#
what's the next, we have to wait till the next session.
#
We have to get agreement and, you know, there just wasn't the will there.
#
And it's odd because when we were attacked on 9-11, massive willpower, right?
#
I mean, there was no question that we were going to fight back and we were going to attack
#
whoever the wrong people.
#
But, yeah, I mean, but we had troops in Afghanistan, we had troops in Iraq, and we had just a
#
massive, massive, we'd spent trillions of dollars, okay, we're still spending huge amounts
#
of money fighting these crazy wars.
#
I mean, it was, we did the wrong thing, but there was no question when we were attacked
#
on 9-11 that the United States would respond, okay?
#
And yet today we have a 9-11 every single day.
#
Every single day right now, more people are dying than in 9-11 and people, there's no
#
action in government and there's no even action among the people, right?
#
You know, I'm concerned, Trudy is concerned, but like, where are the people rising in the
#
streets demanding that people stop dying in nursing homes?
#
We are nine months, 10 months into the crisis and the nursing homes are still where people
#
are dying and we're not protecting them.
#
You know, in World War II, people sent their kids to the countryside.
#
You know, my father-in-law was sent from Holland, he was sent to England, you know, as a young
#
His parents said, it's too dangerous here, we're going to send you, we have no idea exactly
#
where you're going, right?
#
We're going to send you off to the countryside in England to kind of protect you, right?
#
And yet today we cannot protect people in our nursing homes.
#
And I don't understand why, I don't understand why in some cases this triggers some part
#
of our brain, oh, we've been attacked, we must fight back.
#
And yet when the virus attacks us, we don't fight back.
#
This is puzzling to me and it's to do with this, it also has this question of state capacity
#
versus state will and I think state will seems to be more powerful than I had thought previously.
#
So a couple of thoughts which are also kind of questions.
#
One is, could it be the case that, you know, in terms of 9-11, what's happening is much
#
You watch it on television and you see those flaming towers and, you know, it's much more
#
visible and therefore the reaction is much more visceral and also the enemy is identifiable,
#
you know, it is that bunch of specific people who have photographs and all that, the virus
#
in that sense is kind of much more abstract.
#
And as far as, you know, state will is concerned as against state capacity, and I'm just thinking
#
aloud here, would it be the case that for a politician, action will always carry more
#
Because when you do something, you can cause something bad to happen.
#
But if you just stay with the status quo when you don't do anything, at least you didn't
#
cause the bad thing to happen, you know.
#
So is that therefore inherently a bias towards inaction built in for politicians and the
#
You would have thought that and yet, you know, we sent troops to, as I said, to Afghanistan
#
and Iraq, which has mired us in now the longest war in US history.
#
And so there the bias was towards action, right?
#
And sometimes, so I don't always understand, like, why is it in some cases, we are very
#
quick to act, even foolishly quick, and, you know, demonetization in India and also, you
#
know, sending everybody in India back to the villages, right?
#
So that was a huge action, right?
#
And probably mistaken action, but they had the will to do it and they did it.
#
So it is, I think this is one of the big questions in social science, is when is there a bias
#
towards action and when there is a bias towards the status quo?
#
And to try and understand this, I think is very puzzling.
#
You know, this is also related to one of my lessons, but I'll get to that in a minute.
#
But first, to respond to what Amit said, Amit, I would have agreed with you if you had talked
#
about, say, the contrast between 9-11 and diabetes, right?
#
Diabetes is the slow killer, you know, people have it, you can kind of survive with it for
#
a while, even though your standard of living is poorer or whatever.
#
But you know, the 9-11 is this visceral event, it plays in your head over and over again,
#
And you know, there's a certain fantastical element about it that doesn't leave your mind.
#
But I do think COVID is like that.
#
We are trapped in our homes in some bizarre, like social, biological experiment.
#
Our friends are in hospitals, you know, we know people, we've all had friends, family
#
I have family members right now who are COVID positive, right, who are complaining about
#
losing their sense of smell and taste, and I can't talk to them because they are coughing
#
We all know people who've lost parents, who've lost grandparents.
#
The death count is what, about 300,000 right now?
#
So this is no longer a tiny tragedy, right?
#
And you go out, everyone's wearing a mask.
#
Everyone's wearing a mask.
#
So this is bizarre, right?
#
You can't enter places.
#
You can't go and access half the places in the same way one would have.
#
It's winter right now here, right?
#
We have below zero Celsius temperatures all the time.
#
So we can't exactly get together outdoors and, you know, have a cup of coffee and pretend
#
like things are okay for a moment.
#
It's really hard, like, you know, none of us is going to get together for Christmas,
#
These are not low cost events.
#
They're not like diabetes.
#
They're not like, you know, driving or drowning or vending machine deaths, you know, all those
#
other things we normally compare to nylon.
#
And somehow, I don't know if it's the human ability to adapt, but people seem to have
#
adjusted to these numbers as the new normal.
#
No one seems to be outraged.
#
No one has a sense of urgency.
#
I know a few economists like Alex or, you know, Paul Romer, John Cochran, who constantly,
#
you know, writing and posting with a sense of urgency and panic of, you know, what the
#
But most people are pretty calm about it in the narrative, which is something that's really
#
Like, you know, this is not a situation to be calm.
#
The lesson that I learned, which is a little bit related to what Alex said, but slightly
#
different is I am deeply disappointed in self-interested politicians, right?
#
I mean, there are some massive low hanging fruits which you could just go for, like,
#
you know, in this emergency situation, you could really co-op the situation to your benefit.
#
You know, you could be Winston Churchill, who furthered every single agenda of his while
#
also furthering British interests in the war, right?
#
So for instance, Prime Minister Modi was interested in, like, you know, India's health care and
#
providing some kind of health insurance and things like that, even before the pandemic.
#
They announced a half-hearted plan, Ayush plan, you know, in the budget for last year
#
and the year before that.
#
This is the moment to seize, right, and say, you know what, I will be the person like Nehru
#
who built Bhakranagar dam or the IITs or something, I am the person who will make this massive,
#
you know, investment or intervention in health care policy.
#
He might get it right, he might get it wrong, but this was sort of like the perfect opportunity
#
to brand something Indians really care about, you know, co-opt all the finances at a war
#
footing towards that particular agenda, and he already had this agenda, right?
#
And they are still nowhere on the plan to do this, right?
#
Nowhere do we see Prime Minister Modi come and say, you know, ICMR is very slow when
#
it comes to approving testing.
#
I'm going to scale up India's testing, you know, 800-fold, right?
#
Where is that announcement, right?
#
So it's not just like political will.
#
I'm also like, are these politicians not genuinely self-interested?
#
Do they not care about PR?
#
Do they not care about maximizing their budget?
#
You know, all the things Gordon Tullock would have taught us, they're failing on every single
#
They're not even good self-interested politicians.
#
They are bad politicians, not in the usual sense.
#
So I am very disappointed on that margin.
#
I expected at least one Winston Churchill to come, you know, awful as he was, right?
#
But I expected one leader like that somewhere in the world to, you know, make like crazy
#
outrageous statements and completely co-opt this tragedy to their benefit.
#
And also, you know, maybe some good would have come out of it, but I just haven't seen
#
Same in the United States.
#
I mean, Donald Trump could easily have won reelection, right, had he just displayed competence
#
in even just one area of handling the pandemic.
#
It's very peculiar because he did Operation Warp Speed, but why wasn't there a similar
#
You know, there was a plan actually using the post office to send out masks to every
#
single household in the United States.
#
And you know, taking action like that, I think Donald Trump would have won, would have won
#
I mean, most incumbents win.
#
He came extremely, extremely close.
#
And yet, just taking these very basic actions, he didn't even want to stimulate the economy
#
until, you know, very late, even though that was totally in his interest.
#
So very, very puzzling to me.
#
And you know, one of the things that we often talk about and worry about is that during
#
a crisis, leaders will take the opportunity to kind of consolidate state power.
#
And that's only a bad thing in the long run.
#
And my response to that in the context of India is that, listen, our state is too incompetent
#
So you know, so in a sense, it's a damn good thing that these people haven't shown that
#
kind of leadership because it would have manifested in the wrong kinds of things.
#
So is that the big lesson here?
#
Like, is your fourth lesson, Truti, really that really about the incompetence of the
#
No, my fourth lesson is my priors about politicians have had to really change, right?
#
As a public choice economist, right, the constant thing we are thinking about is politicians
#
are rational, self-interested people, they can't be trusted with power.
#
We must keep checking their power, even if it is at the, you know, trade off of slowing
#
things down or making things incompetent.
#
Only in extreme emergencies like war and a global pandemic must we give them even a little
#
And I'm like, frankly, they have all the leeway, they're just not doing anything with it.
#
My lesson is I have had to seriously think about and revise my priors about self-interested
#
politicians and how they behave, right?
#
Somehow inaction in a pandemic doesn't seem to hurt their prospects very much.
#
Or even if it will hurt their prospects, they don't want to be seen doing very much.
#
And I can't figure out why.
#
I just can't figure out why they wouldn't co-opt this, you know, in their peculiar way.
#
Like, for instance, if I were doing vaccine research right now, I would completely co-opt
#
this emergency, even if the research I was doing was not on coronavirus, right?
#
I'd be like, oh my God, see, the world comes to a standstill if you don't have one vaccine,
#
Like, you want to spend lots of money on vaccines and, you know, start this whole rancy.
#
I don't see any of that happening.
#
So the way I would have thought like your classic Gordon Tulloch politician would have
#
reacted, they just, I can't find a single example of anyone reacting like that.
#
And I don't know enough about, you know, more specific Chinese politics, if there were in
#
fact more local leaders who might have done something like that in the Communist Party.
#
But outside in the Western world and in India, I just don't see it.
#
They're not making dictators like they used to.
#
They're not making dictators like they used to.
#
And I guess it's a blessing that, you know, they are not acting rationally to consolidate
#
power as, you know, a theory predicts they should.
#
And I guess that's a blessing for us.
#
But I would at this point coin a new axiom, which I will call Verma's razor, never attribute
#
to virtue what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
#
No, but it's not virtuous either.
#
It is, I believe it might be a misunderstanding of the low-hanging fruit and self-interest.
#
Either they are misunderstanding it or I am misunderstanding it, right?
#
My understanding would have been there's a huge coalition to support investments in healthcare
#
Maybe that coalition doesn't exist and that's why they didn't capitalize on it.
#
But the low-hanging fruit, according to me, nobody went for.
#
I mean, we talked a lot about Trump, but in Congress, you know, either in the Senate or
#
They're the ones who are supposed to be passing the law, right?
#
So here was an incredible opportunity for a politician, like somebody like an AOC, for
#
example, to brand this as her issue and to put forward a plan and to rise in the national,
#
you know, rankings as the anti-Trump or something like that.
#
And that never happened.
#
Like Biden, he's not really even...
#
I mean, he won because people voted against Trump, right?
#
They voted against Trump.
#
But Biden was never the anti-Trump in any sense.
#
And you know, he came, he won, I think, because he was, again, actually the candidate who
#
was least interested in big change.
#
And in one sense, I'm grateful for that, you know, because the change that the other candidates
#
were interested in was almost all bad.
#
So I'm grateful that the Democrats chose a candidate whom, you know, I could support
#
because he was sort of the more rational conservative candidate.
#
So it was very peculiar that there was no coalition or no coalescence around a alternative
#
So this is something that AOC or somebody like that could have taken up.
#
Here is the plan that we're gonna deal with the pandemic.
#
I mean, Congress is supposed to be the ones to be passing the law.
#
And yet, that never happened.
#
There was still the focus of...
#
Everyone who wanted big changes, the focus was all on these cultural issues, all on,
#
you know, raising the minimum wage or, you know, fixing national healthcare or something
#
There was no big plan on the pandemic.
#
And again, it just seems very peculiar to me.
#
You know, if the war isn't going well, you expect the opposition party to have a different
#
plan for the war, not to run on raising the minimum wage while we're losing the war.
#
And yet, that's exactly what happened.
#
It was like the Democrats were running on all of these cultural issues and, you know,
#
economic distribution, redistribution issues while we're losing the war against the pandemic.
#
And so, why that didn't become the national issue, again, very strange to me.
#
So, I'll move on to my fourth lesson now, because that's again about politics and kind
#
of a natural segue from this, which is that, again, it's not something that is new and
#
it's something that's been commented upon before this even by me, but I think this year
#
kind of really brought it home in terms of number one, of course, you know, there is
#
a banal fact that politics has become more and more polarized, partly, you know, driven
#
Alex, you earlier spoke of what Cass Sunstein called group polarization, that, you know,
#
once you form your little tribe or your little echo chamber, you become more shrill and you
#
go more towards the extremes.
#
And we have indeed reverted to that kind of tribalism.
#
But what is also kind of worrying here is that politics, I am increasingly beginning
#
to realize is not just driven mainly by tribalism, but possibly only by tribalism in the sense
#
that if you look at, for example, over the last four years, how the Republican Party
#
was basically completely demolished by Trump and just became something other than what
#
it was, where it was earlier, the party which would stand up for free trade and all of that.
#
And, you know, look what happened to it.
#
It was that just it was a will to power that mattered and not the principles you stood
#
And politicians everywhere, of course, we know that when you enter politics is the art
#
You want to get to power and it does corrode character and whatever principles you may
#
have started out with means nothing.
#
But at the same time, you imagine that parties stood for something and all of that.
#
And in India, of course, on the spectrum, all parties are pretty much the same.
#
They are, you know, illiberal on economics, illiberal on social issues.
#
And it's just a question of degree and nuances and details.
#
But what I have also seen is that this is not just true of politicians.
#
This is also true of voters who support political parties.
#
Like if you just see people's different reactions to the lockdown in the US, Trump was against
#
So people who are on the left, therefore, you know, would naturally be for it.
#
And in India, it was the other way around that Modi called for a lockdown.
#
And, you know, it kind of goes the other way, which is bizarre, because typically before
#
that you have, you know, Modi supporters also being Trump supporters.
#
Similarly, you know, as someone who has written about policy, edited a magazine on policy,
#
my sense always was that you have to evaluate a policy on its own terms.
#
It doesn't matter who's bringing it out.
#
And yet, after, you know, decades of, you know, all parties agreeing at an intellectual
#
level that our labor laws need to be reformed, that agriculture needs to be reformed, when
#
some kind of reforms, even if they were flawed in a limited sense, but broadly a move in
#
the right direction, when some kind of reforms are brought out by governments, which, you
#
know, people like us otherwise oppose, you had a lot of people reflexively opposing those
#
policies only because they are against a party in question.
#
And for example, in the farm bills, you know, the Congress has had very similar measures
#
When AAP ran a previous state election, they had very similar things on their manifesto.
#
You know, all experts in the field before this have all unanimously agreed that these
#
are the reforms we need.
#
We need to empower farmers with choice, remove the monopoly of these middlemen, so on and
#
And yet, now, because of the politics of it, you completely ignore, you know, and it's
#
so predictable now that when I talk about politics with someone, you know, if they are
#
against party A and for party B, they will not be able to tell me one good thing that
#
party A has done, because they are against a party, or one bad thing that the politician
#
they admire has done, because again, you know, so A, it's tribal and it almost takes on sort
#
of a religious level of belief.
#
And if this is the case, if all our stands and our positions are going to be determined
#
by this kind of reflexive tribalism, then where is the open debate, where is the discourse
#
And this kind of has, in a sense, 2020, of course, has made people lose hope in many
#
But I have lost hope of our politics ever really being reformed or, you know, because
#
it's not just the politicians who don't care about principles, it's everybody else as well.
#
And there's also this massive gaslighting which goes on in that people act like whatever
#
we're doing at this very moment has always been this way.
#
So this bizarre thing happened in the United States, where at the beginning of the crisis,
#
it was the liberals who were saying, don't worry about it.
#
This is just like the flu, okay, there's not going to be any problems.
#
We don't need a travel, you know, shutdown.
#
And it was the conservatives who were saying, no, we need a shutdown from China, we need
#
to have a travel shutdown, as Trump did.
#
And it was the conservatives on Twitter, you know, there were some libertarian types and
#
some radical types who actually had this early on, like Balaji Srinivasan.
#
And these guys were ahead of the curve.
#
And then within a matter of weeks, it really bizarrely just suddenly shifted while the
#
conservatives who had been warning about this, it suddenly became, oh, no, no, no, no, that's
#
Our tribe has decided, Trump has decided that our tribe is going to be anti-mask, is going
#
to be anti-virus, is going to pretend that this isn't happening.
#
And same with the liberals.
#
So like the liberals right now, like on Twitter, like right now, you know, you know, going
#
on about the CDC, all kinds of stuff, I won't get into it.
#
It's completely the opposite of what they were saying, you know, eight months ago, right?
#
They've completely changed from eight months ago.
#
And what is more, there's a gaslighting in that there's never any acknowledgement that,
#
hey, you eight months ago were saying this is not going to be a big deal, that we shouldn't
#
overreact, that Trump is using this, you know, to gain political power.
#
That's what you were saying eight months ago, Mr. Epidemiologist, you know, Mr. Scientific
#
This is what you were telling us.
#
This is what you were advising the public.
#
You were telling the public eight months ago, don't worry about masks, you don't need masks,
#
Masks are just for doctors, you don't need them.
#
It's not going to be a problem, you know, it's not where the flu kills 30,000 people
#
So don't worry about this.
#
It's only going to be like, you know, 100 people, you know, like people.
#
That's what you were saying eight months ago.
#
And now you're all blah, blah, blah, and there's...
#
Look, look, people should change their mind, right?
#
You know, you should be Bayesians.
#
People should change their mind when the evidence changes.
#
So I'm not criticizing them for changing their mind.
#
What I am criticizing is that they now think that to hold the opposite view is like evil.
#
And that's the view they had just eight months ago.
#
You know, you must be stupid or evil to have this.
#
And there's no recognition that they themselves have completely changed their mind in reverse
#
And it's just a massive gaslighting which goes on.
#
And both sides, both sides do it, right?
#
You know, Trump at the same time wants to say, you know, we shut down against China
#
because we knew the pandemic was going to be important.
#
And at the same time, so it's not important, you know, just go back to work, right?
#
I mean, so these cultural things, as exactly as you say, they're tribal.
#
And the speed at which the tribe can shift, it's like those birds, the murmuration, right?
#
You know, they're flying one way and whoa, they're going the other way.
#
And whoa, you know, and if you don't follow your tribe, you know, woe to you, right?
#
Because if you're the one bird which doesn't know to turn when every other bird turns,
#
you know, then you're going to become evil and you're going to be attacked by your tribe.
#
And they're going to say that you're stupid, you're evil, you know, how could you possibly
#
And if you don't stick with your tribe, you're crushed, you're crushed and that's the craziness
#
You know, there's another aspect to it.
#
So this is in particular, I don't want to name names, but some of it might be clear.
#
We've had, like you said, you know, economists, experts who supported the farm bills when
#
it was a previous government who no longer support it or were at least hedging, you
#
know, and saying, oh, but it's this issue of contract enforcement or something, you
#
know, there's all this stuff that keeps coming up.
#
They're very good economists, right?
#
I cannot imagine them saying this in the classroom, right?
#
But I think everyone does somewhere have to worry about, you know, where their next gig
#
And you know, this goes back to an earlier point that Alex said about this whole collectivization
#
of all decision making, right?
#
Now, if we collectivize all decision making and everything is political and everything
#
is democratic, it also means everything is partisan, right?
#
Because that's how we are choosing in politics, right?
#
In the United States, it's a particularly acute version.
#
In other parts of the world, a little, it's a little less so.
#
Maybe there are a few more parties involved.
#
But the moment you collectivize decisions, it will become partisan and it will become
#
Now, I can support labor law even if it is coming from the stables of Yogi Adityanath,
#
who I otherwise abhor, because my bills are paid thanks to the Mercator Center, right?
#
I don't have to worry about the BJP or the Congress or AAP hiring me in any position
#
And my next meal is not contingent on them.
#
And I can be completely independent.
#
I also don't live in India, which means I know that the mob is not going to come and
#
break my windows, you know, the way they do with Siddhartha Paridharajan or something
#
So there's a reason, right?
#
It is people in tenured positions, Michael Kramer, John Cochran, Paul Romer, Alex Dabarok
#
who are saying these things, right?
#
They don't have to rely on the government as experts for their next paycheck or, you
#
know, rely on the Republican Party to appoint them to whatever nonsense post that there
#
is within their government.
#
Most other pundits do, right?
#
And even if they're not directly working for the government, they are pundits in the sense
#
that, you know, they're going to be invited by MSNBC or Fox, right?
#
So to get your next gig, you have to do what you have to do.
#
So I think this might be more deeply entwined to just the way we think of decision making
#
than like this current moment of, I don't, what I mean is I don't think it's related
#
I think this is true of the war, right?
#
Everybody on the liberal side said anything when Obama was killing thousands of civilians
#
I just read Obama's, you know, the autobiography and I thought it's going to have like this
#
big thoughtful chapter on, you know, I really spent sleepless nights over all those civilians
#
But, you know, this is what I was thinking at the time, nothing, right?
#
Like I mean, not nothing, it's acknowledged, but there's no nuanced articulation of that's
#
what I thought at the time, I've changed my mind or maybe I haven't changed my mind, nothing,
#
And nobody seems to think that Obama has a bad record on war, right?
#
Because in their tribal world, Bush is bad record on war.
#
The other side, our side, good record on war, right?
#
So my problem with Obama is not healthcare, all the usual stuff conservatives are going
#
Obama has been terrible on foreign policy when it comes to killing civilians.
#
But again, like, you know, so the gaslighting, I don't think it's COVID related.
#
I don't even think it's 2020 related, but it's very stark right now because we are trapped
#
at home and the social media version of the movement of the birds, it's really something.
#
Like it's, you wake up one morning and up is down and down is up and now everything
#
This has happened with the defunding the police and unbundling the police or support for the
#
I mean, the Democrats support police unions in a really big way, right?
#
Not just the Republicans, the Democrats are union people.
#
That's the party and built its bones on unions, right?
#
Your current vice president, right?
#
Your prize vice president elect made her bones supporting police unions.
#
So now suddenly that side becomes the face of like, you know, we must defund the police
#
and we are anti-police brutality.
#
It's all, it's everything.
#
It's every single major issue from war to education, to police brutality in the United
#
And I don't see any way out of it.
#
And I don't see any way out of it in India either.
#
Yeah, this mass movement of the birds is quite hilarious.
#
And what Alex just said about the gaslighting in the sense that if you have a different
#
opinion, you are evil period.
#
That's the end of the matter.
#
So you know, you're scared of, you know, sometimes I'll think twice about saying something on
#
Twitter because everyone's kind of going to just jump and luckily the kind of people who
#
listen to the podcast are much more nuanced and reasonable.
#
So I guess there's a sort of a selection effect inherent in that, which is quite delightful.
#
So we have four more lessons to go through.
#
So Alex, it's time for your fourth lesson.
#
Let me go with a positive one and that is the internet.
#
It's even better and greater and more fantastic than I thought.
#
I am shocked that it is actually held up.
#
So I thought, or I wouldn't have been surprised with everybody at home, you know, watching
#
Netflix and working from home, I would not have been at all surprised if we had been
#
faced with internet, you know, bugginess and collapsing all the time and shortages and
#
like the, you know, trying to use too much electricity, brownouts or the equivalent of
#
that slagging us, slowing down.
#
And yet the internet has been like rock solid, you know, everyone's watching movies and I
#
haven't had a single, you know, major, major problem.
#
The internet has been like totally rock solid.
#
I've been enjoying, you know, my Netflix and, you know, the chess thing and all that kind
#
And we have been able to work from home and a lot of us, I mean, not everyone, of course,
#
but the ability to do that.
#
And I'm sort of reminded there's kind of a famous study of, which looked at people's
#
commuting decisions in London and how they, you know, got to work.
#
And then for a while because of a terrorist attack, some of the tube stations in London
#
were closed down and people had to find a new way to get to work.
#
And then the stations were opened up again.
#
And what they discovered is that a significant minority of people, like 25%, they did not
#
go back to the old commuting route that they had taken before.
#
And instead they stuck with the new route.
#
So that indicates that they needed this big shock to try something new and that the new
#
route was actually better, you know, save them some time or something like that.
#
And so I think that work from home, we're not all going to, you know, return back to,
#
you know, working at the office.
#
Some of us are going to stay working home because it's worked better than we expected.
#
You know, it is by no means, you know, Zoom is a problem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
We can go on about all Zoom fatigue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But it has worked better than I think anyone would have expected in advance.
#
So for example, this now is the season of interviewing job market candidates for economists.
#
And we all used to travel to like Atlanta or Chicago and going to hotels and people
#
would come, you spent all day in a stinking hotel room and, you know, your job market
#
candidates would come one at a time, half an hour each.
#
And you'd interview 10 of them or 20 of them at the AEA, the annual AEA means I'm never
#
The Zoom works just fine.
#
You know, we can interview job market candidates online.
#
And I think a lot of people are going to be in a similar kind of situation.
#
We needed this big push, but it has worked better than expected.
#
It's more solid than expected.
#
And we're going to even see bigger changes than you might have thought.
#
Yeah, and you know, that's a bonus lesson that I didn't put into my five, but that was
#
among the contenders is that we are almost in a sense lucky that this pandemic happened
#
in 2020 and not say 2005 because technology now allows so much like I'm being able to
#
do so much of my remote podcasting without a hitch.
#
And what I tell the students of my podcasting course also is that, you know, the basic budget
#
equipment that you need to start podcasting is what would have been considered studio
#
You can get professional quality output, whether it is an audio or even video without investing
#
I mean, there are films being shot with the iPhone for God's sake.
#
Of course, the iPhone is hardly cheap and I don't have one either.
#
And of course, you know, the three of us are incredibly privileged that we can work from
#
home productively and we are extremely lucky that way.
#
And so many people don't have that choice, but it is something to note that the technology
#
has come to this point that many of us are realizing that we don't need to go back to
#
We can be much more efficient, I guess, just being at home.
#
Like I was thinking, maybe, you know, I was telling Shruti the other day that next year
#
I want to try out streaming and just kind of throw things at the wall and see what happens.
#
And I've realized while researching it that it's really cheap.
#
You know, I don't need a television studio.
#
I don't need a production house.
#
It's literally doable on my own if I, you know, kind of show the will, which a state
#
doesn't, but thankfully I'm not the state, I'm an individual.
#
So yeah, but that's been a revelation indeed.
#
I think it's also like Nandu, my husband, who both of you know, was joking with me the
#
And he said, I think you are a little too well adjusted for pandemic life.
#
Like in terms of choice of job and luck and temperament and everything, he's actually
#
worried about me rejoining normal society.
#
He says, what are you going to do then?
#
And I mean, some of this has an element of privilege, but it's also luck, right?
#
I mean, doctors are incredibly privileged, but they find themselves on the front lines
#
I mean, the New York Philharmonic musicians are incredibly privileged, but they are out
#
So I think, I mean, the pandemic has also hurt the privileged and the elite, not just
#
poor people, but it's just pure chance that I happen to be a professional economist in
#
2020, you know, and this happened to me right now.
#
That's just luck, dumb luck, you know?
#
And it's very hard to counter dumb luck like that.
#
I mean, the next thing could affect my age group.
#
It could affect my gender.
#
It could affect South Asians.
#
Like we just don't know how the next pandemic will hit people.
#
It's not going to be an equal distribution.
#
So some of it is just luck.
#
The next thing could be a virus that makes economists stupid.
#
Oh wait, we already have that, there's politics.
#
Shruti, shall we move on to your final lesson now?
#
Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot.
#
So of course, once again, like as an economist, you're especially public choice trained economist.
#
I'm constantly thinking about market failure and government failure, right?
#
And the classic public choice lesson is that we focus in neoclassical too much on market
#
failure and the solutions we give to counter market failure are typically rife with government
#
And once we take the political incentives into account, then we realize that, you know,
#
maybe there are solutions to market failure and maybe government intervention is not the
#
So this is the, the cliff notes version of, you know, so much of public choice economics.
#
And I've been thinking about it.
#
And I have frankly been surprised by the amount of, you know, sort of like private voluntary
#
action by private citizens and their failures, right?
#
And I've been trying to put this in perspective in one sense.
#
So the state has of course failed spectacularly.
#
We've talked about it for almost two hours on the margins on which the state has failed
#
spectacularly, but I don't see 10 months into the pandemic, private individuals, civil society
#
groups doing that much better.
#
You know, I don't see private movements for wearing masks or getting tested or movements
#
I don't even see private movements to say, Hey, this is how we can make Christmas better
#
without getting in a room with each other, right?
#
Or make Thanksgiving better.
#
I don't see any movements among young people saying, Hey, we are not going to be so affected
#
by this, but maybe we should save grandma or whatever, like, you know, wear a mask.
#
So I live in a fairly urban area and when I walk past, you know, when I'm walking the
#
dogs, every single sports bar is completely packed full, right?
#
On evenings and on weekends, those sorts of things genuinely surprised me.
#
I thought it might've been okay initially, 10 months into the pandemic at 3000 plus deaths
#
It's pretty shocking that people are behaving like this and I've been trying to think why
#
this is the case, right?
#
And this is, I think, going back to the Adam Smith lesson, right?
#
The entire goal for us in society is to find institutions that will align self-interest
#
with social interest, right?
#
So of course people don't want to sacrifice and there are, you know, if you're 20 something
#
and you're not going to be that severely affected, of course you want to go out and you want
#
to be with your friends and you want to have Christmas, all of the usual things.
#
But what would have, you know, changed that?
#
What could have aligned that better?
#
And I think that's mass rapid testing, right?
#
If we had gotten our testing act together in March and April and just gone whole hog,
#
built up testing capacity, approved all kinds of different tests, you know, and, and just
#
encouraged people, test frequently, test all the time, return tests quickly, and get back
#
to society, we would have had some remarkably different outcomes because I, you know, 20
#
somethings are self-interested, but they're not like serial killers, right?
#
I mean, they're not good, most, I mean, America's very pro-social, at least my experience with
#
Americans, they're very pro-social, they're very engaged in civil society.
#
There's high level of trust.
#
You know, people are not going to fake their COVID tests and go and infect a whole bunch
#
of people just to watch their favorite football game or something.
#
People tend to be responsible.
#
And the big problem was that we did not inform them about their own situation and how much
#
risk they might cause, and we imposed all sorts of bizarre costs on them, whether or
#
not they can infect other people, right?
#
And that's sort of like the worst combination in terms of aligning, you know, self and social
#
And so I think the failure or like, you know, what we would traditionally call like an externality
#
kind of failure, which has happened in COVID, I think that's just because, to my mind, that's
#
because of testing, right?
#
And 10 months in, it still takes three days to get your test back, right?
#
We know right now, there's a lot of holiday travel over Christmas.
#
Most people who need to take an airline, you know, they need to show a negative COVID test
#
in the last 72 hours or 96 hours or whatever the airline rules are.
#
It takes three days to get your test back.
#
Even now, they're not giving us test results on weekends in many of the labs.
#
I mean, 10 months in, this is just shocking in a country as well resourced and as rich
#
Given the cost of the pandemic, so many people would have been willing to spend a fair bit
#
of money frequently to keep getting tested so that they could engage in all the activities
#
So I think that has been the big lesson for me, and I think this is an important lesson
#
So my sense in the early, when I supported the original version of the Indian lockdown,
#
Which was just supposed to be three weeks, it was supposed to flatten the curve and,
#
you know, ramp up testing capacity, we never ramped up testing capacity that much in India.
#
I mean, we did, it is better than it was before, but never enough to actually, you know, deal
#
Neither in India nor in the United States.
#
And the second thing about that was just, and here I come to the government failure
#
and maybe even social failure, which is just the drift, right?
#
We were all talking about testing capacity in March and April.
#
Nobody is talking about testing capacity except like Paul Romer right now, right?
#
Everyone has forgotten, everyone has moved on.
#
Then it became shelter in place and lockdowns and masks and Trump elections.
#
Now it is vaccine and who gets the vaccine first and how unfair that is.
#
We never really solved the original problem and no one pointed out the failure in that
#
So I think just information, you know, it would have really aligned self and social
#
interest and we failed globally in that in a big way other than places like South Korea
#
and Vietnam and, you know, those are the countries.
#
If you look at the success stories, they all did very, you know, they really ramped up
#
testing capacity and their citizens behaved sensibly and their death numbers are very,
#
So there is a lesson there.
#
I'll both agree and disagree with you.
#
I mean, and the reason I'll both agree and disagree with you is that society contains
#
multitudes to, you know, invent a version of my old cliche and therefore people react
#
So yes, many people have been irresponsible and crowding the bars in the restaurants,
#
but equally what I have seen in India is that it is civil society that really stepped up
#
For example, look at the migrant crisis that was just horrendous in Delhi.
#
It is civil society groups who actually fed them in Bombay.
#
It is, you know, civil society, which, you know, Sonu Sood organized all these buses
#
There's this wonderful organization called Khana Chahiye.
#
And in fact, you know, one of the founders is a friend of mine called Ruben Mascarenas
#
and we've been talking about him coming on the show at some point and he got COVID himself
#
once and thankfully recovered and is fine now.
#
And what those guys literally fed hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Bombay.
#
And that was civil society doing something you typically expect the state to do.
#
So I would simply say here that, you know, that yes, it, you know, it wasn't perfect,
#
but in many senses it was better than the state.
#
And while, you know, state failure, government failure is ubiquitous, especially in India,
#
I think market failure is, you know, occasional and temporary.
#
And you know, so it's, so let's not give civil society a bad rap.
#
No, I'm not giving civil society a bad rap on everything.
#
Of course they do wonderful things.
#
I mean, even in the United States, there are church groups that actually, you know, they
#
were sewing masks and giving to people.
#
That's not what I meant at all.
#
I meant civil society has not had a good solution to this limited point of the externality
#
aspect of COVID, right?
#
We don't see that element being solved by, you know, voluntary action.
#
Of course civil society does wonderful things.
#
I mean, how else would we solve half the government problems in most places in the world?
#
I do think they've underperformed relative to expectations.
#
Again, in the United States, I think about, you know, who is overperformed and it's the
#
And like some of the universities, University of Illinois, University of Virginia, what
#
has done well, you know, and it is because of testing, you know, they ramped up testing
#
and kept their people safe.
#
But there are not many, you know, fast grants, my colleague, Tyler Cowen, but there are not
#
many institutions which have overperformed in this crisis.
#
So Alex, let's move on now to your fifth and final lesson.
#
Of course, I'm sure we have unlimited lessons, but your fifth and final lesson for this episode.
#
So my fifth and final lesson is that I'm more worried about viruses than before.
#
Now you might think, well, that's bloody obvious, isn't it, Alex, but I want to talk about computer
#
So the next crisis, the next pandemic, I worry that our computer systems will go down and
#
we'll all be forced to go outside and interact with people again, you know, we'll all be
#
forced to go, oh no, I got to spend more time with my family.
#
You know, now I've been kicked off the internet.
#
But yeah, it does, I mean, you know, viruses do share some similarities, computer viruses
#
and people viruses, you know, the robots could be infected with the virus.
#
We've seen, you know, we're being hacked by the Russians or perhaps by the Chinese, depending
#
But so much our systems, including our nuclear power, our electric grid are under the control
#
of computers and artificial intelligences, our financial system, most of the trades on
#
Wall Street now are done by AIs, okay?
#
Most of the trades are not by human beings, they're by AIs.
#
And so creating vaccines for computers and insulating some computers from the internet,
#
all of this seems much more important.
#
Partly this goes back to the tail risks that we were talking about earlier.
#
So one of the risks is from, you know, solar storms and things like that, natural risks,
#
things like that, which can in fact are, which could bring down our computer systems and
#
And malicious actors are another one.
#
And I don't think we have seen, you know, the big one, we haven't had the big one.
#
And the big one is coming, you know, even just shutting down the internet, you know,
#
for a few hours, you know, Gmail and, you know, something like that, which has occasionally
#
You know, that's a big cost to GDP and so forth.
#
And I don't think we've seen the big one and so much of this technology is becoming decentralized.
#
So it doesn't take a state actor even to make some deadly computer viruses or even some,
#
you know, biological viruses, non-state actors.
#
Even high school kids can create a virus nowadays, both biological and computer.
#
So I think my, the weight that I now put on the value that I now put on, you know, Norton
#
antivirus, but more generally on also on the U.S., the U.S. has a anti-hacking, antiviral
#
system which tries to keep control of our electric grid and so forth.
#
And I just think we need to be investing much more.
#
And we need to do it obviously before the big one happens.
#
Let's try not to be caught this time, okay?
#
You know, this should be like a big warning bell, okay?
#
Like how obvious does it have to be that a virus is bad, okay?
#
Now let's just change that, oh, computer virus, okay?
#
So we've been given the warning.
#
Nobody can say that we were not warned.
#
And of course, we were warned about the biological virus too, many, many times.
#
But now we're being warned about computer viruses and I think we ought to pay attention.
#
You heard it here first from Alex Stabrock, you know, and it strikes me that if such a
#
virus does strike us and everyone in India loses the internet for a day or two, we might
#
finally begin to empathize with the people of Kashmir because that's exactly what has
#
They haven't had the internet for a year.
#
And I think most of us just take it so much for granted.
#
Like 30 years ago, the internet would have seemed absolute freaking magic.
#
You know, we are stunted without it in all the things that we do and the ways we communicate
#
and even the ways we find comfort in solace sometimes.
#
So yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe we deserve that.
#
I'm just being facetious here.
#
And you know, so here's the thing, right?
#
I mean, when we say that we've been warned, right?
#
Of course we've been warned and we were also warned about this pandemic.
#
And of course, I mean, my granddad is 104 and he survived the Spanish flu.
#
So we also have like living life examples of being warned in one sense.
#
I don't think they'll pay attention precisely for the reasons we talked about at the head
#
of the conversation, which is state of risk, right?
#
I don't think, I mean, we have a better chance of Microsoft killing the hackers or holding
#
them at bay as we saw just in the last two days, then we have at, you know, some kind
#
of concerted global action to make sure these sorts of things don't happen.
#
So I have very little faith that they are listening.
#
You know, so I think the best thing we could probably get out of this is maybe some really
#
smart people who are all sitting in different parts of the world are alerted to this and
#
start working with each other in a decentralized way, the way we saw with the vaccine sequencing,
#
you know, something like that.
#
But I don't, you know, really believe that people are going to pay, when I say people,
#
I mean, those in power will pay attention to this.
#
You know, unless it's a military problem in the United States government, people don't
#
pay attention to tail risks, right?
#
So if we can convert this and say, you know, hacking a computer virus is like a nuclear
#
attack because they can hack into your nuclear prowess, then maybe they will, they will pay
#
But other than that, you know, it's, it's pretty sad.
#
And in the case of something like this one, when you say we have been warned, we are actually
#
warned of so many things, there are economists who predicted seven of the last two recessions,
#
you know, so it's what, what warning do you even take seriously?
#
And even if you think intellectually that, yeah, this is a problem, you're good, the
#
free rider effect kicks in, you'll wait for someone else to do something to solve it.
#
And you're like, what can I do, we'll kind of, as we are coming close to running out
#
of time, we'll move on to my fifth and final lesson, which is kind of more about the human
#
condition in the sense that, you know, Alex just joked about how if the internet goes,
#
we'll actually have to talk to real people again and spend time with the family.
#
And it strikes me that in 2020, that's literally what happened because people weren't going
#
You know, families were forced to sort of stick together for long periods of time.
#
And what this does is it kind of reveals the real way in which people relate to each other.
#
Like I think in a lot of interpersonal relationships, there is this slight delusional aspect of
#
what there is, there's a kind of inertia which keeps it going.
#
And what we have seen during the pandemic is that, you know, incidents of domestic violence
#
Even, you know, I think someone in England was making an argument that the reason there
#
should be no lockdown is all the kids who are being killed by abusive parents, you're
#
So those are again, kind of unseen effects.
#
And I think that there's been this, perhaps this increased scrutiny and I don't know how
#
many people are introspective about this on personal relationships and what they mean.
#
Like one of the things that I sometimes think about is, you know, Kant's warning about not
#
using people as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves.
#
And I wonder how many of us do that in our personal lives, where everyone is a character
#
in a drama where we have the lead role and they're just means to an end in a sense.
#
And obviously we will rationalize it and, you know, and all of that.
#
But I wonder how much of the, you know, that facade would have broken down in this period
#
of people, you know, forced to kind of be together.
#
I mean, I know at a personal level, all three of us are obviously very lucky in this regard,
#
but many people aren't and many people don't have a choice.
#
And it also strikes me that, you know, again at an intellectual level, and I don't want
#
to get too philosophical about this, but all of us wear a mask or a variety of masks.
#
And sometimes as you know, Vinay Sitapati pointed out in a recent episode in the context
#
of the BJP, that if you wear a mask long enough, the mask becomes a face, which clearly hasn't
#
happened with the BJP, which wore the Vajpayee mask for a while.
#
But it strikes me that when the mask doesn't become the face that it can sort of melt away
#
And you know, and I'm not being very articulate about this, but I think what lockdown did
#
was that it forced people to actually, you know, be in forced proximity with each other
#
for long periods of time where you could no longer, you know, warehouse your family away,
#
but you actually had to deal with them on a daily basis and perhaps deal with yourself
#
So sort of an abstract point, I don't really know what the lesson in this is, but I think
#
this is one of the possible consequences of, you know, or the stuff that's gone down this
#
I'll point out the contra to this.
#
I was talking to Alex about this the other day.
#
So one of the things I realized during the lockdown that has probably shaped me the most
#
in a way that I hadn't figured out before is that I'm an immigrant, right?
#
And that means that I don't live in the country where I was born.
#
It's a small minority of people in the world.
#
My parents live very far away.
#
Everyone I grew up with lives very far away.
#
Over the last, say, 10 or 15 years, I have been very lucky in that my closest friends
#
are not the people I see every day, right?
#
So I've already coped to pandemic life over 12 years in a sense that all my closest friends
#
are only reachable by Zoom, I have been wishing them on their birthday and toasting champagne
#
at different time zones and things like that.
#
So this has been my life for a very long time.
#
So that part doesn't feel different, right?
#
But the part that does feel that that's very stark is there was this comfort that you can
#
always reach people that you need to reach in a happy moment or an emergency or whatever.
#
And that has been taken away from me during the pandemic.
#
And that makes suddenly being far away and being an immigrant quite difficult in a way
#
So I've had very close friends lose their parents and I cannot give them a hug, right?
#
Something that I would have just immediately traveled to see them at a funeral or a memorial,
#
I can't, if anything happens to my parents or my granddad, who's quite old, right?
#
I can't quickly travel to India if I can travel at all, given all the COVID restrictions.
#
So I always spent a lot of time far away from the world I grew up in, in the comfort that
#
I can access it anytime I want.
#
It's just a matter of throwing money at the problem.
#
And now that is not so true anymore.
#
So I've both had a lot of training for this moment, but all my safety nets and backups
#
have collapsed during COVID.
#
So that makes this very difficult.
#
And you know, another flip side of it is that perhaps we stopped taking friendships and
#
relationships for granted.
#
We appreciate it a little more.
#
Like I was certainly thinking the other day that has been so long since I got together
#
with, you know, many of my friends in the flesh.
#
So you know, maybe that's one good thing that comes out of it, that we have a heightened
#
appreciation of all the actual person to person relationships we are blessed with.
#
And of course I used a redundant phrase there because what is a relationship, but person
#
The most important relationships in my life, aside from my immediate family are my dogs.
#
They're actually what got me through the pandemic.
#
They are the happiest things in the world.
#
They live in the moment, which is exactly the lesson we all need.
#
Alex has dogs, but he's not quite obsessed with his dogs as I am with mine.
#
But they're joyous, right?
#
They brighten your day.
#
They're so happy to see you.
#
They are so happy you're trapped at home 24 seven and you will never ever leave.
#
They're like, this is amazing.
#
And by the way, the price of puppies has gone way up, so I'm going to be an economist and
#
So we thought we would, you know, get one of the rescue shelter puppies and be like,
#
you know, do gooders or whatever.
#
We were on the wait list for four months and then we finally got the puppy from the same
#
family we got our first dog from and actually paid like cash for him.
#
But so I disagree that relationships are person to person.
#
I think one of the nicest lessons that has emerged from this is the one from your dogs
#
live in the moment, which is indeed a beautiful lesson.
#
Take happiness in the small things.
#
Somebody throws a ball out of love, go and fetch it.
#
And on that note, you know, thanks so much, Ruthie and Alex for coming on this show.
#
This has been a delightful conversation.
#
It's always lovely to speak with you.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow us on Twitter.
#
Shruti is at S Raj Gopalan, Alex is at a Tabarrok and I am at Amit Verma, A M I T V A R M A.
#
You can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot I N. Thank
#
you for listening and hey, have a great 2021.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to scene unseen dot I N slash support and contribute any amount you like
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