1 00:00:00,080 --> 00:00:02,720 Welcome to Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone and the 2 00:00:02,720 --> 00:00:06,200 Libertarian Institute. Today I'm joined by Doctor Phil 3 00:00:06,200 --> 00:00:11,520 Magnus to discuss Thomas Sowell. So often I hear from the critics 4 00:00:11,520 --> 00:00:15,400 that he is a pop economist that no intellectual actually 5 00:00:15,400 --> 00:00:17,640 respects. So I thought I'd get us an 6 00:00:17,640 --> 00:00:21,960 intellectual to see what contributions, if any, has 7 00:00:22,560 --> 00:00:25,400 Thomas Sowell given the world. Dr. Magnus, thank you for your 8 00:00:25,400 --> 00:00:26,880 time. Thanks for having me. 9 00:00:27,920 --> 00:00:33,160 What is Thomas Sowell's greatest contribution in the field of 10 00:00:33,160 --> 00:00:36,600 economics? When you come across a statement 11 00:00:36,840 --> 00:00:40,520 he's just a pop economist, what comes to mind as his best 12 00:00:41,280 --> 00:00:43,560 achievement? Well, when I hear a statement 13 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:46,960 like that, my immediate thought is this is someone who hasn't 14 00:00:46,960 --> 00:00:51,160 read Thomas Sowell beyond maybe a superficial delving into some 15 00:00:51,160 --> 00:00:54,640 of his political op eds. This is someone who isn't 16 00:00:54,640 --> 00:00:58,400 familiar with his academic and scholarly background because if 17 00:00:58,400 --> 00:01:01,640 you actually look at Thomas Saul's work, turns out he is a 18 00:01:01,680 --> 00:01:07,440 multi faceted economist with essentially 1/2 century of 19 00:01:07,440 --> 00:01:11,000 scholarly works as well as popular works to his name. 20 00:01:11,320 --> 00:01:13,920 And this really goes back to his earliest forays into the 21 00:01:13,920 --> 00:01:16,520 profession, you know, back in the 1960s. 22 00:01:17,160 --> 00:01:21,160 He makes his name as a historian of economic thought, working in 23 00:01:21,160 --> 00:01:26,120 particular on what He starts as a Marxist and does write several 24 00:01:26,120 --> 00:01:30,400 papers, including in some top journals analyzing Marxist 25 00:01:30,400 --> 00:01:33,000 economics. But then he shifts his focus to 26 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:36,320 the topic of his dissertation, which is Jean Baptiste, the 27 00:01:36,320 --> 00:01:41,000 Classical economist, and writes a well regarded scholarly 28 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:45,200 manuscript on that. I know he does shift later in 29 00:01:45,200 --> 00:01:49,080 his career into taking up questions of cultural economics, 30 00:01:49,360 --> 00:01:52,120 some of the philosophical underpinning of economic 31 00:01:52,400 --> 00:01:54,480 evaluation and visions of the world. 32 00:01:55,160 --> 00:01:58,120 He even writes a book essentially assessing price 33 00:01:58,120 --> 00:02:01,800 theory as an economic term. But it's again, it's a multi 34 00:02:01,800 --> 00:02:07,840 faceted polymath of a scholar who is dug into a wide variety 35 00:02:07,840 --> 00:02:11,760 of topics, all of which he seems to approach with a very 36 00:02:12,240 --> 00:02:16,160 penetrating scholarly lens, at least certainly in his books and 37 00:02:16,160 --> 00:02:21,440 and journal articles. You do get distillations of that 38 00:02:21,680 --> 00:02:24,600 in some of his op eds and popular writing, but that's 39 00:02:24,600 --> 00:02:26,920 exactly what offense and popular writing are supposed to do. 40 00:02:28,440 --> 00:02:32,840 One of my favorite things that I learned from Seoul is just how 41 00:02:32,840 --> 00:02:35,240 to analyze claims that are given to you. 42 00:02:35,520 --> 00:02:40,680 So if someone says what wages have stagnated, what Thomas 43 00:02:40,680 --> 00:02:44,520 Seoul does is he looks at the data that Robert Reich provides 44 00:02:44,520 --> 00:02:47,520 and says, well, according to this, wages have stagnated. 45 00:02:47,840 --> 00:02:50,960 The problem is you're not focusing on individuals. 46 00:02:50,960 --> 00:02:54,800 You're focusing on groups that go in and out of certain 47 00:02:54,800 --> 00:02:57,960 categories. I say in my book, this is the I 48 00:02:57,960 --> 00:03:02,120 summarize Thomas Sowell's basic economic section like this. 49 00:03:02,120 --> 00:03:08,560 I said, imagine a guy goes to see how college kids age. 50 00:03:08,840 --> 00:03:12,720 So in the year 1980, he goes to a college and all the freshmen 51 00:03:12,720 --> 00:03:16,680 are 18 years old. He comes back 40 years later and 52 00:03:16,680 --> 00:03:19,240 all the freshmen are still 18 years old. 53 00:03:19,480 --> 00:03:21,840 So people at this college don't age at all. 54 00:03:22,200 --> 00:03:26,480 Like, well, what happens is people go in and out of this age 55 00:03:26,480 --> 00:03:29,920 group. People go in this income bracket 56 00:03:30,120 --> 00:03:34,080 for a very short amount of time and then gain on the job skills 57 00:03:34,240 --> 00:03:38,720 and then work themselves up. So yes, the Robert Reich example 58 00:03:38,920 --> 00:03:42,320 doesn't count because you're not actually following individuals. 59 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:44,640 Never. It took me 10 years before I 60 00:03:44,640 --> 00:03:47,960 ever heard someone say, does this follow individuals or 61 00:03:47,960 --> 00:03:52,000 groups which people move in and out of when it comes to incomes 62 00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:54,720 or economics? What can Thomas Soul teach us? 63 00:03:55,480 --> 00:03:57,880 Yeah. So this is a fascinating feature 64 00:03:57,880 --> 00:04:03,160 of souls approach to economics. He is an interlocutor of myths. 65 00:04:03,640 --> 00:04:07,040 He's a debunker of myths. And he he tends to take a social 66 00:04:07,040 --> 00:04:09,640 scientific approach to it, but does so in a very accessible 67 00:04:09,640 --> 00:04:11,760 way. Like you just explained, he 68 00:04:11,760 --> 00:04:17,240 likes to study patterns over time, but doing so on terms and 69 00:04:17,240 --> 00:04:21,079 parameters that reflect reality, not terms and parameters that 70 00:04:21,079 --> 00:04:22,680 reflect just a statistical relic. 71 00:04:23,440 --> 00:04:26,520 So, you know, an example you just gave, he is debunking a 72 00:04:26,520 --> 00:04:30,400 statistical relic by bringing in another dimension that was 73 00:04:30,400 --> 00:04:32,920 neglected in the original presentation of the same data. 74 00:04:33,640 --> 00:04:37,840 And he has done this in a multitude of of areas of social 75 00:04:37,840 --> 00:04:40,560 science, one that I like to to draw attention to. 76 00:04:40,560 --> 00:04:44,960 Seoul is actually a very powerful debunker of what I 77 00:04:44,960 --> 00:04:48,040 would call the pseudo scientific claims that emerged in the mid 78 00:04:48,040 --> 00:04:52,960 20th century trying to link race and intelligence and other 79 00:04:52,960 --> 00:04:56,880 certain characteristics. Again done on a very collective 80 00:04:56,880 --> 00:05:00,560 basis trying to group an entire race or nationality and assert 81 00:05:00,800 --> 00:05:04,840 that maybe this group is less intelligent than the other or 82 00:05:04,840 --> 00:05:08,480 vice versa. Souls answer to that was not 83 00:05:08,480 --> 00:05:11,440 just to scream and shout, hey, this is a racist approach even 84 00:05:11,440 --> 00:05:14,520 though it is and then dismissed it out of hand. 85 00:05:14,520 --> 00:05:18,120 Is is said, let's dig deeper into the data and we can 86 00:05:18,120 --> 00:05:21,560 actually find other dimensions that are not accounted for and 87 00:05:21,560 --> 00:05:24,120 the people that are asserting this correlation. 88 00:05:24,840 --> 00:05:27,200 And that is if you start treating people as individuals 89 00:05:27,200 --> 00:05:29,880 and you looked at historical antecedents, historical 90 00:05:29,880 --> 00:05:32,520 examples. So one of his most famous works 91 00:05:32,520 --> 00:05:36,600 on this as he looks at the history of immigrant communities 92 00:05:36,600 --> 00:05:39,920 that come to the United States and their level of achievement 93 00:05:39,920 --> 00:05:43,320 over time, but looking at them at an individual basis, and he 94 00:05:43,320 --> 00:05:44,920 finds there's a historical pattern. 95 00:05:46,200 --> 00:05:49,360 People that arrive in poverty, say in like the late 19th 96 00:05:49,360 --> 00:05:52,600 century, over the course of a couple generations, you start 97 00:05:52,640 --> 00:05:55,200 measuring educational and economic attainment. 98 00:05:55,760 --> 00:05:59,680 They rise out of poverty. It completely debunks the notion 99 00:05:59,680 --> 00:06:03,920 that there's some genetic characteristic that a afflicts 100 00:06:04,080 --> 00:06:07,640 certain immigrant groups or ethnicities or nationalities or 101 00:06:07,640 --> 00:06:09,640 races. And, and he's basically saying 102 00:06:09,640 --> 00:06:14,040 when we see examples of this argued in the present day, we 103 00:06:14,040 --> 00:06:17,160 have to look to the historical antecedents to it. 104 00:06:17,320 --> 00:06:20,000 We actually see that there are other patterns and and this 105 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:22,040 simply means that we're at a certain stage of the pattern. 106 00:06:23,360 --> 00:06:25,960 I forget what God he's written so much. 107 00:06:25,960 --> 00:06:28,280 I can't remember where he says this. 108 00:06:28,960 --> 00:06:35,840 I thought that he sort of explained income mobility 109 00:06:36,240 --> 00:06:39,400 through immigrant groups that come to America, start poor and 110 00:06:39,400 --> 00:06:43,440 overtime get richer. But I thought he said that that 111 00:06:43,560 --> 00:06:45,520 just could be a selection process. 112 00:06:45,680 --> 00:06:50,440 There's only very few smart, you know, people from this country, 113 00:06:50,440 --> 00:06:53,320 they come here and they lift themselves out of poverty, but 114 00:06:53,320 --> 00:06:57,440 that's a selection process. I remember his race and IQ thing 115 00:06:57,760 --> 00:07:03,760 being there was a, there were intelligence tests in the First 116 00:07:03,760 --> 00:07:07,600 World War where black, black Northerners and white 117 00:07:07,600 --> 00:07:11,240 southerners. Black northerners outscored 118 00:07:11,240 --> 00:07:13,920 white Southerners in a number of ways. 119 00:07:14,240 --> 00:07:18,000 So you could just what he basically did was he took people 120 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:22,400 with similar cultures, different races, but similar cultures. 121 00:07:22,600 --> 00:07:26,160 That was his variable. That's what I couldn't remember. 122 00:07:26,800 --> 00:07:30,480 Was there anything else in the race and IQ thing that he used? 123 00:07:30,480 --> 00:07:34,240 Because I think that gets a little more attention today, 124 00:07:34,240 --> 00:07:34,720 yeah. Yeah. 125 00:07:35,080 --> 00:07:39,240 So especially looked into immigrant groups from Eastern 126 00:07:39,240 --> 00:07:44,280 Europe and Southern Europe that at the time were discriminated 127 00:07:44,280 --> 00:07:47,360 against visa be Northwestern Europe. 128 00:07:48,400 --> 00:07:51,080 A lot of the immigration laws at the time tended to favor 129 00:07:51,520 --> 00:07:56,160 Northwestern Europeans and deprecated other groups that 130 00:07:56,160 --> 00:07:57,960 were immigrating to the United States. 131 00:07:57,960 --> 00:08:01,880 And and again, he studies data and he finds similar debunking 132 00:08:01,880 --> 00:08:04,200 patterns in here. So there's a there's an 133 00:08:04,200 --> 00:08:07,360 interesting characteristic when he's taking on these questions 134 00:08:07,360 --> 00:08:12,640 of like race and IQ, he doesn't just dismiss wrong research out 135 00:08:12,640 --> 00:08:16,480 of hand, he debunks it. He goes through and it and tries 136 00:08:16,480 --> 00:08:21,800 to scrutinize errors of logic, errors of thinking, errors of 137 00:08:21,800 --> 00:08:25,520 statistical inference that have occurred and LED people on these 138 00:08:25,520 --> 00:08:28,440 straight paths. And then doing so in such a way 139 00:08:28,440 --> 00:08:31,000 that corrects the interpretation. 140 00:08:31,280 --> 00:08:37,080 And you know, lo and behold, his correction actually verifies a a 141 00:08:37,080 --> 00:08:42,080 much stronger position argument against the race and IQ types of 142 00:08:42,360 --> 00:08:46,520 of people literature than you would find by just dismissing 143 00:08:46,520 --> 00:08:50,640 them out of hand. I want to read my favorite 144 00:08:50,640 --> 00:08:54,280 immigration quote from Seoul, and then I want you to tell me 145 00:08:54,280 --> 00:08:58,760 whatever topic comes to mind for another great soul contribution, 146 00:08:59,040 --> 00:09:00,800 he says. In civil rights rhetoric or 147 00:09:00,800 --> 00:09:04,600 reality, Japanese immigrants to the United States also 148 00:09:04,600 --> 00:09:07,560 encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, 149 00:09:07,800 --> 00:09:10,760 culminating in their mass internment during World War 2. 150 00:09:11,040 --> 00:09:15,000 But by 1959, they had equaled the income of whites, and by 151 00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:19,760 1969, Japanese American families were earning nearly one third 152 00:09:19,760 --> 00:09:23,440 higher incomes than the average American family. 153 00:09:23,760 --> 00:09:26,520 It's not all doom and gloom, ladies and gentlemen. 154 00:09:26,520 --> 00:09:30,080 You can't apply yourself. Progress is real, people. 155 00:09:30,880 --> 00:09:33,880 And that's exactly the case. And he's also referring to this 156 00:09:33,880 --> 00:09:37,640 in a time when there's a breakdown in racial barriers 157 00:09:37,640 --> 00:09:40,200 that are sustained and imposed by the state. 158 00:09:41,560 --> 00:09:44,320 You know, racial discrimination is often an instrument of the 159 00:09:44,320 --> 00:09:45,800 state. Segregation is certainly the 160 00:09:45,800 --> 00:09:47,520 case. Japanese internment was 161 00:09:47,520 --> 00:09:50,640 certainly the case and he's pointing out these are 162 00:09:50,640 --> 00:09:53,800 government actions that reinforced race racist norms at 163 00:09:53,800 --> 00:09:55,720 the time. But as you start to break them 164 00:09:55,720 --> 00:09:59,560 down, you actually see that the racist norm is undermined as 165 00:09:59,560 --> 00:10:01,840 well as the discriminatory mechanism. 166 00:10:02,400 --> 00:10:05,600 So this and this is a recurring theme in Souls work. 167 00:10:06,240 --> 00:10:12,080 It's also a very thorny area of social commentary, but one that 168 00:10:12,080 --> 00:10:15,120 he applies pretty rigorous economic analysis. 169 00:10:15,120 --> 00:10:18,960 You know, he's, he comes out of that Chicago School tradition 170 00:10:19,200 --> 00:10:23,200 that looks at discrimination as an economic mechanism as well as 171 00:10:23,200 --> 00:10:26,400 a social one. And, and, you know, when you 172 00:10:26,400 --> 00:10:29,880 consider it that way, considering it through the tools 173 00:10:29,880 --> 00:10:34,480 of economics, you often find explanations that are at odds 174 00:10:34,720 --> 00:10:37,320 with political analysis of the same subject. 175 00:10:37,680 --> 00:10:43,360 And Seoul is, you know, somewhat notorious for picking fights 176 00:10:43,600 --> 00:10:47,960 with the sacred cows of the political establishment, 177 00:10:47,960 --> 00:10:50,720 political literature and doing so on economic terms. 178 00:10:51,600 --> 00:10:55,320 So, you know, he gets a lot of criticism and and push back in 179 00:10:55,320 --> 00:10:58,400 that area precisely because he's added a different way of 180 00:10:58,400 --> 00:11:00,560 understanding some of the same problems. 181 00:11:00,560 --> 00:11:02,280 And it's a way that's less ideological. 182 00:11:02,280 --> 00:11:07,720 It's a way that's less wedded to prejudicial precepts that people 183 00:11:07,720 --> 00:11:14,400 bring into the question. He has a book, Black Rednecks 184 00:11:14,400 --> 00:11:16,480 and White Liberals. I'm sorry, I'm there. 185 00:11:16,480 --> 00:11:21,560 I've been sick. He summarizes his thesis in 186 00:11:21,560 --> 00:11:25,280 Economic Facts and Fallacies. He says many of the social or 187 00:11:25,280 --> 00:11:28,520 cultural differences between American blacks and American 188 00:11:28,520 --> 00:11:32,920 whites nationwide today were in antebellum times pointed out as 189 00:11:32,920 --> 00:11:35,400 differences between white Southerners and white 190 00:11:35,400 --> 00:11:38,160 Northerners. These include ways of talking, 191 00:11:38,400 --> 00:11:41,600 rates of crime and violence, children born out of wedlock, 192 00:11:41,840 --> 00:11:45,320 educational attainment and economic initiative or lack 193 00:11:45,600 --> 00:11:48,480 thereof. So he's telling you that there's 194 00:11:48,480 --> 00:11:51,240 a big cultural aspect. It's always important to say, 195 00:11:51,600 --> 00:11:53,680 gosh, I really wish the system would change. 196 00:11:53,680 --> 00:11:57,520 I wish Lindsey Graham would go do the right thing in Congress 197 00:11:57,520 --> 00:12:00,560 for the first time in his entire life, but it turns out you don't 198 00:12:00,560 --> 00:12:02,920 have to wait. You can embrace cultural traits 199 00:12:02,920 --> 00:12:06,320 that make you more successful when it comes to the cultural 200 00:12:06,320 --> 00:12:08,840 aspect of things. What are Souls contributions 201 00:12:08,840 --> 00:12:11,320 here? Well, here he's writing at a 202 00:12:11,320 --> 00:12:17,920 time when I'd say the academic focus on on race and culture has 203 00:12:17,920 --> 00:12:19,440 gone in a very different direction. 204 00:12:19,680 --> 00:12:23,240 And remember, Seoul is an economist of the mid to late 205 00:12:23,240 --> 00:12:26,280 20th century United States is when his his most active 206 00:12:27,440 --> 00:12:31,800 commentary period is his most active scholarly contributions 207 00:12:31,800 --> 00:12:36,600 come from that era. Now he's writing in a time when 208 00:12:37,000 --> 00:12:40,040 the other major economic contributions to the study of 209 00:12:40,040 --> 00:12:43,200 race and culture come from figures on the far left. 210 00:12:43,600 --> 00:12:47,760 Someone like Gunnar Meredall has Nobel laureate, shares the Nobel 211 00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:50,160 with Hayek even though they're very different in their 212 00:12:50,160 --> 00:12:55,080 viewpoints, writes this multi volume work called The American 213 00:12:55,080 --> 00:13:00,800 Dilemma, which is a purported analysis like a sociological 214 00:13:00,800 --> 00:13:06,320 socio economic analysis of the status of African Americans in 215 00:13:06,320 --> 00:13:08,720 the mid 20th century. And it has some interesting 216 00:13:08,720 --> 00:13:12,640 insights. But Miradol is very complicated 217 00:13:12,640 --> 00:13:15,120 as a figure because he's also a die hard eugenicist. 218 00:13:16,080 --> 00:13:20,920 He believes that there are genetic traits that cause and 219 00:13:20,920 --> 00:13:24,680 are related to poverty and not just a eugenicist against black 220 00:13:24,680 --> 00:13:26,200 people. He's also a eugenicist. 221 00:13:26,400 --> 00:13:31,840 He's a Swedish, so he is involved in the creation of 222 00:13:32,120 --> 00:13:36,080 Swedish eugenics laws and sterilization laws with him and 223 00:13:36,080 --> 00:13:38,600 his wife. So he's importing kind of this 224 00:13:38,720 --> 00:13:43,720 this viewpoint that there is a social determinism between 225 00:13:44,160 --> 00:13:47,960 heredity and intelligence, economic ability. 226 00:13:47,960 --> 00:13:50,720 And he takes the same framework and he applies it in the very 227 00:13:50,720 --> 00:13:54,080 progressive left wing way to the United States. 228 00:13:54,840 --> 00:13:57,200 Seoul was an individualist. He's coming in and he's 229 00:13:57,200 --> 00:14:00,920 basically offering an analysis of some of the same problems, 230 00:14:00,920 --> 00:14:06,160 same issues, but doing so in a way that explicitly rejects this 231 00:14:06,160 --> 00:14:09,440 scientific determinism that's coming out of the predominantly 232 00:14:09,440 --> 00:14:10,800 in the political left at the time. 233 00:14:11,400 --> 00:14:15,560 Now, we do know in the 20th century, the far left and the 234 00:14:15,560 --> 00:14:18,400 far right often converge. And it, you know what I like to 235 00:14:18,400 --> 00:14:20,880 call the, the horseshoe of eugenic theory. 236 00:14:21,080 --> 00:14:24,080 It's both a progressive idea and something that's adopted by the 237 00:14:24,080 --> 00:14:28,600 racial obsessed right at various points in history. 238 00:14:29,400 --> 00:14:32,440 And you have a figure like Seoul who would reject both. 239 00:14:33,480 --> 00:14:37,800 Seoul offers an individualistic retort to the collective 240 00:14:38,440 --> 00:14:41,280 approaches of the far left and the far right and then studying 241 00:14:41,320 --> 00:14:44,040 race essentially. Yes. 242 00:14:44,040 --> 00:14:49,960 So I believe he says we can dismiss this. 243 00:14:51,160 --> 00:14:55,040 The races have inherent intelligence, and this is just 244 00:14:55,040 --> 00:14:56,360 the way things are going to be forever. 245 00:14:56,360 --> 00:15:00,760 By saying at one point, Baghdad led the world in scientific 246 00:15:00,760 --> 00:15:04,520 discoveries. China led the world in in 247 00:15:04,960 --> 00:15:08,400 innovations and contributions. The British people were a 248 00:15:08,400 --> 00:15:11,560 primitive island during the time of the Roman Empire. 249 00:15:11,680 --> 00:15:15,120 Sometime later, the people of Britain ran the world. 250 00:15:15,320 --> 00:15:18,960 There's a massive disparity between Western Europeans and 251 00:15:18,960 --> 00:15:22,040 Eastern Europeans, bigger than the difference between black and 252 00:15:22,040 --> 00:15:24,680 white Americans. So once you see this, it's just 253 00:15:24,680 --> 00:15:27,200 so encouraging to know that there's not. 254 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:30,280 Everything's within our power. But there's much more than just 255 00:15:30,280 --> 00:15:34,280 this stagnation. You have tweeted about Thomas 256 00:15:34,280 --> 00:15:39,800 Ole's research on Marxism. I that book I have not read so 257 00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:42,920 I'm hoping he mentions it violates the non aggression 258 00:15:42,920 --> 00:15:45,000 principle and that's why Marxism is bad. 259 00:15:45,160 --> 00:15:47,320 Why is Thomas Soul against Marxism? 260 00:15:47,640 --> 00:15:50,920 Well, a big part of it is he actually starts out his academic 261 00:15:50,920 --> 00:15:55,880 career as a convinced Marxist. He's he's against Marxism 262 00:15:55,880 --> 00:15:58,680 because he's actually been through the motions of studying 263 00:15:58,680 --> 00:16:02,040 Marx in death some of his earliest academic work. 264 00:16:02,200 --> 00:16:05,160 He writes a couple of journal articles that are exploring 265 00:16:05,160 --> 00:16:08,480 dimensions of Marxist theory, surplus value, all the all the 266 00:16:08,480 --> 00:16:13,680 usual standard canards of Marxist economics. 267 00:16:14,040 --> 00:16:18,040 And he actually comes to and arrives at a position of 268 00:16:18,160 --> 00:16:23,320 rejecting this when he sees central planning at work through 269 00:16:23,320 --> 00:16:26,120 his own professional career. You know, he spends some time 270 00:16:26,640 --> 00:16:29,200 studying labor economics. He also spends time in the 271 00:16:29,200 --> 00:16:31,320 military. He spends time in the 272 00:16:31,320 --> 00:16:35,800 bureaucracy. And he sees elements of planning 273 00:16:35,800 --> 00:16:38,320 at play in each of these. And they start causing him to 274 00:16:38,320 --> 00:16:41,400 question his precepts. He also tells a story that, you 275 00:16:41,400 --> 00:16:44,320 know, when he arrives at the University of Chicago, he was 276 00:16:44,320 --> 00:16:47,000 still a committed Marxist even through Milton Friedman's 277 00:16:47,000 --> 00:16:49,120 classes. But it's, it's actually these 278 00:16:49,120 --> 00:16:52,880 observations of the real world that caused him to to 279 00:16:53,160 --> 00:16:56,960 essentially turn on Marxist ideas and conclude that this is 280 00:16:56,960 --> 00:17:00,040 just not a viable system of economic thinking. 281 00:17:00,200 --> 00:17:03,800 Planning does not work. He eventually comes around to 282 00:17:03,800 --> 00:17:06,880 kind of a more Hayekian view that I think is implicit in a 283 00:17:06,880 --> 00:17:10,960 lot of his that his writings, especially the several of the 284 00:17:10,960 --> 00:17:14,520 books that he publishes in the 1980s in particular, really 285 00:17:14,520 --> 00:17:19,839 adopt and expound upon Hayekian knowledge problems as the 286 00:17:19,960 --> 00:17:23,880 undercurrent of economic organizing. 287 00:17:24,240 --> 00:17:27,599 And you know, if you accept that premise, central planning 288 00:17:27,599 --> 00:17:30,160 becomes impossible, Marxism becomes impossible. 289 00:17:30,360 --> 00:17:33,120 Though he does that, he writes an entire book length assessment 290 00:17:33,120 --> 00:17:37,440 of Marx, actually digs into the weeds of of some of the stuff 291 00:17:37,440 --> 00:17:40,160 that I work on. For example, looking at Marx's 292 00:17:40,160 --> 00:17:44,640 reception in his own time, Visa V the post Soviet Union uptake 293 00:17:44,640 --> 00:17:46,160 on him. And he points out, quite 294 00:17:46,160 --> 00:17:50,240 correctly, that Marx is a very fringe, obscure figure in the 295 00:17:50,240 --> 00:17:54,680 19th century, lives in the same neighborhood as John Stuart Mill 296 00:17:54,920 --> 00:17:57,480 for most of his adult Simon London. 297 00:17:57,480 --> 00:18:01,520 And Mill has no idea who this guy is, even though they're 298 00:18:01,520 --> 00:18:03,800 working and writing on ostensibly the same social 299 00:18:03,800 --> 00:18:06,680 problems. And Saul points this out. 300 00:18:07,440 --> 00:18:11,240 He also then points out and says that it's actually political 301 00:18:11,240 --> 00:18:16,920 actors that elevate Marxism as an idea into not only the the 302 00:18:16,960 --> 00:18:20,440 the academic mainstream, but into political operas, 303 00:18:20,480 --> 00:18:27,120 operationalization of it in the Soviet Union and other Marxist 304 00:18:27,160 --> 00:18:30,600 communist countries that emerge in the 20th century. 305 00:18:32,000 --> 00:18:34,120 And you know, Seoul will look at this and he sees there's 306 00:18:34,120 --> 00:18:39,080 essentially a veneer here of theory that is actually 307 00:18:39,080 --> 00:18:43,800 legitimizing and authorizing some very bad actors to attain 308 00:18:43,800 --> 00:18:48,400 power, to attain enrichment for themselves, to attain the perks 309 00:18:48,400 --> 00:18:50,600 of political control and political office. 310 00:18:51,280 --> 00:18:55,720 So we also basically offers an explanation of why Marxism 311 00:18:55,720 --> 00:18:59,840 devolves almost invariably into the same totalitarian result. 312 00:19:01,400 --> 00:19:06,360 And why is that? Because equality is impossible, 313 00:19:06,920 --> 00:19:11,600 so only a tyrant would ever try to give you such a lie. 314 00:19:11,600 --> 00:19:13,760 And once you give the state so much power, they have no 315 00:19:13,760 --> 00:19:16,800 incentive to make them equal to everyone else. 316 00:19:17,200 --> 00:19:21,280 It's a, it's a cultural precept that people in that side of the 317 00:19:21,280 --> 00:19:24,600 spectrum adopt. It's a very unconstrained vision 318 00:19:24,600 --> 00:19:27,200 of society. If you're a Marxist, I mean, 319 00:19:27,200 --> 00:19:29,160 you're, you're trying to reorder the world. 320 00:19:30,240 --> 00:19:32,960 You know, they, the Hayekian insight comes out in The Road to 321 00:19:32,960 --> 00:19:36,320 Serfdom, where Hyatt points out, why did the why did the worst 322 00:19:36,320 --> 00:19:39,600 always rise to the top of these totalitarian societies? 323 00:19:39,920 --> 00:19:42,800 And it turns out there are certain characteristics and and 324 00:19:42,800 --> 00:19:45,560 in the way that they view the world, they see themselves as 325 00:19:45,560 --> 00:19:49,440 remaking the world. And any and every action 326 00:19:49,640 --> 00:19:53,040 undertaken in pursuit of that goal is legitimized by the goal 327 00:19:53,040 --> 00:19:57,280 itself. Very similarly, Seoul expands 328 00:19:57,280 --> 00:20:00,840 upon this idea, contrasting constrained and unconstrained 329 00:20:00,840 --> 00:20:04,440 visions of allocation of culture, of society. 330 00:20:04,680 --> 00:20:08,760 And he said there are certain characteristics that emerge in 331 00:20:09,120 --> 00:20:12,520 in certain types of visions of the world that lead people to do 332 00:20:12,520 --> 00:20:15,480 horrible things in pursuit of that vision because of the 333 00:20:15,480 --> 00:20:19,360 belief that the vision itself. Is a desirable end to attain. 334 00:20:20,840 --> 00:20:25,240 I remember just reading his book, he was talking about the 335 00:20:25,800 --> 00:20:30,760 importance of, you know, liberating the masses and the 336 00:20:30,880 --> 00:20:33,960 the importance of getting the working class, you know, the 337 00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:37,000 power to, you know, really take on the bourgeoisie. 338 00:20:37,240 --> 00:20:41,200 He goes ask these people, you know, before we give, you know, 339 00:20:41,200 --> 00:20:43,240 have a dictatorship of the proletariat. 340 00:20:43,400 --> 00:20:46,600 See how comfortable they are with giving the working man 341 00:20:46,600 --> 00:20:51,520 school choice When you realize there is not one freedom that 342 00:20:51,520 --> 00:20:54,840 they'd really they're not even comfortable giving them a little 343 00:20:54,840 --> 00:20:59,360 say over their lives. They're like, OK, they it's not 344 00:20:59,360 --> 00:21:02,120 about empowering the masses. It's about a dictatorship of the 345 00:21:02,120 --> 00:21:04,840 proletariat. Basically, it's about, I believe 346 00:21:04,840 --> 00:21:09,440 he refers to it as it's not about individuals being 347 00:21:09,440 --> 00:21:11,840 empowered to make decisions, it's about empowering 348 00:21:11,840 --> 00:21:16,520 politicians as coercive surrogate decision makers for 349 00:21:16,520 --> 00:21:18,480 the masses which they claim to represent. 350 00:21:18,800 --> 00:21:21,320 That's his thesis in Discrimination and disparity. 351 00:21:21,960 --> 00:21:25,520 And there's the keyword, what they claim to represent, you 352 00:21:25,520 --> 00:21:28,320 know, persons of a certain vision that view themselves as 353 00:21:28,320 --> 00:21:33,000 reordering all of society necessarily have to speak on 354 00:21:33,000 --> 00:21:37,080 behalf of other people. And they speak on on behalf of 355 00:21:37,080 --> 00:21:39,720 them as treating them as as collective units. 356 00:21:40,240 --> 00:21:43,720 Yet there's never really any voice of the other people that 357 00:21:43,720 --> 00:21:46,240 they're purporting to do all these actions on behalf of. 358 00:21:46,760 --> 00:21:49,920 Then eventually, you know, a devolution into a totalitarian 359 00:21:49,920 --> 00:21:52,800 society, which is what occurs in the Soviet Union. 360 00:21:53,120 --> 00:21:56,320 And who gets killed? It turns out to be the very same 361 00:21:56,320 --> 00:21:58,360 masses. They're the starving peasants 362 00:21:58,960 --> 00:22:04,160 that are the victims of the supposed dictatorship of the 363 00:22:04,160 --> 00:22:08,800 proletariat at the top is actually screwing them over, and 364 00:22:08,800 --> 00:22:11,080 doesn't mind that it's screwing them over because that's what's 365 00:22:11,080 --> 00:22:14,200 necessary to attain the society that they desire. 366 00:22:15,320 --> 00:22:18,600 So that this is a fundamental contradiction that seems to come 367 00:22:18,600 --> 00:22:22,640 out of very unconstrained visions of society is they'll 368 00:22:22,640 --> 00:22:27,840 profess to be acting on behalf of a greater good, but in 369 00:22:27,840 --> 00:22:30,440 action. What materializes is something 370 00:22:30,440 --> 00:22:35,800 that makes the greater masses entirely expendable to their 371 00:22:35,800 --> 00:22:39,000 political objective. One of the things that really 372 00:22:39,000 --> 00:22:42,000 helped me see through the lockdown and mask mandate 373 00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:45,720 madness was Thomas Old's book Civil Rights Rhetoric or 374 00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:48,360 Reality. He says it's true that black 375 00:22:48,360 --> 00:22:53,160 incomes rose after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that's 376 00:22:53,160 --> 00:22:56,040 not how you measure if a law had a good effect. 377 00:22:56,040 --> 00:23:00,000 You want to see what trend was occurring in the 20s, thirties, 378 00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:03,680 40s and 50s with this demographic and then see the 379 00:23:03,680 --> 00:23:08,120 change afterwards, he said. What the what happened was, of 380 00:23:08,120 --> 00:23:11,200 course, Jim Crow laws should be repealed in their evil. 381 00:23:11,400 --> 00:23:14,640 But he says, is this the sole explanation for why people have 382 00:23:14,640 --> 00:23:18,160 an increase in income or an increase in accessibility to 383 00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:22,120 access to products and services? So when it came to the 384 00:23:22,120 --> 00:23:26,800 lockdowns, I said, oh, you know, deaths went down after this mask 385 00:23:26,800 --> 00:23:29,320 mandate was imposed. What was happening before then? 386 00:23:29,560 --> 00:23:32,760 And time and time again, you find out there's no correlation 387 00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:37,240 between lockdowns, mask mandates and COVID deaths, especially 388 00:23:37,240 --> 00:23:41,560 comparing countries. When it comes to this trend of 389 00:23:41,560 --> 00:23:46,440 how Seoul was able to verify the claims of researchers, what 390 00:23:46,440 --> 00:23:51,120 comes out to your mind when you look at his attempt to really 391 00:23:51,120 --> 00:23:54,920 empirically analyze historical narratives that will just take 392 00:23:54,920 --> 00:23:57,160 for granted? Well, he's a, he's a very 393 00:23:57,160 --> 00:23:59,600 innovative social scientist. And that seems to be like the 394 00:23:59,600 --> 00:24:04,000 core underlying theme of his work is to scientifically test 395 00:24:04,400 --> 00:24:08,000 claims, whether they're popular, unpopular, conventional wisdom 396 00:24:08,000 --> 00:24:11,760 or completely out of left field. You know, he wants to take 397 00:24:11,760 --> 00:24:14,800 nothing for granted. He actually wants to see what 398 00:24:14,800 --> 00:24:19,960 the data show. And this is a very rare mindset 399 00:24:20,760 --> 00:24:24,920 to encounter among intellectuals in particular, You know, 400 00:24:24,920 --> 00:24:26,760 intellectuals, I think in the worst sense. 401 00:24:26,760 --> 00:24:29,960 They're they're Hayeki and secondhand dealers and ideas. 402 00:24:30,200 --> 00:24:32,840 They come to a problem already thinking that they know all the 403 00:24:32,840 --> 00:24:35,960 answers. Seoul, actually, he engages, 404 00:24:36,400 --> 00:24:38,840 even though he does so in a very acerbic way at times. 405 00:24:38,840 --> 00:24:44,640 And I love the acerbicism, but he engages people that basically 406 00:24:44,640 --> 00:24:48,520 act as know it alls with his own state of intellectual humility. 407 00:24:48,520 --> 00:24:51,960 And he says, well, wait a minute, let's question the core 408 00:24:51,960 --> 00:24:56,240 assumptions of an assertion. And, and, and let's do so in a 409 00:24:56,240 --> 00:25:00,360 way that sets up a natural experiment using historical 410 00:25:00,360 --> 00:25:02,800 data. Let's actually tease out what 411 00:25:02,800 --> 00:25:06,280 the data say on a, a subject and you get some really interesting 412 00:25:06,600 --> 00:25:08,560 deeper understanding. And again, you know, as I 413 00:25:08,560 --> 00:25:13,240 pointed out, he often comes to a conclusion in the end that 414 00:25:13,240 --> 00:25:16,520 verifies and validates what was taken for granted. 415 00:25:16,960 --> 00:25:20,840 Like in the the race and IQ thing, he rejects racial IQ 416 00:25:20,840 --> 00:25:24,320 science. That's a fundamental derivative 417 00:25:24,320 --> 00:25:28,520 of his work, but he gets there through scientific analysis and 418 00:25:28,520 --> 00:25:33,160 testing of the claims rather than just asserting same thing 419 00:25:33,160 --> 00:25:36,720 you see in in other aspects. And I think this is a big part 420 00:25:36,720 --> 00:25:40,480 of his conversion from Marxism. It's it's testing the theory 421 00:25:40,480 --> 00:25:43,960 against reality. And he starts to see breakdowns 422 00:25:43,960 --> 00:25:47,680 in reality, both on a micro level of observing, planning and 423 00:25:47,680 --> 00:25:51,200 practice and then in in a large societal trends of observing 424 00:25:51,200 --> 00:25:53,920 this trend toward totalitarianism and Marxist 425 00:25:53,920 --> 00:25:57,160 societies. That's the convincing evidence. 426 00:25:57,360 --> 00:26:01,800 Not it's not like let's go pour back over Marx and have the 27th 427 00:26:01,800 --> 00:26:05,560 new interpretation of Dos Capitol that finds something 428 00:26:05,560 --> 00:26:08,480 supposedly hidden that every other Marxist has somehow 429 00:26:08,480 --> 00:26:10,520 missed. Seoul's not interested in that. 430 00:26:10,520 --> 00:26:12,880 He's interested in testing it in practice. 431 00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:17,680 I love the Marxism one that he ends social justice fallacies 432 00:26:17,680 --> 00:26:19,760 with, he said. You know, since the rich are 433 00:26:19,760 --> 00:26:24,280 only rich because they extract their money from the surplus 434 00:26:24,280 --> 00:26:27,320 value of the poor, we should see the places with the most 435 00:26:27,320 --> 00:26:30,200 billionaires have the most amount of poverty, he says. 436 00:26:30,200 --> 00:26:33,360 Turns out America has a lot more billionaires and a lot less 437 00:26:33,360 --> 00:26:36,840 poverty than places in the world that have no billionaires but a 438 00:26:36,840 --> 00:26:39,800 lot more poverty. I'm like OK I wish I would have 439 00:26:39,800 --> 00:26:41,920 read those three sentences 10 years ago. 440 00:26:41,920 --> 00:26:44,800 I would have saved myself some humiliation. 441 00:26:44,920 --> 00:26:48,440 Let me give you a disparity and I want you to use Souls 442 00:26:48,440 --> 00:26:54,040 methodology to refute this. If I say men are 50% of the 443 00:26:54,040 --> 00:26:59,480 population yet 95.5% of people killed by police, therefore 444 00:26:59,480 --> 00:27:03,920 discrimination exists. The average income of a 16 year 445 00:27:03,920 --> 00:27:08,480 old is way lower than the average income of a 46 year old. 446 00:27:08,680 --> 00:27:12,480 Therefore men and young people are systematically discriminated 447 00:27:12,480 --> 00:27:14,640 against using Souls methodologies. 448 00:27:14,640 --> 00:27:16,800 What, if anything, is wrong with my logic? 449 00:27:17,440 --> 00:27:19,480 The very first thing is you're you're treating people as a 450 00:27:19,480 --> 00:27:20,640 group. You're treating people 451 00:27:20,640 --> 00:27:23,720 collectively and a lot of the phenomena you're talking about 452 00:27:23,720 --> 00:27:27,280 are individual instances you'd want to dig in. 453 00:27:27,280 --> 00:27:31,640 Can you make that inference from a summary statistic to 454 00:27:31,640 --> 00:27:34,160 causality? And so would say, basically, no, 455 00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:36,440 you can't. You actually need more data, 456 00:27:36,440 --> 00:27:39,480 better data that tells the actual causality now. 457 00:27:39,920 --> 00:27:44,040 So, for example, on on police shooting, it's not enough to 458 00:27:44,040 --> 00:27:48,800 simply say this percentage of persons in such and such group 459 00:27:48,800 --> 00:27:52,280 represents whatever share of police shootings you have to. 460 00:27:52,800 --> 00:27:56,440 You actually have to dig into the data and figure out if the 461 00:27:56,440 --> 00:27:59,800 particular instances of police shootings have a racial 462 00:27:59,800 --> 00:28:03,840 component to them. So for example, if you had a 463 00:28:03,880 --> 00:28:08,640 subset of data that showed police encounters between 464 00:28:08,640 --> 00:28:12,520 different racial groups of the same nature, let's say we took 465 00:28:12,520 --> 00:28:17,160 all traffic stops between police and and private citizens and 466 00:28:17,160 --> 00:28:23,120 then we divided them on racial lines and you could detect which 467 00:28:23,200 --> 00:28:26,120 traffic stops ended peacefully, which ones escalated. 468 00:28:26,400 --> 00:28:29,440 That's a that's a much more narrow subset of the data. 469 00:28:29,680 --> 00:28:32,920 And I could see Souls as someone who would would like advocate 470 00:28:32,920 --> 00:28:36,240 that type of an approach because if you detected that kind of 471 00:28:36,240 --> 00:28:40,120 disparity, it's very different than saying, well, 80% of this, 472 00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:45,480 90% of that result in an escalation just based on the 473 00:28:45,480 --> 00:28:48,880 summary statistic. He'd want to get down to what is 474 00:28:48,880 --> 00:28:51,360 the mechanism? Are there geographic 475 00:28:51,360 --> 00:28:55,640 disparities? Are there other patterns at play 476 00:28:56,160 --> 00:28:59,080 that determine the nature of why police stops occur? 477 00:29:01,240 --> 00:29:05,400 I guess in other words, you can't just reduce a descriptive 478 00:29:05,400 --> 00:29:08,320 statistic in the causality without investigating the 479 00:29:08,320 --> 00:29:10,640 causality. Is that descriptive statistic? 480 00:29:10,640 --> 00:29:13,800 It might be something causal, it might not be, but you actually 481 00:29:13,800 --> 00:29:17,720 have to dig deeper into the data to figure out what's really 482 00:29:17,720 --> 00:29:20,480 going on. Visa vie what the political 483 00:29:20,480 --> 00:29:24,000 claim is. I love his warning and 484 00:29:24,000 --> 00:29:27,400 methodology and the vision of the anointed. 485 00:29:27,400 --> 00:29:31,400 He says there's a scam, here's what's going to happen, there's 486 00:29:31,400 --> 00:29:33,800 a huge crisis that needs our attention. 487 00:29:34,040 --> 00:29:37,040 There's a solution which is going to be coercively imposed 488 00:29:37,040 --> 00:29:38,880 by a state that people must fund. 489 00:29:39,400 --> 00:29:42,320 There's going to be results. And regardless of what the 490 00:29:42,320 --> 00:29:44,840 results are, they're either going to prove that we're right 491 00:29:44,840 --> 00:29:47,160 or going to prove that we need even more funding. 492 00:29:47,520 --> 00:29:49,960 We were wrong. It was worse than we thought. 493 00:29:49,960 --> 00:29:52,920 We need to double down. So he says this in like the 494 00:29:52,920 --> 00:29:57,040 early 90s, before the current hysteria that we get when it 495 00:29:57,040 --> 00:29:59,680 comes to other things. Do you think of the vision of 496 00:29:59,680 --> 00:30:01,160 the anointed? Was this a great contract 497 00:30:01,240 --> 00:30:04,080 distribution? Does school choice come to mind? 498 00:30:04,800 --> 00:30:08,200 Take this wherever you want in our last few minutes here. 499 00:30:08,320 --> 00:30:10,720 What else about Seoul should people appreciate? 500 00:30:11,680 --> 00:30:18,880 Well, he has a, a very skilled gift at distilling complex ideas 501 00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:22,760 into accessible terms. And then this really comes 502 00:30:22,760 --> 00:30:25,040 through. So I love conflict of visions as 503 00:30:25,040 --> 00:30:30,320 a, a great way of articulating ways of looking at the world 504 00:30:30,320 --> 00:30:32,840 both social scientifically and philosophically. 505 00:30:33,360 --> 00:30:38,080 And I think it's the expressions that he has there of, of, you 506 00:30:38,080 --> 00:30:42,560 know, dividing ways of looking at the past, ways of looking at 507 00:30:42,560 --> 00:30:47,080 the present into different categories and groups of vision, 508 00:30:47,080 --> 00:30:50,960 different categories of, of philosophical underpinnings. 509 00:30:52,120 --> 00:30:57,680 This makes thousands of years of complex political philosophy 510 00:30:58,240 --> 00:31:01,480 very accessible and understandable in a cohesive 511 00:31:01,480 --> 00:31:04,560 framework. So I think there's a, there's, 512 00:31:04,920 --> 00:31:10,080 you know, I, I hear the term pop economist used as a slur, but 513 00:31:10,080 --> 00:31:12,240 this is a very snobbish approach. 514 00:31:12,720 --> 00:31:14,440 Actually. What he's doing is he's taking 515 00:31:14,440 --> 00:31:19,920 some very complex and difficult to access ideas and distilling 516 00:31:19,920 --> 00:31:24,520 them in a way that is accessible and yet also still intelligible 517 00:31:25,400 --> 00:31:28,960 to a mass readership. There's value to that. 518 00:31:30,520 --> 00:31:35,160 In fact, I I I deprecate scholars that speak in 519 00:31:35,160 --> 00:31:39,400 obscurantism and jargon and intentionally obscure the 520 00:31:39,400 --> 00:31:44,000 accessibility of their work because that's really often just 521 00:31:44,720 --> 00:31:47,760 a a cloaking mechanism. It's a veneer that their 522 00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:51,560 arguments aren't nearly as strong as they claim them to be. 523 00:31:52,520 --> 00:31:53,680 I mean, you hear this all the time. 524 00:31:53,680 --> 00:31:56,880 You encounter Marxists and challenge them so well. 525 00:31:56,880 --> 00:32:00,080 You just don't understand Karl Marx like I do because I was 526 00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:04,520 trained in the such as that school of, of Marxist thought. 527 00:32:04,840 --> 00:32:08,560 And it's, it's actually, no, you, you, you don't have good 528 00:32:08,560 --> 00:32:12,400 arguments on your side to coherently and intelligently 529 00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:15,720 explain your position to an educated layperson. 530 00:32:15,880 --> 00:32:17,880 That's a sign of weakness of your position. 531 00:32:18,760 --> 00:32:23,440 So Saul takes his readership very seriously in speaking to 532 00:32:23,440 --> 00:32:27,480 them in accessible ways. He's not lecturing down at them. 533 00:32:27,640 --> 00:32:31,760 He's saying, let me walk you through the logic of my position 534 00:32:32,040 --> 00:32:35,000 in a way that you can understand and then I want you to evaluate 535 00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:38,320 it and challenge me. So we'll invite that challenge. 536 00:32:38,320 --> 00:32:41,520 He may be dismissive of a stupid challenge, but he will none the 537 00:32:41,520 --> 00:32:44,760 less invite the challenge. And he says, explain to me in 538 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:48,960 accessible, intelligible terms what your position is and why 539 00:32:48,960 --> 00:32:51,640 you think that and all do the same in return. 540 00:32:51,640 --> 00:32:55,720 So he's he's actually engaged his readers in a conversation in 541 00:32:55,720 --> 00:32:59,920 ways that I think is it is extremely rare among 542 00:33:00,640 --> 00:33:03,800 intellectuals, among academics, among people that have his 543 00:33:03,800 --> 00:33:05,480 caliber of scholarly achievement. 544 00:33:06,560 --> 00:33:10,760 Yes, I wish Matthew Desmond would take note and do that same 545 00:33:10,760 --> 00:33:15,360 thing with the 1619 project. Let us know where I know you're 546 00:33:15,360 --> 00:33:18,320 an economic historian at the Independent Institute. 547 00:33:18,480 --> 00:33:21,640 Where can people find your work and what are you working on now? 548 00:33:21,960 --> 00:33:24,840 Yeah, listen, independent.org is where I publish a lot of the 549 00:33:24,880 --> 00:33:27,720 material and it's it's our website. 550 00:33:28,440 --> 00:33:32,840 I am working, you know, much much as soul did on the history 551 00:33:32,840 --> 00:33:38,000 of Marxism and and trying to explain why this takes over 552 00:33:38,280 --> 00:33:41,360 large swaths of the Academy in the 20th century. 553 00:33:41,920 --> 00:33:46,160 Why we get to where we are today despite this being very early on 554 00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:48,640 and discredited way of economic thinking and then further 555 00:33:48,640 --> 00:33:51,960 discredited in practice from the events of the 20th century. 556 00:33:52,960 --> 00:33:57,560 So is that why you and Bob Murphy are engaged in this back 557 00:33:57,560 --> 00:34:00,200 and forth? Because the fact that Marx was 558 00:34:00,200 --> 00:34:05,000 not popular in his time means academics really don't take him 559 00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:06,640 seriously? It's only the Bolshevik 560 00:34:06,640 --> 00:34:10,520 revolution which made him popular, because that's the 561 00:34:10,520 --> 00:34:12,840 whole thing. That's essentially the gist of 562 00:34:12,840 --> 00:34:15,239 the argument. And, and you actually find soul 563 00:34:15,239 --> 00:34:18,440 hints at this. And, and in his book on Marx, 564 00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:23,480 you know, it's observing that in his own lifetime he's an 565 00:34:23,480 --> 00:34:25,719 extremely fringe peripheral figure. 566 00:34:25,840 --> 00:34:29,120 But he is noticed by economists in the decade or so after his 567 00:34:29,120 --> 00:34:34,159 death, mostly the marginalist pick him up and notice him as a 568 00:34:35,280 --> 00:34:38,400 a relic of the older system, also a potential challenger to 569 00:34:38,400 --> 00:34:40,199 marginalism. And they engage with him in 570 00:34:40,199 --> 00:34:42,960 depth and deconstruct his arguments. 571 00:34:43,159 --> 00:34:46,400 But by about 1900, by about the turn of the century, Marx has 572 00:34:46,400 --> 00:34:50,080 been defeated intellectually in economics. 573 00:34:50,080 --> 00:34:54,600 There are very few people that think that he emerged from those 574 00:34:55,120 --> 00:34:58,680 discussions and battles of the late 19th century as the 575 00:34:58,680 --> 00:35:02,640 superior economic system. He's seen as something, you 576 00:35:02,640 --> 00:35:05,600 know, I'll paraphrase. John Maynard Keynes, of all 577 00:35:05,600 --> 00:35:09,920 people, writes that Marx is the author of an obsolete textbook 578 00:35:09,920 --> 00:35:11,960 of no interest to the modern world. 579 00:35:12,400 --> 00:35:14,800 And this isn't just Keynes saying, hey, I'm going to 580 00:35:14,800 --> 00:35:16,680 dismiss the guy. This is Keynes saying 581 00:35:16,800 --> 00:35:21,320 marginalism 1 over the labor theory of value. 582 00:35:22,400 --> 00:35:25,080 And yet you have the Bolshevik Revolution, which is just like 583 00:35:25,080 --> 00:35:30,040 this giant influx of state support for the propagation of 584 00:35:30,040 --> 00:35:33,760 Marxism that resuscitates and revitalizes it in intellectual 585 00:35:33,760 --> 00:35:36,800 circles. Thank you to everyone for 586 00:35:36,800 --> 00:35:38,840 watching Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the 587 00:35:38,840 --> 00:35:41,920 Libertarian Institute. Doctor Magnus, thank you for 588 00:35:41,920 --> 00:35:43,840 your time. Absolutely, thanks for doing 589 00:35:43,840 --> 00:35:44,000 this.