Fri, 29 December 2017
Robin Hanson returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, co-authored with Kevin Simler. As the subtitle suggests, the book looks at humans' hidden motives. Robin argues that these hidden motives are much more prevalent than our conscious minds assume. We are not conscious of the vast majority of the functions of our brains. This extends beyond the most basic things our brains do (such as commanding our hearts to beat every second or so) to many things we think of as higher-level cognitive tasks. Hanson and Simler argue that, if the brain were a corporation, the conscious mind wouldn't be the CEO but the press secretary. Most of the reasons our conscious brains give for our actions are actually ex-post rationalizations for decisions that have been made unconsciously and for reasons that aren't immediately obvious to us. As a press secretary, the conscious mind is better off not knowing if we are doing things for selfish reasons since that would make it more difficult to justify our actions to others. Some very compelling evidence for this thesis comes from studies of people with split brains. People with severe epilepsy have sometimes been treated by severing the connections between the two halves of their brains. Researchers noticed that when one side of the brain was fed information that led to a particular action (e.g. an instruction from the researcher to "stand up") the other side would construct a reason for the action (e.g. "I was thirsty and I got up to get a drink"). If the brain were truthfully answering these questions, it would say "I don't know." However, the split-brain patients confidently gave false answers apparently without realizing they were false. Hanson argues that neurotypical minds are doing the same thing: constructing justifications for our actions even if we aren't really aware of our true underlying motives. From the book's online description, "The aim of this book is to confront our hidden motives directly---to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once our minds are more clearly visible, we can work to better understand human nature: Why do people laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?" We discuss this theory of the brain and how it applies to many areas of everyday life from medicine to body language. The Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If this podcast convinced you to buy a copy of The Elephant in the Brain, doing so through one of these links will provide revenue to the podcast at no additional cost to yourself.
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Fri, 22 December 2017
My guest for this episode is Ennio Piano of George Mason University. Our topic is Ennio's work on the economics of biker gangs. Ennio has two papers on this subject. The first, published in Public Choice, is entitled Free riders: the economics and organization of outlaw motorcycle gangs and it describes the franchise-style model of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, and how that model contributed to that gang's rise to prominence. By making the local chapters of the Hell's Angels residual claimants, while the head chapter in Oakland is responsible for the gang's name and reputation, the gang exploits local knowledge while also coordinating activities internationally. The second paper, Outlaw and economics: Biker gangs and club goods describes how the norms and rituals of biker gangs fit with the theory of club goods. Costly, unreliable motorcycles and even Nazi tattoos can be explained through this theory: they are credible commitments to remain loyal to the club. This behaviour is similar in purpose to rituals practice by many religious sects. We discuss the history of biker gangs and the gang wars of the 1990s. Finally, Ennio describes the relationship between biker gangs and other criminal organizations such as the Mafia and Mexican drug cartels. |
Fri, 15 December 2017
My guest today is Jake Meyer of California State University, Long Beach. We discuss Jake's work on the intersection of financial crises and politics. Jake's work explores important questions such as the interaction between interest group politics and financial and currency crises. A country's monetary authority needs to manage both the domestic labour market and the country's exchange rate, but particular interest groups tend to favour one over the other very strongly. If one of these interest groups becomes disproportionately influential in national politics, they can affect monetary policy in ways that lead to crises. For instance, if a group that cares about the domestic economy and not the exchange rate takes power, they can push the monetary authority into causing an exchange rate crisis. If a group that cares exclusively about the exchange rate takes power, they can push the monetary authority to ignore the domestic economy to the point that it causes a banking crisis. Jake's work also looks at the way countries learn in the wake of financial crises. He looks at the change in the growth rate of credit before and after a crisis, and he finds that things like the number of veto players and the independence of the central bank impact this change. Check out Jake's Quora account, where he answers many questions related to economics. |
Fri, 8 December 2017
Today's guest is Kyle Coates and our topic is pro wrestling and the intellectual property problems that arise from it. So prepare to be amazed as we BODY SLAM this topic, or something. Who owns a wrestler's name, gimmick, and persona? Kyle was inspired to do research in this area when he heard about a legal dispute between the wrestlers Jeff and Matt Hardy and the wrestling network TNA. The Hardys changed networks and wanted to continue using a gimmick they had developed while performing for TNA. We discuss some of the lawsuits and disputes that have occurred in the pro wrestling sphere, and how to courts have treated these issues. And yes, we answer the most important question: If Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson runs for President, will he be able to use Rock puns in his campaign ads? Listen to the episode to learn the answer!
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Fri, 1 December 2017
Today's guest is David Friedman of Santa Clara University. Our discussion centers around his upcoming book, Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, which you can read in draft form at his website. David became interested in this topic when he became interested in the decentralized legal system of saga-period Iceland. This interest has since expanded into a full book covering everything from Imperial Chinese Law to the customary legal system of Somaliland in northern Somalia. We discuss some of these chapters, with a focus on Somalian, Jewish, Icelandic, and 18th-century British law. We also discuss some of the major themes of the book, such as feud law and embedded or polylegal systems. Related links: I. M. Lewis' book on the modern history of Somalia The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson (He contributed a chapter on pirate law to Legal Systems Very Different From Ours). He was also a recent guest of this show. |
Fri, 24 November 2017
My guest today is Frank Milne of Queen's University. Our topic for today will be unintended consequences. Frank has written a paper directed at policymakers to help them understand some of the pitfalls that economists have identified. The paper is directed at Australian policymakers, so some of the examples are Australia specific, though they generalize quite well to other countries. We start where the paper starts, with a discussion of Australia's heavy investment in commodity exports to China in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Many people mistook the temporary increase in demand for Australian mineral exports for a permanent change, leading them to over-invest in developing the Australian mining industry. We go on to discuss many topics, with a particular focus on housing. We also touch on Frank's work on Systemically Important Real Sectors (SIRS), which he is working on with co-author John F. Crean. SIRS are sectors with the potential to cause systemic problems in the banking sector. They feature high volatility of costs and revenues, which create the potential for large losses to lenders. Related links: The Diamond-Dybvig model (Wikipedia) and the original paper. The Arrow-Debreu model (Wikipedia). House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again by Mian and Sufi. |
Fri, 17 November 2017
Today's guest is Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution. We discuss infrastructure, particularly roads and airports, and the incentives faced by their users. Bad incentives create congestion problems that can't be solved by simply throwing more money into infrastructure; you need to fix the incentives! Clifford's work on privatization shows how it could improve incentives and reduce the costs of congestion. Clifford argues that self-driving cars will fix some of the problems created by bad policy. We also discuss the letter grades issued for infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers and what they do and don't tell us about the quality of American infrastructure.
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Fri, 10 November 2017
Peter Leeson of George Mason University joins the podcast today to discuss his latest book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird. We discuss the economic reasoning behind some of history's strangest practices: ordeals that were used to determine innocence or guilt in medieval Europe, trials by battle that were used to settle land disputes in Norman England, wife auctions that happened during the Industrial Revolution, and the criminal prosecution of insects and rodents by ecclesiastical courts in Renaissance Italy. Also check out Peter's previous book, The Invisible Hook, about the economics of pirates. You won't regret it!
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Fri, 3 November 2017
My guest today is Jared Rubin of Chapman University. He is the author of Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not, which is our topic for today. The book deals with the question of why Western Europe became wealthier than the Middle East after centuries of being poorer. The book is part game theoretic model of society, part historical narrative through the lens of that model. The model considers two main factors: the state's power to coerce and its need for political legitimacy granted by elites. Importantly, different groups have been the ones to grant legitimacy to the state in different times and places. In the Muslim world, religious leaders primarily played this role, as they did in Europe prior to the Reformation. After the Reformation, however, the power of the Catholic Church was much diminished in many parts of Europe. Rulers in places like England and the Dutch Republic turned to economic elites to grant them legitimacy. This gave the merchant and capitalist classes a seat at the bargaining table, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution.
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Fri, 27 October 2017
My guest today is Kevin Leyton-Brown, he is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Kevin's work involves not only computer science topics such as artificial intelligence, but also game theory, and the intersection between the two. Our topic for today is an app that Kevin co-founded called Kudu, which uses double auctions to help Ugandan farmers trade more effectively. Kevin was interested in using his skills to help people in the developing world, so during a sabbatical seven years ago, he resolved to go to a country in sub-Saharan Africa to do just that. He settled on Uganda and, after living there for a time, noticed something peculiar about the market for agricultural goods there. In the city, you would sometimes find vendors selling goods at very high prices, and even running out. Meanwhile, in the countryside, vendors would have so much stock they would be selling at extremely low prices, even rotting before they could be sold. Kevin, along with his partners John Quinn and Richard Ssekibuule, set out to help the locals seize these apparent arbitrage opportunities by constructing a platform to allow buyers and sellers in these markets to trade with one another at competitive prices. Most Ugandans have cell phones. Not fancy smartphones (as I wrongly guessed) but basic flip phones. So Kevin and his partners decided to set up a platform by which people could make bids and asks using a basic text-message system, and that system turned into Kudu. The platform has facilitated $1.5 million USD worth of confirmed trades, and it has made the prices of agricultural goods much more transparent for everyone trading in these markets. Related links: Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism
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Sat, 21 October 2017
Returning to the podcast is David Henderson of Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. Our topic for today is the German Economic Miracle. David wrote an article on it for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. The article begins as follows: "After World War II the German economy lay in shambles. The war, along with Hitler’s scorched-earth policy, had destroyed 20 percent of all housing. Food production per capita in 1947 was only 51 percent of its level in 1938, and the official food ration set by the occupying powers varied between 1,040 and 1,550 calories per day. Industrial output in 1947 was only one-third its 1938 level. Moreover, a large percentage of Germany’s working-age men were dead. At the time, observers thought that West Germany would have to be the biggest client of the U.S. welfare state; yet, twenty years later its economy was envied by most of the world. And less than ten years after the war people already were talking about the German economic miracle. We discuss the West German economy, before and after WWII, and contrast it with the East German economy. We also discuss some of the interesting figures who played roles along the way: Ludwig Erhard, Wilhelm Röpke, Konrad Adenauer, and Walter Heller. We wrap up by discussing the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics itself, which David created and has edited since its first publication in 1993.
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Fri, 13 October 2017
My guest today is Jamie Pavlik of Texas Tech University. Jamie has done a ton of research on corruption and development. She has examined corruption in the developing world, with multiple papers examining corruption in Brazil. She has also looked at international comparisons of corruption, and corruption in the United States specifically. We discuss her work on corruption as well as some of the statistical issues with spatial econometrics.
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Fri, 6 October 2017
My guest today is Thomas Sampson of the London School of Economics. Our topic for today is the economic impact of Brexit. Long-time listeners will recall that I did an interview with Sam Bowman on Brexit immediately after the vote occurred. Think of this as a follow-up to that episode now that the dust has settled and we have a better idea of what Brexit is going to look like. Thomas has written multiple papers on the subject, including Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Its abstract follows: This paper reviews the literature on the likely economic consequences of Brexit and considers the lessons of the Brexit vote for the future of European and global integration. Brexit will make the United Kingdom poorer because it will lead to new barriers to trade and migration between the United Kingdom and the European Union. Plausible estimates put the costs to the United Kingdom at between 1 and 10 percent of income per capita. Other European Union countries will also suffer economically, but their estimated losses are much smaller. Support for Brexit came from a coalition of less-educated, older, less economically successful and more socially conservative voters. Why these voters rejected the European Union is poorly understood, but will play an important role in determining whether Brexit proves to be merely a diversion on the path to greater international integration or a sign that globalization has reached its limits. Globalization and economic integration have been on more or less a constant rise since WWII, and Brexit is a rare reversal of this trend. Thomas argues that it is important to understand the causes of Brexit to see if this is just a temporary blip on the way to global economic integration or the start of a reversal of the post-WWII trend.
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Fri, 29 September 2017
My guest today is Karl Smith, he is the director of economic research at the Niskanen center. Our topic for today will be market power. Karl has written a series of posts on the Niskanen center blog discussing markups and market power. The debate was sparked by a paper by Loecker and Eeckhout that claimed that average markups in the American economy had risen from 18 percent in 1980 to 67 percent today. There are many different interpretations one might have for this data. What Karl points out is that these markups have mainly risen among smaller firms. Wal-Mart has very low markups, but niche specialty firms such as the local vegan café have relatively high markups. This makes sense in the context of monopolistic competition, where consumers pay a small premium in return for greater product differentiation. Noah Smith had this response to Karl's article: "Robin Hanson and Karl Smith both have posts responding to De Loecker and Eeckhout’s paper and attacking the Market Power Story. Both give reasons why they think rising markups indicate monopolistic competition, rather than entry barriers. But both seem to forget that monopolistic competition causes deadweight loss. Just because it has the word 'competition' in it does NOT mean that monopolistic competition is efficient. It is not." As Tyler Cowen points out, this is not necessarily the case. What is inefficient in a partial equilibrium model may not be inefficient in a general equilibrium model.
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Fri, 8 September 2017
My guest today is Fabio Rojas. He is professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. Fabio is the author of three books, the first is From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline, published in 2007. The second book, coauthored with Michael Heaney, is Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11, published in 2015. The third book, Theory for the Working Sociologist, was published just recently in 2017. We begin the conversation by talking about the discipline of sociology in general. What should an undergraduate student know about sociology, and furthermore, what should other social scientists know about the field? We discuss the distinct methods that make sociology sociology. Moving on, we discuss the relationship between activism and scholarship, particularly as it pertains to sociology but also as it pertains to black studies, the subject of Fabio's first book. Related Links: The Theory of Moral Sentiments James Heckman discusses field experiments on EconTalk Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matt Desmond The American Journal of Sociology The American Sociological Review
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Fri, 1 September 2017
My guest is Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. He is the author, along with Jason Brennan, of Markets Without Limits. We recorded this on August 24th, 2017, the same day Peter published an op-ed in the National Post titled "Canada needs blood plasma. We should pay donors to get it." The op-ed argues in favour of allowing people who donate blood plasma in Canada to be compensated in return:
Peter and I discuss the best and most popular arguments against compensating blood plasma donors, and organ donors in general, then Peter gives counterarguments to each of these objections. Furthermore, we discuss the United States' recent legalization of compensation for bone marrow donors. In 2012, The Institute for Justice successfully argued in front of the 9th Circuit Court of the United States that bone marrow should be exempted from the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), since bone marrow can be extracted from blood and does not thus count as an organ. Blood was specifically exempted from NOTA. |
Fri, 25 August 2017
Samuel Hammond is returning to the podcast today to discuss the relationship between capitalism and social justice. Sam was prompted to write about this by an insensitive Pepsi commercial that caused some controversy in April 2017. The controversial ad featured generic protesters and Kendall Jenner sharing a Pepsi with police. While the ad was insensitive and more than a little absurd, Sam pointed out that Pepsi has a history of promoting social justice and racial harmony through its marketing. Back in 1940, Pepsi was a small player compared to Coca-Cola; the latter selling 25 sodas for each one Pepsi sold. In order to compete, Pepsi's CEO Walter S. Mack Jr. decided to do something the other companies weren't doing: marketing specifically to African Americans: "In 1947, [Mack Jr.] hired Edward F. Boyd, an African-American adman who later became known as one of the fathers of niche-marketing. Boyd crafted ads for Pepsi that celebrated black cultural and professional achievements, and above all portrayed African-Americans as normal, middle-class consumers. It was this marketing push that ultimately drove Pepsi’s rise to the number two soda company in America." In pre-civil-rights America, this was a major achievement, and it served a deeper social purpose by extending social recognition to black Americans. We also discuss some other interesting niche marketing campaigns, like Subaru's marketing strategy targeting lesbians in the 1990s. Finally, we tie it all back to capitalism as a force promoting diversity and inclusion, with references to Becker's work on taste-based discrimination.
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Fri, 18 August 2017
This episode’s guest is Vincent Geloso, here to talk about his work on Cuban healthcare statistics. He recently released a working paper with coauthor Gilbert Berdine titled "The Paradox of Good Health and Poverty: Assessing Cuban Health Outcomes under Castro." The abstract reads as follows: In spite of being poor and lacking in economic opportunities, the population of Cuba enjoyed significant improvements in health outcomes under the Castro regime. Many have praised the ability of the regime to overcome the barriers of poverty and economic stagnation in order to improve health outcomes. Many have also argued that efficient features of Cuba’s health policy should be imported regardless of political considerations. In this paper, we argue that these improvements are probably overestimated, but that they are real nonetheless. We also argue that some of these improvements were an integral part of health policy and could only have been realized by the use of extremely coercive institutions. While efficient at fighting certain types of diseases, coercive institutions are generally unable to generate economic growth. On the other hand, the poverty such coercive institutions engender may have actually helped improve health outcomes, providing us with a false impression of the efficacy of the health care system in Cuba. We have a wide-ranging discussion about Cuban health statistics, what they mean and don't mean, how good health could be achieved by forcing people into healthy behaviours, and how well other Latin American countries have done in comparison to communist Cuba. Photo credit: Eric Marshall
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Fri, 28 July 2017
My guest for this episode is Noel Johnson of George Mason University, and if that name sounds familiar, it's because he was the coauthor on the paper I discussed with Mark Koyama last month. Noel recently released a working paper titled "The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution." It is coauthored with Theresa Finley and Raphael Franck. The paper examines the consequences of the land auctions held by the Revolutionary government in France. The abstract reads as follows: This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a greater proportion of land redistributed during the Revolution experienced higher levels of agricultural productivity in 1841 and 1852 as well as more investment in irrigation and more efficient land use. We trace these increases in productivity to an increase in land inequality associated with the Revolutionary auction process. We also show how the benefits associated with the head-start given to districts with more Church land initially, and thus greater land redistribution by auction during the Revolution, dissipated over the course of the nineteenth century as other districts gradually overcame the transaction costs associated with reallocating the property rights associated with the feudal system. What's so interesting about this particular instance of land redistribution is the fact that it was all sold to the highest bidder rather than being given to the poor. This breaks with the pattern of most attempts at land reform throughout history. People have been trying to take land away from the rich and give it to the poor since at least Tiberius Gracchus in the second century BCE. But the Revolutionary government needed money and they needed it fast. So they concocted a plan to seize and auction off all French lands owned by the Catholic Church, which comprised about 6.5 percent of the country. Land auctions take time though, and the government desperately needed funds in the short term, so they issued a monetary instrument known as the assignat that could be used in these land auctions. The land was eventually auctioned off and then traded in secondary markets, where much of it was consolidated into large estates that could employ capital-intensive agricultural practices on a large scale. The evidence suggests that these land auctions added to the productivity of the regions where they occurred. Noel argues that this occurred because the reduction in transaction costs allowed for a more efficient allocation of property rights. One could argue, however, that the Church might have simply owned more productive land to begin with, and the paper uses a series of identification strategies to show that this is not the main driver of their results. Related Links: McCloskey (1998) on the Coase theorem. Gallica, the website where you can download a ton of digitized French archives. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005) on Atlantic trade. Rachel Laudan discusses the history of potatoes and other foods on EconTalk. Photo credit: Early French banknote issue during the French Revolution (Assignat) for 400 livres, (1792), from the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.
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Thu, 20 July 2017
My guest for this is Ekaterina Jardim of the University of Washington. Ekaterina is one of the authors of the new minimum wage study that has been making headlines recently, "Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle." One reason this study is so interesting is that it was funded by the City of Seattle, which is something that governments aren’t obligated or expected to do when they enact major policy changes like these minimum wage hikes. There was a broad theoretical and empirical consensus in the 1980s that higher minimum wages have disemployment effects on the low skilled, and then Card and Krueger (1994) started a new empirical literature that found no evidence of disemployment effects. A major problem with Card and Krueger (1994) and with many of the other studies conducted over the past quarter century was their use of proxy measures for low-skilled workers. Instead of looking at workers who actually earned less than the new minimum wage, these studies looked at groups that they knew to contain many minimum-wage workers: generally teenagers or restaurant workers. This new study does not face this limitation because Washington State requires firms to report both the hours worked and the wages of all workers. One criticism I’m seeing a lot in response to the media coverage of this study is the fact that they had to drop multi-location firms from the sample. The reason for this is that the data only shows what firms people work for, not their location. So if a firm has locations both inside and outside Seattle, you don't know whether a given worker in that firm belongs in the treatment or the control. Still, despite this limitation, the study's sample included over 60 percent of workers in Seattle. Furthermore, the study authors surveyed employers and found that the multi-site firms that were excluded from the sample actually reported more reductions in work hours than did the firms that remained in the sample. So if anything, this omission understates rather than overstates the effect of the minimum wage increase. One big concern people have is just how much this study's results deviate from the established literature. The authors address this by repeating their analysis using employment in the restaurant industry as a proxy for low-skilled labour. They find that using this proxy for low-skilled labour reduces the measured impact of the minimum wage to near zero, consistent with past studies that have looked only at the restaurant industry. It seems that this apparently robust finding, replicated in study after study over the past few decades, was actually a quirk of studying the restaurant industry, which tends to substitute high-skilled labour for low-skilled labour rather than cutting total labour hours as a short-run response to minimum wage hikes. Related Links Kevin Grier explains the synthetic control method, which the minimum wage study uses to construct a control group.
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Fri, 14 July 2017
My guest today is Kevin Erdmann, he blogs about economics and finance at Idiosyncratic Whisk. Kevin has written a ton about housing, as evidenced by the titles of his blog posts. A recent one is labeled Housing: Part 239. This series is part of a larger book project that Kevin is publically drafting on his blog. We discuss the housing bubble of the 2000s and the post-2008 housing market. I took my first undergraduate economics class in 2008, just as the financial crisis was beginning, so there's never been a time in my economics career when people weren't talking about this. And yet, I still have so much to learn! Kevin makes an interesting distinction between "open-access cities" and "closed-access cities." Closed-access cities are places like San Francisco, New York, and San Jose that have restricted their housing supplies. Open-access cities are places like Houston and Phoenix with more elastic housing supplies. We talk about these factors and how they relate to the housing boom and bust, liquidity, and central bank policy. Kevin points out that supply side restrictions on housing construction are necessary for demand-side factors to cause housing bubbles. That's because in a market with an elastic housing supply, more demand doesn't result in higher prices, it just causes more homes to be built. Related links: Credit supply, housing supply, and financial crises
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Fri, 7 July 2017
The guest for this episode is Jonathan Morduch, he is a professor of public policy and economics at NYU and the author of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty, co-authored with Rachel Schneider. The book looks at the financial situations of ordinary American families. It is centered around a detailed survey of 235 households where they recorded what they earned and what they spent at an extremely granular level. From a truck mechanic whose income depends on bad weather wearing out the parts on trucks to a blackjack dealer whose tips literally depend on her customers' winnings at the blackjack table, the surveys reveal a huge amount of variance in the incomes and expenses of these households. This variance is not captured in annualized statistics, but it has profound implications for the way these households spend and save. We discuss financial literacy in the context of the real problems people face and relate the stories to some results from behavioural and experimental economics.
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Fri, 30 June 2017
In this episode, I have three guests on the show with me: Kewei Hou of Ohio State University, Chen Xue of the University of Cincinnati, and Lu Zhang of Ohio State University. Kewei, Chen, and Lu have coauthored a paper titled "Replicating Anomalies," a large-scale replication study that re-tests hundreds of so-called "anomalies" in financial markets. An anomaly is a predictable pattern in stock returns, or stated differently, it is a deviation from the efficient markets hypothesis. Their abstract reads as follows: The anomalies literature is infested with widespread p-hacking. We replicate the entire anomalies literature in finance and accounting by compiling a largest-to-date data library that contains 447 anomaly variables. With microcaps alleviated via New York Stock Exchange breakpoints and value-weighted returns, 286 anomalies (64%) including 95 out of 102 liquidity variables (93%) are insignificant at the conventional 5% level. Imposing the cutoff t-value of three raises the number of insignificance to 380 (85%). Even for the 161 significant anomalies, their magnitudes are often much lower than originally reported. Out of the 161, the q-factor model leaves 115 alphas insignificant (150 with t < 3). In all, capital markets are more efficient than previously recognized. We discuss the process of replicating these anomalies, issues involving the use of equal-weighted vs value-weighted returns, and the problems of p-hacking in finance research. Works Cited Hamermesh, Daniel S. 2007. “Replication in Economics.” Canadian Journal of Economics 40(3):715–733. Other Links The Marginal Revolution post on this paper.
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Fri, 16 June 2017
My guest on this episode is Kevin B. Grier of the University of Oklahoma. Our topic for today is a paper Kevin wrote on the economic consequences of Hugo Chavez along with coauthor Norman Maynard. I had Francisco Toro on the show last year to discuss Venezuela's economic history, so you can listen to that episode if you want a refresher on Chavez. For this episode, our main topic is the empirical method Kevin used to quantify Chavez' effect on Venezuela: synthetic control. Synthetic control is a relatively new empirical technique. It grew out of an older technique called difference in differences (or diff-in-diff). Diff-in-diff is simple and intuitive: Given two statistics with parallel trends, we can compare their changes before and after some intervention affecting only one of them to see the effect of the intervention. So for instance, if you wanted to know the effect of Seattle's minimum wage increase, you could compare the employment trend among low-skilled workers in Seattle to the same trend in Portland. Then assuming Seattle and Portland would have had similar trends if not for the minimum wage hike, we say the difference between the employment growth in the two cities is attributable to the minimum wage hike. But what if Seattle and Portland don't have similar trends? What if there's no labour market similar enough to Seattle's to provide a valid comparison? That's where synthetic control comes in. Seattle might not be like Portland, but it might be like a weighted average of Portland, San Francisco, and several counties just outside Seattle. We could construct this weighted average and call it a synthetic Seattle; it is designed to mimic the dynamics of Seattle's labour market before the minimum wage hike. Then if the synthetic Seattle deviates from the real Seattle after the wage hike, we can attribute that difference to the hike. This is what Kevin has done to study the impact of Hugo Chavez on Venezuela. Listen to the episode to find out his results! |
Fri, 9 June 2017
My guest for this episode is Mark Koyama of George Mason University. Our topic is a recent paper titled, "States and Economic Growth: Capacity and Constraints," which Mark coauthored with Noel Johnson.
As stated in the paper, "state capacity describes the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods." That said, state capacity does not mean big government. A state may have the power to impose rules across its territory, but it doesn't have to use that power in a tyrannical way. Another way of saying that is to say that having a high state capacity is compatible with Adam Smith's desire for "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice." One metric that researchers use to measure state capacity is tax revenue per capita. But as Mark is careful to point out, a state with less state capacity can still sometimes achieve a relatively high income through tax farming. This is the practice in many pre-modern states of auctioning off the right to extract tax revenues to local elites in different regions. We discuss the rise of modern nation-states in various regions, and why some states developed more state capacity than others going into the twentieth century. In particular, we discuss Europe's transition away from a feudal system ruled in a decentralized way by monarchs who held power based on their personal relationships with local lords. England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 allowed it to develop its state capacity earlier than other European nations, with a centralized tax system controlled by parliament. By contrast, continental powers like the French Ancien Régime and the Hapsburg Empire were legally and fiscally fragmented, leading them to develop their state capacity much later than England. We also discuss the development of state capacity in Asia, and why Meiji Japan was able to develop its state capacity much faster than Qing Dynasty China.
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Fri, 2 June 2017
My guest for this episode is Nuno Palma, he is an assistant professor of economics, econometrics, and finance at the University of Groningen. Our discussion begins with the monetary history of England. Nuno has authored a study that reconstructs England's money supply from 1270 to 1870. We discuss his methods and findings. We also discuss the influx of precious metals into European markets after the discovery of the New World. We discuss the impact of empire on economic development with reference to Nuno's work on the Portugese empire. We revisit some topics from my previous interview with Jari Eloranta. Later in the conversation, we discuss the effect of trade on economic growth during the industrial revolution. Nuno places a greater importance on international trade than McCloskey and Mokyr, but a lesser importance than historians like Wallerstein. Although gross trade flows were not particularly large, trade created new domestic industries like the porcelain industry that was created to compete with Chinese imports. Imports also encouraged urbanization among the European population, something that created many positive spillover effects over the long term.
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Fri, 26 May 2017
My guest for this episode is Jari Eloranta, he is a professor of comparative economic and business history at Appalachian State University. Jari's work focuses on the economic history of national defense. In this far-reaching conversation, we go all the way back to pre-modern societies' methods of financing their militaries, then trace the transitions up through the early modern period and into the 20th century. We discuss the way war has shaped modern states and institutions. Books mentioned: The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, by David A. Bell. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, by Tonio Andrade. |
Sat, 15 April 2017
My guest today is Alex Lubinsky, co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup Rentberry. Rentberry is a platform that lets landlords post units for rent so that tenants can bid on them. Once a landlord posts a vacancy, different potential tenants can make offers and the landlord can select which one to rent to. Importantly, the landlord doesn't have to select the highest bidder. Potential tenants on Rentberry put in their personal characteristics up on the site, so landlords can select for the type of tenants they want. Maybe they're willing to accept a lower rent from a quiet single woman than a family of five with four dogs and six cats. There has been some controversy about the site, stemming from the fact that it leads tenants to bid against one another, potentially pushing up prices. One tenant advocate said, "I think it's incredibly arrogant and incredibly concerning in light of the fact that we have the highest number of homeless families since the Great Depression. For them to do something to increase the rents seems really callous." Vanity Fair said Rentberry would turn rental markets into a Hunger Games-like death match. Alex and I address these criticisms in the episode. The critics are missing one simple element to the story, which is that Rentberry doesn't just cause more tenants to bid on any given listing, driving up the price, it also allows each tenant to bid on more listings, driving down prices by giving each tenant more options. The two forces cancel one another. By only charging a one-time fee of $25 when a lease is signed, Rentberry reduces the costs of applying for vacancies. In some markets, tenants can expect to pay hundreds of dollars in application fees while apartment hunting and Rentberry allows them to avoid those. What Rentberry is really doing is allowing the market to approach equilibrium more rapidly. Preliminary evidence also suggests that Rentberry decreases vacancy rates, since these are lower for landlords using the site than for the country in general. This is equivalent to an increase in the housing supply, which is unambiguously good. Listen to the episode for the full discussion. |
Fri, 7 April 2017
Hello and welcome to the fiftieth episode special of Economics Detective Radio! Today we have Ash Navabi back on the program, but we’re flipping the script: Ash will be interviewing me about the show and about all the things I’ve learned while making it. In this episode, I alienate the political right by discussing the importance of labour mobility and the desirability of open borders. I also alienate the political left by expressing a lukewarm position on climate change. I also discuss my own research plans relating to law and economics. Finally, we discuss literature! Really, if you like Economics Detective Radio, you have to hear this episode.
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Fri, 24 March 2017
Returning to the podcast is Vincent Geloso of Texas Tech University. Our topic for this episode is anthropometric history, the study of history by means of measuring humans. Doing serious historical research into the distant past is difficult work, because the further you look back in time, the less information you can access. For the 20th century we have wonderful thing like chain-weighted real GDP. Going back further, we have some statistics, lots of surviving physical evidence, and loads of documents and writings. Going further than that, we're left with the odd scrap of thrice-copied surviving manuscripts and second-hand accounts from people who lived centuries after the events they describe. And going even further than that, we have just bones and dilapidated temples with the occasional inscription. Anthropometric history allows us to look into the distant past at what economic historians like Vincent hope might be a good measure of different populations' health and standards of living: their heights. People who have healthy upbringings with lots of access to food tend to be taller than people who don't; that's why modern humans are much taller than they were a thousand or even a hundred years ago. Vincent has contributed to this literature with his latest co-authored paper, The Heights of French-Canadian Convicts, 1780s to 1820s. The abstract reads as follows: This paper uses a novel dataset of heights collected from the records of the Quebec City prison between 1813 and 1847 to survey the French-Canadian population of Quebec—which was then known either as Lower Canada or Canada East. Using a birth-cohort approach with 10 year birth cohorts from the 1780s to the 1820s, we find that French-Canadian prisoners grew shorter over the period. Through the whole sample period, they were short compared to Americans. However, French-Canadians were taller either than their cousins in France or the inhabitants of Latin America (except Argentinians). In addition to extending anthropometric data in Canada to the 1780s, we are able to extend comparisons between the Old and New Worlds as well as comparisons between North America and Latin America. We highlight the key structural economic changes and shocks and discuss their possible impact on the anthropometric data. Listen to the full episode for our fascinating discussion of this branch of historical research, including the so-called "Antebellum puzzle," the anomalous observation that American heights decreased in the years prior to the Civil War even though the economy was apparently growing rapidly. We also discuss the heights of slaves in the American South, who were taller than their white counterparts despite being oppressed as slaves.
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Fri, 17 March 2017
Today's guest is Kate Raworth, she is a senior visiting research associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. In this interesting and wide-ranging discussion, we discuss Kate's critiques of the standard models taught to economics undergraduates, as well as her views on development, economic growth, inequality, and the environment. You might think our viewpoints would be very different on these topics, but we find a surprising amount of common ground. During our discussion of inequality and the patterns noticed in the 1950s by Simon Kuznets, I bring up Geloso and Magness' work on inequality in the early 20th century. You can hear my conversation with Vincent Geloso about that research here, as well as his comments on it here.
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Fri, 10 March 2017
Today's guest is Akin Unver of Kadir Has University. He uses geospatial data to study political events such as the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016. The coup was an attempt by certain rogue elements of the Turkish armed forces to oust President Erdogan. However, unlike past coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the Turkish people documented and coordinated their opposition to it on social media in real time, leaving a rich record of events as they unfolded. Akin's research, which was featured in an extensive and detailed article for Foreign Affairs, shows how, when, and where the opposition to the coup occurred. He shows, for instance, the importance of mosque networks in coordinating resistance. And while the media put a lot of importance on Erdogan's personal appeals through FaceTime and Twitter in galvanizing support, the data show that resistance started organically almost as soon as the coup began, hours before Erdogan appeared on television to rally support. The discussion delves deep into specific details of the coup and the resistance, while also touching on other areas of Akin's research. Towards the end, we discuss the technical side of working with geospatial data. |
Fri, 3 March 2017
This episode features Anton Howes of Brown University. He is a historian of innovation, and in this conversation we discuss his work on the explosion of innovation that occurred in Britain between 1551 and 1851. You can check out his Medium blog for some of the articles we discuss. Anton has collected a data set of over 1,000 British innovators who worked during this period. He has documented their education, their experience, and their relationships with one another. Some of the interesting patterns that emerge in his data are the large fraction of innovators who developed technologies in industries outside of their areas of expertise, as well as the high degree of interconnectedness between innovators. Innovation, it seems, is a mindset; one that can be spread from person to person like a contagion. As far as Anton can tell, this mindset seems to have spread from Italy and the Low Countries during the Renaissance and taken hold in Britain to usher in its Industrial Revolution. With his view of innovation as a mindset, Anton's work complement's Deirdre McCloskey's work on the origins of modern economic growth. Our conversation concludes with stories about some particularly interesting innovators, some of whom were also pirates!
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Fri, 24 February 2017
What follows is an edited partial transcript of my conversation with Stephen M. Jones. He is an economist for the US Coast Guard. However, we are discussing his own research, so nothing in this conversation should be taken to represent the official views of the US Coast Guard. Petersen: So Stephen, let's start just by defining regulatory discretion. What does that mean in this context? Jones: Sure. So, I think first off, we should probably define regulation because when Congress writes a law, they pass the law on to regulatory agencies and it will say something to the effect of "agencies: issue a regulation." So, when we talk about regulations this point isn't always clear because people just aren't familiar with this process. The regulation is a statement that kind of clarifies existing congressional law or is written in direct response to congressional law. And this could be as specific as, say, Congress can direct an agency to set an exact amount of pollution that is permitted for an industry to as broad as saying something like "protect consumers from unreasonable risks." And then the agency has room to interpret that statement as wide as it wants to. So, when I talk about agency discretion what I'm really talking about is Congress wrote a rule that gave the agency power to issue legally binding rules that may or may not trace directly back to Congress. Petersen: Yes. So, in the example you use with the pollution, Congress has something fairly specific in mind---a specific type of pollution---but the agency might have to clarify and to say what counts as pollution and how much they're measuring it and maybe they might establish a quota system, they might have specific rules for specific firms. And in the other example you gave, which is just protecting consumers from unnecessary risk, in that case they can basically write rules as if they were their own legislator, they're essentially doing what Congress is ostensibly meant to do. Is that correct? Jones: I'm not sure I would go that far. So, there are various theories of the purpose of the regulatory apparatus in the bureaucracy. Some people---I cite them in the paper---Baumgartner and Jones and Workman have one that is called 'The Politics of Information' and I forget what the other is called, it was written in 2015. And their theory instead is that Congress gives the agencies discretion because Congress doesn't know the problems it needs to solve and so the agency is kind of like the specialists that you subcontracted to figure out what Congress wants them to solve without actually knowing, say the relevant information to determine that. That's one theory. You've got other people like Philip Hamburger notably, who has written a whole book on how administrative law, which is another word for regulation, is unlawful and so he goes through sort of the common-law tradition and cites numerous pieces of evidence to say, exactly in the way that you put it, that it's a deep legislative function and only Congress should be performing that. And so, whether that's true I think depends on a number of different assumptions that aren't always discussed directly in the literature. That would be my interpretation if that makes sense. Petersen: Right. And of course, we're approaching this from an economic standpoint so there are important public choice issues involved with this. The same rule whether it's written by a legislator or a bureaucracy---a regulatory agency--- it's the same rule and so in principle, there should be no difference. But the important thing is that the agency and the Congress may have different incentives and may write different rules. That's what I interpret as an important underlying theme in your paper. Jones: That's most certainly true. So, that's actually one of the things that frustrate me greatly about reading a lot of these other, I think, great researchers who don't in my opinion sufficiently consider the role of incentives. To couch it in Baumgartner's or in Jones' and Workman's terms, okay, let's assume that the purpose of the bureaucracy is to create the information that's necessary to solve the national problems, whatever these supposed national problems are. Why would you assume that bureaucrats would supply the right amount of information in the right ways consistently throughout time? And it's not clear to me that those incentive systems are ever worked out; or if you do work them out, I don't think it actually shows that bureaucrats are beholden directly to Congress. So the big terminal literature, which comes from McNollgast, which is McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast, in the 80s is called Congressional dominance. They basically say that because Congress writes the rules they structure all the incentives and have all the tools at their disposal to monitor and police agencies. And I'm just deeply skeptical that that works as well as they describe. Petersen: Right. Your paper mentions the Administrative Procedure Act which is sort of an attempt by Congress to keep these agencies in check. Could you describe that act and what exactly it does? Jones: Sure. So, the Administrative Procedure Act is the main document that governs how agencies regulate. It defines the process by which regulation is made. And the chief component is that it really says before an agency issues a regulation it has to go through notice-and-comment. And what that means is when it sends out a rule it issues it in the Federal Register, which is the government's journal of record, and then it allows everybody to comment on this rule, and literally anybody will comment on these rules, and the agency is legally required to respond to all comments. So, the basic theory is this, it's kind of got a two-part mechanism here. On the one side, it's a sort of direct structural constraint and doesn't really affect agency decision making because all it's really saying is you have to send out all rules---if the fire alarm is triggered it acts like a fire alarm. So, if you get a whole bunch of comments it's a really easy way for Congress to tell, "oh there's a problem with this policy" or it's a contentious policy because all of these people commented it and it's really loud, it's like a fire alarm. But it doesn't necessarily mean that an agency, that an individual bureaucrat in that agency really feels that alarm. It's more like it'll just be triggered, make sure just do something that doesn't trigger that alarm and you should be okay. The other way in which it might change agency behavior is that by forcing agencies to publish rules they reveal a lot of information and in the rule itself you have to describe, say, the cost of the benefits. You have to describe whether or not it has impacts on Native American tribes, or on the Federal structure, or various other executive orders that have been issued. So, one of the main ways in fact that notice-and-comment system has changed is executive orders that define how in a very practical sense these final rules will be constructed. And so, they're all today reviewed in an office inside of the OMB---the Organization for Management and Budget---and the office is called a wire at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And so, they're responsible for reviewing all regulation and they are an Office of the president. So, some people then conclude that the President has all this power, in effect, of rulemaking in general. Petersen: I guess the idea of the President is that it's the executive branch and so it executes and it sort of makes sense that these agencies that are executing laws would ultimately be beholden to the President. It sort of fits. So, do you know quantitatively how many comments? Are these regulatory agencies writing regulations and getting hundreds of comments every time, or is it rare to get even one comment? Jones: It depends on the agency and it depends on the rules. So EPA because many of its rules will have national effects, and then there are national environmental organizations that you can say are key stakeholders in the outcome of all these rules could very easily generate hundreds of thousands of comments. And so, they'll actually have computer programs that scrape the comments and kind of try to sort them in the boxes. You have other organizations, like FRA for instance, they might have a rule that only gets 30 comments. Petersen: Sorry what does FRA stand for? Jones: Sorry, that's the Federal Railroad Administration and that's one of the two main regulators of railroads in the United States. The other regulator, the Service and Transportation Board, is primarily focused on business practices, antitrust type issues, and FRA is focused primarily on health safety and welfare of anything railroad related. So that's everything from, say, the occupational safety of railroad workers to the safety of passengers on trains. And so, the Federal Railroad Administration might only get 30 to 40 comments on a normal rule, they might even get less than that. It really depends on the rule itself. Petersen: And typically, this would be if a rule affects my business and I might pay attention to the new rules coming out in my industry and if one I thought was going to be detrimental to my bottom line if I work for or run a private business, then I would comment. Is that the typical thing that happens? Jones: Probably. I really think the diversity of interaction is so high it's really hard to characterize exactly what normal public commenting looks like. Because it could be everything from "I'm a regulated businessman who wants this," there might be somebody on the other side who benefits directly because the new rule sets a standard and the standards organization writes in and says your standard isn't strict enough. It could be something like there's a proposed rule that the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial flying, or anything air related at all pretty much, and they have a rule on the use of cell phones on planes. They've got about 5,000 comments, 6,000 comments. It's quite a number. Once you get above 100 that's usually quite significant. And a lot of those could be something as simple as "we just think phones shouldn't be on planes" and just average citizens writing in upset at the very concept of a phone being on a plane. So, there's quite a diversity of interactions between the agency and public on that. Petersen: So, getting into the main topic of your paper you discuss what you call channels of influence. So, what are those and why are they important? Jones: Yes. The way I think about it is this. I think the chief question of the bureaucracy literature is who does this regulatory bureaucracy exist for? Does it exist for interest groups? Does it exist for Congress to ultimately provide information that Congress needs? Does it exist for the President to carry out the President's wishes and his policy? Or does it exist for the bureaucrats themselves which is the one I also like to emphasize because the literature on that one is not very common today. It was more common I think about 30 years ago but the framing of it is a little different. And so, my point is to say each one of these separate groups should have an effect on the outcome itself of the final rule which changes say the regulatory set. Some rules may be demanded by bureaucrats, some rules are demanded by interest groups in Congress. If I were to put it in the econ speak---because I'm writing this paper probably more for a political science literature---but if I had to put it in an econ speak my I'm kind of saying you have four different demanders for this product and so who is the regulatory agency really supplying this for? It's I think really how I'm thinking about it. For the full conversation, listen to the episode.
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Fri, 17 February 2017
What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Maxime Bernier. If you like his ideas, I encourage you to go to his website to learn more about them. Petersen: You're listening to Economics Detective Radio. Before we start let me give a quick disclaimer that although today's guest is a politician this show is nonpartisan and doesn't endorse any particular candidate for office. My guest and I are also Canadian so we'll be talking about some Canada-specific issues. I know I have an international audience but sometimes it's fun to learn about what's going on in other countries. So I hope you'll listen nonetheless. And now on to the episode. My guest today is Maxime Bernier, he is the Member of Parliament for Beauce, Quebec and a contender for the Conservative Party leadership race. Maxime, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Bernier: Thank you very much for having me. Petersen: So, our topic today will be Canada's economy and its economic policy. There's a lot to get to on this topic but let's start with the positive. The Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index ranks Canada as the fifth freest country in the world, actually tied for fifth. We're well ahead of our neighbors, the Americans, who come in at number 16. So, to start our discussion, Maxime, what is Canada doing right with respect to its economic policy? Bernier: First of all, I think that this was the ranking that the Fraser Institute did a year ago, if I remember very well, and at that time we had a balanced budget when we were in government and also we were successful in lowering taxes for every Canadian. And I think that's a key when you speak about more freedom you must also have less government and a limited government in Ottawa. And I think that was the goal of the Conservative government when we were in government. And also we have a lot of free trade. That's very important. We signed free-trade agreements with I think, if my memory is good, 45 countries. So, when you have more free trade like that, Canadians are able to buy goods from every country and they are able to also export products. So, that's helping also. More free trade, less government, lower taxes and I think that's a big reason why we are there now. Petersen: Yeah, there's a pretty general economic freedom, and you mentioned that that ranking came out last year and we have had a change of government recently so let's see if we can keep our high position. But let's move on to some specific areas where we're not so free. Let's start with telecommunications. Canadians have some of the most expensive cell phone bills in the world. You personally did some work in deregulating the telecommunications sector when you were Industry Minister in 2006-2007. Can you talk a little bit about the changes that happened then and where we are now? Bernier: Yeah, at that time we wanted to deregulate the telecom industry, mostly the regulation that was imposed by the CRTC. We were successful in doing that, and afterwards I think we had a little bit more competition in Canada in telecom. But we didn't have time to also abolish the restriction on foreign investment in telecommunication. And so I think that would be the next step to take to have a bit more competition. And so that's why in my program I have a very strong platform about deregulating and also abolishing the prohibition on foreign investment in telecom and also in the aviation sector. So like that, corporations from outside Canada will be able to invest here in telecom and that will help Canadian consumers, who will have more choices and lower prices. But it was the deregulation that we did---that I did when I was Industry Minister---that was the first part of the deregulation. So now we must go ahead with abolishing the prohibition on foreign investment in telecom. Petersen: Right. The vast majority of Canadians live right on the border with the United States and if you just step across the border suddenly you can buy a data plan for much less. One thing I was struck by when visiting the United States was that people just watch YouTube videos when they're on their mobile data. And you don't see that in Canada because it's so incredibly expensive. So, I wouldn't be surprised if we allow the American companies to sell to us if we wouldn't get exactly the same plan they're getting which would be great. Bernier: Yes, I just want to add that Verizon, I think they wanted to come to Canada but they were not able to. They had created a Canadian corporation and all that and at the end, they decided not to come to Canada like their operations in the US. So, I think that will be a big step if we are successful in abolishing the restriction on foreign investments. That would make a difference for Canadian consumers. Petersen: So, we have a similar issue with the airlines. It's very, very expensive to make a domestic flight within Canada, for instance, flying Vancouver to Toronto is about twice as much as flying L.A. to New York even though they are similar distances. So, do you want to comment on that situation? We only have the two airlines West-Jet and Air Canada. Could that be similarly fixed? Bernier: Yes, you're absolutely right. If you want to fly from Canada to another country it is still competitive, but if you want to fly in Canada, inside the country, from example Montreal to Toronto, or other cities like that, it is very expensive. Because, like you said, we have only two main carriers in Canada: West-Jet and Air Canada. And we don't have like other countries a low-cost carrier. So, we need to have one and I know that some business entrepreneurs want to create one low-cost carrier but their funding, their capital it's coming from the U.S. and from U.K. And you still have the same things in aviation, we have a restriction on foreign investment coming from other countries. So, that's why we must abolish that and like that we'll have a low-cost carrier and that will compete against Air Canada and West-Jet. That adds more competition, more choice and at the end lower prices. So, I know that the Federal Government and the Minister of Transport, they're looking at it right now because these entrepreneurs want to create that corporation, a low-cost carrier. And they're ready for that. They're looking at it right now so, I hope they will abolish that but I'm not so sure. This is why for me, I have a platform that is based on more freedom and less government and it will be always good for Canadians. That is why I'm pushing that very hard, I wrote to the Minister about that to be sure that they will abolish foreign restriction in the investment in the aviation sector. I don't know if they will do it but if not I will do it when I will be the leader of the party and Prime Minister. Petersen: Yes, I hope you succeed in that. This one is a particularly important one because if airfare is expensive then more people drive and driving is statistically much more dangerous. So, you have more highway fatalities. I personally drove over 1,200 kilometers to visit family over Christmas. So, I'd really love to have an option to fly cheaply but it's just out of reach at our current airfare prices. We also have a problem here in Canada, a similar related problem with cartels. We tend to create cartels in a lot of industries and we have one set of policies called Supply Management that applies to poultry, dairy products, even maple syrup (which is very quintessentially Canadian) keeping these prices artificially high. So, could you talk a bit about Supply Management for those who maybe haven't heard of it? Bernier: Yes, Supply Management it is a legal cartel for dairy, poultry and eggs and the like. The producers on the Supply Management are able to fix high prices for these products and they are fixing the production also. That's why it's a cartel, they're fixing the production for the Canadian market and they are fixing the price, every year they increase the price of these products. So, I am the only candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada and also the only member of Parliament who's speaking for Canadian consumers and that wants them to save $2.6 billion every year. Because that's the cost of keeping that cartel and for a family the cost is $500 every year. I want them to be able to buy poultry, eggs, and milk from other countries---they want to export that---but because we have tariffs at the border of 300% on products coming from other countries to be sure that the dairy producer in Canada will be able to fix high prices for their products. So, for me, if you believe in a free market you must abolish that and I don't want to do work for 19,000 farmers that are on Supply Management, I want to work with 35 million Canadians. And I think that's the most important for me and actually, the farmers just represent 10% of the farmers and all the other farmers in Canada, like the beef producers and all the other farmers are not on the Supply Management, they are operating in a free market. So, it is not fair and to be fair we need to abolish that but because as a special interest group they are very powerful and they're very well connected with the politicians, they were able to keep that privilege for a very long time and I think now it's time to speak for Canadian consumers and that's what I'm doing so I hope to be successful with that. Petersen: Ironically Facebook has been serving me advertisements from the Canadian milk producers and their tagline or slogan is Canadian milk is worth crying over, or spilt Canadian milk is worth crying over, or something like that. And the irony is that if they supply too much milk, because of Supply Management they actually have to dump it to keep the price high. So it is really just wasting perfectly good milk and poultry. Bernier: Yes. If they produce too much they cannot export their surplus because it's a subsidized milk. So that's why it's bad for them. They are producing good products, good milk, good dairy, good poultry, and eggs and I want them to be able to export their products to other countries and right now on Supply Management they can't because they have the responsibility and the obligation to produce only for the Canadian market. Petersen: You mentioned the 300% border tariff on U.S. dairy. I think in the U.S. they have a different policy where they actually subsidize it and keep the price artificially low. But we had this strange situation a few years back where Canadian pizzerias were smuggling in black market mozzarella over the border and got caught. You shouldn't have to smuggle mozzarella cheese. If we had a free market, there would just be one price for mozzarella cheese and you wouldn't get a benefit by smuggling it. You mentioned that you're really the only one calling for an end to this Supply Management policy and yet our Prime Minister for almost a decade, Stephen Harper, has a Master's degree in economics. He must have known that this policy was not good for Canadians. And most of the MPs are smart people, they must realize it, but is it as simple as the cartels themselves just making big donations and buying protection for this policy? Bernier: First of all, you're right, when we were in government that was the policy of our government to keep that cartel, that Supply Management system. All the members of the Conservative Party of Canada voted in 2004 in a convention to protect these farmers and after that when we were in government in 2006-2007, that was the policy of the government, and that was the policy of the government until the end, until 2015. And I think that at that time we didn't want to displease the cartel and that special interest group. And I tried to fight for that on the cabinet table but I wasn't successful. Most importantly, I think now I'm able to do it and I will ask---if I'm the leader of the Conservative Party---I will ask the members to decide on that and to review their policy statement that they did more than 12 years ago, and I hope the members will abolish that and they will believe in a free market also for producers on Supply Management. Petersen: Have the supply managed industries been pushing back against you? Have they been taking out ads or funding your opponents? How are they trying to protect their cartel status? Bernier: For sure. It's an important cartel in Quebec and in Ontario, they want to do everything for Maxime Bernier to not be elected. And so I think they are buying memberships to vote for the leadership of our party to be able to vote because, as you know, you need to be a member. If you want to be a member and support my candidacy you can go on my website www.maximebernier.com and you'll be able to become a member for only $15. But, yes, the dairy producers are working to be sure that I won't be elected. But there's more Canadians than dairy producers. So, I'm working hard to be sure to be successful because they want to keep their privilege and we'll see what will happen. And it's easy for them because I'm the only candidate who wants to abolish that and speaking for Canadian consumers, so they can vote for all the other candidates and they will have somebody who will support their special interest. Petersen: I hope you succeed. And you're right there are more Canadians than supply managed firms or farmers that benefit from this particular policy. But you have this issue of the cost being dispersed and so although there are fewer farmers who benefit from the cartel and from Supply Management there may be a lot more motivated per capita. So, I hope you can succeed in getting over that, sort of, public choice hurdle. But my cynicism kind of says that it's an uphill battle. Bernier: Absolutely. But also, I must say that the other farmers that are not on Supply Management, they have a huge interest also for that cartel to be abolished because it's not fair for them. Each time Canada is negotiating a free trade agreement with another country they have access, for example, Canadian beef will have access to the other country's market, but they won't have the full access because we're not giving full access to their milk, poultry, and eggs. So at the end, they are paying a little bit for that and they don't have the access that they would have otherwise. And they understand that. So the other farmers that are not on Supply Management have the interest to be sure that we have all these steps that can counterbalance the special interest group. Petersen: I wonder about that because if beef and poultry are substitutes then you would think that the beef producers would want their competitor to have higher prices than they do so people would maybe buy more beef. But there is the issue of the international agreements. You've called for the privatization of Canada Post and the removal of its monopoly on letter mail. That's another area where Canadians pay more, not just for letters but also parcels shipping to and from and within Canada is much more expensive than it is in the United States and other places. So could you talk about what the legal status of Canada Post is and what both parcel shipping and regular mail are, what the legal status of both of those is? Bernier: Yes, you're absolutely right. Canada Post is a state-owned enterprise and I think in 2017 we must do like other countries and privatized that. They are charging at a huge cost because they are not competitive, they have huge expenses and they're not so efficient. So, my thinking about that is, these are not services that Canadians need to be delivered by a government entity. We have a private sector for delivery and I think that it is not an essential service for Canadians any more. And they are using Canada Post less and less with emails and all that, and so we must do like in Belgium, like in U.K., like in France and privatized it. Also, they're charging very high prices for their products. So, if we have more competition, that will help and at the end that's the solution. But they want to keep that and for me if you want to speak for Canadian consumers you must go ahead and do that reform, that's my proposal. Petersen: Yes, it's such a big issue because in other countries that have much cheaper shipping, people are opened up to the whole global marketplace, you don't have to go to your local store to buy any particular good, you can buy it online and have it shipped to you. But for Canadians, you're adding $10-$15 to the price and so Canadians aren't really online buying things nearly as much as, for instance, our neighbors the Americans. And when Canadians want to run online businesses and maybe ship things to other people to stay competitive they often have to drive across the border and ship from the United States because it is just so much cheaper. And Canada Post has a legal monopoly on letter mail which is a little bit odd. Why should one particular government entity have the legal right to ship our mail? It's kind of an odd historical anomaly that we could be rid of. Bernier: And you have to think the price also. It's not a free market. It is them who are fixing the price because, like you said, they have a legal monopoly. That's what I want to do, I want to be sure that we can have competition there. Petersen: You've also called for reducing trade restrictions within Canada. This is one of those things that is so odd, is that we're one country, ten provinces, but we restrict many goods from being shipped within our own country across borders. So for instance alcohol. If you have a craft brewery or a winery in British Columbia it's very hard to ship it to even Alberta right next door. Can you talk about some of the internal trade restrictions that we have in Canada? Bernier: Yes. We have a lot of them in these kinds of industries, but for me it is a bit of a shame that after 150 years we don't have an economy of exchange in Canada, because that was the goal of the Fathers of our Constitution. The fathers of our country, they wanted to have an economic union and we don't have that because of some restrictions, legislation, and regulation by provinces. So, my goal is to be sure that we'll have an economic union. And to do that, it's against the Constitution and so I want to be sure to have a team in Ottawa of civil servants that will look at all the regulations and the legislations that are imposed by provinces and to bring provinces in front of the court when they don't respect the Constitution. Nobody has had the courage to do that and I think it's time to do it. And that will be the only solution because I cannot change the legislation or regulation at the provincial level and at the federal level we must respect the Constitution. But I can assure Canadians that we'll do everything for the provinces to respect the Constitution. That's why we're going to bring the province in front of the court and the court will decide if it's constitutional or not. And I think it won't be because it's clear in the Constitution that we must be able to sell and buy goods from any province in Canada. That would be the solution. Because if you ask the provinces to do that, they have the problem and they cannot find the solution. So, that's why every year you have a meeting with the premier at the provincial level and they're saying, you know, we will abolish trade barriers and all that and it is not happening. And they're the problem and they're not able to do that. They want to protect their own little market it is not good for Canadians, so we must do something at the federal level and that's what I want to do. I want to do a strong analysis of every regulation, legislation that provinces are imposing, legislations that are against free trade and after that bring them in court and the court will decide. And in the end I'm sure it will be unconstitutional and maybe when you do that, in five years after that, you have a real economic union in Canada like the fathers of our Constitution wanted. Petersen: Yes. One wonders what is even the point of having a country if you're not going to have at least free trade within your borders? That seems to be the main benefit of all confederating and joining into one country instead of being 10 smaller countries. Do you have any concluding thoughts, anything we didn't cover that you'd like to say? Bernier: First of all I want to thank you for giving me that opportunity to speak with your people and if they want to know a little a bit more about our economic policy, they can go on my website www.maximebernier.com. Everything is there and I'm very proud of our platform. It's a platform that is based on individual freedom, personal responsibility, respect, and fairness and it is a platform that is based on real conservative values and the values of Western Civilization. So, if people like that they can become a member and they can vote for the leadership. I appreciate that you gave me this opportunity and maybe another time we can go on and speak about other economic issues. Petersen: My guest today has been Maxime Bernier. Maxime, thanks for being part of Economics Detective Radio. Bernier: Thank you very much and have a nice day.
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Sun, 29 January 2017
What follows is an edited transcript of the first part of my conversation with Gret Glyer, creator of DonorSee. For the full conversation, listen to the episode. Petersen: My guest today is Gret Glyer, he is the creator of a new app called DonorSee. Gret, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Glyer: Thank you for having me, Garrett. How are you? Petersen: I am great! So, DonorSee is a charitable giving app with a very interesting twist which---we'll get to the app itself in a little bit---but first let's start with some background. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with the nonprofit sector. Glyer: Sure. So, I graduated from college in 2012 and immediately started working at a rental car company and did that for about a year and did really well. And I was promoted very quickly and I was told by upper management I was going to skyrocket through the ranks and that whole idea of being very successful having six or seven figure income, getting a company car, that kind of stuff, was just a depressing thought to me because I didn't want to wake up in twenty years and be really good at renting cars to people. So I started looking at a bunch of different ways to find something more fulfilling, more around doing work that I cared about and I decided to go overseas for a year and I found an opportunity to go to Malawi, Africa. So I went over there, I spent a year as a math teacher and I really loved being over there. Teaching math wasn't exactly my vocation in life but being in a very impoverished area and being a part of helping those people, that was something that I found a lot of fulfillment and gratification in. So I spent another two years out there and then I came and I was out there, I did a whole bunch of different crowdfunding stuff and I got involved. I started a charity and a few other things and then when I came back---about six months ago---that's when I started this new company DonorSee. It's kind of in the nonprofit sector, but I've also been telling people it's kind of like the anti-charity. There are so many negative connotations associated with what charity is, and how people understand it, and how effective it is, and how much they waste money that I almost don't want to be associated with non-profits or with charities, I'd almost rather be considered like the opposite end of the spectrum. So, in some ways it is in the nonprofit sector in some ways it's the farthest thing from it. Petersen: Yeah, well I'm hesitant to describe it as the Tinder of charity but it's almost like that. So, you're not a tech person, you're not a computer programmer but you come from, well not charity, but from the helping others in poor countries angle. How did you get to this point where you can start a tech startup? Glyer: Yes. So, basically, you can do anything you want as long as you have the resources to hire people who do the stuff that you can't do. So, I came up with the idea back a year ago, actually in January, and I spent the next two months developing it and writing out a business plan for it and getting screens made to see how it would look, and what the flow would be like, and how people might use it. And then I paid a guy online who lives somewhere in Eastern Europe and he---I think it was Ukraine---and for a relatively small amount of money he made a basic very buggy first draft, like a prototype, and I used that. And I took it to investors to show them what the app was like. And they believed in the idea, they believed in my vision for what the app could be and how it could disrupt the charity sector and so forth. And so they saw that and they decided to provide me with investment money and I was able to use that money to hire the tech people and hire a marketing team and all that kind of stuff. So, that was how I got from having no technical background to running a tech company myself. Petersen: Yeah that's great! So many idea people are also sort of averse to hiring others. You know a lot of people have great ideas and flounder because they try to do everything themselves. I do something similar on a smaller scale, but I outsourced a lot of the things for the podcast so I can focus on the parts of it I like, the interviews, the sort of high-level thinking side and also so I can finish my Ph.D. which I promise I will eventually. And you know it's just good to hear you taking this smart approach. Let's get into the app itself. I actually did, I went to your website and I installed the app. So if someone listening were to install the app and booted it up, what would they see? Glyer: The app it looks most similar to---when someone opens it, it reminds most of them of Instagram when they open it up. So they open it up and then you see you can scroll through this list of pictures and descriptions underneath. I think the one thing that might look different is that each picture has a little circle at the bottom that shows the progress of how much money has been donated. So, each picture is actually a project and that project could be providing a wheelchair for a kid in Malawi or providing hearing aids for a little girl in India or education or any number of things. And you see the picture, you see the description underneath and then you have the opportunity to donate to any of those things and the progress bar tells you how much has been donated. So, if there's 25$ left you can be the person to donate that final 25$ and get it out to that person who is usually in a very urgent or desperate situation. They open it up, they see this list of projects and then they can pick where in the world they want to give to, what kind of project they want to give to, in what way they want to be involved and we have all sorts of different stuff from over 30 different countries. And when people give, the thing that is very---so far there's nothing special about it, this is pretty much like every other thing that you've ever heard of except for maybe it being on an app---the thing that makes us special is that when you give to one of our projects you will get relatively quickly a visual update at some point of how your money was being spent. So, let's say you gave to that kid who needed the wheelchair. You actually get to see a picture of that boy being fitted for the wheelchair and getting his wheelchair and going out, how his life is improved because of that. Or the girl who needed hearing aids; you'll get a video of that girl hearing for the very first time. So, we provide very strong connective visual feedback on every single donation. That's what makes this different than anyone else that's out there. Petersen: Right, and the great thing about doing it through an app is that you can get that warm fuzzy feeling in the feedback in the knowledge that you've had an impact, which is not always clear. With a lot of charities, you give them some money and it goes into their general revenue, you don't know if you actually gave that goat to that far-off person or if it went into marketing to get more money to---I mean hopefully---to buy more goats but maybe just to market some more. And if we want to look at the distant end of the spectrum in terms of warm fuzzy feelings per dollar actually spent helping a poor person, we might look at something like Habitat for Humanity where they fly people with no building experience from the West at great expense to a poor country to build buildings that nobody wants that have to be torn down because they're so poorly built, just in order to get---I guess they pay some kind of fee---and eventually a little bit of money goes to the people in the country. But there's just a lot more effort put into that warm fuzzy feeling. I think we as humans are a little flawed in needing it. We need that feeling in order to do good in the world. It's not enough to just abstractly know. Could you compare your charity to some of the others? Glyer: Yes. So, I lived in Malawi for three years. So, most people have seen what charity is kind of like from the American side of things. They give five bucks to a charity and then that charity bugs them every week for the next year, asking them for more money and they never show where their money goes. And they promise they're constantly saying "Hey, we're doing all these amazing things, we're helping 10,000 kids here and 5,000 kids here," and they throw all these confusing numbers at you but they never show you anything. And they're responsible to no one. And you can go to Charity Navigator and you can kind of see all of these percentages going here. But ultimately, you can make up all of those numbers, numerical transparency is a complete farce. So if you've ever given money to a really big charity, I'm sorry, but there's a good chance that it's been blown. There are a few charities I would highly recommend and they are doing really good work and in general that's like one in 50. The vast majority of charities are blowing your money. I say that as someone who lived in a third world country for three years and was on the other side of the world when that money was supposedly being spent. So, I was there when the executives of these big charities were coming and staying in nice hotels, eating really nice meals. And I was there when I saw tons of shoes---I've seen in Malawi a warehouse full of shoes in boxes that were never distributed but they were reported as distributed. There's no accountability whatsoever, there's no transparency and anyone who tells you "oh, we have unprecedented transparency." Well, prove it, show us. In general, no one's doing that. So, I think what we do differently is we really do show you visually. If you gave money to a lady who needs a sewing machine. You will get to see her using that sewing machine and there's a good chance you'll get updates months or even years down the road of how that sewing-machine has improved her life after that one-time donation because our model is just a superior model to what most charities are using. Listen to the episode for the full conversation! |
Fri, 20 January 2017
What follows is an edited partial transcript of my conversation with George Bragues of the University of Guelph-Humber. We discussed his new book, Money, Markets, and Democracy: Politically Skewed Financial Markets and How to Fix Them. This is his second appearance on this show, you can hear the first one here. Petersen: So your book looks at the interaction between Democratic politics and financial markets. In your introduction, you quote the Greek Prime Minister Alexi Tsipras, who claimed that "democracy cannot be blackmailed." And this was in the context of the 2015 bailout referendum that would have helped pay some of the massive Greek debt but at a cost of forcing them to adopt fiscal austerity. So, can you talk a little bit about that situation and how it played out and also what it tells us generally about the relationship between democracy and finance? Bragues: Yes, sure. That situation has its origins about a year or two after the financial crisis of 2008. The financial crisis of 2008 initially arose out of the subprime mortgage sector in the United States. It affected banks worldwide that were holding or otherwise exposed to the subprime mortgage assets. But then as one of the spillovers of this crisis we had pressure on countries in southern Europe including Portugal, Spain, and Greece. And so it all came to a head in 2010 and back then it was Nicolas Sarkozy and Merkel, Germany's chancellor---who's still around---was a player, and they came up with a framework to bail out these countries including Greece. So, as part of those bailouts, Greece had to comply with various conditions including the fiscal austerity measures that you mentioned, there was a privatization that had to be done but it didn't go so well and so in early 2015---if I remember these dates correctly---Tsipras is leading what was then a sort of outsider party, one of the two major parties in Greece. And so they thought that they would take a different approach to the previous Greek government which was to play ball with mainly Germany and instead of playing ball with Germany and trying to use measures to get their budget under control they thought that they would try to essentially threaten the breakdown of the financial system. a breakdown of the euro unless Greece were forgiven their debt or otherwise given more lenient measures. The European establishment wasn't buying into that. So this is when Tsipras went to a vote, a referendum on a bailout package. He won that vote, that is to say, the Greek people voted resoundingly against the European establishment of the time, but that ended up not really mattering. The European establishment said basically we want our debt paid, we're willing to renegotiate the debt and you have to comply with these conditions. And so that was a situation where democracy and the markets came into play. The Greek government was hoping that by creating a crisis in the markets through a democratic act, one of the most democratic acts you can imagine, which is a referendum---because in a referendum the people vote directly on a policy---that they were hoping that democracy would have its way---through the markets---would have its way. It didn't work out. So, I start my book off with that event because it nicely and dramatically---the Greek situation is still ongoing---but it nicely illustrates how politics and the markets interact. And politics today in most of the developed world means democracy and this interaction between politics and markets, while known, while recognized, I don't think its full implications have been recognized and that's why I decided to write a book. Petersen: So, with the bailout referendum---this is a massive debt---I believe it was 177% of Greece's GDP? Bragues: That's correct, yes. It's probably different now. It's probably higher now, I haven't looked at the latest numbers. Petersen: Even if they paid their entire output and didn't eat or consume anything, it would still take them almost two years to pay it off, which of course is unfeasible. And then they were trying to refuse to pay it off and I suppose they were hoping that markets would have a big reaction and then when they didn't their leverage was gone. They didn't have the bargaining power they thought they had. Bragues: That's correct. The markets the next day---the referendum took place on a Sunday---and the next day the markets were down---not down significantly, specifically those in Europe, which would be more closely impacted---and the euro which was the key financial instrument in this entire drama barely reacted at all to the referendum result. Now, part of that was because by this point---I mentioned before that this is a drama that had started back in 2010---the reason why the markets' reactions were muted by this time, much of the debt that the Greeks held were no longer held in private hands. In other words, they were not held by private market players, whether that be pension funds, commercial banks, hedge funds, and other institutional investors but they had been effectively transferred to the government, whether to taxpayers or to central banks who had started---even though this goes against the Maastricht Treaty that brought the euro into being---the Central Bank started buying European bonds, and I'm talking here specifically about the European Central Bank. So, that's how it's played out. It's still currently playing out because Greece is back in the news because part of the deal that was made in the aftermath of the 2015 referendum is that Greece would still have to comply with various fiscal policy requirements and in order to get additional disbursements from the so-called troika, and the same party is in power, Tsipras continues to be in power and they still as you'd expect they would rather pay less debt or at least pay the debt on less onerous terms. Petersen: The odd thing is that people keep lending them money when they're so resistant to paying back their loans. Bragues: Yes, and that brings up the larger question I talk about in the book which is the role of the bond markets. The bond market is it is one of the biggest of the financial markets. In the book I go through the main ones. These would include the stock market, the derivatives market, which has grown dramatically since the early 1970s, I go through the currency market, which is the biggest one, at least on a per-day trading rate. But the bond market is huge. The bond market is a lot bigger than the stock market, it doesn't get as much public attention as the stock market does. It is not the subject of a cocktail party conversation the way the stock market is, but the bond market is huge. It is a major lifeline for governments---most governments today. It's hard to think of an exception among the democracies now---most governments today do not finance their expenditures, their infrastructure, their social programs through taxes. They run deficits and those deficits have effectively become perpetual. If you go back to the early 1970s---and we can come back to the issue why the early 1970s is such a critical date---but you go back the early 1970s, you do find countries from time to time running fiscal surpluses, or running balanced budgets, but for the most part they're running deficits, and so as a result since then we've seen a sustained increase in the level of public debt as a percentage of GDP. And so we're getting close to levels that we haven't seen since World War Two among the OECD nations. So, the bond market is a key player. I argue in the book that the bond market is an enabler of the worst fiscal habits of democratic states, that democratic political systems have an inherent tendency to overspend, and that the bond market becomes a very enticing place that politicians look to in order to finance the spending that helps them get them elected. And so then the question arises why do the bond markets keep on buying the bonds of these increasingly indebted states? I'm not sure I have the complete answer to that question. That was one of the questions that really got me thinking as I was writing the book. I think tentatively the factors are these: the key one is the desire for safety that seems to be very strong in the human psyche. So, I think we have to go into psychological explanations for this. The thing about government bonds, unlike bonds that you would buy, say, from a corporation, which is the other major sector of the bond market, government bonds are backed by taxes and taxes have to be paid. They are coerced from people. You don't pay your taxes, you'll either get fined or in a worst case scenario you end up doing time. A corporation doesn't have the same ability to gather money. It has to rely on the voluntary decisions of the buyers of its products. So, if you buy a bond in General Motors, or you buy a bond in Bell Canada or something like that, your ability to get money from that bond---and a bond is effectively, by the way, a loan that an investor extends to an entity, a government or corporate entity---so you buy a bond from Bell Canada or from some other private company, you've got to rely on the fact that they're going to be able to get people to buy their goods and services voluntarily. When you buy a government bond, you have the assurance that the entity who is supposed to pay you back the money has the power to force people to give it money and so that makes government bonds safer, in general, all else being equal than corporate bonds. And since people do crave safety, they do crave security---I don't want to get too much into the depths of human psychology here---but there's a deep-seated desire to avert risk and this is well known. Among financial academics we talk about it all the time, we talk about it in terms of risk aversion as being part of the model that we used to depict investor behavior. So, this is such a powerful desire to have safety when you invest your money, to know that if you plunk 1,000 dollars now and you're promised 2% interest, you will get that money back and a 2% interest at some future point in time. So, I think that's the most powerful driver for the demand of government bonds and that demand is so strong that investors will overlook the fiscal health of the countries to which they are effectively lending to. I think the other factor is legislation. There you look at the regulations specifically pension funds but also banks and so on have to operate under, if they're required to have a certain percentage what are deemed to be safe investments in their portfolios---by the way this also includes insurance companies---and safe investments invariably encompass and tend to get restricted to government bonds and so there's a built-in legislatively driven demand for government bonds and this plays out significantly with the commercial banks because they have to show to regulators that they have a certain level of core equity in their balance sheets. You look at these regulations---these are the Basel regulations---they have traditionally incentivized banks to buy their country's bonds. So, you've got a situation where Greek commercial banks tend to own a disproportionate amount of Greek government bonds or Italian commercial banks own disproportion amount of Italian government bonds. So, you have the banking sector effectively forced through legislation to have to finance the country's debt. Petersen: So just as a part of doing business, if you're a bank, you have to show that you're safe. There was this issue during the financial crisis of these AAA rated mortgage securities and if you think about it in terms of just supply and demand and all these things, it's not clear why the rating is so important. But then when you think about needing to prove to a third party that I am safe, then what others think that your assets are worth or how safe others think they are, becomes really important. And at least there's sort of a perverse element here where if you're lending to Iceland or Greece you can maybe get a higher return while still maybe appearing safe because you say, "well I've got all these government bonds," but the fact that they're not safe is why they can give you that higher return. And if you're managing a bank you want to earn a high return but you still want to appear safe and if you lose money you want to lose money when everyone's losing money so that you can say "hey it's not my fault, not personally at least." Bragues: That's another factor too that everyone---and John Maynard Keynes, I don't agree with everything he says, but he's pretty good on this point, on the behavior of investment managers. You have a huge incentive as an investment manager to go with the crowd because if you're right with the crowd you can bask in the general adulation that all investment managers are receiving at that point in time, you're generating nice returns for folks. But if things go awry, the crowd becomes more important as a kind of protection device against criticism because you can always say---as you point out---that this is a systemic issue, I couldn't do anything about it everybody else also was adversely affected. And so that does tend to work in favor of government bonds and does tend to over inflate the level of demand for government bonds relative to what they should get if you had a truly free market, people were just free to buy whatever bonds they thought would fit their risk return preferences. I think that's a key factor as to why I believe that bond markets end up not being vigilantes. There's this line Edward Danny, a well-known analyst on Wall Street, came up with this phrase 'bond market vigilantes'. I believe it was in the 1990s and it supposedly referred to this group of people in the bond market who were always on the lookout for countries that were running fiscal deficits, that were doing the wrong things economically, and that these bond market vigilantes would pick on these countries by selling their bonds, shorting their bonds, and then putting those countries in a bind supposedly by raising the interest rates that they would have to pay any time they issued bonds again. But the reality is that the bond market vigilante---if it exists---it exists too late. You look at the history of the bond market---we're talking a couple centuries now the bond market is actually older than the stock market---you look at this market and the vigilantes only come up really late in the game when it's pretty obvious that the government in question cannot pay and so the bond market doesn't do---I would argue---the job that it advertises: namely, always keeping yields in line with risk. It does tend to underestimate the level of risk, specifically with when it comes to governments. This is a partial transcript only. For our full conversation, listen to the episode. |
Fri, 13 January 2017
What follows is an edited transcript of my discussion with Ray March about the economics of medicine and health insurance. We had a fascinating and far-reaching discussion about health care policy, both in the United States and Canada, as well as some cases of entrepreneurship in the medical sector. This includes a slightly awkward discussion of the development of sexual pharmacology, the early experiments with nitrates and Viagra, and the, uhhh, "firmness" those drugs produce. Enjoy! Petersen: My guest today is Ray March of Texas Tech University. Ray, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. March: Thanks for having me. Petersen: So our topic today is the economics of medicine. Ray's research concerns entrepreneurship and regulation in medicine. Let's start by talking about this idea of entrepreneurship in medicine. The medical field isn't like Silicon Valley. You can't just launch a pharmaceutical company out of your parents' garage. In fact, the whole field is tightly regulated and controlled by the government both in the United States and Canada, other countries. So how do people in the medical field still manage to be entrepreneurial? March: Entrepreneurship is fundamentally a question about how do I find resources I have now and put them towards their best use and that will help me turn a profit and therefore we have market signals. You're right to point out medicine is a much more regulated area compared to other service industries but what makes medicine entrepreneurial is that there's always a void to discover, there's always a need to find better uses and better cures or better ways to treat patients. And because the government is usually behind the curve in terms of the advancement of science---and this is particularly true in health science and medicine---there's always opportunities for entrepreneurship. And a lot of my research explains or tries to explore what are these areas of medicine or of health just more broadly that the government is not involved in because they're not necessarily aware that this is an emerging field. And that leaves room for scientists and more broadly entrepreneurs to come and fill in gaps. Petersen: Okay. So, when you say the government is behind the curve, a big part of that is the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, in the United States. And of course it has its equivalent in other countries as well. So, tell me a little bit about the FDA. So, if I discovered a new drug, what kind of process would it take for me to bring it to market in the United States? March: If you want to go through the FDA procedure usually takes between 12 and 20 years and somewhere around a billion dollars of investment. You bring it to the FDA, you go through initial screening which is "Is the drug effective?" "Can it actually do what you purport it can do?" That's phase one. Phase two is a little bit larger clinical trial so instead of 30 people you go through 1,000 people. And you have to report that it's also effective. Then you get into safety which is what the FDA was originally intended to do was to eliminate the worry that they were going to be unsafe drugs on the market. Then you have to go through a clinical trial about typically 3,000 people to show that it doesn't hurt them. Beyond that, you've got phase four which is approval, you get your drug approved and even the drug is approved, you are not quite off the hook. Yet you still have to have post surveillance. And post surveillance is, it's approved but if we find any problem outside on the market or we find that we didn't pick up with something in our very detailed clinical study, we find there is some kind of problem, then we can remove the drug and that typically lasts 14 to 16 years. Petersen: Okay, so it's an extremely long process. Long and costly and we hear sort of horror stories about before there was an FDA---before there was regulation of medicine---you'd have people sell snake oil or tonics, miracle cures that really just made people sick. Doesn't it help to have a process in place to prevent the kind of things that might damage people's health? March: Absolutely. I wouldn't deny that it's not helpful to have processes in place to weed out effective treatments from ineffective treatments. The question that I'd like to mention is who does the planning? Do we need to have the federal government with the FDA come in and say if you want to prescribe a drug legally or use a medical device legally you go through our process or does it make more sense to open it up broader and have competition? And that is where the entrepreneurs would find ways to treat elements and diseases and in effect, those are weeded out through the market process. Petersen: Yeah so what I like in your research is that you've actually found cases of course of both kinds: of the FDA sort, of the public government regulation of drugs and also private regulation or private discovery of new uses of drugs. So, let's talk about your paper on entrepreneurship in off-label drug prescription. So, you look specifically at the off-label uses for three specific drugs: Aspirin, Viagra and---I might pronounce this wrong---Minoxidil? March: No, perfect Minoxidil. Petersen: Yeah, Minoxidil. Okay. So, first what is an off-label drug use? And why does it matter? March: The off-label use of a drug is using a drug for a purpose that's not approved for by the FDA. So, in the case of Aspirin, Aspirin is approved for pain relief or in the paper I say it's not just used for pain relief doctors also prescribe it to prevent myocardial infarction and other heart-related conditions. So, in general, when you use a drug off-label, you are saying I'm prescribing it for use that hasn't gone through the rigors of the FDA's regulation. It hasn't gone through the four phases and the post surveillance, which in the United States is perfectly legal. But the reason that off-label becomes very important---and full disclosure, in the United States one out of four drugs is prescribed off-label, that is, one out of four pills you're taking is not for the approved FDA use---is that it allows doctors and pharmaceutical companies to be entrepreneurs, to find the best alternative use of medication, which the FDA in theory, could do, but because the process of approving drugs is so long and costly and often lags behind what medical professionals typically find 15-20 years ahead of the pace. Petersen: Okay, but it seems contradictory that that would be legal because as you said the FDA is not just checking for safety, but for effectiveness. And if you're using Aspirin as a blood thinner, it hasn't been tested for that purpose. So isn't that a contradiction and shouldn't the FDA have some kind of interest in making sure these off-label drugs are effective? March: So there's been put forth regulations on, or just people trying to get off-label drugs regulated so that you can't prescribe it for any use. And in some cases, there are instances where it is illegal to use a drug for off-label use. For example, if I'm a doctor, I can't prescribe you 40 Oxycontin in a bottle of liquor and then you can do physician-assisted suicide. I can't do that. But the FDA, it does have some sort of an interest, from a public choice perspective, that they want to regulate all use of pharmaceuticals which it hasn't deemed safe. But I think this is where my research sort of comes into play here. The FDA is so far behind the curve, I don't think it's really aware of how these drugs are being prescribed. And if we look at the case of Aspirin, Aspirin, the initial hypothesis put forth by Lawrence Craven---he was an entrepreneurial cardiologist---said that aspirin could be used to prevent heart attacks. This was in the 1940s. And a good period of 30 years went by before this really took off in the mainstream where this became a very common procedure to avoid heart attacks, or heart disease, other cardiovascular things. And the FDA only really got around to approving Aspirin in 1996---I believe this was the first year to approve it for preventative care. So, I think there is an interest on behalf of the FDA but I think it's also just the FDA is very slow. I don't think it's able to stay ahead of medicine or to regulate some of these uses. Petersen: It's shocking to me that people would advocate to extend regulation to these off-label uses because if it's one in four pills in the United States, if you then banned those uses, wouldn't one in four patients then become sicker? Who's doing this advocating? March: One of the key distinctions to keep in mind is keeping you safe is not helping necessarily, it's not curing you. And those are two distinct things a lot of people won't necessarily think through the implications of when they want to advocate the FDA should have more power. Petersen: Okay, so that's one argument I've heard is that if the FDA approves a drug that then goes and poisons people and it turns out it wasn't safe after all then, it would be a huge political fiasco maybe the head of the FDA could get fired or definitely the people who were directly responsible for approving that drug. But if the FDA simply delays approving a drug and the same number of people die on account of not getting it---people whose lives would have been saved by it---then, the incentives are kind of asymmetrical. The error of omission is punished less harshly or not at all compared to the error of commission. March: Absolutely. I mean that's the seen and the unseen. What's seen is that the FDA is keeping all these drugs going constrained or not, keeping them off the market because they want consumers to be safe and they want to run through these clinical tests again. But what you don't see is that people who are in dire situations that need this to feel better or to function or even save their lives. You don't necessarily account for that when you account for the cost of the FDA. So, it's one thing to say it's 20 years of approval and a billion dollars or 1.2 billion dollars to have the drug approved, but you also don't account for the lives that are waiting to get ahold of this drug. Petersen: So, even though there's this huge process to sort of block, or to slow down drugs from reaching the market so that they can be tested and checked and made sure they're safe and effective. Still most drugs, when companies do develop drugs they earn most of their money in the U.S. market because of the strong patent system there. So, there's something to be said for having at least these incentives for the drug companies to develop these things and to keep technology marching along. Can you speak to some of the differences between the U.S. and other countries with respect to pharmaceutical development? March: Well, in terms of IP---and you're absolutely right that IP is a critical component of a lot of pharmaceutical companies' balance sheets---because they're going to invest large sums of money and large sums of time. Then if they go and put their drug on the market and then a generic comes out four or five months later, then there goes the profit margin. So that's an important component of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, where certainly European and in some cases, the Canadian pharmaceutical come and try to get their stuff approved by the FDA so they can get stronger patent rights. But a lot of that is somewhat misleading. So, for instance there's no real reason medically that you should have one drug or that one drug is necessarily going to treat a huge variety of patients. When drugs go generic, you don't see just a drug go generic and it becomes the same drug, you see generics vary in their chemical structure. This way it's not just the drug becomes cheaper because there's no patent preventing other people from making this pharmaceutical or engaging in this chemical composition, but they vary the composition so they can better suit other consumers. So, it's not necessarily the case that when drugs go generic they all become the same and just immediately the price drops. There's a better service towards the consumer market. Petersen: Yes. So, having these patents, on the one hand, they create the incentive to develop new things but on the other hand, they take away all the benefits of market competition which includes not only lower prices but also some of these sort of marginal improvements and developments in serving more niche markets and things like that. So, where do we see competition in the drug market? You have a paper called "The Substance of Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurship of Substances" which is a wonderful title by the way, do you want to talk a little bit about the entrepreneurship of substances? March: Sure what I tried to develop, or what me and my co-authors tried to develop in that paper is you have entrepreneurial theory which takes various forms whether you look at the Kirznerian theory or Baumol's theory and we try to adapt that for what I do is the market for pharmaceuticals. In that paper I examine off-label drug prescription too, but I try to explain how does the entire process work. So, given we have severe, very stringent regulatory structure set forth by the FDA and we have these conflicting patent rights, how is it that we actually see entrepreneurship in treating people? And off-label, one, it creates alternative uses of resources which is what entrepreneurship is in a nutshell, is find the best use for scarce means and then when they find better uses for existing drugs---so Aspirin, Minoxidil, Viagra like I talked about in my other paper---these findings get distributed through medical journals which is the system of how do we figure out which drugs are safe to treat various illnesses that we previously weren't aware of. Pharmaceutical sales representatives are going to also play a role in doing that, but they're not supposed to disclose too much information about off-label drug prescriptions, that's another regulation. But fundamentally what you have there is a system of feedback. So, without the FDA's involvement physicians and pharmaceutical companies are able to find alternative uses for their drugs. So, instead of Viagra being used to reduce cholesterol essentially or to reduce congestion in the heart, it's better used for sexual performance in males. And a lot of this was found in clinical trials which then got introduced in the U.S. market through voluntary tests which then became part of medical journals, which then were introduced into specialized medical journals to make sure that this information was distributed to urologists, or doctors of various disciplines and then that's how the market emerged for sexual pharmacology, which was largely an entrepreneurial act by urologists saying "We think sexual performance is not, for lack of a better word, all in your head. We actually think there's a physiological problem here and we think we can use pharmaceuticals to solve this." Petersen: So, you're saying that the main purpose of Viagra, the one that we've all heard of, that was not its original use? March: Oh no. Viagra was developed for heart congestion. Petersen: Wow, I did not know that. March: When you think of a little blue pill you think of erectile dysfunction for sexual performance, but no originally it was for---I'll tell the entire story, hope this goes to a family friendly audience---the story was this is developed in Britain, they started sending out these pills in an early clinical trial, they send them out to 30 or 100 middle-aged men, people you would think would be suspect for heart congestion and they send out the pills and they phone and they say "Okay, how is it? You feel like you have less heart palpitations? We will run your blood and we'll see what your actual congestion is." And it didn't seem to be very effective in that, this is about halfway through a 30 day trial, and they say "Okay, well send the pills back" and then nobody sent them back. So they were questioning "Why has nobody sent the pills back?" and they started getting reports, "Well it was actually helping with this other thing." And then they said "Well we need to develop this drug for sexual performance. This is going to be a blockbuster." Petersen: And before that there wasn't an interest in, or doctors were interested maybe more in saving lives. So it's almost like the market for sexual performance enhancing drugs sort of came from the consumers themselves. Before this nobody said "Hey you know what would we be great? A pill that enhances things in the bedroom." So, it's interesting. So they learned from the customers what their customers wanted. March: Yes, in this case directly. The field of what's called sexual pharmacology---so treating sexual problems with drugs---it largely emerges in the United States originally not Britain, and it's in the 1950s. And it's a group of, I believe, is about half a dozen to twenty urologists treating urological problems. They come to the conclusion that sexual problems are not all in your head, so it's not a psychological problem why sexual performance is not up to par, you're having these issues in the bedroom. It can actually be a physiological problem, so there's a problem with your sexual organs. And so they start experimenting with what were essentially nitrates, so things that affect blood flow and they start injecting them originally in themselves. So in the urologists' actual selves they would test that then test firmness, for lack of a better word, then they would say "Okay, we think this can help our patients we're going to prescribe these off-label." Patients would go, they would increase their sexual performance, this starts getting out in medical journals. And then over across the ocean, you have Britain which sort of serendipitously comes across Viagra and finds out this little blue pill can actually do this too. They enter the U.S. market. So it's an international competition but it all originally starts with an entrepreneurial idea saying, "No, we think we have a better way to treat sexual dysfunction." Petersen: Right. And yet they had to get over the idea that it was all---I don't know, this with would have been before the days when people also maybe believed strongly in mental illness because---the idea of something being "all in your head" in the age where we're all very aware that mental illness is an illness and it is related to physical things in your brain; the fact that something's all in your head doesn't mean necessarily that it's not real but this was the 50's, when maybe people philosophically didn't see things that way. March: Right the 1950s---there was some awareness of mental illness in the 1950s---the 1950s is when you start to have anti-psychotics, it's when they start to see we can help people that have previously been institutionalized by giving them these drugs which uptake into the brain, which can help you alleviate manias and depression, or anxiety. But the predominant theory for sexual dysfunction---it wasn't even called that back then, but what we can call for this podcast sexual dysfunction---was that this is a psychological problem so, the male couldn't perform---this is also true for females but what we were focusing on here is males---if the male couldn't perform it was some form of anxiety, so he needed to undergo psychotherapy or some kind of sexual therapy. And then he would go through that again and again until the point where he was comfortable enough performing sexually and that would somehow dissipate the problem. But entrepreneur urologists come in and say "No." There's alternative explanations. It's not just that he has anxiety. It could be there's something actually physiologically wrong. And this is sort of a new idea because that, one, it's a whole new idea to say no the sexual performance is not always linked to your mental state or your perceived anxiety, but that we can actually treat this with injections, or with nitrates or with drugs and drugs that already exist on the market because we believe this is a blood flow problem. They had it tested on themselves so they were pretty confident in their theory. But then to go ahead and give it to patients and then give patients the ability to self-medicate. All of this progress was a period of 20 or 25 years for them to progress to that stage to where ED can be treated---be self-treated really---without the use of psychotherapy which was inconsistently effective. And then we get to the point where you can just inject an oral tablet, that's where Viagra comes in. All of this comes about because of an entrepreneurial awareness to say "No, we don't think that the medical professional is treating this condition correctly." Petersen: So, one thing you talk about in your paper is the idea of superfluous entrepreneurship. What is that and how has it occurred in drug markets? March: Superfluous entrepreneurship as we go about it in this paper is the idea, given you're an entrepreneur in a regulatory state which prohibits you from discovering more effective ways to distribute goods, what happens to the goods you distribute? Are you distributing as effectively as you could without said regulation? And one of the ones we analyze in the paper is the development of insulin. I'm sure you and your viewers are aware of what insulin is, a diabetic who can't produce his insulin or doesn't produce enough, the Type-one and Type-two, needs to inject that when he eats carbs so he can manage his blood sugar and avoid diabetic complications. So, when insulin originally hits the market we've got to go back to, I want to say the 1920s, when they first started doing animal insulin. We have pig insulin and we have bovine insulin which saved thousands of diabetics' lives at the time, but they have side effects. As you can imagine, insulin is a hormone, if you inject animal hormones in you, there's going to be some side effects. And so by the time you get around to the 1940s we start finding ways, medical science advances enough to where we can synthetically produce human hormones, which is what modern insulin is, a human insulin. But the fear of the regulators is now that we can synthetically make hormones we don't necessarily know what are the side effects of synthetic hormones. And so in 1941 Congress passes what's literally called "The Insulin Act" which is if you're going to prescribe, or you're going to try to create a life-saving medication, which is what insulin is to diabetics, to Type-one diabetics especially, it has to go through additional rigorous testing. So what that means is the release of human insulin on the U.S. market is delayed, so diabetics who need to receive their insulin are still taking bovine and pig insulin, which is okay but when there was a clearly better alternative being human insulin available, you end up with superfluous discovery so instead of investing time---and this is what happens in the insulin market---you invest time and effort into finding ways to reduce complications from injecting bovine insulin, or find ways to change the what's called the duration event, so how long insulin last in your bloodstream trying to find ways to manipulate that or make that better. You have a better alternative which is to immediately bring in human insulin and treat diabetics using that and that doesn't become possible in the U.S. market because of these delayed regulations. Eventually insulin does get on the market but you have a prolonged period where people are noticeably getting worse treatment than what's available. Petersen: Right, and that's a very long period. I read in your paper they didn't approve human insulin until 1983 and did you say 1940s was when they discovered it? March: I believe 1941 was when it was first available for clinical testing and this was all done in Germany. Petersen: So 42 years. March: Right, of taking animal hormones. Petersen: Yes. So, the superfluous element of entrepreneurship is we have some kind of problem, people are willing to pay to have that problem solved. We have a cheap way of providing this subjective benefit to people, but the cheapest, best way that people would do in a free market is somehow blocked or illegal and so people entrepreneurship around regulation. Is that correct? March: You certainly see that in illicit drug markets, but yes that's also true in some pharmaceutical markets. I want to get this drug approved in the United States. I have human insulin which is better than cow and so I want to get approved in the United States. There's a big market for diabetics in the United States but the additional regulation makes it tough. So, I can find a way to circumvent that, either bring it on the black market, the illicit drug component, or I have to say no I can't compete in the United States because it is going to take too long, I'm just going to prescribe it over here in Germany or in Asia. And what that does, that just limits the entrepreneurial aspect of bringing better cures to market. So it's a superfluous effort you could say, marketing this drug in Asia or different countries in Europe instead of the United States. Those are all resources that could have been diverted towards something, or towards marketing the drug in the United States where you could argue it would be the highest value of use. Petersen: Right. And in your paper you also talk about delta nine THC found in marijuana, which is a treatment for nausea. Can you talk about that? That's illegal of course because it's from marijuana. March: That's an example where there's tons of medications out there for nausea, but the one you find in the medical marijuana derivative has been shown as particularly effective in difficult cases. So take cases where the typical forms of treatment which would normally help people---now we have more difficult cases---we're no longer allowed to prescribe these drugs we have to find synthetic uses of these drugs. So any time you take a synthetic use you're necessarily making the complications which you would face when the drug interacts with your body, they become a little bit more widespread. So you open yourself up to the treatment being less effective, but you also get more of a probability of these tail effects, where things you wouldn't necessarily see happen occur in your body. So, you make the drug. In some cases it's less effective, but you also can potentially make it more dangerous, which is the superfluous act. I am trying to use synthetic drugs to treat cases or treat illnesses when there's a better alternative in the background. So, I'm just trying to find a new and better way to make a potentially dangerous drug safer when there are already safer drugs available. Petersen: So a previous guest of this show, Mark Thornton, who you cite in your paper has argued that in the case of illicit drug markets, what the entrepreneurs do is to make them easier to smuggle by making them more concentrated, have a stronger effect for a smaller mass so they can be hidden in places where they're smuggled across borders or from the place they're produced to the place where they're sold. One example would of course be moonshine, so during the depression they obviously weren't selling low-alcohol-content wine because it would be so costly to smuggle that to people. They instead got the super strong moonshine and it was actually very dangerous. So, I suppose that's kind of an example of superfluous entrepreneurship, getting around the burdens placed on you, when in legal markets, of course, you don't have to always make things more concentrated and easier to smuggle because you don't have to smuggle them. March: Right exactly. Entrepreneurship is finding---I have my product, I eventually face competition because I'm making a profit, how do I make my product better? And so when you have to change the institutional setting to where now I have a product that I'm selling but it's technically illegal to sell this product, where can I put my efforts best for us to continue making a profit? In illicit markets it can just be the concentration, right? You mentioned the moonshine and the nine THC is another great example which is the main content of marijuana which people used to get high, you see the potency of these get much higher because that's primarily what you're trying to do is to sell the THC content to potential marijuana users. So instead of trying to find appropriate levels of THC or finding what you call niche, just accessories towards consuming marijuana which would differentiate the markets and serve consumers better, that is no longer profitable revenue and that's no longer a profitable or viable way to compete with people that are selling marijuana. Now it's how do I smuggle? How do I become a better or more active smuggler? And that's to raise the content of THC. Petersen: Or to get people onto drugs like cocaine that are significantly more potent per weight. I guess the great point made by Thornton is that by criminalizing these things, by criminalizing milder drugs in particular, you create a market for stronger ones. March: Right. Because that's how you compete on the margin for things like that. Yes. Petersen: So what other kinds of entrepreneurship do you see in the United States in medicine? I've heard about people sort of getting around the medical system, joining collectives where they pay directly to their doctor, trying to get away from the sort of hybrid insurance system that you have down there. March: That has become an alternative. And I don't know if I want to say an alternative market. But there has emerged a need for people to get outside of the larger insurance---that's the word I'm looking for---to get outside of the mainstream insurance market and to niche themselves into more specialized markets. So, with the passage of the Affordable Care Act right now, everybody has to have health insurance or you pay a massive penalty. You've standardized insurance, which in some cases maybe there's nothing wrong in having a standardized package of insurance. When you try to blanket that over the population of the United States you leave out specialized cases. So to give you a specific example what you see now in the market for diabetic treatment is now that insurance has become standardized to treat diabetics, you see less prescriptions written for specialized forms of insulin or insulin that acts faster or insulin that has a longer duration period. Now you see just generic insulin is being prescribed. Which is fine because the majority of diabetics are type-two diabetics and that's what they typically use, but then that leaves out cases of people with pancreatic cancer or type-one diabetics who need specialized insulin in order to better suit their individual illnesses, and you don't see that specialized treatment. So that leaves the market open for specialized insurance, or people that are going to co-ops, private alternatives where you pay into essentially a fund and 50 or so people will contribute 100 dollars a month. If one of them gets sick, they'll use the money in that fund to help this person overcome an illness they've come down with or any injury that's kept them outside of work. I think a lot of those entrepreneurial aspects are trying to get out of standardized medicine, standardized insurance but again because all of this is more or less dictated by the government you don't have the wiggle room to compete on the margins, what you have to do is go completely outside of a highly regulated market. That's what you're seeing marginally with insurance. You don't see as much of that in medicine. Medicine is a little more tightly controlled than insurance, even in the insurance market even today, but it's interesting. So, I think in the future there's going to emerge especially a larger market for these different forms of health insurance. It will help to treat people who have religious affiliations when they don't want to have insurance that helps to cover birth control or abortions for people that are in their group or they are pooled in the same insurance group. But also just people that aren't getting the kind of treatment they want. And this allows them to actually have health insurance for lack of a better word. I need a specialized form of treatment or I actually come down with a rare illness that the standard treatment is not going to help me with, I need to have insurance as a means to cover it and I think that's what you're seeing in the market with what you describe. Petersen: Right. So, I live in Canada and we have single payer, which ultimately is like post-Obamacare having private insurance companies but then having everyone legally required to get the insurance and then having those insurance companies having the government dictate what they provide and require them to take on people with preexisting conditions. It's almost like just some sort of weird way of replicating single payer just while maintaining the veneer of a private system but in Canada we have single payer officially. And there are some myths about it. So, we don't have socialized medicine per se. Doctors are not public servants but they can only accept payment from the government on your behalf, so sort of like maybe a private prison in the United States where they're kind of private but the only customer they can legally take on is the government. March: Which you wouldn't typically describe as a market. The market is to serve the consumers. Petersen: When the consumer is like a private contractor, serving the government. But of course we also restrict---you're not allowed to buy healthcare or medical care outside of the single payer system. There have been some court cases recently with people trying to argue for a right to do this but the typical thing to do is to cross the border to the States or fly to Southeast Asia to get your unapproved---or in order to pay for your own medicine. And the sort of justification for this is they don't want people competing up the prices of medical services, medical goods. I guess they like their monopsony status as the only buyer of medical services. But whenever I find myself arguing against the system or saying something to the effect of "Hey this is a pure private good, why don't we let the free market provide it the way we do with our food and shelter and other things that are very important for living?" I get really smart people arguing against me and some of the things they say are "Can you point to a country with free market healthcare that works?" and I have to say "Well there isn't a country with pure free market healthcare" Singapore is 50/50 and maybe that's as close as you get. But I guess to get to my question, why does every country intervene so strongly in medicine? What is it about medicine that that makes people really want to control it and have it centrally planned or regulated? March: Sure. I think that's the fundamental question of health economics. Analyzed from the perspective of an economist, how much is the market able to take care of the sick or those less able to take care of themselves and how much do you need state interference or government involvement to make a successful health company or healthcare system work? The way I'd like to think about health economics if we get outside of just focusing on insurance or treatment of rare illnesses or pre-existing conditions or asymmetric information and all these complex issues that people like to point and say, "See that's where the market fails in healthcare, that's why you have to have a government." Fundamentally what we're looking at is how do you deal with uncertainty? We have more or less ways of assessing risk, where we know your risk increases of lung disease if you smoke a cigarette as a simplified example. But how do we purely deal with uncertainty? So, I'm an insurance company and I take you on as a client, I don't know your health status. Various regulations make it impossible for me to find that out. But I don't know your health status. I don't know if in five years you're going to develop cancer, if you're going to be healthy for the next 30 or 40 years. How is it ideal with that as an insurance provider or if I'm a doctor how do I know you're going to use this pharmaceutical responsibly or how do I know that these other clinical trials I've seen where this has helped the patient with your condition is going to help you because there's heterogeneity in how people respond to things. But fundamentally this uncertainty both in the provision of healthcare and in medical science itself, these permeate medicine. We're never fully going to be able to reduce the uncertainty. There's always going to be that element of the simple fact that we don't know. And I think that provokes the idea in a lot of people's heads that with no centralized plan we're not able to address this uncertainty. So we need to have the government come in and say health premiums need to be this or guarantee a system where even if you don't have health insurance you'll be taken care of if you need to go to the emergency room. Or if you come down with a very rare illness there will be pharmaceutical stock up in the hospital. I just think that in general, the uncertainty drives a lot of people to look toward centralization or to develop a centralized plan to try to mitigate that. But a lot of those efforts are somewhat short sighted because when you centralize things you don't take advantage of the uncertainty aspect of anything you just put all of the decision-making power within a federal bureau, the FDA or the federal government or even the USDA to some degree. At least in the United States, I know Canada has similar governmental bodies up there. But when you do that you divorce decision-making from the knowledge and you also divorce it from the incentive, like when we talked about what if the FDA doesn't have an incentive to release potentially dangerous drugs? Or as a pharmaceutical company if they see profits, they absolutely would, even if it is somewhat risky. So, I think the motivation primarily in why we don't see free healthcare or a free market in health insurance or competing systems of determining whether drugs are safe or effective is that there's a primary fear with people how do we address this uncertainty. Petersen: So there are various elements of the uncertainty. If I'm an insurance company I might worry that the people who come buying insurance, there's an adverse selection problem so the people who come to me for insurance are going to be the people who are the least healthy or the people who expect, for some reason that maybe I can't observe, to get sick. And that means based on the fact that only people likely to get sick are coming to me, I need to charge very high premiums for my insurance. And so it's the classic market for lemons problem: The very fact that someone's selling you their used car maybe tells you that the car is a lemon. And the fact that you think it's a lemon means you won't pay very much for it, meaning that anyone who doesn't have a lemon wouldn't be willing to sell. So, at least with that, it seems that pooling everyone into the same pool helps. But on the other hand you do lose competitiveness. So, one example I've heard is the cost of rhinoplasty---the plastic surgery to make your nose look better---since that's not paid, since governments perhaps rightly see that as it's not life-threatening, it's not important and we're not going to pay for it, you pay for it yourself. And we see that the cost of a rhinoplasty has fallen dramatically over the years. And whereas life-saving surgery, you look at healthcare and housing and I guess university tuition, those are the three big things that consistently go up in cost over the years. Do you know a lot about the market for plastic surgery? March: Not a whole lot. I do know that because it's not regular you have means of competing and you have essentially competition to provide you with care to make your nose look better or for facial reconstructive surgery and similar things. I do know that a lot of cases like when you get breast augmentation you have to replace the inserts or whatever they're called. You have to replace those every set amount of years and you get routine inspections to make sure there's nothing going on with the surgical procedure, nothing wrong with the implant and all of that is done privately. So, it's interesting because getting plastic surgery is not necessarily a simple procedure. Just because the FDA is not involved in the procedure because there's not federal guidelines about when or when not you can do this procedure, how the procedure should be performed, it doesn't mean that the procedure is simple. As you pointed out, it's not life-saving but it's still surgery and there are still risks and complications. What we typically don't hear, with the exception of maybe a few TV shows, that sort of shock people, we don't hear about these horrible things going wrong on the surgical table when people get nose jobs. And I think a lot of that has to do with because they have to compete to make sure people are happy with the outcome but they also have to make sure, again if the procedure is safe and its efficacy. You look better when you're done and nothing happens to you or receive complications, you get infections from surgeries. So you do see that a lot in the United States. I want to go just briefly back into the adverse selection problem which I think is broadly the main argument for why you need to have government involvement in health insurance. Because you have that selection problem where only sick people want insurance and then insurance companies only want to provide really minimal standard care so you have that sort of mismatch and that would be a bad scenario for all. But to the extent that's true, it's based upon how is the insurance company is able to segment the market. So, if you're comparatively healthier than me and you just want to have catastrophic care, so something that if you were involved in a horrible accident and nobody could have planned for it, you need to have emergency care. You pay pretty low premiums and then the deductible is higher whereas someone like me I'm a type-one diabetic who needs to have consistent care throughout their life in order to maintain their health, their premiums should be a little bit higher but then the deductible should be a little bit lower since I have to keep taking insulin. But the problem is if they're not able to segment the market, and I think the reason they can't segment the market is because it's illegal to segment the market. What you don't have, they are two different forms of insurance. You don't have the insurance for sickly Ray me, or healthy you. You don't have means to compete on those margins, all you have is various plans. You buy into them, you have health insurance costs go up because there's less competition and the reasons we have explained before. So a lot of what you see with the adverse selection problem is a lack of marketing and the lack of marketing stems from the fact that it's illegal to do a lot of the research that health insurance companies want to do. Petersen: So, because deep down it seems so unfair that you could have a huge cost throughout your life just because you got sick through no fault of your own, we want people to pay the same. But then in doing so we create the adverse selection problem and it's sort of the old lady who swallowed the fly. We have to swallow the spider to eat the fly and eventually we're swallowing a single-payer healthcare system to put everyone in the same risk pool to deal with the problems that our initial minor intervention to try to make insurance more fair caused. March: Right. So what we would end up doing in that situation is that you would have to pay premiums, I would have to pay premiums we want to equal them out because it's unfair that you should have to be subsidized me for lack of a better word. Well, that means that you end up paying more in premiums than you actually wanted health insurance, I would end up paying less because we have to even out. More fundamentally if you want to address the fairness question---I think a lot of people do approach this from the aspect of fairness---is, one, why is it somewhat unfair for me as someone with a chronic illness to not have access to healthcare on a competitive market where I can decide which program I want, where I can assess my own risk, and where I can decide based upon my medical needs how at best to treat my illness; whereas someone like you who doesn't have a chronic illness places a completely different set of incentives? So when they pool us all they end up doing is limiting both of our choices. I think a fundamental question to ask there is which one of those is more or less fair? Petersen: Right. So, what sort of institutional changes, big or small---obviously some things are more politically feasible than others---but what institutional changes would you like to see to improve on our system? March: By "our" you mean the US system? Petersen: Yes, or in the systems worldwide that have similarly been adopted for similar reasons by many different countries. March: Sure. If we segment along the lines of there's health insurance and there's actual health products or health services. I would primarily start with the approval of pharmaceuticals. And I say that because a significant portion of the illnesses and conditions in the United States are treated with pharmaceuticals. So, if we're able to allow competing access to approval processes, that would drastically lower the cost of drugs. If you lower the cost of drugs, health insurance becomes less vital, certainly in my situation but in a lot of people's situations who need access to pharmaceuticals. The access to insurance becomes less important because there's less of a risk that you won't be able to afford the treatment if you need it. And I think that would push back insurance into---for lack of a better word---a more appropriate role. Insurance is supposed to be, there's a potential down the road that something bad will happen or I will develop an illness, I'll get sick, I'll break something, whatever you want to call it. I don't know if that's going to happen but if it does I want to make sure my livelihood or my standard of living continues as best it can. That's what actual insurance is. There's a chance that you could crash your car someday. And if your car is totaled you want to have repairs, you want a new car, that's why you buy car insurance. But now when we have health insurance we say "oh no health insurance covers your routine doctor, it's going to cover some aspect of your drugs if you get a prescription, it's going to cover procedures from other people in this case because everything is pooled." But you don't see your progressive car insurance company pay for your oil change. That's a different thing. That's routine care. And I think if you reduce the cost of entry into medical devices and pharmaceuticals, so you reduce back the power of the FDA, you would naturally see health insurance go back into the proper insurance role. You could make an argument on the other way too as if you let insurance companies compete, premiums would go down. People would self-select into consuming health care products or not consuming health care products more effectively. That would drive down the cost. But I think the primary problem here is there's a restriction of access to medical devices and to pharmaceuticals and once you allow for a market and that health insurance no longer competes on those margins it would compete on margins of trying to ascertain risk of whether that would happen or not down the road. Petersen: So when you talk about pooling or when you talk about making approval cheaper, is that the system where two or more countries agree that a drug only needs to be approved in one of the countries to be allowed in all of them? March: That's one method. I was thinking more along the lines of within the United States could have private companies that would give you gold and silver standards of approval for pharmaceutical X and drug Y. And then people based on that would decide, okay I want to take this drug or I want to take that one, or physicians would have more access to information based on that than waiting for the FDA to approve. That's more what I was thinking about. On an international level that gets interesting because developing a drug in Europe and in Canada is completely different than developing that in the United States. The difference in the rigors of the approval process is what drives a lot of those conflicts but in terms of how you agree that everyone is going to come up with the same approval process method, I'm less optimistic about that because I think there's a public choice story behind it. Pharmaceutical companies want the approval process to be tough. So, like you said you can't develop pharmaceuticals in your basement despite your chemical knowledge. I do think there's more of a hope in the future though for less emphasis on FDA approval and more for private raters or private ratings to come in and say these drugs have been shown safe or for pharmaceutical companies to interact with private laboratories or clinical testing facilities to say, okay we passed these tests, and we communicate that our product is safe without the FDA Petersen: Right. And at the very least you could remove the effectiveness criteria from the FDA. Just say that the president or Congress could just tell the FDA, your job is just to check safety. Now if people want to take an ineffective drug, as long as it's safe they can do that. There's the idea of right to try. Have you heard of that? March: I have a segment of that in one of my pieces. I think that's very interesting because that's completely illegal action but you have certain states that will say okay if a drug is within phase three---that's when we start to do the safety testing with the FDA---and you say someone has an illness, they're in an insufferable pain, we know they're going to die, let's give them a shot to take this drug. And whether or not that helps or not is kind of secondary but it's a circumvention like we talked about earlier of the going around the FDA, which is a federal governing body, you are not supposed to be able circumvent that at the state level. But you go around and you give people access to potentially life-saving medication. But me being more of a market-oriented economist, I wonder what if you did that not just for life-saving drugs but for other drugs? And granted there are risks with every single drug, basically including water has certain risks to it. But given that there are risks associated with every drug, what would emerge in a freer market where you could better ascertain the safety of these drugs or the efficacy of these drugs? Petersen: So do you have any closing thoughts, anything we didn't mention? March: I guess one last concluding thought with regards to health economics I just want to reiterate that health economics is fundamentally a question about which set of institutions is best able to deal with uncertainty. And uncertainty in the sense where we just don't have clearly defined answers. Who would be better able to protect the population of a country from an epidemic or who would be better able to take care of the mentally ill, which is a set of illnesses we don't know very much about, or who is better able to find alternative uses of pharmaceuticals given their potential potency to be able to help people, and the potential side effects? And the debate is still very lively. It's to what level do we need centralization in order to answer these questions and to what level do the discovery processes of the market---for lack of a better word---how are we able to address these questions better? My research asks a question of if you don't have centralization what is the alternative? What are examples---not necessarily of entirely free health care systems---what are examples of private mechanisms working in the medical field and thus far I've found pretty convincing results that the private market is able to handle some pretty difficult situations, some pretty uncertain situations and when compared to the centralized alternative they fair fairly well. Petersen: My guest today has been Ray March. Ray, thanks for being part of Economics Detective Radio. March: Thanks for having me.
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