October 24, 2024 • 30 mins
Mia and James discuss Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson's recent fake economics Nobel won for being to first economists to discover that history exists.
Sources:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.4.938
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023118773614
https://www.nber.org/papers/w10481
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/117/4/1231/1875948
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/advanced-economicsciencesprize2024.pdf
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/advanced-economicsciencesprize2024.pdf
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.91.5.1369
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media, No Bell Prize, Welcome to it could
happen here a podcast about Nobel Prizes.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I guess I'm your host. VA wog with Me with Me?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Is James Heimia excited to hear about the dynamite guy prices.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, so as people I think are aware.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
The man who invented dynamite established a bunch of prizes
to be like the pinnacle of human achievement. Right, every
years decided I'm a bunch of judges and you know,
and this year in the Nobel Prize in Physics, right,
Nobel Prize in Physics went to two guys who did
a whole bunch of the sort of fundamental basic work
on what became machine learning algorithms. And as annoying as
(00:44):
modern AI is, like machine learning algorithms has fundamentally changed
the way that science works. It changed the strong and
I've used it. I used the new astronomy like there's
all this, you know, it has fundamentally changed the way
that humanity functions.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, it's an important discovery.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Yeah, and you know, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went
to a group of people who discovered micro RNA, which
is like a different type of RNA that fundamentally changed
the way that we understand how like gene regulation works.
This is like a fundamental path breaking thing in biology.
They got that, They got the fucking medicine Noble price
(01:21):
for the Nobel Prize in economics went to three guys
who discovered that institutions affect prosperity.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Huge groundbreaking shit.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
It's like economists don't discover shit, they just they just
say shit, and then other economists are like, yeah, cool.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
This is okay.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
So when I was originally platting this episode, this is
going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize,
which is the economics Nobel Prize, which you've talked about
on the show before. But it's worth saying again this
is not a real Nobel Prize, Like, this is not
one of the prizes that was established by Alfred Nobel.
This was a thing established by the sweetest central at
as a way to push neoliberal economics new classical economics.
(02:03):
And every year they're always very stupid. It is the thing, right,
And and my plan for this episode because I started
seeing stuff about this Nobel Prize and I was looking
at this and I was like, this is the this
is the one of the dumbest ones they've had since
they gave out one in the two thousands for realizing
that people could simply not make a trade. Like but
I was like, Okay, I'm going to go read all
(02:25):
of these papers, right, we're gonna come back, We're gonna
have a detail analysis of it.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
And and I'm reading these papers and it's like it's nothing.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
These three economists are They're from what's called institutional economics.
These are supposed to be the smart ones, right, these
are These are the economists that like the neoclassical economists
have to bring in, like the normal neoclassical econmomts have
to bring in because their models don't work right. And
the thing and the thing that makes them like quote
unquote smart is that they understand the institutions exist, and
they know how to use really really basic game theory models.
(02:55):
And this makes them like the cutting edge, the absolute
elite cutting edge of borgewiw economics, the front lines.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
What are these people discovered?
Speaker 4 (03:04):
I wanted to people win this prize for, right, Okay,
the thing that they won this prize for, like the
initial thing, and there's a couple of stuff that we'll
get you in a second. But like, the big thing
that they figured out is do a series of thunderously
stupid regression analyzes.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
They discovered something.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
I don't even know how to frame the magnitude of
this discovery, but it took them a shit ton of
math and like a bunch of like tabulations of mortality
data to discover that in some places European colonial powers
formed settler colonies and in some places they established a
colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies, and that
(03:43):
these were different. This is what they won the Nobel
Prize for. They did a bunch of regression analyzes and
were like, holy shit, in some places the Europeans did
setular qualities and in some places they didn't, and it
had to do with like disease and a level of
redictance from the indigenous population. They want a Nobel Prize
(04:05):
in economics for this? Are you fucking kidding?
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Also also a paper that you could write for my
history one ten class at community cottage.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Okay, some of the discourse about this, right, the Marxist
economist Sharamazar pointed out that like these fundamental observations were
made by another guy we've talked about on this show
the Red Again Marxist economist Paul Baran.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And that's a good point.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
But also what I was thinking about how to do
this episode, right, This isn't a thing like with like
Donald Harris, Like we talked about Kamal Harris's dad's book, right,
and that's that's a book where there's there's like ideas
in it, right, Right, you can go through it and
you can watch them developing ideas. You can't do that
with this because these people are not developing ideas. They
(04:51):
have discovered the most obvious things. They have read a
single book about history, and they have attempted to use
a bunch of regression analyzes to prove things that like
you can just read a Wikipedia article and discover about
the course of colonization.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, yeah, and then you can go back and to
a bunch of aggression otities to produce something that everyone
already needs.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
And the place that I got to about this is
I have the shoke about Maoism where all the things
that people get from Maoism are things that you should
have learned in elementary school. Like one of the most
common things you get from Maoists like, ah, you have
to read no investigation, no right to speak and like
my friend, Okay, if you needed Maose Dung to tell
(05:31):
you that you needed to you needed to research something
before you talked about it. What the fuck happened in
your like the rest of your life? Wrong with your life?
What we're wrong with your education? Like what has gone
wrong with the way you think about the world that
you needed Maose Dung can tell you this, and this
(05:52):
is this is what most Nobel prizes and economics are
and this is the most.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That it has ever been. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
So basically their argument is that, like this is also
an argument that Paul Baran makes is that like, okay,
depending on whether you're dealing with a settuler quality or
a sort of like India style like administrative colony, I
guess I'm like a technical term for it.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
It gets like an extractive colony, where you have more
about extracted labor, raw materials and settling.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Yeah, like that changes the kinds of institutions that are
set up. And like, okay, you can if you want
to credit Paul Baron for the discovery that like the
settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different legal institutions
and they function differently and that has had long range
economic impacts like stretching into the future. But like this
(06:41):
is something again that you can you can just you
can find in a history book and immediately understand. And
these people have tried to do this. They're trying to
like track the difference in why we're like some colonies
more prosperous later than other colonies. Right, They're they're trying
to track this process through a whole bunch of incredibly
sketchy regression analyzes and we your assumptions about what income is.
They're trying to track like why was it that like
(07:04):
China and Turkey were like rich in the fifteen hundreds,
but they ceased to be rich after that.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Oh sick.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
They're doing a fucking Jared Diamond. Yeah, they're doing a
West and the Rest.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's wonder a Jerediamond bullshit, except
you know with China standard of living in Europe, if
you actually go back to the historical record and aren't
doing their like stupid weird like using population density as
an index for stuff, whether they start bringing malfus into it.
If you don't do that and you look at like
the actual like historical record, like the average quality of
(07:37):
life in China like is not eclipsed by Europe until
like the May eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, like you know, so like this is all this
is all like very even.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Then, like life expects in the Midican hundreds, didn't it
took decades to go up after the Industrial revolution?
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Right late?
Speaker 4 (07:53):
Yeah, Oh, this is this is sort of drawing to
what they're trying to do here, is that like a
lot of this is just it's directly it's just the
product of colonials, right, and they sort of acknowledge that
colonialism existed and that it was like extractive. But their
job is to take the basic insights of history and
depoliticize it. Right, We're going to get you later. One
of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution,
(08:14):
turning revolution into like a Nash E. Colibrium game theory thing.
Oh god, which is unbelievable. It's incredible.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, these are the kind of people who I have
to deal with on a daily basis on list serves
Like these are the economists emailing the entire list serve
with a unique insight into something that we all you
thirty year Like the old faculty email list is plagued.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
By this kind of individual Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
And like like this is a thing where so they're
absolutely convinced that, like, like the one hundred percent convinced
that the thing that leads to economic prosperity is like
the safeguarding of individual property rights. And like I will
give them a little tiny bit of credit where they're like, well, yeah,
so direct colonial institutions were attractive and they're bad because
(08:59):
they infringe on but he writes, and that's mildly better
than most of these people. Yeah, but these are these
are these are again, these are the most advanced busheois economists.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Right, they're not. They're not like pro Rhodesia and neoclassical guys, right.
They do.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
They do have a lie where they say, we're not
going to say when the colonialism is good or bad.
And I think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because
like in their work they're pretty clear that it's bad.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
They're just trying to make like a moral judgment because
God forbid.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Yeah, well they said they're saying it's extractive, and they
think that like attractions bad because it's inefficients. Yeah, but
basically things like that, they think that like Okay, so
like if you if you set up like regimes that
like SafeCare private property, this will like make people like richer.
But I want to read a quote from from one
of the papers they wrote. Quote, in comparatively poor and
(09:46):
less tense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle, it
was in the colonizer's interest to introduce inclusive economic institutions
that help to boost prosperity for the majority in the
long run.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Now, now me like they didn't go on to say,
how like yeah, but Britain built the railways in India,
Like like like.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
This is what he says, right, because what's happening here.
You know, this is something that economists love to do.
It's like economists love to go into other fields and
to have to colonize them, right, Yes, Like what they're
doing here is there they've gone into like this field
of history. Yeah, and they're attempting to sort of colonized them, right,
many such cases. Yeah, and you know they're looking at
this stuff, right, and you've got things like this where
(10:30):
it's like no, like the economic institutions that were set
up in like settler colonies were not designed to introduce
inclusive economic institutions to like help boost prosperity for the
majority of the long run, like that was.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
The result of social struggle.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
But they for some reason basically think that social struggles
started in like the eighteen eighties. Oh yeah, the Nobo
Bell like committee. They're like Econ fake Econdo Bell Committee
like releases, like a giant statement. Like there's like press
summaries have like a slightly more detail and they have
like the Econi one. And I want to read this
(11:05):
from so part of what they're doing, right, you're talking
about like the work that was inspired by this, by
the understanding that like the different institutions change economic outcomes.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Quote.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Beterg and Ivery two thousand and five examined the legacy
of British land institutions in India that gave cultivators in
certain regions proprietary rights, including that productivity was higher in
these regions post independence. Genioli and Rainier and Micaelopolis and
Papa Iyanu studied the impact of differences in political centralization
(11:39):
along ethnic groups dream Dream pre colonial times. None documented
the long run negative impacts of the slave trade. Delwy
ten by my non paper in two thousand and eight,
So we'll go back to that in a second. Del
twenty ten investigated the long run effects of the so
called meta system in operation between fifteen seventy three and
eighteen twelve and Peru. Inblivian where men were forced to
(12:01):
work in minds, within the boundaries of metsa household consumption
was twenty five percent lower in twenty twenty one than
just outside the boundaries. So what they have discovered here again,
in the late two thousands and early twenty tenths, they
discovered that slavery had more negative economic impacts are the
places where there was slavery.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Jesus Christ, Like, thanks for trying guys like this.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And shit that they gave these people a Nobel prize
for inspiring this is insane.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
You're right, economists, dude just love to tourist in someone
else's discipline and like fucking have the most basic insight possible.
Like all of these are things that would be like
an interesting undergraduate paper, right, Like, yeah, insane that these
people are getting Nobel prizes for this insane. It's economics
that same difference, I guess.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
All right, So speaking of economics, we need to go
to ads because so it'll be a long term detrimental
consequence for us.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Don't but when we come back, there's some more unreal bullshit.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
We are back, Okay.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
So speaking of undergred bullshit, well, one of the big
things in their like initial paper that they did the
whole oh my god, they discovered that there's difference between
settler colonies and like attractive colonies. One of the big
things in that paper was they spent a whole bunch
of time looking into was the economic difference in these
countries because.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Of the climate.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Which, now, for those of you who are students of history, right,
the thing you will remember is that this was like
the most advanced race science theory of the early eighteen hundreds. Yes,
and these people are like the economists are finally getting
around to busting this.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Like two thousand and four.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
They had a looked at skull measurements because I felt like,
I feel like we're heading down that pod like econophrenology.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
So bad, incredible.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
That was actually a whole thing in fascist Japan where
they had all of I can't remember if I ever
talked about this in the episodes that I did on
Bachelor's episodes, but they had this whole thing where they
had like racial categorizations and like biological characteristics of like
the races, and they would use them to like determine
allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use to do what.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Oh cool, cool, cool, cool cool. It was great.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
It like great, I mean, like, holy fucking shit, it's
so bad.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
They dis missed that time. Man, those people could kick
the shit out of a Nobel Price in like twenty
twenty five. They came back with that stuff.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
Yeah, I get, like, you know, I mean one of
the things we were talking about, right, is like you
were mentionings like these these are like these are like
such obvious insights. And I remember, so I went to
University of Chicago, right, and that means that I fucking
know all of these fucking ghouls, Like I met all
the people who are going to become these econ dipshits.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, you have ground zero for that shit.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
One of the things that's funny is that like this
is like a particular thing of the universe of Chicago
become people's like they all think they can do math
and they can't, right, they suck at it. But one
of the thin things I was almost like so a
bunch of my friends are math majors, and math majors
can like actually do math, Like they could do the
kind of math that's like there's no there aren't like
numbers involved. Like it's like they're doing like field theory
(15:28):
or some shit, or like they're doing a kind of
math that when someone tries to explain it to you,
they have to start like making diagrams of like the
faces of cubes and then like explaining how there's like
thirty two dimensional edges or whatever. And there's always this
joke from the math professors where they'd be mad because
like they look at the econdable price and they'd be like,
this person made like an incredibly minor optimization to a
(15:49):
trading algorithm that's like incredibly obvious to anyone who even
sort of knows math, and they gave them at a mole
price for this.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And this is that before history. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
So the other thing that they discovered, right, oh God,
I I I'm trying to find the least depressing way
to put this. They they discovered that there are revolutions,
and they discovered that like there are different interest groups
(16:20):
in a revolution who have different interests and like like
literally One of the things that they won this prize
for is a paper where they they discovered that giving
people like the franchise, like giving people the ability to vote,
and setting up the welfare state was something that was
done by elites to stop revolutions. Yeah again, Yeah, they
have all these mathematical models that look very impressive until
(16:41):
you realize they're just they're like incredibly stupid game theory
bullshit to like determine whether or not a country will
do a revolution, and their model for it basically is
and they've discovered some some genuinely impressive insights for like
a sixteen year old who wants to go into into
political science, right, Like, they discovered that, for example, elites
(17:01):
have economic interests and that those economic interests are different
from masses. But because they're economists, the only way they
can conceptualize this is in terms of tax rates. So
they make the argument, and this is not a joke.
I am, I am being serious about this. I read
this fucking footnote. They make the argument that the overthrow
(17:21):
of Salvador Allende was about elite tax rates.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Oh that one is fucking like Jesus wept.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
And it's so funny too, and this is this is
like one of the biggest most obvious problems with their models, right,
And this is this is this is from all the
way back to like their whole thing about like how
the institutions that were set up by colonialists being different
affected like the long term trajectory of these countries. They
treat these entire process because like one of the things
that they've discovered is that there are revolutions and counter revolutions,
(17:54):
because they read a Wikipedia article about like right wing
coups in Latin America, and they discovered that eats can
do antidemocratic coups because they don't want their taxes to
be too high.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
That's the only reason they do it.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Yeah, But but their discovery of this, right, that that
right wingers do antidemocratic cups to like preserve their wealth
and political power. Right, But never at any point in
their process does it seem to have occurred to them
that elites are not purely single national figures, and that
there are in fact multinational elites and in fact there's
(18:26):
something called the Central Intelligence Agency that doesn't come FAMI.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
These people do curse. And this is this is like
the fundamental core of this right.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
It's like these models talk about sort of like e
lead extraction, right, but it's all framed through the language
of sort of like taxes or like rents, basically like
like the thinking like land ranch or like they're fighting
over a surplus. Right, Okay, But what they're trying to
do is depoliticize how this actually works, because the thing
they're trying to present is that all extraction happens through
the state, right, Yeah, Like the state is the tool
(18:57):
that leads use. And now if you think about those
five seconds, well, like well no, obviously, like there's an
exploitation in like the workplace that's actually in indies, right,
military hatorships, that's actually like the primary place where extraction happens.
Where you shoot all the union organizers and then you
fucking force solved the peasants to work in the field
and shoot them if they don't. Right.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
But but what what they're doing is attempting to sort
of deep politicize the deep plicize this entire process. This
is what I'm talking about. Like they are the.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Most advanced Bushwi economists, and being the most advanced Bushwise economists,
they have finally figured out that the whole they call
it modernization theory. That's not really what modernization theory is.
But they're economists, they're fucking stupid. They don't know anything.
You can't judge them for not actually knowing what modernization
theory is. But they finally discovered that the old line
(19:43):
about how economic development and evidently brought democracy was wrong.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Again, huge insight here.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
Yeah, but this brings them into the world of democratic transitions. Now,
after we come back from these ad breaks, I would
read you the most thunderously stupid line I've ever read
in a paper in my entire life. And that is
fucking saying something given how many eCOM papers I've read. Yeah,
you've been in the trenches. Okay, oh god, let me
(20:22):
let me, let me, let me read this line. This
is This is a quote from the ECON Nobel Prizes site.
In their two thousand and sixth book, the two of
the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote,
the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consolidation
(20:43):
of democracy.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
The first This is very funny. This is fucking insane.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
This is like an entire field of international relations of
political science.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
This is ship not not just that there are literally
multiple disciplines. This is an entire field of study, right,
Like I have read it, Like obviously, this is an
entire matcho political science. This is an entire branch of
international relations. This is an entire branch of sociology. There's
like there's like an anthropological school kind of that that's
about this.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
They're interdisciplinary fucking institute, so that exists for this reason,
Like this is shit that I studied from people who
wrote books about it in the nineteen fifties, Like.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
This is like like you, And the funny thing is
they are they literally quote people who are writing about
this from the age, like people have been studying this
for fucking it as long as there has been democracy.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
People have been studying.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
This Shitah yeah, their eCOM thing that they always was like, oh,
nobody ever did formal analysis for It's like, have you
ever fucking.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Read have you read a poly side paper?
Speaker 4 (21:54):
I understand, I too dropped my public policy major the
moment I realized that public policy was just fun an
econ with the lines in the graph relabeled, Yeah, have
you ever fucking read one of these papers? Like you
actually have a chance of understanding them because they are
you know, Okay, I can't bet you mean to political science,
they are about one hundred and fifty times more advanced
(22:14):
than the ECON papers on this subject. But that's still
not like a very high level of advancement, right, but
like still they're like they have formal models of this.
They've done all the stupid math bullshit. The sociologists done
all the fucking number crunching, Like okay, okay, here's another
go from this. The authors start the paper by showing
that democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in GDP per capita.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
They discovered this in two thousand and nineteen. I was having.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Twitter arguments, like arguments again with like sixteen year olds
on Twitter in like twenty sixteen about what the relationship
between revolutions and declining and raising living standards were.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Like this was Twitter discourse, right.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
This is seven years off to the Arab Spring.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Like just a twenty nine Yes, insane, they discovered.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
This, Yeah, do they do formal analysis of the Arab Spring,
famously the first and only democratic transition that's ever happened.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
No, that's like two recents. Okay, They're all all their stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Is what they call the quote the second wave of
democratic transitions.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
Which is the second wave of all because they're two
social idiots, so that they're talking about the protomocracy movements
in the eighties in Latin America and you saysia great, Yeah,
which they're also just thunderously wrong about like all of
the time.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah. I was going to say, I can't wait to
hear what they have to say about those.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
I'm literally not even going to talk about it because
it's nothing.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
It's just like air.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
I'm just looking up a very very insightful paper that
ali Ka Diva wrote, who I've interviewed several times so
different things. It's called stick Stones and Molotovs Cocktails. It
is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about like
the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation
it has between like succesful demotratic transition movements.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It's good paper. Read that.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Yeah, there's a lot of great like analysis. We'll put
that in like the notes here. There's a lot of
great analysis of this. But what they're trying to do
is they're trying to build this model where they're like
looking at like basically bargaining between like the masses and
elites to decide whether you do a revolution or a
counter revolution. And they're trying to build like a game
theory model based on like fuck off the elites and
like give ranting concessions and when they don'te grant concessions,
(24:26):
and whether people believe they're getting grant concession. The other
thing that's also very stupid about this, right, is that
like the thing that they're interested in is why or
why not people like believe that the olibal economic reforms
are going to work, And a lot of democratic transitions
are also about like resistance to that shit. Yeah, like
the revolutions to Dan for example, like he is a
(24:47):
bard of Marcus movement, but like it is also in
large part a reaction to imf postructural reforms these people
all think are good and will like cause long term prosparity,
and like a lot of the democratic resitions they're talking about,
like like for example, again Pinochet, right, like that was
like you know, like obviously the pro democracy reformers did
more neoliberalism, but like a part of the part of
the reason like that stuff worked was because Pinochet ran
(25:08):
the economy into the graduating yeah, right.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Which is what he was sad to do.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
But yeah, but like I want to close it on
two things. One, I want to read this line right
from I'm talking about like the advances in their papers.
This is again from the equitible prize thing quote in
the earlier models. The probability that the masses are successful
when they stage a revolution is always one.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
But this is a strong assumption that does not reflect
real world events very well.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
They published a paper about how people make a decision
to do a revolution. This this was peer reviewed in
an economics journal. It's one of the papers that incited
in the noble price they gave them when they assumed
that revolutions always succeed. Yeah, Nobel prize. And the second
paper was one they realized, holy shit, that's.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Not true, mom Melter, isn't it. This is the kind of.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
Assumption that these absolute fucking morons make all of the time,
all of the fuck. This is why they had to
bring in the institu social columnists in the first place
to bring the shit in right, because like they're basic
models of how humans work. Were like every single human
like sits out and calculates a fucking utility curve, figure
out where they're going to brush their hair in the
morning was obviously not true. That's what I had to
bring in game theory in the first place. Right, they
(26:23):
make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time. And
again this is one of the ones they're making in
one of the papers that was cited in here as
the reason they want to know what prison economics.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, I want to read this models of Cocktail's paper
out to everyone. Here's a fun little sentence, and event
history analysis finds it, right, so positively associated with political
liberalization in one hundred and three non democracies from nineteen
ninety to two thousand and four. Attacks by civilians on
police stations during the January twenty fifth Egyptian Revolution illustrate
one way in which unarmed collective violence can bring about
(26:54):
a democratic breakthrough. Incredible, thank you, We love to see it.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
I love this.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
That's a pretty normal thing from like I guess you
would call it like the center left of like Democrats
edition studies stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Right, Yeah, it's the sociology paper.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Yeah, that's like a pretty normal it's like a good life,
a good paper. This is from one of the books
written by people who won the Economics Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Quote.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Chapter six explains why several European countries have managed to
build broadly participatory societies capable but still shackled states. Our
answer focuses on the factories that led much of Europe
towards the corridor during the early Middle Ages, as Germanic tribes,
especially the Franks, came to invade lands dominated by the
Western Roman Empire. Afterwards collapse, We argue with the marriage
(27:40):
of bottom up participatory institutions and norms of Germanic tribes
and the centralizing bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman
Empire forged a unique balance of power between the state
and society.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
The rise of the.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Oh good for me, so depressing. I spent ten years
getting a PhD in history and they've just given these
people a Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
But like Jordan Peterson, shit, they have discovered.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
But this is the thing, Like these people have discovered
the concept of history. Yeah, and they've read like four
Wikipedia articles and they've used those Wikipedia articles they started
doing regression analysis.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, and this is this is what they want a
Nobel prize. Yeah, this is fake Nobel prize.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
Like again, like I've been thinking about, like you know,
in physics, what you have to do to win a
Nobel Prize, you have to make a prediction about the
fundamental nature of the universe that can only be tested
by building a fucking machine that can measure a vibration
of gravitational ways, which is a It has to be
(28:52):
able to measure a ripple in the fabric of space
time that is smaller than the diameter of the fucking
nucleus of an atom.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
That is what you have to do to win the
Noble Prize in physics.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
What you have to do to win the Noble Prize
in economics is realize that institutions affect prosparity.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Jesus, I just cannot like. This has been. This has
been the vibess Econdoble Prize episode.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
I don't know. I hope this made your day slightly
slightly better, because holy shit, this is the fakest prize
in the entire world.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Shout out to the economists like I guess I'm eagerly
awaiting you discovering some other ship from my one oh
one class. Feel free to sign up anytime if you
want to get about fucking prize in economics.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I guess ah. All right, well this has been. It
can happen here. We'll return.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, next time they give the economics surprise for tying
their shoes of something.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
It happened here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
For more podcast from cool Zone Media, visit our website
fool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 6 (30:09):
You can now find sources for it could happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Al Zone Media, No Bell Prize, Welcome to it could
happen here a podcast about Nobel Prizes.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I guess I'm your host. VA wog with Me with Me?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Is James Heimia excited to hear about the dynamite guy prices.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, so as people I think are aware.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
The man who invented dynamite established a bunch of prizes
to be like the pinnacle of human achievement. Right, every
years decided I'm a bunch of judges and you know,
and this year in the Nobel Prize in Physics, right,
Nobel Prize in Physics went to two guys who did
a whole bunch of the sort of fundamental basic work
on what became machine learning algorithms. And as annoying as
(00:44):
modern AI is, like machine learning algorithms has fundamentally changed
the way that science works. It changed the strong and
I've used it. I used the new astronomy like there's
all this, you know, it has fundamentally changed the way
that humanity functions.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, it's an important discovery.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Yeah, and you know, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went
to a group of people who discovered micro RNA, which
is like a different type of RNA that fundamentally changed
the way that we understand how like gene regulation works.
This is like a fundamental path breaking thing in biology.
They got that, They got the fucking medicine Noble price
(01:21):
for the Nobel Prize in economics went to three guys
who discovered that institutions affect prosperity.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Huge groundbreaking shit.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
It's like economists don't discover shit, they just they just
say shit, and then other economists are like, yeah, cool.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
This is okay.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
So when I was originally platting this episode, this is
going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize,
which is the economics Nobel Prize, which you've talked about
on the show before. But it's worth saying again this
is not a real Nobel Prize, Like, this is not
one of the prizes that was established by Alfred Nobel.
This was a thing established by the sweetest central at
as a way to push neoliberal economics new classical economics.
(02:03):
And every year they're always very stupid. It is the thing, right,
And and my plan for this episode because I started
seeing stuff about this Nobel Prize and I was looking
at this and I was like, this is the this
is the one of the dumbest ones they've had since
they gave out one in the two thousands for realizing
that people could simply not make a trade. Like but
I was like, Okay, I'm going to go read all
(02:25):
of these papers, right, we're gonna come back, We're gonna
have a detail analysis of it.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
And and I'm reading these papers and it's like it's nothing.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
These three economists are They're from what's called institutional economics.
These are supposed to be the smart ones, right, these
are These are the economists that like the neoclassical economists
have to bring in, like the normal neoclassical econmomts have
to bring in because their models don't work right. And
the thing and the thing that makes them like quote
unquote smart is that they understand the institutions exist, and
they know how to use really really basic game theory models.
(02:55):
And this makes them like the cutting edge, the absolute
elite cutting edge of borgewiw economics, the front lines.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
What are these people discovered?
Speaker 4 (03:04):
I wanted to people win this prize for, right, Okay,
the thing that they won this prize for, like the
initial thing, and there's a couple of stuff that we'll
get you in a second. But like, the big thing
that they figured out is do a series of thunderously
stupid regression analyzes.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
They discovered something.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
I don't even know how to frame the magnitude of
this discovery, but it took them a shit ton of
math and like a bunch of like tabulations of mortality
data to discover that in some places European colonial powers
formed settler colonies and in some places they established a
colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies, and that
(03:43):
these were different. This is what they won the Nobel
Prize for. They did a bunch of regression analyzes and
were like, holy shit, in some places the Europeans did
setular qualities and in some places they didn't, and it
had to do with like disease and a level of
redictance from the indigenous population. They want a Nobel Prize
(04:05):
in economics for this? Are you fucking kidding?
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Also also a paper that you could write for my
history one ten class at community cottage.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
Okay, some of the discourse about this, right, the Marxist
economist Sharamazar pointed out that like these fundamental observations were
made by another guy we've talked about on this show
the Red Again Marxist economist Paul Baran.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And that's a good point.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
But also what I was thinking about how to do
this episode, right, This isn't a thing like with like
Donald Harris, Like we talked about Kamal Harris's dad's book, right,
and that's that's a book where there's there's like ideas
in it, right, Right, you can go through it and
you can watch them developing ideas. You can't do that
with this because these people are not developing ideas. They
(04:51):
have discovered the most obvious things. They have read a
single book about history, and they have attempted to use
a bunch of regression analyzes to prove things that like
you can just read a Wikipedia article and discover about
the course of colonization.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, yeah, and then you can go back and to
a bunch of aggression otities to produce something that everyone
already needs.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
And the place that I got to about this is
I have the shoke about Maoism where all the things
that people get from Maoism are things that you should
have learned in elementary school. Like one of the most
common things you get from Maoists like, ah, you have
to read no investigation, no right to speak and like
my friend, Okay, if you needed Maose Dung to tell
(05:31):
you that you needed to you needed to research something
before you talked about it. What the fuck happened in
your like the rest of your life? Wrong with your life?
What we're wrong with your education? Like what has gone
wrong with the way you think about the world that
you needed Maose Dung can tell you this, and this
(05:52):
is this is what most Nobel prizes and economics are
and this is the most.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That it has ever been. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
So basically their argument is that, like this is also
an argument that Paul Baran makes is that like, okay,
depending on whether you're dealing with a settuler quality or
a sort of like India style like administrative colony, I
guess I'm like a technical term for it.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
It gets like an extractive colony, where you have more
about extracted labor, raw materials and settling.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Yeah, like that changes the kinds of institutions that are
set up. And like, okay, you can if you want
to credit Paul Baron for the discovery that like the
settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different legal institutions
and they function differently and that has had long range
economic impacts like stretching into the future. But like this
(06:41):
is something again that you can you can just you
can find in a history book and immediately understand. And
these people have tried to do this. They're trying to
like track the difference in why we're like some colonies
more prosperous later than other colonies. Right, They're they're trying
to track this process through a whole bunch of incredibly
sketchy regression analyzes and we your assumptions about what income is.
They're trying to track like why was it that like
(07:04):
China and Turkey were like rich in the fifteen hundreds,
but they ceased to be rich after that.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Oh sick.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
They're doing a fucking Jared Diamond. Yeah, they're doing a
West and the Rest.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's wonder a Jerediamond bullshit, except
you know with China standard of living in Europe, if
you actually go back to the historical record and aren't
doing their like stupid weird like using population density as
an index for stuff, whether they start bringing malfus into it.
If you don't do that and you look at like
the actual like historical record, like the average quality of
(07:37):
life in China like is not eclipsed by Europe until
like the May eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, like you know, so like this is all this
is all like very even.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Then, like life expects in the Midican hundreds, didn't it
took decades to go up after the Industrial revolution?
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Right late?
Speaker 4 (07:53):
Yeah, Oh, this is this is sort of drawing to
what they're trying to do here, is that like a
lot of this is just it's directly it's just the
product of colonials, right, and they sort of acknowledge that
colonialism existed and that it was like extractive. But their
job is to take the basic insights of history and
depoliticize it. Right, We're going to get you later. One
of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution,
(08:14):
turning revolution into like a Nash E. Colibrium game theory thing.
Oh god, which is unbelievable. It's incredible.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, these are the kind of people who I have
to deal with on a daily basis on list serves
Like these are the economists emailing the entire list serve
with a unique insight into something that we all you
thirty year Like the old faculty email list is plagued.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
By this kind of individual Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
And like like this is a thing where so they're
absolutely convinced that, like, like the one hundred percent convinced
that the thing that leads to economic prosperity is like
the safeguarding of individual property rights. And like I will
give them a little tiny bit of credit where they're like, well, yeah,
so direct colonial institutions were attractive and they're bad because
(08:59):
they infringe on but he writes, and that's mildly better
than most of these people. Yeah, but these are these
are these are again, these are the most advanced busheois economists.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Right, they're not. They're not like pro Rhodesia and neoclassical guys, right.
They do.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
They do have a lie where they say, we're not
going to say when the colonialism is good or bad.
And I think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because
like in their work they're pretty clear that it's bad.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
They're just trying to make like a moral judgment because
God forbid.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Yeah, well they said they're saying it's extractive, and they
think that like attractions bad because it's inefficients. Yeah, but
basically things like that, they think that like Okay, so
like if you if you set up like regimes that
like SafeCare private property, this will like make people like richer.
But I want to read a quote from from one
of the papers they wrote. Quote, in comparatively poor and
(09:46):
less tense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle, it
was in the colonizer's interest to introduce inclusive economic institutions
that help to boost prosperity for the majority in the
long run.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Now, now me like they didn't go on to say,
how like yeah, but Britain built the railways in India,
Like like like.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
This is what he says, right, because what's happening here.
You know, this is something that economists love to do.
It's like economists love to go into other fields and
to have to colonize them, right, Yes, Like what they're
doing here is there they've gone into like this field
of history. Yeah, and they're attempting to sort of colonized them, right,
many such cases. Yeah, and you know they're looking at
this stuff, right, and you've got things like this where
(10:30):
it's like no, like the economic institutions that were set
up in like settler colonies were not designed to introduce
inclusive economic institutions to like help boost prosperity for the
majority of the long run, like that was.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
The result of social struggle.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
But they for some reason basically think that social struggles
started in like the eighteen eighties. Oh yeah, the Nobo
Bell like committee. They're like Econ fake Econdo Bell Committee
like releases, like a giant statement. Like there's like press
summaries have like a slightly more detail and they have
like the Econi one. And I want to read this
(11:05):
from so part of what they're doing, right, you're talking
about like the work that was inspired by this, by
the understanding that like the different institutions change economic outcomes.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Quote.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Beterg and Ivery two thousand and five examined the legacy
of British land institutions in India that gave cultivators in
certain regions proprietary rights, including that productivity was higher in
these regions post independence. Genioli and Rainier and Micaelopolis and
Papa Iyanu studied the impact of differences in political centralization
(11:39):
along ethnic groups dream Dream pre colonial times. None documented
the long run negative impacts of the slave trade. Delwy
ten by my non paper in two thousand and eight,
So we'll go back to that in a second. Del
twenty ten investigated the long run effects of the so
called meta system in operation between fifteen seventy three and
eighteen twelve and Peru. Inblivian where men were forced to
(12:01):
work in minds, within the boundaries of metsa household consumption
was twenty five percent lower in twenty twenty one than
just outside the boundaries. So what they have discovered here again,
in the late two thousands and early twenty tenths, they
discovered that slavery had more negative economic impacts are the
places where there was slavery.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Jesus Christ, Like, thanks for trying guys like this.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And shit that they gave these people a Nobel prize
for inspiring this is insane.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
You're right, economists, dude just love to tourist in someone
else's discipline and like fucking have the most basic insight possible.
Like all of these are things that would be like
an interesting undergraduate paper, right, Like, yeah, insane that these
people are getting Nobel prizes for this insane. It's economics
that same difference, I guess.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
All right, So speaking of economics, we need to go
to ads because so it'll be a long term detrimental
consequence for us.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Don't but when we come back, there's some more unreal bullshit.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
We are back, Okay.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
So speaking of undergred bullshit, well, one of the big
things in their like initial paper that they did the
whole oh my god, they discovered that there's difference between
settler colonies and like attractive colonies. One of the big
things in that paper was they spent a whole bunch
of time looking into was the economic difference in these
countries because.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Of the climate.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Which, now, for those of you who are students of history, right,
the thing you will remember is that this was like
the most advanced race science theory of the early eighteen hundreds. Yes,
and these people are like the economists are finally getting
around to busting this.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Like two thousand and four.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
They had a looked at skull measurements because I felt like,
I feel like we're heading down that pod like econophrenology.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
So bad, incredible.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
That was actually a whole thing in fascist Japan where
they had all of I can't remember if I ever
talked about this in the episodes that I did on
Bachelor's episodes, but they had this whole thing where they
had like racial categorizations and like biological characteristics of like
the races, and they would use them to like determine
allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use to do what.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Oh cool, cool, cool, cool cool. It was great.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
It like great, I mean, like, holy fucking shit, it's
so bad.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
They dis missed that time. Man, those people could kick
the shit out of a Nobel Price in like twenty
twenty five. They came back with that stuff.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
Yeah, I get, like, you know, I mean one of
the things we were talking about, right, is like you
were mentionings like these these are like these are like
such obvious insights. And I remember, so I went to
University of Chicago, right, and that means that I fucking
know all of these fucking ghouls, Like I met all
the people who are going to become these econ dipshits.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, you have ground zero for that shit.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
One of the things that's funny is that like this
is like a particular thing of the universe of Chicago
become people's like they all think they can do math
and they can't, right, they suck at it. But one
of the thin things I was almost like so a
bunch of my friends are math majors, and math majors
can like actually do math, Like they could do the
kind of math that's like there's no there aren't like
numbers involved. Like it's like they're doing like field theory
(15:28):
or some shit, or like they're doing a kind of
math that when someone tries to explain it to you,
they have to start like making diagrams of like the
faces of cubes and then like explaining how there's like
thirty two dimensional edges or whatever. And there's always this
joke from the math professors where they'd be mad because
like they look at the econdable price and they'd be like,
this person made like an incredibly minor optimization to a
(15:49):
trading algorithm that's like incredibly obvious to anyone who even
sort of knows math, and they gave them at a mole
price for this.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And this is that before history. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
So the other thing that they discovered, right, oh God,
I I I'm trying to find the least depressing way
to put this. They they discovered that there are revolutions,
and they discovered that like there are different interest groups
(16:20):
in a revolution who have different interests and like like
literally One of the things that they won this prize
for is a paper where they they discovered that giving
people like the franchise, like giving people the ability to vote,
and setting up the welfare state was something that was
done by elites to stop revolutions. Yeah again, Yeah, they
have all these mathematical models that look very impressive until
(16:41):
you realize they're just they're like incredibly stupid game theory
bullshit to like determine whether or not a country will
do a revolution, and their model for it basically is
and they've discovered some some genuinely impressive insights for like
a sixteen year old who wants to go into into
political science, right, Like, they discovered that, for example, elites
(17:01):
have economic interests and that those economic interests are different
from masses. But because they're economists, the only way they
can conceptualize this is in terms of tax rates. So
they make the argument, and this is not a joke.
I am, I am being serious about this. I read
this fucking footnote. They make the argument that the overthrow
(17:21):
of Salvador Allende was about elite tax rates.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Oh that one is fucking like Jesus wept.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
And it's so funny too, and this is this is
like one of the biggest most obvious problems with their models, right,
And this is this is this is from all the
way back to like their whole thing about like how
the institutions that were set up by colonialists being different
affected like the long term trajectory of these countries. They
treat these entire process because like one of the things
that they've discovered is that there are revolutions and counter revolutions,
(17:54):
because they read a Wikipedia article about like right wing
coups in Latin America, and they discovered that eats can
do antidemocratic coups because they don't want their taxes to
be too high.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
That's the only reason they do it.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Yeah, But but their discovery of this, right, that that
right wingers do antidemocratic cups to like preserve their wealth
and political power. Right, But never at any point in
their process does it seem to have occurred to them
that elites are not purely single national figures, and that
there are in fact multinational elites and in fact there's
(18:26):
something called the Central Intelligence Agency that doesn't come FAMI.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
These people do curse. And this is this is like
the fundamental core of this right.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
It's like these models talk about sort of like e
lead extraction, right, but it's all framed through the language
of sort of like taxes or like rents, basically like
like the thinking like land ranch or like they're fighting
over a surplus. Right, Okay, But what they're trying to
do is depoliticize how this actually works, because the thing
they're trying to present is that all extraction happens through
the state, right, Yeah, Like the state is the tool
(18:57):
that leads use. And now if you think about those
five seconds, well, like well no, obviously, like there's an
exploitation in like the workplace that's actually in indies, right,
military hatorships, that's actually like the primary place where extraction happens.
Where you shoot all the union organizers and then you
fucking force solved the peasants to work in the field
and shoot them if they don't. Right.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
But but what what they're doing is attempting to sort
of deep politicize the deep plicize this entire process. This
is what I'm talking about. Like they are the.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Most advanced Bushwi economists, and being the most advanced Bushwise economists,
they have finally figured out that the whole they call
it modernization theory. That's not really what modernization theory is.
But they're economists, they're fucking stupid. They don't know anything.
You can't judge them for not actually knowing what modernization
theory is. But they finally discovered that the old line
(19:43):
about how economic development and evidently brought democracy was wrong.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Again, huge insight here.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
Yeah, but this brings them into the world of democratic transitions. Now,
after we come back from these ad breaks, I would
read you the most thunderously stupid line I've ever read
in a paper in my entire life. And that is
fucking saying something given how many eCOM papers I've read. Yeah,
you've been in the trenches. Okay, oh god, let me
(20:22):
let me, let me, let me read this line. This
is This is a quote from the ECON Nobel Prizes site.
In their two thousand and sixth book, the two of
the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote,
the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consolidation
(20:43):
of democracy.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
The first This is very funny. This is fucking insane.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
This is like an entire field of international relations of
political science.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
This is ship not not just that there are literally
multiple disciplines. This is an entire field of study, right,
Like I have read it, Like obviously, this is an
entire matcho political science. This is an entire branch of
international relations. This is an entire branch of sociology. There's
like there's like an anthropological school kind of that that's
about this.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
They're interdisciplinary fucking institute, so that exists for this reason,
Like this is shit that I studied from people who
wrote books about it in the nineteen fifties, Like.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
This is like like you, And the funny thing is
they are they literally quote people who are writing about
this from the age, like people have been studying this
for fucking it as long as there has been democracy.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
People have been studying.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
This Shitah yeah, their eCOM thing that they always was like, oh,
nobody ever did formal analysis for It's like, have you
ever fucking.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Read have you read a poly side paper?
Speaker 4 (21:54):
I understand, I too dropped my public policy major the
moment I realized that public policy was just fun an
econ with the lines in the graph relabeled, Yeah, have
you ever fucking read one of these papers? Like you
actually have a chance of understanding them because they are
you know, Okay, I can't bet you mean to political science,
they are about one hundred and fifty times more advanced
(22:14):
than the ECON papers on this subject. But that's still
not like a very high level of advancement, right, but
like still they're like they have formal models of this.
They've done all the stupid math bullshit. The sociologists done
all the fucking number crunching, Like okay, okay, here's another
go from this. The authors start the paper by showing
that democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in GDP per capita.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
They discovered this in two thousand and nineteen. I was having.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Twitter arguments, like arguments again with like sixteen year olds
on Twitter in like twenty sixteen about what the relationship
between revolutions and declining and raising living standards were.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Like this was Twitter discourse, right.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
This is seven years off to the Arab Spring.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Like just a twenty nine Yes, insane, they discovered.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
This, Yeah, do they do formal analysis of the Arab Spring,
famously the first and only democratic transition that's ever happened.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
No, that's like two recents. Okay, They're all all their stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Is what they call the quote the second wave of
democratic transitions.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
Which is the second wave of all because they're two
social idiots, so that they're talking about the protomocracy movements
in the eighties in Latin America and you saysia great, Yeah,
which they're also just thunderously wrong about like all of
the time.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah. I was going to say, I can't wait to
hear what they have to say about those.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
I'm literally not even going to talk about it because
it's nothing.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
It's just like air.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
I'm just looking up a very very insightful paper that
ali Ka Diva wrote, who I've interviewed several times so
different things. It's called stick Stones and Molotovs Cocktails. It
is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about like
the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation
it has between like succesful demotratic transition movements.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It's good paper. Read that.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Yeah, there's a lot of great like analysis. We'll put
that in like the notes here. There's a lot of
great analysis of this. But what they're trying to do
is they're trying to build this model where they're like
looking at like basically bargaining between like the masses and
elites to decide whether you do a revolution or a
counter revolution. And they're trying to build like a game
theory model based on like fuck off the elites and
like give ranting concessions and when they don'te grant concessions,
(24:26):
and whether people believe they're getting grant concession. The other
thing that's also very stupid about this, right, is that
like the thing that they're interested in is why or
why not people like believe that the olibal economic reforms
are going to work, And a lot of democratic transitions
are also about like resistance to that shit. Yeah, like
the revolutions to Dan for example, like he is a
(24:47):
bard of Marcus movement, but like it is also in
large part a reaction to imf postructural reforms these people
all think are good and will like cause long term prosparity,
and like a lot of the democratic resitions they're talking about,
like like for example, again Pinochet, right, like that was
like you know, like obviously the pro democracy reformers did
more neoliberalism, but like a part of the part of
the reason like that stuff worked was because Pinochet ran
(25:08):
the economy into the graduating yeah, right.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Which is what he was sad to do.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
But yeah, but like I want to close it on
two things. One, I want to read this line right
from I'm talking about like the advances in their papers.
This is again from the equitible prize thing quote in
the earlier models. The probability that the masses are successful
when they stage a revolution is always one.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
But this is a strong assumption that does not reflect
real world events very well.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
They published a paper about how people make a decision
to do a revolution. This this was peer reviewed in
an economics journal. It's one of the papers that incited
in the noble price they gave them when they assumed
that revolutions always succeed. Yeah, Nobel prize. And the second
paper was one they realized, holy shit, that's.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Not true, mom Melter, isn't it. This is the kind of.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
Assumption that these absolute fucking morons make all of the time,
all of the fuck. This is why they had to
bring in the institu social columnists in the first place
to bring the shit in right, because like they're basic
models of how humans work. Were like every single human
like sits out and calculates a fucking utility curve, figure
out where they're going to brush their hair in the
morning was obviously not true. That's what I had to
bring in game theory in the first place. Right, they
(26:23):
make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time. And
again this is one of the ones they're making in
one of the papers that was cited in here as
the reason they want to know what prison economics.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, I want to read this models of Cocktail's paper
out to everyone. Here's a fun little sentence, and event
history analysis finds it, right, so positively associated with political
liberalization in one hundred and three non democracies from nineteen
ninety to two thousand and four. Attacks by civilians on
police stations during the January twenty fifth Egyptian Revolution illustrate
one way in which unarmed collective violence can bring about
(26:54):
a democratic breakthrough. Incredible, thank you, We love to see it.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
I love this.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
That's a pretty normal thing from like I guess you
would call it like the center left of like Democrats
edition studies stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Right, Yeah, it's the sociology paper.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Yeah, that's like a pretty normal it's like a good life,
a good paper. This is from one of the books
written by people who won the Economics Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Quote.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Chapter six explains why several European countries have managed to
build broadly participatory societies capable but still shackled states. Our
answer focuses on the factories that led much of Europe
towards the corridor during the early Middle Ages, as Germanic tribes,
especially the Franks, came to invade lands dominated by the
Western Roman Empire. Afterwards collapse, We argue with the marriage
(27:40):
of bottom up participatory institutions and norms of Germanic tribes
and the centralizing bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman
Empire forged a unique balance of power between the state
and society.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
The rise of the.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Oh good for me, so depressing. I spent ten years
getting a PhD in history and they've just given these
people a Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
But like Jordan Peterson, shit, they have discovered.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
But this is the thing, Like these people have discovered
the concept of history. Yeah, and they've read like four
Wikipedia articles and they've used those Wikipedia articles they started
doing regression analysis.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, and this is this is what they want a
Nobel prize. Yeah, this is fake Nobel prize.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
Like again, like I've been thinking about, like you know,
in physics, what you have to do to win a
Nobel Prize, you have to make a prediction about the
fundamental nature of the universe that can only be tested
by building a fucking machine that can measure a vibration
of gravitational ways, which is a It has to be
(28:52):
able to measure a ripple in the fabric of space
time that is smaller than the diameter of the fucking
nucleus of an atom.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
That is what you have to do to win the
Noble Prize in physics.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
What you have to do to win the Noble Prize
in economics is realize that institutions affect prosparity.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Jesus, I just cannot like. This has been. This has
been the vibess Econdoble Prize episode.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
I don't know. I hope this made your day slightly
slightly better, because holy shit, this is the fakest prize
in the entire world.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Shout out to the economists like I guess I'm eagerly
awaiting you discovering some other ship from my one oh
one class. Feel free to sign up anytime if you
want to get about fucking prize in economics.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I guess ah. All right, well this has been. It
can happen here. We'll return.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, next time they give the economics surprise for tying
their shoes of something.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
It happened here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
For more podcast from cool Zone Media, visit our website
fool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 6 (30:09):
You can now find sources for it could happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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