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