Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello everyone, and welcome to Morals and Markets, the podcast presented by the Atlas Society and hosted by Atlas Society, senior Scholar and Professor of Political Economy at Duke University, Dr. Richard Salzman. Over the next few weeks, you'll notice that we are posting fresh episodes of Morals and Markets, the podcast from the Vault, meaning episodes that Dr. Salzman hosted back in 2020 and 2021. We hope you enjoy today's episode, p p e programs at universities. A little throwback to a covid discussion Dr. Salzman had last year. If you enjoy the podcast, you can join Dr. Salzman live on Zoom each quarter for his next discussion where you'll have access to an extra 60 minutes of q and a and discussion, visit alice society.org/events to register for the next webinar. And as always, we invite you to like, subscribe, rate, and follow the podcast on all of your favorite podcast platforms. And if you feel so inclined, please share with friends as a 5 0 1 <unk> <unk> nonprofit. The S Society relies on our faithful followers and donors to make the work that we do here possible. So we appreciate your support and hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 00:01:09 Okay, welcome everyone to Morals and Markets. Now, I wanna make sure, I think you can hear me wave if you can. I wanna make sure. Thank you, Nik. I wanna make sure I can hear you. So this is my button to make sure. So Nik, say something, uh, provocative.
Speaker 1 00:01:27 Uh, taxation is theft. <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:01:30 Try again. I can't figure
Speaker 1 00:01:32 You couldn't hear me that time.
Speaker 2 00:01:34 I can hear you now.
Speaker 1 00:01:35 What about over the four, last four years? <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:01:39 I couldn't hear you at first, so I'm, I'm assuming it's not a swear word. Thank you, Nik. Great to see you again. Um, welcome everyone. I first want to thank the Atlas Society. This is a very exciting night for me. I've been doing this since May and I realize I did 15 of these. So I'm gonna start by telling you a little bit about morals and markets, and then we'll dive into our topic tonight, which is pp and e. And some of you, I can tell on the phone call, know a bit about P p D, know a lot about it. And some of you I know have told me ahead of time you, it's an introduction for you. So, um, first things first, I want to thank the Atlas Society because, uh, Jennifer Grossman, who's, uh, the president, and I want to thank David Kelly, Dr.
Speaker 2 00:02:22 Kelly, and then Dr. Steven Hicks. They've all been just great. Emily Brown is head of student programs, and Emily's been an enormous help to me, as, as has Erin, uh, Redding. So thank you Atlas Society folks. Uh, and, um, the, the origin of this last May, and qui and others, I think were involved from the beginning. I started missing my students, I missed them, and I wrote them. And then I said, how about some doing some stuff outside of class, or some of you were graduates and onto other things. And I thought, well, how about a session every couple weeks? Uh, uh, talking about some issue from the pp e perspective. And, uh, actually every two weeks is a bit much. So now we're on a monthly schedule. And originally, uh, you may remember we did maybe an hour, and we always went overboard. And so this one, we carved out 90 minutes, thinking 90 minutes might be better.
Speaker 2 00:03:18 The format is usually I say something for 20 minutes or so. Uh, sometimes it goes a little bit over, but that's my goal. I start with introductory comments, you know, from the emails I sent out, uh, or that Atlas Society sent out. I also have suggested readings. So there's links to various readings, totally optional. You don't have to do too much work for this, but just in case you wanna learn more, you go to these links, you go to these readings and learn more. Um, and let me just give you a flavor. I have it in front of me, um, of the, of the kind of topics we've covered in prior sessions. So the very first one we did was last May. And if you remember, there were shortages associated with the, uh, the coronavirus and things like that. So the very first one we did was price gouging and profiteering.
Speaker 2 00:04:04 So you could tell from the beginning, this is kind of provocative topics, uh, little off-center, little different take on things. But, but even the seminar itself, morals and markets, when you think about it, if you asked a, uh, philosopher, he'd say, or she'd say, what's morals got to do with markets? You know, markets are about self-interests and maximizing utility and things like that. If you know the language of economics, and they would say, that's j that's not moral. Moral is, is compassion altruism kindliness not this profit-seeking, profit maximizing thing that goes on in markets. So part of what I want to do is integrate moral theory with market activity and show that, uh, indeed a lot of the egoistic activity that goes on in markets is precisely moral. Now, the other thing we covered last May, seems like months ago, years ago, decades ago, maybe.
Speaker 2 00:04:59 The second one was crisis and public health policy. And my argument was kind of provocative there. It was like, unhealthy is unhealthy. You do not help the health of citizens by shutting down the economy. Um, in June, we discussed policing. That was controversial. Riots were going on, people were arguing for the defunding of police. So that theme was something like defund or de defend the police. Uh, in June, they were doing the big fiscal stimulus, as they call 'em, stimulus packages. So we discussed that, uh, got a little more philosophical in July, had two sessions in a row. One was on varieties of anti-capitalism. All the ways that that groups and people can be against capitalism. So capitalism is getting it from all sides, if you will. Uh, in August we did just anarchism versus capitalism. So there was a subset of the libertarian argument that says, you know, the state itself is a problem, you gotta get rid of the state.
Speaker 2 00:06:01 And so we talked about that. Then we turned in, uh, September to monetary policy, kind of technical, but I have some great students who really no monetary theory and policy. So that one was leveraged off, off of the Fed announcing that it would no longer follow the Phillips curve. Oh, that's really too technical for tonight, so I'll just leave it at that. Then we did woke CEOs and stakeholder theory. So the whole theory of whether corporate managers should be serving shareholders, which is the old Milton Friedman view, or whether instead, uh, they should be serving a broader audience called stakeholders. We talked about that Now in October, I have to confess, we covered something that I did not think would be relevant, but we covered it anyway. It was the, it was the Bernie Sanders Biden Manifesto. Remember that thing? It was like 80 pages long and we're reading through all the changes they would make.
Speaker 2 00:06:53 Were they to, uh, win office? They did win office. If you haven't followed the headlines, <laugh>. So the title of that was the Biden Manifesto. How would America Change? Wow, it is changing after that. Threats to judicial independence. I, that hasn't come yet, but that was the controversy about whether the Supreme Court would be packed or not added, whether seats would be added or not. I still think that might be coming up. So, uh, judicial independence, is that a, a key part of a constitutionally limited government and capitalist system or not? Uh, October, just before the election, we covered the whole issue of polls and pundits and things like that, and how accurate are they or not, and does it affect people voting or not? Uh, then we did a little retrospective on the election, and now in November we were doing Big Pharma November.
Speaker 2 00:07:49 They hadn't come out with a um, vaccine yet. We did a big thing though on big pharma and, you know, whether pharma companies should be defended or not. We also discussed a little bit big tech. So the, the attack on tech, uh, the social media companies by both parties actually, you know, whether they should be tres busted or not. And then the last, uh, session we did was in Sep, uh, February effective altruism, which if you've been in college, you know, Pete Peter Seger, I think is the Princeton professor who does that, who's been doing that for years. But the idea that students, here's the idea, which I criticized, students should not really pursue their passion or their interests when they leave college. They should go make as much money as possible and then give it away to, uh, for altruistic reasons, to other causes.
Speaker 2 00:08:41 And I kind of called that slavish labor. I thought it was a, i, I thought it's a really bad idea to go pursue a career, which takes so much work. When you think about it, it's really hard to figure out a major and specialize in it and pick a career, and it's an enormous effort. So you really need to be motivated, I would say self-interested in that whole process. So, okay, that is a quick rundown of four. I don't know, that's 14 or 15 topics. Just give you a flavor of the kind of stuff that's covered. Now, I would call that applied, p p e. And so to back off a little bit, let's get a little deeper and talk about, uh, pp and e itself. Now, <laugh>, if you heard p, p and E over the last year, you, you look it up and it says, uh, you know, I don't know, personal protective equipment, right?
Speaker 2 00:09:29 Because we're in the Covid era, but that's not what I mean. And so those of you students out there, you know, pp and e means philosophy, politics, and economics. And there are pp and e programs, thankfully at major universities, there's dozens of them. And I'm in one at Duke. I've had great colleagues at Duke. I've been in the PP and E program there. I think about, I don't know, I'm going on seven or eight years now and teaching it, it's in the political science department at Duke. These pp e programs don't have to be in PolySci. Sometimes they're in econ, some rarely in philosophy. They're mostly in political science departments. But here's the idea, here's the basic idea. You cannot really understand the world if you're only looking at it from an economic lens or if you're only looking at it from a political lens, or if you're only looking at it from a philosoph lens.
Speaker 2 00:10:29 Now, let's back up a minute and remember, specialization's a good thing. Adam Smith told us that if you specialize in business and elsewhere, that you will, uh, create the wealth of nations. I mean, you will specialize, you'll become smarter, you'll become a more adept in your field. And certainly that is true also in the intellectual field. Uh, if you look at human history, uh, during, especially since the Enlightenment, what has it been is it's been a series of increasingly specialized study disciplines that sometimes call fields. And there would not be, I don't think, great intellectual advances without this specialization. But, but here's the big, but sometimes it can become too isolated. Sometimes these fields become so isolated and specialized, they're almost living in silos, if you will. They don't talk to each other anymore. They don't really interact enough. And so the buzzword is multidisciplinary. If you have a more multidisciplinary approach, you, uh, see the bigger picture.
Speaker 2 00:11:27 Uh, you learn from each other in different fields. And, uh, pp and e you could think about it as, um, integration and multidisciplinary in the social sciences. Now it is just those three. Sometimes it brings in psychology, sometimes it brings in sociology, sometimes it brings in law. So there's even P p L programs, philosophy, politics, and law. But the general idea is you are enormously benefited, not only as a student, but just as a citizen to be able to, and it isn't easy to be able to be adept in and find the connections between them. So now the history, this is the centenary of pp and e programs, believe it or not, or roughly, it was last year. They began an Oxford University in Britain in 1920. So Oxford first came up with the idea, and not to go too much in, go into the gory details of the history, but if you go back to the beginning of political economy, Adam Smith in Scotland was originally a moral philosopher, alright?
Speaker 2 00:12:37 But then he became the founder of Political Economy, 1776, with the Wealth of Nations. So that alone is an example of someone who is Erod because he knows at least two fields. But Smith actually also knew law. So he had lectures on jurisprudence, uh, really just a multifaceted guy. And that probably, I think, contributed a lot to why the wealth of nations was so great and so influential. Okay? But now fast forward a long time Marx by would, by the way, in the mid 18 hundreds, I would say Marx was a p and e, I, I don't, I wouldn't say scholar, that's a little too nice to marks, but he was definitely pp and e I mean, he did philosophy, politics, and economics. He's not the most known for the economics, but the whole revolution theory and things like that, that's, that's politics. Okay? But here's what happened In the late 19 hundreds, the two fields, especially politics and economics went their separate ways, they bifurcated.
Speaker 2 00:13:36 And most of it was due to the 1870s, what I would call the Neoclassical revolution. The neoclassical said, you know what, our role model is physics. We want to be scientific. We wanna get away from those political guys who are just making stuff up. We want to be rigorous, we wanna be mathematical. And so that's where you get terms, by the way, like equilibrium velocity and stuff like that. They were literally borrowing the terms and aping the methods of the physicists. Now, the Neoclassical school was, was good, was brilliant, but, and that started at about 1870 or so. But by the turn of the se well, by 50 years after that, Oxford was saying, what the heck? The two fields are not talking to each other. We now have not political economy, we have political science and economics, and they are not talking to each other.
Speaker 2 00:14:30 Uh, now, right around this time, Kanes became famous, John Maynard Kanes, 1919, uh, the Economic Consequences of the Peace, a critique of the Post World War I settlement, where if you, if you know your history, you know, reparations were imposed on Germany and Kanes opposed this. The more important point though, is Kanes is a pp and e guy. Kanes did politics and he did moral theory in a way. He worried about the money mode, what he called the money motive, and it's corrupting influences. But he was most famously known of, of course, for the 1936 treatise, a general theory, a book that was turned into a textbook by Paul Samuelson in, I don't know, something like 15 editions between 1948 and 1992. And it taught that book, that Keynesian textbook taught millions of people. So talk about the influence of, um, a pp and e approach.
Speaker 2 00:15:31 I'm not sure Kanes would've been that influential had he not also been politically and morally influential, uh, or at least adopting other morals, the morals of other folks. Okay? So Oxford is doing this and trying this, and, but what it's basically doing is telling students, uh, you need to study these three fields. And so we'll, he, we'll recommend, you know, go over to econ and take these. Go over to PoliSci, make sure you take these, make sure you have a little mix of these three things, and you'll probably be better off. And they were, and Britain started producing very famous political leaders and other business leaders who had a background in VP and E. So gradually over the years, people came to see that wow, pp and e students and pp and e trained people are just better conceptual thinkers. They're better able to make connections between things.
Speaker 2 00:16:21 That was the whole point of it. Now, I would name the mid eighties. Uh, people can just sort differ over this, but I think when James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986, it gave a great impetus to a return to a synthesis of what we would call a political economy. So that that's what he was known for. He headed with Gordon Tak. He headed basically what's known as the Public Choice School. So the Public Choice School integrates economics and politics. It basically brings into politics the methods and assumptions of economics. It says, you know what? Political leaders are just as self-interested and just as much maximizers as market makers. And we need to get away from the romantic view of politicians as altruistic public servants. Um, and as a result, we'll have a more realistic view of politics. Now, forgetting the, forgetting the political spectrum for a while, cause I don't wanna overemphasize this.
Speaker 2 00:17:21 The value of pp and e is the integrative approach. It's not the idea that it represents left, right, or center, cuz you can find all kinds of pp and e all along the spectrum. Uh, in the 1970s, John, John Kenneth Galrith was a good example of a left-leaning pp and e guy and a guy who actually complained that economics was too mathematical, too detached from reality, uh, too unwilling to engage with political debate. So, um, so when Buchanan wins this Nobel Prize in the mid eighties, I think there's a greater appreciation for political economy now bringing it up to the present, I would say, and I'm so glad to see Professor Anomaly here. So if you can hear me, I'm gonna ask him to weigh in because he and I worked together at Duke. Um, and that's when I began to learn more about the history of pp and e.
Speaker 2 00:18:19 And he is the practitioner of it and a theorist of it. And by the way, look at this, look at this great performance. I dunno if you could see this, but there's, here's this pp and e book from 2015, pretty thick. It's Professor Anomaly, professor Munger, who I work with at Duke, professor Brennan, who was a close associate of Buchanan for many years. I think Buchanan died in 19 2013 or so. So Dr. Brennan is at Australia National University and teaches, and also at U N C. So Professor Anomaly at U N C at Duke. Now at Uen, uh, Mungers, I'm working with Munger at Duke, another one, Jeff, Sarah McCord, a philosopher at U N C Chapel Hill Point is in the last 20 years, last time I checked, there are at least two dozen, maybe more, but two dozen really, uh, high quality PP and e programs at various universities.
Speaker 2 00:19:21 Uh, not just Duke and UPenn, some of the IVs and Notre Dame, Michigan, uh, growing leaps and bounds. And I think it's a good and positive thing. We can talk about applications of it, but it's a, I think it's a positive thing because knowledge should be integrated as far as I can say. You, you check your work, so to speak by checking it against other disciplines. Now, before I, before I ask Professor Anomaly to say a few words, let me just give you examples of stuff that's come up over the years. If I said to you, we should enact a fairer tax code, that's a fairly simple statement, right? We should enact a fairer tax code that's PP and e. You could not answer that just by economics or just by philosophy or just by politics. So what part of it is, okay, we should enact that sounds like political.
Speaker 2 00:20:22 That means we need a political coalition to enact and in law, and that there's a whole science behind how does that happen? How do you get popular support or not offer something, right? But a tax code. Now the economist ears perk up is a tax taxes. Oh, taxes affect the economy. It's fiscal policy. Uh, yes. Now I'm interested, I don't know how we're gonna pass that, but I'm an economist and I'll tell you what effects it'll have on incentives and investment and savings. Okay? But then I also said fair. Oh my God. Here's where the philosopher comes in and says, I'll tell you what's fair or what's just, and you know what the tax rates would be. And the this is where the economist gets off and says, I'm not, I'm not, I know nothing about fairness and, and I don't, I'm not gonna opine on that.
Speaker 2 00:21:10 See? So just something as simple as we need a fairer tax code. I mean, I would argue that unless you have pp and e, it's uh, you know, it's hard to answer those kind of questions or even begin to investigate. All right, just quickly, other example. Healthcare is a right. What if I said to you, healthcare is a right. We have Obamacare, we have a healthcare sector, we have economics in there. It's a right, that sounds like a political issue. Sounds like a philosoph issue. Inequality is unfair. Inequality of what? Income, political rights, voting government has to fix market failure. Did you ever hear that one? Sweat shops are exploitative workers deserve a living wage, maybe even a guaranteed universal basic income. I, that's a mix of three different fields, I think. Or how about this one? We have to stop climate change to benefit future generations.
Speaker 2 00:22:10 Wow, it take hours to unpack that tri, oh, the president said this the other day. Trickle ec trickle down economics doesn't work. What the heck is trickle down economics, it's supply side economics. It's from the Reagan years. Uh, professor anomaly and others have a whole section of this book. It's called Markets on the Margin. What does that mean? Really weird stuff. Like should prostitution be legal? Uh, should drugs be criminalized or not? What about buying and selling human organs? What about price gouging and other things, right? So on the margin meaning really controversial, usually banned, but arguments for why, why should they be banned? Why can't we, uh, trade and sale and those things. Um, I'm gonna leave a aside for a moment cuz I don't wanna go on too long. Uh, samples of syllabuses. We use syllabi, we use and introductory pp and e and then the capstone. But um, alright, now seeing Professor Anomaly, do you want to chime in here? I would love to hear from you and cuz you know so much about this and have been teaching it for so long. Um, not to put you on
Speaker 3 00:23:29 The spot, we'll talk too much. We should probably open it up pretty soon here. But, um,
Speaker 2 00:23:33 Give me your thoughts.
Speaker 3 00:23:34 The only, the only thoughts I have are, you know, little bits of disagreement. One is, although a a lot of what goes on in America in p p E programs is friendly to economics and more broadly to liberty for this audience. Many PPE programs were founded by libertarians like, like Mike Munger at Duke and, and Jeffrey Brennan and so on, but many are not. And there is a famous essay by Robert Conquest and after Robert Conquest we get something called Conquest second law, which is that every institution that's not explicitly right wing ends up left wing. And
Speaker 2 00:24:15 Oh, I never heard, I never heard that. Wow.
Speaker 3 00:24:17 We're we're seeing that with p p E right now, which is, there's a steady left word move really
Speaker 2 00:24:22 Because Oh, okay.
Speaker 3 00:24:23 And this is one of the problems, it's become so popular, um, especially in the United States, but also in the uk, that what's happening is a lot of philosophy departments as as, as they've gone woke over the last five to 10 years, they've lost students. Actually, they're not gaining them that way. They're losing them, but okay, they then turn to p P e and they say, well let's start a PPE program to save the philosophy department, which is exactly the wrong motivation. And you could see why then they would suck p p e in a left word direction uhhuh. And that's going on. I won't name the institutions cuz I don't uhhuh,
Speaker 2 00:24:59 Right?
Speaker 3 00:24:59 Yeah, it's happening <laugh>. But anyway, uh, yeah, that's, that's a nice overview. So
Speaker 2 00:25:05 That's interesting. That trend is, is interesting. I, I think, uh, some of the, what I would call the founders Yeah. Of, uh, pp and e programs, um, you know, would go on to consult with other universities who wanted to set them up. Yeah. And there's, so there's always, um, there's always like conflicts about, uh, whether there's trenching on certain departments or not. But yes, in cases where departments are losing matriculation, they'll say anything to fill the seats, anything to bring more in. And so
Speaker 3 00:25:36 It ends up being, it ends up being a bit of a, a pitch to try to get majors. And look, this is an instance of, well you just mentioned Public choice theory from James C. Cannon. I mean, universities are, are like any other political institution and so they're gonna maneuver in ways that get them money and power and influence and so on. And so, yeah, that's one of the things you see. And anytime you, anytime you see these, uh, requirements, you guys have all had them. Some of you are former college students or current ones, and you wonder like, why do I have to take this strange anthropology class that's trying to indoctrinate indoct it? And it's like, well it's because the department was losing students and so they lobbied the university to make you take it because nobody wanted to take it. You know, <laugh>, this stuff happens too with dpe. But
Speaker 2 00:26:24 No, is it, wouldn't you agree that some of it is, um, anx anxiety's over where is my first job? Or what career should I pursue? So, you know, we would remember, we would talk to philosophy students and they would be the most nervous cause they would feel like, wow, I have no practical skills. But if I take a, if I get a pp and e certificate attached to my philosophy degree, maybe I'll be better off. Now the e the econ students would tell me, um, if I interview and I come across as a robot, you know, who only knows how to do simultaneous equations and things like that, I need you to know a bit about politics and philosophy. So, and then poli sci, they know nothing about economics. I mean they couldn't draw a supply demand card if their life depended on it. Um, I think that's a little less true in Duke and other places where they care about political economy.
Speaker 2 00:27:10 But so, so each of the students majoring in these other things as a motive to dip their toe in poly in P P E now at Duke. The other difference, right, uh, professor is, is it a certificate or a minor or a major? Well you could see why it wouldn't be a major. Cause the whole point of a major is you're specializing. So people have actually discussed this and they say, wait a minute, it makes no sense to major in PP and e cuz it's three different fields. How could you possibly do that? But it is a minor, isn't it? Still a minor at ns? At N c I think. Um,
Speaker 3 00:27:43 A lot of this is political though. I don't know how interesting the students will find it. I mean this is more just like that's how you start a program. Often it's easier to start a minor and then you hope to build a major at Penn. PPE is the biggest major we have actually. So it's somewhat surprisingly, wow, it's bigger than economics or you know, I guess the next up would be some premed major. It's big at Oxford too. But actually to correct one other thing, you know, I spent a lot of time there and interestingly, Oxford P P e I think is a terrible program. It's really misconceived because what happens is you have to take one class in each of the three and then you just specialize. So yeah, you can just do nothing but Play-DOH scholarship and you get a PPE degree. Yeah. So that's kind of an odd thing. Whereas in America we like to integrate a bit of game theory, political economy history, political economy, ethics, you know, so.
