[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

At any given moment, there are a couple big ideas I’m working through on the podcast and in my columns. And the big one right now, the one occupying most of my time, actually, and my thinking, is what I’ve called supply side progressivism, or to be a little less wonkish about it, a liberalism that builds. Here’s a way to think about it. In my lifetime, at least, progressivism has been very much about helping people buy or afford the things they need.

So universal health insurance, which has been a lot of what I’ve focused on in my career, helps people buy health care. Food stamps gives them money to get food. Housing vouchers gives them money for rent. Pell grants give them money for college. Social Security is money for retirement. The child tax credit is money to care for children. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit, they give workers more money to buy whatever they want. And nothing I say here, nothing, not a word, takes away from the urgency of that agenda. We need all of that and more. That is table stakes of being a decent society.

But I’ve also come to believe that progressivism doesn’t build enough. It doesn’t dream enough about creation. And a lot of the problems you see in places where progressives govern reflect that. We didn’t build enough homes. We didn’t build enough clean energy or low emission public transit. There aren’t enough good public colleges or good public preschools.

And this statistic — it always breaks my heart as a University of California grad — since 1965, California has built one, one new University of California campus, one. The greatest public higher education system in the world, bar none, we stopped adding to it, even as the UCs we do have began turning more and more students away. Just an absolute shame.

So that’s level one of the problem: We don’t build the things we already know how to build. It’s not some feat of engineering to build a home or build a new UC. We’re just not doing it. But then there’s also level two. We don’t put enough resources into building and creating the things we don’t yet know how to build. And a lot of the problems we need to solve, a lot of the future we need to invent requires innovation.

We’ve had an object lesson in how much that can do to improve human life in the past couple of years. Social insurance cushioned the economic blow of Covid. It did remarkable things there. But it was mRNA vaccines that have been the true miracle that have saved the bulk of the lives. And look ahead, solving the climate crisis while still spreading the miracle of abundant energy, that’s going to require invention. Feeding a world population that’s growing in a humane and sustainable way, that’s going to require invention. And a list like this can just go on and on and on.

It is not just social insurance that will make the future more humane than the present or the past. It is invention. And then it is being able to build those inventions into social and public goods. Liberalism used to do this. It did it through much of the early 20th century, particularly. But to get back to that kind of liberalism, it requires government to do more to help, sure. But it also requires government to do less to hurt. And that’s what today’s show is about.

So Alex Tabarrok is an economist at George Mason University. He’s a blogger at Marginal Revolution. And he’s a libertarian, someone I’ve known for years and sparred with often. We do not think about politics very similarly. But recently, he’s been bugging me to read a classic book in public choice economics called “The Rise and Decline of Nations” by Mancur Olson. This is a book about why advanced societies become sclerotic, why they become incapable of building.

The argument is that stability and wealth lead to interest groups and bureaucracies and endless meetings and negotiations and complexity, and then over time, you begin to have a society that prizes bureaucracies and interest groups and navigating them and internal politics, that society becomes weighed down by its own success. It’s a disease of abundance. But the result is that over time, getting anything done becomes harder and harder. Growth slows down, innovation slows down. And so the ability to make the future different than the past, that also slows down.

And there’s clearly truth here. I mean, look around. But this critique is often wielded against a government by people on the right. And to my frustration, it becomes then self-fulfilling. It becomes a rationale for outsourcing, for privatizing, for undermining what the government can do.

But I wanted to take it differently. What if you took the critique seriously, but you also believed, as I do, that you need government to do big things and build big things in order to solve big problems. What light then does Mancur Olson and public choice economics shine on how to make government work better?

And so I thought it’d be an interesting experiment to ask Alex to come on the show and talk about it. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Alex Tabarrok, welcome to the show.

Great to be here, Ezra.

So I’m a liberal, and liberalism is premised on the idea that government can and should and, I think, importantly, must do big things, solve big problems. So tell me why I should be more skeptical of its ability to do any of that?

Well, look around, Ezra. The government is trying to do big things, and it’s often failing. I might agree with you, actually. There are some big things the government should do. But we’re asking it to do lots of small things, as well as medium-sized things. In fact, any time there’s any type of problem in society, the first thing people do is, they think, well, what can the federal government do about this problem?

And that’s putting a lot of weight on an institution which, I think, cannot bear all of that weight. There’s a limited attention span that Congress has, a limited attention span the president has, the public has. And to ask the institutions of government to bear all of the problems of society, I think, is just creating a collapse. And it’s not even able to do the things that it should do.

So you’re an economist, and you particularly work in an area called public choice theory. Give me the two or three-minute introduction to what public choice theory says about the government.

Public choice theory is economists doing political science. And it basically says, what if we think about politics the same way we think about markets, which is that people are generally self-interested. When people move from the marketplace to work in government, they don’t suddenly become angels. Like Madison said, we wouldn’t need a government if everyone were angels. Instead, they come with all of the same types of self-interested motivations. Some of them want power. Some of them want to do good. Some of them just want wealth perhaps, all kinds of things.

So we ask, well, what if people in government are self-interested? And what Buchanan called politics without romance, that’s not a big leap, but when you think about politics without romance, I think you do become less enamored with what is possible because you begin to see that it’s not good enough to say, here’s something good that we want. Let’s just pass a law. You actually have to say, will the people who are responsible for not just passing the law, but implementing the law, will they have the incentives which are necessary to actually make the law effective? And quite often, the answer to that is no.

But what does self-interest mean in this context? Because I think you actually expanded it a little bit more than where maybe original public choice theory put it. Because once you say that people are self-interested, but they can be self-interested for power, or for money, or for doing good, or to keep a view near their house unobstructed, or to express their moral identity, or to express their religious values, once you expand self-interest beyond the old school economics, I’m just trying to get more utility and money for myself. You begin to have so many interests that you’re just saying, on some level, people have motivations. So what does self-interested mean here?

People have motivations, but we can’t assume that those motivations are either necessarily benevolent or that they encompass all of society. There was this view, which actually quite a few of the founding fathers had, that the people going into government were virtuous — civic republicanism. And for an economist, politics is more like a market. People are buying and selling. They’re trying to get something. And you have to ask, well, what’s the equilibrium going to look like?

So for example, let me just give you a simple example. We have a sugar quota — classic public choice example. Price of sugar in the United States is higher than in the rest of the world. And why is that? Well, the sugar quota, it means that the few sugar producers which we do have in the United States — the United States is not a great place for producing sugar. Sugar can be produced much more cheaply in Brazil, let’s say.

But there are some sugar farmers in Florida. They give a lot of campaign donations to people who are on the farm committees. And since nobody else is really paying any attention to this — it’s not a big public issue, the price of sugar, how big the sugar quota is going to be this year— they get away with it. So they’re not acting in the public interest. They’re acting in their own self-interest, both the sugar producers and the politicians. So we end up with a policy which is not really in the public interest.

A couple of months ago, I was tweeting about the difficulty that San Francisco is having as it tries to make the little parklets that opened up where you could eat outside during the pandemic permanent. And as that went from an emergency measure to something that could be sustained, well, the Fire Department said they’re a fire hazard, and there are disability access concerns. And the S.F. M.T.A. was losing revenue. And just the regulations for how you had to build them and what you had to do with them to keep them open, they really swelled.

And you wrote, after I was tweeting about this, that I should read Mancur Olson’s “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” and I did. And it’s a very interesting, very unusual book, I think, but I think it’s actually a useful one to talk about. So can you give me your version of “The Rise and Decline of Nations” argument?

Sure, so like James Madison, Mancur Olson was interested in it was a theorist of factions, right, or special interest groups. And he made a couple of points about special interest groups. First of all, think about a special interest group that represents, let’s say, 1 percent of society. What makes these groups potentially dangerous is that they’re willing to make society worse off by up to $100 in order to get $1 for themselves. So these small, powerful interest groups, they can be like vandals in distributing small resources to themselves at great expense to society. They’re sort of willing to do that.

The second important point about these groups is that the smaller ones are actually easier to organize. So if you have a political system in which small, organized groups can wield a lot of power to do things in their interest, then you have a recipe for the decline of nations.

And this is what Mancur Olson thought he saw, was that the rise over time of more and more of these distributional coalitions, which are not just redistributing resources to themselves, but also slowing down society’s capacity to adopt new technologies, to reallocate resources, any politically powerful group, the thing which it fears most is change. It’s the unpowerful, the unorganized who are hoping for change. The politically powerful organized groups, they like the status quo.

And so as these groups accumulate, Jonathan Rauch called this demosclerosis, right? The building up of the sclerosis in the veins, cholesterol in the veins, right, until you get a heart attack. They’re making society more complex, regulation more complex. It’s the rise of lawyers. It’s everything has to go through a committee, the slowing down of response to change. So that’s what he saw as the rise and decline of nations.

So let me add to that a little bit because I think that it’s worth playing up the context of the book here, because it also gets to ways in which I think the analysis is weird. So Olson is writing in a very post-World War II context, and part of his animating question is, why do Germany and Japan grow so fast after World War II? Why is the United Kingdom so sluggish at that point? Why is the U.S., in his view, more sluggish at that point? Why is France relatively more dynamic than the United Kingdom?

And the argument he makes is that continuity of a stable, prosperous country will necessarily create more and more and more and more and more of these groups, that the longer you’re around, the longer things are pretty good, the more you’ll have interest groups, corporations, unions, political parties, whatever it might be. And there’s no real way to get rid of them.

And so his argument for “The Rise and Decline of Nations” is that sometimes something happens that is fundamentally disruptive — a war, a plague, a revolution, a violent change of regime. And that can sweep away this crust of society. And then you can unlock that pre-demosclerosis dynamism again, which, in his view, is what happened there to Germany or Japan. It’s interesting. On the one hand, I mean, certainly, there’s something to the idea that continuity creates bureaucracy. It creates groups. I mean, society just becomes more complex with more bargaining agents. And on the other hand — well, two things. One is that it’s almost — he keeps trying to say it’s not this, but it clearly, on some level, is— an argument for very disruptive forms of change.

And second, I don’t know that — and I’d like to hear what you think on this. I don’t know that the analysis there held. I don’t think that we today believe Japan is way more dynamic than the U.S., or the U.K. is such a laggard compared to France or Germany, even. So was he right about the rise and decline of nations?

So I think two things. One, of course, Japan has caught up to us in demosclerosis, right? I mean, they have had plenty of time.

But that implies it happens very quickly. Because what he’s saying is continuity matters. I mean, Japan got destroyed in World War II. We’ve been not destroyed by anything for a lot longer than that. So for them to catch up that quickly, it makes me wonder a little bit about the underlying dynamics.

Yeah, I mean, they’ve had 60, 70 years. That’s plenty of time to catch up to slowing down. But I will say this, and this is true about public choice more generally, as well as about Olson. Olson was mostly talking about sort of these distributional coalitions, coalitions which are getting wealth to themselves, lobbyists sort of thing. One thing I’ve changed my mind about is that a lot of this is not distributional coalitions. It’s stuff that we’re doing to ourselves.

So for example, I’m involved on a hiring committee at George Mason University. Now it used to be that we required three people to be on the hiring committee. This year, we have nine on the committee so that we have race and gender diversity and so forth. And now there’s a diversity office to sort of oversee our candidate picks.

Now this means that the cost of hiring somebody has now gone up tremendously. We have three times as many people overseeing this process. Now it takes a lot longer just to get them all together in the same room or in the same Zoom room. With three people, you could kind of quickly make a bargain with the other person, say, oh, well, let’s do this, or what do you think about this, and read some agreement.

Now, we need rules. You can’t just come to a consensus with nine people. You sort of need some voting rules, right? And then it has to be, well, do we follow the same rules every time? And we need to write down the rules so that this is fair. So we have made the hiring process much, much more complex, regulatory, legalistic.

And it’s sort of amusing to me that our solution to creating more diversity in hiring is actually to make it more like an N.I.H. grant, like getting a grant from the N.S.F. or the N.I.H., which means you have to go through this big committee, right? And a lot of people think that getting through a committee actually reduces diversity, makes people more risk averse. You get follow the dot science, rather than bold leaps of imagination and so forth.

Either way, we’ve created this more bureaucratic, kind of rule-bound, legalistic and costly structure. And that’s not a distributional coalition. That’s not lobbying. That’s sort of something we’ve imposed upon ourselves. And I see this throughout society. And in firms, as well as in governments and organizations everywhere, same sort of thing has happened.

Well, this strikes me as getting to what I thought was the most provocative of Olson’s arguments. So I want to separate two things here in the example you just gave, which is the goal of increasing diversity and then the process by which it is done, which is you could just say that, well, there’s going to be somebody hiring, and they’re going to decide they’re going to only hire diverse candidates. And that is going to be how they hire from now on.

But as you’re saying, to increase diversity, but also to do all kinds of things in society now, from how we decide if we’re going to build a road or new housing to how a decision is made when a company goes public, we increase really dramatically the number of meetings you need to have, processes you need to follow. This is true on the left very much, as much as the right, maybe even more so than on the right.

And it gets to something that Olson argues, which is that societies have internal natural selection, that their evolution will be shaped by the way their groups and incentives come together. So he writes that in these societies that have a lot more groups and a lot more of this kind of sclerosis, that, quote, “the incentive to produce is diminished. The incentive to seek a larger share of what is produced increases. The reward for pleasing those to whom we sell our goods or labor declines, while the reward for evading or exploiting regulations, politics, and bureaucracy, and for asserting our rights through bargaining or complex understandings becomes great.” And that last bit is interesting. He’s basically saying a society like this will begin to select for people who are better at meetings, who are better at dealing with regulations, who are better at moving through large corporate or public bureaucracies. And so instead of all these daring inventors and engineers and devil-may-care thinkers, which maybe we have at some point, you get a lot of lawyers and management consultants and bureaucrats. And so you could have a tendency just towards those kinds of processes because people are more comfortable with them. That, I think, is the Olson diagnosis of this. Do you think it’s true?

It certainly feels true. Now I’m always reluctant to offer the old man perspective. Get off my lawn. Things were better when I was a kid, you know? But yeah, it certainly feels true to me. I think it is difficult to get entirely convincing data on this. But certainly, there’s a lot of things like environmental impact statements, right? The bureaucracy necessary to build something. It’s not just environment, but historical preservation rules, all of these sorts of things. It just does seem to have increased tremendously. And as I said, in my experience in the last 20, 30 years in a university, the university has become more bureaucratized.

So this is maybe, we could call it a society level argument. But take it down to the individual level. You’re an economist. Go from macro to micro here. You teach students. You hire, you’re on committees. Young, idealistic people don’t go to college and say, hey, I don’t want to produce things. I want to parasitically capture the gains of past innovations or the gains of past structures.

So how do you see this playing out through the way individuals frame their self-interest to themselves? Because it’s not that I want to go be part of slowing down society and an annoying bureaucrat. Everybody’s a hero of their own story. So how do you think the stories people tell themselves in our country have changed for this to be true?

Well, I think, frankly, it’s become more feminized. The virtues have shifted towards the feminine side of the spectrum, if I can be politically incorrect. Like safety, safety is a big one, right? So anything you can justify in terms of safety or justify in terms of the children — we’re doing it for the children — that’s a big one.

Fairness is another one — equality in access, in speaking, all of these kinds of things. Like, everybody has to be heard, that kind of fairness. That’s one of the reasons just for having meetings is so that you give everybody an opportunity to be heard.

Well, that’s fine, but that means that we have to hear from a lot more people, and things get slowed down. So to the extent that people frame their lives and careers in terms of heroic virtues, those virtues have shifted towards the more feminine side, as opposed to the Howard Roark, you’re going to build it my way, or I’m going to blow it up, right? It doesn’t get much play anymore.

But when you put it like that, I think people can hear that as offensive, but you could also hear it as actually a good and overdue correction. A society that cares about children, a society that wants to make sure it’s hearing from different people and different kinds of people, a society more concerned about equality. I mean, rather than thinking about this as a disease of prosperity, that makes it sound like an overdue benefit.

Yeah, I mean, that is the problem, is that it’s Apollo and Dionysus. There’s arguments for both sides. And the issue is try to find something in the middle perhaps. I think we’ve swung too far. And the evidence for that is precisely that people like yourself, who are thinking about these things more prospectively, see that some of the things you want are becoming impossible because people are paying too much attention to all of these other virtues.

Like, for example, you think about a government stimulus program. Well, what do we always say about a stimulus program? Well, you want shovel-ready projects. But there are no shovel-ready projects anymore. I mean, the Empire State Building, it took 410 days to construct that building. We can’t even get a single permit in 410 days.

So there are a lot of good things. You want the government to do good things, but that’s not going to happen when everybody has voice, when everything is slowed down due to concerns about equity. And look, it’s true again that Robert Moses bulldozed, right, some communities. And that wasn’t a good thing, OK?

And not randomly, right? He bulldozed through Black communities.

Right, he bulldozed communities of people who didn’t have a lot of political power. So there was a backlash to that, which is understandable. But now I think it’s even the case that people in those marginalized communities, they themselves are not being well served by an inability to build subway infrastructure, an inability to build housing, an inability to build environmentally consistent infrastructure like windmills.

And here’s the thing — who is opposed to the windmills? It’s not actually the marginalized communities. It’s the guy with the fantastic house on the coast who doesn’t want to look at a windmill off the shore because he thinks it spoils his view.

Look, let me put it in a way in which progressives can understand. There is an inequality of voice. And that inequality of voice also goes to the rich and the powerful and the people who can hire lawyers and the people who can use these so-called equitable institutions, use them to their advantage. And so I think even the people in the marginalized communities are not benefiting by all of these things.

I think that last point is important, but it would lead me, I think, to a pretty different diagnosis than the one you just offered, which is, I agree that the values of the country are changing. And I think what you and your colleague, Tyler Cowen, often call the feminization of values, I think that’s a good thing. And Tyler often says it is on net a good thing, so I’m not suggesting otherwise.

But there’s an idea in business of the glass cliff, where you’ll finally have a woman C.E.O. at exactly the moment when the corporation is teetering on the edge of a cliff. And I think if you take some of the public choice theories about the buildup of processes and regulations and institutions and interest groups seriously, that all operates separately even from values.

The filibuster in the Senate say, to use one example, if something has made the Senate more sclerotic as the filibuster has interacted with polarized parties in recent decades, that wasn’t created by anybody’s new values. I mean, that’s been around for a long time. A lot of the, say, in California, different processes you can use to block anything, they’ve been around for a very long time, I mean, since the progressive era, right? Long before I think we would say that society was, in any way, feminizing.

But the issue is you have an increase in the power of groups who have been left out and their ability to express and push their values. At the same time, you have a country in which it is, as you point out, harder and harder and harder to get anything done. And I think one of the unhappy equilibriums of that is that you end up with representation, but not action. Because representation is fairly cheap, having people on your hiring committee, and action is expensive, actually hiring, actually changing the composition of a department, actually building a bunch of windmills and creating a power grid that will have in the long run more equitable and sustainable impacts.

And so in a world where what you have is committees and meetings and processes, you can express that your values are changing by trying to express that in all of your meetings. But the problem if you care about things like racial inequality is that it doesn’t express now into action, that the rising power of these groups has happened at the time when it has become really, really hard for that power to make change.

Yeah, representation without action, I think, is a very nice way of putting it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So let’s try to ground our conversation a bit. We’ve circled around housing a bit here. Let’s talk about housing as an example of Olson’s thesis of the public choice questions, that it gets undoubtedly a lot harder to build a house in urban areas in California, or New York, or frankly, anywhere in this country than it was 100 years ago. How do you understand the housing crisis from this perspective?

So we’ve collectivized so many decisions. I think that’s a huge, huge problem. So giving to HOAs, as well as the zoning boards, and things like that— instead of saying, it’s your land, you get to build what you want to— so now you’re subject to the common law. You can’t put smoke out or something like that. Instead, we’ve said, you know what, you must get permission. Before you build, you must get permission.

So I actually had a circumstance this year trying to build a house myself, and I had difficulties with my HOA committee. They didn’t like my Frank Lloyd Wright house. They didn’t like that. The windows were too big, right? And the roof was too flat. So we had some problems with that.

And the amusing thing— looking back on it, I can now be amused. The amusing thing is that, actually, we’re all on five acres. You can’t even see our house, nor our neighbors. But still, there was a collective decision-making process. And I had to appeal, and fortunately, the bulk of my neighbors, the majority of my neighbors overruled the HOA committee. So I was very fortunate. I love my neighbors. Thank you, neighbors, if you’re listening to this.

But why was there a collective decision-making process? Literally during Covid. we all had to get together with masks in someone’s house to debate whether my roof was too flat or not. And so this was insane. This was completely insane to me. But we’ve done that a lot. And when you collectivize these decision-making processes, again, they’re not neutral because there’s an inequality of voice. But it’s actually only a minority with voice, right? Because it’s only a tiny minority which actually shows up to make their voice heard, but it slows everything down.

At Ronald Reagan Airport, near where I am, there were, in 2015, 8,760 noise complaints. And 6,852 of those came from the same two individuals living at the same address. And this is the problem with voice writ large, is that it’s a tiny minority of people who are using the processes and the procedures which have been put in place to protect minorities. They’re using them in a way which actually protects almost nobody and imposes very large costs on the rest of society.

But why do you have this kind of collectivization of what do seem, in many of these cases, to be individual or private decision-making processes? Because if all I’d read was public choice theory, and I knew nothing about how our society had evolved, and you asked me to predict it, I don’t think I would predict exactly what we see.

For instance, in housing, you would think that maybe the most powerful player would be the developers because they’re the ones who can really get a lot of the pie. If they get the regulations right, they’re the ones who have a lot of time to show up at meetings. They can employ people to show up at meetings. So particularly in places that have high real estate values, you might think we would have a process really dominated by developer interest groups.

But in fact, we don’t, right? Many of the developers are very frustrated. They end up becoming primarily good at managing regulations and navigating the system. The idea that you would end up with a lot of systems where you have an HOA composed of kind of randos from the community telling you what your windows can look like, it’s not an obvious outcome of a successful society developing coalitions who all want to pursue their own self-interest. So what is your actual explanation for this?

No, I agree with you. I think that’s a very good point. And it’s something which I’ve changed my mind on or over time, is to think sort of naked self-interest is less important than some other things. And I’ll give you an example which supports what you’re saying. And that is, if you look at renters and the opinions of renters, and they are almost as NIMBY, Not In My Backyard, as owners, right, which is crazy.

So the economist tends to think, oh, it’s just the owners. They want to increase the value of their property. But if that were the case, then the renters would be Build In My Backyard, right? They would be Yes In My Backyard, YIMBY. But they’re not. And yet the renters bear most of the costs of higher construction prices, but they’re not getting the benefits. It’s the homeowners which are getting the benefits.

Now maybe you could come up with some kind of sophisticated economics model in which the renters hope one day to be homeowners and they’ll benefit. But more, I think it’s that everybody has kind of succumbed to this ideology. And in that sense, the special interests have made their point of view, just broadly, people just agree with it a lot.

Another example, again, which supports your point, is the farmers. The farmers get massive redistribution in their favor. Frankly, in the United States, the farmers are some of the biggest recipients of welfare in the United States. But yet, if you go to the public and you ask them what do you think about the farmers getting all of these price supports, they’re not all up in arms. They’re not all, oh, get the farmers off welfare, like Tabarrok says.

They’re, oh, no, we’ve got to protect the family farm. America, that’s about farmers. That’s about the yeoman farmer, like Jefferson said. They’re actually pretty supportive of this distribution towards farmers. They haven’t really thought about it that much. And maybe if you talked to them more, like in my economics classes, I can sort of convince people this is actually a giant rip-off, right? But yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot more consensus about these redistributions than one would expect from a purely public choice or Olsonian analysis.

One thing that public choice and, frankly, actually, a lot of political analysis — because there’s a lot of political science, I think, that traditionally thought redistribution would be more powerful than it has proven to be in recent years. And I think what a lot of it ends up missing is a collection of, let’s call them interests, self-interests, but that you could think of as post-materialist. And there’s a lot of work by Ron Inglehart and others on this.

But that as societies get richer, they begin emphasizing what he calls post-materialist values, these moral values, these identity values, values about fairness. I mean, a lot of people participate in politics in contravention of their direct material self-interest — liberals who are higher income but are voting for candidates who will raise their taxes. You can go up and down the line on this.

It’s obviously a longtime liberal critique of the right that all these poor people are voting for Republicans and voting against their self-interest. And the answer to that is always, no, you have mistaken what they see to be their self-interest. You’ve made it one-dimensional when it’s multidimensional, and they’re operating on a different dimension. They’re emphasizing a different dimension of it.

But that, again, becomes where I wonder what power some of these models end up having. Because if interest can be literally anything, then what are you really saying, except that over time, societies end up developing a lot of meetings, a lot of clamorous voices, and a lot of people with the ability or groups with the ability to be heard, and that when you have a lot of people getting heard, things slow down a little bit.

So I think there’s a prisoner’s dilemma here, is that when everybody gets to speak, nobody does, right? And everyone acts in their self-interest, however broadly or narrowly you want to define that. I think there’s a coordination problem or, like I said, a prisoner’s dilemma, in which everybody acting in their self-interest results in a situation which is worse for everybody. Like, everybody trying to get on the highway to get to work more quickly ends up creating congestion, which slows everybody down.

And the same thing is true — each of us trying to divide the pie in our favor has made the pie get smaller. And so I think it’s breaking out of these coordination problems. It’s not just that we have decided that we’re going to have a more fair, just, equal voice kind of world and accept that things are going to be slowed down a little bit. It’s not that we’ve made that decision. It’s that we’ve been forced into that equilibrium by each of us acting in a self-interested way. And then we end up where nobody has really benefited.

Another kind of example I get is, look, I think about regulation as throwing a stone into a little river, and you throw the first stone and nothing happens. And you throw the second stone, and nothing happens. And each successive stone, however, starts to build up and build up until the river is dammed.

And then you say, well, what stopped the river? Was it this one? No. Was it this regulation? No, that regulation has got a good reason for having it. Was it this regulation? No, no, no, that’s a good historical preservation rule. That’s a good environmental rule. That’s a good equity rule. And so every single one of these regulations on their own might pass some kind of cost-benefit test. But it’s when you put them all together and you have these massive interactions that you get a situation in which the regulations as a whole fail the cost-benefit test massively.

One irony is that there are very specific ways, I think, that the left and the right have both adopted a version of this critique of government or this fear of what will happen to government and, in responding to it, made the situation worse. And let me start with the left before we get to the right. So I think on the left, the version of this is a belief the government is always and everywhere captured by rich interests, like the developers, like Robert Moses, like the lobbyists, like whoever could spend the most money on politics.

And so you need to build all of these processes into the system to slow those interests down, to create spaces where they can be opposed, where the community can come together, where more public oriented lobbies can get in, where there can be public comment. The House in California I think has a lot of this legacy in it, but so does our citizens initiatives process. I think if you look at how federal regulations are made, you have these huge comment and notice periods. And the idea behind a lot of them was to let the public weigh in. But of course, the public doesn’t, for the most part, want to weigh in on random federal regulations.

And so it’s another venue in which the most interested and the powerful can control the process. But there has been an effort in trying to respond to fears that the government will be captured by these rich and moneyed interests that you fracture government’s power so the public can have a voice. But that just ends up fracturing government’s power. Government can’t act. The rich and moneyed interests end up in those same places where you tried to give the public a voice. And you end up with a worse problem. Does that strike you as a fair analysis?

Sure, absolutely.

And so then, on the right, I think the version of this has been — and I mean, the movement you’ve been part of in libertarianism has very much been part of this — has been attacking government for anything that looks silly or wasteful. For years, there were the Golden Fleece Awards, where the senator would attack any kind of scientific research that sounded silly to him.

There have been just endless efforts to try to point out Solyndra was apparently this huge boondoggle, but of course, you hear less that the same program also funded Tesla. And so government over time becomes very bureaucratized, risk averse. I think a lot of the people now complaining that our scientific process to make grants is just unbelievably risk averse underestimate that part of the reason those processes came about was that the government was afraid of being accused of favoritism or funding stupid things.

And so, on the right, the constant attacks on any time you think you see government making a bad decision have also made it so government has a lot of trouble making decisions because it has become filled with people who have learned to be cautious and to try to have a bulletproof, slow, overly measured process.

I think that’s fair, and I’ll take some of that blame. I mean, very similar to this, I think undermining trust in government. Andriei Shleifer has some work showing that trust, as you know, is down in the United States. And the kind of weird thing is, is that trust in government is down, but actually, this doesn’t lead you to kind of a libertarian paradise where people say, I don’t trust the government, let’s use the market.

Actually, what happens is trust goes down in all kinds of institutions. And if anything, people become more in favor of government. Not that they actually think it’s going to work, but they just think everything is unfair. And they think that nothing is going to work, and they become removed from the political process. But decline of trust doesn’t lead you to something which I want. And it’s unfortunate, in a way, because you would hope that people would sort of — well, if not the government, then the market. But that’s not the way it works.

Oddly enough, right, the societies in which people have the most trust, not only do they trust the government more, but they actually also trust markets more. These things work together. So if you have a lot of trust in government, then you’re actually willing to have free trade because you figure, well, the bottom half of people are still protected. You’re willing to have vaccines, which actually gets the economy going. So it turns out that trust in markets and trust in governments correlates actually pretty highly.

So then what do these theories, public choice theories or the work you’ve done over the years, what does it tell you about mediating between these kinds of interests more effectively? Because I mean, even Olson says, well, the prescription isn’t we should have a revolution. So then what is it?

Yeah. [LAUGHS] I mean, it is a really, really hard question. And frankly, I do not know the answer. I wish I had more of an answer. I do think that government should do less, but the things that it does do, it should have more of a free hand. This is what my colleague, Tyler Cowen, calls state capacity libertarianism. You want a strong state but a small state.

The way I always used to put it is that government is like a fire. You put it in the fireplace, and it keeps you warm. You let it out of the fireplace, it burns your house down. So I’m actually in favor of kind of a government which can act quickly and with vigor when things like emergencies do happen. But I would like it to do fewer things. Now how we can come to some agreement on that, how we can get there, I’m not sure. I do think that what I call state capacity libertarianism, you call supply side progressivism, right? What do you call it, Ezra?

Yeah, that’s been my term for it.

Yeah, yeah. Supply side progressivism, to me, is one of the most important movements or things which is going on today because I do think that there’s no way of solving our problems without some agreement among both the right and the left. So if we can get some agreement on some of these things, then I think, actually, progress can be made.

There is a core in the American public which loves innovation. There’s a core in the American public which loves Elon Musk, which rewards billionaires, which likes to see scientific progress, which takes pride in the mRNA vaccines, takes pride in something like the space program. There is a core in the American public which is very optimistic, the Ronald Reagan kind of optimistic core, progressive core. And I think if we can get people to focus more on that rather than on redistribution.

So let me give you one example and then I’ll finish, but thinking about health care, we’ve made all of our debates about health care about how to distribute the pie. Who should get more? Medicaid, Medicare, the elderly, the young, the children— who should get more? What we actually know, however, is that most spending, we’re at the top of the curve. It doesn’t actually get you that much. So redistribution, it can be some benefit, but it doesn’t help you all that much.

Instead, if we could focus the public’s attention on innovation in medicine and reducing mortality rates from cancer, in speeding up mRNA vaccines, things of that nature, that has a huge, huge potential to make everybody better off and actually at lower cost. I think there would be a big argument — it might be one if the right and left could agree — to spend more on innovation and less on warfare and welfare. Most of what the government does today is warfare and welfare. And I would be behind anybody who proposes to spend more on making us an innovation nation.

Yeah, my old line on this is that if you actually look at the federal budget, we’re an insurance company with a large standing military. We’re not doing a bunch of the other things at high scales that people think we are. But I appreciate the convergence there, but I want to then focus on our divergence because I think redistribution here is much more important than you do. And I think a lot of the people who see themselves as pro-technology are missing its importance in such a profound and profoundly self-destructive way that it’s a real shame.

And I’ll give the example here of Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development initiative that you’ve been a big fan of. One of the remarkable things about that project is that the government did step in to try to hasten this technology into being. And when it did, it also put down these conditions such that it wasn’t the case that the vaccines came out, and you just couldn’t get them if you weren’t rich, or they only went to the richest people at the beginning, or that they were rationed across society by income, which is normally how we do most of these things. There’s also a lot now of just incredibly crazy drug pricing happening with new pharmaceuticals that emerge. Some of them are not even better than what we’ve had before.

And I think some skepticism of what gets called progress here, some skepticism of technological change, comes from people not feeling that they’re going to be the winners of it. I think this gets to what you were saying a couple of minutes ago, that isn’t it interesting that in societies that have high trust in government, you also see high trust in markets. But I don’t find that confusing at all. I think a society where people feel that the government is going to have their back and that new things are going to be distributed, or at least, their gains will be distributed, for their benefit, not just to make Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg rich — I mean, they should get rich to a certain point, but only to a certain point. I think that that’s an easier sell.

Yeah, so look.

I guess my view comes down to this. I’m much more concerned about regulation and about cutting off the top of the stalk than I am about helping people at the bottom. I can live with a welfare state. I’m not a big fan of the welfare state. It has some negatives. I think we could probably agree that, actually, on the welfare state, there is a lot of bureaucracy.

And nobody understands government bureaucracy and is subject to government bureaucracy more than people who are trying to get food stamps or welfare or some benefits out of the government. I mean, it’s just an incredibly convoluted process, which is slow and bureaucratic and legalistic. And I would like to see a welfare state, which, in some sense, is smaller, but is more direct, uses more cash payments, for example, gets people, instead of public housing, Section 8 program, in which you get vouchers. So housing vouchers and school vouchers, things like that, which get people into the market, which make them more participants in the market, I’d be much more in favor of that.

But I can live with that. I can live with some of the welfare state, especially if we let the stalks grow tall. Because inequality doesn’t bother me at all, right? I’m totally fine with Elon Musk. I’m totally fine with people getting rich. I even enjoy it. I like it. So if we could get some agreement, like stop focusing on trying to tax Elon Musk, who’s going to be the most taxed person in the history of the world, and let’s focus on getting rid of bureaucracy at the bottom of the scale, then I think that there’s a lot to agree on.

But I’m going to keep on our disagreements here because I think you’re taking the easy case in the welfare state, and I want to take the hard case of social inequality. Something that struck me, reading Mancur Olson, was that it had a pretty obvious implication I tend not to hear from public choice theorists, which is, you mentioned earlier some of his examples about why a group might prefer to try to take $1 out of the $100 pie, as opposed to try to increase the pie to $101. Because they put in all this effort to make everybody a little bit better off, but they’re really getting very little for it.

And that implies very directly that high levels of inequality are going to focus groups on carving up the pie if they are not groups of very rich people because they don’t believe correctly that economic growth overall is going to affect them that much. Olson also has a bunch of arguments around this in terms of his preference for very large organizations, like sectoral bargaining over more narrow, this union, that union. Because his view is that if you’ve organized all of the machinists, well, then they want the entire machine sector to do well, versus if you’ve only got this couple of shops, then he thinks they’re going to be more out for themselves.

So a very clear argument, it seemed to me, that would emerge from wanting to align incentives better is that if you want groups to focus on economic growth, they have to believe they’re going to get that economic growth. And as inequality continues to rise and sit at the levels we see, it’s not crazy for people not to think they’ll get that.

I mean, you listen to the people developing AI — and I’ve had Sam Altman on this show and others — I mean, they’re explicitly saying this is going to be an amazing technology, and what it’s immediately going to do is give tremendously more amounts of money to the people who own the capital of the artificial intelligence algorithms and screw over a lot of workers unless we do something really dramatic really quickly. And so of course, people aren’t going to be super excited about that. So I don’t know. It seems to me that all this implies, you should be much more worried about equality than I often hear public choice theorists admit.

So I think people are worried about money and politics. And my superficial answer, perhaps, to that is that if you want to get the money out of politics, get the politics out of money. That’s going to be a much more successful, ultimately, strategy. Now I do think there is something to larger groups. And here we have a choice.

Think about housing. So one of the solutions or one of the offered solutions to the housing being dominated by these neighborhood associations and zoning boards and so forth, is to push the decision-making level up to the state, and then have a one rule for the state, like in Nebraska, the state in that sense, to have a state level rule instead of to have all of these small or individual neighborhood rules, and the idea being is that at the state level, then people have more of an incentive to vote in favor of growth.

Because at the neighborhood level, who’s voting? Well, it’s really only the people who live in that neighborhood. And who is harmed? Well, it’s the people who want to live in that neighborhood. It’s the future people who would like to move to that neighborhood if only there were more housing.

Now they don’t get a vote. They don’t live there. They don’t even know that they might want to live there a year from now. They don’t get a vote at the neighborhood group. If you raise it to the state level, however, then the argument is, is that people will think more broadly in a more encompassing way and then will vote for more growth. That’s one solution which a lot of progressives have sort of offered. And I think it’s not a bad, not a terrible solution.

My solution, though, is to push it back down to the individual level, is to let individual landowners make their own decisions. And it’s then in the landowner’s interest to build. That’s how you get rich. You have a nice piece of land. You’re able to build apartments on it, instead of having just a single-family house. If you can build a duplex or a quadplex, you can make more money. So I would kind of push things back to the individual level. I think ultimately, that creates a more creative disruption. That creates more kind of an evolving system which can adapt, rather than one which is stuck at this other level. So I do think we have this kind of choice.

But that strikes me as somewhat to the side of the issue I’m bringing up here, which is that if you want to align the incentives of more groups to push for more overall growth, as opposed to pushing for just their slice of a stagnant pie, to mix my metaphors here, then you actually want lower levels of inequality. And I even see that in the housing example you turn to there. I’ve attended these meetings in S.F., and I try to watch what happens with them.

And something you cannot miss in a city like this, which has insane levels of internal inequality, just insane, like nothing I’ve ever seen, is that there’s no trust. I will see people tweeting about this or that development, which would have turned a vacant lot into something with a lot more units and some affordable units, and frustration that groups are organizing against that. But when you listen to them, they believe they’re going to get pushed out because they’ve been getting pushed out. And they want 100 percent affordability, which is hard to do in a market economy. But otherwise, they just don’t buy that it’s going to make their life better.

And something that is partially behind the toxic politics of housing in SF is clearly how many people don’t trust the development is going to be good for them because it hasn’t been. They’ve been pushed out. Their neighbors have been pushed out. Nobody’s been thinking about them, at least, in their view. And so it just does seem to me that very high levels of inequality just follow very naturally from this to being a problem and misaligning society in a way that people say, ah, let’s not have all this redistribution sort of miss, that maybe redistribution is playing a political stability purpose that is more important than it’s being given credit for.

So I just don’t think you’re going to solve it by more collective decision making, especially not in a diverse society like the United States, where there’s not just wealth inequality or income inequality, but we are tremendously diverse in terms of race, of course, but also in terms of religion and culture. We want to be a society— and we are, to a large extent— of immigrants who come at things with completely different perspectives.

And we’re not going to be Denmark. We’re not going to be Sweden. You’re focused on income inequality. But if you want to create a society in which people agree, you have to make them more similar not just in income, but in religion, in attitude, in politics, in all kinds of other things, right? You can’t have a high immigration society and do that.

You can’t have a society with the diversity which we celebrate and make people all similar. We shouldn’t be Sweden. Even Sweden is becoming less Sweden-like over time. So I think trying to solve our political problems by making people more similar than they actually are won’t, in fact, be a solution, but is just more of a recipe for continuing down the path that we’re on now.

And you see then why these coalitions are hard to build.

Yes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m going to use this moment to take a sort of hard turn towards an example that is more digital, but I think is going to get at this in some interesting ways. So I’m just not on board with calling crypto web3, so I’m going to call it crypto. But obviously, there’s been a huge explosion in interest and investment in building around the crypto space, a lot of it driven by people who think that our society has become highly sclerotic and overly weighed down by meetings and consensus mechanisms and so on. You have A16Z people like Marc Andreessen who wrote, it’s time to build, and A16Z is just running huge crypto funds.

But a very odd thing about crypto to me, and something that Vitalik Buterin, who is the central figure behind Ethereum, wrote up in an interesting blog post about this bulldozer versus autocracy political axis he’s been thinking about, is that these crypto mechanisms are much more consensus oriented. They’re much more collectivization of how decisions are made. They’re much more binding.

There’s a feeling that the corporations, the big middlemen corporations, had way too much power in setting the rules and making their movements in, I guess, what’s now called web2. And so you need all these strictures to enforce very different decision-making. And it’s such an interesting thing for me to see the tech world with its whole “move fast and break things” ethos embracing. So I’m curious, as a public choice person, how you look at and think about crypto.

Yeah, so I’m a public choice person. Also for full disclosure, I’m an adviser to a number of companies in the crypto space, including companies like Elrond, which is an Ethereum competitor. So I’m interested in these issues. I do agree that there’s something very strange going on in the crypto world in that there is a lot of talk about cutting out the middleman and creating a decentralized kind of consensus, almost like a better version of democracy, voting to run these protocols, for example.

I’m not so much a fan of that for the reasons that we’ve discussed. I think all of these institutions will ultimately break down into hierarchy. There is a natural tendency towards a hierarchy and inequality of voice, as we talked about earlier. I don’t think any of these protocols will solve that problem. So I’m more interested in the protocols not as new forms of governance, of new forms of creating consensus, but just of doing a lot of things more cheaply and more quickly and easily.

Decentralized finance is going to be potentially very big. So already in decentralized finance, you can have these protocols where, instead of using the New York Stock Exchange, you have people trading with a smart contract, which is on one of these blockchains. And so the only intermediary is computer code. The computer takes a much smaller cut than does the New York Stock Exchange.

So I think one thing we’re going to see in the next few years is that places like NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange, and in fact, all of the financial markets, they’re going to face intense competition from below, intense competition from these decentralized blockchains. These are the big players. So that’s going to create a tremendous shock to the finance system, which we know takes a big chunk of GDP.

But isn’t there a tension there between the part of it you think is going to work and the part of it you think is not? Which is to say that if the value of a lot of these initiatives is that they’re decentralized, then as they have to scale up and take on these more profound social efforts, right — NASDAQ is a very important thing, but so is a lot of what they’re trying to challenge here from how currencies work to how more currency is made through Bitcoin mining or mining on some of the other platforms, that the inability to move quickly, to correct mistakes well becomes a real problem.

I mean, you’re seeing that Bitcoin is a somewhat unusual example because its founder or founders are still unknown. And so it doesn’t have anything even like a founding group around it. But nevertheless, I think that a normal thing that got that big, if you had more straightforward ways of managing it, they would have moved to a mining mechanism that isn’t so environmentally destructive. But they can’t right now. The thing is just rolling on because the incentive is just to keep mining. And it’s very, very hard to change.

And so it seems to me that as things begin to scale up, they’re going to have to come up with a lot of rough ad hoc solutions. I mean, OpenSea, the big NFT marketplace, they’re trying to deal with fraud when, in some ways, the point of crypto is that once you own the thing, you just own it. And so they’re then halting trading on NFTs, but then they’re just a middleman again.

And I don’t know. It seems to me that there’s a more genuine tension between wanting to take over really complicated parts of the economy and wanting to be decentralized and what gets called trustless, but actually, these things are going to need to have a lot of trust placed in them than people are giving credit for.

Yeah, I think that’s correct. And one of the things which I’ve advised some of the companies which I do advise is that the public just wants the thing to work. There is a small ideological group which is concerned about decentralization. But the public doesn’t understand that. The users don’t understand that. They just want the damn thing to work at lower cost. They want to send their money to India or wherever at lower cost.

So just like the internet itself started out with censorship can never happen, right, on the internet, the voice wants to be free, and we found, well, that’s not quite right. And we thought we’d all be able to gamble on the internet, and then the government stopped that. And it’s the connection with the real world is everybody loves crypto until they want to pay their mortgage. And if you want to pay your mortgage with crypto, then you’ve got your customer and all kinds of bank regulations and rules. And it becomes much more difficult.

So I think we are going to see a merge moving down and moving up. The systems which we’ll arrive at will be more decentralized, but not perfectly decentralized. I think there will be some companies which use the blockchain type of technology, but which are, again, are not fully decentralized for some of the reasons that you said, is that a company can just act much more quickly.

There are experiments in creating consensus online in these groups. I don’t think any of them have been terribly successful so far. So I do think that there is something to be said for the corporate form, which does at least enable, a lot of the time, these private actors with private incentives to move quickly and to make decisions. It’ll be messy. We’re not going to get a fully decentralized world, but it is going to be more decentralized than we’ve had in the past.

And I think some of these experiments, although none of them have been successful so far, it is good that we’re making experiments. We are trying governance in different ways. It may be that governance spills over from the online world into the real world. We’re living much more of our lives online than we ever have before, so experimenting with communities that you can move easily from one community to another community.

You can try out different rules. This community has got more of a leader, and it acts quickly. This community is more consensus-based. And you get to choose online which community you want to live in. That flavor has got a lot of potential benefits to it. It’s like voting with your feet, except you don’t even have to move your feet. You’re just voting with your cursor.

You just move from one world to another world. And that allows much more experimentation and innovation. So I’m excited to see what happens, though I do agree with you that this fully decentralized vision of people voting to run a corporation, I think that’s not going to work.

Let me end this by going back to an Olson point and asking why it didn’t happen. So when you think about profoundly disruptive events that could transform processes and groups and coalitions and structures in a democratic country, you think about wars and revolutions, and you think about plagues. And we are living through an ongoing plague. We are going to be rounding on a million deaths in America. And I think not too long, we’re past 900,000 now.

You’ve been a very aggressive voice on — and I think you’ve been right on a lot of it, on a lot of the failures of the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. and just our public health architecture. And for all that, I don’t see much changing. I don’t see a big effort to change the C.D.C. or the F.D.A. I don’t see that we have really built a whole new pandemic structure or a set of emergency governance mechanisms that can be put into play during one of these periods. Why don’t you think that coronavirus has triggered more disruption and rethinking of our system?

Yeah, it’s very depressing. The way I put it is, first, the American government failed, and then the American public failed. I contrast this with 9/11. So 9/11, within weeks, we had troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Within a couple of months, we’d taken over Kabul. And I’m not saying this was a good — we did the right thing, but at least we were active. We did something. We moved quickly, aggressively.

And yet, when people were dying, as still are today — and thousands, thousands of people dying every single day — the public never got angry in the same way that they got around 9/11. They never even united even briefly the same way they united around 9/11. Maybe this is something about the human psyche that we need to put a face on our enemy. We find it easier to unite around fighting another human being than we do around fighting a virus.

And yet the irony is, is that our tools against the virus are actually much better than our tools for fighting the war on terrorism. We actually do have the scientific tools to defeat the virus. We’ve got the vaccines. We have the treatments. We could have done a lot more by being more aggressive and by being willing to fight this thing the way we fought other wars. And yet, for reasons which I still don’t really understand, the public never got angry, and it never united. And you saw that in politics, and you just saw that in social relations as well. We just became more and more divided and dispirited.

Well, it got angry. It just got angry at each other, at other factions. And I’m not saying I think a lot of that anger was justified. But I don’t think the anger, to pick up on your point, has channeled in a unified way in a constructive direction.

Right, I mean, it’s amazing that first, we were warned that this pandemic was coming. Time and time again, the scientists told us. Bill Gates told us. It’s coming, it’s coming. We’re not ready. It’s coming. And of course, we weren’t ready. But you would think now, having experienced it, that we would — how many times you have to be hit in the head?

And yet, as you said, we’re still not spending a lot on being prepared for the next pandemic, on getting a universal coronavirus vaccine or enrolling out nasal vaccines. We’re still not pushing on all of the margins we could push to fight the pandemic we have now, let alone the next pandemic. And how much more is it going to take before people wise up and say, this has killed a million people, and it didn’t have to be this way. It did not have to be this way.

Well, I think that’s a good, depressing place to end it. But always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Three books. Well, right before the pandemic hit, I was in India. I love India. It’s a fascinating place. I haven’t been able to travel. I hope to return to travel and return to India soon. A couple of books, William Dalrymple, “The Anarchy,” which is about the East India Company takeover of India. But I love Dalrymple. Any of his books, I’d recommend — “City of Djinns,” “Nine Lives,” “Return of a King,” which is about Afghanistan. Very familiar theme.

That book is amazing, by the way, “Return of a King.”

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. It almost plays out episode per episode what the British and the Americans did and the failure of the British and the failure of the Americans. Could not ask for a more parallel construction. So anything by Dalrymple, I’d recommend.

Along those lines, I’ve been enjoying “India: A Story Through 100 Objects,” which is by Vidya Dehejia. She’s an art historian. And this is a coffee table picture book with a little description and context for each of these amazing, often beautiful, and interesting objects from India throughout its history.

And the final book I’d recommend I think probably other— I imagine you’ve read it— I think a lot of people have — “The Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson, which is about Churchill during the Blitz. It also has a lot of parallels to, I think, our fight against coronavirus and how Churchill did.

And it’s a total page turner. It’s quite a remarkable book because even with the Blitz, people were falling in love. They were falling out of love. They were becoming alcoholics. They were having interesting people over for dinner and conversations. And it’s almost a day by day diary of Churchill’s life during this time. And it’s really incredibly well written and a total page turner.

And one thing about that book, which, you’re right, I have read, is to the point of our conversation, happening both in the foreground and the background is a tremendous amount there of Churchill just figuring out how to organize production across the British economy, how to make the planes, how to get people involved.

Exactly.

And I mean, there are meetings, but one thing I think about a lot with coronavirus, as compared to actual wartime mobilizations, which we’ve compared this to, but I don’t think done, is, when you look at past wartime mobilizations, a lot of rules get suspended to organize production in a wartime way. Certainly, that’s the story of World War II and World War I.

And it’s really not the story here, for better or for worse. But it’s really not the story here. Government did things to mobilize the private sector, but it did not organize production across the economy with goals in mind. And when you read these war histories, the difference is really striking.

Exactly, I agree completely. We did not have the same vigor and action, which Churchill did, despite the fact that many more people died due to coronavirus than did due to the German bombing during the Blitz.

Quite an ending point. Alex Tabarrok, thank you very much.

It’s been great being here, Ezra. Thank you very much for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s the show. If you enjoyed it, there are a few ways you can help us out or shape the next episode. You can rate the podcasts on whatever play you’re listening on now, or send this episode to a friend, family member, if you didn’t like it, an enemy who you think deserves it. Or you can tell us who you think we should have on the show next by emailing me at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. We really do get suggestions for guests we have on from the email. And though we can’t respond to every message, we really do read every single one.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of The New York Times. It is produced by Rogé Karma, Annie Galvin, and Jeff Geld. It is fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lin.

[MUSIC PLAYING]