Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of several books including FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and his New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. The New Deal still seems pretty prominent today in the political narrative. We hear it referenced all the time. We talk about New Deal Democrats and these programs that were created during the New Deal that are often held up as exemplars of government working. Is this picture of the New Deal that gets thrown around by politicians on both sides of the aisle say, well, start by, is it accurate? Do we have the right picture of it today? Certainly not. The New Deal, of course, is the great model for peacetime big government. Prior to the New Deal, we saw government expand rapidly, primarily if not exclusively in wartime. Plus, all the principles here are progressives. So this is the great progressive dream, throwing aside the Constitution and establishing one new program after the other that becomes part of the legend. Although I would have to say that if Roosevelt were only elected through 1940, I think he would be remembered today as a failure. Was there a fair amount of opposition at the time of 1940 in terms of contemporary opposition? There was more opposition that particularly developed after his effort to pack the Supreme Court after the 1936 election. But he never figured out how to banish chronic high unemployment. That plagued them all the way up to 1940 when you really get into mobilization for World War II and the conscription of more than 9 or 10 million young men. Well, that turned out to be the way the New Deal dealt with unemployment. But I think as we remember, President Obama was ushered into office behind the New Deal dream. He was recalling, 2008 and 2009 was recalling the glories of the New Deal. A heroic figure comes in when there's a terrible depression on the landscape and he starts all these things and he defeats all the obstacles and everybody's happy in the end. As we know, Obama has had a few problems just with the economy. And I don't think it's been a while since we've heard any references to that big success. It's really vanished. Before we get into the details of the actual New Deal so that we can see how the contemporary narrative might not be accurate, can you give us a picture of – so the New Deal was a reaction to things that were happening in the country. So what was the state of the country in the time leading up to the New Deal? Well, FDR is elected in 1932. He's sworn in on March 4, 1933, which if you look at a chart of GNP back during that period, which the last time I looked at this was published in one of Paul Krugman's columns to prove another point, you can't generalize – you can't be too specific of this because the figures were not that precise. But this chart of GDP shows that it reached the low point sometime not long before FDR is sworn in. That would be picking up the narrative here. A product of the free market policies of the Hoover administration, correct? Yes, but the point was that the bounce had already started when he came into power. But the question being, the bounce coming back up, you're saying? Going back up, the recovery, the upswing of the information on the direction of the economy had already started to go up. As I said, it's hard to be too precise about this, but if you look up GNP figures – now we talk about GDP, but back then it was a gross national product – it started before. So that's very important timing because if he had stepped aside and not done all these things that interfered with the functioning of the economy, made it harder for businesses to function, more expensive to create jobs, all those things. If he had avoided all of that, and we can talk about some of those bizarre experiences, I think at all likelihood the economy would have bounced back very powerfully without him. Is it accurate to say that Herbert Hoover had laissez-faire policies? That's always part of the narrative. The laissez-faire policies of Herbert Hoover then need to be rectified by FDR. We had the same narrative with Bush and Obama. Was Herbert Hoover just a radical libertarian hands-off guy? Well, he signed a big, massive tax increases in 1932. That followed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff 1930, which increased average tariffs, 59% on thousands of items and triggered retaliation against the United States, which made everybody worse off. Hoover also signed the Norris LaGuardia Act that made it illegal for businesses to insist on hiring people, only if they agreed not to join a union, in other words, freedom of association. And he was basically a big spender in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It was doling out money left and right. He was trying to prop up the economy, basically a Keynesian idea. If he could prop up the economy and have people paying above-market wages, they're going to spend the money and that's somehow going to help turn things around. And that was exactly what FDR thought, too, correct, about propping up the economy for your wages. FDR did a number of major policies that were actually started by Hoover. Yeah, so they were both big government guys. Don't forget that Hoover was in the Wilson administration. So if things were getting better, why did we get a new deal to begin with? Why rush into all of these very large programs? Was it that they didn't know things were getting better at the time? It was too hard to see it? They probably didn't know because it's going to take, you know, if a year passes, it's like we are at the present time. Everybody talks about global warming and we get hit enough by record low temperatures after a while. It takes people a while to recognize, you know what, we don't seem to be having that anymore, the warming. And of course, economics was a relatively new or inexact science at the time, so they maybe didn't have the indicators to act. Well, if a year had passed, if FDR had refrained from doing anything, saying let's calm down and see what really needs, what's the nature of the problem and what can we best do about it. He rushed in from one thing after the other and if you look at the individual policies one by one, they are pretty bizarre. Well, let's talk about one of those, one of my favorites and one of Roosevelt's favorites, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, signed in the first 100 days. He was a very big believer. What was that and what was the theory behind it? Well, it is well known at that time that we had suffered from a contraction and the National Industrial Recovery Act clearly promoted more contraction. Whatever else was going on because what it did was authorize the president by executive order to establish cartels and the cartel agreement that would determine how much sales is going to be permitted or allocated to each participant in an industry. They basically break determining market shares of hundreds of industries, from dog food to draperies to underwear to machine parts to stone crushers. Anything that anybody who had a trade association was calling their trade association lawyer to work with the federal government and establish a cartel agreement allocating business and then FDR would sign all these things. Each of these things was activated with the executive order. And so the key thing is to determine how much production is there going to be and the thought was to reduce production to try to force up prices. That's what cartels try to do, limit production to create enough of a shortage to force up prices. They all wanted to keep prices back up the way they were during the good times of the 1920s. But this gets to one of the aspects of the kind of current narrative we hear of the New Deal, which was you get the sense that people on the left see it as a clash between government trying to fix things and run away capitalism, that the businesses that were being regulated by this fought against it tooth and nail. And is that true where the businesses opposed to all of this?  Were they opposed to it? And if they weren't, why? They were promoting restrictions on competition. The only exception to that really wasn't an exception. The only exception to that was toward the end of the New Deal period in the late 1930s. Roosevelt authorized the filing of antitrust lawsuits against some 300 companies or company associations, including some like mobile oil that had been forced back in the days of the National Industrial Recovery Act to restrict their production and to have above market wages and raise their prices to try to bring back business the way it had been in the 20s. So the idea behind this was if we can force industry to restrict production that will increase prices, which will get more money, people will be paying more for things, which will get more money flowing, which will jumpstart the economy. Okay. Did it work? Let me tell you about the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which is exactly the same thing. Farm prices are low. They're trying to prop up farm incomes. And the only way they can figure out to do it is to restrict supply. So basically Henry Wallace, who's the Secretary of Agriculture, pays farmers to plow under 10 million acres of crops and to slaughter and bury 6 million pigs to try to drive up all these supplies. But one of the bizarre things is they were burning oats to create a shortage of oats. At the same time, we were importing oats. We were slaughtering the pigs at the same time that we're increasing imports of lard. We're burying corn, and there's still a lot of corn being imported. And with all these efforts to help poor farmers, primarily it's the big farmers. Only 20% of American farmers got any assistance from any of these New Deal programs. Some of them spent very like the Farm Security Administration spent almost no money. But it was the big farmers, the land holders, who got the money. And the people who were hurt the worst were black sharecroppers because the money went to people who owned land. If you own land, somebody else works on the land. Well, you're getting the benefit from the government in that program, but what you're doing in exchange for the money you're getting is you're reducing your production. You don't need that black sharecropper anymore. Let me try to wrap my head around the economic theory driving this, whether it ultimately doesn't work, but there's still people thought it would and they had a theory for why. And I'm trying to figure out what this was because when we talk about progress today, one of the things that you talk about like a certain time only so many homes could afford a television and then now every home has multiple televisions or similar things like with refrigerators. Refrigerators were these massively expensive things and now everyone can have one. And we look at Sears catalogs from the 1970s every now and then. Someone will pass one of these around the internet and you'll laugh at how expensive these things, these electronics used to be and how much cheaper they are and how much wildly better they are today. And so that's kind of like things becoming more abundant and cheaper. We hold up as a sign of progress for a civilization. But it sounds like these policies in the New Deal were saying the reason that the economy is in trouble is because certain things, food, is too abundant and too cheap. And so the way to spark forward progress is to make food scarcer and more expensive. Or am I being unfair? Well, the New Deal consisted of a lot of things where people were desperately trying to do something and basically what they always did was grab the cliche, rich people have money, let's tax rich people and so on. Back in the 30s, only about 25% of the population were farmers. And the New Deal was focusing on trying to raise farm incomes. So to the degree it was successful, it's increasing the cost of living for the three-quarters of Americans who were not farmers. So they create a problem there. Also, the National Industrial Recovery Act, while the farmers were trying to figure out what to do about the farmers, the National Industrial Recovery Act, was busy making manufactured goods more expensive and farmers were needed farm equipment and various farm tools, all of which they had to pay more for than they did before. But it's okay because they're earning more from their food, so everything works out. Yeah, well you're trying to keep, you know, how do they ever keep straight with all these transfers? Everything's a transfer. It's always a question, well, we'll help them, we'll focus on this one problem, we'll give money over there and then later somebody's complaining on the other side, so they have to address that and they're going to create more problems. I'm trying to figure out how these prices were decided, these codes of fair competition, these NIRA codes, which were called codes of fair competition. Who decided them? Who wrote them? Well, weren't we all about antitrust in the, you know, trust-busting days of the first president Roosevelt and that antitrust is bad, you know, trust is bad and cartels are bad and then all of a sudden we're making cartels out of huge areas of the American economy. That's what FDR did most of the time, he created cartels. If you take some of the smaller agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, that was giving away licenses and franchises to relatively small number of larger broadcasters and retaining the right to interfere with speech. You have the Civil Aeronautics Board that provided licenses for interstate airlines and between the time the interstate, the Civil Aeronautics Board was established in 1938, I think, for 40 years until it was abolished in 1978, it did not issue a single new license for an interstate air carrier in 40 years, not one license. And they said, well, unless there's some compelling reason to license another airline, we don't think we need any more. That was their practice there. At the same period, this is late 1930s, FDR signed into law the Anti-Chain Store Act that was doing illegal discounts and you had the Retail Price Maintenance Act. That was another, that's all against price cutting. No price cutting, no discounts. This sounds really bizarre. It sounds like an invitation for businesses to get involved with government. I mean, to A, try to control the laws and become the business that writes the code and participates in the lawmaking and starts to create the kind of crony capitalism situation we have now. Yeah, there's so much of that. There's so much of that going back and forth where everybody is picking everybody else's pocket. It's very hard to determine how particular individuals or groups fare because they're gaining a thing over here and they're losing it over here. Everybody's in everybody else's pocket. Well, it's interesting too because Erin asked about the justifications. They did have this idea of destructive competition and it was some sort of competition that was too much. I don't know, they could never really define it. Well, they were all anti-competition. Yeah, to some extent, but they wanted some sort of managed competition between, let's say, tire producers in Ohio. And so the groups would get together, the businesses would get together to write the tire code. And of course, it was written by Firestone in Goodyear in Goodrich and the little guy was completely harmed by the tire code. And that was part of the idea, I think. I was never able to figure out whether they were just in the pockets of these corporations or just did not understand markets or hated them. I have no idea which one. But the Agricultural Act you mentioned, which was setting prices on what theory? So how do you decide what the price of an agricultural good should be? Well, they didn't have any theory. It was all, see the way somebody else does it. As I said, they're looking at one issue at a time. If the farmers are hungry, let's get the farmers some money. And then they find out later it's more complicated than that. Let me tell you about gold, which involves, that'll get back to how do you set the price? Look at what one of the things that FDR was doing in the early days of his administration had to do with gold. Well, you start with the Trading with the Enemy Act that was passed under Wilson in 1917. The Trading with the Enemy Act empowered the president to prohibit any transaction involving gold, silver, or foreign exchange. That was the supposed legal basis for what FDR did to restrict gold. What did he do? Well, after you had the presidential proclamation of, I think it was March 6, 1933. So it was two days after he was sworn in. That extended the bank holiday, but it also prohibited banks from paying out any gold. Because at that time, if you had any gold double eagles or any gold coins, you would go into a Federal Reserve Bank and they were obligated to give you $20.67 per ounce. Okay. And he wanted to stop that. So the first thing he does, again, supposedly based on Wilson's Trading with the Enemy Act, in the executive presidential proclamation of March 1933 prohibiting banks from paying out anything, the next thing that happens in April of 1933, he issues his executive order 6012, which orders Americans to hand in all of their gold to the banks and the treasury by May 1, 1933. So that's where he expropriates gold and their $10,000 of fines if you're caught with gold after that. This sounds like something that someone, a villain in a bond would do. And then there is FDR signs an amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act. And the amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act empowers the president to set the price of gold. So did he do that? He famously does sometimes in his bedroom. With what dice? An advisor would come in and they would tell, what should the price of gold be today? I'm trying to wrap my brain. Why?  Why do we end up with a series of moves that are supposed to have to do with the recovery? But what does he think? By prohibiting Americans from holding gold and then he gets to set the prices. But what does he think this will do to the economy? He doesn't know, but he's desperate. And what he's basically doing throughout the 1930s is throwing different policies against the wall. They contradict each other, as you pointed out. Sometimes he's bashing big business and he wants more competition. Most of the time he wants to suppress competition because it's kind of unruly. There's all these different things that conflict. It's a whole mish-mash. And as Henry Morgenthau's famous testimony in 1939 that we've tried everything and still they have depression level unemployment, it averaged 17% throughout the New Deal period from 1933 until 1940, which is when you get into war mobilization. I guess I'm a bit confused on a couple of issues about the gold thing. The first is if Americans are prohibited from owning gold, then what's the point of setting the prices of gold? Because if you can't own it, then you can't buy and sell it, right? In terms of central banks. Okay. And then the second is, okay, so he was restricting gold, but for what purpose? What was the theory behind how Americans owning gold and then being able to get $20 or whatever it was per ounce for it? What was the theory of how that was contributing to the economic depression? I think what he was trying to do is inflate the currency as one way of reducing the impact of the depression. Well, that would do it.  Right. He's trying to prevent private individuals from protecting their purchasing power by increasing their holdings of gold. I mean, and that, in fact, is what Roosevelt ended up doing. But you end up there in a number of memoirs by brain trusters from the Roosevelt administration, from the first term of the Roosevelt administration. They're talking about these insane sessions in his bedroom where he talks about what should the price be today. And he says, seven. You know, make it seven, $7 or whatever it is. And he said, I think it was Henry Morgenthau ourselves. He said, why seven? It's lucky. It's a lucky number. I mean, it has nothing to do with market pricing. He's the most powerful person in the country and he can try it if he wants to try it. But he was never anybody familiar with theory. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about him. What kind of person was FDR? Where was his background? What kind of temperament? What kind of attitude, ideology? Well, he had served, I believe, as Secretary of the Navy. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration. He was Governor of New York, as we know. And he is generally considered to have been a playboy until he was diagnosed with polio, which is, I think, around 1920, maybe something like that. It was 20 years. He spent a year out of private life. And that's what gave him humanity and so on. But nobody considered him a master theoretician and that's not what they were doing through this period. It was a disorganized, you know, the National Industrial Recovery Act was basically modeled after Italian fascism. Now, this is before, this is a decade, of course, before Mussolini forms an alliance with Hitler and gets into the war. Because fascism was very fashionable during the 1920s among American intellectuals. A number of American progressives went to visit Mussolini in the early 20s, including Ida Tarbell, who wrote the muckraking biography of John D. Rockefeller. And I can't think there were a number of Lincoln Stephens. There were a number of early 20th century progressives who went over there and everything worked. And he was very charismatic. This came after the tumultuous war. He ordered out of chaos.  I remember Ida Tarbell's autobiography. She says, he kissed my hand. I could feel the magic and how his people view him and so on. So, you know, progressives went for him. Can you give a quick thumbnail definition of fascism? Because it's a word that gets used a lot today, but often means something like anyone whose political views I really don't like is a fascist. Fascism, economic fascism basically means private ownership, government control. Unlike communists where the government owns everything, owns and controls. So is it kind of like cartels or something like that? So everyone privately owns it, but the government controls everything and makes sure that these businesses are better.  You have been drawn in perhaps with funding, with contracts. And if you become too important to the government, you are going to get a lot of scrutiny. And you better make sure that you are not doing anything that could be misinterpreted by the government. Now, you mentioned earlier the court packing plan, which some of our listeners may have heard of before. But can you just, that was in 37. Can you describe a little bit what that was and what precipitated it? Well, several of FDR's early major pieces of legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act and a couple of others were struck down by the Supreme Court. In the case of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, it was for imposing a tax on food processors and giving the money to farmers. That's very much like recent cases we've had on zoning where property is seized under eminent domain by a community taken from one private individual, let's say, and given immediately to a big hotel developer. Well, that was basically the same kind of thing, giving it to one participant in the food business, giving it to somebody else because it fulfilled some government policy they had. But the court struck that down and it struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in a case about some Jewish butchers, too, which is very interesting by itself, the Schechter Brothers. Right, right, right. Well, you had a core of four, what we're called the Four Horsemen of Reaction, which was George Sutherland, James McRinalds, Willis Van Der Venter, James McRinalds and Pierce Butler, right? They were the core, and sometimes there were additional votes from the Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and from Warren Roberts. Oh, and, yeah. Oh, and Roberts, so they were successful to 1935, 1936, and so FDR figured that the only thing he could do was to expand the court. He did that after the 1936 election, so he could conquer the world at that point because, I mean, he felt like he could conquer the world because he won by such a huge margin in the 1936 election. And so he started to address his frustration with his major pieces of legislation getting struck down. He said the Supreme Court, their old men, so right away he starts to antagonize the court, but he said, you know, after 70, I think, after 70, you need somebody else on the court. So he couldn't take him off the court because they already had life tenure, but he could increase the number of people on the court until he had a majority. Wasn't this a naked power grab? I mean, that sounds absolutely apolitical. Well, that was, you know, he went into political decline after that, FDR, because you've got to, the Republicans gained a lot of seats in the House in the late 30s, and things just didn't go. Plus you had the depression of 1938, depression within a depression. The economy hadn't recovered in terms of unemployment from the Great Depression, and now you have a big setback, mainly arising from Fed blunders plus the National Labor Relations Act that suddenly made it much more expensive for employers to hire people, that provided incentives to cut back hiring dramatically, especially in the mass production industries, automobiles, steel, coal, where you had large numbers of people and a lot of violence and so on. Weren't there things like the Works Progress Administration that put people to work building highways and amphitheaters, and wasn't that a good thing? Well, it certainly helped FDR get re-elected because it meant the government had five billion dollars to spend in the 12 months before the 1936 election. That was a lot of money. And, yeah, but you know, all these things, there's a very interesting fine line. How can you help people without screwing up the economy? Because there's a humanitarian desire and a political necessity. You have a lot of unemployment. How can you help people? Can the government provide, is it possible to provide any assistance without screwing things up? Because of all of those work relief programs and there must have been a half dozen or a dozen, this is during peacetime. There were hardly any army. There's no war. Usually, military is the biggest expense. So all these relief efforts with millions of people in them, raking leaves, building dams, all this public works, all this stuff, that's what led to the tripling of taxes during the Great Depression. And ironically, one of the most ironic things I didn't realize till after I'd written FDR's Folly, you may know the biggest tax. What was the biggest tax? Biggest source of federal revenue during the New Deal period. Do you have any idea? Tariffs on alcohol, maybe? I don't know. Well, tariffs are one source. They're corporate income taxes. They're personal income taxes. But those weren't that high at that point, were they? The biggest source of federal revenue during the Great Depression were excise taxes. Oh, excise taxes. Excise taxes on beer, wine, cigarettes, chewing gum, soda, radios. In other words, cheap pleasures for millions and millions of people. They can't afford a nice car or a nice house or anything, but they can have some fun food sometime where they're smoking. That's excise taxes. And the first thing FDR did when he came in was to start increasing excise taxes. He raised the Beer, Wine Act, the Liquor Revenue Act. You have two or three of those just in the first year. But until 1936, there was more federal revenue generated by the federal excise taxes. There wasn't just one tax. Federal excise taxes generated more revenue until 1936 than the federal personal income tax and the federal corporate income tax combined. And it's not until about 1942 that the federal personal income tax becomes the biggest revenue generator in the government. Until then, the biggest tax is excise taxes. All these wonderful government programs are paid for by taxes that hit lower income people big time. You said that the best thing for FDR to have done would have been nothing because a recovery had already begun by the time he took office. I think that's probably true. But he didn't know that. And people didn't know that. And so given that lack of knowledge, what would have been the right thing for him and his brain trust and the people of the federal government to do to turn the country around to help those people who are out of work based on other situations where the country's had a depression and we've gotten out of it in a different way, what would have been better policies than what they tried? Well, I think first of all that probably in that situation I think the most important thing is what he did very well. He gave these fireside chats and these speeches and he was able to establish a personal bond and the confidence in the people. So that's important. That's about the only thing you can do because you don't want to get mixed up in humanitarian policy that ends up forcing you to do things that are going to make the recovery more difficult. And I'm sure you know about the Depression of 1920 that Harding and Coolidge or Harding got us through. And I think his philosophy was very wise because Harding believed that the most humane thing you can do in an economic crisis is to get people through it as fast as possible. So that means you're having severe adjustments. But you know after World War I when the war was over there were military contracts were being discontinued. Companies that made a lot of money making war material they were going to have to look for something else and he was, he wanted the message, Harding wanted the message to be understood loud and clear that your future is in the civilian sector of the economy. We want you to have the strongest incentives to find a job. The company's going to need a new line of business, new products to sell. They're having nothing to do with the war. We're done with that. And the faster you make the transition the better. Well, there was a terrible interlude but it was over in less than two years. The Roaring 20s were underway by 1923 and I think so in Hoover's, in Hoover Roosevelt's case you know the smooth holly tariff that's one obvious thing to attack. Now politically that's very difficult because every interest group there are thousands, literally thousands. I've still got a lot of the volumes of smooth holly testimony and everybody is testifying. So that would politically be very difficult but if you could begin to phase them out, phase them out. There are a lot of these taxes, especially focus on taxes that make it more difficult and expensive to hire people. You want to make it as what can the president do that would make it as easy and cheap as possible for businesses to start hiring people because what the normal course of development in a depression is that what happens is prices fall so much and they're going to keep falling until they become irresistible bargains. There is a point when they become irresistible bargains and even in 1933 when there were 25% unemployment that meant that 75% of the people were employed and getting a regular check so it's not like there was no money in the country it was just a severe setback. So you got 75% of the people who have money they're going to start buying stuff and stocks and whatever else they want to buy so it's going to get down and you don't want to be in the way when they start buying another house or more food or whatever it is that people want to buy or invest in. I've heard an argument that at the time as we mentioned fascism was very popular socialism was very popular people had gone to the Soviet Union and seen the future. Seen the future. Yes, exactly. So perhaps I mean I believe that what you said would have worked and would have gotten us out of the depression more quickly but perhaps what was needed at the time was to save capitalism was the idea that government was doing something because something to help out the little people even though there really could have been a socialist revolution in the country if you go read you know grapes of wrath and Steinbeck's views about this and what the people were doing you had a dust bowl at the same time just you know coincidentally at the same time in Oklahoma which is where my family's from so I've heard about that for my whole life and even just the perception that FDR was helping people out was very important so would you say that was a good He was also a new face so that would buy him a little bit of time but it really was important for him to use what little time he had and there's a transition to get going in the right direction and he didn't do that that's why he was you know what you continually find with these interventionist policies is that they're doing a favor over here and they're giving somebody else a kick back here and you just can't keep up with all the unexpected consequences you look at the TVA for example the Tennessee Valley Authority the Tennessee Valley Authority yeah that was a big that was a big thing Roosevelt was very excited about it he got into it from Norris LaGuardia who was a senator who believed in public power well the TVA was set up as a monopoly it drove the I forget what the company was but there was a power company that was serving the TVA privately owned company he drove it out of business he established the Tennessee Valley Authority as a monopoly within their within their area they were not subject to federal laws or state laws they were not subject to federal or state taxes so this is supposed to be a great miracle it's going to provide subsidized cheap electricity and bring a new world for these poor people in the Tennessee Valley but you know what it lost money it depended on congressional appropriations every year to cover their losses and but the people had power right I mean it wasn't the idea so well there was a study done 50 years after the TVA was established first of all the TVA didn't build very much there were only six dams built before 1940 up through 1940 then you get into war mobilization and 80% of TVA power went for war-related stuff including enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project so that you know in World War II you're not talking about the TVA helping poor people because it's not supplying energy to poor people anyway so it only did six dams these are small dams because the gorges in the Tennessee River whatever river it is it's very narrow it's not like it's not like Grand Coulee and the Hoover Dam out in the Pacific Northwest those are huge these are small and it to build a dam you need skilled labor so these are people making above-average wages this is not for people this is not doing anything for people who are unskilled and they didn't do much of it because the more ambitious a public works project is the longer it takes to get going so most of what the TVA built by far was finished after the Great Depression is over but the greatest irony comes there's a study done 50 years after the TVA got started and it found that in the southern states that did not have did not get any of their energy from the TVA the southern states the southeastern states like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia that didn't get any power from the TVA they grew a lot faster they had a much greater growth in incomes and growth and curiously they had a much more rapid growth in the use of electricity consumption and growth in the percentage of farmhouses that had running water this is a non TVA if you did not have cheap subsidized TVA electricity you were growing faster you were making more money interesting how does that happen well the interpretation was that the TVA well first of all the farmers needed a lot of things to make more money that did not use electricity like tractors they use diesel fuel they needed more seeds they needed a lot of things to raise their level of farming that did not have to do with plugging something in and they didn't have as much electrical usage they didn't have as many appliances because that's more directly all the electricity usage is more directly related to incomes not to the cost of electricity so if you have higher incomes you're probably going to buy a few more appliances regardless of whether your electricity is subsidized or not so they needed all these other things and the same thing went with you you're going to have running water in the house if you have the money to invest in the system and it has nothing to do with whether if you just run an electrical cord out to a farmhouse well you can plug in a few light bulbs there's probably not a great deal else that would be done in there maybe a heater but that's about it so what are the lessons I mean overall from TVA from NIRA from AAA what are the lessons we get from the new deal there's no such thing as a free lunch you know I mean I think what they're doing in the Great Depression and right through everything that Obama's doing now they're looking for some they can force somebody else to pay for it to fix somebody's problem by forcing somebody else to do it and then we find out as they did during the 1930s that you're causing another problem over here you know the TVA as I said the most incredible thing to when I was writing this chapter on this was realized that they're subsidized I mean it's not making money if they don't pay any taxes federal or state they're not subject to any of these inconvenient regulations and so on and they're losing money and only 2% of the American population was living in the Tennessee Valley so 98% of the people were being taxed 98% of the people poor and wealthy are being taxed to subsidize the 2% and it's not even doing them as much it's basically one of the things that happened with the TVA was apparently it gave people enough these poor subsistence farmers enough of an incentive to stay put in the other states they didn't have any incentives to stay put so they moved they migrated out of subsistence farming they said you know what the problem is there are too many farmers more farmers and more cultivated acreage than the market can you know can be supported on it with a good income and so you had a more rapid migration in these non TVA states out of subsistence farming and into services and manufacturing and other things and that's why they got higher incomes and that's just another thing another example of the unintended consequences of this kind of government intervention too which is maybe kind of the lesson we can get from the Great Depression or the New Deal in general yeah as I said I think you're trying to figure out how can you get out of a crisis you have to be a political genius in order to pull this off but you basically have to look for positive steps that don't create problems in your wake and that's what all these people have done they know bomb and so on he's trying to do a favor over here and he's making it more difficult over here and he leaves such a trail of people who are paying somebody else's subsidies entitlements or special deals whatever it is and you're just going round and round on the same old problems but you do have great political difficulty these days we know nobody can figure out what to do about the entitlements because you've got 50, 60 million people who are on them and are not going to want you to touch them so that's a that's one reason why you know don't start a new government program because if you start it especially if it's an entitlement you will never get rid of it Well that gets to something I was actually curious about the New Deal was this massive cluster of all sorts of programs doing all sorts of things which ones of those are still around today what's still plaguing us from this series of policies that was called the New Deal Well the biggest one of course would be Social Security because we had not Social Security but not just Social Security but you had Medicare added to it Medicare is an amendment of the Social Security Act Medicaid is an amendment to the Medicare which is an amendment to the Social Security Act then Bush's drug program that's an amendment to that so it's like all the trade legislation today I think this is still true all the trade legislation is still an amendment of the Tariff Act of 1930 you know as Reagan said nothing has a government eternal life like a government program but when you're talking about huge amounts of money being spent now a lot of the anti competitive pro laws that FDR did have gone by the boards in the 1970s a number like the Retail Price Maintenance Act the Anti Chain Store Act most your discounting laws were before 1980 they were gone I remember E.J. Corvette which was an appliance retailer in Walmart you know they were back in the 1950s they started to do discounting and discounting was tricky because it was illegal and I remember I was in the 1970s I was writing advertisements for several companies direct mail advertisements for several companies that sold gold and silver to investors and we discovered in the laws that survived from the New Deal the Anti Gold Laws that there was an exception with coins that have numismatic value if you had bullion the only reason anybody has bullion is as a hedge against inflation or where you expect to make money from it but that's not a collecting thing there's a numismatic we had to use the collectors will buy these these are all bullion coins or one out coins but we had to use that language you had to stamp something on them collectors and so but most of those anti competitive restrictions the similar non export as I already mentioned that was gone in 1978 it was after then that you had and you had this three or four or five other major airlines from the late 70s that were starting all of a sudden and you had financial deregulation you had Big Bang which was about 1975 I think then during the 1990s Glass-Steagall was repealed now some people have blamed the absence of those regulations the irony is nobody really understood Glass-Steagall the best the most familiar thing about Glass-Steagall was the prohibition having a single firm engage in both commercial banking and investment banking and that was a New Deal law originally 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and so it was because of that that those functions were broken up so JP the most famous case the ironically the most famous case was JP Morgan JP Morgan and company became a commercial bank and Morgan Stanley became the investment bank the irony is that the banks that did both functions were typically big city banks they weren't failing the banks that were failing were unit banks unit banking means you can only have one office and that went back before I think the 1920s but it was unit banks started basically it was small bankers who did not want a big city banker to be opening a branch in your town and competing with you giving you a hard time because you're able to get more service from the big city guys so maybe we got rid of some of these things the Glass-Steagall 90% of the banks that failed were unit banks civil aeronautics board we still got agricultural problems and we still got social security Roosevelt repeatedly stressed that those farm subsidies because the agricultural adjustment act got struck down and then he signed two or three more bills just like it but they didn't have the tax in there taxing the miller to subsidize the farmer so there were several others this is only for temporary relief and the other thing we still have and we still have it but we also still have the story which fits into the modern political narrative this New Deal story it seems like it always hangs around that we have to remind people this was not the way they thought it was I think an important factor here is that Roosevelt is always because he went on to get elected twice more especially 1940 he won the war if he had not served he had not been president during the war and been on the winning side I think he would be viewed now as a failure because people are just going to look at the chart and saying well that was he just couldn't figure out what to do about the depression and we had good times during the 20s and then bad times in the 30s but he won the war and that covers everything at that point he beat Hitler Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts If you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks To learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


Welcome to the short presentation by Rubis Unlimited where they'll be presenting us with some gloves and masks. First we will call on the terminal manager who's also the country rep, Mr. Gary Gustav, who will give us some brief remarks. We at Rubis are very pleased to partner with the Ministry of Health to make a presentation of some much needed safety masks and gloves towards the fight of COVID. We are pleased to partner with the CMO and to ensure that those critical persons on the frontline get the much needed PPE so that they could continue to work diligently and to maintain their safety, to ensure that their families and the island as a wide continues to recover from this pandemic. We at Rubis have partnered with Ireland around the region and we continue to show our appreciation and our support in these tough times. We are very, very thankful to ensure that we do our part to make sure that we continue to remain safe and recover quickly from this pandemic. Thank you. It is quite a pleasure for us to be here this morning to once again receive a donation from our corporate partners. As you can see, these are the people who we see when we are in challenging times. And once again, they have come to our assistance and to our aid at the Ministry of Health. And of course, on behalf of all of the people of St. Lucia, on behalf of the government of St. Lucia, our frontline workers, it is my pleasure to accept this much needed donation that you are making here today. It is wonderful to see that corporate society is coming forward and working with us to ensure that our people keep safe, that our frontline workers have the necessary PPEs for them to do the job that they are doing. And of course, we all know that so far they have done such a wonderful job in keeping our people safe, in keeping our country safe from this horrible virus. Let me say that so far, St. Lucia, we have managed this virus very, very well. We have been very successful in managing this virus. Not only have we been able to contain it, we have been able to bring ourselves down to having zero cases on island at one time, and that in itself is something to be celebrated. I believe that all Kudos goes to our frontline workers, our corporate sponsors, all the people of St. Lucia who have embraced the necessary protocols, like social distancing, wearing their masks. We are extremely grateful and appreciative for these people who understand the necessity for them to do so. So on this note I will say thank you very much to Rubis St. Lucia, thank you very much country manager. You know, I'm always very touched when I see corporate citizens who do not have to just come on board and voluntarily assist us the way that you are doing. I thank you very much on behalf of the government of St. Lucia and on behalf of all the people of St. Lucia. Thank you. It is an extraordinary thing that you are doing here assisting us, you know, to ensure that we all remain safe in St. Lucia. Thank you.


Hi, I'm Salvatore Bobonas, and today's lecture is on skewed sex ratios at birth. Biologically, in human beings, an average of around 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This seems to be a nature's way of adjusting for the fact that boys simply don't seem to be as robust as girls.  They're more susceptible to disease than girls are.  As a result, by planning more boys than girls at birth, nature assures that in the natural course of events, there will be roughly the same number of boys and girls of reproductive age. Now, historically, female infanticide, the killing of girl babies, was common in many countries, leading to skewed sex ratios that favored boys. But today that's virtually disappeared. Today, skewed sex ratios have returned, but not due to infanticide, primarily it's now due to sex-selective abortion and sex-selective artificial insemination. Biological reproduction, as I said, produces a sex ratio of around 105 boys per girl at birth. We usually express the sex ratio as number of boys per 100 girls, just to give it a convenient number. But sometimes it's also reported as a simple ratio, so for example 1.05 boys per girls. Very occasionally you'll see it flipped the other way as the number of girls per 1,000 boys. In that case, you could think of it as the girl deficit, but that makes it a little bit confusing because the natural number of girls per 1,000 boys is 952, which means that anything less than 952 represents a deficit of girls, and that can be a bit hard to remember as a number. Until the late 1980s, the global sex ratio hovered around just under 1.06. It was like 105.5, 105.7, reflecting a residual level of female infanticide in some places, like very poor and rural areas of India and Pakistan, and some very poor rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But since the 1990s, the global sex ratio has risen to over 107, driven mainly by super high sex ratios at birth in India and China. The numbers I give there, 111 for India, 115 for China are the official World Bank figures for those countries for the year 2015. In fact, both countries are probably a little bit higher than those numbers suggest. If you look at the map, and this again is official World Bank data for 2015, you'll see that high sex ratios are overwhelmingly concentrated in South and East Asia. The countries affected today are primarily India, Pakistan, China, and Vietnam. There are a small number of cases of warped sex ratios in the rest of the world, for example in Azerbaijan, but really in terms of pure numbers, because India and China each have nearly 1.4 billion people. The warped sex ratios in those countries are responsible for most of the global excess of boys. Now in some countries, and under some circumstances, some preference can produce truly staggering sex ratios. So this table shows some data for sex ratios in China and South Korea by parity, that is by birth order, for a woman's first birth, second birth, or fourth birth. If you look at South Korea in around 1990, 1989 to 1992, and you look at the sex ratio for third and fourth births, they were approaching 200. That means that on average, for women who had multiple children in South Korea, that third or fourth child was twice as likely to be a boy as a girl. Now that number has since come down, it's still high, but it's since come down as a result of government education campaigns, trying to persuade people not to practice sex-selective abortion. Sex-selective abortion became possible only in the late 1980s with ultrasound technology, and here you see it impacting South Korea just at that point. ultrasound technology came a little later to China, though again, you'll see sex ratios starting to rise in the late 1980s. It's really the massive wave of sex-selective abortion hit China closer to the year 2000. Society-wide sex ratios are almost always skewed to the overproduction of boys, though individuals of course can use the same tool to have girls if they want. Among poorer households and in poorer countries, the main mechanism is sex-selective abortion via ultrasound technology. Ultrasound has become very widely disseminated throughout the world, and it can be used to abort children who can be viewed on the ultrasound as being girls. Among richer households and in richer countries, this is much less common. In richer countries, the reason for warped sex ratios is now tilting towards selective fertilization. When I say richer countries, I even mean the richer areas of China, where if people are only having one child now under the two-child policy, they may be having a second child, but still they might be very careful about choosing what child they want, and they may do it at later and later ages, and maybe moving towards in vitro fertilization, which is becoming more and more common. And thus they're choosing to implant only those eggs that can be identified genetically as being male eggs. Boys are often preferred for economic or cultural reasons. I think this has to be stressed that go beyond simple personal prejudice or desire for a baby of a particular sex. It's very easy to condemn sex-selective abortion or sex-selective fertilization, because the overall consequences are so dramatic, producing these massive deficits of girls, massive overabundance of boys around the world, especially in China and India. But we have to keep in mind that for poor families, the need to have a boy to labor on a farm may be the difference between eating and not eating, you know, if the girl is unable to do the heavy labor required on the farm. Similarly, in strongly patrilineal societies where the family name goes with the boy, it may be considered simply essential to have at least one boy. Now that's something that I personally don't endorse and that many people listening to this lecture won't endorse. But if you live in a society where you believe that the shrine of the family gods can only be maintained by a male heir, well, not having a boy is akin to allowing all the past generations of the family to perish. That can be a very powerful motive for people to want to have a son. And finally, you know, in societies that don't have adequate systems of social security and elderly old age support, if it's perceived that boys will have higher incomes and in most countries, actually in all countries, men do earn higher income for the same work as women and men work at higher rates than women. So if you put that together, male income dramatically surpasses women's income around the world and as a result, it can be a very rational response of parents that they want a boy to support them in old age. I would say it can be a rational response because there's a lot of evidence that even though the boys are richer, they don't support their parents as much as the girls do. But that aside, parents may want their children to make more money and if we know that boys make more money than girls, on average, then there might be a strong reason, especially in poor countries, for parents to choose to have boys. Look, this technology is coming to be every day available to middle class parents in all rich and middle income countries. We can now produce designer babies and the only limit on that are poorly enforced regulatory restrictions. So right now, if you want to choose whether to have a boy or a girl or even if you want to choose the eye color of your baby, if you want a blue eye baby, a green eye baby, a brown eye baby, you can do that through selective choice of fertilized eggs for in vitro fertilization. And it only costs $10,000, $20,000 to get it done. It's illegal in Australia, but it's perfectly legal in the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and many Australian mothers simply fly to Thailand to have the procedure performed. In fact, people in countries like Australia where it's illegal can simply go to an Australian-owned and managed clinic in Thailand and have the in vitro fertilization done there in order to choose the sex of their baby. If they don't trust Thailand and if they have a little more money, they can go to the United States.  Even the regulatory restrictions in place on that tend to have a lot of loopholes. So for instance, in China, it is illegal to choose the sex of your baby, but illegal, but nonetheless very commonly practiced. In Australia, it is not commonly practiced. It's considered unethical and it's, I believe also illegal in Australia to choose to select the sex of a baby via IVF unless the health of the mother is endangered by having a baby of a particular gender. And right now in Australia, there is a movement to classify gender disappointment as a psychological illness that could then justify the selection of the sex of the baby. So very soon, all countries are going to have to grapple with this question. Whatever the society-wide sex ratio, the fact is that we have to grapple with the individual moral question of should parents be allowed to choose? We have the technology to choose. People are going to use the technology unless there's very strong regulation and education to prevent it. Okay, key takeaways. First, sex ratios of birth are usually expressed as a number of boys per 100 girls with a natural ratio being around 105.  And third, designer babies have simply become a reality for which society has not developed appropriate ethical principles. Thanks for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me at my website, salvatorebobonis.com, where you can also sign up to get my monthly Global Asia newsletter.


As-Salaam-Alaikum-Qibati' Nohaz-Rat' Wasimás, welcomes you to Lecture No. 22 of Marketing for Non-Profits, MKT 628 at the virtual University of Pakistan. The component of learning is going to be integration of all the three levels of the brand-raising process into communications. Meaning, coming up with a communications campaign which is integrative in its nature after it has taken into account all the three levels. In other words, we have our positioning and personality for the cause right in front of us. We also have the identity level and we know what are the communication tools available to us. There are a host of them and we've got to be very astute in picking up those which are compatible with our cause. This compatibility counts not only in terms of the outreach but also in terms of the financial resource and the human resource that we have at our disposal. So in other words, we are talking about making the campaign very optimal and effective. Optimal in the sense that we have earmarked boundaries within which we operate and we do not keep in store any surprises that may embarrass us later during the campaign. And effective in the sense that we have to have all those tools together which do the job of the outreach and get us the kind of response that we have envisaged as part of the objectives. And therefore, we need to be very consistent in order to be optimal and in order to be effective. So in other words, we can say that our campaign is not going to be optimal and effective if it is not an outgrowth of a very serious consideration of the comprehensive brand raising process which comprises three different levels. If that is not the case, the campaign is going to be ineffective. It is going to be ad hoc because it will not be reflective of a consistent positioning and personality platform. And given that, we are going to end up in a situation which is going to be embarrassing not only for the marketing department but also for the organization as a whole. And therefore, we have got to be very consistent to show that we did follow all the requisite steps that formed in the first place the organizational level and in the second place the identity level and in the third place the experiential level where our audiences in particular the target markets start experiencing what we have to offer and the channels through which we offer and the tools that we use in order to offer what we talk about. So we need to count a lot on something which can govern the process of putting together an optimal and an effective campaign. And I would like to take you back to the concept of style guide which I talked about as part of the identity level. That is something that the marketing people and as a matter of fact all in the organization who matter for the communication campaigning have in front of us to make sure that nothing goes unnoticed making things inconsistent and hence ineffective. So how do we ensure that? Well, we have to make the one particular person responsible for the style guide. Now, this is the same style guide which was developed after painstaking efforts on part of so many different people from within the organization meaning people from within the marketing department and people from the very top of the organization who gave the approvals for all the identity marks that we use as part of our communications and also the efforts that were put in by our consultants like people from advertising and promotion agencies and the people who specialize in event management and so on and so forth. We should not shy away from taking help and support of all those people who are into the field and who may not be the part of the organization but are in a position to guide us effectively toward achieving our communication and advertising goals and objectives and therefore the style guide which I am talking about is a result of all those efforts which all the experts have put in. This person generally is a senior person within the organization. In a very small organization the person could be the chief executive himself or herself and in a larger organization this person could be the marketing manager or the marketing director. The objective here is to ensure that nothing comes into the organization as something inconsistent with what we already have designated as consistent parameters, consistent parameters of communication and advertising. So anything which is not in line or not in consonance where the parameters are marked in the style guide we have to refrain from them and this person responsible for maintaining the sanctity of the style guide has to reject all that material that has come into the organization carrying identities and marks which are not really reflective of the true positioning and personality of the organization. Not only that this person could also carry out an investigation into the fact why this kind of inconsistency could have happened in the first place and what in the second place is the remedy to take care of that and this person also has to ensure that this kind of a gross strategic mistake is not repeated again. It is a waste of resources and it does not really send positive signals to the marketplace. Any signals with a sense of inconsistencies are not going to be helpful to the organization as a matter of fact they are going to be detrimental. The implication here is for people like you when you enter such organizations and start working as assistants to the marketing manager or to the communications manager you have got to be fully prepared in terms of your knowledge about all these parameters. Although you will not have the prime responsibility of putting together these campaigns and then executing them with your responsibility but nevertheless you certainly could be extremely useful support to the bosses in terms of pinpointing those factors which are not in consonance with the parameters of the style guide because you are being prepared to enter the gates of the organizations and start helping organizations in every strategic way by making some valuable contributions. Now the question here is in order to make communication campaigns very effective what are the broad parameters that we have to keep in mind and give a very serious consideration to the while we put together these campaigns. I am going to talk about the factors which we already have learned but here you see I would like to pinpoint the relevance of advancing in terms of learning more and more of the course because the more we learn the more we realize that the concepts that we already have learned are intertwined and they play a very significant role in making each other more meaningful and more workable and therefore when I talk about something which already has been taken care of as part of some other component this is not to be mistaken as a repetition rather this is to be looked into an effort to broaden your perspective of the marketing effort in the context of a non-profit which is going to make use of all the concepts that may have to interplay while we put together our communication campaigns. For that matter we put together different strategies. Well first of all we have got to be mindful of the fact that our communications are destined to different audiences. This is something which can hardly be overemphasized. The fact of the matter is that this really is the backbone of our communications and the one mistake at this particular stage and we are going to mess up our whole campaign. What I am saying is that our marketing and communication people have to be mindful of the fact that they are talking with donors at this particular moment and they are talking about particular levels of motivations which cause that particular action on which we have been working so hard. We carried out marketing research in order to realize and reveal as a matter of fact what are the levels of motivation that stir those feelings and actuate these prospects into making donations and then make them donors on a repetitive basis and making them very loyal donors to the organization as long as we have a clear understanding of such motivations and as long as we are keeping our knowledge of those motivations up to date because changes can take place. Your donors may start donating to other causes which are equally noble and therefore your knowledge has got to be up to date in terms of the levels of motivation when you are talking with your donors. Therefore this goes without saying that one set of communications that we have put together for one particular audience does not really work for another. Here I would like to point out another thing. I would like to take you back to the concept of the messaging platform which we put together to make our communication very effective because that is where we talk about all those things that support our mission as well as the positioning and the reflect of our personality in a very comprehensive way because that is a platform which the audience goes through in a comprehensive way educates itself about all the goals, objectives and the steps and measures that we may take to reach our different audiences and make them aware of all that we have put together as part of our programs. It is not just the communication campaign that we are pursuing. It also is an effort on part of the organization to let it be known to its audiences meaning all the audiences what the organization is all about, what it does and where it is destined. Therefore we can say that the messaging platform as part of the identity level is something very primary. It is kind of a generic platform which we use as part of generic and primary communications. You have posters for those primary communications but when it is a question of reaching your audiences with some very particular objectives and goals you need to be a little more precise in terms of choosing your communications. An example of that already has been given while I talked about the distinctiveness between two different campaigns. One belonging to the donor audience and the other belonging to the lobbyists or the volunteers, activists. The point is that you need to bring about changes to communications in terms of updating your status as the program stands in terms of its execution because unless you talk about the updated status you may have to share with the audiences some very interesting stories and this is something which I talked about earlier as well. So you need to bring about a change in the copy of your communication and this is where the importance of the online tools comes in and this is where the dynamism of the online tools plays its role in terms of bringing about that change and making your communication very updated. If a change has taken place to the extent that the organization may start pondering over bringing about a change in the primary of the platform as well so be it and the organization should do it in that particular instance but the fact remains that not very frequently organizations have to undergo that kind of a change. The changes are basically brought about to address different audiences from time to time and another fact that we have to keep in mind that we need to talk about these changes when we go through the different stages of the behavior change model. Here is another concept that we are very familiar with and here is the application or rather the intertwining and the interplay of two different concepts or could be more than two when we talk about the communications and the ability of the communicators to take the audience from one particular stage to another to another and to the final stage until the time the audience really has graduated into the final stage where they become loyal donors or lobbyists or activists. So whatever is the case it all boils down to the ability of the marketing communicators to bring about those changes and to convince their audiences if they happen to be at one particular stage of the behavior change model they need to go to the next stage. So from that particular perspective let us talk about the very first stage which is the pre-contemplation stage. Here you see the objective that the marketing person has to himself or to herself is to offer a beautiful alternative to the audience for which you have put together the program and the basic objective is to bring to light the very fact that an established set of behavior which they are following or which they have adopted is not the one which is socially acceptable and it is not the one which is beneficial for them rather it is detrimental. It is harmful and therefore they have an alternative. They offer another set of behavior which if they adopt they will certainly derive some good benefits out of that and we know the kind of benefits I don't really want to go that far back into the concepts that I really have to talk about the fundamentals all over again but all I'm saying is that it is the duty of the marketing person to convince the audience of the existence of the alternative which is an offering as part of the program and it is an offering as a good alternative for the established behavior which is kind of a negative behavior. For example, your audience is into very heavy smoking or drinking or taking drugs or they are not paying attention to family planning so on and so forth. You need to talk about that alternative very convincingly with the audience that the alternative that you have is a better set of behavior which is going to yield so many different benefits and prepare them to graduate to the next stage which is all about contemplation stage and as the name suggests and we already know that contemplation stage is the one where people start considering very seriously the offering that you have made as a good alternative to the audience and it is the job of the marketing people to here again play a very prominent role in convincing the audience that the alternative carries benefits that far exceed the cost that they may have to pay when they change their behavior. So in other words it is a very formidable challenge for which they are going to prepare their audience into accepting the alternative which they made their audiences aware of in the very stage of the pre-contemplation. So in other words here you people are going to capitalize on the opportunity which you have created by offering that alternative in the first place and then cashing in on that opportunity by highlighting the benefits which you have to convince them are far greater than the costs that they may have to pay. So you see the role of the marketing people that they need to play as part of communications in order to make their audiences more and more aware of the process of behavior change and setting the ground for steering them toward the final stage where the ultimate behavior change takes place and that is the ultimate objective of the marketing department and you people. Therefore with that we get on to the next stage which is all about the preparation and action stage. Here again the marketing people have to play a very important role. A question that may be flashing into your mind. How do marketing people do all this great job with so much effectiveness and make their audiences graduate from one stage to another? Well the answer lies in not just the communication campaigns in terms of the tools that we talked about as part of the experiential level there are some other efforts on part of the marketing people that have to undertake and I'm going to talk about once I'm done with the factors responsible for making your campaigns very effective in the sense that they are really integrated with the three levels of the brand raising process. So let me be done with that first and then I'm going to talk about some additional communication tools that the marketing people have to themselves in order to make the kind of marketing effort very successful I'm talking about meaning taking their audience from one stage to another. Here the marketing people have to prepare their audiences into taking the requisite action. How do they do that? Well this takes us back to the concept of self-efficacy which we learnt as part of one of the components in which I talked about many members of the audiences being confident about their taking requisite actions but feeling at the last final stage a little shy due to any given set of reasons and marketing people jumping in and helping them with the behaviour change. So in other words what I'm saying is there are people who are educated who are fully appreciative of the moves that you have put together and the efforts that you have undertaken in order to have them take the requisite action but then you see they are waiting for people like you to come and talk about this program or this particular step they should take. So in other words they still need the support of someone who can give the whole thing the final push and this is where your role as a marketing expert comes in. This role can be played by way of telling them some inspiring real life stories which they have not heard before and which can convince them that other people have taken similar actions and have felt better of and by the same token you can talk about the motivating factors which have been responsible for people taking action toward the betterment of society. You can talk about the motivations in relation to donors for example and you can talk about different testimonials given to the organization or to your program or to the staff members of the organization by individuals or groups or agencies may those be local agencies or international agencies whatever testimonials stand in your favor you have to talk about those in order to convince your audiences that now is the time they have to take the final action so that they can complete this particular stage of graduation. One more important factor has to be considered here is and that is of theme the meaning what is going to be the theme of the communication campaign whether it is going to be funny or friendly sympathy arousing or it is going to be outright threatening it is going to be friendly if you're talking about improving the environment for example it could also be educative in a way because you want to develop a certain level of awareness on part of your audiences to keep the environment later free and if it is an anti-smoking campaign you can be a little threatening because it is very harmful and therefore you can talk about the number of deaths caused by lung cancer for which the prime culprit is smoking the number of deaths caused by this particular disease or ailment is something that has to be compared with any other cause for death and I'm sure it can bring about some interesting statistical comparisons which will be inviting for your audiences I can give you another example if you are talking about the AIDS it is kind of a disease which results in death no question about that and you can be very convincing and very threatening in your campaign saying that if you do not change your behavior you may die now I'm not saying that we use these very direct words because we still can play with the copy of the communication campaign but then the fact remains that we can be very threatening in terms of the theme it is the mood that really matters so we have to create a mood which automatically homes into the hearts and minds of your audiences who must think that they really are approaching fast toward the terminal day if they did not change their behavior let us now talk about the last stage which is the maintenance stage as the terminology suggests it is this stage where the marketing people maintains the changed behavior of the audiences because this is where the ultimate change takes place and the objective for marketing people is to maintain that change it is just like having loyal customers on the commercial side because once people have started using your product you like them to become repeat purchasers and once they buy your product or your brand again and again they have become brand loyal and exactly by the same token you have to make sure that your audience becomes loyal to your program and whatever role they are playing they've got to play that over and over again and that causes a lot of economies because that's something which is equivalent of a repeat order and that's something I think that I'll be talking about in relation to some other concept as well but the fact remains here is that we need to maintain behaviors because once they have been changed because if they go back to the old behavior we still have the challenge of going back to the earlier stage or earlier stages and start working on those people all over again and we know from research that there are people who go back to their original behaviors but the objective of this stage is to maintain the behavior that already has been changed and here again we can talk about certain motivating stories in order to keep their motivations at a very high level so that they never think in terms of the days which are behind them with this I would say that the factor of communication in terms of having different communications for different audiences is over and we now move to the second factor which is extremely important in order to keep our campaigns because we are very well integrated into the strategic process this takes us to the third factor which is budgeting and the budgeting plays a very important role in terms of pre-planning all the moves in terms of our communication campaigns the factors that many organizations would like to go for huge communication campaigns in order to be very visible and in order to have a widespread outreach but then you see the factor of financial constraints and other associated constraints within the organization that come into play and keep organizations from executing their wishful thinking if I can say that and therefore it is extremely important for the organizations to tie all their plans with limited budgeting it is a good move because it really prevents organizations from running into embarrassing situation later on while they are in the process of executing the program and all of a sudden they realize they have to cut certain parts of the program or they have to cut certain parts of the communication process itself and they are kind of hamstrung to go further ahead with the communication campaigning this is an extremely detrimental situation which outweighs all the positive impact that has been created so far and therefore should be avoided under any given circumstances meaning thereby that we have to resort to budgeting and budgeting exercise basically is like I said earlier tying your plans with the amount of rupees that you have at your disposal if you think you are short of money take it up to see in the board meeting and this is something I talked about earlier and you solicit support not just from the board of directors but also from your donors and all stakeholders convincing them of the effectiveness of the communication campaign that you envisage launching and making use of in terms of achieving your goals and the chances are that you will be in a position to convince all the stakeholders if not all of them, many of them or if not many of them, soft them and will end up generating more revenues as part of the advertising or communications budget having this budget is going to be a safety valve against any embarrassment that may be in store for you if you did not prepare your budget in the first place and therefore you have to be very careful and very considerate of this particular factor the fourth factor is about the competition meaning what the competition is doing and this of course takes us back to the concept of market intelligence as well but I am going to talk about that as part of another learning here I think what is important is that we must know what others are doing and we have to surf their websites we have to subscribe to their newsletter we have to be very analytical about the content rather the quality of content that they have and we have got to pinpoint all the dimensions that we think are responsible for their position of strength in the marketplace and at the same time we also should be critical of all those moves that have failed on their part and have reflected their position of weakness and we as a matter of fact can capitalize on that having known that something our competitors or our peers started or initiated it did not work and therefore we should keep it at a distance and do something which offers us an assurance against a more effective communication campaign so in doing so we also have to be analytical of the factor of interactivity as to how they interact with the different audiences and like I said if you have subscribed to their newsletter and if you go to one of their blogs you interact with them and you know what they are all about and the fact is they can do the same with you and this tells us you see the power of the online tools and at the same time the need for us to be alert all the time and need for us to be very quick all the time in terms of being very updated with all the stories and with all those matters and substances that can be very convincing for different audiences so the four factors that I have talked about in the context of integrating communication campaigns into the strategic process are we are dealing with different audiences and therefore we need to have different communication campaigns and we have talked about to see these communication campaigns in terms of the differential with regard to different stages of the behavior change model so don't forget that we are communicating with them at a time when they are changing their behavior they have started changing their behavior some of them already have changed the stage where they were earlier and now happen to be at a different stage therefore you see that we have to go along those stages with them and as a matter of fact facilitate them in graduating from one stage to another and that is where the test lies and that really is a very formidable challenge for marketing people but then the factor is that is something only they can do and none else on the behalf will do that job and then I talked about the factor of budgeting which is very important because it keeps us very realistic and we can come up with the optimal level of campaigning we can be constrained and restrained to begin with instead of jumping into the water before putting our toes in the first place that is what I am saying now the last factor that I talked about was about competition we learn a lot from competition and given the online tools I think it is no longer the case which used to be more than 10 years ago when people really had hard time trying to find out what the competition was really doing they had to go to the marketplace physically to find out the different moves they had made and then carry out certain studies to find out to what extent they had been successful with the advent of the internet and all the tools that we have to choose from we can be more effective while sitting before our computers this is not to discount the importance of going to the marketplace in physical terms but this is support that we have to ourselves with this the component of integration of communications with the strategic process is over and I am going to talk of the next component this component is going to be about additional tools of communication the reason I call them additional tools because they have not been part of the experiential level to which we all have been exposed and therefore they have their own role to play and they basically are the personal communication and relationship marketing and then internal marketing the fact of the matter is that you people might have thought already how come a combination of different tools of the experiential level have so much potency that they already can make communication campaigns extremely optimal and effective the answer lies in sharing with you that there are some additional tools and with the addition of these tools the communication campaigns can really be made very effective and as a matter of fact in the context of non-profits the tools which I am going to talk about now are really the ones without which the experiential level may not be complete and therefore let me talk about the personal communication to begin with well the personal communicators could have happened to be a very very important and important tool of communications with any organization organizations have the different kind of people there are organizations that have the people who are very good at communications they are highly energetic and competent people which of course is not to say that others are not good at communications are not really competent but the fact here is that some organizations are endowed with this kind of human resource that is they are good for the taking and they do this job on behalf of the organization to connect with their stakeholders and they can personally engage them to a level which is much more effective than advertising this really is a statement that I have made and it is full of substance because whenever you talk with people on one-on-one basis there are so many different things which you can share and you can create a bonding between the organization and the stakeholder maybe the donor, the activist or the volunteer or lobbyist whoever he or she happens to be you can not only immediately connect but you really can engage with those people for organizations that are endowed with such human resource are lucky organizations and they generally happen to be those who are resourceful in so many different terms and are generally large organizations but then there are organizations that do not have for the kind of resource that is good at communication either they do not have the resource or even if they have the resource is a shot off what they really require so on both counts they have a resource level which is inadequate in order to be fully equipped with an adequate level of resource they have to either hire more people or seek more volunteers who can do this job of the personal communications back to personal communications organizations need to have for the people who really are energetic very self-confident and full of vigor and zeal to take on formidable challenges of refusals and resistance whenever and wherever they go talk with different people it never is a level ground it is never a piece of cake therefore the taking they have to go through a lot of hardship in order to convince people in the first place to have them listen to them meaning to the marketing people or to the communicators before they can connect with them and engage them so it really is a formidable challenge and therefore these people need to have some very special skills before I start talking about the skills let me share this thing with you once again that the personal communicators could also have to be mindful of the fact that they must go through the behavior change model the same good old behavior change model which I keep talking about because they have to talk those people into making the graduation from one stage to another and while they do that do not take the loose sight of the fact that they talk with not just the clients meaning people who are part of the program they also talk with the donors with lobbyists and with the volunteers they talk with donors with a very obvious objective they want to raise donations they talk with lobbyists because they want to have support on their side for different people and agencies to lobby on their behalf meaning on behalf of the organization and they need to communicate with the volunteers because they want to recruit them into becoming very useful workers for the cause and this is where the fact that some of them need to become good communicators comes in and those volunteers who happen to be good at communication and happen to be good at comprehension and have good personalities they could become very good communicators on behalf of the organization but the fact remains that different audiences have to be contacted personal communicators have to go to all of them I am not saying they have to go to each and every member of the organization they basically have to go to those who are influencers but once they have talked with the key influencers the ripple down effect will automatically make job they have at their hand easy and effective another factor that they have to keep in mind and other organizations have to keep in mind that these people meaning personal communicators have to communicate with all the audiences that I just enumerated in terms of identifying prospects developing relationships cultivating relationships and developing through communications and personal relationship a sense of obligation on part of the audiences so that they start feeling kind of committed to the cause so that they can take the decision which they have to take to graduate from one stage to the other meaning to have them graduate to a higher level and therefore these people need to have very special skills but before I start talking about the skills let us now summarize with the help of the talking I have done as to what really are the objectives of the personal communicators and don't forget to keep in mind alongside this intake that they are working side by side with other communication tools that we have kicked off as part of the communication campaign so this brings us back to the point what really are the objectives which personal communicators have to achieve first of all they have to do prospecting meaning they have to identify prospects who would be willing to donate and once they have done that they set the process on and what happens next is something I would leave to your imagination of course they have to keep visiting those people and generate more funds for the program the next objective they have at hand is that of persuading once they are in touch with them they persuade them over and over again into making them committed to the cause and this is something that I mentioned earlier they should have the ability to create a sense of obligation on part of the audience to become committed to the cause and it is this commitment which is going to take the audiences from one stage to the other so this is another objective they have at hand the third objective these personal communicators could have to achieve is that of servicing now you might think what kind of service these people are going to provide to their audiences well it could be a lot of information technical information that they may have to share with their audiences because when they are going through different programs or when they are talking with other stakeholders some programs can entail a very in depth kind of the medical initiative and treatment therefore they may have to talk about certain things with the help of their colleagues who happen to be doctors and that is something which they have to share with the audience and that is a service which they render this is just one example that I have cited they may have to give a lot of information on the family planning program or similarly on any other program that requires a lot of professional expertise to impart and then share with all those who are part of the program the fourth objective is that of gathering market intelligence now very interestingly this takes us back to the concept of market intelligence as part of marketing information systems you will recall the two people as marketing support to the organization are responsible to gather such information and nothing could provide a better opportunity than being with your audiences talking about your programs and doing your can meshing for the cause and also in the process of generating information not only about your own programs but also about your competitors or your peers because you also will recall the fact that many stakeholders and audiences happen to be common to different causes people donate to different causes people can work for more than one cause and therefore you may be talking with those key personalities who are connected with the more than one cause so here it is a great opportunity to ask them different questions in relation to so many different dimensions of the total non-profit perspective there is no limitation on asking the kind of question as long as you ask the very relevant and professional question to which you think the answer would lead you a long way in making your strategies more effective the next question also happens to be the very important and interesting and the fact is it takes us to the next level and that is what is it that we should consider before we start either hiring personal communicators or seeking the volunteers to do this particular job what really are the parameters on the basis of which we make the decision here are the people who would do this job effectively there are a few important questions that we have to answer and let me enumerate those questions one by one in the first place you have to be clear about the qualification of the personal communicator and how is that related to the cause for which you think that person should be working if there is a match between the two well I think you should go ahead with hiring or taking that person on board another thing that you have to consider is the amount of paperwork which these people have to do because going and seeing different stakeholders who we believe are professionals in their own right because you go for professionals as your directors as your other stakeholders because you always need their support so you have to go to them very well prepared so the people who need to do a lot of paperwork in relation to a certain cause also becomes the basis of whether or not they can become good communicators and then you see that we have the questions like how much travelling is involved and then the question of to what extent these people can be on their own areas away from the decision making centre do they really need immediate supervisory support or they can make certain strategic decisions in terms of execution on their own and I would say there are the tactical decisions and not strategic decisions because whatever they do in the marketplace is a reflection of the strategy and is a translation that you already have put together as a strategy or a set of strategies and then transferred that into different tactics so as long as these people are good at making independent decisions in terms of different tactics there could be good people another thing we have to keep in mind while selecting the personal communicators do they have the capacity to take the refusals and all kinds of obstacles that may come in their way if the answer is yes they can do that then you should go ahead and recruit them as personal communicators organizations have experienced that that population that have been subject to their programs could also be very good communicators for example those people who have been part of the rehabilitation program of drug addicts can be very good communicators with those who are druggies because they fully understand the kind of situation those druggies are passing through and they also have a very good understanding of what really motivates them to do it and then quit it so with that understanding of the motivations these people who have been subject to your programs can also be very good communicators thanks