Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is our colleague Ryan Bourne. He occupies the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Ryan. Good to be with you. Hi. You've written that the focus on income and services has blinded the debate about poverty from the truth that there are lots and lots of state, local and federal policies that increase the price of goods and services the poor spend a disproportionate amount on. What do you mean by that? Well, I think conservatives, liberals, libertarians, progressives, we all have different theses and ideas for what the causes of poverty are and the causes of certain households suffering from being very, very low income. But in terms of how we go about alleviating poverty, I think it's fair to say that there's been a consensus over many, many decades that the most effective way that the government can help alleviate poverty is through what I'd call an income based approach. Now that either means transferring resources to poorer people directly through means tested welfare, kind of indirectly through benefits in kind, which then reduce the amount that poor households have to spend on certain services like healthcare, or indeed through mandates and regulations such as minimum wage regulation controls on the prices of certain goods and services, rent control, for example. Now what I'm trying to get across in this paper really is that in part the reason why governments are having to or see the need to engage in such policies is to compensate for some of their existing mistakes elsewhere. So there's a lot of things that governments do that raise the costs of what I describe as essential goods, basic necessities that every household in the country needs, but which the poor spend disproportionately on. If you look at the bottom 20% of the population, about 60% of their total spending goes towards shelter, food, transport and clothing and footwear alone. In each of those areas governments undertake policies which drive up the cost of living. So I'm trying to turn the debate around in this paper and say rather than always reaching for new ways to try and compensate people or raise incomes of people, actually what really matters to people is their real incomes and how far the income that they do have goes in achieving a decent living standard by acquiring goods and services. And there are many, many things we can do moving things in a free market direction to reduce the cost of living through supply side reforms in all of these markets. When you say that the bottom 20% of the income distribution spends 60% of their income on that bucket. Sorry, 60% of their total spending. Their total spending is on that bucket. How does that compare to the other income quintiles? So for the average household, it's about 51%. So still a very, very significant chunk, but a bit lower. I think I'm right in saying that for the richest quintile, we talk about 47%. So these things are significant cost to people across the income distribution, but they're disproportionately borne by people in the lower fifth. And of course that excludes things such as utilities and healthcare and energy costs as well. By the time you include all of those things, you're looking at say 70 to 80%, but I kind of had to stop somewhere in my paper because I didn't have all the time in the world to write it. But this seems like you're more increasing the denominator in that percentage. If you have to live in Washington D.C., you have to pay a certain amount of rent. It's hard to go under 600 a month, let's say. And so if your denominator, your actual wages go up, then your proportion of it, if everyone's paying $1,000 for rent, if you're poor, that's a much more bigger chunk of your income than if you're richer. Or is it the case that the poor also have different buying habits? Because you mentioned apparel and weirdly footwear, which I thought was the most specific thing you put in there. Is there also a buying habit difference? Well, I was talking about spending here and not income, but you're right in that averages hide probably much more than they tell us. Obviously, if you're somebody who's living in Washington D.C. or New York, the amount that you spend on rent and probably the proportion that you spend on rent is going to be much higher than in many rural areas. If you've got children, now one of the things I haven't talked about but is included in the paper, if you've got children then obviously you're much more likely to be spending on childcare services than if you don't have children unless you're compensating somebody else for childcare services. So you're right in that sense. Now in some of the areas that I write about, you're also correct in saying that the poor have different spending habits. So if you look at clothing and footwear, for example, there are kind of two effects here. The poor tend to spend more as a proportion of their total spending on clothing and footwear than people higher up the income distribution. So anything that raises the price of clothing and footwear is regressive in that sense. But actually a lot of these, well, a lot of the protectionism that comes on clothing and footwear is doubly regressive in that the particular products to which higher tariff supply are more significant on low quality, low price goods than higher price goods. So to give you an example, an acrylic sweater has a tariff rate for countries that US doesn't have free trade deals with has a tariff rate eight times higher than the tariff on a cashmere sweater. So in all of these things, primarily I'm looking at areas in which the poor spend a disproportionate amount. But even if you drill, sometimes if you drill down within those categories, you find that some of these policies are doubly regressive. But these policies, the various regulations and tariffs and restrictions and whatever else, it's not like we're not doing them, well, tariffs may be your acceptance. We're not doing them to raise the cost of these goods. We're doing them for, we think that these services, childcare needs to be regulated to protect people from poor quality childcare, so on and so forth. So we've got these reasons which might be good reasons. And so then what's wrong with saying, okay, we acknowledge that we need these regulations for various reasons. They bring benefits. It would be worse if we didn't have them, but they're going to raise the cost for, they're going to raise the cost across the board, but that's going to hit the poor the hardest. So we're just going to subsidize the poor. We're going to give them cash or transfers or whatever else to kind of make up the difference. What's wrong with that? Well, there's certainly one way of looking at it and there are debates of evidently, which I go into in the paper on all of these areas and the wisdom or otherwise of the regulations to achieve different ends. I've tried to be very, very conservative in the way that I've judged what the price impact of these regulations are. I've also only tried to look at areas where I think there's a clear case that the regulation not only has regressive effects, but also adversely affects GDP. And where appropriate, I've tried to assess whether the regulation is effective in achieving its regulatory goal. So the main example that I've thought and written a lot about is childcare regulation. You're right in saying that in theory, some of these childcare regulations, staff child ratios, for example, are imposed because the idea is we want children to enjoy more interaction time with the staff and that will raise the quality of care. Actually, almost all of the literature in this area suggests it doesn't, on any objective measure, improve the quality of childcare, but the overwhelming effect it does have is to drive up the cost of care. And that actually, because of the price effects, because that raises childcare prices and that affects the poor disproportionately, that means poorer households are more likely rather than using formal centres to put their kids into home daycare or to stay at home and look after kids themselves. Now, in those areas, we have no idea what the quality looks like because it's measured less objective, there's less availability of objective measures there. So I think this is a key point that's often missed in this debate is that even if in certain circumstances some of these regulations could raise the quality or achieve another goal in a particular market, these price effects lead people to substitute away into often more informal markets or lower quality housing or other settings which can have an adverse impact on the population as a whole. The main form of childcare regulation, the ratio thing, are there other kind of regulations for childcare services? I mean, I'm sure there's, you know, your standard kind of public health regulations, but are there like licensing rules or anything like that? Yeah, there are and that varies state by state. So the two overwhelming or the two key regulations I'd say are staff child ratios and kind of occupational licensing requirements on childcare is usually around what type of education the carer has to have, whether they have to have a degree in child development, whether they have to have a high school diploma and that this varies dramatically across states. And that's one of the reasons why we're able to obtain such good evidence in areas like this because there's so much variation. Economists have been able to run quite effective regression analysis that control for a whole host of other factors like the prosperity of the state and whatever and try to identify the effects of these specific regulations on prices or the availability of care and the overwhelming evidence particularly on staff child ratios where there doesn't appear to be any quality benefit to them is that these things not only reduce the availability of care and drive up price accordingly because of that contraction in supply, but that effect overwhelmingly occurs in lower income areas. Actually in higher income areas, you often get a greater provision of care because a lot of richer parents are kind of quality assured by the existence of the regulations say, well actually, if I know that my child's going to get a decent amount of interaction time, I'd perhaps be more willing to use formal childcare than otherwise would say, again, extraordinarily regressive effects because not only is there the price impact, but the availability of care seems to be restricted most in low income areas. When you say that the evidence shows that it restricts supply, that it raises prices, but it doesn't say with the staff ratios doesn't increase quality. How are you measuring quality? Well, there's a whole bunch of different studies that measure quality in different ways. Some measure quality according to fulfilling certain requirements that lead to almost like a kite mark kind of rubber stamp through some sort of objective measure through some of these non-governmental organizations and think tanks that assess things in that way. But there is a major question mark actually of what quality when it comes to childcare really means because quality is an extraordinarily subjective variable in many ways and some parents when they're putting their children into childcare might regard quality as just a kind of warm and loving environment for somewhere where their kids can be whilst they're at work. Now, almost all of the studies in these areas judge quality according to either some independently assessed kind of kite mark or some child development objectives. And one of the things that I've kind of complained about in this paper and in previous work for other organizations is precisely that the education less almost taking over this debate and defining what they want the ends of childcare to be which can be very, very different from what parents actually objectively want from the care for their children. Yeah, you bring up like the preferences of the wealthy and in DC you have this class of people who want to know what the magnet childcare center for Yale is, right? That's they're very concerned that all these educational attainment things are being realized by their childcare.  I'd like to do the teaching to my kids myself and that preference difference. It seems like the edukrats are forcing it on the poor who might have the same preferences or maybe they just want grandma to take care and teach them wisdom of old or something like that. Yeah, it's quite funny. Actually, I ran into a guy who used to used to be head of the Ofsted Inspection Board in the UK, which is responsible for undertaking inspections of childcare centers and actually schools in the UK as well. So this was completely integrated into the educational sector. And I said to him, well, look, from a standard libertarian perspective, you do not go round and assess individual parents and judge them according to all these different practices. They might want to though. So why do you insist that when parents outsource their decision for who they want to care for their kids that the childcareers have to go through all this? And he said he alluded to precisely that. He said, well, of course we don't have the resources to inspect every parent. Oh, I think there's a lot of people who would like to inspect parents. I just said my own experience when you hear people complain about the education system and they say the real problem is parents. I've had people argue that. So it might be a resources problem. Let's hope it continues to be a resources problem. Let's move on to zoning and housing prices, something that actually has been getting more attention. I think from both sides over the past few years, at least then it used to get, especially San Francisco and California, which has a particularly bad housing crisis. But overall, how does zoning affect housing prices? So there's a wide range of economic literature now that shows that restrictive zoning or zoning which attempts to circumscribe to a high extent what housing or what apartment blocks should look like. And the characteristics they should have has an inflating impact on housing costs. And that's especially true actually with urban growth boundaries when you try and artificially restrict the growth of the city, usually by suggesting that you can't have any development on the outskirts of cities because you don't want to allow urban sprawl or whatever. Now economists have looked at this in two different ways. One way that has been pioneered by Ed Glazer is really to compare house prices or apartment prices to the marginal cost of building. The idea being that in a competitive market price should roughly equate to marginal cost. So he's judged any differential between price and marginal cost of building as a kind of regulatory tax. And that's shown that in certain metropolitan markets, as you alluded to, that regulatory tax can be very, very high. In certain areas in California, it can be as much as 50%. But in some major cities, Boston, DC, we're talking about 20 to 22%. And even that research was undertaken sort of 15, 20 years ago now. And from everything that we've seen in most of those areas, the zoning burden or at least the binding nature of the zoning burden might have got worse in the interim period. But that's been buttressed by a whole another slew of research which has tried to control further factors and measure this econometrically. And overwhelmingly, all of those studies show as well that areas with tight zoning laws lead to higher prices. Now, why is that? Well, it's mainly because by imposing all of these conditions and regulations, you make the market less responsive to changes in demand. And we know that housing demand is going up. As people get richer, they demand more in the way of housing and bigger space. Lots of people want yards or gardens or whatever. We also know that with population changes, people are living in perhaps smaller households than they did before. So households are dividing up. And when you put all of those different factors in, if you're making the supply of housing more inelastic, less responsive to changes in price, but at the same time demand is going up and up and up, that means in certain very, very desirable markets prices are rising very quickly or have risen very quickly and are structurally high as a result of these policies. What arguments do the people who are in favor of these restrictive zoning things give for this?  But then you hear these stories about blocking anything and everything in terms of building in the area. And so the people who are blocking it, is it that they have no idea that the reason houses cost a million plus in Berkeley is because of restrictive zoning? Or do they just not care? Or do they think that there are benefits to this zoning that outweigh the fact that middle and low income people simply can't afford to live there? Well, clearly, new development has effects on other members of the community. Housing has externality effects. Now, whether that's in terms of changing the way that a neighborhood looks or increasing congestion in an area or anything else, there's going to be externality effects. So that's one thing. Now, you can try and get around that by trying to facilitate bargains between existing homeowners and new potential homeowners. So lots of polities around the world have tried to find ways that as development is going on, as the first houses are sold, you extract a certain amount in taxes, which is then used to compensate the rest of the community. So that's something. Now, the other impact, of course, is that an increase in the housing supply in any given area, Keterus Paribus, puts downward pressure on house prices, which is not good for people who are already homeowners in a particular area. And that's one reason why zoning laws are so pernicious for the poor, because the poor much more so than the rest of the population tend to rent. An increase in rental costs or increase in house prices and an increase in rental costs at the same time are unambiguously negative for people that rent. Whereas, you know, if you already own your own home, then lots of these zoning regulations are actually beneficial to you. Now, it may well not be the case in the long term. And if you're forward looking, thinking about future generations, thinking about the availability of your kids being able to live somewhere they want to live, you might have a different view. But whereas for renters, this is unambiguously bad, you know, the situation is more different, drone occupies of housing. And there are clear reasons why you wouldn't perhaps want new development or at least mass scale new development in the area that you live. So you're saying we should just subsidize homeownership too. Wasn't that recently proposed by Elizabeth Warren, I think, or of some sort. You mentioned kids, young people. When we talk about the poor, sometimes we're talking about people beginning in their careers too, 25-year-olds, not yet making a ton of money. And it seems that the housing costs in a place like San Francisco or New York City, if you wanted to move there and take advantage of the, as Ed Glazer says, the dynamics of a city to have better economic opportunity, to have better social opportunity. But you're just simply being priced out of living in New York City or San Francisco anymore. Does that have any measurable huge effects or measurable effects on people's ability to start a career in an urban environment if they simply can't afford to live there when they're 25 years old? Well, some researchers suggested that the overall impact on GDP is huge. So there was one study in particular, the author's name escapes me now. But there was one study that suggested that if you reduced the extent and kind of tightness of zoning regulation in just three cities, New York, San Jose and San Francisco to the average across the country, then you could increase GDP by 9%. Wow. Which is a huge impact. Now that's been contested, but let's say even on conservative estimates, it's half of that. That's still huge. That's still over a year's worth of economic growth. So we're talking about a monumentally big impact. Now, clearly, if you are young and you're trying to access those jobs for the first time and you want to move to a dynamic growing area and zoning makes it more difficult, then it's going to mean on the margin you're less likely to be able to move there. First of all, it may well mean that you decide that you want need to commute from some of the suburbs of that city, sometimes a bit further out and drive in. So you can, you know, there's a big opportunity cost in terms of the amount of time and money you spend on commuting in or traveling each day to work. And some people, because they're so determined to get decent jobs in these cities, end up living in extraordinarily cramped and undesirable conditions as well. Now, it's much more difficult for poor families, especially those with children to adjust downwards in that way in terms of the amount of space that they're willing to live in without very, very negative consequences. So I'd say that this problem is particularly acute for families with children who would find it less desirable to live in that sort of environment. Well, meaning urban residents have tried to address this problem of the poor not being able to live in their cities is through boosting the minimum wage that you just the poor aren't earning enough to live there. So just dictate by law that their employers have to pay them enough. A living wage it's called is, do we have, what's the evidence look like on that?  You just mandate by law that people make enough money to live and then they can do that, which would be wonderful. Well, first of all, there's, before we get onto the economics, there's a philosophical point here which I find really bizarre, which is that the living wage campaigns across this country. And indeed internationally seem to be saying that rather than compensate you for the actual work that you undertake during your working hours, an employer has a duty to compensate you for your external living circumstances, whether that be your rent, your food bills, how many children you have and all of these other things. And that's a profoundly dangerous idea which has been picked up actually by members of the political class, including Bernie Sanders, perhaps most famously. This idea that employers have a responsibility to pay you for all of your living circumstances. And if they don't, they are in some way being subsidized by the government because their employees are then in receipt of various welfare benefits. So let's park that philosophical issue for a second. On the economics, I think it is fair to say that despite some of the warnings that perhaps economists on the free market side have made over many, many years about the jobs impact and minimum wages, minimum wages set conservatively overall for labour markets do not appear to have major consequences in terms of their effects on jobs and hours. Now they certainly have differential impacts on different groups within that. Young and unskilled teenagers in particular seem to find it much more difficult to be able to find jobs or hours as a result of that. We see instances of companies replacing low-skilled tasks with machines and that one could imagine on the margin that's accelerated by higher minimum wages. But set conservatively, it does not appear as if minimum wages have a massive impact on jobs. Now that said, studies that have looked at much bigger minimum wage hikes or in the case of Seattle being the obvious example, there was a University of Washington study that looked at a two-stage hike in the minimum wage that was implemented there. Now the first, the first effect didn't, the first raise didn't appear to have an effect on the overall labour market. But the second raise to, I believe, to $11 did have a big impact and it both reduced the number of hours worked by low-paid employees and reduced the number of jobs available, so much that on average, people within that low-paid group defined as earning under $19 an hour were actually worse off on average as a result of the policy. Now the rest of the literature from my reading, and there's a lot of back and forth on that, seems to therefore suggest that if you raise the minimum wage too much or too high, then you do get the effects that classical liberal economists have long warned about. And secondly and importantly, certain studies in the past have found no impact of the minimum wage on jobs have tended to look at very specific industries, the restaurant industry as an example. Now the fascinating thing about the University of Washington study is that they looked at the overall impact on low-paid employees across the whole economy in Seattle, but also undertook an analysis just of the restaurant industry and they replicated the finding of other papers that in the restaurant industry they didn't appear to be a big impact or if any impact of the minimum wage on jobs, but more broadly they did, which suggests that many of these previous studies that have proxied for the impact of minimum wage just by looking at the restaurant sector may have been missing much bigger impacts on other industries. Why wouldn't you see the impact? I mean it just makes intuitive sense that if you increase the price of something, people will buy less of it. So why would the restaurant industry be able to absorb a minimum wage hike? Well, there's all sorts of ways that different companies can react. One thing that means it might not be picked up and it depends on the time frame of your data is that many companies don't adjust straight away, but it may well affect their hiring decisions next time they're deciding whether to expand or not. There are costs to laying people off as well. Don't forget there are costs in terms of lost experience and skills. You've taken time often to get people used to working in an environment. In some companies there are redundancy costs and all sorts of other things. So it's costly to lay people off and it's costly to retrain. One impact is that you might see future job growth effective rather than an increase in unemployment there and then. Some businesses no doubt do use it as an opportunity to invest in labour saving technologies or increase productivity in other ways and make the stock of jobs that they do have more highly productive than they otherwise have been. So they use the minimum wage hike as a catalyst for rethinking their business and not all businesses are operating on maximum efficiency straight away, so some businesses can deal with it in that way. And some businesses are able, depending on how responsive their demand is, to at least put some of the costs through to consumers in terms of higher prices. Do we have evidence of that? So these restaurant industry studies, do we see the restaurants raising prices? I personally see it all the time.  Yeah, there certainly is a lot of anecdotal and economic evidence. Usually the studies, well quite often the studies don't look at both things at once, but certainly there have been many studies that have looked at the impact on restaurants and fast food chains of increasing the minimum wage and have found that it was in part passed through in higher prices, yeah. And of course that can affect poorer people as well if that kind of price increases primarily in fast food outlets which poorer people are more likely to spend money in. It seems another philosophical point which is related to the one you said initially is that there's something very odd about believing that these people are not well off and then kind of commanding a business to be the ones who subsidize them as opposed to saying, you know, it's all of our jobs to get together and subsidize them directly which of course you mentioned earlier is not the best way of alleviating poverty but making the business bear this entire cost is kind of odd by itself. And you've seen some businesses like Amazon decide to voluntarily go up to $15 an hour I think making this claim to that kind of moral authority like we will take this on for our business, our workers, pay them the living wage, the fight for 15. What do you think about when Amazon or companies like that make this big pronouncement that they're going to raise their wages? Yeah, I got annoyed with a lot of people who messaged me or reporters who got in touch with me and said, what do you think of Amazon raising their minimum wage to $15 an hour? I said, well, it's not a minimum wage. Let's be absolutely clear. A minimum wage is a statutory mandate of what businesses should pay in terms of a minimum and hourly rate within the state or across the country or within the city or whatever. What Amazon are trying to do is juggle decisions which businesses are making every day which is how much to pay your employees taking into account what your long-term business plan is taking into account the political pressure being put on you and your portrayal of your brand in the media taking into consideration the bad press that you might get as a result of that and taking into account the long-term profitability of the company. Now, the interesting thing about the Amazon decision is that Amazon has been at the forefront for many years of lots of investment in lots of labor-saving technology. They've opened at least one that I know of convenience store that has I think one or doesn't have any in-house staff. So they're very well placed as a company in the longer term to make investments that lead to more productive jobs and a lesser need for lower skilled employees particularly as robotics and things within warehouses become more prevalent. Now, they accompanied their announcement of course by saying and as well as doing this what we want to do is start lobbying the federal government to raise the statutory minimum wage to $15 an hour as well and that will of course affect all businesses including their competitors many of which will not be as well placed to deal with those changes and will not have the potential to invest in some of the technologies that Amazon do. But I do think in part they will respond into political pressure particularly from Bernie Sanders and others and I do think that that is a crucial misguided point that Bernie was trying to kind of get across. He genuinely seems to believe that the existence of programs like food stamps and federal contributions to Medicaid and school meal vouchers and rental assistance and all of this other stuff represents a subsidy from the taxpayer to companies who are then able to pay less and I just think that's wrong from a philosophical perspective but also wrong economically and the reason it's wrong economically if you think of your basic supply and demand curves all of those forms of welfare that I've just outlined that you can receive in work they're conditional on your income level they're not conditional primarily on your work status and so if you're paying people some money through virtue of their income level irrespective of their work status then actually employers then have to offer higher wages in order to induce you to work because now you've got this welfare subsidy for not working so actually it has the opposite effect of what Bernie said which is it contracts the supply of labour and so other things equal should be driving up wages that the employers have to pay now it's certainly true that there are some in-work benefits the earned income tax credit being the most obvious example that do to a certain extent subsidise employers because the whole point of them is to subsidise people into work and the payment levels go up the payment levels are there when you move into work and then remain high over the first band of income where you're earning income and the result of that is to shift the labour supply out and reduce market wages now that helps the people who it gives jobs to it's not good for perhaps substitute workers who are childless and ineligible for the benefits but the whole point of that programme is to induce people into work because policy makers have felt that there are positive external effects from having more people in work so to kind of summarise that the areas that he thinks the federal government subsidises employers aren't subsidies to employers they're taxes on employers if anything I think he's fundamentally misguided about who should have responsibility for employees or individuals having an arbitrarily defined level of income which we consider socially acceptable and curiously the types of benefits where you do see a degree of subsidy he doesn't say anything about and I think that's probably for the reason that there is quite a lot of evidence they're effective at getting people into work Is there, so for Bernie one of the reasons that he would say focus on the employer versus kind of our community, society-wide obligation to help each other which would then cash out in terms of paying higher taxes for welfare transfers or whatever might be that he's thinking in this kind of Marxist all-employed labour is exploitation sense so if you're hiring someone you're just off the bat you're doing something wrong but how dare you but that view is not that common so what's the reason why people who are advocating like we need to boost the incomes of the poor so that they can afford houses in Seattle are pushing for a minimum wage increase as opposed to simply saying let's subsidize wages let's just do a straight up wage subsidy and so if you're making less than 15 then the taxpayers of Seattle will cut you a check or the difference well I think a lot of people are politically astute and recognize that transfer programs are actually particularly to working-age people not so much to older people transfer programs are incredibly unpopular for people who aren't recipients of transfer programs if you look around the world almost any fiscal consolidation deficit reduction program first and foremost goes after working-age welfare because actually it's incredibly popular to cut it indeed one of the reasons in my paper that I suggest that this kind of supply-side agenda and the cost of living should be something that appeals across both platforms or both political parties or political viewpoints is precisely that trying to boost people's incomes through redistribution is fraught with the timing consistency but views on welfare fluctuate much more than in many other policy areas you know you go from saying we desperately need to alleviate this pain and suffering through to welfare moochers and welfare queens and that kind of change can occur quite quickly whereas if you were to undertake quite robust supply-side reform in a range of different markets under an overall banner of trying to reduce the cost of living becomes much more difficult to undo all of those reforms and it's not something that can change dramatically now to go back to your first point so that's politically I think it's a recognition that certain transfer programs are unpopular there has been an economic narrative developing the last few years and whilst it's not quite the Marxist kind of viewpoint that you suggested that all employers kind of evil capitalists pretty much getting there which is the idea that all employers have a degree of what's described as kind of monopsony power employers tend to know better the opportunities available to any individual employee better than the employee themselves across the different industry their privy to more information on the broader labour market because they quite often hire a bunch of different people and they interview them and all this other kind of stuff and that gives them a degree of market power to suppress wages below what they should be in free open and competitive markets and that traditionally that story was related to the idea of kind of company towns in the 19th century and you know mining communities where you'd have one overwhelming employer I really do fail to see how that's even theoretically possible when we're talking about companies such as Amazon and you know employing relatively small numbers of people except for in a couple of different cities you know but small numbers across a wide range of different places and it certainly doesn't seem to me that there are many industries that you can conceive of where at a local level any individual employer has that sort of power to determine wages outside of ordinary supply and demand supply and demand functions You write about these various programs we've discussed some of them how much does it add up to these ones that affect the poor disproportionately how much does it add up to that maybe they're getting not fleeced by the government but at least forced to pay higher prices for various things Yeah so I look at five different areas which is housing, childcare food, transport clothing and footwear and then a broader occupational licensing impact of occupational licensing across the economy and that incorporates I believe nine different policy areas I was incredibly conservative as I kind of have already implied in looking at what the impact on people would be but the direct price impact on all of these things depending on where you live and how many kids you have I'd say that for a household in the poorest 20% of the income distribution the impact could be anywhere between $800 and $3,500 when you combine all of these things which is a huge amount when you consider that for the bottom 20% of the population their total spending is around $25,000 a year so it's pretty big chunk and that can be much higher if you're in certain California and cities for example or you have lots and lots of children those impacts could be greater still now what I miss out in those figures though and what's important is that all of these policy areas are areas where I can see that reform in the area in the direction I'm talking about will also enhance GDP and it will also lead to a more productive economy and so higher wages through that mechanism as well and that would achieve higher wages higher market wages without some of the unintended consequences that you get with higher minimum wages as we've already discussed or more in the way of redistribution so I think there's I think the impact is pretty large and I think there are good political reasons why this sort of agenda should be appealing not least because it appears that we have hit diminishing returns where it comes to how redistribution and minimum wages and things can improve the wellbeing of people at the bottom and not least because we're facing a huge federal deficit as well which should at some stage become a binding constraint against people suggesting more and more wacky policy proposals what about a federal jobs guarantee which is another hot proposal from people on the left so this is where you would simply if I can't find a job working for a private employer the government would essentially give me a job and pay me some minimum amount I mean that seems if I'm not in the labor market I'm not being productive I'm not contributing to the economy and we have lots I don't know how many people the federal government employs right now but it's quite a lot and so what's wrong with just increasing those payrolls enough to kind of get everybody on board well there's a lot wrong with it I mean one of the things I'm really struck by by this is that the labor market in the US is pretty healthy at the moment unemployment 3.7% some of the kind of African-American Hispanic employment rates are the lowest they've been for decades yet the radical nature of the suggestions for what we should be doing instead seem to be proliferating at a rate of not so not only have you got the jobs guarantee but of course the discussion about basic income and everything that comes with that negative income taxes and a whole range of other things now the suggestion for jobs guarantees that we've heard from Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker's talked about piloting and certain think tanks are pushing would in essence say that any private individual that wanted a job at $15 an hour plus health care benefits financed through the federal government could have a job so it's not just people who haven't been able to find a job it's not just people who are currently unemployed or people who are employed part-time but wish they were employed full-time or people that left the labor market after 2008 now can't find a job this will be open to anyone now they think that 16 million people would take this job up that would make the program if you looked at it on an individual basis the largest employer in the world by far by order of magnitude I think bigger than the next five biggest employers after that combined but even that only considers that the people that I talked about people currently unemployed or want to work longer or recently left the labor market take this up in reality if you're paying a job that as its basis is paying you over $30,000 a year and you know that that job is guaranteed and you don't face the kind of perhaps market disciplines or unpleasant working conditions that certain market jobs entail then I could foresee a situation where the number of people willing to take that up is dramatically higher than 16 million and the real question is here what would all of these people do Democrats have been pushing this idea I've talked about people engaging in infrastructure projects and caring jobs and environmental jobs and of course I imagine at least some things that people will undertake in these types of things would be worthy in some way but what this gets fundamentally wrong from an economic perspective why it would be so damaging to the economy is because it fundamentally gets what work is about the wrong way round the reason that work is inherently valuable is because people are engaging in the production of goods and services that other people are demanding that's where the value of the value added from work comes from that's the whole point of work jobs are a cost the production process but the reason that they're valuable is they add value in producing the goods and services that we all want this tries to flip it on its head and says jobs are inherently valuable and what we need is to create work for anybody who wants to work and it almost doesn't matter what they engage in now aside from anything else you can see when you view it in that way that through the prism of kind of economic welfare this cannot be anything other than very very damaging to the productivity levels of the economy now so there are big problems with it first problem is I think way more people would take this up than is suggested by some of these proposals and that would mean the cost would be astronomical you know you're talking about you're talking about anywhere between 2 and 5% of GDP an additional program which I believe is bigger than Medicaid just added to the federal budget straight away I think it would be damaging for the economy for that because it would be putting more resources towards things that are inherently less valuable for the reason that I've outlined and I think thirdly it would be prone to a hell of a lot of corruption and I don't mean just kind of the usual ostentatious corruption but actually political candidates and local areas which are kind of bidding for these federal workers engaging in projects that perhaps circumvent the political process in other ways so one example that I've given of this is that I have no doubt that if this kind of jobs guarantee was on the books democrats in many areas would use it to push for environmental projects but equally one could imagine republican candidates and particular areas bidding for workers on the basis of wanting people to say build a border wall so I think when you combine those three things the direct fiscal cost the economic cost and then the kind of corruption and perverse incentives I just think it's a dreadful idea I just is there provisions in there for like you can get fired because if I'm guaranteed a job can I just like not show up but because I'm guaranteed I'm still going to get paid or show up but just not do anything or if they can fire me can I then just kind of go home and log into the website again and say well I'm out of a job give me another one well that's actually a very very good question because it's something that I thought about when I was reading the paper by the Levy Institute they seem to suggest in there that whilst people would be judged on their output to a certain extent they would not be held to market disciplines which is actually one of the reasons why I suspect many more people would be willing to take these jobs up than perhaps their initial calculations suggest much easier yeah exactly and if you know that there's far less risk and far more economic security from working in one of these positions then I don't see why the number of people who wouldn't take it up would be much much higher when libertarians and conservatives some libertarians and conservatives talk about the poor sometimes they talk about in an insulting fashion that the poor deserve their lot and they don't deserve welfare or things like this but it seems like your vision is a little bit different that they've been held down by various things to live worse lives by government programs that this is something the way that libertarians should talk about poverty rather than attacking the poor and believe that the market order is just yeah I think that's right I think that look we could imagine a situation where there was no there were no redistributed programs and no minimum wage or whatever and we could all speculate as to as what the outcomes in that market economy would be it seems doubtful to me that we'd be in a situation where every single poor person was better off if there were none of these programs whatsoever but equally it seems likely to me that if none of these programs existed we'd see significantly more in way of civil society or charitable institutions undertaking a lot of the functions that governments have so we can kind of park that theoretical debate I think the useful thing about this type of agenda is it it offers something to everyone to liberals I can say you don't have to believe that all welfare programs have failed to think that they're actually undermined by all of these regressive regulations which drive up the basic cost of goods and services I mean the money that you transfer people isn't going as far in delivering high living standards as perhaps you would like but equally you can turn to conservatives and say well one of the reasons why we're seeing demands for high living wages and minimum wages and one of the reasons why we're seeing this these policy proposals jobs guarantees and Medicare for all and all of these other programs is precisely because people at the lower end are struggling in part under the burden of some of these regulations and some of the demand for new programs or demand for improved generosity of increasing programs comes as a result of the need to compensate people for these bad policies so I don't think you have to be conservative or progressive to think that this is an agenda that you could sign up to the basic point of trying to get across is that irrespective of your views on redistribution irrespective of what you think on the economics of a minimum wage there are clearly a bunch of things that governments do to drive up the cost of necessities and that has direct financial impacts on the poor means they spend more than they otherwise would need to to obtain the same goods and services but it also makes the economy far less efficient and reduces market wages at the same time thanks for listening free thoughts is produced by test terrible if you enjoy free thoughts please rate and review us on iTunes to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


This past month I had the opportunity to go to El Paso, Texas. It was the first time in my 14 years of living in the United States that I actually got to see first hand the real impact of this violent wall. Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall! Hearing the stories from organizers at the border really reinforced for me why climate and migration are connected issues. Drought fueled by climate change has had disastrous consequences for Central America. Farmers, for example, haven't been able to till their lands the way that they have used to. Drought has been impacting their ability to grow coffee and other crops that have been essential to their livelihoods. And therefore communities are feeling that there's no other choice but to leave their homes and to migrate to the United States. It's important that we know that the United Nations has estimated that by the year 2050 there will be over 200 million people who are migrating because of climate change related reasons. And already since 2008 over 26 million people every year are displaced because of extreme weather, drought, rising sea levels and a whole host of consequences because of climate change. This is a much bigger issue than just the current migrant caravan. We're looking at the impacts of the climate crisis on communities all around the world. We cannot claim to fight for climate justice if we turn away climate refugees once the storms are over and the droughts have ended. And they want to come into our country. Border agents throwing tear gas canisters. And it's not happening on my watch. It's not going to happen. Building the just world we need means that we must fight for policies that support people who are impacted by the climate crisis. We need for their human rights to be respected. We need for their ability to migrate and create new homes and lives to be supported. And we need to stand up as a climate movement for migrants and refugees.


The study revealed that the existing promotion criteria was unrealistic, inconsistent and biased, and lacked justified faculty evaluation. Furthermore, there was a general consensus among the participants that the criteria should be strengthened by incorporating research into the promotion process. Additionally, the participants suggested that the criteria should be standardized, and that a robust faculty promotion policy and guidelines should be introduced. This article was authored by Mohammad Riyaz Shabazz Janjua, Jamila Janjua, Shazia Mwazam and others.


NYC at 50. Many social media platforms have been floated with image memories from people who have successfully passed through the National Youth Service Corps program in commemoration of NYC at 50 years. I've made the different images from people, brought back, you know, some nostalgia. Many people shared their NYC experience. There are several key lessons to draw from these experiences. And if we're to make progressive headway with the NYC program, we must go back to the drawing board. The NYC program was created on the 22nd of May 1973 as an avenue for the reconciliation, reconstruction and rebuilding of the nation after the Civil War. It was established based on the decree number 24, which stated that the scheme was created with a view to the proper encouragement and development of common ties among the youths of Nigeria and, of course, the promotion of national unity. Some years ago, there had been a movement to scrap the NYC program, and it had more negative impact than the intended positive impact for which it was originally designed in 1973. It stems from the fact that many young people wasted 11 months of their lives sitting in a remote village where they were literally incapacitated. I mean, if we think about it deeply, we all know that the NYC program needs a lot of facelift. I personally do not hold the opinion that it should be scrapped, but we can do so much to revamping it into something much better. The program affords the government an opportunity to get real-time feedback from core members, but I doubt that the government has explored this opportunity. These feedbacks will become the necessary tool to rebuilding and restructuring the NYC program. The program also reveals how much broken our educational system is. There is very low premium on education. There's also the issue of national safety and national security, which has always been there. I strongly believe that the NYC program is a massive opportunity for cultural awareness and integration across board. People shouldn't have to influence their deployment and posting, but it's happening to you this very day. We won't pretend that we don't mostly know why people influence their deployment. There's a lot of untapped potential with the NYC program, and I am specially calling on the government, this very minute, to invite relevant key stakeholders to take another critical look into the program. So I'm going to start with Elijah. You served during the National Youth Service School program. What was the experience for you? I served in August 2017 to July 2018 in Anambara, specifically Onitsha. Aside from the nice food and rice, I don't joke with that. I am able to go and test my Ibu understanding. I understand Ibu language to a very good extent, and I can write to a very good extent. I may not be able to speak fluently, but it was an opportunity for me to test my Ibu. But the good thing is, during the period of my service, I met people from different parts of Nigeria that came there to serve, and of course we learned quite a lot of things, meeting people and the rest. But the service itself, the scheme itself, I think there are some overhauling. Let me give you an example. They want to emphasize skill acquisition because of trying to give us this idea that don't expect the government to provide a job for you. You can actually acquire skill and use this for your own economic advantage. But the process by which they recruit people to give you such kind of training, number one, the trainings are not sufficient enough, timing and maybe some people are not really in tune with what they are in for. So I think they can work with stakeholders to make it more meaningful. Over the years, NYC has, I wouldn't say it as I would leave its purpose. This period that we're having problem of, I don't want to use the word national disintegration, but you know what I'm saying. People say, well, this you have also tried, you don't marry this. I think NYC scheme should be fostered to help national integration, but it should be revamped because I remember a case where, you know, when you go to the, when we're in camp, you know, we learn quite some things, but if you check, these things they are teaching you, is it relevant to these markets? Now, those these, if you go and serve, it has served this purpose. They need teachers in villages and all those things. Yeah, it's okay. But right now, we, Nigeria should not be dragged to that level. Just being a rural teacher, that's all. You want to help the government in helping educate children in a rural environment. What would the government do for you? How can you be able to came to the trade first century business like era or skill, recommended skills? So I think the government should look into it. Fantastic. And it's a good thing that some other countries are copied, I wouldn't say copy in us, but emulating us. Countries like Niger Republic, I think that was the time they came, their president came to Nigeria, I think some years back, where they wanted to launch their own national service, even Ghana, Ghana doesn't seem, Ghana doesn't seem. Other countries like Israel, South Korea, their own is more military like. But I think whatever is what doing at all, is what doing well. Wow, awesome. So let me come back to Mr. Steven. So basically, right, it's been a long time you served. I don't know if you can remember your experience. No. You know, so I like to share your experience. And also, what do you think? I mean, it would also be good to glean on, you know, several decades since you served and then looking at what it is now, right? And how can we really tap into the full potential of this program? Okay, so I served in the last year of the 80s. And where? It adjusted me. Now, my experiences, well, I think I found in the ordinary Nigerian, a fellowship, a work on, I mean, on the, on the broad, on a broad look at it, I was welcomed by people I did not know. Once it was recognized that I was a youth copper, amenities were made, accommodation was made for me. Oh, it's a youth copper. Let's see what we can do. So on that level, just imagine, if people like us are not gone there, that's that that just seeing people from another culture, just seeing other people will not have happened. So on that level, there's much to see is progressive about youth core. But then we lose a lot.  And these days, it has become massive, even that essence of mixing up with cultures that you don't know, we miss it a lot. But you can't blame them now considering what happened in 2011 in Kaduna, where core members were killed following the re-election of, should I call it re-election? Okay, following the election, it was actually the re-election of Good Luck Donatan. Very young, very young. Security concerns. Very unfortunate. Also, on another level, I want to take it from the management level. Over the years, I think also what has not been looked at is how NYC itself has been managed. Has it been prudently managed economically and all those factors need to be looked at. When you embark on such huge projects, there should be time when you come back and reflect on what you are doing. I don't think those, that kind of reflection has gone on with NYC. NYC is an offshoot of something old. America used to have what they called the Peace Corps, but they use it as an instrument of diplomacy. They take a young person who has graduated and bring him to your country to teach another way. In Nigeria here, we receive such people. They manage it up to a point, to the point they realize, okay, is it, are we getting the bang for the buck? And they gradually deal with it. Like you said, other countries do military service. What other countries do with military services? They look at it and say, we are not constantly at war. Do we need a standing army of this proportion? Can we use young people coming up to be stopgap and to keep them in the army for as people who can be brought back? America does something like that. South Korea does something like that. And some other countries, Switzerland does something like that. Where the bulk of the army is the youth. They are trained. They are part of the army for a number of years till they are 40, but they go to work. If there's a war, they could be called back. In that way, you are managing your resources in terms of you are not wasting money, which is where I go back to the, what I was talking about, about fund management and all that. Because what they are doing, they are killing two birds with one stone. They are having an army at the same time. Working class people. Working class people and army. Working class people and army and all that. So those help their security along the line and all that. The issue of insecurity across the country is a big issue that we need us to reflect on the value of NYC. Nobody wants to train anybody and send him defenseless to a place where he's endangered. And come back in the box.  They can't defend themselves. If to say they were sent in to be like in a military outfit, they would defend themselves. They would have things to defend themselves. They were part of an army. But here, they are just sent there and they are left at anyone's mercy. But there was a time when we were sending it to propose the idea of military training for NYC and it was done then. Remember that that was done in Mac. They were sending it to Mac. Right from the beginning, right from the beginning it was raised. That's from the inception of NYC. It was raised. We were a military ruler at that time and the military did not like it. Although ironically, every NYC station is headed by military men. But they didn't like the idea. So we need to look at the insecurity in the land and ask ourselves whether in the light of the insecurity that is going on, we may not need to adjust because insecurity is not going to go away easily. You have a situation where Boko Haram, ISIS and all that are growing. Above us, you have all kinds of things going on in Mali, Chad and all that. So like I said, you don't have big projects like this without sitting back after some time and reflecting. Come back, sit down and reflect on what you are doing. What are the challenges? What is the future? What is the forward way forward? I don't see, at 50, you should expect, I don't know whether there is such a colloquium of them coming back to seriously talk about what's the future of NYC, giving all the challenges for the next 50 years. Are we going to move forward towards the paramilitary something or is it giving us bang for the buck or is it not? And with these redeployments, what's going on? We need to sit down and think of it, reflect for the future, plan for the future. Other nations, which progress, this is what they do. There's no perfect anything. Every time you come and you find tune and you think about it, but you must always do it honestly for your own progress. Fantastic. All right. So I believe we can do great things within these 12 months. We only need to intentionally create the enabling environment to make it happen. Steven Aguirre is next after the break. Please stay with us.


Hello to all my conscious writing friends out there my name is Ian and on this channel I show writers how to transform the world with their work but today I am showing you guys a very important aspect of being able to do that and that is rewriting myths, fairy tales and old stories. So writers don't think about this very often but they steal all the time because if you've been a part of modern culture you subconsciously have been embedded with all the ideas within even the people you hate, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowulf all that is within us and we use a lot of those ideas just intuitively because they work. So today this video is for two different people because beginning writers love to rewrite old stories and old myths. They love to bring in gods and goddesses from Greece or exploring different cultures and older writers maybe have an affinity or experienced writers sometimes have an affinity with a certain mythological figure for instance like Orpheus or a certain historical event that they maybe want to remix or fairy tale they've loved since they were young. So when you are going to start crafting these stories though you have to realize that objections are going to come up that if you remix some a great old story the first thing that most readers are going to have is objections when they are reading it because they loved the first story and that's why they're reading your story now. So first of all you have to make the characters the myth the story a lot more interesting because a lot of people think that just adding those things will make the story more interesting that if you just add a crazy historical remix or make Orpheus a Mexican rapper in 2030 that suddenly that's going to make the story interesting. Nope sorry you still have to use variable sentence structure, contrast, characterization, have a nice plot, do all the same do all the typical things that great writing has and with all of these objections you have to show and not tell. Once again beginner writers or writers sometimes will try to breeze through all these objections to this new world. You've created this new world and of course the reader is going to have some objections because they're so familiar with that world. So the way that you can end the in pass right break through that kind of awkward period is just let characters wonder the same thing. Give the reader it's almost like direct marketing that you are putting the objections into the character's mind so that the reader can have a more smooth and relaxed experience so a lot of the big objections like for instance if we wanted to write an old story about what if Napoleon took over all of Europe well we would have to have some historical context to that if we were remixing that we would need to for instance maybe wonder about Napoleon's successor or the fate of the United States all these you know those are just random things but you guys get what I mean that there's always going to be objections and you need to get those out of the way through the characters at the start to ensure more success for instance in the new remix book not that new Cersei the author whose name I can't remember adds so many details to fill us into the life of Cersei and who she was and what she feels and what she's doing the backstory all these different things so by the time the plot actually kind of got going and all the deep stuff happened we already felt comfortable with her I already felt comfortable with that world and what was happening even if there were all these familiar faces and ideas around so another thing you can do is change the point of view that you that the story is being told from from the original and you know what's really funny I just realize this is that rewriting old myths and stories are like fanfiction at some level but fanfiction kind of sucks because the the stories that were being told in the first place most of the time suck too like harry potter fanfiction I know there's I love harry potter but in terms of can harry potter transform the world no it already tried harry potter was read by tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people and look out look at the world today did that really do the intellectual work or lead us to the door to do that work no and she had what seven books do that thousands of pages and I know that's not what writing is supposed to do but it can do that and it has done that in the past so if we're looking at a work that we're taking a myth something that's in the canon something that has influenced us for hundreds of years one of the best ways to remix it is just hell it from a different point of view it could be in the same time period right it could be we're talking about nero the roman dictator we could have nero have an old best friend who's watched this watch this whole collapse and he's trying to help him and that's just a simple way and you can also if it pretend it's a modern remix pretend we have like we were talking about like the mex Mexican rapper orpheus well you could have a different point of view on the whole situation once again from the outside or have a very a very third person omnipotent point of view where a third person close instead of maybe the very visceral first person point of view you would expect from a story like that the second thing you can do is change something completely about the story so if we are rewriting an old fairy tale right and let's say it took place in England or in Scandinavia well how about in Chile or South South Africa Australia you know change the whole location make it a desert tale that's a very easy way to make you know and if you're a beginning writer and you're struggling with things to write that's a really easy just novel throwaway novel that you can do you could take the story of iron john add some weird surreal elements and make it in the desert the next thing you can do and this kind of has a the field that Dickinson did if anyone's ever seen the show Dickinson about Emily Dickinson on apple tv you guys know what i'm talking about because they speak and they say words like dope and fire and they have you know asap rocky music in there and it's not like a typical period piece they modernize it a lot Margaret Atwood is really good at this and this brings life to the story so easily that if you just add some modernization to it once again like we talked that's what i did with the orpheus story i could write a different perspective of orpheus i could write from the perspective of one of orpheus's friends or a lover an earlier lover there's you know all these different things that we could write from but it would instantly be more interesting if i change the point of view put it in present day and then you have to make it unique you have to make it yours you have to as Neil Gaiman would say you have to make it your own and by doing this it adds flair to it it becomes a co-creative experience because you have all this experience you have all this knowledge and you get to add to that for instance to the orpheus story you could add all your opinions of art and criticism and the criticism and ideals of our society and of music to that story and that is so cool and that is such a good way once again if you are out of creative fire you don't need to write your own story it's okay to rewrite an old story if you add the flair if you change the some points of views and modernize it a little bit and add you know change the setting change some characters genders you know um you know there's so many different things that you can do to a story if you're in writer's block this could be with a short story a poem a novel a piece of music a piece of art just take from the past and just make it better no one's going to copyright infringe you and look at all historical fiction is such a potent field how could you ever not be inspired if you're looking at all this material that's already right there for the taking and the way you start to get in touch with these things is through journaling it's through understanding yourself through more reading you can find these ideas and these things by understanding your own interests and understanding your own self because once again we you shouldn't be looking for the next big hit you should be looking at something that you're motivated to write because if you write it and you do it well maybe it won't be the best right maybe well maybe it won't be like the most marketable thing what if you write a weird story a story about a gay cupid in 1930s Louisiana you know maybe that's not going to be the next New York Times bestseller but by finishing a project to be highly motivated to make it really good even if it gets picked up and sells 2000 copies you'll have a lot more experience for a more serious story in the future maybe one that you actually write to sell a little bit more and all that experience you know you want to ride motivation waves as a writer whenever you can because you might be able to finish a book in under a year and let's say i'm 28 right now which i am i'm 28 that means if i write a book a year i could have 60 books out more books out before i die which is insane 60 books out but i have to find those motivation waves or i might be taking a lot longer and you might need to anyway but it might take a lot longer so these are some things to think about as you were thinking about rewriting an old myth fairy tale or story and let me know how it's going let me know maybe in the future if you're inspired to do this let me know how it went send me a link and check out this video right here on david lynch's favorite books if we're talking about inspiring artists