In 2005, Professor Bostaff was awarded both the Lawrence A. Fertig Prize and the Prague Conference on Political Economy Friedrich von Wieser Prize for Excellence in Economic Education. He's also won awards from the University of Dallas, including the Edmund R. Hager Presidential Awards, which he received three times. He's on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and is currently working on a new book, tentatively called the Early Austrian School, a Critical Comparison of Manger, Wieser, and Bomber. So please join me in welcoming Professor Sam Bostaff. I'm now a little hesitant about this because so far today, three different scholars whom I respect, two of whom I've known for about, well, I've known Doug Rasmussen for forty years at least, and Jeff Herberner, gosh, I'm not sure, twenty maybe, Doug this morning talked about the action axiom, which I will also mention, and Jeff Herberner talked about time reference. Then I find the Lawrence Fertig Prize, I routed to Christopher Hansen, who talked about Minger and Mises on Money, which is another topic I'm going to address, and unfortunately I didn't look at that issue, so I haven't read his article, and consequently I'm a little concerned that I might not make different points, but I hope so, we'll see. Well it is a great honor to deliver this year's Mises Memorial Lecture, and I thank the Ludwig von Mises Institute for inviting me to do so. I consider Ludwig von Mises to have been the premier economist of the twentieth century as was Carl Minger of the nineteenth. I also consider Mises to be Minger's intellectual heir. I will argue that Mises not only extended Minger's work, he greatly improved it, improved upon it. I have a little acid reflex from lunch, so if I cough occasionally, please don't think there's anything wrong with me, especially during this period of time, and I've had my vaccinations for some time. As this is a lecture rather than a paper, I intend to present a looser, more opinionated and celebrational oration than I would if this were a paper session, and I hope you can endure this approach. It's fitting to deliver the Mises Lecture here in Auburn at the Ludwig von Mises Institute because this institute nurtures cutting-edge research and new scholarship in the Austrian school tradition, and it is very gracious of Don Prince to sponsor his namesake annual lecture. Thank you so much, Don. There are many old friends and colleagues here today. I just turned seventy-nine this month, but I recall vividly my first participation with young colleagues like Joe Salerno in the Israel Kursner-led Mises seminar at NYU in the late 1970s. It was a stimulus to my research that has never died, although I haven't written much in the past two years. Instead, I've been reading the books that I accumulated but never read, like Jerome Tuchel's Radical Libertarianism, first published in 1970 and sitting on my shelf for fifty years. His contrast between conservatives and libertarians reminded me of an event at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society a decade or so ago. That society includes both conservatives and libertarians, among its members, and they're all united by the belief that honest discussion and argument can deepen the intellectual foundations of a free and ordered society. At one point in the meeting, Midge Dector stood up and announced that she viewed the United States as rightfully the world's policeman, and asked everyone who agreed with her to please stand up. Half the people in the room stood up, then she asked for those who disagreed to please stand up. Half the people in the room stood up, including my deeply conservative colleague, Melvin Bradford, alongside me. So there are some things conservatives and libertarians can agree upon and some they cannot. We're a mixed group of political and research orientations in this room today, but one subject that we no doubt all agree upon is the importance of the Austrian school tradition for the further development of economic theory, and I use that term narrowly. That tradition starts with Karl Minger's 1871 Principles of Economics, and by the way for convenience, I will state the titles of the words to cite in their English translation. In that book, Minger's primary focus is on the knowledge and subjective evaluations of individual economizers that drive all economizing activity in a market economy. And all the argument is set in a real-time causal genetic context. Causal connections are argued to be the focus of understanding the results of the actions of individual economizers. This was a methodological break with most of past economic theorizing. Strangely, his two most important mentees, Frifing von Wieser and Orgen von Baumdahlwerk, did not continue this methodologically individualistic emphasis. Wieser's first paper, quote, on the relationship of cost to value, end of quote, delivered to Karl Knie's seminar in Heidelberg in 1876, does introduce the concept of opportunity cost. However, Wieser then uses it, quote, in his words, to demonstrate the influence which the use of economic goods of a higher order to produce goods of a lower order has on the value of the latter, end of quote. He goes on to argue that the lower the opportunity cost of higher order goods, the lower can be the value of any unit of any specific first order good they are used to produce. This leads him into a Volrazian demonstration of a system of mutually determining and determined values, and thus a non-mathematical presentation of a timeless general equilibrium. von Baumdahlwerk chose to center his research efforts on production theory, which led to his focus on the assumed productivity of real capital, and all the errors of that approach which Ludwig von Mises identifies in human action. The foundation of Karl Minger's scholarship was his expressed belief that the purpose of science is to investigate reality, to attain a theoretical and a historical understanding of the phenomena investigated, and to systematize results for use in the practical or applied sciences. As a social science, Minger listed five divisions of this investigatory program, economic morphology, economic theory, economic statistics, economic history, and practical or applied economics. He grouped economic statistics and economic history together as historical studies. As Murray Rothbard notes in his book, Ludwig von Mises Scholar Creator Hero, published by this institute in 1988, Mises first read Minger's principles in 1903, I think it was in December of that year. My colleague and friend Guido Holzmann points out in his masterful Mises biography, also published by this institute, that doing so changed Mises' whole direction in his study of the market economy. It made an economist of him. Like Minger, Mises focused his attention on the individual economizer as the directing force of the market. But unlike Minger, he did not see the economizer as driven by identifying the relationship between his or her needs, whether real or imagined. The pages are sticking together. Whether real or imaginary and the means to satisfy them. Minger had focused on need satisfaction, which needs he claimed arise from drives embedded in our nature. For he said to satisfy our needs is to live and prosper. Instead, Mises saw the purposefulness of human action as the more important focus and that the particular purposes are really not relevant to the question of how to act to achieve them. It is not the ends chosen, but the principles of purposeful action to attain them that matter. As he says early in human action, page 21 actually, the only standard which applies is whether or not the means chosen are fit for the attainment of the ends aimed at. As Ludwig Lachmann remarked over 40 years ago, and I quote him, it is a long way from Minger's theory of wants to Mises' doctrine of ends and means. Both Minger and Mises recognized that physical science laws and economic laws differ in nature, but both are compelling context within which people act. They are both independent of human will. Minger referred to economic laws as either empirical laws obtained by careful observation or what he called exact laws obtained by conceptualization. Of the latter, he argued that there is only one true economic way to attain any end. Mises' way of making the same point is to argue that people can ignore economic laws, but doing so frustrates the achievement of end sought. So obviously, he believed that those laws apply to the world in which we live. And yet, Mises argued that economic laws are obtained by a priori reasoning. Jeff Harbiner discussed Murray Rothbard's interpretation of this this morning. There's a long controversy concerning what Mises meant by a priori reasoning. Because he argued that this was a necessity given by the structure of the human mind. In the Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, the book, he specifically says on page 15 that quote, the logical structure of the human mind and the a priori categories are the result of natural selection during the evolution of Homo sapiens, end of quote. His reference to mental categories caused some, including Murray Rothbard, to argue that Mises was inspired by Immanuel Kant. I frankly don't know. I'm not a philosopher. Don't know much about Kant. But as an Aristotelian in orientation, I accept the idea that the human mind has a logical structure. There are three basic epistemological laws of thought that are exemplified in all thinking. These are known as the law of identity, the law of contradiction, and the law of excluded middle. A thing is itself. Quoting from H.W.B. Joseph say a imminent Aristotelian philosopher turn of the century, turn of the 20th century, and his introduction to logic, he says the following. And I quote, if we think about anything, then one, we must think that it is what it is. Two, we cannot think it at once has a character and has it not. And three, we must think that it either has it or has it not. And he goes on to say that I cannot think at the same time that this page is white and not white. Lastly, it's because a thing must be something determinant that I can, in fact, think it and think about it. In Aristotelian epistemology, it's the determinateness in things that is the ground of the determinateness in thought. Similarly, cognition of causal relations is cognition of connections between determinant things, having determinant natures by means of their conceptualized natures, and without regard to mere repetition of the causal connection and experience. If Mises meant something like that by arguing that praxeological laws are obtained by a priori reasoning, then I have no problem with his use of the term. I do think that he used both extrospection and introspection in identifying praxeological and catalactic laws. Now, I apologize for overbelaboring this point. I've just wondered since I first read Mises what exactly he meant by a priori theorizing. Early in my career, I even wrote a paper examining the question, 50 pages. He was presented at a conference, received underwhelming interest, and sank beneath the waves. Surely, he couldn't have meant pure tautologizing, although he specifically says in human action, and I quote on page 38. This is the 1965 edition, third edition, quote, a priori reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them, end of quote. By the premises he's referring, see Epistemological Problems of Economics, page 17, to quote the fundamental category of action, which contains the concepts of action, economizing, preferring, and relating ends to means. Karl Minger specifically rejected a priori theorizing in several places in his writings. Both men did clearly recognize the difference between theory and history. Minger became embroiled in the Metodenstzeit with the German historicist Gustav Schmoller and trying to show that history cannot be written without a thorough knowledge of theory. And Mises addressed the same subject in his masterful book, Theory and History. And yet the argument continues today with the publication of attempts to present history as the basis of theory, such as in the work of Thomas Piketty. A decided difference between Minger and Mises is their respective treatments of the relationship between the division of labor and the economic progress of humankind. Minger argues that the progressive division of labor is not the most important cause of that economic progress. Instead, it's the progress of human knowledge united with the will to use that knowledge that is the key according to him. Mises sees a more central role for the division of labor. Knowledge and will are important, but the extension of the division of labor and use of knowledge and will require capital accumulation for economic progress. Less developed countries can be aware of the progress and technological knowledge, but without capital, it can't be used for their economic progress. In addition, human cooperation is enhanced by the division of labor, and its benefits are obvious to all participants. It removes any natural conflict of interest that, for example, are faced by most other animals, people, creatures who must fight each other to preserve their life. Some of you may be familiar with Deirdre McCloskey's trilogy on bourgeois ethics. She argues that economic process is also required, also requires, general cultural support of the bourgeoisie by society in the whole for them to create wealth. In Minger's on the theory, and I highly recommend that trilogy, especially the, I think the second book is the strongest, but the first book is really clarifying what he means by the bourgeois virtues. He lists all seven of the virtues as driving businessmen. In Minger's on the theory of capital, an article published in 1888, he defined capital as the money equivalent of money or goods employed for the purpose of increasing income by an enterprise. He adds that national capital is merely the concept of the amalgamation of all individual capitals. But such an amalgamation is no assumption that one can think of a nation as a single enterprise with a single capital stock, he says. This would be an erroneous concept. Just as the concept of the economies of individuals is very different from the erroneous concept of a national economy as something other than the sum of all individual economies. A mistake that many people who call themselves economies still make. Mises approaches similar at first, defining capital and human action as, quote, the whole complex of goods destined for acquisition. Evaluated in money terms, and this sum, the capital, is the starting point of economic calculation, end of quote. Mises also differentiates between capital goods and capital. He says socialist societies have capital goods, but there's no capital, because there's no meaningful way to assign prices to higher order goods, as he argued during the economic calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s. This debate between Mises and Friedrich von Hayek on the one side and a number of theorists on the other, I'm not going to call socialist economists. They're not. They have no concept of what economizing means. Excuse me, socialist theorists on the other side, among whom was Oscar Lange, was inconclusive at the time because of the socialist ignorance of basic economic thinking. Just three years ago, this conference held a second economic calculation debate to discuss still unsettled issues. Throughout human action are critical remarks directed at Bumbawert's capital theory as a productivity theory, because capital goods, Mises says, have no productive power of their own. They are nothing but labor, nature, and time stored up. Mises also denies any mean fullest to the idea of a national capital or national wealth, because quote, the businessman can convert his property into money, but a nation cannot. The economics profession as a whole still does not grasp this point as witnessed by their widespread admiration of the musings of Thomas Piketty in his capitalism in the 21st century, where he compares something that doesn't exist, the interest rate in the aggregate, whatever the hell he thinks that is, in any event. There is no market for the sale of an entire country's capital. Those who seek to purchase the capital of an enterprise have a specific, potentially profitable plan for its use. No such purpose exists for the capital of a country. Well, if some little green man arrived and wanted to purchase the United States, we could return to this issue. Though I like that, excuse me, I doubt that. Maybe Europe might try to purchase the United States, but I don't think they can afford us. No intended insult to any European sitting in this room. Sprinkle throughout Minger's principles are conflicting statements concerning the measurability of value. On page 293 of the 1950 English translation, he asserts that it can be measured. Well, on pages 121 and 146, he terms it entirely subjective in nature. And of course, in his treatment of value imputation, he argues that the value of any given quantity of a higher order good is equal to the difference in the expected value of what can be produced, given its presence, and what can be produced in its absence. Now, this can be interpreted as implying either subjective or objective measurability, depending on how you think of value as subjectively conceived or objectively existent. Unfortunately for Frutig von Wieser, he thought there must be a way for objective measurement of value. And coupled with his desire to find a way for economic calculation in a socialist society, he invented a unit of calculation. He called it the natural value, or unit of utility. Mises cuts through all of this in human action, stating that values are ordinal and subjective, always. They cannot be calculated. Valuing is confined to the question of the preference of A to B. So far as calculation is concerned, and I quote Mises, economic calculation always deals with prices, never with values. The market determines prices of factors of production in the same way in which it determines the prices of consumer goods. And economic calculation always deals with the future. Yet another quote reaches its full perfection in capital accounting, where it makes success and failure profit and loss ascertainable. A central focus of Minger's principles is the theory of exchange, and of price formation in competitive and monopoly markets. Minger concluded that price itself is a historical datum, as also does Mises. As Minger then says, quote, from his principles, prices are only incidental manifestations of an economic equilibrium between the economies of individuals. I think this may be what Mises later characterized as a plain state of rest. But Mises sees market prices as more importantly a portent of relative scarcity and a means of anticipating expected future profits or losses. Prices of higher order goods are ultimately determined by prices of lower order goods. The process of doing so involves transferring appraisements of expected prices of lower order goods to those of higher order goods, and then a competition to obtain the higher order goods between those who wished to use those higher order goods in the expectation of profitable production of lower order ones. That competition determines their prices. This understanding led Mises to his famous 1920 article, Economic Calculation and the Socialist Common Wealth, and subsequent 1922 book, Socialism and Economic and Sociological Analysis, both critical of socialism. A socialist planned society deliberately excludes private property rights for higher order goods, the use of which are to be controlled by the state. As Mises recognized, this means that they are not traded on markets, and thus have no market-determined prices to reflect their relative scarcities, in the opinion of those who wish to employ them. Without market-determined prices for higher order goods, it is not possible to economize in their uses. To economize is to calculate in prices. It is to seek the lowest expected opportunity cost of the means to achieve the end for which one is economizing. So it's not possible to make decisions concerning which production process are to be used in the socialist society. Production processes become ad hoc. There is much more in Mises' critique of socialist society, including its effects on incentives, international relations, the family, and so forth. However, the inability to rationally organize production is the heart of the critique. And we all know that the poverty-stricken histories of the Soviet Union, of Cuba, of North Korea, and now Venezuela historically exemplifies that theoretical critique. Minger ably argued that money originated now, we're turning to the thing that I'm trespassing on Christopher Hanson's ground. Minger ably argued that money originated as a commodity more saleable than other commodities. And the holding of which became so universally desired that it became the basic tool for trading. Misa extended this argument in two directions. First, he saw that money prices of the present become one basis for the expectation of future prices and for planning cash balances to be held in the future. But money prices and cash balances of the present are based on those of the recent past, which in turn were based on those of the not so recent past. And this process stretches all the way back to the point at which a highly desired commodity that in the past had been traded as a commodity became so saleable that it began to be used as a medium of exchange, Minger's point on money. Of course, this is on the origin of money. Of course, this is Misa's regression theorem, which solved the problem of the alleged circularity of the idea that the demand for money depends on its purchasing power, while its purchasing power is determined by the demand for it. Actually, it's the purchasing power of the immediate past that affects the termination of the demand for money to hold for expected future purchases. Misa's first book, The Theory of Money and Credit, not only presented these key arguments but examined the whole structure of the banking system and credit markets. Two of the most important results in his treatment of the banking system were the recognition that it is important where money enters markets and where it goes from that point on. The whole market changes its structure as money passes from hand to hand, and there is a redistribution of wealth. There is no such thing as the neutrality of money, which many neoclassicals still argue. The other result is the kernel of what became known as the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, as it later developed in the hands of Misa's Friebe Van Hayek and other scholars up to the present day. One only has to look at the history of the Federal Reserve system to see the consequences of the Fed's attempts to manipulate the supply of money and the level of interest rates. Margaret von Mises relates in her book, My Years with Ludwig von Mises, that Mises illustrated the courage of his convictions in the 1920s by refusing a high position offer from the credit on Stalt, the most important banking institution in Vienna. He told her that a great crash was coming, and he did not want to be associated with it. In his America's Great Depression, Murray Rothbard explains how the alleged price stability of the United States in the 1920s, which I still see people arguing, well, prices didn't change in the 1920s. Rothbard shows this was actually inflationary of the money supply. As the economy expanded, price levels would have declined if the Fed had not been inflating the money supply. And now we see economists at the Federal Reserve Board concerned about the possibility that average prices might fall. Instead, they want inflationary increases in what they calculate as the price level, which is another question whether one can even do such a thing. It's 2%. They want 2% target. They want to rob us 2% a year. Well, then we turn to the concept of time preference, which both Minger and Mises included in their work. In this morning, Jeff Herbiner discussed the changing rationale for assuming it. Minger's explanation in his principles is pretty bare bones. He just says that time preference means that the satisfaction of earlier needs must necessarily precede attention to later ones. Actions that preserve life and well-being in the present make possible actions that preserve life and well-being in the future. A present satisfaction is therefore more important than a later one of equal intensity, Minger says. Minger also says that experience shows us to be the case. But in the place in the book where he makes his argument, he leaves out some stuff. Left out of his argument is an earlier stated fact that the future is uncertain. In contrast, the satisfaction of a need in the present is a virtual certainty that it will be satisfied in the same way to the same extent and with the same intensity at some point in the future is not. In fact, the complexity of causal relationships among phenomena assures that uncertainty will be greater the further in the future it is necessary for a need to be satisfied. As Minger had noted earlier, this is the result of our lack of knowledge of the causal relations of the future and our inability to totally control them. Expanding this knowledge and extending the control of the less proximate conditions of production are the major factors in increasing the productivity, he had argued, when downplaying the role of the division of labor and generating economic progress. The uncertainty of future conditions, the relative lack of knowledge about them, and relative inability to control them as compared to those of the present provide a more supportive argument for time preference that is implicit in Minger's text, although not stated in one place. Despite the weakness of his bare bones argument, Minger identifies time preference as an actual restraint on economic progress. Providing for the needs of the present dominates provision for those of the future. Resources available must first be used to assure the satisfactions of the needs of the present. Given that he also argues elsewhere that more extensive use of higher order goods in production is directly related to greater production of first order goods and that longer time periods of production are also directly related to greater production of first order goods. Minger concludes that time preference requires the amassing of ever greater quantities of higher order goods in ever longer time periods of production as production planning is extended into the future. Now the argument gets ever more complicated from that point, but I will spare you from it. Mies's argument for time preference is a purely logical construct. He argues, quote, time preference is a categorical requisite of human action. If he, the actor, were not to prefer satisfaction in a nearer period of the future to that in a remote period, he would never consume and so satisfied once. He would always accumulate, end of quote. It applies to choosing between the immediate consumption of a quantity of goods and the later consumption of the same quantity. And two, it also applies to the case of capitalist saving in which the choice is to be made between the immediate consumption of a quantity of goods and the later consumption either of a greater quantity of goods or of goods which are fit to provide a satisfaction which except for the difference in time is valued more highly. That's from Human Action pages 486. Saving and investment are limited by time preference. Now we turn to the theory of the entrepreneur which Mies has characterized as the driving force of the market, one of Israel Kroesner's book titles. Minger's comments on the entrepreneur and his principles are also pretty bare bones. He characterizes entrepreneurship as economic calculation coupled with the will to initiate a production process. The entrepreneur exercises, he says, the functions of obtaining information, engaging in economic calculation, engaging in the act of will that creates the production process and supervising the process to its conclusion. This defines entrepreneurship as a particular kind of labor effort. Nevertheless, he argues that entrepreneurship services have no price because those services are not commodities to be exchanged for other commodities. Profit is the entrepreneur's reward for those labor services as Minger. A second peculiarity of entrepreneurial services according to Minger is the necessary perquisite of their having the command of capital services. They cannot be supplied without it. The availability of capital is thus a limitation on the amount of entrepreneurship in a society. Further, money interest as a price of capital services paid to the owners of capital includes a risk premium because those who buy the services of capital obtain the physical command of them in order to use them in production. Minger specifically rejects risk bearing as the essence of entrepreneurship. To Mises, the market economy cannot exist without the purposeful entrepreneur. He says, and I quote, entrepreneur means acting man in regard to the changes occurring in the data of the market. End of quote. The term entrepreneur is also used by Mises for those actors who hope to profit from adjusting production to expected changes in market conditions. Minger prefers the term promoter for this narrower view. In the pure view, the entrepreneur gets his capital from a capitalist, from the capitalist, and quote Minger, a capitalist is also virtually an entrepreneur and speculator. Entrepreneurs earn profits, capitalists earn land, I'm sorry, this is Mises, I didn't, not Minger. Lost my thought there. Entrepreneurs earn profits, capitalist and land owners earn originary interest, workers earn wages. Originary interest is the discount of future goods as against present goods. It is not a price paid for the services of capital and it never appears unalloyed, but it's contained in market interest rates, which are gross rates that are determined by many factors. A few words, no, yeah, quickly. On differences between Carl Minger and Ludwig von Mises on the role of government in the economy. Both were raised as subjects of an emperor, yet Minger was a classical liberal and Mises became libertarian, an advocate of laissez-faire market economies with minimal governments. In Minger's case, he was even appointed by Emperor Franz Josef as tutor to Crown Prince Rudolph, in which capacity he joined Rudolph in writing critically of the Austrian aristocracy. Nevertheless, he approved a certain functions of the state in the last section of his principles. He argued that although money came into existence because economizing individuals were led by their interests without any agreement, without legislative compulsion, and even with regard to the public interest, to see that they can trade their commodities for more saleable ones and more easily find advantageous trades. The state can improve the character of money. How? Minger says by coin it and sanctioning its use. Of course, money in his days was gold. In contrast, as you know, Mises wanted a completely private gold standard to serve as a free economy's money. So far as monetary policy is concerned, he argued that the key was for government to refrain from inflating the money supply or from creating conditions that encourage credit expansion by banks. The monetary theory of the trade cycle or what has come to be called the Austrian business cycle theory argues that cycles of boom and bust in a market economy where government controls the money supply and interest rates are created by recurring government attempts to lower the gross market rate of interest by credit expansion. If gold was money and privately mined and coined, cycles would be muted by problems in gold mining. As gold was mined and flowed into the economy, commodity prices and wages would be affected first, and the loan market and interest rates later. Although he viewed democratic government as necessary to preserve the social order against disruptors and to maintain peaceful inter-human relations, Mises also recognized that its essential feature is enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. This is admittedly a brutal conception of government, one that fully lives up to Mao Zedong's view that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Perhaps we should attempt to envision democratic government as it could be. Such an envisioning is approached by Mises' 1927 book, Liberalism. There he presents a model of a world that could be if all countries in it followed liberal or as I would say now, libertarian principles. It would be a world where the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Modern libertarians say instead, not all of them now unfortunately, that it should be the task of government to act to curb the initiation of violence by anyone against another's life, liberty, or property. Private property rights are the key. For private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. Excuse me. Or of anybody else's initiation of coercion. For Mises, the division of labor makes people into social animals. And as it extends, the progressive specialization of production tends towards the development in every field of enterprises that have the whole world for their market. Of course, this requires the absence of protectionism and the existence of liberal regimes in all trading countries. Further in such a capitalist liberal world, the whole of the Earth's surface forms a single economic territory. If there were completely free trade and no barriers to the free movement of capital and labor, then they would be employed wherever conditions were most favorable for production. Every person would be free to live and work wherever he or she wanted. With no intervention of states and worldwide liberal governments, productivity and standards of living would be higher worldwide. And wages and incomes would tend to equality between countries or among countries. Borders would be incidental and subordinate. And there would be no distinction between domestic commerce and international commerce, except for exchange frictions like transportation costs, for example. There would be no colonialism or tendency for states to attempt to expand their territories and no stimulus to wars. Wars restrict the international division of labor and thus prosperity and produce lower levels of the standard of living within warring nations, as well as senseless destruction. Liberal regimes prosper through peace and social cooperation, Mises argues. As he says, liberalism is from the very outset a world embracing political concept that makes the goal of domestic policy the same as that of foreign policy, peace. After all, all men really desire prosperity and abundance, or they should. Socialist regimes always promise prosperity, but they don't deliver it, because they can't. Why do they promise it? So that people will accept the socialist regime. Until the last two decades, I thought we were headed in that direction as a world. At this point, my optimism is fading. And I consider it possible. I don't know how possible, but I consider it possible that modern civilization could self-destruct. Nevertheless, I cling to Mises' vision of the world that he expressed in liberalism, the world that could be. It gives me hope. Thank you for listening and I will take questions if you like.


All right, Gene brings us the first one and we will read it in a fist shake take style. Completely hidden in the Photos app is a robust map view, a robust map view for geotagged photos. When viewing a single photo, you can scroll the photo up to reveal a map showing the photo's location on a fairly detailed scale map. Of course, the scroll bar is on the right is hidden until you scroll giving no indication that there is something there and this even happens if you have always show scroll bars turned on in the general system preference pane. You can't seem to find, you can't seem to get to this fine map view going through the info panel and the places view is completely useless for locating an individual photo. I have been trying to get a good map view from the info panel for quite some time now. One more example of Apple hiding good things.


So now we have a quorum. We'll start the meeting. I just want to remind everybody that we are alive and being recorded. Yeah, I normally just allow everyone to be panelists and to speak freely and I guess I can't do that unless I know who the person is from now on. So it was my fault. Sorry. Okay. Other things going on too. I'm going to, can someone else share the agenda actually that would make it easier. I'm trying to find it. I'm taking notes. So I can't do it. Almost there. I can't. Julian's coming out in and out, but he's here. He's just as video is coming in and out. All right, while we do that, let's collect ours. Shawna, you're muted. Four hours. Okay, Ellen, you're muted to Ellen. Oh, there we go. Three, Bennett. Three. Me, I probably had 15. Julian. 10. Okay. And hopefully we'll get from, did I miss someone? Sarah is not here. I can't. And Brit, she's going to put her hours in. Okay. Good. So there's the agenda. Hopefully everyone can see that. And do we approve the October minutes. All in favor. Thumbs up. Again, Julian can't see you. Shawna. Yep. I approve. All right. Minutes approved. Bennett, do you want to take over minutes right now? Ellen's doing it. I'm happy to do it. It's got to pull up. It's okay. I've already started. It's fine. Okay. Yeah. Good. Okay. Thank you. All right. The chairs we go. So let's see who we do have someone else in the. Too many things going on here. Brooks Ballinger. Is that a real person? How do I find that out? I guess I'll allow them to talk and. Brooks, if you could introduce yourself. Hello. Yes. Hi. Hi. My name is Brooks and living in Amherst. And I just joined up with your committee. Great. Well, welcome. If you want to put on your camera, I can allow that. Yeah. My camera doesn't seem to be working. I don't know what's up with that. Okay. That's fine. Thank you. And Sophie is a student who's visiting us. Yeah. Do you want to say more Sophie? I'm really interested in. I mean, for us to, in general, urban forestry. As sort of a subset of that. And I would love to just like. Listen to how that manifests in a civic capacity. I'm also, I should say, I'm not going to put my camera on either. I'll be back. I would like to just. At work delivering mail as I listen in. Okay. That's fine. Thank you for joining us and both Brooks and Sophie. If you have any questions, please feel free to either raise your hand or just speak up. Okay. And we'll move on to the agenda. So the first thing is the chairs report. Not a lot to report. That's not in the agenda elsewhere. from people, someone requesting an Allen, we should talk about this at some point during the meeting. Some replacement trees are a lot of ash trees that are dying along Applewood and Bay Road near there. Also heard from the Amherst Garden Club, they're wanting to sort of re-band and working on pollinated networks that would love to join us at some point. December, every source is gonna send someone to talk to us about tree clearing along their lines. And the other thing is we used to reach out to a lot of the other committees and we haven't been doing that much, but I think now's a good time to contact the planning board, attend one of their meetings, invite town council members to join us and things like that. So let's talk about it. It's not on the agenda for this month, but maybe next month we can do that as a full agenda item. Okay, that's all I have, Julian. Yeah, I have three things. A, I've noticed ever source has done quite a bit of tree work around town or their contractor has. B is that Amherst College appears to have planted unless the town did three trees where the Norway Maple was removed and then the last thing that I had was just I guess curiosity about the new project on Ball Lane and if any trees would be included or if we'd have a chance to plant there or that sort of thing. Helen, do you have something about that? I'll start with the last one, the Ball Lane one. I mean, if the trees are planted in the public way, we can do that. It looks like it has some tree planting going on in the development itself, but along Ball Lane and along Hopewood Hill, we could definitely plant trees. Route 63 is actually maintained by the state money road. So if we wanted to plant along that, we just need to get permission from the state to do that. I know in the development plans for that, they're planning to keep some of the standing trees as much as possible and add new ones. Wonderful. Good. Thank you, Julian. Tree Warden report. I don't have a lot to report. I mean, obviously we had a very successful tree planting on West Pomeroy, West Street. That was a big help getting those trees in. The Tree City, USA Awards, Tree City, USA application with the National Labor Day Foundation is due next month. So if the committee wants to tell you all of your activities, write up a report, send me pictures of what you did, we should be able to go for a growth award this year. And I just need to document all that and go for a growth award. I'll start pulling together a overview of what we've done. If anyone wants to send me photos from any of the events we've done this year, that'd be great. And then, you know, it's the newsletter, you know, PDF of the newsletter items, anything the committee has done. So it all counts. We'll be spending $20,000 of the $40,000 that was put into a capital account to do tree work. I'll be putting some tree removal and stump grinding out to bed in the coming weeks. And we'll have the $20,000 to buy trees. Sugarloaf nurseries, I think most of you know, donated 12 to 13 trees last month. And we have them, most of them have been planted, some of them we healed in down at the new nursery, Hofestation Road at the horse barn.   And looking forward to get those planted next spring. Thanks for having me. Alan, before you move on to the next thing, I'm just gonna make a note for the newsletter that seems like something we would wanna acknowledge, right? Yes. So Sugarloaf gave us how many? I can send the exact number, I think it was 13, 13 trees. Okay. Nice trees, I mean, they're big, you know, some of them were the size of the trees that we were planting Saturday, so. Cool. Very, very generous. That's great. But I can send you the exact species and everything. Yeah, if you think about it, great. If I don't get it, at least if I have the number of trees and I can work with that, so. I'd like to recognize if the committee can recognize them, personally or on the webpage or the newspaper or something that they're making these donations. I mean, they're $400, $300 trees, so it's pretty good. I will take the action. I'll write, this is one of those feel-good letters to the editor, I think, is that right? Yes. They probably published that, the bulletin or something. So I'll take the job of doing that. Thank you. Yeah, that'd be nice to acknowledge their generosity. Yeah, I agree, that was certainly very generous and they looked like really good, healthy trees on Saturday too. Yeah, they were a little long in the grow bags rather than that, they were good trees, yeah. We'll make a note of that and a thank you. Shashana, can you also post that on Facebook and Julian on Instagram? Yes, I would also like photos from that. I can send you the photos. I took some photos of the trees being loaded up and being healed in at the nursery, so. All right, cool, thanks. And then we did get a lot of info, I've been getting a lot of requests from the Ramling Road, Hampshire Village, Alpawood, Upper Orchards area where the developer planted a combination of ash, pinnoke and nori maple and the ash trees are all dying and one by one we're taking them down. And last, not this past summer, two summers ago, we did do, we did plant part of Ramling Road and we went down country corners up to West Street. So we've kind of started the replanting there. I'm discussing with, beginning the discussion with the property manager along Ramling Road in Alpawood, the possibilities of setback plantings because there's not a lot of space in the grass belt. We've got a lot of sidewalk damage from the pinnoke trees and the ash trees, the sidewalks almost impassable. And I'd like to see if we could do a planting in the setback commission from the property owner. So we're working on that that might potentially next planting, second anxiety, planting round, we can sow Ramling Road in again. I think that's the fewest covers all the highlights. All right, thank you. The treasure is not in attendance but Britt couldn't make it because of work and Sarah also. I was wondering, maybe we should think about changing the time that we meet and I don't want to do that today partly because we didn't advertise that on the agenda but also because two people are not here who couldn't make it today. So I'm gonna put that on the agenda for next month to see if we can come up with a different day or time that works, everyone. So think about your schedules, maybe we can't change it, but maybe we can. All right, social media, Shoshana and Julian. Yeah, I posted for our planting and I think I posted something else as well. It's been kind of slow and steady and I'll be posting about our thank you after I get all the information about that in all the pictures and such. Yeah, pretty much same here. Okay. One thing is I put it on Facebook today, the meeting. So I think if you can, a few days before the meeting, post that the meeting's coming up as well as the plantings, that would be great. Okay. Good. I see Julian, yeah, okay, good. All right, presentations and discussions, the library trees, is there any follow-up with that or are we done with that issue for anyone? Well, I guess we're done with it. I don't think so, Clark. Yeah, second Saturday workdays, I think we had a good year this year doing the nursery, doing the November planting. I'm pretty pleased. Anyone have any other comments about it? Yeah, same here. I think we got good attendance for most of them. We did quite a lot of trees and it's certainly great to have the help of Alan and his crew, so that was great. And oh, the other thing I would just note is that we sort of broadened out where we did in town this year, I think more than past years, at least from what I remember, which is good and we should keep doing it. Okay. Do we have a count of how many trees we planted this year? I don't have the count with me, but that's easy enough to get. It was down from previous years, but we did a number of trees. It's just good information to have to promote ourselves. Yeah. And Sophie and Brooks, we do tree workdays every second Saturday of the month from April through November. So if we're not planting trees, we're taking care of trees you already planted or working in the nursery. We started a nursery last month on the workday in South Amherst, so we're gonna grow some trees. This is just a thought, but in the winter months, if there's snow on the ground, we can't really do anything, but would it help if there's not snow on the ground to do mulching, pruning, that sort of thing on Saturdays? Pruning is dormant season. There's always a great time to do pruning. So as long as you're not trudging through snow on the side of the road, it's dual. Well, do we wanna try to schedule December or January, second Saturday planting? I do not want to do one in December. Maybe start in January. Yeah. Yeah, December is very busy. All right, let's try the second Saturday in January. We'll do a pruning project somewhere. Great. Anyone have that date, Handy? 13th. And if the weather's miserable, then we don't have to go out, but yeah, we'll try not to cancel it. That's my goal. Okay, any other comments on workdays? We should start thinking of where we wanna plant for the next year. Sounds like we have an idea if it's starting and we have the nursery to work on, but it'd be good to be able to publish a list saying here's what we're gonna be working on this year. We used to do that. All right, town tree inventory. Anything new on that, Alan? Nothing new, unfortunately. Okay. And the town tree tour, it was a good success. We only had about a dozen people, but everyone really enjoyed it. Paul Backelman was there again, which was nice, and he really enjoyed it. And we were walking by the Lord Jeff and these two women were walking by and overheard us talking about a tree and they asked what we were doing and they ended up joining the entire tree tour. That was cool. Everyone enjoyed it, so it was very nice, yeah. Yeah, that was fun. Is that down from the previous year? Because you say 12 people. I'm like, that sounds like a success to me. That sounds good. We actually had, I think, 47 at the first school. Whoa, I forgot that, yeah. We weren't expecting that either, so yeah. I thought it was great and I actually learned a lot. Say that again. I thought it was great and I learned a lot. Oh, good. All right. Thank you, Brooks. Yeah. All right. Anyway, I don't know if we'll do it again, but we probably should, but it's a lot of effort and there's not a difference. I don't think we're gonna do it in the summer, so it's spring or fall, so maybe we'll wait a year and do it every year and a half. How's that sound, Ellen? That's fine. I mean, we've talked about doing different locations or different routes. Yeah, we could do that too. All right, let's think about that, especially if you have some more time at some point. Good. The nursery, probably not much we need to do right now, but once we start planting trees, we'll need to be keeping it mowed and water the trees. And I thought it'd be good if we have some way of scheduling that. Julie, and you mentioned you could bring a lawn mower over. I have a little ego push mower and would be happy to go down there, I don't know, once a month and cut it back. Doesn't have to be perfect, but at least walkable. Yeah. Anything else we might need to do for maintenance, Ellen? Yeah, I mean, just like watering is the most important thing and if we can keep the grass mowed, that'd be great. It helps keep the mice down. And yeah, just keeping an eye on it. So if something falls over or looks like it needs repotting, you know, replanting in the grow bag or something, someone can keep track of it. Any danger of deer or other critters chewing on these? Great question, yes. We'll probably be using some kind of trunk guard to keep the mice and voles and other critters from chewing on the trunk flares. And the deer we're hoping will be discouraged by the fence from the old horse corral. It's not deer proof, but they'll have to work to get through it. Okay. Good, so that's something we should be thinking about towards spring is how we can do the work of mowing it and keeping it running. So maybe Julie is doing all the mowing, but just in case, yeah, good. I think it's a great project. Is water available at the building or would we have to bring seven, one in and water it? Hoping that the water would be working at the building. Okay, great. It had water, the meter was pulled because the building was abandoned. So we have to reconnect the meter to it. And hopefully, you know, nothing, there's no other. Pickups. Thing has happened since the water was just abandoned. So there may be some expense in fixing water lines, but there is a, what they call the yard hydrant on the side of the building facing the horse corral. Is that on your list to look at for the spring, Alan? Yes, it is, yep. Okay, thank you. All right, UMass interns, Britt's not here, so there's no word on that. The Mary Maple table, I think that was Britt. Alan, you were going to do a label and then Britt was going to contact the library. I can do that whenever, yeah, anytime, whenever I think we have a date. Deadlines help me. Okay, let's wait till Britt's back and we'll keep it on the agenda for next week. Okay. So possible state funding through Mindy Dom, she has money, she calls airmarks that she can put to anything in her district. And it's a good chunk of money. And so she had talked to me when we were trying to get the town line item budget thing and said, if they don't give you the full amount, then I can give you money for my account. So we did get the full amount. I don't think we're urgent for money right now, but if we have a project that could use some funds, the deadline to approach her is the end of the year or approximately the end of the year. So we should be thinking about that. I can't think of any reason to ask for those funds this year, but if you guys have an idea, let's talk about it next month. And future reference, if we're gonna, especially we're gonna be working on areas that are not town street trees where we can't necessarily use our funding for, that might be another use for that. All right. Urban forestry management plan. I've not made any progress on that. I'm hoping that things will slow down and I'll be able to spend some time with winter on that and the tree inventory. Again, if there's anything we can do to help you, let us know. All right. Environmental justice neighborhood planting grant. Someone was looking into that. I forget who I don't have that written. Yeah, there's money available through the TD Bank and the Arbor Day Foundation. They do a lot of focusing on environmental justice neighborhoods. The DCR promotes, when you go through the urban forestry program and apply for one of their grants, if you're working in an environmental justice neighborhood, it gets a higher ranking for tree planting. You know, that would be some of the money that you were mentioning from Mindy that they're not public ways. So, we can't use the money we have for tree planting to plant there, but it would take coordination. So somebody would have to be reaching out to these neighborhoods. It's mostly parking complexes, like the boulders, that area, that are not public in the property, they're private. And there's a big need to educate the property owners on why trees are good. A lot of them look at them as just something that takes more maintenance and makes a mess. So, you know, we should be reaching out to these places now and seeing if they're interested. Do we need to apply for a grant from that? Or do we know a deadline? Well, it sounds like if Mindy has money, then we would need to let her know, you know, before the end of the year. I'm not sure what that money is or what the application process is. But yes, with the state and with the Arbor Day Foundation, there is an application. I'm not sure what the deadline is. It's usually early spring sometime, I think I have to look that up. Yeah, the thing that it requires from us is somebody to, you know, initiate the conversation with the property owners. You know, whether it's the, we talked about the housing authority place on Lower Main Street also. But so we need to reach out, we need to get a partner there. And then from there, we can say, all right, how many trees are you gonna plant and we can come up with a proposal. Before then, I don't think it's worth, you know, figuring out when the grant deadlines are. Is this similar to what we did? And we weren't at the boulders, we were at a complex next to the boulders maybe two years ago. It was private property, but we planted a lot of trees there. Oh yeah, the brook. I think those were mostly donated trees, correct me if I'm wrong? Yes, they were donated trees. So we did it ourselves and Alan helped, but mostly we didn't. Oh, okay. So somebody donated the trees to the brook and then we just planted for them, is that right? We'll donate the trees to us. Oh, okay. We used to have the garden center this year, like we got the trees from Sugarloaf, so yeah. Has anybody been back to look at that planting, see if we had any success? I went back a while ago and it was less than half were there still, but. Yeah, I went back like a month ago and pretty much all the small ones just looked to be crushed by a mower or some sort of equipment. Some of the bigger ones on the main drive-in made it, but other than that, not many. Yeah, I'll try to swing by and look also. Yeah, that's the thing. Not only do we need the property owner's permission to do it and to apply for a grant, but we would need their buy-in to take care of the trees as Alan was mentioning. Yeah. And to communicate with the landscapers and the residents and so on and so forth, which obviously if you're a big property owner, that takes time and money, which often they, even though they should, don't want to do. Would it, if we did something like this again, would it work to like just put little hardware screening around the baby trees? So the lawnmowers are discouraged from hacking them down. I think that's a great idea. We could even like make little like square fences. I've seen them like this around gardens and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Sophie, you have your hand raised. Sophie, I want you to talk. I thought you were allowed, okay. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes. So I was wondering, I'm totally just curious. Do you have a program or a protocol or some kind of like publication fact sheet for homeowners to be like, these are the benefits of the trees here or how you can plant them to also mitigate risk and cost and messiness and things people don't like? Like how do you usually give people that information? We at least last time went to the farmer's market. We had a good bit of literature, educating folks on that sort of thing. I don't know who has it currently. Shashana, do you want to say anything? Not Shashana, Ellen, I'm sorry. No. No, okay. Henry, I'd like to add something to Sophie's question. So I think a lot of the times we get somebody from within the complex or within the neighborhood and they ask us, ask the town and ask the committee if, you know, could we plant trees there? So we have an inside person who helps coordinate between the property owner or the neighbors. And a lot of times neighborhoods have, you know, they have their own network email, whatever kind of exchange going on what's happening in the neighborhood or in the apartment complexes. And so we have a pipeline to get information to people. And then we have met them, you know, sometimes in the evening or on a day when people are available to actually discuss the planting and things like that. So. And we do have some literature. I don't think we have anything exactly like you're saying, Sophie, would that be something you might be interested in working on? Yeah, I can see that being helpful for people. I've, I mean, I don't know everything. I don't know a lot, but I've been taking a course about minimizing tree costs and maximizing benefits. And that's just on my brain is something that sort of plays in as an availability of information issue. Okay. If you can send an email to the Shade Tree Committee email address, do you have that? I can find it. Yeah. And just once we have your email, I can try to send you what we do have in the way of literature. That would be good. Thank you. And then yeah, that'd be great to think about. So yeah, let's keep that as an idea. Ellen, make sure that's noted in the minutes. And good. Anything else on environmental justice neighborhoods right now? No? Okay. So the old ongoing items, state level initiatives is nothing to report on that. I haven't done anything significant tree ordinance. Sarah is not here, but I don't think she's done anything on it, the solar bylaw group. Anything, Julian? Not really. I am, they have now changed their meeting time to be when I don't have a worker school. So I can now attend and attended their last meeting and we'll attend their next meeting, but I don't have any updates currently. Okay. And the Mary Maple love letter exhibit that's Britt and she's not here. So I think we have completed the agenda. Any comments from anyone on the committee? Yeah, I guess, I don't know. Just seeing that we probably, if we were gonna do a love letter exhibit, this is the time to do it the year after the tree came down. So at the holiday season, obviously, and I don't know that it needs to stay on our agenda if it's not gonna happen this season. I'll contact Britt and see if she can do anything for this winter. Yeah. Is the new Mary Maple, the Maple on the South Common near where the farmer's market is? Yes, that's the Maple that's gonna be lit this year. I believe the plan was to go back to the North Common and light the Norrie Maple that's on the North Common. That's the construction's finished. Great, sounds good. All right, and then Pat, you're here and you wanted to talk about trees along Bay Road in that area, do you wanna speak? Yes, I live at Applewood, can you hear me okay? Yes, how much do you say your last name too, please? Swataka, S-V-E-T-A-K-A. And I'm a resident at the Applewood community and we have a number of trees along Rolling Road that are ash trees that are dying that we heard were gonna be taken down and we were just wondering what might they be replaced with and what kind of schedule that might be on for replacement. Okay, thank you. Alan, do you wanna talk to that first? Sure, again, like I said, earlier we have had a lot of interest from that neighborhood about what's going on with the ash trees, why they're dying, what are you gonna do to replant? So it is definitely on our radar and we are essentially right now we're just taking down ash trees around town as they decline from emerald ash borer which is a non-native pest that's killing ash trees everywhere around here and in the Northeast, unfortunately. There is really only thing we can do to protect the trees would be to inject them every two to three years and we don't have the resources to do that. So we are hoping that maybe one of these trees that we're not treating is the miracle tree and is resistant and doesn't get killed by emerald ash borer but it's unlikely. So we're taking the ash trees down as they decline and in neighborhoods like the Ramblin Road neighborhood where there's a lot of ash trees planted we will be trying to plant new trees to make up for that canopy loss in the neighborhood. So we can probably schedule a tree planting for some time next year. You had asked in the email about what kinds of trees being that the ashes are a large shade tree we would probably look for other large shade trees. We do try to plant a diversity of trees and we don't always plant native because there's so many natives we can't plant like the ashes now. So yeah, we will be working on that in the spring. It's a challenging place to plant there's a lot of underground utilities even in the setback side on the house side of the sidewalk not just in the grass belt. So there's a lot of underground utilities there and it's gonna be challenging to site trees. It can be done. It's just gonna be, it looks like a nice wide open lawn it's not underground. I understand. Yes. Speaking of ash trees, are there species of ash trees that are more resistant? Cause I got one growing in my backyard that seems to be doing fine. To my knowledge, I don't believe there is I believe all ash trees will succumb to their melash poor. Don't believe there is one that's sort of resistant to it. Now, which side of town do you live in? North, South, East. South. Yeah, Pot-Wine Lane. Okay, yeah. So most of the ash trees on Pot-Wine Lane have already died and taken them down. So that's Pomora, Pomora, I'm sorry. I'm talking about potwines. So North Amherst, the ash borer hasn't really hit that side of town as hard yet. It started in the southern side of town and it's working its way across the town. Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, this one just appeared. I didn't plan it. It appeared about six or seven years ago and it looks pretty good so far. Yeah, that's great. You know, the emerald ash borer, ash will sprout from the stump often and so sometimes ash, emerald ash borer will kill the top of the tree but it doesn't kill the roots. So the tree will resprout and it'll grow for a couple of years until it gets large enough where the ash borer can actually get into the wood of the tree and start feeding on it. So hopefully we're not gonna totally lose ash and some native species will, you know, pests will find they really like or disease will like killing emerald ash borer and there'll be a new balance in nature and everything can coexist but not the moment, not for a while. Okay. They have found woodpeckers feeding on emerald ash borer in the Midwest area. So anyway, yeah, it's a difficult thing to figure out what trees are gonna survive with the climate changing and with the invasive things. So we try to plant at diversity. Are there any other comments about this issue or about anything else? I just wanna ask, just occurred to me, you know, we need potentially, I would like to do another lecture next spring for every day and I'd like to coordinate with the Amos College again if possible and then other organizations. So if, you know, if anybody knows of a particular speaker or somebody that, you know, can give a great presentation that people would enjoy hearing or maybe they haven't heard before, let us know. Now it's time to plan and reach out and try to get some of you lined up for April, every day. Yeah, Britt might have some context. A few years ago, I went to a really good lecture by an apple tree guy, a palmologist at the Hallam Library and it was very well attended and he had like all the different kinds of apples to try and it was fun. Hey, why don't you get his name to Alan or reach out to him yourself? Yeah, I would be good at it. Good in the fall. Yeah, in the fall when the apples are around to try. Yeah. Yeah, I think of Doug Tallamy who, you know, wrote that book about oak trees. He's a good speaker. Hallamy, does that work? Yeah, T-A-L-L-A-M-Y, I believe. I think so, yeah. And he wrote a book that's called Something Like the Nature of Oaks, something like that. Thank you. Good, all right. Well, thank you everyone. Thank you, Brooks and Sophie and Pat for joining us. We meet second Tuesday of the month, although next month we'll talk about if we're gonna change that. And you're always welcome to write to us or join us for any of the events we do. And if you have ideas of things you wanna actively pursue, then we're very happy. We're all volunteers and we're happy to get more people involved, so. Yeah, thank you very much everybody. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Hi, thanks. I will close the meeting now, thank you. All right.


Thank you very much, Jadrin. So we heard in yesterday's policy panel that actually we do need to reach out more to broader groups in society and do so in novel and innovative ways to regain trust. And I think that's agreed amongst all. However, when we turn from the theory to the practice, that's where we see the challenges. We actually run up against quite a few constraints, sometimes due to our mandate. Where can we communicate? Which are the themes and topics we can communicate on? The legal frameworks we have, and some rules also which are self-imposed, such as the quiet period. And believe me, a quiet period that lasts a week, the world doesn't stand still for a week. And in terms of a fast moving world, a lot of challenges can come up in terms of communications. So I'm going to use the next 10 minutes to really tackle three issues. First, to reach out, we need to know our audiences. So who are our audiences and what do we know about them in the euro area? Second, how can we reach out effectively and how do we define success? And third, what are the technological challenges that we're facing? So first, who is it that we want to get through to? Here in the European Union, and in the euro zone more specifically, we know from surveys like the euro barometer that the level of awareness regarding the ECB is quite high. Actually, nine out of 10 Europeans have heard about us. Not many people or institutions can say that about themselves. What is interesting, and this is also linking to the Mentimeter, is that still the vast majority of people, around 93%, have actually heard about the ECB on traditional media. So if we go through this, it is TV 85%, 62% newspapers, the print version, 49% radio, and only a minority at the moment. And although that's increasing on internet, Facebook, and the ECB website. So right there, you'll see a challenge that I'll come to in terms of TV. It is not our own voice on TV, it's reporting. And it is not in our language necessarily, because the most used language is English, but there is a translation filter. And we've seen it that when you have a board member speaking, and actually the language is a different one, sometimes actually it is a male voice and a female speakover, it does lead to some strange feelings. The challenge we have at the same time, and although people hear about us through various channels, is that only 47%, and that's less than half, say that they understand what the ECB does. And even lower, and that's the real worry, is the trust in the ECB at 37%, and a lot has been written about that. And my main point here is actually a paradox, is that while the euro is widely popular, 73%, it's never been as popular, the very institution that is behind the euro, ensuring its value, ensuring its stability, that's the one that's suffering from trust, even if we already saw an uptake in the last quarter. So that really calls for a bit of analysis. You know, what's driving those numbers, and what's actually influencing people's trust behavior and people's lack of trust. One of the things that's interesting, and we've seen it in research by Michael Ehrman, who was on the podium yesterday, is when the economy's slumping and people's personal situation deteriorates, that's when trust goes down. So one could say, well, then there's not much that we can do about it. But actually, that's not true. And we also know that just relying on the recovery for trust to return is not enough. So the question is, why are those people not trusting the ECB, and what can we do about it? There's a quite intuitive, there's evidence supporting quite an intuitive line, which is helping us in terms of communication. Those who know more about the ECB also have a better understanding about what we do, and then there are those who trust us more. And the majority of people who trust the ECB, indeed, if we look at the figures, consider themselves to have some or good knowledge of the ECB, that's 54%, and on average, those people are the ones who have a higher level of education. So this is actually the crowd that we're most communicating to, and this is when we're in our comfort zone. Therefore, it also means that if we want to move the needle here, what we have to do is reach out precisely to these other groups, those who are less interested, and those who will speak a different language, and those who are not typically addressing, i.e., we're going beyond the comfort zone. But my main conclusion here is we need to make the ECB understood, not liked, understood, and this is what we show here. That's quite difficult. Per se, and in general, but we have to do this across 19 countries and up to 24 different languages. We not only have the linguistic barrier, Silvio de Goulart also mentioned yesterday, people in different countries may have very different challenges. Why some may be worried about interest rates and savings, some actually worry about making the ends meet at the end of the month. Some are thinking about career, some are thinking of getting out of unemployment. So that will also have an implication on the topics that they're interested in. And that leads me to my second point. How do we go about understanding the needs and listening in order to make the ECB understood? So what most people don't know is that we have a lot of data coming in based on public inquiries, thousands a month of telephone calls, of letters, of emails, which don't come from media, which also give us a good insight as to what people in the European Union are actually worried about. To address this, however, we've also felt that there is nothing better and more effective than direct interaction. So on the one hand, we will try to do face-to-face direct interaction. That's one of the part of our two pillar approach. And on the other hand, it's stepping up our digital engagement. On the direct interaction, let me tell you it's a bit of a challenge because we have 340 million Europeans. So if the ECB is trying to interact directly with 340 million Europeans, it's gonna keep us all very busy. But thank God we have the euro system. And this is where the system has been very efficient at reaching out in their own countries, in their own language, understanding the themes, and specifically also focusing on financial education. So some central banks, for instance, the Central Bank of Spain does a lot with schools. The French have a fantastic website also explaining economic concepts. Everyone's found a way supporting that need for financial education. Here at the ECB, we've just opened the visitor center last month. Some of you walked, well, your walk past it on the way to the conference room. Some of you have registered for a guided tour at the end of the conference. And the aim of this is to increase people coming to the ECB and understanding the concepts. And that's probably gonna drive the numbers up from 50,000 to 40,000, which to be honest, in the light of the millions we just mentioned, is not much. And the other point is, the people who actually asked to visit the ECB, they're the ones who are convinced, they're the ones who are already interested. The challenge is, how will we reach the ones who are not interested? And this is where, if we look at a challenge, all institutions, the media, but also the institution space, is trust. So why would people actually want to find out about an institution they don't really know about, and fundamentally they don't trust anyway? Especially when you actually also know, according to various surveys, that people don't trust the heads of institutions, they trust people like you and me. That's family, that's friends, that's neighbors, they are the real trustful sources of information. And this is where the ECB has started tapping a so far vastly unused resource, our own employees.  But what you actually then need to do for that is equip with the necessary tools. So one of the elements we've done after each press conference, after each big international events, is explain what the policies of the ECB are, why, and give some easy to use, and literally that you can use for the small talk lines for all our employees. Now this is also not without risk. We talked about noise, we talked about different messages, and even if you go to school, even if you go to a so-called private event, trying to educate, there will be social media coverage. So we're exposing ourselves to risk in terms of explanations being misinterpreted, in terms of any different word being seen as a different stance from the ECB. But actually, in terms of communication, I'm convinced that that's the right way to go. We have motivated employees, and we should take that risk and just give everyone the education that they need. Another way of getting people interested is just showing us in different angles. So one of the things that we've done when we had two years ago the big migrant wave, some staff of the ECB went out to help young migrants, 14, 16, 18 year olds coming from Africa from really tough places, and helped them integrate in Frankfurt, and some of them spent quite a bit of their free time on weekends teaching them languages. Now they weren't interested in the ECB, they were interested in surviving and getting used to Europe. But our hope is that with that, we will have the chance of getting them, once they are set in, to say, well, why don't I actually try and find out a little bit more about this institution? The same is architectures. We have a great building. You can get people in here doing an architecture tool. Again, that's a different way. That's potentially a more emotional way, and emotional normally doesn't sit well with central banks. I'm not gonna dwell too much looking at the time on language, and Andy Heldin already referred to this in a former speech, you may speak about it today. But I would just say that if we only went back to George Orwell's politics and the English language from back in 1946, we would already make a big change. One of the things, for instance, he recommends is never to use a long word where a short one will do, and never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word, if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. And that, I think, is key, because jargon, by definition, creates distance. It creates the higher level and the below, and it basically shows them versus us, the elite versus the rest. And if we could just stop at that internally and then use it externally, it would help.  There is a bit of economics are boring, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. You can actually, now let me see if this works, you can actually make the economics very entertaining. We're back and forth for a century. I want to steer markets. I want them set free. There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it. Play ball interest rates. It's the animal spirit. Fear the boom and bust. Keynes versus Hank debate, it actually goes on for a minute. It's been viewed six million times. This is a very different way of communicating, and I'm not saying, let me reassure you, the ECB will go down this route. But what we have realized, though, is that we do need to use much more animation, much more video. And one of the things that worked best for the ECB is when we went down our asset purchase program, we did the video for internal purposes, using our own employees to explain what we're doing. And then the media team said, well, actually, why don't we use this externally? And it's the one that's worked best. So it's going away from text, it's going a little bit more into emotions, showing people, we didn't, you know, we used our own staff who work every day. And that was the one that worked best. Now online, the second problem. With Justine, for instance, Facebook, as one of the words mentioned, one of the things is we're reaching out, but we're also looking exactly at what platform, for which purpose, for which audience. So Twitter, yes, we are on Twitter, but that's an expert audience again. Should we be on Instagram? That's a question. What is the message, what is the audience? LinkedIn, for instance, is another great tool. Again, that's not the same as Facebook. That might be more to show the experience we have to get people for HR, to get people recruited. So we're doing a lot of work there, but I also think that very often people just rage in, and one of the, in my view, one of the opportunities we don't have is the trial and error. We mentioned it yesterday, if you start something, you can't stop it, and if it fails, certainly for the ECB, it's gonna fail very visibly. That's in a world where, however, technology is a big challenge, because we have the rise of machines. And it was mentioned yesterday, how many of the people reading on our Twitter actually machines, we don't know. How many of the people criticizing us are machines, we don't know. But what is really scary is to get this machinery for or against you, is actually very cheap to buy. You can influence social media very easily. So a research firm just recently reported that for as little as $2.60, and that's less than a Starbucks coffee, you can buy 100 comments on a YouTube video.  So I think we'll probably be discussing this on the panel, this is what we need to think about. And therefore my final reflection is really, we need to, all the communicators in the central banking world, like everyone else, we need to reflect about the evolution of big data, data analytics, the micro targeting for ourselves, how we use the algorithms. If other use bots, why wouldn't we use bots to reply? And certainly, how can we make sure that we always know who we're talking to and what the best mechanism is to deal with this? I think there's a lot more to discuss on this. We'll have the panel and potentially also another conference on the subject. Thank you very much.


Hi Simon, thank you for stopping by for an impromptu interview with SuperUserTV. Absolutely Heidi, thank you. Well you've been with the community for a long time. I have. I was part of the founding team of Ink Tank that built the Ceph Distributed Storage System that now has gone global and is doing very very well. And then for the last four and a half years I was CEO of Dreamhost which has built a big open-stack cloud and so on. So it's been a fun ride and the community here has been great in Austin. And we have some news from you, tell us what's new with you. I do, so I've been looking a lot at what the next phase of open-stack is during the summit and before the summit over the last few months. And what I'm finding is that open-stack is really becoming a known platform, a known infrastructure around the world. And so increasingly there is a strong demand for services to implement open-stack and to operate open-stack at scale. And so having known the team at Aptira, which is one of the leading open-stack implementation companies for quite some time and helping them out on it from an advisory perspective, I've decided to step in as executive chairman there to work with the team to help them scale the business globally. That's very exciting. What can we expect from Aptira next? So Aptira has a lot of depth of customers and strength in Asia right now. Originally out of Australia where I was originally from before coming to California. And so part of its geographic expansion, continuing in Asia and into Europe and then the US, but the other aspect as well is there's a lot of demand for getting applications, common applications running on top of open-stack and building a lot of the software tooling such that that can be delivered very easily and quickly. So Aptira is going to be focusing quite a bit of development effort on a lot of the tooling around delivering a really seamless managed open-stack experience. Thanks so much for sharing your news with us. Thanks Heidi, I appreciate it.


A retrace foreign minister has blamed U.S. administrations that supported the Tigray People's Liberation Front for the last 20 years for the current war in northern Ethiopia's Tigray region. In a letter to the UN Security Council, Osman Saleh accused President Joe Biden's administration of destabilization and stoking further conflict through interference and intimidation in the region. The TPLF led the coalition that ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades on the Prime Minister I.B. Ahmed Rose to power in 2018. I.B. then sent Ethiopian government troops into Tigray in November, and thousands are estimated to have been killed.