This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Welcome, everyone, to the inaugural Human Action Podcast. We're so happy to have you here listening with us. Now, before we get started, I want to talk a little bit about our decision to change the format of the old Mises Weekends podcast, which I'm sure many of you listen to. Generally speaking, we want to focus on economics and directly related topics at the Mises Institute. And Mises Weekends had sort of devolved into a more general libertarian podcast. As you probably know, there are a lot of podcasts out there, a lot of libertarian podcasts, a lot of blogs, websites, etc., a lot of social media feeds. And a lot of them deal with what I would call a libertarian take on current events, which increasingly, I think, bores me to an extent. But more importantly, we have to talk and think about how we're spending our time. And I think the Mises Institute really exists to provide economics education. Now, of course, libertarian philosophy will always be important to what we do, but economics is really why we exist. And so we thought it might be a good idea to shift the podcast towards more of a deeper dive and really get into Austrian economics. And hopefully by doing so, encourage people perhaps to spend more time being introduced to and thinking about and ultimately going to original sources, people like Manger and Mises and Hayek and Rothbard, rather than spending more time maybe on social media or worrying about the minutiae of some current event or what Trump is tweeting. And I think that there's a lot of value to be had in going deeper into economics topics and not being superficial about all of the libertarian questions of the day, whether those be about taxation or regulation or governance or whatever it might be. So while we certainly enjoy doing podcasts on all kinds of things like the FDA and Brexit and drug laws and you name it, the new Human Action Podcast will be a bit more focused. And I think mostly what you'll notice is that it's longer. We're going to allow our guests to go in depth on some of the topics that we'll be touching. And I think that as a result of that, you'll benefit from it perhaps more, perhaps it won't be enjoyed by as wide of an audience because some people don't want to listen to an hour or perhaps 90 minutes of more hardcore Austrian or libertarian thought on economics. But I think a lot of people will benefit. So we're trying to reach people a little bit more deeply and distinguish ourselves again from all of the many libertarian podcasts out there. So that said, our first guest is Dr. Peter Klein, someone many of you know, really a great guy and nobody better situated or suited to talk about the profession of economics itself and what kind of shape it's in. So I hope you enjoy the first Human Action Podcast. Well, Peter Klein, great to talk to you. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Jeff. That's great to be on today. You know, I wanted to talk about today and we set this up a little bit in the intro. It was just this idea of the end of economics is economics is a profession failing apart from the different perspectives within economics. In other words, a lot of people are criticizing the discipline in general people like Nassim Talib. More recently, Fareed Zakaria wrote an article in foreign policy called the end of economics and he makes some arguments that we would actually agree that econ has become too mathy and predictive. But he also says, well, gee was it's fallen off of its pedestal and it doesn't really serve people much anymore. And of course, those of us who who think the Austrian school is the correct economics or the correct perspective would would find a lot to criticize in the field. But because you're at sort of the nexus of academia and conferences and Austrianism and technical professional economics, I thought you'd be a good person to talk to about this this this sort of metatopic. Is economics serving humanity at this point is it doing any good or has it lost its way. So that's that's my opening gambit to you. Yeah, it's a great question and a great way to kind of kick things off. It's interesting, especially since the financial crisis, we've seen increasing calls from sort of mainstream and kind of left heterodox figures, you know, for a radical reconstruction of economics. And economics failed us and not, you know, anticipating or predicting the financial crisis and the Great Recession. You see at a lot of prestigious universities, movements often led by undergraduate students to restructure the economics curriculum and to throw out, you know, sort of the old establishment ways of thinking. And it picks up the references that you mentioned pick up exactly on this kind of discomfort that a lot of people have, particularly outside the Academy, but to some extent inside it as well with kind of the state of the mainstream economics profession. As you said, for those of us in the Austrian camp. I mean, at one level, this is really great news, right? We've been saying some of the same things for years that there are a lot of problems and issues with the sort of standard way that economics is done, especially at the elite universities. Now my sense is oftentimes, the kind of cure that these critics propose, you know, is worse than the original disease, but but at least it kind of gets the conversation started. And it gives Austrians, I think a great opportunity to sort of, you know, to pile on in a sense and say, yeah, you're right, mainstream economics has this problem has that problem has this other problem. Here's a kind of a solution that maybe you hadn't thought about as much. One of the interesting sort of tensions, though, is, you know, as you mentioned, I'm kind of, you know, I'm an Austrian school economist by, you know, by talent and temperament, but I'm also embedded in the kind of professional world of mainstream universities and so forth. And it's ironic that while the economics profession is being hammered publicly and in the media and a lot of think tanks and so forth, you know, economics as an academic field still seems to be doing pretty well in terms of the number of academic positions in terms of, you know, number of majors and so forth, hiring is strong and salaries are good. You know, we hear a lot today about the crisis facing the modern university and we Austrians have been, you know, at the forefront of some of these critiques as well. And you hear about postmodernism and, you know, that infamous hoax from a few months ago where three professors spoofed a bunch of kind of articles and got them in the top so called grievance studies journals, and you know, all of that critique is those are all very solid critiques. But it's not affecting economics so much. I mean, PhDs in philosophy are driving are driving Ubers and, you know, working at McDonald's and so forth that PhDs in economics still seem to still seem to be finding jobs. So within government, within academia itself, within the prestige kind of think tank, you know, in that those think tank in that part of the think tank world, there seems to be a lot of place for establishment economists. It's just their dialogue with, you know, sort of with ordinary folks with business leaders, entrepreneurs with a lot of policymakers. You know, that seems to have, there seems to be a gap there between what mainstream economics thinks it's doing and what most outsiders are interested in and want to hear. Well, by outsiders, we mean the public here. And Ryan McMakin on our site wrote an article at the end of last week called Why the Left Isn't Convinced by Your Economic Arguments. So I want to talk about the public perception. I mean, it was a great article. He basically said, look, not only do people dislike economists and economics or increasingly so, but he said a lot of people on the more left side of the spectrum just view it as propaganda. It's just corporate propaganda. It's not even worth knowing.  Yeah, I think Ryan is exactly right in that article. And it's funny, this is, you know, this is a rehash, right, of the old kind of 19th century debates. It's kind of the same position espoused by the old German historical school or the American institutionalist school of the late 19th, early 20th century. These are the people to whom Karl Manger addressed his great treatise, you know, the principles of economics. In the early days of the Austrian school, it was the Austrians who were arguing that, no, look, there are, you know, there is a kind of economic law that's akin to natural law that is relevant. And indeed is essential in understanding social and human interaction. And you may not like some of its implications, right? You may not like the fact that, you know, rent control doesn't help improve the standard of living for people in, you know, poor communities. The minimum wage laws have undesirable effects. You can't print your way into prosperity and so forth. You know, sorry if that's not appealing to you, but you could just as easily say you don't, you know, you don't like the law of gravity. Well, you can't, you can't legislate against it. I think we're seeing a revival of that same kind of thinking. People have, you know, poke a lot of fun at Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and she makes an easy target many times. She said something a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if I'll get the exact quotation right. It's something about, you know, the facts and the analysis are not important, not as important as sort of how we feel about this. It's about people and it's about, you know, helping each other and so forth. I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing that would make Karl Manger or Ludwig von Mises, you know, roll over in their graves.  You can talk about how much you care about helping people rather than helping greedy corporations or whatever. But none of that is relevant to our understanding of how the world works. And if you want to change the world, if you want to make the world better, you've got to understand first how the world works. And that's what economic theory, especially the economic theory of the Austrian school, allows us to do. But when you bring up the German historical school, I mean, we're talking about people who didn't believe that economics could be studied independently, that it wasn't its own field. And I almost feel like we get hints of that today. Like Richard Toller or Toller wins the Nobel for behavioral economics, which to me is almost psychology or motivation or something other than than econ. Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think we have to be a little bit subtle in treating that, you know, the particular issue of kind of compartmentalization, right? So the Austrians have always believed that there isn't a science of economics that is distinct from the analysis of history. It's distinct from psychology and even sociology and political science and other social science disciplines. And it's definitely distinct from physics, chemistry, biology and the natural sciences. Right. Hence the Austrians have always embraced what means is called methodological dualism, meaning the kind of experimental techniques and the kind of mathematical theorizing and so forth. That is appropriate in the physical world is not is not appropriate in the human sciences. So Austrians have always believed that economics is kind of a distinct approach to looking at social phenomena. At the same time, Austrians have always been very interdisciplinary to use today's kind of jargon, meaning that they thought to have a complete understanding of any particular social or political problem to have a complete understanding of society and how society works. You need not only economics, but also an understanding of history and maybe a good feel for statistics and maybe some insight into psychology and so forth. But that doesn't mean that that all of those disciplines are doing the same thing, asking the same questions, using the same techniques. And you mentioned Thaler's Nobel Prize and this sort of behavioral revolution and social science. That's something that I find a concern in the following sense. I'm all in favor of research on human behavior from a variety of perspectives. That can include everything from psychological field studies to work on cognition and brain scans and the biology of the brain. All of that stuff is interesting and important. But in my mind, that is not economics. That is something very different from economics. A popular approach now within the mainstream is to say, well, you know, economic theory has always said X and then present a kind of, you know, slightly strongman version of some basic economic principle from a mainstream textbook. Say, well, you know, now in 2019, we're much more sophisticated than that. And we can do experiments or we can do field studies to show that really that basic principle doesn't hold. For example, you know, mainstream economics textbooks always have some language about rational behavior. And Mises and the Austrians have never used the concept of rationality in that way, right? Mises talks about human action being purposeful, being goal oriented, being goal directed. But Mises never used a term like rational in the sense that people use that term in economics, mainstream economics. But so the behavioral social scientists will say, economics insist that people behave rationally. But look, when we put people in these situations in the laboratory, when we observe people, you know, in the field, we see that they behave irrationally all the time, right? You know that eating that extra serving of dessert is bad for you. It might give you a little bit of short term satisfaction in the long run. It's going to affect your health and your weight and so forth. So clearly a rational person would not eat that second or third slice of pie. But yet, lo and behold, look, we see people doing that all the time that proves that people do not in fact behave rationally. And maybe they behave irrationally in ways that are sort of systematic and predictable. And therefore, and this is kind of the crux of the argument, you know, all of those old less say fair type arguments about letting the market work and how, you know, market solutions are the best way to deal with certain kinds of problems. Those must all be wrong because, you know, the only possible defense of markets one can construct is one based on this assumption of sort of super rational or hyper rational behavior. Therefore, markets, you know, don't work and we need some, you know, kind of governmental solution in place. I mean, that is wrong on so many levels, right? Even the best neoclassical economists, you know, the best classical economists, you know, Adam Smith on to, you know, Alfred Marshall and Milton Friedman and other people who do not share the same approach as the Austrians. I mean, none of them believed in that kind of straw man notion of rationality. Certainly no good economist built a defense on markets. That kind of an argument because obviously it'd be easy to show that that people are not rational in that sense. But you find these critics saying, oh, well, you know, we just we need to reconstruct economics to reflect how people really behave. And so you get what is essentially kind of pop psychology. I mean, people like Taylor and Cass Sunstein and other behavioral economists, they're not doing cutting edge psychology that would be published in the leading, you know, psychology journals, theoretical, experimental, whatever. They're doing kind of pop psychology, which to many economists seem seems very profound. And it's presented as a real challenge to the way economists think and how economists understand the world. We also see a lot of emphasis on statistical methods and statistical design. I mean, that's been true since the 1950s, right, as economics, economic theory became expressed mathematically. And as we saw empirical work in economics become more formalized and, you know, it rise to be kind of metrics and so forth. So that's been going on for a number of decades. But within the last five to 10 years, it seems that everyone is interested in what you might call experimental design in economics. So any empirical project in economics is set up as a laboratory experiment or a field study or what they call a randomized controlled trial, where all the emphasis is on making sure that, you know, the design is like what you find in pharmaceutical research, right? And research on drugs and drug effectiveness. You've got a population of test subjects and you have a treatment group and a randomly selected control group. And you make sure that you apply the treatment only to one group and not the other. You observe the results and so forth. That's fine. I mean, in doing those kind of empirical studies, I think attention to a well-designed, you know, experiment makes a lot of sense. But that's become almost an obsession of mainstream empirical work in economics. All of the dissertations coming out of the top schools are about this notion of kind of experimental design and the use of what empirical economists call instruments or instrumental variables. What is your instrument? How good is your instrument? Can you make causal, can you draw causal inferences from your experimental work? Such that, to give you just one what might seem like a silly example, but I think it was informative.  Are you ready? It's what statistical package to use, right? Should I be coding in package A or should I be coding in package B? And how do I train people how to code and what kind of coding systems are best? People are 10 times more interested in that within mainstream economics than in any actual substance of economic question, right? So to get a PhD in economics now, you really just have to learn how to code. You don't have to know much about, you know, demand curves. You don't have to know anything about money or anything on the sort of classic economic topics and issues. But when we look at something like Thaler and he wrote that dopey book Nudge with Cass Sunstein. And as you mentioned, this is sort of pop political science or pop policy. I mean, it feels very lightweight. Nobody's writing treatises. Nobody's writing human action or general theory or even maybe a more Friedmanite book like the book Milton Friedman wrote with Anna Schwartz or or even free to choose. I mean, it seems like our economists today writing a serious books. Yeah, it's a great question.  Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Robert Solo, you know, the great mainstream economists of days of your, you know, they were interested in really serious, fundamental questions. You know, what makes markets work and how do firms compete in a market? And what's the effective, you know, what causes the recessions and what's the effective international trade and so forth. It does seem like economists are less and less interested in those kinds of topics nowadays. I think part of it, I mean, you know, it's hard to trace this out.  But one of the culprits might be the whole sort of Freakonomics style of research. Freakonomics is, as our listeners will recall, was the title of a book by Stephen Leavitt, a well-known economist at University of Chicago and his writing partner Stephen Dubner.  And the book was wildly popular. It was on the New York Times bestseller list. There was a TV documentary made about it. They wrote at least one, maybe two sequels. They had had maybe still have, I'm not sure, you know, a column and newspaper column, you know, lots and lots of, there's lots of interest in using economics to shed light on cute little puzzles and paradoxes. Now, that's fine. I mean, from a pedagogical point of view, I think that's, that's certainly commendable. I mean, I once contributed a chapter to a book about how to teach economics to undergraduate students using episodes of The Simpsons. So, I mean, I'm all in favor of doing, you know, using whatever approach, using it, doing anything that we can to get people interested in economics and thinking about economics. But that shouldn't be all that economists do. And surprisingly, you see more and more economic research focused on these, you know, against small issues or what, you know, what I've called kind of small topics. And what I mean by small topics is not things that are small from sort of a social impact point of view, but issues that don't really involve economics, things that you don't need a PhD in economics to address. I'll give you a couple of examples from an article that I wrote a couple of years ago called It's the Economics That Got Small. One of the most famous experimental economists is a guy named John List at the University of Chicago. And I heard him give an address one time where he talked about some of the great contributions of experimental economics. And he criticized Paul Samuelson, who, of course, someone who has received a lot of criticism from eases and from the Austrians and Rothbard and so forth. Samuelson had said back in the 1970s, you know, well, it'd be great if economists could perform controlled experiments in the lab like physicists. And Samuelson thought that physics was the queen of the sciences and economists should try to imitate physicists as much as possible. Samuelson alas, you know, unfortunately for us, controlled experiments aren't possible, so we've got to use some other technique. And John List said to the audience, well, poor Samuelson, you know, how wrong he was because today in the modern era, of course, we can perform controlled experiments in economics. That's what we all do. That's what good empirical economics is all about. And he gave several examples of experiments. And one example that he gave dealt with the question of how to incentivize high school students to study for exams for the ACT GRE or maybe just for the regular course exams. And he described a very large and complex multi-school project that he had done with the city of Chicago involving hundreds or maybe thousands of students where they tried different techniques to get these students to study more for their exams. He said, you know, the big finding and the crowd sort of oo'd and ought about this big finding was that, well, if you promised the students, if you promised to give them $20 if they make an A on the exam, that doesn't have any effect on, doesn't have any statistically significant effect on how they prepare for the exam and what kind of grades they make. However, if you give them $20 before they take the exam and say, if you make a poor grade on the exam, we're going to take the $20 back, that has a large effect on how hard the students work on the exam. Right. The behavioral economists call this loss aversion, this idea that a lot of times people, you know, we sort of value more something we once had and then lost than something we might have wanted but never had. I mean, it's an interesting sort of behavioral insight. That's great. I mean, to me, it doesn't take, you know, a huge research budget and dozens of research assistants and PhD students and postdocs and professors, you know, to perform this kind of experiment to get that result. Another one of the experiments he described looked at the language that nonprofit organizations put in their fundraising letters and he showed that if you send out these letters to different people and the letters are all identical except for one set of letters contains a phrase to the effect that, you know, if you will donate to us, if you'll respond to this letter by giving us money, we promise we will never send you another fundraising letter ever again. Apparently, including that language in the fundraising letter led to a significant increase in donations because people figured, hey, I'll give some more money now and these people will leave me alone down the road. Well, I mean, I guess that's interesting.  It's like a little bit of sort of technology help for the manager technology help for the entrepreneur. Okay, fine. Does it really take a PhD in economics to analyze those kinds of phenomena and to reach those kinds of conclusions? I think it doesn't.  I don't even want to call it pop economics. You know, people respond to certain kind of incentives. Okay, yeah, that's that's true. But economics is not that right. Right. But so now we have all of this, you know, lots of resources and all of this talent, a lot of the top young PhD students, postdocs, junior faculty at the elite universities are devoting all of their time and energy to these kinds of, again, what I call small problems, meaning small from the perspective of economics. They don't use economic theory in any kind of a serious way. And if that's all economics is, then why would anybody need to get a PhD in it? But how did this come to pass? It almost sounds like economists are getting bullied that they've allowed their profession to become small. And and I also like your thoughts on whether they have been shunted oftentimes to business schools. There's nothing wrong with business schools. And I think in many ways, maybe that's where econ departments belong, but maybe not. How did economics get small? I mean, what caused this? Yeah, it's a very good insight and a suggestion that economists have sort of done this to themselves. And I think part of it may be that over the last several decades, economics has definitely been the star among the social scientists in terms of external influence. Right. Economics has always been considered the most policy relevant of the social sciences. Right. You know, we have the, you know, economists serving in government and there's the Council of Economic Advisors, you know, as one of the, you know, small group giving advice directly to the president. It's really a counterpart of the National Security Council, right, which is supposed to advise the president, you know, day to day on the key national security issues. We find academics in political science or sociology or psychology or other fields saying, well, why don't we have a Council of Advisors from our area that's providing this sort of mission critical day to day advice to the top leaders. Why don't we get as many op-eds in the newspaper or in, you know, in the financial times or in Business Week or whatever. What is it about the economists that makes them so special? I think economists are kind of worried about, and to some degree are kind of losing their elite status within the policy and sort of business worlds. Right. You mentioned to seem to lab earlier. I mean, I don't agree with everything Taleb says about this, but I appreciate his, you know, continued emphasis on, you know, things like real world experience and how entrepreneurial insight is not something that you can learn from reading a book or that you can, you know, you can't do a bunch of mathematical simulations as a substitute for entrepreneurial insight, understanding judgment and so forth. I think he's very right on that point, though I think he pushes it a little bit too far. But it is an issue, right? In the old, you know, kind of 1950s style big corporations, there was plenty of role for economists as advisors to managers working on, you know, kind of technical issues of efficiency and so forth, advising companies on how to deal with government regulators and of course advising governments and how to regulate and so forth. Well, I mean, the demand for economists to do those things may actually be waning just a little bit. You know, entrepreneurs don't have much need for economists on their payroll. So it's funny, there's been a little bit of discussion in just in the last couple years about how some of the big tech companies, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and so forth, have put some PhD economists on their staff, on their staff to help them with things like, you know, designing the auctions that Google uses to sell advertisements, to take bids as for time on the Google homepage, to aid with some of the machine learning and sort of artificial intelligence issues that these companies are dealing with. But that's sort of conspicuous, but nobody talked about that before because there were always jobs for economists and big companies, right, big manufacturing companies. But the big tech firms have not traditionally had much of a use for academic economics. And the fact that now there are these few exceptions and there are some very famous economists who are doing a stint at Google or Microsoft or whatever. You know, that's very salient because all of a sudden we realize, oh wow, yeah. Except for that, economists don't seem to be playing a big role in helping, you know, Jeff Bezos or helping, you know, people at Apple or whatever figure out what to do. So there may be a little bit of nervousness on the part of some economists that they're not, you know, not as policy relevant as they once were. But, you know, it's hard to say exactly what is driving this particular movement. Some of it's internal as well. I mean, people want to get published in top journals and want to get good jobs. And maybe there's a feeling that kind of the big issues, you know, inflation, unemployment, economic growth, institutions, etc. That maybe those are really not amenable to analysis using economic tools. Therefore, economists have retreated away from those topics towards issues that while not as complex, not as critical and important are nonetheless doable, you know, using their tools and techniques that they're comfortable with. So I think that might explain part of it as well. Okay. But if you believe in empiricism, Uber, all this, everything is testable. And if you don't believe in universal economic laws or axioms, then, you know, why not have a gender studies or sociology, academic writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal? In other words, economists are sort of giving away some of their importance. Yeah, I think that's right. I think economists have done that. And I think they're recognizing it and there to some extent concerned about that. So you see this polarization now where there is, of course, still theoretical work being done in economics. But it's kind of, it's game playing. It's gamesmanship. Who has the most clever model without any regard to how it might be used or what kinds of phenomena might be able to explain and so forth. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have this completely a theoretical empiricism that is dealing with actual practical problems, but in a way that doesn't involve any sort of insight from economic theory. So there's not much integration or certainly much less integration than we saw in the past. Okay. Well, academia is a whole nother topic, but let's talk about academic economists. Let's talk about what's going on in PhD programs with conferences, with tenure, with publishing, etc. I think, first and foremost, a lot of people don't understand just how rigorous the math is in a PhD program and how difficult it is to get through that math without having a math background. In other words, we're almost teaching people to be mathematicians and statisticians as much as we are economists. Oh, you're absolutely right. I noticed that trend when I did my own PhD studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it's only accelerated since then. I remember very something that has always stuck with me is when I was a PhD student and in my program, students in their first year did not do any teaching, but starting in the second year, third year, PhD students would do some undergraduate teaching either as a teaching assistants or maybe be given responsibility for their own class. And I remember asking the professor who was in charge of running the PhD program, I said to him, I noticed that when you have a PhD student who's teaching economics for the very first time, you always assign them to be a teaching assistant or a section leader or whatever for the very first basic econ class. The class that is dealing with the kind of stuff that you would find in Henry Haslitz's economics in one lesson, very basic intro econ. And I said, well, for someone who has never taught before, that's actually a difficult, challenging teaching assignment, right? To teach economic principles to people with no prior exposure to economics takes a fair amount of skill that takes some knowledge of pedagogy and some knowledge of teaching technique. Why don't you assign these new teaching assistants to teach kind of an intermediate economic theory course or something that has a little bit of math in it, something they'll be more comfortable with that's closer to what they're doing as PhD students. And then once they've learned some skill in teaching, then put them in the intro class. And the guy says, oh, well, of course, you're right. But there's one simple reason we put them in intro econ. So they'll learn it. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, most of our PhD students were math majors or physics majors or engineering majors that never had an undergraduate economics course. They've never read a book like economics in one lesson. They don't know what a demand curve is, right? They're basically doing math and statistics in their PhD program. So we recruit people who are good at math and statistics. If we're going to call it an economics degree, they've got to know a little bit of economics. And for them to get an academic job once they finish, they're going to have to teach some intro econ. So they might as well learn it now. And I thought, that is so, I mean, it struck me as being so absurd. But the more I reflected on it, I thought, well, yeah, I guess that does make sense from his point of view. And this goes back to the point that I maybe made a few minutes ago about coding. And I'm totally serious about that, but it seems to be a good empirical economist today, or maybe even a theoretical economist. The most important skill is how to do econometric programming on the computer, right?  And these are a little bit antiquated now. Where most of the routines were kind of programmed in. So it wasn't like what you do in computer science. It was using prepackaged programs and routines to analyze some data series on employment or prices or whatever. Nowadays, it's not enough to be able to do that. You need to actually write your own code to do some kind of clever statistical technique that has not yet been incorporated into the package where you can just point and click and do it. And I think, are we training computer scientists or are we training economists? How much economics are they supposed to know? How much economics will they ever know? And will these be the kinds of economists that ever could have any hope of speaking to the general public or even speaking to policy makers or business leaders or whatever. And I think the answer is no. But because of government subsidy for higher ed, right?  It's kind of a self-depatuating thing, right? The elite universities are producing the professors of the next year of universities. And they're producing their professors for the next year of universities and so on.  But there seems to be enough money flowing into economics departments, you know, to keep this going for a while. Now, you mentioned business schools. A lot of economists are taking jobs in business schools. And I think this is all for the good because most of the economics in the business context is less. It doesn't suffer as much from the kind of problems that we've been talking about. Business schools are professional schools. They're training people to be future business leaders and so forth. And so there is a kind of a more practical, pragmatic kind of economics that one often finds in a business school context. And I think it's one that it's a place where there's more sort of tolerance for non-traditional approaches, including Austrian economics. I've often encouraged young people who are interested in doing, you know, having an academic career in the Austrian tradition to consider maybe getting a PhD in economics, but even a PhD in management or entrepreneurship or operations research or something like that. And then having a career teaching in a business school because you can really do, you can do Austrian economics in those applied areas. And it doesn't threaten the establishment the way it appears to be threatening within sort of the mainstream economics department. But in those departments, if they're consumed with math and stats and econometrics, doesn't the method ultimately become the discipline? That's the approach we're taking. I mean, the slur against people like Mises were that they were literary economists. Their treatises weren't full of charts and graphs and numbers. Have we now become wholly a math discipline? Is the method the discipline now? Is this all that's left? Yeah, I think that is the case. Is that overstating it? Well, I mean, maybe it's a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one. I think within the top mainstream academic economics departments, I think that is a fair characterization. It's really about the method rather than the underlying substance or the idea is that, well, the substance is easy to learn. You can just sort of stick that in where you need to. But it's not good work unless the technique, the mathematical or statistical technique is up to sort of cutting edge standards. But the point I wanted to make about business schools, I think that's not so much the case within business schools. There is a lot of, I don't know what you might call literary economics that is done in academia. It's just not done in the Department of Economics. It's done in the Department of Management, maybe in the Department of History or Political Science, in the Department of Entrepreneurship or Innovation or something like that. So a lot of the good work in these allied disciplines really is economic theory often expressed in verbal form and sometimes building explicitly on insights from the great Austrian writers. So that's what I mean by saying one can do sort of economics that is more substantive, that is really more about the economics than about the technique. It's just very hard to do that in an economics department. But there are other places in academia where that to some extent can be done. Well, that seems terrible, though, to me. That seems like a shame and something that economists ought to fight against. If for no other reason than just academic turf battles, don't they want their own departments, their own budgets, their own conferences? Yeah, I mean, look, it's not for me to say what kind of strategy is the most likely to be successful. I totally agree with you. Of course, that is a shame. I'm sure your dean won't be listening to this podcast. I have a coup in the works that I'm planning to stage at any moment. But to me, it's useful to think by analogy. I mean, look at our old friends, the Marxists, with whom the Austrians used to battle. Of course, the Marxist more or less dropped out of the scene almost entirely in economics. When I was a student in the 80s, most of the top economics departments had one or two token Marxists sitting around. Those people are almost all gone, but Marxism isn't gone. It just moved from economics into history, English literature, philosophy, these grievance studies departments that we were talking about before, where Marxism is really thriving. Now, I'm not suggesting that Austrians should do exactly the same thing. But it may be that fighting this sort of battle head to head inside the economics department at Yale or MIT or Stanford or even Auburn or University of Kentucky or whatever, that may not be a winning strategy at this time. It may be a more shrewd strategy for Austrian economists to outflank the mainstream a little bit by continuing to do good work, but doing it in a way that one doesn't have to spend all of one's time fighting those kinds of battles. Because it's really difficult to overthrow an entrenched oligarchy, and that's essentially what we have in the top economics departments. I don't see many cracks at the moment or many opportunities to kind of push them to the side. Well, let's say hypothetically a young person comes to you or maybe even one of your own children come to you and say, I'm thinking about getting a PhD in economics just like you. I want to teach and learn Austrian economics. What would you say to them? Well, I think being an academic can be a great life. And as we said at the start of the interview, there are a lot of jobs for economists, even Austrian economists. If my child said, I want to get a PhD in philosophy or I want to get a PhD in English literature, I would not discourage them from pursuing their lifelong dream, but I would want to make sure that they have a very solid understanding of what the trade-offs are likely to do. So you would take a more pecuniary view of this decision. Paying for that yourself. No, I mean, look, people ought to do what they want to do, but yes, I would want them to understand that taxi driving may be in their futures. And it's better in economics, but I would be very, and I am very straightforward with young people when they ask me these kinds of questions. We get all these brilliant kids coming to Mises University, many of whom are interested in an academic career. And I say, look, you have several choices. You can employ what Murray Rothbard used to call the Superman strategy, or it's really more like the Clark Kent strategy. Well, try to get into a top tier economics PhD program. Don't put any Austrian stuff on your application. Don't put anything about Mises. Don't put anything about free markets and liberty and so forth. Take a lot of math classes and statistics classes and undergraduate and try to get into a top tier economics department.   I mean, that's one potential strategy. As Murray used to point out, that strategy very rarely works because by the time you get to that point where you've achieved all these professional goals, you've got a PhD, you've got a job, you've got tenure, you've got accolades and so forth, now you're ready to become Austrian man. Well, by that point, you're too old. You don't remember how to do Austrian economics anymore. All you know how to do is the stuff you've been doing for the last 20 years and it's really too late for you. So, I mean, if someone wants to pursue that strategy, I would not try to talk them out of it, but I would want to make sure they understand that it's very difficult to pull off for that reason. Another strategy is to go to one of the universities, the few universities around the world where one can get a PhD in economics or a closely related field and do explicitly Austrian style research and there are some places like that. They tend not to be the top, you know, to your elite schools and there are jobs available to people with PhDs from those schools, not as many jobs and not as prestigious jobs as the ones you get from coming out of a top school, but there is employment to be found and one can have a good life teaching economics. Now you may be at a school where you have to teach a lot and you don't have as much time for research and your salary may not be as high as you would like, but you can still do that. Another option would be to pursue a degree in business or history or polypsy or sociology or some other field where one can do what is essentially Austrian economics, though it may be dressed up a little bit differently and maybe have good professional opportunities, but always be a little bit of a second-class citizen compared to the quote-unquote real economists. However, I think it's worth pointing out as Joe Salerno did in a very nice article a few years ago contrasting the idea of economics as a profession and economics as a vocation. If your passion is to be an economist in the Austrian tradition, that's your vocation. That may or may not be the thing you do to get a paycheck. That may be something you do nights and weekends while you're professionally doing something else. If you can combine your vocation and your profession, that's fantastic, more power to you, but it isn't necessarily the case that you do and it's very dangerous if your vocation and your profession are close enough that one gets compromised by the other. I've seen this my entire career, bright young people interested in the Austrian school who are just a little bit careerist in their actions.  That's fine, but the more you do those things, eventually they can consume you and eventually that's all you do and you're not an Austrian anymore. That's a little bit like the Superman approach. I think that's a real danger as well. The goal of doing good Austrian economics is not to earn a good living from doing it, although that's great if you can. It's to advance the scientific discipline of the Austrian school. Look at some of our great heroes. Mises, of course, had a day job for most of his career, which was not writing economic theory. Murray Rothbard, throughout much of his career, was an analyst working for a private foundation and reading and writing and contributing to the Austrian school on the side. Mises and Rothbard were super geniuses and extraordinarily productive and that's not necessarily the career model for all of us, for us mortals, but I think there is a lesson to be learned that they did not conflate their vocations as Austrian economists with the day-to-day professional responsibilities of putting food on the table. Why doesn't that vocation also involve teaching? We hear all these things that economists do and their trendy books and their studies. What about teaching? I think Mises had that famous quote that at any time there's no more than a score of men who really contribute to anything essential to economics. Doesn't that suggest that we ought to be out there becoming good teachers and it always warms my heart when I hear someone within our orbit talking about assigning Rothbard or assigning Hopper or something. It seems like the profession is given up on teaching. That's for TAs or something. You're exactly right. I think that the Mises quote, I think about that Mises quote often. I think, look, you know, if I can put on my gravestone, that I helped to communicate the great ideas of Mises and the other Austrians to other people, to up-and-coming generations, that's the achievement that I desire. Yeah, I mean, I write books and articles, but I don't pretend that those are making pathbreaking contributions to knowledge on the level of, you know, what a Mises or a Rothbard or a Hayek is able to contribute. And unfortunately, the profession of academia sort of pushes people, you know, publish or perish kind of pressures that they're always writing and there's emphasis on quantity over quality and we do deceive people of the thing, oh yeah, you're going to make the next great contribution. But you're right. What most of us, the impact that most of us can have on the world is in, you know, teaching in the broad sense. That may mean teaching college students semester by semester. We also mean writing and speaking and using social media and other kind of, you know, mechanisms and platforms for exercising influence. But yeah, that's what 99% of us as Austrians do, is we're teachers or we hope to be teachers or influencers. You know, unfortunately, the way academia is structured, most of the colleges that emphasize teaching and do it very well are set up in a way that you're just doing so much teaching you really don't have a chance to write articles or to write books. Again, that's fine. Probably most of the articles and books in economics, I don't mean in Austrian economics in economics in general, should not be written. You know, it's a waste of paper or a waste of electrons or storage based on a disk somewhere and certainly a waste of people's time. But if you do want to do some writing, some independent research, it's a challenge to do it in an environment where you have a very, you know, sort of teaching responsibilities. But again, those are the people who have much more influence. If I contrast myself with my wife, Dr. Sandra Klein who some of you know, she has a PhD in economics and we've both taught at the University of Georgia, at the University of Missouri, now at Baylor University. You know, my job has been at all of those schools has been kind of in a research professorship where I am teaching but I'm not teaching a large number of students and I'm mainly teaching graduate students and upper division students and mentoring theses and dissertations and so forth. Most of her teaching has been at the intro undergraduate level and in much larger classes. I can't remember the number now, but she estimated when we were on a panel together at a recent Mises event I don't remember how many thousands of students she's had during her last sort of 20 years of teaching, but she's taught an order of magnitude more students than I have and in every one of her classes she's having the breed, you know, Haslett or Rothbard or Mises or whoever might be appropriate given that particular topic and so she's had a much bigger impact on the spread of Austrian ideas almost certainly than I have even though my name is better known you know, among, you know, within the sort of Austrian academic circles but you know, really what have I contributed not that much. It's people like like her and like many of the other great teachers that we have in our movement who are really having an influence on future generations and it is too bad that you know, elite academic institutions tend to disdain teaching.  The dean cares about you know, research grants and publications in prestigious journals and that sort of thing that's an unfortunate part of again, academia is this kind of self-perpetuating oligarchy. Most of what academia produces is for the consumption of the academic sector, not for the consumption of the student or the general public or the business person or whoever. So is that true though really across the board because that's the public perception that these Ph.D. academics and we're getting a little broader here, but in general, Ph.D. academics are not really focused on teaching your kids and they're all talking to each other in obscure journals and it's a bunch of movement not action. I mean, that is the current public perception of academia especially in the non-tech side. Yeah, I think it's largely fair. What's deteriorated is this idea that there are these great teachers who don't do any research and there are great researchers who are not capable of being good teachers. That I think is not true because some of the best teachers that I've ever known have also been among the great researchers and also, you know, service within the academy and so forth. But what is true is just that there's only so many hours in the day and at the top universities that employ the top researchers the typical teaching load might be, you know, two or three at the most four courses per academic year whereas at a teaching-oriented liberal arts college or even at a community college people are teaching 6, 8, 10, maybe 12 courses per year. So it's true that the academics at the elite universities don't spend hours in the classroom. But many of them are fantastic teachers and again, to be fair, if they are doing some kind of outreach if they're writing for popular consumption if they are doing podcasts like this one if they're blogging or using social media that is a kind of teaching in a sense that's a kind of outreach that is important. I do have to say there are many mainstream figures who who are working on communicating with the general public, you know, people like Paul Krugman. Yeah, there are many things that make me unhappy about Krugman's speaking and Krugman's writing and so forth. You know, but I do give him credit for writing in the New York Times. I mean, I think that is something that academic economists should do, not all the time necessarily. I mean Krugman's case seems to be all he's done and he doesn't use any economic thinking in his New York Times column, so that isn't good. But I think one problem with the way higher ed is structured is there really isn't any extrinsic reward for professors, especially professors on the tenure track writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal appearing on MSNBC or CNN or whatever being involved in social media blogging. You know, I admire people like even Noah Smith, who was an academic economist and now a full-time writer for Bloomberg. I mean, I don't agree with most of what he says, but he tries to engage the general reader, the lay reader, with ideas from academic economics and I think that is the kind of thing that the great Austrian economists certainly devoted a lot of their time to and I wish that more of us well, I mean those of us in our circles, Jeff, our scholars and fellows associated with the Mises Institute almost all of us do quite a bit of that kind of outreach work. That's great. I wish that more economists outside our circles would also do those things and that those things would be valued by the administrations of their universities. Well, when you're talking about people like Krugman and Noah Smith, I think what a lot of that outreach work has resulted in or they've been part of, let's just use the broad term neoliberalism. Early you're alluded to, relative to the other social sciences, perhaps economics has enjoyed an outsized influence on politics and policy. If we define neoliberalism very broadly as saying a fair amount of respect for markets and property but also a strong social safety net or some form of social democracy, that seems to be the approach of our age and as far as economics and how it affects it, what we're hearing a lot is that just as neoliberalism is something new, of course we know it isn't, it's some sort of third way between socialism and markets, that we also need a third way economics. In other words, a new economics people like Stephanie Kelton who promotes MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, she was an advisor to Bernie Sanders, I guess she's at Stony Brook University in New York. I hear a lot of this third way talk out there and I just want to get your comments out there's just economics, there's no new economics, there's no third way I think we ought to resist it and push back but I want to hear from you. Yeah, exactly the same view. I think there's really nothing new there. A lot of it is just sort of general mushiness, it's people saying well economic theory seems to point us in this direction but that seems a little bit extreme so let's not go that far, let's just have a mix of what economics tells us and what some other things tell us and it'll all kind of blend together in a kind of middle of the road sort of third way model because we don't want to be too extreme, we don't want to be too radical. I mean come on that in itself is kind of crazy talk. What is interesting I think or something that's interesting related to that is most academic economists are kind of I don't know centrists in economic policy and on other sort of political issues they would be either center left or center right in the kind of European sort of spectrum but it's funny because most of academia is so far to the left even somebody like Noah Smith or Paul Krugman appears as being almost right wing to a lot of people in India because they think that markets can at least play some role they think that prices and private property are not per se illegitimate and heinous but there is some role for markets of course they would say that markets have to be steered and controlled and there are all kinds of market failures that the government needs to regress and so on and so on and so forth but because they are at least a little tiny bit friendly to markets where they get sort of pigeon holed as being extremists like you were saying before having sold out to corporate interest and they're just promoting the well-being of plutocrats and blah blah blah to people like us this is just it's so funny because we see those people for what they actually are which is middle of the road centrist types who like a little bit of markets but a little bit of government too so I think the term neoliberal it doesn't have a really fixed meaning but of course it's almost always used as a smear term very few people identify as neoliberal but someone who thinks that you're too far that you're too favorable towards markets will describe you as neoliberal as a way to sort of delegitimize your ideas or make it seem like you're just an apologist for big business or something like that what another thing that's interesting is how as you said none of this is really new right in this kind of neoliberal mixture a little bit of this a little bit of that in some sense it's almost to me it represents a step backwards now as several Austrian economists have observed following the financial crisis and the great recession beginning in 2008 we saw a revival of what Robert Higgs calls a vulgar Keynesianism I call it sort of 1950s era old school Keynesianism where you know it's all about there's a the Fed is driving a car and on one side you can fall off the cliff into recession and on the other side you can fall off the cliff into inflation and the Fed has got to be very careful and how it steers the car or how it puts its foot on the gas use whatever metaphor you like so that it drives the economy the right way without things heating up too much or cooling off too much it's this very primitive like one equation kind of model of how the macroeconomy works now when I was studying mainstream macroeconomics in the 80s and 90s I was told that old fashioned Keynesianism is dead nobody believes that anymore the Chicago school and the rational expectations theorists like Robert Lucas showed that those models you know can't withstand they don't make any sense when you allow the actors populating the models to be forward looking and to adjust their behavior and then we saw the so-called micro foundations revolution that you can't do crude aggregate style macro models you've got to take into account the individuals who make up those aggregates it's very Austrian sounding kind of critique you know nobody believes that old Keynesian stuff or much more sophisticated now that's what I was taught right then once 2008 all of a sudden all these sophisticated macroeconomists forget their rational expectations critique they forget about micro foundations they forget about all the fancy stuff and they revert to these backward 1950s style Keynesians well we just need Bernanke and Yellen to just keep their foot on the gas a little bit longer if inflation starts to creep up well then they can just lift their foot off the gas or they can turn the wheel to the left or right or use whatever metaphor you're like just sort of appalling another example of that is in the antitrust field in the last couple years we're seeing a revival of sort of aggressive interest among academics and policy makers in having more aggressive antitrust enforcement some people call this hipster antitrust progressive antitrust the claim is that the old neoliberal antitrust which is the approach that has dominated in the US the justice department and the federal trade commission since the Reagan era is neoliberal and right wing right so what you know the old fashioned antitrust of the 1950s said big is bad if a company is big if it has a large market share then it must be harming the consumers it must be broken up with antitrust policy in the 1970s 1980s even again even within the mainstream of academic economics people figured out they said no that model doesn't make any sense sometimes firms are large because they're efficient because they do a good job of serving the consumer large firms can be more innovative than smaller firms there's nothing per se wrong with being large or having a large market share and of course now the mainstream view is not the Austrian view the mainstream are saying well you gotta look at these on a case by case basis and industry concentration is not the thing you look at you look at some measure of consumer well-being consumer welfare and it's okay for companies to be large and markets to be concentrated as long as consumer welfare is high that is now considered troglodyte neoliberal you know extreme right and so the new kind of hipster antitrust movement wants again to go back to the 1950s and say no Amazon market share is too big google facebook apple samsung their market shares are way too big they need to be broken up by antitrust why will how are consumers being harmed by these companies doesn't matter they're big and they have a high market share that's enough to say we need to break them up you know Jeff we Austrians you know in the time that I've been in the profession have often been criticized for kind of aiming at the wrong target so for example think of think of Murray Rothbard's great treatise man economy and state you know there's the main text but there's also a very detailed and lengthy set of footnotes or end notes right and the footnotes are like a running commentary on everything that was wrong with mainstream economics when Rothbard was writing that book in the late 1950s and even even Rothbard critics and mainstream Rothbard critics within and outside the Austrian school will say well yeah his criticism of mainstream economics of this day is really sharp really spot on but of course a lot of Austrian economists will say even yeah but who cares about that I mean all that stuff's out of date we Austrians we need to be we need to be focusing on the new modern stuff we need to be criticizing game theory and we need to be criticizing behavioral economics and of course we are doing those things but we don't need to worry about that old stuff like old-fashioned Keynesianism or old-fashioned industrial organization well guess what the old stuff is back old is new again or new is old again and all of those criticisms of bad old economics we need to we need to learn those and hold on to them because all of that bad stuff you know what goes around comes around and the revival of interest in these sort of old-fashioned bad ideas means you know we really it justifies all the investment that Austrian economists have made in understanding the specific critiques of Mises Rothbard and even Carl Manger at the errors that were prominent in their day because those errors have all come back and were the vengeance well maybe we should wrap up this conversation with this thought you know something beats nothing generally so when our friends on the left progressive side of things are advocating for MMT or something else that's something and oftentimes I think Austrian economics feels like more forbearance than action and I don't just mean in its policy prescriptions or political ramifications obviously it's a neutral thing but do you understand what I'm saying how do we sort of reintroduce theory and what we would consider proper methodology how do we advance this thing against something the somethings out there neoliberalism MMT whatever those things might be it's a good question as a school of thought or an academic tradition that throughout most of its manifestation has laid kind of outside the mainstream we find ourselves engaging in a lot of criticism right we criticize the mainstream more than the other way around because the mainstream is the mainstream and we're not at the same time you're absolutely right there is a role for critical engagement with other schools of thought but by no means is that all that we should be doing in fact we shouldn't be spending as a field as a movement I don't think we should be spending even most of our time doing that I think most of our time should be spent advancing the paradigm of the Austrian tradition and how do we do that well most people academics or otherwise don't really respond all that well in my experience it's a methodological critique I think we should make methodological critiques but really more as a way of helping those who will come after showing students who are not yet established in their careers and so forth what's the right way to do things but established economists don't respond well to methodological critiques really the proof of the pudding is in the eating so most of what we should be doing to show the superiority of the Austrian approach is demonstrating it through our theorizing and our analyzing and of course we do that I'm not I'm not trying to be a gadfly because that's exactly what most of us in the Austrian tradition have done and you look at phenomena such as business cycles I mean who had the best you know who has the best understanding interpretation of what was going wrong before 2008 there was the Austrian economists who said look this what we're in now has all the classic marks of an investment boom an over investment or malinvestment bubble within the context of Austrian business cycle theory it's not going to last forever there's going to be a crash and of course there was Austrians are pretty good at explaining those kinds of phenomena a lot of my own recent work is in the entrepreneurship and innovation area and I think there are a lot of people who don't have little or no prior exposure to the Austrian school who are very sympathetic to Austrian understandings of entrepreneurship and the role of the entrepreneur in society not because somebody has told them well the mainstream view is wrong because of blah blah blah but because researchers in this tradition have simply demonstrated the value of the Austrian understanding in their descriptions of as they advance entrepreneurship theory and how entrepreneurs deal with uncertainty and the role of institutions in shaping entrepreneurial behavior as they analyze the impact of entrepreneurship and innovation on economic growth and so forth if you demonstrate to people both inside and outside academia that you have something to say that your ideas are useful and relevant and explaining difficult issues that people care about that's how you attract attention that's how you attract followers yes the formal criticism of alternative approaches is important and necessary and I'm not saying how any individual should allocate his or her time because we all have different temperaments and talents and opportunities and so forth but just as a movement I think we always need to keep our eye on the ball of advancing the Austrian tradition and you know through our own journals through the QJAE through our working papers through our courses at Mises U lectures at Mises U courses on Mises Academy the work that our PhD summer fellows are doing you can see exactly this manifest in in action you see the new content that's being produced whether it's books or articles the training passing on these great truths and their modern applications to the next generations I mean that is what we mostly do within the Austrian tradition and within the Mises Institute those must associate with the institute we need to continue to do that and make sure people know about what we're doing and you know who knows what will happen in the long term if there is an implosion in the formal institutions of academia especially within the mainstream academic economics you know we're going to be well positioned to step in and fill that gap and pick up those pieces so I'm a long run optimist about the future of the Austrian school. Well Dr. Peter Klein thank you so much for joining the Human Action Podcast. Hey it's been a lot of fun let's do it again sometime. The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org


Hi, everyone. Joe for Jaspy's Case Breaks.com. Happy Monday. Coming at you with something nice here. 2022 Tops, five star baseball, eight box. Pick your team, number 41. A lot of great stuff in here. I guess please note, the last few hours I've been done with 19, a gold silver ink autograph. It's supposed to be one per case, but yeah, just FYI on that. And I think that's clearly stated. Big thanks to this group for making it happen on a Monday. Thanks for spending a bit of your Monday with me. I appreciate that. Frank had double last spot in Mojo with the Pirates and the Nationals. Good luck to him, good luck to everybody. Eight box break with two autographs per box. Not too shabby. Let's see what we got. Use this blank card here to hide the hits a little bit. Just the microphone, just for a second here. Okay, let's see what we got. Good luck, everybody. First one out of the gate is Reed Detmerce. Rookie Otto for the Halos, that's gonna go to Franklin. Frank with that one. And then we've got a Wander Franco Rookie Otto. That's nice. Six out of 25. That's Tristan with the raise. There you go, Tristan. Playing some good baseball lately. All right, that's a good way to start it. Next box, Redemption, maybe, yeah. Thin pack, Redemption. A live hit first is gonna be Jose Barrios for the Toronto Blue Jays. That will be for Kevin H and the Bluebirds. And the Redemption, congratulations. You are due to receive a five-star dual-subject pentamorous penmanship of, looks like they're both on the same team. They're both on Texas, wow. Corey Seeger and Marcus Simeon. Both Rangers, of course. And that's gonna go to Andrew and the Texas Rangers. Very nice. Let's keep it going. Yeah, who do you think dropped the ball on that Redemption? Do we see more live Corey Seeger autographs or do we see more live Marcus Simeon autographs? Who's holding that up? All right, we got Corbin Burns. Nice, 13 out of 15. Nice autograph for the Brew Crew. That will be for Nick P. There you go, Nick. And that's his team. And back here is a Cubby. It's Rhino, Ryan Samberg. And that will be for Ed P. Or check that, Eddie, that is. Eddie Hardin, got the Cub straight up. Our next couple hits, we've got an Astro, we got Jake Meyers. Rookie Otto for the Stroves.  And then we've got Hall of Famer Barry Larkin. Two out of 10, on-card autograph for the Red Legs. That's for Ed P. Good penmanship there as well. All right, halfway through this eight box break. All right, we've got Hoy Park for the Pirates. Park for the Pirates.  And a nice patch Otto, two out of 10 each year old. Ooh, this has been a pretty nice case here. That goes to Kevin M. and the Miami Marlins. Nice autograph Jumbo Patch Relic card, Kevin. Next one, yeah, that's a good-looking card. Next right, it's a pretty sharp-looking card. All right, another two. We've got Tony Santillon. Rookie Otto for the Reds, for Ed. And then we've got a Dave Winfield Twins Edition. Eight out of 50. That will be going to Oliver and the Minnesota Twins. Dodger is hosting the Twins tonight. That game's in a few hours. All right, a couple more to go. We've got another pirate, Rodolfo Castro. 19 out of 75, 1975. Might have been a good year for the Pirates back then. That goes to Frank, Franklin with that one. Then we've got a Brave, we've got Matt Olson. Who's got the ATL? That's gonna go to Ed P. and the Braves. All right, two more autos to go. Good luck, everybody. And right after this break, we do have another case. I'll load it up. Love this five-star, good-looking set and a potential for some monsters. All right, we've got Will Clark. I'm signing up there, not down here. It's in a one-of-one. Will the Thrill. Wow, Chris Walker with my rivals, the Giants. Nice Will the Thrill. And out of fives and under, get the train whistle. All aboard the Big Head Express. Woo-hoo! And the last one is Tony Perez. Part of the big red machine, Ed P. Ed with the reds. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Real nice break in the books. We've got some more in the store. I'm Joe for jaskyscasebreaks.com. Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us. And I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye-bye.


The first official dietary guidelines for Americans were issued in 1980, and have been updated every five years since. Let's see how they've evolved over time. Originally, they recommended to maintain an ideal weight. They soon realized this was a bit of an overreach, so they switched it to OK, at least maintain a desirable weight. As Americans got fatter and fatter, that became fine. How about just maintain a healthy weight? By the 1990s, they just apparently gave up and advised Americans to at least fine improve their weight, or at least aim for a healthy weight. And by 2005, apparently the best we can do is just try to manage it. Let's go back. Avoid too much sugar. Good for them, started out strong. But that's avoidance language, can't have that. So instead, use sugar. Don't avoid sugar, use sugar, but only in moderation. But only in moderation, anti-American. So that became, choose a diet moderate in sugar, as if we should go out of our way to make sure a diet has at least a moderate amount of sugar in it, who doesn't want to appear moderate. Then they changed it into a verb, choose beverages and foods to moderate your intake of sugars. That's a little negative, and by 2005 there wasn't any sugar-specific guideline at all. They went from avoid sugar to basically the same with many of the others. Avoid too much sodium. Ended up choosing to prepare foods with less salt. Choose especially whole grains to choose carbohydrates wisely for good health. That's a guideline? The whole point of the guidelines is to give guidance. That's like asking your mechanic what's the best way to maintain your car, and them saying wisely.  Started out pretty straightforward, but maybe a little too negative sounding to the meat, dairy, egg, and junk food industries. And so they changed it from avoidance to affirmation.  Of course, even. That was too bold, and so again left with the cryptic, choose fats wisely for good health. As the American public has gotten fatter and sicker, you'd think the recommendations would get more stringent, more emphatic. Instead, there appeared to be more emphasis on the industry's bottom line, and less on America's waistline or lifeline.