And I learned later my friend Joe Kalt, who went through the system at UCLA and got a position at Harvard, we did this appreciation of Harold after he died at this event at UCLA and just to listen to the ways he went to Demsetz and asked, Hey, here's how I'm feeling about my career. Can you help me? It never occurred to me to do that, and I think there were key parts where I should have done it. I'm not saying I should have asked for help at every step. I really do like the independent life I built for myself, but I wish had done it at key points in my career.

What's interesting being a TA now and seeing the younger generations of students pass through is that there's this funny dichotomy, and I'm kind of wondering if you've observed this or if it's just a generational thing. I don't know. A lot of the students that I have either, they ask for way too much help and they use kind of all the resources as a crutch, right? They're always there, they're always asking. They're asking some of the right questions, but sometimes it's like if you took the time to be independent and figure it out on your own, it might even take you farther. But then there's this other set of students who never ever ask and you would never know how much help they need, how to help them. And as someone in a teacher role, you just want that little bit of information of how can I help you? Because that's what you want to do. You want to help them, you want to teach them, you want to help 'em learn. And I never really know how to help those students other than by saying, ask me for help, while at the same time telling this other group of students be a little bit more independent, struggle on your own a little bit. And it's kind of weird trying to send one message to these two super different groups. 

Yeah, right. No, that's hard. That's hard. I had a colleague, he left here, he left the school before he came up for tenure, but it wasn't, he was doing badly. He got a better offer. And I remember hearing that he was so into helping his students. He would go over to the library, which was just across from our building, and look around for his students and go to their tables where they were working and ask them if they needed help. So that one extreme. And of course if he was, I don't know how strategic he was, I bet he was. So he might've gone to the people who weren't asking for help. I mean, I had a little different issue because I was teaching military officers and almost none of them asked for help, right? There wasn't that bimodal thing you're talking about.

So maybe they all just need a little bit of help. But it's very interesting that I think a lot of people need to hear that. But the way that you have kind of balanced it, where on the one hand there's the independence, and that's really good and that's really important. But at the same time, being able to ask for help is also a super valuable skill.

I just need to know when to do it.

Which I guess you have to figure out by doing a little bit of both. So let's get into it. The Nobel Prize, how are you feeling about this one?

I'm feeling pretty good in the grand scheme of things, and I'll tell you why. What I've observed about the Nobel Committee over the last 10 to 15 years is that they have seemed to be moving in the direction of giving Nobel prizes to people who've done things that are in Robert Solow's words, technically sweet. In other words, very skilled on technique, not necessarily dealing with big questions. So what I like a lot about this prize is it went to three people who are looking at one of the most important, maybe the most important question in economics, how do you set up institutions so that you get sustained economic growth? Because economic growth solves a huge number of problems. It solves poverty, it solves, we don't have a lot of poverty in our country, but it just solves a lot of people's concerns in this country even. So I feel really good about that. I mean, I was seeing, I won't name names, but I was seeing people saying, oh, this or that person should get it. And I'm going, no, because that's just technically sweet, but it's not that important. And so can I tell you how I do this with my editor at the Wall Street Journal because I'm kind of proud of it?

Yes, please.

So it's announced at 2:45 AM Pacific time. And so I set my alarm for three. Why get on, why not get that extra 15 minutes of sleep? So I woke up at three, get on my computer, I find out it's these three people, and my usual deal with my editor at the Wall Street Journal is I will tell him by four 30 or five my time at the latest, whether I know enough to do it. I didn't need that. As soon as I saw who won it, I went, oh, I reviewed a book, Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson about 10 or 12 years ago. And so when I review a book, I read every page, every footnote, every reference. Well, I don't read the references, but I look at what the references were, and I just thought, I know how to do this. So I just thought about it a little more and woke up a little more, and I emailed him at three 30 to say, Hey, I can do this.

And so I go into my office, I'm there by 5:00 AM. I research. The first thing I did, by the way, was read my book review. And that really was good. It really grounded me. Okay, that's going to be part of the basis for this article. And then I read the 50 page plus thing the Nobel Committee put out, and that helped a little. And then I did that till about 6:30 or seven and started writing, and I had a pretty good draft by nine o'clock. So anyway, this was the best of the last few years because I knew their work so well. Although Claudia Goldin's work last year, I knew her work well also, she wrote the entry on the gender gap for my Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. So I was familiar with her work. Anyway, so that's what I do. And I think in the grand scheme of things, this was a good choice. Now let me tell you what I think would've been a better choice.

Oh, here we go!

The Nobel Committee used to, every once in a while, I think, I'm just guessing, I've never talked to them, look out at the world and say, okay, what's happening where we think economists have some serious input to maybe offset some bad trends in the world? And so I said to my wife the night before, I know I'm not going to get this, but I know who I think absolutely should get the Nobel Prize. It should be Doug Irwin at Dartmouth and Jagdish Bhagwati. I think he's still at Columbia. He's probably emeritus because they did a lot of the good work over the last number of decades to say why free trade is good and why protectionism is bad. And if you look at the world right now, no matter who wins in the presidential election, we're going to get more protectionism, especially if Trump wins, and we're going to get most likely a trade war.

I mean, he's just kidding himself about how good he is at negotiating this stuff. And so this would've been the statement to make to the world, and that's why I would've liked that. So anyway, that's my take. The other thing is I did manage to get in a little mention in my Wall Street Journal article about the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World thing that Bob Lawson puts together every year with some help from other economists, because really if they're talking, see, the three winners are talking about the importance of institutions like the rule of law, private property. They never mentioned that work, and it's just kind of parochial on their part not to do.

Juliette Sellgren (11:14)

So I like the idea that the Nobel can make a statement, and I do like the idea that the statement against protectionism would've been a good one, but to kind of get deeper into, maybe I'll make a good one for next year, but I don't know. We'll see. But to get deeper into the winners for this year, can you kind break down for us what institutions are, how they affect economic growth, and which ones in particular they're talking about and I don't know, examples maybe?

Yeah, so what they talk about has changed over time. I think the earlier work, the book, Why Nations Fail was the better one. And so I'm glad that's the one I read thoroughly because they talk in there a lot about things like private property and the rule of law. If you have the rule of law, you know what the rules are and they can't be changed quickly on you. If you have private property, of course, that's a bulwark against state power. And also if it gives people an incentive to produce because they get to keep it so implicit then is somewhat low tax rates, although they don't talk about that much. So anyway, that's the basic as what I got out of Why Nations Fail. Now, I did read some of their later work, and I didn't mention it as much. I have very limited space, but the Nobel Committee did this 50 plus page paper and I read it, and one of the things they talk about is democracy, how important democracy is.

And I actually do think democracy is important and in the direction they say, but I do think they overstate the importance of it. I mean, think of Hong Kong. They didn't have democracy for decades and decades, and they still don't now. It's gone bad because the Chinese communists have taken over. But before 1997 when communist China took over, they had just stellar economic growth because they had private property, they had the rule of law and all those things. And so that's a huge counter example. Singapore, I don't think under Lee Kuan Yew had a whole lot of democracy. I'm not real sure who got to vote, but I think it was fairly limited. And they had stellar performance, not quite as good as Hong Kong, but close. And so all these examples of countries, I mean important examples, at least of countries that didn't have democracy but had great economic growth, and so can I think they trust too much in democracy.

So I guess here's a question. What are the other institutions that exist when there's not democracy that kind of outweigh that? If you can have great economic growth without it, what is in place of it that is causing this growth?

Well, with Hong Kong, which is the case I know best, completely free trade, no tariffs, no import quotas. That was really huge for Hong Kong. I mean, that's one of the major ones.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I guess that ties back to the other one. So I guess, how are we supposed to act on this, right? So I guess it even could relate to, or I guess critique a lot of the economic policy proposals that we've seen floating around the political realm recently. And it doesn't seem in favor of things like protectionism, even if it's not so explicitly about that.

And so Daron Acemoglu, who's the more outspoken of the three, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday, which I read yesterday. And he's not talking about free trade at all. And so Acemoglu has written works again that I'm not as familiar with, but Ryan Young, at Competitive Enterprise Institute, did a great article about the Nobel winners. And he points out that they go and somewhat in, I've read so many things since my article, I'm not sure if it's he, but anyway, it's a good article. But anyway, people have pointed out that Acemoglu pushed in favor of industrial policy, and that's not a good idea. And Acemoglu, I think has two problems. One is he doesn't really get Hayek’s knowledge problem. He wrote something in which he said, Hey, we're supercomputers. Maybe that's not a problem anymore. And he doesn't get that all the information that people have exists in the minds of the people acting, which is you, me and billions of other people, and a computer can't capture that no matter how powerful.

But he also doesn't get what I call the public choice insight. But what I mean, it was an insight my parents had to some extent, which is that politicians don't have great incentives. I mean, my parents only slightly had it, but still the way you would hear people bitching about politicians in the sixties when I was growing up, you kind of understood that they understood that, wait a minute, this guy's just feathering his own nest, or this guy's just catering to this particular interest group, and Acemoglu doesn't seem to have that insight at all. So he still seems to have what Adam Smith called the man of system idea. And Adam Smith didn't say the man of system as a compliment. It was like this person who's trying to rearrange people on a chess board as if people don't have their own internal laws of motion.

You note in the article that Acemoglu is a fan, I guess is maybe not the best way to put it, but I'm going to put it that way of antitrust.

Yes.

That seems to kind of go along with this kind of weird to me, I guess, because I come from a standpoint of consistency. If property rights are good, then property rights are good, then how do you then impose antitrust in breaking up effectively property rights after the fact? So what do you make of that? How does this kind of, I don't know, inform your opinion of him and his work and how to interpret a lot of his

Work? Well, it makes me think less of his work, and I highlighted that in my review of their book, why Nations Fail about 10 or 12 years ago. What they have at the end of their book is a bibliographic essay that goes chapter by chapter. So when I want to say, Hey, where'd they get this? I go to the end and almost everything they have is pretty well backed up. The one really striking exception is when they talk about the Robber Barons in the 19th century and they highlight Cornelius Vanderbilt as one of the worst. It's like, oh my God, they don't know anything because Cornelius Vanderbilt, as a young man in his twenties, helped his boss break up a monopoly that the New York State government had granted to, I'm going to forget the name now. It was Gibbons versus Ogden, I think it was.

I've forgotten which was which. But anyway, given to someone Fulton, the steamboat guy had sold his franchise to this guy, and the New York State government had given them a legal monopoly. Well, that's in violation of antitrust laws if it's a monopoly from New Jersey to New York, which it was. Sorry, a violation of the Constitution that where state governments can't restrict interstate commerce. And it went all the way to Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, everyone’s heard of him, wrote the decision saying, no, you can't give a monopoly. And people celebrated in the streets of New York and parts of New Jersey because, hey, we're going to get more competition. They know none of that. And then the other Robert Baron, they highlight is John D Rockefeller. They never point out that from 1880 to 1890, when he got 90% of the market, he didn't use 90% of the market to charge high prices.

He got 90% of the market by charging low prices. Prices fell, inflation adjusted by 70% over that decade. And so again, there's none of that understanding. And so if they don't know their economic history, they are going to, and then they look at the fact that antitrust laws came along in the 1890s as a response to the trust, they go, oh, okay. That's why we needed that. And the trusts were broken up, or at least some of them were like Standard Oil, New Jersey owned by Rockefeller. So okay, that's a good idea. But again, they say that based on incredible ignorance of our economic history.

So how do you place this Nobel Prize? I guess first I have a few questions just about the overall Nobel, how it stands today, all of that. But how does this stand compared to last year? Where is it going? What is the trajectory? I guess if you can see what the Nobel Committee is thinking about, obviously you already mentioned that maybe they could have taken a stronger stance on protectionism, which I agree with, but how does this follow off of last year or the past few years, and where do you think their minds are at?

I don't think I can predict that. So for example, I thought this year was a relatively good choice. I thought last year was quite a good choice. Claudia Goldin. I thought the year before giving it to [Douglas] Diamond, [Phillip] Dyvbig and Ben Bernanke was a horrible choice. I've written these things since 1996 and I've missed, I think six years when I didn't know enough or where I was traveling. So that's around 20 some times I've written it, and I've generally been pretty positive, like 80% positive, sometimes like 90 or 95% positive. And just little criticisms, the one on Diamond, Dyvbig, and Bernanke, I think I was at most 10% positive because I just thought it was a horrible choice. So I think this is both the Claudia Goldin one and the one this year are a big step up from that. I don't think you can say what the trajectory is.

I think there's probably this internal discussion. I mean, everyone kind of knew Acemoglu would get it at some point. And so in a way, they're following fads, although that's not totally fair to, he did good work, but I mean, they're looking at that and at some point they're going to give it to him. I've given up predicting, I've literally never predicted correctly in 30 years of following this I've predicted. And then the person doesn't get it that year. He gets it the next year or the year after. I've come that close. But I've never predicted it for correctly. And what I used to do, because these awards are typically made in Columbus Day, and when I was at the Navy School, and even now, the library’s closed Columbus Day. So on Friday beforehand, I would go to the library and say, okay, which four people are most likely?

And I'd get their books out if I didn't have them, and I'd have them all ready. I quit doing that because I never got it. And by the way, the Nobel Committee has made it a little easier. They put out this pretty decent technical report at the same time, and you can kind of fill in the gaps, even if you don't know the book they're talking about. If it's the article, you can go online and find the article. Anyway, I'm getting a little off track, but the point is I can't predict. I gave that up about 15 or 20 years ago.

It is good to admit that, but it's kind of interesting that you can kind of have a vague idea of maybe who could win, but you don't actually know.

I mean, if I knew, just think of the money I'd make in the betting market, right?

Yeah. Are there betting markets for this?

I think I have not checked, but I would bet they are, so to speak.

Someone let me know.

Yeah.

So how does this fit in terms of the Nobel Prize generally? So we talked about the past few years, but in terms of your rankings of some of the best, some of the worst, is this just somewhere in the middle? How does this fit in?

Good question. I would put it in the middle, but in a way that's a little unfair to them. And here's why. When the thing started, I think they started giving the Nobel Prize in 1969. There was a huge backlog of people who you could say deserved it. And so they had an embarrassment of riches for the first 10 or 15 years with, okay, this person's, but you've got to be alive together it. And so this person's alive, he's in his seventies, better give it now kind of thing. And so they've gone through most of that backlog, although I'll give you a couple of exceptions in a minute. But anyway, yeah, I think it's in the middle, but it's kind of because there aren't as many in the backlog now as there were, let me mention a few who I think should get it, who are still alive. One of them is I think a hundred years old,

And that is Arnold Harberger, who's done fantastic work, and he still, I think, is in the classroom teaching a course once a year at Clemson. And he's great. He's just great. And I think one reason he won't get it is because I think it's the main reason is that he was at University of Chicago in the sixties teaching the So-called Chicago Boys who went down to Chile. They were from Chile, and they reformed the Chilean economy in a good way, and they worked with the person you had to work with there who was Pinochet, and it wasn't, they weren’t fans of Pinochet. They were very critical in some ways, but I think he gets tagged with that even more than Milton Friedman did. And so anyway, that would be one that I would give it to another one. When I give talks and people find out I'm Hoover, one of the first person they'll typically mention if they're thinking of economists is Thomas Sowell.

You can tell they've read him rather than heard him or heard him his name pronounced, they'll often say, Thomas Sowell, that's how it's spelled. And then in q and a, I'll get, well, when do you think Thomas Sowell will win the prize? And I go, never. And it's not because he doesn't deserve it, it's because, so his work is incredibly valuable, but it's so out of the mainstream and he's never probably run a regression in his life, but it's really good work. So anyway, that's one who I think should get it. Harberger should get it. There are a few others. The other ones I used to list are now dead, Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, who taught me at UCLA, William Baal at Princeton who died a few years ago. There are a number of people like that. Anyway, but by the way, one of the reasons we aren't getting as good choices as good picks as I think we should get is one of the people who was on the committee for a quarter of a century. I wrote a whole book review about this, which I can send you the link if you're interested. [Editor’s note: The Nobel Factor: What Does the Prize Reward?] 

Yeah, that would be awesome.

Yeah, he was a Swedish economist named Assar Lindbeck. He was a social democrat, but bit by bit, I think he became more free market. He was the one who had that famous quote, the most effective way to destroy a city other than bombing is to impose rent control. And he had a big role in choosing some of the more free market oriented people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, people like that. He's gone. I mean, I'm pretty think he died, but even before he died, I think he was off the committee. And I think that shows,

That's so interesting. I guess how many people are on the committee? I don't even know the specifics of all of this.

Well, when they present it and I watch it live, if I wake up at 2:45 or just a YouTube, if I wake up later, it's three people. And I couldn't tell you their names, although by the way, this year they gave their phone numbers. I was thinking of calling some of them, and I might still anyway, and not to say, Hey, you just say, Hey, pretty good choice. Have you thought about this? So I think it's just three, but I'm not sure. But people can make nominations and Nobel, past Nobel Prize winners, I think are encouraged to make nominations. So they've got a long list of people they're probably considering.

Wow. Something that I'm kind of wondering about is where to go from here. I think a lot of the time we think of the Nobel Prize and we're like, oh, cool, that's been done. Great. Now we know that. But especially in the way that you've kind of depicted this one, it kind of leaves me thinking what happens next? Obviously you've mentioned there's been a lot of work done that kind of fills in some of these gaps, but I don't know, I guess where does that leave younger economists or those who are kind of interested in those topics? A lot of the time when I see someone win the Nobel Prize for something, I go, okay, that's not something to do research on anymore. It's not something to think about. You've already decided as a discipline that it's done, which I guess is a silly thought, but it seems somewhat final.

Well, if your goal is to win a Nobel Prize, but then think of the probabilities. It doesn't make sense early in your career, even 10 years into your career to say, oh, I'm going to do work that'll win the Nobel Prize. There's such a randomness and there's such a low probability. It's not quite the same, but it's almost like saying, I'm going to win the lottery. I mean, no, you know what? I'll take that back. I mean, the lottery, it's one in a billion. There aren't a billion economists, so it's way better odds than that. But I just think it would be a silly way to spend your career to say, I'm going to do work that wins a Nobel Prize. I think you should say, I'm going to do work. That's important, period.

Yeah, I guess that's, I'm not organizing my entire career around getting a Nobel Prize, but I guess that kind of informs how we should think of the Nobel Prize in the context of the discipline. Maybe it shouldn't be this all important thing. And I guess for a lot of people, it probably isn't a really cool accomplishment. We hold Nobel Prize winners to be some of best in the field, which I think makes sense because kind of a rare prize, but some of the most, Adam Smith could never have gotten a Nobel Prize. It's not the oldest acknowledgement of greatness of…

Well, no. If Adam Smith, if the Nobel Prize had existed in 1776, I think he absolutely would've got it.

Oh, yeah. But it didn't exist.

Right. Okay. I just wanted to make sure.

Yes,

The same.

No, no, no, I agree. Especially if that guy who was key in the Milton Friedman, Hayek was on the board.

So one who was alive, and some people say should have got it because he was alive for three or four years after the prize was introduced, was Ludwig von Mises. And by the way, Paul Samuelson, who was the first American winner of the prize once wrote an article in which he had a list of who he thinks should have got it through history and Ludwig von Mises was on it. And Samuelson is this somewhat left of center economist at MIT. That was really striking to me.

That is super interesting. I guess that's really unexpected, but also maybe it shows that it economists can kind of, I don't know, reconcile differences or something, as you would hope.

Would hope. Yeah, I mean, Samuelson was good at that. This is how the world has changed Juliet. Because when I was growing up in economics, I started in the late sixties, early seventies, there was this civility between Samuelson and Freeman, for example. So when Freeman won the prize in 1976, Samuelson wrote this glowing tribute to him, and oh my goodness, I quoted it in a book review I did about Samuelson and Friedman, and I mean, you just wouldn't see that anymore. Although I will say I'm a little disappointed because Samuelson died a few years after Friedman, and he got kind of nastily negative in one piece he wrote, which disappointed me, but just over the years, he was very civil and nice.

We need to be civil and nice. I don't think you really get anywhere without it. Yeah.

Yeah. I think Twitter or X, I guess, has made that worse because people just feel compelled to be nasty, not just to critical. I go on X and I criticize, but I don't say I owned you or anything like that. So yeah.

So something that I'm wondering about that you mentioned was that part of the reason why Sowell would never win the Nobel Prize is because he has not run a regression or probably has never run a regression.

It's not just that though,

Yes?

No, he has isolated himself.

But in terms of the way that we conduct economics research and the way that the field is going now, do you think that that is a necessary part of economics no matter what type of economics you're doing, no matter what your contributions are? My friend and I were reading this George Stigler essay the other day, and he was criticizing, he was criticizing the discipline, and it's move towards something that is way more complicated than it has to be, where instead of just laying out your thesis, and he uses these colorful examples that make modern economists who use a ton of math look really silly. Instead of saying things that are logically consistent and simple to understand that are based in principles, you actually probably need a PhD to even comprehend the simplest form of what economists are saying, because they say, I very simply take a regression where after I've done 1200 different mathematical processes, then you obviously reach this conclusion.

Which essay was that, by the way? I thought I'd read pretty much everything Stigler’s written.

I don't remember because I was kind of handed a phone that had this on it and was asked to laugh about it, but I can let you know. I can figure it out. But it was a really good essay. So I definitely will send it along for everyone to read. But I'm kind of wondering, is that kind of necessarily the direction of economics? I know there are a lot of people who still do principles based, very logical economics, but in order to be recognized, in order to be acknowledged in your contributions and to make meaningful contributions, should we lean on things like regression analysis? I know they're helpful, but how helpful? What is the bound?

I don't think you should lean on them, but actually mean, this is part of what I liked about the award this year, and when you think about their contributions, a lot of them were popular books, which I think is a nice step. Granted, the books were based on academic articles that had regressions and so on, but still without those books, without Why Nations Fail and one or two other books, I don't think Acemoglu won the prize this early. So I think that was another healthy aspect of the award this year.

I guess last year it was white papers, white papers, white papers, right?

What do you mean exactly?

It wasn't based on popular books at all. It was very much I ran this regression.

Yeah, Claudia Goldin didn't do, I'm trying to think if she did any popular books. No, but still, her stuff was pretty understandable. And it wasn't like she was Miss Regression or something like that.

And by the way, the story, her husband, Lawrence Katz, who some people say should have shared the award, and I think there's a case for that, but I loved what he said when he was interviewed, and he said that she worked under Gary Becker, University of Chicago, and I think Robert Fogel, University of Chicago. And so she was studying various things about black, white wages and stuff in the south. And she went down there and she was so kind of innocent. I love this about her, that she's kind of like me in the sense with this independence and not asking for help, she didn't even know she could get a travel budget. And so she paid her own way, I think by bus and stayed with people whom she was interviewing. It's neat. I mean, she went the hard way in collecting data, but I think the data were probably for that reason because of the way she collected, are probably fairly credible compared to some data sets.

Yeah, no, that's a cool story.

Yeah.

Okay. So to wrap up this state of the Nobel Prize, current Nobel Prize, what should the main takeaways be? What should we be thinking about and how can we uphold things like the Doug Irwin Free Trade is a significant institution while also being like this Nobel Prize was really cool.

I think it's by not really paying attention to the Nobel Prize. I mean, the reason I pay attention is I have a chance to tell a whole bunch of people, potentially millions in the Wall Street Journal, why it's important, why it's deserved or why it's not deserved. So that's why I do it. But in what we work on, what we write about, we should just be talking about the important issues no matter who came up with 'em. So I'll tell you one where I remind. So there's this site called the UnPopulist, which Shikha Dalmia, who used to work for Reason has, and I don't like the site at all, but they had a very good piece on it about a month ago going after Vance and Trump for what they were saying about people in Springfield, Ohio, all those Haitians and so on, and just kind of exaggerating, but also literally making things up or at least telling other people's made up stories.

And one of the ideas was somehow the federal government sent those people to Springfield, and here was where I had a chance to add some work from Sowell as a commenter. I said, no, no, no. A few Haitians go there. They find it kind of works for them. They have other Haitian friends or relatives who therefore come there. And the person who laid this out in so many ways in his books on ethnic America and so on was Thomas Sowell. He says, it's not random. Someone from Germany arrives in Minnesota or Wisconsin, no, Wisconsin. And someone from Sweden arrives in Minnesota, and it works for them. So other people from Sweden come to Minnesota, other people from Germany come to Wisconsin. And that was this huge soul insight that you won't see really in any economics journals nowadays, but it's really important. So anyway, I get carried away with my answers and I forget what the question was, but anyway,

Well, it's focusing on stuff outside of the scope of the Nobel,

And so stuff will be valuable whether or not, and it's going to be not, he wins the Nobel Prize and just keep talking about it, keep finding the value in anything that's valuable.

Yeah. So it's great that we talked about both the Nobel Prize and people that maybe should have won it, will never win it, but could win it or should win it, but will never win it. Because actually, I think it lets us have a conversation about actually the state of the discipline of economics and kind of what the important findings are and truths are, and it's just kind of a beginning of a conversation, right?

That's right. Yeah.

So I have one last question for you. What is one thing that you are working on currently to improve yourself or your skillset?

All right. You did tell me that question was coming and I had real trouble with it when I started thinking about it yesterday morning, and I talked to my wife. I don't feel like I'm doing anything new or anything to do that. Can you help me with that? Because, and I can't say I'm perfect, so I should be working on something. And she said, yeah, you're almost 74 years old. You've been retired for seven years. You're still going into your office five days a week and doing this stuff. You're still getting up at 3:00 AM and doing the Nobel Prize thing. So in other words, just keeping up a certain level of energy is a way of improving myself. I don't know if that fits, but anyway, that's what she and I came up with.

I think that that's wonderful, even and maybe especially as a college student, I am really impressed that you managed to wake up at three in the morning and are committed to writing these pieces for us all to read and enjoy. So thank you for doing that, and thank you for sharing. And thank you for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed this, and I love having you on Julia every single time. So thanks once again. 

I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.