{ "episodeId": "SLP527", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "stephan_livera": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "guest", "tag": "STEPHAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.3, "text": "If we want to ask, \"Was business exploiting the workers?\" Well, that question is answered in nominal dollars." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "00:19", "start": 18.7, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to the Stefan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics, brought to you by Swann dot com. Joining me today is Jean Epstein. He is the founder of the SoHo Forum, and he was a long time editor, economics editor at Barron's, and he's rejoining me on the show today. We're gonna be talking about, lots of interesting things. Jean, great to have you back." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:41", "start": 41.1, "text": "Good to be back, and of course, good to get the opportunity to promote myself for, for among your millions of fans, Stefan. Not quite that many, but yeah. You get a free ticket, we charge twenty-four dollars plus it's eight dollars for the party afterwards. we're having, Jay Bhattacharya, on, Sunday, December seventeenth, gonna be a matinee, and, tickets are on sale for that. and, in February, we're having a debate on the, on, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And if you go into thesohforum dot org, thesohforum dot org, tickets are on sale for all our debates through March. Jay Patil, especially whom you probably have heard of, is, going to, debate the, the successful case that he helped bring against the Biden administration for censorship, and he's gonna be Be debating a lawyer, and that'll be a Sunday matinee. In addition, I wanna emphasize that we have a twofold mission at the SoHo Forum to have a debate, one-on-one debate of interest to libertarians, but hopefully to the larger community, but then to have a party afterwards where people can commune. Most of the time, our debaters attend, in this case, both debaters will be at the party to discuss the issues afterwards as part of the show. People meet each other, they form friendships, career- Romances, they have sex afterwards. This is part of our mission to get people together, Stephan. So if you're passing through New York, you, your wife, and your nine-month-old on December seventeenth, you wanna come to our debate, your many listeners should be coming as well. There are lots of things to do in New York in, in, December seventeenth, but as I say, there's the debate and the party afterwards. so, the solform dot org is where you should look. Alright, Stephan. I'm through, I'm done, that's it. I've got, you know, let's get to your questions. But I wanna, I wanna-- Well," }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "02:46", "start": 165.8, "text": "okay, so let's, let's, let's, let's talk a little bit about what we were planning to talk about. Now, the reason I wa-- you know, wanted to chat with you again is, I know you have a specific critique of a, a, a particular, idea that seems to be prevalent right now, and that idea, and this is relevant for Bitcoiners as well, because At the top of that website is this infamous chart, which basically shows-- basically, the idea is to try to show, \"Oh, wow, look, look at the divergence between labor productivity and labor compensation.\" And so, if people can see on the chart, but, Jean, I know you have a very, strong disagreement with this, and you have a-- I think, and I think a lot of people who don't know you might sort of initially think, \"Oh, wow, is this just like some lefty person who's sort of disagreeing?\" No, actually, Jean The guy, and he's critiquing it for his, for a different reason. So Jean, I know you have a, a very specific framework to outline around this, so do you mind outlining some of your thoughts there?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:52", "start": 232.25, "text": "I, well, as a matter of fact, bear in mind that, I've made few friends with this critique of mine, as you call it. Few because, as you probably know, Bitcoiners and other free market types like, to argue that the government has so screwed up the economy That, this, divergence between productivity gains and wage gains actually did occur, and so many of them dated from the early 1970s, because for them, it's because the vest-- whatever vestiges of the gold standard, were retained up until then, were abandoned, as you know, got, for foreigners, the dollar was redeemable in gold, and then Nixon, as the phrase goes, closed The gold window and a lot of free marketeers said, \"I say, that's why, productivity kept increasing, but, wages barely, followed, lagged far behind.\" indeed, I, I was just speaking to another interviewer and I was saying that, you know, most people are doing better than their parents d-did," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:18", "start": 317.69, "text": "on all levels of income. Things are improving, and, I get a lot of pushback. So it's not just from the left, it's from, from the libertarians, the free market people, that I get this pushback. Now, ironically, my critique is so simple that, one would, might say it almost defies belief and I, and, I did an interview, I'll mention, with, with, Bob, Bob Murphy, right? and, some people said you got a little bit too quickly into the statistical weeds, and I lost you. You know? And it's a little bit hard to convey these points, in just such a discussion. I did a, a, I hope you actually linked to it. I did a lecture at the Mises Institute about a year ago, two years ago. ago actually by now, in which I threw up some slides so that the graphs are fairly simple and I had plenty of time to explain it. But really, the whole point is quite simple. It's quite simple. And I want to begin it this way. There's nominal dollars, there are nominal dollar measures of productivity and of Labor compensation, I should say, of course, labor compensation includes benefits. the, KACIMI chart you sent me from the Economic Policy Institute seems to include benefits as well, so we don't have to get into that argument. Benefits, mainly medical benefits, pension benefits, and so on. That, that's part of your salary. It would be money you'd spend out of your salary if, if it w-- if the benefits weren't provided. So that's compensation. Okay. So take compensation and take the measure of output per worker hour, both of them measured in nominal dollars. Now, what are nominal dollars? Nominal dollars are simply a measure of what business sells the output for. It's always selling it in nominal dollars in 1972, '73, '74, '97, '98. It's always selling its output in nominal dollars, and it's always paying compensation in nominal dollars. Now, if you then take output per worker hour in nominal dollars each year, take compensation in nominal dollars each year You're lining them up each year together, and that means then that you'll simply ask a question like, \"Well, did the increase in nominal dollars paid workers in compensation track?\" The increase in nominal dollars in the output per labor hour. Did they track each other? The answer is However, you measure the, the productivity and the compensation according to the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the official arbiter of these numbers, the answer is yes The two tracked each other, tracked each other in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, and in every decade since. Up through the present." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "08:58", "start": 538.02, "text": "Yeah. Not exactly, not precisely." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:00", "start": 540.05, "text": "Just to make sure everybody's" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "09:01", "start": 540.97, "text": "following along, basically what you're making, yeah, you're making the point that when you put everything into nominal dollar terms Productivity and labor compensation have actually, in fact, tracked each other, and that there's another reason for this supposed divergence on this chart. Which, well, yes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:20", "start": 560.36, "text": "Well, the, the, see, what I'm trying to do is bring it down to earth. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not, I'm, I'm not exactly saying anything very sophisticated here. I'm not, I, I'm, I'm not massaging numbers really, although I will tell you that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when they post their numbers, the agency posts its numbers, it takes a little bit of manipulation to put the numbers in nominal dollars. They don't, I mean, it's not like it's-- I'm not exactly a, a, a statistical whiz, but I can do it 'cause I'm familiar with the numbers. But, you, you have to do a little bit of a manipulation to-- and it's simple enough, nominal dollars. And my point is that the rest is Bullshit. The rest is just how, how do these fanatics take nominal dollars if they, if the Bureau of Labor would only say, dollar for dollar each year? And again, I emphasize Why does it make sense? Well, business sells in nominal dollars and people are paid in nominal dollars. So why are we messing with this? We want to match one with the other. Why do we have to? Inflation adjusts These numbers, when we're comparing nominal dollars with nominal dollars. And by the way, there are other-- It's a-- any sophisticated person, and now I have to use the word \"sophisticated,\" should know that price indexes are a bit of a can of worms. We can argue about them endlessly. They're, they're, they're very gross approximations. Murray Rothbard, an economist I revere, wrote in his, in his, In Man, Economy, and State, the book that, that, that was my gateway, my, my, to libertarianism, that, that price indexes are all bullshit. Although Murray Rothbard, whenever he needed to use a price index, did use it, so he was a little bit hypocritical. In this case, we don't need to use a price index because we're comparing the, the, the dollar in nom-- the nominal dollar dollar value of what was s- at what was made with the nominal dollar value of what was, paid to workers. We don't need to use a price index So that should be the end of it. We don't have to bother with this anymore. We, we then have to unravel why people like the Economic Policy Institute folks have turned this thing into a, an entangled mess with price indexes, or why the Bureau of Labor Statistics does it as well We only have to ask, what is wrong with these people that they can't think in simple terms? the, the, I, I, I believe that in the case of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it, it's a combination of a very strong sort of left wing tradition that, that they use price indexes when the price indexes only confuse, they don't clarify. In addition, it's a kind of a bureaucratic inertia. But I think that I got to know some of those people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they sort of like the idea of showing that there's a huge divergence between productivity and compensation that started in the early 1970s. Okay. I hope now, now if you take away nothing else from what I'm about to say, it's what I've just maybe belabored. The nominal dollar measures, which are easy to come by, which I post over and over again, anytime I'm asked. And the beauty of the statistics has different, you know, it, it-- By the way, it's, it's actually the fact that they line up is almost like, I almost regard it as miraculous, because these numbers are to some degree statistical sausages. and if you, if you actually unravel the standard measure of compensation, usually the preferred measure is nonfarm productivity and then nonfarm wages. And, a-and I, I could get into, nonfarm compensation, I should have said wages compensation. I'd get into the complications there, but they do line up. So Case closed, who cares? Now, now you sent me the graph of the, of the Economic Policy Institute, and of course, the main thing to say about that graph, although the other things to say about how screwed up it is, but the main thing to say about that graph, as well as all of the others that are posted Is that they're dealing in two sets of books. What do I mean by that? They're using two different divergent price indexes for compensation versus output. That's the only reason why they get that result. they're using, if for compensation, they use typically the consumer price index. I, I'm not sure it says that in the graph that you just sent me, but I'm sure that's what they're using, the consumer price index. and, in the case of output, they're using something called the implicit price deflator, a very different measure. Now, those two indexes sharply diverged starting in the early 1970s. If you want to Make something of that, that, that, that if you believe the implicit price deflator as a way of measuring the real output per worker hour versus the CPI versus the, the real wage, that's fine if you wanna say, \"Well, something interesting happened. The, the, the value of the output, was priced differently from what workers had to pay in order to make ends...\" Meet. I don't know if I've lost you there. My point is that the price indexes diverge, and somebody could say, \"Well, but that's the reality.\" if you believe in the price indexes. Price indexes, as I say, are statistical sausages. They're very screwed up. I happen to believe al-along with the Brookings Institution that the c- that the consumer price index s- still overstates price inflation by nearly one percentage point a year. But that's- Not important in this case. The point is that if you wanna say that the value of the output increased be-- because of the, the different price index faster than, than the cost of living based on our price index, you could say that And you could make something of it, you could discuss it, but that evades the question. The question is Was business exploiting labor? Was business paying labor so much less than the value of the output? That question is answered through nominal dollars. As, as a, as a guy I know who, who's got a lot of experience with the BLS and with the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis They throw out these numbers and they don't realize if this is really the case, that the exploitation rate just really hit the moon, that productivity soared and compensation barely followed, profits must have been going through the roof The fact of the matter is that profits didn't go through the roof, which is, by the way, another interesting story in itself. But the point, they don't ask, my God, the windfall must have done, but they don't trace it out. But again They're not curious about it because they're happy with their results. So again, back to square one. If we wanna ask Was business exploiting the workers? Well, that question is answered in nominal dollars. No, they increased compensation pretty much in line in nominal dollars with the value of the output in nominal dollars. So no, there, there wasn't some big break, there was no great, departure. be-f-starting in 1971, where, where labor was suddenly getting exploited and not getting paid the nominal dollar value of their output Again," }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "18:49", "start": 1128.68, "text": "I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:49", "start": 1128.8, "text": "keep beating the same dead horse because I found that when I started by saying, \"Oh, well, they're using different price indexes,\" I'm getting people into the weeds, they get a little bit confused, so maybe we ought to go over it again. But, but, but again, I hope I've, I, I made the point. Yeah, no, I think, I think I've" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "19:08", "start": 1147.71, "text": "got you. So let me just summarize. It's simple enough. It's all" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:11", "start": 1151.08, "text": "bullshit. It isn't even anything for me to say that I'm respectfully challenging These people, I am saying they have their heads up their asses. I am saying that they have such an ideological stake in this result that it doesn't occur to them to say, \"Let's do it in nominal dollars.\" Now there are, now there are more subtle problems with, with, with the EPI measure, and again, because I think, I think they have a particular stake in the result. But, you know, I, I, I, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, in- I'll interrupt myself again and say that probably if I were talking with an API person, and I said that the, the API person would probably say, \"But look, the price indexes are, are the price indexes. So are prices. So the price index of productivity, diverges, and so productivity's taken off, and so the real value of the output took off, and the real value of the compensation didn't. \" I'm sure, I'm sure that I would never convince that kind of hard- That, that, that, that, that's an interesting story itself, but it doesn't address the exploitation issue." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "20:25", "start": 1224.93, "text": "The normal labor" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:26", "start": 1226.07, "text": "issue addresses it." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "20:27", "start": 1226.83, "text": "Yeah. So I think this is a, an interesting one for, for Bitcoiners because a lot of Bitcoiners are have kind of been making this argument. They've been out there saying, \"Look, you know, the Federal Reserve and taking the, you know, closing the gold window and all the, these typical arguments.\" Now, there may be arguments that are correct, but maybe just not this particular one about labor exploitation, right? So I think as Austrians, you can definitely make the argument about the Cantillon effect, right? This idea that, you know, those people who are closer to the money printer, they are winning and the savers are losing in this fiat inflationary system. And I think those arguments still apply. Well, there's a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:05", "start": 1265.04, "text": "lot of things, there's lots of things, but the, I mean, the, the argument about, about the connection between this exploitation, essentially, essentially Neoclassical economics, not just the Austrians, but neoclassical economic also says, the standard mainstream economic also says that, that, that, that labor as a, as a whole will be compensated, that increases in compensation will more, will, will pretty much pace the increase in, in, in, in, in the, in the value of, of the productivity of labor, that, that this will be a strong tendency year to year. It's not Perfect. It, it, but it will happen. And so indeed, this departure, this huge divergence indicates something very dramatic happened to American capitalism. The left wing likes to say it's the decline of unions, I guess, that did it, among other things, or then maybe later on the, the, the idea that, there was a competition from, from cheap labor abroad. My fellow Austrians and free marketeers, I think, are less A little bit incoherent about it, 'cause I've never really heard any convincing argument, maybe you could give me one, w-about the causal connection between the closing of the gold window and, and the, and the takeoff of price inflation and, and this huge divergence. You know, how, how, how was it in a competitive labor market? that, that, that workers were suddenly not, th-th-that compensation suddenly was so far lacking increases in productivity. You know, Ludwig von Mises and others explain it much, but pretty clearly that, that if labor is really getting, that, that if it's usually underpaid in a particular sector, then, then competition will bid the la-the wage up, because I can, I can take all your workers from you, because they're producing so much more. I can make a huge profit by just bidding up the wage. So that's, that's the standard argument against unions, and even, even Joseph Stiglitz, this progressive economist, others point out that, that, that, that unions only cause differenti-different-differentials in wages, unions don't lift wages, productivity lifts wages. There's pretty much of a consensus about that." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "23:31", "start": 1411.08, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. If you need a place to stack sats, swan dot com is the place to go. 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Swan wants you to self-custody your coins, and with Swan, there's a range of learning and material available to you, whether that is Swan Signal, whether that is additional private research for Swan private customers, there's so much that you can explore over at swan dot com, and if you go to swan dot com slash livera, you'll get ten dollars of Bitcoin dropped into your account when you start stacking with Swan. And now back to the show. With Jean. Yeah, and I'm, I'm saying I'm agreeing with you on this particular, on that particular point about, you know, I think this notion of the disconnection between the labor productivity and labor compensation isn't correct, as you're saying, because when you put it in nominal, it's all the same. But I think maybe the point where other, where maybe there's still, you know, I'm curious to hear your views on this as well, is I think a lot of people would argue that CPI is understating inflation and That actually people are, you know, there's a cost of living crisis and that's-- and I'm sure you're seeing this as well, but I'm curious to hear your view on that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:14", "start": 1514.18, "text": "We, we can get into that. You, okay, all right. As you said, we've sort of kissed off- We've kissed off the issue about, about this, this, this exploitation phenomenon that, that, that, that the whole idea that, that, that, that compensation tends to increase productivity got rescinded, capitalism suddenly, abrogated that tendency, something-- and, we know that this is simply not true. Okay. I, I could, I could, I could mention, by the way, that, that- the EPI likes to take their own construction, the Economic Policy Institute, so I'm referring to the left wing institute. They, they like to tell, to take their own construction, and they like to make it the wages and benefits of production and non-supervisory workers. That was, they don't take the entire compensation figure that is posted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they take out this portion that That, that they get for production and non supervisory workers. And there's another more subtle scandal in that number. the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself repudiated that figure years ago. The idea that you can actually track production and non supervisory worker payouts, maybe that's an interesting thing to get into, but it looks like maybe you're not that interested in it. The fact is that, the, the s-- there's a slight scandal going on. In my book, EconoSpinning, I quoted, a landmark statement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was posted, I guess it was in, yeah, in two thousand and five. They said that they were discontinuing the series on wages of production and non-supervisory workers. They said they were discontinuing it And they explained why they were discontinuing it, and then lo and behold, they brought out the larger figure of for, for all workers, but they decided not to discontinue the, the, the way, the, the, the, production and non-supervisory workers number. and, they didn't, as I" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "27:38", "start": 1658.18, "text": "understand, then this kind of comes down to how you are, how you count what kind of workers, and so I think I think that's, is that the point you're making around the supervisory workers versus the all employees number?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:51", "start": 1670.76, "text": "They, they, yes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, I quoted the statement in my book, but maybe best for me to summarize it. The scandal about that number was that it started, the production numbers started back in the 1940s, and it conjured up what was a reasonable demarcation that if you in-- that, that if you send a questionnaire to, to a factory An establishment that is a factory, and it probably can fill out the, the, the pay it gives to the production workers versus the, versus the workers that are supervising versus the foreman. But then what increasingly happened, of course, over time, was that we're not really sending out questionnaires to, to the production versus the supervisory work, we're sending it out to service industries. They found that the respondents were leaving that part blank. As I jokingly said, I work at Barons, and when I wrote about this in my column, I work at Barons, and I can guarantee you that whoever fills out the form that is sent by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, \"What did you pay your non-supervisory workers?\" They don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about whether, gee- Napstein is a supervisory or a non supervisory worker. They don't know, because do I supervise some people? Yeah. Am I supervised by others? Yeah. Well, the fact of the matter is that they were finding that, that the vast, that so many companies were simply leaving that part blank. And the-- and, and they had to, the Bureau of Labor Statistics then had to deal with, with very skimpy returns on, on that part of the question, because increasingly companies were simply saying, \"This doesn't mean anything to us.\" The further joke is that when you looked it up at the Bureau of Labor Statistics glossary, they said people who are non-supervisory are people who aren't in a supervisory position, meaning then they, they defined it in In a circular way. So the whole thing became a left wing joke. And what I added to the insight was, why was it that this wage figure for non supervisory workers was so flat? Why was it lacking other wage figures that were coming from other sources? My theory, which I originated in my book, was that because the companies that paid people best, that were giving, average workers stock options, that, that, that were giving raises to people, that, that were mixing it up, these were the companies that were paying the best. And so the companies that were being missed in the survey was the better, was the increasing share of the better paying companies who had no such difference Definition anymore." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "30:57", "start": 1856.92, "text": "Yeah, okay. I think, yeah, that, that's probably more into kind of the statistical weeds, but I, I think, I think it'll be more interesting to hear your views on CPI and how you think CPI is actually understating inflation. sorry, I think, sorry, most-- I think most, you know, people are probably thinking CPI rather is understating inflation, and you actually believe it's overstating the perceived inflation. I'm curious why you, why you believe that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:24", "start": 1884.15, "text": "Well, well, let me, let me give it a- Let me give one, one broad, broader statement. This might shock you, but the, the CPI, given the way the formula works, completely missed the Walmart effect and completely missed the Amazon effect. I, I, and I wouldn't be getting into the weeds in order to explain why, but when, when, when Walmart came along And, especially in the foo- in the grocery area, they, they, they, and, and came along in all the other goods areas, Walmart specialized in selling name brand goods and then in selling food at huge discounts. And the CPI, the way it was technically set up, just linked to those numbers, I'll put that in quotes, linked to those numbers, and never registered the huge discounts that were brought. And so the, the, there was, there was no decline in price Prices that, was ever recorded from this. Same thing with Amazon. Amazon was, well, brought, brought about huge discounts on books and other things, made it possible for people to, to, to buy things for less. That too was missed. So Those are two sort of major events, in discounting that they simply weren't able to handle because of the way the formula works. So that in itself should be a little bit of a shock. now, what else is involved? they, they tend to come, I guess, you, you, if you look at the history of, well, well, let me give you the other dramatic example. They didn't know how to handle the smartphone. The smartphone revolution was really extraordinary in that it hit hard, in the, during the Great Recession. Session, oh eight, oh nine, people were suddenly throwing away those clip phones that, that became sort of collectors' items or, or niche, niche items, and they were suddenly buying smartphones. And the smartphone replaced so much. Most young people I know don't own watches. I mean, maybe the clip-on phone was keeping-- no, I guess it wasn't keeping time. most people I know, they don't own flashlights. they, they, they often don't even-- they don't use a desktop computer or a laptop. They just use their smartphone as a computer. It, they're too- All of, all of the many goods and services that a smartphone provided were simply not reflected in the numbers. now again, if I would explain it further, I would be getting to the weeds. But you recognize that the smartphone had a huge, huge deflationary effect since it, since it substituted for so many goods and services. and then of course, they, you know, obviously admit you didn't no longer need it to use a, use a The landline, most, most young people I know don't own a landline, phone anymore." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "34:37", "start": 2076.78, "text": "the, the," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:38", "start": 2077.68, "text": "the obviously the camera, don't buy a camera anymore. All of these goods and ser-- goods that are part of the CPI suddenly become sort of like Lame ducks, and it's all encapsulated in the smartphone. A huge-- and, and of course, the smartphone was pricey, but, but, but the bundle of goods that it brought was a huge disinflationary effect in the CPI. So," }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "35:05", "start": 2104.67, "text": "I mean, look, granted that, you know, the smartphone and the internet and, you know, some of these things had it where- And Wal-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:11", "start": 2111.26, "text": "and Walmart." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "35:13", "start": 2113.02, "text": "Yeah. Well, I, I'm not an American, so I'm probably not as familiar with that, but yeah, sure." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:18", "start": 2117.5, "text": "And Amazon. And you wanna grant that as well?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "35:20", "start": 2119.87, "text": "Yeah, of course. I think, yeah, yeah, of course. Those are, yeah, certainly, I agree with you on that. But do you not-- I mean, I'm sure you also hear a lot of people who are also complaining about the cost of living, that, you know, grocery-- like, meat prices have risen so much in the recent years, and, you know, there are these alternative indexes, so as an example, the Chapwood Index is one example, but I'm curious- Do you, do you see, like, how much can you account for that with the, as you said, the Walmart effect, the Amazon, the smartphone effect? But how much, I mean, you can't, I can't eat my smartphone, right? Like, like there's a certain amount of cost of food and cost of, you know, petrol for the car or" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:57", "start": 2157.19, "text": "things. Well, I just got to explain, Stephan, let's slow down a second. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just got to explaining to you that Walmart is major in the food business, in the grocery business Walmart, Walmart started to discount groceries in a major way. W-w- I'm, I live in New-- in Manhattan, so I don't experience it, but when I'm on the road, the, the stunning grocery stores they, they run, the supermarkets, the, that's food. They discounted it substantially. So let's make sure that I'm talking about necessities as well. Now, so- I'm, I'm, you, you might say, \"Look, I'm giving you anecdotes. I can't, I can't give you a chalkboard demonstration of, of, of why the CPI misses it. I'm only giving you some major examples, and food is indeed a major example of that, 'cause Walmart is major in food. It, of course, it forced discounting from other, grocery stores, other supermarkets as well.\" But let me get to the Chapman, the Chapwood index, which actually, in my ignorance, I'd never heard of, but I looked it up. I, I thought, there's another guy, I forget his name. These alternative indexes have a certain reductio ad absurdum nature about them, and what is that reductio ad absurdum nature? It's that if you apply-- and I, and actually I looked it up, I'm not the first one to make this crit-critique, or the only one, it's an obvious enough one, that if you apply the Chapwood index and if you believe in it, we have not had an economic expansion for the last ten years. We've had nothing but contraction. You know why? Because obviously, if you then, then take-- now, of course, maybe you're not gonna believe in nominal GDP. If you take nominal gross domestic product and then you apply any version of the Chaplin index to it in order to turn it into real gross domestic product You get a continual contraction because nominal gross domestic product never rose more than four percent, five percent at most, and the chapter is rising at more than five percent consistently. So we've had nothing but contraction. Now, I'm able to meet people who say, \"Yeah, well, that's right, we've had nothing but contraction. we are poorer than we used to be.\" Well, the problem with Believing that, that, that gross output or whatever amount of measure you want of output has been contracting is that there are so many other independently derived numbers that contradict that, mainly employment numbers. We have universal counts of employment from unemployment insurance claims, w-we have, we have other, counts of the actual quantity of goods, sold and manufactured. We have reasonable verification of- The fact that there has been economic expansion, and, and, and the difference between the Chappell index and the, and, and, and the nominal GDP is now so great that it's just impossible to believe the Chappell index has any basis in reality for that reason alone. Now So that's why these alternative indexes are deeply unimpressive. I'll go back to the, to the obtuseness. Again, these are, these are arguments that are so silly for me to belabor the refutation almost dignifies such arguments. Now, with respect to my more subtle point about the idea that the CPI still tends to overstate inflation, now that's a little bit more subtle. I've made only a few general points about Where it makes mistakes, and, a-and but, but more broadly, the, the, the problem with any price index is that if you have an entrepreneurial economy where discounting happens, where fortunes are made from discounting, if you have an entrepreneurial economy where new products are coming out, it's very hard for a price index to keep up with it. And but, but- By the way, I, I, as you know, I began by saying that to whatever extent you can avoid using a price index, I would avoid using it the, the, the, I, I would tell you by the way that wage-- you can take wages as a share, compensation as a share of output, that's much better 'cause that's a nominal versus a nominal. I wouldn't use a price index for wages. I, I prefer not to. so I wanna avoid price indexes to, to whenever it's necessary, but price indexes at times become un-avoidable. let me make a more general point as well about what I believe is the psychology of, of the way people perceive prices. T- there are two issues. Number one In the life cycle, as people get older, they tend to buy more expensive goods. They tend to buy-- so they become sort of more aware of the fact that things seem to cost more than they used to. that's, that's part of it. But secondly, I believe that, people will tend to notice a price hike more quickly than they'll notice a price decline, or more quickly than they'll notice a flat price. They'll become aware of price hikes, more easily, than they will of price declines. So I think that's the reason why there's a kind of, a bias in, that, that people tend to sell Suffer from with respect to, to, to, to their perception about what is happening to prices. I guess again, I mean, I've never done a survey, but- Yeah, so I think it seems interesting to me because we're" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "42:17", "start": 2536.51, "text": "seeing people who are, you know, there's a lot of people talking about even the same item, you know, let's say ribeye steak or something like that has, you know, that has gone up more- Look, I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:27", "start": 2546.54, "text": "mean, again, I, I ribeye steak, I, I mean, I, I, we could get But, the question is, I mean, the certainly the, the CPI, oh, yeah, let me just look it up. I mean, the, the CPI certainly shows that, that steak and meat is a lot more expensive. It's not like it doesn't-- I mean, I mean, that, that's not a difficult item to track, except as I say, they missed the discounting that Walmart was opposing, but, but still, they definitely show an increase." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "43:00", "start": 2579.68, "text": "Yeah. So I, I guess at the end of the day, it sort In your basket, and of course, everybody's basket is different in terms of the real goods and services that you actually purchase. But I guess does that, in your view, does that, does that then explain, because we're seeing a lot of people who are saying, \"Hey, I can't make ends meet,\" it seems that, you know, and we seem, like, we seem to be seeing a lot more conversation about cost of living crisis. Do you put that all down to that effect that you were saying that just basically people notice increases more than they notice decreases? Is that, is that the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:33", "start": 2612.94, "text": "The additional point is that there's a certain life cycle issue where people going from their twenties to their thirties, they want more things, they, they, they, they have trouble making ends meet because their expectations rise, they buy more expensive items. I was gonna look up meat, but I guess there's no point. The, the, the CPI definitely shows a huge increase in meat. And of course, let me emphasize, I posted a tweet just the other day where I took, I took the CPI CPI, because, the, the, this, this, the CPI over the last, you know, just uniformly, I took the CPI, which is the official measure that the Bureau of Labor Statistics takes, and, and then I took this Bureau of Labor Statistics measure of Not, not the average hourly wage of the production supervisory workers, which is, as I mentioned, a screwed up number, but of all workers, which is what they've been tracking, and I found that if you compare the real hourly wage, in October of 2023, last month's number, the most recent number, that is now inflation-adjusted by the CPI And then the same CPI inflation adjusting over the last seven years. You've-- and then compare October of twenty twenty-three with February of twenty twenty. Forty-four months ago. Why did I take February of twenty twenty? Because it's the month before the lockdown started. It's the month before the US, the, the, the governments of the states shut the economy down. The last month when there was a, when something was happening in the economy, and then, and then the lockdowns occurred. So compared to February of, of twenty twenty, forty-four months ago, according to their official numbers, the average hourly earnings are up by just four cents. Four cents. Now take the same forty-four month periods in nine-- twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen, and the rise was about forty cents. So I make that point because there are a whole lot of cheerleaders out there, Paul Krugman among them. For the Biden economy, and I began this tweet by saying, \"Well, maybe this is a reason why people aren't too excited about the Biden economy, about the performance of the economy. There's just been, according to the official numbers, a four cent increase.\" Now, I do think the CPI is understating, but bear in mind that I'm-- that I'm making a comparison according to the same, I mean, overstating rather, but according to the same CPI measure, it used to be forty cents over four A gain over forty-four months, not four cents. So, so even if I'm correct, by the way, the CPI-- By the way, I'm just saying the CPI overstates by, a little less than one percentage point a year So, so inflation is running four, five, six percent as it has been, that's not a huge difference in terms of overstatement. The only main issue about the overstatement of the CPI has to do with the very long run that if you're gonna look at Fifteen, twenty, thirty year periods, a one percent, a, a nine tenths of one percentage point in, difference makes a difference, but not over forty-four months, not so much, or even, not so much over forty-four months. Why do I make that point? Because I'm trying to, of course, point out to you that I'm hardly ignorant of the fact that price inflation has taken off. It's been punishing a whole lot of people. The gains over the last forty- four months, according to the CPI, have been a mere four cents. Even if I'm right about the overstatement, it's been maybe five cents or five and a half cents, over forty-four months when it used to be over forty cents. So that's been bad news. And indeed, there too I get I'm, I'm really sounding like a commotion, forgive me. I'll slow down, calm down a little bit here. But there was a huge explosion in the conventional measure called M2 that began In, in early 2020, by any means, an explosion that completely dwarfed the last time there was spikes in the 1970s. There was spikes in the 1970s that, that connected to the price inflation then. Then, then, then the increase in M2 greatly slowed, and then, starting in early, 2020, M2 ex- M2 exploded on the upside. M2 is the measure Of the money supply adopted pretty much by the Chicago Monetarists. it's a broad, it's, it's a measure of, of cash plus checks plus a lot of near monies like savings accounts. It's the well accepted measure of, of the money supply, and it exploded. Big news, hardly surprising that price inflation took off. And now M2 has greatly slowed its increase. So much of the, the, the only reason why my-- again, as I mentioned, the only reason why my, my idea that the CPI overstates inflation matters is because of lo-- of using it as a long-term measure, not in the short run. So people have a right to complain about. Although, again, I w-- was just interviewed by somebody who claimed I was being a Pollyanna by even suggesting that, that the average hourly earning, Earnings are up by four to five cents over the last forty-four months. That, that there has been some modest increase, a very modest increase, but hard. But if people are used to forty cents, used, then, then a lot of people are hurting. A lot of people in their own life cycles are hurting. So indeed-" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "49:34", "start": 2974.14, "text": "Right. Yeah. Back to the show in a moment. If you're trying to transact recently, I'm sure you've seen the dynamics in the mempool can be a bit tricky. Mempool.space is your way to help navigate what's going on here. With Mempool.space, you can see at a glance the mempool dynamics and see how much of a fee you need to attach to your transaction to get it confirmed into a block. With Mempool.space, you can view the mempool, you can view the blockchain, the historical record of transactions, you can see data relating to those transactions, such as It relates to a Lightning channel, the RBF history of that transaction, there's all kinds of information you can dive into there. 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And one other idea that I'm curious to get your view on, it, you know, this is like another, I guess, pop culture thing we're seeing people talk about this idea that, oh, it used to be possible to be a single breadwinner and have, you know, the wife and kids at home and this kind of thing, and would you put that down to- People's expectations has r-has risen so much that they believe it's not possible to do that anymore, or do you think there's some genuine, you know, something, something wrong there that it used to be feasible? Where, where are you at here?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:12", "start": 3132.41, "text": "You know, I'm, I'm turning, I'm turning seventy-nine in a few days, so just bear with me, bear with the fact that I'm sounding like a real curmudgeon. I ap- I apologize for, for, for sounding so insulting toward my intellectual adversaries. But, but, but of course, here too, I would say the same thing, you know, people have expectations too. Look, the fact is that, it- I do have the advantage of being seventy nine, that I was, that I, I grew up in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, and, a-and, and certainly, it's also possible to show that that if you wanted to support a family on a single income, according to the standards, a living standards of nineteen sixty, if you'll take that year, if that's a decent year, then, then, then you'll never make a long distance phone call, you won't own-- you'll own a house, if you even live in a house that's, that's like half the size of the house you're in now, you won't have access to air conditioning, you'll never fly on a plane, your diet will be much more restricted." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:25", "start": 3205.06, "text": "there's air conditioning, there are planes, what else is there? the, the, the, the, the diseases like leukemia, if, it w-will kill you. Leukemia isn't longer a death sentence, it certainly wasn't in 1960. And so the whole basket of goods and the whole, the, the whole expectation of how people lived in 1960 was so much different. And I guess people, have expectations, so they, they b-because, it is true that there's so many, double-income families, women enter the workplace and their husbands are working, and so they're used to living on those two incomes. But, if they wanna live the way their parents lived back in 1960, then they can afford to do it on one income. It's, you know, of course, obviously, you'll be disconnected, you'll ha-- you'll own, you'll own a black-and-white TV that will be Be on the fritz half the time. You'll have to smack it in order to get it to work. as I said, you won't-- your car will rust out. You won't have any air conditioning in your car when, on a hot day. You won't have any-- you'll, you'll go to the movies or to the beach in order to escape the heat, because amazingly, the, the, the movie theaters were able to bring out air conditioning early on through some technology. That's what, that's where people fled during the heat waves. no air conditioning on Where I am, so a very different standard of living. people got by, but again, it's, it just shows ignorance of history, that, that people can actually talk in those terms, that, that, that, you know, you used to be able to support a family on one income, and indeed, obviously, the wife did stay home and oftentimes didn't have a job, most of the time didn't have a job, and now oftentimes the wife does Even when the kids are going to school. So basically that's, that's the answer to that question. Yeah. It is indeed also based on ignorance." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "55:31", "start": 3330.86, "text": "So I wonder then, is it also just a factor of social and cultural expectations, right? Maybe, maybe in years gone by, you might have had kids and not every kid had their own bedroom, right? Like that was, you know, whereas nowadays it sort of seems the expectation almost seems, oh, every kid has to have their own bedroom, like as, just as an expectation. Example, right? That's one example of where families needed much bigger fat houses, or at least, you know, today would need a much bigger house to have a big family theoretically under that, you know, if you follow that, I don't necessarily agree with that. I, I, you know, I, I only have one kid, but I'm, you know, once I have multiple kids, I'm, I'm okay with them sharing rooms, especially when they're younger. But, you know, but I think that's an example of a social difference." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:16", "start": 3376.11, "text": "Every kid needs There are more cars than there are people, and then everybody needs a home car. Yeah, indeed. Obviously, it, it is the revolution rising expectations, pretty much, that, I guess, that, I guess, all people think is that, if, if, if you and your wife both have a job, both work, and then if you think about how would you live if only one of you were working, you'd have to cut back, and then the logic then goes that, well, then you can't support a Family on one income anymore. But of course, as I said, it's almost impossible, ironically, it's almost difficult to replicate, the way people lived in nineteen sixty, because, you know, of course, i- Part of, part of the subtle issue here, I guess, is that, is that if you don't own a smartphone, if you don't own some kind of-- if you're not connected to the internet, you're not a part of society anymore. And so therefore, you might say that in a way what I'm, what I'm arguing is sort of academic because it's like, you, you're obliged to do" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "57:28", "start": 3447.97, "text": "that. Right. Like that it's not feasible to actually go back to the nineteen sixties. Yeah. Basically, you're saying, \"I- You could sort of make this argument that it's not feasible to actually go back to that standard because today you sort of have to have a smartphone to sort of operate in certain, in many jobs or many contexts." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:44", "start": 3464.5, "text": "Yeah. And maybe, I mean, can you, can you find a car that runs-- Can you find a car like the, like the cars of the nineties? Can you find a car that has no air conditioning? Can you-- I mean, again, that's, I, I guess that's part of the point, although I guess you agree with me that, that, that there's W-while all that, I think it, it's been even called something by economists, something like the neighborhood effect, which forces you to have a higher standard of living if you're gonna become a part of society. And I think it's a significant point to make. on the other hand, I imagine you agree with me, at least it's a very different kind of point from the one people are usually making, which is that, you know, like I'm poorer than my parents were, they could support a, you could support a family in those days, they're thinking in different On the other hand, there is a certain reality to their point in the sense that we've just explained." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "58:39", "start": 3518.86, "text": "Right. And maybe another angle is around regulation, right? That maybe as an example, maybe there's government regulations that stop, houses below a certain size or cars without certain functions or, you know, some of these government regulations may even impact licensing and your ability to get a job because maybe they say, \"Oh, you're not allowed to be a babysitter until you've done X, Y, Z, this regulation, that regulation, whatever.\" Whereas maybe historically- Maybe people just had, you know, the, the kid next door be the, you know, the babysitter or something. You know, I'm just making an example, but the regulations that impact occupational licensing, maybe that's also a factor that we've just seen this big bloat over time, and that's also what's driven the re-the cost, and the affordability up" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:24", "start": 3563.58, "text": "Well, you strike a responsive chord in me when I say that, that, the, the, there has been a, an explosion in occupational licensing, and, and it's all ninety-nine percent corrupt. It's affected a lot of low-level industries. I don't think there should be occupational licensing re- I don't think there should be restrictive licensure, even for medicine. You know, when Milton Friedman in nineteen sixty-two published Capitalism and Freedom, his first- Book on the free market, and he went after restrictive licensure. He chose medicine as his example because he said, \"If I can convince you that there should be no restrictive licensure in medicine, then I imagine you can accept the other categories as well.\" That of course we want certification, we, we want agencies, and we want, we want private sector agencies telling us this is a legitimately trained doctor recognized by his or her peers, but restrictive licensure Messenger is something else. It has taken off just to become a funeral assistant or a beautician or a manicurist, difficult to get those jobs. I think it has b-- unless you go through training, and that of course is just the corruption of the guild system, or to become a florist. there's, there's never been any good explanation as to how these, how they, they, they perform a service. There's no question we'd always want, again, we'd want certification, but not restriction. That has caused- That, that has exacerbated income inequality. And, although, although even if you have a job, even the poorest paid people are doing better than the poorest paid people did thirty, forty years ago. Yeah. But another crucial part of it, since you struck a, a responsive chord in me, that's even more important is the explosion in the restriction on housing, on the building of housing in high wage areas that started in the 1960s. And, and interestingly- Interestingly, while the New York Times will inveigh against it that housing is so expensive and that in New York and San Francisco and L-A because of the, of the zoning restrictions imposed by government And other restrictions imposed on the ability to build, they don't connect the dots and recognize, that has a huge effect on wage distribution. Because if you are in the forty to fifty thousand dollar a year category, then your ability to move to a high wage area is very restricted, because of the cost of housing. If you're in the hundred thousand plus category, the housing, will pinch, but you can afford to take advantage of the high wage jobs in the high wage areas. So that too, has been a major contribution to the, mal-distribution of income, the, the greater inequality of income, among workers. And those are the two, two forms of inequality that we free marketeers, we libertarians also object to. Not, not specifically because it causes inequality, but specifically because it isn't unjust and it causes, it, it, it, it, it denies people economic opportuni- This is, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:02:38", "start": 3758.87, "text": "this is another point that we're seeing now because a lot of, we're seeing like this generational conflict, let's say, right? Like, not kinetic, but just they're sort of politically arguing. There's arguments in different parts of the world saying, \"Oh, look, you know, and as an example, millennials are arguing against boomers saying, \"Oh, look, see these boomers, they had it easy, or easier, and maybe they've then sort of raised the ladder up, behind them because maybe they've, it's To, to the point about property, maybe they've engaged in quote-unquote nimbysm to block development of new housing, which in turn kind of keeps the prous-- the house pricing high, which kind of locks or kind of keeps people unable to access property, right? That's kind of an argument that we're seeing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:24", "start": 3804.16, "text": "Well, to clarify, again, you said NIMBYism, I always wanted to find out what NIMBYism stands for, not in my backyard. for, for those of your listeners who aren't familiar with the term, but, but, but w- I always want to emphasize that it is true, of course, that the average homeowner favors the NIMBYism, but you can only do it through the power of, of your government. The government is the agency through which you can do this, and that's why I wanna say, I'm not blaming it, I can blame it on the people, but I also wanna em-emphasize that it is basically a government-imposed restriction. Of course. To elaborate, to up-update your point a little bit, what's also happened Again, because of the runaway price inflation, that would, that was truly a scourge and is still eating into the salaries of people, even though, as I say, the average is four cents higher. you know, it's, it's not, it's not lower, it's a little bit higher. I've been-- I was wrong about expecting a recession this year. It's been a very slow expansion, but, but there has been some expansion. the other part of it, of course, is that the- Huge hike in the mortgage interest rate, the, in a matter of, of, of, of, of months, has meant that there are people with Three percent mortgages, and then now suddenly, the young people who, who wanna buy their first home are facing seven to eight percent mortgages, and that, and that, that's been a huge wrench in the economy due to the price inflation that the Federal Reserve brought about Although it was, it was of course the Treasury, and of course it had to do with the lockdowns. The lockdowns meant that the Treasury, US Treasury started to, to spend trillions of dollars that showered into the economy. It ran trillions of dollars worth of debt, and that debt was bought through printed money by the Federal Reserve, that caused an explosion in M2, which brought the price inflation, and people of limited means are paying for it, and so that's been The story, I, I'm often walking a tightrope where I sound like a Pollyanna, and I wanna make sure that, that, that people recognize that I do understand, all of the injustices, of, of, that, that are imposed mainly by government on, on, on people. Of course. And as a, as a, as a, as a free marketeer, of course, I believe that the-- that, that ninety-nine percent of the- The goals of progressives are best realized through a free market, and that in, in a free market, we would have less income inequality and less wealth inequality. The trillions that were, were printed by the government made a lot of people very wealthy, including Jeff Bezos, because Amazon became so important. Amazon played an important role during the lockdowns, if the lockdowns had to happen, but it certainly, greatly enriched him, and the lockdowns never really did have to happen, in my view." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:06:34", "start": 3994.66, "text": "Right, of course, yeah. And I think to clarify, yeah, certainly I agree with you, about the government being the issue in many of these cases, where, you know, even this intergenerational conflict, some of that argument is also because they're sort of saying, \"Well, hang on, look at you, this generation above us, who controlled the government and used the government to sort of make it harder for other, you know, to sort of make it easy for yourself and, you know, live, live for today and push the cost off to the younger generations.\" That's, you know, that's part" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:05", "start": 4025.62, "text": "You touched on, you know, I'm, I'm fascinated by the, you know, we have, we've had a, a huge, we have a huge surplus of office space, and I'm fascinated by, the potential for the office space to be converted to residences. And, and I, and oddly, you know, one of the limitations that I almost never read about is, is the rule that every room in an apartment has to have a window. You know, I, I was speaking, I was speaking to you from an office without a window. I live in a- A loft apartment with my wife, and we have-- and my, my wife bought the loft apartment in nineteen eighty-one. I married her years later. She's an artist, and, one of those rooms doesn't have a window. You know, hopefully we won't get arrested. You know, is it, is it possible for people to actually-- you know, when you mentioned regulation, you can't, you can't, you can't live in a place without a window. You know? I mean, I, I'm in an office without a window. A window is very nice, but and offices are-- so the point is we would, that that's a good example of the way regulation just screws things up. Windows are nice, but, but, but for somebody of limited means, if you can live in a nice, decent neighborhood and, and have a-- and live in a place with that, that has very few windows, just turn the lights on, it's not such a terrible life, and, and yet the regulation won't allow it. And I'm curious as to what extent is it making it more difficult to convert office buildings to apartments?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:08:33", "start": 4113.12, "text": "Right, I'm might impede that conversion because maybe some regulation about toilets and plumbing and, you know, whatever else that that might, pose some kind of barrier. Of course, as you said, it seems that, there's also been some discussion about what's happening with commercial real estate, especially with people, maybe more people working from home now that maybe commercial real estate, maybe there's not as much of a business case for it as there used to be, and maybe there's a structural difference now. so- Well," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:09:04", "start": 4144.34, "text": "well indeed. Yeah, yeah. No, no, and, So, it seems like it's here to stay that, I, I don't, I mean, I don't regard-- I mean, I think it, it, it, if this was-- the, the, the lockdowns were a huge humanitarian tragedy. the, the, the one, the one thing I, I, I liked, I liked about the lockdowns is that the teachers' unions behaved like such pigs that parents rebelled, and there's, there's been, there's been a huge turn away from, away from teachers' union-dominated public schools to home Home schooling and to charter schools, that's been one good result. If the other result is that the laptop class, obviously a lot of people do have to go to work, that, likes to stay home and commercial real estate is no longer viable, then to what extent can we convert that real estate to residences? That's the logical alternative. Although by the way, I know a number of people who, who aren't too happy working at home and they, they don't, you know, they- That, that's, that's been another fallout where businesses aren't maintaining offices and they, and they, and they miss the social life. So the, so maybe there will be a little bit of a turn back to working, but if indeed a lot of people want to work from home and not commute, that in itself is nothing that you and I can object to. we, we can only hope that, that government gets, they, they, they, they, you know, they're providing tax incentives, for, for commercial real estate to convert to residences, but I rarely hear what you and I were just talking about, the easing of regulations that, that make it possible for people to have the options that, look, look, I've opened up a building and, and half the, and, and it's, it's tiny apartments, and, and, half of them don't have windows, but, but obviously my rents are very low. Do you want to- I don't live there, you know? It's, it's not such a tragedy to live in a apartment without a window, but, but, but apparently from the standpoint of the regulators, it's not permitted. So that's part of the problem" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:11:06", "start": 4266.04, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, I think, it's probably a good spot to finish up here, Jean, but, we've spoken about a lot of things, your critique. But you have another" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:11:13", "start": 4273.25, "text": "question. How should one try to get it ahead in today's day and age? We haven't covered that, I guess, some other time. and, I've managed to talk about the Soulform, enough. Go into thesoulform dot org. In, in March, by the way, I've done nine debates Since our inception in September of 2016, I've done nine of them. one of them with a socialist has gotten, six point three million YouTube views, and, with the socialist Richard Wolf. I'm proud of that one because, it, I think it's partly- He, he must be the celebrity who's brought it up to six point three million, since it's an amazing figure. It's one, we, other, some other debates we've had have hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, but nothing like six million. I'm debating, a, a, a, a journalist named Jonas Sarah in March He's, he wrote a book against the lockdowns, but, but his argument is that capitalism was a big reason why the lockdowns were imposed. That, once again, when in doubt, blame it on capitalism. And so I'm debating him on that issue. Right. I don't really think capitalism is to blame for the lockdowns, but this is a popular book, and I thought I'd debate him on it. So that's gonna be me in March. So Stephan, I hope to see you in New York and at the after party. With your wife and your, and your nine-month-old son." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:12:45", "start": 4365.57, "text": "Yeah, well, we'll, we'll see. It's, it's a long way to travel, Dubai to New York, but, maybe, maybe we'll wait, we'll make it out sometime. So look, I think that's a great spot to finish up, Gene. Thank you for joining me. I will put the links in the show notes. So, just a reminder, that's thesohoforum dot org for people who wanna catch Gene and watch, check out some of" } ] }