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Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
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Welcome to the Not Old Better Show's Smithsonian Associates Edition. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today we're diving into the minds of history's greatest economists with our special guest, Smithsonian Associate, Dr. Robbie Mockery. Dr. Mockery is not just an esteemed economist with over 30 years of teaching experience, but he's also an insightful, humorous author whose latest book, How to Think Like an Economist, explores the timeless wisdom of economic giants like Aristotle, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Esther Duflo, to just name a few. In a world where the economy affects every aspect of our lives, from the way governments navigated the pandemic, to the pressing need to tackle climate change, Dr. Mockery shows us that understanding economics is indispensable. Today, with Dr. Mockery, we will explore how these thinkers shape the world and how their ideas continue to influence policies that can make or break our future. Then, Coming up at Smithsonian Associates, you'll get a deep dive into all of these subjects where Dr. Mockery will discuss who his favorite economist is and delve into the revolutionary ideas that could help us address some of the most significant challenges of our time. It's a conversation that will challenge what you think you know about economics, offering new perspectives on how we can all contribute to a better, more sustainable world. So stay tuned as we uncover the power of of economic thought with Dr. Robbie Mockery, Smithsonian Associate, right here on the Not All Better Show, Smithsonian Associates edition on radio and podcast. Join me in welcoming our guest, Dr. Robbie Mockery. Dr. Robbie Mockery, welcome to the program. Thank you. It is great to talk to you. I think the subject of your upcoming presentation at Smithsonian Associates, How to Think Like an Economist, title of your new book, I think is very much on our minds. Certainly in this country, we're thinking about upcoming elections, we're dealing with the vagaries of interest rates, we're trying to understand how all of that impacts buying a home and just very broad global subjects that are economic principles or certainly have repercussions within the study of economics. And you're going to really be talking to us all about that. Why don't we start right at the start and just tell us briefly. about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. And we're all on Zoom these days. So maybe tell us how you're going to use Zoom to engage our audience.
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Really, what I want to do is tell a story. If I'm being the briefest possible description that I can give of economics, and I'm not sure if this is a trailer or a plot spoiler, but the briefest definition that I can give of economics is that it involves prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Now, Those, anyone who has done some classical philosophy will probably recognize as being the Aristotelian civic virtues. I associate in economics, I associate Aristotle himself with the beginning of prudence as economics. Then what I do is I run through history a little bit. And by the time I come to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century AD, period which I would associate particularly with the establishment of Western Europe as a coherent entity intellectually. By the time we get to the 13th century, justice seemed to be particularly important. Move on from the 13th century to the end of the 18th century, so another jump of another five centuries, Adam Smith was the first person to think about effectively an economic system. And with that, he emphasized the importance of temperance. So with Smith, what we start to see is the possibility of economic growth and an industrial society, even though he was really writing just before that was possible. Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations, and this is for an American audience, perhaps quite important, 14 weeks before the Declaration of Independence. But the story which I tell that's more important is that it's three years before James Watt patented the steam engine. So when we were still just in a water-based rather than a carbon-based economy in some sense. And then Finally, what I want to do is get to the 1930s. And I've been studying in great detail recently the work of John Maynard Keynes and particularly what he did during the 1930s, during the Great Depression. This was a time in your country. where the size of the economy shrank not by 5% or 10%, as has done in the recession after the global financial crisis, it shrank by 50%. And it took three and a half years to go from its peak to the trough. By the time it was finished, people were poorer than their parents had been. And in fact, by the time it finished, people were so scared that they weren't willing to keep money in banks. Richer people weren't even willing to have... bank notes, they wanted to have gold instead, because that was seen as being the absolute guarantee of value. And into that world came Maynard Keynes. And he said, actually, if we're thinking about the economy, and we want the economy to work, courage is extremely important. It's with courage that we face the future. And so the story of economics, which I will tell in five seconds, if necessary, is to say, remember, Aristotle brought prudence. Aquinas emphasised justice. Adam Smith brought in temperance. And finally, Maynard Keynes said it was all about courage. That's economics. It has to do with what you might have learned about supply and demand.
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Right. I've never heard it explained that way. I like that explanation. So who among them, Keynes or Adam Smith or Aristotle, who among them made the most profound impact? Is it all necessary to exist together and be interlocking or was one just an obvious choice?
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Now, I'm slightly biased here. I'm Scottish. My university owns Adam Smith's house. You may be unsurprised that I think that Smith was largely irreplaceable. I have described him not in the book, but in another thing which I've written. I've described him as the last common ancestor of a disputatious tribe. Anyone who's doing economics nowadays, even if they're Marxists or libertarians, it doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum they're coming from. They will look back. And they will find ideas in Adam Smith, which you can see, that's where it started from. So really, it's impossible for anyone doing economics nowadays, I would say, to look beyond Adam Smith or to say that they've come from somewhere completely different.
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I think that that's very helpful too. And you've referred a couple of times here with us to Aristotle and in particular, his ideas about consumption restraint. You talk about this in the book, he was just ahead of his time. How do some of those principles impact us even today? with regard to our economy and the purchase of goods and services?
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Of course, Aristotle, when he was thinking about economics, was not concerned about thinking about the economy that we do nowadays and particularly thinking about it as being driven by consumption. So for Aristotle, the purpose of economic activity was to underpin human happiness. And What I think is completely different about Aristotle to what we see nowadays is that the standard assumption of economics is that we live in a world of scarcity. There isn't enough. People always want more. Aristotle said, no, that's not true. We live in a world of abundance. If you can't satisfy your appetite, you're the problem. You need to change what you actually want yourself. And so what Aristotle argued was that essentially what we had to do. And this actually, I suppose, ties in in many ways with Smith and Prudence as well, that what was important is that we learn to restrain our appetites. But more than that, along with Socrates, his teacher's teacher, he argued very much that it was important that the best possible way in which people could spend their money was not on goods for themselves, but ideally on goods which would advance knowledge. In other words, they should support philosophy. And if that wasn't something that's particularly interesting to them, the next best way was through political activity. Remembering that political for a Greek would mean to support the city. So really what he was saying was, you've got to think about the well-being of, first of all, pursue the highest possible virtues. If you can't do that, then support the well-being of your city, but don't simply sit at home and consume all your goods.
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It's interesting because that has happened to us just recently when the pandemic struck, we all sat at home and we really consumed. Amazon delivery drivers became our best friends. And so how do we get around some of those times? Because governments needed to freeze the economy even without destroying it.
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Yes, yes. I mean, I think that this is one of the major challenges which we have had, because obviously you're seeing governments had to freeze the economy. You haven't mentioned the fact in the thinking about the pandemic. that when governments froze the economy, that meant that their tax revenues fell, but their spending increased. And certainly, it's an issue in presidential election that Vice President Harris has to explain how her government or how the Biden administration managed to bring inflation down after quite a bit of effort. but also has to explain how the government is going to be able to spend more money. Now, I think that that is probably the area in which she's going to struggle most when it comes to her campaign. But actually, if you think about it, many of the decisions which are related to that had to be made by President Trump, who lost office before the chickens came home to roost. Now, when you're talking about this at a much more personal level, yes, we spent money because that was the easy thing to do. I suppose that what we're seeing here is we're thinking about how do we actually derive enjoyment? What is it that we get value from? And perhaps what we should have been thinking about as well, we are at home. Gosh, well, I think that it was a lot easier for people in my sort of situation. I suddenly didn't have to travel to work. I had a garden. I could tend my garden. I could still, even when I was... we were under lockdown, I could spend time exercising quite actively. It wasn't a great disruption to me. So I thought that when you were going to say, oh, we spent all this money on consumption, I thought you were going to go in a slightly different direction. I thought you were going to point out that actually, because many of us suddenly had a huge reduction in our outgoings, even after we'd made friends with our Amazon delivery driver. We still had a huge reduction in our outgoings. We couldn't go on big foreign holidays or anything like that. So we ended up saving a huge amount as well. And I think that one of the interesting things has been seeing how that's unwound in the last few years.
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I want to go back to your choice, really, of the most profound economist among many of these, and that's Adam Smith. As you say, he really emphasized this idea of morality and moral character for economic development. When I look at today's economy with artificial intelligence, when I see... all of this technology dominating the markets and the economy. Do we have parallel ideas there? Is there a point of intersection with moral character? Or is it just now because of technology all going to shape up into a completely different approach to our spending and consumption?
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I think that one of the things about Adam Smith, which I would want to emphasize, is that in this context, he is very much two-faced. He is looking backwards towards the classical tradition of philosophy. He is looking forward towards modern economics. So that makes him a particularly important character as a hinge, but of course, only at a particular point in history. Now, what I have seen of artificial intelligence so far, we are nowhere near having artificial general intelligence. There are some things which can be done. by artificial intelligence, which will make quite a lot of jobs, quite a lot of important jobs, probably will become more or less redundant. I expect, for example, that large parts of medical diagnosis within a few years will be done much more effectively with artificial intelligence support than it is just now. Large parts of legal practice can be done perfectly effectively using artificial AI tools already. There are parts of computer coding, for example, which can be done just as well by artificial intelligence as by humans. So there are plenty of areas in which we are able to extend our capabilities. Now, the absence of artificial general intelligence would mean that is not going to help us particularly with moral reasoning. I am not yet aware, if you think about it, moral problems become... interesting because there are a variety of possible actions which we can take, each of which we can give good reasons. It requires judgment of a completely different kind to make those decisions well. And so I believe that while artificial intelligence will enable us to make decisions which are much better informed and possibly to make decisions much more quickly than we do at the moment, it will take a very long time before the kinds of decision-making, the fundamental decision-making about the economy can be done effectively using artificial intelligence. That is where humans will continue to provide value to the system. But of course, what I'm talking about, I mean, I can remember, oh, 40 years ago, when I was at high school, I still learned how to use logarithm tables. I explained what they were to students recently. And it was a bit like, oh, I don't know. explaining that when I grew up, we didn't actually have mobile phones or cars, automobiles. People took horses and carts. If I'd said that I also hunted woolly mammoths and had to be careful of the saber-toothed tiger as I went home to my cave, I wouldn't have sounded any older-fashioned to them.
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I hope they appreciated that. I always found professors that had a good sense of humor and shared it. were my favorites. So I hope that's good. Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a non-profit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate guest speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody. Yes, today is Dr. Ravi Makri. Dr. Makri is a Smithsonian Associate. Dr. Makri will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up on the 26th of September. Please check out. our show notes for more details about his Zoom presentation. We'll have links to his wonderful new book, How to Think Like an Economist, Great Economists Who Shaped the World and What They Can Teach Us. The book is getting great reviews. Certainly, I can't recommend it enough. Thank you for sharing it with me, Dr. Bakri. But Professor John Kay, who's the co-author of Radical Uncertainty, a very popular book, has written, Thinking Like an Economist Involves Thinking. like a philosopher, a mathematician, a psychologist, and a political scientist. Let Robbie Macri explain it all to you. I love that. That's just a nice review. And I think it just says so much about your work. You talk about economic thinking emerging in the book. You say that economic thought emerged well in advance of formal economists. So the study of that economic thinking. wasn't really present until a little while. How do some of us who are non-economists get started thinking like economists? Where do we begin? What's a simple way for us to kind of jump in, Dr. McCrary?
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First of all, what I would have to say is everybody has to be an economist to some extent. I'm not going to let you away just with saying you're a non-economist. Because the way that I define economics, going back to Greek stuff, if we're thinking about it, it's about household management. So every time you're in your grocery store, every time you're trying to work out whether your paycheck will last till the end of the month, you're doing economics. You're making economic decisions. Now, what I do in a university, what I expect my students to do is to think in a much more structured way, to draw on two and a half thousand years of thinking about economic relationships, which has to do with the management of resources and the way in which people can exchange resources. I don't know. and accumulate resources over time. So for example, if you're in employment, you're thinking about state retirement, you're thinking you have to save, you're thinking you have to have a pension, those are financial decisions you might say. But actually, because you're thinking about resources and how you're going to use them, they are economic decisions. And actually, one of the things which I would point out is that if you're thinking about the resources which you have available to you, you yourself in many ways are a resource. And so one of the things which economists have become particularly interested in in the last 70 years or so is thinking about how we can actually think about people and economics way of thinking about it. What happens if we imagine people are self-managing resources? Everyone's an economist to some extent. Some of us are just spent more time thinking about the economy or economic problems than other people.
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Let's talk for a moment about one of the female economists that you write about, Esther Duflo. Her work really focuses on giving some advantage to some of the world's most poor communities and bringing them out of poverty. What would you say are the most important lessons from her approach that you think can be applied to us today on a global scale to combat poverty from an economic standpoint?
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Oh, that's a very big question. There are people, for example, like Angus Deaton, another economist who's done a huge amount of work in development and who's also won the Nobel Prize. who is very skeptical, people like Angus Eaton, very skeptical about the approach which Duflo has taken. So just to explain to your listeners what Duflo does, and this part I think is actually really important. She and her team will spend months, possibly years, with institutions in countries which recognize that there are areas that they want to develop further. They'll try to understand already what they are doing. what the strengths of what they're doing might be, what the weaknesses and challenges are going to be, and how they can address those weaknesses and challenges while building on the strengths. So in many ways, that sounds much more like a management consultant than economics itself. But what they do that goes beyond management consultancy, ordinary management consultancy, is that they will say, right, working with this local government or this financial institution or this hospital group or whatever it might be, what we're going to do is to think about a very simple way of changing the way you deliver your services and seeing how that relates to the way in which people engage with your services. Sometimes what they find is that what people think they're doing is not actually what's happening. So their research into microcredit, for example, which is very small loans made to poor people so that they can start their own businesses, found that yes, for many of the people who got the loans, they transformed life. But when they actually... pulled back a little and looked perhaps at what was happening in an entire city or a region of a country. there was no evidence really that microcredit was accelerating the process of economic development. It was making it easier for some people to begin their own personal path out of poverty, but it wasn't making it possible for societies as a whole to manage that. Or again, if you look at examples around something which might seem quite obvious to us, one of the largest killers of children in many parts of Africa is malaria. Of course, we have some drugs which allow us to manage that. But people who live there, malaria is an endemic risk. And one of the best ways of reducing that risk is by using bed nets. In many places, people wouldn't use bed nets. Now, this allowed Duflo and her team to get into what had been a very sharp row between two other development economists, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Easterly. And Sachs believed that what you had to do was have huge government programs which would... distribute nets everywhere. He certainly said, well, if you give people nets, then they're not going to value them. You have to give them a stake in what's managing it. What Duflo's team's research actually came up with was I think much more interesting in many ways. What they found was that in some sense, people hadn't thought about the advantages of bed nets. You gave people bed nets and they were more likely to take another bed net, whether you asked them to pay for it, or you simply offered them another one free. You gave one family a bed net and their neighbors would be more likely to accept them in the future. So almost one way of thinking about this, and this is where I can actually talk about, we're self-managing resources. There's two different ways we can think about this. One was the people in these countries simply hadn't thought about it. They didn't have the way of think framing the problem that would allow them to think about why this would be a good thing to do. The other way of approaching it, I suppose, would be to say, well, if we're thinking about these people, then what's happening is that in order to use bed nets, you need a certain amount of what we would call human capital, a certain kind of human capital. And that capital can be obtained by using it. It can be obtained by people seeing how they're being used. And so what we have is if bed nets are being given out, then that increases the capital within the community in which the bed nets are being given out. That means that they're more likely to use it again. And so what you start to see is good practice spreading and diffusing naturally. So that has turned out to be one of the more effective low-cost innovations which has been possible in public health. Very simple ideas in many ways, but very profound effects.
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Thank you. Fascinating. So good to talk to you, Dr. Robbie Macri. Smithsonian Associate will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates. Again, check our show notes for more about Dr. Macri and his upcoming presentation and his new book. How to Think Like an Economist, Great Economists Who Shaped the World and What They Can Teach Us. The book is out now. We'll have links so that you can find it at many of your favorite book-related sites. But all of these thoughts are so timely, Dr. Mockery. Thank you for joining us today and being so generous. And we look forward to seeing you at Smithsonian Associates. Have a great rest of your day. And please, as you're doing more work on this, I'd love to selfishly invite you back. Please come back and talk more. I know our audience is really going to be interested in this subject. Thanks to both of them for helping me stay right on track. Thanks to all of you for joining us on radio and podcast. We love doing this show for you. Thanks for all of your notes of support over the last few weeks really has meant a lot to me. I look forward to an upcoming holiday season where we will be busy with another bunch of great topics. But thanks, everybody. Have a great week. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Edition on radio and podcast. See you next week.
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Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories, or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show.
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Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about The Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better, and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
