 The debate this month reads, in terms of its resolution, free market ideology is largely responsible for the dismal performance of the U.S. economy over the past few decades. Please vote yes, no, or undecided on the resolution in order for us to determine who gets the Seoul Forum Tootsie Roll. And because I am speaking for the negative on this debate resolution, I've got to recuse myself for the rest of the evening from moderating, and I bring you, for the rest of the evening, Nick Gillespie, editor at large of Reason. Nick, please come on stage. Hi, everybody, I am Nick Gillespie. I'm with Reason. I wanna thank you all for coming out. It's a great night, and it's gonna be a great night of debate. There is, I wanna also thank the Donald Smith Family Foundation for helping to fund these debates, as well as Reason, the company that I work for. There are free issues of Reason out in the crowd. Please take them, read them, share them, put them on the front seats in the toilets of people that you dislike, so that maybe they will learn something new and different and wonderful. Tonight's resolution, of course, is free market ideology is largely responsible for the dismal performance of the U.S. economy over the past few decades. And Binya Applebaum of the New York Times is the main debater against Jean Epstein. Binya, could you take the stage, please? Binya will be defending the proposition. Jean will be taking the negative, and the way it's gonna work is that Binya will go for 20 minutes. Jean will go for 20. We'll have five minutes of rebuttal. 30 minutes of questions from the audience, both here and online, live streaming. Thank you so much for joining us by the internet and then five minute finishing statements. And then we'll vote and then we'll go and party at Jean and Hisakos, which is perhaps the real reason. Jean never had parties as a child. He doesn't like to talk about it, but maybe that's what we're doing here. So let's get started, Binya. Could you please take the podium and make your opening speech? Oh, I'm sorry, Jane, please close the voting. And now, Binya, please take the stage. Good evening. There's a joke I like about two men who are standing at a parade, at a military parade, and they're watching as tanks go by, and soldiers go by, and missile trucks go by. And finally, the last truck in the parade goes past, carrying a couple of guys in jackets and glasses, and the first guy says to his friend, who's that? And the second guy says, oh, those are the economists. You won't believe all the damage they can do. Well, my burden tonight is to convince you that there's some truth in that joke. And I think that's gonna have to take two parts. The first is to convince you that there is a problem, which may not be intuitive to all of you. And the second part is to convince you that my explanation of the problem is correct. So let's start with the nature of the problem, the idea that the United States economy has in some important sense performed dismally. That obviously runs up against the fact that the United States economy has grown, and in fact has grown more quickly than the economies of other developed nations for the most part in recent decades. And really what, and I didn't choose the word, but I think what I mean when I say that the United States has had problems economically is that our economy has not performed as well as it could have or should have, and in particular that the distribution of our prosperity has been uneven, which is both a problem in and of itself and one reason that growth has been disappointing in recent decades. For me, the statistic that really embodies what has gone wrong economically for the United States is a comparison between the United States and France. I think a lot of Americans feel some satisfaction in a sense that we grow faster than France. We compare ourselves to them and think that we're doing better, and in the aggregate we are. The American economy has undoubtedly grown faster than France. If you look at the period between 1975 and 2006, average household incomes in the United States increased by 32.2% and in France by just 27.1%. Comparisons with other developed economies are similar. The United States has, on average, produced more economic growth. What happens though if you strip out the top 1% of American households and the top 1% of French households is that the numbers look very different. In America, the average growth in household incomes for 99% of the population is 17.9% over that period, while in France it's 26.4%. You may notice that the French numbers remain very similar. Not much of the economic growth in France has been concentrated in the hands of that elite, whereas here in the United States, a very large share of the economic growth has been concentrated in the hands of the elite, and by that measure, which to me is more important than aggregate GDP growth, because ultimately an economy is a collection of people, and what we care about is the welfare of all those people, by that measure we are underperforming other countries. We're not doing particularly well, frankly. We're growing quite slowly if by we you mean most of us, and not just those 1% of the population who happen to live disproportionately in this neighborhood, and perhaps some of you are in the audience tonight. Second point, life expectancy. To me, there is no greater measure of the failure of the American economy than the fact that Americans are dying at younger ages than they used to. This is shocking, and before the COVID pandemic, unprecedented in developed societies, there has been a straightforward march upward in terms of life expectancy, with very limited exceptions, for example, during World War II, but during periods of peacetime, it has been a stable and reliable fact that with each passing year, people will tend to live longer, and that was true in the United States until about five years ago, when life expectancy finally tipped over and began to decline. The driver of this is very straightforward. There's once again a huge disjoint between the quality of life at the top of the economic spectrum and at the bottom. A man in the top fifth of the economic spectrum will live on average in America 13 years longer than a man in the bottom fifth of the economic distribution, and that divide has doubled since 1980. That to me is a shocking statistic. It really speaks to the ways in which our economy is failing a significant portion of our population. There's a final measure by which I think we have a big economic problem, and that's opportunity. It's easy enough to say that people's lives end up in different places. We know that has to do with them as much as with their societal surroundings or context. Some people succeed, others fail, some people deserve to do better, others do not put in the work or have the ideas or have the luck. But in the United States, our problem is increasingly that how your life ends up is determined by how it begins. When my father was born in the early 1950s, roughly 75% of American men of his generation ended up earning more than their parents had in their middle income years, the prime earning years of their adulthood. For my cohort of adults, that number is less than half. The evidence that we have suggests that it has declined further since then. What we're seeing is that people are struggling to keep pace with the lives that their parents had, they're struggling to pursue opportunity, and one particularly striking pattern is that where they are born determines their destiny. So within a single urban area, there are increasingly large divides between the prospects for children born in the poorest neighborhoods and the prospects for children born in the richest neighborhoods. People's fates are determined not by their efforts, not by their aptitude, but by the accident of birth, by where they happen to be born, by the opportunities afforded to them in that neighborhood, in that context, the levels of pollution, the quality of education, the access to role models, to jobs, all of these things factor increasingly heavily into the American experience. And so our self-image of ourselves as a nation in which people can succeed and chase a dream and grow and find riches, it is now the case that that is more true of Europe than it is of the United States. We have fallen behind in terms of social mobility, we have stopped being the place where a young woman or a young man has the best chance to chase those dreams. So that is to me the problem that we're confronting, and then we come to the diagnosis, the question of why that's happening and whether in any sense free market ideology can be blamed. My story really begins in the late 1960s and the early 1970s when there was a market shift in the way that our government approached problems and handled the basic task of governing. A shift in ideology that was driven by the economists who in that military parade seemed to pose such a great threat, those guys had an idea about how an economy ought to work. They thought that markets should play a larger role in the distribution of resources in answering questions about how a society should approach its challenges, and they began to exercise a persuasive influence over the federal government, first here in the United States later in other countries as well. One of the earliest chapters in that story is actually military conscription, which if it's not a story you're familiar with may come as a surprise to you. Up until the early 1970s, military conscription in this country was in essence universal. Not everybody was actually enrolled in the armed forces, but everyone was eligible unless they had some specific exemption, and that was the way that we and most other developed nations filled the ranks of our armed forces. Well, economists began to argue, and with considerable logic on their side, that this was not an efficient way of finding soldiers. It didn't make any sense to have Sergeant Elvis Presley in the ranks. He would be better off singing. You didn't want to send Willie Mays overseas to fight. You wanted him to stay home and entertain people by hitting home runs. It was very inefficient to take the people who might be teachers or doctors or what have you and send them to be soldiers. What you should do is you should find the people who wanted to be soldiers or pay people enough to convince them to be soldiers, and you'd end up with a better military. People would remain engaged in the military for longer. They would do a better job. They would be better soldiers. And society would then have the benefit of realizing the potential of the people who didn't want to be soldiers. This was a very powerful idea, and it was ultimately persuasive to Richard Nixon, who moved to end the draft. One of the ironies of the end of the draft is it did not end because of the opponents of the Vietnam War. The end of the draft was not primarily driven by the people who hated the use of conscripted soldiers in Vietnam. It was driven by the proponents of the Vietnam War who thought that by changing the terms of military service, they could temper some of those protests and preserve the ability of the American military to be used in foreign engagements. And so Nixon acted on the advice of these economists who he'd assembled in a presidential advisory commission, which at the time were all the rage, and he got rid of the draft on the advice of those economists, including Milton Friedman, a name many of you may be familiar with, who was probably the most influential member of that commission. That idea in its application to the draft may seem like a really good idea to many people. I think it probably was, but that same principle that markets should be used to allocate resources was increasingly applied in other areas of government policy with increasingly harmful consequences. And so what you see over the following decades is that the government begins to approach all of its nails with this hammer to take the same set of solutions and apply them to all manner of problems, and that's where things really start to go wrong. And I wanna go through just a couple of areas as examples of that to give you a sense of the broader story. One which I suspect everyone here lived through, although the years march on, is the financial crisis that we experienced in the late aughts, 2000 and date and forward, which was caused in large measure by the deregulation of financial markets, by the freedom of financial firms to experiment and to sell products to customers that their customers neither understood nor could safely own with devastating consequences for the American economy. This was a straightforward application of free market ideology to our economy, and the consequences were not wonderful. There are more interesting examples though. One of my favorites is the work of a man named George Stigler who was probably Milton Friedman's closest friend. They made a very odd pair. Friedman was very short and talkative, Stigler very tall and thin and quiet, and they'd go strolling around the Chicago campus together in that image and dirt in the minds of many of their disciples. They were a pair and intellectually as well. Stigler wrote a very famous paper in which he argued that the government did not need to regulate cartels, organizations of businesses for the purpose of restraining, for the purpose of raising prices and restraining production, because cartels would fall apart naturally. They were unsustainable in a market economy. There was such a huge incentive for businesses to cheat that someone always would. And therefore the government could just stand by and let cartels blossom and fall apart and the economy would essentially be unaffected. This prescription became dogma in Washington. The federal government embraced it and stopped hunting for cartels for several decades. Until in the mid 1990s, someone had the clever idea to create a reward program at the Department of Justice where the first company to report its participation in a cartel would get out of jail free card and the other companies in the cartel would be held accountable. All you had to do was to get to the DOJ office first. This was approved as an experimental program. Nobody knew what to expect. Indeed, the guy who created it, who was an economist, didn't think it was going to attract many takers because he understood that there were not very many cartels in the economy. That was the thing that he expected. But what happened almost immediately is that companies started rushing to the Justice Department to report that they were participants in cartels. The program was overwhelmed. They had to assign more staff to it because it turned out that actually George Stigler was completely wrong and that cartels were remarkably common in American business and unfortunately remain surprisingly common right up until the present day. I was just reading a story about real estate companies getting together to set prices for apartments using algorithms to determine the prices that they would all collectively charge. This type of business behavior remains remarkably persistent and needs to be regulated. It doesn't go away on its own. Cartels do not fall apart just because the market economy says so. My own paper, The New York Times, read an editorial in 1986 calling for the abolition of the minimum wage on the grounds that it was not logical as a free market principle, that it was a restraint of trade basically, that it was a distortion of the market economy. We've learned since that that was not a great idea. The evidence suggests that labor markets actually are inefficient and that you can set a minimum wage, not any minimum wage, but you can set a minimum wage without reducing the number of people who are employed in a given area. It turned out when you went and looked at the evidence at the ground level, what we thought was true from economic theory and what had reshaped economic policy for a generation was in fact not the right set of conclusions to draw. I can go on with examples, probably one of the most important is that our failure to regulate externalities is currently causing the planet to overheat, but the bottom line is that markets don't work by themselves and if you allow them too much freedom to roam, what you get is outcomes that are bad for the market and bad for the people who live in that market economy. And that's really the point that I wanna make as I move to the conclusion here is that markets and society, markets and the government exist in a form of productive tension. Too much market, too much government and you get bad results. What you need ultimately is balance. What you need is that dynamic back and forth tension between the two where you're constantly trying to find the right point between them and not let things slip too far to one side or too far to the other. During the coronavirus pandemic, we all learned the importance of government investment and basic research and government support for the development of vaccines in government coordination of the distribution of medical supplies. We learned that if you allow some things to be produced solely in China, you can end up in a strangely vulnerable position when you need those things. Those are all functions of government that had been allowed to wither and that had been allowed to fall by the wayside and in the absence of which people suffered and quite literally died for an absence of government in their lives. Democracy ultimately needs to hold markets accountable and make them work. The purpose of a government is to structure the marketplace in ways that deliver the outcomes that people want and need. And what people need in their lives is a degree of economic security and a degree of access to opportunity. One very interesting finding from the work of an economist named Pietro Rivoli is that the level of anti-trade sentiment in the United States, opposition to globalization, is much higher or was over the last couple of decades much higher than in nations with stronger social safety nets. And her theory is that in nations that afforded their citizens access to healthcare on a guaranteed basis, that provided stronger minimum wages, stronger retraining programs, that basically said, listen, you can fall thus far but no further. We're gonna make sure that life does not get any worse than a certain minimum level, that in those nations, the stakes seemed lower to the workers and they were more willing to accept the types of changes that a market economy can ultimately use to produce dynamic and beneficial results. They were willing to get behind trade. What happened here in the United States is I think an instructive tale for proponents of the market economy. The thing that they wanted, the thing that they believed in, the thing that they regarded as an engine of prosperity, and I may say so do I. I think that trade is really important but it's not sustainable as a political proposition if you are not tempering it with programs that meet the needs of your citizens and ensure that those who are the short-term losers in the inevitable redistributions caused by free trade are getting what they need from society as a whole, are recompensed for their losses so that the proposition that trade can be beneficial to everyone, which is undoubtedly true, becomes the reality that trade is beneficial to everyone rather than the more common reality in which some people lose because that redistribution never happens. We are living with the political consequences of that experiment and the lesson for people who constantly emphasize the beauty of the market is that the market is beautiful but it's not sustainable if it's not potted in a garden in which people can get what they need and do not need to fear the consequences for themselves. There's a famous quote from the economist Frank Knight that markets must sometimes be seasoned with mercy. The point is that you'll never get there with your formulas. There's always gonna be a rationale for ignoring that side of things but you ignore it at your own peril. If you treat markets as the be all and end all as the absolute engine of prosperity, you will miss the consequences that will ultimately make it impossible to persist with a market economy and I fear that that's very much where we are right now. Our faith in markets is threatening our ability to have markets working for us and to deliver prosperity. Inequality is jeopardizing liberal democracy in the United States. It's making it harder for we the people to have enough in common to govern ourselves effectively or to agree on an economic agenda. It's jeopardizing that sort of foundation of common interest that is necessary for democracy to function and ultimately necessary for a market to function because the market is ultimately happening in the context of society and if society breaks down so does that market mechanism. Markets are characterized by the ability to walk away. I think of that as ultimately the defining characteristic of a market. You don't have to do the deal. You don't have to make the purchase. You don't have to make the sale. Markets are about choice but if a society persists in making the choice to walk away as America has tended to do, persists in making the choice to go build something else to start over to ignore the hard questions of how we make the markets that we have sustainable, you get to a very bad place and I fear that's where we're headed. Thank you very much. Jean Epstein, 20 minutes. Just make sure this is working. So please start my time now. Okay. I believe that the economy's disappointing performance over the past few decades is largely due to progressive ideology but I'm relieved that I don't have to convince you of my view in the brief time allotted since it's a vast topic. Binyah has graciously taken on the burden of proving his view that free market ideology is largely to blame. I hope you don't come away thinking that the free market properly defined bears even partial responsibility but even if you do, you'll still vote against the more ambitious resolution Binyah is defending. Let me begin with a couple of trends that should put the implausibility of Binyah's case in perspective. Progressive ideologues generally believe government spending is too low and government regulation too limited and they generally seek an increase in both. Free market ideologues believe the opposite and seek a decrease in both. Binyah believes free market ideologues have had undue influence but in these two major areas, progressives have gotten their way on both counts. Take government spending. As this chart shows, total government spending on the federal, state and local level had already risen to 30.5% of nominal gross domestic product by 1969 and government spending has accounted for a higher percentage of nominal GDP in every year since then. Notice we hit an all time record of 43.7% in 2020 and fell back to 40.9% in 2021. The second highest figure and the most recent year available. Now consider government regulation. As this chart shows, there were 180,000 pages in the code of federal regulations by 2019. The most recent year available are tripling since 1969's 58,000 pages. That's pretty compelling evidence that the burden of regulation has greatly increased. Now let's shift our focus to widening income inequality. The evidence is clear and compelling that much of the greater inequality in the vital area of labor compensation can be traced not to the free market but to the increased role of government in thwarting the mobility of labor in the free market. Start with government's imposition of restrictive licensing requirements that make it costly in terms of time and money for workers to switch to higher paying jobs. The percentage of workers subject to such requirements has jumped from 10% in 1970 to nearly 30% today. And two thirds of the increase has spread to more occupation, virtually all of them covering jobs that the less educated could take. Studies have shown that these requirements do virtually nothing to improve the quality of service in these jobs but are simply the same old use of government power to keep out competition. In his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, free market economist Milton Friedman had already called for a rollback of restrictive licensing requirements then in place. And instead of a rollback, we have seen a massive government imposed increase that shafts many of the most vulnerable. Then there's the other far more destructive way in which government has been impeding the mobility of workers. This is the accelerated rise since the 1960s and government imposed rules, regs and restrictions that make it increasingly expensive to build housing in high wage areas like New York and San Francisco. The resulting scarcity of supply has driven up the price of housing in these areas making it increasingly costly for low wage workers to move to these areas and to take advantage of the higher wages. Here is how one account summarizes the problem. Quote, high income workers still enjoy a net wage premium when they move to a high wage area and thus still have an incentive to move. But for less skilled workers, the regulatory tax on housing wipes out any wage premium. As a result, college grads continue to move to human capital hubs while less educated workers who would stand to gain the most by moving are kept away by artificial scarcity, unquote. With college grads benefiting and less educated workers shut out, we have a perfect recipe for the widening gap between the earnings of the two groups. A 2019 peer reviewed study by two economists, quote, quantifies spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and its aggregate costs, unquote. As the economists explained, quote, misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and San Francisco have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity, unquote. They put the cost to workers at an absolute minimum at a staggering 9% of gross domestic product. A New York Times column of February 24th helped sound the alarm on the issue in the New York area. The author calls for, quote, a change of the rules so that, quote, developers could begin to build more of the housing that New York so desperately needs without spending decades begging for permission, unquote. Note how the columnist stands up for the developers. The very capitalist that progressives have been taught to despise. The columnist forthrightly points out that these capitalist can build housing that is, quote, desperately needed if only government would back off. Well, that admirable column was written by none other than my debate opponent, Binyah Appelbaum. But if Binyah can argue for unshackling the free market in housing, that logically requires him to abandon his argument that it's largely to blame in the area of widening income inequality. Much of Binyah's argument about the supposed connection between bad outcomes and the free market is based on conjecture. But he does make one attempt to demonstrate that his argument is not merely conjectural, which I want to take seriously. His very specific claim about the pattern of slowed economic growth over the period he covers. His argument is that free market ideology began to dominate by the late 1960s to the 1970s, and that as a result, economic growth slowed in each of the decades that followed. I'll show how his factual claim does not quite withstand scrutiny. In a podcast interview, Binyah made due allowance for the difficulty of explaining why economic growth slows. Quote, our understanding of growth, he stated, is highly incomplete, and we are to some extent talking about things we don't fully understand, unquote. But despite conceding a limited grasp of the factors that cause economic growth to slow, he still claims to find a trend that lights up the road. Quote, but it is a fact, he goes on to say, that average growth declined in every decade from the 1960s through the aughts in the United States adjusted for population. And it is a fact that during that period, we saw a fundamental shift in our approach to managing the economy, unquote. The fundamental shift he refers to is, of course, the alleged ever-tightening grip of free market ideology. He continues, quote, if we think that that approach promoting free market ideology was consequential, it's not unreasonable at least to wonder about how it might have affected that trend, unquote. To emphasize the importance he places on that trend, let me also quote this from his book, quote, the market revolution went too far. Growth slowed in each successive decade during the half century described in this book, adjusting for population and inflation, unquote. Notice he emphasizes that each successive decade suffered a slowdown from the previous decade. By adjusting for inflation, he means real or inflation-adjusted growth in gross domestic product, and by adjusting for population, he means growth of real GDP per capita. As mentioned, the best evidence is that progressive ideology, not free market ideology, has become increasingly dominant. But Binya is also mistaken about the pattern of slowed growth which leaves a major flaw in his core argument. Here are the numbers provided in his book on growth of real GDP per capita, which span 10-year periods and which purport to show a slowdown in each successive decade with each of his 10-year periods ending in the ninth year of each decade. Let's start reading those numbers from top to bottom. It's clear that growth slowed from the 60s to the 70s from 3.13% to 2.160%. Now look at the next step. Growth slowed from the 70s to the 80s from 2.160% to 2.156%. But was this really slowed growth, 2.160 to 2.156? Binya had to take these numbers to three decimal places to get his desired decline. Round each of these figures to two decimal places and you get 2.16% in each case, which comes to a flat trend. This inspires the old joke that if you torture numbers long enough, they'll confess to anything. And Binya's three decimal point torture clearly indicates how much the pattern matters to him. Even the next step from the 80s to the 90s from 2.156% to 1.98% looks a little suspect, a slowdown of less than 2 tenths of a percentage point. I put each of these annual numbers on a spreadsheet, grouped them in rolling 10-year periods, and found the pattern is sensitive to which years you choose. While there is a slowdown from the 60s to the 70s and from the 90s to the aughts, the middle decades show no real pattern but a relatively flat trend. As one way of illustrating this, I'll show how easy it is to get the reverse patterns from Binya's in the middle decades by tracking 10-year periods that differ by only two years from his. Since the updated numbers go through 2021, the most recent year available, I worked backwards from there. So each of my 10-year periods ends in the first year of the following decade. I got this as a result, also taken to three decimal places to stay consistent with Binya's method. Let's also read these numbers from top to bottom. We see a similar decline from the 60s to the 70s, from 3.07% to 2.040%. But from the 70s to the 1990s, we just get a slight acceleration instead of Binya's slight deceleration. 2.040% in the 70s, 2.046 in the 80s, and 2.329 in the 90s. The 90s to the aughts show a similar slowdown from 2.356% to 0.926. The aughts to the teens do show a pickup, but the 1.488% rate in the teens is still pretty dismal. The point is that the middle decades deprive Binya of the linchpin of his argument, that growth slowed in each successive decade over the period under review. He wants us to believe that the grip of free market ideology placed a gradual chokehold on growth. Now we are forced to believe the alleged impact was felt only twice. So much prematurely from the 60s to the 1970s, since by Binya's own account, free market ideology was beginning to wield, only beginning to wield destructive influence in the 70s. We then find zero impact in causing a slowdown in growth from the 1970s to 1980s, which included the presidency of free market ideologue Ronald Reagan, and zero impact from the 80s to the 90s. Instead, we had to wait nearly 30 years until the aughts for the impact to be felt a second time. The corrected trend must send Binya back to the drawing board to devise some other attempt at a coherent narrative. Given the relative incoherence of his current narrative, his initial disclaimer still applies, quote, our understanding of growth is highly incomplete and we are to some extent talking about things we don't fully understand, unquote. I could elaborate on a totally different explanation for the slowdown in growth since 2000 that I regard as more plausible, having to do with the decline in the economic freedom index since 2000, which reveals the declining influence of the free market. But I wanna use the time remaining to make two more general points. I'm about to quote from a passage in Binya's book that betrays a certain mindset about the free market. He writes the following about the state of poverty in the early 1960s, quote. About a fifth of the American population then lived in destitution with little prospect of betterment. Both liberal and conservative administrations had taken the view that poverty was best treated by pursuing broad economic growth. But by the early 1960s, scholars and journalists were focusing public attention on the inadequacy of this strategy, unquote. So if, as Binya writes, there was quote, little prospect of betterment among those in poverty, we can only assume that things hadn't been getting better for quite a while. And if the scholars involved were focusing public attention on the inadequacy of the strategy, we must assume this was based on their scholarly research and we further assume this scholarly research lent support to the federal government's announcement of its war on poverty in 1964. Binya cites no data in this account, but now try a very different narrative that does cite relevant data from social scientist Charles Murray, quote. In 1949, 41% of Americans were below the poverty line. When LBJ announced the war on poverty in 1964, that proportion had dropped to 19%. In just the 15 years between 1949 and 1964, the American poverty rate had dropped by 22 percentage points. What had the government done to help? By the definition of the 1960s and thereafter, nothing. The federal government was missing in action in the real war against poverty, and yet somehow America cut poverty by more than half over this period. Well, the trend Murray cites was well known when Binya wrote his mistaken account. I suggest that this reveals a certain bias despite Binya's occasional nods to the benefits of the free market. In areas that include such trends as the decline in poverty, the decline in the rate of auto accidents, and the increase decrease in injuries in the workplace, the progressive assumption is that government regulation is required to fix the problem since the free market has done virtually nothing to fix it. These misdependent part are ignoring the evidence that trends like these were noticeably improving before government got involved. It's a short step from there when considering any bad outcome to regard the free market as guilty until proven innocent and government innocent until proven guilty. Finally, I can't avoid mentioning something else in Binya's book that falls into major error. He places great significance on the trend displayed in this chart, the long-term downtrend in all wages and salaries as a percentage of gross domestic product. But in constructing this chart, he ignored the advice of his source, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, or BEA, in two basic ways. First, the BEA tracks not just wages and salaries, but the growing category that covers benefits, including pension and health benefits, benefits that are no doubt important to Binya as a New York Times employee. Second, the BEA tracks not just gross domestic product, but net domestic product. Net domestic product is simply gross domestic product minus the depreciation of capital. And the BEA instruction clearly conveys the point that use of net domestic product is more accurate in calculating this kind of percentage. I quote this from the BEA handbook. Net domestic product is a measure of how much of the nation's output is available for consumption or for adding to the nation's wealth. I quote, well here is Binya's chart through the second quarter of this year, which takes wages and salaries as a percentage of gross domestic product. Now, here is the same chart with the corrections I take from the BEA. Labor compensation, which includes wages, salaries and benefits as a percentage of net domestic product. Notice that Binya's downtrend disappears in this corrected chart. Properly measured, it turns out to be a relatively flat trend and not as Binya has written a smaller share of the pie. So I encourage him to go back to the drawing board on all these issues. Thanks. Thank you, Gene Epstein. We've got five minutes of rebuttal, Binya. Do you want to, you can use the handheld mic? Either way you can sit or stand. We believe in choice here. So there's a lot there. Thank you, Gene, for your close engagement with my work. I appreciate it. I didn't mention the data that Gene spent most of his time talking about because I don't think it's the most important indicator of the problems in the American economy. It's an interesting data point. It's stylized. You can take it or leave it. I think there has been a downward trend. It is possible to cut the data in ways that make it a little bit bumpier or a little smoother. I concede that point, but I don't think it's the most important point. As I said at the outset, by many measures the American economy and aggregate has done quite well. Where we are faltering is in the distribution of prosperity, not in the creation of prosperity. That is our particular challenge. And that's why that was not one of the points that I actually made at the beginning of my talk. So you can take that for what it's worth. The more important thing is that I think Gene's absolutely right about regulation. I think it's one of these issues where one needs to be nuanced. There are clearly areas, and he quoted me writing about one. I've written about it repeatedly, where I think that the economy is over-regulated in ways that are enormously harmful. And housing is example number one. It is the case that we need more room for the market to operate in the housing sector. It is the case that occupational licensing is detrimental and that our society has come to tolerate unions for educated and highly paid workers, doctors, real estate agents, where we don't allow them for low paid workers. I think that's an enormous problem and one that we would all benefit from breaking down more of those walls. So this is a nuanced issue. There's no question about it. I'm not here to tell you that the free market has prevailed in every respect. I'm not here to tell you that we wouldn't be better off by having more of a market in some areas. That would be a fool's errand and it would be wrong. And those are clearly areas in which the opposite is undoubtedly true. I do think that when Milton Friedman was late in life and he was asked to sort of reflect on his achievement and he said, oh gosh, there's so much left to do. I just look at all the arguments I haven't won and I despair that one would have been remiss not to tell Friedman, hey buddy, you won a lot more than you lost. You've succeeded in changing American society in a lot of ways. You've won massive arguments about the role of monetary policy, about the role of taxation, about the role of public spending, about the draft, and you should rest on your laurels and take comfort and confidence in the fact that you have succeeded in many of those areas. And I always am a little bit puzzled when I hear people bemoaning all of the ways in which they haven't made progress, fine, well and good, but our society has changed enormously and one shouldn't write that off. It is true that the number of pages in the federal register has increased. I'm not really sure what to take from that fact. It's a lot of, any of you have ever taken the time to read the federal register. It's a lot of extremely complicated expositions. One thing that has definitely increased is the amount of time that's required to justify each regulation. So pages and pages and pages of the federal register are devoted to elaborate proofs and research and public surveys and all sorts of stuff. How exactly one correlates that with regulatory intensity has never been clear to me. As I said before, there are clearly some areas in which we have too much regulation and others in which we have not enough. I don't think regulation is the central area in which free market ideology has prevailed to the detriment of our society and I hope that was clear earlier. One, two specific things I guess that I wanna touch on in my remaining time. The first is auto accidents. It's a very famous example. So early on when you get out there and you've got everybody driving in their new cars, the rates of auto fatalities are just astronomical. There's a whole genre of American music from that period that's basically devoted to people dying in auto accidents. It was such a common feature of life that it infected our music for a time. And it is true that in response to consumer demand, car companies began to introduce some safety features even before Ralph Nader famously went before Congress and called them out and forced the government to begin regulating the industry. It is also true that the auto industry was assiduously resisting many of the features that are now standard on American cars and have contributed to a much sharper decline in auto fatalities since the advent of federal regulation than before it. And the reason for that is quite simply that you need both things. Consumers can't get there on their own. They need government to help them. Final point, those BEA numbers. That was a very fine illustration but the important point there is benefits. What those numbers take into account is the growing share of your compensation that comes in the form of healthcare benefits. It is not clear to me that you're getting any more value than you did a couple of decades ago from all of that increased spending. Our life expectancies are in decline. We are getting much less per dollar than other countries but if you want to include healthcare and take seriously the proposition that it's several times more valuable now than it was then then by all means you can reverse that chart. Thank you, Bin Young. Jean? Well, quickly. I took Bin Young's numbers seriously because I believe that they are his only attempt at some kind of a rigorous analysis. Otherwise to make a statement about how this bad thing has happened and look the free market guys have been sounding off more than they used to I think is conjectural. So I wanted to take his analysis seriously and that's why I quoted him emphasizing those numbers both in an interview and in his book. And so I believe that it's a little bit difficult for Bin Young to shrug that off. With respect to the pages of the Federal Register 58,000 pages to 180,000 pages are tripling more than a tripling from 1969. That should be compelling enough evidence the burden of regulation is greater and of course Bin Young didn't even question spending by all levels of government. What else? With respect to his statement about regulation of housing again I think he's written some good stuff but the thing that he does not seem to directly confront is the very important research that has shown that so many of the things that he's talking about the difficulty of a bottom half to get decent jobs it's not just this idea that poor people would like to move into the neighborhood and have decent housing. The mobility issue is what has been stressed by the peer-reviewed research that has very carefully said that the drain on these people's incomes and the disparity in income resulting from housing regulation is enormous. So Bin Young is concerned as we all must be about inequality that in my view is artificially caused by government intervention than we're talking about something ultra important and it makes it increasingly difficult for him to argue that free market ideologies largely blame for the things that bother him and bother me when we're talking about government that is largely to blame for things like the fact that people have difficulty finding new jobs when we start trading with China. The fact that people have difficulty functioning because they can't get decent employment because of the problems of housing that are so severe and that Bin Young is at least commendably beginning to tackle in his columns in the New York Times. So that's why that's important. With respect to auto accidents, again, I faulted Bin Young for talking about the decline in poverty not happening but I would also have to fault with respect to auto accidents. I don't have the data in front of me but I mentioned that in my initial talk. The fact is that accidents per passenger mile met a proper measure of auto accidents were declining steadily from the 1920s on. Another factor to bear in mind as well is that so much of the intervention by government to make cars supposedly better and more expensive has meant that people of limited means have difficulty affording these cars, difficult affording a used car with less than 100,000 miles on it so they buy the older cars that are more dangerous by virtue of being old. So again, he's showing a certain indifference to the law of unintended consequences but again, my point is that the auto accidents has been a widely cited point by those in the free market. The auto accident rate was declining from the 1920s on and that kind of bias, I believe, is something that Bin Young should overcome. Well, I guess, oh yeah, I guess I wanted to show one other thing and that's the following. I hope you can look at this. Bin Young has talked about fixing prices and about cartels. Let me show this chart. This is the PCA chain price index that the Federal Reserve follows and the only thing I want you to be aware of is that 12 month change in price inflation from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s into the aughts when supposedly all those price fixing cartels were taking over has gotten more and more mild until of course, 2021, when other things began to happen having to do with the printing of money. Take a look at airline fares there too. The airlines were supposedly carteling, they supposedly organizing against us and yet if you look at this chart, the prices of airline fares based upon the CPR were going negative through the aughts. So again, I would want him to show me some evidence in the official prices that cartelization is such a problem, thanks. Thank you, Gene. Okay, we're now at the question and answer period so if you have a question, would you please line up in front of the microphone? You can identify yourself or not but you must ask a question, not give a speech and while people are queuing up, there's only two there and I would expect that most of the audience would be rushing over there. Can I, I just want to ask, I'll take the moderator's prerogative to ask each of you a question. Gene, kind of philosophically, is it possible for you to admit that market forces, an increase in market freedom or market forces, could lead to worse outcomes? Do you believe in market failure or regardless of whatever evidence that Binya Marshalls or not, you'd be like, it can't be the free market because the free market never does anything wrong? Markets fail us all the time. Markets fail us all the time in the economic realm. Government in the economic realm fails us more often and so for that reason I would want to say that, again, the approach that Binya is taking as he sees a problem and the problem may exist and it may be due to markets. That, I can't think of a good example of hand but it may be due to markets. The question is, for example, do we have auto accidents? Are cars as well made as they might be? Well, is government doing us more harm than good? More good than harm? We don't know for sure. We have to look at it a little bit more carefully than progressives look at it. But again, I want to emphasize, again, markets fail us all the time. It's a non-secretory to say that government is the solution. Okay, thank you. Binya, can I ask you quickly? Does this, your argument is based that we've had a dismal economic performance relative to the past or relative to what might be because of an increase in free market ideology throughout society. Does the fact that the United States has lost ground in the 21st century pretty continuously in every index of economic freedom or of global business competitiveness, does that temper your argument at all or not? So I think that those indices are interesting creatures. They tend to be produced by advocacy groups. But I think that there is no doubt, as I've said several times tonight, that there are areas in which the United States does restrict markets to the detriment of our economy and our society. And then I think there are areas in which we are overconfident in the value of market. So it is a complex picture and there are undoubtedly areas in which, we're doing the wrong thing by not relying enough on markets. I don't think that I am compelled by the evidence that we are in some aggregate sense, moving away from a reliance on markets. I don't see that happening in a meaningful sense. So if that's the question, I'd wanna see more evidence for that proposition. Okay, let's go to the audience. Sir, please ask a question. My question is for Binya. In that program that you mentioned where they were looking for cartels, do you know how many were identified and how many were regulated or how they were regulated? I don't have the numbers here off the top of my head, but the regulation was, I mean, a cartel is illegal. So if they have evidence of a cartel, they take a criminal enforcement action against it and there were some famous cases in that period. Probably the most famous is the ADM price-fixing cartel that became a big Hollywood movie in which they were fixing the price of several basic components and several additives that went into a wide variety of food products in collaboration with firms in Asia. The other major producers were in Japan and South Korea, I think, and there was this whole famous FBI sting on it. But there were a whole series. I mean, what was remarkable about it was that the program was overwhelmed by these. One of my favorite stories about it is one of the lawyers who's involved in this took a client down to Dallas to be the first ones to get in the door at the DOJ office there and as they were walking into the parking lot, they ran into one of their rival firms, one of the fellow participants in the cartel walking out of the office. I won't repeat what was said at that time. I just want to comment briefly and again, just repeat that. Look, if you want to find evidence for cartels and Binya mentioned prices, fixing prices, you should see it in the official price indexes. Binya has, in another interview, mentioned airline cartelization. Well, let's talk about airlines. You mean? Yeah. Let me finish if you think about it. And again, if you look at the consumer price index, it's the official price index, and it has a sub component called airfares. And I showed the chart where airfares were dropping most years from 2000 to the present until, of course, 2021, when I believe Binya understands that new things happening. But we have had an increasing price dampening in airlines and in all markets, and yet we're supposed to believe that there's a lot of cartels price fixing. Please find some evidence in the prices that are officially quoted, and then I might be able to lend some germ of truth to this argument. I'm glad you asked, because there is evidence for it, and the evidence is the comparison between the United States and Europe. What we have seen over the last three decades is that the European airfare market, which is much more competitive than the United States, much less concentrated, where airlines have not been able to acquire their competitors, airfares per air mile are much lower in Europe as a consequence than they are in the United States. Well, again, let me just go again. Jean, either use, now, don't go back to the slides, a very quick point. I want to make a brief comment. There are structural factors that are causing a general decline in airfare. Those are undoubtedly true, and you can see them exerting their influence on American airfares, but if you compare our performance with theirs, they're doing better. And I'll be honest with you. I showed a slide, I showed a slide. I only want to mention to Brynja that a better test would be the US against its own history. And the slide I showed was that airfares were from the 80s to the 70s to the 80s to the 90s. Every decade thereafter, success of decade, airfare inflation dropped. So a better comparison would be the US market against itself. And in most years, in the aughts, per airfare prices were formed. I'm gonna ask that we move on to the next question. I think you both have aired this very well. So thank you, sir, question. This question for Mr. Appelbaum. So I think most people- Wait, I'm sorry, did you say it's roundabout? No, Mr. Appelbaum. Okay, thank you, because I was gonna say if it's a roundabout, hit the road. It's gonna be very direct. I think most people would say that two of the biggest reasons for the poor performance of the US economy in recent decades are the last two big recessions, the one since COVID and also the 2008 recession. So your colleague at the New York Times, Paul Krugman, recently admitted that the stimulus bill that was passed in early 2021 did not stimulate the economy as they predicted on the basis of Keynesian economic theory. And the data shows the very same thing with respect to the Obama stimulus bill in 2009 to get us out of the 08 financial crisis and recession. And the reasons behind that and the prediction that these stimulus bills would fail was made by free market economists way ahead of time and for decades before that. So the question to you is, why do you ignore these two data points which are totally antithetical to your thesis? Okay, thank you. So first of all, as I think I mentioned, my view is that the 2008 recession was caused by the deregulation of the financial industry. It's a classic example of the government getting out of the way and allowing people to wreck their cars as it were. And so my view is that the subprime mortgage industry was basically a grand experiment in holding a party on the roof of a very tall building. And every time someone walked off the edge pronouncing that it was their fault and never getting around to asking whether at some point you should build a fence around the roof so that people cannot walk off the edge anymore. And what we had was a financial system premised on the ability of people to make good choices about complicated financial instruments that they didn't understand. And then we got a crash as a consequence. Whether the government's response to that crash was or wasn't effective, I'm not sure of the basis for your assertion. I have my own. But to me, the more important point here is that we got into trouble because of our reliance on free market ideology. Jane, do you have a point? Well, the soil form did have a debate on this issue a while back. Just to, again, parry, Vinya, we have a deep disagreement about this. Strict suggestion. Start reading the public statements of Bill Clinton who urged that we get the home ownership rate up from the mid 60% range to 70%. Read the statements of George W. Bush about how we have inequality of housing and the government needs to goose up housing. Look at the fact that into the year 2000 most of the toxic mortgages were owned by a government-sponsored enterprises called Fannie and Freddie. And look at the price rises that were occurring then, 12%, 13% up, and then, and then, the crony capitalists came in. Only then did they come in. But what set the stage for the housing bubble was the early 90s into the aughts with Clinton, Bush, and Barney Frank being the major cheerleaders for this. And by the way, also including Alan Greenspan. So that's a different view. Thank you. But I'm afraid I'll have to leave it at that. Final point. And the invention of the saw and the nail and the house. I mean, you can go back in history as far as you want. The housing market didn't crash in 2000. It crashed after the subprime industry started mass producing loans that people couldn't afford to repay. And Wall Street started packaging them into derivatives that didn't produce the expected revenues. That's the story of the housing crash. The prelude isn't irrelevant, but it's also not the core of the story. Well, just a brief response. Fannie and Freddie went broke. They had huge losses and Fannie and Freddie were government sponsored enterprises. They set the stage, the private sector came in later. Lunatics, by the way, who were not the mortgage broker who would not give you the mortgage. They were a preacher of the federal government as well. We have a deep disagreement. It has to stand there. Well said question, sir. Yes. Thank you for the debate. It was very enticing. My name is Brendan and my question is more at a philosophical level, which is that, I think just stepping back, this is, we've kind of been down this road before where there's been a lot of populism of the left and the right, a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment and just general negativity around the U.S. A little bit more like this, I can't hear you. Yeah, just like the populism that's growing in this country. It's, this isn't the first time we've been here. If you look at the 70s, if you look at World War II, we even had a civil war. And my question is, what is your outlook on the future? Are we, we kind of been through this before we always get through it? Are we gonna get through this one? And, you know, is it kind of just gonna work itself out? What's your thoughts on that? Okay, is that, that's for both? I'm looking on the future. Please take it, Ben. All right. Gene quoted me earlier saying that I don't know much about the past. I know even less about the future. So I'm not sure I answer that question. Well, my future is that first of all, I want Binyah, just my narrow focus tonight, is I want Binyah to write more articles about housing for the New York Times. They're very good. And I want to send them the citations and the research on why it's so fundamental in causing the very thing that concerns them so much, widening inequality and short life spans of Americans. So that's what I want for the future. And I think Binyah's headed in the right direction. He's had a few pieces on that. Okay, thank you. There's a member of the audience who came up to me at the beginning of the program tonight to say that she wished that we achieved consensus in tonight's discussion. Gene, I mean, listen, on housing, I am 100% with you. Well, we've done it. Well, again, I think you want to put more of a cutting edge. All right. Let's go to a new question. Gene, don't spoil the moment. Don't spoil the moment. Sir, a question, please. Thank you both for great debate today. So my first question comes to you. Now, you only get one, so pick wisely. Okay, so only one question. So my question comes to the past, to Binyah. Since, like, Gene provided two key data to define if the US economy has become more and more regulated in past decades, do you agree with him? If not, how do you define if an economy is more regulated or free, and besides the comparison between US and Europe? Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that we're regulating the number of questions. I would say that I think that it is very difficult, and there have been very sophisticated efforts to do this, but to define regulatory intensity, the way you definitely don't want to do it is by counting pages in the federal register, which is, I'm not sure what it's a metric of, but there are clearly areas in which I think any reasonable observer would conclude that the economy is less regulated than it used to be. The airline industry is a great example. Federal government used to regulate prices, the number of seats where you could fly, what kinds of sandwiches you could serve. There was a federal agency that did all of these things. That agency no longer exists. The government no longer regulates those things. The airline industry has a lot more freedom than it used to. Financial markets, another example where there has been a clear trend toward deregulation, we've seen in that area. And conversely, there are areas in which the market like housing has become much more regulated. So, how you aggregate all of that across an economy, how you figure out what regulatory density is, it's a really complicated theoretical issue. I don't think there are good answers. I will just repeat what I said at the outset, which is that I don't think the intensity of regulation is the key respect in which free market ideology has exercised its influence over the American economy. I have a question for you, Binya, picking up on that. I thought you were basically thought that the abolition of the CAB and... That's the civil aeronautics work. That regulation was a good thing. Yeah. I think it had positive effects. And if it had been coupled with antitrust enforcement, it might have been an entirely happy story. Okay, yeah, okay. Sir, question. For Mr. Appelbaum, you mentioned life expectancy, flattening or declining, and carbon emissions growing. But my understanding is that life expectancy declining is largely driven by obesity and drugs, kind of cheaper food and cheaper drugs available and carbon emissions by more energy consumption. And so is this not a dismal, but rather we're kind of trading bad problems for better problems? Yeah, I mean, the sort of the agony of excess is kind of an American phenomenon, right? But so I think that the best research on this has been done by Ankees and Angus Deaton, and they talk about what they call the deaths of despair, in the sense that we're seeing increased younger mortality among, in particular lower income Americans who have lost hope, lost the ability to function in the economy, lost the ability to find meaningful employment, and that they have turned to drugs and done healthy lifestyles, and in many cases even suicide as a consequence. So there is absolutely the opportunity to do these things because we live in a society of abundance. The question is, do people have, what is the nature of our relationship with that abundance? There's a healthy way to live in that context and an unhealthy way, and the decline in life expectancy reflects people making choices that they didn't use to make, and the question is why. Well, again, again, again, again. Just very quickly, I'll just point out that two thirds of deaths of despair are met. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. You know, deal with that. But Jean, I also want to point out Jean is now 75, 77. You are the opposite of a death of despair. 78 next month. 78, even more so, incredible. Again, I hope, when he answers that question, the future will ask himself again, where is the immobility of labor? He spoke very articulately about the restrictive licensure. All of those things that cause labor to be immobile that make it hopeless for you to seek a better employment in high wage areas. I wish he'd focus on that a little bit more than he already has. So, when he talks about those depths of despair, connect it to government policies. All right, we have an online question, which is for Binja. It says, aside from free market capitalism, what other societal construct has been more fair and equitable to its citizenry? So, I mean, I think that free market capitalism is, it depends what you mean by that. I think that there's a version of capitalism that is optimal for our society. I'm not here to advocate for something other than capitalism. I believe that capitalism works best when it is embedded in the context of a strong government and a clear sense of civic purpose. I think that when we provide a social safety net, when we provide people with the opportunity to prosper and to ensure that they have access to what I think of as the infrastructure of opportunity, the stuff that New Yorkers take for granted, public transit, high quality schools, recreational opportunities. This is a context in which people can flourish and to take advantage of the free market. And when you have a free market that is not embedded in those things, the results are worse. It is not, the question for me is not whether or not we want capitalism. There is no viable alternative to capitalism. The question is how do we maximize the benefits of capitalism? How do we ensure that we collectively are prospering? And that is what I want to see. Can I just ask before Jean, is there a... Nick, could you let me answer the question? Well, Jean, I'm the moderator. I'm sorry. You chose to be a debater. I know you're the moderator and not the dictator. You guys want me to get out of the way. If I may, though, is there a stopping point for you in that and saying, okay, we start with capitalism or we start with free markets. That's the default setting. What is the stopping point where you say, okay, you know what, we either have to start regulating or regulation becomes too onerous? You know, we live on the slopes. I think one of the worst things that Hayek ever wrote was that, you know, that it's a slippery slope. And once you begin regulating, who knows where it's going to go? We live on that slope. There are no absolutes in this game. And so you're constantly engaged in calibration. You're constantly asking, how do we balance the benefits of the market and the downsides? How do we find the right role for government to play? And there is no answer. And even if you arrive at the right answer in a given moment, you'll need to adjust it in time. That is the work of government. Thank you, Nick. Look, the other dimension to this that I wish Binyah, a lot younger than I, and many years of productive writing and thinking ahead of him, would contemplate is chronic capitalism. He quoted George Stigler, but he hasn't quoted George Stigler on his concept of regulatory capture. That obviously, if you give the government a lot of power, if the government has a lot of money to throw around, if it can clamp down on different businesses, then business that is well-placed is gonna get the picture and is gonna start conspiring with government. And we see it everywhere. We saw it with Pfizer and the vaccines recently. We see it in the financial industry. We see the revolving door between those who run Goldman Sachs and those who run the government. And so the utopian picture that Binyah paints is something I wish he would abandon and understand that when you give government an enormous amount of power, business that is well-placed is gonna get the picture and you will have what I have colloquially called capitalism, a contraction of crony capitalism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that causes cartels to the extent that we have them. Binyah, would you like to respond? I mean, I have to say briefly that I think one needs to always be looking at what is the alternative. And if the alternative, it is no question that Goldman Sachs has a malign influence over the federal government. Apologies to any Goldman Sachs employees who are present this evening. But the question is, if there wasn't a federal government and Goldman Sachs could just do whatever the hell it wanted, would that be a better situation? And to my mind, the answer is clearly no. We need constantly to be engaged in the work of improving the quality of this balance, but it doesn't mean you can't just throw, yes, crony capitalism exists and so therefore what? What do we do as a consequence? I'm gonna put that question to you. What is your preferred alternative? Well, as a broad-breast strokes in the profit and loss system, profits encourage risk-taking, losses encourage prudence. When you bring the government in to provide a safety net below where the banks can go, or where General Motors can go, or Christ can go, when you abolish losses in the capitalist system, then you have problems. But if the government backs off, let them lose, let them go bankrupt if they make wrong decisions and that will tend to get them to behave better because capitalism can sometimes be pretty cruel to those capitalists in charge if they make wrong decisions by imposing on them losses in the profit and loss system known as capitalism. Then your final rejoinder. I mean, I just think that when Goldman Sachs is allowed to run free, we've seen that it does indeed behave cruelly and it does indeed impose massive losses. I'm not sure that society ends up better off as a consequence. All right. I think, thank you for that exchange. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your online question as well. Out there in the dark, Jean, you have five minutes of a closing stick. I apologize for disrupting the flow. Benya, you have five minutes to bring it on home. So I mean, I think this has been an illuminating exchange this evening and I'm grateful to Jean for asking me to participate in it. And what I really wanna emphasize in closing, which may not be the best strategy for a debater, but it's closest to where I think the truth lies, is that we are dealing with a calibration issue. It is not the case that we are going to live in a world in which markets get to decide everything or in which government gets to decide everything. Those are not the choices that we're confronted by. And often when I hear these types of questions debated, I hear a reflective tendency to frame things in those terms and to assert that government is the problem or that markets are the problem. And the reality, in my view, is that the problem is an improper or incomplete or imperfect synthesis of governments and markets. Karl Polanyi, who was a wonderful writer in the mid-century and lived through a lot of bad things and drew some pretty bleak conclusions from the experience, wrote that there is a constant negative tension between society and the market, that they exist in a state of trying to debilitate each other. The market constantly preying on society, society constantly preying on the market. And I think that that bleak vision actually gets things wrong. I think that what America has been for most of its history is a society in which society and the market are engaged in a constructive, if immensely frustrating relationship, constantly building on each other, constantly trying to take advantage of each other but to climb up on top and then up and up. And so through our history, we have seen the market produce prosperity and we have seen society make choices about how to manage and distribute that prosperity, often in ways that ended up producing more market-driven prosperity and then more distribution of the gains, more prosperity in a virtuous cycle. That is the reality that I think we need to continue to perfect. That is the world in which I would like to live, is a world in which the government has its role and so do the markets. And there are clearly going to be areas like housing in which the solution at a given time is for the market to play a much larger role. And there are areas, I think healthcare comes to mind for me, in which I think the government could productively engage with market forces and produce better outcomes than we get right now. And even if you disagree about those particulars, even if you think that healthcare is the opposite, or housing is the opposite, which is a surprisingly popular viewpoint in New York, you still are going to be talking about the calibration. And you're still going to be ultimately debating not whether we should have markets or whether we should have government, but how we get the best possible relationship between markets and government. Milton Friedman famously observed that government is best off if it can reserve to the market as much decision-making as possible and that then it can restrict the work that the citizens have to do and that'll make things easier. If you can limit the number of decisions we need to arrive at collectively, you'll limit the burden of making those decisions. And I've always thought that he got things fundamentally wrong, that in that respect, what you really want to be doing as a society is exercising your collective decision-making capacity because it's a muscle and it needs to be used in order to grow stronger and in order to produce better results. And so I think that for me, when we talk about these questions about how we get the best results in auto safety or how we get the best results in the airline sector or in housing for that matter, the very fact that we're here having a discussion tonight, the very fact that these are discussions that people have all the time reflects a tendency not just to rely on market forces, but to want to manage them and to want to think about the role that they play in our society and to want to make rules that allow them to play that role as productively as possible. I'm just gonna go back to the beginning in closing because Gene's harped on it several times tonight. I gave you three specific metrics at the beginning, three data points by which I think our society has deteriorated in recent decades. I told you that the distribution of growth means that for most Americans, the economic prosperity has not lifted their ships as much as it has in other countries. I told you that average life expectancy has been in decline and particularly for those who are the least well off in our society. And I told you that the chances that you will do better than your parents have sharply declined as economic mobility in our society has declined. Those three problems in my view are all rooted in the failures of our ideology, of our governing ideology, in a tendency to rely too much on market forces and to make that balance imperfect. It's my belief that if we corrected that balance, not to get rid of the market, but to introduce government as a stabilizing force that we would get better results. And with any luck, I've convinced some of you of that this evening. Thank you. Thank you very much, Pinyah Applebaum. Gene? Well, you know, we might think in terms of the history that I've lived through since I was born in 1944 is that back in the 1960s, John Kenneth Galbraith, who I'm not an economist, I respect, but I certainly read him, was talking about the dominance of the cartels like General Motors and then cut to decades later. And General Motors is a basket case and Barack Obama bails out General Motors. We've recently had a moment when a drug company, Pfizer, brings out a vaccine and the government protects Pfizer against any liability. And so again, I would only emphasize that, that the lure of power, the lure of money is such that inevitably, if you're gonna get government more involved, you're gonna get business more involved, you're gonna get not more free market capitalism, not more of anything what that Pinyah honestly wants, you're gonna get more capitalism, more crony capitalism. And that's the danger. The housing market is indeed a crony capitalist market because the established developers in the inner circle like it because they have friends in government. They can build and they don't have to suffer competition. And so that too is something that Pinyah should argue against when he speaks nicely of the developers, which I think is good, he should understand that some developers actually continue to want scarcity in housing. Some landlords want scarcity in housing. Obviously it keeps the rents up. So that too is the crony capitalist system that I wish Pinyah would do more to object to. But broadly speaking, I wanna certainly give Pinyah the Tootsie Roll for character development this evening because I believe that he's given sufficient ground to basically concede my point. He has graciously born the burden of arguing that the free market is largely responsible. And yet he's given ground on so many points that he seems to be arguing both earlier after we spoke and now most recently in a summation that it's a mixed bag. And I don't have enough time. We've raised so many issues about what's going on in the last 50 to 60 years. As I say, it's a vast topic. I believe the Federal Reserve should be abolished. I think the Federal Reserve is part of the problem. It's not a free market. The Federal Reserve is not a free market institution. It's Soviet style planning for the money supply and the industry and it's caused the inflation that we're suffering. At least it's been part and parcel of having caused it. Initially, of course, it was the huge pile up of debt and starting in March, 2020, which the Federal Reserve then underwrote by printing money. And then that money printing went into the economy and now we're looking at 8% price inflation. But the Federal Reserve didn't exist. It wouldn't be there to underwrite all of these things. So that's a very long story and I haven't had nearly enough time to touch on any aspect but the surface of it. But all I want to say really is that Binyia has raised some points. I've raised some points, but he's basically failed to bear the burden of showing that the free market is largely responsible when he's already manfully and graciously conceded so much in our debate this evening. Thank you very much. Hi, thank you, Gene and thank you, Binyia. That was a great debate. I think everybody learned a lot. And now comes the final vote. If you, in order for your vote to count, you need to double up. So you gotta vote again. And while we are calculating the debate, the votes, the information on where to vote is up on the screens. I will tell you about the coming Binyia will be selling books for 10 bucks, $10. And by tomorrow they're probably gonna be $11 or $12. So you wanna get it now, okay? Build a house out of them. At the after party at Gene's. And if you have questions about where the after party takes place, talk to us right after the debate. But what we have coming up, and I guess actually even before I get that, I want to give a shout out to Gene, not to influence your voting, but for founding, co-founding and directing the Soho Forum, we have these kinds of civil debates on really important, interesting topics on a monthly basis. In a city that is famous for giving people, you know the Bronx cheer is the least awful of the cheers that the different boroughs give people when they get mad at them. So thank you Gene for heading up the Soho Forum. Other upcoming Soho Forum events included on Tuesday, November 15th, Stanford University Professor of Medicine, Jay Bhattacharya will defend the resolution of the Pandemic Treaty of the World Health Organization should focus on targeted production of high risk groups consistent with the approach taken by the Great Barrington Declaration and he'll be going up against Yale, Professor of Public Health, Stend Vermond. On Wednesday, December 14th, National Review Editor and Chief Rich Lowry will defend the resolution. Nationalism is an important value that Americans should support against Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Alex Narasta. On Thursday, January 26th, University of Mason, George Mason University Professor of Economics, Lawrence White will defend the resolution replacing the Federal Reserve with free market institutions would significantly improve the economy's money banking and financial systems and he's gonna be going up against Columbia University Professor of Banking, excuse me, and financial institutions, Lawrence Mishkin. On February 21st, Tuesday, if you're counting, Mises Institute Senior Fellow, Ryan MacMacon will defend the resolution, the breakup of the United States into distinct regions is a workable option likely to bring a market improvement in human affairs and he's gonna be going up against Libertarian Party Classical Liberal Caucus Chair, Jonathan Casey. In March 23rd, on Thursday, March 23rd, Einrein Institute Executive Director, Yaron Brooke will defend the resolution and Narco Capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity and he'll be taking on George Mason University Economics Professor, Brian Kaplan. That should be a fist fight. Monday, April 24th, Kato Institute Senior Fellow, Alex Narasta will come back and he will defend the resolution, US immigration policy should be, US immigration policy should be, excuse me, US immigration policy should be to issue immigration visas without numerical limitations to all applicants who are not on a terrorist watch list and who do not otherwise have criminal records, contagious diseases or cell phones that go off in the middle of people reading, upcoming events at the SOA forum and he's gonna be taking on Manhattan contrarian blogger, Francis Menten. Those are fantastic debates coming up. How are we doing on the vote? Anyone, is anybody counting? Okay, do you need a little bit more time? Very excited, okay, so now as we recall and I will probably screw this up because I am a multiple English major up through the PhD level, so I outsource my math to people like Jean, but this is an Oxford-style debate so the winner is the person who gets more people to agree with them over the course of the debate. So before the debate, the yes votes, the people who were agreeing with Binyah, correct? That was 7.37% of you and we are going to take it. Surprised we're not taking it to a third decimal place given what that means. So the people starting out who agreed with Binyah was 7.3%, Jean, the agreement with Jean was 68.42%. So Binyah went from 7.37% to afterwards 16.84%, so the change was 9.47, and I guess I should also tell you just to keep the suspense going a little bit longer, the undecided people were 24.21% before the debate, but so the no people, the people who are on Jean's side went from 68.42% to 74.74% for a gain of 6.32%, which means that Binyah Applebaum came into the Tiger's Den and bearded the lion, just to mix many metaphors. Binyah is the winner, thank you. And he gets the Tootsie Roll, which by the way is one of I think one item that has defied inflation. I think it might be as cheap as it was when these first started pulling fillings out of people. Binyah. Thank you so much for coming out. Go to the reception, buy a book, talk with Jean, enjoy Hisaka's fantastic buffet. It's truly a world of wonders. Thank you all for coming, and we'll see you on Tuesday, November 15th when Jay Bhattacharya and Sten Vermin discuss things.