 This question is for Sean Gabb and Daniel Motel. Sean, you mentioned that that your raising interest rates caused a great deal of trouble with the labor class specifically, and in my mind, raising interest rates was a way for her to strengthen the currency. Where had that effect anyway? And Daniel Modell, you said that a strong currency is actually good, and so they're contrasting comments because you said it was damaging in England's case and good for Switzerland of a strong currency. I think the sudden appreciation of Swiss franc was problematic. And my question to both of you is would this problem, or lack of a problem, or the sudden change thing, how would that be affected if there were a single worldwide currency unit specifically gold by weight? I guess, sorry, I forgot one thing. The Federal Reserve sometimes says something like wages are sticky downwards and so that the trouble, the good thing about a moderate inflation rate is that it gets kind of automatic wage cuts. And so in a world with gold that steadily appreciates in value it probably would happen that a worker with steady productivity would have a steady wage cut over a period of years. So anyway, how would you, and could you do that just with the strong currency unit like the Swiss franc, just cut wages or cut, cut, how would that work? I agree that wages are sticky downwards, but that may be because the trade unions resist any kind of wage cut, but it is also a fact that there are contracted employment which specify wages and it is difficult to renegotiate those. I have no objection to a strong currency and that's putting it mildly but there is a difference between a currency which is naturally strong in times of a neutral monetary policy and a strength of the currency in response to a sharp and sudden increase in interest rates. The monetary problem we faced in 1979 so far as I can tell is that the British government was running a large budget deficit which was then monetised. There are various ways of stopping that, but the most painless way of stopping it if I can use the phrase in macroeconomic terms was to cut government spending to close the budget deficit. The entire burden of adjustment would then have been imposed on the state sector for which the budget deficit existed anyway and there would be no need to raise interest rates. What the government did was to raise interest rates in order to stop the creation of new money by the banks. The government continued to borrow money in vast quantities. It is just that private business was crowded out and that was a serious mistake. There were other reasons why the currency would have strengthened in any event. There was the beginning of the resale receipts from North Sea Oil but the sudden, the dramatic rise in sterling and unexpected shock of British industry was on the weakest sector of the economy, of the private economy and it took industry by surprise and as I said about a quarter of it collapsed over three years. Some of this should have been in decline for years. It should have been replaced by more modern industries to bring this kind of shock on suddenly was a disaster for many people. Your question is directed in a field of complete mess and in a way it's so hard to say anything in monetary policy because the disaster, I never thought as a student at that time that things would be the way they are today. Never. I would never have thought that there is one euro for different economies and obviously it happened and I don't know how it could happen. We don't have natural interest rate. It's a complete mess in the sense that we lose orientation as such. I just picked the positive sides of a complete mess which in a way is nothing to do with objectivity. Strengthening of the currency quite quick so after that happened just 11 months after that I went into negotiation for a transaction that was worth much more than 100 million. I mean this is in a way a very quick act to take the positive side out of this complete chaos. This is a typical opportunistic behavior of an entrepreneur but if you ask me as an economist and probably as a philosopher Rahim would have to say a lot to this mess as well. We lose orientation. We are in a bubble economy and I presented to you a wonderful story of a success but what is bubble out of this success? I am lost in such a question and I couldn't tell you of course many are failing in that mess so we have to keep being opportunistic and the way out is the way in the middle. So we have too low interest rates and Switzerland has a too strong currency definitely because the whole world is speculating in Swiss francs and the national economy of Switzerland is a fraction of a world economy so this disparity is so large you have to state this and there is no way out unless in the middle. So we took on debts for this acquisition. The interest rates we pay is 0.8%. This is a ridiculous interest rate but we take it. We are opportunistic and we do not we should not feel ashamed for it but it's the wrong interest rate but let's take it. We have a too strong currency so let's use it for an acquisition. That's my very praxeological answer for a mess. Sorry I can't do more than that. Hi I have a question for the first two lectures in the morning. I am myself home educated first in China and in England. Sorry, oh okay that's my voice there. So I was home schooled first in first in China and then in England when I would tell people in China that I am home schooled first question they would ask me is what do you study at home? But when I told people in England they would say are you allowed? That was the natural reaction I just found it fascinating but I did work with children myself for many years I do find that following the first lecture there the end consumer of so called education as it were I think it's really the children not the parents the parents are there to guide us and so on and so forth maybe all the way through university but the children themselves are the consumers of learning in a way and I think that should be stressed more in the whole process and besides the word for me the word education for me is not even a nice word because you know growing up in communist China if you didn't do it right the first time they reeducate you somewhere in Xinjiang or Inner Mongolia or so on and so forth but I don't think I have a question as such but maybe your comments as to I'm not a parent myself but I understand many of you here are what would you think if my point of view is being the parents being the guardians or they pay for the education because the children can't pay for it even though they're the consumers how do we settle that issue there in search of better education or better quality good here as such well of course in the market sense it's those who pay or the consumers and there might be a misalignment of interest sometimes and in higher education I observe it a lot the interest of the parents and the children are not entirely aligned and that may also be abused by private entrepreneurs I've seen that and of course it's a challenge to this whole question of what's the responsibility of a custodian of a child the typical political response was that and that was something that was really claimed in the early 19th century in particular in the British debate it was Nassau senior even a classical liberal who claimed that the problem is parents who are not educated are not able to make the right choice for the children so we only have to educate one generation and after that we can leave it to the market of course it was never left to the market because once you take away the responsibility of the parents of course how should they learn to make the right decisions so it has been perpetuating ever more and there is no sign that parents are making better decisions now than they did in the 19th century quite to the contrary in some fields we can't really solve the problem politically and usually parents making right decisions are a symptom of a culture that will remain wealthy and will sustain itself so I mean it's a tautology in the end because if in a society parents always make the wrong decision this society wouldn't really count that much in the end and there wouldn't be much education left and no one left to pay for it so if the rightist survives and flourishes you can assume that parents are making not so bad decisions even if you don't understand them because a lot of market demand and we see it where the state is not intervening like in third world countries in some slumsters some market education there and parents focus on the foreign language and very universal technologies like computer science and I think that's not a better choice in the medieval era it was Latin and the trivia I called it now I think today it's a foreign language probably English and another one if you can afford it as a basic minimum standard and probably some affinity for computer science programming as a basic education everything else which you as a good custodian would enable your children if you have developed if you can afford it for many children I think that working is a better choice than education I mean one of the worst things of the public education system is to force children at puberty between at the age where they're incapable and uninterested in explicit abstract learning force them to sit in a closed room whereas afterwards they'd be interested in before so we focus most money on particularly the wrong age of children and that's only no market entrepreneur could in the long run survive that's only a system which is not held responsible for its results that can waste most of the money at the time when children are less perceptive for education to think about the tension between the child and the parent if you look at a child who is one month old that child is very dependent on the parent for everything and the parent makes decisions on behalf of the child which are not really challenged by anybody then you go to 18 then it's sort of the opposite because at 18 the child is actually pretty self-sufficient and they're capable of earning money if they really have to so to the extent the parents spend money at that point it's more like a charity kind of organization and certainly the legal responsibility of the parent to the child pretty much ends up at 18 so the way I see the years in between 0 and 18 is a linear interpolation between these two extremes of infinite dependency of the child to basically no dependency and so anything that happens at say 13 at Puberty is a bit of a negotiation between the two but the waiting scheme should be driven by some linear interpolation so in my family I don't actually really run this as a democracy it's more like a monarchy actually with the property and freedom society in the first year was defined by Professor Hopper as a monarchy I think something like that there was some word around those lines but the truth is as a monarch and I think it's Juan Carlos of Spain who said that it's something like I'm the king but I'm only the king if I don't actually use my power as the king the less you use the power as the king the more you actually stay the king so I think that it's quite important to sort of not use the power so that you keep it and all five of you on very very excellent speeches I really enjoyed them all I sat here and listened to every word the ones that I could hear while I was still awake because I'm still time lag but the ones I heard were really good I wanted to give my views on Margaret Thatcher and invite anyone to comment on them who was interested and I'm sure Sean who spoke about her would I wanted to do with Ludwig Lachmann who was an Austrian economist from South Africa and one of his favorite statements was V must smash Zem I admired his spirit greatly and that's roughly my view on unions the V must smash Zem they are evil not necessarily because it's conceivable to think of a union that only engages in mass quits which would be compatible with the libertarian non-aggression axiom but most unions that we know of are virtually all unions that we know of initiate violence against people and therefore they deserve to be smashed my view on Margaret Thatcher she was magnificent in smashing the unions as for a lot of people losing their jobs I'm not that familiar with the British situation but in the U.S. Detroit they were smashed because of the unionism they were getting something like $75 an hour whereas in the south the union members in automobile industry are making like 15 or 20 an hour which is you know decent and you're not going to go bankrupt if you have to pay that much Murray Rothbard used to have this thing called what was it praxeological history you can't do a prior history and he would say just because the Soviet Union was very vicious internally doesn't mean that they were very vicious externally and I think that looking at foreign policy the Russians so the soviets were not that bad in foreign policy they were very bad in domestic policy and one of the things that I despise Margaret Thatcher for was that she was very anti-Soviet union so there I would agree that she was very bad but on the other hand smashing the unions and privatizing what they called the council housing in the U.S. would be called public housing I thought was magnificent so I agree she had some good and some bad points but I think the good points were privatization and smashing the unions and the bad points was she was a warmonger and warmongering is and I'm not talking about defensive warmongering I'm talking about offensive and she was very bad on that so that would be my view on Margaret Thatcher and please if anyone wants to comment feel free one of the secrets of of course one of the secrets in politics is to set priorities and without prejudice to the statement that the unions were a menace in the 1980s that they were not the greatest menace they were not an existential threat to the constitution and the liberties of my country that they were a nuisance which had to be dealt with they were a nuisance which was dealt with but the real existential threat in the 1980s in both Britain and America was the death of the politically correct classes they are the people who brought on the police state all the trade unions wanted was a bit of old fashioned socialism and free things which they couldn't have and they didn't get it but that is something that could be dealt with and was dealt with Margaret Thatcher's greatest shortcoming she entirely failed to realise that the dispute in Britain which had raged since the 1920s was effectively over and that there was a new dispute about which she unfortunately did nothing or perhaps less than nothing I would definitely agree that the best thing she did was she sold off the council houses because that's really in line with not only the left libertarian position on how to privatise and how not to privatise but also in democracy the god that failed there's a chapter to a similar effect on how to desocialise however her privatisations were nowhere near as good as the selling off of the council homes when she sold off the social housing she just created millions of property owners with the click of her finger but with the privatisations she tended to just create private monopolies and she didn't deregulate sufficiently the same with John Major's government but yeah I think taking Margaret Thatcher's selling off of the council homes as a general policy for how to actually go about privatisation is a good one but she still only sold them at something like 30% lower than the market rate I would have given the way I'll just very quickly to add something I actually remember of socialist communist China privatising council housing as it were basically how it worked as far as I remember workers would work for a company state owned but labour itself is state owned as assumed but you would be given housing there is housing allocation and there is internal calculation on how much would be allocated to housing repairs because buildings are still built, families grow and people get married and life is quite messy and they actually have to calculate but when Deng Xiaoping came into power and so on I think maybe ten years later or so after that so basically state owned factories would be bankrupt their assets if any left would be sold off at discounted rates but also people's homes these workers they've been living in their generations they had to be privatised so in a sense they were almost given away for not free because they actually paid for it through their wages so they paid for it you know it was theirs people considered their home theirs anyway even though they didn't have a deed each person would be allocated their own I don't know how it worked in England but in a true socialist country as I consider China was in an extreme that's how it worked practically and people had no problem with that I guess and I think Deng Xiaoping is well loved in China as well very quickly I much blame Margaret Thatcher for her legal and constitutional changes there is no case to be made for the defence where that is concerned the missing up of privatisation is something that I should regard with a great deal more indulgence there had never been a large scale programme of privatisation of state assets before the Thatcher government was making things up as it went along and it made grave mistakes but as I said this was a learning experience other countries appear to have done the job rather better than our government did but the Thatcher government led the way in privatisation and I think we should look with some indulgence on the often very grave mistakes which were made during that process just out of false modesty I think Sean hasn't mentioned the fact that he was the economic advisor of Vaclav Klaus while he was Prime Minister I think that's probably worth mentioning so it may be that you learnt from Thatcher's mistakes during the privatisation that the government tended to do privatisation much quicker and much better there were comments that Margaret Thatcher was a war monger I'm not saying she was or she wasn't there was comments about Russia and I would just like to say that it was Margaret Thatcher who reached out to Member of Parliament John Brown asking him to go as her ambassador to meet with Gorbachev saying see what we can do and whether we can work with this man after John Brown met with Gorbachev he came back and said yes we can work with this man and she met with him and it was a big opening for the West and of course he then went to America and so that comment is just she did reach out in a big way and I'd also like to say that it's because of Margaret Thatcher that countries around the world considered having women in more powerful positions women half the human beings on the planet were definitely a trailblazer to look up to and so I think that this is a very important part of her legacy. Hi, Passo Olivia or Rahim but anybody's welcome we're seeing in Europe large disparities in youth unemployment to what extent do you believe that's a consequence of educational policies in the different countries and or the different regulatory policies I'd be happy to hear your opinions on that Okay, well I mean I think somebody said that you shouldn't stick the kids in school forever if there are 50 jobs I think you said that if there are 50 jobs for graduates you shouldn't have a million diplomas and so clearly lots of people are being put into sociological studies or African American studies or whatever whatever they're doing these days and that's not really preparing them with skills that they can sell in the labor market now when you couple that with a minimum wage law then you're actually spending a lot of money to form people to give them productivity levels that are very low and then obviously the wage limit is here so then clearly they're going to be unemployed I think if you scrapped the minimum wage laws then you would see all these graduates from sociology studies get jobs that are very low paying they wouldn't be unemployed they wouldn't rage against the machine or the system or against the man they would actually take those jobs because they would have to and then maybe there would be some percolation effect down the road whereby they would maybe either not go to university altogether or maybe specialize in computer science or something that is useful but given now that they are unemployed almost unemployable and they probably get subsidized for being unemployed there's probably some sort of government welfare scheme for them but that's really not very healthy of a loop. Yeah I totally agree it's a vicious combination of regulation and the educational system the countries with the highest youth unemployment usually are those with least vocational training and the most academicization of jobs and if you don't have the vocational training at least it starts earlier and it's more on the job it's more practical if it's the whole thing academic then you have very low productivity for people coming from university to the enterprise because they practically have to be retrained so their productivity is very low or even negative in the beginning that's why you have such a lot of unpaid internships and so on so that is of course closely linked but of course at the same time countries which have the euro and their level of productivity doesn't match that it's the low productivity people that suffer the most and interestingly it's people coming going from university to the job market still they feel that they have a right to higher salaries than they would get according to the already low productivity and that's even more of a mismatch big calculation problem I'd say I don't think that taking courses in feminist studies or queer studies or black studies or sociology all about the same I think that reduces productivity but I think that they could still get jobs without a minimum wage hauling trash or washing dishes or something like that with regard to Margaret Thatcher I'm a big fan of hers in spite of the fact that she's a woman not because of the fact that she's a woman she was the first woman to be head of state I think Golda Meir beat her by a bit maybe Indira Gandhi I'm not sure about that but the reason the reason why there are so few women leaders is because my understanding is that the average IQ of men and women is about the same but the standard deviation or the variance of women is very very low the standard deviation of men is much higher so you get out 2, 3, 4 standard deviations above the mean and also below the mean they're in jail they're homeless whatever that's why there are so few women in leadership positions and this feminist stuff about you know Hillary should win because she's a woman and the reason that there are so few women around is because men are sexist pigs or something like that I think that's all wrong I think it's because of the standard deviation or the variance of abilities that you get so few women who are grandmasters in chess or who are winning Nobel prizes or fields prizes in mathematics now they winning in literature but God knows what the criteria there is it's usually to give it to women or poetry or something like that I mean you get counter examples every once in a while you get chemistry I think one woman one there Marie Curie yeah and then there was a woman in economics but that's only one woman in economics or in chemistry and I think that this idea that little girls are taught that they should have half of all jobs is crazy in my school they want to have you know professoriate that looks like America which means since blacks are 15% or 14% of the population 14% should be professors but the NBA or the NFL the basketball or the football has got blacks of 70 or 80% so maybe what we should do is fire them all because they should only have 13% of the NFL even though they're obviously much better and I think the NFL and the NBA are roughly proportioned into ability black people have springs in their legs they jump 40 feet high and that's why they're there not because of any discrimination or anything like that thank you can I start an argument with Kier you've said Kier that you have said Kier that James the second was an apostle of toleration now I agree that he said in the 1680s that he wanted to throw open all state protests to all his subjects regardless of their religious background which is a most noble sentiment however it is one thing to say that as an ordinary individual as a philosopher shall we say it's another thing to say that when you are the person who appoints people to those state positions can you tell me how many protestants appointed to important positions during his reign as soon as he had established that he would be able to appoint Catholics to senior positions he only appointed Catholics to senior positions and indeed his own cousin the Earl of Rochester was forced to give up his position in the administration because he refused to convert to Catholicism I could mention that when James went up to Scotland in 1679 he had no objection to persecuting the extreme dissenters at the time also when the Hugianos turned up in England in large numbers in 1685 he had no objection to requiring these people to conform to the Anglican church therefore they could receive the charity that he established for them and so James has form not only as somebody who was biased in favor of his own faith but as somebody who actually persecuted people from what he would have regarded from one gross heresy into another I'm not entirely convinced by his credentials as a man of toleration Will you ask how many, what do you mean by an important position you mean to cabinet or to the Privy Council Halifax was an Anglican Rochester was the beginning, still was Clarendon, was it Lord President of the Council OK Clarendon yes he was an advisor of some sort he was too busy getting all the dissenters out of prison to appoint them to important positions he released I think was it 2000 or something like that from prison in his first few months many of whom have been languishing in prison for about 15 years I mean yes he was a Catholic and he liked Catholics and he wanted to be king and so he appointed people who would work with him he had to appoint his cabinet from Parliament they were mostly opposed to him so picking co-religionists would be the best way of getting people who would be most likely to work with him he appointed three Anglicans to the Ecclesiastical Commission and one dissenter just one Catholic to that he made use of lots of Protestants but he was too busy not killing them or not putting them in prison anymore and the covenanters were terrorists the Protestants in Scotland quite liked him they left as high commission of Scotland and they were praising him to the skies he acted as well as he could in Scotland but the only trouble was the Scots covenanters were people who went around causing a great deal of nuisance returning then to education and perhaps taking a bit of an example from Dr. Maudel's discussion of overcoming hardship and using that to transform into something better I would ask now in the age of technologies what pursuits do you perhaps see avenues by which we can regain that libertas scholastica what technologies, what inventions, where do you see the new perhaps virtual sometimes even smaller the pub house to inform that nucleus obviously this is a great example but what else could you suggest I think on a whole education is overestimated it has become part of a substitute religion the ancient Greeks they differentiated between a technique and an episteme and the one is a practical art and the other one is reflection, it's theory and the thing is that most practical arts you can't really teach explicitly from a podium to people the best way to learn them is just do them and practice for most practical arts it's about 10,000 hours of practice and then you master them a lot of university subjects today were never meant to be university subjects it really doesn't make sense to study entrepreneurship okay, entrepreneurial theory is part of practical philosophy maybe and that's maybe part of theory and it's interdisciplinary approach and understanding the world and the people within them and that clearly is part of a leisure activity I'd say it's not something that you can count on to make your living societies have a need if they are wealthy for craftsmen in the liberal arts as well in understanding the world in conveying them but much much less than the huge supply of academics we have today there's no way all those theoreticians would find employment in a market society and of course that's the reason why they are against the market that's the main reason they unconsciously know that there won't be such a demand for that so I don't think that of course technology it lowers the price of reaching people why your words and that will put some good pressure and healthy pressure on universities but people will realize that universities are not selling education they are selling certificates so a lot of entrepreneurs have tried to make digital education work they found out that it's really hard to make it a business to make it a business you usually sell the certificates from the elite universities and then you fake some kind of digital education but it's not the education that people pay for it's the certificate they get and then you have to distinguish and be aware of that there are some problems with digital education because usually it lacks the commitment and it's not entirely sure there are some results from neurological science that make you vary about some of the claims of digital education so I don't think that digital education can cover everything of the part of epistemy of really thinking about the world and understanding it because there's a lot of argumentation it's arguing it's trying to refine your arguments and it's very hard to do in a one way direction which you can easily scale up you can't really scale up the seminar people who are successful in their field and trying to master the field by learning from them by copying them imitating them that's been a traditional way throughout the world throughout the cultures and I think it will remain the way for the future as well there are some technical things that can be made explicit but take a lot of programming but there are already very good offers to teach yourself coding via internet, digital platforms it's difficult to make money from that but some entrepreneurs manage ways to do that and I think we'll see more of that for everything that can be made explicit but that's just a tiny proportion of the practical arts yes I will give two answers on the field that I'm more familiar with which is mathematics and I mentioned the Cannes Academy so they don't actually make money they're more like run like a charity and that I think is the model that sort of works I find the videos are very explicit very clear you can watch them as many times as you want and the best thing about this particular website and organization is you get graded in every dimension and then you can progress, you can charge your progress in a very structured way so you don't jump around from this video to that video you just go forward in the many subfields of mathematics at the right pace and in an ordered fashion so I think that sort of works but I mentioned that it's not very profitable but the other thing that I can mention is the fact that nowadays if you don't believe in the electronic kind of way and you mentioned some research that's cast some doubt there you can really just buy a textbook and let your child go through the textbook go through the homework, go through exams, you don't actually have to do the teaching self-teaching for certain textbooks so it's completely okay obviously you have to be a presence you cannot just sort of go to the office and then come back eight hours later and expect the child has gone through the book so the child has to be next to you and you're working you have a job, you're doing things and then the child doing their own things to structure the whole thing and the textbook if it's well chosen is completely fine so definitely in mathematics and the sciences that's a good model just a little addition, I think it works really well for maths for coding for everything where there are laws that you just need to learn and practice, you won't get educated, I don't think anyone should be full in the European sense become an educated person by attending Khan Academy or reading textbooks and so on, there's a whole different sense in the European sense to being educated and that's where most of the prestige of high education comes from, you cannot separate from that ancient prestige and something very broad, something based on arguing and logics and confronting things for which they are not set laws I have a criticism of not only the five of you but of Hans also none of you gave us a trigger warning where is the safe space on a more serious note Hans is looking at me as scared, I'm just kidding the University of Chicago president just came out with a very very nice letter to incoming freshmen at the University of Chicago and I think if anyone is not aware of that they should be, he was saying we don't believe in trigger warnings in the safe spaces, we believe in robust discussion as we have here at the PFS so that would be a very important addition to the education system that we're open to all ideas and we believe in thorough disagreement if need be, I mean John Stuart Millen on Liberty one of his good things said that the way to get to the truth is one says this one says that, you argue back and forth and if we have trigger warnings in the safe spaces we're not going to have much education