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This is the Human Action Podcast, where we debunk the economic, political, and even cultural myths of the days. Here's your host, Dr. Bob Murphy. Tyler, welcome to the Human Action Podcast. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me on, Bob. So the topic of today is going to be your book trying to determine, or at least give the framework by which one might evaluate and determine who is the goat in economics. So can you first explain what that acronym means for those who don't know, and then what made you pick this topic to write a book on? Goat is an acronym that I believe comes from sports, most commonly from the NBA, and it stands for Greatest of All Time. Who is the greatest of all time? So being a fan of economics, I wanted to write this book from the point of view of a fan and ask the question, who's the greatest economist of all time? And that's the origin of the book. Okay, and as you said, was it partly because you weren't sure yourself, how you felt about it, and so you thought, well, I need to write a book in order to flesh out my views? And I'm still not sure who's the greatest economist of all time. It's a deeply complex project, and one never quite settles on a right answer, and that to me makes it more appealing. Yeah, so I heard you, I think it was on Russ Roberts' show, but where, yeah, we're leaving the mystery open to the listeners, like we want them to go read your books. We won't say how Tyler wraps up the analysis, and I should also say, folks, it's a very, there's a lot of material in the book, and so what is going to happen here? By no means am I going to basically have Tyler summarize the whole book. I'm just going to go through as we get into this, and just grab things that caught my eye and have him respond. So, and also we're going to, of course, cater this, make this cater to an Austrian audience, since that's what this podcast is for. Let me just say, the book is free and online, and if you Google Tyler Cowan Goat, you get right to it. Yes. So you can just download it, put it on your Kindle. You can read it through GPT-4 as you wish. So that was one thing, the artificial intelligence angle before we get into the content of the economic discussion. Can you just explain a little bit? I guess you partly wrote it with the assistance of it, but also the AI is there to help you study the book? Can you explain about that? No. I wrote the book completely myself, and I wrote virtually all of it before GPT-4 was even on the market. But you can read the book through GPT-4, and what that means is, well, one way to read the book is just read it like you're reading a normal book. Or you can open up an app we give the reader for free and just start asking questions about the book. Like, what does Tyler think was Adam Smith's greatest contribution? Or what does Tyler see as the greatest flaw on John Maynard Keynes? Or what would Paul Krugman say about this chapter? Or if you don't want to read the chapter on Malthus, just ask it. Summarize this chapter for me. So that's an extra option you have. But again, you can just read it without the AI. Okay, great. Now, one thing that surprised me early on when you were just sort of giving the background and how you got into this is just, you had a little story about that you went to the phone booths in New York City, and you looked at the entry for where the local bookstores were, and you would just rip those pages out. This would be like Wilmington or Philadelphia. Because New York City, we knew how to get around. We knew where the stores were. But if you're in Wilmington for the day, looking for used bookstores, right? There's no internet. You can't Google anything. So you would look for yellow pages. Okay. And then you just, you ripped the pages out. I was just surprised. I didn't know you were such a naughty boy. That was the point. That's when you were in your hell-raising youth. But that's the worst thing I ever did in my hell-raising youth. Okay. I can tell you that. Okay. Well, why don't we, again, we're going to get into your stuff in a second. But the elephant in the room for this podcast, you know, tied to the Mises is, Tyler, how come not only did Mises not make your short list, but you didn't have an explanation as to why he didn't make the short list? Well, I think Mises would be one of the 15 or 20 greatest economists of all time. Marx is another person I don't consider. I actually thought then and still now that I will write separate, shorter monographs on both Mises and Marx that they were better handled in standalone form. But Mises doesn't make the short list because I don't think he's goat, essentially. Mm-hmm. So I'm a big admirer of his books, Socialism and Liberalism. A Theory of Money and Credit, I think is a quite good tract on monetary economics. But I don't think he is as sharp an economic reasoner as, say, either Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. Okay. And he doesn't have the firstness of, say, Adam Smith. Okay. So I guess what I was thinking in terms like his contributions that, for one thing, let me say this and then you tell me if you think I'm wrong. So I think that he was the one who really showed how this subjective marginal utility approach could handle money. Whereas I think before him, they thought that, no, there was a circular, you know, regress in that and that Mises was the one to show that, no, we can apply this new subjective value theory even to money. Are you okay with my claim there? Well, I don't think that makes him goat. But if you're asking me, do I think we need Mises's regression theorem to solve for a value of money? I don't think we do. I think it's an interesting hypothesis about how expectations were formed. It's a real contribution. But I don't think there was a circularity problem to begin with. Once you stop confusing like movements of supply and demand curves and shifts along the curves, I think there's just broadly speaking an equilibrium in that market with the value of money, especially if government accepts it for payment of taxes. Okay. Let me try one more. Not because I'm disagreeing with you, Tyler, but I just want us to be clarifying our views for the listener. Sure. I'm not saying it doesn't make him goat. I just meant, among your criteria, originality and what new things did they bring to the table, this is what I have always filed in terms of just as an economics scholar as a thinker, did he actually bring anything to economic science? One of the things I had filed away was that using the subjective value theory from 1871 on or the way economists eventually would describe like a barter equilibrium in terms of subjective valuation, there definitely was a strain of thought that said, however, you can't use this new framework for money because you just argue in a circle that you're saying, oh, why does somebody accept money in exchange? You subjectively value it more than the thing you gave up. Why do you subjectively value it? Well, because it has purchasing power. It looked like you were explaining the purchasing power of money by reference to the purchasing power of money which is moving in a circle. What Mises did is he said, no, you got to bring in the time element. Today's purchasing power was formed from about expectations of imminent purchasing power and that so, forget like tying it back to gold and silver but just like the idea of bringing the time element to show it's not a circular argument it's an infinite regress but it's not circular. Yeah, that's a contribution. I think his biggest contribution is the 1920 article showing that economic calculation under true socialism is impossible. Okay, so that was going to be the other one I was going to say. Sure, and that's by far his biggest single thing. But again, the books socialism is probably what I today find most interesting in Mises. I think they've held up very well and what he thought was wrong with those systems. It's not just technically correct but he fixed on a lot of the most relevant and interesting points and he had this big picture thinking those are probably, you know, still the best books on their topics. Okay, and then one last thing on Mises that I'll move on is another big one in my book is his explanation of the business cycle. I think his explanation is partly why to you that's not another reason that maybe he's a goat is because you actually don't think that's... I know you've written criticisms of what's called Austrian business cycle theory. Is this on my right on that score? That's right. I think Mises extends the 19th century theory of the credit cycle which to me is a contribution but that said, I don't think he or Hayek for that matter ever explained why in the data consumer and investment good sectors go up and go down together rather than seeing shifts from one to the other so I don't think the theory succeeded as stated but it was a good extension of a 19th century theory. I think Mises himself viewed it as such I would count it as a contribution I think there's probably some modified version of the theory that will in fact explain some sub-segment of business cycles so that counts for something for me. Okay. I meant to ask you before we got going here can you just for the listener with this crowd probably this goes without saying but I'm just curious, especially if there's listeners who are themselves professors and trying to get their students to understand there's a strain in economics of saying all the important discoveries and knowledge of the past has been brought forward and the cutting edge approaches there's no reason to read history of economic thought unless it just interests you there's no reason physicists don't go read stuff that Isaac Newton wrote they might take Afi-Gozame and that kind of stuff but we don't go read it in his work so why the heck would I waste my time going and reading some of these classics if I just want to do good economics do you want to respond to that sort of position? The best classic writers were just better, deeper and broader thinkers than most maybe all current economists so it depends what you're interested in and what your political estimation even then you might want to read them to get a sense of what the important questions are but if you want to understand your world have a better sense of policy of course you need to read them if you don't read them I would just say you're not really literate in economics Florian Aderer, the economist he said today on Twitter no one should read these old books people are debating this on Twitter as we're recording I just think that's so wrong economist you might like much less Marx, Keynes, whatever they're very insightful and smart even if you don't like all the conclusions Yeah, for me it's much more intellectually satisfying to read like Bumbaverk in my mind dismantle Marx's theory of surplus value as opposed to listing all the thousands and millions of people that died under communism as a reputation of Marx like to me the grappling with his theories of it is much more interesting I agree and I would add I don't know of a newer treatment that does it better than Bumbaverk did maybe there's one I don't know about but he's very thorough the quality of the reasoning is very high he hits on the right points and he to my mind just destroys the labor theory of value and the concomitant theory of labor being exploited Okay, one other one I want to ask as to why didn't this person get in it might surprise some of our listeners but what about Irving Fisher couldn't he plausibly have been somebody that you should have given more attention to I think so you know I could have given more attention to Kenneth Arrow, William Stanley Jevins I think is quite underrated there's also Carl Minger I just had to draw a line to make the book a book so it's about a hundred thousand words which is fairly long I can say I'm going to write more in these areas and cover some of these individuals at greater length so I picked people that I thought readers wanted to read about and who were plausible candidates but Minger, Jevins Fisher, possibly Schumpeter who is mentioned but not for so long well Arrow you do explain why Arrow didn't make the shortlist that's what I'm saying that yeah but Arrow I feel is the strongest of the people I put in the queue and who didn't make it and just for the listener I know you know this Tyler but the reason I personally have an affinity for Fisher is a lot of people think oh quantity theory of money and yeah but that's not why his work on interest theory when I was teaching at Hillsdale a history of thought class I spent three lectures just going through excerpts and explain what he did just because not for the history of economic thought purposes but just to really get across the essentials of how to think about inter-temporal transfers and things because I just thought he nailed it so well that anyway and he understood stocks and flows so well right he also invented the Rolodex and he wrote on nutrition and alcohol he was a very interesting guy too much a progressive for my taste but he thought about social matters at a very general and deep level okay so now let's move into the well let's do a quick one on Arrow so Arrow in your framework he didn't make the shortlist but he was a someone you had to explain why didn't make the shortlist so can you just give us your reactions on him he was a very brilliant man and a deep theorist ultimately I don't feel that general equilibrium theory is the way economics either did go or should have gone but for many people especially theorists it's a very very important contribution and the underlying theories of how we price securities which prove themselves every day in the financial markets those really come from Arrow and his work in the mid 60s and that's very very important not enough to make him go but I feel I didn't quite give it enough attention in the book and I might in the future now you did have a line in there that surprised me about him because for me the reason again I have an affinity for him again might surprise some of our listeners is his impossibility theorem you can actually prove that if you have someone who's willing to give you a half an hour they need to have no prior knowledge of set theory or anything and you can sit there and prove I think it was Amartya Sen actually came up with the way to prove it that I ended up using in my classes you know like an easier way to do his you know with some lemmas and stuff that made the whole thing pretty like with little sub-routines as it were to prove it but it was to me it was an astonishing result just like you would not have thought looking at the axioms that the conclusion there is no social welfare function that obeys all these axioms to me that's jaw dropping and yet you seem to say that like yeah it's a good result but it's not really a big deal or I don't remember your exact words but do you want to just react to that I now view the impossibility theorem as less important than I first thought my actual worry with many democracies is just how poorly informed voters are not some intrinsic underlying technical difficulty of having fully consistent voting rules so majority rule in some way with division of powers is what most countries do what's the actual problem it's not procedural I would say it's the quality of the voter inputs okay alright is that analogous if we wanted to draw an analogy to like the critiques of socialism what arrows doing there maybe is a more analogous like Mises saying just in general it's impossible to have calculation but someone might say okay sure maybe but the real issue with communism is like the abuse of power or the incentives are all wrong is that a good analogy and I think that is a limitation on Mises's argument I don't think Mises would have disagreed with what you just said but the planners they're not really trying to calculate an optimum to begin with they're trying to exercise power and seize or answer themselves so you don't even get to the impossibility of calculation mattering that much yeah right it's more like someone with that much power might start murdering their rivals as opposed to how can you be sure that the tangency between the we're just keeping the prices of goods too low to create shortages so there's a queue and you can give away the meat you know for favors or bribes right so in a funny way the people in the shops could calculate the price like the price of meat in the Soviet Union it was always too low it was never too high there was something they did calculate right they knew to set it too low to take in bribes and be correct okay all right yes okay yeah that's maybe a good way to put it so again just we're not losing people your point is yes Mises general observations like even stipulating that the planners want nothing but the best for their people and they have all the technical knowledge still there's this insurmountable review gap if you're not guided by genuine market prices for capital goods but your point is in practice they never got there that they were already deviating from the assumptions of the exercise and that was leading to problems sure and in Mises's book socialism he clearly shows he understood that bigger picture okay all right so why don't we now move into the people that are on your short list so for this podcast obviously Hayek is one of the contenders that you spend you know a chapter on so do you want to just give your broad remarks then maybe I'll ask you to elaborate on some of them well his most important and best known articles such as use of knowledge in society which you could read online I think it's the greatest article of economics of all time so that alone makes him a serious contender the way prices allocate resources mobilized decentralized or even inarticulable knowledge in the marketplace it's just a phenomenal piece it's the best thing we economists have done what's funny about that Tyler is when I was in grad school at NYU like maybe my second or third year so it was in the regular program but it was on an Austrian fellowship so every Monday there would be the colloquium that I would go to as a grad student and some of my peers in the program with me were asking me what is this Austrian stuff and so one of the guys, he was this guy from Japan very good at math so like he was one of our best you know if you had trouble with the problem set you might go ask him for help and so he wanted to know about Austrian so I asked him or I emailed him Hayek's use of knowledge in society and said start with that and he came back a couple days later so I tried to read this and I didn't even know what he was talking about so like that really underscored for me the gap between his studying of mathematical models and determining equilibria versus what Hayek was saying about how markets work and now he could ask chat GPT to explain it to him through my book if he wants to right and that's one of the innovations of the book if there's any part of it you don't understand just ask the AI and it will tell you things that I don't you can even ask the AI well if Tyler put Mises in the book what would he have said about Mises the answers are not so bad okay yeah and by the way I also Tyler think people are underrating chat GPT for that I've been telling people you got to check this thing out you can't believe the capabilities of this like you can have real conversations with it okay what so just again going back to Hayek so you think that he it wasn't just that that was the best one didn't you say something like his his three was it his three are better than any other three from any other single economist is that the different way yeah different ways you can tally them up but competition as a discovery procedure is one of the best articles of all time maybe the second best and Hayek speaks are very very strong I'm not sure about the overall quality of his contributions so unlike some Austrians I don't think Constitution of Liberty is a great book Murray Rothbard wrote a long critique of it I think in the early 60s maybe the late 50s and a lot of Rothbard's critiques Ron Hammouy's critiques I think were correct so Hayek's big master work it's a good and interesting book I don't think it's a great book and Hayek got obsessed with a number of normative questions where he never was willing to either go for a rights theory or be a utilitarian and he would have been better in either direction and it became this rather soggy mess that just got more and more complicated and in my view he never succeeded in resolving but again he's clearly a contender for go the best stuff is incredible right okay let's move on to Keynes so you said again I want to put words in your mouth something along the lines of like if you if you were going to go out to dinner with any economist from the list it would have been Keynes or something like that am I getting it right it seems like he was the most fun so other people who wrote about Keynes including Hayek by the way they seemed to really like him and he was very charming very well educated had an interest in the arts and music people wanted to hang around with him so of course I've never met Keynes and reminiscences can be misleading when it's a powerful man but it does seem like he was a lot of fun okay great yeah you had can you speak a little bit there's something that wasn't on my radar you said he was part of this group called the Apostles can you just speak a little bit about that they were a Cambridge group you know earlier part of the 20th century they were in a way like today's rationality community they were obsessed with using one particular notion of reason to evaluate and improve everything in human life a practice Hayek objected to greatly and I think they overreached they did not have enough epistemic humility they thought they could sit down figure out how everything ought to be which included them as the planners and that in my view was a mistake a detour and it led Keynes and many of the others astray on many issues so it was really a fundamental error and I think behind everything they did even though they were brilliant Bertrand Russell has some of the same problems so overestimating the powers of the individual human mind and underestimating the powers of decentralized mechanisms and you soon after you bring that up you mentioned how Keynes himself admitted that at least for a period this group they viewed Christianity as the enemy was the term apostles like tongue in cheek or not to good question I suspect it was tongue in cheek I don't know that I know I think they didn't stop viewing Christianity as the enemy I think they grew to accept it they realized it wasn't going away though today in Britain the percentage of people who go to church seems to be below 5% I believe so in that sense it's gone away maybe Christian modes of thought have not vanished but Keynes in particular as we know he was gay and the Christian church Anglican church was a strong opponent of having a gay life or being gay and he resented that on that he was clearly correct so the rationalism say the view that we should integrate people with different sexual preferences on that the rationalism completely got it right but in the realm of politics it became more problematic okay so I'm glad you clarified because yeah I know you said something but you may at that point saying we viewed Christianity as the enemy it's not because later they came to be happy with it it was just that they thought okay well it's sticking here so let's move on with our lives and they became more small sea conservative as the age like most people do okay you had an interesting line in here that let me actually read it and then have you explain it so in this your treatment of Keynes you spend a lot of time on what people might think of as his non-economic writings and then you explain that by saying if you want to understand the general theory and the rest of Keynes's corpus think of them as Keynes trying to fill in the blanks so that this broader vision which you know you should just summarize can be realized and to create the politics and economic policy machinery to keep it on track that is what Keynes was all about and that is why I'm so emphasizing his broader social and political thought the economics was a kind of detail so can you just elaborate on that well Keynes is having the central part of his career at a time when communism is very much on the rise it's a real threat and fascism is very much on the rise and Keynes to his credit was strongly opposed to both of those and you wanted to preserve some kind of British liberalism not our classical liberalism not exactly the modern liberalism either but some notion of Britain as a world power with an empire maybe in decline but still making possible this kind of reasoned life where you talked about ideas with your friends there was a fair amount of tolerance something about British traditions could continue within a framework that was neither fascism nor communism and I think that's what motivated him and well you needed good economic policy to get there you can debate whether Keynes got the policy issues right but I think that's why he cared about economics you wanted to preserve this particular world he had grown up in and in that sense he's very small sea conservative and then maybe the last thing on Keynes before we move on near the end there you have a little subsection says does Keynes need to be cancelled and you go through and he has some inflammatory quotes such that if it was a war right wing conservative economist who had said that probably some of their detractors nowadays would bring that stuff up a lot and yet you don't see leftist progressives talking about some of these difficult quotes from Keynes do you want to comment on that? Well Keynes was clearly anti-semitic and for what eight years he was president of the eugenics society in Britain and it wasn't just about birth control it was about actual active eugenics so I don't want to cancel Keynes for those things but the notion that this overly rationalistic progressive approach to economics is going to pick up a lot of other negative baggage along the way because you think your mind can figure everything out that's a way of seeing that Keynes' errors they popped up in these other areas so those are strikes against him intellectually. Okay so actually I realized I was going through my notes here in your manuscript. Going back to Hayek you have a personal anecdote here where you say you were in the room with him and you say I recall asking him a question and then Hayek was saying in response that he was planning to write a sequel volume to his 1941 pure theory of capital because that had dealt with the real economy and then he was going to add money so I had always heard that Hayek intended to write a sequel to the pure theory of capital so the pure meaning there's no money in it and then he just got, my joke was that was so hard he decided to go talk about the nervous system as an easier thing to write on but do we know that from your question or did he elsewhere say that to people that oh yeah I meant to write a sequel and then he just never did but it is known from Hayek's biography that at the time he meant to write a sequel but he started thinking about his earlier review of Hayek's treatise on money which turned out not to matter because Hayek himself repudiated the treatise other the world war, post war reconstruction and Hayek just thought at the time the moment had passed and to try to rebuild the theory of capital integrated with money it wasn't going to get him anywhere he instead was writing the Road to Serfdom which is the best seller I'm very glad he made that switch, Road to Serfdom was a highly influential and great positive book but then this is now Hayek well into his 80s saying he wants to go back to the project and I thought that wasn't realistic of him you know that a man well into his 80s would think he had the intellectual equipment, energy to integrate theory of money in capital basically this is 40 years after he had once been in issue showed you know maybe Hayek was a bit too rationalistic in his own particular way overrating the powers of his individual mind okay I know and no one's ever succeeded at that project there was once talk Roger Garrison would do it you know I liked Roger's piece on Austrian macro but no one really came up with the book that was going to do that I don't really think it's possible to be too complex a problem we're going to go off in a tangent here but what do you think Tyler about the possibility of doing like computers especially talking about AI and whatever what about doing now a pretty sophisticated simulation of the economy and trying to like would you personally be interested in something like that that kind of did a simulated economy and what if you could get an Austrian business cycle to happen in a world like that would that do anything for you or far from that with current AI it's not designed for that purpose but I think current AI can do and people will use it for once there's greater confidentiality is you'll feed in all the documents from your business or maybe even recorded meetings send it to the AI and ask the AI what improvements could we make and I think it will do a very good job at that but a whole economy no we're not there yet I don't think we're close okay it also just again for the listeners don't miss it I'm not saying we can plan an economy with super computers it's not what I'm saying I've explicitly written against that what I'm saying though is instead of economists on paper trying to write little models and things and write books on it you know maybe we could do a simulation okay fair enough looking at the clock here I want to get a couple more in here what about Malthus so Tyler if anyone even knows who Malthus is nowadays 99.9% will say oh yeah he was the guy that thought everyone was going to starve to death and he's the hero of modern environmentalism it's completely antithetical to free markets and you know real economists know the resources are not finite or at least not in a meaningful economically meaningful sense if we need more oil we go find it if you need to feed more people you come up with innovations in agriculture and you know Malthusian is a pejorative term now in the free market camp and yet you're saying Malthus arguably could be the greatest economist of all time so tell us what's how we're thinking about it wrong most people misread Malthus to be clear Malthus is not my candidate for goat but he's considerably underrated he was a largely a classical liberal in his time he understood full well that agricultural productivity could go up that birth control was possible but he was you know a reverend and he a preacher he was afraid that the world that would result from all that birth control would be completely depraved a bit like a London brothel writ large now I think he was quite wrong about that I'm not myself religious or Christian but he's not an out and out pessimist he was a very deep thinker but of all the people I consider on my short list I do think he comes in last so he was wrong about his ultimate fundamentals but he wasn't wrong in the way that most people think okay so are the following correct that you think as an economist he was a lot more than just the essay on population and also the popular distillation of what he was trying to do in that essay is a crude mischaracterization even though probably he is wrong in what he said that essay is that fair yes and you have to distinguish between editions the first edition of Malthus's essay it is pretty crude the third edition is quite sophisticated so he improved a lot which I give him credit for but at the end of the day Malthus isn't the person you read if you want to understand the rest of the 19th century let's put it that way okay okay I'm looking at the clock we got about five minutes here before we have our stop let's end out with Milton Friedman so first do you want to make the case for why he's a contender for goat and then maybe I'll ask you some specifics well he did both micro and macro he did both theory and empirical work he's to this day super influential on monetary economics he along with Hayek was one of the two major figures leading to market oriented reforms and also encouraging people to dump communism and move to systems like what we see in Poland today so in terms of influence doctrine he has a very strong case and you're stressing like he's both a well published scholar with cutting edge research but also a public communicator so he kind of checked all those boxes and he was right about many many issues I never agreed with him about money growth rules but overall Friedman was far far more right than he was wrong for people who don't realize that yeah he was far more than just a glib guy arguing with Phil Donahue about greed or something you mentioned his 48 piece with savage unexpected utility theory like so that's pretty high-brow stuff can you just explain what that is for the listeners who don't know about that result well there was a paradox it's still in the world why is it that the same people both buy insurance and purchase lottery tickets if the risk averse they would buy the insurance but not by the tickets if the risk leaven they would buy the tickets and Friedman savage had a very particular hypothesis as to the shape of the utility function I don't think that particular piece has held up is completely true but they understood a puzzle they tried to answer it they tried to have an answer that would have other empirical implications it was a big advance in the debate at its time and it's deservedly a famous article what about the permanent income hypothesis can you explain what that is this is Friedman revising Keynes and on this Friedman was mostly correct and Keynes was mostly wrong so in simple Keynesian models including in the general theory consumption is determined by current income and Friedman drawing on Irving Fischer pointed out well there's stocks and flows you also care about your wealth and what your income is going to be across the rest of your life you can use the phrase permanent income as a proxy for those broader considerations and if you take that into account if you predicted after World War II there would not be a recession the Keynesians were all terrified that after World War II there would be a recession because of the drop in government spending yes turned out Friedman clearly was correct it may be relevant to inflation falling in 2023 without a recession and it's one of the most important ideas in macro Friedman with Irving Fischer gets credit and again people still are using Friedman's framework to this day and it's not a recession okay great and then maybe the last thing about him and then we'll just kind of wrap up is can you talk something that as you know Tyler there are a lot of libertarian economists particularly if they're fans of the Austrian school and they bristle at Milton Friedman perhaps thinking you know oh he gets too much credit Rothbard was better that sort of thing but something that I think everyone should be able to agree on is the military draft so can you just talk about that well Friedman let a commission that issued a report explaining why the draft should be abolished and President Nixon followed that recommendation so obviously that's a big plus for Friedman it's unjust but it's also economically inefficient and Friedman explained to a broader public why but you know you mentioned the Austrians I do think Friedman was remarkably ungenerous to the Austrian school and when there was talk of giving Hayek a mere honorary appointment in Chicago economics Friedman opposed it and I think Friedman was completely wrong there very closed minded hmm okay what was his rationale I don't know this isn't the historical record it's in the Jennifer Burns biography I asked Jennifer about this in my podcast with her she thought it was simply that well Hayek was not scientific enough for Friedman and Friedman in my in my view did have too much scientism which a bit he abandons later on when he's a more popular figure but he veered a bit too much toward extreme scientism and then extreme popularizer and never quite stopped in the middle at exactly the right point for my taste okay can you just expand a little bit more what specifically was his argument about the military draft just besides saying hey you can't force people to go die against their will what was the like the economic argument is to say why this is a silly or a counterproductive policy well opportunity cost if you look at nominal numbers in the budget a draft seems cheaper because you don't have to pay the people very much but the foregone output what those people could have done in the private sector today it would be all these teenagers with startups right the true opportunity cost of the draft is extraordinarily high and Friedman understood that 110% okay great so last minute here can you maybe just tell people if they want to see more of yours like maybe to talk about your blog or where they should go to follow you or things that you'd like them to know about well you can just google my name Tyler Cowan C-O-W-E-N my blog is called Marginal Revolution my podcast conversations with Tyler my youtube economics education site is mru.org I'm on twitter and again to get to this book you can just google Tyler Cowan goat G-O-A-T thank you Bob thank you all for listening okay thank you Tyler for your time and contributions and the work you've done on this and thank you everyone for tuning in we'll see you next time check back next week for a new episode of the human action podcast in the meantime you can find more content like this on nieces.org