4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception: Difference between revisions

'''Eric Weinstein''': The show trials.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes

'''Eric Weinstein''': Does that match your..

'''Timur Kuran''': I think this has happened. And I think this has happened in a growing range on a growing range of issues, which is why. Now we go back to New York Times lists of who in which party voted which way, sometimes that list doesn't appear because simply party they say is just a party line vote. And this is a reflection of society, that and it's not that within the Republican Party or within the Democratic Party, you don't have people on whatever the issue is. You don't have people in in the middle. But that if they take if they bring up the nuances, if they try to bring the conversation a little bit toward a compromise, they will get skewered by the people, by their own people or the other side,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': and the other side will not come to their defense. And in fact, if the other side does come to their defense, that's a terrible signal for them, and they'll be skewered by their own side.

'''Eric Weinstein''': What concerns me here, though, is that we are dependent on people of integrity, who risked everything when it was least popular to do it, so that we can sort of hold these people in reserve. So when the madness becomes too great, we can turn to them. Let me just take a couple of examples that matter to me, one of which was the Patriot Act. And then when the Patriot Act was voted in, in the wake of 9-11, and there was this sort of mob hysteria to do something, because something very significant had happened to us. Only one person, only one senator voted against it. And that was Russ Feingold. And so I don't have a clear memory of the other names in the senate at that time, but I will always remember Russ Feingold for the courage to stand alone. a different sort of version of that, I think about as Katharine Hepburn, who is the sort of the most loved of all all Hollywood actresses, I think she had four Academy Awards that she used as doorstops for her bathrooms. Because she didn't seem to give a wit what other people thought of her. And she went and did, if I recall correctly, you know, Connecticut community theater theater during the McCarthy era, because she was just going to wait out the stupidity, the excess and the idiocy of the movement. Whereas, a Humphrey Bogart who or organized an artist's push to fight back against this was immediately cowed by an article in Filmfare magazine if I recall correctly. He said, Well, sorry, he had to write an article saying, Hey, you know, don't call me red you, I'll never do that again. And the great Humphrey Bogart, the tough guy of movies crumbled under this pressure, whereas Katharine Hepburn, his co star, you know, sort of stood tall and waited it out, do we have these hyper individuals, these incredibly disagreeable people in the sense of the agreeable component of the Big Five personality inventory, where we know who they are, and we know to whom we can look in times of crisis?

'''Timur Kuran''': Well on particular issues, you will find people who write books that advocate a middle position that I do identify all the nuances that portray both sides as having legitimate goals, they don't necessarily get attention. So they they write a book, whether the issue is abortion or immigration, it takes some kind of middle position, it doesn't get the play in the media

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': that it that a book that takes a very strong position a very absolutist position does so so yes there do on any on any given issue, there are some some people who you can find people who are trying to start a dialogue you can find here their little associations, little nonprofit organizations that are trying to start a dialogue doing so but they just don't. That's not where the what the media pays pays attention to. So effectively, they don't exist. And the the groups that increasingly, the groups that get attention are the groups that pigeonhole people into one side, you're either for us or against us. And the two sides, the two extremes, both of whom are playing this game of you're, you're with us or against us, the're actually reinforcing each other.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah, yeah, they're agreed.

'''Timur Kuran''': They're completely agreed on that.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah,

'''Timur Kuran''': that there is no middle position. And having a middle position and having the media pay attention to the people in the middle would hurt them both.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah, I don't think it's in the middle. I mean, I really think and for those of you who were watching, rather than listening, I think that there's this very flat, low dimensional plane where these positions live. And what we're calling the middle is not the thing between these. It's in a higher dimensional space that combines these crappy low-resolution moronic positions, and it projects to the middle. But it isn't the middle.

'''Timur Kuran''': Absolutely, absolutely. There are many more dimensions that they ... these. It's simply that these simple position, positions hide I completely agree with that. And, and the middle is is often is more complex involves many more dimensions. And these dimensions to go back now to these extreme groups that don't want these dimensions to be brought into the picture. So for the pro life group, the issue is, are you going to terminate the life or not

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': and for the pro choice group is do you Respect a woman's right to choose. And so each one of them for each one of them is just a one dimensional thing. There's a yes, no answer its a yes/no answer. And there's no bring in some other dimension is immediately gets you in trouble.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So I want to talk about the specific weirdness of economic theory. Yes. Now, I claim to be an economist, I've never taken a class in economics and partially The reason for that is that I developed a theory with my wife about gauge theoretic economics. And I always thought that if we could get attacked, and somebody could say, well, you're not really an economist, I'd get a chance to defend myself because it dealt with another aspect there. They're the great adjustments to preference theory. preference falsification is yours. Yeah. gauge theoretic changing preferences is ours, Paul Samuelson had one about incoherent preferences. That was he buried in his Nobel acceptance speech,

'''Timur Kuran''': which has received very little play in economics

'''Eric Weinstein''': almost nothing. He was the one who pointed it.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yeah,

'''Eric Weinstein''': pointed me to it saying, you know, this idea that we don't actually even have preferences is something I always thought was important. He saw it as the lack of integralability of tangent planes to create indifferent surfaces, for those of you geeks following at home. And all of these theories about what's wrong with our preferences, George Soros has one about beliefs with reflexivity have been really effectively kept out of the mainstream of economic theory. And I find it, I view economic theory is a little bit like it's not quite as totalitarian as North Korea, but it's very similar to certain places in Eastern Europe where there's that what you can explore freely in that what you can't talk about, or at least it was this way until recently. Now, I look at the moment where I think you had your kind of Saddam Hussein moment about what we can and can't discuss. And I trace it in part its funny to even think of it in these terms to Becker and Stigler's paper called De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. And in it, they hardened the theory of fixed preferences to a dogma by comparing preferences to the Rocky Mountains, and they said on on our interpretation, there's an alternate view of why we can't discuss tastes. And that's because like the Rocky Mountains, they are unchanging over time, and the same to all men. And you know, my jaw dropped as an outsider because I hadn't been indoctrinated when I read this. And I thought that is the single, craziest, idiotic thing that could be said about human beings and their beliefs and preferences. And yet, somehow it became Have a famous paper as opposed to being laughed out of the field.

'''Timur Kuran''': Well, there was here's again an example of a theory that is foundational to discipline that gets falsified. I think his first name was Richard Richard Herrnstein. You would does the name ring a bell at ah Harvard was Richard or Robert, remember but anyway Herrnstein, he developed a theory that explained a phenomenon that that Becker swept under the rug which is that an addicts heroin addicts preferences,

'''Eric Weinstein''': hyperbolic discounting

'''Timur Kuran''': do change through hyperbolic discounting so there are many addicts who after they've taken their fix want to, they understand now that the panic attack is gone away. And they understand that this heroin addiction is ruining their life and they very sincerely want to give it up. They very sincerely want not to take more heroin.

'''Timur Kuran''': But a few hours pass and they need their body starts

'''Eric Weinstein''': jonesing

'''Timur Kuran''': they they start craving

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah,

'''Timur Kuran''': heroin again, they need a new fix. And they get to the point where their preferences change to let me have one more

'''Eric Weinstein''': I'll quit afterwards,

'''Timur Kuran''': and I'll quit afterwards. I am prepared to quit now. A few hours ago they were prepared To put immediately, now they're willing to quit. But after I get my next fix, and this thing can go on again again, so you have inter-temporally inconsistent preferences. So this is another problem with the, with the economics discipline. But economics is not immune to the forces that we've been talking about,

'''Eric Weinstein''': well,

'''Timur Kuran''': there is preference falsification. In the economics discipline, there are certain fundamentals of the discipline and if you challenge them, as a young person, you're never going to get a job.

'''Eric Weinstein''': right.

'''Timur Kuran''': And if you and if you challenge them before you get tenure, you're not going to get a job. But if you develop a reputation to get tenure, you have to develop a certain reputation. And that has involved adhering to the conventions of the discipline. Theoretically, you could after you got tenure, you could switch. But the costs then are huge because you've developed a certain there's a lot of reputational capital you have.

'''Eric Weinstein''': And we're watching a lot of prominent economists sort of change their position without announcing that they used to be, in effect working for a nonsensical theory, or at least quieting themselves. I was astounded by Paul Krugman's column, or maybe as a blog post called a protectionist moment where he starts talking about the scam of the elites forever freer trade, where I associated that with sort of the intellectual force of Jagdish Bhagwati. And some of these theorists who clearly were sort of pursuing political position where, you know, in the case of like free trade, there, there are two separate phenomenon, you can say that something would parado improve the society if everyone is made either as well off as they are today or better off. And then there's this other kind of more technical version of this called Kaldor Hicks improvement, which is that if we were to tax winners to pay losers, then everyone would be parado improved. And I've noticed this very interesting thing about economists, where they have two voices they have the voice that they have to use in the seminar room, because there's nowhere to hide from the fact that a lot of these public pronouncements are absolute nonsense. And then the claim is, is that oh, well, when we're in our seminar voice, and then maybe this was Danny Rodricks phraseology, I can't remember whose it was. But then when we speak publicly, we're allowed to say something that is actually different. It's not the same thing in two different voices. It's an idea that there's an exoteric and an esoteric way of expression, which is a sort of Straussian theory and the esoteric is reserved for one's colleagues. But we're actually allowed to lie to the public to help the fortunes of the politicians we favor when we're speaking publicly What the hell is going on?

'''Timur Kuran''': So there there's some people who have achieved a certain stature in the profession. And yet they feel there's certain things that are wrong about the profession or that they can't say within the profession, they develop a second persona, which is their op-ed personality

'''Eric Weinstein''': the're policy entrepreneurs

'''Timur Kuran''': and the're, but the're, the're the'er policy entrepreneurs and as public intellectuals, they're much more critical of the discipline than they are within the discipline or they have decided that there really isn't a possibility of changing the discipline. But there's certain points that have to be made. And they're going to make them anyway and they're going to make them in a much less technical way. And there's there's a third a charitable interpretation. I think this does apply to some of my colleagues, I would say, they believe that the, the the core principles of economics, even if they're not true, even if they don't give you a reflection of the real economy, they lead to useful correct thinking that they're very useful for disciplining your way of thinking, thinking as an economist and they represent, they give you a good base model, which you can tweak

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': to, to bring in reality. So I have had some people say to some people who for years did not take my work on preference falsification seriously, who have now come to the position that this is a useful extension of economics. And they've said, you know, you did use standard economic tools of utility maximization.

'''Timur Kuran''': In order to get to this point. And there is

'''Eric Weinstein''': that's why you're so dangerous

'''Timur Kuran''': there is a, there is a point to that. Yeah, but there's a point to that.

'''Eric Weinstein''': The problem is, is that that's why it's actually intellectual kryptonite. So, because your theory can be accommodated within the standard theory,

'''Timur Kuran''': yes.

'''Eric Weinstein''': The question is well, okay,

'''Timur Kuran''': a version of it.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah, well, I I think I could do a pretty decent job of shoehorning it into this sort of Samuelson neoclassical perspective. The problem is it's a ready made upgrade to the existing theory in which nothing is lost, but new degrees of freedom are gained. And that could have an absolutely unpredictable effect on the entire field because it's at the level of the substrate.

'''Timur Kuran''': But the the big danger is that so many propositions involving efficiency, that if you let the system

'''Eric Weinstein''': and revealed preferences

'''Timur Kuran''': you left and and the the principle of revealed preferences that that that actions reveal people's people's preferences that goes out the window, and many efficient properties if if that if you allow people to to interact with each other, you're going to get efficient political solutions you're going to get efficient solutions in in the market. My way of thinking leads you to multiple equilibria. And one equilibrium can be preferable to another.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So this is one of the great dangers for economists as high priests, which is if there are multiple ways in which a market can evolve. Therefore, you can't say that the market finds the optimum because you can't say which of these things actually was the optimum.

'''Timur Kuran''': And there's a danger to political economy, which is that the political system what the political system generates, is not whether you have elections or not, and whether you have a secret ballot or not, is is not necessarily efficient. Because if you in a system where people are are not cannot speak freely. Many ideas are stuck underground, they're not being expressed. People are when people are going through the primary process. They're not thinking of all the options. They're not thinking of all the dimensions. They're thinking in a single dimension. And so they're not coming up with the with candidates who hold the best positions, whatever your values are, or a set of coherence is something we haven't talked about is the coherence of various policies. one of the things that can get you in great trouble is if you say, within the Republican party or the Democratic Party, look this policy on this policy I'm with you on this other policy I'm also with you and on this other third policy I'm also with you, but the three policies you cannot put them. You can't we don't have the resources to accomplish all

'''Eric Weinstein''': drug interactions between ideas

'''Timur Kuran''': what are your what are your and some of these policies undermine others these are not necessarily consistent with one another. So in the eh with these these parties or coalitions these coalitions have certain objectives

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': they are they are deliberately keeping quiet about the contradictions.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, I think

'''Timur Kuran''': among these Among these,

'''Eric Weinstein''': I think there's some contradictions that we legitimately even lies I talk about load bearing fictions.

'''Eric Weinstein''': We have to have some number of load bearing fictions in any society because you can't actually just do everything in broad daylight and hope that every everything that we want can be harmonized, some people are gonna have to accept that there are trade offs. Who can't intellectually accept that there are trade offs, and they will require load bearing fictions, for example, we do, we do convict innocent people using our system of justice. And there's nothing magical about 12 people on a jury being able to decide what actually happened. But if we don't have some kind of mysticism around the wisdom of a jury of our peers, we won't be able to mete out almost any justice at all. So I don't think that we can hope for a sort of child's vision of an honest society. But what I find really impressive is the rent seeking aspect of keeping it so expensive to investigate something that it's impossible. So you talked about a system of selective pressures where if you raise certain questions, you won't be employed and therefore through survive directed survivor bias. There's nobody at the top of a profession who will speak about something openly and in public. One of the things I've been curious about it, my wife has a concept that she's talked about called economics squared. The econ economics of economists. So economists are famous for training their lens on everyone else, except for themselves. They'll talk about what are the economics of a physician in trying to figure out how to allocate scarce organs, very upsetting things. And the culture of economics for those who don't know, is that economists don't blink when they talk about things that are incredibly upsetting. That this is they're part of a technocratic class who considers emotions to be beneath them. The one place that I can find where they cannot actually have an honest conversation in general, is if you say, let's talk about the economics of being a macroeconomist. You know, if you're so good at understanding the economy, you should be able to trade in the market which is relatively complete because there are instruments of every kind to place any bet. Why are you asking for a grant? Because obviously, if you're any good, you should be, you should be rich, not because if you're so smart, why aren't you rich works in general, but you happen to be concerned about the one thing where that would be the proof of concept. Can economic squared be born?

'''Timur Kuran''': Well, this is I mean, asking, I cannot imagine being in a department meeting where somebody asked this question and says, Why don't we base our hiring on of say macroeconomists on how well they've done in a market? or I, I think they would be immediately left out. I don't think it would ever make it onto the agenda. I think the institutional pressures against applying such a criteria are too great because economists also believe, most academic economists, that they have come into an institution where the primary goal is seeking the truth. They've given up possibly more lucrative careers, and they should not be there for judged on the basis of how well they do.

'''Eric Weinstein''': I'm not saying only trading. Maybe you could ask the question, for example, does being an expert witness as an economist?

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes,

'''Eric Weinstein''': for one side or the other influence the objectivity of your judgment? You could ask the question does the prestige of being invited to Jackson's Hole affect the quality of discussion? Because people don't want to be excommunicated from the priestly class, you could ask the question of whether or not the secret Harvard jobs market meeting which is a particular problem for me, actually serves the interests of economics or serves the interests of the higher ups in the,

'''Timur Kuran''': in the profession,

'''Eric Weinstein''': in the profession by being a direct interference in the free trade of ideas, all of the really fun questions that economic economists would ask in a heartbeat about anyone else they refuse to ask about themselves. So it's quite a bit more pointed than just asking for trading prowess among macroeconomists. You've the profession and this isn't against you, the profession has trained it's magnifying glass on everyone else. When do we start doing the economics of economists?

'''Timur Kuran''': You know, again, I think there are a few people here and there who publish in journals that very few people read who have done this sort of thing. There have been studies of the economics profession Mirowski Philip Mirowski

'''Eric Weinstein''': More Heat than Light,

'''Timur Kuran''': More Heat than Light I think might be was he he has done some work along these lines.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yeah. But the people doing this are not people at the top of the profession

'''Eric Weinstein''': as perceived

'''Timur Kuran''': as as perceived as perceived by the departments that get take the first picks when the junior job market opens are considered in the rankings in the US News and World Report rankings are considered the top departments to get a PhD from and so on. Based on on that ranking people who are at the top are not among those asking the question. So again as with other issues, which were very polarized, other issues on which there are taboos

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': areas that quest questions that involve or that raise questions that nobody can really or that bring to mind questions that nobody can really ask at least in polite, in polite the company. As in those cases here, the questions the contradictions you're raising have been noticed. There are people who have written they just don't get attention. They don't again..

'''Eric Weinstein''': but but, to me like it's like saying, you know who is the greater wrestler? Gorgeous George who wrestled in part of the professional wrestling arena where everything is fixed. Or Khabib Nurmagomedov, who wrestled inside of the UFC? Who's an unbelievable grappler. Well, I don't think that Nurmagomedov has ever achieved what has been achieved inside of the WWE. When everything's scripted you can do things that are so much more fantastic than anybody outside. And yet, what we've been trying to do in part is to ask the question, why can't we smuggle legitimate economic kryptonite into the economics profession so that it can grow into a real field, if I think about the favorite example is imagine that you've got alchemy and chemistry in the same department, or you've got astrology and astronomy in the same department, the great opportunities to get rid of the astrologists and get rid of the alchemists,

'''Timur Kuran''': right

'''Eric Weinstein''': Because it's not that all of economics is nonsense, but so many of the perceived top players in the field are actually acting as professional wrestlers, that it's time for the revolution that I would imagine. Your theory actually predicts. It's so ripe and so many of us who are mathematically inclined look at the kind of the history of mathematical intimidation. And when you think this is mathematically intimdating, you guys aren't even that good at math.

'''Timur Kuran''': You know, this, this may actually happen through the young generation. And it might actually took a couple of generations one huge change that has happened in the economics profession.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Data

'''Timur Kuran''': Since, exactly, since Becker and Stigler road Augusta was known as Disputandum,

'''Eric Weinstein''': yeah,

'''Timur Kuran''': that was, I believe 1977 Yeah. Since they wrote that the most prestigious field within economics, which used to be economic theory, has lost prestige, the best economists now go into data heavy area, and they are driven by empirics. And often the theory follows the empirical work that they do if there's a theory at all and

'''Eric Weinstein''': sometimes with like deep learning you don't even know what the theory is

 

yeah ....

'''Timur Kuran''': you don't even know what the theory is and they start with so much data that they they just start analyzing it from some some corner of the the issue and then hope to come to and that leads in the very, very best of those works, then generate new theories. So where now the empirical parts of the profession are driving the theoretical

 

and the theory and the theory and the theory. The the old theorists who were trained as theorists never to touch and to look down on people who worked with the with the data, look down on on them, many of them are retiring. They are being replaced by theorists who are who are getting accustomed to operating in departments where the bigwigs

'''Eric Weinstein''': Are the data cowboys

'''Timur Kuran''': are the data cow cowboys, and this is going to have some effect on the theory because the empiricists that I talked to in the economics profession now, consider a lot of the theory a waste of time, a lot of it highly. Highly misleading.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yes,

'''Timur Kuran''': some of it far too abstract and, and irrelevant and that the the theory taught to the first year graduate students and even going before that to undergraduates and master students, that this has to change. Nobody yet though, has come up with the equivalent of Paul Samuelson's first edition of economics

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, this is

'''Timur Kuran''': where he where he wrote where he

'''Eric Weinstein''': a framework a extensensible framework for which it almost any question that can be posed can be posed within the framework

'''Timur Kuran''': within the framework. And and it was and it was, and and within a few years, all major departments were using either Paul Samuelson's textbook or textbooks written according to the same template following you know, basically offering the same thing at a somewhat higher level somewhat lower lower level, but basically and that is that has come down to the present. There have been a few attempts to bring in behavioral economics for example, the're the're textbooks are not quite popular people like Bob Frank, Daniel Kahneman have of course introduced new ideas about, concerning behavior and how people how people think. And they've been attempts to bring some of these ideas into textbooks, but they don't define the mainstream yet.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, this is, this is the thing that I think people don't realize about economics, which is I could make a decent argument that our two greatest theories or two greatest intellectual theories that we've ever come up with, would be Darwinian selection in the in the realm of biology, and which I think has flaws and what I would call geometric dynamics, which covers both the modern understanding of the standard model and general relativity and what's weird is is that economics if you think about it is a decision to make a continuation of selection by other means, which is to come up with an as if physics to mediate selective pressures between apes, which is us, and it's the only place I know where there's a meaningful interaction be possible between our two greatest ideas. So for me, the really interesting part of economics is that it is the one place where our greatest ideas might even touch and reproduce. The problem I have what the profession is, is that the fear of what could happen if we started to do real economics has locked out the kind of innovative spirit which requires both much more detailed knowledge of selection as per Kahneman and Tversky, and much greater understanding of mathematics. It's not that you guys have used too much mathematics it's that you're not good enough and you're not advanced enough in mathematics, lots of people have master's degrees, very few of PhDs and very few of those are trained in the few subjects that would reveal market markets to be truly geometric, which is a revolution that happened between geometry and physics in the mid 70s, or for the Standard Model, or the teens for Einstein's theory of relativity. You guys are next. And it's a question of people holding back the possibility for genuine innovation. So this is a place where I've been hoping the preference falsification would actually lead to the cascade effect that we began this podcast talking about.

'''Timur Kuran''': Well, this is I'm not sure that actually don't think that this is going to happen through people who have who are currently falsifying their preferences to agree with the direction you go,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right.

'''Timur Kuran''': And then they become, disguising their preferences, they the chairman of the major department, then they suddenly suddenly redirect hiring and the department changes. I don't think it's going to happen that way. I think it will happen through the emergence of new departments and smaller departments, lesser known departments that

'''Eric Weinstein''': George Mason

'''Timur Kuran''': that decides, so George Mason is has

'''Eric Weinstein''': a particular direction,

'''Timur Kuran''': a particular direction, something and there were some brilliant people. Buchanan, Tullock, Vernon Smith joined them later on who had problems with the direction that economics was going with what it implied for political science for political markets. And they were they were pushed out of the mainstream of the profession. They just decided to form their own department. They, they, of course, they all congregated at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Then when they decided Virginia Polytechnic Institute decided crazily, I think that they'd rather have a mainstream department. They just packed up and left and George Mason jumped at the opportunity. So this can happen that that is the model that I think that there will be a group of people, some of them young. In fact, probably many of them young young enough that they still have, can

'''Eric Weinstein''': energy and creativity,

'''Timur Kuran''': energy and creativity and think of think of developing their ideas for several decades. Who Who, and there's some university with with a with a visionary president and some entrepreneur who gives a big grant to establish a new department and you get 10-15 people collect somewhere. That is, I think the what will happen to shake up the the economics, the the profession and shake up in particular, the theoretical

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah,

'''Timur Kuran''': core of the discipline. I think the empirical parts of it Yeah, I think are just being shaken up daily true through the data coming in and through the, the very interesting results and findings that are that are coming up as people are developing huge sort of new datasets.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Like if you think about natural experiments, you happen to have a flood that you could never actually, you know, ask for because it would kill people and it would destroy crops. But once you have such a thing, you look at the peculiar thing that happened as a control experiment. So I do see that there's some hope the concern that I have is that the theory is going to get thrown over because it was handed to the wrong group of theorists, and that the right group of theorists is not going to be allowed in who could actually change the theory.

'''Timur Kuran''': Well, this is this is in a sense, the George Mason people have would have never been allowed in, Buchanan and his group, he did win a Nobel Prize. He did. He has, he's actually been more influential outside the United States in mainstream economics departments than

'''Eric Weinstein''': on the blog

'''Timur Kuran''': than in the than in the United States. But there are, they did create a self sustaining-group,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right.

'''Timur Kuran''': And they've generated enough PhD students who have gone to departments generally departments that are not in the top 20-30 maybe not, usually not Not in the top top 50 and they're doing work that continues the Buchanan tradition. This is the way it may start. But just because the that Buchanan's experiment didn't result in the quote unquote, conquering of major departments doesn't mean that the next one that the that that takes on the core theory, which Buchanan didn't do

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': Buchanan dealt with the political implications of political markets. And he objected to, to applying the competitive economics model without some modifications to political markets that there were certain inefficiencies that people were overlooking. This was his problem

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah, but I am talking about something much more fundamental

'''Timur Kuran''': He wasn't challenging the fundamentals. And if you look at the, the the basic economics that is taught at George Mason, it doesn't challenge the core,

'''Eric Weinstein''': no

'''Timur Kuran''': ideas of the

'''Eric Weinstein''': well this is the thing that I want those of us who are trying to upend the core to actually go into open intellectual combat with the stalwarts, who are defending the core, from updating and if the core is so fantastic, they should welcome it, I don't see that happening. Let's switch gears slightly.

'''Timur Kuran''': Yes,

'''Eric Weinstein''': you grew up in one of my favorite places on earth. Many people may not know this, I guess I don't know if we mentioned it at the beginning Turkey. And you grew up in a very interesting context that I was learning more about, which is that you happen to be very aligned with the sort of governing ethos of Turkey, which was unlike any other Muslim majority country. The world so far as I could tell, and you came to understand that the preferences of others were being falsified even though your preferences were very much in line with the country, given what we've been seeing with the AK Parti and Erdogan and all the changes in Turkey, can you take us through a little bit of your evolution as a as an observer as to what exactly happened to change turkey so radically so quickly.

'''Timur Kuran''': So for the listeners, the watchers, perhaps a minute or two on Turkish history is would be useful. Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire, which where the law of the land was Islamic law in the 19th century a growing group intellectuals started seeing Islam as the source of the Empire's problems and the Empire was falling apart. And the problem turned into an existential issue as a major components in in Europe were taken away and in World War One, when the Empire's survival was at stake and the danger the Europeans would just colonize what was left of the Empire was becoming more acute by the day. These intellectuals were, many of them were in, in the military. They fought for the Empire and then for Turkey's independence after Turkey was on the losing side in World War One

'''Eric Weinstein''': very touch and go situation

'''Timur Kuran''': and the most of the most of what is modern day Turkey was occupied by Western powers divided among them. They fought to gain back these territories and they won and they won the Turkey's war of independence and

'''Eric Weinstein''': created an unbelievable opportunity that was actually seized.

'''Timur Kuran''': Exactly. It gave them they it made them heroes and the leading hero was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who had fought the British in Gallipoloi, you had to put together a coalition to to defeat the Italians, the Greeks, the British, the French, the Russians. And he was a hero, and he sensed he and the people around him, there were many other heroes around him, sensed that they had a huge amount of political capital, to modernize the country and to do something that was unthinkable until that point

'''Eric Weinstein''': Can we talk about how crazy these reforms were,

'''Timur Kuran''': which was, one of them was to abrogate Islamic law and replace Islamic law with secular laws, legal systems borrowed from the Western adapted to Turkish society. Abolish the caliphate and send the Caliph packing and one by one introduced a series of reforms

'''Eric Weinstein''': change the language

'''Timur Kuran''': inspired change that will change

'''Eric Weinstein''': the orthography

'''Timur Kuran''': change the script which was the Arabic script

'''Eric Weinstein''': to Latin

'''Timur Kuran''': and explicitly openly make westernization a goal of the society

'''Eric Weinstein''': outlaw traditional dress

'''Timur Kuran''': outlaw traditionally

'''Eric Weinstein''': polygomy

'''Timur Kuran''': dress, outlaw polygamy give women the right to vote long before several other countries including Switzerland have given women their right right to vote, rewrite history and of course, the this involved introducting their own myths. Now, we could go on and on

'''Eric Weinstein''': well just

'''Timur Kuran''': describing these the the reforms. It was, it was

'''Eric Weinstein''': unthinkable

'''Timur Kuran''': unthinkable cultural revolution. And of course, the all the economic institutions are changing at the same time the political institutions are changing. The country's sense of identity replaces a religious identity with a national identity. So nationalism, so people are to call themselves Turks, not Muslims, and being a Turk takes precedent over being being a Muslim. Religious marriages have to be civil, involves civil ceremonies, religious ceremonies have carried no legal weight at all.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So the reason I'm so animated about this, this is almost like communistic level reforms, but in a in a different idiom