I had a great conversation with regular Economics Explored guest Darren Brady Nelson on the Go Woke, Go Broke hypothesis in episode 139 of the podcast. I’ve cut a couple of clips (see below) from the video of our Zoom conversation so you can quickly see some of the highlights.
You can listen to the conversation using the embedded player below or via Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, among other podcast apps. A transcript and relevant links are also available below.
The British-French supersonic airplane Concorde soared through the skies at Mach 2 in the years 1976 to 2003. Its history illuminates several important economic and business lessons. Is a supersonic airplane simply uneconomic or will commercial passengers fly supersonic again? In Economics Explored episode 131, show host Gene Tunny and his fellow economist Arturo Espinoza Bocangel discuss.
Transcript of EP131 – Concorde’s economic lesson: A closer look
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Gene Tunny 00:01
Coming up on Economics Explored.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 00:04
In probably France and Britain, they wanted to show to the war that they are able to produce this kind of supersonic airlines.
Gene Tunny 00:16
Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host, Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is Episode 131, a closer look at the Concorde. And joining me to chat about Concorde is Arturo Espinoza, research assistant at Adept Economics joining me for the first time. Arturo, great to have you on the show.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 00:50
How are you? I’m really glad to be here with you.
Gene Tunny 00:53
Excellent. Yes, Arturo, it’s good to have you on. Arturo, you’re an economist too. You’re helping me out with economic research on various projects. And you’ve previously worked in the trade ministry in Peru and you’ve got a master’s from University of Queensland in economics and you’ve also got a degree from the Catholic University in Lima, haven’t you?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 01:19
Yes, that’s right.
Gene Tunny 01:21
Excellent. Excellent. Yes, you’re well qualified to chat about economics, so pleased to have you on. Excellent. Why I’m looking at Concorde, Arturo, is because in a recent episode I did with Tim Hughes, who I occasionally chat with on the show – Tim’s not an economist, he’s providing the man on the street view of things – we talked about my top 10 insights of economics. And one of those insights was about sunk costs. One of the key lessons from economics is to ignore sunk costs. Bygones are bygones.
And in illustrating the sunk cost, what’s often called the sunk cost fallacy – the fact that people too often don’t ignore sunk costs, they throw good money after bad – an example that’s often given is Concorde, because it was colossally expensive to develop. And the British and French just kept throwing money at it, even after it looked like it wasn’t going to be a commercial proposition. Often, they talk about the Concorde fallacy.
Now, I mentioned this in the show, and Tim and I had a bit of a chat about it. And I said, look, I think Concorde was always going to be a difficult proposition. It’s probably something they shouldn’t have invested in just because of the economics of it. And then, in the conversation, it became clear that I probably needed to do a bit more research on what the underlying economics of Concorde were.
One of my listeners, so Todd, he wrote in and he sent me a passage from an article. Based on that it looks like the there are multiple issues affecting Concorde and the economics and viability of Concorde. This passage he sent me is, “Aviation regulations mandated that Concordes would have to fly more slowly overland to reduce sound disturbances over the ground. This hit French Concordes particularly hard after the post-9/11 dip in air travel. The already struggling birds were even less in demand and therefore less profitable.”
Okay, so I thought we could have a chat about Concorde and just all of the issues involved, because there are multiple issues. There’s regulations, there’s the actual operating costs, because of the cost of oil. There was the fact that there was the Air France crash in 2000 at Charles de Gaulle, where 113 people died. There are multiple issues with Concorde. Are you happy to get underway on the Concorde, Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 04:17
Of course, Gene. Given all those facts behind the Concorde operational activities, I think there is an important issue, which is an externality. When we talk about economics about externalities is when one activity transfer those calls to third parties. Those third parties, they are not involved in that activity. They must assume that cost. Definitely, if we talk about this case of Concorde, and the most important negative externality was related to the noisy. The takeoff of Concorde, very noisy. Also when this type of supersonic flies affected possibly private properties. For example, in USA they found that some properties were affected by Concorde flights in terms of broken windows.
Gene Tunny 05:24
Seriously?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 05:25
Yes, so that’s why at that moment USA government banned Concorde flights in between cities or inland. That’s why at that moment Concorde flights only focused on transatlantic flights between New York, Paris, and UK. That’s why I’ve seen behind that, it was a very important limitation for potential demand of Concorde flights or Concorde airliners. Definitely that was a huge impact on potential demand for Concorde airliners.
Gene Tunny 06:14
Yeah. There are those regulations which would prevent Concorde if it were still operating. Neither Air France nor British Airways, which were the two airlines operating Concorde, they haven’t operated Concorde since 2003. But there are regulations that would prevent inter-city flights across land. And so therefore, you are restricted. They were restricted to just those transatlantic flights, so from Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle in Paris, to JFK in New York City. That really meant that it just limited the scope of those Concorde operations. I think that’s a good point.
We might chat about what Concorde is, I just want to make sure that if you’re listening and you’re unfamiliar with Concorde… I’m guessing you probably know a little bit about it, because it’s such an iconic aircraft. It’s such a beautiful design, really sleek, and the delta wing, and that nose that… It’s like a beak, isn’t it, like the beak of a bird? I think they called it a droop nose, because it can move around. Depending on what stage of the flight you are, it will either be in the standard position or it will drop down. I think when they were coming into land, they would drop it down just to improve their visibility. It’s got an interesting nose there.
As you mentioned, it’s supersonic, so it can travel faster than the speed of sound. I think it actually travelled about two times the speed of sound, so at Mach two. It’s supersonic. When I was chatting with Tim, I said, “Oh, is it hypersonic?” No, it’s not hypersonic. Tim corrected me. It was supersonic. Supersonic is faster than the speed of sound, and hypersonic is five times the speed of sound, at least. I think there are some hypersonic missiles that have been developed that I’ve seen in the news reports.
It was a joint project. It was a joint venture in a way between the British and French governments. And the name for it came from an agreement that they reached in the early 1960s, I think. A treaty was signed on 29th of November, 1962. And so what you had was, this is something that came out of the 1950s. There were British and French companies that were investigating supersonic air travel. I think the Americans were looking at it too, but the British and French, they reached an agreement whereby there would be a joint project, because there was a British company that was looking at it, the British Aircraft Corporation, and that was being funded by the British government. They were providing funds for research and development by that British aircraft corporation. And there was also a French company, which was state-owned, Sud Aviation, which later became Aerospatiale. They were looking at it too. And so the two governments got together and decided to enter this joint venture for Concorde, whereby they would jointly develop this aircraft. They’d share the development costs. They would split the production of it across Britain and France with a view to creating jobs and all that. It was a British and French government project.
I would argue that this is a good example… There’s a few economic principles which come out of the whole Concorde experience. And we talked about the sunk cost fallacy, the fact you should ignore sunk costs. One principle, or close to a principle, I would argue, is that governments need to be very careful about going into business. Governments really shouldn’t be picking winners or picking projects. They should be doing the core business of government, national defence and the justice system, and arguably some assistance for health and education, rather than trying to develop a new supersonic aeroplane. When you’ve got governments making these decisions and funding R and D for this sort of thing, it’s probably more likely it’s not going to be a commercial proposition, and it’s going to be a waste of money. That would be one thing, I would argue. Do you have any thoughts on that, Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 11:18
Of course, and that is an interesting point. In order to see what is the real scope of the government, definitely the government should focus on other issues that are more relevant for people, instead of promoting this kind of investment that, as we have seen, was a failure in terms of economic business perspective.
Gene Tunny 11:53
Who knows, maybe if things went right and the oil price didn’t increase three or four times over what it was previously after 1973, maybe the economics of the whole project would have been better and it could have been more of a mass market proposition. I think the problem that they ended up having was that it became a real niche product. It was really only wealthy people, pop stars and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who could actually afford to fly on Concorde, as we can talk about later. I think tickets ended up being about, in today’s dollars, I think over 10,000 US dollars, really. Expensive tickets. You really have to have deep pockets. You have to be someone who really doesn’t care how much they’re spending or it’s just absolutely time critical that you need to get from New York to London or the other way or Paris to New York, you need to get there in three hours or so, because it could fly incredibly quickly.
Now, I think the figures I’ve seen is that, so this thing’s flying at basically two times the speed of sound, whereas a Boeing 747 flies at .84 times the speed of sound. It’s not supersonic. The Boeing 747 can fly about 900 kilometres an hour, whereas the Concorde could fly at 2,172 kilometres an hour. Just incredible. And at 60,000 feet too. Wouldn’t that be amazing to have been up that high?
And so it really ended up just becoming a transport option for the rich and famous in a way. One example of that, have you have you heard the story about the Live Aid concert and Phil Collins, how he used Concorde to fly from the Live Aid concert in London at Wembley Stadium? He performed at Wembley, and then he hopped on the Concorde. He got a chopper from Wembley to Heathrow Airport and hopped on the Concorde, and then got the Concorde to JFK, and then he ended up getting –
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 14:32
Wow, that was tornadic. Wow.
Gene Tunny 14:35
It’s a huge logistical job. Where is it?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 14:38
Wow.
Gene Tunny 14:39
He took a British Airways Concorde flight to New York City before taking another helicopter to Philadelphia, just so he could perform at the stadium in Philadelphia, which I think might have been JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. That was in 1985, July 1985, so the big Live Aid concert for… I think it was to raise funds to help address or alleviate the suffering of people in famine in Ethiopia, if I remember correctly. That’s one of the famous examples of the use of the Concorde.
And another example of the sort of rich and famous, there’s a photo. And I’ll put a link to the article in the show notes, if you’re interested in seeing it and some other photos of the Concorde in operation. There’s a photo of Sting, the rockstar Sting, pouring a glass of champagne for Piers Morgan, so the noted media personality, editor of various newspapers that Rupert Murdoch owned. He was on Good Morning Britain. He’s doing something in Australia at the moment. I’m not entirely sure what. He’s anti-woke or he’s trying to cancel cancel culture, if I remember correctly. Big personality. He flew on a flight that they had in, I think it was late 2001. It was the first British Airways flight that they ran with Concorde after the crash at Charles de Gaulle in 2000.
There was a terrible crash when it was taking off from Paris, in the airport in Paris, and 113 people in total, so all of the passengers on the Concorde that had 100 passengers and nine crew. Then there are four people on the ground who were killed as well. Just an awful crash. There was an issue with the Concorde that meant that they had to sort of stop flying them for a while and just check that everything was okay and do some modifications to ensure that sort of thing didn’t happen again. And so what happened after that, you had that incident, and that means that fewer people want to fly on Concorde. I think that’s really what then led to both British Airways and Air France just not running Concorde again after 2003.
Concorde was launched in early 1976, in January 1976, and the final commercial flight was in October 2003. And it looks like what happened, so according to The Economist… The Economist did a good article on this in 2003, which I’ll link to in the show notes, although it may be paywalled. It looks like in 2003, they figured out that there was this cost associated with refitting the Concorde aircraft. A study commissioned by British Airways of the case for a 17 million pound refit of the supersonic aircraft showed the viability had ended with the turn-of-the-century stock market boom at the start of 2003. Airbus, the modern incarnation of the Anglo French manufacturing partnership that created Concorde, told Air France and BA, the aircraft’s only operators, it could no longer provide technical support for the aircraft at anything like a commercial price. Air France, which never made as much from Concorde as British Airways, stopped flying it in May. But BA said it would keep Concorde going into October simply to please its fans.
I think what they’re alluding to with the stock market boom is that after the share market crash in the early 2000s… In the late ‘90s you had the dot-com boom, and then there was a recession or a downturn in the early 2000s, associated with the dot-com crash in the US. And I think what they’re suggesting is that that meant that after that downturn, companies and wealthy people were less likely to splurge on a Concorde. And then there was the Air France crash, and that meant that not as many people were flying Concorde. That really just destroyed the viability of it on an ongoing basis.
Now, what I think’s interesting is that – and this is something I didn’t know until I had a closer look at Concorde for this episode – is that for a few years, Concorde was actually profitable for British Airways and Air France. It didn’t look like it was making huge amounts of money, but it was actually profitable from about the mid ‘80s and possibly up until that Air France crash. It wasn’t profitable for the governments that had invested in it originally because the cost of it just blew out massively. If we go back to the development costs of it, the cost of the British and French government’s ended up being, I think it was over one billion pounds before it even went into service. And in today’s dollars, that’s over 11 billion pounds, because it was reported as 11 billion in today’s dollars in – sorry, pounds, 11 billion pounds in today’s pounds, in 2003 by The Economist. That was 10 times what was budgeted for. The cost of it was just colossal.
It would never have been a commercial proposition if you tried to recover those R and D costs. But what happened was that the governments essentially wrote off those costs. After they’d already invested all this money, they basically let the company, so Air France and British Airways, buy the Concordes at a discounted price, so that they didn’t have to pay back or they didn’t have to pay for the cost of having the Concorde developed. The R and D costs of the Concorde weren’t actually included in the sale price of the Concordes, as far as I can tell.
What you’ve got as a situation where this huge R and D cost, it’s written off by the government. In a way, that’s the other side of the sunk cost proposition, that yes, this has already happened, this money’s already been spent. In a way, the Concorde is a gift from the governments of Britain and France to the aviation industry. It’s already developed. The technology is there. Then what matters for the aviation industry is can it make a profit with those Concorde planes as they are now? The aviation industry never had to make substantial enough profit to cover the original R and D costs, and so in that sense, Concorde was profitable for several years from the mid ‘80s.
It’s extraordinary. There was there was an AP, so an Associated Press report in 1986. Where is it? It’s basically saying that Concorde is an unexpected success, but it’s only unexpected or it’s only a success if you do ignore the fact that all of that billion pounds of research and development costs are written off, that you just accept that taxpayers aren’t going to get that money back. It ended up being an unexpected success for British Airways and Air France for a while, although not for the governments of Britain and France.
“Concorde, an unexpected success, marks 10th anniversary. London, 10 years after its detractors branded it as an enormous white elephant, the Concorde is the fastest, most luxurious, and to many the world’s most beautiful airliner. It makes money too. After years of losses and a $2.8 billion government development costs that has been almost completely written off, financial winds have turned in the plane’s favour. The Concorde brought a $17.3 million profit to British Airways last year, and a profit of 8.8 million to Air France in 1984. British Airways didn’t record profits from the Concorde until 1982, and Air France and until 1983.”
I found that quite interesting, and that was something that I wasn’t aware of. And I guess it sort of makes sense, because they wouldn’t have kept operating it for a couple of decades – because it did operate from 1976 to 2003 – they wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t at least making a profit for those airlines. That sort of makes sense, but there’s no way in which the Concorde ever recovered the R and D costs that were paid for by the governments. Therefore, if you were back in the ‘60s looking at this project, and you’re in the British and French governments, and you had perfect foresight as to what would happen, you would have gone, “Okay, we’re going to stop spending money on this because we’re never going to recover and costs the blowing out. Let’s just cut our losses now.” Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.
Female speaker 25:18
If you need to crunch the numbers, then get in touch with Adept Economics. We offer you frank and fearless economic analysis and advice. We can help you with funding submissions, cost-benefit analysis, studies, and economic modelling of all sorts. Our head office is in Brisbane, Australia, but we work all over the world. You can get in touch via our website, http://www.adepteconomics.com.au. We’d love to hear from you.
Gene Tunny 25:47
Now back to the show. Does that all make sense, Arturo? Is there anything confusing there?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 25:54
It’s clear, everything about the factors behind unsuccessful operation of the Concorde. Perhaps the main objective of that project wasn’t to have the best economic successful in producing those airliners. I think probably France and Britain, they wanted to show to the world that they are able to produce this kind of supersonic airlines, that they had the best technology to share to the world. I think possibly that is another explanation and why they wanted to continue with operate.
Gene Tunny 26:48
That’s true. There’s that national prestige element involved. There was a cost-benefit analysis, a prospective cost-benefit analysis done in the early ‘70s before the Concorde was ever in operation. Do you know that study? And I think the economist who did that, was it Woolley, he was arguing that okay, there’s actually a loss in economic terms to the governments of Britain and France from Concorde, of I think it was a negative 100-and-something million pounds, I’ll put a link in the show notes to the study so you can have a look at it if you’re interested. But he was arguing that okay, this means that the governments of Britain and France value these other elements, all these intangible elements of the Concorde project, which could include the national prestige, national pride, they value those elements as at least this much money.
And this is a point I made when I was chatting with Tim. This is a time when the great superpowers… The superpowers at the time were the US and the Soviet Union. And they were the ones who, they were in the space race. Britain and France were probably never going to get in the space race. Britain and France were once the great powers in the world, in the days of Nelson and Napoleon, the great powers in the… And I guess Spain as well. But yeah, France and in Britain were once great powers. And this could have been a way, they could have seen this as a way of getting back into that game. I think that’s a really good point.
I’m just trying to think what I should… Other things I should talk about, the operating costs of the Concorde. they did have higher operating costs per passenger than say 747. I think what I saw is that even though you’ve got 100 or so people on a Concorde versus more than 400, 400 to 500 on a Boeing 747, I think you need almost as much jet fuel. The cost per passenger per mile on a Concorde… There are some figures. There are various sources for figures. Wikipedia has got a great article on Concorde I’ll link to, and it has some figures in that. From what I can work out, Concorde had nearly twice the operating cost per passenger than a 747. It was never really going to be a mass market proposition.
I think certainly the oil shock in 1973 when the Arab nations restricted supply of oil… I think that was in response to the Yom Kippur War, where the Israelis pushed back the Arab invasion. And I think what happened was, because those higher oil prices meant that it was never going to be a mass market proposition, what you saw was that through the ‘70s, all the aircraft companies, the airliners that had previously expressed some interest in Concorde, other than Air France and British Airways, they just said, “Look, we’re no longer interested.” Partly that was because of higher oil prices. It could have been that they’re crunched the numbers and just worked out, we’re not going to make money on Concorde. The Boeing 747, it came out in I think it was 1969. And it was just such a great aeroplane. You could fit so many people on it. It’s just such a fantastic airline plane for international travel. And so I think they just worked out oh, look, Concorde’s not really going to work. Qantas here in Australia, I think it was looking at getting Concorde at one stage, but worked out it wasn’t gonna work. The only companies that ended up running it were Air France and British Airways.
Because of the higher operating costs, you needed to have a higher ticket price. And so you needed to appeal to those wealthy buyers. What I found, and this is something you notice too, Concorde, it was super quick, you’d save hours on your travel time, but it wasn’t a really luxurious experience, was it, flying Concorde, from what I could tell.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 31:50
Yes, that’s true. It was not comfy. I think due the design of the airliner, the people must be seated closely. It wasn’t too much comfortable to be there. I think that was one of the problems. You compare that airliners against Airbus or Boeing, those airliner offer you a better experience as a passenger?
Gene Tunny 32:26
Yes. I think I was reading that they didn’t even have enough room for on-flight movies. You’re really enclosed. You’re really close with other people. And in a way, that could be good, if you’ve got Paul McCartney or Sting or someone on the plane with you. That’s pretty special.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 32:48
Of course.
Gene Tunny 32:49
But otherwise, it wasn’the super comfortable. And I guess they tried to compensate for that by having the freely flowing champagne and caviar. But look, there’s only so much that only goes so far. If you’re on a business trip, you need to watch how much champagne you’re consuming. The combination of attributes that had only appealed to certain types of wealthy people. They might have wanted to impress or maybe they really did need to get – it was just absolutely time critical that they needed to get from London to New York or Paris to New York. And I think we’re talking about a really elite segment of the population. And then what happened was that after the Air France crash, a lot of those people decided well, okay, look, I’m not really sure I want to fly on the Concorde anymore.
That Economist article I mentioned before, it writes… In The Economist article it has, “In its heyday, Concorde typically flew three quarters full, earning BA about 20 million pounds in operating profits from 35,000 passengers a year. When it returned to service, paying over 8,000 pounds to fly supersonic had lost its appeal. BA could attract enough business for only one transatlantic flight a day, instead of the previous two. And even then, the aircraft was often carrying only a couple of dozen paying passengers.” You’ve got more than half your plane unfilled. Actually, three quarters of your plane if you’re only carrying –
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 34:40
That is a loss.
Gene Tunny 34:41
“Extra seats were often filled by upgrading subsonic first-class and business-class customers. Delays and diversions due to bits falling off and engines faltering began to tarnish Concorde’s image and emphasise its age.” That’s part of the problem.
Apparently Concorde was quite fragile. And I saw one estimate that for every hour, it was every hour of flight time, it needed 18 hours of maintenance or something like that. It had this issue of needing all of this maintenance, and then they would have needed to have done a refurb of it, a refit in the early 2000s. British Airways and an Air France just looked at the numbers and thought, ah, that’s not gonna make any sense, so let’s just discontinue operations.
That’s a fascinating story. You’ve got this combination of the oil price, you’ve got a combination of it being… It wasn’t a mass market proposition. It had to become a niche, luxury proposition or for the business elite and the entertainment elite. Then that market was compromised by a downturn in the economy, people being less willing to splurge, and also the Air France crash, which hugely concerning. You really worry about Concorde.
Maybe if it was more mass market, if there was a larger number of Concordes in operation, maybe they could get more efficiencies in the operations of Concorde. They wouldn’t have the problems finding someone to service the Concordes. I just wonder if that would have meant that it would have been more viable if there were more of these planes. Certainly the British and French governments intended originally that there’d be many more Concordes in operation. I think they thought they’d be selling hundreds of these Concordes. I think I saw an estimate they were expecting by 1980, 350 or 400. I may have misremembered that, but I’ll try and put it in the show notes. And that cost-benefit analysis we saw, it had projections based on Concordes in the hundreds, whereas there are only ever 20 Concordes built, ever built. And only 14 of them were an operation. Six of them were for testing, were prototypes. It’s quite extraordinary.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 37:21
That’s crazy. Wow.
Gene Tunny 37:23
I think economics ultimately defeated the Concorde. Certainly the crash and the regulations contributed as well. The regulations we talked about, the fact that it couldn’t go supersonic over the land, that certainly affected viability, particularly for the French, for Air France, because I think it had to travel further overland from Paris to New York than you probably would… Maybe I’m wrong about that. Anyway, apparently it affected the French Concordes particularly hard, as that passage from Todd quoted. Then there’s the fact that you can’t do the cross-continental. You couldn’t go from New York City to Los Angeles. You couldn’t go from London to say Moscow or wherever or Beijing or something. I don’t know. There’d be a whole lot of other routes that you could travel if you didn’t have to worry about the sonic booms.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 38:28
The thing told you that USA government banned those kind of inland flights of the Concorde.
Gene Tunny 38:34
Right, of supersonic planes, yeah.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 38:38
Due to those negative impacts on private properties and people as well.
Gene Tunny 38:42
Yeah, I’ll have to look up the exact regulation. That makes sense to me. A couple of other interesting facts I thought would be worth talking about is that the Soviet Union or the Russians actually had a supersonic airliner too, the Tu-144. It had a different design from the Concorde. It looks similar, wasn’t as beautiful though, wasn’t as elegant, but it had similar features. I think it had the delta wing too, and it had the drooping nose but it just wasn’t as beautiful or as smooth as the Concorde was. And one of the problems it had, it was using an afterburner through the flight to go supersonic. And that meant that the cabin was really noisy, about 90 decibels, which I think is equivalent to a hairdryer. I think I read that.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 39:37
Wow.
Gene Tunny 39:40
In contrast, the Concorde turbo jets, they only needed the afterburner at takeoff, to take off. That Russian supersonic plane, it didn’t last and so they don’t run that anymore. But I thought that was fascinating that they had they had a supersonic plane themselves.
Now, is there a future of supersonic aircraft? I was surprised. This really surprised me. I read that, so the United Airlines, the US airline company, it’s announced that it will buy up to 50 of these Boom Overture Supersonic jets. And the idea is to get them operating by 2029. Now, this is a company in Denver, Colorado, that’s developing supersonic aircraft. It claims it’s going to be using sustainable aviation fuel, and so that minimises concerns you might have about impacts on the environment, climate change, because airline travel is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 40:57
Yeah, definitely.
Gene Tunny 40:59
They’re claiming it’s sustainable. They’re also claiming that they’re looking at the aerodynamics, they’re working on the aerodynamics of the plane to reduce the sonic booms. It’ll only have a thud of 75 decibels compared with Concorde’s 105-decibel sonic boom. We’ll see how that all goes, how that works out. That’s interesting that potentially, there is a company that’s been looking at reviving supersonic flight. Now, let’s see how that all goes. I guess you want to try and look through the fact that the oil price now is spiked because of what’s happening in Ukraine. Hopefully, that’s all resolved by then. Look, I think, a supersonic aircraft, it’s still going to face that issue of the regulation. There’s always a risk that maybe it can’t fly the routes it wants to, even if it does get that sonic boom down. I don’t know. I think we’ll have to wait and see there. But I found that fascinating that that there could be supersonic flight in the next decade or so, again. Have you seen anything along those lines, Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 42:20
No, I haven’t checked that. But I think from my perspective, it’s going to be difficult for those ventures in order to develop these kind of supersonic aeroplanes. And of course, these aeroplanes are going to compete with these two big companies, which are Airbus and Boeing. Of course, they will face that limitation in terms of competition as well. I think that is going to be complex for them. Even if we talk about, for example, the many tries of Chinese government to develop their own airlines, or to compete with those big multinational companies, but we have seen that the results were unsuccessful.
Gene Tunny 43:15
It’ll have to have tickets priced a lot higher than standard travel. Let me have a look at this. There’s an article in the conversation in June 2021. “Supersonic flights are set to return. Here’s how they can succeed where Concorde failed.” This is by Peter Thomas, who’s an aerospace engineering lecturer at a university in the UK. I’ll put a link to that. He’s written, “Boom will be optimistic that it can overcome fuel efficiency challenges by the time its aircraft begins carrying fare-paying passengers in 2029. Those fares look set to be high, with Boom anticipating a 3,500 pound price tag per seat. In 1996, British Airways charged around 5,350 to 8,800 pounds in today’s prices for roundtrip tickets from New York to London.”
It’ll be cheaper than Concorde, but it’s still going to be much dearer than a normal fare that you’d pay, probably about, I don’t know, three times or so. I’m not sure what the exact fares from transatlantic fares are in pounds. But I’ll see if I can put something in the show notes. It’s certainly going to be more expensive than the standard fare.
“This means that like Concorde before it, the Boom Overture looks aimed at the luxury market, beyond the reach of even business class passengers.” I think that’s the problem. If you’re aiming the luxury market, then maybe it’s too narrow a segment to try and run an airline on I don’t know. That would be one of the concerns that I would have about that as a proposition, but let’s see how it develops. I’d certainly like to fly supersonic one day, I think it’d be one of those so-called bucket list things to do, if you know what I mean.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 45:26
Yes, the same for me. I would like to do that.
Gene Tunny 45:30
Flying at 60,000 feet at Mach Two or whatever it is, just be spectacular. Some of the facts, or factoids you could say they are, that they have about, because who knows if they’re right or not. You just read these things on the internet. But I think one of them was saying by the time that the hostess or the stewardess pours your champagne, you’ve already travelled 26 miles or something ridiculous, in the Concorde. It’s flying that fast.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 46:02
Wow.
Gene Tunny 46:07
I don’t know whether that makes sense or not. You just think about how fast you’re travelling, and it’s just extraordinary. I wanted to end with my takeaways from this whole Concorde episode, or experience with the Concorde, because I think there are a lot of important economic lessons associated with Concorde. It’s more than that you should ignore sunk costs. This is the point that if the British and French governments were smart, or they were paying attention, or this thing wasn’t so caught up with their – it wasn’t such an exercise in national pride or national prestige – if they thought rationally about it, they would have cut their losses in the ‘60s sometime and just given up on it, but they didn’t do that. They ignored the key lesson, very important lesson from economics to ignore sunk costs. Bygones are bygones. Don’t throw good money after bad.
The other lesson, I think, is ultimately economics prevails. If something doesn’t stack up, it won’t survive. Even though Concorde was profitable for a while, over the long run it just wasn’t a commercial proposition. There the regulatory issues. There was the fact that it had higher operating costs than the standard aircraft because of the amount of fuel relative to passengers it needed. This meant it had to be a luxury proposition. That meant that the market was smaller, and more volatile, you could argue. I think that’s what happened. You had the Air France crash, and the downturn in travel associated with 9/11, and people being more budget conscious after the stock market fell, this perfect storm of things that happened that ultimately defeated Concorde.
Okay, my third takeaway is governments should be careful about going into business, i.e. picking winners. I think that’s something governments really need to be careful about. I used to work in the Industry Policy Division in Treasury and we would always cast a critical eye over any idea for government to get involved in business. I think you have to be really careful about that.
Number four, you need to think about those externalities. This is the point you made. There’s this externality associated with Concorde, the sonic booms. And if there is an externality, you need to think about what does that mean, what could governments do in response? And we saw that there was that regulatory response that the Concordes, they couldn’t go supersonic over land. And that really affected the economics of the operations.
Another externality, of course, is greenhouse gas emissions. And so you have to think about if you’re going to run a supersonic aircraft in the future, then what does that mean if there’s some sort of carbon tax or if there’s some crackdown on air travel because of people who are concerned about climate change? Of course, that’s why with this Boom technology company, which is looking at a new supersonic plane, that’s why it’s trying to get into sustainable aviation fuel. It’s looking at “Biofuels and synthetic kerosene that are manufactured using renewable and sustainable materials. It looks like it will mean an impressive 80%… ” This is what the author of the article is writing. This is Peter Thomas. He writes, “An impressive 80% reduction in lifecycle CO2 emissions is often quoted.” Then he goes, “The key word here though is lifecycle. It doesn’t necessarily mean less harmful emissions from the engine.” Who knows what it’ll ultimately mean for the emissions and what potential carbon tax or carbon price they’d have to pay? Anything else we need to chat about with Concorde, Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 50:46
I think today, all that you have mentioned are enough to have a better idea of what happened about the case of this white elephant case.
Gene Tunny 51:04
I hope if you’re in the audience, you’ve got something out of this. I’ll put links to these articles that I’ve mentioned or have quoted from in the show notes. Check them out. There’s a lot that’s been written about Concorde, I think because people find it fascinating just because it’s such a beautiful aeroplane, and I guess the celebrities that have been on the plane and there are such interesting stories when you got Phil Collins and going to Live Aid, doing two Live Aid concerts in one day. I think even the Queen, Queen Mother, they’ve all travelled on Concorde. The Queen Mother, she’s no longer with us, but they travelled on Concorde at different times.
One other story I forgot to mention, there’s this idea that you can get a pricing lesson from the Concorde. Part of the reason that the profitability of Concorde, it became profitable in the mid ‘80s, was because British Airways figured out that they could put their prices up, because the people who were flying on Concorde, they were busy executives, or they were senior executives, and their secretaries were booking the flights. The actual people flying didn’t realise how much Concorde was costing. They thought it was actually more expensive than it was. British Airways did a survey. British Airways raised their prices and they didn’t have a fall in demand. They ended up making more money, because they increased their prices. How would economists describe that? At that point of the demand curve for those consumers, the demand is in elastic with respect to price. Is that the right way to explain it?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 53:00
Yes.
Gene Tunny 53:03
That’s what British Airways figured out. And so therefore, they could increase prices and therefore increase –
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 53:12
The demand for or travelling, it wasn’t going to change.
Gene Tunny 53:20
Yeah, or very little for that group of consumers, the people who really weren’t budget conscious. I think that’s fascinating. There’s a great article, A Pricing Lesson From the Concorde from The Adaptive Marketer, Gerardo Dada, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Wow, I think we had a pretty comprehensive discussion of the Concorde, Arturo. Thanks for joining me on this conversation. I think that’s been really good.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 53:55
Thank you again for inviting me.
Gene Tunny 53:57
Yeah, of course. And if you’re listening in the audience, and you have any thoughts, any comments, any questions, please get in touch. You can email me, contact@economicsexplored.com. I also have a speak note service set up so you can send me a voice message. There’s a link to that in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and hope to speak with you again soon. Thank you. Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com, and we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye.
In Economics Explored EP130, we explore a new book Thriving: The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, Society, and the Economy, by Professor Wayne Visser of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Antwerp Management School. Wayne is reassuringly optimistic about the future of the planet due to a variety of technological and business practice changes that mean we are approaching “tipping points”, after which we will rapidly reduce the stress we are placing on the environment – all going well, of course, as nothing is guaranteed.
In the episode, Wayne speaks about a convergence of positive developments, such as rapidly improving electric vehicles, cultured/lab-grown meat, blockchain and synthetic DNA to aid traceability of supply chains, green hydrogen, and Unilever committing to deforestation-free palm oil (by 2023, and whether it achieves that is still to be determined). You can listen to the conversation with Wayne using the embedded player below or via Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, among other podcast apps.
Here’s a short video clip from the conversation in which Wayne introduces the concept of Thriving:
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Gene Tunny 00:01
Coming up on Economics Explored.
Wayne Visser 00:04
Being optimistic or at least having thriving as a lens is just a more effective way to be, no matter what the state of the world is.
Gene Tunny 00:13
Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia, and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is Episode 130. In this episode, we explore a new book from a world leading expert in sustainability, Dr. Wayne Visser, who joins us from the UK via Zoom.
Wayne’s new book, published by Fast Company Press is Thriving: The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, Society, and the Economy. Wayne currently serves as head tutor, fellow and lecturer at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. He is also Professor of Integrated Value at Antwerp Management School, where he holds the world’s first Academic Chair in Sustainable Transformation, as well as being a world leading authority on sustainability. Wayne is an accomplished poet, and he shares some of his poetry with us toward the end of this episode. Wayne’s new book Thriving considers issues with huge implications for our economies, so I was very glad to chat with him about it. His book contains lots of valuable examples of how businesses and communities worldwide are attempting to make themselves more sustainable.
Please check out the show notes for links to materials mentioned in this episode, and for any clarifications. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions related to this episode or the previous ones, please get in touch by SpeakPipe. See the link in the show notes or email me via contact@economicsexplored.com. I’d love to hear from you. Righto. Now for my conversation with Dr. Wayne Visser on his new book, Thriving. Thanks to my audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Professor Wayne Visser, welcome to the programme.
Wayne Visser 02:23
Hi. Great to be joining you.
Gene Tunny 02:25
It’s fantastic to have you on, Wayne. Yes, very happy to be chatting with you about your new book, Thriving, which is on a topic that is of great interest to me, and I know to many of my listeners. It’s this issue of sustainability. Climate change is related to that, obviously a big environmental challenge. I’d like to explore what your book is about, why you wanted to write it, what those key messages are. First, I’ve just got a couple of questions about your work. You’re at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Could you tell us a bit about that, please?
Wayne Visser 03:20
Yeah. Great pleasure to be talking to. The Cambridge Institute is a department of the university that was set up many decades ago actually, firstly, mainly, at the request of the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, one day soon to be king, I guess, who’s always had a passion for sustainability. He set up a business and environment programme through the university, and it just evolved from that. And ow they it’s a very large office and runs many, many programmes, I head up their business sustainability management online programme, which is getting great traction. We have upwards of 900 students, taking that four times a year. We’re seeing the uptake. I’ve been associated there for nearly 10 years, and I really see how it’s changed. In fact, 20 years. Yeah, since 2003. Really, the interest levels are up, and the demand for solutions, especially from business, is really rising.
Gene Tunny 04:39
Right. You’re certainly right about Prince Charles. I remember visiting his country estate, just as a tourist, Highgrove in Gloucestershire, and before you go on a tour of the estate, you have to sit through a 10 or 15-minute video of Charles, of the Prince of Wales talking about the importance of sustainability. I think he’s into organic farming and that sort of thing. I’ve certainly seen his commitment to that, so very good…
Wayne Visser 05:19
He was way ahead of his time, especially on the organics side, or what they sometimes call in Europe, Europe bio. Many of the programmes have been very specific. We have very good climate legislation in the UK, for example, and also in Europe. That’s partly down to the Prince of Wales Business corporate leadership group that we set up at Cambridge on climate change, where we tried to be an intermediary between business and government, because business was saying they couldn’t be bold in their commitments, because they didn’t have clear policy guidance, and the politicians were saying they couldn’t be bold in policy, because they thought business would lobby against them. Playing that kind of role has been very, very effective in making the progress that we need to make.
Gene Tunny 06:11
I’d like to ask you later about good legislation in the UK. and EU. I’m interested in what you consider good legislation. That’s something we can chat about. Also, you’re a professor at, is it University of Antwerp, is it, in Belgium?
Wayne Visser 06:31
Yes, Antwerp Management School. It’s actually a sister organisation of the university, but it is independent. Yes, I have a chair there in sustainable transformation. It’s supported by corporate partners, BASF, Port of Antwerp and Ronstadt. I run the Sustainable Transformation Lab there, where we mainly work with corporate partners on advancing sustainability, but also on embedding it into all of the teaching for the full-time and the executive MBA students.
Gene Tunny 07:04
BASF, this is one of the biggest chemical corporations in the world, isn’t it? It’s a huge company, isn’t it?
Wayne Visser 07:14
It is, and right there, Port of Antwerp Zone, which goes for more than 30 kilometres, has one of the biggest chemical clusters in the world. And of course, it’s a great challenge, I must be honest, because the chemical industry has many, many impacts, and is one of the institutions, one of the sectors that has to transform, if you look at something like climate, and it’s not easy. There are massive technology investments that have to be made, whether that’s on using green hydrogen, to get their energy for their crackers, or even going for carbon capture and storage, investing in renewables, which they’re doing as well. But at least they’re one of the progressive ones, I would say, and they really are seeing that this is the future and they have to invest in it.
Gene Tunny 08:10
Okay, Wayne, what was that word you used? Was it crackers?
Wayne Visser 08:14
Yes, yes. Crackers are just the way that they get them, the molecules, the chemical molecules, how they break them apart. This is a very, very intensive, energy-intensive process, much like many other industries. Smelting I know is being done in Australia, for example, aluminium smelting, cement making. These are all very intensive industrial processes where there is no easy solution. For climate change, they really have to come with new technology, such as green hydrogen, where you get the renewable electricity to power the creation of hydrogen from water normally. That takes a lot of energy. But once you have that hydrogen, that can then create the heat that you need for these large industrial processes.
Gene Tunny 09:07
We might have to chat about that a bit later. I guess one of the things I’ve been fascinated by is just how a lot of these big corporations are… They’re seeing the future and they realise—well, many of them, I mean the more enlightened ones are realising, we probably have to get on top of this now, to start addressing this, or we could lose out in the future. I think that’s an example of that. Very good. One other thing I’ve saw in your bio, which I thought was really interesting, so you’re also a poet as well as a pragademic, if I’ve got that right, or pracademic. You’re a pracademic. You’re an academic and you’re also doing practical things involved in policy. You’re also a poet, and it turns out you’ve written 40 books. There are books on both environmental issues and also poetry? Is that right?
Wayne Visser 10:14
Yes, it is a mix. I must say, the majority of them are on sustainable business. And they range from the encyclopaedic, literally because I did an encyclopaedia the A to Z of corporate social responsibility, nd I’ve done a world guide on sustainable enterprise covering countries around the world, so that kind of reference work through to yes, even a fiction. Some poetry books, but also some fiction. There’s a parable on leadership, called Follow Me, I’m Lost, about a goose, a Scottish goose, who gets lost on the way to leadership school in London and ends up in Africa, travelling down and meeting strange creatures who each teach him a leadership lesson. There’s the full range.
Thriving is, I would say, in the middle. It’s really written for a broad audience. But it is about how we change society and the economy fundamentally. It includes some of the poetry actually in the book, as well as many stories, both personal stories, but also stories of the innovation that’s happening. I guess we’ll dive into that. But that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book is, there’s so much doom and gloom around now. Look at the statistics on many trends. Some of that is justified, even what’s going on in the world today with war breaking out in Europe. It’s hard not to be pessimistic, but you also have to take the bigger picture and see this global system that is in transformation and is actually speeding up. Many of the signals are all headed in the right direction. There’s so much innovation out there. This book was about capturing that innovation that’s happening.
Gene Tunny 12:09
That sounds great. That sounds great. With Thriving, so what you wanted to do, is basically you wanted to counter the doom and gloom. Is that what you’re saying? You think there’s too much doom and gloom? There’s actually a lot of innovation occurring out there, and are you trying to suggest, okay, given all of this innovation, this is what the appropriate policy settings are? Are you touching on policy settings at all, Wayne?
Wayne Visser 12:43
I touch on policy, but I would frame it like this. In fact, I start with something in the early chapter, called the Stockdale paradox. And this is named after Admiral Stockdale who survived a prisoner of war camp, I think he might have been in there for seven years, and came up with this philosophy that what you need to do to survive and thrive is to face the absolute reality, all the brutal facts, completely honestly. So don’t kid yourself about the state that you’re in. But at the same time, you can never give up faith or hope that things can change and can get better.
You’ll see in the book, it’s not a book of denial, or wishing things were better. I set out a lot of the facts on what’s going wrong, what’s really challenging, when nature, society, and the economy are breaking down. But then I look at the larger system and I look at how systems change, especially living systems, of which society is one nature is another, organisations as well. When you distil it down to the scientific principles of how those systems change and thrive, you actually see many signs that we are heading into a tipping point of change towards the better. It’s not that we don’t face these big challenges, but we’re seeing many transformational signals. And most people are not aware of that. And so yes, they get trapped in the pessimism or the doom and gloom.
It’s also that, you know, being optimistic, or at least having thriving as a lens, is just a more effective way to be, no matter what the state of the world is, because if you’re trapped in in pessimism, you’re disempowered. You sort of just give up before you’ve even made it a try to tackle the issues.
It’s a little bit philosophy, but it’s also backed up by some science of how change happens. And then lots of examples of where business especially, is really charging ahead and bringing the solutions that we need and starting to scale them, which is something that in my 30 years plus working in sustainability was always missing. We always had many of the solutions, but they weren’t scaling. Now they’re scaling. Tesla’s one of six trillion-dollar companies now, and its core mission is a sustainability mission. It’s to speed the transition to sustainable energy. That’s scaling. And it’s valued at more than all the other auto manufacturers, even though it makes less than 1% of the cars.
Gene Tunny 15:53
That’s extraordinary. That’s extraordinary. I want to go back to this point you made. You’re generally optimistic. However, you did note before that there are places where nature, society, and the economy are breaking down. Where is that, Wayne? Are you able to describe or tell us where that is most acute, because we hear all of these horror stories about bad things that could happen, tipping points, and all of that, but where are things breaking down? Could you tell us, please?
Wayne Visser 16:30
This gives a little insight into the structure of the book, really, because I structured into these six great transitions that we’re going through and that we need to go through. There are two breakdowns in nature, two in society, and two in the economy. I’ll briefly touch on each.
In nature, what we see is huge breakdown in ecosystems, so degradation of ecosystems. You’ve got the Great Barrier Reef on your shores there, and it’s literally dying, bleaching, just as one example. The loss of species is actually catastrophic right now. We are going through the sixth mass extinction. And we’ve lost 67% of wildlife populations since 1970. Something that took 3.8 billion years to build up on the earth, we’ve wiped out in one generation.
Yes, huge breakdown in ecosystems. But there is this counter movement of restoration, so protection and restoration of ecosystems. Yu start to see, there’s in fact a lot of work going on through the UN trying to create an equivalent international agreement to the Paris Agreement, which is on climate change, to have one on nature now. There is a widely promoted target for the world now to protect and restore 30% of our land and our oceans by 2030. Likewise, there’s a lot of work going on around deforestation coming out of the 26th Conference of Parties on Climate Change in Glasgow last year, where we have now more than 90% of the world’s countries committed, that have forests, committed to end deforestation and reverse it in the next few years. A lot of movement happening there, and a lot of big companies starting to actually put money into helping to protect and restore. If you look at the Bezos Earth Fund, putting more than a billion into the Congo, the rainforest in Africa, which always gets forgotten about because we know the Amazon, but the second largest tropical rainforest is the Congo. So that’s one example of a transition.
The second breakdown is depletion of resources. This is many, many nonrenewable resources, whether it’s water or timber or topsoil. All of these are being depleted at an alarming rate, nothing like what the earth can sustain. This has been going on—we call it the great acceleration—since about 1950, when we’ve had this exponential growth of economics, of economies and consumption, and of course, resources are finite.
The solution there is renewal of resources. This links to one of the market solutions I write about, which is the circular economy. How do we get it so that everything we use in our products and services either is made from nature and goes harmlessly back to nature—that’s one type of circle or loop—or is made artificially like chemicals and plastics and metals and so on, but continues to go back into manufacturing in an endless cycle. That’s the circular economy. Today, we’re around about 10% circular in the world. This is a massive transition. We have 90% of the economy that we need to change from a linear take make waste economy to a take or borrow, make and return economy. So that’s the second transition. Those are the two breakdowns and breakthroughs in nature.
In society, what we’ve got is disparity. Despite all of our economic growth over the last 50 years, inequality has gone up in almost every country. Even though we’ve had hundreds of millions of people coming out of poverty, the gap between the rich and the poor has gotten wider. And effectively, the rich are getting richer, faster than the poor are getting richer. And this has all sorts of social implications as well. If you look at a book like The Spirit Level, they do the research on this, and they find all sorts of social problems occur in the countries that have the highest inequality, including many developed countries.
The counterforce to that is responsibility. It’s actually to have what we call an access economy where we take care of diversity and inclusion. And again, there’s a big movement for that, but still a long way to go. If you just look at gender equality. If you look at the gender pay gap, according to the World Economic Forum, it will take more than 250 years to close that gap, if we continue on current trends, which is just ridiculous in the 21st century, but we still have a lot of progress to make there.
And then we have the second breakdown in nature, which is disease, which we’ve learned a lot about in the last few years with lockdown and everything else.
Gene Tunny 22:07
Sorry, Wayne, this is in society, you mean, is it? Second breakdown in society, disease.
Wayne Visser 22:13
The second breakdown in society is disease. We know all about COVID and communicable diseases, but the interesting thing is that 70% of people die from non-communicable diseases. These are things like heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, cancers. Many of these are lifestyle related. In fact, 40% are preventable because they relate to what we eat, especially how much meat we eat, in particular red meat, and also processed foods, and whether we live in toxic environments, polluted environments. Of course, there are things like stress as well that take that toll. What we want is revitalization, and so the well-being economy, which is again, a massive opportunity, lots of investment in innovation, lots of technology going in there, really exciting things happening, but plenty to do there. So those are the two breakdowns, breakthroughs in society.
Then if we look at the economy, I talk about disconnection. This is the technology piece. What’s happened is that we think we’re all connected, but we’re not. There is still roughly half of the world, maybe three or four billion who still don’t have an internet connection. Many, many billions still don’t have a mobile phone or live outside of mobile phone signal areas. The world is not all connected. And this refers to what we call the digital divide. It basically is an amplifier for inequality, because technology gives us opportunity. We have to really look at that gap and work on closing that gap. Meanwhile, of course, many are streaming ahead with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and with 5Gg and artificial intelligence and virtual reality and all of those things, and so the gap potentially gets wider. So we have to address that.
Then there’s a second kind of disconnection, which is that the machines start to disconnect us. This is really about automation. 25% of jobs today are at high risk of automation, and another 70% at medium risk. It’s not that we want to go backwards, but we have to look at that and take care of that, start re-skilling people, upskilling people, to be ready for that hugely disruptive transition.
The solution there is all about, I call it rewiring. It’s really the digital economy, but it’s mainly about using all of those fantastic technologies, like big data, like 3Dd printing, like all of the other things, to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Artificial intelligence, huge potential there, but we very quickly found out that it’s racially biased. We have to take care of how technology is being used and whether it’s being used to solve the problems. I really believe that it does bring many of the solutions.
The last one is disruption. This has to do with crises and catastrophes, which we’ve also learned a lot about recently. This is where climate change comes in. If you look at the wildfires, you look at the storms and floods and the droughts, you know all about that in Australia, but also all around the world now. It’s costing the world hundreds of billions, of which roughly only a third is insured. You’ve got two thirds of the millions of people who are affected by this just left hopeless, so tackling this and other crises. By the way, COVID is another example of a massive disruption. You get industrial accidents, also disruptive. BP lost 50% of its value within 50 days after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, just over 10 years ago, and has paid $65 billion since.
All of these have to be addressed. What do we want? We want to move to resilience. That’s the breakthrough. That means making our institutions but also our infrastructure more resilient. Some of that is physical infrastructure, like building flood walls and having buildings that can withstand earthquakes and lots of other very practical things we can do, but it’s also about how you build the economy, because what we’ve discovered is that our economy is very brittle in the crisis. Look at what’s happened with supply chains during COVID or during the Icelandic volcano a few years ago. There’s no longer any slack in the system to take the shocks. We think we’ve been very clever by making everything super efficient just in time, everything delivered, next-day delivery, everything like that. But actually, it makes us more vulnerable. This is all to do with a risk economy, everything that can reduce risk, but also help us survive and thrive through crises. Those are the six transitions.
Gene Tunny 27:28
That’s a very comprehensive overview. I’ve probably got comments on a lot of what you said, but I’ve got to ask you about that Icelandic volcano. That’s the one that no one can pronounce the name of, or certainly I can’t, if I remember correctly. Can you remind me what happened there? You mentioned that as an example of a disruption.
Wayne Visser 27:48
It was obviously just, they have a lot of volcanic activity there. But this one was so big that this cloud just spread across Europe and grounded everything, so planes couldn’t fly. As soon as you start messing with logistics, not only does it mean people literally stranded all around the world in countries, but also business grinds to a halt because of all of the trade that happens through logistics. It’s just an example of that kind of disruption. We’re starting to see more and more, the recent supply chain disruptions around COVID, but also to do with the oil price. Lots of these shocks just show us that… Even my book was delayed by over a month, because suddenly, there was no paper. They couldn’t get paper in the world. So we have to prepare for these kinds of shocks. This is the new volatile world, the VUCA world.
Gene Tunny 28:55
Yeah, well, it’s certainly taking a while for everything to get back to normal. I’m an economist, and I’ve got great faith in the ability of markets to adjust ultimately, but it takes time. We could have these sort of disruptions for another year or so. I think I saw one estimate.
Wayne Visser 29:21
And remember, the kind of COVID type disruption, earthquakes, volcanoes are a bit random, but COVID will most likely happen again. It still has a bit of course to run, but another type of infectious disease, we can expect those again. In fact, it’s linked to these risks we’ve been talking about because as we’ve wiped out nature, zoonotic diseases, which are these diseases that leap from animals to humans, also as we have this huge industrial agricultural system with livestock, the chances of, again, diseases going from animals to humans actually is going up. We can expect that kind of shock again. But all of the analysis that we’ve seen of climate change suggests that COVID is just a very mild dress rehearsal for what’s coming on climate change. The point is that we should be expecting to live in a world of disruption. We have to know how to cope with that, and how our economies can cope, how our organisations can cope, and personally, how we cope.
Gene Tunny 30:30
What will that disruption from climate change be, Wayne? What are your thoughts or what’s your expectation as to what we’ll see? You mentioned wildfires, and I guess flooding as well. We’ve just had some flooding here in Brisbane, where I am, on the east coast of Australia. Look, there’s a big debate. It seems to be it’s difficult to attribute any particular natural disaster or to say that that’s related to climate change. I’m not sure you can do that. But certainly, I understand that it could increase the risk of these things, so I accept that. What do you see as the potential future if we don’t stabilise the CO2 in the atmosphere?
Wayne Visser 31:28
You’re right, there’s weather, and there’s climate change, and weather changes. It’s hard to link individual weather events to climate change, although there is now a scientific centre that is doing exactly that through statistical analysis, showing the probability that this could have been just a normal weather event, without the climate driver. They can now very quickly, actually, on most events, give a rating as to whether this is likely to be climate related.
But essentially, what we’re going to look at is just more extremes, I think that’s one of the one of the mis-sellings of what was originally called global warming. People thought it’ll just get a little bit warmer, we’ll go to the beach a bit more. But actually, it is climate change. It’s more disruptive, because it’s hotter and it’s colder. The storms are more intense and more frequent. That’s for complicated reasons, largely that the oceans are warming up, which makes the weather more unstable. Just everything that used to be a very rare occurrence, like a massive storm or extended 10-year drought, will just become the new norm. Temperatures that we never used to see—Canada had its highest temperatures in the last 12 months—will again become the new norm.
This has impacts on all kinds of things. It has impacts on agriculture, of course, the food system, to survive those floods and droughts, but also the climate is moving. So if you’re in a particular area, and that’s no longer good for agriculture, because everything’s got warmer, then that becomes a problem. Tropical diseases will increase because we’re moving to a warmer world. So places that never had to deal with things like malaria or Dengue fever suddenly will be dealing with those. So there are health impacts. And also remember that for every degree, on average, warmer that it is, people are less productive. And there are statistics on that as well. You have economic losses as well, as the world gets warmer.
So lots of different impacts, but it’s all about the volatility and the extremes of climate and wheather our infrastructure and our organisations and even our homes are just ready for that. As I said, you know, only a third is insured of all the climate damage that we’re seeing year on year. So for two thirds of people, it’s not covered.
Gene Tunny 34:25
Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.
Female speaker 34:30
If you need to crunch the numbers, then get in touch with Adept Economics. We offer you frank and fearless economic analysis and advice. We can help you with funding submissions, cost-benefit analysis studies, and economic modelling of all sorts. Our head office is in Brisbane, Australia, but we work all over the world. You can get in touch via our website, http://www.adepteconomics.com.au. We’d love to hear from you.
Gene Tunny 34:59
Now back to the show. Wayne, I think what’s terrific, what you’ve done is really good with these six great transitions, I think you call them, so two in nature, two in society, and two in the economy. And if you hear that, then you’re thinking, oh, okay, there’s some big challenges that the world faces. How are these going to be addressed? It sounds like you’re relatively optimistic. To what extent will they be addressed by what’s happening with business, business transforming itself with innovation that’s occurring right now? And then how much needs to be addressed by government policy, or changes in the household that could be encouraged by government policy—changes in households and business? Could you take us through that, please, because just looking at that, those six great transitions, it looks like we need some sort of, I hate to say great reset, because that’s become such a controversial term and really triggers people, so I don’t want to say that. But could you take us through, how are we going to get through this, please?
Wayne Visser 36:19
I don’t think it’s wrong to call it a great reset. It’s become a political term. But it is of that scale. We really are looking at reinventing capitalism and going through another industrial revolution that’s very different. World Economic Forum calls it stakeholder capitalism. Now, that’s a huge shift from shareholder capitalism.
But maybe I’ll give you a little insight into another part of the book, which is to look at the underlying science, because the science tells us where the change is happening. There are six keys to thriving, which is an insight into how these complex systems change. One is complexity. This is all about how many relationships there are in any given system. And what we see is the world getting more and more complex. Of course, we’re getting more and more connected. Social media can help; sometimes it can hinder. But just in so many ways, the connections are increasing.
One of the solutions we start to see more and more, partnerships, so companies getting into partnerships with government, with NGOs, and even getting into partnership sometimes with competitors to change the landscape. When Unilever decided to go for 100% sustainable palm oil, which is a big problem in the world today, if they did it on their own it’s useless. They had to convince their competitors as well to do it. The other big ones like Nestle, for example, Procter and Gamble, and so they went through the Consumer Goods Forum, and they got everybody signed up. We’re seeing far more of those kinds of initiatives. It’s all about creating more and more connections.
Then the second one is coherence. This is about having really big goals to aim for. Now we’ve got the sustainable development goals, which are certainly helping, these 17 global goals that all the world’s countries have signed up to, that has created a common focus. But we also see coherence arising around specific issues. Like I mentioned, the 30% land and water protected by 2030, or on climate change, consensus really has emerged around a 1.5 degree warming target, not even two degrees anymore, and net zero by 2050. That’s just become the new norm that everybody is going for. We see this coherence start to emerge in different ways. Policy certainly helps here, because that’s what good policy does is it sets the destination, and then lets business innovate to get there. And we’re starting to see more and more of that good policy. If we look at the Green Deal in the European Union, it’s a great example of that.
Gene Tunny 39:18
Sorry, the Green Deal. I’ve heard of the Green New Deal in the US, but that’s not been implemented. There’s just some sort of wish list from AOC and people of that sort of persuasion, but you mentioned a Green Deal.
Wayne Visser 39:44
Yep. EU Green Deal. It’s effectively Europe’s strategy on climate change. It’s very, very comprehensive and very ambitious. And it touches everything. It’s got a Farm to Fork area which touches agriculture. It’s got a mobility area, around electrification of mobility. It’s got a circular economy element. It’s got a finance element. It’s a very, very strong policy. In some ways, America is trying to copy that with the New Green Deal. Yes, policy helps with the coherence piece.
Then you’ve got creativity, which we’ve talked about a little already. For things to change, for all living systems to change, they need innovation. And that happens through diversity. Again, there’s something we’re working very hard on, but we are living in an age of innovation, no doubt about it. In many of our most difficult problems, we are seeing some amazing solutions coming. If we just pick on one, for example, we know electric cars. I’ll leave that alone, but just remember that that is changing much faster than people think. Norway is burning fossil fuel cars by 2025. That’s just around the corner. In most other countries, UK, it’s 2030. Within 10 years, it’ll really be something to watch.
But take food, for example. There’s a whole movement of course around going more plant based. That makes sense from a health perspective, because 20% of mortality can be reduced just by going more plant based, but also from a climate perspective, and a biodiversity perspective, and of course an animal welfare perspective. But here we see innovation. You’ve seen the Beyond burger and the Impossible burger. These are really engineered to look and taste like the real thing. I know that may be a hard sell in in Australia, but on blind tests, actually, they’ve done extremely well.
Not only that, but we’ve got cultured meat coming. This is grown in labs meat, essentially grown fermented, grown in fat, like you do for insulin. And this is this is going to completely change everything, because again, you don’t have the input of land and water. You have much lower energy input, and you’re not killing anything. You’re literally just taking cells, live cells from a cow, for example, and you’re creating that. In Singapore, you can already go to a restaurant that sells cultured chicken. This is innovation happening very fast. Massive amount of investment going into this.
Gene Tunny 42:41
Sorry, by cultured chicken, do you mean lab grown, do you?
Wayne Visser 42:46
Yes, lab grown.
Gene Tunny 42:48
Wow.
Wayne Visser 42:48
That’s the popular—
Gene Tunny 42:49
In Singapore.
Wayne Visser 42:50
For everything, for steak, and you can literally grow it how you want to try, so lean or however you want it. It is real meat. It’s just that it’s grown from cells rather than the living cow that you have to slaughter or chicken you have to slaughter. And it’s very sustainable, not only in terms of those impacts, but literally, if I remember the numbers correctly, if you’ve got a factory that’s making this, every two days that meat replenishes itself. It grows back. You’ve just got this endless supply of meat that is growing much faster than a cow that you have to grow for months and months, or years. It’s just an example of innovation happening. That’s the creativity piece of the underlying science.
You’ve got a really interesting one, which is convergence. Convergence is very linked to innovation. It’s really the perfect storm. It’s when things reinforce one another. We call this in the science, positive feedback loops. And this is what creates tipping points. And here again, if you look at what’s happening, there are many of these positive reinforcing tipping points. When you were asking do we need more policy, do we need more market forces, what do we need, this is where we’re seeing the convergence because in fact, what we’ve got are the breakthrough technologies, which are starting to scale, plus the policy, which has really been a huge amount of policy reform in the last five years. We’ve just had the UN agree, for example, now to also create a plastics treaty globally, similar to the climate treaty, which countries will need to sign up to. That will happen by 2024. A lot happening on the policy front. Plus the market forces are kicking in. The likes of a Tesla or an Ørsted, which many people don’t know the name, but used to be a fossil fuel company in Denmark, completely transformed to a renewable company and now is one of the largest offshore wind companies in the world. We’re seeing this kind of transformation really happening very quickly.
And then, in addition to that, so we’ve got the policy force, we’ve got the technology force, we’ve got the market force, and then you’ve got the social movements that are kicking in. This is whether it’s the climate strike movement, or the Black Lives Matter movement, or the Me Too movement, or the extinction rebellion, these are very, very significant, with millions and millions of people, especially younger generations of people, who are just starting to say, “We want a different world. We don’t want our future sold out.” All of these are reinforcing one another.
And if I throw in one last one, finally, finances come on board, coming out of the Glasgow climate agreement. From November last year, there was something called the GFANZ. It’s now the Global Financial Alliance. This is $130 trillion of assets under management that is lined up now from the 450 largest financial institutions in the world, top 10 banks in Europe, top 10 banks in America, all committed now to fund this transition to net zero carbon. Now, practically what that means is they have to go back now to their corporate clients and say, “Show me your plan to get to net zero not only by 2050, but how you’re going to halve your emissions by 2030.” It starts to put massive pressure right through the value chain. All of these things are reinforcing one another, which is why the change is speeding up and why I think on many of these issues, we’re getting to these positive tipping points.
Gene Tunny 47:03
You’ve got a lot of great examples in your book. I would recommend, if you’re listening in the audience, and this sounds interesting, then yeah, please, you should get a copy of the of the book. There’s lots of great examples in there.
I wanted to go back. You mentioned palm oil. That’s something of great interest to me. I’ve done a little bit of work with Indonesian ministries, and palm oils are a major commodity in Indonesia. And if you go to, I think it’s in Bogor, just south of Jakarta, if I remember correctly, there’s a botanic gardens near the presidential palace, and there’s an extraordinary thing. There’s a monument or a statue or a tribute to a palm oil tree I think it is, because it’s such an important crop in Indonesia. I think it was first they imported it to Indonesia from elsewhere in the world, maybe from Africa. I can’t remember correctly. But they tested it in Indonesia, in that the gardens there. There’s a large amount of deforestation, I think in Borneo, due to it. But you mentioned Unilever is now committed to, is it renewable palm oil? Is that right? Is that having a practical impact on deforestation?
Wayne Visser 48:35
Yeah. A couple of things happening there. And you’re absolutely right, I think Indonesia maybe supplies 60 or 70% of the world’s palm oil, along with Malaysia, which provides another 20 or so. It has been absolutely devastating for forests. Indonesia has the third of the world’s largest tropical forests, and that’s really under threat. So we’re destroying these lungs of the earth for commercial interests, because the demand is there. And often the demand is from us in the West, isn’t it, the rich countries, because palm oil is in one in 10 products that we buy, everything from detergents to food. It’s very, very useful.
Yes, quite some time ago now, they set up something called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. This has a way of growing palm that doesn’t have the impact that the old commercial approach does, and doesn’t have the deforestation but also the biodiversity impact. Companies can get certified and supply chains can be certified to that RSPO standard. All the big players are on board, whether it’s Nestle or Unilever or Procter and Gamble. They’ve all committed to go 100% to that. It takes a bit of time, but there are large parts of the sector that are still not committed to that, and so it’s a partial solution right now.
But again, here you start to see the value of policy. Part of the EU Green Deal, one of the most recent things they’ve done in the last few weeks, they have a law being drafted now that they will refuse any export or import of commodities, of which palm oil is one, that can’t prove that they haven’t caused deforestation. The onus is on the supplier. If you’re Indonesia, and you can’t prove that this is palm oil that’s deforestation-free, you’ve just lost Europe as a market. This is going to have huge impacts. It’s not just palm oil, it’s coffee, it’s tea, it’s timber, and several others. This is how change really happens.
Gene Tunny 50:58
Yeah. One of the technologies you talk about in the book is blockchain. Can blockchain help us with traceability, with understanding the origins of or the history of the products that we consume?
Wayne Visser 51:16
Yes, blockchain has massive potential, and is one of those ones, it’s an early stage technology, which still has unfortunate unintended consequences. The upside is traceability. And there are companies using that, to show the sustainability of supply chains. A company called Provenance in the UK is a good example. They track and trace a whole value chain for fish or for gold, and they can show, in a very secure way, every step of that process. Another example is a company called Circularise that does this for plastics and can track all the… They actually even use artificial DNA, which they put into the plastic so that just by scanning it, you can tell at every stage of the supply chain, exactly what is in that plastic and how it needs to be recycled. That’s the upside.
The downside is the blockchain, like cryptocurrencies, takes massive amounts of energy. Until we can solve the energy problem—it helps of course if it’s 100% renewable energy—but so long as it’s largely fossil fuel energy, it’s just adding to the problem of climate change.
Gene Tunny 52:34
I’ll have to look up artificial DNA. I wasn’t aware of that. That sounds fascinating. I’ll put a link about artificial DNA in the show notes. Okay. Before we wrap up, Wayne, I want to ask you about a passage in your book. Now, you talk about economics. This is an economic show. I need to ask about this passage, because I’m not sure I entirely agree with it, but that’s fine. Look, I’m trying to be open-minded on this show.
You write that, “Contemporary economics is degenerative. It systematically disregards ecological limits and fails to ensure that fundamental human needs are met. Economy is good at creating jobs, product services and technologies, but what is the quality of these outputs? Do they create more harm than good? The impacts of economic activity are explained away as negative externalities, as if environmental integrity and social justice exist in some realm outside of the economy, but that is not true. Everything is interconnected.”
Look, I agree everything’s interconnected. My view is you’re probably being a bit unfair on economists. I think contemporary economics is trying to embrace the environment more. There’s a discipline of environmental economics, as I’m sure you’re aware, and even ecological economics, although that’s really sort of a minor discipline. My view would be that economists are increasingly conscious of these issues. I think externalities is an incredibly powerful concept. And it can help us think about potential policy solutions. My concern is that we’re not going to be able to get to net zero globally, because to do so you really need some sort of carbon tax. You need a carbon price of some kind. But to do that properly, you need to have that agreed internationally and you have to have it applying internationally, to the same extent. I just think that we’re just not going to get that international cooperation to be able to do that by 2050. I’m a bit pessimistic on that.
I just wanted to note that, that as an economist I probably… That was the one thing in the book I really reacted to. I’m not negative about the book because of that. But I just wanted to get an understanding of where you’re coming from there. Do you really think contemporary economics is really that bad?
Wayne Visser 55:19
Let me start by saying that I’m not anti-economics, I did a major in economics in my business degree. And I studied environmental, ecological and resource economics in my master’s degree. Economics is a tool that we use to better understand the world and to help manage our economies.
What I think we have to look at is what kind of economics system we’ve had, and what kind of behaviour it’s promoted. Certainly, since the neoliberal economics really took off, since the 1970s, and alongside that, the push for deregulation, it’s been a disaster for the environment. There’s just no other way to say that. It has externalised a lot of the costs. It’s gone for production in places where the environmental standards are the worst, where the social standards of the worst, labour standards are the worst. It has resulted in modern day slavery. We have more people in slavery today than we had when it was officially abolished in the 1700s. That’s all kinds of forced labour. It really hasn’t managed to create a system that is consistently good for all people and for the planet on which we depend. That’s the issue. It’s created an economy that is linear, that take make waste economy, where many of the resources are simply not priced right, they’re just too cheap. If you look at Virgin plastic, for example, it’s just too cheap. It doesn’t take into account those social and environmental costs that we have.
I do think the concept of externalities can be effectively applied to remedy some of this. If we do have taxes on carbon, for example, or on poor social labour standards, this can certainly start to rectify that. But we just have to ask whether those are strong enough.
I actually do believe that we will get a carbon price. It may not emerge as one global price, but I think it’s emerging in different places all around the world, lots of emission trading schemes popping up, lots of companies providing their own internal carbon pricing. I think a consensus will start to emerge on what that price is, and governments will start to impose it in different ways. They have to, because they can’t get to their net zero targets without imposing that restriction on companies and on citizens. It’s definitely coming.
Of course, we don’t get to net zero only by changing production. We also need to invest in nature. That’s the way that you also can draw down some of the carbon to make up… It’s a kind of a Pareto rule, like 80% you need to reduce directly from your lifestyle or your operations or your value chain, and then the remaining 20—or some say it needs to be more like 10%—should be in actually restoring nature, which makes up the balance.
I think all of those things are happening and will happen. I do think there is a brand of economics or a new understanding of economics that can get us there. If you look at Doughnut Economics, which you’re probably familiar with, Kate Raworth and her book, I think that’s the best coherently argued alternative to what would be more conventional economic thinking. All it’s really doing is saying, how do we better build and the ecological limits, or what we sometimes call the scientific planetary boundaries beyond which the whole system is in danger of collapse, and how do we build in those social foundations, the minimum requirements that people need. Economics has been dabbling with those things, but just hasn’t been very effective if you look at some of these trends we’ve been talking about. It’s just how do we improve economics and have a new version that is more effective than we have at the moment.
Gene Tunny 1:00:09
Wayne, you’ve written a really fascinating book with lots of great examples of what business and what communities around the world are doing to try to tackle these challenges to improve sustainability. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up, to conclude? This has been a great conversation, and we’ve gone over a lot. I could talk to you for another few hours, but we’ll probably have to wrap up for now. Is there anything you’d like to say in conclusion?
Wayne Visser 1:00:46
Yeah, let me just mention two things, and then I’ll have a cheeky suggestion. One is that there is a chapter on the book specifically on business and how business needs to integrate thriving, the practicalities of how they do that, and there’s six steps to that. That’s based on work that I do with companies, big companies like Johnson and Johnson, where we take them through these steps of integrating. It touches on all kinds of things, on how you consult with stakeholders, how you relook at your values, how you relook at your strategic goals, how you build in new and different metrics, how you redesign your portfolio of products and services. Just be aware that there is, if you’re coming from the business world there, besides all the innovation examples, there’s also this very practical, how do I do this on Monday morning.
There’s a chapter on leadership, because that is really crucial. We are seeing a different brand or a different type of leadership emerging, that is able to tackle these big challenges and turn them into breakthroughs and into thriving. I look at the different characteristics that those leaders have, obviously, with lots of examples.
The cheeky suggestion to end with—I’ve started to do this even in keynote speeches—is to end with a poem, since as you mentioned, I’m not only a professor, but a poet. I just find that it taps into a different part of the brain. With your indulgence, I might just end with one of those.
Gene Tunny 1:02:19
Please. Thank you.
Wayne Visser 1:02:21
I’ll do the one which actually opens the book. It is a poem called Thriving. It even has a stanza that is really all about markets and economics, so you should like it. But see what you think of this. Thriving.
Our life is so much more than a duty or a chore of merely getting by without a why or what for, the law of tooth and claw, the struggle to exist, to rally and resist against life’s slow decay, the way of entropy of living just to see another day, to stay, to endure and survive. No. Life is meant to thrive. In nature, all things grow from seed to tree. We know the cycle of living through giving of reap and so, the flow. Things come and go. The cycles of grooming from sprouting to blooming of stretching for the light, the bright palette of hope, the diverse ways to cope, to cherish and flourish, bursting forth and alive, for nature means to thrive. Society lives too. A melting pot we brew from cultures and crises with spices for flavour and kindness to savour, ideas for conceiving and goals for achieving, that stretch us and bind us, that find us together in all kinds of weather, wanting what’s fair, to care, longing to love and strive for society to thrive. The markets live and breathe in complex webs we weave. The synapses of trade have made the things we need, each deed a chance to lead. While tech is getting smart, yet still it needs a heart, a compass as a guide to tide us through the storm and find a better norm. A breakthrough to renew an innovation drive. Yes, markets too can thrive. All life is meant to rise, to reach up for the skies, to move beyond the edge, to fledge with hopeful cries. Life tries until it flies. It shakes and spreads its wings and trills each note it sings. While given time and space, the race of life is run, full powered by the sun, on land, in seeds, like bees’ sweet nectar from the hive. All life is made to thrive.
Gene Tunny 1:04:57
Very good. Excellent. Professor Wayne Visser, this has been terrific. I really enjoyed our conversation and your poem at the end and fully agree. All life and society and nature and markets are meant to thrive. What a great message to the end on. I’ll put links to all your social media and your website for the book in the show notes. This has been terrific. I really, really value your time and your thoughts and all the great insights in your book. Well done and thanks so much. Hopefully I’ll look forward to your future work. I’d really look forward to chatting with you in the future. That’s been great, learned so much. Thanks again, Wayne.
Wayne Visser 1:05:54
Thanks so much for having me on. Of course, I’m always happy to find an excuse to visit you down under. I used to teach also in Melbourne, and love it down there. I look forward to those opportunities. Just also to say for people, there are different ways to access the book, so not only e-book and hardback, but also an audiobook version, so whatever takes your fancy. Delighted actually that it’s already hit Amazon bestseller status, so really looking forward—
Gene Tunny 1:06:33
Wow.
Wayne Visser 1:06:34
That’s in its first week, and number one on the new titles in various categories, including several economics categories. I’m delighted with that. Just thanks very much for having me on. I love the conversation and I hope your listeners do too.
Gene Tunny 1:06:51
Oh, very good. I’m sure they will. Thank you, Wayne. Really enjoyed it.
Wayne Visser 1:06:55
Thanks a lot. Bye now.
Gene Tunny 1:06:57 Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com and we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye.
Credits
Big thanks to my guest Dr Wayne Visser and to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode.
In Economics Explored EP129, show host Gene Tunny reviews his top ten insights from economics with Tim Hughes. These include insights regarding specialization and trade, opportunity cost, and the price mechanism, among others. Applications to traffic congestion and climate change, among other issues, are explored.
You can listen to the episode using the podcast player below or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, among other podcasting apps. A transcript of the conversation is included below.
The e-book which is the basis of this episode is available to subscribers of the economicsexplored.com website.
Transcript: Top 10 insights from economics – EP129
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Gene Tunny 00:01
Coming up on Economics Explored. But can you imagine what traffic would be like in central London if you didn’t have a congestion charge? I mean, it’d just be mad. Well, you wouldn’t be able to move.
Tim Hughes 00:11
It was. I remember the few times I was there, and it was like every European city. It was just chockers. But regardless, I don’t mind those kind of charges. But I do resent the fact that they’re not straightforward.
Gene Tunny 00:25
Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host, Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia, and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is Episode 129, which is about my top 10 insights from economics. And joining me today is my occasional co-host, Tim Hughes.
Tim Hughes 00:49
Hey, Gene. How are you?
Gene Tunny 00:50
Good, mate. Very good. Thanks for joining me for this mini episode in a way. I just want to go over my top 10 insights from economics. So I’ve prepared an e-book. And if you’re listening and you’re interested in getting it, you can subscribe to the website, the economicsexplored.com website, and you’ll get a copy of that e-book. So Tim, I just wanted to go through what I think those top 10 insights from economics are. And one thing I should note is we’re recording this on the 2nd of March, 2022. Currently, there’s a huge crisis in Ukraine with the Russian invasion. We’ve got no idea how that will play out.
Tim Hughes 01:36
Hopefully swiftly and peacefully.
Gene Tunny 01:38
Yeah. But look, I mean, huge, huge risk to the world. And yeah, just feel for the people of Ukraine who are suffering from that invasion.
Tim Hughes 01:48
Absolutely.
Gene Tunny 01:48
Just terrible. Okay, so should we get into it, Tim?
Tim Hughes 01:53
Yeah, let’s do it. Can I ask if this is one to 10 in any sort of preference or order? Is it just top 10 all round?
Gene Tunny 02:00
This is one to 10 in the order that they occurred to me as I was jotting them down.
Tim Hughes 02:05
Cool.
Gene Tunny 02:06
So I think I’ve tried to order them in what I think are the most important insights. But having said that, I recognise that there’s possibly insights that other economists would put ahead of the ones I’ve chosen, or maybe they don’t agree with what I think are insights. And so if you’re listening in the audience, and you have a different view, or if you think I haven’t explained something exactly correct, then sure, please get in touch. So you can send me a message via SpeakPipe, there’s a link in the show notes, or email contact@economicsexplored.com. We’d love to hear from you, as always.
So Tim, just to begin with, I mean, this is one that I often point out when we’re just chatting is that insight about how $50 bills or $50 notes aren’t just lying on the sidewalk, waiting to get picked up. There’s a famous joke about the two economics professors walking along the street and one of them sees a $50 note and says, “Oh, there’s a $50 note there.” He’s about to bend down to pick it up, and the other one says, “Don’t be silly. If it was a real $50 note, then somebody would have already picked it up.” So it’s the idea of opportunities for profit or gains from trade are rapidly exploited in a market economy. So it’s that sort of insight, this idea of arbitrage, so the fact that you don’t have exchange rates being out of alignment. If you think about what we trade, say Australian dollars for US dollars, and then US dollars for British pounds, they all sort of make sense collectively. You’re not going to get an opportunity to, say, take your British pounds, buy Australian dollars, then sell them for American dollars, and do better than if you just sold your British pounds for American dollars. So those gains will actually be arbitraged away.
Tim Hughes 03:58
So if there is a $50 note on the footpath, it’ll get picked up so quickly that it’ll be unnoticeable on the macro.
Gene Tunny 04:04
Well, yeah, exactly. And I guess it’s a philosophy for life too. It’s something that Seth Godin, world’s number one marketing guru, will often say, that look, someone’s going to be number one, or someone’s going to win in this game. Someone’s going to be the top YouTuber. Somebody’s going to be Joe Rogan.
Tim Hughes 04:24
It’s probably not going to be you. Still hope yet, Gene, there’s still hope.
Gene Tunny 04:32
So I’ve always thought that was an important lesson from economics. That’s a key insight. It’s important in economics, because we’ve got all of these models in which there’s optimising behaviour. So we’ve got businesses trying to maximise profits and consumers trying to maximise their utility or their satisfaction. And generally if you assume competitive markets, then businesses can try to maximise profits all they like, but the force of competition means that they’re just earning a reasonable return on their capital. I mean, they’re being compensated for their investment, for their assumption of risk. But they shouldn’t generally be earning monopoly profits. Of course, then there’s that issue about, well, what about if you’re Amazon or what about if you’re Facebook, and so clearly, there are some monopoly profits or supernormal profits being earned. But the way that some economists rationalise that is that they’re being rewarded for the innovation. And you really need those supernormal profits to stimulate innovation in a way.
Tim Hughes 05:40
Yeah, it’s an interesting one, because, I mean, there are so many of those big companies. Certainly Amazon is profitable, but a lot of the big ones who aren’t profitable, just to get scale Uber, and I don’t know if Airbnb are profitable, but you know, it’s those ones that are massive to market. Spotify, for instance so they’re actually making money. But they’re getting market share. So it’s interesting to see how that’s possible without turning a profit. And it’s obviously on the future promise of reward.
Gene Tunny 06:15
It’s all based on future earnings. And so this is what’s interesting in this world of low interest rates, because interest rates are so low, and you can borrow money so cheap and invest for the long term. If you look at what these companies such as Uber could be earning in the future, and you make assumptions about, oh, well, we could all be using Uber, no one will own a car anymore, and look at what the potential revenues could be. If you’ve got very low interest rates, then if you discount those future earnings back to the present, they’re worth a lot more. And that pushes up the value of those companies, because in a way, it could make sense to borrow a lot of money now and invest in those companies, because interest rates are so low, and these companies have such huge potential earnings into the future. So that’s why you’re seeing a lot of these tech companies having such high valuations. And as soon as interest rates start increasing, that could reduce the value of these tech companies, because well, people would rather get the money in the short term, because the opportunity cost of money is higher if the interest rate is higher. Does that make sense?
Tim Hughes 07:32
It does. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is this still along the lines of the $50 note on the on the street?
Gene Tunny 07:38
We somehow got onto that issue of … You’d talked about the tech companies.
Tim Hughes 07:42
It was my fault. I guess what it is is that they all lead from one to the other, but without getting off that first one, because it is a thing, for instance, of like, yeah, if there is innovation, and if people can copy it, then it will be copied. And generally more people will be doing it, so that general movement away, so that opportunities get taken advantage of by more than one person, obviously. If it works, then other people will copy it and follow and it becomes more dispersed. That would naturally be how it works. So I guess we’re talking about exceptions to that rule with these big, massive companies that are all on the promise of future reward, whereas most companies can’t operate that way. They have to be more instantly profitable if they’re going to survive.
Gene Tunny 08:29
Yeah, look, I may have gone on a bit of a tangent there. But that’s insight one. We might go into insight two. And that is this concept of, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Now a guest I’m having on in hopefully next episode or the episode after is David Bahnsen. He’s a fund manager over in the States. And he’s written a great book, There’s No Free Lunch. And this is the idea that, look, there’s always an opportunity cost with any action. And so my insight two is it’s opportunity costs rather than cash outlays that matter in economic decision making.
Now, I think the original idea or the original, is it a proverb or a saying about there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, came from bars in the, might have been late 19th century or early 20th century USA, where they advertised as having a free lunch to get the patrons in the door. And they’d know that they could cover the cost of the free lunch by selling them drinks, or maybe they inflated the prices of those drinks a bit while having the free lunch. So there’s that idea.
But also, if you think about it, you’ve got an opportunity cost. Someone could offer to take you to lunch, but that’s an hour of your time and that hour is worth something Time is money. I mean, that’s one of the things we often do in economics in cost-benefit studies. We value people’s time and we work out well how much benefit could erode or a new bridge provide through the time savings. There’s an Australian government estimate. I think it’s $32 an hour or something, on average, you can value people’s time at.
Tim Hughes 10:11
I think it’s a good rule of thumb. You know, there’s usually some reason for something being given freely. Sometimes if it’s charitable, then that is what it is. But in many cases, I think it’s tied in the process of reciprocation, in the form of something else, the other party reciprocating in some form or other, or an opportunity to sell a product or service at some stage. So I think everyone’s aware of … I think that’s a fair one to have in there, Gene. That’s a good home truth, I think.
Gene Tunny 10:49
Yeah. And it’s important because you’ve got to recognise the opportunity cost of your own assets. If you’ve got assets, and they’re not being used, then you’re losing the income from that. So you’ve got to recognise that. It might make sense for you to offload something that’s just sitting around, like an old car or something, that’s costing you. You’re losing money on it through depreciation every year. So yeah, why not get rid of it? So I think that’s an important concept, this idea of opportunity cost, what are you giving up through your current course of action, your current actions.
Okay, insight three, comparative advantage and gains from trade. So this is the classic principle from David Ricardo, the British stockbroker, member of Parliament I think he was, economist from the 19th century, which is essentially arguing that there’s generally going to be gains from trade. Even if a country can produce most things, or in his model, it’s even if a country can produce everything better than another country, more efficiently, it still makes sense for one country to specialise in particular goods and services, relative to another country. Then that maximises the total amount that can be produced, and then you trade amongst each other. So it’s an argument in favour of specialisation and then trading.
Often the examples are given … I think they have the example of England trading with Portugal, and they use the commodities of cloth and wine. And there’s a numerical example that shows why it makes sense for, I guess it was England specialising in cloth and then Portugal specialising in wine. What’s neat about it is it doesn’t actually matter. If one country is superior in productivity to another country, it still makes sense to have specialisation.
One of the ways it’s often explained in economics classes is if, say, you’ve got a professor, and the professor has a secretary. And the professor could be as good as the secretary in administrative tasks, or even better. They could be an even better typist, or better at the admin stuff. But they’re also a great researcher. If the professor gives up an hour to do the admin stuff, that’s going to cost them a lot in terms of the great research output they could produce, whereas the admin person, they’re not going to be able to produce in an hour. If they gave up an hour, they’re not going to be able to produce anywhere near what the professor could in terms of research output. And it makes sense collectively. If you look at it collectively, it makes sense for specialisation to occur. So I’ve got some examples in the insight in the e-book. It’s essentially the benefits of specialisation.
Tim Hughes 13:56
And then maximising the available time within that sphere of specialisation as well, I guess. So for instance, like if you’re educated to a point of being a specialist in a certain area, like in your example there, so you want to be operating in that area of specialisation for the most amount of your available time.
Gene Tunny14:16
Exactly.
Tim Hughes 14:17
This would speak to scale though, I guess, as well, wouldn’t it? For instance, certainly around my part of the world, originally Manchester, and cotton or linen production around there was huge. And so if you do that to such a scale, then per unit cost or square metre or however you measure the product, that would be ultimately cheaper to produce than if everyone tried to do it somewhat on a smaller scale.
Gene Tunny 14:47
Yeah. I think it’s related. I mean, definitely the gains from scale, the economies of scale, that will come from specialisation. And this is I think what Adam Smith was getting at. He was talking about how just the productivity and efficiency gains from specialisation, the division of labour. Ricardo’s model, his theory of comparative advantage doesn’t depend on that though. It is related. That’s a good point. I mean, maybe I needed insight about increasing returns in economies of scale in this in this e-book. I haven’t got one at the moment. I think that is an insight. That’s an important insight.
Tim Hughes 15:33
For instance, I don’t know what Portugal’s opportunity or capability was to manufacture cotton or linen, but I know the vineyards of Manchester wouldn’t have cut it as far as supplying the local areas with wine. I don’t know if anyone’s tried, but I’m certain that we would have heard about it if it was any cop.
Gene Tunny 15:51
I’ll have to put some examples in the show notes, a link to them on comparative advantage, because there are neat little numerical examples. And, I mean, yeah, it’s just not going to work in the podcast, but I’ll link to it in the show notes if you want to check it out.
Tim Hughes 16:06
I’ve just googled Manchester vineyards and it’s just tumbleweed blowing across my screen.
Gene Tunny 16:13
What about with climate change? See what happens.
Tim Hughes 16:15
Maybe, maybe.
Gene Tunny 16:16
See what happens. I shouldn’t be joking about that sort of thing, because there was a new IPCC report that came out. Was it yesterday? Just saying, yeah, still urgent. Something has to be done. We’re not really doing anything.
Tim Hughes 16:37
As far as climate change and crops.
Gene Tunny 16:39
We’re not doing enough. I think that’s what the message is.
Tim Hughes 16:41
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a different podcast on that one. And I know we’ve talked about it. But absolutely, I think, just very quickly, urgency would be a good thing. No matter whether people believe in climate change or not, urgency in the right direction, of all the changes that would make this planet cleaner, would be a good thing. Anyway, I’ll stop it there.
Gene Tunny 17:05
We’ll have to come back to that. I mean, there is one insight where we could talk about climate change. Insight nine, we can use market mechanisms, taxes or subsidies to correct market failures. So climate change can be thought of as a market failure, because businesses aren’t … At the moment, unless they’re paying a carbon tax, or there’s an emissions trading scheme of some kind … There aren’t many of those around the world. There’s one in Europe. I think there might be one in California. I’ll have to put that in the show notes. If they don’t have that, then they’re not paying the cost of the pollution. They’re not facing that cost. So the idea of the emissions trading scheme or the carbon tax, they’re two different ways of doing the same thing. It’s a way of putting a price on the carbon dioxide that’s emitted. So forcing people to pay for it. So the polluter would essentially pay for it. They’d have to buy the emissions permits. So they would pay the tax based on their emissions. And then they’d pass it on to consumers, to an extent. That’s one of the insights.
So now, the challenge is, of course … That sort of makes sense. It’s a global problem. That’s the problem. So we really need a scheme that operates globally, or there’s some sort of compatibility or trading between different countries, the schemes of different countries. Otherwise, I’ve made this point many times about Australia. It doesn’t make sense for Australia to do much to reduce emissions if the rest of the world isn’t. If China and the USA aren’t doing it, what’s the point of us imposing these costs on our economy?
Tim Hughes 18:55
It’s a fair point, because it is that thing of like, why hobble yourself if other people … Then you’re just giving an advantage elsewhere, and making it harder. But here’s one of those things, it’s like one in all in, which of course, is different around the world, like people from different circumstances or Third World countries who are going to struggle to try and meet a matching scheme. But I’m certain that whatever the future holds in the way of making things better, I think technology and breakthroughs in cleaner energy and all these different things, they’re probably the areas which will get taken up, because if you can make it cheaper for someone to have clean energy, compared to digging fossil fuels out of the ground, or having something that’s not clean energy, as soon as it becomes cheaper, then you’ll have uptake naturally. You won’t have to have schemes or anything in place. That will be widely accepted and welcomed, because you’re going to be better off doing it.
And so those kind of breakthroughs, I think, I can only hope that that would be the sort of game changers. Of course we’re talking about future technology in most cases, but given the right intent behind doing that, and the right minds, the right backing, I’ve got no doubt that that would be a reality. And so that’s where the support globally could come from, if that’s supported, to go down that road and follow that opportunity, because there are opportunities there. Then that would be the global uptake, rather than … I think it would be too hard to try and expect everyone to join a global scheme. I think that is hard. And maybe that’s just an intermediate sort of measure. Maybe that’s an intermediate measure between those who can and that still would make a difference. But anyway, again, I don’t want to get off your top 10 here, Gene.
Gene Tunny 20:47
Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.
Female speaker 20:52
If you need to crunch the numbers, then get in touch with Adept Economics. We offer you frank and fearless economic analysis and advice. We can help you with funding submissions, cost-benefit analysis studies, and economic modelling of all sorts. Our head office is in Brisbane, Australia, but we work all over the world. You can get in touch via our website, http://www.adepteconomics.com.au. We’d love to hear from you.
Gene Tunny 21:21
Now back to the show. Okay, we better rip through these pretty quickly, because you’ve got to get going in about five to 10 minutes. So far we’ve got through … I think we’ve done four insights now. I’m up to insight four, the magic of the price mechanism, or you can ration by price or by queuing. So this is another point I often make about how a lot of the problems we’ve got is because we don’t have appropriate prices, or we’re not charging for scarce resources.
And a classic example is car parking, the high cost of free parking, as Donald Shoup I think it was, who was a professor at UCLA, that’s what he calls it. And part of the reason you can never find a park is because the councils, at different times they’ll allow people to park for very little cost or for free on the streets. And so they’re not appropriately charging for the scarcity of that resource, the fact that yeah, street park is valuable, and it’s not necessarily going to the person who would be most willing to pay for it.
Tim Hughes 22:40
So going against the supply and demand model, you’re suggesting? Is that right?
Gene Tunny 22:43
Yes.
Tim Hughes 22:44
Because normally supply and demand would go to-
Gene Tunny 22:46
Economists, we’re great believers in supply and demand.
Tim Hughes 22:48
That makes sense.
Gene Tunny 22:49
Another example is congestion. And so economists for years have argued that there’s a lot of benefit to congestion charges. There’s a congestion charge in central London, and I think in Singapore. It’s terrible, isn’t it?
Tim Hughes 23:04
I got stung. I got stung. Don’t get me started, Gene. I haven’t got time to go through.
Gene Tunny 23:11
You get confused at Marble Arch and you end up in the centre of London.
Tim Hughes 23:17
Just very briefly, we were there for two days, like five years ago. And we left central London and paid. We knew there was a fee. We weren’t sure if we were in the central area or not. We were told we were just outside it, had a higher car, etc. But you’re supposed to pay by midnight the following day. And we did it the day after that, and it was 80 quid. It stung massively. It’s like, come on. It was not straightforward or easy to make those payments. And that’s my issue with any of this stuff. Happy to pay for … It was 12 quid a day, I think whatever. That sounds about right. But to then be fined 80 pounds in such a short period of non-payment, which by anybody’s standards, by midnight the following day was like, hang on.
Gene Tunny 24:07
Can you imagine what traffic would be like in central London if you didn’t have a congestion charge? I mean, it’d just be mad. Well, you wouldn’t be able to move.
Tim Hughes 24:13
It was. I remember like the few times I was there. It was like every European city, it was just chockers, you know. But regardless, I don’t mind those kind of charges. But I do resent the fact that they’re not straightforward. When you went across the Sydney Harbour Bridge 40, 30 years ago, whatever, you threw coins into the tollbooth, and off you went. It was very clear if you paid or hadn’t, etc. There was a little bay to pull over into if you couldn’t find the loose change or whatever it may be. Whereas now those costs are far less visible, I find. You just ticker over on these costs, which come out. I think there’s an element of rot in a lot of this, which I’m not so keen on.
Gene Tunny 24:54
Tim, I agree. That’s an implementation issue there. We’re dealing with the high level ideas here.
Tim Hughes 24:58
Sorry, Gene. I got sidetracked there. It’s a personal thing, and I said I wouldn’t talk about it, but I did.
Gene Tunny 25:02
It’s fair enough. Insight number five, ignore sunk costs. Bygones are bygones. Economics is forward looking.
Tim Hughes 25:11
That’s timely.
Gene Tunny 25:13
Well, it’s true.
Tim Hughes 25:15
That’s right, just forget about it, write it off.
Gene Tunny 25:18
But we often fall into the sunk cost fallacy and we just throw good money after bad. I mean, we spend a few billion developing a Concorde jet that we figure out pretty early on is not gonna be very commercial, or it’s just a money pit. The British and the French government just keep investing in it. And it turns out it just wasn’t commercially viable. Beautiful aeroplane.
Tim Hughes 25:41
Yeah, definitely.
Gene Tunny 25:43
Amazing technological feat, but the economics just didn’t make sense. You just couldn’t pack enough people on the Concorde.
Tim Hughes 25:50
I never knew the economics behind it. It was a tragic end to the Concorde era when it caught fire, which was awful, however many years ago that was. But I wasn’t aware of the economic cost of it at all.
Gene Tunny 26:07
I think the economics of it were bad, so never going to recommission them or to build new ones because I think the problem was you need so much jet fuel to get hypersonic. I mean, it was hypersonic, wasn’t it?
Tim Hughes 26:19
Supersonic.
Gene Tunny 26:20
Supersonic, that’s it. Supersonic, that’s right. And so you need a huge amount of jet fuel to get supersonic. Beautiful design, but it was very sleek.
Tim Hughes 26:32
It was stunning.
Gene Tunny 26:33
You couldn’t pack as many people into a Concorde as you could a 747, could you?
Tim Hughes 26:39
No. I mean, I guess looking back at the time, that was very soon after the lunar landings, and around that sort of time, so it was very much a modern forethinking sort of thing to get involved in. So there’s probably a bit of ego involved in the whole thing.
Gene Tunny 27:01
Yeah. It was British and French prestige. I mean, they wanted to play with the big boys. I mean, they wanted to play with the Russians and the Americans. There was a space race, and the Brits and the French wanted to, I don’t know, I guess they wanted to show that they were technologically advanced as well.
Tim Hughes 27:24
I was just a kid at the time. But I remember there was pride in the Concorde. Pictures of it were plastered everywhere. And it did, it looked amazing. You did take some pride in that in some way. And I guess that, yeah, maybe if they felt that there was other benefits from having that kind of visibility of something that modern looking. I don’t know.
Gene Tunny 27:50
Yeah. Well, it’s a shame. But anyway, it’s the example I give about sunk cost, because they just kept throwing money at this thing, even though it was a really bad investment. So you’ve got to ignore what you’ve spent already, and just think about, is the additional money you’re spending on this endeavour, is that going to be worthwhile?
Tim Hughes 28:09
So cutting the losses?
Gene Tunny 28:10
Exactly, exactly. We better rip through the rest of them pretty quickly. Insight 10, that’s an easy one. We’ve chatted about this one before. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. So that’s something from Milton Friedman. I’ve chatted about that enough on this programme. So far, we probably don’t need to elaborate.
Insight six, redistributing via the tax transfer system can be superior to redistributing via fixing prices. What I’m talking about there is, a lot of times governments try to fix prices, try to set wage rates or try to fix prices of different goods and services. Rent control is one example, generally a bad idea, because that can discourage investment in new apartments. And that can make the situation worse for people. It’s good for the people who’ve got a rent-controlled apartment, but it’s not good for the majority. So economists tend to think that rather than trying to fix prices, you’re better off letting prices adjust, because there’s the magic of the price mechanism that economists talk about. And then if people, they’re doing it tough, because there are people who need help, then provide that through the welfare system. That’s an idea. That’s one of the insights there.
Tim Hughes 29:30
So now we’ve got something to talk about more in more depth in that area as well, coming up. It would be good to expand on that because it’s certainly an area where it’s getting very, very difficult for new homeowners to get a foot on the market ladder. And I know there are different schemes in place around the world. I know Singapore has got a scheme whereby the government buys the buildings and allows people to get homeownership through a scheme that they basically provide the building or the land.
Gene Tunny 30:08
It seems very interventionist to me. But yeah, we should chat about that in a future episode.
Tim Hughes 30:13
There were a few things. I know we never talked about having that. But it’s along the lines of this, because that still basically isn’t a fixed thing, but it’s more of an assisted service or assisted package.
Gene Tunny 30:26
Insight seven, collusion and monopoly power can be a concern and may require regulatory action. That’s probably pretty self explanatory. I mean, economists celebrate the market generally. We think the market system’s great. But of course, there can be situations where companies become extremely dominant, they can abuse their market power, and hence, you might want to have some antitrust action against them. I mean, we’ve got an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission here in Australia to do that sort of thing. The United States has got a Federal Trade Commission, I think, or they’ve got the Department of Justice. So there’s a lot of talk now about should we break up big tech companies like Facebook, like split Facebook proper from Instagram and WhatsApp, is there something that they should do with Google, should we break Google away from YouTube, etc. There’s all that debate going on at the moment. I’ve covered that on the show before
Tim Hughes 31:23
It’s a thorny issue, isn’t it?
Gene Tunny 31:28
It is. And I think what my takeaway from economics would be that, yeah, it can be a problem in some circumstances. And there’s some guidance in the literature. I’ve offered that as an insight. And I guess it’s a topic we should come back to in a future episode, because there are a lot of issues to consider pros and cons, because you don’t want to eliminate that process of creative destruction as Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, who is at Harvard, called it, because that’s important. We like that creative destruction. New companies are rising and innovating and offering services that everyone enjoys. I mean, Amazon. I’m not a great Facebook fan. Maybe Google’s a better example. I think Amazon and Google have certainly provided a lot of value to consumers and to people in the community,
Tim Hughes 32:25
it seems to come down to ethics, I think, and that’s maybe the direction to take. That would be my feeling on it, because it’s hard to put limitations on a free market. The less governance I think is always a good thing. But then there comes responsibility with these massive companies then to do the right thing and to employ people under good conditions, etc, all those kind of areas, you know. That money should be going back into society at some level. If the profits are so huge, then yeah, it would be, I think, a fair thing to tax those companies more, to give back to society.
Gene Tunny 33:07
Yeah. So there’s a big issue there on multinational tax avoidance. So that’s covered on the show with Pascalis Raimondos.
Tim Hughes 33:13
Outrageous, yeah.
Gene Tunny 33:14
Important issue. Final insight for now, inside eight, because we’ve already covered nine and 10.
Fallacy of composition and the paradox of thrift. So what’s good for the household is not necessarily good for the economy, so just the idea that in economics, you’ve got to think about how everything fits together, just how does everything connect together. And this comes from Keynes in the ‘30s. There are a lot of people who are negative about Keynes and think it’s a very … It’s the economics of depression, you could argue, but the idea is that it might make sense for a household to cut back on its spending if the breadwinner loses their job or one of the household members loses a job. But if everyone in the economy does that, it’s bad for the economy collectively. It’s less spending, less income, less production. So that’s the paradox of thrift, that what could be good for the household may not be good for the economy.
Now I’m not necessarily advocating a Keynesian viewpoint or Keynesian fiscal policies. But I think that is a key insight, that you’ve got to think about how everything collectively fits together. And if you think about governments, back in the ‘30s, when the revenues fell due to the Depression, a lot of the governments thought, we’ve got to tighten our belts, we’ve got to cut spending, to make sure we balance the budget. Sound public finance was what was going to help us in the Depression. But it turns out that wasn’t the case, because when they cut spending, that meant they weren’t spending as much on their public servants or on infrastructure projects. And that meant less activity in the economy. So it was a perverse fiscal policy.
Tim Hughes 35:13
That’s interesting, because now that’s happened more recently, when there have been cases of the government handing out money to people just to get the stimulus packages, for instance, just to keep money moving around and keeping businesses going in it. The first time it happened, it seemed like the craziest thing. I’d never seen that happen before. I’m trying to remember when it was.
Gene Tunny 35:37
2009, Kevin Rudd, the Rudd money.
Tim Hughes 35:39
That’s right. Yeah, it was the GFC, wasn’t it?
Gene Tunny 35:40
$900 checks.
Tim Hughes 35:42
Yeah. And it was just like, it seems insane. But it appeared to work, which is remarkable. But it’s exactly what you’re talking about, I guess, isn’t it?
Gene Tunny 35:51
I’d say it’s got a mixed record historically. But that’s the idea that comes from John Maynard Keynes in the 30s. That’s why Keynes is seen as revolutionising economics, because up until the ‘30s, in 1936, when he published the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, everyone thought that idea was crazy.
Tim Hughes 36:12
It seemed counterintuitive. We’re in tough times, and you start spending. But there was sense to it.
Gene Tunny 36:18
What’s counter?
Tim Hughes 36:19
Well, for instance, the stimulus package, like at the time, a GFC.
Gene Tunny 36:24
Oh, I see.
Tim Hughes 36:25
It would appear. And at a household level, you’d think, yeah, tighten your belts and sort of, like, hold on to everything, whereas like, it was completely the opposite. Here you go, put this into the economy, like keep everything moving. The value of that on the greater scale, on the national scale, was really effective. It was impressive to see.
Gene Tunny 36:52
Exactly. So I’m not in any way endorsing Keynesian fiscal stimulus, because there are all sorts of issues with it in terms of timing, are we gonna get the timing of it right. There’s a possibility you could actually add instability to the economy, that sort of thing. Crowding out impacts, all that sort of thing we can cover in another, or I’ve covered with Tony Makin in a previous episode. Tim, that’s been great. Thanks so much for sitting in, as I’ve sort of done this quick tour of my top 10 insights of economics. You’ve given me some things to think about. I want to add something in about economies of scale or increasing returns to a future addition to this. But at the moment, if you’re listening, you’re interested in this, please get on the website and subscribe so you can download it. Tim, thanks so much. Really enjoyed that conversation.
Tim Hughes 37:37
Thank you, Gene. That was great. It was really interesting.
Gene Tunny 37:39 Thank you. Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com, and we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye.
Credits
Big thanks to my guest Tim Hughes and to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode.
The COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow in 2021 disappointed many advocates for strong action on climate change. In Episode 117 of Economics Explored, show host Gene Tunny discusses whether COP26 should be perceived as a failure or, at best, a mild success with fellow Brisbane-based economist Scott Hook, who has attended several global climate change summits in the past.
About this episode’s guest – Scott Hook
Scott Hook has over 25 years of experience in policy, economic, environmental and financial analysis and in the development of Pacific regional, national and local government policy. He has also researched and written on the role of institutions in shaping policy implementation in Fiji and the Pacific, climate change and disaster risk and climate and security issues. He has a PhD from the University of Queensland that was completed in 2010.
In the last decade he has worked extensively on infrastructure reform and policy, understanding and building resilience to climate and disaster risk and improving access to, and management of, climate change and disaster risk finance for Pacific island countries. He has supported Pacific Island Delegations in the Finance discussions of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties negotiations as a technical adviser, coordinator and negotiator.
He has experience with working with a range of partners and their modalities of engagement, such as. the Green Climate Fund (Forum Secretariat is a Readiness Partner and organising the 2015 and 2016 Pacific Roundtable Meetings), European Development Fund (design and governance for a €29 million energy programme), and a US$10 million regional programme of the Climate Investment Fund through the development of the Pacific component of the Strategic Program for Climate Resilience. He has worked closely with a wide range of partners including the Pacific Community, SPREP, DFAT, EU, NZAID, the ADB and World Bank.
In Episode 111, Australian Senator Matt Canavan, Australia’s most prominent critic of the Net Zero by 2050 policy to address climate change, speaks with Economics Explored host Gene Tunny about the 2021 UN climate change summit, COP26 (i.e. the 26th Conference of the Parities) and policies to address climate change.
About this episode’s guest – Senator Matt Canavan
Matt Canavan is a Liberal National Party Senator for the state of Queensland, Australia. Matt was first elected at the 2013 Australian federal election for the term beginning 1 July 2014. He was the Minister for Resources and Northern Australia between February 2016 and February 2020. Matt holds the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Economics (Hons.) from the University of Queensland. He has professional experience working as an economist in Australia’s Productivity Commission, and he has also worked as a consultant at KPMG. Matt’s main office is in Rockhampton, in Central Queensland.
Matt spoke with Gene over Zoom while located in his Parliament House office in Canberra, Australia. The conversation was recorded on Friday 22 October 2021.
Thanks to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode. Check out his Upwork profile.
Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.
In Economics Explored Episode 110, Dr Alan Moran, prominent Australian critic of climate change and renewable energy policies, speaks with show host Gene Tunny about the 2021 UN climate change summit, COP26 (i.e. the 26th Conference of the Parities).
About this episode’s guest – Dr Alan Moran
Dr Alan Moran is Director of Regulation Economics, a consultancy firm. He is a noted economist who, in his own words, “has analysed and written extensively from a free market perspective.” Dr Moran was the Director of the Deregulation Unit at the Australian Institute of Public Affairs from 1996 until 2014. He was previously a senior official in Australia’s Productivity Commission and Director of the Australian Government’s Office of Regulation Review. Subsequently, he played a leading role in the development of energy policy and competition policy review as the Deputy Secretary for Energy in the Victorian Government. Dr Moran was educated in the UK and has a PhD in transport economics from the University of Liverpool and degrees from the University of Salford and the London School of Economics.
Thanks to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode. Check out his Upwork profile.
Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.
In Economics Explored EP109, Dr John Atkins, philosopher and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, provides great insights into the nature of truth, highlighting the importance of trust, probabilistic thinking (i.e. thinking not necessarily about truth but our level of certainty in a fact), and the Socratic method. Show host Gene Tunny shares his own views on the nature of truth, including his commitment to being “radically open-minded”, a stance promoted by legendary investor Ray Dalio (see Principles).
About this episode’s guest – Dr John Atkins
Dr John Atkins is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Queensland. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Quietism, and Institutional Integrity. He has a PhD from the University of Queensland.
Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli (book on Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Physics mentioned by Gene)
Thanks to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode. You can check out his Upwork profile here.
Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.
In Economics Explored Episode 108, energy and climate change policy expert Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute explains what COP26, the 2021 climate change conference in Glasgow, is all about and why it’s important. Tony discusses what Net Zero emissions means exactly, the prospects for nuclear energy, and implications for fossil fuel (e.g. coal) dependent economies.
About this episode’s guest – Tony Wood AM
Tony Wood is Program Director for Energy and Climate Change at the Grattan Institute, a leading Australian public policy think tank. Tony has been a Program Director at Grattan since 2011 after 14 years working at Origin Energy in senior executive roles.
From 2009 to 2014 he was also Program Director of Clean Energy Projects at the Clinton Foundation, advising governments in the Asia-Pacific region on effective deployment of large-scale, low-emission energy technologies. In 2008, he was seconded to provide an industry perspective to the first Garnaut climate change review.
In January 2018, Tony was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his significant service to conservation and the environment, particularly in the areas of energy policy, climate change and sustainability. In October 2019, Tony was elected as a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.
Thanks to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode.
Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com. Economics Explored is available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.
In these times of intense debate over COVID-19 and climate change policies, it is important to ask what theories and evidence we can trust – i.e. how do we know what’s true or why trust science? In Episode 101, Economics Explored host Gene Tunny tackles this topic with returning guest Tim Hughes in a first instalment of what will probably end up being a multi-episode conversation.
