(1/13) I began this episode thinking "another 'hot take' on inflation, at least I can zone out while I run"
But this last statement knocked me off my feet, and so I've transcribed (and lightly edited) it for you
"What narrative do we need to be telling about the modern world?"
(2/13) @ezraklein: "What do you think the moral, economic narrative is that would work in [the modern] era? What do you think, when people begin trying to tell a story, they need to be paying attention to, recognizing that it’s more than an economic policy?"
(3/13) @delong: "In some ways, this is, I think, Paul Seabright’s book, 'The Company of Strangers:' that you drop any one of us in the wilderness and we die.
That we really have to be part of a society with a sophisticated division of labor in order to survive at all.
(4/13) And we have this — I suppose I don’t know whether to call it a natural or a societal propensity to engage in gift-exchange relationships with others.
In these relationships, you don’t want to be a moocher but you also don’t want to always be the person doing the work.
(5/13) And so there’s this complicated dance of favors and obligations in which (ideally) everyone feels obligated even though everyone is getting enormous amounts from the relationship.
And then we invent coins.
(6/13) All of a sudden, you can have this gift-exchange relationship not just with your neighbors, your friends, and your kin, but really with everyone everywhere else in the world; that all 8 billion of us can be part of a unified division of labor and an intelligence.
(7/13) We must realize how very lucky we are, that we all are cousins and how we all are involved in this reciprocal exchange of favors for each other.
And we must take that very seriously.
(8/13) Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” argues against mercantilists who say a low-wage economy is going to be a strong economy because prices stay low. You can spend your gold, get lots of work done, produce lots of stuff and project military power.
(9/13) He says, 'wait a minute. The society is made up of people. If most of the people are starving, that’d be a good society?
Shouldn't those who feed, clothe, and care for the rest of society should themselves, be well fed, well clothed, and well cared for?'
(10/13) We must, I think, take seriously that the market economy is a gift-exchange network - possibly only among honest people who trust each other and who really do recognize that they are cousins and we have enormous amounts in common and we owe things to people far away.
(11/13) People in Pakistan wove the carpets that are on my living room floor. Every time I walk on them, I (should) think that I have this wonderful carpet.
And I’m trying to keep the dog from barfing on it, but when it does, we go to considerable effort to clean it off...
(12/13) ...because it is a thing of beauty.
And I really have an obligation to whoever the guy in Pakistan is. I do not know who tied these knots. And whatever I should do, I should take care that they’re somewhere close to the front of my mind."