YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Blyth

lines on the record: 28
first: 2020-07-14
most recent: 2020-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Central Bank can have a meeting tomorrow and the day after every adult citizen has a thousand euros or $1,000 pounds in their bank account. And you do that whilst unemployment persists and you do more if you need to get the economy going and then you stop when the economy is booming. It's as simple as that.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the book, which is becoming acceptable as an idea, is let's give central banks the power to transfer directly to your bank account. So when there's a recession, it's really simple. You support everybody's income. And then when the recession goes away, you stop supporting their income and wages pick up and the rest of the economy and the private sector takes over. It's really simple and all of the evidence we have is that it works because it's actually not empirically any different to doing a combination of quantitative easing and tax rebates. And if you look at the empirical evidence on it, that is a much, much better supporter of our consumption and spending in our economy than all of this quantitative easing and all of these other pyrotechnics that central banks are engaging on. So I think we need to stop messing around and set up a system where the Bank of England, the Fed, the Bank of Japan, the European...”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we look at so many social traumas are caused by recession, causes huge, huge human suffering, and I find it absolutely unforgivable that the economics profession hasn't got an agreed kind of, so COVID hits. You can't predict a pandemic, but we're not surprised that there's a recession, right? We typically get one at least once a decade on average. So why weren't we prepared? And I find this infuriating. And I find it also infuriating that the system we've become reliant on, which is central banks cutting interest rates, is an accident of institutional history. The only reason we have central banks cutting interest rates in response to recession is because central banks were set up in the 17 and 1800s to provide liquidity to the banking system and to finance government. That's why they do asset purchases and cut interest rates. It is clearly not the optimal way to run monetary policy. And one of the proposals we make”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got plenty more. Well, the other thing, you know, I studied economics not because it's fascinating. I mean, it is fascinating, but I mainly studied it. It started with moral outrage, which is, you know, recessions are extraordinarily damaging phenomena.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interest rate on deposits unchanged, or you even raise it, and you cut the rate of interest on lending and targeted lending. This is rocket fuel. But the key point is nobody is onto this and nobody is saying, how do we target these loans? Now, if you said, I'm going to give the private sector 15-year loans at minus 2% to finance green energy investment, you will make our economy sustainable within 15 years. I mean, that is as close a thing in economics to a certainty. And we can do it.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, which is related to a Green New Deal, you know, and this is where I really, really think we all have a moral obligation to do something about this, right? So because I actually think that the whole challenge of sustainability is solves our economic problem. It's been presented the other way around, right? People go, oh my God, we've got this huge challenge of climate change. What are we going to do? It's going to require huge sacrifices. I view it completely the other way around, which is, thank God we have this great opportunity to do loads and loads of investment spending because actually our economic system is crying out for investment spending. What do I mean by that? It goes back to this point about where interest rates are. We seem to be concerned by the fact that central banks have zero interest rates. This actually, and we show how to do this in the book, but if you use dual interest rates, which the European Central Bank has started to do, which is if you leave...”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over that data, and we could effectively auction our data. So if we recognize that as a community, we have a huge amount of valuable data. And so we're going to auction it in the same way that we auction Spectrum to mobile telephony companies. And as a consequence of that, that then gives us an asset that we can distribute. And this is a way of trying to, you know, we've thought an awful lot about these ideas of universal basic income. And we've thought that this is a way which a lot of this is about framing an economic policy. And the criticism of universal basic income is it's kind of something for nothing. Well, this is which people are resistant to, this actually is about something that you own and just getting paid for it, which lands very differently in terms of how people perceive it.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the data dividend here is, I mean, again, so a common theme amongst all the policies really is to try and either broaden distribution or access to income and cash flows in different situations for households and also to try and change, to broaden the distribution of wealth to give people more protection. And the data dividend is a really simple idea, which is we have these huge technology companies who are making incredibly profitable. They have monopolistic characteristics. They're not simple monopolies in the old sense because a lot of what they provide is for free, but they certainly have monopolistic characteristics. The interesting thing is that almost their asset base, what gives them this value is in fact ours, which is it's our data. And all we're really suggesting is, why don't we enforce some of our property rights?”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By virtue of the arithmetic, over 15 or 20 years you can repay the debt and you've got the assets. And we could distribute within 18 months, we could distribute 15% of GDP to people in the economy who have no assets currently, and then they would be able to participate and share in the creation of national wealth. The idea really is that simple. It's very difficult. Actually, I don't think we've heard a compelling counter-argument.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because all you need to do is generate a positive return on your investment, and that actually strengthens the state balance sheet. So there's no issue about the net assets of the state go up if you borrow negative real and you invest that positive real, right? That's just arithmetic. It's the law of arithmetic. You can't disagree with it. So what Mark and I are saying is, well, if the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund can generate a 6% return over 20 years or Harvard's endowment can, or the Wellcome Trust in the UK, we have all of these charities, independent organizations, sovereign wealth funds. Why can't the British government, the Irish government, the German government, the American government, why can't we all do this as a state? And the answer is we could easily do it. We could issue 15% of GDP tomorrow in the bond market. We could buy a diversified basket of global assets.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To try and tackle wealth inequality. And the challenge there is a very simple one, which is to say, how can we give ownership of assets to the large majority of our population who have very insignificant levels of asset ownership? Because in an increasingly uncertain world, asset ownership helps you in terms of the quality of your life. And so one of the interesting things, and we have to get into a bit of economics here, but one of the most defining characteristics of our current economy, and you will, as an economist, but will be well aware of this, Linda, is how low the real cost of capital is to the state. Now, what does that mean in English? It means that the British government today, for example, can borrow for 30 years at negative real interest rates. That means the private sector is paying the government to borrow, right? Now, all of us economists are pulling out our hair because we're tearing our hair out, going, why on earth aren't we doing lots of investment spending?”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we kind of have identified these three legitimate areas of concern which are relevant to all of us in our societies and where there is a very, very strong cross-party consensus, which is we have to do something about the sustainability of our planet. We have to tackle wealth inequality. And we have to try and bring recessions, keep recessions as short as possible, causing as least damage as possible. So inequality, there is a very, very strong consensus, but there is no real consensus about what to do about it. And one of the kind of benchmarks we gave ourselves is we said, right, we need real policies that can tackle these problems quickly, that will be effective, and that are simple to explain, right? And now the idea of a national, and we want a national wealth fund significantly.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have is part of the reason that we're seeing tribalism exploited by the political elite elites is that we lack motivating ethical ideologies. So we lack a political ideologies that people can be motivated by, which they think are going to positively change their societies, positively change their societies. And the moral questions that we're all concerned about are about the sustainability of the planet, about the scale of inequality. I think whatever your perspective, wherever you sit on the political spectrum, a situation where you can have 90% of vast quantities of wealth concentrated in the hands of 1% of the population is clearly not very functional. So we have moral outrage over the climate. We have moral outrage over inequality. And I think the other very important factor, which is”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a great question. So I guess our claim would not really be that it's not like we're measuring the frequency and quantity of moral outrage and trying to say there's more now than there has been historically. We wouldn't be really making that claim. What we're intrigued rather is trying to understand the form of moral outrage that we're observing currently. Because as Mark describes this kind of history of forms of capitalism, and we should get him to talk through it where you've kind of had three types of capitalism. And whenever we've had these crashes in the economy, we've had manifestations of moral outrage. But if you think about it, it becomes in many ways it's really clear to us what's happening in the current environment. And I think this is the kind of optimistic element of the book. So one really important theme that we have.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this because that, to my knowledge, in the literature, we don't find identification of this. So people are aware in the literature angle that fans get angry, but they haven't made this link that says actually it appears to be the case that most of us don't wander around obsessing about our national identity all the time. But you can switch on this little minority of individuals who can kind of trigger a very strong sense. And once it's brought to our attention, it's like everybody turns a certain color or shade. So this propensity is a hardwire and very, very powerful propensity.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you separate a room full of children based on which their preference is. And you would literally get both group identity and potentially even wrongdoing towards the other group. And these studies have been reinforced now where they've even done it with neuroscience, where they've done experiments which based on, they will just say, you are part of group A, you are part of group B, where it has no characteristics, but your sense of allegiance affects you and it affects our decision making. I mean, it is very, very interesting. Let's put it like that. Now, it's clearly functional because groups are more successful than individuals ultimately, but it has very dangerous dimensions to it quite clearly as well. So our propensity, our willingness to create the other, as it were, appears to be very, very deeply hardwired. And the innovation, I think, in our book is to identify the role that anger.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's really fascinating, Linda. I mean, if you look at the literature and social psychology, there was research that's been done that's very well established now in the 1960s, which was effectively the minimum groups paradigm, and which was looking at this whole issue about what caused tribal identities and what triggers could cause human beings to form groups. And it is frightening our propensity to break into groups and that we will make groups based on utterly trivial distinctions. And our sense of group identity and our behavior as a group, even based on really spurious premises. So for example, they took classrooms of children and divided them into which one preferred the two abstract expression as clay and kandinsky, you know, which are two abstract expressionist Russian artists.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“rage. It is an age-old, evolved instinct, which is a precursor to violence. And that's why the bit that we are very, very concerned about is how politicians are exploiting this to motivate what are minorities, but a minority identity regulators in order to tactically win elections. And that's a very important strain and dimension to what we're trying to analyze and understand.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the civil rights movement. And he actually says he's being interviewed on CNN and he pretty much says, what would it say about our society if people weren't protesting? And that's exactly that Greek idea, which is you're supposed to get angry. So in the ways that Churchill said it, ironically in this context that it should be a Churchill quote, it's appropriate that people are affronted by these acts of injustice and violence. But having said that in the sense that it's the measure of your character, the anger of tribes, and this is really, really important, I mean, again, if you read some of the social psychology literature on the history of this, you know, sporting events in the ancient times and in recent events as well can turn very quickly to violence, brutal violence. And that is indicative. We have to be really, really careful about this tribal.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, it's a very astute observation as a quote because we kind of, if you take this idea of public anger having these two faces, and indeed private anger, what makes you angry tells something about your character. And so this whole point of the function as human beings that anger serves, anger serves multiple functions. And one of the important functions is this whole point about recognition of an injustice. And this dates all the way back to Aristotle. The Greek philosophers thought anger was an appropriate emotion because it identified an ethical wrongdoing. And what I find so interesting about this and why it's such a perceptive concept is there's a great YouTube video at the moment with Cornell West, who I think is he at Princeton now anyway, who's been a long time intellectual advocate.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, you have this sort of duality where they seem like opposites. And then the second component, so you have private and public are very different, but then the two faces of public anger. We have this moral righteousness we've described, but also, and this is the football reference, we came upon this idea of the angry fan, which anybody who's gone to a sort of big sporting event will identify with. And they're a very curious phenomenon. And why do they exist? And we sort of identified this as they become identity regulators. So this is the typology that kind of is a starting point for setting us up to understand anger.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the self-held books, all covering anger. But nowhere really did we find a satisfactory typology or synthesis. And we kind of threw an interesting process, we came up with this typology, which is it's almost like there's an angelic and a devilish form of anger. And the first kind of binary form is this between public and private. So what's really interesting is when you see private public expressions of anger like extinction rebellion protesters or the righteous anger of Black Lives Matter, it's actually argued justified, there's almost pride in the anger because it's righteous anger. Let's put it like that. In the private sphere it's typically associated with shame, right? If you had a colleague who was suddenly getting angry, you'd take them to one side and say, is everything okay at home? It tells us about an internal.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first thing I think that's important to understanding the thesis, and then Mark can sort of pick this up, is the concept of anger itself. So one of the things that's intriguing about anger is it's so prevalent. You know, children not know what anger is. Every human being has experienced or felt anger at some point in time. And yet, we're very inarticulate when it comes to anger. So if I said to you, what are the different types of anger? What function does anger serve? Why do we get angry? Is there good anger? Is there bad anger? Is private anger the same as public anger? We don't have a given vocabulary for making sense of this. It's just sort of assumed that we understand it. And so the first part of the thesis was to try and make sense of anger. And we did a load of reading. And anger is covered in so many disciplines. There's neuroscience, there's moral philosophy, there's social psychology, the psychology.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we just really felt that we had an insight into what was happening in the world. That was one key thing from a kind of political economy perspective, even though our starting points in some respects were different. And then the crux was a discovery that anger this very strange emotion that everybody is familiar with, but nobody really understands, is the arc that brings it all together. I think that was really the genesis of this book.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm kidding. But yeah, we're very different, but we work really well together. And one thing that's great about Mark as a collaborator is there's very little ego. So I think we've got a nice mix. I mean, you'll know this, Linda, when you're trying to collaborate with people. It's really hard if people are very precious about what they say or possessive about it. And we just really hit it off well. I think though, that's the sort of, you know, the personal case for it. The idea”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. I mean, I think there's no doubt our sort of friendship was a big part, no two ways about it. And it's a very interesting exercise in collaboration, I find working with Mark, because I think, and this will hopefully this will come through and it comes through in the book, we are very different in many ways, not just because he supports football teams that aren't going anywhere.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eric Lonergan to discuss their new book Angrinomics, in which they explore the rising phenomena of anger in our societies and how we might be able to use economics to make things better. It was really interesting episode and they spoke to Linda Yu, economist and broadcaster, and we hope you enjoy it.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello podcast listeners, it's Connor from Intelligence Squared, and before we go to this week's episode, I want to let you know that very special offer we have for all our listeners. As many of you will be aware, we have migrated to the online space in recent months and launched a new subscription service called Intelligence Squared Plus. We've been having some fantastic debates and discussions from Mehdi Hassan on Iran to Thomas Picketty on capital and ideology. So if you would like to take part in these events, ask your questions to some of our speakers and even watch back all our previous events, then please go to intelligence square dot com and subscribe today with a special 20% off discount using the code podcast. That's PODCAST and join us over the next few months as we deal with issues such as taming the coronavirus pandemic and look at the upcoming election in the United States with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. So get started today and join the debate via the link in our podcast description. And on this week's episode we were joined by Professor Mark Blythe.”
2020-07-14 · Intelligence Squared · Angrynomics: Why The World is So Angry, with Mark Byth, Eric Lonergan and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source