Meaningful Economics: Making the Science of Prosperity More Human | Bart Wilson
This one is about rethinking economics. I speak with Bart Wilson, professor of economics and law at Chapman University (California) about experimental economics and what it has to say about how societies prosper. I also pick his brains about some current affairs, such as the growth of the Canadian government, Javier Milei, Carbon Taxes and much more!
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Bart shares fascinating research from experimental economics, including the famous trust game and studies on policing theft, and the origins of property. The conversation covers everything from the challenges of designing effective economic policies, to the crucial role of trust and the moral dimension of markets, to why freedom, creativity, and commerce are so deeply interconnected. Discover why our sense of “mine” and “yours” is unique in the animal kingdom, and what that means for everything from trade to high-trust societies.
Perfect for anyone curious about how basic economic ideas shape our politics, culture, and daily lives, this episode brings a fresh, reflective perspective that goes far beyond numbers and charts. Don’t miss it!
Find out more about the guest:
https://www.bartjwilson.com/
The Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy
Topics discussed:
The State of the World: Room for Improvement, Room for Reflection
Opening the episode, Wilson reminds listeners that while it’s easy to focus on what’s broken in politics or institutions, we must also see how far humanity has come. “We are flourishing in a way that human species has not flourished in over 200 years ago… we’ve achieved a lot, made our lives more comfortable, more healthy, living longer lives.” The contemporary tendency to emphasize crises can make us miss the broader arc of progress—a theme which threads through the rest of the episode.
Experimental Economics: Learning from the Lab
Wilson is best known for experimental economics, a field that uses controlled experiments to observe real human behavior in economic contexts. Rather than just theorize, Wilson creates laboratory games and virtual worlds where individuals respond to incentives, revealing how “property comes about… when it does come about, how it doesn’t come about.” His humility shines through: “I’m learning how little I truly know about why people do what they do.”
These experiments have tackled topics from policing theft to trust—fundamental issues for both markets and societies.
Trust Games and Human Nature
Wilson’s description of the quintessential “trust game” reveals a gap between economic theory and actual behavior. Two participants are given money: the first can keep it or pass it to the second, and whatever’s passed is tripled. The second can return some (or none) of the money to the first. Classic economic models suggest everyone would act selfishly, but Wilson found that “about half” do trust, and “two thirds [of recipients] reciprocate.” Even when anonymity is total, humans overwhelm theory by extending trust and returning favors, demonstrating innate social preferences that economics can’t easily explain.
Incentives, Institutions, and Moral Dilemmas: A Lesson from Policing
Wilson discusses experiments around “policing theft”—for example, how rules allowing police departments to keep confiscated assets create perverse incentives. When officers can enrich their department with seized assets, they are more likely to confiscate, illustrating the power of institutional incentives. Change the rule so that police don’t directly benefit, and behavior shifts toward prosocial outcomes.
This highlights that the structure of our institutions matters greatly: “If you give people power to confiscate stuff, they will do it.” Policy design isn’t just about intention, but about the real incentives that arise.
Emergence of Norms and Rules: From Whaling to Modern Societies
A fascinating example comes from the study of property rules among whalers—who, without government oversight on the high seas, evolved shared understandings of who “owns” a caught whale. Wilson’s experiments found that people regularly, and spontaneously, form such allocation norms based on the context, proof that humans can coordinate to minimize conflict over resources. This aligns with Hayek’s insight: the best knowledge is often “local,” and top-down solutions miss the nuance participants create themselves.
It’s a model for thinking about environmental policy too: wherever costs and benefits are local, decentralization works, while global problems like climate change require mechanisms that fairly track who creates which costs, and incentivize innovation rather than just impose controls.
Property: More Than a Right, A Moral Foundation
Moving to his book The Property Species, Wilson recasts property’s origins. He contests the legalistic idea that property rights simply flow from laws or sovereigns. Kids, for example, intuitively assert “mine!” before being taught. What’s nontrivial—and crucial for culture—is learning that someone else can say “mine” too.
Wilson posits that property, at its root, is a relationship not just of exclusion (“keep off my lawn!”), but of mutual recognition—respecting both “mine” and “yours”. Animals can defend territory, but only humans organize trade and markets, which requires this double-sided recognition. In Wilson’s words, “you are never going to get trade off the ground if you don’t have this notion of mine and yours.” Without it, peaceful cohabitation breaks down and we revert to “might makes right.”
Trust, High-Trust Societies, and Prosperity
Trust doesn’t just grease the gears of economic transactions—it’s the invisible infrastructure supporting innovation and cooperation. Both the trust game and real-world examples (like Sean’s business relationships) reinforce how prosperity depends on a culture where people largely fulfill obligations, even when enforcement is impractical.
Societies nurturing trust and respect for property can focus on productivity and creativity rather than constant vigilance. Trust isn’t just developmental; it’s existential for societies that hope to flourish economically and socially.
Trade, Specialization, and the Morality of Markets
Wilson is critical of the way economics is usually taught—emphasizing scarcity and self-interest, rather than the moral aspects of voluntary trade and division of labor. Trade is not just practical; it’s fundamentally moral, a way of aligning interests so “I’m doing something for you and you’re doing something for me.” Specialization and market exchange aren’t just techniques—they are community-building, peace-making human achievements.
He draws the comparison with chimpanzees, who—even with 95% of our DNA—don’t trade in the human sense. The market economy’s achievements are rooted in social and moral capacities unique to our species.
Free Markets, Liberty, and the Creative Individual
Both Hayek and Friedman are cited as understanding the deep interdependence of liberty and free markets. Creativity demands freedom—not just political rights, but the trust and institutional predictability to try, fail, and try again. As Wilson says, “Freedom, prosperity, creativity, it’s all… one… virtuous circle.”
But because freedom’s benefits are often “invisible” (or show themselves only when lost), society must keep reminding itself why these first principles matter—even when they’re taken for granted.
Critiques, Ideologies, and the Value of Commonality
Today, Wilson observes, much social science and policy discussion focuses on differences—between men and women, Americans and Japanese, political groups, and more. While diversity matters, we often underplay the “common humanity” that supports our systems of commerce and mutual benefit.
Attacks on property or free markets, Wilson warns, risk undermining the shared moral framework that makes peace and prosperity possible. If we abolish property, “might makes right” fills the vacuum.
The State and Its Growth: Realities and Limits
Addressing issues of government growth (from Canada to the U.K. to the U.S.), Wilson expresses skepticism about the prospect of reining in the state. His pragmatic optimism: as long as individual freedom, property rights, and the permissionless enterprise they enable aren’t fundamentally destroyed, creative individuals can “grow faster than [government] really takes over.” Policy changes that enable rather than restrict dynamism (for example, Austin’s relaxation of housing regulation) offer hope, regardless of state expansion elsewhere.
New Generations, New Moral Economics
In closing, Wilson expresses hope that today’s economics students are demanding a more moral, human-centered curriculum. He believes the future of meaningful economics lies in listening to these voices and recentering on first principles: trust, cooperation, the social function of property, and the moral dimensions of trade.
Conclusion: The Human Science of Prosperity
This episode distills the heart of economics—not as a “dismal science,” but as the science of how free, moral, creative people solve the ultimate human problem: how to flourish together in peace.
Bart Wilson’s work reminds us that trust, cooperation, and property aren’t just technicalities. They’re the evolved foundation of everything from innovation to everyday civility. Policies and institutions matter—but so do the subtle, social norms and moral intuitions that sustain civilization itself.
The next time you enjoy both liberty and prosperity, remember: there’s deep meaning in the ordinary exchanges, commitments, and trust we build each day.
For more, explore Bart Wilson’s books or visit the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University.
Let us know if you’d like a future blog post focusing on a specific aspect—like Wilson’s trust experiments, the modern debates on climate policy, or the philosophical background of property rights.
Transcript:
Sean Rasmussen:
This is Viewpoints a deeper look into the ideas that shape our politics and culture. Break free from the orthodoxies of mainstream media and hear diverse perspectives from interesting people across the political spectrum. Bart Wilson is professor of economics and law at Chapman University and director of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. His most recent book is Meaningful Economics Making the Science of Prosperity More Human. Bart Wilson, welcome to Viewpoints.
Bart Wilson:
Thank you for having me.
Sean Rasmussen:
I just want to know what you thought about my opener there in terms of characterizing a lot of what’s going on in elite institutions right now.
Bart Wilson:
Well, it’s easy to get preoccupied with all the things that we need to improve about our social, moral and political lives. But in doing so, we seem to overlook just the incredible time this is to be alive and to be human beings on this planet. And so we’ve achieved a lot and made our lives more comfortable, we’ve made our lives more healthy, and we’re living longer lives, and we are flourishing in a way that human species has not flourished in over 200 years ago. And so there’s a lot to be very reflective about in terms of how well we’re doing.
Sean Rasmussen:
And that’s what I really like about your work. I heard you talk on a different show, and I really liked what you had to say, and the piece you did about property blew my mind. We’re going to get to that eventually, but I thought maybe we could start with something you’re known for, which is experimental economics. Can you talk a bit about what that is and what got you interested in that?
Bart Wilson:
So experimental economics is the laboratory method of inquiry where we design models of how we think economics works, and then we pay undergraduates, based upon the rules and incentives that we create, to do what they think is in their best interests. In this exercise, for me, mostly that involves building kind of virtual worlds, kind of miniature versions of different parts of economics, and I want to see what people do with them. I spend a lot of time working on how property comes about, when it does come about, how it doesn’t come about, what are the rules behind it and how it works. And. And it’s really up to the participants to do what is in their interest. And most of the time I’m learning how little I truly know about why people do what they do.
Sean Rasmussen:
That’s fascinating. I know that you’ve done studies on things like policing theft, building trust, and rejecting unfair deals. Can you tell me about one of those studies?
Bart Wilson:
Oh, sure. So there’s a very basic game in economics called the trust game, which, where you ask one person to decide how much of their money would they like to invest in a second person that they’re pat that they’re paired with. And so they both could just end the game with $10. Or the first mover could say, no, I’m going to take my $10, invest it in the second person, and the experimenter triples that 10 into $30 by the time it arrives to the second person. And then the second person has to decide how much money, if any, to give back to the first person and how much to give to themselves.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay?
Bart Wilson:
And so if the first person takes it all, then the second person goes home with $40 and the first person goes home with nothing. Or the second person could decide, let me take that $30 and split it equally, in which case he gives $15 back, the first mover and has adds 15 to his $10 and now he has 25. And, and so if you trust and invest that $10 in the second mover, both people are made better off when the second mover returns some of that money back to the first mover. But economics has this basic model of kind of predicting based upon your material self interest, what are you going to do? And so that means if there’s any money transferred to the second mover, they’re going to take it all, which case the first mover says, I’m not going to send you any money and everybody goes home with $10. And that’s not what happens. And this is kind of a shock to economists. Like, why are that people not behaving this way to ordinary people, this seems pretty, pretty natural to help somebody out. And then when they’ve trusted you and invested something in you, that you give something back to them for doing so, giving you that opportunity to be better off. And so the question is, why does that happen? And we try to run different treatments and conditions to understand what’s going on. What’s that, how does that basic principle work? It was a model that kind of shook economists a little bit and got surprised by how regularly people trust, which is usually about half of the people. And then 2/3 of the second movers respond by giving money back to the first mover. So 2/3 of them to it. Now it’s not everyone. One third take the money and run. Okay, but, but these are anonymous and they’re done through a computer terminal. And so you don’t know any names, no faces, and still one half trust people. And two thirds reciprocate that trust, which is pretty high and also fairly Robust. I’ve been running versions of experiment and other people started running it before me. And like over 20 years, those ratios of half sending and two thirds reciprocating is pretty robust.
Sean Rasmussen:
Interesting. And I guess that works for other things too, like policing theft and unfair deals.
Bart Wilson:
Yes. So the policing theft was an interesting problem. So when police come across resources that have been used in a crime in different states, depending on the rules, you can just confiscate that money and then put it towards your policing resources. So a lot of police departments love that because this is a way to fund them, very extravagant and get all the best new toys to go out and policing. But it puts these police officers in a, a bad situation where they have to decide do I take this money or do I let the people who are involved, what they’re doing, get to keep it. And so when it’s, when they, when it’s posed as you, you or me, they’re going to take, they’re going to go for themselves. And that means make their police departments better off. And so my experiment was designed to see if will people do that and let’s change the rules where they don’t get to keep this money, what happens? And when they don’t have those rules, they will gladly help other people out. They’ll help all the people that are running policing out because there’s nothing in it for them. But when they have the power, you give them that power to confiscate other people’s resources, they’re going to use it because it’s, they’ve been incentivized to choose themselves or somebody else. And so that kind of tension is, it’s, it’s important so people will act in their own interest. The question is, do we want to put people in that position, like particularly people with policing powers to be, to benefit themselves or, you know, most people, when if there’s nothing that, no way to enrich themselves at the expense of other people are going to be very sociable and help other people out.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay, interesting. And that tells you a lot about how you might want to structure some of those institutions.
Bart Wilson:
Yes. So if you give people power to confiscate stuff, they will do it. And so it’s an example of having a bad rule in the situation of policing, which is about basically who gets these resources. Do the police department get them or do we let the people get to keep them?
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay. In that case, though, like if you’re saying, like if a, if a cop pulls over someone doing a crime or something and they’ve got some money there in the car or something like that. Is that what you’re talking about?
Bart Wilson:
If it’s part of what they’re being so being investigated for being illegal, yes. Then they can confiscate the resources in some states. Okay, so generally this is the context of drug enforcement.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay.
Bart Wilson:
So it’s this part of the crime that you have the money and so therefore that can be confiscated while you’re being charged with the crime. And so it’s whether or not the money is part of what you’re doing and then who gets to benefit, benefit from that.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay, and how would you get around that just by saying, okay, when you confiscate this, this illegal money, you just put it to charity or something or what would you, how would you get around that?
Bart Wilson:
Well, so the, so the question is whether or not the police departments themselves get to keep this for their own reasons. And so yes, the state can keep it and use it for things, but the question is, does it directly go into the, the revenue of the police department?
Sean Rasmussen:
That’s what makes a difference?
Bart Wilson:
Yes, every single. So that’s why we have this kind of run where you get the police officers have the fanciest cars and the souped up fans and the SWAT teams are all really highly decked out and because they had a lot of money from these things and maybe that’s, you know, second thought. So yeah, it’s whether or not the money directly can go into to the police departments themselves. And it creates problems if a police department is dependent on that money. So now when they pull people over like, oh, oh, we need some more money for what we’re doing. Let me see if I can find some reason to create a crime, see, investigate a crime here and confiscate the resource.
Sean Rasmussen:
Interesting. I know that in your experiments you’ve observed that people form norms and moral boundaries spontaneously in a way, like these things just kind of emerge. Can you explain a little bit about that and what that tells us about human nature?
Bart Wilson:
So one project kind of directly on this is kind of seems a little obscure, but a law professor, Robert Ellison at Yale was interested in how is it that people, whalers solve their problems of who gets the whale when they’re out in the open open seas, because there’s no government out there, there’s no one to enforce this. But somehow it’s just not a free for all out there. They actually come, they have some set of rules for this. And so what he observed was that when the prey were right, whales were off in the North Atlantic, they’re called right whales because they’re the right whale to hunt. That is, they. They have their baleen, so they don’t have teeth when they die, they don’t sink, they don’t fight really hard, and there are big pods of them. And so they’re just the ones to go after. And so the rule that he noticed was that if the harpoon was in the whale and attached to your boat, it was called iron holds a whale. If as long as your harpoon was in the whale and attached to your boat, it’s yours, you can hold it. No one else will go after that whale. But if it got away or you’re, you know, you’re not, you’re a little bit inept. You had a bad luck that day and it got. It was open for anyone else to go after. So it was fast. How fast? It’s yours, loose somebody else’s. But when the whaling moved off the coast of North America and the prey were sperm whales, now they have teeth, they’re going to dive. And so you had to attach a drogue, some, some buoyancy to your harpoon and you didn’t want to attach to your boat. And then you had to be in pursuit. So as long as you’re in pursuit of your whale, it was called iron holds the whale, then that it was your whale and no one else else would go after it. And so they have different rules based upon the prey and the circumstances and the context that they implemented. Decide who gets what. Well, this law professor was noticing. He’s just looking through history. And so it’s kind of an ex post rationalization of why you see what’s going on here. And I thought that’s what an experiment’s for. I can ex ante design a world where there are right whales and sperm whales. And I can ask my undergraduates to go out there looking for them and seeing what do they come up with any rules? And if they do, what kind of rules do they come up with?
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay.
Bart Wilson:
And so it was fast fish, loose fish is pretty intuitive that it’s mine and, you know, kind of as long as I’m attached to it. And we found that if people wanted to find the resolution to this conflict, they found those rules.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay.
Bart Wilson:
What I didn’t find was the second rule. And that kind of forced me to learn a few things that maybe I could have implemented some other features of the world into the experiment because they were missing. But what was really interesting is the conversations that they had about what rule, because Literally two people could be saying, I think the rule should be the first one. Whoever attaches to it gets it. And other ones say, no, no, I’m the one chasing it. That’s the way the rule should be. And so they have to work those things out and they’re. And what that means is it’s conditional on those local circumstances. It’s kind of conditional on what group of people are you in. It’s also conditional on the resources that you’re interested in. All those things come together for a set of rules and we try to settle on ones that minimize the conflict.
Sean Rasmussen:
I’ve been interested lately in Hayek and his idea of the knowledge problem. I just found that interesting how knowledge kind of resides in this bottom up way where people who are right in the middle of the situation have the best information about how to make the decision or not. It reminds me a little bit of that kind of thing. Do you think there are around these rules that you’re discovering and the emergent order like this, can that say something about maybe current models of economic policy, say around even things like inequality, climate, innovation or anything like that?
Bart Wilson:
Well, so the big issue in the Great Society, the open Society, however you want to describe it, is how is it that we coordinate the activities of all these different people who all know things about their local, their local conditions and their local circumstances? And that’s the problem that needs to be solved. How do we get this, how do we get this together so the people who know what they’re working on can communicate what they need to communicate to the other people in the system, in the society? And that’s the problem we have to solve. And so some problems, if the benefits and the costs are local, that’s the, that’s when you really want to reside everything locally, let these people decide. And so problems that are bigger then require some way of feeding up to that. And that’s where the challenges come. So climate change is one of those. Right? So polluting on one side of the world is still adding pollution to the entire planet. And so how do you do that, coordinating that? It’s not to say that there isn’t a way to do this within a country even, but even then you’re going to, you know, you have different interests, different states and how that works. But within a country there are mechanisms that experimental economists have worked with and trying to understand how we can basically tie the costs to the people who actually generate it and then bake, then internalize that. So they then adjust their output accordingly and they’re exciting things that people are coming up with. You know, the problem with pollution is once it’s out there, it’s like whose is it? But if they can find a way to tag it, then you know exactly how much is going out there. And you can create a mechanism saying look, our targets in this geographic area are we’re going to have this much pollution here. We’re going to grandfather what you have been doing and now that’s your proportion of it. And now we’re going to slowly shrink how much of that can be put out there. Now trade off amongst yourselves who gets to. So if you can discover new technologies that reduce your pollution, then you are going to benefit. And so it gives you the private incentive to look for those things when the total market for polluting. But it, it’s necessarily you have to do that tracking. And that’s the hard part. That’s why there’s a problem in the first place.
Sean Rasmussen:
And I guess people like Milton Friedman or Hayek would be pretty skeptical of, of even creating those systems in the first place because they’re probably going to be wrong and they’re probably going to interfere with the natural way that the market can solve these problems in the first place.
Bart Wilson:
Yes, but I think it’s pretty well accepted like a carbon tax is the way to think about how to do this that we can find if we can find a way that we can track and measure all of that’s being generated that we can find a way that we can reduce this and you can make that revenue neutral in other senses and things like that too. But I mean the alternative is, and this is largely the way the world has gone is you, you, this is a world in which you adapt and we just got to find ways to adapt to the problem. And look, I mean if you look at the data the, you know, United States and Europe’s all of our emissions are going like this. And so in fact, if I saw correctly we’re at back at levels that are wouldn’t have been thought of, you know, 10, 15 years ago how much pollution and carbon has been being added to the, to the planet through the atmosphere. It’s much lower than you might expect. But that’s because we, we allow commerce to thrive and became rich and we can come up with these technologies. If you’re a poor country, I think there’s a reason to be concerned about saying well no, you don’t get to do that. Yeah, because they will also find a way if what the richer they get to also work on their Emissions. So it’s, that’s a, that’s a particularly tough problem because it’s a world problem, because it’s a difficult problem to assign who is the one creating the costs and things like that. But yeah, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be solutions to this.
Sean Rasmussen:
Sure. In your previous book, the Property Species, you investigate the origins of the idea of property and you argue that property is not a legal invention necessarily, but a moral and cognitive perhaps like an evolutionary adaptation, and that it’s kind of a crucial component of peaceful cohabitation. Can you explain a little bit about how our senses of yours and mine develop?
Bart Wilson:
So the common language in the legal academy and in economics and is we used talk about this notion of property rights which implies that they are assigned by somebody and imposed on how people work. And that is the way it has to work in some sense at a, at a political level. But it doesn’t operate that way necessarily at the individual level and an individual embedded in the community level. I mean, the government deciding what property rights isn’t going to be the reason why a kid decides not to steal or steal or to steal a bike. Like there’s something else going on there than it is coming from our political level of our society that in how property works. And that’s what I wanted to explore and to bring out that anything that any notion that we’re looking at at the political level has to have something starting down on the individual level, in an individual level embedded in a community. And so where we learn those rules, and this is, you know, every kid has to learn from their mentor the rules of when they can call something mine and not mine. You know, kids don’t have to be taught to say mine when they grab something. They seem to do that all on their own. No one says put some little toy in their hand, you know, say mine, you know, make this. That’s your. And, and no, they do that. What they have to be taught is that’s not yours, that some, somebody else can call that mine. And that is the essential part of property. It’s putting the mine and the yours together and understanding that reciprocal situation that we live in every day. And I think that’s also slightly missing when you talk about property rights. It’s only about what you can do and maybe not do, but it’s not really about jointly recognizing that other people can say about other things. This is mine. And to me, that that’s not, that’s not yours. So it’s, I think it’s Gotta start somehow in terms of the individual in a community. And those communities, you know, are gonna work together to create something political across them. But we don’t spend enough time thinking about what it is at the ground level of an individual in their community and how these rules of property come about. So my book is about trying to understand where that might come from. Why is it that human beings are doing this? Can we kind of give some sense by looking at our primate cousins, you know, chimpanzees and other ones? What kind of notions do they have, what kind of facilities they have? Think about mine, yours. And I mean, I’ve come to the conclusion that basically only human beings have this notion of property of mine and yours. It might look like wolves, when they urinate and defend their territory, have property, but they don’t actually say, that’s yours, they just play, this is mine, don’t come here, we’ll fight. The same is true about baboons and their harems and their females. Sure, they don’t go out. They don’t say, that’s yours. They’re just saying, don’t go after mine. And so it’s food, territory and mates. You see, it looks like there’s notions of property, but it’s really only about excluding others from it, not about conveying a notion that there’s something of yours to operate and do as, as you wish. And then the other difference is we do it with a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t food, territory and mates, like all these chattels, you know, my movable things, animals and things like that. And so why is it that’s the case? And so I wanted to pose the question, that’s not just excluding people. We’re finding the set of things by which we can say, that’s not mine. And that is the hard question to figure out where that comes from. And I come, come down. That is, unless you have this abstract notion of thought where you can think about connecting a person to a thing and that this is a relationship that extends to the future, then you’re not really going to get a notion of property off the ground. Here’s why this is important to economics. Because at its core, you are never going to get trade off the ground if you don’t have this notion of mine and yours. And what do I. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s also quite famous. Adam Smith recognized this. Matt Ridley talked about it in his book the Rational Optimist. We’re the only species that also trade one thing for another thing. So why is it that that’s the case? Well, it’s. I would argue it’s because we’re the only ones who have a notion of mine and thine, of mine and yours. And so that becomes real important when we actually sit down to trade. We can say, this thing is not mine, it’s yours. And then you say, this thing is not mine, is yours, about something else. And all we had to do was say it, say those magic words, and now it’s happened. But we have to have mine in yours to get the fact that we’re moving and trading these two things between two people. And. And we do it simply by saying something. But our saying something changes how we see the world and our relationship between us. And so that’s why property and trade are only found in human beings and no other animal. We got this way of just using our minds to envision the world being different than it is right now. I have possession of this thing and you have possession of something else. And now we’re going to change it.
Sean Rasmussen:
One of the things that fascinated me about the property ideas that you talk about is that it might be the case that without property, it’s really hard to have peaceful cohabitation. Wonder if you could explore that idea a little bit.
Bart Wilson:
Most people’s nature of property is that you’re like Yosemite Sam, sitting on your porch, saying, you’re forcing me to use force if you come after my stuff. And so that somehow, if you’re going to use this levers of government to enforce properties or people aren’t taking it, that property is necessarily tied to this notion of violence. Somebody gets to use violence at some point in time. I don’t think that’s quite right, because what property is at its core is that I’m respecting the custom that that is mine and that is yours. And then some people are not respecting a custom. And that’s when the notion of violence needs to be used. And so it’s not in the custom of property itself, but in the violations of it. And those are two different things, because the whole point of deciding that this is mine and that’s yours, just like it is with the whalers, is that we’re not fighting about it. And so one of the reasons why we come up with property is so that we’re not fighting. And so I argue that peace is this final cause of why we have this notion of property. It means that we’re not spending time defending our stuff, fighting people off, that we can be confident that these. This is Mine and that’s yours. So the violence is actually in the violation of the particular custom. And that’s how you can differentiate it as being necessarily violent. Island it’s necessary only to the extent that we are fallible human beings who sometimes can’t control ourselves and want to take things from other people who claim them as their own.
Sean Rasmussen:
And this can be seen across cultures and different types of government structures too, right?
Bart Wilson:
Yeah, anthropologists, they’re fairly robust. Finding even in the middle of the 20th century was that every human society has a set of things, either tools, utensils or ornaments about which somebody can say, this is mine and it’s not yours. And so that can be a very small set of things or it can be a very large set of things. So if you are a hunter gatherer, obviously you don’t have property and land, because you don’t. But you have them in your spears, you have them in your small, your tools and your ornaments because you made them yourself. But they wouldn’t have it in land because they don’t need it for the way their society is organized. But as your society evolves and changes, you can take that same notion of mine and yours and things and kind of start expanding them into other things which, you know, Western societies have gone hog wild with this to the point where we have ideas and we call those mine and yours as well. Yeah, they don’t even have boundaries. And we’re like, but we can say we own it.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah, copyright that. What does it say about political ideologies that are, say, hostile to private property?
Bart Wilson:
So if you abolish the fact that people can claim things as their own, then everything is up for grabs. And in some sense things are. People are going to be trying to claim them and they’re going to be spending time and resources to enforce those. If no one can actually exclude somebody or and more importantly count on other people to exclude themselves from taking your stuff. And so the notion of property came about because it over a very limited sense, you can think of tools like, I made this thing in a way, I argue, this is a part of me. And why would I make these things if other people just come and take them if they’re not going to respect that? And so if so I’m not going to invest my time if I don’t think I’m confident that I can maintain this ownership and possession of something and other people are going to do the same thing. And so property is important to generate common expectations over how our lives and how we use the resources around us to the point of where the peace then allows us to do other things and spend our time on. So if you try to abolish that idea, first of all, you’re not going to abolish the people in a way innate childless thing to grab stuff and claim it. That’s not going to be abolished. And so people are still going to find ways to try to claim things. The problem is if they can’t be enforced, then it becomes might makes right look and just take the stuff.
Sean Rasmussen:
How does it relate to the concept of high trust societies and low trust societies and the ways in which trust is such a crucial part of prosperity and like a growing economy and a growing sophistication in society?
Bart Wilson:
Well, it’s a way of aligning people’s expectations and what they can expect to happen even when they can’t anticipate all the different ways that you could be taken advantage of. And so the more we cannot have to think about protecting ourselves against the capricious acting of person, the more we can spend our time in thinking about more productive things and more, more constructive ways of spending our time, more creative ways to spending our time. I mean, so what trust is, is a way of having aligned expectations about what we expect other people to basically not do to us more than they will do for us.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah.
Bart Wilson:
And that because we like, if people are going to take advantage of us, they’re going to find a way, they’re going to do it. And if we can take those possibilities and make those as rare as possible, then that’s going to allow us to do a whole lot other kind of things that we can’t even anticipate.
Sean Rasmussen:
I can relate to both like the economic experiments and this property idea too because I, I’ve had my own business for 25 years and as a small business. And so all of the deals that I do with people, even if I write them down, I have long term relationships with clients for you know, like a decade or more. But I know that any time any of these people can just say I’m not going to pay you, and there’s not really anything I can do about it in that particular case, I’m not going to probably, I’m not going to go to court over it. It’s not going to be worth the time or effort, an expense of taking someone to court. And so there’s this huge trust thing that happens between me and my clients and it goes both ways too. They trust me to meet my deadlines and, and it’s a very virtuous circle. Like I, I’ve never had someone not pay me in 25 years. And it’s been, it’s been a good experience, you know, like I’ve never had any issues that way. And so this really resonates with me, some of these ideas in a lot of ways too. The nature of owning my own business has forced me to kind of be a better person in a way just because of the things that you’re forced to understand about yourself. And like, oh yeah, I have to do this thing because I said I was going to do it and if I don’t do it then it’s down the road going to lead to them not trusting me again. And so I really have to knuckle down and maybe like pull an all nighter or something and finish this or whatever it is.
Bart Wilson:
The really difficult question is how do we get that off the ground? Yeah, where does that come from? Because if you don’t have it, you just can’t see how it’s going to come around. And if you do have it, you’re like, how are we keeping this? Why isn’t it, why is it not subjected? Why is it not subject to kind of a decay? Those are important questions and big ones that I don’t think we quite really know the answer to.
Sean Rasmussen:
And they’ve, there’ve been moments in history too where with political turmoil or maybe some like transfer over from one system to communism or to capitalism, vice versa, where some of that stuff does break down and there is a lot of corruption and things like that. So I know that there are case studies, I’m sure that they’re out there. I don’t know if you’ve looked at.
Bart Wilson:
Those, but yeah, there does seem to be something about, I think that the word now being bandied around is abundance or prosperity. That kind of breeds more peace and prosperity because we can afford not to have to take things like that. But it’s not clear like how you get those basic set of respect rules for dealing with each other off the ground so that some society can do it. The easiest way seems to be you import the people who don’t have it to the ones who do have it and then they can adapt to the new world and it grows because it’s easier to adapt to a custom already in pace than it is to create a brand new one.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah, yeah. And that’s sort of why like a lot of this nation building stuff that the America’s tried to do in the past just has failed miserably. Right?
Bart Wilson:
Yeah. The Easier thing would be bring them here, but we’re not really in the mood of doing that either.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah, yeah. But you also might run the risk of there might be a tipping point in which you’re, if you’re, if that trust does break down, if there’s too many people who don’t agree to your basic principles of fairness and things like that, then it could break down.
Bart Wilson:
Yes, yes. And that those are. Yeah. So where that is how that is how that works. Those are not easy questions to answer.
Sean Rasmussen:
No, but they’re pretty interesting and they’re kind of relevant to a lot of the current stuff that’s going on right now. Right. In the Anglosphere, particularly like I know in the UK they’ve got immigration issues and I guess you guys do too, a little bit less so now that Trump’s in, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, maybe we’ll move on. Now, I know that you’ve taken a similar approach to, as you did to property, but to other parts of important aspects of economy, which is trade and specialization. Can you talk a bit about why it’s important to look at trade and specialization in the same way that you did property?
Bart Wilson:
Well, there’s a fundamental question that the way we talk about, introduce economics, that I think just doesn’t work for the person who isn’t already economically minded. And that is we start with saying the problem in the world, the problem which economics is about to solve, is that we want more stuff than the world can provide us. And so scarcity is this, this problem that needs to be overcome. And then we look outside the window and we say, look how rich we are right now compared to where humanity natural condition is, you know, prior to the last 250 years. And we’re like, look, it’s exponentially growing. Like, how do you put those two things together? We tell you, you’re telling you it’s all about scarcity and like, but that exponential growth of world GDP per capita looks pretty not constrained what’s going on here. And so scarcity necessarily puts us in this mindset of it’s so much stuff to be moved around and that’s kind of what we got. That’s what we got to solve, not about what it is that actual people need to do in order to create a better life for themselves. And so what I notice is that we don’t actually explain why the basic principle of trade, which is the foundation of economics. I would say Adam Smith saw that as the primary axiom for explaining the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, that, that is the really small way which just me trading this for that with you makes us a little bit better off, that that in itself is moral because we could have been, as we’ve been talking about, fighting with each other, trying to take it from each other. So I have all of it or you have all of it. But no, we do something much more limited. We just make ourselves slightly better off by having ourselves exchange these things. And that’s moral at its core, that I’m doing something for you and you’re doing something for, for me as opposed to thinking it’s scarcity and everyone’s acting in their own, their own self interest in order to get the most, the most they can for themselves. And now we just kind of figure out the rules by which people do that. And so I think it’s important that we think the starting point is a moral act of trading things and not stealing things or not fighting for things. And that’s where we need to, we need to start with that premise. And you understand as talked about before, that property is inherently a part of that conversation because you got, you got to have that piece before you’re actually doing the trading and property gives you that piece. But as Adam Smith recognized, you know, just trading things here and there, that’s, those are going to be small things. That’s not really where the gains come from. In Adam Smith’s time. He’s, he’s living at the time west when the world’s starting to change. We’re seeing that UK is, is being this, this place of growth relative to the rest of the world. It’s like, well, what’s, what’s causing, what’s causing that? Well, we can divide our labor, we can specialize what we’re doing. So he concentrated on the fact that, you know, my task, we just divide the tasks to create this one thing into it down to individual people doing certain parts of the component. But another version of that is not also just spending time going into a particular profession, a particular line of work in, specializing in that way. So it’s not just a division of labor that we do that we can create more stuff. And the only reason we’re going to create the more stuff is not because I want it all for myself, it’s because other people will exchange me for things. But that involves us already living together. And so in order to have this kind of specialization, division of labor, we already have to be community minded to want to be sitting and organizing ourselves as a town or a community such that different people are doing different things and then we transport the stuff around. And if we can extend that to broader and broader geographical areas so we can ship the stuff around, then we can do even more specialization and get things. And so, but, but you have to live together. You have to have these communities. And that’s another moral aspect that we have to want to be in the company of other people in order to take advantage of the division of labor, all the gains that can come from trading stuff and specializing. And so the general kind of introduction to this in economics doesn’t start with that very human aspect of how we live as a species. It doesn’t start with the very moral aspect that we are interested in doing things for others, because this is very different than any other human, any other animal. So, you know, chimpanzees are very closely related to us. You know, some say somewhere around like 95, 97%, same DNA. But generally chimpanzees are out for themselves. Sure, they’ll help their young out, they’ll work together to, you know, depose things. But with their out, when they go hunting, it’s every chimpanzee forms for themselves. And so there isn’t a notion of in this together doing something for you. There’s no joint goal that is for the benefit of both of us. It’s just happened to be coordinated in time and space, but not doing it with the notion of doing it for somebody else and jointly.
Sean Rasmussen:
So that idea that there’s a moral component to markets and trade, it really resonates with me and my own experience and also from just looking around at the wider society that we live in. But it seems like there’s a lot of people out there who are really skeptical of markets and don’t see that moral aspect of markets, which ends up making them a lot more sympathetic to say, something like socialism or something along those lines. What do you think’s going on there?
Bart Wilson:
Well, it’s difficult to see the moral in the familiar. If you’re just used to having everyone follow through on their word and you get what you want when you’re trading things, it’s hard to see that they had a choice to do that, that they, they did that. They did that because they wanted to do the right thing and follow through on their, on their word or deliver their product or, or service as they said they would do, do it. And at the quality that you expect, they’re not trying to kind of, you know, fraudulently slip something else in there and change. And so it’s hard to see that all these Little things in every part of our daily lives. That kind of high trust that you’re talking about is all around us. And what we tend to focus on are those really bad examples out there of people taking advantage of situations, you know, and they are there. And, you know, in a sense, being especially alert for those is good because we want to be able to identify them and to take. To inoculate ourselves for them. Yeah. But if we preoccupied by that and not really see the whole picture that we’re actually creating a civil society by engaging in commerce, that we will then kind of lose that commerce and that civil society if we don’t take care to recognize that it’s there in the first place.
Sean Rasmussen:
Both Hayek and Friedman talked a lot about the relationship between freedom, liberty and free markets and the way that they’re kind of mutually supportive of each other. Can you talk a bit about their ideas on that? Or yours, for that matter?
Bart Wilson:
Well, so the greatest thing about human beings is our ability to create with new ideas. But that’s only going to be beneficial if I can actually do something with that. I just can actually come up with it. So to be creative, you have to be free to think about things, free to do things differently, Free to do things that put me in competition with somebody already doing something related.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah.
Bart Wilson:
And so you. That notion of freedom kind of is tied to being creative. And so you can’t have those two things kind of separate. And you need property in that sense that this, this piece that we’ve talked about that you need to be able to. Then to be able to use that freedom, you have to be willing, not have to worry about defending yourselves against something. So freedom, prosperity, creativity, it’s all kind of one. One part of that, as you put it. This virtuous circle, they all make each other, strengthen each other, and they’re also sometimes hard to see. And so we got to be, in a way, defending that freedom. I think Hayek puts. It can never be about expediency. It has to be about a principle, because it’ll have to apply very broadly. Even when I think expediency demands something else, that. No, no, no. I gotta trust in this notion that freedom, along with property and along with our creativity, is gonna actually do more and better things for more people.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah. It’s hard to, I guess, trust the invisible hand. Because it’s invisible, right? Basically, yes.
Bart Wilson:
Yeah. It’s hard to see what it be lost and then when it. When it is lost. There have been many examples in history. It’s not clear that it’s attributed to a loss of freedom that caused the problem.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah.
Bart Wilson:
And it’s hard to see the absence of coercion. It means an absence. And so that’s really difficult to appreciate when only the observable is what you see.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah. That’s what I really love about your work and why I wanted to have you on the show. Really important for people to hear about these ideas about the moral side of the market too. I know back in, I guess it was like the 70s and 80s, or maybe I think it was around the 70s and 80s when Milton Friedman did that whole free to choose TV series documentary series, which is like a 10 hour thing, which was on mainstream TV, communicating the value of free markets and selling the idea more broadly, both to the general public, but also probably policymakers and stuff as well. It seems like we need more people like that doing that kind of work.
Bart Wilson:
Milton Friedman had the preternatural gift to be able to say something so succinctly in just one and two sentences and with a smile at the same time. That is so important for persuasion. His gift. We don’t see his gift in action as much as we should.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah. Are economists doing enough right now to educate the policymakers and the general public?
Bart Wilson:
Well, in a way, Milton, framing was about first principles, about how commerce worked. And economics has become very much interested in the fine details of things. And so it becomes very difficult for us to communicate to the average person about what is important about what we’re doing, because we haven’t really thought through coherently about what our first principles are.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay.
Bart Wilson:
And he’s. He was thinking about very big picture things and then knew how to take the concrete examples that his viewers recognize and put them into an example of this, of these big principles at work. I think we tend to be a little more concerned about our technical aspects than kind of the deeper philosophical principles of what we’re doing.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah.
Bart Wilson:
And that’s part of what I want to get back is that think through those principles. I, in writing the book, I was kind of forced to do that because I hadn’t done that well really since I started my career as an economist. I just kind of took with the way we were taught and kind of went with it and, and not question like where do. Where would I want to start if I’m thinking where economics is to begin? And somehow morality has to be in that starting point.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah, yeah. I think too, especially right now with all these different strains of criticism of Western civilization that are going on, you know, postmodernism critical theories of various sorts, you know, cultural Marxism, all that kind of stuff. They’re. There’s a lot of people out there kind of working at, whittling away at the achievements of the West, I guess. I don’t know if you see it in those terms.
Bart Wilson:
So modern social science, maybe this is that what you had in mind, but modern social science largely is about trying to find differences among people. So let’s say men are different from women, Americans are different than Japanese Trump voters are different than Hillary Clinton voters and things like that. And then we run our experiments and we find our statistical tests and they know P value is less than.05. There’s a difference between group A and group B. Yeah. And what we aren’t spending much time on is all the things that we have in common. And so I understand the need to kind of, I think diversity and perspectives are very important. And actually, as we talked about earlier, about how understanding your local circumstances, you know that better than other people. And so that’s, that’s the big problem that needs to be solved is how do we can combine all those local circumstances for something bigger than any one of our minds can understand. But there’s also something very common to all of us that makes this entire whole system of commerce work and that we have probably more in common than we have, that makes us different. So I think we spend too much time trying to make ourselves different than seeing what we have in common with people. I think that applies to a lot of debates. Like we’re not. Immigration debate is not finding what we have in common with the people who are trying to immigrate here. It’s a notion of difference. And so something about common humanity is, is important. And I think lost in our, in our modern discourse, I don’t see us trying to appeal to that. We’re trying to appeal to a tribe more than across the tribe, to something bigger than our tribes.
Sean Rasmussen:
And there’s sort of like a lot of criticism right now against the, the liberal project, generally speaking. Right. From a lot of these different groups. Whereas I think it’s actually a pretty great project. And like the achievement of the west in that respect is pretty amazing.
Bart Wilson:
Well, it’s amazing how many. How, how we are free to craft our own identities in a way that just was impossible 50 years ago. That. And so there can be these common links within which I can be different and express myself. But I, but if, if it’s only about our differences, then we’re not going to be able, then we’re going to fight over when whose differences can be made legitimate as opposed to what is what we have in common.
Sean Rasmussen:
That’s why I think the, the work you’re doing is so important. And I think more of that first principle stuff, finding the moral foundations for a lot of the stuff we take for granted is so crucial to countering some of these other narratives that are going on right now.
Bart Wilson:
I agree and I thank you for those kind words. That somebody who is in the real world doing business and not sitting in an ivory tower recognizes those things is the greatest compliment an economist could get.
Sean Rasmussen:
One more question I want to ask you about is the Canadian context. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Canadian context much.
Bart Wilson:
Well, I traveled to New Brunswick for the first time last March, go to Mount Saint. Okay, Mount Allison University. So I loved it. It was a fantastic trip and got to spend some time in Toronto and Montreal before and after it. So I was, I was there when you’re, you’re most recent election was, was called okay, talk to people about it.
Sean Rasmussen:
But yeah, so yeah, so the, the, the context is that in Canada the size of our government, like, you know, the number of employees working for a government has increased like by 40% in 10 years. You know, all kinds of other measures where you look at government spending and, and the, the ways in which government are starting to, you know, put their fingers into the market in a variety of ways that, that, that seems to be the trend that is going on in Canada and, and people seem to like it. They voted for Carney recently, who is a kind of globalist type who, you know, talks, talks about big federal projects and things like that. Do you have any opinions on, on the, like, I mean that’s happening all over the west, not just, not just Canada, like it’s UK And I think the States too has, has grown in government immensely. What are your thoughts on, on that whole process over the last say 50 years?
Bart Wilson:
Well, if you are thinking you’re going to be able to constrain this thing from growing, you’re going to be disappointed. I’ve been hoping all my life that there’s going to be a way to kind of maybe slow this down, but there isn’t. I think the best you can hope for is that you still have the freedoms and the protections in there to pursue what you, your projects the way you want to pursue them, that you can grow faster than that really takes over.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay.
Bart Wilson:
And so you have to have that open economy I think is it. Deirdre McClosy calls it the permission Less society kind of thing, more permission to do things and make those permissions more equal in society. But that basically creativity and growth can just kind of keep pace with the way the government is kind of growing. Wow. I just. It’s going to slow. Like, look, we had some people come into the, into government, you know, Trump’s new administration with this Doge thing, and like, they’re just going to take a cut to. And like they weren’t doing this in any thoughtful way that actually would be there for the long run. And so if anything, that’s probably set back how we’re going to be able to. Because it was just done so poorly.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah.
Bart Wilson:
It wasn’t done thoughtfully, it wasn’t done in a principled way. It was done abruptly. And so even when you think you have the right people that could do this, it hasn’t been done right or. Well, I’m, I’m pessimistic on that.
Sean Rasmussen:
I’m just, I would say.
Bart Wilson:
So, yes, I’m optimistic about what the regular person do outside of that to create benefits for the rest of the society in the world.
Sean Rasmussen:
Interesting. So, yeah. So what’s the role of economists in shifting the attitudes towards that? I know that in the Reagan years and the Thatcher years, that was, I was pretty young at the time. I don’t really remember much from that time, but they, I don’t know how well they succeeded at it, but that was part of their aim was to kind of reduce the state a bit and shift things around.
Bart Wilson:
I, I think, I mean, I don’t know UK example well, but I think the most important thing that Thatcher did was denationalize stuff to make things more private that weren’t private before. And Reagan had some of the biggest budgets of all time and deficits of spending of all time at time in the 80s. I mean, they make ones today look quaint even on a. They make it look quaint on a per capita level. That’s what’s just kind of disturbing.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay.
Bart Wilson:
But it’s never. I think they had a philosophy that kept it from going faster than it might have otherwise. But.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay, interesting. Something that I’m really concerned about and I feel like I want you to give me the answer, but.
Bart Wilson:
I don’t have the answer. I just think we still keep finding ways of productivity that just to make the world use fewer resources to make more stuff. And we are still finding many different ways to do that. And I don’t see that slowing down as long as we don’t, you know, really clamp down on the notions of property and freedom that. That make that possible.
Sean Rasmussen:
And I guess a lot of people, like, especially if you. If you’re on the. On the right of the spectrum there. There’s a lot of people like saying that that’s where we’re going, which is to clamp down on those freedoms.
Bart Wilson:
And yes, I. The question is, is it happening on the margin or is it happening at a very broad core level? And I’m not sure that it’s only just happening on margins.
Sean Rasmussen:
What do you mean by broad core level?
Bart Wilson:
Like, that we’re really not allowing people to, you know, create new businesses. Like, it’s just kind of. It’s just not possible to do these kind of things anymore.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah, no, they’re still possible.
Bart Wilson:
Yeah, it’s possible. It’s. You’re not. You’re not discouraged from this. It’s not going to be expropriated. You know, if we’re starting to literally expropriate stuff, then we have a serious problem.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay. Okay.
Bart Wilson:
It’s. We’re just making it just much harder to get something started. You know, there was an old metric about when they’re looking at development, how long does it take to put in a phone line? You know, and if it. If that took years, well, you’re not going to be able to create a business if it’s going to take that long. So we have a lot of those things that slow things down on the margin, but things are still getting built. New things are being created, except for housing, but even that’s like the city of Austin. I mean, it’s not getting enough kind of discussion about how their populations are growing and rents and housing is falling because they just had a big boom in building, which is fantastic. People aren’t just willing to go that far to let it happen, but you finally have a great data point in it going in the right direction because they just made it more possible to build a lot. Some might say probably built too much, but that’s only to our benefit if you’re a consumer of housing.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah. So interesting. So they. So it was really. It was like a regulation thing getting in the way of new builds, mainly.
Bart Wilson:
Yeah, they. They made it easier to build and people built large. Like, I mean, it was a real problem. I wasn’t there personally. I’ve only. I’ve only read about it, but, you know, congestion was a real problem and things like this and probably still is, but they’re able to get more housing, more big buildings of housing, construction projects to the finish line in a pretty Short amount of time. Interesting order to kind of turn that, turn that around. Yeah. It’s just a matter of willingness. But there are examples. And, you know, there’s a reason why businesses are flocking to the south because there are opportunities there. And so as long as we have that and the federalist system kind of makes it gives different states an incentive to be those, to try those experiments out. Think I’m pretty optimistic in that.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay. Yeah, Like, America’s kind of has some advantages that way that other countries don’t have. Like, I don’t think Canada is quite as dynamic and we don’t have the same kind of options, I don’t think. But a fellow economist is, is running Argentina right now and he’s trying to reduce the size of government.
Bart Wilson:
Oh, well, well, yes. And it just, I mean, I don’t think people expected him to win, if I recall correctly. And so his success will again, maybe lead to some more examples, but things had to get really bad before they gave him a shot.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah, yeah.
Bart Wilson:
And, and that’s just, that’s the sad part that really before we’re going to try these things out that kind of can make us better off. Things have to get really bad. But I’m rooting for him. I don’t know all the details of what he’s doing down there, but he did something right off the bat to make housing a lot more tradable and it had an effect as well.
Sean Rasmussen:
Okay. Yeah, I know that the inflation’s come down, but I didn’t want to get into the weeds of that. But I just kind of wanted to get your initial impression of that.
Bart Wilson:
He certainly adheres to the Hayek’s principles. He likes to quote him quite regularly. Hayek, and I think Mises too.
Sean Rasmussen:
I think, yeah, Mises, yeah, he’s into that stuff. He calls himself an anarcho capitalist, I guess, which I don’t understand what he’s saying when he says that.
Bart Wilson:
Yeah, as president of a country, he’s an anarcho capitalist. Okay.
Sean Rasmussen:
But where do we go from here? What are things that you’re hopeful about in the future, looking forward as you investigate human prosperity?
Bart Wilson:
Well, I’m hopeful because I think the new generation of students learning economics want something more out of their economics. They are looking for the moral and the social in their economics. And so if they, in some sense, if they want it, we’re going to have to give it to them or they’re going to go elsewhere. And so I am, I’m optimistic in that sense that we are the Students themselves are going to look for and ask of us what we do need going forward in the study of economics. That’s interesting. So I think these ideas come to me from listening to my students, where they’re coming from, the pushback on how I would traditionally think about things and then try seriously, taking that seriously, to kind of rethink through how I would present what economics is about. And the students want that, and I think that that’s a good thing. The question is whether or not we’re going to hear them and respond with what they are looking for.
Sean Rasmussen:
And if people want to find out more about you and your work and your books, where can they go?
Bart Wilson:
I’m@bartjwilson.com as my website. You can just type Bart Wilson into Google and Bart Wilson Economics and I’ll pop up on Twitter here or my website.
Sean Rasmussen:
Sure. And you’re also head of the Smith.
Bart Wilson:
Institute, Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy.
Sean Rasmussen:
Yeah. Which seems to be quite the opposite end of what your normal work is much more focused on the basics about economics, but the political economy seems to the opposite end of things.
Bart Wilson:
Well, it’s when you appreciate philosophy and literature that you can see how you can put the social and the moral into economics. Without them, I would not be able to think through any of these kind of questions. My English colleagues and my philosophy colleagues are very important for helping me think through these things.
Sean Rasmussen:
Interesting. And where can they go to find out more about the Smith Institute?
Bart Wilson:
The website’s really long, but if you type in Smith Institute, Chapman University, it should pop up right up in Google.
Sean Rasmussen:
All right. All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on. I’m really excited to have found your work because I’m going through this phase where I’m finding out all about all these amazing economists like Hayek and things like that, but it’s nice to see someone doing stuff on first principles nowadays, too. That’s amazing. So thanks for coming on, talking about it.
Bart Wilson:
Thank you for having me. It is a joy to hear somebody now in the academy find the ideas and find something useful in them. So it’s been my pleasure.
Sean Rasmussen:
That’s it for this episode of Viewpoints. Thanks for listening. If you like viewpoint diversity and you want to hear more like this, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. To find out more, visit ViewpointSpartcast CA. And if you have ideas for topics or guests, we’d love to hear from you. You can connect using the contact form in the website or you can send me an email directly at seanviewpointspodcast CA sa.
